The time had arrived for Lawrence to leave the headmaster’s office. The time had come to face Tuttle and Asanee; time to decide how to deal with Sarah’s ghost which had followed him to Thailand. And most importantly, it was time to start fresh; he had made so many mistakes and errors of judgement about Tuttle, distorting his words and motives by listening to them as a voice from the past; the time had come for Lawrence to plunge into the present, and discover who Tuttle had become. What kind of man uses his own daughter—was the obvious conclusion, but something else was troubling Lawrence: what advantage was Tuttle seeking to gain by using her? Perhaps the strangest realization of all was Lawrence’s determination to bring Asanee to America and enrol her at UCLA; if that’s what she really wanted. This informal step-daughter of Sarah’s; this secret daughter of Tuttle’s who had tumbled straight into his life, robbed him of his sleep, channelled his thoughts into an aggressive desire to possess.
11
When Tuttle and Asanee came back into the headmaster’s office they found Lawrence sitting on the edge of the battered office desk, arms crossed, looking at them with searching eyes. His body and mind felt numb. Their Mediterranean green eyes tracking him from the moment they re-entered the room. Sarah had planned this moment perfectly. As she crashed into the 88 Olds, perhaps the last image in her mind hadn’t been Tuttle; but visions of Tuttle and Asanee working together in shabby rooms deep in a Bangkok slum. Lawrence’s thoughts were jumbled with regrets, sorrow, hurt, anger, and confusion. The spirit of the dead filled the room. It gave Asanee a chill. She shuddered, sat down in a chair, glancing up at her father. Tuttle rested a hand on her shoulder.
“Father and daughter,” Lawrence finally said. “Who would have thought it! Bobby, the family man. I would have given anything to see Sarah’s face when she found out you had played the paternal trump card. The troubadour turned father.”
Tuttle’s fixed, immobile gaze shot past Lawrence at some counterpoint that only he could see. A long, narrow shadow spread across Lawrence. His troubled expression, the breaking voice, failed to conceal the waves of emotion that Sarah’s letter had left. The tidal wave of emotion still left over from the previous night. That made Lawrence disposed to attack. Since meeting Tuttle, Lawrence had reached a footpath to some truth in Tuttle’s life; and then, managed to get himself promptly lost, pounding down a side road, knocking down any roadblock in the way, always in the unquestioned belief that he knew Tuttle’s map of the world. Law was based on people being predictable, and that their lives followed a common reality, Lawrence thought.
“This pain hasn’t been easy for any of us,” said Tuttle.
“What do you know about pain? ” asked Lawrence, pounding his fist into the side of the desk. The gesture froze Asanee, whiteknuckled, in her chair. “You don’t know anything. How you get so sick in your guts you don’t think you’re gonna live. How your life collapses overnight. One day it’s one thing; the next, it’s totally changed. You don’t know who the hell you are. And the future you’ve relied on . . . it’s broken down. Shattered. You don’t know what I’m talking about.”
Tuttle turned, after a long, thoughtful glance at Asanee, reached over, and touched Lawrence on the shoulder. “Maybe you’re right, Larry.” His voice was emotionally charged; his face strained and bracketed with doubt. “I have no idea what Sarah wrote in her letter. That’s between you and her. But I would like to correct one thing. Your life isn’t the only one that’s ever turned upside down. Dreams lost. I didn’t tell you why I gave up journalism. Or why I started the school. Because you never asked. Maybe you’re not interested in anyone else’s life, or maybe you think you’ve figured everything out? ”
“After last night, I don’t think I’ve figured out anything,” said Lawrence.
* * *
“IN February ’82 I went to Mae Sai to do a story for UPI. For years I wrote for the wires; my by-line appeared in newspapers all over America. One story appeared in the local press; it was about Khun Sa’s raid on Mae Sai, a small Thai town on the Burma-Thai border in the north.
“Khun Sa and a raiding party had shot up the town. I had done the Khun Sa story before. I got an exclusive interview with him at his house in Ban Hin Taek. We sat beside his swimming pool. He wore expensive sunglasses and talked about a movie deal in Hong Kong. The phone kept ringing beside the pool. He laughed, threw me a wink, signed a document, and talked about this karate film he had financed. ‘Better than Bruce Lee,’ he said.
“You looked at him, and you thought, a movie producer with machine guns and an army behind him. You wouldn’t want to be the guy who wrote the bad review. That had been five years before, in early ’77. Back then, I had a good idea that he had killed people. Years later, when he hit Mae Sai, he left bodies in the street. There was no lingering doubt.”
* * *
“I planned to take an overnight bus to the north. An air-conditioned job where the driver gulps down Yah mah—speed—by the bottle. It gives the drivers red-rimmed eyes that no longer blink. Cartoon eyes with black circles underneath, except they are pencilled on the face of a human being with one bare foot on the gas and the other on the brake. That last night in Bangkok, I had several hours to kill before getting on the bus. It was too early for a hitand-run mission on HQ. So I stopped off at Bunny’s Bar in one of the sois that snake off from Soi 23. Bunny and me had a history that went way back to the late ’60s—a few months after I left LosAngeles—when she was in between husbands, we shared my first monsoon season.
“That year—’68—the claps of thunder came in mid-May and rattled the bedroom windows at four in the morning. Claps of loud, booming thunder that drove spikes straight into your soul. The thunder, like mortar fire, came in fixed patterns. Five evenly spaced booms. Then a pause. Five more sharp spikes with the night sky flashing a hot white. I knew the sound of mortar fire from covering Vietnam two months earlier, and for a moment I could pretend with Bunny, this wasn’t Bangkok, this wasn’t thunder; but the sound of incoming mortar rounds with their hypnotic explosion as each round marched closer toward our bed. Hostile, earth-tearing, window-shattering jolts fell from the sky that May.
“Bunny curled up like a baby against my shoulder, shaking, and hiding her face beneath her long, black hair. Going up to Mae Sai to cover Khun Sa’s lightening pre-dawn attack, I thought of the past; those four a.m. mornings with Bunny rocking against my neck. She had the trace memories of real mortar fire in her head. She had covered her ears. Boom. Boom. Boom. Closer and closer. Boom, and another loud boom twenty meters away. We lay in dead stillness, side by side, and then she felt my face, touching my eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. There was no blood. She can’t understand why there are no wounds, no blood, with incoming shells landing on top of us. I tell her it is only thunder. She shook her head; she wouldn’t believe that thunder made the mortar rocket sound. She accused me of lying to her. That the earth was on fire; an invasion had been launched; the rockets and mortars fired.
“Nostalgia was a condition I came down with in Bangkok a couple of times a year. The best cure was getting on a plane to Saigon, Singapore, or Hong Kong and staying out of the country for two weeks, covering a story or a war. I’d come back healed. I was a couple of months overdue for a trip; and deep into nostalgia at that time I had to go to Mae Sai. Nostalgia is always the greatest danger. I tried locking myself up inside the apartment. But I had the key.
“I decided to let myself breakout.
“I was on the run, straight into a taxi and pulling to the curb beside Bunny’s Bar in time for the nine o’clock news. Bunny sat on a low stool behind the counter; her eyes barely cleared the top. As I came in, she gave me a long, hard look. That hard-core look, “Where in the hell have I seen you before? In the rushes of my early life? ”
“Her smile and the eyes were the same. Everything else from her youth had been buried in clumps and rolls of fat. She wore the tent dress of fat women. Underneath, she carried an extra load; perhaps, as much as sixty pounds s
ince the nights of the thunderstorms; the weight collected in her face and upper arms.
“‘Tuttle, is that you? ’ she asked me.
“‘Still afraid of thunder? ’ I asked her.
“She laughed, rose up from her seat, the loose-fitting fat lady’s circus dress falling around her breasts and hips. I leaned forward and kissed her on each cheek. She still drank screwdrivers; a half empty glass, with lipstick on the rim, rested at her elbow.
“‘I heard you got killed in “Nam,’ she said.
“‘And I heard you killed off two husbands,’ I said.
“‘Not true,’ she squealed. ‘The second one, Norman. The one from Chicago. He died of a heart attack. Right on top of me. I had dreams of ghosts for one solid year. The third one, Gary, he got killed on a motorcycle in Pattaya.
“‘One died in bed and one on the road. That’s not a bad record, Bunny. A Thai wife with two dead husbands, and you never once used a hitman. Impressive!’
“‘Tuttle,’ she cried at me. ‘You’re so bad. You come in here like a ghost. I still don’t believe it’s you. You got some ID or something. A passport.’
“‘You have a small wine-colored mole here,’ I said, pushing a finger to a spot just below her right breast.
“‘Shit, it is you,’ she said, clapping her hands together.
“I was going up to Mae Sai and do a cover story on Khun Sa’s raid; and found myself side-tracked in Bunny’s Bar, killing time, waiting for the bus. I watched her tumble a handful of ice cubes into a glass and pour me a drink on the house. I was deep into a past regression with an old girlfriend, whose body confirmed every fear and story I had ever heard about the devastation middle-age brought to a woman’s body.
“Three husbands had come into her life since that monsoon season. Two had died. One, the only Thai in her arsenal of husbands, Bunny had divorced before I ever met her. Number four, and her current companion, was an American who sat at the far end of the bar, shaking dice in a leather box and slamming the box down on the bartop. He wore cowboy boots, drank imported Budweiser beer, and listened to Grover Washington Jr. on pirated cassette tapes. What Bunny and I had to say about our past lasted the standard fifteen minutes it takes to remember that monsoon season. But it had gone cold; the sharp bite was gone, the sting and the cuts from the old emotional arc welding flares. Four months compressed into a quarter of an hour. She drank two screwdrivers as she ransacked her memory and found a few unbroken fragments that had survived from the old times. All that we had clearly remembered was the thunder and lightning. There must have been more during that time; things locked deep inside our memory, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember them, and neither could Bunny. We stood smiling at each other as her fourth husband slammed the dice down once again on the bar.”
* * *
“THE dice game had ended; Bunny’s husband had disappeared upstairs to watch television by the time I had found a stool at the far end of the bar. Bunny worked up front near the door. Again, I had vanished from her life without a trace—though I was no more than thirty feet away. I no longer existed in her world. On the wall a TV set was turned to the local news. Two go-go dancers moved lazily on two small stages that were separated by a glass case housing an expensive collection of imported liquor.
“One of the girls had tan lines under her bikini bottom; tan lines that curved high on her ass. A sign, as every hard-core knows, of a go-go dancer who hung out on the beach near Pattaya. She floated me a kiss, touching her fingertips to the center of her warm, smooth smile. I nodded and looked away toward the television. She would warm my bed with hundreds of farang ghosts. She had that look.
“The diskjockey, one of Bunny’s sons, played ‘Unchain my Heart’, cranking up the volume to full blast. Another son switched off the sound on the TV; it is a government channel, and like the go-go dancer, it only told everyone what they already knew, running a script we’d heard a thousand times before. The dancer directly in front of me hardly moved to the music. She held onto the silver center pole and watched the news. The TV pictures cut between rice farmers in the field, a folk music festival, monks chanting in a temple, a beauty contest in the north, and street scenes of Mae Sai. The camera closed in on a crying woman on the street. There was a burnt-out car beside several street vendors. I glanced at the go-go dancer, who was nearly motionless, except for a small twinge as she turned on the automatic pilot that pumped her legs at the knees.
“By the time the weather report had finished on the bar TV, the girls had me sized up as hard-core and ignored my presence. Just as Bunny had already forgotten that I was drinking at the opposite end of the bar. A customer beside me paid his bill, the hostess counted the money, looked at the bill, then placed them on a silver tray and walked across the bar to Bunny. Two stools down a passed-out farang slumped over the bar, sleeping. No one paid him any attention. He didn’t exist. He wasn’t part of their job. No one had the courage to risk waking him.
“A new girl jumped onto one of the platforms. She wore tight jeans, running sneakers, and a designer jersey. Large silver earrings dangled from each ear and large bangles rattled on her wrists. I caught her eye; she locked me on her emotional radar screen. Farang sighted at twelve o’clock, approaching straight on. Appears to be a friendly. Squeeze trigger on target and launch a hip. Direct hit. Target cannot disengage. Shoot one leg, then the other. Target disabled, dead in the water, and unable to leave the scene of engagement. Push out the final weapon, the one held in reserve for the coup de grace, two large, firm breasts pressing hard against the T-shirt. Target surrendered.
“She jumped off the stage, and climbed onto the empty stool next to me. I ordered her the standard hostess drink; a Cola that arrived in a double-shot-sized glass. Neither of us blinked for over a minute, she hooked one leg over mine, and leaned forward with her forehead touching mine. This was the melt-down phase. Nothing I could do—or would try to do—could prevent the inevitable. Nothing broke my fall into the void of nostalgia better than the firm cushion of such a body. She told me her name, ‘Bun.’ That was her nickname. In Thai, Bun means merit; Buddhists belief that merit is needed to be born to a better life, she explained to me, stretching forward from the bar stool.
“‘Tonight I go to Mae Sai,’ I said to Bun.
“‘I go with you,’ she said.
“‘It’s dangerous. Khun Sa’s men killed six people last week in Mae Sai.’
“‘I’m not afraid,’ Bun said.
“‘How long you work the bar.’ I asked her, because I had to know if she were a pro.
“‘Off and on. Whenever I want. I go to school. I no have number. You see. I only go with man I like. Understand? ’
“She worked the bar to earn money for school. An out-of-the-way bar, where she could selectively decide who would pay her school fees. I liked the idea of being chosen as her financial aid officer. She told me proudly that she studied political science; her bar-girl English suddenly sounded more fluent. And she said that she had finished a paper on Khun Sa last term; she had quoted my earlier interview with Khun Sa. By then that monsoon rainy season with Bunny might have happened in another life. I pulled out my wallet, just as the drunk farang lifted his head from the bar.
“‘I dreamt the Bengals won the Super Bowl,’ he says in a sleepy voice. ‘And I beat the spread.’ He pivoted off the stool and walked straight out of the bar, leaving a five-hundred baht note under an empty glass.
“Bun and I shared the joke as our first in-joke. She was nearly nineteen and didn’t have a boyfriend; of course, that was the standard line. But somehow she was different. I believed her. I handed her the two reds to pay the bar fine and another red to cover the bar bill. Ten minutes later, she returned with her handbag hooked over her shoulder. She planted a passionate kiss on my mouth. All the time, I was thinking, ‘If I have to go to Mae Sai, this is the way to go.’ A nineteen-year-old political science major who had quoted one of my articles in her thesis on Khun Sa. And those full, red li
ps, and those eyes looking back like a high-powered mirror.
“And after she pulled herself off the stool, she leaned back on her heels and smiled.
“‘You know Bunny? ’ she asked.
“‘I knew her back . . .’ I broke off because I had realized that giving a date, one that would sound ancient to her, might give her a better fix on my own age. I avoided the cold, impersonal number of years that had passed and said, ‘I knew her a few years ago.’
“On the way out of the bar, I stopped and said good-bye to Bunny. She rose to her feet and wiped the sweat off her face with a large, white handkerchief.
“‘You take good care of my daughter, Tut. She’s a good girl.’
“‘I always like your maternal instinct, Bunny. How many daughters you have working the bar? Ten, fifteen? ’ I asked, joking with her.
“She laughed, and nodded her head. ‘You never listen to no one, Tut. Bun my daughter. No bullshit.’
A Killing Smile Page 19
