The Hot Countries (6 page)

There's something in Varney's voice, the edge of something just barely concealed, a razor beneath a sheet of paper, and Rafferty glances up, his hands folded on top of the wet envelope, to find the man's bright blue eyes on him. The moment Rafferty looks at him, Varney's gaze skitters away, fast as a drop of water sizzling across a hot pan.

It suddenly seems to Rafferty that the paper with the numbers on it warms beneath his hands. He's certain that Varney knows what's written there.

“But
wisdom
, Bob,” Varney says, “at least in my opinion, wisdom is knowing how to
take
those things, the cards or the metal and the powder and the cotton, and put them together in a way that turns them into something. A royal flush, for example.” He looks at Rafferty again, holds his gaze for a moment, and then turns back to Campeau and says, “Or a bullet.”

Rafferty swivels his stool to the left until he's facing Varney directly. The stool squeals, and he finds Varney regarding him with what seems to be a mixture of curiosity and amusement.

Varney says, “Get a letter?”

Rafferty slips the wet paper into the pocket of his T-shirt. Something is squeezing his chest, and he recognizes it as a blend of fury and fear. He says, “Do you ever shut up?”

“Have I gone on too long?” Varney's tone is mild, but the amusement in his face has hardened into an expression that shouldn't be caught in freeze-frame. And, Rafferty thinks, Varney knows it and shows it to him anyway.

“This is my fourth night here since you showed up,” Rafferty says, the anger putting a steel rod between his shoulders, stiffening his neck, “and the only thing I've heard is your voice.”

Hofstedler says, “Poke,” and puts a hand on Poke's arm.

“I know,” Varney says, cocking his head slightly to one side as though he's curious. “It's a terrible trait. I was alone too much as a child.”

“And I can see why,” Poke says. Without taking his eyes off Varney's, he says, “Check, please, Toots.”

“Early,” Toots says. “They still looking TeeWee.”

“There are worse things than English actors,” Rafferty says.

“Kid must have brought you bad news, huh?” Varney says. He's still smiling.

Campeau says, “You know what, sonny? I heard enough, too.”

“I also would like to talk sometimes,” Hofstedler says deferentially.

“Well,
fine
, Leon,” Varney says. There are tight red highlights at his cheekbones. “We're all eager to hear it. Go right ahead.” He rests an elbow on the bar, puts his chin in his hand, and waits. Drums his fingers, once. No one says anything, and Toots puts a check in front of Rafferty.

“Need a topic?” Varney asks Hofstedler. “Wagner, maybe? Nietzsche? Why Shakespeare is better in German? Who was it who translated him again?”

Hofstedler says, “Goethe.” The back of his neck is turning a dark cherry red.

“
Much
better in German, with Goethe and all,” Varney says. “The Bauhaus school? Caspar David Friedrich? Eugenics? Nerve gas? Aryan bloodlines? Innovative operations for changing eye color?”

“This is enough,” Hofstedler says.

“Guess it is.” Varney gets up. He reaches over and turns his glass on its side, flooding the bar with beer.

Campeau gets off his stool.

“Come on, Gramps,” Varney says. He takes a step back. “Tote that old bag of bones over here.”

“I'm buying your drinks,” Rafferty says. “Get out of here.”

“Too bad,” Varney says. “I was just beginning to work the room.” His eyes, fixed on Poke's, are bright with something that might be glee.

The door opens, letting in a gust of wind, bearing the ghosts of many cigarettes, and Pinky Holland puts his head in. He says, “Whoops,” and starts to back out.

“Come on in, Pinky,” Rafferty says. “Mr. Mustache here is just leaving.”

“Naw, that's okay,” Pinky says. “Just
 . . .
you know, popping in. Maybe later.” The door rattles when he closes it.

“Thanks for the drinks,” Varney says. He puts on a shiny black slicker, very deliberately, taking his time. “Quite a mood change there. You ever think about medication?” He takes a step in Poke's direction.

“You're big,” Rafferty says, stepping toward him. “But I fight dirty.”

“Pitty-pat, pitty-pat,” Varney says, tapping his chest with a flat hand. “Guess we'll have a chance to find out sooner or later, won't we?” He pushes his stool over, and it hits the floor with a bang that sends Toots eight inches into the air. “Be seeing you.”

He walks the length of the bar, and Campeau sidles around behind his own stool.

Just before Varney reaches the door, Rafferty says, “Why were you looking for me?”

“Looking for you?” Varney says without turning back. “Why the fuck would I look for you?”

He leaves the door wide open, and Rafferty gets up and closes it. When he turns back to the bar, everyone is staring at him. He says, “He
has
been looking for me, and he's had someone watching me. It's a bar girl, and I need to find her. Short, wide face, late twenties, long, loopy spiral curls. She's got a
 . . .
a birthmark or something, above her mouth. Left side, I think.” No one responds, and he adds, “I think this might be important.”

Campeau says, “No one like that comes to mind right off the bat.”

“Thought you knew everyone.”

“Slowing down,” Campeau says, looking embarrassed. “Losing the old moxie.”

“Anybody?” Rafferty says to the bar at large. “Come on, this isn't a very long street.”

Hofstedler says, “Tomorrow. Just before the bars open.” He looks around the bar and swallows, someone about to reveal a secret. “Meet me here and we talk to my ladyboys.”

6

Not the Shophouse

Wallace Palmer awakes
to darkness, the only light a somewhat-less-dim rectangle that indicates the window. He peers at it and shakes his head to clear the fog; the window is on the wrong side of the room. Is he sleeping with his head at the foot of the bed? His sleep these days is thinner than the worn sheet that covers him, laundered almost out of existence. He couldn't have moved around that much without waking up. Or could he?

He can't remember. Has he done this before? He knows that the window should be over—

Oh.
Not the shophouse. The new apartment. The
new
new apartment. The one he still can't navigate in the dark without bumping into things. Not the place above the shop where he lived for all those years, his first home in Bangkok when he came back after the war, fifty-some years ago: the two rooms with the wooden shutters over the windows that you could prop open. Concrete walls two feet thick, cool wooden floors, the smell of cooking from downstairs. In the shophouse he could put his hand on anything no matter how dark it was, since no one but he ever moved anything. Living there alone while he ransacked Bangkok for Jah. Because he'd destroyed things with Jah.

He hears rain, spattering against the tin housing of the air conditioner.

He sits up with a soft grunt, swings his long legs over the edge of the hard little bed, and puts his feet on the floor.
Carpet.
Not the shophouse, then, the apartment. The second apartment, or maybe the third. What had happened to the shophouse?

Now that he knows which room he's in, which year he's in, his hand can find—after a couple of timid sweeps—the surprisingly heavy little brass lamp on the table beside the bed. He spiders around its base with his fingers to find the chain and tugs it. The bulb puts out just enough piss-yellow light to show him a low-ceilinged, heavily shadowed room, with a wide recessed closet yawning open in one corner, one of its sliding doors derailed and leaning at a seasick angle against the wall. His clothes, what remain of them, hang any old way, not so much organized as abandoned. The air conditioner sits idly in the window with the rain banging off it. He decided long ago to live with the heat. After all, he'd
chosen
the heat. The bathroom is over there, through that grimy door. He reminds himself again to take a sponge to the door.

One of these days.

With his sight restored, the world tilts slightly and snaps into place with an almost audible click. Time reintroduces itself, as it has a way of doing lately. The shophouse had been demolished years ago, along with the whole neighborhood, a cluster of two- and three-story structures of inky, mildewed concrete webbed with thick electrical wires, the whole thing built on either side of a narrow
soi
paved over one of Bangkok's lost canals. A genuine
neighborhood
, the remnants of one of the small villages Bangkok had devoured, a place where he was the only
farang
among people who'd known one another for years. They'd raised one another's children, each woman automatically picking up and soothing the nearest crying child. He'd spent months looking out the window and trying to pair the kids with their biological mothers. People who took the time to stop and talk when they met, whose grandparents had been friends, who shared old jokes, who had accepted him with smiles.

All gone now, scattered apart and blown through the big city. Living now among strangers. All the buildings lost, even the spirit houses, knocked into dust and chunks of cement.

You don't see many spirit houses in the city now, he realizes, except for the big commercial ones with all the gilt paint. When Wallace thinks of a spirit house, he thinks of a small wooden structure on a platform, a miniature old Thai-style village house, the paint long bleached away by the sun and the wood a dry, pallid ash-gray
 . . .

How
noisy
it had been when they destroyed the place, the machines growling at the buildings like big dogs before taking bites of them, the residents staring dolefully from across the
soi
, like attendees at a cremation. The funeral of an entire village, all its smiles and stories wadded up and tossed away to make room for something
useful
.

He gets up slowly, straightening carefully through the sudden grab of pain in his lower back, always there and always a surprise, and launches himself toward the bathroom, feeling a slight fizziness in his head. He stops abruptly, trying to remember where he left his shoes. For the last ten years or so, after one too many panicky, flailing, full-length falls over one of his own shoes in the dark, he's made a point of creating a clear path between himself and the bathroom.

But wait. He's got enough light to see. This is not, is not, is
not
the shophouse.

And what time is it? His wrist is bare. It's been weeks, and maybe a lot longer (maybe
years
?), since he could find the heavy steel Rolex his father had given him to take to 'Nam. He promised his parents he'd keep it on California time so he'd be with them whenever he looked at it, but that hadn't lasted. Nothing had lasted. Not even the Rolex. When he'd lost track of it, whenever that had been, he'd bought a counterfeit at a street market, and as he turns on the bathroom light, the watch gleams fraudulently at him from the edge of the sink and informs him it's 11:21
p.m.
So he's slept through the day's heat and dust, and outside, the Bangkok he loves best is once again camouflaging the city's dirt and dreariness behind the bright nightly tangle of neon and steam.

The bathroom mirror shows him the grandfather or great-
grandfather of Wallace, never Wally, Palmer, shockingly old. In place of his thicket of bright, curly hair, a few long, iron-gray strands, inexplicably straight, paste themselves across his scalp, which is mottled like a faded map of countries no one wants to visit. He's played a few times with the strands, trying to comb them lower on his forehead to simulate a real hairline, but the last time he'd done it, Ernie's phrase, “turban renewal,”
flashed through his mind, and he'd laughed and abandoned the effort.

Wallace says, “Shit.” He looks away from the mirror, avoiding the sight of his neck or the slope of his once-broad shoulders, and picks up his toothbrush. Sees the yellowness of his nails, the spots on the backs of his hands.

Someone knocks on the door in the living room.

“It's always something,” Wallace says aloud, although he's aware that lately it hasn't been. He leans heavily against the sink, closes his eyes, and waits for whoever it is to go away, but then there's a triplet of knocks, louder this time, and a basso profundo voice calling, “Wallace? You are in there, Wallace?”

Leon
, Wallace thinks with a minor surge of despair. Leon Hofstedler, the most boring man in Bangkok, which is saying a lot. So boring, Leon's friend Ernie had once said, that if you'd just come out of a cave where you'd spent a year alone and saw Leon, you'd turn around and go back into the cave. What happened to Ernie? Ernie always made him laugh. He again sees Ernie's grin, white in the dark face, the gap between his teeth—

The knocks sound once more, loud as kicks. “Wallace? I need to hear you talking. Everybody in the bar asks is Wallace okay. Even
Poke
says hello to you.”

Leon isn't going away. Leon has nothing better to do with his life than to stand in that hallway, kicking Wallace's crappy door and singing German opera for everybody in the building to hear. A fucking menace. The German Peril.

The idea of Leon being dangerous makes Wallace laugh as he heads toward the living room. Wallace lived with
dangerous
day and night for three tours of steaming, blood-stinking duty. The only thing Leon had ever killed was time. He'd like to say that to Ernie, Wallace thinks. Ernie always looks surprised before he laughs, as though it startles him that other people are funny.

“Coming, Ernie,” Wallace calls. He looks down at himself and is reassured to see that he'd gone to sleep fully dressed.

“Ernie?”
Hofstedler bellows though the door. “This is not Ernie. Ernie—
mein Gott
, Ernie is a thousand years dead. You should not be alone so much.”

“I'm not alone,” Wallace says, undoing the door's assortment of locks—a joke, given that the door itself is made of soda cracker. “You're here.” He opens the door on the mountain that is Leon Hofstedler.

Hofstedler, his magisterial bulk draped in one of his many-pocketed safari shirts, narrows his eyes as if trying to sight Wallace through a fog. He says, “Ernie?”

“Been thinking about him,” Wallace says.

Hofstedler continues to study Wallace's face. After a moment he gives a grudging grunt. “I will tell them you look okay.”

“Of course I'm okay,” Wallace says around the sudden bloom of irritation in his chest. “Why wouldn't I be okay?”

Hofstedler shrugs. “They worry, you not coming, night after night. You know, thinking maybe
 . . .
” Whatever they're thinking, it's too dire for Hofstedler to voice it. “Tonight,” he says, “tonight we almost had a fight. In the bar. You remember this man Varney?”

“Sure,” Wallace says, wishing he could shut the door. “Varney.”

“You would have liked it.” Hofstedler is looking past Wallace, into the apartment. “Talks, the man talks all the time, and tonight Poke—do you remember Poke?”

“Leon,” Wallace says, and it's close to a threat.

“So,” Hofstedler, says, lifting placating hands, “Poke, he had enough, and he asked the man, Varney, if he ever shuts up. And I said that I
also
would like to talk once in—”

“Sounds great,” Wallace says. “I'm a little busy.”

“Yes?” Hofstedler sticks his head around the door as though to make sure no one is standing behind it. “You are alone?”

“Writing my memoirs. Before I forget them. Funny, huh, Ernie?”

“Ernie is—” Hofstedler shakes his head. “Tomorrow, eight o'clock, I will come for you. Take you to the bar. Will you remember?”

“I've got a memory like a
 . . .
like a
 . . .
” He scratches his head—shocked, as always, at the bare skin beneath his fingertip—but he manages a laugh. “That's a joke, Leon.” He puts some weight on the door, forcing Hofstedler back. “You tell them I'm fine and say hello for me, 'kay?”

“And tomorrow,” Leon says. “Eight. Do not forget.”

“Yeah, yeah, tomorrow.” He pushes the door closed on Hofstedler, completing in his mind the sentence
 . . .
whatever is supposed to happen tomorrow
.
Through the door he hears Hofstedler sigh and then the man's heavy tread drawing squeaks from the cheap plywood flooring.

A shower. That's what he needs, a shower and some clean clothes.
Jah
, it's Jah he wants to see, he realizes with a jolt of electricity. Whip-thin, tousle-haired Jah, who went with him to Don Mueang Airport the first time he flew back to 'Nam and cried inconsolably at the departure gate. And was there, jumping up and down like a teenager, when he came back. Running at him from thirty yards away and leaping on him, her legs twined around his waist, as all the other guys stared.

Jah.

In 'Nam the women and children had been terrified of him, afraid to meet his eyes, and he understood why. His very idea of who he was had been shattered, that easy, cheerful California boy broken into pieces one death at a time and reassembled wrong. Six months in country, his feet rotting with the damp, whole colonies of exotic parasites claiming his intestines, his soul knotted with death. The girls in the villages they defended, sometimes by burning them, looked at Wallace and the others in his platoon with the terror and revulsion the Americans occasionally earned: Twice, men Wallace knew well had turned bestial on the floor of some thatched shack, impatiently taking turns on a girl barely out of childhood. Leaving behind on the packed earth the sobbing remnant of a human being.

And then his first R&R furlough. After a copter out and an hour or two in a plane, he was here, in the city of joy. Smiles everywhere, food everywhere, everything cheap and easy, and girls who
loved
him, or at least seemed to. Girls who looked at him and saw a young, handsome man, not a beast. Girls like nutmeg, girls like cinnamon, girls who blended into a single smile, a single “No problem” as he took them, in threes and fours at first, like a starving man sweeping a whole tableful of food toward himself, feeling like some fool out of
Playboy
but finding, in the crowded beds, a kind of life that flowed into him and filled him back up. And then one night, the bed too full to give him room to turn over, he got out and slept on the floor, waking in the morning to find that he'd been layered over with towels from the bathroom and that sleeping next to him on the carpet, curled into a ball against the chill of the air conditioner and uncovered except for a hip-length cascade of tangled hair, was a slender dark-skinned girl. When he smoothed a towel over her, she opened her eyes and smiled at him as though he were the God of Morning, and Wallace, for the first time since leaving 'Nam, felt his heart unlock. Her name was Jah, and after that it was Jah, just Jah, always Jah. Staying with her for days on end. Falling asleep beside her on clean sheets in a cool room. Warm breath on his chest. Smooth cheek against his. Crossing the river once in a long-tail boat to sleep in a musty-smelling, lantern-lighted wooden shack, not a vertical wall anywhere and overhead the dry scrabble of rats as she breathed her way into sleep. He was safe. Writing her letters from 'Nam, letters he never sent. She couldn't read a word of English.