By the time I arrived, though, it had already been conceded there was no contest on the been-there-done-that front, and our friendly neighborhood guru was on a different tack.
“Oh, yeah,” Eddie said, waving a smoldering cheroot expansively, and swigging from a bottle of Singha. “You’ve got to have, I figure, maybe thirty-five units, minimum, to make a go of it.
‘Units’? I asked myself. Did he mean ‘rooms’? If you’d wanted to give me two-to-one odds, I’d have bet you Eddie didn’t even know how many rooms there were in the Cheri-Tone, much less how many units.
“That way you get the volume of peak-season trade you need as a hedge against the ‘off season, you know what I mean?”
Maybe they did, but I reckoned he was talking through his hat, and looking at Lek’s face, you had to think she agreed. ‘Units’ and ‘volumes of trade*. Eddie knew about how much return you got on an empty Singha beer botde, but after that his interest in business waned considerably.
The next thing I knew, however, I was witness to an exchange between Eddie, Wolfe, a barefoot investment counselor from Sydney, and a shaven-headed accountant from Denver that was couched in terms so commercially esoteric as to confound me altogether. Olga simply stared, enthralled; she kept leaning forward attentively, emitting the occasional “Marvelous!” and thereby inciting Eddie to ever new heights of flim-flammery. He was even saying things like ‘bottom line’ and ‘go for it’. It was as though some Yuppie demon had taken possession of him. It was frightening. And it was funny — Eddie had been a friend of mine for years, but it was only that night that I learned he’d done degrees in Commerce and Economics, and had worked as an investment consultant in Pittsburgh before coming out to the Far East Unbelievable.
You could see Eddie’s hangover was very much a thing of the past, by that point Or, more accurately, it had only been deferred. Lek would make sure it reappeared with a vengeance the next day, if I read the situation correctly. Right at that moment Eddie was in full flight, however. He had by now fully established his status as a dab hand at this business of Existence, and as a guru of no small talent. He even went so far as to introduce Olga to his Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry tapes. The thoroughly tanned Nordic nymph had never heard of either of these gentlemen before, but she immediately recognized them as artists of some stature. As a reward for her perspicacity, Eddie was going to teach her to dance the Twist to the tune of “Maybelline”.
But suddenly everything went black, and the music died. Then Lek’s disembodied voice announced a fuse must’ve blown, and would Eddie please see to it? Somehow, a cement bench had found its way out onto the patio and Eddie almost broke his jesus leg, as he put it
When I dropped around a couple of days later, Olga and Wolfe were no longer at the Cheri-Tone. Regretfully, of course, Eddie had had to inform them that the place was fully booked and that their room had been reserved for an old and favored guest. He said he could place them in a very nice guesthouse over on KhaoSan Road, if they liked.
Just then my heart gave a little leap; I heard “Marrr-velous!” articulated as by a furry oboe, and there was that familiar old fuzzing and fizzing deep inside.
“Blasted bird ! Auk!” Nixon added in his normal voice.
“You said it,” Eddie replied. Then Lek called and he had to go inside.
I went over to Nixon and said: “What’s the bottom line? Eh, Nixon? What’s the bottom line? Cmon. What’s the bottom line?”
“Auk!” he answered, somewhat enigmatically.
SNAPSHOTS
There was a sudden sharp report like a gunshot, as the minivan we had come in backfired and left. I winced, and winced again as the boat motor started up, the boatman racing the big engine, impatient to be gone.
We piled into the long-tail boat off the old wooden pier, the six of us. Bags and backpacks had already been stowed under a tarp up in the bow. Mr. Macho was still going on about white-water canoeing in Canada. Heady adventure it was, real hot stuff. Exactly what I needed, what with a whole two hours sleep behind me, and what with feeling as though somebody had just shot Dead Man’s Rapids using my skull for a boat. Mekhong — Thai whiskey — is okay if you mix it with lots of soda and ice. It’s okay, that is, as long as you don’t drink too much of it. And as long as you don’t first lay down a few large Singha beers as a foundation for the whiskey.
“Oh, yeah. No problem. As steady as a church, is this boat.” Mr. Macho felt it was incumbent on him to reassure the ladies. Maybe me too, since an innocent bystander could’ve been forgiven for thinking I was sea-sick even though the boat wasn’ t moving yet.
About thirty-five feet long and narrow, gaily painted yellow, orange, and blue, the craft swept up to a high pointed wooden prow, the beak of some exotic river bird out of Thai mythology. In the stern, where the boatman sat on a raised bench to one side holding the tiller, there was a diesel truck engine mounted at an angle, the long steel propeller shaft trailing behind. Engine and prop could be tilted and swung with ease when it was necessary to clear floating water hyacinth or other obstructions. The long-tail boats on the Chao Phraya River, back in Bangkok, were usually covered with canvas awnings which ran their length; this one, however, was open. Great, I thought, looking up, going glower to glower against the dark monsoon sky: five hours in an open boat in the rainy season with a gargantuan hangover. And Mr. Macho.
Besides Mr. Macho, the Australian world traveler, there were two girls in their twenties, a married couple from the States, and me. Everyone except the boatman and myself were on vacation. The boatman, of course, was driving the boat, while I was mostly wishing I was back in Chiangmai sleeping off the previous night’s indiscretions. But I’d had some time and I’d booked this boat-ride on the River Kok, figuring I could get some extra local color en route to my appointment next day. I was going to talk to people in a hamlet on the Mekong, near where the borders of Laos, Burma, and Thailand came together. Khun Sa, the notorious opium warlord and commander of the so-called Shan State Army, had reportedly put prices on the heads of Americans and their dependents living in Chiangmai — at least on those in any way connected with drug enforcement Thai officials, with the help of American agents, had just grabbed off about half a ton of best quality No.4 heroin, and Khun Sa was unhappy. Money aside, there was the small matter of face; the authorities had done some amount of crowing in public about their big bust, and the local papers were full of it. So I was in the Golden Triangle to get some background for a story I wanted to write. A story I had wanted to write. Just at that moment I didn’t want to do anything except maybe toss lunch over the side and then sleep for a week. To tell the truth, I wouldn’t have minded seeing Mr. Macho get eaten by a crocodile as well, before I went to sleep, but I guessed crocodiles were pretty rare items in these waters, these days.
It seemed we were to travel in convoy. Another long-tail boat, more crowded than ours, was loaded and ready to go. They angled out into the current first, taking the lead. I noticed they had an armed and uniformed guard riding shotgun, but if he was meant to reassure us, I didn’t find it very reassuring. Why wasn’t there another soldier in our boat? Anyway, if we ran into bandits, there were going to be more than one of them, and you could bet they wouldn’ t be carrying what looked to me at a distance like a WW II-vintage M-2 rifle. They’d come much better equipped than that. Realistically speaking, of course, there was a very small chance of any such encounter. But there you had it—hangovers always made me morbid.
I didn’t bruit these thoughts about, and no one would’ve heard me if I had, sprawled the way I was in the bottom of the boat down by the boatman on a sheet of polyethylene, cocooned in the racket from the engine. The other passengers were up near the bow, to all appearances engrossed in each other’s company. Mr. Macho was evidently still the center of things, much as he had been on the bus. He was all extravagant gesture, tanned skin, and laughing white teeth. In part, he was attired in the standard uniform of a Southeast-Asian backpack traveler: baggy cotton trous
ers, probably from India, and an embroidered Shan State shoulder bag. On top, however, next to his bare skin, he wore a studded leather vest which you would’ve thought was extremely uncomfortable in that weather. In a final triumph of style over comfort, he sported lizard-skin boots with a boot knife in a hidden sheath. He’d pulled the knife, with studied nonchalance, when one of the girls had had to cut a thong on her pack. He also wore aviator sunglasses with mirrored lenses.
“Well, yeah; I was traveling with this German sheila,” he’d told the ladies on the bus, “but I left her in Kathmandu.” The way he said this, he wanted you to know he’d left a lot of sheilas in a lot of far-out places, and probably most of them were still combing the world trying to find him again.
Oh, yeah, he’d been into Burma overland from Thailand with a laisser-passer from an insurgent army; he’d been white-water canoeing in Canada; he’d lived with the estranged wife of an Italian czar of industry, floating about the ‘Med’ on a fifty-foot motor yacht until it turned out there was no more money for fuel and his ladyfriend was going to be broke flatter than the dregs of yesterday’s beer until she got her divorce, but he wasn’t going to hang around when there was so much world out there, so many things to do. Too right, he’d said, sliding his newly-polished sunglasses back on with both hands and grinning in the way healthy young adventurers grin when they are impressing young ladies. Or maybe I just envied him his vitality, that muggy grey day in August.
“Been there, done that,” Wife had said admiringly.
“How many times have you had the clap?” asked the Libber. The Libber was at least as fascinated with Mr. Macho as were Wife and the Braless Wonder, the Libber’s Scottish traveling companion. Only her interest, she’d have had you believe, was less admiring, perhaps more that of the entomologist confronted with an intriguing species of insect.
The lad’s peregrinatory accomplishments were inspiring an entirely ingenuous wonder in BW, on the other hand. Actually, if Ihadn’t been lying in the bilge waiting to die, I might well have been led into a contest of checkered histories, BW was that tempting a morsel of maidenly charm, what with her dewy golden skin and nipples sticking out everywhere. This was not even to mention the arm-holes in her tank-top, teasing windows on a fine musky world of heavy swells and smooth curves. And there were her beautiful big gray eyes, as well, great pools of willingness-to-believe-anything you wanted to drown yourself in.
No matter how much Wife had lavished admiration on Mr. Macho, Husband had talked with quiet enthusiasm of photography the whole way to the boat landing. He’d seemed to direct his conversation to the assembly at large, though I’d been the only one who’d even pretended to listen.
“I have just the one lens,” he’d said, at least twice. “This is it, you see; it’s a 35-200 mm. That’s all the range you need for handheld photography. Any more than 200 mm., you should have a tripod. Of course, sometimes I could wish I had a wider angle, but...”
“Did you hear that, dear? Wife had interrupted. “Our friend has been to China; he went in through Tibet. Isn’t that something?”
Husband had nodded. “We could’ve gone to China, sweetheart,” he said in mild tones, “but you didn’ t want to. You said it was still too uncomfortable to travel there. Too primitive.”
He’d turned back to me and gone on: “Of course a zoom doesn’t really give you first-class images, but it’s plenty good enough for most purposes.”
“No, no,” Mr. Macho was protesting, taking off his sunglasses so the Libber could see how big and round and honest his eyes were. “She wasn’t a prostitute. A hooker? Oh, no. This was China. This sheila was a government official. But still and all, if we’d been caught at it... This was China, you know.”
“And it’s a bit slow,” Husband went on. “All zooms are slower than your fixed focal-length lenses, of course. But no problem.” He rummaged in a bulging pocket on his camera bag, pulling out boxes of film. “See? 200 ASA. 400 ASA. With the fast films, these days, you can get good color saturation, very adequate resolution even at 400 ASA. In this kind of overcast, this rainy-season weather like today, you have to use at least 200 ASA film if you want results with a zoom lens. At longer focal lengths, anyway.”
Husband’s camera was in his lap, the strap around his neck. He held the erect zoom in one hand as he dabbed and blew at the lens.
Wife, whom I would’ve sworn hadn’t been listening at all, had cut in with, “Two-hundred ASA, schmoo-hundred ASA. It all comes out the same, once my husband gets his hands on it. He carries that big bag around and spends all that money for what? I tell him he’d do better to buy a little automatic like yours.” She looked at Mr. Macho.
“Idiot-proof?” suggested the Libber, with a sweet smile for the Australian hunk.
“What kind of boat is it going to be?” BW had asked Mr. Macho. “I hope it’s safe; I’m not a very good swimmer. Have you been on this trip before?”
No, he had not, Mr. Macho had disclaimed modesty, but he had been white-water canoeing in Canada, and he proceeded to tell us about this at length.
And now we were on the river. I tried closing my eyes and resting my head against the hull. The vibration from the motor rattled my teeth and kind of distracted me from my despair for a while, but I didn’t really sleep. A fine drizzle had been falling for some minutes, cooling my fevered brow. Opening my eyes, I was greeted with the sight of Husband and Wife in hooded rubber jackets. Who, I asked myself, would travel in the tropics with rubber anoraks? Husband and Wife, obviously, for there they were. But it would be hotter and wetter inside the jackets than it was outside. I broke into a sweat just thinking about it. Prepared for anything, was Husband. Earlier, I ‘d noticed a combination digital watch-compass on his wrist I bet myself he’d been a Boy Scout.
From my vantage point in the bottom of the boat, all I could see were the tops of jungled hills going by on either side. My companions evidently were finding much to comment on, however; I could see them pointing and jawing away excitedly from time to time. All I wanted to know about was if someone spotted a nice hotel with a nice dry bed. You could’ ve kept your herds of elephants or hill tribe villages or whatever it was that was enjoying everyone’ s attention.
The miserable, muggy overcast weighed heavy, together with the assorted physical and psychical vestiges of the previous night’s booze-up. When I thought about bandit attacks, for example, or when I felt the passing urge to engage Mr. Macho in some duel of words, I experienced mild flashes of dread, rather like the premonition I’d had the night before when I’d switched from beer to Mekhong. I wanted to be out of the boat, on the road or, even better, in a hotel. Asleep. I’d already had enough of this ship of fools, our impassive boatman at the tiller, director of our destiny along this wild and remote stream, around this bend and the next one, our fate in his hands and the river’s for hours to come. I had the feeling, mind you, that if I could sleep for even a few minutes, all this would pass, and I would start to enjoy the trip, like I was supposed to.
As I was musing thusly, I was seized by a sudden surge of alarm at the sight of the Libber getting up and charging towards me.
In fact, she was only clambering back to stand over me and scream at the boatman. He clearly didn’t understand, or couldn’t hear, a thing she said, but she kept jabbing a finger at the shore, her whole manner proclaiming a call of nature which demanded an answer without much delay. The engine throttled down and we put in to a spot where a little stream tributary trickled down through a cut in the steep bushy bank. What an excellent place for an ambush, I thought
Silence bellowed as the boatman switched off the diesel; I felt suddenly exposed, vulnerable, my comfortable shell of high-decibel sound gone. I sat up and stretched. It occurred to me I could use a leak, myself, and I tottered up to the bow to drop down onto the sand.
“Are there any snakes?” Wife asked Mr. Macho.
“You just be sure you shuffle your feet along — make lots of noise. Snakes are more afraid of you than
you are of them.”
“There was a beautiful snake in the shower at this bungalow we stayed in down south,” said BW. “Really brightly colored. A lovely pattern.”
“I killed it with a stick,” said the Libber.
The Libber was somewhere ahead of me as I made my way up the little ravine, refusing to shuffle, looking for a place to pee that would disturb neither snakes nor fellow travelers.
“I’m going over here,” hollered the Libber, though I was pretty sure this wasn’t an invitation.
When I got back to the boat, Husband was speaking; this time, it looked like, he held the attention of one and all.
“But you don’t think there’s any real danger, do you?” asked BW, her fine sandy-blonde hair blowing loose across her face, failing to hide her huge gray eyes. “Thailand is supposed to be really safe.”
“Oh, it is,” said Wife. “He’s just being silly.”
Using his tongue, Mr. Macho was rolling a dead, half-smoked cigarillo back and forth between his lips, something he must’ve seen in a movie somewhere. “It can happen, mind you. They wouldn’t jump us here, though; how would they know we were going to land exactly here? No, they’d come out with boats, or they’d think of something to draw us ashore.”
”What would you do if bandits did stop us?” said BW.
“Oh, I’d hand over whatever they asked for, I expect.” Mr. Macho managed to make this admission seem like a tough stance. Maybe it was the cigarillo.
“That’s one thing,” he continued. “Out here, they don’t put the same value on human life. They could kill you just because you looked at them wrong. Or just because you didn’t have enough money to give them.”
“What?”
“Too right Loss of face. These boys’ll kill you as soon as look at you, if they think they have to save face.
“I always keep about 300 baht out where it’s easy to get at. But you see this belt, here?” He was wearing a broad leather belt It looked like elephant hide. “I’ve got a couple thousand baht and $700 zipped up in this here.” He gave BW a big slow wink and then relit his cigarillo, dragging a lungful of smoke and exhaling it without removing the butt from his lips. “And there’s more in here,” he added, tapping the same boot that concealed his knife.
Bangkok Knights Page 9