Bangkok Knights

by Collin Piprell

  Yet there he was—there she was—and he’d introduced her to most of us as “Little Miss Thirty-seven, here, from Smokin’ Sal’ s Saloon: ain’t she a beauty?” You had to suspect he was relatively serious about her, as well, or he probably wouldn’t have bothered introducing her at all.

  I didn’t hear anyone else refer to her as “#37”. In fact, nobody said much of anything to her — she didn’t speak English, not beyond the most basic Bargirl English, anyway, and she didn’t come across as a real conversationalist in any case, which was maybe not too surprising, under the circumstances.

  She was more than three feet tall, and she didn’t have a flat head, even though her forehead did slope back pretty radically before it disappeared into her bangs. Still, you had to think Dexy had found his ideal woman, the way he was carrying on.

  She did look sort of cute, if you didn’t look too closely. She wore a frilly white blouse tucked neady into a short denim skirt and her hair was tied back in a pony-tail with a big white bow ribbon. She could’ve passed for a student, if you ignored the metallic sparkle stuck all over her eyelids and the spike heels with the straps crossed over and coming halfway up her calves. And if you didn’t look too closely at her face.

  Dexy was telling us about Thai women and dentists, and other mysteries of this life. “These Thai dentists don’t know their business, and that’s a plain fact. I send my little buddy, here, on three visits to this dentist. Three. He X-rays her, stuffs her mouth with plaster and makes a kind of statue of the inside of her mouth she gets to take home, and then charges me just about as much as Smokin’ Sal’s take-away fee. I ask you. And then he tells me there’s nothing wrong with her bite. Now, you don’t gotta go to dentist school to know that’s just plain bullshit.

  “Half the girls in Thailand have bad bites, if you want to know the truth.”

  Dexy was down on girls who ground their teeth at night.

  “I can’t sleep. And it makes me nervous. Goddammit. Why don’t they get their teeth fixed? Of course then you got the dentists, they don’t know their business — don’t know a bad bite from their own arse end.”

  I was no dentist, myself, and no psychiatrist either, but I had an idea #37’s problem might lie elsewhere. I’d been watching her while Dexy told us how it was, and she’d been chewing ice cubes — crunching them right up like a little gravel crusher. Crunch, crunch, crunch. All the while she wore an expression of cold, blank intensity on her face that chilled you more than the remorseless ice-cube chewing. I wasn’t the only one that noticed; it was hard not to notice. She chewed up the ice from her orange soda, and then she fished the ice out of Dexy’s whiskey and processed that, too.

  N umber Thirty-Seven came out of her shell for a moment to say something to Big Toy, who then served the kid up a bowl of fresh ice-cubes. Right away, she was at them like they were her favorite khanom, the tastiest candies you could ever imagine. No, that’s not quite right, because she didn’t look like she was enjoying them. But she didn’ t stop, except now and then, when Dexy would turn to her and ask “Ain’t that right, you little honey?” and she’d show him a tight smile that was as warm as ice, as pleasant as grinding teeth.

  I thought I could hear Eddie’s teeth grinding, as well, though it might’ve only been my imagination. He’d been listening to Dexy’s exposition in spite of himself. Given his attitude towards this expert on oilrigs and women, you’d have expected to find Eddie at the far end of the room; but there he was, practically hanging on Dexy’s every word. It was probably the same impulse that leads a person to probe a sore tooth, no matter how much you know it’s going to hurt.

  Eddie said something to #37 in Thai, asked where she was from, where her family was. That stopped her for a minute, this farang speaking Thai and asking her nice questions, polite as can be, just like she was a person and everything. For a minute she did seem like a little kid; she stopped chewing ice and gave Eddie what could’ ve passed for a real smile, though it was kind of sad-looking. Only for a moment. Then she glanced at Dexy and recollected herself.

  “Sexy man,” she said to Eddie, and sniggered. Her smile had turned purely ugly.

  ”Hey. What’d you say to her? Huh?” Dexy appeared consternated altogether out of proportion to the circumstances. I guess it was because he felt at a disadvantage, not speaking more than the most basic Cathouse Thai.

  “Nothing,” replied Eddie, with a smirk as ugly in its own way as #37’s smile. “Only telling her what a prince you were; what’d you think?”

  Dexy took a long, hard look at Eddie, and momentarily the oilman’s bluff, hearty persona dropped away, and you caught a glimpse of something starkly dangerous. Then he roared with laughter, and turned back to the bar. “Big Toy, let’s have a drink, goddammit; orange pop for my friend, here, another one of these here for me, and another tequila for yourself. And you better give Eddie a beer.”

  He turned around again, but Eddie had already moved away to the other end of the room, where Leary was talking to some guys.

  “Oh, well, yeah. Just a couple, you know,” Leary was saying. “Gosh-darned things hardly cost anything at all, anyway. Little bit of food, some clothes. Like that. Maybe look after their schooling.”

  Seemed he was talking about kids — slum children who’d been orphaned or else just abandoned. Some kind of foster-parent program that Nancy had gotten involved with. She’d had Leary convince Doc he should host a special night at Boon Doc’s to help her off-load some needy children. Doc had said he would, sort of in lieu of taking on a kid or two himself, since it was already all he could do to maintain his own extended association of perennially needy kinfolk.

  But Doc still hadn’t turned up, and Leary had probably recognized that soon everybody would be long beyond thinking about child adoption, they were having such a good time. So he’d broached the subject himself, a fairly heroic action for this notoriously voluble advocate of Leary’s Law.

  Leary had already been embarrassed by his own admission that he and Nancy were sponsoring two of these waifs. Embarrassed by his embarrassment, then, he compensated by broadcasting the following directive in his best Moses voice, scowling at his audience all the while: “You all want to do your bit, and help out, here. Darn it These kids got every right to a friggin’ life just like you do, and all they need is some of your spare change; it’ll make the difference between a life worth living and years of nothing but misery. C’ mon. Gosh, you don’t even need to have them underfoot; all you have to do is sign one of these little papers, here, and write a pitiful little check once a month. Or you can do it all in one lump sum — it’s hardly anything at all—and set up a kind of trust for the tyke, and not be bothered any more. Here — we got lots of these papers behind the bar, here. C’mon, gosh-darn it.”

  Leary had turned quite florid with his own eloquence, and he was sweating profusely. He grabbed a fresh drink and rubbed the icy glass back and forth across his fevered brow before downing it in one go and slamming it back on the bar. He wiped at his face with a hanky and glared at everybody within range.

  Meanwhile, Dexy had sashayed over to see what was happening.

  Leary pointed a finger at him and boomed, “Dexy, you’re going to take one of these kids, you hear me? Nothing else you ever done in your life is any credit to you, you got to be the first to admit that. Just this once you’re gonna do the right thing.”

  “You can go to hell, old buddy. I got enough on my plate without taking care of some rug-rat You want to have kids, a bunch of rug-rats, then you go ahead. But you should have your own. You adopt one of these here poor trash, you don’t know what you’re getting. Yuh know what I mean? They could be sick, and you might not know it. It could be the genes, you know. They could have genes — bad ones, I mean.”

  This time I was sure I could hear Eddie grinding his teeth.

  “You can look on it like a kind of tax,” Leary persisted. “It’s not like you gotta bring’ em home with you—they got other people to look after the
m. No, you just cough up a little bit of money, and that’s all; then you can sit back and collect all the good gosh-darned karma and never change a diaper or nothing. It’s not like it’s going to bust you, Dexworth. You spend more’n that on friggin’ beer, in a good month.”

  Dexy spoke, and you suddenly got a vision of what it would’ve been like if two Moseses had come down from the mountain. “Taxes? You’re talkin’ to me about taxes! I pay more taxes on whiskey and beer in a month than your average Thai pays in income taxes in a goddammed year. Don’t talk to me about taxes. You know how much tax there is on a bottle of beer in this country?”

  “Friggin’ right — they should build a monument to you, Dexy. Build friggin’ public monuments to the lot of us, the amount of tax we’re paying, the booze we take care of.” Leary didn’t usually wax sarcastic, but this was one of those times, probably.

  Dexy didn’t notice, though. Caught up, no doubt, in a fit of altruistic fervor, he ordered a round for the house, thereby adding significantly to both the government coffers and the general welfare, according to his latest insight.

  “And all the money you give your girls, Dexy — I guess that’s another principled attempt to redistribute the wealth, right? Out of the goodness of your heart and all?” Now Eddie was trying his hand at sarcasm, though maybe a shade heavy-handedly.

  Leary took up the line of attack anyway: “Friggin’ right. The amount of money you lay out only on women in your month off you could put three kids through university, here in Thailand.”

  “Listen here,” Dexy demanded. “You can’t take care of ‘em all, can you? It’s just like all the beggars everywhere. It don’t do no good to give ‘em anything. And it’s the same with these slum kids you’re talking about. You start giving them money, you’re just encouraging them, yuh know what I mean? They’ll just keep makingmore ‘n’ more little kids and leaving them on doorsteps, and they won’ t give a hoot because they’ 11 know people like you’ s going to take care of them, so no problem, right? Next thing you know, the place is crawling with these poor trash folk, they don’t know how to look after themselves, can’t do a lick of work, only make more babies.

  “Same thing back Stateside, these days. Now my man Reagan’s leaving, God knows what’s going to happen, you get some liberal do-gooder in there.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Dexy hastened to assure the assembly. “Leary here is a working man just like you and me, got his head screwed on straight. But he’s hooked up with this lady — none finer, don’t get me wrong — but Nancy’s basically a do-gooder, like a lot of these broads. You’re not careful, you’re trying to keep them sweet, they’ll have you doing all sorts of damn-fool things.

  “Now don’t get me wrong, Leary — you know I got every respect for you, but that’ s the way I feel. It’s what happens when you listen to these broads. Ladies.”

  Dexy had special license to speak to Leary this way, I guess. And who knows? Maybe Leary didn’t think what Dexy had said was utter crap, though of course it was.

  All you’ d have had to do was ask Eddie; he was back probing at the tooth, figuratively speaking, picking at the wound, clearly wanting to say something himself and at the same time not wanting to say it. Once again, however, prudence lost out.

  “What about you, Dexy? Did your folks leave you on a doorstep? I’ll bet they did; at least if they had any sense they did. And I’ll bet they never looked back.”

  A couple of the guys laughed, and then they stopped. You could see something was wrong. Dexy wasn’t laughing — here he’d just been sorely insulted, and he wasn’t laughing. Nor was he coming back with twice as good as he’d received. Leary hadn’ t laughed either, in fact, his face was mostly registering grim concern.

  Dexy had gone entirely expressionless, quiet. Then he spoke. “I’ve had just about enough of you,” he said as, very deliberately, he reached out and dumped his glass of whiskey and soda over Eddie’s head.

  Eddie didn’t even move. He seemed spellbound as the whiskey dripped down through his hair. Then he swung at Dexy.

  Eddie must’ve confused right with might. He did make a serious error in judgment, anyway. For not only was Dexy without peer as a cusser and profaner of all things sacred, he turned out to be more than just okay as a streetfighter. Leary made a move to intervene, and I thought about making a move, but the whole thing was over in a matter of seconds. Eddie had taken a left to the jaw, a piledriver right to the midsection, and an uppercut to the face as he was doubling up in the way one tends to do under those circumstances.

  Leary stepped in to veto any further hostilities as Eddie was sliding down the front of the bar, taking a bar-stool with him, and just as Dexy was lifting a boot As Leary explained later, in Dexy’s defense, Dexy wasn’t really going to put the boot in; it was only reflex. If Dexy had really wanted to hurt Eddie, after all, he wouldn’t have been as gentle as he’d been from the outset

  And after all it was Dexy who saved Eddie from #37’s attack. At some point during the altercation, this latter item had appeared behind Dexy, so interested she’d left off crunching ice cubes, and when Eddie went down, she went right in, a spike heel raised high with lethal intent, eyes glittering with vicious excitement. Dexy, one arm still in Leary’ s grip, grabbed her with his free hand and yanked her back. #37’s laugh was like fingernails on a blackboard, and hectic spots of red stood out in her cheeks.

  But you couldn’t really have described Eddie as a serious contender, even if you left #37 out of the equation. And this should have been no surprise to Eddie; after all, Dexy had made his way in life through the ranks of oilrig roughnecks and barroom brawlers on three continents, while Eddie had spent the last several years mostly finding ways to avoid having to paint the attic of the Cheri-Tone Guesthouse and making notes towards the Great Expatriate Novel.

  The party wound down quickly from this point. Dexy had to give #37 a little slap to bring her around to what passed for her senses. Then he offered Eddie his hand, but Eddie was in an unforgiving mood.

  Dexy and his friend left without adopting any slum kids. Dexy had been right — he did have enough on his plate already, at least if he was planning on any further association with the intriguing Miss Thirty-seven from Smokin’ Sal’s Saloon.

  Eddie didn’t adopt anybody, either, but he’d been pretty well distracted by the events of that evening, and could probably be forgiven if his earlier intention to take on a foster child was forgotten in the course of things.

  Several of us did allow Leary to browbeat us into doing good, however, and between us we signed up for any number of waifs. So the evening was a fair success, at least in that respect.

  And Sue-wang seemed inseparable from a nice young man in the import-export trade, which was nice for her. Nid and Noi, on the other hand, were both sick, taking it in turns to monopolize the toilet, and this was making life somewhat uncomfortable for the rest of us.

  Keeow and Boom had both disappeared.

  Big Toy was awash in tequila, and she’d had to turn over the bridge, to relinquish command of the cash to Dinky Toy, who resented this mightily, since she’d grown quite fond of a fellow from the Aussie Embassy who’d wandered in off the street, and it was very hard to concentrate on these two matters of business at the same time.

  I left at 1:00.

  Doc never did show up, which everyone agreed was very strange.

  III

  “You gotta understand Dexy’s position.” Or so Leary was trying to claim.

  It was a week after the Orphan Party, and I’d dropped in at Boon Doc’s to see how things were going. The joint was empty. There was Leary, Big Toy, Dinky Toy, and myself. A couple of the other girls were curled up asleep in the booths along the wall.

  “Dexy was abandoned by his momma, though you don’t have to tell him I told you so. But she didn’t leave him on no doorstep; she left him up an alley behind some trash cans to die. Somebody found him there; heard him crying.”

  Leary wiped at the sweat o
n his face and cast a black look in the direction of the air-conditioner that didn’t. “Abandoned by his momma, and he never knew who his poppa was. It’s okay to call some guys a bastard, they know it’s only a word, but Dexy grew up with a kind of a chip on his shoulder, and there’s many a boy and there’s many a man never called him a bastard twice.

  “Till he struck off outa there to get his first oil job — he was just thirteen — he was nothing but ‘poor white trash’, in that little town he came from. Well, he never went back to that town, after he heard his adopted nanny died, and he never took kindly to anybody suggesting he don’t have folks like anybody else. Dexy’s a proud man.

  “Anyway, he’s sorry he roughed Eddie up the way he did. He doesn’ t think the lad’ s a bad guy; you just have to be careful what you say to old Dexy, sometimes.

  “And speak of the devil...”

  Sure enough, the door to the street had opened, and there was good old Dexy, though he didn’t appear to be the same proud man Leary had only just then described. He had a large gauze dressing stuck to his face, and he was walking very carefully, like he was carrying a rattlesnake in his pocket, maybe, and he figured it was best not disturbed. All in all, Dexy was considerably more subdued than was his wont. He got up on a barstool and ordered a drink; he sat there silent, in no way at all his usual ebullient self.

  “What happened to youT Leary finally asked. “Gosh. Last I remember, you whupped the other guy.”

  “And I was gonna send her to hair-dressing school.” Dexy’s voice had the hollow ring of a man whose last illusions had been cruelly shattered. “You can never trust a woman,” he added, his voice regaining some of its old timbre, though it still bespoke a man who’d had confirmed his worst suspicions about Life, and Women and Everything.

  “A woman?” Leary was taken aback. “What’re you talking about?”