Provincetown Follies, Bangkok Blues (Cape Island Mystery)

by Randall Peffer

  That is just what Michael is wondering while he is bent over the table with some guy’s fingers up his butt. Just when he thought he had Tuki figured out. His belly churns.

  “I feel sick, bathroom, plea—” he shouts.

  A green look begins to cross everyone’s face as they picture what is coming.

  “Fuck, go!” shouts an agent. “Run, man!”

  “Run!!” shout about a dozen voices.

  So he does …

  In the bathroom, after he empties himself, he has time to wonder about what has gone wrong with his nose for femininity. He misread Ruby as a biological woman. But guess what? It may be small and shriveled and almost buried in the biggest blonde bush you can imagine … but he saw it. Her chaang. She has been keeping this a secret from everyone except Silver it seems. Jesus!

  And Tuki? He thought he understood her. Thought her upbringing in the drag houses of Bangkok had shaped her. Made a lost little boy named Dung crave the glamour of being a showgirl. But now this. Tuki really is a female. Well, sort of. Except for the chaang. If she has an IUD, then she must ovulate. Nature did this to her. It seems like such a cruel joke.

  He has heard about hermaphrodites. Oysters are hermaphroditic. Some fish, too. But somehow the concept of a third sex has seemed a myth to him. Like something seen in cave sketches of a pagan god. Yet here she is. Like the Buddha, her mother had said. A holy child, a love child. Now he understands what Brandy and Delta must have been trying to tell Tuki when they spoke of the Buddha with breasts, when they spoke of old souls to her. And what she has been trying to tell him when she speaks of the Buddha and old souls. He sees that Brandy and Delta made a choice for her, to protect her. They somehow felt Tuki’s essential femaleness. So they kept her in the drag houses because it was possibly the only place she could really live her life as a female and be accepted, and maybe find love. He cannot imagine what it feels like to live with a secret like hers. But he knows it has to hurt. Even if all your mothers love you. Even if you are an old soul. A child like Buddha. A holy child. Somewhere hidden beneath all of those smiles lies insecurity, maybe self-loathing. And anger. Probably anger. Maybe enough anger to kill. If he were Tuki, he might kill. Might do more than make a flamethrower out of a can of hairspray. The thought leaves him shaking.

  By the time one of the troopers passes a robe into the bathroom, Michael has gotten enough color back into his skin to come out and face the public. Shangri-La looks like it has been hit by a hurricane. The troopers and agents are backing out the door with his ID, the girls’ passports, everybody’s cell phones, beepers.

  “Clean yourselves up, and get this place back in order. You are free to go back about your legal business,” says the agent in charge. “But do not try to leave this compound. We have guards at the gate.

  You are all under house arrest until we can run some computer checks and make arrangements to ship the whole bunch of you off to a zoo. Have a good day!”

  For about twenty minutes Ruby, Silver, Tuki, and Michael sit on the couches in the living room in bathrobes. Nobody says a word. They are all just sitting … staring at a pile in the middle of the floor of the assorted peculiar underwear of the trade … listening to the big stainless steel refrigerator humming in the kitchen. Michael is trying to imagine how he is going to explain this to Filipa, their families, and his bosses. He was conducting research for the case. It was the wrong place at the wrong time. He got caught in a sting and—

  “I smell a rat,” says Silver.

  “Somebody out there doesn’t like us,” says Ruby. “Alby had the cops paid off.”

  “He’s dead.” says Michael.

  “Thanks to your client and her ninja boyfriend,” says Ruby.

  Silver turns to Tuki. “Where the hell did Jackie Chan get to, love? I thought you’d be gone with him by now. Skip bloody bail. Wasn’t he going to sweep you off to his golden cloud? What happened with that? Or does the dragon lady have the hots for her lawyer now?”

  Tuki stands up, starts out the door toward her bungalow, hissing something in Thai.

  “Wait!” He jumps to his feet.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Months after she was turned away at the hill station, she reads in the society pages of the Bangkok Post about his engagement and sudden marriage to the youngest daughter of a respected Thai silk merchant. Four times she pays a water taxi to carry her across the Chao Prya to Thonburi and ride down the klong past the River House.

  Only once does she see them there—Prem and the bride. He is in olive shorts and a red polo shirt, cooking something on skewers over the charcoal brazier. She is arranging a bouquet of flowers on an outdoor table set with linen and silver and wine glasses for dinner. He sees her, she thinks. For a second he looks up and stares at her boat. And while he looks, a big fork drops from his hand. His wife turns to look at him when she hears the noise. He gives her a silly grin and shrugs his shoulders. Later, she reads in the paper that his wife is pregnant. She gives him twins. Little girls. After that day, she only crosses the Chao Prya River to Thonburi one more time.

  When she comes back from seeing him in his new life at the River House, she does not get out of her hammock for two weeks except to go to the bathroom. A great tidal wave is rolling through her body with the speed of a turtle. She cannot eat. Her hair starts to fall out in clumps. Her legs turn to sticks.

  Maybe AIDS, think Brandy and Delta. They are so worried they get a Buddhist priest to come to the apartment. It is late afternoon. The shadows are long and brown around her hammock hanging in the corner of the living room. He is a thin little man in a saffron robe with a shaved head, a lopsided handlebar mustache, and eyeglasses.

  “Khawy thii nii dai mai?” he asks her mothers, pointing outside the door of the apartment. Can they wait outside, please?

  When he is alone with her, he lights joss sticks all around the room. He speaks to her in Thai, tells her not to be afraid. There are things he must do to help her lift the weight of bad karma from her spirit.

  “Open yourself to the Buddha. Buddha is the all. Buddha is the peace that passes all understanding.”

  His hand covers her eyes, and she feels his fingers brushing tears from her cheeks.

  “Close your eyes. The soul cannot see with the eyes, only with the heart.”

  “I do not care about my heart,” she says. “I wish it would die. I wish all of this life would die away soon. I want to be dust, la.”

  “Remember the teaching of the Buddha. Say with me again the lessons of the Buddha. Listen to the lessons singing in your heart, child. Will you do this?”

  She nods.

  “Life is suffering,” he says.

  “Life is suffering.”

  “Suffering comes from desire.”

  “Suffering comes from desire.”

  “If we eliminate desire, suffering will cease.”

  Her heart pictures desire, pictures Prem. Her chest heaves.

  “We burn desire into nothing when we follow the eight-step path of the Buddha to happiness.”

  Her lips say these words. Her heart tries to sing with these words.

  The priest talks to her about the Way of the Buddha.

  In her soul she wants right understanding, right thinking, right speech, right bodily conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right attentiveness, and right concentration.

  But her mind is stuck on those words, “we can burn desire.” She feels the fire in her heart, wants to burn something. Burn desire.

  FORTY

  “You’re where?” Filipa’s voice crackles over the phone line. “They booked you for what?”

  He does not want to give her the bad news again. He is not really in jail. Yet. He is just sort of in detention at the state police barracks in West Yarmouth, having been arraigned in Orleans. But it looks like they are going to lock him up, until someone bails him out. He had expected just to be booked on probable cause for soliciting sex for money and be released on personal recognizance. That is the usu
al drill for Johns. But both the State and Immigration seem to have a burr in their butts about Shangri-La and the Sisterhood. So they have booked him on conspiracy, too. The charge will not stick, but for the moment it means the slammer, unless he can make bail. He tells Filipa this is all so stupid. A case of mistaken identity. He was just doing an interview for his case and there was this crazy raid….

  “Did you tell them you’re a lawyer? That you were there on business? That you’re going to sue the hell out of them unless—”

  “That’s not how it works, Fil. Trust me. The cops don’t want to hear that kind of thing. It doesn’t intimidate them. It just pisses them off. The time to fight this is at my hearing. I have to play nice until the dust settles, or they can make it real hard for me to get out of here.”

  “This is what you get for hanging out with all those … those weirdoes.”

  He is silent. What the hell can he say?

  “Michael. Michael, are you there?”

  “Sorry.”

  “I’ll bet you are. I’ll just bet you goddamn are. I swear to god, if we didn’t have the invitations sent out, the church rented, the caterer, and the band, I’d … never mind. What do I do now?”

  He tells her she needs to contact a bail bond person. Gives her the name of the folks that covered Tuki eight or nine days ago.

  “I suppose you want me to get your client out again, too.”

  He takes a deep breath, knows what could happen to Tuki in jail.

  “Well, it is the only safe solution for—”

  “Wait. Can I ask how much this is going to cost?”

  “Bail is $20,000 for me. $40,000 for her.” As soon as he says “her,” Filipa hangs up. He feels like a total fool. And for some reason he is picturing Vietnam again. The bar in Saigon, the girl dancing to a soul riff from Gladys Knight, the GI with his head hanging over a bottle of Bud.

  His firm makes the bail for him and Tuki, but they are none too pleased. He tells the senior partners that he is making headway with Tuki’s defense. He goes out on a limb and says she is clearly innocent. If ever there was a case in which the authorities have rushed to judgment, this is such a case. Tuki is a victim of racial, class, and gender prejudice. The hype sounds great. If only he can prove it. He has to. He has to come out of this a hero. It is the only way to redeem himself with Filipa, his firm, his family. And Tuki, too. So he better get down to business.

  On the taxi ride back to P-town from the barracks, he tells her it is now or never. What is she still not telling him? He wants the naked truth. Even if she killed someone. He can deal with that, too.

  “Don’t worry. Just tell me everything. What is the big secret about Bangkok?”

  When she wakes, the apartment is dark except for the flash of the neon signs from the street. The priest is gone and so are Brandy and Delta. Five minutes after ten. Her mothers are at work. At the earliest they will be home by midnight.

  She dresses as a market woman in black pajamas and takes the up-river ferry to the landing by the Royal Palace. A lot of the long-tail boats and river taxis tie up here. But at this time of night most of the boatmen have gone home, or they are out on the river carrying passengers. No one is watching these boats at the landing. She takes six full gas cans from different boats and loads them into one empty water taxi. She unties the taxi and drifts downstream with the current until she is away from the lights of the restaurant on the bank. Then she starts the engine.

  She goes up the river almost a mile until she reaches the klong that heads to the River House. At the Royal barge sheds, she cuts the motor. The current carries her through the shadows of the stilt houses built out over the klong until she reaches the steps up to the deck of the River House. She can tell by the darkness and the stale dusty smell of the charcoal in the brazier that no one is here. Her cowardly lion and his family are safely sleeping in their Rama Road penthouse.

  Maybe she is secretly hoping they might be here to stop her from going through with the plan. But now there is nothing to hold her back. She unlocks the door with the spare key from the flower pot. She goes inside and soaks the hammock where they used to make love. Then she wets down the bathroom, pours gasoline on top of the water in the big urn. She splashes gasoline on the dining room table, the living room floor, the cushions on the deck. There is a trail of gas between every place they ever made love. She saves half of the last can just for the steps down to the river. On the bottom step, she places two candles in a banana leaf and fills the cupped leaf with gasoline. She lights the candles, like they are on one of those little boats Thai people set out on the river as offerings to the gods and prayers for lost souls at the celebration of Loi Krathon. Then she starts the taxi’s motor and slips out onto the dark river. And waits.

  She looks back across the Chao Prya from her water taxi at the River House. Finally, when the candles have burned down to the level of the gasoline, there is a low thud that echoes over the water. In seconds the River House is burning from top to bottom as the sirens of the fire boats wail.

  The fire nearly spreads to the Royal barge sheds.

  It is the top story on TV news the next day.

  FORTY-ONE

  They are sitting across the table from each other on the porch of her bungalow. The afternoon is blazing with heat and humidity. Both of them are still wearing the jeans and T-shirts they wore to the lockup in West Yarmouth.

  “Are we finished yet, Michael?” Her voice sounds frayed. Those last stories about Prem came with a lot of tears.

  He hesitates. The story of her revenge, the story of her torching the River House, has hit him like a brick in the chest. The D. A. gets a hold of this, Tuki’s case will be screwed royal.

  “Can I go to bed?”

  He wants to say yes, go to bed … sleep your heart out because we are in a world of hurt. But he still has questions. And a hunch. Maybe he better go for it now. Who knows how soon Silver and Ruby will be out on bail and back here raising holy hell? And he is still not convinced Prem Kittikatchorn is totally out of the picture. Either in terms of the fire and murder, or now. Tuki makes it sound like the guy has crawled off somewhere to die. But who says he plans on dying alone?

  “Just one or two more things, okay?” He fiddles with his water glass on the table. “You told the police you were with Prem when the security camera seems to have taken pictures of you stealing the murder weapon and Silver’s DVDs. But you were here at Shangri-La weren’t you?”

  She tosses the curls back out of her face with her hand and squints at the ducks paddling across the inlet.

  The way the sun is playing with her hair, lighting her golden skin, is unbelievable. After all the crap of the last twenty-four hours. He thinks this is the best he has ever seen her look. It is not beauty that he is seeing, he decides, it is peace. She looks like some weight is lifting off her heart as she starts to talk.

  This is the honest truth. The last time she sees Prem, it is the night of the fire, the murder. He has been watching her already for days. Now he says he wants to talk. It is important.

  So she is with him again, walking barefoot along a dark and empty fish-boat wharf with her jeans rolled half way up her calves. His white cotton jacket is over her shoulders. The rain has stopped. As the sun sets over Cape Cod Bay, fog begins to swallow the pier. He is holding her hand and—she has to admit—looking very Jackie Chan in his rolled-up khakis and gray hooded sweatshirt. They are so alone. The water birds are only shadows, distant music.

  She tries to avoid his eyes, cannot bear to see their glassy, faraway look. Tries not to think about the gun hidden in the pouch of his sweatshirt. But she knows it is there. Felt its weight when he hugged her. Does not know what she will do if he pulls it out. Say, shoot me, maybe.

  “I’m going away tonight,” he says.

  She feels a faint trembling in his hand.

  “You are using pung chao again.”

  “It dulls the pain.”

  “It kills you.”

 
“Not fast enough.”

  “Would you give it up for me?”

  He gives her a sad little smile. “It is too late.”

  She thinks back to Bangkok, her broken lover in the hammock at the River House. “It was always too late. From the start.”

  He shrugs. Maybe she is right. But now it is different.

  “When I came here, I thought that if I found you again we could bury the past.”

  She says she wishes they could, but she knows that you cannot bury the bad without the good. All or nothing, it seems to her.

  He says he can forgive her, but now he sees he cannot forgive himself.

  That is how it is. It is the same for her. “And now … other things. Terrible things.”

  “What you have done to your family?”

  He gives her a grim look. “It is worse than you know.”

  Her heart feels like a tiny stone. For a moment she thought that just maybe this could work out. But now she sees there is no going back. And no going forward for the two of them. Not together.

  “We could have had such a good time,” he says.

  “I did…. Didn’t you?”

  He looks at her like “Don’t you know?”

  But that is not good enough for her because a girl needs to hear someone tell her she is not alone with the things she is feeling. “Please, la!” He sighs.

  “Anything I say will sound … empty.”

  “Try me.”

  They shuffle along for minutes without saying anything. Finally she hears him take a deep breath.

  “It hurts too much to be without you…. There I said it! Alright?”

  She has to stop and swish her foot through a puddle on the pier before she answers him.

  But she is out of words. There is a small furry animal stuck in her throat. She can feel her eyes start to overflow as he draws her to his chest, and lifts her chin with his hand to kiss her. His other hand is on the gun in the sweatshirt. She can feel it.