The Hot Countries

by Timothy Hallinan

  The bell rings as the door opens. Miaow comes in, looking everywhere at once, as though she’s entered the garden of the beasts, before her eyes settle on Lutanh. Behind Miaow is Rose.

  “Look, everybody,” Lutanh says, wincing as she touches the padding covering her nose in a very gingerly fashion, “my acting teacher.”

  “Isn’t she beautiful?” Miaow says to Rose, who is regarding Rafferty with the air of someone working toward a diagnosis. “Even with all this stuff on her nose.” She puts her fingertips beneath Lutanh’s chin and turns her face slightly. “I want to see. Wow, look at that eye. Poke always says to put raw steak on one of those.”

  “I vegetarian,” Lutanh says. “It go away. Tomorrow I look okay. Tomorrow I very okay.”

  The door behind Miaow opens, and she and Rose and Lutanh step aside to make room for Arthit.

  Miaow nods hello at Arthit and says, “Poke,” glances around the room and changes it to, “Dad. Lutanh wants to take an acting class. We talked about it when I was teaching her to move . . . you know, like Treasure.”

  “I very want,” Lutanh says. “Want to play Little Mermaid.”

  Betty says to Poke, “Scotch, please? Orangina?”

  “Acting is a good idea,” Rafferty says dutifully, bending down to open the refrigerator.

  “She was fucking great,” Campeau says. His eyes go automatically to the tip jar, and then he closes them. When he opens them again, he looks at Miaow and Rose and says, “Sorry.”

  “With Dr. Srisai,” Miaow says. “I told her about Dr. Srisai, and—”

  “If he can take her,” Rafferty says, popping the cap from the big orange bottle.

  “He said he can,” Miaow announces with the air of someone who’s sneaked a peek behind Door Number Two.

  “In afternoon,” Lutanh says, her hands clasped together imploringly, making her look like someone who’s about to sing. “Before I go bar.”

  Mid-pour, Rafferty sees where this is going. “Dr. Srisai is . . . ummm, kind of expensive.”

  “I know,” Miaow says, “but we were hoping—”

  “I’ll pay for it,” Arthit says. “That’s the least I can do.” Lutanh lets out a small, delighted squeal as the door opens again and Anna slips in, leading Treasure by the hand. Treasure is wearing the clothes Anna bought her the night they went shopping, and the sight of the clothes seems to roll everything that’s happened since he last saw them into a giant ball of solid regret, and for a moment Rafferty thinks he will simply break down in front of everyone. Treasure looks at all the men in the room and sidles closer to Anna.

  Arthit says to Anna and Treasure, “We’re going to send Lutanh to acting school.” He ignores the puzzlement on Anna’s face and says, “Is my watch right? Is she late?”

  “She’s late,” the Growing Younger Man says. He’s looking a bit shamefaced, probably because he hadn’t shown up on the night everything changed forever.

  Picking up the bottle of Betty’s scotch and clearing his throat to get rid of the lump in it, Rafferty says, “According to my watch, she should be here at any minute. Miaow, you want a Coke?”

  “You work here now?” Miaow says.

  Betty says to Poke, “Your wife? Your daughter?” Poke nods and pours the scotch, and Betty, shaking her head, says, “No. No ladyboy.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Rose says. To Lutanh she says, “You really are pretty.”

  “She try with him already,” Betty says.

  “Everybody tries with Poke,” Rose says, studying Poke again. “I don’t know why he comes home at night.”

  Rafferty dredges up a smile and says, “I get hungry. Do you want something?” Rose shakes her head.

  Arthit shoos Anna and Treasure toward the booth Pinky usually sits in, and they settle. Treasure says to Miaow in a half whisper, “What are you going to drink?”

  “Coke.”

  “Then can I have a Coke, too?”

  Arthit says, “What do you want, Anna?” and Anna says she’d like one of the orange things Lutanh is drinking, and Arthit says, “Beer for me, I don’t care what kind.”

  Campeau says, “He can’t handle all this by himself,” and gets up. On his way to the bar, he swaps drinks with Pinky and then slides in behind the counter, next to Rafferty. “Tight back here,” he says. He grabs a glass and hits the Coca-Cola spigot.

  “It is,” Rafferty says, more pleased than he’d ever thought he’d be to have Campeau’s company. He hears Miaow and Lutanh talking, two very different voices in the same approximate register, and when he turns around with Anna’s Orangina, he sees Campeau offering him a Coke. Taking the drink, he says, “What a team,” and as he totes the drinks over, Miaow and Lutanh beat him to the booth, both of them talking to Treasure. Seated, Treasure tilts her head up to them, reserved but listening. Rafferty gives the drink to her, and Anna turns back to the bar to get Miaow’s Coke and Arthit’s beer, and Lutanh says something that has both Miaow and Treasure laughing, and then he hears Anna laugh, too.

  He hasn’t heard Anna laugh very often.

  Rose snags his arm as he passes and tilts her head inquisitively. He shrugs in equivocation: he has no idea how he actually feels.

  The door opens yet again, and Wallace comes in, his cast patched with some kind of composition the color of cooked salmon. He looks at his watch and says, “Where is she?”

  “She late,” Toots says with finality. She gets up and straightens Leon’s stool, the red ribbon in place, the brass shining. “She say she come three thirty, but maybe not come. She very angry everything, always angry too much. Maybe she not come.”

  She pushes the stool into its accustomed place. “This Leon,” she says. “This always Leon, okay? Leon always here.” She looks around the room. “Now. Everybody sit same places, same place you sit at night. You and you,” she says to Campeau and Rafferty, waving them from behind the bar, “Out, out. Get stool.”

  She goes briskly behind the bar and draws a tap beer for Wallace, plunks it down, and then pulls Leon’s big stein from beneath the bar. “Always he think I don’t make this full enough,” she says. She blows off the foam and fills it to the brim, then slides it gently across the bar, dead center in front of Leon’s stool. “Forty-two year,” she say, “and I never make full enough.” She lifts her shirt from the neck and blots her cheeks and looks at them defiantly. “Okay. Everybody right place.”

  For the first time since he began to come into the bar, Rafferty sees Toots pour herself a glass of whiskey, from the Jack Daniel’s bottle. She holds it at the center of her chest, looking down at it, as though the words she wants are there.

  “Leon own this bar,” she says at last. “He buy many, many year before, tell me not to talk about it, so I not talk about it. He pay money for police every month, pay money for land every month. Cannot own land because Patpong family own land, but he own bar.” She takes a first sip. “Real Jack,” she says. “Now my bar, now I own bar, we have real Jack. Leon give me, some kind of paper for when he dead.”

  “A will,” the Growing Younger Man says.

  “Maybe,” Toots says. “Nam-Fon, wife of Leon, she get house, get money. Me, I get bar and small money for police and land. And Leon’s ashes. Nam-Fon, she very angry. Want bar, want everything. When I call you to come here, I think she bring Leon’s ashes, I think we say goodbye to him, but now she late. No problem.” She lifts her glass in the direction of Leon’s stool. “Leon here now, we can say goodbye anyway.”

  People around the room lift their glasses. Wallace and Campeau say, “Goodbye, Leon,” and Rafferty finds himself on his feet.

  “I just . . . I don’t know how, but I have to say how much I . . . how deeply I—” He’s weeping, and he sees Wallace stand up, but he goes on, saying, “A hundred times a day, I try to change what I did. I go over and over and . . .”

  “It was my fault
,” Arthit says, getting up. “I was the cop in charge, and I screwed it up. I should have had more men there, should have had them everywhere, but I thought he’d spot them, so I—”

  There’s a bang as loud as a shot, and they all turn to see Wallace standing at the bar with beer all over his hand. He says, “I’m going to say what Leon would have said if he was here, and if I get lost, one of you guys can take over, because we all know what he would have said. He would have said we’re old, we’re all going to die soon, in a hospital or alone, or maybe next to someone we’re paying, but however it happens, it’ll be soon. And we’re just counting time here, in here, trying to, trying to . . .”

  “Figure it out,” Campeau suggests.

  “Trying to figure it the fuck out,” Wallace says. “And trying not to look like clowns. And that Varney or whatever his name was, that son of a bitch came in here and made fools out of us all. Laughed at us while he used us to get to Poke, used us to try to hurt one of these precious little girls here, killed people. Left me to die.

  “I went with you that night, Poke, we all went with you. I didn’t care if I lived or died, long as I was doing something to fuck up that human tumor. Leon felt the same. He was old, he was fat, he wasn’t doing anything. This was a chance to do something, and he did. He showed up, he knocked that fucker ass over teakettle, and I can guarantee he felt great when he did it. You know what? It was quick, it was exciting, and it probably didn’t even hurt very much. So I’m here to say fuck you to your guilt, and if I can’t say goodbye to Leon’s goddamn ashes because that bitch hasn’t showed up, then I’ll just do this, because this is what he’d want me to do.” He comes around Leon’s stool and wraps his arms around Poke. To Arthit he says, “You, too, damn it,” and Poke hears Arthit get up and come across the room, and then Arthit is behind him and Wallace’s arm goes around Arthit as well.

  Then Rose is beside him, and Miaow, and all over the room people are getting up. Rafferty hears a squeal to his left and turns to see Campeau pushing his stool back and getting up, rigid with duty, his mouth as downturned as a trout’s, and Rafferty is grinding his teeth at the prospect of being hugged by Campeau when the bell rings, so sharp and hard that someone might have hit it with a hammer. The door strikes the wall with a bang, and a furious-looking woman, with the assertive emaciation of those who live on anger, stalks into the room. She slaps onto the bar an urn, thin, cheap tin, badly plated with something meant to suggest gold, and already dented. Without a word she wheels around and leaves. The door sighs shut behind her.

  On the other side of the bar, Toots tilts her face downward and brings up her hands, palm to palm in a prayerlike wai, and says, “Hello, Leon,” with Rafferty half a tight-throated syllable behind her, and then everyone else says hello to Leon.

  The silence fills the room until Toots says to Campeau, “Turn on lights, please, Bob. We open now.”

  Afterword

  The Hot Countries is the final book in an informal trilogy that explores the evil caused (and left behind) by the villain of The Fear Artist, Haskell Murphy. The second of the “Murphy” books, For the Dead, concerned itself in part with Rafferty’s effort to sort out the wreckage within Murphy’s nightmarish household, especially the fate of his badly damaged daughter, Treasure. At the end of The Hot Countries, I feel we’ve reached a kind of resolution on that front, even if it turns out to be temporary.

  One of the interesting things about writing as I do, which is to say by the seat of my pants, is that I never have the faintest idea what I’m getting into. Even when it became obvious to me at the end of The Fear Artist that I needed to find a way to complete the story of Murphy and Treasure, I had no idea that Miaow would prove to be so central as I pursued Treasure’s tale. This development has been a source of delight to me. A confession: If I were told that in the future I could write about only one of my characters, I’d choose Miaow. She’s come so far from the defiantly terrified street child Poke and Rose adopted, and yet I think at her core she’s still the same person. As someone who’s never had a daughter and has obviously never been a Thai street child, I find it fascinating and somewhat bewildering that Miaow is the only character I write whose next action, next words, are never in doubt: I write them as though I’m taking dictation, and then I have to sit around and figure out what the other characters are doing.

  I also want to give Miaow credit for my favorite fan interaction. From the first Rafferty book onward, I received mail from people who had chosen to follow the sometimes difficult path of intercultural adoption and who wrote to tell me that when they read the books they felt as though I’d been hiding in their closets, taking notes. I corresponded for several years with a couple in the Midwest who had adopted a little Thai girl, Tippawan, who was about Miaow’s age and who, in a sense, grew up in their household as Miaow grew up in the books. When I’d finished a bookstore event last year, a young girl came up to me, gave me a wai, and said, “I’m Tippawan.” Behind her were her parents, both wearing enormous grins. Their obvious happiness put me on the edge of bliss to think that my little fictional family might have contributed something to Tippawan’s very real family finding their way to one another, across some very forbidding cultural gulfs.

  Finally, and probably most important, a word about all the help I had in writing about the guys in the Expat Bar. I knew from the very beginning of the series that I wanted to write a book about the first American expats in Thailand, the ones who found their way there from the killing fields of Vietnam and stayed. (In A Nail Through the Heart, the first book, it’s Leon Hofstedler who tells Poke that someone needs his services, setting the main plot of the book into action.) For quite a while I’d been thinking about a guy who’s beginning to have cognitive problems and who lives part of the time in a Bangkok that was paved over decades ago. I had roughed out a story line for him when I was contacted by the Bangkok novelist Christopher G. Moore to submit a short story to a collection to be called Bangkok Noir. I developed one fateful night of Wallace’s story and sent it to Chris, and I’m happy to say it got very nice reviews.

  But I wasn’t finished with the Expat Bar or the Bangkok of the Golden Mile. To reconstruct it for this book, I needed the assistance of people who had actually been there. Bangkok author Dean Barrett, whose books I’ve always enjoyed, talked to me about the period and gave some names and email addresses. Both in person and via email these men brought to life the Bangkok of the late 1960s. Anything that’s accurate and evocative of that era I owe to their generosity with their time and memories. (Anything that’s wrong is my fault.) So the final thank-you and the biggest of all goes to Dean Barrett, John McBeth, Tommy A. Odiorne (O.D.), and Norm Smith. You guys are amazing.

  About the Music

  I listened to a lot of Vietnam-era stuff during the writing of this book, especially Creedence Clearwater, Marvin Gaye, Edwin Starr, Buffalo Springfield, The Rolling Stones, Country Joe, and so forth. In what I initially saw as a courageous sacrifice to art I overcame a lifelong aversion to The Doors, and I have to admit that they provided a lot of fuel. I’ve even put “Whiskey Bar” and “Roadhouse Blues” on some playlists. How could you not like a song that contains the line, “Woke up this morning and I got myself a beer.”?

  But the majority of the music was more contemporary. I listened to a mostly-female playlist of about 600 songs that had big chunks of Lake Street Dive, Broods, Ingrid Michaelson, Alabama Shakes, Imogen Heap, Rachel Yamagata (thanks, Ed!), Parker Millsap, Langhorne Slim, mid-career Dylan, Ashley Monroe, Dwight Yoakam, the great James McMurtry, the immortal Little Feat, Lucius, Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks,” and a lot of string quartets, mainly Beethoven’s later ones.

  As always, feel free to contact me at www.timothyhallinan.com to clue me in on music you think is better than the stuff I’ve listed here.

  And thanks for getting all the way to this page.

  nan, The Hot Countries