Bangkok Knights (3 page)

One thing together with the other, and being in a bad mood
anyway, he had made some ill-considered remarks about this kind of love being
cheaper on the street and did she think he was made of money, or what, and was
that the only reason she enjoyed his company?

For her part, Noi called him
kee niaow,
stingy,
burst into tears and stormed off, clearly believing herself to be the injured
party.

Ernest, basically a conventional sort of chap, went straight
away to a bar and drank more than was his wont, and was now pretty happy not to
find kippers at the breakfast banquet, keeping his stomach down where it
belonged already being something of a problem. Looking at him, it was hard to
tell where heartbreak left off and hangover began.

Bearing the lad’s condition in mind, Leary went on with
even greater delicacy than usual. “Ernie, my boy, you’re a darned lucky man.
Gosh, you just count your blessings. Do you realize you almost got married? At
your friggin’ age you were about to have your nose fitted for a ring and a
meter put on your enjoyment of the finer things.

“Now, I know you don’t feel so good right now, but that’s
mostly hangover. Darn it, we’ve all got to fall in love, just like we’ve all
got to drink beer, but you don’t want the hangover to stay with you all your
life, gosh-darn it, and that’s what happens when you get married.

“That’s life, Ernie my boy: friggin’ love and taxes. And
death. No getting away from ‘em. But marriage, that’s another thing. That’s up
to you.”

None of this was making any discernible impression on
Ernest, other than the obvious pain caused by the sheer volume of Leary’ s
remarks, but the ladies present were evidently inspired, and would no doubt
have had something to say about matters soon.

Eddie, however, headed Lek off, saying to Leary “Okay,
Leary, but you know there’s a saying: ‘Next to no wife, a good wife is best’”
He smiled fondly at his wife, the way a husband does under the circumstances.

“That’s
right”
agreed Leary. “Haw! ‘Next to no wife
at all, a good wife is best’; and a good wife is a friggin’ orphan, for
starters. And you can call that a gosh-darn rule to live by. A kind of law of
nature.”

I did; I called it ‘Leary’s Law’, and I’d heard him
expound it before. I glanced over at Nancy, a bit nervously, but she was still
positively serene. My girlfriend had earlier remarked how good Nancy was looking — she practically glowed, in fact. Maybe she was pregnant, my companion
suggested.

“No, you came out of this one smelling of roses, Ernie,”
Leary bellowed. “You just go ahead and have a plateful of those scrambled eggs,
and put some of those onions and potatoes and nice spicy sausages on the side.
Nance, here, can make you some fresh toast. You’ll feel better before you know
it, and tomorrow you won’t even remember her name, or her uncle’s or her
sister’s names either, come to that. Or how much her folks figured her
upbringing set them back. Now you go on and eat up, gosh-dam it.”

Ernest winced, and his pallor took on a greenish cast.

Eddie told him, for maybe the third time, that he should
go ahead and have a beer or two. For her money, my lady friend said, this was
one brunch Ernest could’ve missed, and maybe he’d have been better off lying in
bed with the Sunday comics waiting for Noi to phone.

“You see, Ernie, things are done a little bit differently
out here in Asia; the family’s still the thing, you know, and it isn’t simply
‘Well, I’m eighteen now, folks; so long now, and maybe I’ll see you around
sometime.’ No, sir. These families stick together, and if you marry into one of
them you marry the whole shebang. Now, you might think the girl is trying to
shake you down, and all her kin are maybe scrambling to get on the gravy-train,
as well, but that’s just not so. No, by gosh, it ain’t.”

After all Leary’s very good advice and obvious concern, it
was only now that Ernest began to show any interest. “What are you saying,
Leary?” he asked.

”It’s responsibility, my boy. In this part of the world,
everyone is responsible for everyone else in the family, and that means if
someone needs money and you’ve got it, you give it, and that’s the end of the
matter. If you fall on hard times, then by gosh you get the same treatment, no
questions asked. Now, you have some kind of brain seizure or such-like and you
marry into one of these situations, you’ve gotta understand you’ re responsible
for the lot. And if you’ ve got more money than the others, then you can expect
to play the banker more often. It’s as simple as that, dam it. Haw! And that’s
why I say, if you really think you
have
to get married, for some reason,
you either marry an orphan or you’re just a gosh-darned fool.”

The ladies had come to be standing shoulder to shoulder,
establishing a visible solidarity, and they were not casting kindly glances
Leary’s way. A lesser man might’ve felt distinctly uncomfortable.

Ernest, meanwhile, was looking happier than he had all
morning, and Leary was clearly pleased his advice was having such good effect.

“And what about the money for her folks?” Ernest asked.

“The bride price? That’s nothing. It’s the custom, and
it’s the least of the headaches you got to expect in dealing with the in-laws.”

“But, that’s... wonderful!”

“That’s no lie; you almost stepped right into it.”

“So this is just the way things are. Noi’s not really
after my money; she’s looking after her family, and now I’m part of the
family...”

It was Leary’s turn to show consternation: “Now you hang
on there a friggin’ minute, Ernie. Didn’t you listen to any of what I’ve been
telling you?” Leary was spluttering.

“Why don’t you phone her, Ernest?” Nancy interrupted.
“There’s another telephone upstairs in the big bedroom. Go ahead.”

The resilience of youth. Ernest came bounding down the
stairs a bit later and announced: “I’m going to meet her at home. Thanks, Nancy. Thanks for the breakfast. And thank
you,
Leary. I needed to hear some good
sense; I’ve apologized to Noi, and explained how I simply hadn’t understood.”

“You haven’t had any breakfast, Ernest,” said Nancy. “Why don’t you eat something before you go?”

Ernest’s spirits and his appetite had picked up together,
and it almost make
me
sick to see the way he went at the cold remains of
the feast. “No, no, Nancy; don’t bother to heat it up. Thanks, but I’ve got to
hurry.”

Possibly out of respect for Leary’s sensibilities, Nancy waited till after Ernest had gone before telling the rest of us there had been
another reason for this little celebration, something beyond the new house. She
and Leary were getting
marriedl
She beamed with pride and happiness,
while Leary shuffled around saying “Aw shucks, nothing’s friggin’ changed” as
we all congratulated him. Lek poured fresh coffee all ‘round, and she didn’t
even put any in Leary’s lap.

“Leary,” I said, “I am happy for you and Nancy’ s one of
the finest women it’s been my pleasure ever to meet, but what’s happened to
Leary’s Law?”

“Listen to this and remember it,” he told me. “There is
one, like, supervening law, and that is this: ‘You’re never too old to learn
some new way of screwing up.’ You can chisel that one in granite. But what the
heck. I guess that’s what keeps life interesting.”

I didn’t even mention to Leary that Lek had told me there
was yet one more reason for Nancy’s happiness. Her brother had only the week
before gotten his degree in Electrical Engineering, but she hadn’t wanted to
make Leary lose face by thanking him in front of one and all. That was Nancy for you — a fine lady in every way.

“That’s one thing,” his mates from the Middle East had
said. “Now old Sid doesn’t have to go back to play in the Sandbox.”

Indeed, they looked downright envious as they finished
their drinks and prepared to enter the departure lounge. Stack and I had met
them at Sid’s funeral, and we’d met again at the airport to wish them bon
voyage. Looking at their faces as they trooped off, you really might have
believed they would rather have been lying dead under Big Toy.

Amazing. No one was pointing guns at their heads. But
you’ve got to sock that money away, by Jingo, and you’d better do it quick.
None of us is getting any younger, and when you get to feeling you’re
middle-aged, you get to thinking there isn’t a lot of time left

And there they were, headed back to the Sandbox, leaving
one casualty behind. Stack and I, on the other hand, headed back into town
poor, but pretty happy to be alive and right in the mood for another drink.

So Sid was dead. Sid ‘Siddiqi’ Davis. It was hard to
believe. He’d only been thirty-six years old.

“It sure makes you think,” said my friend Stack Jackson, staring into his beer-glass. “Geez.”

”But what a way to go,” I said.

“Yeah.” He brightened momentarily, and chuckled. “S till,
it really makes you think. Why, it could’ ve been any one of us. Gone — just
like that. Is this what middle age is all about?”

Middle age!
Even allowing for all the beer Stack
had put away, I had to call this malarkey.

“That’s malarkey,” I said. “In the first place, you’re
only thirty-five years old. Nobody’s going to tell you that’s middle-aged,
unless maybe you ask a teeny-bopper. Good grief. And Sid was only thirty-six.

“Anyway, it’s not as though he died a standard kind of
death; it was unorthodox, was old Sid’s grand finale. Colorful, you might even
say.

“Middle age? Middle age is mortgages and Milo before bed.
Middle age is the late-movie-as-birth-control-device. Middle age is holidays
from the Middle East spent in Surrey.” I raised my glass: “No, I give you Sid
Davis, young Quantity Surveyor rampant, who came to Bangkok from the Persian Gulf on a vacation and died — reasonably happy, one hopes—beneath a woman called
Big Toy.”

“What an epitaph,’ said Stack. “Heroic.”

“That’s right,” I replied. “Middle-aged, my eye. This was
a young man cut down in full bloom. Tragic, it was. Sort of.”

“Admirable, in any case,” agreed Stack. “And so okay, we
‘re not middle-aged, and we’re not one foot in the grave, maybe. But if a guy can’t
get maudlin at a wake,where can he get maudlin?”

There were just the two of us, by then, but we were
drinking beer and mourning the dead, so I guess it was a wake, at that.

“I reckon there’s a lesson in it all somewhere,” said
Stack. He looked thoughtful and then continued. “You know, Sid was quite a
worrier. For example, I do believe he started worrying about middle age around
the same time he first heard the expression.”

“And he was worried about going bald from the first time I
met him,” I added. “He once told me he’d begun losing his hair when he was in
his early twenties. If that’s the case, he must’ve been quite the hairy bugger
back then, because fifteen years later he was still ‘going bald’ and, as far as
I could see, he had a long way to go yet.”

”Yeah, and not only that, he was always getting fat. I
knew him for six years, and he always looked the same to me. But he’d go on
about heart attacks and strokes and diets and things.”

“I figure it was the Sandbox that was getting him down.
Five years in that environment would be enough to give anyone heart attacks.
Probably make your hair fall out as well.”

“I had breakfast with him just last week,” Stack told me. “We
met at Boon Doc’s. I got tucked into the home fries and sausages and eggs, but
he told me he was skipping breakfasts because he was trying to lose weight.
Next thing you knew, he started rummaging around in his bag; he put together a
multicolored pile of tablets and capsules of all shapes and sized, and
proceeded to wash them down by the handful with a large Singha beer. It turned
out he’d wolfed 2000 mg. of vitamin C, two aspirins, a megadose or so of
vitamin B, vitamin A with carotene, a large dollop of vitamin E, some ginseng
and bees-pollen tablets, three varieties of anti-malarial pills, two Valiums
and a Lomotil and maybe some more I can’t remember. Volume for volume, I reckon
he ate more than I did.”

Sid was always dieting. He’d quit smoking; he didn’t drink
tea or coffee. He always had a new theory about what either caused or else
cured cancer, heart attacks, back pains, and hangovers. He wouldn’t eat refined
sugar.

Sid wasn’t the real name of this prematurely middle-aged
seeker after eternal youth; it was Chauncey. Chauncey Davis.

“You knew that ‘Sid’stood for’Siddiqi’, didn’t you?” asked
Stack. “Yeah? And you know what
siddiqi
means?”

I knew; I also knew Stack was going to tell me again
anyway.

“It means ‘friend’ in Gulf Arabic. And that’s what they
call their local white lightnin’ —
siddiqi,
or
sid
for short.
Thai’s just about your best friend, living there in the Gulf.”

Sid had had a real taste for the stuff, if you could
believe what he and his friends had to say. He had been of the opinion that all
that home-made wine and beer was full of impurities. You keep drinking it and
you wind up with everything from wrecked kidneys to arthritis, he’d tell you.
So he drank
sid.
“It’s just alcohol,” he’d say. “That’s not going to
hurt you.” Of course he was just about the only one in the Gulf that believed
that.

But when he was in Bangkok he never touched anything
except beer, and not too much of that “It’s hard to drink too much of this Thai
beer,” he’d say ,”no matter how hard you try. It’s great stuff.”

On the whole, though, his behavior tended to border on the
neurotic. His buddies from the Sandbox told us one tale that might be taken as
the story of his whole life in microcosm. Apparently, he’d suffered from an
aversion to mosquitoes almost phobic in its intensity. Before leaving the
Middle East to come on this last trip to Thailand, he’d taken precautions
sufficient to make his defenses against baldness and cancer seem positively
lackadaisical in comparison. He’d stock-piled several tubes of repellent, a
quantity of mosquito coils, and, the ultimate weapon, an electric gismo which
emitted the sound of a lady mosquito in heat, and which was supposed to fry the
sizzling Siren’s excited suitors in their droves. All this for just a short
stay in downtown Bangkok.