Mr. Bones (20 page)

The Thais were absorbed in their own affairs of travel. That was the beauty of the waiting room. No one was idle; the travelers' thoughts raced ahead, to the journey. Handling luggage, herding children, checking the clock, they were leaving this place. He knew these people somewhat. He saw them in the plant, at tables, in smocks and gloves, some wearing dust masks. Diligent little people, and when he was among them he felt—was it the business of outsourcing?—that his fate was intertwined with theirs.

 

2

 

He was sketching, smiling at this irrational thought, the night he noticed the beaky woman coming toward him. He'd seen her there before many times; her nose made her unmissable. She was, like him, another loiterer.

She was not tall but her features were so enlarged as to seem like distortions—menace in her nose, menace in her tangled hair, defiance in her chin. Among these tidy people she seemed like a freak for being so disheveled. But her shabby clothes seemed to inspire respect, even awe, in the passersby. She was someone from the lower world; she had nothing to lose. She had singled him out. Or was he imagining her menace? From a distance, shuffling, she had seemed so sad.

Ignoring half a dozen people near him, she scuffed toward him with a clapping of her plastic sandals. She didn't look like any Thai he had seen. He hoped that she would walk past him. But she stood before him, near enough to assault his nostrils. Her body odor seemed another kind of aggression: a hum of hostility in her smell.

She began to squawk. The people around him, all Thais, giggled in embarrassment hearing her, yet they were fascinated, too, at the sight of the foreigner being challenged. For those waiting for trains, this was a diversion.

One man said to him, “She talking you.”

She was much too close: her dusty toes in the sandals touched his shoes. She wore a tattered wraparound, her lips smeared with lipstick. One cheek was cut cleanly, and though not a serious wound was crusted with dried blackish blood. She whined a little and nodded to get his attention, seeming to peck at him with her fleshy nose.

The bystander said, “She say, ‘I not myself what you see.'”

This obscure statement made him look away. Without meeting the woman's gaze, but feeling disgusted as he brushed past her, Osier walked to a bench where a woman and a man were sitting with luggage.

Haunting him with her ripe-smelling shadow, the woman followed, legs wide apart, carrying a shoulder bag. Some of the Thai travelers also followed. Osier turned away and pretended to be busy with his notebook, but still he heard the aggrieved voice.

Someone touched him lightly with a finger. It was the Thai man who had said, “She talking you.”

The woman was gabbling in her sinuses. The foreign language had a twang of incomprehensible menace in it, too.

“She want money.”

At first he resisted, but he got another whiff of her and dug into his pocket. He found a ten-baht note and handed it over.

The woman handed it back, gabbling.

“She want three hundred fifty baht.”

Osier smiled at this precise amount, which wasn't much, but stopped smiling when he looked up at the woman. She was still talking in her scratchy voice. Her reddened eyes scared him.

“What is that language?”

“It Thai, but she
kaek,
from India. She want talk you.”

“What about?”

His question was translated. Everything the woman said sounded like a threat or a protest.

“She say she special.”

Osier reacted sharply, as though remembering, and shook his head. He said, “What's she doing here? I think we should get a policeman.”

“No, sir.” The man looked frightened. “That make her angry.”

“Why does she want to speak to me?”

“You
farang.
You listen.” The man laughed a little. “Thai people no listen.”

Osier looked at the woman and said, “Hello.”

But the woman's gaze did not soften.

“She come from far away,” the man said.

The woman clutched her ragged wrap with heavy sunburned hands and turned her beaky face on Osier. She was chewing something, and then, as she began to shout, showing red teeth and dark gums, she grew devilish.

“You come from far away too.”

“I don't understand.”

“She wanting money. You have money.”

Osier put his hands in his pockets, to protect his wallet.

“She say, ‘I not normal.' She say, ‘God make me different. People treating me in a bad way because I not normal.'”

The other panhandlers Osier had seen always repeated the same whiny phrases, pleading for food, saying, “No mother, no father.” They made themselves pitiable. But this rough-looking beggar woman was making a speech, becoming angrier, denouncing Thais, proclaiming her abnormality, and, her voice going harsher, all of it seemed threatening.

“I someone else,” the Thai man said, still translating, but slowly—he could hardly keep up with her. And because Osier did not understand anything she said, he looked closer, scrutinized her, and saw that she was not a woman.

She was a man in a woman's clothes, middle-aged, lined, muscled and graceless, clownishly painted with sticky makeup, in a torn wraparound and a dirty blouse, with big filthy feet and swollen hands, a wooden comb jammed in his matted hair, and demanding money, beginning to shriek, showing her green gummy tongue.

“If you don't give, sir, she will remove clothes. She will make nuisance and shame.” The Thai man in his panic was clawing in his own pocket for money. “She will show private parts.”

Seeing Osier counting twenty-baht notes onto his lap, the man (Osier no longer saw him as a woman) became calmer and licked the spittle from his lips. He reached out, his thick hand like a weapon, and snatched the pile of money.

“That's more than you asked for.”

After the man in the wraparound whined his thanks and touched the notes to his forehead, after the Thai translator hurried away, after the crowd of onlookers dispersed, Osier got up and flapped his hand at the lingering cloud of stink and walked quickly out of the railway station, feeling banished.

He thought, Why did he choose me? But the sudden pantomime had been a shattering experience, much worse than being accosted by an aggressive beggar. He'd felt assaulted, and the smell, which was poisonous, wouldn't easily wash off. Then the unwelcome memory of the man who had provoked thoughts of mutilation and danger gave way to sorrow. It was not the menace he remembered, but the sadness.

He called Joyce and talked inconsequentially to calm himself. She said, “That's funny. You called me just a few hours ago and said the same thing.”

 

3

 

He wanted to go home. He would have gone home, except that his work was not done. The hours to fill, from five to eight or nine at night, hours that were made bearable by his sketching at the station waiting room, he could not endure at the hotel. His room was small and poorly lit by a dim stylish lamp; sitting in the lobby, he felt conspicuous. He couldn't take the accounts back to his room, and he had to leave the office at five when all the others left. He'd been using a taxi, to avoid the questions in the company shuttle bus. But now he took the shuttle bus.

He'd turned Fred and Larry down so many times he didn't think they'd ask him to go with them anymore. He hoped that one of them would say “Drink?” Not because he wanted to carouse but because he wished their protection. He needed to stay as far away as possible from the railway station and the sight of the man-woman who was probably waiting for him.

The Thai workers were competent and hardworking, the factory so well run by the local managers that he had time on his hands. So did Larry and Fred. Like Osier, they had wives back in the States, but it didn't stop them going to strip shows and massage parlors.

“Soi Cowboy! Great bars! The girls are hot—they wear boots and Stetsons!”

“Great little place called Angels. They're barely legal!”

They talked like excited boys. Maybe it was a feature of going overseas, a danger in outsourcing—you were infantilized by the efficiency of the locals. Larry and Fred were like teenagers. Had Bangkok done that to them? Even he felt it, the vitality of being among healthy hardworking people.

“Guess Bar—Soi Four. It's not far.”

“Nana Plaza—amazing women, but they're all dudes!”

Joyce always asked what life was like in Bangkok.

“I don't know what to compare it to,” he told her, but thinking of Larry and Fred he wanted to say, “It's like being young. I guess it's a kick.”

Because when you were young you had a sense of choices, of not knowing how your life would turn out. Only the old foresaw the undeviating road ahead, and beyond it a darkness. That was how Osier had felt, but now his nights were empty.

In the shuttle bus Fred Kegler said, “Funny seeing you here.”

“Just thought I'd hitch a ride.”

“Maybe we can tempt you to have a drink,” Larry said. But he laughed, because Osier had rejected them before.

“Maybe one,” he said.

The shuttle bus dropped them at Patpong Road. They walked to a bar, Fred leading. “Here we are,” Larry said. It was dark inside, smelling of beer and incense, with side booths. Osier squinted ahead, wondering if he'd be recognized. He liked the bar for being dark.

“Pretty soon you'll be out of all of this,” Fred said.

He meant Osier's retirement. Were they gloating?

Osier said, “We've got a house. Near Rockland, Maine. My wife's already there.” Out of fastidious sentiment he avoided mentioning Joyce's name in this smelly bar.

“A lot of guys opt for the severance package and stay right here in Thailand. You have a bundle coming to you. You're on one of the old contracts. You could have a second career.”

Creer
again; it jarred on Osier and seemed like satire. They didn't know the half of it, even Joyce didn't. Yet Osier said in an offhand way, “But what would that be like?”

“That would be a wet dream,” Larry said, giving each word a meaningful lilt.

The bar was everything that Osier had objected to the first time, not just the rankness of beer and the slime of cigarette smoke on the clammy plastic cushions of the booth, the American rock music, and the Christmas lights, but the girls, too—six or seven of them, overfriendly, converging on the booth. They seemed to know Fred and Larry well.

Fred said to one of them, “This is our friend. Be nice to him.”

“We be nice to him.”

Each of the men had a familiar and favorite girl, who brightened at their arrival, almost like a steady girlfriend. Instead of talking to him, as he'd feared, they talked to these bar girls and took them aside, leaving him to nurse his drink with the remaining girls. The girls watched, whispering, as he took his diary from his briefcase. He sketched their pictures on a blank page. They laughed, but for a while they stood still, because he was drawing so carefully.

In the booth of four girls, only one was attractive—tall, thin-faced, slender, a bit aloof, possibly haughty or else shy, while the others fluttered around him.

Osier sketched her pretty fallen-angel face, her long lank hair, then said, “What's your name?”

But she turned away and wouldn't tell him. Sketching, he stared, and as he did, he heard Fred call from his booth to Larry in the next booth, “I'll mud-wrestle you for that one.”

Fred laughed and said, “Reminds me. I told my ex-wife, ‘When you're fifty you'll be standing on a street corner waving at cars.'”

Hearing their voices, Osier put his sketchbook away and finished his drink. Larry looked at Osier, sitting with the four girls, and said, “A bevy of beauties! Hey, Boyd, we're going back to the hotel. Are you staying?”

Surprised in his solitude, Osier said no and left with them in a taxi. This was all? A drink, a giggle, then back to the hotel? He felt kinder toward the two men.

Larry said, “They all have families. Like us. They send money home. Ask them what they want and they won't say a husband. They'll say, ‘I want a coffee shop,' ‘A grocery store,' ‘A noodle shop.' Having a drink there, I figure we're helping the economy.”

“Piss them off and you're in hell. Horror show,” Fred said, and the
hoor
grated.

At the hotel, Osier said, “I'll pay.” After Larry and Fred had gone into the lobby, he said to the taxi driver, “Take me back to the bar.”

“Casanova? Patpong Road?”

“I guess.”

The girls laughed when they saw him, the man who had just left, and that made him sheepish. Did they understand more of what was in his heart than he did? As though anticipating what he wanted, they made a place for him at the far corner of the bar in a small booth.

He said nothing, he hardly glanced at the tall girl, and yet one of the girls said, “You come back see her!”

They knew exactly why he'd come. They were so shrewd about men. But then, what was so complicated about men?

The tall girl emerging from the shadows looked even more like a fallen angel. She walked over, stately in her high heels, holding her head up, dignified, giving nothing away in her expression.

“Have a drink with me.”

She seemed to hesitate. Osier was not dismayed, because after considering the offer, she chose him. She sat beside him and ordered drinks—beer for him, lemonade for herself. They drank without speaking, and for once Osier was glad for the loud music filling the silence and the space.

Finally she said, “You make picture?”

He showed her his diary, flipping pages. She put her finger on the sketch of the king and touched her heart.

“You like Bangkok?”

“I like the railway station.” Though it no longer seemed safe to him.

“Nice station.”

“And I like you.”