by Lilburne,Guy
“Village not beautiful” said Angel.
“I think it’s lovely.”
She flashed me a disbelieving look, but I had meant it. Beyond the unmade roads and old wooden houses were beautiful green fields of rice and sugar, which seemed to go on forever all the way to the mountains in the distance. The people who waved to us all smiled at the farang stranger in the car and then grinned when they saw Angel driving the car. In the middle of the sleepy village was her mama’s house. I knew it straight away because there was a marquee in front of the house. There were a lot of tables and red plastic chairs. Huge music speakers were piled high at the side of the house along with boxes of beer and whisky. Her brother’s coffin was at the side of a temporary stage. It had an electric lead running from it into the nearest socket. It was plugged in and acted like a fridge to keep the body from rotting before it was cremated. There were electric coloured lights around the coffin with flowers and candles and a big photo of Angel’s dead brother with his name and dates of birth and death. The photo was a close up of his face. It wasn’t a great photo. He looked very stern and serious. Maybe he thought that death was a serious business and it shouldn’t be taken lightly. Maybe it was just an old photograph which he had taken for his national Thai Identity card and the family just used it for his death picture. Anyway, I greeted everyone as Angel introduced me to her family and I paid my respects to her dead brother. I also said a prayer for him. I wasn’t going to, but I could hear Angel telling everyone that I used to be a monk, so I thought that I had better say a short prayer because I knew that they would expect it. When I stood up I noticed that all the old ladies were smiling at me and a lot of them gave me very respectful wais. Even though I was no longer a monk they were treating me as if I was. I said hello to a few people and they seemed even more amazed that I could speak Thai than they were when they just thought that I was a monk. Angel had wandered off and came back with two bottle of beer straight from the ice box. She used her teeth to take the tops off and nobody batted an eyelid. Well, except for me. I was amazed. It looked so cool and I made a mental note about asking her to show me how to do it. Angel handed me an opened bottle and everybody gasped.
“He’s not a monk anymore” explained Angel to everyone who was in ear shot. I just nodded my confirmation of the fact and took a sip of the ice cold beer. Most of the day was spent just hanging around and not doing a lot. People came and went all day long. Usually they stayed for a few hours and ate food and drank beer. Little groups of people set up card and dice games on the dusty ground around the house. Although gambling is illegal in Thailand it seems that during the days before someone’s cremation the police turn a blind eye. Angel told me that they wouldn’t be allowed to gamble so openly like this the very next day after the burning. It was a long hot day and I made sure that I drank very slowly. People came and went well into the night and the card games were busy. Angel mingled amongst her family and friends, but kept coming back to me to ask if I was OK.
After dark the temperature dropped a couple of degrees and it was more comfortable.
“Are you OK, tee rak?” asked Angel, as she sat beside me on the little concrete bench at the front of the house. She gently put her hand high up on my thigh and gave it a squeeze.
“Yes, thank you. I’m fine.”
“Every person will be going home soon. We go shower now and go to bed.”
“Where are we going to sleep?”
“We sleep in house mama.”
I wasn’t too shocked, because I knew that inside mama’s house it would just be one big room and many people would be sleeping on the floor. It wasn’t like we would be sleeping together in the same bed or anything like that. Before I could offer any further comment Angel grabbed my hand and walked me to the back of the house. The bathroom was made up of corrugated steel sheets nailed onto a wooden frame. A squat toilet was set into the cemented floor and a large blue barrel held gallons of water, which were used for flushing the toilet and showering. Amongst the cobwebs inside the bathroom were nails that had been banged into the wooden frame and held various plastic bathroom utensils like toothbrush and soap holders. The gap between the tin walls and the roof was about eight inches. Big enough to allow in all the spiders, moths, flies and mosquitoes that had made the bathroom their home. Several candles were placed on the wooden frame under the tin roof. Angel lit them and the soft yellow glow made the bathroom look so much better. I saw from the blackened tin above the candles that this had been the only light source for a long time. I also saw a huge bullfrog sitting in the gap under the roof. I could see from the look on his face that this was his home and he wasn’t going anywhere. He was going to watch us shower. I even think I saw him wink at me. Dirty old frog!
Angel undressed me gently but quickly and hung my clothes on a couple of the bigger nails. She slipped out of her own clothes and I got to see her perfect naked body again. She really was very beautiful. It was such a shame about the cancer. I felt a rush of love for her surge through my heart. I don’t think it was just pity. She really was the sort of person who anyone could easily fall in love with.
Angel took one of the plastic bowls that was floating in the water barrel and scooped out a bowl full of water. She smiled at me as she stood on her tiptoes to pour it over my head.
“Bloody hell!” I screamed, as quietly as I could. “That’s bloody cold.”
Angel laughed and poured another bowlful of cold water over me, but the shock to the system had diminished and it started to feel very pleasant. It was always a blessed relief from the heat and humidity that covered Thailand like a blanket. Angel washed my body and I washed her. Well, mostly I just washed her breasts because they were within easy reach. It was a very arousing shower and something quite amazing happened. Angel somehow ended up on her knees and for some reason she put my penis in her mouth and started sucking it. I don’t know if she just made it up on the spur of the moment or if she had thought about it before, but it felt amazing. I have never had a feeling like it in my whole life. The feeling of ecstasy spread through my entire body right down to the tips of my toes. I don’t know if Angel invented the whole penis sucking thing or if somebody else did, but I had never heard of it before and it feels amazing. I really think that it could catch on. When I asked her about it later she told me that she called it a ‘Blow job’, but I think something had got lost in translation. I think what she really meant is that it is called a ‘Suck job’. Anyway, I think it’s the future!
After the shower we climbed up some very old, warped and rickety wooden steps to the old, warped and rickety wooden house. A lot of her older female relatives were already inside. Some sat around chatting while they ate even more food and others lay on the floor boards in front of the flickering TV, either watching the TV or sleeping. Besides an old wooden wardrobe with no doors and the laminated cabinet on which the TV sat, there was no other furniture. Angel went to a pile of folded bedding and straw mats in one corner of the room. She picked up one of the mats, an ultra-thin mattress and a sheet. She made a bed up in the opposite corner of the room and we got in it. An hour or two later the room was full of sleeping, snoring old people. The few who weren’t asleep sat around the TV and whispered stories and memories from the past to each other. I couldn’t stop thinking about the ‘suck job’ and I had to lie on my back so as not to squash my erection. I thought that Angel was asleep, but when she put her leg over me she felt my erection and quietly slid over me and sat on it. I felt myself sliding inside her. It was wet and warm and just wonderful. If I had known that sex was this good I think I would have gone out of my way in the past to have had a lot more of it. If the old people who were still awake noticed what we were doing then they chose not to say anything. I could hear the bullfrogs croaking in the woods. I could hear the crack of wooden logs burning on the fire outside. Thai whispers and the occasional stifled laughter from the men sitting around the fire.
A dog barked somewhere in the middle distance and then other dogs joined in without really knowing why. Wind rustled through the trees and huge raindrops started to splatter on the tin roof of the house. I heard the men around the fire moving to take cover under the house. The rain started to clatter down hard on the roof and the din got louder and louder. As the noise got louder and more aggressive so did the sex with Angel. She was sliding up and down my penis, faster and harder with every stroke. I could hardly believe that we were still going and I hadn’t climaxed yet. I had always had problems in that area. It usually just went off by itself before I had actually got a chance to do anything with it. I think it was on some sort of hair trigger mechanism. That night as the rain thrashed down and thunder cracked so loud it shook the old wooden house, as the lightening forked and flashed blinding light outside, I made love to an Angel. She gripped my skin tightly, moaned and then screamed.
“Yes! Yes! Yes!”
I just screamed because she really did grip my skin tightly. She climaxed and so did I.
“Tee rak, you did really good that time. Really very good! You make me feel so happy now.”
I looked around and saw the old people who were watching TV were now watching us. I smiled and nodded. I didn’t expect them to break into a round of applause or anything, but I was feeling quite good about myself. I had achieved something that I had never done before. So maybe a little bit of support or appreciation from the watching audience wouldn’t have gone amiss!
Angel slid back off me and lay next to me. She wrapped her warm body around me and she fell asleep. I lay there for a while thinking about what we had just done. I was sort of re-living it really. I couldn’t stop smiling. I think that it was actually the best thing that had ever happened to me in all my life. I had never felt so good. I was happy and after some time I fell asleep, just as the rain faded away.
I don’t know how many hours we had been asleep. It was still dark when the dogs started barking and woke me up. Dogs bark in Thailand a lot. Most of the time they just bark for no reason. They think it’s their job until some old Thai person whacks them with a big stick and then they realize that they had no reason to bark in the first place. Anyway, the barking dogs awoke me and it was still the middle of the night. They also woke Angel, but she must have heard something different in the barking from what I did. She jumped up from the flimsy mattress on the floor and ran out of the house and down the rickety wooden steps, wearing only her G-string and a tiny white tee shirt. I jumped up, but not as quickly and followed her outside wearing only my boxer shorts and a tee shirt. I put my flip flops on when I got to the bottom of the steps.
Now the first thing that I have to say in my defence is that I’m a man of peace. I’m not a fighter. The second thing I have to say is that I’m a coward. It was still pitch black outside. There was no lighting like there is in big towns and cities. I heard the sounds of the fight before my eyes had acclimatized enough to the dark to see it. The noises from a fight are unmistakable. Punches, blows, slaps, shouts, screams, grunts and groans. Things getting banged into and knocked over. The fight was taking place by the car. I ran over shouting;
“Everyone calm down.”
I could see Angel was fighting with two men. There was also a dog which seemed to be clamped onto one of the men’s legs. Angel looked wild. She was punching and doing high kicks. I was impressed. She also did a low kick and caught one of the two men right between his legs. It certainly took the wind out of his sails and I suspect at least one of his testicles out of his scrotum. A black car, parked on the unmade road outside mama’s house, sounded its horn and the two men ran back to it. They dived inside the car and it sped off with no lights on. Angel was squatting down on the ground holding her stomach and gasping for breath. The dog that had been helping her gave up chasing the black car and came back to lick Angel’s bruised hand.
“Angel, are you OK?”
“Yes, tee rak. I’m OK. Thank you for helping me.”
“Who were those men?”
“I don’t know. They were farang. They were trying to steal your car.”
“Why would they want to steal the car? It’s an old banger.”
“I don’t know, tee rak. I think I need shower now.”
Angel got back up on her feet. She was limping. I put my arm under her to support her and we walked to the tin shower house. I lit the candles and then I could see just how bruised and battered Angel was. Her left eye was already bruised and swollen and she had bruises, marks and scratches over her arms and legs. She had a cut lip and a trickle of blood came from it. I helped her pull her t-shirt and panties off. I washed her beautiful body as gently as I could and she held onto my shoulders.
“I saw the man in the car.”
“What?”
“I saw the driver in the black car. He look very evil to me. He have big scar over eye and down face. Somebody cut him with knife sometime. I see he very bad man.”
“What about the other men?”
“I not really see their faces. They big and strong. One of them was fat little bit.”
“Are you hurting now?”
“No, tee rak. I’m OK now. Thank you for come and help me fight and for take care about me. You are a very good man.”
Angel took my clothes off and she washed my body as I washed hers. It was a very bonding activity and I felt very close to her.
“Why do you think three men in a nice new car would want to steal an old tatty car Angel? Do you think they were just passing and saw it unattended - opportunist thieves?”
“No, tee rak! Nobody just passing my mama house. No farang ever come this village before. I think they follow us here. They want that car.”
“It’s not worth anything. It’s a wreck.”
“Maybe something in car that they want. We need to search car and have a look in the boot. They were after something tee rak.”
“Have you got a torch?”
“No. Not have.”
“In that case we’ll have to wait until it gets light in the morning and then we can have a good look.”
I went back to bed for a few hours more sleep, but with all the commotion most of the villagers were now up and talking about the farangs who tried to steal the monk’s car. Angel sat outside with them all and drank coffee and someone made a fire. Angel woke me up with a hot coffee at 6 am and the sun was already up. After another shower together we dressed and went to search Jack Sparrow’s car.
I would imagine that sometimes the problem with searching for something, when you don’t know what it is that you are looking for, is recognizing it! We didn’t have that problem. We opened the boot and it was packed full with black plastic sacks. The first one that we slit open contained body parts. The smell hit us as soon as we cut open the sack. There were enough body parts to make up a complete human. When we looked closer we realized that it used to be one complete human - a Thai man with a lot of tattoos. When we took his head out of the bag I saw that he seemed to have a surprised expression on his face, so I guessed that he wasn’t expecting to have his head cut off. A few of Angel’s family were sat around watching us examining the chopped up body as they ate rice and chatted about the thunder storm from the previous night. Dead bodies in Thailand aren’t as shocking as they could be in other parts of the world. I heard Angel’s mama ask her if she knew the dead man. She also asked her if we had killed him. Angel just answered ‘no’ to both questions. All the other black plastic sacks contained kilo bags of plain flour. I didn’t know what Mr. Sparrow did for a living, but I would have never guessed that he was a baker.
“How do you think he died, Angel?”
“I think he died from his wounds.”
“Do you think it was suicide?”
“No Sa-teven. This not suicide.”
“Why did they need so much flour?”
“Not flour. Drugs. It’s cocaine and there is a lot of cocaine here. The farangs who tried to take the car wanted their drugs back.”
“How did they know that there were drugs in the car?”
“I think they put there. Same they put drug dealer in car after they kill him and cut him in pieces.”
“How do you know he is a drug dealer?”
“He is a drug dealer sure. I can tell from his tattoos. He is part of a gang and sell big drugs. Maybe farang not want to pay or maybe he steal drugs from his boss and try and make deal with farang, who decide to kill him and take drugs anyway.”
“How do you know all this stuff?”
“Because I Thai and I not stupid.”
“Oh!”
“Sorry, tee rak. I not mean you stupid! I just mean you not Thai.”
“Jack Sparrow is going to be shocked when I tell him what we found in his car.”
“No, tee rak. He already know. He is part of this. He is just using you to deliver the drugs. You are taking all the risks and he is taking none.”
“Are you going to call the police now?”
“No. We cannot call police.”
“Why not? We haven’t done anything wrong.”
