Street Music

by Timothy Hallinan

  Rafferty pays and says, “Keep the change,” and the kid says, “Too much,” but drops it into the jar anyway, and Rafferty retreats to the back of the store and sits, downing chocolate like he had when he was twelve, and watching, without much interest, the traffic on the sidewalk.

  He’s seen this particular show so many times. It seems to him that people who say that some things never change are rarely referring to things that cheer them up. The stream of foot traffic into Patpong is no exception. This early in the evening, the pilgrims are mainly solo men. It’s safe to assume that most of the patrons are either freshly showered or newly drunk, or both, for their plunge into the long string of largely interchangeable bars that have begun to pump passé music into the street. Bangkok is one of the few cities in the world in which “Hotel California” is still played without irony, and he’s wondered for years what kind of karma it would take to sentence a young woman or man to dance to it literally a thousand times a year.

  Patpong One and Two were once Desire Central in Bangkok, a gaudy heart of darkness, but now they’re adrift, outdated, and out-glittered by the once dusty Soi Cowboy and the three-story emporium of squeeze called Nana Plaza, both over on Sukhumvit. And then there are the specialty locations such as Soi Kathoey a few blocks away, offering boys and ladyboys, and the rich vein of trans clubs scattered in and around Soi Nana. Not to mention, of course, the monotonous metropolis of skin down on the Gulf, Pattaya, which to Rafferty is ultimate proof of the notion that too much of anything can become not only boring but repulsive and even allergenic.

  Still, Patpong trudges on, relying mainly on a peculiar mix of relatively young, wide-eyed, first-time visitors and the geriatric lifers in whose memories the place still shines bright: old soldiers like Bob Campeau and a few dozen others who patronize ancient holes in the wall such as Leon and Toot’s and the Madrid Bar. These are the guys who remember when everyone was an amateur, when nobody went for short time, and when a bar girl and a patron—sometimes on leave from Vietnam—had no way of knowing when commerce might be shouldered aside by love.

  At the thought of Campeau, he scoops up the last of the chocolate almond, which he’s saved for the finale. In a world in which pleasure is justifiably regarded as fleeting, chocolate almond has staying power.

  As he gets up, his attention is snagged by someone battling the tide on the sidewalk, heading away from Patpong rather than toward it. At first glimpse it seems to be a pile of discarded garments that has somehow become mobile, but by the time it passes the window it has resolved into an old woman, battered as a wrecked car, her spine curved into a painful-looking C and her shoulders hunched almost level with her ears. It’s the wild scrabble of gray hair that rings the bell, though; this is the street woman he’d seen earlier, peering through the dirty window of the bar. Slung from her shoulder is a jumbo plastic tote bag, ragged and dog-eared, that says louie vuitton on it, either a misspelling or someone’s notion of how to duck a lawsuit. He makes a mental note to give her a few baht if he spots her on his way home. The plainclothes cops who keep Patpong running don’t tolerate beggars. No profit in them.

  The boy behind the counter bids him a cheerful goodbye and says “Moooooze” as Rafferty pushes his way back into the heat and falls in with the herd. He’s already back to thinking about Campeau, a man whose emotional compass seems to be frozen halfway between misery and resentment. And really, Rafferty asks himself, what is there in Campeau’s life that would inspire a broader spectrum of reactions? This is what he’s got: a barstool, a meager pension that dwindles as prices go up, an almost operatic comb-over, an empty apartment, a spotty disposition, dying friends, and—in his late seventies—the Big One, the final station on the line. Sooner or later, when it’s finished messing around with his friends, it’ll be staring him in the face.

  If he were in Campeau’s shoes, Rafferty thinks, he’d probably be even more miserable than Campeau seems to be.

  In the nine years he’s known the man, he’s only made one lighthearted remark about the life he was dealt: When some dickhead, bucktoothed kid, obviously in the wrong bar, called him a fucking duffer, Campeau had said, “The whole world is duffers, jerkface: duffers-in-waiting, like you; duffers, like me; and former duffers, every single one of whom would give his soul to get back across the line and be a duffer again. And,” he’d said to the kid, whose top incisors jutted out at such an acute angle he could have used them as a shelf for tiny toiletries, “why don’t you give us all a break and get your fucking teeth fixed?”

  Campeau may not be the man he once was, Rafferty thinks, but he’s still got a formidable edge. And he’s owed an apology.

  4

  Pieces of It Fall Away

  It’s a narrow road and relatively dark, and she’s not sure how she got there. If she could remember that, the path she’d taken, she’d know where she is.

  She took a fall not too long ago, recently enough that she still hurts, recently enough that she’s still trailing the pink ghost of pain and her palms still sting. She tripped over a paver—it must have been a paver—and went down. She’s heavy now, so she went down hard. Her tote bag slipped off her shoulder. The fall made her lose track of herself the way something sudden and painful will: it shakes the day and cracks it so that pieces fall away and all that’s left is whatever hurts and a vivid impression of the moment everything went wrong, glaring at her like a spotlight, beyond which she can see only the broken bits of what happened before. She looks at her skinned and filthy palms and is surprised to see a ballpoint pen in her left hand. It says something, some kind of bank, on the side. krungthai bank, that’s what it says.

  She thinks, I don’t keep any of my money in Krungthai Bank, and then she laughs. She had a bank account a long time ago, but it’s too many days or weeks back. Maybe years, certainly years. And hard to find in her memory: the days or years in her deep past that haven’t broken into pieces around something impossible to forget are folded away now. Hard to locate. She used to read comic books, and her days now sometimes seem like the pages in a comic book: when she’s turned a few of them, the old ones disappear. They’re hiding back there somewhere, she knows. She could look for them, but she can’t always expect to find them. And even if she does find them, they might be in the wrong order.

  But when you turn a page to something blindingly bright, like pain or a thief or a too-strong dose, or a bad cop, that brightness can make everything that went before it go dark and kind of loose, for a while, anyway, hard to figure whether it was then or now, here or there, or rattling around somehow between here and there.

  The cop. There had been a cop. He’d kicked her. Sideways. She’d been sitting on a sidewalk and he came up beside her and kicked her over onto her right side, his foot on her shoulder. Then there was some pain and some shouting and his hands all over her, in her bag and in her clothes, and then she was walking away.

  On Silom. Walking away from . . . She’d been waiting for . . .

  Wait.

  The cop . . .

  She slaps at her pockets, dropping the pen. It’s gone. The fifty baht that was left of the two hundred the Sour Man had given her that morning. Breathing heavily, she stands still and closes her eyes, seeing the moment again, putting its pieces together: the cop, the push, the shouting, the hands. The money. Panic crackles deep inside her. The money’s gone, but what about . . .

  She opens her eyes and very, very slowly looks up and down the street to see whether anyone is watching her. There are people across the way, but they’re not paying any attention to her. Still, she waits until their backs are turned, and then she slowly, slowly—quick movements draw attention—reaches inside her big loose outer dress and pats the pocket of her T-shirt. Feels the tablets, the bright orange tablets, still in their aluminum foil. There should be three of them. Three warm visits to the place where everything is fine, where she’s not frightened and tired and hurting. Where the stre
et music is.

  One. Two. Three.

  The sigh she releases is so deep and so long that she imagines herself turning inside out and laughs at the notion. Old lady, inside out, on the sidewalk. Who would they call? The inside-out squad? Bet they sit by the phone a lot, she thinks, and she laughs again, laughing herself all the way down into a sitting position, knees up in front of her. That puts the scrape on her knee at eye level, and she studies it for a moment, thinking look, I’m meat, until it stops interesting her.

  Still, the cop got her money. That’s one of the things the bag is for, to carry her extra plastic sheet and her blanket and to get snatched by thieves. It’s so big they just grab it. She doesn’t know how many times it’s been taken, but it’s been more than she can count on one hand: the yank, her fall, the thief running around a corner, and then the bag thrown to the pavement. But this time, the cop hadn’t even looked at the bag, he’d gone straight for one of her pockets.

  She stops, reliving it. He’d found the money in the first pocket he invaded. That was why she still had the pills. He’d hit the money and then he’d stopped.

  So where was she when the cop . . .

  Patpong. She’s supposed to be on Patpong now. Or maybe it’s too late. Maybe everything’s all gone dark already. The Sour Man will be angry. She needs to do what the Sour Man says. The Sour Man has the money.

  The Sour Man terrifies her.

  She puts her hands down to push herself up and something rolls beneath her right palm. The pen. She sits again, picks it up, reads again the name of the bank, and has a brief flashbulb of memory, of seeing the pen, practically under her nose on the pavement, when she tripped on the sidewalk.

  She clicks it a few times, click click, click click, and she’s a girl again, sitting in a hot wooden classroom up in rice country, some of the students asleep with their heads on the desks, and in her hand is a gleaming pen, the first new one she’s ever seen. And she does now what she did then: she uses the pen to write on her left palm, a bigger, much dirtier left palm than the one that little girl had. What she writes is her name: Hom, meaning sweet-smelling.

  She had been sweet-smelling once.

  She closes her eyes and rocks back and forth for a minute or two, thinking about the orange tablets. Thinking about taking one and going into Lumphini Park, which can’t be far from here, and reclaiming her bush. Maybe the extra pill she buried will still be there: she’d patted the soil down carefully. It had been almost dark when she finally left the park, and it would be hard to see the little mound. She’s got three with her, but four is better than three. At one pill each night or even two, four is better than three.

  But then, in her mind’s eye, she sees the Sour Man, and the image puts strength into her legs. Slowly and stiffly, she gets her feet beneath her and stands up. Little red fireworks pop in the air just in front of her eyes, and she waits until they’re gone. There’s a big street to her left, she knows that much. If she can find a big street she can find Patpong. She knows now what it is that she needs to do in Patpong. She looks at the name on her palm again, the name of that long-ago little girl, and starts to walk.

  But it might be too late.

  She hates the way she smells. That little girl with her new pen, she thinks, and then there’s only the walking and the pain.

  5

  The Only One

  The bell ringing over the door brings every head in the place around, reminding Rafferty of a herd of antelope that’s just scented a predator, a unanimous shift of interest that makes it clear that nothing really hypnotically interesting is going on. Toots is glaring at him with her fists planted on her hips, a stance that usually signals fireworks. Pinky is grinning at him with a kind of gleeful expectation. The guy with the hair seems to be checking for split ends. The Growing Younger Man sips something so green it might be the essence of a million Aprils and studies a chessboard with an unfinished game on it; he plays by mail and cheats at every opportunity. A couple of leathery, self-styled old Bangkok hands whose barstools have been drawn up to Campeau’s, probably to commiserate or plot some Byzantine revenge that they’ll never get around to, are staring at him wide-eyed and open-mouthed; and Campeau has sprung off his stool with the intensity of someone who’s been stung by a wasp. Instantly Rafferty realizes, Bob’s enjoying this.

  As the door closes behind him, Rafferty gives Campeau a high, respectful wai. He says, “I’m sorry, Bob, I’m sorry. Toots, I’m sorry to you, too. Can I ring the bell?”

  After a punitive moment, Toots nods, reestablishes her authority by saying, “I do,” and yanks at the rope dangling above the bar. A rusting bell makes a noise somewhere between a chime and a quack, and everyone in the bar starts to chug whatever he’s drinking to clear the way for the free one coming up. Toots says to Rafferty, who’s still in the doorway, “Come in, come in, air-con all go outside.”

  Rafferty says, “Okay with you, Bob?”

  Campeau says, “Shit, yes. I can’t say I’ve missed you, but if you’re buying, what the hell.”

  A little less than an hour later, Campeau says, “You’re the only one.”

  They’re in Pinky Holland’s plastic-upholstered booth. Poke had offered Pinky an additional free drink to vacate it when it became evident that the members of Campeau’s posse were unwilling to let him and Poke talk without listening in.

  Since Campeau is at the stage in his evening when he doesn’t necessarily identify the topic under discussion and he seems disinclined to elaborate, Poke can’t be sure why he’s just been called the only one. So he says, “Really.”

  “Well, yeah,” Campeau says, going instantly to his default tone, irritation. “I don’t mean the only only one, but one of the only ones. I know thirty, maybe thirty-five farang guys who married locals. And look at ’em. There’s you and Rose, there’s Jerry and Lamyai, there’s Leon and Toots and, shit, Leon’s dead so he doesn’t really count. And a couple others, maybe. But you’re the only one I know who married a working girl and wound up with a whole skin.”

  “I don’t think of Rose’s time in Patpong as a formative experience,” Rafferty says, hearing the stiffness in his tone. “It’s not like she grew up dreaming day and night about coming down to Bangkok to screw strangers in crappy hotels. If her father hadn’t been about to sell her to—”

  “Ahhhh,” Campeau says. “You know what I mean. Mine, Malee—you ever meet Malee?” He focuses on Rafferty, squinting a little bit as though to hold Poke still. He’s had quite a few during Rafferty’s absence.

  Rafferty says, “Not that I remember.”

  “Nah.” He shakes his head. “You wouldn’t. She was gone long before you got here. Damn, she was beautiful.”

  Poke waits, sipping his bubble water. Toots is absolutely not going to let him drink alcohol. “Didn’t work out?”

  “Worked out for her.” He picks up his bottle and puts it down several times, making a pattern of wet rings on the tabletop. “Oldest fucking trick in the book. Needed a house, right? I mean, she was gonna be married, gonna have a baby, needed a house.”

  “A baby.”

  “Don’t even ask,” he says. “Goddamn rainbow baby. No matter how close you got, it was still the same distance away. But I believed it. I believed everything. She loved me, right? So I buy her a house, and since this is fucking Thailand it has to be in her name ’cause foreigners can’t own, et cetera. Up in some village in Nakhorn Nowhere, I go up there one time before I sign the papers and people sort of nod at me, not a big welcome, but they seemed to realize I was there. House is a crappy little dump, a few regular rooms in back and a couple open rooms in front, you know, no wall, so the whole fucking village and its chickens can come in and say hi, but I figure, hey, it’s what she wants, so I buy it, just buzzing with goodwill, and then I fly back to the States to arrange things. I’m gonna live here, right? So I gotta get banking stuff set up, sell some propert
y. Takes me about a month, and she’s not answering the phone but I figure she’s up in Dirtville putting up curtains or some fucking thing, and there’s like three phones in the whole place. I get back here, and the first surprise is that my apartment is for rent.”

  “Oh, no,” Rafferty says.

  “Yeah, oh, no. So I get all heavy with my landlady and she says my wife told her I wasn’t coming back. She took everything that wasn’t cemented down, bed and all, even some of my clothes, so I make a sort of panic run to the bank, and the joint account’s been cleaned out. About nine thousand US. And I re-rent the apartment, buy a bed, get a motorbike, and break the world speed record from Bangkok to Nakhorn Nowhere, and there’s nobody in the house and the people in the village tell me they have no idea in the world who my wife was. She’d never lived there in her life.”

  He swipes his mouth with the back of his hand as though he’s wiping away suds and says, “Later I find out half a dozen guys have bought that house and not one of them ever lived in it.” He takes a pull from his bottle. “Woulda been a good investment.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve had a lot of time to get used to it. And it could have been worse. I know a guy, it was a condo down in Phuket, right on the beach, cost him most of what he had in the world. Sold out from under him while he was on a four-day visa run to Singapore. At least mine chose a dump.”

  “But it’s not just the money,” Rafferty says.

  “No,” Campeau says, studying the pattern of rings on the table as though they were a code of some kind. “It’s not.”

  Rafferty is adrift in the conversation. He’d wanted to apologize, but he hadn’t been looking for sad tales, especially not one that makes him feel even more fortunate than he had when he came in. He says, for lack of anything interesting, “Sorry to hear all that.”