by Jim Algie
JIM ALGIE
TUTTLE Publishing
Tokyo | Rutland, Vermont | Singapore
Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd.
www.tuttlepublishing.com
Copyright © 2014 by Jim Algie
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission from the publisher.
“The Death Kiss of a King Cobra Show” was originally published in the Bram Stoker Award-Winning American anthology Extremes 2: Fantasy and Horror from the Ends of the Earth in 2001.
“Wet Nightmares,” under the original title “Fucked Over,” was the second prizewinner in the Chiaroscuro webzine’s annual short-fiction contest in 2002. It was reprinted under the new title in the 2013 anthology Crime Scene Asia.
“Flashpoints in Asia” was originally published in the ezine Read in the Dark and longlisted for a World Fantasy Award in 2004.
“The Legendary Nobody” was published in the Dark Dreams ezine in 2008.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data for this title is in progress.
ISBN: 978-1-4629-1379-4 (ebook)
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CONTENTS
1 The Death Kiss of a King Cobra Show
2 Flashpoints in Asia
3 Wet Nightmares
4 The Legendary Nobody
5 Obituary for the Khaosan Road Outlaws and Impostors
6 The Phantom Lover
7 Life and Death Sentences
8 The Vicious Little Monk
9 Tsunami
For the ghost of my hell-raising, harness-racing, horn-playing soldier of a non-father: Edward Algie (1928-1992)
SHOUT OUTS
Special thanks to Eric Oey, the president of Tuttle, Terri Jadick my ever-helpful editor, the “product evangelist” Steve Ja dick, Gail Tok and Michelle Tan in the marketing department, Greg Lowe, agent and advisor extraordinaire from the Watchman Agency, and the blurb writers John Burdett and Christopher Moore.
Certain stories are dedicated to different allies. Let those stand as tokens of gratitude. I’m also thankful to the Algie brood (Patricia, Richard, Anita and Ryan), Ellen Boonstra, Bee, Ooh Mukdavijit, Penny Pattison, Brian Zelnicker, Michael Hirsch, Bill Hammerton, Ben Hopkins, Liz Smailes, Rich Baker, Evan C. Jones, J.D. Villines, the merry pranksters from Farang Magazine, Susan Alduous, Jim Pollard, Bill Bredesen, Mark Fenn, Veeraporn Nitiprapha, Max Crosbie-Jones, Joe Cummings, Robert Fernhout, Janet Brown and Albert Wen from ThingsAsian Press, John Boyer, Lisa Gorecki, Noel Boivin, Paul Dorsey, Alison Riley, Lisa Swaren, Tom Hilditch, and most of my former band-mates in Jerry Jerry and the Sons of Rhythm Orchestra, The Asexuals and The Uncolas, as well as the editors who purchased some of these tales and the judges who awarded or nominated them for various prizes.
While reporting on the Asian tsunami of 2004, many survivors, volunteers, and relatives of the deceased helped me out with interviews and insights. There is not room to thank everyone. But in particular I would like to single out Reid Ridgeway, Kelly May, Bodhi Garrett, Klaus Duncan Bom, Di Duncan, Dr. Pornthip Rojanasunand and Police Colonel Khemmarin Hassiri, the Chief of Police of Takuapa, who all exuded so much courage, grace, wit and kindness in the midst of a series of pressure-cooker ordeals.
Kudos is also due to my former instructors and literary guides at Concordia University: Professor Veronica Hollinger, Professor Geffen, Professor Michael Butovsky, and Scott Lawrence, my Creative Writing teacher and a fine short-fiction author in his own right, for all his encouragement, constructive criticisms, and for teaching me more about writing and reading fiction than anyone else ever has.
Last but most I need to thank Umaporn “May” Pandee, without whom life would be little more than the living death of a lovesick heart.
“If a way to the better there be it lies
in taking a full look at the worst.”
—Thomas Hardy
“Even the most tortuous creepers around the
hoariest tree are not as crooked as a man’s heart.”
Sunthorn Phu, Phra Abhai Mani
THE DEATH KISS OF A KING COBRA SHOW
For May
Before every snake-handling show started, Yai always rubbed his left thumb, which was permanently numb and partially paralyzed from the bite of a Siamese cobra; he could move it from side to side, but couldn’t bend it; and the white scars from the two puncture wounds were still visible.
He looked over at the Thai announcer, who was holding up a big placard with newspaper and magazine stories pasted on it.
With his microphone, he pointed at one of the clippings. “This photo shows a seven-meter-long python who ate a man here on Phuket island, and then the snake exploded,” he said.
He pointed at another photograph. “This photo shows a golden flying snake. We have many, many in the jungle here. They are one of five species that can expand its ribs to glide from tree to tree. This snake eats birds and geckos.”
Yai got down on his knees in front of the cages holding all the deadly reptiles, put his hands together in a prayer-like gesture, bowed his head, and asked them to forgive him for mistreating them. Still on his knees, Yai remembered the shrine in his parent’s home, which had an image of the Buddha sitting and attaining enlightenment while Phaya Nak, the seven-headed Lord of the Serpents, protected him from the elements.
But he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d prayed to the Buddha or the Serpent Lord.
Now my temple is in the bar, he thought with a snicker, and I pray to the whiskey god every night.
Yai stood up. Since he’d heard the announcer’s routine almost every day for the last six years, he scanned the bleachers for pretty white women. If only he could find a rich foreign wife who wouldn’t mind helping to support his parents, then he could finally quit this dangerous job, and maybe even buy a Harley-Davidson. He imagined the envious stares of all the people in his village when he sped down the dirt roads on a Harley with a beautiful blonde on the back.
Out of the forty people in the crowd, there were only a couple of older women. None of them looked very rich, but it was hard to tell with foreigners. He could never work out why they all dressed so badly on holiday, walked around with prawn-colored tans, and didn’t show off their gold and money.
During the show he’d play to the older women and see if he could milk them for a few tips.
Over in one corner of the bleachers, three white sailors or Marines, dressed in shorts and tank tops, were talking loudly among themselves and drinking beer. The buzz-saw haircuts on these “Jar-heads” gave them away.
Just seeing them brought bac
k the humiliating events of the night before and made him swear he would avenge that dire loss of face.
Yai had been drinking a local tonic and aphrodisiac (fermented rice whiskey mixed with snake bile) in a bar that had a wagon wheel, rimmed and spoked with strings of flashing lights, on the wall. A big sign beside it read: “Welcome U.S. Troops for Cobra Gold 2000.” Yai wasn’t exactly sure what “Cobra Gold 2000” was, although he assumed it was some kind of joint operation between the Thai and American navies.
A few sailors in muscle-baring T-shirts and Hawaiian shorts sat at a corner table under a huge water buffalo skull that had red light bulbs in its eye sockets. Each of them had a Thai bargirl sitting on his lap. Every time they laughed together, every time one of the men touched or kissed one of the women, Yai’s loneliness ached like a phantom limb and made him drink faster.
By his calculations, it would cost him about one-third of his monthly salary to pick up one of these prostitutes for the evening. So he debated whether or not to go to a suan gai (“chicken farm”) for locals; but no, seeing all those sad-faced “chickens” sitting behind the big window with the one-way glass, so the men could walk right up and window shop for sex, was depressing.
If he hadn’t slept with a woman for exactly 387 days now, he could at least talk to one and prove that he was smarter than all these other rich tourists and brawny soldiers. So he looked over at the longhaired woman sitting alone at the bar to his left. She was bathed in a purple fluorescent light that gave her teeth a ghostly sheen when she smiled at the tourist down at the other end of the bar.
A local with a huge golden python wrapped around his neck and chest approached the tourist with a Polaroid camera to see if he wanted to have his photo taken with the snake. On the bar’s stereo, the CCR song “Run Through the Jungle” was cranked up so loud that Yai had to yell at the girl.
No matter how politely he asked for her name and where she came from, the woman wouldn’t respond or even look at him.
Yai kept smiling at her, kept asking the same polite questions until she finally sneered: “Mai chawp khon tai [I don’t like Thai people].”
For a few seconds, he thought she was joking and that he was just too drunk to get the joke. But she didn’t laugh.
To show her how honest and humble he was, Yai said, “You mean, you don’t like poor Thai people like me,” and laughed.
When she didn’t respond, he repeated the joke three more times, always laughing for a tagline, because he didn’t want to be mean about it, he just wanted her to tell him the truth.
Finally, not even looking at him, she repeated, “I don’t like Thai people,” and smiled at the tourist across the bar.
It was that smile—a deliberate insult—which really set him off. “How can you say that? We are Thai people. That’s the problem with all these rich tourists: they make us hate ourselves. And every time you sell your body to one of them, you hate yourself a little bit more. Don’t you see that?”
The bargirl gave him a sarcastic smile and walked right past him to sit down beside the tourist.
“Hello,” she said to him and smiled. “What your name?” Then she turned back to Yai and yelled the Thai equivalent of “Go fuck your mother.”
How dare this stupid whore insult him and his mother like that!
To make him even angrier, the three bargirls sitting with the sailors laughed.
Yai staggered over to where she was, so drunk that he felt like he was on the heaving deck of a ship, and grabbed her by the arm, when the golden python wrapped itself around his neck, strangling him. The serpent then coiled around his mid-section and made his ribs ache.
At least he thought it was the python—until he was lifted off the ground and carried to the doorway of the bar. The man dropped him on his feet and then shoved him through the open door.
Gasping for breath and massaging his throat, Yai turned around to see a big sailor blocking the doorway. He tried to scream an insult that the American was a “reincarnation of a water buffalo” but nothing came out except a gurgling wheeze.
The white hulk took a step towards him. “You don’t treat women like that, boy.” He folded his arms across his chest to show off his muscles. Behind him, the girls were all laughing now—laughing at Yai.
Crippled by alcohol, he staggered down the crowded street past the Viking Scandinavian Restaurant, an Indian tailor shop, and the Vegas Beer Bar, the loss of dignity stinging and tightening the skin on his face like a sunburn as the girls’ laughter echoed in his ears.
Why did the dumb brutes like these guys always get the money and the girls and the opportunities and the fancy clothes, nice cars and expensive whiskey, and all he got was insults and snakebites?
Now, as he watched the Marines sitting in the bleachers, he suspected that it was one of them who’d picked him up and thrown him out of the bar. But it was hard to tell; they all looked the same.
After he’d sobered up this morning, Yai had to admit to himself that he had no right to criticize that prostitute. Was he any better? Wasn’t he making a living off tourists and hoping to marry a rich foreigner, too?
But the sailor was a different matter. That guy couldn’t speak Thai. He had no idea what Yai had said to the woman, or how she’d insulted him. So what right did he have to interfere in their argument?
The announcer was almost finished his routine now: “Thailand has about half a million cobras. If one bites you then you must have the serum in thirty minutes or you will die sure.”
Yai frowned at the sailors for so long that it made him cross-eyed. They thought they were so big and tough, but did they have the guts to get in the snake pit and wrestle with banded kraits and king cobras? Now he was ready to teach them a lesson about who the real tough guy was. So he tightened his green headband, rubbed his numb left thumb, and wiped his sweaty palms on his baggy black sweatpants.
“I would like to introduce to you our snake-handler, Yai, or ‘Mister Big’ as we call him.”
To the tune of a techno track shredding the speakers, Yai ran across the snake pit, did a few cartwheels, a back flip and a head-stand, leapt back on his feet, punched the air and, all the while, never stopped smiling. His nimbleness and playful demeanor erased a decade from his thirty-five years.
The music faded out, the crowd gave him a smattering of applause and he grinned and yelled. “Welcome and thank you everybody. Thank you for coming to my funeral…” he paused to let the joke sink in before waving it off and laughing.
Using a wooden stick with a metal hook on one end, he reached into the cage, pulled out a jumping snake, and put it down in the middle of the circular pit. The meter-long serpent, which had black, red and brown scales, twisted across the floor. Yai put the stick down and walked towards it. Immediately, the snake leapt at him. He veered back as it nipped at his crotch. Yai made a funny face and grabbed his crotch with both hands. He looked over at the older women in the bleachers and smiled. “Sorry, ladies, but my little dragon is snake food now.”
But the dumb hags didn’t even get the joke. That was the trouble with these white foreigners; they were so boring and serious all the time. Even on holiday they rarely seemed to relax.
The next segment of the show was much more dangerous, so he tied his headband a little tighter until he could feel his pulse throbbing in his forehead. Then he wiped his eyebrows, remembering how a bead of sweat had dripped in his eye, distracting him long enough for a Siamese cobra to bite his thumb.
In the center of the pit, three banded kraits with glossy black skins and yellow bands around them, coiled in circles. All three of the venomous serpents were around two-meters long. In order to smell him, they flicked their tongues out in his direction.
Yai looked over at the Marines; they weren’t talking now; nobody in the crowd was.
Satisfied that he had their complete attention, he got down on his knees and crept towards one of the banded kraits. Slowly opening his fingers, Yai moved his right hand toward the right side of
the snake’s head. Immediately, it stopped moving—a sure sign that it was ready to attack. Using his right hand as a decoy, he moved his left towards the other side of the snake. Sweat ran down his back and tickled his spine as he moved his hand closer and closer to it. With a loud groan, he snatched it up by its head and held the writhing serpent in the air. The crowd applauded.
Then he snatched up another one in his left hand and transferred it to his mouth. He had to bite down on the snake’s head just hard enough so that it couldn’t get loose, but not so hard as to bite its head off and poison himself.
Both of the banded kraits were furiously whiplashing their tails from side to side as he knelt down again. Hot sweat ran down the crack of his ass, and the sound of his heart thumping was louder than the murmurs of the audience. As he knelt down and stared at the serpent’s yellow eyes and black pupils, Yai whispered, “I’m not going to hurt you, my little friend. Not going to hurt you. Not going to…” and snatched up the last snake by its neck.
The audience applauded. Yai stepped out of the snake pit and stood at the foot of the bleachers, holding up a banded krait in each hand, the other one caught in his teeth. Flashbulbs went off and made him blink.
Now that he was closer to them, Yai could see that one of the Americans was the same guy who’d strangled him in that python grip last night. When he saw the snake-handler staring at him, the sailor held up an empty beer can in a huge fist and crumpled it.
The threat, and the sudden flashback of last night with the sailor gloating over his loss of face and the “chickens” laughing, made Yai’s lower jaw tremble, his fists clench and, for a few frightening seconds, he thought he was going to bite the snake’s head off and crush the other two skulls in his hands.
During the next segment of the show, he pried the jaws of a small Siamese cobra open with a pair of tweezers and put a microscope slide between them. He carried the snake around so that the crowd could snap photos and get close-ups of its jaws and the pool of yellowish venom on the slide.
