Bangkok Knights (9 page)

“Till he struck off outa there to get his first oil job —
he was just thirteen — he was nothing but ‘poor white trash’, in that little
town he came from. Well, he never went back to that town, after he heard his
adopted nanny died, and he never took kindly to anybody suggesting he don’t
have folks like anybody else. Dexy’s a proud man.

“Anyway, he’s sorry he roughed Eddie up the way he did. He
doesn’ t think the lad’ s a bad guy; you just have to be careful what you say
to old Dexy, sometimes.

“And speak of the devil...”

Sure enough, the door to the street had opened, and there
was good old Dexy, though he didn’t appear to be the same proud man Leary had
only just then described. He had a large gauze dressing stuck to his face, and
he was walking very carefully, like he was carrying a rattlesnake in his
pocket, maybe, and he figured it was best not disturbed. All in all, Dexy was
considerably more subdued than was his wont. He got up on a barstool and
ordered a drink; he sat there silent, in no way at all his usual ebullient
self.

“What happened to
youT
Leary finally asked. “Gosh.
Last I remember, you whupped the other guy.”

“And I was gonna send her to hair-dressing school.” Dexy’s
voice had the hollow ring of a man whose last illusions had been cruelly
shattered. “You can never trust a woman,” he added, his voice regaining some of
its old timbre, though it still bespoke a man who’d had confirmed his worst
suspicions about Life, and Women and Everything.

“A woman?” Leary was taken aback. “What’re you talking
about?”

You got the idea Big Toy and Dinky Toy also wanted to know
the answer to this question, because by now they were both polishing glasses
with furious intensity, half leaning over the bar, bracketing Dexy like two
mimes doing KGB agents, avid curiosity pretty well obscuring any concern they
might have felt for the poor guy.

“Number Thirty-seven,” croaked Dexy. “You know; from
Smokin’ Sal’s... And I was gonna send her to hair-dressing school.”

If the way Dexy looked right at the moment was the result
of that offer, then you had to get the idea #37 didn’t want to
go
to
hair-dressing school.

Dexy shifted on his barstool and winced, putting a hand
gently on his thigh and uttering a quiet but potent obscenity. Then he winced
again because his first wince made his face hurt. But you could see this
threatened to lead to an infinite regress of wincing and no end of pain, so he
opted for impassivity once more, and his voice dropped to a rusty whisper: “She
had a goddammed straight razor in her purse.”

No matter how immobile Dexy tried to keep his face and no
matter how level his tone, you got the idea this straight razor in #37’s purse
had been a big surprise, as far as he was concerned. Personally, though, if
that little ice-cube crusher had been one in a crowd of a hundred bargirls, and
you’d asked me which one was likely to be hiding a straight razor somewhere on
her person, there would’ve been little or no hesitation before I told you
“#37.”

“She took a swipe at my... at my.. .Here!” Dexy pointed an
indignant digit at his nether regions.

I suppose that’s one drawback to a woman who’s three feet
tall, or even a bit more, as #37 was — when she starts swinging a straight
razor, the targets of first opportunity are somewhat unfortunate ones, at least
from the point of view of the guy whose targets are hanging right there within
easy reach.

“She just missed, too. Took a dozen goddammed stitches to
close up my leg. Dozen more in my face.

“And I
liked
that girl, never mind it was like
sleeping with a gravel crusher. Goddammit. Why’d she ever want to go and do
like she did?”

Trying to talk without moving any muscle in his face the
way he was, what should’ve been a fairly poignant or maybe even downright
heart-breaking utterance sounded more like the voice circuit in a cartoon
robot.

Maybe the same thought had occurred to Big Toy and Dinky
Toy, because they were having trouble keeping merry looks of delight off their
faces, from what I could see. In fact, they gave up trying, and retired to the
other end of the bar for a minute to chirrup away, every now and then firing
something akin to looks of malicious satisfaction up towards Dexy. Dexy didn’t
even notice. But if he had, he probably would’ve told you it was more evidence
they were all in it together. These women.

“Women!” he said. “I’ll be glad to get back to the
platform. There I was, talking to a few of the boys down at Skipjacks, and
there was this girl, one of Skipjacks’. And Thirty-seven, she cuts this girl— I
don’t really
know
this girl, don’t even know her name, I’m just fooling
around, being friendly, like. She cuts this girl across the face and then whips
the razor back and slashes her right across her tits. Jesus, there’s blood
everywhere and the girls are all screaming...

“Some of us are lookin’ to grab Thirty-seven, only she’s
turned into a regular little tornado with that there razor, and no one is real
happy about getting in too close. Finally I move in on her, though, and I’m
trying to tell her she’s gonna get herself into big trouble, and she’s never
gonna get to go to hair-dressing school if she’s not careful, when she catches
just a piece of my face with that thing. Well, I was surprised—it stopped me
cold, for a minute, and that’s when she went for my...

“And after all the times I laid awake all night listening
to her grinding her teeth. And I paid for dentists and everything. You just
never know.”

Dexy had to fly back to Jakarta in two days, he told us,
and then it was back out to the oil platform for another month of ‘sour’ — to
complement all the ‘sweet’ he’d just enjoyed in Bangkok, of course. In fact,
you got the feeling he was ambivalent about going back, this time, just as he
was ambivalent about staying. So he drank twice as much as he usually did,
which was already twice as much as anybody else ever could, and he concentrated
on not wincing too much.

Eventually, he got quite maudlin, and he and Leary swopped
tales of the old days and traded wisdom on Life and Women, with Leary generally
taking the ‘pro’ side of things, and Dexy arguing the’con’. Nobody had ever
seen Dexy pass out before; Leary and I carried him into the back room where Doc
kept a cot for those nights he couldn’t go home.

Doc never did show up. In fact, nobody had seen him since
before the Orphan Party.

Eddie signed up for a Tae Kwon Do course on Sukhumvit Road two days ago. And he’s already popped a knee while demonstrating a
round-house kick, half-pissed, at Boon Doc’s yesterday afternoon. Right now
he’s going around on a cane, his leg all taped up. He also has a plaster on his
cheek from where he hit the edge of the bar as he went down. His eye was
already black, but I believe it’s even blacker, now. Added to the scars and
bruises of his violent encounter with Dexy the other night, all this gives
Eddie a certain dash.

When I dropped around the Cheri-Tone Guesthouse today to
check on the martial artist, I found his wife Lek and his sister-in-law Meow in
rare good spirits, what with this visible evidence Eddie is
apbun,
a
klutz, just like they’re always trying to tell him. For my part, I am impressed
by Tae Kwon Do as a true killer art Stepping back out of range of his cane, I
tell Eddie it’s truly terrifying to see how a rank beginner like himself can
beat somebody up, even if it is only himself, doing quite serious injury
without even trying very hard.

Big Toy has inaugurated her regime as Manager-in-Chief of
Boon Doc’s Bar by shortening Happy Hour to only an hour, showing us a
literal-minded side of herself never apparent before. She has also put a piece
of tape on a tequila bottle identifying it as her own personal preserve. In all
fairness, of course, she’s entitled to a therapeutic hit of cactus juice now
and then. Though Doc’s wife never wants to come around to the bar — it’s not
polite — Pin nevertheless inquires into the provenance, present disposition,
and likely fate of every single
baht
and can of bug-killer in the place,
at least to hear Big Toy tell it. Pin tells Big Toy how she trusts her like
family, and then she switches on the 1,000-watt bulb and gets out the rubber
hose and she goes on asking questions till all hours, it matters nothing to her
Big Toy’s closed the bar at 1:00 a.m. and has to get up at 10:00 in the morning
to start getting ready for the next day.

Big Toy tells me Pin has been looking at prospectuses for
American universities for young Sam, and she’s done a lot of talking to the
insurance people, never mind anybody who really loved and admired Doc is
thinking it’s a bit premature to start counting the life-insurance money.

The police have found Doc’s car on Jomtien Beach. His clothes, together with his wallet, were on the front seat There was about ten
baht
in the wallet, or so the police say, as well as his driving license and
resident’s card. The car keys and Doc himself were nowhere to be found.

The insurance people probably have little human feeling
about it one way or the other, but they think it’s too soon to take Doc out for
the count And they are rooting for it to be alive he is, naturally enough; what
insurance company in its right mind wants to cough up a pile of life insurance,
no matter how much Pin thinks Sam should go to university in the States?

There are little things... Like for example: it’s funny
Doc’s passport hasn’t turned up anywhere yet. That is really funny, when he
kept all his personal documents—his birth certificate, copies of his driving
licenses, life insurance policies, and so on — so meticulously in order and all
together there in his strongbox. This is what Big Toy and Dinky Toy tell me,
anyway.

Or probably he just forgot he had his passport in his
bathing suit that day on Jomtien Beach when he decided to go swimming for the
first time in twenty years. Who’s to say? Stranger things have happened.

And there’s the poster from the Orphan Party. There was
something odd about the wording of that thing. Leary agrees with me. “It was
like Doc was trying to tell us something,” he says.

Trouble is, the poster got thrown out long ago, and we can’t
remember exactly how it went.

Anyway, Dinky Toy eats all the grasshoppers she wants to,
these days, and there’s no one says “Don’t.”

Leary has come around to say howdy to Eddie, and to convey
Dexy’s compliments.

“Ugh. It stinks out here!” Lek has just emerged from the
kitchen. “I thought it must be you, Leary.”

“Waddaya mean?” Leary is indignant. “I even put on an
extra dose of the old Sheik of Araby, it’s so friggin’ hot today.”

Dexy’s away for his month of sour. Leary tells us Dexy
never pressed charges against #37, and he paid the Skipjacks girl for her
medical expenses and her pain. He also squared things with Big Turk, who runs
the place. Still, it cost Dexy a
baht
or two to get #37 out of jail.
He’s put her in a clinic, leaving instructions they’re to straighten her out
and fix her goddammed teeth while they’re at it. But he never wants to see her
again, he says.

“Yeah, that’s
right
, and that’s not all—old Dexy’s
gone and adopted
three
of those little critters. Those orphan kids. Just
before he left for Jakarta. Good old Dexy. Heart of gold.”

Eddie doesn’t believe this, not for a minute. But I can
tell him it’ s true. Just before Dexy passes out, the other night, I overhear
him tell Leary this: “Hey, listen; do you think Nancy’s got a couple more of
those kids lying around? Maybe I can do something. Goddammit.” And as luck
would have it, Leary still had some of the forms behind the bar.

Leary figures Dexy knew what he was doing. “Got a head for
his likker, old Dexy has; what he’d do drunk, he’d do sober.”

That’s what Leary says. But if you ask me, this
foster-fatherhood is going to be as big a surprise to old Dexy as the time he
woke up in Singapore married to a Chinese hat-check girl (or so she claimed,
anyway). Or the morning he came to in Aberdeen and discovered the ‘Mr. Nice
Guy’ tattoo—the one he still wears on his right fist.

“It’s a symptom of the crisis of modem civilization — an
expression of pathological alienation.” Ernest was raving, his diatribe
accompanied by suitably exaggerated gesticulations.

Looking on, a waiter had somehow interpreted it all as an
order for one more Singha beer, another Kloster, and a plate of nuts. Since we
didn’ t argue the point, he decided we were probably going to be around for a
fair spell of boozy palaver to come, and he turned the music up to serious
good-time levels.

“What did you say?” I shouted at Ernest.

“The noise!” he screamed back. “It’s driving me nuts!”

Massed unmuffled motorcycles scrambling at the traffic
lights, amplified fruit vendors cruising the laneways at daybreak, music
cassette vendors drowning out the traffic with their samples...

My friend Ernest had only been in Bangkok for ten months,
and he had some kind of thing about noise pollution. “It’s not just all that
stuff — motorcycles and everything. Oh, no. Now people actually seek it out.
It’s a sickness.”

I couldn’t hear what he was saying very clearly, so I
waved the waiter over and asked him to turn the music down.

”They crave music,” Ernest continued. “What do they do to
relax? Like there wasn’t enough noise in this city already, they go to
nightclubs where the music is so loud your beer goes flat. Or they go to
discos, which are worse; they can turn your brains to jelly. The disk jockeys
all went deaf long ago.

“People can’t talk to each other any more; they don’t want
to talk. At the same time, they’re uncomfortable with silence. If everything is
quiet, then they start to think, and people don’t want to think. They can’t
handle it. There are too many horrifying things to think about. So they need
insulation. Insulation from each other, in case somebody says something
significant, and insulation from their own thoughts, in case they scare themselves
to death.