Street Music Page 13

  She pushes the beer halfway to him, her mouth as tight as a knot.

  “Blood,” he says, sitting back on his stool. “Everywhere.”

  She says, her eyes enormous, “Bob blood?”

  “That would be my guess,” he says. “It was Bob’s apartment.” The two of them regard each other for a moment, and then she centers the beer directly in front of him.

  “Why thank you,” he says. “It’s like old times, isn’t it? I don’t know what happened there, and Bob wasn’t inside when we got there, but there was blood.” He picks up the Singha and knocks back about a third of it, and a little coil of unease loosens around his heart.

  “Not dead.”

  “Well, not dead there. Tell me about last night.”

  “Last night,” she says, as though the phrase is new to her.

  “You know, the night before the sun came up this morning? You got me into this, Toots, and the least you can do is tell me what I might need to know to get out of it.”

  “Him stay. Drink one beer long time, look at nothing. Not talking.”

  “Did you try to get him to talk?”

  “No. I think, him want to talk, him talk.”

  “Was he drunk?”

  Toots focuses on something above his head for a moment. “Same every night. Drink many beer before close-up. But last night, after close-up, maybe one, maybe two.” She studies the bar for a moment and says, “I give him one when we go outside. This morning, bottle all broke out there, I sweep up.”

  “Did the whole bottle seem to be there?”

  “I don’t know. I not try to put back together. Oh, you mean—”

  “No, no, nothing. I doubt he toted a piece of broken glass home. Just a dumb . . . um, was there any blood out there?”

  “Not that I see.”

  “Okay. Last night when he was sitting here alone. He didn’t talk at all, he didn’t give you any sense of what he was thinking about?”

  “Nothing, I think maybe, I don’t know, maybe because brother die? Maybe him just . . . tired. You know, tired everything. Maybe him lonely. Not have lady long time.”

  “How do you know that?”

  A laugh explodes in the midst of the Campeau contingent, and Toots leans toward him. “Poke. Him here every night. Drink beer too much. Bar close, him go home late. Him old man, not same before. Not strong.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “And have broken heart.”

  “You mean, from before. Long time ago.”

  “Girl no good,” Toots says.

  “You knew her?”

  A shake of the head, pure disapproval. “She work Safari bar, over there.” She tilts her chin in the direction of the bar across the street.

  “How well did you know her?”

  “Not know, just see, say hello. We only open short time then. I waitress then, say hello, serve beer, not marry Leon yet. Bob bring her here sometime, like she Queen of Thailand. Her drink water, her drink joot—”

  “Joot?”

  “Orange joot, apple joot.”

  “Ah,” he says, “joot.”

  She says, “I say joot.” She looks down at the bar chewing on her lower lip, the picture of someone who’s on the verge of saying something she shouldn’t. “Leon,” she says, lowering her voice, “Leon and me, we not talk about customer. Customer ask about other customer, we say we not know. Not talk about lady. People fighting sometime, but they not fighting us.”

  “I understand.”

  “But Bob, him go back Vietnam, that lady come here with other man, other man, other man, drink everything. Drink whiskey, drink wodka, drink everything. One time, take money. Man have money too much, stick out of pant, her take. Leon see. Not tell man, but when man go toilet, him tell her, not come here again. One week, two week more her come back, Leon say no. Man very angry, want boxing Leon, but Leon say no. Him go away, her go away.”

  “What about Bob? Did he ever bring—”

  “Yes. She come with Bob, we say okay.”

  “You know, Toots, not to take her side, but these girls are poor, and they—”

  “No, no, no, no, no.” She makes a side-to-side gesture with an open hand like someone erasing a chalkboard. “Not same Rose, not same Fon, not same me. Not same many lady. Some lady no good. I poor girl, too, Poke. Then I lucky too much, marry Leon, but before, when I have no money, I not take. Not good for karma. You know, you are poor and you good, you win. You are poor and you bad, poor win.”

  He sits for a moment as she responds to a rap on the bar: Pinky Holland trying for his first of the evening. After his short dry spell, the bottle feels familiar and comfortable in Rafferty’s hand, and he indulges himself in the sheer tactile pleasure of it for a moment. Then he gets up, nods at Pinky, and goes around the bend in the bar to the stools claimed by the members of the Campeau Club. They cut off their chat as he approaches, so abruptly they might have been discussing classified information. One of them, the one to his far right, says, “You buying again?”

  “Sure. Toots?” Toots, who is talking with Pinky, holds up a finger, but he says, “One more round here, on me.” To the acolytes, he says, “I need to talk about Bob.”

  “So talk to Bob,” growls the one who’d spoken before, who might be the oldest. He has a freeze-dried look, as though something had abruptly brought the aging process to a halt and his skin had responded by thickening instead of wrinkling. Up close, it looks like the faux leather on Campeau’s couch.

  Rafferty says, “As you might have noticed, Bob’s not here. There’s been some sort of tussle at his apartment, a little blood here and there. I’m trying to track him down.”

  The one in the middle, who is emulating Bob’s comb-over, says, “A little blood?”

  “Yeah. Just enough to worry about. I’m going to have someone check the nearest emergency hospitals, but I’m wondering where else he goes.” They look at him with the unfocused attention of hibernating bears who have been shaken awake a couple of months early. “Besides here, I mean.”

  “You talking about Bob?” rumbles the one on the left, whose voice is almost low enough to make the floor vibrate, and Rafferty notices for the first time that he’s wearing a hearing aid. He’s the only African American in the group.

  “Some kind of problem,” says the one with the vinyl face. “Nothing for you to worry about.”

  Rafferty says, “How do you know that?”

  “Bob?” Vinyl-face says. “Bob can take care of himself.”

  “It was a lot of blood,” Rafferty says, suddenly and surprisingly furious. “He didn’t fucking cut himself shaving.” He regards the three of them and sees, right to left, scorn, uncertainty, and, on the face of the one with the hearing aid, bewilderment. He chooses the one who looks uncertain. “I think he’s in trouble. I know he’s a tough guy but he’s also a borderline alcoholic in his middle seventies, and to some people he’s going to look like bait. All alone, half-drunk, old guy—”

  “Not so old,” says Vinyl-face.

  “Not talking to you, Jack. Talking to Mr. Reasonable here.”

  Mr. Reasonable says, “Huh?”

  Vinyl-face says, “Drink or no drink, ain’t nobody here wants to talk to you.”

  “People who think they speak for everyone,” Rafferty says, “are almost always wrong.”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” says the one on the left, fiddling with the thing in his ear. “He’s not speaking for me. Something happened to Bob? I want to know about it.”

  “Why don’t you go get the beer?” Rafferty says to Vinyl-face. “Do something useful.”

  Slowly and meaningfully, Vinyl-face gets off his stool, which actually makes him shorter without, somehow, making him seem any less dangerous. “You watch it, bub.”

  Rafferty says, “We seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot.
My fault. Tell you what, you have a couple of beers on me and, umm, your friend here—”

  “Lanny,” says the one with the hearing aid.

  “Lanny and I will go chat for a bit, and then the evening can resume its long slow slide into whatever it is.”

  “Sleep,” Lanny says. “People just waitin’ to go to sleep.”

  “I can sympathize,” Rafferty says. “I haven’t slept more than three hours at a time for thirteen days.” To Toots, he says, “Give these guys two each on my tab, and then bring Lanny and me two more.”

  “You already have,” Toots says.

  “They’re both for Lanny,” Rafferty says. He puts his index finger to his lower lip and tilts his head, Shirley Temple–style. “I’m being good.”

  Once they’re settled, Rafferty gives him a three-minute version: Campeau staying at the bar past closing, the noise in the apartment, what he and the landlady saw there.

  “Who else he hung with?” Lanny shakes his head. “You wouldn’t know this yet, but, Jesus, guys our age, our circles get smaller, not bigger. It’s not like high school, where you knew a thousand people. We know—or maybe I should say, we’ll put up with—ten or eleven. And that’s pushing it. People fall away. People die. And then, you know, when you’ve been through something like we went through, it’s not easy to hang with people who haven’t.” He takes a pull off the beer, and Rafferty can tell from the way he handles the bottle that he probably won’t drink the second.

  He waits until Lanny has swallowed a moderate mouthful. “What about women?”

  “You kidding? At our age, unless we’re married, like old Leon was—” He raises his bottle to toast Leon’s old stool, which still has a ribbon running from arm to arm to prevent anyone from sitting on it. “It’s pay for it or go without, you know? ’Course, it gets easier to go without, as ol’ Henry develops a will of his own, no longer automatically stands for the ladies. Not even in Bob’s case. But, you know, used to be, back in the day, you couldn’t stop him. The girls called him old triple-pop—you okay?”

  Midswallow, Rafferty has spurted half a dollar’s worth of beer through his nose and segued instantly into a coughing fit, tears streaming from his eyes. “Sorry, sorry, just, uh, just caught me off guard.” He coughs again and sniffs deeply, drawing a censorious look from Toots, all her worst fears confirmed. He tries for a jaunty toast, lifting the bottle toward her, but has to wipe his eyes and sniff again. “Sorry. Old, um, triple—”

  “Triple-pop. Because, you know, back in the day he was Mr. All Night Long, he could go so many—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know.” Rafferty wipes his eyes. “I mean, so they say.” He had thought this was Fon’s private nickname for Campeau, for whom she possesses a truly concentrated dislike, and Rose had told him it had spread over the years among the women who were unlucky enough to win Patpong’s nightly Campeau Lotto. It’s a whole new perspective to think that Campeau was aware of it.

  Lanny centers his beer on the coaster, making him unique among the bar’s customers. “So who says?”

  “Oh. The, um, the women in the bars.”

  Lanny nods. “That’s right, you’re married to one.”

  “I am.”

  “Beautiful girl,” Lanny says. “You’re a lucky man.”

  “I won’t argue with you. So about Bob. No women now?”

  “The spirit is willing,” Lanny says. “In fact, the spirit is insistent, but the flesh has its own ideas.”

  “Well, okay. Just trying to cross off—”

  “There’s one woman he talks about sometimes, though.”

  “Which bar?”

  “No, a massage parlor. It’s, ummmm . . . it’s got some stupid English name. Not far from here, over toward Soi Kathoey.”

  “With women?”

  Lanny puts his thumb into the neck of the bottle and pulls it free with a damp little popping sound. “Things aren’t that bad. Bob may be past it, but he hasn’t turned the corner.”

  “No, no, I just meant that over there it’s mostly boys or ladyboys and—”

  “Massage place, it was there first, before the neighborhood changed.” He shakes his head. “This is the only place in the world where before the neighborhood changed could mean that you got boys in the bars instead of girls. Name of . . . name of—” He snaps his fingers. “Rub a Dub Dub, if you can believe that. Boy, I still got it when I need it. You know the setup, bathtub, all that shit? Maybe you don’t do that stuff anymore.”

  “I know the setup, and no, I don’t—”

  “Didn’t think so. Man got a prize garden at home, he doesn’t go pawing through the greens in the market.”

  Toots knocks on the bar, and Rafferty looks up. “They want two more.”

  “Tell them to show you their money. But Lanny here—”

  “Naw, thanks, I’m good. Most nights I’m the designated sane person.”

  “Do you know her name?”

  “Girl at Rub a Dub Dub? Yeah, yeah, lemme think a minute. Trix, he calls her Trix. With an X at the end.”

  “Like the old breakfast cereal?”

  “Yeah,” Lanny says, turning his hearing aid back down. “But he says she’s really dessert.”

  “He probably would,” Rafferty says. “Being Bob and all.”

  13

  Abattoir

  She’d seen him the moment he turned into the street from the Silom end, heading for the little bar he always goes to, and she’d ducked between two night-market booths to get out of the light. No point in drawing his eye. The guy who runs the stand she’s partly blocking glares at her, and she takes a couple of steps back. She realizes she’s hungry, and that reminds her that when she woke up that afternoon, the bag she’d put under what she thinks of as the boy’s tree was on the ground beside her. It was empty and clean and it had been carefully folded. That had touched her; there were always uses for a perfectly good plastic bag, but he’d brought it back and even cleaned it out. This is the fourth time he’s done it.

  So, that’s good, it means that he’d eaten something. On the other hand, it means that she hasn’t. And it’s getting late. Her stomach growls so loudly she can hear it, and she shifts from foot to foot as the street vendor, who has customers approaching, gives her the smile that means get out of here. For a moment she decides to drift over to the Isaan restaurant just to see whether there’s a plastic bag hanging beside the back door, but as she backs away from the vendor’s stand she sees again the man she’s supposed to follow stepping up onto the sidewalk and pushing open the door to the little bar. And she remembers: this is the last night. She’s almost certain the Sour Man hadn’t meant what he said about the cage of hungry soi dogs, but her ear is still hot and swollen where he pierced it with his fingernails—when? Last night, it had been just last night, and tonight is the night she has to . . .

  Anyway, there, he’s gone in. She’ll have to wait and eat later, after the Sour Man pays her.

  But she has to follow him home first. The little girl in her stamps her foot and says a word that had once prompted her mother to take a switch to her calves, one of only three times she can remember being hit. Hurting a child, she thinks, is an unforgivable thing to—

  The thought had slipped up on her from behind or she would have sidestepped it, the same way she had tried to sidestep her mother’s switch. There are certain things she can’t think about because she has no defenses against them: they sweep her sideways, pick her up and spin her around, and when they’re through with her and they drop her at last, she usually has no idea where they’ve taken her. They wipe her memory clean in the same way a fall does: they shine with such a terrible brightness that everything else fades and recedes. She usually has to find something familiar to orient herself.

  She can’t afford that now. She has to stay where she is. She can’t drift; she knows that she drifts. She pats the
pocket of her inner shirt, the two tablets reassuring in their predictable solidity, the familiarity of their shape. Out loud, she says, “Soi dogs.”

  Groups of people are separating to pass on both sides of her, some of them turning sideways to squeeze by, unwilling to brush up against her in the thickening throng. She hears music now. From all directions the bright, cold lights of Patpong blink at her, signaling terrible things, glinting off shards of memory she has tried to crush beneath her heel for years and years and years. She doesn’t know how long it’s been when the door to the small bar opens again and closes behind the man she’s supposed to follow.

  Coming out of the bar, back into the heat and the smells and the noise and the neon, he’s startled at the intensity of the worry he feels about Campeau.

  Unlike most of the Vietnam vets in the bar, who have good days and bad days, it’s seemed to Rafferty for years that Campeau has bad days and worse days. For many of the men who were dropped into that meat grinder, and perhaps especially to those who volunteered, it had been devastating to realize that the entire enterprise was misconceived, mismanaged, and shrouded in lies, with everyone from the president down, as the old song said, trying to keep it from you. Vietnam was a clusterfuck on the grandest possible scale. It was an absolutely personal betrayal of the Americans who died there, of the Vietnamese who were killed and maimed there, of the millions of acres of fertile land that were bombed and poisoned into sterility, their only crop the birth defects that scarred the babies of the young women who were exposed to the best that American chemical firms had to offer.

  And the vets: the knowledge of what was done to them and what they had done to others had left them with a kind of emotional scar tissue that many of still them carried. It was probably less marked in those who had remained gung ho behind the mission, those who had continued to buy the government’s myth of righteous warfare for a humane cause, those for whom the young reporters in Campeau’s book were traitors while the rich men in their unwrinkled suits back in Washington were patriots. The gung ho, Rafferty supposed, persuaded themselves that they had fought in, and their friends had been wounded and died in, the pursuit of an objective that was consistent with the shining city on a hill the men in suits were always talking about. For the others, the ones who decided never to go home again, who no longer knew where home was, the war was a brutal, pointless abattoir, a misguided spasm in the ancient and discredited global shell game of empire. It was a blunt-force con that had destroyed their lives in ways that went as deep inside them as those American poisons had into those once-green fields.