“Where is he?” asked Tuttle.
“Upstairs sleeping. He drink too much. It make him mean. Man drink all the time get mean like a dog kicked on the street everyday. Why don’t Army shoot man like him? Shooting these kids makes me angry.” Her fleshy, soft face turned red as tears filled her eyes. She bit her lip and slowly shook her head, looking into her Bloody Mary. “What did you come here for, Tut? It sure wasn’t to see me.”
“Asanee’s safe. I thought you’d want to know that,” he said.
She looked up at him, her lips tight. “He shouldn’t have hit me like that Tut,” she said, as if news about her daughter’s safety didn’t matter much one way or another. Asanee had become her father’s daughter; his problem, his worry, his responsibility.
“I know that. You’re the only one who can fix it. Divorce him,” said Tuttle.
“Easy for you to say,” Bunny said, raising her Bloody Mary to her lips. She swallowed real slowly, letting it flush her throat of the lump she felt would never go away. “Life ain’t organized for women. You know that. We grow old. And look at you, Tut. Even when you’re seventy you’ll have some twenty-year old to take a long bath with. I got a man. He’s not the best. Yeah, he hits me now and again and he drinks too much. But he’s my husband. You think there’s another one out there waiting to take his place? If so, send him in. The interview starts in five minutes.”
Personal misery extinguished all other misery. It didn’t much matter about the killings once she started talking about the wreckage of her own life. The images on the TV were abstract. Sure they made people cry a little while but the pain didn’t last much beyond the tears. Real pain was one’s own personal hell. The suffering of a life which never was going to right itself.
“I need your help, Bunny,” said Tuttle.
She lit a cigarette. “Here it comes. The reason why you came around. Not some bullshit that Asanee is okay.”
She had him cold. She always had that ability.
“You’re right. Can you help me?”
“Depends on what you need.”
“I was upcountry on the Nan River. I spent some time in a village. There’s a villager worried about her daughter. Named Daeng. She’s nineteen. Has a small half-moon shaped scar on her right cheek. Her mother said Daeng’s working the bars on Soi Cowboy. I know that’s not much to go on. She could be anywhere. I don’t know where to start. Where to look. But I told her mother I’d try and find her,” said Tuttle.
“So you can screw her?”
Bunny regretted it as soon as the accusation hit Tuttle. She saw him flinch and go all sad.
“Okay, Tut. I’m a little fucked up this morning. Never mind. You’re not angry with me? You want to give me another black eye? Can. I would deserve it. Sure.”
“Bunny, I’m not angry. Can you help me?”
“Girls come and go all the time.” She gave a long, frustrated sigh. Tuttle rarely got angry, she remembered that. He was mister jai yen. The cool-hearted man, climbing over the walls for a sweet woman’s dreams just long enough to make certain that he’d be remembered before slipping away. It had happened to Bunny with him all those years ago when she still had dreams. “I can’t keep track of who comes and goes in my own bar, Tut. None of my girls are from Nan,” she said, running her finger through her graying hair. Yeah, this was the man who had touched down during that moment of youth. She smiled. “It’s good to see you, Tut. Did I tell you that?”
“It’s good to see you, too, Bunny.”
Tuttle made the rounds of several more bars. He came up empty until he met up with a bar girl in plastic sandals with a T-shirt reading—The Bullet is the Target—Crazy Eight Bar. She was buying a bag of fried grasshoppers. Tuttle gave the vendor a twenty-baht note before the bar girl could react.
“You good man,” said the bar girl, smiling and offering the bag. She brushed back her short hair, and looked Tuttle over. Then gave him a crooked-tooth smile.
Tuttle pulled one of the perfectly preserved grasshoppers out of the bag. Fifty or more tiny bodies had been poured into the bag. Likely the grasshoppers had been killed with lethal insecticides then cooked in rancid oil; but there were upcountry girls who shrugged off the health risk and couldn’t get enough of them. He ate the head first, then slipped the slender body into his mouth. It made a crunching noise like granola.
“Geng,” she said, admiringly. Skilfully done.
Then after a couple of minutes she told him that her boss hired girls from that region of Thailand. This was her first week on the job. “Boss in a bad mood,” she said, as she walked back to her bar with Tuttle.
Crazy Hank, the owner of Crazy Eight Bar, wasn’t in a bad mood; he was in a hysterical rage. His fat gut exploded over his belt, swelling and bloating the graphics on his T-shirt. Below the words—The Bullet is the Target—Crazy Eight Bar—was the picture of a standing naked girl, her buns facing out, looking over her shoulder, and a bulls-eye target around her ass. On Crazy Hank, the legs of the girl stretched over his huge bulge, making the girl on the T-shirt look like she had double-jointed legs. He bellowed at the girl behind the bar, who was cleaning up broken glass with a broom.
“I’m docking your pay for that glass,” he shouted.
The girl with the bag of grasshoppers fled to a corner and tried to make herself small. Tuttle walked over to the bronze bell hanging over the bar, and rang it. Crazy Hank spun around on his stool.
“You know what that means?” asked Crazy Hank. “You buy drinks for everyone in the bar.”
The bar was empty except for Crazy Hank, the grasshopper eater, the girl sweeping the glass, and two other girls squatting on the floor and eating sticky rice and fish paste with chili sauce.
Tuttle put a purple on the bar, not taking his eyes off Crazy Hank who was expecting this guy to start an argument.
“This round is on me,” said Tuttle.
Crazy Hank made a crumby, gurgling sound—half smoker’s cough and half nervous tic—when someone caught him wrongfooted.
“Make mine a double Jack Daniel’s,” said Crazy Hank, who looked to be in his early 60s. He was from Indiana. Drinking double Jack Daniel’s until he became abusive, violent and stupid with mindless rage had resulted in Hank Galan’s nickname—Crazy Hank.
“Make mine a double orange juice,” said Tuttle.
The girls ordered beer and Mekong whiskey.
“Before I started this line of business. I was in the snake business. I exported big snakes. The biggest mistake of my life was to believe that running a bar with these girls was more profitable than selling snakes. Now the fucking Army’s shooting up the town.”
“So I hear,” said Tuttle.
“You know what that’s gonna do to the tourist business? It’s flushing it down the goddamn toilet. Who in their right mind is gonna come to Bangkok this year? At least with snakes, it was all export. The Army can shoot the hell out of people on the street, and it don’t for a minute affect the snake trade. Snakes don’t break your glasses. Snakes don’t quit and disappear on you. Snakes don’t come down with VD. Snakes don’t bite your balls. You know what I’m saying?”
Tuttle had the basic idea that Crazy Hank was disappointed in his career move. In the corner of the bar, near the door, where his friend ate grasshoppers, was a bulletin board of polaroid photos of girls with their nicknames written below. There were four rows and each row had six photos. Tuttle scanned each row, looking for a photo of girl with a small half-moon scar on her right cheek with the name of Daeng.
The double Jack Daniel’s had softened up Crazy Hank.
“You looking for a girl?” asked Crazy Hank. “I can tell you now, most of them aren’t showing up. I’ve got ten, twelve living upstairs. They’re still sleeping. And snakes don’t sleep all night neither.”
Tuttle described Daeng. Afterwards, Crazy Hank leaned over the bar, and pulled out a shoe box containing about a hundred Polaroid photos which were in no apparent order. “These girls once worked here. But
have fucked off. To where? Your guess would be as good as mine.” He shoved the box across the bar.
After twenty minutes, Tuttle found a photograph of a girl with a half-moon scar. “You remember her?”
Crazy Hank didn’t remember. But one of the girls who was drinking Mekong looked over Tuttle’s shoulder.
“That’s Daeng.”
“Daeng from Nan province?”
The girl nodded, sipped her Mekong dry and put the glass on the bar.
“One thing to remember, Hank. Snakes don’t have much of a memory,” said Tuttle.
Tuttle leaned forward, reached up, and rang the bell again. Peels of laughter rang out. The girls liked any excuse for a party, some excitement in the middle of all their boredom.
“Yeah, I remember her. She was a good earner. Strange but good. Fucked off a few months ago. I ain’t seen her since.”
“She work HQ,” said the girl who had spontaneously remembered Daeng.
A bar girl had remembered—the girls had developed a memory for faces and names. There was little slippage among the girls. But not Crazy Hank. And not Tuttle. How could that be? Why had Crazy Hank and Tuttle mortgaged their memories? Tuttle had more questions than he cared to find answers for. The reality was plain, and not one Tuttle could ignore. Daeng was not a stranger; she had been working the crowd at HQ. She had been at HQ night after night, for all those weeks before Tuttle had gone upcountry. It stood to reason he had seen her but at the same time he had not seen her. Nothing was more disturbing, unsettling. Looking for someone that he had seen and never recognized. He had done much the same when he had bought his own daughter out of Bunny’s bar on Soi Cowboy years before. He had learned nothing, he thought. History was about to repeat itself. If only Daeng had gone to another bar. He could search with noble aims of paying back the kindness of Old Uncle and the others in his compound. It was no longer that simple, the motive no longer so pure.
The full weight of responsibility for Daeng’s whereabouts doubled up on him like Crazy Hank’s double Jack Daniel’s which pushed him over the edge. Hardcore HQ regulars were woman blinded; it was like a whiteout in a snow storm, up and down no longer had definition. There was a big difference—one would recover the ability to see the landscape separated from the sky once the snow storm blew itself out. In HQ, the sexual storm winds never stopped blowing, leaving the HQ hardcore blinded and without memory. If he could find this Daeng, another throw-away prostitute, someone who came and went without a flicker of recognition, Tuttle knew he had a chance of recovering the kind of vision necessary to witness humanity. Without that vision, he saw people no differently than the generals. This was the broken continuity he had gone upcountry to discover. Daeng was one more HQ girl who yielded. Those who yield are faceless, meaningless, and without purpose, Harry Purcell had said. But Tuttle didn’t want to see Daeng through Purcell’s eyes. He wanted to start seeing people again; not in Denny Addison documentaries which were entertainments for those permanently damaged by sexual whiteouts. Daeng would pull him back; let him recover the person his neighbors had prayed would return or be released from the wheel. Daeng was the reason he had gone to the Nan River. He had been looking for what he hadn’t seen before his own eyes.
“Why did Daeng quit?” asked Tuttle.
The girl slumped over the bar, her head propped on her hand. She shrugged, as if there needed to be a reason. “She bored. Daeng not like other girl. Not drink. Not smoke. She save, save money customers give her. She tell me that she want to buy water pump for her mother. Daeng has very good heart. She have a hard life. Father die. Dog eat her face. She talk to ghosts.” She giggled a fearful laugh. “She have good heart. Buy water pump very good.”
Having finished his second double Jack Daniel’s, Crazy Hank exploded. “Water pump! Fuck, that’s a new scam. It’s usually a TV, VCR, or a motorcycle for their boyfriend. Or a gold chain to show off in front of their friends. Most of them gamble the money away as fast as they make it.”
Tuttle put another two purples on the bar counter.
“Her mother showed me the water pump, Hank,” said Tuttle, rising from the stool. “I saw it.”
Crazy Hank ignored the information. Hard facts had a way of being wired into the hardcore circuit board of gossip, doublecrosses, and double Jack Daniel’s.
“Another thing about snakes. They never bullshit you,” said Crazy Hank, belching as Tuttle walked out of the bar. He was in a hurry like a man who had decided he was lost and now had the chance to find and recover himself.
6
AT RADIO BANGKOK 108.3 the DJs, staff and Navy personnel had gone cranky, pale, silent; some had the shakes from the lack of sleep, nerves and tempers were frayed. Asanee sat with her head down next to the phone which had been ringing without her or anyone else answering it. Somewhere in her dream she saw herself naked standing under a waterfall. The falling water made a ringing, comforting sound. One of her eyes opened and she stared straight into Denny Addison’s hand-held camera. He had been filming Asanee for more than twenty minutes.
“Denny, what are you doing?”
“You were sleeping.”
“I hate it when you do that. Why do you film me when I’m sleeping?”
“That’s cool. Look up.”
She raised her head. She picked up the phone. “Hello, Radio Bangkok 108.3. No, we have no intention of surrendering.” She slammed the phone receiver down.
“What’s that on your cheek?” asked Addison.
Asanee opened her compact mirror and examined a small, reddish triangular shaped impression. She snapped the compact shut and smiled. Around her neck on a two-baht gold chain was an amulet. Once or twice before, she had been tangled up and the amulet pressed against her flesh, leaving a reddish calling card. A fortune teller once told her this was a sign of good luck, strength, a destiny aimed in a straight shot toward the right target in this life. She believed and didn’t believe this explanation.
“It’s from this,” she said, holding the amulet out on the chain to the camera.
“What is this?” asked Addison.
“You know what it is,” she replied.
“But not on film.”
“It’s an amulet. My father bought the chain but the amulet is from my mother’s mother.”
The camera zoomed in on the amulet. On a gold chain, the amulet was a white Buddha entombed inside a gold heart-shaped locket covered by a glass dome.
“And why do you wear it?” asked Addison.
The camera remained on the amulet.
“It brings good luck. It keeps away evil and misfortune,” answered Asanee, as the camera pulled back to reveal her face.
“Bizarre,” said Addison. “And you believe this?”
Addison had been filming Asanee while she slept, and she started to resent his cross-examination, his condescending tone, and the way he walked around pointing the camera in her face.
“Of course I believe or I wouldn’t wear it.”
“Now you’re angry. I like that. What makes you feel this way? Okay, forget that. Tell me the history of the amulet.”
“It’s a family heirloom. My mother received it from her mother, and my mother gave it to me. The Buddha image is carved from the tooth of her mother’s grandfather.” She fingered the amulet, toying with the glass dome, catching the overhead light and showering the rays across the walls of the control room.
“As long as you wear it, then you’re not afraid of the soldiers downstairs trying to kill us?” asked Addison.
“I’m not afraid,” she said.
“Does your father wear an amulet?”
She nodded. “Always.”
Addison paused, but kept the video camera rolling.
“Have you talked to your dad today?”
Asanee blinked into the camera.
“He’s looking for a girl,” said Asanee. But it came out in a way she hadn’t intended.
“Wow, the streets are filled with tanks and soldiers and Robert Tuttle is
searching for a girl! Now that is totally bizarre.”
“No, no, no. Not that way. He promised her mother he would look for her. When he was in a village in Nan, a villager was worried about her daughter. She asked my father to help.”
“What does this girl do?” asked Addison.
Asanee didn’t want to answer.
“Is she a secretary? Work in a bank or for the government?”
“Daeng worked in a bar,” said Asanee, her expression going grim.
“Daeng. That means ‘Red,’ Right? Right. Your father is on the streets of Bangkok looking for a ‘Red’ prostitute because some peasant in the country was worried about her daughter? Amazing,” said Addison, laughing.
Then he asked, “Where is he looking?”
“Around the Royal Hotel area.”
“Tuttle in the heart of the killing zone. Wow, is this the Robert Tuttle trip? He’s going into the line of fire to rescue a prostitute? Or is he just crazy?”
“I’m proud of him,” said Asanee.
“Do you think he might have a death wish? Or a Hemingway complex? The great Robert Tuttle defies the jaws of death, avoiding Army patrols to locate a fallen angel from the countryside. Wow, what a great documentary. You think he would let me do a film about this?”
“No,” shouted Asanee. She was showing her anger.
“What about Daeng? I’ll do Daeng. She’d be much better than Tuttle anyway.”
“You are the most selfish man alive,” said Asanee. “I can’t believe I let myself expose myself in your film. I’m ashamed.”
“Hey, at the time, you were into it. Admit it. You’re just upset because you’re tired. But you have to admit what your father is doing is far over the border of sanity.”
“It’s up to him,” she said.
“Maybe he’s wearing an amulet so he figures he’s protected. He has magic. So he’s not afraid,” said Addison.
“Why do you want to argue with only me on camera? Why don’t you ever show yourself? That’s what my father says. You hide behind the camera and make everyone else look simple, stupid, confused while you play God. That stupid ferris wheel from Mexico doesn’t make you a film maker or God.”
A Haunting Smile Page 18