Rust and Bone (21 page)

“What are you thinking?” Beatrice says.

“Don't know.” I shrug, suddenly despondent. “Fucking.”

“Fucking who?”

“You. Bette. The librarian. Anyone. The ‘who' isn't critical—that's the problem.”

“Head back inside?”

“I'm easy.”

She grasps my jacket sleeve. “Come on.”

My name is Sam. I'm a sex addict.

Welcome, Sam.

Do I believe love is possible? Sure. I mean, of course. Certainly as an abstract concept: immaculate love, God's love, whatever. And you see it every day: a couple passes you on the street and you get this sense that, man, those two really love one another. The way I feel about Ellie—that's love, isn't it? I don't really know. It's possible, in that
anything
is possible. But I've made a vow to be totally honest about who and what I am; how many rational women would want to involve themselves? Still, I'm an optimist. The understandings and intensities would be different, but there's always that chance. It may not be love by anyone else's definition, but whatever works, right? So, yeah, I think it's possible. Absolutely I do.

STREETS AGLITTER WITH FROST
. My eyes follow the yellow dash-dash-dash of the median strip running along dark tarmac. Roads forlorn and devoid of human life. A sickle moon cuts through a bank of threadbare nightclouds to grace shops and offices with a washed-out pall. Beatrice in the passenger's seat fiddling with the radio; every so often she says, “Left here,” or “Hang a right at the doughnut shop,” leading me through the city grid to an unknown destination. A lamplit billboard towers over the shipyard, the tanned blow-dried visage of some local paragon I should recognize but do not staring down benevolently and I'm left feeling ashamed, the way you feel bumping into a person who knows your name when you cannot recall theirs— ashamed for being unable to remember what it was you'd shared together, however meaningless. Beatrice twists the radio knob and the speakers come to life: a string of garbled syllables devolving into a scream or howl, low and mournful and ongoing, the signal weak, crackling with static and I imagine a ghostly deep-space transmission, some doomed cosmonaut shrieking into an intercom, fishbowl helmet starred with cracks and the steamwhistle screech of pressure hammering his eardrums, a dead man's voice traveling through the empty vacuum of space like a message in a bottle washed ashore on the far reaches of the AM dial.

“Weird,” Beatrice says.

“Yeah. Freaky.”

“Swing left up at the side street. Almost there.”

The building is a deteriorating five-story in the packing district. Faded scorchmarks rise, black tongues against the gouged masonry, scars of some long-ago fire. The intermittent signature of a strobelight flashes across high casement windows. Adjacent parking lot uncommonly packed: BMWs and Mercedes rowed alongside pickups and rusteaten Dodges.

“What is this place? Looks like it should be foreclosed.”

“Most likely is,” Beatrice says. “This is a one-night-only sort of deal.”

Trail her to a green-painted door set between a pair of dumpsters. Her knock is answered by a black man with the rough dimensions of a Morgan Fort gun safe. Beatrice whispers something: apparently the safeword because the man steps aside, allowing just enough room for her to squeeze past. The man is easing his planetary bulk back into position when Beatrice informs him I'm her escort; with a world-weary sigh, he steps aside once more.

“What's the story?” Follow Beatrice up a narrow staircase. Walls graffiti tagged, holes punched through plaster to reveal corroded wires and sodden pink insulation. “Are you leading me into ruin? A snuff film crew? Black-market organ farmers?”

“It's a traveling showcase.” She stops, glancing back at me. “Different cities, different participants. I've done it a few times.” A wink. “Surprised you don't know about it.”

At the top of the stairs a girl with a pierced bellybutton stands beneath a sign reading
Coat Check
. Doff my jacket and hand it over. She taps the sign with a hot-pink fingernail and I notice it in fact reads
Clothes Check
. Beatrice and I strip, turning our shirts and jeans over to the girl. She hands me a claim chit but I've no idea where to stow it. Beatrice slips hers under her tongue. I do the same.

The girl positions herself before a sliding metal door. Spraypainted on the door in pink letters matching her fingernails is the word GOMORRAH.

“Pitter-patter,” says Beatrice, hopping lightly from one foot to the other, “let's get at 'er.”

The first thing to hit you is heat: this warmth closing around your body. The second is smell: sweet and bitter at once, the scent of bodies in close contact. The way Bette said: like sweat, but deeper. As my eyes adjust I see we're in a warehouse. Steel girders row the vaulted ceiling; small creatures, birds or mice, scuttle across rusted A-beams. Strobelights set on telescopic tripods throw kinetic pinwheels on the walls and floor. A DJ spins trance music on a pair of portable turntables.

“Welcome to the viper's nest.” Beatrice's lips next to my ear. “Or is it viper's pit?”

She leads me to the clutch of naked bodies. Thirty or forty people sprawled on swaths of thick velvet. Arms and elbows, calves and knees; occasionally a head will crest, person taking a deep breath as though they've been trapped under water. No one speaks; no voices at all save the sporadic sigh or shuddering exhale. Beatrice is gone, her body twined with a dozen others, amalgamate now, indistinguishable.

Wade in slowly, as a swimmer immerses himself in cold surf. A hand reaches out, grabbing my calf, pulling me down; I'll go willingly enough. Bodies press against mine, limbs hairy and smooth; breasts pushed into my face, a perfumed arm wrapped round my head urging me on; someone's hand, cold and brittle as a talon, clamps onto my leg and delivers a nasty pinch; my lips on thighs and asses, in vaginas and mouths, the crooks of elbows, the undersides of knees; a hard cock crosses the underside of my throat, across lips, gone. A faceless stranger with a dextrous tongue, woman or man I cannot tell, performs fellatio with such wanton bravado I'm left on the verge of weeping. Men and women congregate in well-dressed groups in the warehouse shadows, silent observers. A man stands amidst the teeming surge and emits a high gibbering shriek like some jungle creature and in the plated moonlight falling through the casement windows he appears skinless and I'm thinking about my daughter standing in a green summer field, Ellie's smiling face lit by the July sun. Peace and serenity I'm thinking. Wayne's mangled cock I'm thinking. Pussy tits ass I'm thinking. Admit the existence of a higher power I'm thinking. Flesh I'm thinking. Flesh flesh flesh flesh …

At some point I am standing. Beatrice faces me: hands on hips, head cocked to one side, appraising me with a slight smile. She's kicking off this unearthly glow as though her veins rush with phosphorus. Her beauty is crushing and I feel minuscule. Bodies seethe at our feet but in this moment nothing else exists. She brushes at a lock of hair fallen over her eyes and it's ludicrous but I'm envisioning the country cottage and white picket fence, the words SAMUEL + BEATRICE encircled by a heart carved into the wood of an oak tree, all these childish insupportable fantasies. And sure, I've run through this script enough times to know how it turns out but before the guilt and recrimination there exists a state of grace—right …
now
—a fleeting span of limitless possibility and hope.

“Think it always has to be this way?”

“The viper bites,” Beatrice says. “Can't help itself.”

She reaches for me and I pull away. Can't bear to touch her. My body's electric; tongues of blue static lick and pop off the ends of my fingertips. You're gonna exit this world with regrets; it's an absolute given. And okay, I've been burned before—haven't we all? All I'm saying is, there's that chance, right? A longshot, fine, a million to one. Still—it's there.

Maybe. That's as far as I'll go. Just
maybe
.

LIFE IN THE FLESH

TWO MONTHS SHY
of my twenty-eighth birthday I beat Johnny “The Kid” Starkley to death in Tupelo, Mississippi. A stiff right to the solar plexus sent him to the ropes, gulping for breath. I clubbed him a pair of overhand rights and a left just below the ear, where the jawbone connects. Brutal punches fired straight from the hip, subtle as a train wreck. The Kid—an apt nickname: sandalwood-smooth skin and clear green eyes, so light on his feet he seemed to float above the canvas— held his left arm out, that arm trembling, red glove bobbing like a buoy on a riotous sea. The Kid's mouthpiece stuck to his teeth, the insides of his lips filmed with white lather, holding his left arm out as if to say,
Please, I've had enough,
but his body too stubborn, too disciplined, to buckle to the will of his mind. I hit him until his eyes glazed over like a dying animal's, until that arm fell away, until the ref signaled for the bell. Starkley's death hit me hard, but at the time I wouldn't cop to it. The fight was sanctioned. Marquis of Queensbury rules—I'd done nothing
wrong!

Started juicing on Ten High bourbon and Schlitz. Went from training five hours a day at Top Rank gym to closing out the Cyclone, the gin joint next door. I shed a sickening amount of weight, skin green and jaundiced, booze destroying the mitochondria in my guts. For a few months I didn't know sobriety: sixpack for breakfast and a flask of mescal on the nightstand, brushing my teeth with apricot brandy. I saw Starkley trapped in the ropes, mouthpiece dangling out, blood filling his eyes. And, in this persistent vision, I knew he was dying, knew I was killing him, but I didn't stop. The worst part was watching Starkley grow younger with each blow—now thirty, now twenty-five, now eighteen, finally my fists slamming into this kid, this skinny-legged, sparrow-chested child hung up between the red and blue ropes.

My manager, Moe Kundler, tried to salvage me. Stumbling back from the Cyclone I'd find AA schedules taped to the door, twelve-step brochures in the mailbox. Then Moe dropped by to find me zonked on the kitchen floor, shards of shattered bottle punched into my palms, pants filled with piss and shit. He filled a pot with water and dumped it on me. I came to sputtering, fists balled and ready to rumble. He slapped me hard and said, “Clean yourself up. I'm making the phone call.”

No way could I hack detox or the nuthatch, glimpsing Starkley in those Rorschach inkblots. I gathered up the money I'd ratholed and hightailed it. Thailand was my choice on account of an uninhibited sexual politic and stern non-extradition policy. I arrived in Bangkok twenty-five years ago, and have never left.

Yesterday Moe wired he's sending a hardass. Time and distance have patched our old beefs. The kid arrives on the 9:40 Air Canada out of Vancouver. Late twenties, baggy board-shorts and a garish Hawaiian shirt, eyes dark behind oversize wraparounds. Workably broad across the shoulders and chest, bull necked, narrow waisted, and small hipped. Underslung jaw and a nose busted eastward. His acute-angled brow would give any cutman the screaming meemies: heavy layers of scar tissue rim the curves beneath each eyebrow, and I know if he tastes the long knuckle the sharp ridges of bone will tear those scars to shit.

“Roberto Curry?”

“Welcome to Bangkok.”

He wipes at sweat beading his forehead. “Country this hot all over?”

“Hotter,” I say. “Airport's air conditioned.”

Don Muang airport sits atop an arrow-headed promontory, the darkened city stretching out below. To the west: the meandering strip of Ko Sanh Road contoured in stark neon. To the southwest: Patpong a bright starfish, lit tendrils spreading from its central hub. Humidity's intense: like breathing through boiled wool.

The taxi traces a route down Thanburi Road, skirting the Chao Phraya river. Oil-slicked waters dotted with coastal trawlers and derelict coalships, floating communes of tin-roofed sampans. Turn onto Ko Sanh Road. Almost every building converted into guest houses, every corner has long distance telephone booths with cooling AC, cafés screen
Rush Hour II
and
Brokedown Palace
on video. Sidewalks strung with stalls trafficking in pewter flasks and teak elephants, knock-off Reeboks, bootleg DVDs. A train of Thai women dressed in garishly colored sarongs walk down the side of the road toting various bundles on their heads: firewood, guavas in large porcelain bowls, sacks of kola nuts, stalks of plantains, volcano fish, deep-fried crickets in beaten tin pans. Their husbands walk in front of them carrying not a damn thing.

The kid pockets his sunglasses stepping from the cab. His eyelids are networked with scar tissue. So he's a bleeder.

Blood ruins some fighters. Since the deaths of Johnny Owen and the Korean Duk Koo-Kim, both of whom were blood-blinded from cut eyelids, paranoid refs and ring docs are kiboshing fights at the first sight of red. Some fighters got tough bodies but weak skin—breathe on them hard, they cut. There's nothing a guy can do about it, any more than a guy with a glass jaw can help being brittle. But if that claret keeps flowing—a bad cut above the eye, say, deep and wide and vein-severed, your fighter's heart pounding merry old hell—forget it, the fight's over even if your boy's not really hurt. But Muay Thai matches are rarely stopped on blood, and trainers are permitted certain measures—double-strength adrenaline chloride, ferric acid—to handle the most vicious cuts. Of course, all the ferric acid in the world isn't going to help with the detached retinas and crushed metacarpals, but that's come what may.

We sit in a curry stall with a dining area open to the street. Green curry for me, red for the kid, plus pints of fresh guava juice. The kid axes the juice in favor of beer.

“So,” I say, “what's your record?”

“Twenty-two and three. Two losses on stoppages.”