Bangkok Knights

by Collin Piprell

  Enlightenment abruptly dawned. Ann reared back and shrieked: “V.D.? You mean he has V.D.!?”

  “Urn,” he said. “Yes. Rather.”

  Everyone in Skipjacks was by now taking a certain amount of interest in the conversation.

  “V.D?” she went on in a similar vein, the decibel level rising slightly, if anything. It was as though she hoped she’d misunderstood, and what Ronald really had was some V.O. or a V2, or something. But such was not the case.

  “Well, he didn’t get it from me! I don’t have V.D.,” she hollered quite categorically, still leaving open the possibility, one had to understand, that she might have had some V.O.

  I offered a sickly smile to our audience, and indicated to one of the girls we could probably use some more beer.

  There were at least two gentlemen in there, I noted, who had edged closer and who were now taking a very intently serious interest in the proceedings. Chances are they were rooting for it to be V.O. that she had.

  Having no first-hand knowledge of these matters, and frankly referring only to hearsay, I suggested that you couldn’t always tell; I meant to say there weren’t always symptoms. You know — Typhoid Mary, and all that.

  After we’d calmed her down a bit, talking softly and buying her colas, she agreed maybe she should check with a doctor. But did Ronald realize how expensive medical advice was? Not to mention rent and clothing and getting enough to eat. Ann decided she’d better send him another letter posthaste and get a few things sorted out.

  In the spirit of good fellowship, and feeling somewhat responsible, on Ronald’s behalf, for the demure Miss Ann with the legs like a racehorse, we helped her compose the draft communication. Not being experienced scribes, we really made only a few suggestions; this rough effort was to go to Mu at Fancy That for whatever refinements and embellishments she would deem advisable.

  Ann dictated the general outlines of what she needed, while Eddie and I collaborated on rendering this in English prose. First of all, Ronald had to realize that she loved him too much, even if he was sick with a foul disease. (Eddie must take credit for the phrase ‘foul disease’.) Furthermore, he should know that she missed him and hoped he’d get better soon, and she was going to kill him when she saw him again. It had to be one of those Shaky Jake’s girls that was responsible for his present delicate condition, and she believed this would show him the error of his ways and the value of constancy. (Eddie told me ‘delicate condition’ was used conventionally to refer to pregnancy; I said I didn’t care, I liked the phrase, and Ronald would know what we meant, anyway.) For Ann’s part, constancy was an expensive virtue, and medical bills were, too. Expensive, that is. Knowing that Ronald was such a generous, not to say gullible, dear sweet big nitwit, it went without saying that his next letter to her should include negotiable earnest of his affections, and tangible evidence his sweet words were not just sweet words, after all.

  We all three of us went on in this way for some time, with Eddie even trying his hand at singing some romantic doggerel of his own composition before it was over.

  Given the number of drinks we went through before appending “Love you more than words can pay” to the draft of Ann’s letter, it might not have been surprising if this billet-doux included errors of both content and intent, not to mention spelling mistakes and avant-garde syntax.

  No problem, however; Eddie and I could wend our bleary ways home with easy conscience, knowing that Mu the Scribe would edit the manuscript ere it winged its way to Riyadh. Ronald would get the message. Or so we hoped.

  LEARY’S EXORCISM

  “Ghosts? Well, I’m not exactly going to say I don’t believe in them. No, there are stranger darn things in this life, I can tell you. That’s right. Gosh. You only have to look back Stateside; I can tell you stories from Alabama, never mind your Far Friggin’ East.”

  Leary normally seasoned his talk with salt (gosh) and pepper (darn), reserving the mustard (frigging) for especially pungent observations. At the same time, however, he was a sucker for a nicely alliterative turn of phrase, and might occasionally add a friggin’ on purely stylistic grounds.

  “Anyhow, I don’t care if there are no ghosts or not; as long as Nance believes there are ghosts it amounts to the same thing, because I ain’t gonna get any gosh-darned sleep.”

  Leary and his fiancee Nancy had recently moved into a lovely house on a quiet soi off Sukhumvit Road. They liked almost everything about the place: it was bright and airy; it combined the charm of traditional Thai teak architecture with all the modern conveniences, such as an electric oven big enough for Thanksgiving turkeys and air-conditioning efficient enough to have Nancy complaining about the cold all the time. They had a large garden, complete with enough greenery to hide a small herd of elephants and maybe a band of communist insurgents, as well.

  Leary was pretty sure there were no elephants or insurgents, he told us, but there might be things more annoying than that at large. They ‘d been in the house for about a month when they started hearing peculiar noises, usually late in the evening. First, there had been soft creaks and moans—the kind of thing Leary had put down to wind and the natural settling of a wooden building in Bangkok. Nancy hadn’t been entirely convinced. Singaporean Chinese, she shared with many people in Asia a healthy respect for the spirits of the departed.

  Then, one night, they heard footsteps on the stairway. Leary had to agree with Nancy on this point — there had been footsteps, no question. And when he went out to check, expecting to find the maid or, at worst, a burglar, he found nothing. He went into the maid’s room and determined that she’d been asleep. He went all through the house and went out into the yard to check on Dung, the dog, who’d also been asleep. Nary a sound did he hear, nor an intruder did he see. He led old Dung all around, and Dung saw nothing worth remarking upon, either. By the time he went back to bed, he’d almost convinced himself it’d been their imaginations; something that Nancy had dreamed up which he’d then fallen victim to because of sleepiness and the power of suggestion.

  Later that same night, they’d been awakened by the sound of a dull, rhythmic thumping downstairs, followed by a low moan.

  “That was the end of it,” said Leary. “No more sleep that night. Nancy was all for getting out of there right then and heading for a hotel. She was spooked, and make no mistake. Gosh. I had to just about pry her offa me so I could go downstairs for another look. This time I took a baseball bat.”

  If you’d asked anybody who knew him how Leary would handle an exorcism, they probably would’ve told you “With a baseball bat.”

  “Given all the things in this world it could be, I had my money on a lot of stuff before ghosts. There were prowlers and there were boyfriends of maids, for just two examples. The next day we had a talk with Nid. The only result of that was the household now had two darned females who weren’t ever going to sleep again, and Nid was thinking maybe this was a good time to go upcountry for a while and visit the folks.”

  Nancy wanted to bring in some experts, Leary told me. She said she had no idea how to deal with ghosts, but she was sure they had ghosts, and she knew that was bad news and no job for amateurs with baseball bats.

  “I reckoned we had a few things to try still before we got around to the mumbo-jumbo,” Leary said. “I was pretty sure, now, we could rule out Nid or any boyfriend; so Nance and I checked the whole house over for cracks in the plaster or any other sign the house was settling. I even tested the place all over with a spirit level. Nid thought the spirit level was some kind of ghost-bustin’ apparatus, I think, because she wanted to use it in her room as well. Truth was, I kinda hoped it would lay some spirits to rest, but the gosh-darned house turned out to be so level you could’ ve shot pool on the floor. So that wasn’t it.

  “And the noises kept on, night after night By now Nance and the maid had no doubt what we were up against. In my mind, though, prowlers were the next best bet. Thing is, if they’re burglars, they sure are having a gosh-darned har
d time deciding just what it is they want to steal, because nothing’s gone missing. On top of that, they’d have to know things about stealth that’d baffle Davy Crockett. Gosh, I’ve set up every kind of ambush and trap you could think of.

  “One night I decided to spend some time in the yard, and kind of stake out the place. Nance told me there was no way she was going to stay in the house alone. Good gosh, I told her, you can take Dung inside for company. But Nance won’ t have dogs in the house, and what good was a sleepy old mutt against ghosts anyway?”

  Leary said he told Nancy the maid was there as well, and she told him that wasn’t the case, because the maid had developed pressing family business upcountry, and Nancy, herself, was going to stay with Lek and Eddie, and Leary could stay and be friggin’ haunted if he wanted to. “Only she didn’t say friggin’”, Leary added.

  Leary said he had rigged tripwires both inside and outside the house, connecting them to elephant bells and such-like, so unless you were a ghost, you were going to scare hell out of yourself if you tried tiptoeing around the place in the dark.

  Leary had blacked his face with charcoal, donned dark clothing, and hunkered down in the jungle outside the house, baseball bat at hand, prepared for anything.

  “Dung slept loyally by my side right through it all. The mosquitoes and the gosh-darned boredom and the fact I hadn’ t slept it seemed like in weeks kind of wore me down a bit I had to keep drinking Krathingdaeng, that Red Bull tonic, to stay awake, and I kept chasing that with brandy to take the taste of the tonic away. I finally fell asleep, despite the Krathingdaeng. I woke up later with something like a hangover, tripped over one of my own wires, and wound up none the wiser for the whole friggin’ experience.”

  Leary figured he’d about run out of rational recourses. His last stand was going to be an exorcism party, as he told me, and he wanted myself and my girlfriend, as well as Eddie and Lek to come over the next evening for dinner and drinks.

  “I’ve been alone in that darned house for a week, now. Any excuse for a party, anyway, and Nance might feel better about the place if she can have a few laughs there with some friends around.”

  Furthermore, he told me, maybe somebody would think of something he hadn’t. He was gosh-darned if he was going to leave that house just because of some spooky noises.

  *

  It was a great meal; Nancy had spent the better part of the day preparing, as Leary put it, a friggin’ feast fit to make a ghost feel hungry.

  After dinner we sat around with coffee and brandy and Leary outlined the history of those mysterious events once more, with Nancy adding dramatic embellishments that had Eddie’s Lek and my friend sticking fairly close and trying not to turn their backs on any direction at all. Eddie uttered some eerie sounds and made fangs of his forefingers, and everybody told him to shut up.

  I noticed there were a couple of new wall ornaments since my last visit: a masterfully carved wooden mask with glaring ivory eyes and a scowl full of ivory teeth was mounted over an old bone-handled knife in a wooden scabbard. The latter item, upon closer inspection, proved to be heavily incised with Khmer script.

  ”Leary got them in the amulet market,” Nancy said. “The mask is Chinese.”

  “Leary?” said Eddie. “Leary bought them? Have you got some silver bullets, Leary, my man; or how about a garland of garlic? Hoo, haw.”

  Leary gave him a black look, one seconded by Lek.

  The vendor had told Leary these objects were big magic, a proof against all but your most malign spirits.

  “Leary always scolds me for buying medicine without getting proper medical advice,” said Nancy. “Then what does he do?”

  Lek and my friend both agreed with her; you want to get someone who knows what he’s doing to fix this kind of problem. Using the wrong hoodoo could be worse than doing nothing at all.

  For lack of manifest spirits to worry about right at the moment, we all stared apprehensively at the mask on the wall. In the dim light from the lamps and the drifting smoke from our cigars, I thought I saw the lips curl in a snarl even more fearsome. The power of suggestion, no doubt, together with the magnificent old brandy Leary was serving that night.

  Leary wanted to try an experiment; would the spirits manifest themselves before a cheery gathering such as this one? He dimmed the lights still further and turned off the stereo. “Listen,” he said.

  There was nothing. Eddie giggled.

  A few moments later, there was a sound. A footfall. And another. Around the corner on the stairs from the hallway. Eddie didn’t giggle. Child of the Enlightenment that he was, Eddie had his eyes bugged out like the gunners’ turrets on a B29 bomber, as Leary was later to express it. The ladies, meanwhile, were shrinking ever deeper into the upholstery.

  Leary got to his feet, baseball bat in hand, and advanced upon the hallway, every move eloquent of barely restrained mayhem.

  Just then there was a whole series of alarming noises — of things going bump in the night — of scrabbling, halting, slithering descent on the stairway towards the hall. I’m sure it was only my imagination, but I thought for a moment that Leary actually quailed.

  ”Hoo, hoo, hoo,” said Eddie, somewhat enigmatically, to my mind. He picked up a wooden stool and held it high over his head. Maybe he planned to knock himself out if things got too gruesome.

  I would’ ve been happy to assist, but I was in the clutches of three very skittish ladies, and couldn’t move.

  Sinewy hands throttling the bat, powerful shoulders hunched up with spring-loaded tension, Leary was a pretty impressive sight. In fact, if a ghost was about to poke its face around the corner, I figured it was even money the spook would be the one to faint.

  There was a final thump, and suddenly, down at floor level, something appeared; it moved... something weird... Leary jumped back and raised the bat to swing. And there, flopping along all ears and low-slung belly, was Dung, short little legs gallantly trying to convey him across the shiny waxed floor. He was visibly chuffed with his success in getting down the stairs all on his own.

  Eddie put the stool down, no doubt relieved he wasn’ t going to have to brain himself, after all. The ladies let go of me, and we all had a good laugh. Dung lurched and waddled into the midst of this happy gang, pleased to be the center of attention and figuring this might mean he’d finally get fed.

  It appeared that Nancy, tired from the day’s exertions, had decided to have a nap before dinner, while Leary went out for more drinks. Afraid of being alone in that house, she’d broken down and brought Dung in to stand guard in the bedroom, for the first time ever, and then forgotten about him.

  We stayed up past 2:00 a.m., drinking and laughing and dancing, and heard nothing else you could call unusual, unless you wanted to count Eddie’s rendition of ‘Black Betty Bam Ba-lam’, accompanied by himself beating on a wastebasket and blowing into the neck of an empty brandy bottle.

  Maybe it was the latter phenomenon, or maybe it was just that spooks didn’t care for boisterous parties — or perhaps the house had simply finished subsiding — but after that evening there were few manifestations, beyond the occasional moan and creak.

  Nancy finally agreed to try sleeping there again, but only when Leary promised he would see about getting some professional exorcists over to do a proper job.

  ”You know, there are still strange noises, every so often,” said Leary when I saw him the other day. “It’s kind of spooky. I’ll tell you the truth, it doesn’t hurt to be on the safe side, and I’m just as happy we’re getting the ghost-busters in.

  “It’s like some guy said, some philosopher: Even if there isn’t any really good evidence that God exists, a smart man is going to believe in Him anyway. It’s like laying off your bets, you see. You drop dead and there’s no God, and you’ve lost nothing; on the other hand, you drop dead and you find there is a God, and He says * Believers in through this way’, and you’re smelling of roses. Covering your bases, it’s called.

  “And I�
�ve got the same attitude towards this getting exorcised. That’s right. But like I say, it doesn’ t hurt to be on the safe side, and if it isn’t a spook, maybe it’s termites or something, and on Monday I’ve got the bug-boys coming around for a look, as well.”

  CHILD OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

  I.

  Ernest and I sat in the noodle shop — little more than a corrugated iron and scrap-timber shanty, open on three sides; we were sharing a large bottle of beer and a plate of naem sot, the fiery fermented Chiangmai pork sausage. It was 3:00 in the afternoon. Ernest was waiting to meet Noi, his fiancee, who was off getting the results of her AIDS test.

  I had been aware of the deepening gloom as an internal phenomenon, as a mood. But now the sky abruptly darkened to black and the air grew still, breathless with suspense. A quick splatter of fat raindrops exploded on the street—a warning shot On the concrete wall of the building opposite, several small lizards scuttled for cover up under the eaves, and a sudden, furious gust of wind ran a wheeled parking barrier across the adjacent lot, crashing it into a parked car. Another pause, and then the sky abruptly descended in great leaden sheets.

  We hadn’ t really planned to have a second beer but we were, after all, trapped. Make the best of things. Noi would certainly be late; she’d have to wait till the rain slackened off, and, in the monsoon season in Bangkok, that would probably be another hour yet.

  We sat just under cover from the downpour, and the din of wind-driven rain masked the roar and racket of traffic. Soon, the flow of vehicles slowed to a faltering wallow of great metal beasts wheezing and honking their frustration. Within half an hour we’d ordered a third bottle, the better to enjoy the freshening air, the relative cool. We had our feet up on little metal stools; a torrent some inches deep washed through the cafe, carrying, among other things we noticed, an empty Lipovitan bottle and a plastic sandal. The waitresses were cheerful, glad of the break in their routine. Barefoot, sarongs hiked up between their legs, they laughed and bantered with those of us customers marooned by the storm.