by Lucy Taylor
He spread his arms. “It’s Chiang Mai. Everybody’s drunk on their ass.”
“I’m not.”
He laughed. “Well, there you go. That’s the problem. Let’s see if we can fix that.” He beckoned the bartender. “Another drink for the lady.”
Ilsa rattled off some words in Thai. The bartender glanced at Eddie, sniggered, and strolled away flicking her long hair.
“Hey, what’d you say to her? I was just trying to buy you a drink? Pass the time of day with some conversation? Why do you have to be a bitch?”
She gave him an icy once-over that reminded him of a fifth grade teacher he used to be scared to death of. “Oh, it’s talking you want? Okay, let’s start with this: what’re you really doing in Thailand, Eddie Pitrowski?”
The questioned flummoxed him, seeming to hint at knowledge of something she couldn’t possibly possess. What did she mean, really doing? Did she suspect something? Was she psychic?
After fumbling for words, he finally blurted, “I’m traveling with a couple of buddies. Here to see the sights.”
A smirk jerked her pretty mouth askew. “The sights? You mean like the National Museum and the Wat Chiang Man? Maybe the Elephant Nature Park or the Baan Haw Mosque? All are famous attractions here.”
Museums, mosques, nature parks—this was all news to Eddie, who gestured at the crowded room and said, “I’m here for the same reason as the rest of these guys.”
“So for you then, taking in the sights, that means the bars and the massage parlors and the brothels?”
He felt trapped. Why was she pestering him? “I like to raise a little hell, sure. That bothers you, lady, go hang out in a tea house, not a bar.”
“You’re the one who wanted to talk.”
“Didn’t expect a lecture. All I did was ask what you’re writing about.”
He felt his shoulders tense, waiting for her anger to descend on him like a blade, but instead her expression slackened with a melancholy so profound and unadorned that he turned away, her sadness too painful to confront because it mirrored back his own.
“I’m telling the story of a little girl named Tran,” she said finally.
“What?”
“You asked what I’m writing, and I’m telling you. Again. A story about everything people like you avoid looking at. The places where children are bought and sold and raped.”
Eddie could feel the fury radiating off her like a heat lamp. “Well, that’s terrible, that’s awful,” he managed. “That go on much?”
“Thailand’s a hub for child traffickers. Especially in the north.”
“Jesus,” said Eddie, and he thought about Margaret. Not Margaret as she was now with the shitkicker boots and Dykes Rule tattoo on her biceps, but Margaret as he actually remembered her, as a smiling toddler and a mischievous ten-year-old. Before his drinking got out of hand. When she still called him Daddy and hugged him around the waist.
He realized Ilsa was still talking. “My brother and his wife adopted a little Thai girl a couple of years ago. Six months ago, she died of AIDS that she’d contracted while being forced to work in a brothel in Chiang Mai. Her name was Tran. She was thirteen years old.”
“That kind of thing, it can’t be going on right out in the open?” Eddie was wishing he’d never started this conversation. All he’d wanted was to buy the woman a few drinks, get his mind off Danny. Now she’d gotten his mind on something worse.
“Did you notice the noodle shop across from the arcade?”
“Yeah, Numbah One Noodle Shop.” He pronounced the word as it appeared on the sign, so that it rhymed with rumba. “These people can’t spell worth a damn.”
“Have you been inside?”
“No, don’t really care for that khao soi shit.” He couldn’t believe he was still trying to impress this woman, showing off the name of a regional dish he’d heard Kurt order a few days earlier. “I’m more of a steak and eggs man myself.”
She laughed harshly, looking at him like the word moron was tattooed between his eyebrows. He hated women like her, women who just by existing made him feel like a loser. He wanted to get up and leave, but didn’t want her to think she’d run him off.
“The noodle shop? You’re not telling me it’s some kind’a kiddy brothel?” When she didn’t answer, he blustered, “That’s impossible! It’s just a bunch of people sucking down soup.”
“Not if you know a guy named Toy, and not if you get upstairs.”
“Toy? Guy’s name is Toy? You’re kidding me, right?” He saw she was serious and went on, “Well, what about the parents of these kids? Don’t they look for them?”
“Sometimes they’re the ones who sold their children in the first place.”
“They do that?”
“If the family is poor enough or greedy enough, yeah, they do.”
Eddie absorbed this. “Okay, if you know so much, call the authorities. Get the cops involved.”
“They are involved. In more ways than one. Some of the police are as bad as the traffickers. Short of finding a dead body on the premises, getting the police to organize a raid is tough. My partner and I have a couple of connections in the police force, but it’s not enough yet. The legal system here is unbelievably complicated and—”
“Oh, screw the legal system,” Eddie snapped. It was a sentiment he’d frequently expressed before—often in more colorful terms—about the court system back home on the occasion of numerous arrests and arraignments. “People like you, reporters, writers, you find something absolutely over-the-fucking top terrible and get your skirts all in a knot, but then what? If what you’re saying is true, kids are being held prisoner in that noodle joint right now and all you’re doing is sitting here yakking about it.”
“Okay, Captain America, I suppose you’d know what to do?”
“Well, hell, when kids are in danger, you don’t diddle around crying about how awful it is, you take action. You get your hands dirty, you do whatever it takes!”
“Easy to talk tough when nobody’s gonna call you on it. You’re too busy being a sex tourist to do anything more challenging than unzipping your pants.”
“Hey, I just came here to have a good time.”
She leaned back, appraising him. “I’m sorry, Eddie, but for somebody who came all this way to get drunk and buy sex, you don’t look like you’re having much fun.”
“Listen, lady, if I told you why I really came to Thailand—” He stopped himself just in time. Jesus, what was he thinking?
Her mouth crinkled disdainfully. “Yeah, I know, you’d have to kill me.”
««—»»
The sunlight outside hit Eddie in the face like a blowtorch and he almost staggered as he navigated his way up Loi Kroh Road. Across the street from the Numbah One Noodle Shop, he paused, taking the measure of the blank-faced customers who sat at counters in the windows like birds on a line, and watched the customers—mostly men—come and go. After about ten minutes, a side door opened, and a lean, sinewy man with brilliantly tattooed arms sauntered out. He wore boot cut black jeans and a red t-shirt and he walked with a hip-rolling, arrogant glide. He didn’t seem in a hurry to go anywhere, but shook a cigarette out of a pack and strolled into a passageway between the restaurant and an adjacent shop full of tourist geegaws.
Just for the hell of it—to have a look-see and prove to himself that Ilsa was wrong—Eddie decided to go in and get something to eat. He pointed to a picture on a laminated menu, but the bowl of yellowish, flat noodles the guy behind the counter gave him reminded him of a mound of worms the vet had once extracted from his hound dog’s butt. He’d barely paid for the food before he abandoned it and went plunging back into the mid-afternoon furnace.
The intense heat hit him like a brickbat. He lunged to the edge of the pedestrian traffic, ducked into the passageway where the skinny guy had gone to have his smoke, and heaved up a putrid stew of undigested noodles and beer.
When he straightened up, wiping his mouth on the back of h
is hand, he found himself looking at an incongruous scene. The passage opened into a narrow street, little more than an alley, where vendors had set up a line of booths, hawking the usual assortment of tourist rip-off’s and trinkets. Flat Top was standing there with a little Asian girl, looking over a display of DVD’s.
If that’s the kind of action you’re into…
Suddenly, in light of the conversation he’d just had with Ilsa, Flat Top’s words seemed to make terrible sense. Eddie was besieged by a mad impulse to do something and do it now, an act of expiation for all the grief and rage that was percolating in his soul like what had just been disgorged from his stomach.
He stepped out of the passageway and hollered, “Hey, you!” but in the general hubbub his voice was drowned out.
Flat Top was leading the little girl into the maze of booths. Eddie followed, staying at a distance until the pair turned onto the crowded street and Flat Top raised his arm to hail a cab. At that point, the decision seemed to make itself. He raced to catch up to them and blocked the way.
“Let go of that kid!”
Flat Top looked up, dumbfounded, and barked, “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m your buddy from The Joy Palace, remember? This is the kind of action you meant? A kid, for Christ’s sake!”
“Lower your voice, you old coot. Walk away. This isn’t your concern.”
“I’m making it my concern.”
“How about this?” He brushed his shirt tail aside, a casual gesture that gave Eddie a glimpse of the lethal-looking knife sheathed next to his waist. “You want to make this your concern, too?”
Big mistake.
Eddie Pitrowski was a man who’d grown up on Detroit’s meanest streets, who’d survived gang fights, rogue cops, and five years in prison. In the fight-or-die mentality of Eddie’s youth, you never let the enemy see the blade until it’s stuck between his ribs.
“Fuck you,” Eddie said, and smashed his fist into Flat Top’s broad nose. There was a crack like celery snapping, and blood spurted out. Flat Top looked stunned. He threw a sloppy roundhouse, but Eddie parried the blow and banged a hook off his temple. As he moved to throw another punch, he glanced down and saw the little girl cringing in terror. For a second, he felt bad for scaring her, then realized that her reaction wasn’t directed at him, but at something behind him. He turned too late—a blow that felt like a mule kick slammed his lower back, a second, harder one pounded his kidney. Pain razored through him. His lungs emptied, and his legs liquefied as the ground swooped up to meet him. Above him, backlit by a supernova of diamonds, the wiry, sinew-and-bones man from the noodle shop twirled a retractable metal baton above his head, grinning like a demented majorette. His eyes blazed with crazed, manic energy as he circled Eddie, snorting and jabbering. “You make trouble here, I fooking kill you. I kill you, moothafooka…
“C’mon, Toy, take it easy,” Flat Top said, using his shirt tail to staunch the flow of blood from his nose. His voice was as amiable and conciliatory as a gent in a fine dining establishment recommending a good Merlot. “He’s just some drunk thinks I fucked his little sister. He won’t bother us again.” To make his point, he stepped back and lobbed a kick into Eddie’s side. Eddie rolled away, pain gusting through his body like a gritty wind.
By the time he got to his feet, the little girl had disappeared and Flat Top and Toy were going into the noodle shop, friendly as could be.
««—»»
Rather than pursue the two men, which was his first inclination, Eddie reluctantly heeded the demands of his aching body and hobbled back to the hotel, where he found Kurt fiddling with his camera in the lobby bar. He looked up in amazement when Eddie limped in.
“Jeez, what the heck happened? You piss off the wrong ladyboy?”
Eddie ordered a whiskey and recounted a heavily edited and embellished version of what had occurred.
“Effin’ pervs,” Kurt said when he’d finished the account, “ought’a be stomped on like roaches.”
“Damn straight,” Eddie said.
“Man, you can’t pull that shit here.”
“My sentiments exactly—fuckin’ freaks.”
“No, Eddie, I mean you can’t pull that macho shit, playin’ hero and all. You’re lucky you didn’t get your skull busted open. Don’t forget why we came here—to give Danny a smokin’ hot send-off, right?”
That rankled Eddie, because Kurt seemed more interested in wandering off to find photo ops than hanging out with Danny, but he didn’t say anything. Kurt went on, “This isn’t the States, Eddie. You see things don’t sit right with you, keep your nose out of it. Walk away.”
“Shit, man, you weren’t there. I’m telling you, you seen that creep with the little girl, you’d’a done the same thing.”
Kurt stared at him as though trying to read his mind. “No, Eddie. I would not. You know why? Because I control my temper, I’m not a hothead who takes crazy risks. Most of all, I do not screw up in foreign countries with prisons that make our slammers back home look like the effing Four Seasons.” He drained his beer. “C’mon, you look like you could use some cheering up. Let’s go bang on Danny’s door and see if he’s ready to ditch that clingy chick and put some variety in his love life.”
They paid their tab, rolled out of the bar, and were getting off the elevator when the door to Danny’s room burst open and Lek sprinted into the hall. Her eyes were huge and wet and raccooned with goopy rings of mascara.
She latched onto Kurt’s arm, spewing a rapid-fire hodgepodge of English and Thai.
“Hey, slow down.” said Kurt, trying to peel her off. “What’s wrong? Is Danny okay?”
Eddie got a bad feeling in his gut, like a fist constricting. He charged up the hall into the room, barking Danny’s name. No Danny, so he tried the bathroom door and found it locked, yelled at Danny to open up. He had lifted his leg to kick the door, when the lock turned and Danny opened the door. He wore a pair of boxer shorts and an expression of weary disgust.
He looked at Eddie with his leg cocked and sighed. “Jesus, look at this. You’re worse than she is. I’m surrounded by goddamn drama queens.”
“What the fuck is this?” Eddie said, barging past him. On the back of the toilet was a bottle of Stoli and three prescription medicine bottles. The Vicodin and Oxy were in Danny’s name, the liquid Valium was made out to an Oleg Rastinov.
“Who the hell’s Oleg Rastinov?”
“No idea. My nurse friend swiped it from the hospital pharmacy.”
Eddie picked up the vodka. “And what exactly was the plan here, Danny? The way the girl was carrying on, I figured you were standing out on a ledge.”
He shrugged. “Might’a been, if I could’a got the damn window open. I told you my plan. Get it over with.”
“How much of this shit did you take?”
“None of it—thanks to you and my nosy girlfriend. So you can hold off on the goddamn stomach pump.”
Kurt and Lek came to the door. “It’s okay, everything’s cool,” Eddie said. “Kurt, take the girl down to the bar. Danny and I got to talk.”
Lek’s eyes flashed fire. “You asshole, Eddie. I not girl. My name Lek. I stay here with Danny.”
Eddie looked at Danny. “Guess her English is improving.”
Lek hissed something in Thai and gave Eddie the finger.
Danny dampened a washcloth and wiped the mascara streaks off Lek’s face.
“I’m okay,” he said. “Go on down to the bar with Kurt. Please. I’ll be there in a few minutes. “
As soon as Lek and Kurt left, Eddie started in. “What the fuck, Danny, you were gonna off yourself right in front of her!”
“No! I told her to leave! I gave her a whole bunch of baht, enough for the bus back to Bangkok and a lot more.”
“What about me and Kurt? Were you gonna send us back to Bangkok, too, so you could die here alone?”
“Wouldn’t it be better that way?”
“What about the pact? Friends to the end? W
e said we’d be there for each other.”
“Oh, screw the damned pact. That shit’s for kids.” He shuffled over to the bed and sat down heavily. When he looked up, despondency drew his face down like a clay effigy crumbling. He looked like he’d aged fifteen years since that morning. “You and Kurt weren’t around, so I decided to man up and just do it myself.”
“But what’s the rush! Look, Danny, you got a beautiful girl here to spend the night with, why piss it away? You know, carpal deity and all that stuff.”
“Carpal what?”
“Never mind.”
“Look, man, you don’t understand. Lek’s the reason I decided to get it over with. Meeting her, being with her the past few days, it just makes it all worse! Makes everything from before look so shitty and small by comparison.”
“Then get rid of her!” exclaimed Eddie, waving his arms like he was leading a battlefield charge. “Kurt was right about Chiang Mai, this town’s overpopulated with hot babes. Let’s go get some!”
Then he fell silent, because what he saw scared him and mortified him and touched something so deeply entombed in his heart that decades had passed without his ever admitting its existence, the alcohol doing its part, of course, in the service of this helpful amnesia. Danny was sobbing. The tears slicked his cheeks unashamedly. And Eddie, who on a few occasions had found himself in situations where he was required to bend over, spread ’em, and cough, while a couple of guards watched to see if any sharp objects or dope or maybe a long-stemmed red rose popped out of his ass, squirmed with an embarrassment more acute than any he’d felt in his life.
“I just can’t believe my goddamn luck,” Danny said. “First time in years I meet a woman I really like, someone I have fun with, and when do I meet her, but when I’m all set to drop the fuck dead!”
Eddie held up his hands. “Hey, whoa, it don’t have to be that way. Jeez, Danny, come on back to Detroit. Do the chemo, the radiation, whatever it takes. Maybe somebody’ll come up with a miracle cure. Hell, you never know, earth could get hit with a meteor and kill us all.”
Danny gave him a blank stare. “Is that supposed to cheer me up?”