The Hot Countries (22 page)

Boo has lined up five folding chairs along one wall, and Poke and Anna half carry Treasure to them. They try to get her to lie down, but she resists mechanically and silently, without a word, her limbs rigid against their efforts. Ultimately they let her sit down. She slides to the middle chair, two empties on either side of her, and brings her knees up and hugs them, bending her neck until her forehead rests on top of her knees. She rocks back and forth. She's stopped whimpering, but there's a squeaky sound whenever she inhales. Rafferty sits beside her, saying, “Is it okay if I'm here, Treasure?” He gets no reply, but she doesn't move away, just clutches her knees and rocks.

Her T-shirt is pulled up because her back is so sharply curved, and protruding from the waist of her pants Rafferty sees what looks like a bloody napkin, tightly folded. He says, “I'm going to take this because it looks uncomfortable,” and she doesn't resist as he pulls it free. He feels Anna's eyes on him as he unwraps it, and when she sees the knife, she sucks her breath in. A noise at the door makes him look up, and he sees Arthit staring at the knife.

Behind Arthit, Dok and Chalee come into the room. Chalee is bloodier and more disheveled than Dok. They both look at Treasure, with—it seems to Rafferty—more apprehension than affection. Dok's eyes go to the knife, and he bunches his mouth tightly. Rafferty wiggles a hand in the air to get Chalee's attention, and when she's looking at him, he says, “Whose blood?”

“The fat man you hired,” Chalee says.

The squeak of Treasure's breathing scales up a couple of notes.

Arthit sidesteps the children and comes up to Poke, a hand extended. “Give it to me,” he says, and after a moment's consideration Rafferty hands him the napkin and the knife. Arthit takes it, keeping his fingers off the surface of the knife, and very deliberately refolds the napkin around it. He turns and says to Chalee, “Where is he?”

Chalee's eyes go to Dok, and then to Poke, and then to Treasure, but all she can see of Treasure is the mat of bloody hair. “Out there,” she says, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the passageway.

“Take me,” Arthit says.

Rafferty says, “Goddamn it, Arthit, wait a minute.”

Arthit says, “I don't actually need you with me to do my job.”

Anna's snaps, “You stay here. You stay here until we know this child doesn't need a doctor.”

“She doesn't need me,” Arthit says.

“You have
no idea
what she needs,” Anna says, biting off
the words furiously. “Don't make this about you.”

“I want to go with you, Arthit,” Poke says.

Arthit waves the objection off. “For all you know, the man is still alive. What if he dies while I'm standing here?”

“He was going to shoot me,” Chalee says. “And take her back to her father.”

Arthit, turning toward the door, says, “Her father's dead.”

“I know,” Chalee says, scratching her head, “but that's what she said.”

“Chalee, Anna,” Rafferty says, getting up. “Please sit here with her.” He bends down to Chalee, who has looked away, distancing herself from the request. “Please, Chalee? Dok, you take Arthit and me to where it happened.”

They've traversed more than half of the passageway in silence, following Dok, when Arthit says, “What in hell am I supposed to do now?”

“I don't know what would be best for her,” Rafferty says.

“I'm not thinking about
her
,” Arthit says. “I'm thinking about Anna and me. I can't have that child in my house, but I know Anna's not going to give up so easily. Even in spite of what happened tonight.”

“Deal with that when it comes up. If it does.” Rafferty shortens his steps to avoid bumping into Dok, who has obviously slowed to listen to them, even though they're speaking English.

“I plan things,” Arthit says. “I don't play it by ear like that.
And
I'm a cop.” He shakes his head. “She took Noi's knife,” he says, more to himself than to Poke.

“She felt like she needed it. And as it turned out, she did.”

Dok reaches the end of the passageway, waits until they're both right behind him, and then turns left.

“Tell us what happened,” Rafferty says in Thai.

“Treasure asked me to show her some hiding places,” Dok says. “In case that man came, the one with the snake, you know? So I showed her a good place, and then that fat man broke the door and came in.”

Arthit says to Rafferty, “He must have been watching that end of the passage. My guy was stationed at the end of the big alley.”

“He wanted money,” Dok says. They come to a cross street, and Dok steps down from the curb. “He had a gun,” he says, tugging his shirt up to show them. “He was going to shoot Chalee.”

Arthit sighs heavily and says, “Right. Of course. Slow down for a second.” Dok does, and Arthit leans forward and lifts the gun out of Dok's waistband. Dok doesn't try to prevent him, although he gives the weapon a regretful parting glance.

“I'm sure that complicates things for you,” Rafferty says, just barely muting his anger, “it being self-defense like that when you had your mind all made up, but still. Even you have to admit that it's better than not knowing.”

“There's still the gas,” Arthit says. They're heading downhill, warehouses to their left, and coming up on the other side, a sagging wooden building.

Dok says, “He's right in—” and stops, his arm still extended, pointing to the building. He swallows loudly.

The door is lying on the ground outside the building, the empty frame an entryway to darkness, and there's no one collapsed there.

“That's where he was,” Dok says. “It's true. He was right there. Go look, you'll see all the blood. Honest. Go look.”

24

Skin to Skin

Wallace practically has
to push him out the door, but
finally
Hofstedler leaves. He's still talking as Wallace shoulders the door closed, saying, “Yeah, Leon, really Leon, wow, how about
that
?” until the latch snaps into place. There's a moment long enough to light a cigarette in, and then Hofstedler's heavy footsteps echo down the hall. Wallace stays pressed against the door, listening, making sure Leon doesn't turn around, full of some new topic, eager to praise his ladyboys again, seized by the desire to lecture helpfully about the memory-strengthening properties of ginkgo biloba (“Just what you
need
!”), anxious to warn Wallace yet again to keep his eyes open for Varney's watchers. Like Hofstedler ever noticed anything in his life except a stein of beer.

The elevator groans at the far end of the hall. Wallace waits for the sliding doors to open and close again—they squeal in both directions—and then puts his life on hold for a count of ten to make sure Leon doesn't change his mind about riding down; there have been evenings, especially lately, when Leon left four or five times. Nam-Fon, the fierce little Thai woman Leon married all those years ago, who had administered every detail of his life for decades and had terrified the patrons of the Expat Bar with her vehemence about bar girls and the men who pay for them, left him a few months back. While she was with him, Hofstedler had complained about her endlessly. Now he hates to go home.

When he doesn't hear Leon returning, Wallace closes his eyes and presses his forehead against the door. He has more things than usual to think about.

For one there's Hartley, reborn. Oh, well, lately it seems like nobody ever really goes away. Ernie is practically at Wallace's elbow half the time, some of the other guys from the squad are popping up in his dreams, when he's in the bar he keeps seeing the younger faces of Campeau and Pinky Holland—they just push their way through the sags and wrinkles and
leer
at him—and recently he's been hearing his mother's voice, always muffled, chatting from the other room. Once or twice (or three times, or four), he actually changed rooms so he could hear what she was saying. It was one of those slap-your-forehead moments. He's been having a lot of them lately.

Did he drink that beer at the bar this evening or just nurse it? He runs his tongue inquisitively over his teeth. His mouth doesn't taste like beer.

So what it is, is that Hartley—no, Varney,
Varney
—took a picture of him and Leon, and people are using it to look for them in the hope that they'll lead the follower to Poke. It seems to Wallace, as he floats past the couch, foam exploding from its seams in popcorn shapes, that Varney should have been able to find Poke by now. Bangkok's not a small town, but if you know where someone hangs out and who his friends are, you should be able to find him easily in this much time.

Although, how much time has it actually
been
? This is—what?—Monday night, very early Tuesday morning? First time Leon talked about Varney and Poke was just a few nights back. Late Thursday sounds right, although who the hell knows anymore? So it's only three, four days. Not so long.

He's bathed in the light from the refrigerator, bending toward the beer, when he hears himself say aloud, “He likes to wait.”

And there he is again, fresh as the moment, in Wallace's mind's eye: Hartley, his own eye pressed to that sight, the barrel of his M16, complete with its hand-modified flash suppressor, doing a microdance as it follows the movements of someone with a short life expectancy three hundred, three hundred fifty, yards away. Hartley getting the shot lined up, grinning, then tilting the rifle up just to bring it down again a moment later.
Enjoying
himself, anticipating the distant death, delaying it to prolong the fun.

“Of all the cocksuckers in the world,” Wallace says, popping the top, “Hartley.” He turns off the kitchen light, his mind still in the heat and stink of Vietnam, and goes back in the living room, barking his left shin on a corner of the coffee table. Vietnam crowds the little rooms: the heat, the bugs, the leeches, the mud,
the insufferable dust; the asshole sergeant, uniform fresh from the dry cleaner, who ordered them to search the tunnels before blowing them but who wouldn't go into them himself; the guy next to you going straight down like an imploding building, a tenth of a second before you hear the shot; the guys, the guys, the guys. All of them back, thanks to Hartley, all of them staking out spaces in his mind.

And then there's the one, he thinks as he sits on the edge of his bed, facing the watery window, the one who never comes back: Jah. Why can't he bring Jah back?

He's been told by the bar's self-appointed Alzheimer's experts that he's going to find himself living more and more in the past, gradually leaving the present behind like a closed-up room, full of things he can no longer get to. The prospect hadn't dismayed him. But now it's beginning to look as though the past he'll eventually be living in won't contain Jah, and that doesn't seem fair. She's the only thing from back there he wants.

Twice now he's awakened late at night, sufficiently unmoored in time to go visit her, to walk again on the Golden Mile, not as he dreamed it with Ernie but alive with music and lit up, with those impossibly wonderful girls, drop-ins from heaven, drifting up and down the road. But Jah was never there when he searched for it, the Mile was never there; it was buried beneath skyscrapers, and he'd wander, one foot in the 1960s, until he came to the shophouse, but now it was an apartment building, very fancy, complete with a uniformed doorman, and he'd linger there as though his strings had been cut until they sent him on his way. Wherever that led. But it never led to Jah. He had banished her, it appears, even from the small town of his past, and now she wasn't there anymore.

And he, only he, was responsible.

His fourth time here—
in
Bangkok,
damn it,
Bangkok
, and he sticks a mental pin in the name to hold it in place—the fourth time he took R&R in Bangkok, he didn't catch the return flight to 'Nam. He just went AWOL. He'd been preparing for it, consciously and unconsciously, for more than a year. On his third leave, with Jah's help, he'd found an apartment in an airless concrete building where the walls were unfinished plywood, the bathroom was at the end of the hall, and the door was secured with a padlock and a flimsy hasp. A single window opened onto an alley from which the reek of urine rose in waves so pungent they should have been visible, like yellow heat ripples. He'd opened a Thai bank account, and over the months back in 'Nam he slowly transferred the money from his college account in Carlsbad into his new bank. Paving the way to escape.

And then Ernie had been killed, had fallen sideways in a tangle of his own entrails, and that was it. After they got Ernie, Wallace knew he wasn't going back, no matter what they did to him. They'd never find him anyway, he thought, not hiding in some cold-water apartment in an obscure corner of Bangkok. They had too much on their hands. They'd never find him.

And they didn't. At the end he found
them
, but not until he'd destroyed the one thing in the world that was worth having.

His first night back on that final fourth leave, he'd gone straight from the plane to Thai Heaven to find Jah. Her chair went over backward with a bang when she saw him across the room, and she'd let loose a scream of
“Wallet!”
that cut through the music and talk to make his heart blossom in his chest. He'd slapped down the money for her bar fine, and she'd leaped onto his back, slapping his shoulders and driving her heels into his sides to spur him into a gallop.

She had loved his hair, short as it was then. Wallace passes a hand over his scalp, feeling the skin with the long iron-gray strands clinging to it. Back then it had been thick enough for her to grab when they made love, for her to lock her teeth on and pull it from his head, laughing at his roar.
Locked.

They were locked together, virtually never apart. He wouldn't let her work, not even dance, but she wouldn't quit entirely, because, she said, what would happen to her if he left? Who would take care of her mother and her sisters? He argued again and again that he would never leave her, that he was there for good; but that was the only topic that put a wedge between them. She wouldn't discuss it, just looked down, at her lap or the floor, politely disguising her disbelief until he was finished, and then she would say, “But what if you do?” So they found a compromise. After their day together, he took her to the bar every night when it was time for her to clock in and immediately bar-fined her. Then they'd flag a taxi so the two of them could flee the Golden Mile, free for another twenty-four hours. Through those long days and nights, he felt the way he had as a child when he found a new best friend: there was only one person in the world he wanted to see.

Locked.
They were always touching, skin to skin or cloth to cloth; she pressed herself against him in her sleep and squeezed in beside him on the apartment's one narrow chair, throwing her smooth brown legs over his. She rested her head on his shoulder when they sat on the bed, sneaked her fingers down the back of his pants when they shared a seat on a bus. She grasped his hand whenever they left the apartment, as though she thought he might try to run away. Crossing streets against the anarchic traffic with her dragging him behind as she wove between the oncoming cars and trucks, he felt so free and so unburdened that he lost completely, for the space of a long moment, the knots of fear and anger 'Nam had tied in his heart and nerves.

She taught him where to buy street food, how to bargain in the sidewalk marketplaces, how to use the buses. She hauled him up to her village, all dirt roads and mangy dogs and slanting wooden houses, to meet her mother, whose eyes, above her smile, seemed to be doing arithmetic every time she looked at him. Her younger sisters stared at him with the kind of fascination they might have given to a five-legged dog and never got within arm's reach, huddling wide-eyed, their backs pressed against the thin walls, as far from him as they could get. When the train finally pulled away, after a long, long three days, he'd leaned back in his seat and sighed, and she'd doubled over with laughter, laughing until the tears slid down her cheeks, imitating how he'd walked in the tiny house, how he'd sat on the floor, how he'd pulled himself in to seem smaller, less
there
.

To his reflection in the mirror in the bathroom, which is where he seems to be, he says, “What a fucking idiot. What a total, colossal, balls-out, world-class fuckup.”

Inevitably, the world began to push its way in. The apartment, cheap as it was, cost money. Her bar fines cost money, since she continued to refuse to quit altogether. “I quit, no one hire me after,” she said. They ate the cheapest food, but it still cost money. His books, while he continued to buy them, cost money. The T-shirts he purchased after fierce bargains with sidewalk vendors cost money. He found and bought her the occasional present, nothing expensive, until she started taking them back to fight the sellers for refunds, which she handed him with irritation, the only time he ever saw her angry.

Eight months later, when the money was gone, she proposed a deal: she would work in the bar at night but not go with men. She'd just
talk
to them, she said—they all liked it when a girl talked to them. Until he could find some more money, he and she would live off her tips and the commissions she made from lady drinks, bought for her by the customers. Helplessly, Wallace agreed: he'd exhausted his college fund, his mother was furious about his desertion and refused to lend him money, and there was no way he could earn a living in Thailand, not without using the identity papers that would bring the army on the run.

But the lady drinks didn't pay enough. Her tips were minuscule. She'd gotten home late a few times, extra money in hand, to face his silence and withdrawal, and then, on a Saturday, the busiest night in the bar, she'd stayed out all night as he paced the floor and fumed. The next morning she came through the door with almost a hundred dollars and made it even worse by saying, as she handed it to him, “For rent.” Wallace had bolted without a word and spent the day and all of the next night stalking the streets. He ended up on a bench in Lumphini Park, as though sitting in the dark all alone all night, deep-frying his own heart in shame and rage would
pay her back
somehow, although he couldn't have said for what. He couldn't find anything in the world that would compensate him for his humiliation, and this self-centered, all-about-
him
reaction would make him furious at himself for decades to come. When he got back, at eleven the next morning, she wasn't there. On the tidy, unrumpled bed was a bright new T-shirt for him, folded around a wilted orchid. The state of the flower made it obvious that it had been placed there the prior afternoon. She hadn't come back after work.

She arrived in the early afternoon, her eyes tight with anxiety and her arms full of his favorite Thai food, still hot. There was so much of it, cups and cartons of it, that she'd had to use the sawed-off bottom of a cardboard box as a tray. Two steps into the room she stopped, the open door behind her, her hands extended to put the box between them, an offering, her eyes locked on the center of his chest.