He wasn’t bad-looking, as grass cutters went. He had those dark chocolate eyes, not Vosges exactly, more Tesco Lotus plain. But despite that and his knotty muscular stomach, I wasn’t about to let him have his way with me. And I was most annoyed to find him there in my erotic dream. Who did he think he was, clunking away there on top of me, his knees banging against the wooden planks? And to make matters worse, I awoke to the realization that the sound of our love-making was in fact that of a headboard banging against the wooden wall of the neighboring cabin. My mother’s cabin. I looked at the alarm clock. It was six fifteen. Did she have no shame? I took two more antidepressants and wrote on the questionnaire beside DAY ONE, “No effect whatsoever.”
3.
It’s Amazing How You Can Spit Rice Through My Heart
(from “When You Say Nothing At All” — PAUL OVERSTREET, DON SCHLITZ)
One of my chores at the Gulf Bay Lovely Resort was to prepare meals for the family and, on rare occasions, the guests. Sooner than listen to Mair’s headboard, I went to the kitchen early to fix something for our two paying visitors. I was sure they wouldn’t have had a moment’s sleep in that mildewy, lizard-happy, wind-rattling room and would be on the road early. So, as I wanted them to have at least one positive memory to take from us, I bought some of Jiep’s excellent rice porridge in plastic bags and stewed my own o-liang orange tea, thick with sugar, as a going-away present. I needed to waylay them long enough to ask about the missing number plates. That was one of the three mysteries I’d decided to solve that day. The second was to follow my anonymous head and find out who he was and how he’d come to be on our beach. Although I’d lied to Bigman Beung about writing an article, further thought had told me it might not have been such a bad idea.
The Chumphon News, a weekly, was the nearest thing we had to a local paper. It was based in Chumphon town, eighty kilometers north along the highway. (Chumphon’s claim to fame was that it boasted a Tesco, a Carrefour, and a Macro all within a kilometer of each other. In Thailand, our superstores liked to huddle.) I’d done a couple of human interest features for the News and the odd petty crime report. My last exposé had been on the smuggling of carrots from China. They paid less than for a table clearer at Kentucky Fried Chicken, but news was in my blood. It’s what I did. I needed the buzz of seeing my name in print. And that and my antidepressant trial constituted my total income at the time. I decided I would do a piece on head retrieval and visit the foundation whose job it was to trace the families of the dead. And if, in the process, I could get Ben and Socrates fired, all the better.
My third mystery, and I’d moved my food preparation table to the window so I could observe our cabins, was to discover who had been so active in Mair’s bed, night and morning. So far I’d seen nothing. I gutted the lunch mackerel and went through a list of suspects in my mind. Since we lived in a village, I doubted she’d be silly enough to mate with a married man. The smorgasbord of single men in a ten-year radius of her age group was not particularly delectable. Mair was still a good-looking woman, and I hoped she’d demonstrate a little good taste in her choice. This side of the Lang Suan river we had Dr. Prem at the health center, who turned pale at the sight of bodily waste; long-haired Nute, who taught PE at the middle school but was a foot shorter than most of the students; Grit, the good-for-nothing elder brother of Meng, our local private detective and plastic awning installer; Kow, the squid-boat captain who was devoid of front teeth and smelled of fishballs; and Daeng, the dog killer, whom she wouldn’t have touched with a three-meter coconut hook. It was a depressing line-up. All I could hope was that Mair had imported someone eligible from another district, but I’d seen no strange vehicles parked round about.
If all else failed, I’d give Mair a sip of wine, stand back, and wait for the blab gates to open. I have a remarkable tolerance for alcohol, but she can’t drink to save her life. She spews out embarrassing stories that would make a hooker blush. Nothing is taboo to Mair with a drink in her. Nothing, of course, apart from the whereabouts of our missing father, who fled the scene when I was a toddler, Arny was still in nappies, and Sissi was only five and still a boy. On the subject of absent fathers, Mair had taken a vow of silence that withstood the test of booze.
* * *
We were eating our rice porridge—me, Mair, Arny, and Grandad—at one of our resort tables squashed inside the kitchen. We had the shutters closed. The wind from the northeast had obviously had a bad night and was spitting mad. The coconut trees were bent like parentheses, their fronds pointing desperately to Malaysia and more temperate climes. Every now and then, a coconut would break free from the bunch and head off at a forty-five-degree angle to smash a window or fracture a water pipe. The beach was clogged with bamboo roots torn from the streams in the flash floods. They were tangled with discarded nylon nets and garnished with polystyrene. Everything smelled of effluent and old engine oil. Perhaps you can see why I love this place so.
The mother-daughter matching set from room three poked their heads in the kitchen door. Their hairstyles had been vandalized by the wind. They were not carrying suitcases.
“Good morning,” said the mother. “I was wondering whether there might be a chance of a bite to—”
“Oh, my word,” said Mair. “Come in and shut that door. Of course we have food for you. Father, give them your seat.”
Grandad Jah didn’t budge. He was having his breakfast. Arny grabbed two folding chairs from against the wall and placed them at the table for the guests.
“Sorry about the ambience,” I said, quite unnecessarily. I’d become a serial apologizer since we moved south.
“No. Not at all. This is very cozy,” lied the mother.
I looked at her. Even her casual summer wear was designer. She probably had a kitchen twice this size back home just for her maids to eat in.
“Where are you from?” I asked, dishing up the rice porridge.
“Oh, we move around a lot,” she said.
It was a “mind-your-own-frigging-business” answer. I’d heard a lot in my career. But she delivered the line with grace and a nice smile. The daughter hadn’t yet spoken. She cast nervous glances in the direction of Arny, who sat with his shirt off. We were used to it, but he could be a little overwhelming to outsiders. He was built like a stack of tractor tires. He gushed testosterone. Yet despite his physique and his movie-star good looks—both of which make me think I must have been adopted—he was apparently unaware of the effect he had on others. Some feared him the way you’d be nervous of a killer whale heading down your driveway. Some, both men and women, desired his body, caring not whether he had a mind or a personality. Some felt that animal urge to challenge him. The daughter didn’t know what to make of him at all. She was a mid-twenties jaw-dropper, and I’d wager she had saliva trails following her wherever she went. She was used to seduction and had come to expect it. So when naked-torso hunk said “Good morning” and returned to his breakfast without even a cursory glance at her breasts, she was plainly dumfounded.
There was no other woman for Arny. He had met his true love, Gaew, right here in Maprao. She too was a weightlifter. She too had toured the body glamour circuit and won prizes. She too had fallen into that same pit of passion that had claimed my brother. She had taken both his heart and, so we believed at the time, his virginity, in the space of a week. There was only one buckle in this wheel of passion and that was her age. Arny was thirty-two. His “fiancée,” Gaew, was fifty-eight. She was the same age as our mother. She and Mair had idolized the same rock singers in high school and learned Hula-Hoop at approximately the same time. In fact, they were becoming good friends. We all liked her. But that just made her relationship with Arny … weird. Icky even. She’d won her first award when Arny was still learning to use the potty. So, that’s why Arny didn’t notice there was a babe in the kitchen.
The guests tucked into their food with gusto. If they had problems with eating with commoners, they didn’t show it. I was heating up the gooe
y orange tea and planning another subterfuge for extracting conversation.
“Sorry about your room,” I said.
“The room’s wonderful,” said the mother.
“Really?”
I couldn’t think of one thing that was wonderful about cabin three apart from the fact that it wasn’t cabin two. Cabin two had a mouse tap-dance studio in the ceiling.
“We appreciate the simplicity here,” she said. “One can get too dependent on luxury items in the city. I’m a firm believer that one needs to stop and experience frugality once in a while.”
And here she’d landed slap in the capital of frugality. What luck.
“We were expecting you to be back on the road at first light,” I told her.
“We had planned to but it’s so lovely here I think we might stay a day or two.”
That’s when I knew she was lying. Lovely? You’d have to be blind drunk or just plain blind to see anything lovely in Maprao in the monsoon season … especially at the Not So Lovely Resort. These two were up to something. I was planning to creep around the block and sneak up on them from the rear with my next question, but Grandad Jah went at them full throttle.
“You got no registration plates on your car,” he told them. “That’s illegal.”
The guests looked at each other and giggled nervously.
“We were coming over the bridge in Lang Suan, the one on the highway,” said the mother mechanically. “The road there is riddled with potholes. And of course we hit one of them and the license plate at the front just dropped off. So we st—”
“How did you know?” asked Grandad.
“Know what, uncle?”
“How did you know the plate dropped off. You got an A/C car, so you didn’t hear it. It’s under the bumper, so you didn’t see it. And it’s flat, so you sure as hell didn’t feel it. So…?”
I could see a desperation in the woman’s eyes as she searched for another lie. Her daughter came to the rescue.
“The car behind us beeped,” she said. “We stopped and the driver told us we’d lost our registration plate back on the road. We retrieved it and took it to the garage at the main intersection, and they said the housing unit was rusted almost completely away. Same with the one at the back. So the owner is welding us new … new housing units to … to attach the plates.”
She didn’t look at us, just sighed and ran her spoon around the inside of her bowl. I glared at Grandad, but I could tell he was already satisfied these two were up to no good. We both knew a two-year-old Honda wasn’t going to rust away to nothing. We both knew that the only way anyone would beep you on Highway 41 would be to pull you over and mug you at gunpoint. And why not take a hotel room in town? Why drive all the way to the coast without plates? But an interrogation would only frighten these two away, and like Grandad, I wanted them to stick around. I wanted the chance to use my investigative skills. I only have a small nose, barely a squirrel snout. But it can sniff. Oh yes can it sniff. And my nose sensed a story. A big one.
I’m not sure what it was Mair sensed, but she said, “You’ll have to excuse my father. He’s a little senile.” Grandad’s eyebrows almost took off. “Sometimes he thinks he’s a detective. Like on the television. He can be impolite at times.”
“Yeah. Right,” said Grandad. He stood and took his bowl to the sink. “Can I wear my SWAT jacket today?”
“Maybe later,” said Mair.
Arny watched Grandad push against the door with all his might and thrust himself into the wind. My brother had no idea what was going on. Sometimes the world was too subtle for him.
“Any more in the pot?” he asked.
* * *
The Southern Rescue Mission Foundation had a large car park in front and several sheds around the perimeter with spotlessly clean SUVs and trucks and towing vehicles parked facing forward awaiting the next emergency. While the child-care agencies struggled to pay staff and feed the hungry, the lords of the dead played cards in air-conditioned waiting rooms, ate healthy meals in their canteen, and emptied themselves in state-of-the-art, flushing, American Standard lavatories with free tissue paper you didn’t have to dispose of in a pedal bin. I inadvertently parked our Toyota Mighty X in a position that might have prevented the rapid deployment of two, perhaps three shiny black SUVs not unlike the one the rats had driven. Petty? I know. But energizing.
The building marked RECEPTION was in fact a house, the design of which was lifted from the type of Home of Your Dreams catalog my ex-husband used to take into the toilet and drool over. It was a pink mansion squashed into a twenty-five-square-meter plot. I walked in through the front door, where I was assaulted simultaneously by an Alaskan air drift from four ceiling-mounted conditioners and a receptionist in a mini skirt, tights and a turtleneck sweater. She was fiftyish in make-up she probably thought made her look younger. She wai’d me violently.
“Welcome to SRM,” she said in a shrill, somewhat frightening voice. “How can I help you?”
My nipples felt larger than my breasts.
“You couldn’t turn down the A/C, I suppose?” I replied.
I hadn’t seriously been expecting a result from my sarcasm but she immediately went for the remote.
“Chilly, isn’t it,” she said and chirruped down the chill factor. She came around and pulled the chair out for me. She was very accommodating. I got the feeling I could have asked her to bake me something and she’d have run off to the oven.
“I’m here to inquire about the whereabouts of someone I … of a loved one,” I told her.
The features on her face suddenly drooped like a facelift’s expiration date. She reached for her heart.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “This must be a terrible time for you. I sincerely hope that we at SRM will be able in some small way to relieve the burden on you and your family. Although we are a not-for-profit organization relying entirely on small donations from the general public, we do everything possible to make our accident victims comfortable before their next journey.”
It was memorized and cheesy.
“I’m so pleased,” I said.
“When did your…?”
I assumed she wanted me to fill in the gap.
“Uncle?” I said.
“Ah, uncles. So, so important to the harmony of a happy family. When did your uncle pass away?”
I hadn’t seen her reach for the Tiger balm so I had to assume her tears for my uncle were natural. Impressive. I already had an urge to write her a check for twenty thousand baht to further the charitable work of the SRM.
“Two days ago,” I said.
“So sudden. So tragic.”
My loss sat so heavily on her shoulders she dropped onto her chair and sighed, then flipped open a plastic folder.
“And what was the name?” she asked.
“Mine?”
“Your uncle’s.”
I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I wondered then why I’d opted for this untruth. Why couldn’t I simply have said, “I found a head on the beach. Don’t know who he was, but I was wondering how he’s doing?” Why not? Because I wouldn’t have made it past the sympathetic gatekeeper to the beyond, that’s why. Not that I was doing that great with the lie.
“Somyuth,” I said. “We heard one of your teams came to collect his … body from the beach.”
“The beach? My word. What were the circumstances?”
“Fisherman. Ehm … fell overboard. Snagged in the trawler ropes. Drowned … Very sad.”
“I feel for you, honestly I do. One of our cats was caught in the snake netting behind our house. Trapped, he was, for a week. Got so desperate he chewed off his own leg to get out. Limped home covered in blood, riddled with insects. He collapsed in front of us with his intestines all hanging out.”
I had a feeling there’d be a punchline.
“If only he’d had an organization like ours to clean him up and make him look presentable before”—she gasped—“before that horrible moment when my lit
tle daughter came running in to see her beloved Nunu dead and disgusting.”
She was good. Really she was. There was no way this woman was a mere receptionist. I bet she was the daughter or granddaughter of the venerable Chinese gentleman whose portrait hung behind her. I bet she’d drained millions from gullible relatives with this routine.
“I’m not that fond of cats,” I said.
“Of course. Some people aren’t.”
“I just want to find Uncle…” Damn. I’d forgotten his name. “My uncle. Take him home to the family. Loved ones. You know? Uncles. So important. Where is he?”
* * *
After I’d given her a bunch of made-up names and addresses and convinced her my national ID card was in the car, she led me out of the rear door. We found ourselves in two meters of clammy open air. In front of us was another door, this in the wall of a long windowless concrete building. We entered. She flicked a switch inside, but the door closed behind us, leaving us in a black hole. Total darkness often makes me want to wet myself. Don’t know why. Something deep in my subconscious that needs analysis. I was about to evacuate when a bank of fluorescent lights above us popped into life one at a time. I don’t astound that easily, but I was most certainly flabbergasted by what I saw in that building. It was exactly like being in the frozen produce section at Macro. There were open refrigerated units along both walls with a narrow aisle down the center. All it lacked was the trolleys. And laid out in the units were bodies shrouded in green plastic. Only the heads were exposed, some in the throes of an agonizing death, others so at peace they might have just fancied a quick lie down. But the thing I found remarkable was that every head had its hair combed. SRM obviously had a stylist on staff.
I walked along the aisle with the gatekeeper behind me. Some of the green plastic shrouds hinted that the bodies beneath the groomed heads were not all symmetrical or complete. There were a few ways to die in Lang Suan—old age and boredom came to mind immediately—but such horrible deaths as these could only be attributed to the carnage of Highway 41. Our roads were single-handedly culling the population. There were twenty bodies all told, but not one of them was Uncle … my uncle.
Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach Page 4
