Provincetown Follies, Bangkok Blues (Cape Island Mystery)

by Randall Peffer

  “Unreal,” he says before he can catch himself. Suddenly, he wants to ask how in hell she pees in that gear. Of all the cases in the country, he has to draw this sideshow. Is anything what it seems?

  She is smiling again. Damn. Does she like blowing his mind?

  “The queens in Bangkok showed me how to use a leather thong as a gaff when I was just a little princess: goat skin. Very soft. Cord so thin most people cannot even see it through sheer panties. Anyway, whether you see me from front or back, you see G-I-R-L above and below the waist. Right, la?”

  His eyes veer to that lime bathing suit then dart back to the road. They are in P-town now. The Jeep is creeping west in the usual throng of traffic on Commercial Street. A couple of college boys on bikes cruise up alongside, stare at her breasts, smile. Like life is good.

  Tuki gives them a look. A bluesy little grin.

  She sighs. “Some girls scrape together fifteen thousand dollars or more and get a total sex change. Doctors castrate you, peel the skin off your chaang, cut out the muscle, reposition the urethra, and make—”

  “Jesus! Spare me the gory details.”

  She shrugs, gives a little sigh.

  “Sometimes I think about this … maybe save my money … if you keep me out of jail.”

  He feels his stomach churning. “Are we there yet?”

  FOURTEEN

  The Boat Slip is an upscale, weathered-wood, seventies hotel built in the style of a condo complex on the bay side, harbor beach. It has a big wooden deck around a shimmering blue pool. It’s a total gay scene. If you just want to catch some rays for a few hours and check out the current selection of studs, the Slip is the place. They have tea dances at four, a dance club by night, theme parties. It costs you a few dollars to get in if you’re not a guest, but the Slip is a cheap show.

  With her lawyer in tow, she stands in the shade on the edge of the deck at the Slip, waiting for the blurs of tan bodies and bright fabrics laid out before her eyes to settle themselves into shapes. As her vision clears, she sees a dark bronze Tarzan type with wavy dark hair, blue eyes, a long nose, heavy beard shadow. He is sitting up on his chaise, twisted like a discus thrower, showing off the unbelievable vee shape of his upper body. One leg is on the deck, and even from here you can see the line of his hamstring beneath the webs of dark leg hair that seem to meld with his black boxer trunks.

  Michael rubs his eyes. He guesses why she likes it here. But how the hell did he let himself get talked into this little adventure? Men are staring at him. One of them just winked. Damn.

  “I’m out of here, Tuki.”

  “No. Wait. Stay. I want to talk … please. I’ll tell you how this all started.”

  It is Memorial Day weekend, the beginning of June. The start of the summer season in P-town. There is a party after the Saturday night show. Everybody from the Follies is going.

  They take the bartender Richie’s car. When the Range Rover crests a hill and comes out of the woods, she sees the reflection of lights in some kind of harbor or bay or river ahead at the foot of the hill.

  The road dead-ends in a driveway before reaching the water. There must be thirty cars parked around this traffic circle—Jags, Benzes, Porsches. And standing at an Asian-looking entrance gate are two guys in suits.

  They know Richie because they wave the whole entourage down a curved, sloping walk to the house. Meanwhile, Richie is babbling on about the show. He tells her that she was un-effing-believable tonight, and just wait until the effing critics publish their effing reviews because everyone is going to get effing rich.

  She is hardly paying attention because her mind is trying to take in a long, one-story, teak-looking house that stands at the bottom of the hill by the water. It has a really steep roof and a gallery of open French doors. Richie is suddenly grabbing her hand and squeezing it. He says he knew that she would like this place. “It’s Shangri-La.”

  The house is not Thai style, but it is close. It is sort of a pavilion. One wall at the end of the room houses a glass case displaying swords and knives with curved blades and big handles. She does not know much about such things, but she knows they are called dha in Southeast Asia. Suddenly, she is remembering the klongs of Thonburi, the River House, and….

  “What?” Michael feels like he is losing her.

  “Forget it, la.” She is looking around the Slip, smiling at the studs.

  He feels his skin beginning to boil. She is driving him crazy the way she starts stories then cuts them off. Flirts with everything that moves. “Why? Why forget it, Tuki?”

  “Not important, la. You want to know about the party?”

  He is afraid she will clam up if he says even the littlest thing to hassle her. “Sure, the party. Tell me.”

  When she gets to the entrance, she is back in Thailand for a second. Automatically takes off her sandals, leaves them by the door. Inside the music hits her. Brazilian jazz. It pumps from speakers all over a huge room with vaulted ceilings. One side of the room opens onto a deck over the water. Given her current company, she is expecting some kind of drag scene, but the room vibrates with a crowd of people who look like movie stars and models.

  She is thinking she does not even begin to fit in with these people. Like, get me out of here. But she is loving the feel of the wooden floor against her feet. Maybe this place is not all that bad. There is a chef in a white suit and hat standing out on the deck grilling shrimp satay. She smells the ginger and onions and hot pepper and peanut oil and soy sauce. She cannot wait to get over to that grill for a few of those jumbo kung phao. And suddenly she is remembering long dinners on the deck of the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok.

  Before she gets more than five steps into the room, the jazz cuts out. A horn sounds the call to post. Everyone turns to stare at her. She is really feeling embarrassed. Her clothes. After the show she dressed to blend into the crowd along Commercial Street. Her hair is pulled back in a barrette. She is not wearing anything on her face except a little cinnamon lipstick and eyeliner. Her clothes are total college girl—a ribbed, burnt-orange cardigan, a pair of baggy Guess jeans, sandals.

  Someone’s arm hooks through hers. It is a blonde Hollywood type, and she is raising a champagne glass in toast. Tuki looks around the room, sees Nikki, Richie, Duke, Silver, and a number of the dragon waitresses from the Follies among all the pretty faces. She lets out a little flash of laughter, a smile. Nerves.

  The next thing she knows the woman who has her by the arm is shouting. “Everyone must welcome to Provincetown, Tuki Aparecio, diva of the first magnitude.”

  The crowd raises their glasses. Someone cheers.

  She cannot help it, her smile blooms. A blush warms her cheeks. She does not know what to say. No one has ever thrown a party in her honor before. Her body takes over. She presses her hands together and bows respectfully as people do in Thailand. People clap. When she raises her eyes, someone has turned up the jazz again. Richie is standing there with a big goblet of Perrier with lime for her.

  The blonde introduces herself. She is clearly the hostess—very slinky and rich, with serious gold around her neck and an aqua-colored silk sarong from Malaysia. But for some reason, Tuki has the feeling that this is not her house.

  The hostess is stroking her forearm with both of her hands. She says Richie will show her around. There are a lot of people here who are hoping to meet Tuki.

  Then the blonde is gone in a flash of color.

  She does not know what to do. She feels dizzy. But Richie hands her a linen napkin, a skewer of grilled shrimp. He tells her to relax. Pretty soon these people will be her new best friends.

  One night she comes home in her street drag. When she turns on the light in the dark room, there sit Brandy and Delta. Do they beat her and call her a street-sweeper slut? Beat her? No. They never touch her in anger. Call her names? Like she cannot believe.

  They screech at her in Vietnamese for about an hour. She does not understand a word except the references to her mother and father.
But she gets the message, because before the two of them finish with her, Delta has spit on her wig and ripped it into pieces. Brandy has thrown the whole mess out of the window.

  “You want be beat by man, hook on pung chao, die with AIDS? Then you go in streets like cheap ho, la.”

  “You young. You princess. You want respect. You start work in show. Tomorrow. Sleep now. Then make choice. Street or show. No both.”

  When the light goes out, she hugs herself and thinks Luang kho ngu hao. Now I put my hand in the cobra’s throat.

  FIFTEEN

  Even though it is early June, the night has gotten warmer instead of colder. The stars are out, a fingernail of a moon sends a silver trail across the water. From the deck she can see that Shangri-La is on some kind of inlet. She does not hear any surf so it must be on the bay side of Cape Cod, not the ocean side. She cannot leave this deck. It is better than being at the river’s edge in Bangkok. No disturbing lights from a city on the far bank, no scents of charcoal from the cooking fires in the peasants’ houses up the klong, no whining of long-tail boats and water taxis drag racing through the night.

  She stays out on the deck, back against the railing, eating kung phao, meeting amazing looking people who Ruby, the hostess, parades by for introductions. She starts to have fun. The men are right out of GQ. The girls are high as kites and funny. Some are trannies, most are not. But no sooner do they move away to dance indoors—where the light has been reduced to a few candles and subtle spotlights—than she forgets their names.

  To her pleasure, the gods grant small favors and thankfully nobody asks her to dance. She is beginning to feel more than a little tired.

  Tuki drifts to the far end of the deck and collapses in a hammock lit only by the tiny spotlights reflecting off the silver, ivory, jade, polished-steel hilts and blades of the dha in their wall case inside the house.

  Here there is nothing to watch except the ripples on the water from fish feeding just like they do back on the Chao Prya. From a distant speaker come the chords of a guitarist playing a song called “Cavatina.” The song is from the soundtrack of The Deer Hunter.

  While she is thinking of nights riding the river taxis in Bangkok, a handsome man in his early fifties sits down on a nearby deck chair to listen to the music. He looks more casual than the rest of the guests in his Hawaiian print shirt, baggy chinos, and boat shoes. He is huge. Maybe six feet four with the hard, broad shoulders of a younger man.

  She guesses he works at keeping that body. He is wearing Blues Brothers sunglasses, and she can see the flash of emeralds, rubies, and sapphires from his rings as he moves his hands.

  They call him the “Great One.”

  When “Cavatina” ends, he looks her way, takes off his sunglasses, smiles at her with piercing blue eyes and claps. Just twice.

  He asks her if she knows the song. His voice surprises her. It is raw, husky, but sweet, too. She thinks he has Brando’s voice, the voice from A Streetcar Named Desire. She loves that voice.

  She sits smiling her silly grin, says she loves this song in The Deer Hunter. The next thing she knows, he is replaying the movie, talking about DeNiro, Meryl Streep, Christopher Walken … and Vietnam.

  He says he can never forget Saigon. She says she can never remember it.

  The man squints at her. Her body wants to shrivel into a grain of rice. He says that she should have seen it before. She does not understand. He says something in Vietnamese. She knows that he is speaking Vietnamese because he sounds like Delta’s opera tapes. But she has no clue what he is asking.

  Then he asks her in English, “Aren’t you Vietnamese?”

  She shivers a little, wonders if this is an accusation. But the man is smiling.

  She tells him her mother was Vietnamese. She is an American. This is a declaration. Five years in New York City!

  For a long time, neither of them speaks.

  Finally he points with a finger toward the swords and knives in the case. He asks her if she recognizes them. He tells her they are from Vietnam. Montagnard dha. He thinks they are beautiful. He saw them first when he was a Marine in the highlands north of Pleiku. For a thousand years the hill people used to give them away as dowry. They were still fighting communists with them in 1971. Now, thirty-five years later, they are only to look at, or open letters. He has a favorite little one with a dark jade handle to open his letters.

  “Weird guy, huh?” Michael can almost see the case of knives and swords sparkling silver in his own mind.

  Tuki nods. “You have no idea! He owned it all. Shangri-La. The dha. Everything. And he was a Marine. I should have known, la. I should have sensed it. I have seen all the movies like Platoon. I know Marines … my father was a Marine.”

  Michael shifts his weight to the edge of his seat, runs his fingers through his damp hair to keep it off his forehead. Little beads of sweat are popping up in his chest hair. “Did he come on to you?”

  She sits up in her deck chair, turns to face her attorney beside her. Puts a hand on his knee. “He asked if he could take me to dinner after my next show. He rose from the couch, smiled that beautiful smile again, pressed his hands together like a Buddhist person in prayer, then bowed from the waist. His eyes drifted away to the dha on the wall, his collection, as if too much eye contact made him nervous or embarrassed.”

  “And you told him yes?”

  She is working a club called Silk Underground, where Ingrid’s mother is tending bar—top of the Patpong circuit. It is the summer when she is turning twenty-one. Her first summer doing Janet Jackson; her first gig working alone without Brandy and Delta, who kind of half-retired to tend bar at a place on Suriwong Road four nights a week.

  So she is alone. Top billing; a diva. Packing in the house, making so many baht in tips—maybe a thousand dollars a week U. S. She plows it all back into better and better music, costumes, wigs, street clothes, and shoes. Her life is her shows. Ingrid is long gone, disappeared with her sailor boy. Tuki has no one to show up, to share with. Sometimes she sings a love song. Thinks like maybe later, la, for that. She is entirely too busy. And where and how would she meet someone who is kind, not twisted? Who would love her forever?

  While the sex tours from Japan and Singapore, and farangs in general, make up most of the business in the Patpong, the rich boys from Bangkok’s penthouses and suburbs also come slumming to the Patpong. It is the retreat of choice for birthday celebrations, bachelor parties. Almost every night the wealthy young men of Bangkok show up after midnight to look at or rent what their girlfriends are not giving up. Every night Tuki is filling her bra and G-string with baht from a lot of young Thai horseflesh in tuxedos and suits.

  These boys are more or less her age. Not a night goes by without flowers, love notes, outrageous offerings of thousands of dollars if she will perform at a private party or take a limo ride around the city after work. But she never gives in. First, the Johns are always drunk or high. Second, Brandy and Delta have pointed to a thousand examples of broken showgirls who end their lives turning tricks for peanuts on the street.

  “Life no like you movies, la,” says Delta one night when Tuki finds her crying after a date. “Men very dangerous.”

  SIXTEEN

  “Please don’t hate me,” she says. “So you slept with him?”

  She drops her fork with a splat in her crabmeat salad.

  It is three o’clock. They have put on street clothes and left the Slip, at last, for lunch at an outdoor café on Commercial Street.

  He does not know why he asks this question. He already knows the answer. The police report calls her the victim’s estranged lover. Still, something in him feels the urge to nail her here. Maybe he is just flailing. He is frustrated, suddenly feeling a little mean. He has less than four weeks to sort out her story, prepare a defense. And get married. Maybe he just wants to get an honest, emotional reaction by which to judge other things she tells him. He still cannot help wondering if she did the crimes. In his mind, he is hearing the messa
ge from the Thai detective telling him that he may not know what he is dealing with here.

  “Why do you try to make me feel shame?”

  “I don’t.”

  She spits air, like there is a bug on her lip.

  “What kind of a lawyer are you? Beat on your clients? Make them feel small? Look down your big nose at me and my friends at the Slip when all I want is to show you a good time? Make you feel less strangled by life. Alby was a terrible mistake, la. You think I am proud of this? Is that what you want to hear? I am sorry. Very, very sorry I ever slept with an American.”

  He shrugs, takes a sip of his Corona. In his mind the silhouette of a woman beckons from a small boat on dark water.

  She picks up her fork, points it at him. “I asked a question. Your turn to answer.”

  “What? Which question?”

  She gets a sad look in her eyes. “Maybe you should go away. Let the crazy little luk sod tranny eat her lunch alone, okay?!”

  He can almost feel her fork sink into his chest.

  His forehead is starting to pour sweat again. He wants to tell her to just back off a little. Wants to go fishing, wants to spend about forty-eight hours in bed with Filipa. But he knows she is right. He is being a jerk, and this is getting the case nowhere. Except that now he knows that she is not afraid to admit her mistakes. She is explosive. And she will stand and defend herself when attacked. He is betting that she did not run from Bangkok or New York out of fear and cowardice. Something else is driving her.

  “How do you say ‘I am very sorry’ in Thai?”

  For a moment he wants to reach across the table and cover her long slender fingers with his. Instead, he picks up a book of matches and lights the black candle in the center of the table. He fingers the hot wax as it starts dripping down the side. Something to do.