Fools' River Page 7

  “You are kind and good-hearted,” said the old woman, who was actually an angel. “I will bless you.” And from that moment, whenever the girl’s words were truthful and compassionate, the beautiful, prized flowers called phikul would fall from her mouth to show the world that the girl’s goodness and beauty came from the center of her heart. Her evil stepmother sold the flowers and became rich, but ultimately the girl, who by then was also called Phikul, met a young man and married him and lived the fairy-tale life of a beloved wife: a beautiful woman, treasured and safe. The story pierced Keo’s chest like an arrow and lodged in his heart.

  Oh, to meet the angel who could turn him into Phikul.

  The cola is icy in her already-cold hand. She tucks the tag for the drink into her shorts, to be redeemed later that evening, since this is payday, and shivers, exaggerating it as comedy for her friend Fai, who’s sitting across the room. Then she forces a smile and turns back toward her customer, only to see him disappearing toward the malodorous toilet at the far end of the room.

  Like most Patpong clubs, This or That Bar is a long rectangle, squeezed for width by the developers’ goal of jamming the largest possible number of profit centers into a single block. The stage claims the rear third of the room, in front of the toilets and the cramped changing room for the girls, the doorway to both of which is screened by a heavy, damp-smelling length of fabric through which the dancers make their first entrance of the evening. Later, whenever it’s her turn again, she will jump off her customer’s lap or shimmy out from under his arm and just clamber onto the stage at the point nearest to where they’ve been sitting.

  Poles are set into the stage every six feet or so, giving the girls a center for the stage space they claim during their sets and also something to hang on to later in the evening, when the stimulants are wearing off and the more serious stuff coming on. Down the walls on the room’s long sides runs a raised platform with a padded bench for customers extending its entire length. In front of the benches are small, square tables, anchored to the floor every two meters. The place is only half full, but Lutanh has no trouble identifying the empty stretch of bench and the table where Mr. Breath of Death has been pawing at her.

  Occupying the center of the room is the bar, an extended ellipse with a counter surrounding it and swivel stools packed densely all the way around. The bartenders work at the center of the ellipse, so Lutanh only has to go ten or twelve feet from where the cola was handed to her to be at the table where her customer would be waiting if he hadn’t had to pee. She sighs, offering a small prayer of gratitude for his brief absence, and almost trips over an outstretched pair of legs, covered in Japanese-style tattoos. Dragons and serpents wind their way up toward the dubious paradise of his shorts.

  The legs weren’t there a moment ago. He stuck them out on purpose.

  But he’s not looking at her. He’s watching the stage, even though it’s clear he knows she’s there. He’s a sunburned farang, stocky in a way that says strong beneath the fat, with a peculiar haircut; his hair is only about half an inch long, but he’s got wide sideburns stretching almost all the way to his jawbone. The whole thing looks like a fuzz helmet he pulls on in the morning, except that there’s nothing amusing about it.

  He pretends to feel her gaze and turns to face her, painstakingly assembling a surprised expression. It seems to go on for a little more time than it should; either he’s intentionally letting her see it take shape or his internal clock runs more slowly than hers. Looks up at her, then down at his legs. “Oh,” he says, pulling them back at that same deliberate speed. “Sorry. Where’s your boyfriend?”

  “He go brush teeth,” she says. “Where your girlfriend?”

  “Just sitting here, waiting for you.” The smile is also put together a piece at a time: the corners of the mouth, the slight tilt of the head, the crinkling of the eyes.

  “Your girlfriend waiting for me?” Lutanh says. “She no like you?”

  She watches it sail past him and then, slowly, hit home. The smile broadens a little, but there’s also a flush on his cheeks that wasn’t there before. He starts to speak, but Lutanh says, “No problem. Maybe she come back,” and turns away to cross the room. She can feel his eyes on her back like a spot of warmth, like the red light from rifle sights she’s seen in movies, flashing in someone’s eyes just before his head explodes.

  She sighs again. Her customer won’t be in the bathroom forever.

  Keo’s angel had taken the form of an older woman, maybe sixty, who came from nowhere to buy the best house in the village when Keo was twelve. Straight-backed and slender, Than Taeng moved through the dusty, ramshackle village with its filthy, snot-streaked children, as though she were in an immaculate, orderly city, full of people like her. The villagers joked about her behind her back—Keo’s mother sometimes referred to her as “Her Highness”—but to her face everyone gave her a respectful salute and treated her as though she might secretly be someone important, some slumming millionairess or the former favorite minor wife of an unknown person with the power to change their lives.

  From the time she arrived, Keo occasionally felt her gazing at him, but she never met his eyes. Unlike that of some in the village, her gaze was not disapproving, although he knew it would be untrue to call it warm. Still, he sometimes imagined that she took a special interest in him, that she was watching over him, like the spirit in the story of Phikul. That feeling was strongest on the nights when his brothers and sister were asleep and his parents’ single light was still burning, creating a sharp-outlined shadow theater on the wall. Keo would turn his head just so, until the contours of his face were thrown in three-quarter view on the wall, and he would study the shape of his long, delicate eyelashes and his high cheekbones and slender neck and imagine that he was the beautiful, good-hearted girl and that Than Taeng was the angel and that she could transform him into the person he so desperately wanted to be.

  The condensation from the cola glass is dripping from the tabletop and onto her bare thigh. She goes back to the bar, grabs a paper napkin, and scrubs her thigh dry, then wraps the napkin around the base of the glass. The goosebumps on her arms stand up like a tiny mountainscape, and suddenly all she wants to do is go into the bathroom, hold the door closed, and weep. But the next-to-last song of the current shift of dancers is coming to an end, maybe half a minute to go, and that means that in four minutes or so she’ll be up there moving around, getting warm. She glances back at the man with the tattooed legs, sees him avert his eyes, and then the curtain at the left of the stage is shoved aside and her customer comes out, drying his hands on his pants.

  Well, at least he rinsed them.

  She pastes on a smile and climbs up onto the padded bench to wait for him, hyperventilating a little so she’ll be able to hold her breath longer when he’s talking. He goes past her, around the table in front of her, and sits. She shifts to face him, which puts her back to the stage.

  “I missed you,” he says, his hand searching her lap. She crosses her legs to make it difficult and starts to say something, anything, but the onstage shift’s next-to-last song ends, the last one comes on, and he looks past her, laughs, and says, “For Christ’s sake, look at that.”

  And she does. And her heart almost stops.

  The three older boys had been gaining on him, toying with him because they knew that they could catch him anytime. They were playing their newest game, in which they spiraled him out into the forest, where they could catch him and rip his clothes off—just to make sure, they said, that he was really a boy. Then they’d tie his clothes into knots and throw them back into the village so he had to run in naked and get them.

  He’d been circling the village in panic, trying to avoid being forced into the woods, but when they’d come, for the third time, to Than Taeng’s house, they saw her standing outside her door, her hands raised, palms facing toward them, in a gesture with a surprising amount of stren
gth behind it. The gesture said stop, and it turned the pursuing boys into a loose knot of confused children.

  Keo found himself standing very close to her, his knees shaking violently. He could smell something, perhaps not perfume, perhaps soap, and it was the most beautiful scent he’d ever breathed. He learned much later, in Bangkok, that it was a graceful white flower the Thais call sôn glìn—in English, tuberose. It was in fact her soap, and later, when he was Lutanh, he bought it by the boxful.

  She said to the boys, “Go away.” She hadn’t raised her voice, but its authority scattered them like leaves. When they were out of sight, she said, “Come in,” and stepped back so he could precede her through the open door. As he passed, she rested her hand on his shoulder for a moment. The gesture’s warmth made his legs go weak.

  The house, Keo could see as Than Taeng closed the door behind him, had once been much like his parents’, but care and money had been lavished on it. A floor of concrete, somehow dyed a leathery tan, had been poured over the dirt, smoothed until it was almost polished, and covered here and there with thick rugs of deep red. Against the walls stood the furniture he had seen in movies, big, soft-looking chairs with thick cushions. One of them—behind a smooth, shining wooden table—was long enough to hold four people, side by side: the first couch he would ever sit on. The vertical blinds had been adjusted against the glare of the afternoon sun so that the room was a series of angled stripes of light, tracing their way across the floor and partway up the opposite walls.

  To Keo it was a palace.

  “Over there,” Than Taeng said, pointing to the long chair. “On the couch.”

  When he was sitting, as lightly as he could, on the soft leather, jamming himself into one end to take up as little space as possible, he felt something brushing his chest and looked down to see the fabric of his T-shirt vibrating in time to the pounding of his heart. He was still panting from the run.

  “Stay there,” she said. “Keep your feet on the floor. Don’t put them on the furniture.” Moving noiselessly, her back absolutely straight, she went to the wall to the left of the door, which she closed. The open door had partially hidden a sink and a small, two-burner gas hot plate. Glass-faced cabinets held plates and cups and saucers that all looked alike. In his heart Keo seized on that detail: Someday all his plates and cups and saucers would look alike, and so would his drinking glasses.

  “Water?” she said. “Grass jelly drink? Coca?”

  “Do you—” He had to stop and clear his throat. “Do you have Orangina?”

  “Water, grass jelly drink, Coca,” she repeated, but this time it wasn’t a question.

  “Coca, please.”

  “Not good for your teeth,” she said, stooping toward a small refrigerator that came up to her waist.

  “What is,” he began, and then he swallowed and finished the question, “good for my teeth?”

  “Water,” she said. “Also, brushing them every morning and every evening.”

  “I do,” Keo said, almost truthfully.

  “Smile at me.”

  He pulled his lips back, feeling like a monkey.

  “Not bad. But you should straighten them.”

  “How?”

  She made a clucking sound with her tongue, mild reproof at the stupidity of his question, but there was something so harmless in it that he felt his smile broaden. She returned the smile and came up with a plastic bottle of water, took down one of the very thin, gracefully curved glasses, and filled it. “Better for you,” she said.

  He said, “I’ll break it.”

  “Right now is when you begin learning not to.” She picked up something circular and green and glassy from the top of the refrigerator and brought it and the goblet of water across the room to him. She put the green circle on the table and placed the goblet on top of it. “This is a coaster. When you drink, put the glass back on the coaster. It protects the table. When you’re around people who have nice things, you need to know how to use them, how to protect them.”

  He nodded, feeling the awkwardness of the gesture.

  “Now, drink your water, make yourself comfortable, and keep your feet on the floor.” She bent down and pulled a thick, black, leather-bound book from the table’s lower shelf. “Look at this,” she said, “and I’ll be right back.”

  She straightened and disappeared through a door in the wall to Keo’s left. Keo’s house didn’t have a door in that wall. He took another look at the room he was in, revised his first guess that Than Taeng slept on the couch, and wondered what the bedroom looked like.

  Beside the door to the bedroom hung a large photograph, perhaps a meter long, covered with glass. The glass reflected the stripes of sunlight, making it difficult for him to see the picture properly, but he slid as quietly as possible down the length of the couch, and the reflections on the glass moved far enough for him to confirm that it was a black-and-white image of a beautiful woman dressed all in black, or a color that photographed black, looking at the camera with such intensity that he wouldn’t have been surprised to see her blink.

  “Me,” she said, coming out of the bedroom with a small greenish something in her hands. “In Bangkok, thirty years ago. When your mother was just a girl. Move back down, I want to sit.”

  He slid over to the black album she’d put on the table, and she sat beside him and held out her hand. It held what looked to him like a spool of thread inside a transparent box. “This is dental floss,” she said. “You pull some out, knot it around your index fingers, and slide it back and forth between your teeth. Every space between your teeth. In the morning, at night. And you do not let anyone see you doing it. Here.”

  She offered him the small, neat-looking box and coached him through the process, and when she was satisfied with his technique and he was sitting there with a wad of floss in his hand, his gums bleeding a little, she said, “Moment,” and got up again. When she returned, she had a paper towel in her hand. “On this,” she said, and he carefully placed the used floss on the center of the towel, and she wadded it up, took it back to the kitchen, and dropped it into a can with a top that popped open when she stepped on a pedal.

  “Every day,” she said. “Keep the floss hidden. Hidden. Listen to me.” She stopped in the center of the room, brilliant stripes of sunlight angling over her from head to foot. “Anything you do that other people don’t do will be a weapon for them. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes.”

  “The way you walk, the way you talk, the clothes you wear. If you floss your teeth and they don’t. They can all be weapons that some people will use against you. Even the way you think about yourself.”

  “The way I think . . .” He looked up at her.

  She leaned toward him slightly, just sending the words home. “As a girl,” she said.

  His eyes dropped to his lap, to his bare legs, dirty from the chase, with their ugly, knobby knees. Around the obstruction of his heartbeat, he said, without bringing his gaze up to meet hers, “I’m a boy.”

  “Open the album,” she said.

  It seemed like the safest thing to do. He lifted the cover and saw a smaller version of the photo on the wall, the black dress, the confidence in her eyes, eyes that said, I’m beautiful and I know it. He passed his fingers over the face.

  “Turn the page,” she said.

  He did, and there she was again. There were pages of pictures, some big, some small. In some of them, she looked like she knew they were being taken and there was some kind of private joke between her and the camera. In some she seemed to be gazing straight through the camera at Keo—at, he thought, whoever might look at the picture.

  He said, “You’re beautiful.” It felt strange to say it. He’d never said it to anyone, although he had imagined hearing it said to him.

  “I was,” she said. “For a while. Keep turning the pages.”

  A
s the pictures got older, they became less formal, and there were three or four on a page. In some of them, she was talking or laughing or smoking, unaware of the camera, but in most of them she had turned her head or raised her eyes to meet it. Usually she was with other women, but then, after a certain number of pages, they were girls, in their late teens and early twenties, and so was she. In many of these photos, the girls were heavily made up, and in a few the groups included farang men, usually older and bulkier, not laughing as loudly or smiling as broadly as the girls were. And then, toward the end of the book, she was a teenager, five or six years older than Keo, without makeup and wearing plain, simple clothes. Her eyes in these pictures weren’t so confident.

  Every now and then as he turned a page, she murmured a number, her age when the picture was taken, and then he turned to the last page and found himself looking at a village family, not much different from his family. There was a hut in the background. The four children were standing stiffly, the mother shading her eyes against the sunlight, and the father’s expression made it clear that he was putting up with being photographed, but not for much longer.

  “Your mother and father?” Keo asked.

  “Yes,” she said, and then she put a finger on the girl on the left. “My sister Yim,” she said, moving the finger. “My brother, Nong, my sister Kan.” The last child in the row was a boy, standing slightly apart, with a sullen expression. She said, “Me.”

  Keo heard the word, but he couldn’t make it mean anything until he squinted for a long, frozen moment at the child in the photo, definitely a boy, an unhappy boy, and then it seemed to him that he heard a buzzing noise and the room began to spin. He pulled his head back to take in a larger vista, to stop the whirling sensation, and she reached down and tapped a vermilion nail against the plastic over the boy’s face. She said again, “Me.”

  He said, “You? You did that?”

  “I did,” she said. “And so can you.” And then she told him what he was going to do to stay alive for the next few years.