Sightseeing (3 page)

Lizzie hummed contentedly. Then she stood up on Yai's back.

“Here's your shirt,” she said, tossing it at me.

With a quick sweeping motion, Lizzie took off her bikini top. Then she peeled off her bikini bottom. And then there she was—my American angel—naked on the back of Uncle Mongkhon's decrepit elephant.

“Your country is so hot,” she said, smiling, crawling toward me on all fours. Yai made a low moan and shifted beneath us.

“Yes, it is,” I said, pretending to study the horizon, rubbing Yai's parched, gray back.

After
Rambo,
lunch with my mother, and a brief afternoon nap, I walk out the door to meet Lizzie at the restaurant when Ma asks me what I'm all dressed up for.

“What do you mean?” I ask innocently, and Ma says, “What do I mean? Am I your mother? Are you my son? Are
those black pants? Is that a button-down shirt? Is that the silk tie I bought for your birthday?”

She sniffs my head.

“And is that my nice mousse in your hair? And why,” she asks, “do you smell like an elephant?”

I just stand there blinking at her questions.

“Don't think I don't know,” she says finally. “I saw you, luk. I saw you on your motorcycle with that farang slut in her bikini.”

I laugh and tell her I have hair mousse of my own. But Ma's still yelling at me when I go to the pen to fetch Clint Eastwood.

“Remember whose son you are,” she says through the day's last light, standing in the office doorway with her arms akimbo. “Remember who raised you all these years.”

“What are you talking about, Ma?”

“Why do you insist, luk, on chasing after these farangs?”

“You're being silly, Ma. It's just love. It's not a crime.”

“I don't think,” Ma says, “that I'm the silly one here, luk. I'm not the one taking my pet pig out to dinner just because some farang thinks it's cute.”

I make my way down the beach with Clint Eastwood toward the lights of the restaurant. It's an outdoor establishment with low candlelit tables set in the sand and a large pit that the bare-chested chefs use to grill the day's catch. The restaurant's quite
popular with the farangs. Wind at their backs, sand at their feet, night sky above, eating by the light of the moon and the stars. It's romantic, I suppose. Although I'm hesitant to spend so much money on what Ma calls second-rate seafood in a third-rate atmosphere, Lizzie suggested we meet there for dinner tonight, so who am I to argue with love's demands?

When we get to the restaurant, Lizzie's seated at one of the tables, candlelight flickering on her face. Clint Eastwood races ahead and nuzzles his snout in her lap, but Lizzie's face doesn't light up the way it did this morning. The other customers turn around in their seats to look at Clint Eastwood, and Lizzie seems embarrassed to be the object of his affections.

“Hi,” she says when I get to the table, lighting a cigarette.

I kiss one of her hands, sit down beside her. I tell Clint Eastwood to stay. He lies down on his belly in the sand, head resting between his stubby feet. The sun is setting behind us, rays flickering across the plane of the sea, and I think I'm starting to understand why farangs come such a long way to get to the Island, why they travel so far to come to my home.

“Beautiful evening,” I say, fingering the knot of my tie.

Lizzie nods absentmindedly.

“Is there something wrong?” I finally ask, after the waiter takes our order in English. “Have I done anything to offend you?”

Lizzie sighs, stubs out her cigarette in the bamboo ashtray.

“Nothing's wrong,” she says. “Nothing at all.”

But when our food arrives, Lizzie barely touches it. She keeps passing Clint Eastwood pieces of her sautéed prawns. Clint Eastwood gobbles them up gratefully. At least he's enjoying the meal, I think. On weekend nights, I often bring Clint Eastwood to this restaurant, after the tables have been stowed away, and he usually has to fight with the strays that descend on the beach for leftovers farangs leave in their wake: crab shells, fish bones, prawn husks.

“Something's wrong,” I say. “You're not happy.”

She lights another cigarette, blows a cloud of smoke.

“Hunter's here,” she says finally, looking out at the darkening ocean.

“Your ex-boyfriend?”

“No,” she says. “My boyfriend. He's here.”

“Here?”

“Don't turn around. He's sitting right behind us with his friends.”

At that moment, a large farang swoops into the empty seat across the table from us. He's dressed in a white undershirt and a pair of surfer's shorts. His nose is caked with sunscreen. His chest is pink from too much sun. There's a Buddha dangling from his neck. He looks like a deranged clown.

He reaches over and grabs a piece of stuffed squid from my plate.

“Who's the joker?” he asks Lizzie, gnawing on my squid. “Friend of yours?”

“Hunter,” Lizzie says. “Please.”

“Hey,” he says, looking at me, taking another piece of squid from my entrée. “What's with the tie? And what's with the pig, man?”

I smile, put on a hand on Clint Eastwood's head.

“Hey you,” he says. “I'm talking to you. Speak English? Talk American?”

He tears off a piece of squid with his front teeth. I can't stop staring at his powdered nose, the bulge of his hairy, sun-burned chest. I'm hoping he chokes.

“You've really outdone yourself this time, baby,” he says to Lizzie now. “But that's what I love about you. Your unpredictability. Your wicked sense of humor. Didn't know you went for mute tards with pet pigs.”

“Jesus.”

“Oh, Lizzie,” he says, feigning tenderness, reaching out to take one of her hands. “I've missed you so much. I hate it when you just leave like that. I've been worried sick about you. I'm sorry about last night, okay baby? Okay? I'm really sorry. But it was just a misunderstanding, you know? Jerry and Billyboy over there can testify to my innocence. You know how Thai girls get when we're around.”

“We can talk about this later, Hunter.”

“Yes,” I interject. “I think you should talk to her later.”

He just stares at me with that stupid white nose jutting out between his eyes. For a second, I think Hunter might throw the squid at me. But then he just pops the rest into his mouth, turns to Lizzie, and says with his mouth full:

“You fucked this joker, didn't you?”

I look over at Lizzie. She's staring at the table, tapping her fingers lightly against the wood. It seems she's about to cry. I stand up, throw a few hundred bahts on the table. Clint Eastwood follows my lead, rises clumsily to his feet.

“It was a pleasure meeting you, Miss Elizabeth,” I say, smiling. I want to take her hand and run back to the motel so we can curl up together on the beach, watch the constellations. But Lizzie just keeps on staring at the top of that table.

I walk with Clint Eastwood back to the motel. We're the only ones on the beach. Night is upon us now. In the distance, I can see squidding boats perched on the horizon, searchlights luring their catch to the surface. Clint Eastwood races ahead, foraging for food in the sand, and I'm thinking with what I suppose is grief about all the American girls I've ever loved. Girls with names like Pamela, Angela, Stephanie, Joy. And now Lizzie.

One of the girls sent me a postcard of Miami once. A row of palm trees and a pink condo. “Hi Sweetie,” it said. “I just wanted to say hi and to thank you for showing me a good time when I was over there. I'm in South Beach now, it's Spring Break, and let me tell you it's not half as beautiful as it is where you are. If you ever make it out to the U S of A, look me up okay?” which was nice of her, but she never told me where to look her up and there was no return address on the
postcard. I'd taken that girl to see phosphorescence in one of the Island's bays and when she told me it was the most miraculous thing she'd ever seen, I told her I loved her—but the girl just giggled and ran into the sea, that phosphorescent blue streaking like a comet's tail behind her. Every time they do that, I swear I'll never love another, and I'm thinking about Lizzie and Hunter sitting at the restaurant now, and how this is really the last time I'll let myself love one of her kind.

Halfway down the beach, I find Surachai sitting in a mango tree. He's hidden behind a thicket of leaves, straddling one of the branches, leaning back against the trunk.

When we were kids, Surachai and I used to run around the beach advertising ourselves as the Island's Miraculous Monkey Boys. We made loincloths out of Uncle Mongkhon's straw heap and an old T-shirt Ma used as a rag. For a small fee, we'd climb up trees and fetch coconuts for farangs, who would ooh and aah at how nimble we were. A product of our Island environment, they'd say, as if it was due to something in the water and not the fact that we'd spent hours practicing in Surachai's backyard. For added effect, we'd make monkey noises when we climbed, which always made them laugh. They would often be impressed, too, by my facility with the English language. In one version of the speech I gave before every performance, I played the part of an American boy shipwrecked on the Island as an infant. With both parents dead, I was raised in the jungle by a family of gibbons. Though we've long outgrown what Ma calls “that idiot stunt,” Surachai still comes
down from the mountain occasionally to climb a tree on the beach. He'll just sit there staring at the ocean for hours. It's meditative, he told me once. And the view is one-of-a-kind.

“You look terrible,” he says now. “Something happen with that farang girl?”

I call Clint Eastwood over. I tell the pig to stay. I take off my leather shoes, my knitted socks, and—because I don't want to ruin them—the button-down shirt and the silk tie, leaving them all at the bottom of the trunk before joining Surachai on an adjacent branch. As I climb, the night air warm against my skin, I'm reminded of how pleasurable this used to be—hoisting myself up by my bare feet and fingertips—and I'm surprised by how easy it still is.

When I settle myself into the tree, I start to tell Surachai everything, including the episode on the elephant. As I talk, Surachai snakes his way out onto one of the branches and drops a mango for Clint Eastwood down below.

“At least you're having sex,” Surachai says. “At least you're doing it. Some of us just get to sit in a mango tree and think about it.”

I laugh.

“I don't suppose,” Surachai says, “you loved this girl?”

I shrug.

“You're a mystery to me, phuan,” Surachai says, climbing higher now into the branches. “I've known you all these years, and that's the one thing I'll never be able to understand—why you keep falling for these farang girls. It's like
you're crazy for heartache. Plenty of nice Thai girls around. Girls without plane tickets.”

“I know. I don't think they like me, though. Something about the way I look. I don't think my nose is flat enough.”

“That may be true. But they don't like me either, okay? And I've got the flattest nose on the Island.”

We sit silently for a while, perched in that mango tree like a couple of sloths, listening to the leaves rustling around us. I climb up to where Surachai is sitting. Through the thicket, I see Clint Eastwood jogging out to meet a group of farangs making their way down the beach. I call out to him, tell him to stay, but my pig's not listening to me.

It's Hunter and his friends, laughing, slapping each other's backs, tackling each other to the sand. Lizzie's walking with them silently, head down, trying to ignore their antics. When she sees Clint Eastwood racing up to meet her, she looks to see if I'm around. But she can't see us from where she's standing. She can't see us at all.

“It's that fucking pig again!” Hunter yells.

They all laugh, make rude little pig noises, jab him with their feet. Clint Eastwood panics. He squeals. He starts to run. The American boys give chase, try to tackle him to the ground. Lizzie tells them to leave the pig alone, but the boys aren't listening. Clint Eastwood is fast. He's making a fool of them, running in circles one way, then the other, zigzagging back and
forth through the sand. The more they give chase, the more Clint Eastwood eludes them, the more frustrated the boys become, and what began as jovial tomfoolery has now turned into some kind of bizarre mission for Hunter and his friends. Their chase becomes more orchestrated. The movements of their shadows turn strategic. They try to corner the pig, run him into a trap, but Clint Eastwood keeps on moving between them, slipping through their fingers like he's greased.

I can tell that Clint Eastwood's beginning to tire, though. He can't keep it up much longer. He's an old pig. I start to climb down from the mango tree, but Surachai grabs me by the wrist.

“Wait,” he says.

Surachai climbs out to one of the branches. He reaches for a mango and with a quick sweeping motion throws the fruit out to the beach. It hits one of the boys squarely on the shoulder.

“What the fuck!” I hear the boy yell, looking in the direction of the tree, though he continues to pursue Clint Eastwood.

They have him surrounded now, encircled. There's no way out for my pig.

I follow Surachai's lead, grab as many mangoes as I can. Our mangoes sail through the night air. Some of them miss, but some meet their targets squarely in the face, on the head, in the abdomen. Some of the mangoes hit Lizzie by accident, but I don't really care anymore, I'm not really aiming. I'm
climbing through that tree like a gibbon, swinging gracefully between the branches, grabbing any piece of fruit—ripe or unripe—that I can get my hands on. Surachai starts to whoop like a monkey and I join him in the chorus. They all turn in our direction then, the four farangs, trying to dodge the mangoes as they come.