Provincetown Follies, Bangkok Blues

by Randall Peffer

  Tuki, too, is sweating the song. The audience is clapping. She is jumping up and down on the runway, screaming. A dragon princess with the flames rising in her belly. Lifting her out of pain and proclaiming that she can still fly. Her vocal chords sizzling with their song.

  Something takes over; it feels like the summer of 1966. A hot time in the Mekong Delta. Smokey Robinson and the Supremes ooze from the bars around Dong Koi Street in Saigon. Her me is still a schoolgirl in Cholon when Radio Vietnam introduces the Isley Brothers, the new soldiers’ anthem—a special favorite for all the brothers out there like Marcus Aparecio. The song is “This Old Heart of Mine.” What a tune! It is all about getting kicked in the teeth by love … and getting up … to love again. Violins backing up the Holland, Dozier, and Holland piano-of-soul. The song winds up like a merry-go-round ride.

  It is the perfect song for a Saturday night of Labor Day Weekend, thinks Michael. Like the rest of the audience, he wants to hear that summer is not over. That summer and love will rise again. No stopping them. Just like the song.

  And there is no stopping Tuki as she struts and sings her way right to the back of the room for a duet of bump-and-grind action with the light-and-sound kid, then back down among the tables to fall in love with a truck driver and his wife, for a verse or two. Before the song wheels into its last cycle.

  As the crowd claps and sings along, she mounts the runway. She is free. This is her time, her moment to strut the boards, singing, bending to kiss the customers, plucking their tips like flower petals. Head high, chest out, hips swinging … a sexy little kid from Cholon, a Marine’s fantasy, a pair of Patpong queens named Delta and Brandy, a boat baby, a fugitive. A case cracker. A ball of fire. A girl who wears her heart for everyone to see … for a man she will never have. She is all of these things, riding the wave … until the music stops and the lights go out.

  She wishes the scene would end here because she is feeling right with the night. And her vocal chords are ripping out by the roots. But she cannot stop. The crowd is pumped and shouting for more. She knew this would happen. Maybe hoped it would. She gave the light-and-sound kid a fourth CD to play for her encore, for a closer. But when he looks at it, she is sure he is wondering what she was thinking when she picked this piece. “The Crying Game.” It is so dark, so blue.

  She is violating just about every rule of cabaret by bringing the audience down from their high with this encore … but too late. She picked her poison. And now, for the first time, she sees Michael sitting out their in the audience at his table in the shadows. Watching. All she can do is lock on his big soft eyes, listen for the music, and make her exit with style. Do what she has to do.

  So she begins. The red spotlight catches her sitting on a stool at the end of the bar. She is in with the downbeat, afraid of where this song will take her. The words flow.

  “I know all there is to know about the crying game; I’ve had my share of the crying game …”

  The backup is just a lounge piano, rhythm guitar, drumstick keeping time on a block of wood. Brushes on a snare drum. Like a lullaby. She is not even twelve bars into the number when her body starts thinking about sleep, beautiful sleep. She is really forcing now to get the notes out of her wrecked throat. Everyone and everything is getting hazy. The song is unraveling. And she is still sitting on a stool with her back against the bar … paralyzed or something.

  A video is doing a slow-mo waltz through her mind. She is dancing with her handsome young attorney, kissing his cheek in the moonlight at Shangri-La.

  Her voice tells the story.

  “First there were kisses …”

  Suddenly there is an echo in the room. “Then there were sighs …”

  That is not, not her voice singing this last phrase, giving her throat a break. What is going on here?

  Something weird is happening. She is hearing applause. Slowly her eyes leave Michael. They follow the beam of an orange spotlight that is picking up a figure that has just appeared from the doorway to the kitchen. There, singing a call and response thing with her, is the Patron Saint of Drag herself. Wearing a floor-length, metallic-gold cape and a sparkling red and green turban. Chivas reaches her left arm out across the audience to Tuki. Her voice calls like Ethel Merman, strong and clear. Tuki’s own voice calls back to her. She at last slides from her stool and begins to make her way among the tables toward the runway and stage. Toward her pheuan. Her friend.

  They are singing to each other. The old queen draws Tuki to her like a child in the dark. They meet at the spot where the runway and the stage join … and they end in harmony. They don’t want any more of the crying game. Tuki’s voice is shredding into a thousand pieces. Her eyes finding Michael one more time. Her knees going weak. She is smiling like crazy.

  Chivas wraps her arm around Tuki’s back. She can feel the hot rolls of the Queen Mother’s waist in the cup of her left hand. She thinks of Brandy and Delta just as the song fades. Then the house goes black.

  A minute later she is gone.

  But nobody misses her until the next day.

  SIXTY-TWO

  Monday, Labor Day, they go looking for her on Nantucket. Votolatto is there out of concern for foul play, and Chivas. Michael leads them to the place. He guides their little posse right up the stairs to the second floor and main entrance to the Kittikachorn vacation home. Votolatto rings the doorbell. Waits. No one comes. He rings the bell again, knocks hard. But still nothing. He tries to open the door. But it is locked.

  “Tuki, honey.” Chivas calls.

  The detective pounds the door with his fist. “Is there another way in there?”

  “Follow me.” Michael is running as he starts down the stairs and heads around to the ocean side of the house.

  The sliding door to the seaside deck is open. A pale green curtain whips in the afternoon sea breeze. Inside the room is empty. Ever so softly, Lionel Richie croons from hidden speakers.

  “What’s this?” says Votolatto. He is holding a red light-cotton hooded sweatshirt.

  Michael says it is Tuki’s.

  Chivas calls her name again, sniffs the air. It smells like burnt sulfur. “What’s that?”

  “You don’t want to know,” says Votolatto. He is already following his nose down a hallway to the right. Michael behind him.

  At the end of the hall there is a closed door. Michael grabs the nob, turns, pushes. But the door only cracks open, held fast by a security chain.

  “Goddamn it!” Votolatto gives the door a sharp kick and it flies open with the cracking of wood.

  This must be the master bedroom. Michael sees a king-size bed, raised about three feet off the floor. The champagne-colored comforter, the sheets, the pillows all tangled together. Clothes, a man and a woman’s, make a trail across the white rug to a Jacuzzi. It sits, trimmed with a cedar skirt, on its own screened end of the deck looking out to sea. All but the corner of the spa is blocked from view by the high bed. Tuki’s bra looks like a question mark, lying by the dust ruffle of the bed.

  Chivas is just getting here when Michael sees the blood. Rusty swirls. Coiling, ebbing, flowing through the water in the hot tub. “Aw, fuck!” Votolatto sounds like he wants to cry.

  Stepping around the bed for a clear look, Michael sees the body. Nude, sitting on a bench seat in the spa. Back to them. Head buried in a forearm on the edge of the tub. For a second he thinks he is seeing a sleeper, or a person bent over in sorrow. Then he sees the hole, larger than a half-dollar, in the side of the head where the bullet came out.

  The man from Bangkok, the lonely hunter, is dead. A thread of blood leaks from the corner of his mouth. The skin on his back looks the color of wax paper. Next to his left hand is a .357 magnum. Powder burns on his temple surround the purple tattoo of a gun shot.

  “I feel dizzy.” Michael falls to his knees next to the body. Something has sucked all the air out of him.

  Chivas starts. “Oh, god … oh, god … Tuki!”

  “Don’t touch anything!” V
otolatto jams his hands against the sides of his head, trying to restart his brain. His voice cracks. “He’s been dead a while.”

  The detective stoops, puts his arm around Michael’s shoulder. “Come on, counselor. I need you to hold it together for me, okay? I’m not doing so well myself. There’s nothing you can do here. Take care of the old girl, will ya?”

  Michael cannot speak. But he nods, turns his eyes away from the carnage, staggers to his feet. He had hoped that Prem Kittikatchorn would just disappear. But not like this.

  Chivas is sitting on the bed with her face in her hands, sobbing. He drops down beside her. Gives her a big soft hug like he is hugging his mother. But it is as if something has woven a cocoon around him. He cannot feel her hot, wet breath or her tears on his neck. “Come on. I need a drink.”

  “She’s gone,” mumbles Chivas as they shuffle down the hall to the living room to look for the bar. “I don’t understand.”

  “Tuki. She was here. Her clothes are still here. He …”

  In his mind he hears her voice, low and raked with sadness. I promised myself to him. I told him I would come to him … if he just let me have one more day with you.

  The tears are rolling down the queen’s cheek. “She’s dead.”

  “Like hell!” he says. But he knows what she is thinking. Maybe it is true. Prem killed Tuki. Or she took her own life. He remembers the shooting at her bungalow, her scarred wrists from that night in jail. That the suicide rate among Amerasians is more than forty percent higher than the population at large.

  “We’ve lost her.”

  His head snaps back on his shoulders. “She had her whole life ahead of her. She was free to start over.”

  Chivas stops walking. “That’s not how she saw it.” She pulls away from him, looks up into his eyes. They are standing in the living room now. The wind whipping the curtain, sunlight flooding the space.

  “Why?”

  “Everything she loved was behind her.”

  “What about us?”

  “Us, too. I’ve got a buyer for the Tango. And you. You can never be the prince that she …” Chivas has her face in her hands again. She settles onto a couch. “Can you just give me a minute, sweetheart?”

  A web of darkness is spreading inside him. “I’ll be outside.” If she is dead, let it be me who finds her. I owe her at least that much.

  When he gets to the beach, he tugs off his shoes and walks into the wind, thinking that at any moment he will see her crumpled on the sand leaking blood … or floating face-down on the waves. But the beach is bare, and the ocean is empty.

  Suddenly, he feels something tightening in his chest. All the air going out again. His legs shiver and freeze solid. He has to sit right here where the surf comes in and soaks his feet, his calves, his thighs.

  His shoulders fall back against the cool sand and he squeezes his eyes shut. The breaking of the surf is ringing in his ears when he catches the first scents of the charcoal braziers, steaming curry, and roasting peanuts. Then he sees her in flashes, flickers. She is onstage, belting out “This Old Heart of Mine.” The crowd is clapping to the rhythm as she works the runway, singing, strutting, bending to kiss the customers, plucking their tips. A love child, an old soul, a holy child like Buddha. With a nest of dark hair. A sexy little kid from Saigon, a GI’s fantasy in a red dress. It is nothing more than the thinnest veil. Over heart and soul and blood. Her head is high, chest out, hips swinging. She is smiling when he loses her.

  His eyes open at last, and he takes a long breath. He looks out to sea to the east. Rainsqualls are towering north of Georges Bank. The clouds look like violet pillars. Somewhere out there the Rosa Lee is hauling back. He can smell the pungent scent of fish caught in the web of the otter trawl. The birds wheel and dive after silver shadows. Mostly they come up wet and floundering and empty handed. They are fishers. They struggle into the sky. They spin and dive again.

  EPILOGUE

  For a week there is some desire on the part of the Kittikatchorn family to pin the death of their son and brother on Tuki. But in the end, Votolatto convinces them that the evidence is too thin, and the coroner calls it suicide.

  Tuki remains a mystery. After two weeks the detective reaches Michael by cell phone at home one night in Chatham. Votolatto say that the police still have not found her body. No calls on her cell phone. No sightings in Provincetown. No sightings in her old haunts on Silicone Alley in New York. No apparent contact with Brandy and Delta in Bangkok, according to Varat Samset. No sign of her on an internet search of drag shows. No credit card activity.

  “It’s like she just swam out to sea and disappeared,” says Votolatto. “Left that clown dead, stripped out of her clothes, and headed back to the place we all come from, the mother of waters. It’s a shame. She kind of grew on me. Amazing performance when we sent her in with a wire. I can see why you liked her. She had something. I don’t know what. But some kind of vitality, I guess, made her larger than life.”

  Michael cradles the cell phone against the collar of his Red Sox shirt, stares around the dimly-lit attic, scratches the three-day growth on the heel of his jaw. He is sitting on the folding chair at his Formica table. It is empty now. Almost the whole apartment is. His personal stuff is packed in his jeep. To hell with this place. To hell with Tuki Aparecio.

  “You still there, Rambo?”

  “Sorry. I was just kind of remembering some things.”

  “Look, man. You’ve got to let her go.”

  “I just don’t get it. I try and I try, but I still don’t understand how—”

  “You miss her, huh?”

  Her knees are pulled up under her chin, hair falling in a thousand ringlets over her shoulders and her arms. She is a silhouette, a child. In Saigon. In Chinatown.

  “Rambo?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Talk to me.”

  “Where the hell did she go?”

  “Forget about it, will you? She’s just gone, just history.”

  He does not know when Votolatto hangs up. But he knows that he listens to a dial tone for a long time before the earpiece starts bleating at him like a siren … and he throws the cell phone at a wall. It bursts with a crack into a hundred pieces. They flutter to the ground, silver feathers in the dark room.

  When they tie up the Rosa Lee at the fish buyer’s wharf in Nu Bej, Michael, his father, and Tio Tommy are bleary eyed, but grinning at each other. They have been awake for thirty-six hours fighting their way home from Georges Bank with the twenty-foot seas of a freezing November gale eating at their stern. But now they are here. Safe and sound. With a slammer trip of cod aboard.

  The former public defender opens the hatch on the main fish hold. He is wearing a thick, charcoal fisherman’s sweater and his yellow foul weather overalls, streaked with fish guts and blood. Flecks of snow swirl over the boat in the sharp northeast wind. “We going to be rich or what, Kenny?”

  The fish buyer looks into the hold. It is nearly packed to the deck beams with ice and fresh cod. “Yeah, you can buy the moon. This must be your lucky day, Mo. DHL guy came this morning. You got a package in my office. You’re not going to believe this. The tracking label says it came from Vietnam.”

  His father flashes him a squinty-eyed look.

  He shrugs.

  “Well, what are you waiting for?”

  A minute later he is walking down the wharf with a package the size of a shoebox in his hands. He can see his father watching him, but not watching him, as he and Tio Tommy supervise the lumpers unloading gray totes of ice and cod. So he walks away from the Rosa Lee to be alone with his hopes and fears. When he gets to the end of the wharf, he drops down on a pile of nets. Sits and looks at the harbor, the hurricane dike. The snow is coming thicker, starting to stick on the wharf, the boats, the rigging as he tears at the thick cardboard of the box.

  Inside the cardboard, beneath the tissue paper that carries away in the wind, is a rectangular box about the size and weight of a brick, covered
in light green silk. He pushes open the small ivory clasps. Inside there is something wrapped like a mummy in more tissue paper.

  As he peels it away, he sees a face, then a torso, and finally legs. They are folded in the lotus position. It is a statue. Made of some kind of green stone, maybe jade. The Buddha. Its belly is round and full. And so is the chest. The breasts of an earth mother. The eyes almost sparkle in this face that spreads with a broad smile.

  He is holding the Buddha in his left hand, trying to remember what it was that Brandy and Delta told Tuki about being old souls, about what old souls know, when his eyes see something that looks like it may be a picture. It is lodged in the bottom of the silk-covered box.

  When he pries it out with his fingernails, he recognizes the rich colors of a Polaroid snapshot. There are a man and a woman in the picture. They are dressed in khaki shorts and white polo shirts, standing in front of a large stone pagoda. The man is tall, slender, black. He looks like Lou Gossett Jr. The person beside him is Tuki. Her hair is tied up on top of her head in a gold and black fountain of curls. She is holding the little green statue of Buddha in front of her in both hands like an offering. And she is grinning, huge, just like the man.