The Hot Countries (27 page)

Thai Heaven had been nowhere near here.

If he goes left and then left again, trying to get to the bright lights of New Petchburi Road, they might split up and go in opposite directions around the block until one is in front of him and the other behind. He's laboring now. His lungs feel like he's inhaled fire, and his heart seems to be trying to punch its way out of his chest. There has to be
something
to the right.

Right it is.

And he hears flip-flops slapping pavement behind him.

It's the jolt he needs. Some ancient, long-stored reserve of strength flames into being, the soldier's training overcoming, even if only for a few moments, the old man's body. He stretches his stride, feeling like he can fly, angles across the empty street, leaps for the curb, and snags a foot on it, pitching forward, fighting to get his arms down to break the fall. He lands heavily on his right elbow and knee, knowing immediately that the elbow is a problem, and rolls over twice until he can push himself to his feet with the arm he can still bend, and then he begins to move, as much at a limp as a run.

Laughter floats toward him from the boys behind.

The knee of his pants tore on impact. There's blood on the
cloth, making it stick to his leg. His right elbow is an independent sphere of pain with a demonic halo of heat around it that seems to have seized his nervous system by sheer force. It squeezes off a machine-gun tangle of agony every time his heart beats. Looking down at it, he sees for the first time that the stinging he'd been feeling in his right forearm is a neat slice,
the sleeve of his shirt looking like it had been cut with scissors. The
boy he kicked must have gotten to him with a blade as he went down.

He doesn't have it in him to go much farther. They can
 . . .
they can have him.

But the young man inside flares up again and says,
Fuck that,
and Ernie calls him a pussy, and Wallace is running again, feeling like he's leaving red streaks of pain in the air behind him. Doorways and dark windows flow by, and then, up ahead to the left, on his side of the street, he sees light: yellowish, bright, as harsh as a snapped word, but
light
.

A paved area, a parking lot, but not many cars. Instead, from knotted wires, carrying electricity stolen from the high-voltage lines above, a crop of clear, naked bulbs dangle, spherical as oranges, hanging over little stands. A few cars are parked along one edge as though they've been swept aside to make room for this little cluster of carts selling cooked food and produce. Many of the cart operators are packing up, closing the glass doors that kept the flies away, sprinkling water on charcoal. Among the few remaining shoppers, Wallace sees some
farang
, solitary men as old as he,
coaxed by the vendors from their apartments. Old, stooped, balding, left behind when the Golden Mile disappeared.

The cart farthest from the street is a big one with glass sides and a long piece of plywood laid across it, perhaps seven or eight feet long. Four stools are pulled up to it, three of them occupied: a bent-spined man in a blindingly white shirt sitting beside a woman with hair too black even for Thailand, and on the third stool a plump woman in her late fifties or early sixties, her body popping out of a black cocktail dress that might have fit her twenty years earlier. At one end of the plywood plank, a small boom box is playing something from the seventies. Of course, what else? “Hotel California.”

A portable bar. Wallace has seen a few of these, but fancier, on the sidewalks of Sukhumvit, but this one is as unexpected as an oasis with camels and palm trees. He looks behind him, sees
the shoppers thinning and the merchants closing, and goes to the
empty stool and sits. He couldn't run another yard if there were wolves chasing him.

“Beer Singha,” he says, trying to steady his breathing. Now that he's sitting, he feels his legs trembling violently. His elbow sends
up a neural yelp of pain, and the plump woman, who had gotten up
to get his beer, takes a second look at him and straightens. The powder on her face looks like chalk in the hard light.

“Honey,” she says. Her eyes drop to the cut shirt, the blood on the cloth. “What happen?”

“Some kids,” he says, hearing the quaver in his voice. “It's okay. I just need to sit a minute.”

“Poor baby, poor baby,” she says. “Kid no good now. Not like before.” She reaches into the glass case and pulls out a relatively clean dish towel, scooping up a handful of melting ice and wrapping the towel around it. She lifts the dripping mess in both hands, gives it a professional-looking squeeze, and holds it out. “Here,” she says. “For
 . . .
” She flexes her own right elbow and points at it.

He presses the wet, cold cloth to his arm, and the fire of pain banks slightly. A few of the vendors are reaching up with towels or pot holders to unscrew the bulbs over their carts, which sets him looking around anxiously, but the kids are nowhere in sight.

“You say kid,” the woman in black ventures. She pops the cap on a Singha. At her end of the bar is a big Chinese cleaver on a circular wooden cutting board, piled with limes. She grabs the cleaver and cuts a delicate slice of lime. “Glass?”

He shakes his head.

“Kid how old? How many?” She drops the lime slice back onto the board and puts the bottle in front of him, then hoists herself onto the stool to his left, resting her hand on his thigh with the eternal familiarity of bar girls everywhere.

“Three. In their twenties. Smoking—” He mimes the little pipe with his left hand.

“I see before,” she says. “Bangkok now no good.”

A fat Thai man with a Chinese face waddles out of the darkness, abandoning an aluminum lawn chaise with a blanket on it. “Close soon,” the man says. “Order last drink, please.”

“Aaaaahhhhhh,” the man with the bent spine says. “I'll quit now.” He puts a couple of bills down, drops some coins on top, and pushes his stool back. Standing, he's no taller than he was sitting, his back as crooked as a question mark. “You,” he says to Wallace. “That arm's busted.”

“I think so, too,” Wallace says.

“Little shits around here,” the other man says. “Know we're old. Know what days the pension checks arrive. Little fuckers. Oughta carry a gun if you're gonna come here.”

Behind the man with the bent spine, Wallace sees another man come into sight on the street, emerging from the same direction he had run in. The man glances for a moment at the bright lights and then walks on, moving faster, and Wallace's attention is drawn downward by a lightning bolt of pain from his arm. When he looks back up, the man on the street is gone and the one with the bent spine is waiting for a reply. “I won't be back,” Wallace says.

“Smart guy. Get that arm looked at, hear?” To the woman beside him, he says, “Coming?”

“I go with you?” the woman says, doing her best to look surprised and pleased.

“Sure, sure. We talk money later, okay?”

“No problem.” She grabs a tiny purse and darts a quick, victorious glance at the woman beside Wallace, then takes the bent man's arm, and the two of them head for the street.

“Why you come?” asks the woman in the tight dress.

“Golden Mile,” Wallace says.

“Ah,” she says, her face softening. “Golden Mile, yes. Very good.”

“You know a girl named Jah?” Wallace asks.

He gets a moment of silence as she gnaws her lower lip. “I know many Jah.”

“At Thai Heaven.”

“No,” she says. “I no work Thai Heaven. Work California bar.”

“Mmmm,” Wallace says, and knocks back half the beer. With the bottle most of the way down, he freezes.

She follows his gaze, and there they are, the three of them, in a loose triangle at the edge of the lot. She points at them with a tilt of her chin. “
Those
boy?”

“Yes,” Wallace says.

“You stay,” the plump woman says, and faster than he would have thought possible, she's at the end of the bar and she's grabbed the cleaver. Raising it high in the air, she runs toward the boys, small strides because of the tight dress, but a run nevertheless. The boys step back, one of them limping badly, and when she shows no sign of slowing, they turn and retreat, up the street and out of sight. The woman with the cleaver follows.

Wallace's hand trembles as he downs the rest of the beer. He wants very badly to close his eyes.

And perhaps he does, because when he opens them again, she's trotting back into sight, hair slightly disarranged. She sinks the cleaver's edge into the side of the cutting board and says, “They go, but maybe not far. You pay, you come with me. I take you home. We go.” She waits, not sitting, until he's put the money on the plywood, and then she laces her right arm through his uninjured left and leads him toward the street, in the direction opposite the one the boys took.

She wears a light floral perfume, a fragrance that brings to Wallace's mind the wildflowers in a place he and his friends had played each spring in the hills above Carlsbad, a sloping stretch of blue lupines above the hard, bright sun wrinkles of the sea. Looking for the messages they had left there the previous fall, when the hills grew dry and prickly. Answers to secret questions they'd asked each other, maps to things they'd hidden.

Maps.

They're on the sidewalk now, the lights receding behind them. Wallace's knee has stiffened, and he's limping. He says, “How can you take me home? You don't know where I live.”

“No problem,” she says. “I take you where you can get taxi, get
tuk-tuk
. Take you home.”

The shophouse
, he thinks.
No, no, that's not right.

“Have taxi up here,” she says. “Come little bit more.” They pass beneath a streetlight, her face suddenly blossoming from the dark.

“Jah?” Wallace says, studying her, and then she looks back over her shoulder and he hears them.

“In here.” She shoves him into a narrow space between two buildings, half illuminated by the streetlight, with chunks of rubble underfoot. She pushes him in front of her, and then a blue flame ignites ahead of them: the boy with the crimp in his head. The other two come into the alley behind them. The woman backs away from him.

He's turned to face the two who had just come in when he hears the grit of a step behind him, and then something enormously hard slams the side of his head, and his vision fills with flares as the thing hits him again, driving the other side of his head into the wall of the building. He's sliding, sliding somewhere, feeling a rough surface against his arm and shoulder, and then something rises up from below, very fast, and strikes him on the underside of the chin, and his head snaps back so hard he thinks he hears something break.

The woman is screaming in Thai, sounding not frightened but furious, and one of the boys barks a string of syllables like rocks, and she falls silent. Someone kicks Wallace in the ribs, but he barely feels it. He's on his back, not feeling much of anything.

There are
stars
up there, pale ones, at the top of the narrow canyon between the buildings. He hasn't seen stars in Bangkok for decades. When he first came, the stars were
 . . .
He and Jah had
 . . .

A hand under his head, lifting it up, putting it on something soft, her leg. The woman, looking down at him, fat and powdered, her face shining with sweat. He sees the eyes, the bones, the skin; and the fat melts away, and the corners of her mouth curl up, and the lacquered hair falls loose and long, and he says, “Jah.”

“I'm here,
teerak
,” she says. “You okay now, I'm here.”

“I looked for you,” Wallace said. The world dips sharply down for an instant, everything going sideways, but he forces it back the way it should have been.

“You found me,” she says. “You found me.” She wipes his face gently with her hand. “Always I wait for you.”

He feels another hand in his pocket, but when Wallace tries to look down at it, the world tilts again, and this time it keeps tilting and the streetlight goes down like the sun. He's alone in an empty room, the walls rushing away from him, the space growing bigger and emptier and darker until the only light is him, whatever
he
is, a sharp point of white light, narrowing to a pinpoint, and he says again,
“Jah,”
and the light blinks out.

“Who's Jah?” asks the boy with the crimped head, fanning the wad of bills.

“How would I know?” the woman says. “Some
teerak
from a hundred years ago. Why'd you hit him so hard?”

“He hurt Beer's foot,” says the boy with the crimped head.

“Hee mah,”
the woman says. “Dog pussy. Hurt by an old
farang
.” She eases Wallace's head off her leg and lowers it softly to the pavement. “Give me a hand.”