Fools' River Read online

  Poke loves being a father. Poke was born to be a . . .

  She shoulders the thought aside and takes refuge in considering the closet. Miaow’s bucket, brought into view only on her birthday, is empty now, jammed into a corner of the high second shelf, where Poke always stashes Rose’s Christmas presents, behind a couple of old boxes. His choice of a hiding place forces her to drag the hassock from the living room when he’s not home so she can peek. She felt guilty about peeking until the third year, when he bought her a dress so ugly that she spent weeks trying to make it clear that what she wanted was a pair of boots that were so expensive he couldn’t even think about getting her anything else. It took forever for him to hear what she was saying, but one day the dress wasn’t there anymore and the boots replaced them. After that she felt virtuous about peeking. It was her contribution to Christmas, making sure he didn’t waste money on her.

  She hadn’t celebrated Christmas until she moved in with him. She’d heard the unending carols in the stores and worn a blinking Santa Claus hat, like almost everyone else in Bangkok, and, once or twice, a white cotton beard. One Christmas Eve in the bar, the customers had voted her the present they wanted most, and they had wrapped a ribbon around her and held a drawing of slips of paper from a giant cognac snifter, with the winner getting to take her to the hotel for the whole night, free. Not actually free, of course; the bar paid her the following night, subtracting a small fine for the time she wasn’t squeezing the customers for colas because she’d been in the winner’s hotel room, being unwrapped.

  Merry Christmas.

  Now she loves Christmas.

  Below the closet’s two shelves stretches the single, long wooden rod from which their clothes hang, hers neatly spaced half an inch apart and taking up eighty percent of the space and his wedged into a dense mass at the right end, so close together that he once said that someday they would all fuse into a single six-pound T-shirt, eight inches thick. When it did, she promised him, she’d iron it for him.

  She gets up and goes to the closet. For an unfocused moment, she stands in the open door, and then she tugs the bottom of that hanging row of compressed shirts to her, buries her face in the cloth, and inhales.

  The breath she draws is so deep it makes her light-headed, and she opens her eyes wide, puts a hand on the doorjamb, and focuses on the dark outline of the dresser to make the room stop spinning. When it does, she goes to the bed, picks up the phone, and holds down the 1 key.

  “Hey,” Rafferty says.

  She clears her throat. “Have you gotten the takeout yet?”

  “No, we’re following each other around in Foodland trying to find the yogurt. They’ve moved everything again . . . I know, Miaow, I know.”

  “You know what?”

  “That they move stuff around to make you buy more. It’s a basic supermarket principle. So what’s up? Everything okay?”

  “Yes, everything’s—” She stops and strokes the front of her throat with her fingertips. “Why don’t you take Miaow and the boy out to dinner?”

  “Edward,” Rafferty says, “his name is Edward.” There’s a moment of silence except for the store’s tinny Muzak, a little cricket orchestra that’s had too much coffee. “You don’t want your horrible yogurt or your awful, poisonous cherries?”

  “I’m not hungry yet.” She turns around, going nowhere. “Since you haven’t bought it, why not get yourselves something to eat there and then pick up the yogurt and the other things on your way home? I can wait. Miaow likes to eat out.”

  “I don’t want to leave you alone that long.”

  “I know, Poke. I know you don’t want to leave me alone, but right now I want to be alone. Is that okay?” She sits on the edge of the bed and lets her head fall all the way forward onto her chest.

  “Sure,” he says, probably thinking he sounds heartier than he does. “Tell you what. I’ll take them to Patpong. I’ve got a reason to go anyway.”

  “Good,” she says, barely registering his words. “They’ll like that. All children should go to Patpong.” And she disconnects and listens to the silence and feels the fear slip its fingers around the edge of the door to her heart.

  7

  Depends

  They escape from the chill and the bright fluorescents of the supermarket, Edward teasing Miaow for shivering, and into the rank swamp of Patpong 2, mostly abandoned bars at this end, plus a couple of restaurants open and throwing light through their windows in a doomed effort to cheer up the neighborhood. To Rafferty the Silom end of Patpong 2 has always looked like a zip code for rats. Several of the women stationed at the table in front of the immemorial oral emporium called the Star of Light give Rafferty a quick business appraisal and, seeing Miaow and Edward, return to their conversation. Their cigarette smoke puts a sharp edge on the air.

  Rafferty leads Miaow and Edward across the narrow street and into what the old-timers still occasionally call Soi Bookshop, a little stub of road that connects the two Patpongs like the crossbar in an H. The name is all that’s left of a business that disappeared long before Rafferty’s arrival, replaced, no doubt, by an enterprise that targeted a lower chakra.

  Soi Bookshop gets brighter and louder as they approach Patpong 1 and the milling herd of punters and shoppers drawn by the bars on either side and the night market that runs down the center of the road. The crowd is mostly Western and mostly men, either alone or in small packs. Some of them appear to be defiantly guilt-free, shopping for flesh as cheerfully as they might for doughnuts, but there’s also a scattering of solitaries, some of them the type of guys who are often depicted in ratty raincoats. Set in bright relief against this backdrop of anticipatory testosterone are sunburned families whose adults have come to paw the overpriced merchandise in the night market while their staring children store up memories they’ll probably ponder for years until the penny drops.

  It’s a little after eight. Miaow, who was selling gum on this very street when Rafferty met her, plunges into the flow without so much as a look left or right, but Edward has slowed to take it all in. Rafferty is mother-henning the two young people when he hears what can only be a bar-girl shriek, high enough to etch glass and audible from an extraordinary distance. He looks to his right to see a small girl in satin hot pants and an abbreviated cowboy vest waving happily at him from the doorway of a bar, and as he locates her, she recognizes his companions. Her jaw drops, and she yanks her arm down, clamps both hands over her face, and ducks sideways through the door. this or that bar, the sign reads, and he realizes it was Lutanh.

  He grabs Edward, who’s turned instinctively toward the sound, and says, “We’re going this way.” There’s amusement in Miaow’s eyes; she recognized Lutanh, too. The three of them, in a tight triangle with Poke in the lead, push through the crowd to a passageway between two night-market booths. When they reach the other side of the street, he leads them to his left.

  “Where are we going?” Miaow says. She doesn’t hate Patpong the way Rose does, but it holds no interest value for her.

  “To ask some questions about Edward’s father.”

  Miaow looks around. “Sure,” she says. “I should have known. The old guys.” But then she stops, looking up, and the others stop with her. “That’s a new sign, isn’t it?” she says. “And what’s that apostrophe doing there?”

  “I’m raising a grammar snob,” Rafferty says. “And I couldn’t be prouder.” Ahead of them is a very small bar with a single, streaked window. In contrast to all the wattage blazing away to proclaim the bigger bars, this window’s only lure is a short, depressed-looking loop of red and green Christmas-tree lights, two of which have burned out. Above the door is an inexpensive wooden sign, sloppily cut and badly painted, that says leon and toot’s.

  “Well,” Miaow says, “her name isn’t Toot. No one’s is. What did it used to be called?”

  “The Expat Bar,” Rafferty says. There
’s a sudden cramping in his stomach—he’s only been here twice since the terrible night at Miaow’s school. He displaces his discomfort by glancing over at Edward, who’s wide-eyed and clearly unsure where to look next. “This all new to you, Edward?”

  “Yes,” Edward says. “My father came here a few times, but he liked . . . I mean, he likes Soi Cowboy. Likes it better, I mean. That’s what he said at any . . .” A girl half wrapped in the sparkling curtain hanging in the doorway of a bar to their right calls something cheerfully rude to Edward and wiggles her tongue at him, and his eyes bounce off her as fast as a finger yanked from a hot stove. Looking everywhere else, he says, “He said, I mean, that he liked Soi Cowboy—”

  “You’re getting a lot of attention tonight,” Rafferty says, and in fact a couple of women in the next bar up are trying to hail him, too. “But your father’s not alone. Everyone likes Soi Cowboy better. Soi Cowboy is the future, or at least one melancholy version of the future. It’s the current hot spot in the city of bliss and burnout. The trophy is a drinking cup with a hole in it.”

  “Dad’s town,” Edward says.

  “And this, this is an ancient shipwreck, pressed beneath a magic spell at the bottom of the sea. The women here are the spirits of sirens, and the men are the ghosts of dead sailors.”

  “A sea change,” Miaow says. “Wooo-wooo.”

  “My little Shakespearean,” Rafferty says. To Edward he says, “Ariel, in The Tempest, was Miaow’s first part.”

  “I know,” Edward says. “I saw it.”

  “How was I?” Miaow asks with absolutely no self-consciousness.

  “You were the best one,” he says. She starts to smile, and he adds, “Your boyfriend was in it, too, wasn’t he?”

  “Andrew,” Miaow says. She looks down at her feet. “He’s in Vietnam now.”

  “I wondered,” Edward says, but he doesn’t put much into it, and Miaow’s eyes come up for a moment and drop down again.

  “Come on, let’s go,” Rafferty says. “No matter how much your mother wants to be alone, Miaow, I’m still anxious to get back.”

  Miaow says, “Breaking news.”

  The bell over the door rings as he pushes his way into a room that never changes. It looks like it might have been made of some elastic material that’s been forcibly stretched lengthwise to create a narrow, cramped space the width of a couple of bowling lanes with a bar on the right, in front of the usual mirrored selection of brand-name intoxicants. Stools are drawn up to the bar, which has been painted in several colors over the years and then chipped to create patches that look like cut-rate camouflage. A couple of deteriorating booths in an unpleasant salmon-colored plastic sag in an exhausted fashion against the left wall in a way that suggests they wish the party had ended a decade ago.

  As Rafferty enters with the kids in tow, everyone in the place looks at them with an intensity of expectation that says it must be a very boring evening indeed. Leon and Toot’s, as it was renamed by Toots, the ageless Thai bartender who now owns the place, is a tiny lost continent of the almost-extinct, the dwindling members of Bangkok’s first male farang generation, mostly guys who came here in the late 1960s for R&R from Vietnam and never left. For more than fifty years, they’ve taken refuge in this bar, where they’ve told and retold lies to each other until they’ve mostly come to believe their own rewrites of the lives they led, decades ago, in a city that’s changed beyond their recognition.

  “Hey,” Rafferty says, uncertain of his welcome. But the look on their faces tells him they’d buy a drink for a resurrected Saddam Hussein if he offered relief from the others’ company.

  “It’s our little movie star,” Bob Campeau says, making a genuine social effort from the stool he always occupies at the far end of the bar, a stool Rafferty fully expects Toots to bronze once Campeau is no longer with them. Miaow nods, blushes, and says something inaudible. Pinky Holland, his bald, tanned head gleaming, is in his solitary booth, and the Growing Younger Man sits about half of the way to Campeau, working on a drink, the profound greenness of which announces an infusion of powdered algae to redeem the vodka. He plans to live forever, and his main topic is how he’s going to do it. The fourth customer is a man who might be named Ron but whom Leon Hofstedler, once Poke’s best friend in the bar, always called “the guy with the hair,” since neither Leon nor Rafferty could get the name Ron or any other to stick to him. He sports a steely seascape of well-combed waves sweeping back dramatically from a low forehead that seems remarkably unmarred by thought, a characteristic that led Hofstedler to claimed that the man’s hair was so profuse because the roots had a lot of room to move around in.

  “You all already know Miaow,” Rafferty says, “and this is Edward.” Realizing he’s still not sure whether the guy with the hair is really named Ron, he says, “Why don’t you all introduce yourselves?”

  He sees the bright sharpening of interest in Miaow’s face when Bob Campeau says his name. She’s seen him before, in this very room, but without an introduction, and she had been present at an argument a few months back when Rose told Poke about Campeau’s insistence that his girl of the night should allow him to give multiple demonstrations of his potency. The others mumble their names as though they might have expired. They’re so self-conscious that it brings home to Poke how seldom they meet new people. The Growing Younger Man calls himself Louis, and the moment he says it, Poke remembers Leon calling him that once. The guy with the hair introduces himself as Ron. Pinky is the only one who seems comfortable with the ritual of self-introduction, but then Pinky’s only been coming to the bar for maybe ten years, so his conscience is relatively clear.

  Toots briskly brushes her hands together, a habit she has when customers come in, a ceremonial clearing of the deck to make way for a new chore, and says, “Children want what?”

  Edward says, “Children,” but Rafferty speaks over him. “Toots has Coke, Diet Coke, soda water, and—what was the name of that orange drink Leon used to keep here for his ladyboy friend?”

  “Lut—” Miaow begins, and then bites it off, her tongue literally grasped between her teeth.

  “Orangina,” Toots says. “Have. You want beer Sing?”

  “How did you guess?”

  “Ho-ho,” Toots says. “Every night same same. Sit, sit. Move Leon chair over so you have one-two-three.”

  Miaow is still staring at Campeau, whose comb-over is unusually off center tonight, and Rafferty can almost hear the eeeewwww in her mind.

  Sensing her attention, Campeau says to her, “You were great in the play,” and her eyebrows climb a little. To Edward, Campeau says, “You were the kid, right? Her boyfriend?”

  “I was,” Edward says a bit stiffly, and Rafferty sees the money and exclusivity in the boy’s background and then immediately wonders whether he’s wrong, whether what he’s seeing is Edward looking at Campeau and getting a glimpse of his own father in a few years.

  “You were good, too,” Campeau says, a bit grudgingly. He isn’t one to throw praise around. “Couldn’t hear you all the time.”

  “I know,” Edward says. “Miaow was always on me about that.”

  “How’s Rose?” Campeau asks.

  Rafferty can feel Miaow’s eyes on him. “Same as always,” he says. “Better than I deserve.”

  “No kidding,” Campeau says.

  “And the baby?” Toots says to Poke. She plops a big bottle of Orangina on the counter. “For you?” she asks Miaow, who wrinkles her nose and asks for a Coke.

  “Babying away,” Rafferty says. “You’d have to ask Rose to get anything more specific.”

  “You should know,” Toots says, pouring, and even though she’s too polite not to mute her tone, it’s clearly a reproach.

  “I’d love to. But Rose . . . as far as Rose is concerned, pregnancy is something that happens in the other room.”

  “What other room?” Mi
aow asks, rising to her mother’s defense.

  “The one I’m not in,” Rafferty says.

  Miaow says, “That’s not fair,” and then thanks Toots as her Coke is put in front of her.

  Rafferty is wrestling with his reluctance to move Leon’s stool, with its burnished nameplate and the red ribbon knotted tautly between the arms to keep people from sitting on it. The chair and a cheap, dented urn full of ashes on Toots’s side of the bar are all that’s left of Leon—once such a dominant presence here in this dive that’s suddenly been named after him and that was, in so many ways, his true home in Bangkok. Rafferty has just decided to leave the stool where it is and sit on the far side of it, leaving it between him and Miaow, when Campeau, who’s on his best behavior, says with a kind of microwaved geniality, “So what’s the next play?”

  “Something old,” Miaow says dismissively. “Maybe Ancient Greek old. Pig-something.”

  “Pygma—” Rafferty says, but he’s cut off by the Growing Younger Man.

  “That’s not Greek,” he says, “although it’s based on a Greek story about a king who didn’t like women very much, so he carved one out of stone that was perfect, for him anyway, and then he fell in love with it.”

  “Serves him right,” Miaow says.

  “She couldn’t talk,” Pinky Holland says, sounding wistful.

  As though no one had spoken, the Growing Younger man says, “The goddess of love brought her to life, and the king married her, and they lived blissfully ever after.”

  “Does the statue learn to talk?” Miaow asks. “I mean, after it comes to—”

  “The play is all about talk, how people talk,” the Growing Younger Man says. “It’s called Pygmalion, by an Irish playwright.” He squints at the wall of bottles. “George Bernard Shaw? He turned the legend into the story of an upper-class English guy who finds a sort of street girl and teaches her how to be a lady.”