Bangkok Knights (16 page)

“That there’s little Daeng, my boy, but there’s nothing
little about them lovely big knockers she’s carrying around up there. No, sir,
by gosh,” said Leary. “Darn it.

“My boy, you don’t want a wife at all, if you want my opinion.
Listen, you’ve got the world by the tail right now. You’ve got a job with
money; you’ve got lots of holidays; you’ve discovered Shaky Jake’s; and I think
Daeng likes you. Darn it, Crunch, what’d you want to go and get married for,
and screw all this up? You’ve got it made. Gosh. Look here, if you took
everything I knew about life and about women and you put it into your
gosh-darned computer and then you asked it, it’d tell you the same friggin’
thing: you’ve got it good.”

“Sure, that’s easy for you to say. You don’t have to go
back to live in Kuwait,” replied Trevor. “You’ve got to have a wife if you’re
going to work in Kuwait.”

Homing in telepathically on this latter proposition, Daeng
aimed a smile at Trevor that would’ve stiffened the wrist on a ladyboy.

Trevor had by now finished his third gin and tonic, and
was starting to act a bit more like you figure a’ Crunch’ ought to behave. He
smiled up at Daeng, and she immediately found an extra couple thousand
candlepower of good will to beam back at him. You could see a real warmth
growing between these two young folk.

Reaching deep into her arsenal of winning ways, and maybe
fearing she’d been so far too subtle for this boy, Daeng pulled her top down
and proceeded to shake her not inconsiderable boobs wildly in Trevor’s general
direction. He was transfixed. His ears charged with blood sufficient to keep
them fiery for days to come. He took a big gulp of his fourth gin and tonic —
this one a double, though he didn’t know it (it had been Eddie’s round) — and
looked again at Daeng, who was squirming back into her bikini top. She stuffed
a last loose boob back under cover and then stopped dancing for a moment;
probably disconcerted at her own enthusiasm, she turned to
wai
the
shrine as if to say “Sorry; got carried away.”

Trevor’s whole face was almost red enough to match his
ears, now, and this made the blond growth on his lip stand out so you would
probably think he had a moustache.

“Leary, are you seriously telling me I should take up with
someone like that? Someone who makes her living dancing almost naked? And who
probably sleeps with the customers into the bargain?”

“What? Do you think Daeng puts out?” Eddie looked at Leary
with sudden surmise.

Leary nodded. “Hear tell,” he said.

“I can see it, the first time I take her home to meet the
folks,” Trevor went on. “We’ ve got my old Auntie Flo and the vicar and his
wife, and there’s an uncomfortable pause in the conversation. Just to put
everyone at their ease, then, she pulls out her... her
bosom
and shakes
it all over the place, grinning like a loon the whole while. Bloody hell. Just
what I need.”

Trevor’s language was getting a trifle coarse, by some
standards. Altogether, I thought, he seemed a good deal looser than usual. Now
he was staring at another girl, a comely lass who at that moment was stepping
into her dance costume; she hiked the G-string up under her skirt and then
dropped the skirt. Trevor seemed deep in thought

“Crunch,” roared Leary, intruding on Trevor’s reverie and
shaking his head sorrowfully. “Crunch, did I say you should
marry
this
lady? Did I, now? No, I did gosh-darned not. What I said was you didn’t have to
look too far to find a woman and this one, for example, seems to like you, who
knows why. And what I said was:

’Don’t you marry any one of ‘em/ I don’t care if they’re
gonna shake their darned bosoms at your momma and poppa or not.

“Look, my boy, you say you want a Thai wife, but you don’t
really know what you want.”

“I know exactly what I want,” interrupted Trevor, riding
high on three singles and a double shot of gin. “I want a companion and a
help-mate. I want someone I can love and who can love me and live with me in Kuwait. Someone who can meet my friends and my family and make me proud...” He broke off to
finish the rest of his drink in one long pull.

“Are you listening to this?” Leary asked me. “Eddie, you
hear this boy? Gosh.”

The girl who had dropped her skirt was now climbing up to
relieve Daeng, and Daeng was clearly thinking she’d better come over our way
and check out this cute kid with the incandescent ears.

Trevor, meanwhile, was waving at the barmaid. “One more
gin and tonic here, and drinks for my friends.”

Looking at Daeng as she swung her long legs off the bar,
you couldn’t help but note the way her skin glistened, how her whole person
glowed after her exertions. She was also smiling in the most fetching way.

“And bring a drink for the dancer, as well,” Trevor added,
grinning like a loon.

Leary and I had business downtown, but Eddie said he’d
stick around to see that Trevor didn’t get into any trouble. I guess that’s why
I saw him have Ying, the barmaid, slip another gin into Trevor’s glass when he
wasn’t looking. He probably figured it was safest to keep the lad sedated.

Next morning, or so Eddie was to tell me some days later,
Trevor got to try yet another novel experience — a force-10 hangover, or
thereabouts, plus some shaky recollections of all manner of indiscretions and
conduct unbecoming a traffic engineer.

He apparently didn’t remember exactly where or when he had
parted ways with the very agreeable Daeng, but he seemed to recall her last
words had been: “Tomollow, flee!” Whether this had been promise or admonition,
he wasn’t quite sure, now that he thought about it. Whichever — in the outcome
he had evidently fled, for Daeng was nowhere to be seen.

Trevor had made it to one of his interviews, but he’d
quickly realized that he would have to cancel yet a few more days of the
program. He’d returned to the Cheri-Tone and the tender mercies of Meow.

Lek was still fond of him, as well, despite the condition
he was in, but she had her hands full making life miserable for Eddie. No
matter he tried to say he was also in bad shape, there was a leak in the shower
room on the third floor which demanded immediate attention, and he had to speak
to a neighbor who was complaining that the birds had called his visiting uncle
a
hia,
a giant lizard, which I guess is just about the worst thing you
can call a Thai. Trust Nixon.

“Meanwhile,” Eddie told me, “poor Trev is lying abed with
fans blowing from all directions, his moustache limp with fatigue, smiling
bravely as Meow fills him with life-giving substances and a lot of guff about
how he still looks like a young boy and how come? because old Eddie is the
spitting image of a moulderin’ old crock of manure, more decrepit, even, than
he usually looks.”

I came over for breakfast a week after all this
transpired, and Eddie was still running just behind Nixon and possibly
neck-and-neck with a giant lizard in the Cheri-Tone popularity stakes.

Trevor was still there, and he’d canceled another week of
interviews.

As I waited for Eddie to cook the ham and eggs (Lek was
busy), I got to listen to Trevor drill Meow in the correct pronunciation of
‘omelet’.

He did look pretty young, I thought, as I watched his
careful enunciation of the various requisite vowels and consonants. Prince
Charlie himself couldn’t have done any better. Then I realized why he appeared
so youthful — he’d shaved his moustache again, and you get no prize for
guessing who was responsible this time. She was also watching his careful
enunciation, though with a good deal more interest and affection than I felt.

“Omer-ette,” she said.

I exchanged a glance with Nixon; he merely cocked his head
and fixed the young couple with a nasty gaze. “Flee!” I almost heard him
shriek, but of course it was just my imagination.

I was waiting to meet Eddie. He was on a mission, he had
said, and he needed my help. Could I be at this bar called Lots O’ Hots around
six o’clock?

If he wanted to make sure I started the night in a great
mood, then he really knew how to pick a rendez-vous. There were two customers
in the place — myself and one other guy who sat at the end of the bar with a
beer in front of him. He didn’t have any arms, and the cashier would lift his
beer to his mouth for him every once in a while. This lady wasn’t a bad-looking
thirty-nine years old or so, though she seemed pretty tired and she didn’ t
have a lot of teeth. There was another woman behind the bar, and she had a big
greasy bag of fried grasshoppers. She’d offered me one when I first sat down,
but I said no thanks. She and the cashier were crunching up these crispy
morsels, occasionally popping one into the guy with no arms, who would do an
imitation of a hungry baby bird whenever he needed another. He had a
grasshopper leg stuck to his upper lip. I stood drinks for the house — for all
four of us — and tried to find something to smile about.

Eddie finally showed up and he explained how he had wanted
to meet in a quiet place with no hassle so we could talk.

“This joint is quiet, Eddie; I’ll give you that,” I said.
“In fact, I’ve known cemeteries that would’ve seemed pretty rowdy by
comparison.”

Eddie assured me we’d soon move on to more festive venues.
He ordered two more beers, and proceeded to outline the problem. It seemed a
mutual acquaintance of ours named Ronald from Riyadh, a regular traveler to Bangkok, had returned to the Sandbox last time with an unpleasant souvenir of his vacation.
As far as he could see, he had written to tell Eddie, there had been only one
possible source of this memento, and that source’s name was Ann who was a
dancer at Pogo’s Gogo Bar. Now, Ronald was quite fond of this particular
exponent of the hoofer’s art, and not a little surprised that she would do such
a thing to him. He had to assume it had been inadvertent, and he wanted to warn
her, as discreetly as possible, that she was not entirely dissimilar to Typhoid
Mary in some respects, these respects being ones that should be spoken of, if
at all, in hushed tones and far away from the public ear and the idle tongues
of gossips.

“So Ronald wants me to talk to Ann,” said Eddie, “and
break the news as gendy as I can, suggesting she see a doctor.”

“Why didn’t he just write her a letter?” I inquired.

“He said he didn’t want to embarrass her. He only had her
address at the bar, and you know how that would’ ve gone. Anyway, he’s not sure
his Ann can read English, and one of her colleagues would quite possibly have
read it out for all to hear.”

“And why do you need me?

“I went down to Pogo’s the other night, and found it
closed and shuttered. I asked around a bit, but no one I talked to knew this
Ann. I’ve never seen her, and only know her from Ronald’s description, which is
that she has legs like a racehorse. This is by no means enough to pick her out
of your average gang of gogo girls.

“Then I remembered you’d gone on that boat-ride to Ayutthaya with them, and you’d be able to recognize her. That’s what I’d like us to do
tonight — it’s not impossible she’s shifted to one of the other joints along
here, and it might not be too hard to find her.”

Any excuse for a pub-crawl, as far as Eddie was concerned.
We finished our drinks, said so long to the merry crowd at Lots O’ Hots, and
hit the street

The strip was lined on both sides with little bars. Girls
spilled out onto the pavements, working at a carnival atmosphere which failed
to disguise a sense of quiet desperation and the fact the girls outnumbered
customers by a ratio of four to one. A lot more places had closed since last
I’d been there. For every three or four live establishments, there were two or
three steel-shuttered blank fronts offering mute testimony to hard times, and
it reminded me of the gap-toothed smile the cashier at the Lots O’ Hots had
flashed when a customer appeared on the threshold.

Reasoning that Ann would’ ve gravitated to one of the more
successful places, and choosing one that wasn’t too far from where Pogo’s had
used to be, we made our way through the flashing lights, pounding music, and
very friendly hostesses which swarmed outside the doorway.

There was lots of light and sound and motion, but if you
took a hard look through all the razzmatazz, you could see the only patrons
were two tourists in a booth, and four young Thai soldiers in camouflage
outfits sitting at the bar. Nobody was too happy with the latter gendemen,
either, mostly because they’d brought their own bottle of Mekhong in with them.

I didn’t see anyone that could have passed for our missing
person, but asked the barmaid if she knew anything about an’ Ann’ from Pogo’s.
She said she didn’t, but she did know that the cashier from Pogo’s now worked
at a place called Fancy That Maybe she could help us.

Eddie bought the lady a drink, and we set off in search of
‘Mu’, formerly of Pogo’s Gogo Bar.

Mu, who was cashier at Fancy That, did indeed know Ann;
she also knew where Ann worked, and she told us Ann had been quite worried
Ronald from Riyadh wouldn’t know how to get in touch with her. In fact, just
two days before Mu had ghost-written a letter to Ronald for Ann — a 50
baht
special
two-page job, complete with personalized references to good times gone by and
hopes of more to come.

She was working on a missive for someone else right at
that moment. From where I stood I could read the salutation; it said ‘To Walter
My Big Water Buffalo, With Love’.

Mu told us we could find Ronald’s penfriend a little
farther down the road and across the way, at a quiet restaurant-bar called
Skipjacks. Eddie bought Mu a drink, and muttered something about how all this
was going on expenses, and it was going to be Ronald’s shout in a big way
whenever he returned to Bangkok.