by Simon Royle
Chai pulled into a gas station, stopping at the restrooms. He jumped out and disappeared. I got out of the car, a break from the air-conditioning, and walked over to the smoking area. Yes, we have smoking areas in our gas stations – stops people smoking at the pumps while their cars are being filled.
Last night, after we’d made love in the sala, we’d talked more. Pim was excited, eyes large, shining. We’d agreed to break the news tonight at dinner. I looked at the cell phone. In another four hours. We’d also agreed to wait for Por’s health to improve before having the engagement party. The way Thai weddings work, at our level, is that once the happy couple have decided to tie the knot, they turn the whole process over to the respective families. The groom’s parents visit the bride’s parents and “Sing Sodt”, the dowry payment, is negotiated – almost always settled between the mothers. One loses a daughter, one gains a daughter. A down payment, usually in gold, is made once suitable compensation has been agreed upon, and the engagement party is arranged. After that Monks are consulted for an auspicious wedding date. Although the males make all the speeches, the reality is, weddings are women’s business.
Thinking about it, the bombing was a pretty smart move by Colonel Sankit. It was win-win. If he succeeded, problem solved. If he didn’t, he could claim, and he’d be right, that living with me was dangerous. Chai came out of the restrooms, looked around, saw me, walked over and sat beside me on the bench.
“We keep this to ourselves, okay? For now anyway.”
He nodded, staring at the forecourt of the gas station, gas fumes and shimmering heat distorting the view. It was a hot day and humid. Good. Ken’s house had a pool. It was his habit to take a swim when he got home. Usually he got home late, between eleven at night and one in the morning. If he missed his night swim, he never missed a morning swim.
“I can take care of it, quietly. An accident.”
“No. At least not yet. He might be behind the Cambodians. I want to know if he is, then we’ll decide.”
Chai looked at the space between his boots.
“What?” I asked him.
He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, head twisted sideways. It looked like he was going to say something, but he shook his head, got up, and went back to the car. I followed him. A young guy sitting in a new ‘red plate’ white BMW, parked behind our car, beeped his horn. Chai got out.
“Forget it. Let’s go,” I said.
Then the young guy leaned out of his window and shouted, “Get a fucking move on, Uncle” and beeped his horn again. The girl sitting next to him giggled. Chai, who had been about to get back into the car, looked across at me. I shrugged.
Chai moved. The young guy panicked, closing his window fast. Chai whipped out his K-Bar and smashed the driver’s window with the butt end of the knife. The laughing girl screamed. I glanced around at the pump attendants. They all looked away. Chai reached in. The guy climbed up his seat like there was somewhere to go. The hood popped open, and Chai walked around, reaching under, releasing it. He grabbed the top with both hands and kept pushing, climbing onto the grill, bending the hood over the front windscreen of the car. When the hood touched the roof, he jumped off. He squatted down until he was looking directly in the young guy’s face.
“With mindfulness, a person always prospers.” Chai, spreading the Buddhist word, a walking contradiction in a city of extremes balanced on the edge of chaos.
***
I tapped a spoon against my wine glass and stood up, clearing my throat.
“I have an announcement to make.”
They were all there. All the family, except Por. Uncle Mike was filling in for him at the head of the table. I sat at his right hand, Mother opposite and Pim next to me. Further down, the aunts were arranged in order of seniority, then the daughters, those with husbands first, until my youngest sister-in-law at the far end of the table. At another table, set a short distance away, were Beckham, Chai, Tum and a few of the most trusted boys, their eyes now all focused on me.
I looked at Pim sitting by my side, dressed in a simple white shirt, one of mine, and jeans. I held my hand out and she took it.
“I have asked Pim to be my wife, and I’m happy to say, she said yes.”
There was a burst of applause. Uncle Mike stood up and gave me a hug, Mother doing the same with Pim and by then the aunts had crowded around us.
Mother gave me a hug, whispering in my ear, “Has Pim told her parents yet?”
I shook my head.
“Have you fixed a date yet? If not, I’ll ask Por Luang Soong for you. He’s the best. Every marriage date he’s fixed, the couples live happily,” Aunt Su said to Pim.
“What about the doctor that brained his wife with the golf club?” asked Aunt Ning.
“He didn’t do that one. They ignored his advice and went to another monk chosen by the doctor.”
“Are you pregnant?” Aunt Malee said in a voice that was meant to be a whisper but was heard in the farthest corner of the room.
“No, but we’re trying every chance we get.” Pim smiled sweetly, her answer bringing a smile to Mother’s lips and a faux scandalized gasp from the daughters. If there was a virgin among them, I’d walk across Pit 51 naked and covered in buffalo blood.
Behind the smiles, and they were genuine, I saw the calculators go off. There had just been a tectonic shift in the plates on which the family’s foundation rested. No matter that they all loved me, and I knew they did, they were all jealous of Mother. In varying degrees of course, and as time had passed, and they realized Por would never leave Joom for any or all of them, the jealousy had waned. I was the son they never had, but I was not their son. I was Joom’s. Yesterday, the sons of their daughters still had a shot at the title. Today they were ‘could’ve been’. It’s the way we are.
Later, the men at one table, the women at the other, and the youngest of the daughters sent to bed, Chai, leaned across to me.
“Now I have two lives to protect.” His way of saying Pim was okay by him.
I squeezed his breeze block of a shoulder. “Thanks Chai, that means a lot to me.”
We touched glasses and emptied them. A phone rang. It was Ken. I looked at the time 10:45 pm. I left the table and went to the patio doors. Sliding them open, I slipped outside. It was quiet, warm, and a mosquito buzzed my ear. I answered the phone.
“Yes, Ken.”
“Ah Chance, I’ve been trying to get ahold of you. You haven’t been answering my calls. Is everything okay?”
“Sure, Ken. Why? What’s up?”
He sounded like he was in a car. So he hadn’t got home yet.
“Oh nothing. Just wondering if everything is okay your side. Got to keep an eye on my investments.”
“Sure. All good. How about you? You sound like you’re out and about.”
“Yes, I’m heading home. Been a long day.”
“Anyway, Ken, if there’s nothing urgent, I’ve got some stuff I have to deal with.”
“Stay in touch, Chance”
“I will Ken. You’ll be hearing from me soon, I promise.” I hung up. Let him think about that while he’s taking a swim. I went back inside and sat down at the table with the boys.
“I have another announcement to make.” I said, cutting through the talk of football, politics, and loose women. The buzzed eyes turned to look at me.
“The show is on. Now. Mother’s entertainment room.” There was a cheer and a mad scramble for the best seats in Mother’s mini-theater entertainment room. They left the center sofa for me. Pichit and Somboon brought the whiskey, ice, and soda with them. Chai worked the laptop, the screen flickered blue once, then filled with an image of a garden and a pool. Ken’s garden and pool. We’d set up a camera on the rear wall hidden by a tree. Chai had zoom control from the laptop. Tum jumped up and turned the lights down.
Headlights showed, visible through the glass walls of the entrance of the house. Ken had arrived home.
Chai zoomed in. The door opened
and someone came into the house, male, wearing a suit. Lights turned on in the house, illuminating the area by the pool.
Crocodylus porosus – salt water crocodile to you, Farang, are ambush predators. They are opportunistic feeders but prefer to hunt at night, near water. Of all the crocodile species, they are the most aggressive, prone to charge, especially the females, and especially during the egg laying season, October to May.
“Ten thousand even odds he gets killed in the pool.”
“I’ll take a piece of that.”
“Two-to-one, five thousand, he loses an arm but escapes.”
“Five to one, he gets out without a scratch.”
I turned in my seat. “Who offered the 5-1?”
Beckham ducked his head at Tum.
“I’ll take it. Ten thousand.”
“Shush, he’s coming out…”
We turned to watch. Ken, wearing a white bathrobe, had opened the sliding door to the patio. We still couldn’t see the croc, then Ken reached up, turned on the pool and the garden lights.
“There, there,” someone whispered. It was in darkness at the end of the garden, its eyes glowing red. The croc would be pissed off. This morning it was looking after a clutch on a sandy bank in Samut Prakarn. It had been lassoed, manhandled, blindfolded, and thrown in the back of a pickup, then dropped over a wall separated from its eggs. Maybe pissed off was an understatement.
Ken took out a pack of cigarettes, tapping one out. He tapped the cigarette against the pack tamping it down. Then he stuck in the corner of his mouth and lit it. He took a long hit, put the pack and lighter on the table. He exhaled. We could see the cloud of smoke drift lazily across the pool.
One of the boys behind me giggled. That set everyone off.
“Shush, shush…” from Chai, a rare smile on his face.
Ken was taking off the bath robe. His arms tanned, his body pale. Yak tats covered his body except his arms. White Speedos, I cringed. He took another drag of the cigarette and snubbed it out in the ashtray on the table.
“Oh fuck me. He’s going to use the diving board.” I don’t know who said it, thought it might be Pichit, but he was right. Ken walked around the pool to the side closest to the house. He climbed the diving board steps and stopped. The room went quiet, everyone held their breath.
Then Ken started swinging his arms around and the room breathed out. The croc hadn’t moved. Ken stopped swinging his arms and bounced a little on the board. The croc moved forward about a meter and stopped. A loud cheer erupted. A flurry of bets made. Crocodiles have excellent hearing and eyesight. A particular strength is the ability to judge distance exactly, aiding in the ambush attack. On land, for short bursts of speed, they can outrun a human. In water, it’s no contest.
Ken stopped bouncing and took two steps forward, diving into the pool. The sound of a splash in water is a sound hardwired into a croc’s reptilian brain. From the sound, they determine speed, weight, velocity, and make a decision whether or not the splash is prey. Ninety-nine percent of the time it is. Tonight was no exception. The croc moved forward to the edge of the light in the garden, about four meters from the edge of the pool. Ken swam freestyle, smooth, long, steady strokes. He touched the end and turned back to the house. If he kept to his usual routine, he’d do this another nineteen and a half times: twenty lengths of the pool.
Crocs are patient hunters. They’ll wait, often missing opportunities, until they’re sure of their kill. Our croc watched no less intently than us as Ken swam to the far end of the pool and turned. The audio wasn’t that good, just a small directional mike, but we could hear the splashes he made as he swum. Ken reached the turn, the room held its collective breath, and the croc didn’t move.
“He’ll strike now, for his legs. I’ve seen them do it that way.” It was Beckham, his gravelly voice an echo of Ken’s. At that moment, Ken’s bodyguard, the guy from his club, with him at the warehouse, came out of the door near the diving board. He was holding a phone, saying something in Japanese. Ken stopped at the end of the diving board, taking the phone from the guy kneeling down handing it to him. The croc covered the four meters to the pool in the blink of an eye and slipped in with hardly a ripple.
And there was a knock on the door. We froze. The door opened and Pim stuck her head around.
I jumped up from the sofa seat to block her from coming in. Chai had the presence of mind to freeze the screen.
“Hey, what’s up?” she asked, smiling.
“Oh, just watching a show with the boys.”
“What are you watching?”
“Ah, Animal Planet, Bad Animal Attacks. The guys love it. They’re sick, always rooting for the animal.”
“Ah, okay, look I’m going up.” She leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “Mother said we could share the guest room.” Kissed me on the lips, gave me a naughty look filled with promise, and a little wave. I closed the door and locked it.
Chai unfroze the screen just as the croc struck. The croc uses its all-muscle tail to propel itself, up to its full body length, out of water when it strikes. Ken’s bodyguard reeled back in shock as the croc took Ken at chest height. The pressure of the crocodile's bite is more than five thousand pounds per square inch. If this bite, the strongest on the planet, doesn’t kill, the prey usually drowns as the croc takes its victim into a death roll. The death roll serves two purposes; the first is to drown the victim; the second, to tear off whatever they’ve bitten.
Ken’s bodyguard made a big mistake. He pulled out his gun and leaned over the edge of the diving board to take a look. Brave but stupid. The croc launched itself and got his arm. He tried to hold onto the diving board. The twenty-year-old croc weighed three hundred kilos. The pool changed color. The thrashing stopped. The waves in the pool smoothed.
How Much For Your Daughter
22 May 2010 Pak Nam 3:30 pm
There were still eight days left before the escrow account would be triggered. They’d check the account for a deposit from Samuel Harper and when there wasn’t one, they’d move to transfer the assets. There was only one problem, well a hundred million of them actually. The documents that Ken had carefully inspected were copies of the real documents. Mother’s signature was false, and Sam Harper, the witness to her signature, was dead, complete with Death Certificate, issued three days before he’d signed the documents.
This alone wouldn’t prevent a war with the Yakuza. We were hoping that could be avoided by the email we’d sent them with the tapes of Ken stealing their money attached. Along with the link to YouTube where Chai posted an edited version of the video, ‘Crocodile Pool Attack’, complete with Animal Planet logo.
Our gamble was that they had no idea Ken was operating his ‘lend and steal’ scam in Thailand. It was a risk but a calculated one. And the reason Ken had to go in such a way.
It was Por who first came up with the idea of using crocs to scare the bejesus out of enemies, and occasionally allies, who needed firming up. He got the idea after watching the first Godfather movie, the famous scene with the horse head. Uncle Mike could act Por very well. Had him down pat, the time when Por told him of the idea, being a favorite scene.
Uncle Mike would adopt Por’s calm, emotionless face. Crossing his arms and stroking his chin, like Por did when he was thinking about buying a piece of land or a car, he’d drop his voice, mimicking Por’s English.
“Mike, you know, I’ve been thinking. You know, Mike, a horse’s head is nothing. Send it down to the cook, prepare it for lunch. But imagine waking up to a live crocodile. We’d have to sedate it, just enough to knock it out while we get it in the bed. We could experiment on weights and measures...” He’d go on for hours, everyone, including Por, in stitches. Thinking about it made me think of Por. I missed him. Missed his weight around the place. Our anchor.
“What are you thinking about?” Pim asked, putting her hand on mine. We were in the backseat of Mother’s Benz, on the way to Pim’s parents’ house in Phuttamonton, west of Bangkok.
“I was just thinking about Por. How I miss him. Wish he was here.”
Mother turned around in the front seat, Beckham driving, trying to keep up with Chai in the vanguard.
“I’ve arranged for Por to come home on Sunday. Thomas says he is stable enough to travel and it will be better for him to be here with us. His vital signs are strong and he moved his fingers last night. Thomas said it was exactly at the time that you announced you were getting married.” And of course Thomas would never make such a thing up.
“That’s great news. He’ll stay with us at the house?”