Rafferty says nothing because he can’t think of anything, and Arthit adds, “God help us,” and disconnects.
Rafferty ends the call and looks at Rose, who gets up and says, “Let’s go find a hotel I want to stay in.”
16
The Only Thing That Lit It Up
Hunched over the rickety kitchen table where he eats his meals—when he remembers them—he slides his index finger across the sheet of transparent plastic. Beneath the plastic, blistered here and there by tiny bubbles of trapped air, are the flat patterns of black and white, actually black and yellow after all these years, that reopen the past. The plastic is stiffening, and it’s turned a bit milky. Seen around the blisters and through the haze, the patterns resolve themselves into men.
Men face the camera, usually clustered in tight groups, looking as if the proximity is more about comfort than camaraderie. Not many smiles other than Ernie’s, although here and there someone soberly makes rabbit ears behind someone else’s head. In the biggest picture, centered on the page, one of the guys has a blurred face because he turned quickly toward a sound none of the others heard: Steve, who usually walked point, and for just that reason. The faces are young; the eyes, most of them, are old. Some of them already have the thousand-mile stare, and a few are glazed with dope. There are a lot of cigarettes. Here and there a thick, defiant joint. Here and there an upraised middle finger.
His own finger pauses on each face as the names float to the surface. Steve; Eddie; Big Mo; Horse; Ernie, with his grin on crooked; Antwone; T-Bone; Slack Jack; that kid who died before Wallace memorized his name; Wallace himself, looking very pissed off about something; Fat Frank; the Korean guy everyone called Soul, meaning Seoul, which amused some of the black guys; another kid who died before Wallace memorized his name. After a while you learned not to get close to the new guys, so it wouldn’t hurt so much when they went down. And in fact the two unnamed dead boys went down on the same awful night, about three days after the photographer pointed his camera at them.
Your basic eight-man squad plus five drop-ins. Wallace’s squad.
He slaps his pockets, looking for cigarettes, fails to find them, and forgets he was doing it. The picture in front of him, which he’s hidden from himself for years and pulled out because of his dream about Ernie, has gathered potency. It’s more real than the room he is in.
The shot was taken on the perimeter of a temporary camp bulldozed out of the bush, one of dozens. Two or three or four days after these men stared into the camera, Wallace’s squad had moved out, into the ambush that killed the two new guys and Antwone. In their absence the camp had been targeted with surprising precision by a VC gunnery crew. Three of the drop-ins—T-Bone, Fat Frank, and Horse—had been in it when it was blown to bits.
The math is blunt. Out of thirteen people in the picture—thirteen? what were they thinking, was everybody loaded?—out of thirteen, six were dead within a few days. And Ernie was killed under that fucking tree a year or so later, during Wallace’s final tour. So seven. Seven dead.
That he knows of.
He screws up his face, trying to remember who took the picture. Whoever it was, he’d used Wallace’s camera, which is why Wallace has the photograph, but the photographer’s face has been erased, as have so many of the faces from that time. Hundreds of them, gone now. Probably in self-defense; it’s easier to think of the lost as numbers instead of faces, names, voices, hearts. People.
That’s why he never looks at the photographs. They bring back the faces. And the voices, which are even worse.
Ernie’s joke voice, dry as tinder. Slack Jack’s slow Mississip’ drawl. Or Antwone’s, the deepest speaking voice Wallace ever heard, which he almost never used unless someone was hurt, and then the voice cradled whoever it was, for however long he lived. Soul, who wasn’t even born in America but had volunteered anyway, whose Korean accent put the letter U at the end of many words; eventually the entire squad said “yesu” instead of “yes,” and back in camp other guys stared at them. One of the two kids whose name Wallace never learned, a short, wiry guy with dramatically blue eyes, had a reedy, ephemeral voice that immediately led most of the others to brand him as gay until he caught the big, bad one the night of the ambush and died the way most of the men undoubtedly hoped they would: probably scared shitless but managing a kind of quiet, distant acceptance. And that was good, because other people were getting shot and no one could have fussed over him anyway. Not even Antwone, who was down himself by then, his spirit well above the trees.
All of them, just cards in a hand from a well-shuffled deck, dealt at random, straight into the grinder.
“Fuck ’em all,” Wallace says aloud, meaning the men in the suits.
“They shoulda died twice,” Ernie says.
Behind the soldiers but out of focus, an abstraction of alternating light and shadow, is the bush they hid in, hunted in, and were wounded and killed in, the steaming, malodorous, eternally wet bog of mud and red dust, trip wires, snakes, leeches, monkeys, guns, knives, punji pits, and panic: a stick cracking underfoot someplace near, a sudden squawk of radio noise, the glint of the lens on a distant gunsight. The villages, slapped together by the people who built them dead center in the clearings they created, as though they’d consciously chosen to live in a target.
Wallace reaches for his beer, but it isn’t there. No beer, no cigarettes. Wallace says, aloud, “What have I got left, Ernie?” Ernie chuckles. Ernie was the only guy Wallace ever knew who actually chuckled, sort of half laugh, half cough.
A sudden knot in his lower back lets him know he’s spent too much time bent over the album. With the surge of irritation that’s never far from the surface these days, Wallace advises his spine to fuck off and leans even closer to engage Ernie’s two-dimensional gaze. Ernie looks the way he always looked: as though he’s a moment away from making himself laugh.
Wallace straightens in his chair and grunts. Runs his thumb over the album’s upper edge, looks down at the line of grime on his skin, and wipes his thumb on his pants.
Wasn’t he looking for his beer?
He gets up, pushing down on the edge of the table, which wobbles as it always does. The kitchen is the yellow of old butter, a color Wallace has always disliked. A lopsided pile in the sink announces the presence of every dish he owns, plus a few bowls, some foggy-looking glasses, and a couple of blackened frying pans. Utensils bristle out of the glasses. He says, “Gotta wash up.”
But he doesn’t. The refrigerator kicks into its low hum, like a bid for attention. Wallace realizes that going to the refrigerator was the reason he’d gotten up in the first place. He gives the squat little appliance a stern look, waiting for it to volunteer some information, but all it does is shut down its whir, as though daring him. Irritation rises again inside him and then flows out, leaving him empty. Purpose deserts him. He stands there gazing blankly at the refrigerator for a long moment, feeling like he’s dangling lightly at a rope’s end, a weightless husk, the air blowing him slowly back and forth. He can almost hear the toes of his slippers brushing the linoleum. A big shrug and a shake of his head bring his weight back, and he slips both hands into the pockets of his worn jeans. His thighs still feel reassuringly strong and ropy. He wanders into the living room, empty except for a long, scarred wooden coffee table standing patiently in front of a couch that seems to be undergoing a slow-motion explosion, with white foam popping through the edges of its cushions. Both pieces of furniture rest on an oval hooked rug that had been in his mother’s bedroom in Carlsbad and may or may not have been made by her grandmother. The story changed depending on the level in the vodka bottle.
“Here’s to you, Mom,” Wallace says, replying to her favorite toast, and that reminds him why he got up. He says, out loud, “Beer,” and yanks his right hand from his pocket to scribble the word on the air as a reminder. “Stay there,” he says to the word, turning his back on it. Erni
e chuckles. Since he’s facing his bedroom, Wallace thinks, he might as well go to the bathroom. He doesn’t particularly need to, but he’s up and headed that way and he has to piss a lot lately, so why not now? He says aloud, “Economy of motion is our motto.”
It’s getting dark outside, and the rivulets of rain rippling the gray bedroom window take him off guard. For a few unmeasurable moments, he’d been back in Carlsbad, in the house he’d grown up in, and he had been expecting to see the eternal sunshine, pouring down on beauty and ugliness alike, spending itself as generously on the oily grime of a gas station as it does on a white curve of blue-edged beach. Looking at the gray rain wrapping itself around his building, he feels the sun’s warm arm thrown over his bare shoulders as he runs down the path between the succulents and the poppies to the sea, his board tucked, feather-light, against his side, his body perfect and flexible, with a slender beauty he’d never appreciated until it was decades behind him. Wallace at seventeen, his hair a mass of curls bleached blond by the sun, a snarl of light. The Kid, the surfers called him.
The Kid.
What was I doing? he asks himself as he pees, remembering too late to lift the seat. I was doing something. Before I got up for the beer, I was doing something.
“Maybe you’re right, Leon,” he says. “Maybe I can’t be alone now.”
Alone. He’s alone because he’d been a fool, because he’d been an idiot, because he’d been an asshole. Because, at the end, he’d been hopelessly outmatched, not so much by war as by love. War, he’d learned to prepare himself for, but against love he’d had no defenses, no map, no commanding officer, no half-forgotten briefing to orient his compass. It has taken him years to recognize that it had all been love with Jah, every moment of it, even at the end. Especially at the end, in the two or three seconds when he destroyed the only good, true thing that ever happened to him.
He hadn’t known what to do with it.
And he can’t allow himself to remember it all now, his self-destruction, as fresh as if it had happened only a few days ago. It’s too much for him, it’s more than he can handle. It reminds him where he keeps his gun.
Closing his eyes doesn’t help. So he opens them wide, yanks himself toward the present, and finds the toilet handle by touch before turning back toward the bedroom.
He hears himself say aloud, “Jah.”
On the other side of the streaming window, the city has grown darker. (The gun, an old revolver, is on the top shelf of the closet, beneath a never-worn sweater.) He sits on the edge of the bed, watching lights ripple on across the street. The Bangkok night: he had traded his life for the Bangkok night, and then he’d broken the only thing that lit it up.
(The bullets are all the way across the room from the closet, in the drawer of the bedside table. It had seemed like a safe distance when he put them there.)
He swallows something that feels as big as a softball. (The cylinder, carefully removed, is in the living room.) Three steps, he thinks. Gun, cylinder, bullets. Three steps isn’t so many. And then he thinks, Maybe I should throw away the bullets.
Why is he alone?
Dodging the question, he puts his hands beside him on the mattress to prepare for getting up but can’t think of anywhere that would be better. Maybe he’ll call Leon. Go to the bar. The bar, he thinks. Poke. The guy with the mustache, Varney. Ernie saying, “You remember Hartley?”
Hartley.
He’s up and moving, out of the bedroom, through the dark living room, switching on the kitchen light to see the roaches scatter, detouring to the refrigerator to grab a beer, and then he’s flipping through the photo album, a cascade of young, mostly dead faces dragging names in their wake, and there it is: there’s the picture he’d been looking for, and there’s Hartley. At the edge of the group, always at the edge of the group.
There are a lot of reasons to join the armed forces, and the worst is because you purely want to kill people, and that’s why Hartley had joined. Even the men in his own squad, a squad with a lot of blood on its uniforms, had stepped back from the intensity of Hartley’s violence. In the picture he’s turned partway to his left so that he finds the camera out of the corner of his eye. It seems to Wallace that Hartley looked at everything from the corner of his eye. The only thing the son of a bitch did straight-on was shoot. Son of a bitch could absolutely shoot. Problem was getting him to stop. Even after all his tours in ’Nam, Hartley was the worst person Wallace had ever met.
Well. Ernie had been right, and Ernie had been wrong. Arthur Varney wasn’t Hartley. If Hartley were still alive, he’d be as old as he, Wallace, is now. But Varney and Hartley would have recognized each other on sight, would have picked each other out of a crowd of thousands. Varney, Wallace thinks, like Hartley, would never shoot head-on, at least not at anyone who was armed. Like Hartley, he’d find a perch, a blind, a place to wait until he could take a shot that wouldn’t be returned. And he’d take the shot with joy.
He thinks, I should warn Poke.
He goes to find his phone so he can call Leon to come get him.
17
That Travesty on Her Face
Varney’s not going back to the Expat Bar, Rafferty is sure of it. Not after the boy’s death. If Patpong is to be the meeting ground, Rafferty needs to find a place to hang his big fat face out in plain sight, at least until Arthit comes up with the hotel that Varney is hiding in. If he’s using the passport with that name on it.
So: someplace Rafferty will be conspicuous. That narrows it down to several restaurants divided between Patpong 1 and 2. What they have in common is bright lights inside and big windows through which he’ll be visible from the street. Varney will probably be more comfortable if the place is busy, a lot of people going in and out, competing for the attention of the staff. There are four possibles.
One of them is the RiffRaff, right at the top of Patpong. In addition to having a nice big window, the RiffRaff also serves decent food, if you stick with the Thai entrées the employees eat, and the thought makes Rafferty realize that he’s hungry.
Late afternoon has dragged itself in, surprisingly sunny but with a gray slant of rain visible a mile or so away. The country boys who assemble the night market are shirtless in anticipation of the downpour as they fire up their forklifts and ferry up and down the street toting stacks of plywood and the lengths of steel pipe they’ll turn into frames for the booths. Rose is at home, waiting for Miaow to finish packing for the Imperial, the hotel Rose liked. Five seconds prone on the bed in the suite they had chosen was a life-changing experience for her, making Rafferty’s sagging old double feel like a field of stones by comparison. The Imperial, he thinks, could be an expensive proposition. After Miaow’s finished, the day guy, Pradya, will drive them to the hotel and bribe the staff to let him claim a space where he can watch the front until he’s needed or until he’s replaced by Sriyat.
Rafferty pushes the RiffRaff’s door open and walks into a wall of air-conditioning. The staff greets him with big, welcoming smiles. This was where he usually ate when he was roughing out his book, back in the days of early confusion, before Wallace came to his rescue. Most evenings he sat with his laptop at the window table, taking in the nightly transformation of a drab little street into a tarnished peacock, flashing its off-color feathers in a commercial mating display. He’d watched the night market blink into life beneath its dirty fluorescents as the sidewalks filled up with the voluntary homeless of all continents, their bonds cut, their promises forgotten, their common sense abandoned, looking dazzled to be in a no-rules zone where love, if not exactly free, was at least inexpensive and without apparent consequences.
In and out, in all senses of the expression, no harm, no foul. Except perhaps for the women, and anyway they seemed to have no real lives outside the bars, even though they could be surprisingly human in the morning. Still, look at ’em, they smile all the time (everybody smiles all the time), an
d they’re probably doing better than they were in whatever dirt-road, dog-shit-spattered slum they’d escaped. They’re doing okay, and if they aren’t . . . well, whose fault is that anyway? Plane leaves in a few days, back to the real world, where the women, inconvenient though it might be at times, lead actual lives. And this isn’t really a city, it’s a theme park. Everybody’s acting, everybody’s fine. That’s why they smile, isn’t it?
The waitress rattles gossip at him in Thai—this cook was stabbed by his girlfriend, that waitress’s daughter got into college—and leads him to his customary window, the window through which, all those years ago, he’d first seen Miaow. He’d had his laptop open as he tried to find his way to a sentence he could believe, until he felt a presence and realized he was separated by about eighteen inches and a pane of glass from a very dirty little girl with severely parted, tightly pulled-back hair. The first thing that struck him, aside from the filthiness of her T-shirt, was the rigid control in her face: tight mouth, furrowed brow, betrayed eyes, an expression most people don’t acquire until their beaten-down forties. A shallow wooden crate hung from a strap that ran behind her neck and obviously cut into her skin. The crate was full of chewing gum. She’d tilted it against the window, letting the glass take some of the weight.
He smiled at her and realized she was paying no attention to him at all. She’d been drawn by the glow of the laptop. He gave up on his sentence and swiveled the laptop toward her so she could see the screen better. Her eyes widened and came up to his, and then she backed away and took off at a run. She’d returned half an hour later, though, and then the next night and the night after, hypnotized by the luminous screen.
Now, of course—now that she’s one of the two people he loves most in the world, now that she’s played Ariel in The Tempest and is about to play Julie in Small Town and learned English and had her heart broken by a boy and replaced the boy with Benedict Cumberbatch and the entire British national repertory company—now he knows that she came back because that’s who she is: she comes back for what she wants until she gets it. On the fourth or fifth night, he’d persuaded her, via Delsarte-style signs through the glass, to come in, and he’d bought her a Coke, which was all she wanted. Then he’d set up a game of pinball on the computer and abandoned her for half an hour after telling the staff she could have anything on the menu. When he came back from his stroll, the Coke was half drunk, the score on the screen was astronomical, and there were three packs of gum—all different flavors, just in case—stacked neatly on his plate.
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