“I slowly turned and found Bun nodding her head. I had bought out Bunny’s daughter and was taking her to a war zone in Mae Sai. Even for a hard-core, buying out a bar owner’s daughter was a first. Once I took a Noi back to my apartment from HQ and later discovered, from my photo album records that I had slept with her mother. But Bunny was different. Bunny and I lived together. She had been my monsoon wife. I remember holding her as the thunder pounded the ground like advancing mortar fire. Now she looked like a grandmother. This time I had skipped into the next generation with premeditation. I knew exactly what I was doing. I was no different than Khun Sa planning his raid on Mae Sai.
“There were going to be casualties; because there were always casualties every time two people meet in a farang bar in Bangkok. Overwhelmingly the casualties were the girls. Headquarters didn’t get its name by accident. HQ was the command center in this war zone. There were many firefights on Soi Cowboy, that the strip of bars which ran between Soi 23 and Soi Asoke; hand-to-hand combat continued all the way to the back alley entrance to HQ. I had prided myself as being a hardened combat veteran who had defused every known kind of sexual landmine and booby trap. But sooner or later the odds catch up with anyone. I was long overdue for an ambush.
“I thought about it for a moment that seemed like an eternity. I could have walked out that door alone that very moment. Kissed off the two reds as the ticket price for a bout of nostalgia. I looked at Bun one more time, and her eyes, saying take me with you, don’t leave me here. And I told myself that I had a choice. A moral choice. Bunny had sold me her daughter. The purchase price of her own daughter was only two reds. And in the back of my head I vividly recalled the sound of that thunder rattling the bedroom windows.”
* * *
“AFTER we checked into the hotel at Mae Sai, I decided to get business out of the way first. We walked to the police station for an interview with the chief of police, who had been on duty the night of Khun Sa’s raid. Bun, her hair tied in a ponytail, walked at my side; she proudly carried my Pentax 35 mm camera over her shoulder. She wore my vest containing my passport and film; it was so big that it drooped around her shoulders, making her look like a tiny little kid.
“We created this elaborate fantasy, where I pretended that she actually worked with me; that she wasn’t a bar girl that I had bought out for two hundred baht. We were a working couple; two professionals in the same business. The purple per-day fee I had promised her as my assistant journalist provided a face-saving way for her to accept the money. Given this advanced state of detached reality, I could have been hired to write the news for the Government TV.
“The truth, Larry, is, I wanted at least for one day to forget that she was a second-generation night shift worker. So we caught up with the police chief, a stocky-built Thai, with a bullet head and short-cropped hair. He smoked smuggled Winston cigarettes down to the filter. We strolled into his office, and Bun handed me the camera. I took several shots of him standing behind his desk. The more Police Chief Tong talked, the more evident it became that the raid had been the peak experience of his life. People who have had a peak experience can’t wait to re-enact the whole sequence of events in front of the camera. So I suggested in a vague way that allowed him to say no, that maybe he’d like to show me exactly how he stood up all alone to the great opium baron, Khun Sa, armed with a regulation army-issued Colt .45.
“‘l show you, sure. No problem,’ he said.
“He pulled on his combat vest, lighted another Winston, removed his .45 from his holster, checked the clip, and then squatted on his haunches and assumed a firing position beside the window. I snapped a dozen shots of Police Chief Tong aiming at the image of a man who had passed through the town a week earlier.
“Khun Sa had marched into Mae Sai with about two hundred troops on January 26th at that most fragile time of day, just before dawn. The villagers had begun to stir in their beds. Some were already on their way with carts and bikes to the market. Some were deep inside dreams. Most were within that isolated pocket of time when the weight of the world was far away. Police Chief Tong had been asleep in his bed when the first Chinese AK47s opened up on the police compound. And how does the noise of an assault rifle enter the sleeping mind? On the wavelength of dreamland.
“‘Chinese New Year’s, I see in my dreams. I open an eye. It is dark in the room. I know now I’m not asleep and I still hear the crack, crack sound of firecrackers. Only now I know it is a gun. I think a robber shooting at bank,’ Chief Tong told me.
“The police chief was a real find; the kind of official who made great copy for LA freeway drivers. The kind of cop who has seen Bonny and Clyde three or four too many times.
“A round from an AK47 had struck the grandfather clock in the police station, stopping time at 4.37 am. Khun Sa had marked the exact moment of his invasion. The truth was Police Chief Tong never stood at the window with his .45 shooting at the invaders. The truth was the Police Chief was on the floor covering his head and ass. The truth was he reacted to the AK47s the way Bunny had reacted to thunder: with fear, alarm, and childlike apprehension. What made the story was the photo of the chief of police standing half out of the window in his flak jacket, one eye squinted over the sights of the .45.
“After Khun Sa and his men left Mae Sai, cars were burning in the street. Dead bodies lay in the street and houses. Wounded cried out in pain. The police came out of the compound with their weapons drawn and counted the dead and wounded; counted the number of bullet holes in the Thai Farmer’s Bank; counted the number of cars with red tongues of flames leaping into the early morning sky.
“There was a purpose in this madness of death and destruction at 4.37 a.m. Somewhere, maybe in Washington, probably in the White House, someone—try Nancy Reagan—was memorizing some jokes in Reader’s Digest for the President when she came across an article about Khun Sa, the drug baron of Southeast Asia, who sold the tons of opium that ruined American schools, parks, and created a new class of business-criminals. She might have told the President about the article. He might have mentioned it to an advisor, who phoned the State Department, who sent a word to the Prime Minister’s office that America would be very happy if the Thai government could do something to get Khun Sa out of Reader’s Digest.
“The army sent a couple of OV-10 “Peacemaker” planes and eight “Huey” choppers to bomb Khun Sa’s HQ at Ban Hin Taek. The army dropped 500-pound bombs on Khun Sa’s hometown. The army marched into Ban Hin Taek, as if they were looking for any second-rate Lahu Godman, seized Khun Sa’s house, and took photographs of each other in front of Khun Sa’s color TV and swimming pool, and stacks and stacks of assault rifles, hand grenades, grenade launchers, and bazookas. A major loss for any warlord.
“The photos were shipped via diplomatic pouch to Washington, D.C., and I have a picture in my head, of the President and the First Lady sitting in bed with the Reader’s Digest article open on her pillow, the one with the handstitched presidential seal in red thread, and all of the black-and-white photos covering the bed and floor.
“‘Isn’t that a Japanese TV set? ’ she might have asked. ‘That’s the real problem. Japanese imports. Japanese TV sets in the jungle. It makes you sick. The world once bought only American. Now the Japs are everywhere.’
“And so, once again, Khun Sa was left alone on his backwater reef in a remote patch of jungle.
“After the interview, we dragged ourselves back to the hotel room. I made a couple more notes in my notebook, brushed my teeth, shaved, and when I returned to the bedroom, Bun sat on the edge of the bed, undoing her ponytail. I didn’t want to think about Khun Sa, or people dead in the street, or the police chief holding his .45 and smiling for the camera. I wanted her. I had wanted her since the moment I saw this exotic creature dancing on stage and she came around the bar and parked herself on my lap. On the bus I slept sitting up, her head resting against my shoulder. I reached out to touch her, to pull her back on the bed, but she scooted away, as my finger
s grazed her shoulder.
“‘Why did Khun Sa come here? ’ she asked me.
“‘A little revenge is always a powerful reason,’ I said to her, reaching forward and helping her take off her jersey.
“‘You ever meet him? ’ she asks.
“‘Make love,’ you find yourself saying in broken bar girl English.
“”I afraid,’ she whispers to you. ‘Mai! dy! —I cannot!”’
* * *
“AND she sat on the edge of bed and I sat next to her, looking at myself and her in the full-length mirror on the wall. Her body was rigid with fear. Every muscle in her body was flexed. And the look on her face said that she was on full red alert. I had seen that look before in war zones. That’s the look of abject terror. The same look I remembered seeing on Bunny’s face during the thunderstorms all those many years ago. Then reality slammed into me hard; I thought I knew exactly what had happened. Bunny had sold me her sexually frigid daughter. The one with the perfect body and the full lips and the large, sparkling green eyes. The half-Thai; halffarang daughter from one of her marriages. Bunny had found the perfect revenge. Her message was clear, ‘Here you are, Tut. The beautiful young body that was once my body; the body you held in the early morning hours in the late ’60s when we listened to the Beatles; a carbon-copy body from a time machine, only this time there is a flaw, a minor problem, you see, it fears sex the way I used to fear thunder in the night. Can you understand fear, Tut? Can you understand what happens when the body shakes and you can’t breathe because your throat is so tight, and your mind is careening like a wild, out-of-control upcountry bus? ’
“I remembered Bunny’s voice, looking at her daughter in the mirror. I could hear her speaking as if she were in the room. ‘Have you forgotten how I felt? How you held me? How you looked at me when you came into the bar and saw the fat middle-aged lady who now runs the bar? Those eyes of yours dropping 500-pound bombs on my memories of that summer. That was a bad thing, Tut. Never bomb the place of a woman’s fondest memories. She has her ways of coming after you though she never moves from her stool behind the bar. So hold Bun in your arms, and pretend it is the summer of ’68, Tut. Pretend that you are holding me again. That time has reversed. That her body is my body. That your body is young again. That those in the world who have grandchildren are old, fat, with one foot in the grave. The world is for the young. In Mae Sai, here is your chance to be young again. For a couple of nights in the distant: past. Think hard, it will come back to you. What you were then is still somewhere inside. Something inside the girl you see in the mirror is from inside me. Are you getting what you paid for, Tut? Are you getting what you want? Have I left casualties in the streets of your mind? Made you think of all those bodies? And sitting next to you on the hotel bed is a perfect body that I made, Tut. And the perfect revenge. What have you ever made, Tut? After all the summers and all the winters, what has lasted for you? It’s passing out of our hands, Tut. The world of thunder that echoed through the night. Sorry, I had to tell you this way. But I knew you of all people would understand. The man who always loved words more than people. The HQ man of Bangkok would understand that I lived many years with one dream, one hope. One day, I’ll sell a frigid daughter to this man. And he’ll know what a brilliant pre-dawn raid I had made. And he’ll dream of Chinese firecrackers and overturned, burning cars in the street.’
“I collapsed back on the bed, looked up at the ceiling, the cracks and cobwebs creeping out from the light fixture. ‘Which father was yours? ’ I asked Bun. ‘The one who died in bed? Or the one killed on the motorcycle? ’
“I heard her get up and disappear into the bathroom. When she came back into the room, I had fallen asleep. She switched on the light and knelt on the floor beside me. Slowly she opened her fist and inside her hand was a ring. A gold ring with a large “M” engraved in the center. I know that I looked puzzled. I picked the ring off her hand, and looked at it closely.
“‘My father gave this ring to my mother. A long time ago. I never know him. My mother say the “M” stand for monsoon marriage. It was a kind of joke.’
“And when I rose up and put the ring under the light, examining the inside ridge, I found RT engraved inside. Bunny had never told me. Not even that night in the bar; she could have stopped me, pointed out that this girl was my daughter. The ghost of thunder roared in my ears. I had crashed into something that left me reeling inside that room. I couldn’t look directly at Asanee. In a fraction of a second I had gone from someone trying to push her down on the bed to someone who was keeping her at arm’s length.
“I couldn’t keep my eyes off her, I just kept looking at her, staring, my mouth open. Why hadn’t I seen the similarity before? Was I that drunk? That blinded or tired or fucked-up? How much else had I overlooked? What in the hell was I actually contributing to anything? A bullshit interview with a local police chief?
“She sat on the bed, her knees pressed tightly together. I slipped the ring on her finger. She held out her hand to the light, admired the ring, and as she looked up at me, I told her about the monsoon season Bunny and I had spent together. She listened, nodding as I spoke, as if I were pulling her on a sled through snow-blown canyons, guiding her through that season. When I finished, she looked at me in the mirror.
“‘You know what my name means in Thai? ’ she asked.
“An unexpected initial question, I thought. I shook my head.
“‘Asanee means lightening. Thunder and lightening,’ she said. ‘ I never know why my mother give me my name. She always smiled if I asked her. One day, I tell you,’ she said.
“Bunny had never told me about Asanee; about the girl she named lightening after heavy storms that cut across the fingerboard of fear late into the night during our short monsoon marriage.
“My own flesh and blood, my own daughter, a bar girl, was selling her body every night of the week. I had bought her out with the single-minded purpose of taking her to bed. God, I sat on the bed, squeezing a pillow against my belly, rocking back and forth; I thought I was going to be sick. Way to go, champion, I said to myself. From the time I left California, I had been engaged in the kind of deceptions I found amusing in the police chief; he had slept through Khun Sa’s early morning raid but willingly re-enacted a scene of danger—but a danger where he had never been personally at risk.
“We both understood what we were doing; we were creating a pantomime—one that made for good copy, a distinguished myth. I had acted the part so well with Bunny that I believed monsoon marriage had been a real marriage; only she guessed from the rhythms of my own life that change would come, the conditions would shift, and, like the thunder, I had celebrated the passion and force of her presence, of her love from a safe distance, and all the time she was on the front line, the place where people hurled themselves into battle.
“I was an expert on taking an episode like stock footage in a film, re-cutting it, and editing it to produce the grand gesture, the pointing of the loaded gun out the window. Sarah and I had decorated our relationship with that kind of game; one that defrauded reason. That’s why she had the good sense to marry you. You gave her the great comfort of someone who had no desire to explore the coastlines walked by Lahu godmen. Then something happened, I can only guess. Maybe it was drugs. Years later, she had forgotten what had been between us had never been real. She actually believed that I had stood at the window of life, holding off the hordes with a medieval sword. I knew where the membrane of truth ended.
“When you pick up the scent of your own myth, the hunting dogs of the past make straight for your throat, all snapping jaws and razor sharp teeth. I had a daughter, but never had a wife. Asanee’s father hadn’t been the farang who had died in bed or on the motorcycle; he had been the farang who occupied the blank space between the flash of lightning and the clap of thunder.
“You tell me that I have never known pain, Larry. Maybe the strange feelings clustered inside you when Sarah died were so great, so large, or what she
wrote in that letter so cruel, that you will never stop the hemorrhage.
“But your life isn’t the only one that has come to an abrupt halt. You’re not the only one who was knocked down hard, or who felt that everything came out wrong. You carry the ashes of the dead. Sarah’s carelessness; your own, because the right questions never came up. Asanee sat on the bed with the word father on her lips, and I felt the stress of combat. I could have dressed and run. Fled the scene, like I had done from Los Angeles. But if I stayed, this time, then the truth was what I had built my life on wouldn’t carry over. The larger than life foreign correspondent had been a myth I had created for Sarah as much as for anyone else. It is an easy myth to fall for: journalism as a scared cathedral and foreign correspondents as high priests bringing the Word to the masses. With Asanee next to me, I knew I couldn’t make that myth work any more. At the same time, accepting that I was Asanee’s father, I knew wasn’t going to be easy. Finding a new role wasn’t going to be easy. I couldn’t say, ‘Okay, I’m a father. So what else is new in the universe.’
“I had to bang the shutters down or walk away from her. The joke is, that decision is the only true piece of art I ever created. Ever since leaving the States, I had been chasing after those once in a lifetime moments of other people’s lives, ones that elevate, reveal or destroy them, and swindling myself into believing I could derive meaning alone for such an exploration, walking up and down the borders of Southeast Asia, as if I carried the burden for smuggling out the truth to the world.
A Killing Smile Page 20
