Bangkok Knights (6 page)

“Don’t worry; we have our ways. Oh, yes, and by the way:
your ex-wife is one of our founding members.”

He caved in. You could see it right then, though he made a
show of taking it all under further consideration. “But... I don’t know if I
can.
With a condom, I mean.” He was whining, essentially, and the rest of us men
didn’t know where to look. Try to imagine Charles Bronson whining.

While Billboard agonized, the blonde took a moment to hold
a big balloon for the blowgun girl, who put a dart into it first try. The loud
bang roused Billboard from his painful reverie.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll try.”

The ladies wanted him to do a trial run that very night.
In fact, they said they’d buy him a soda, as well, if he’d do it right then.

But he wouldn’t. He said he’d have to prepare himself; he
wanted to get away from it all for a week or two.

Well, they said, they’d see him again on Saturday, in any
case. They wanted to talk to his girls. Also, the brunette told him, she was
going to make a tasty sauce for the
hoi
and bring it along.

“Oh, good,” said Billboard, smiling, his face a study in
despair.

The ladies had to leave; they had business at a bar across
the street. They thanked Billboard for the drinks, said goodnight to the rest
of us, and left, still smiling. It turned out Billboard had some things to do
back at Badman’s, and he left a few minutes later.

Bob decided to abandon his fan club, and he and Eddie and
I retired to Boon Doc’s for a quiet beer and some discussion of apian to turn
Billboard into a kind of community bulletin board. This very convenient and
arresting space could be used for any number of public service announcements,
we figured.

And Bob told us some more about married life back in Pittsburgh. Towards the end of the evening he resolved to go back to Manny’s and do the
live show himself, but first he wanted somebody to write

I’M FREE

on his own not unimposing billboard. In the end, though,
he decided against it. Actually, he didn’t; he passed out, but it came to the
same thing. His last words were: “You know, that little brunette was cute. Do you
think she’s married?

Eddie and I decided we’d pretty well have to go around to
Badman’s on Saturday and see how it all turned out.

There was a sign behind the bar at Boon Doc’s,
hand-lettered and yellowed with age:

MONEY TALKS BULLSHIT WALKS

The place was very quiet. It was four o’clock on a
Wednesday afternoon in late March — the onset of the hot season in Bangkok. Happy Hour wasn’t till five o’clock.

Only a couple of the girls had arrived, as yet. Big Toy
was sitting down behind the bar by the cash, looking for the source of some
anomaly in the previous night’s receipts, brushing her long black hair back
from her face and making an exasperated sort of whinny: “Meeeeh!” Dinky Toy was
sitting on a barstool eating grasshoppers.

Eddie and I had just come in off the street, out of the
sun, and we were momentarily blinded in the gloom. The air-conditioning wasn’ t
working. The tired old ceiling fan whirred away, barely stirring the hot, heavy
air. Stale tobacco and beer blended with the general background mustiness of
decay and roach powder. From the Buddha shrine high up the wall near the
ceiling there wafted a delicate fragrance of jasmine flowers and incense,
accented by the tang of ammonia from the toilet at the back. Familiar and
reassuring, all of it, even the cloying aroma of Dinky Toy’s fried grasshoppers.

But there was something else; there was a definite hint — more
than a hint — of aftershave.

“Leary?” We peered into the darker recesses.

“Yo!” came the muffled response.

“Leary in toilet,” said Dinky Toy.

Leary was back, then. Visions of hangovers to come; you
could hear Eddie’s wife Lek saying “You and that goddam Leary same-same. No
damn good. Drink whiskey too much.”

Lek bad-mouthed Leary a lot. She’d swear at him, and ask
why he did his girlfriend Nancy the way he did. Why didn’t he get married? Why
didn’ t he buy a house? Why did he drink, drink, drink all the time and give
her husband hangovers? And so on. But she really liked Leary, underneath it
all.

Actually, Leary was an expert on women. At least on Asian
women. Or at least so he claimed. Lek liked him, anyway; and I guess Nancy, his
Chinese girlfriend, did too; she’d been with him for years.

“Yeah, that’s
right”
he’d boom. “Oriental broads
don’t like how us
farang
smell. The darned foreigners sweat too much,
you see. We stink. Or so these ladies figure... Ain’t that right, you purty
little thing?” He’d interrupt his exposition to make a grab at a passing
bargirl.

“Yeah, you see, that’s
right.
It’s sweat — too much
gosh-darned sweat. And red meat. These people don’t eat so much red meat, you
know. Poisons. It comes out in the sweat.”

In fact, Thais eat lots of pork and quite a bit of beef,
as well. Leary was probably thinking of Japanese or Chinese or something. He’d
been around for a long time, all over Asia. In the oil business.

“And then, like all that’s not enough, they hate the smell
of butter. The butter clings to you, you see. They can smell it the next
gosh-darned day. Makes ‘em sick, to smell it.”

Leary was a man who liked his red meat and butter, and he
sweated. Therefore, being a man of sensibilities, he also went around reeking
of Sheik of Araby aftershave. That’s how we’d known he was in the bar,
somewhere.

The door to the toilet crashed open, and a large figure
emerged from the back. “Hey, gosh-dam it Guys? Friggin’ long time.”

He didn’t talk; he bellowed. His name was Leary. Just
Leary. He had red hair; he was beer-bellied, barrel-chested, and he swung his
bulk along on two short thick legs. His hands were large and freckled, and
there was a fair amount of scar tissue, particularly around the knuckles. Veins
twisted amidst the thick tufts of sandy hair that bargirls liked to play with.
“King Kong,” they’d murmur, which never ceased to delight him. He generally
stank of aftershave. And sometimes of whiskey.

“When did you get back, Leary?”

“Last night, gosh-darn it. Straight in from Jakarta. What’re
you drinking?”

“Singha beer.”

“Kloster.”

“Hey!” bellowed Leary. “Hey, Big Toy.” Leary stamped a
boot up on the bar-rail; he tore off his grimy San Miguel Beer baseball cap and
slapped it down hard on the counter. “How about another Jack Daniels and soda
here, and beer for the boys. Their friggin’ tongues are hanging out. No
gosh-darned air-conditioning. Where is old Doc, anyway? What kind of a way is
this to run a friggin’ bar? I ask you. That’s
right.
Haw!”

On cue, dripping with sweat and laden with bags from
Foodland, the missing proprietor made his appearance. “I could hear you all the
way out in the street, Leary,” said Doc, as he dumped plastic tubes of pate and
loaves of dark bread out on the counter. “You just get back?... Why don’t you
put these in the fridge, there, Dinky Toy? If you think you can move okay, I
mean; I don’t want to put you to no trouble, and all.”

Dinky Toy raised her eyebrows, popped a grasshopper, and
dismounted her stool with studied languor.

“And what the hell are you doing eating those goddamned
grasshoppers in here? I told you before the customers don’t like it.”

“No customers here, Doc,” said Toy. “Only Leary. And Eddie
and ...” She waved a languid hand.

“What’s goddamned Leary, if he isn’t a customer?” Doc
demanded; I guess familiarity had bred contempt for Eddie and me.

”I’m a customer. That’s
right.
If I’m a customer,
then why don’t you turn on the gosh-darned air-conditioning, Doc, just so I can
get a drink to my mouth before the friggin’ ice melts?

“How about another bourbon and soda, Big Toy; and more
beer. What’ll you have, Doc?”

“The usual, Toy.”

Dinky Toy brought the drinks, including a weak Mekhong
whiskey in a tall glass with lots of ice and water. She put the drinks slip in Leary’scup.

I noticed Doc eyeing the plastic cup ; you could see Leary
had already had a couple. Those were the white slips. He’d also bought the
girls colas — those were the pink. At the end of each night the girls got a
percentage of every drink the customers bought them.

“I’ve had that air-conditioner fixed twice in the past
month, Leary.”

“The gosh-darned thing is apiece of junk. Tear it out and
put in a new one.”

“That’s easy for you to say, oil money coming out your ears,
no family or nothing.”

“I got Nancy.”

“I got Pin. I got Pin, and I got Pin’s three sisters and
four brothers. I got Pin’s momma and poppa and one grandmother. I got aunts and
uncles and cousins I still never heard of, and the ones I heard of already I
can’t count. The ones who aren’ t sick and in need of money for doctors,
they’re going to school, or maybe they need money to pay some sponsor so they
can go to work in Saudi Arabia. I got a pile of them camped in my house right
now.

“And I got my boy Sam, he’s in high school, in some dump,
and all these
farang
kids in Bangkok they get to go to the American International School, I don’t make enough in a good year just to pay the fees.
What can I tell Sam, his buddy gets to go play basketball in Hong Kong for the
school team, Sam gets to go to the movies if he’s lucky. It don’t make me feel
good, I can tell you.

“The lot of them would be better off without me. The
amount of life insurance I’m carrying...

“And you say I should buy a new air-conditioning system?
I’ll tell you what I should buy, I should buy a one-way ticket to Rio.

For one.” Doc yawned mightily, and shook his head in
despair. “Pin’s cousin from Nan is still here. Her twins are teething. What a
nightmare. They took it in shifts screaming last night. Sometimes both
together, in stereo.”

“Leary’s Law,” said Eddie, nicely anticipating what any
one of us there could’ve told you was coming next.

“Listen and listen good,” Leary advised us. “Though it’s
too darned late for you, Eddie. You too, Doc. But if you gotta get married, if
there’s just no other way you think you’re gonna be happy, then you just make
sure the lady you marry’s a friggin’ orphan.”

This was by no means the first time Leary had promulgated
this law, but you had to acknowledge the wisdom it embodied. Never mind Chief
Promulgator Leary had committed himself, not too long before, to marrying his
old friend Nancy, who was no orphan. Probably he just forgot for a minute; or
maybe it hadn’t yet fully dawned on him what he’d done.

Anyway, the hard fact remained — marry one of the local
girls, and you assumed responsibility for her whole family unto the nth
generation or probably even further. With some of these upcountry families,
that could add up to a number that should entitle you to U.N. aid. And there
was nothing like
a farang
in the family, sometimes, to raise the general
level of expectations up to brand-new heights, so far as life prospects went.
You got these plans for self-improvement on every side, each of them requiring
only a little bit of money, after all everybody
knowsfarang
are rich,
and what was money anyway, when it was all in the family?

“But it’s safer to never get married,” said Leary.

“And that’s the truth,” added Doc.

“Nobody marry
you,
Leary.” Apparently Dinky Toy
also chose to ignore Leary’s recently affianced status. No one likes to see a
legend die.

“That’s
right,
Dinky Toy. I’m too darned sexy; no
lady could ever hope to keep me all to herself. And I’m too young, anyway.
Gosh.”

Leary gave a little laugh, just enough probably to scare
the pigeons off the roof of the temple down the street and across the way.

”Leary!” The door to the street swung open. “Leary, I know
you’re in there!” bellowed a voice only slightly less stentorian than Leary’s
own.

Squinting against the glare of sunlight, you could make
out the form of one ‘Dexy’ Dexworth, a beer-bellied, bandy-legged, foul-mouthed
whoremaster and offshore oil platform manager. And that’s how he liked to
characterize himself; other people were often less charitable. Eddie, for example,
always said Dexy was the most objectionable man it’d been his misfortune to
meet during all his years in Bangkok. Whenever Dexy directed anything at him,
Eddie would get kind of taciturn. If pressed, he might come up with as much as
a non-committal grunt, but that was generally all about he’d have to say to old
Dexy. It’s funny, too, because Eddie was the most tolerant fellow you could
imagine, as a rule.

However you wanted to react, it didn’t do to call Dexy
ugly names; Dexy would simply take this as a challenge to his imagination, and
he’d come back with repartee that would turn a longshoreman pink. As a matter
of course, he bellowed and swore and punctuated every statement with “Yuh know
what I mean?” Every phrase he uttered was a physical, aesthetic, and moral
assault on the sensibilities. I kind of liked Dexy.

And Leary always treated Dexy as though nothing were
amiss. This probably had something to do with the fact they were both offshore
oilmen from ‘way back. I’d even heard it said Dexy was merely Leary without Nancy’s refining influence. They did bear more than a passing resemblance to each other,
both in appearance and manner. Dexy was shorter, but he had a bigger
beer-belly. And his voice was less impressive than Leary’s, though he was
fouler-mouthed by far. Other than that, they were practically two peas in a
pod. What differences there were, though, were enough that while Leary was one
of Eddie’s best friends, Eddie could hardly even bring himself to talk to Dexy.