Fools' River Read online

  “Wait,” Miaow says.

  Pinky says, “Yeah, Shaw.”

  “Well,” the Growing Younger Man says, “I haven’t completely lost it. So he gives her, the upper-class English guy does, a bunch of lessons about, you know, talking right and which fork and all that, and then he takes her to a big fancy ball, and everyone thinks she’s noble, royalty or something. A prince dances with her. A young nobleman falls in love with her.”

  Campeau says, “That sounds like My Fair—”

  Miaow says, over him, “He turns her into a . . . a high-class girl?” Her face is as intent as Rafferty has ever seen it. “How?”

  The Growing Younger Man, who has raised his green glass, lowers it again. “I told you. He teaches her how to talk. How to behave.”

  “Oh,” Miaow says. She’s so focused on the thought that she leaves her lips in the circle she made for the O sound.

  “I’m going to try out for Freddie,” Edward says to Poke, sounding doubtful. “You know, the noble guy who falls in love with her?”

  Miaow doesn’t even seem to hear him. To Poke she says, “Would that work?”

  “In a play,” he says.

  “But what about . . . ?” Her fists are clenched. “Do you know anything about this play?”

  “I know something about everything,” he says. But then he reads the look in her eyes and says, “Some. I know about it some.”

  “Would you . . . would you help me?”

  “We’ll download the script tonight. We’ll read it together and talk about it.”

  She closes her eyes for a moment and then nods. “Fine,” she says.

  Edward says, “We could rehearse together.”

  “Fine,” she says again. Then she says, “I mean, fine, that would be great.”

  “Maybe we’ll all go again,” Campeau says without thinking, and Toots freezes in mid-pour behind the bar, and Campeau shuts his mouth and sits frozen, the room held hostage by a profound silence, broken only by a sudden sniffle from Toots. The pressure in the room rises until Rafferty’s ears almost pop.

  Edward surveys the bar’s customers, looking puzzled, and says to Toots, “I’d like some of that orange stuff.”

  “This is Bangkok,” Campeau says, with the authority of someone who knows he’s right. “People disappear all the time. And then they pop up again.”

  “Not always,” the guy with the hair says, prompting a second awkward silence as the bar’s patrons, who have been trying to reassure Edward that his father was probably off fishing somewhere and is already on his way home, glare at the guy with the hair. He senses it and looks up and says, “But I . . . I mean, your father, I’m sure he’s—”

  “There’s disappearing,” Campeau says with lethal authority, “and there’s disappearing.”

  “Really,” Rafferty says. Edward has his Orangina in his hand and his straw, forgotten, in his mouth, and he’s looking at Campeau as though Campeau is an oracle, which, Rafferty thinks, he almost is. No one he knows can match the breadth of Campeau’s knowledge of the Bangkok bar scene. He’s the Neil deGrasse Tyson of pay-for-play. In a different, and slightly worse, world, he’d probably have a television show.

  “There’s selective disappearing,” Campeau says, clearly enjoying the attention. “You know, where your friends know where you are and they’ve got a list of people who aren’t allowed to find out.”

  “Like who?” Miaow says. It’s the first remark that’s snagged her interest since the group stopped talking about Pygmalion.

  “The little woman,” Campeau says. “The other little woman. A bunch of other little women. The insane girlfriend with the gun. The cops. Collection agencies. Immigration. Yaa baa dealers. The American IRS. Lawyers.” He shrugs. “Those people.”

  “If a woman asked you where her husband was and you knew, you’d lie to her?” Miaow asks.

  “Sure,” Campeau says, sounding surprised at the question.

  “Even if she thinks he’s dead?”

  “She knows he’s not dead,” Campeau says, shaking his head at the obviousness of it all. “People like this, she knows he’s not dead. Women,” he says, “whatever other problems they’ve got, they’re not stupid.”

  Pinky Holland says to Edward, “How long has he been gone?” and Edward tells him. Campeau shrugs and says, “That’s no time. He could be around the fucking—Excuse me,” he says to Miaow. “Around the corner, I mean, he could be . . .”

  “We have other reasons for being worried,” Poke says. “So let’s just say, for the sake of getting me home to my wife before the baby is born, that our reasons are worth taking seriously. You guys have been here forever, you’ve known thousands of men who came through here. None of you can think of anyone who disappeared like this in the last five, ten years?”

  “Sure we can,” Pinky says. “Up to the northeast, into Cambodia or Vietnam, down to Bali or anywhere. But most of them came back.”

  “No horror stories?” Poke says. “No one got robbed or beaten up or anything?”

  “Hold it, hold it,” Campeau says. He closes his eyes, looking momentarily like the centuries-old death mask of someone with a bad reputation. “Larry Finch,” he says, opening his eyes. “Larry got waylaid somewhere four, five years ago. Got beat up so bad he was in the hospital. We didn’t know anything for a couple weeks, and then he walked through that door, all wrapped up like a Christmas problem. I mean, present.”

  “My auntie has called the hospitals,” Edward says. “He’s not in any of them.”

  “Auntie?” Pinky says, looking interested.

  “Never mind,” Rafferty says, but Edward says, over him, “One of my father’s girls. Women, one of his women.”

  Sounding like a lepidopterist who’s just heard a description of a possibly unknown butterfly, Campeau says, “What’s your father’s name?”

  “Herbert Dell.” Edward glances down into his drink. “But he likes people to call him Buddy.”

  “I’ll bet he does,” Pinky says, and then realizes he’s said it out loud and looks up, startled, negating the words with a side-to-side movement of his upraised hand.

  “I know my father’s an asshole,” Edward says. The cool he usually affects has been dropped like a jacket. “I don’t need input from—”

  “Sorry, sorry,” Pinky says. “I’m sure he’s actually—”

  “He’s not,” Edward says.

  “Buddy Dell,” Campeau says, his eyes half closed and apparently trained on something on the other side of the bar’s front wall. Everyone falls silent in deference to the oracle. He reaches up and scratches his head, a clichéd mannerism Westerners may have relearned from Thais, who probably picked it up from old American movies; Southeast Asia is full of people who scratch their heads when they’re stumped. “Buddy,” he says. “Buddy, Buddy, Buddy.” He swivels his stool back and forth, making it squeal, until Toots’s flat hand lands on the bar with a crack. Campeau jumps and says, “Sorry.” He picks up his drink and puts it down again, squints at something only he can see, and says, “Soi Cowboy?”

  “Wow,” Edward says, and it sounds sincere.

  “White shoes?”

  “That’s him.”

  “Reason I remember,” Campeau says. “It was raining like shit. His shoes were muddy as hell, and some of it wasn’t exactly mud, you know what I mean? Buddy,” he says. A grin escapes, but he shuts it off.

  “He had to throw those shoes away,” Edward says.

  “Shoulda thrown them all away. I saw him again later, he had on another pair. Tell you something, sonny. Your dad drinks too much.”

  “I know,” Edward says, tight-lipped.

  “I mean for Bangkok. You can’t get shitfaced night after night wearing white shoes and stumble around in Bangkok without something . . .” He looks down into his drink and clears his throat. “Right,” he says.<
br />
  “So . . . old Larry,” Rafferty says over Campeau. “What did happen to Larry—what was his name?”

  “Finch,” Campeau says. “He never told us. Wouldn’t talk about it at all. Just disappeared for a week or two and then showed up knocked half to pieces with nothing to say. Couple months later he went to Phnom Penh. Or someplace.”

  “Phnom Penh,” the Growing Younger Man says. “I saw him there once. At Martini.”

  “Used to be a great bar,” Pinky Holland says, gazing into a better past.

  “Well, you guys are no help,” Rafferty says.

  Campeau hits his drink and puts it down. “Hang on. Takes a while to get the old motor running.” To the Growing Younger Man, he says, “What about that clown Bruce?”

  “Bruce Wayne,” the Growing Younger Man says to Rafferty. “Not his real name, not Batman, just what he called himself. Acted like Interpol was on his trail all the time. International man of mystery, that kinda nonsense. Wore sunglasses at night, walked into things, never told anybody where he was staying. Yeah, he went missing for eight, ten days, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “But they found him facedown in a canal.”

  “With a cast on his leg,” Campeau supplies. He snaps his fingers. “Jeez, it was even in the papers.”

  “I forgot about that,” the Growing Younger Man says. “Getting old. Still, if anyone deserved to end up in a canal—”

  “Let me get this straight,” Rafferty says. “He goes away with two good legs and winds up dead a week or so later in a canal with a broken one?”

  “Somebody, I can’t remember who, said the leg wasn’t even broken, cast or no cast.” Campeau shrugs. “But, you know, there’s people here who think that whole thing with the moon was in Arizona.”

  Edward says, “What whole thing with the—”

  “Apollo. Think it was just some guys running around in slo-mo in the desert.”

  Edward says, “My dad thinks—”

  “Depends,” says the guy with the hair, only his second sign of life since saying his name, which Rafferty has already forgotten.

  “On what?” Campeau snaps. “You mean you think Neil Armstrong was in Phoenix or something? Maybe at the Hilton? ‘One small step for a man, one great leap over a cactus’?”

  “No, I mean old Depends,” the guy with the hair says. “You remember.”

  “You mean he wore those . . . you mean he was incontinent?” Rafferty says.

  Miaow says, “What does ‘incontinent’ mean?”

  “Later,” Rafferty says.

  “It was just a nickname,” the guy with the hair says, sounding defensive. “He had some name that sounded like that, you know, like Nelson sounds like Wilson.”

  “Nelson doesn’t sound like Wilson,” Pinky says. “Jeez, don’t go into writing valentines, okay?”

  “I know who you mean,” Campeau says. He reaches up to check his comb-over and adjusts it so that it’s off center in the other direction. “Name was Stu, Stuart. Stuart Depend . . . Depend-something.”

  “That’s what I said,” the guy with the hair says, sounding aggrieved.

  “Dependahl,” Campeau says. He snaps his fingers. “Damn, I still got it. Stuart Dependahl. Hey, you know what? They found him in a canal, too. And jeez, he had casts on both legs.”

  “Dead?” Rafferty says.

  “As good as.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Brain stopped working,” Campeau says. “Like he went too long without oxygen. Only reason we knew he even turned up was it was in the papers. Because of a tattoo he had, somebody recognized it from the story in the papers.”

  “Tattoo of what?” Pinky says.

  “That caterpillar from whatsit, Alice in Wonderland. Sitting under a mushroom and doing hits on a water pipe. Old Stu never got over the sixties.”

  “He was the one, his wife came by,” the Growing Younger Man says. “Wanted to ask about him, right?”

  Edward says, “His Thai wife?”

  “Naw,” Campeau says, reclaiming the floor. “American wife. Came all the way here from someplace to see what she could do for him. Long as she was in Bangkok, she dropped by to talk to us about him.”

  “And what could she do?” Rafferty says.

  “Nothing,” Campeau says. “Stand the old vegetable watch, you know? Guy never opened his eyes.”

  “Okay.” Rafferty finishes his beer and looks at his wristwatch. “So what you’re telling me is that there’s a minor epidemic of Western punters dropping out of sight and then falling into canals, is that it?”

  “Hey,” Campeau says, “we just report the news, we don’t make it up.”

  “I’ve got to get these kids some food before we go home,” Rafferty says. He puts his glass on the counter, says, “Toots?” and mimes signing a check.

  “Where you gonna take them?” Campeau says.

  “I don’t know.” To Miaow he says, “Want to go to RiffRaff?”

  Miaow sticks out her tongue.

  “Okay, but that’s where we met each other.”

  “I remember,” she says. “How about the Sizzler?’”

  “Okay with you, Edward?”

  Edward seems startled at the sound of his name. He’s clearly been following his own train of thought. “Sure,” he says. “I don’t care.”

  “Okay. Drink up and let’s go.”

  From behind the bar, Toots clears her throat and says softly, “Have more.”

  “More?” Rafferty says.

  “More man in water. Two, maybe three. You talk bar girl, old bar girl. Maybe bad bar, upstair bar. Some old girl work there now.” She shrugs. “Leon know. Before, him talk about.”

  Edward starts to say something, but over him Campeau says impatiently, “Do you want to talk to her?”

  Rafferty says, “Who?”

  “The wife. Mrs. Dependahl.” Campeau pulls a creased and battered spiral notebook from his jeans, licks a finger, and begins to flip through it. “She’s still here,” he says. “In Bangkok. You want a phone number?”

  8

  You Did That?

  The customer has apparently never heard of dental floss. His breath smells like he has an entire herd of tiny, long-dead animals stuck between his teeth.

  Dental floss. Her second life, in a way, had begun with dental floss.

  But the customer she’s with at the moment doesn’t use it, so she looks down demurely when he talks to her, holding her breath until he’s done. Then, whatever he’s said, she puts an appreciative hand on his arm, turns to show him her left profile, and inhales through the right corner of her mouth.

  This is not how it was supposed to be.

  Being a girl, Lutanh thinks for the hundredth time, doesn’t solve everything.

  After the scrawny, unloved Lao village boy named Keo had been told the great secret, he’d occasionally glimpsed his future female self as a beautiful, possibly semitransparent entity wrapped in a golden haze who would inspire appreciation—and maybe a little awe—from all. He, or rather she, would be a remote flower that people would appreciate from a distance or, at least (if they got too close), gently. The way beauty should be treated. Not—not this. Half naked, half freezing, covered in goosebumps, and stuck next to a man whose breath would smell better if he set his tongue on fire. And who keeps putting his hand in her lap to see whether she’s still got what she was born with. If she knew which he wanted, pre- or post-, she’d just tell him, but that would deprive him of his fun, fondling her like a thing. A thing he hasn’t even paid for yet. I’m fun, she thinks.

  And the place smells like piss.

  This is the future. It already seems to have lasted a long time.

  Keo had sealed his fate in his Lao village at the age of eight, when he’d gone outside twice, dressed happily
in his sisters’ best clothes, thinking only how pretty he looked. He’d been laughed at the first time and beaten up the second. As he grew older and his identity became more unmistakable, a few of the other boys flounced around him, pitching their unchanged voices into soprano squeaks, miming the way he walked, the way he washed his hands, the way he touched his hair. Although most of the village was either sympathetic or neutral, Keo became the secret plaything of three older, bigger boys. They waited for him on his walk home from school, yanked his pants off and threw them up into a tree, rubbed dirt in his face, in his hair. Blew him kisses.

  Broke his arm.

  Lutanh runs her fingertips over the arm, almost surprised at the smoothness of her own skin, feeling the irregularity where the bones were imprecisely joined. The man misreads the gesture and puts an arm around her, squeezing her close, saying, “Baby’s cold, huh?” and giving her a generous whiff of the open grave.

  She turns away, grabs a breath openmouthed, nods toward the girls on the stage, and says, “Very pretty, yes?” The shift onstage is the group of girls she dislikes. She and her friends are due up in two more songs.

  “Not as pretty as you. Hey, you want a drink?”

  “Oh, thank you,” she says. It’s a few baht in her purse. She unwinds his arm from around her shoulders and says, “I get.”

  “No, wait—” he says, but she’s already gone.

  One of the girls onstage makes loud kissing noise. When Lutanh turns to glare at her, the dancer fans her hand in front of her face and laughs. She knows about the customer. Lutanh gives her a sharp, rude tilt of her chin and goes to the bartender to request a cola, asking him to pour it slowly.

  When Keo was very small, his mother had told him and his sisters of the young girl in the ancient tale whose stepmother sent her into the forest to get water from the river. On her way back, carrying two heavy, brimming buckets, she met a filthy, ragged old woman who put a spidery hand on her arm, fixed her with oddly bright eyes, and asked for a drink. The girl told her to drink all she wanted and, since Thais and Laos value cleanliness so highly, to wash her hands and face if she wished. “Please,” the girl said, “I can go back for more.”