Good Friends

by Leeanne Moriarty

  She shook her head. “No. That would be bad luck.”

  “Come on.”

  Liz looked at him for a long time, then she reached up and took the studs out of her ears. She slid the earrings into her pierced lobes and looked at herself in the mirrored wall.

  “They’re gorgeous,” she said.

  “Keep them on.” he said “They’re yours,”

  “You’re crazy,” she said.

  His phone rang again. Caroline. He ignored it.

  “We’d better go,” Liz said, lifting her hand to remove the earrings.

  He stayed her hand, holding it for longer than he needed.

  “I mean it. Keep them.”

  She gently pulled free of his grip and unhooked the earrings, returning them to their little box. She closed it with a sharp snap.

  “I never could resist anything that belonged to someone else,” she said, “but we’ve been doing some serious guzzling, so I’m going to decline your offer.”

  She slid out of the booth and headed for the door. Michael followed her into the lobby, blinking at the bright lights.

  “Do you need a ride?” he asked.

  “No, I have my car.”

  “You okay to drive?”

  “Hell yes. I have a PhD in DUI,” Liz said.

  They both laughed.

  “I have a project I’d like to discuss with you,” she said as they crossed the lobby.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. A resort. That’s what you do, isn’t it? Design resorts?

  “Yes. Caroline told you?”

  “Uh huh. She’s so very proud.” Liz leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. “It’s been fun. See you soon, Mike.”

  As Michael watched her walk away he had a sense of being drawn into something by a force he couldn’t resist, and like gravity it pulled in only one direction.

  35

  Caroline sat at the kitchen counter, hearing the rumble of Michael’s Mercedes in the driveway, the slap of the car door and his feet on the paving.

  She’d ordered take-out from an over-priced Thai restaurant at Central.

  The delivery man had gotten lost, and the food had arrived cold.

  But it arrived before Michael, who rolled in looking three sheets to the wind, as her father would’ve said.

  Working hard at keeping her good mood afloat, Caroline said, “You have fun?”

  He shrugged, sitting down at the counter, poking at the food containers.

  “I went to Blues. I texted you to join me.”

  She shook her head.

  “I never got a text.” She reached for her phone and checked. “Nope. Nothing.”

  “Well, I sent it. I can show you.”

  “It’s fine. Probably just a glitch.”

  She found plates and dumped the take-out onto them.

  The food looked greasy and smelled nauseating.

  Michael spooned a mouthful of green curry and grimaced before pushing the plate away.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Not a great idea.”

  He shrugged again.

  “I’m not really hungry.” He walked to the fridge and removed a bottle of water and drank long and hard. “I bumped into Liz Keller.”

  She looked at him. “At Blues?”

  “Uh huh. Some client of hers was a no-show and she ended up in the bar.”

  “So you had drinks with her?”

  “Yeah. A few.”

  Caroline felt her mood sour.

  Liz Keller had urged her to open up about Michael at lunch.

  Had hugged her afterward when she’d cried.

  And yet she’d sat and gotten drunk with him only hours later.

  “You want any of this?” Caroline said, indicating the food.

  Michael shook his head. Caroline turned her back on him and took the take-out and dumped it in the trash and started rinsing the plates at the sink.

  ***

  Michael wandered to the window and stood looking out into the dark. His head was thick and his mouth tasted sour.

  He touched the little box in his pocket.

  He saw Liz Keller smiling at him through her cigarette smoke as she inserted the earrings into her pierced lobes.

  The memory brought with it a stab of desire, but guilt rode in on its coattails, and he felt sad and empty.

  The box stayed in his pocket.

  36

  Charlie parked the Vespa outside a massage parlor in Patong, the lurid neon painting his white shirt the color of blood.

  Three young women dressed in tank tops, shorts and shoes with towering heels perched on a bench on the sidewalk, hypnotized by their phones.

  A fourth, a beautiful country bumpkin, sat astride a parked scooter, staring into its side mirror as she squeezed a pimple on her cheek.

  Noticing Charlie, she wiped her fingers on her satin shorts, and showed her teeth.

  “Massage, sir? Very nice.” She made a sucking sound.

  Charlie shook his head and walked on, hands in pockets, doing his best impression of a farang sightseer.

  Patong was a place he avoided like the plague.

  It was a Mecca for package tourists, with overpriced hotels and restaurants that served slop at extortionate prices.

  And it was Phuket’s sex tourist ground zero, with girlie bars and live shows and the ubiquitous massage parlors.

  It also boasted the most invasive CCTV system on the island.

  Scores of beady-eyed cameras beaming their images to a central control room manned by zealous Thai coppers.

  Charlie ducked into a store selling ghastly T-shirts and trinkets, ignoring the exhortations of the Nepalese sales boy who called him “mate.”

  He slipped a peak cap from his trouser pocket and pulled it on, hiding his bangs and most of his face.

  Not a perfect disguise, but it provided at least some protection from the cameras.

  Stepping back out into the heat, he dodged a scrum of drunken Mancunians on the prowl for Asian delights.

  Crossing the road, he weaved through minibuses and scooters, the night air thick with gasoline, stopped drains and fried fish oil.

  Feeling the warm, briny spill of leaking aircons, he walked up a narrow road crammed with cheap and nasty hotels, their signs offering specials in English, Mandarin and Russian.

  He stepped off the sidewalk into a dingy lobby with eye-tearing strip lights, moldy sofas, dusty plants, and scuffed walls the color of human skin.

  The reception desk was deserted.

  A huge TV, caged and bolted to the wall, strobed with images of picture-postcard Thailand. Surging longtail boats, electric-blue seas, and the kind of pristine white beaches that Leonardo DiCaprio and his accomplices had defiled while filming the turgid flick that had drawn multitudes of foul backpackers to these shores.

  Charlie slipped behind the desk and tapped on a closed metal door.

  He took off the cap for the benefit of the camera peering down at him from above the lintel.

  A lock sucked and clicked and Charlie pushed the heavy door open.

  The fetid athlete’s foot stink of durian fruit filled his nostrils.

  A tortoise of a man in a green silk shirt, sleeves rolled to just below his skinny elbows, sat behind a chipped steel desk. He portioned durian with a paring knife, and fed the slices into his wide, lipless mouth.

  Belching, he said, “Mr. Charlie.”

  “Mr. Boy.”

  The man waved a hand at a chair, his gold Rolex sliding to his knuckles.

  A large portrait of the Thai king dressed in a white tunic with a yellow sash stared down at Charlie from the wall behind the desk.

  He sat and watched as Mr. Boy chewed and burped his way through the giant, spiky fruit.

  At last Mr. Boy pushed the plate and the knife aside and wiped his hands on a gray towel.

  He cleaned his teeth with a long pinkie nail and said in English, “You have something nice for me, Mr. Charlie?”

  Mr. Boy refused to converse with Charlie
in Thai, as if a farang’s mouth befouled his ancient tonal tongue.

  Charlie delved into his pocket and set three credit cards on the desk top, like he was opening a bid in Texas Hold’em.

  Mr. Boy observed the holy trinity—Visa, MasterCard and Amex—with unblinking, heavy-lidded eyes.

  Charlie waited a few seconds before he skimmed Murray Muldoon’s navy-blue Australian passport across the table.

  Mr. Boy cleared his throat and lifted the passport and flicked through it, stopping at the photo page, scrutinizing it like a customs official.

  “This man him already cancel card?” Charlie shook his head. “And report passaport is stolen?” Another shake of the head. “How not?”

  Charlie said, “Don’t worry. He won’t do that.”

  Mr. Boy narrowed his eyes. “And why?”

  Charlie shrugged. “Trust me.”

  The man smiled, showing gold teeth. “Truss you? Truss you? Farang joke, huh?” He sat back and scratched at his wrinkled neck. “I think maybe you bring to me too much trouble.”

  “No trouble.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  Mr. Boy hawked and spat into an asbestos plant pot that held only a mound of cigarette butts curled like silk worms.

  Charlie said, “How much will you give me?

  The man sucked his teeth. “Five thousand.”

  “U.S.?”

  This amused the Thai hugely and he smacked the palm of his hand on the desk top in appreciation. “Joke, joke, joke!”

  Charlie said. “Five thousand baht?”

  Mr. Boy nodded. “Good offer.”

  When Charlie scooped up the cards and the passport, Mr. Boy scratched in a hidden drawer.

  Charlie waited for the swart snout of a pistol to appear, but Mr. Boy merely slapped a skinny wad of banknotes onto the desk.

  “Ten thousand? Yes?”

  Charlie shrugged. “You’re a bloody crook, Mr. Boy.”

  The Thai man cackled.

  Charlie pocketed the money and left without counting it.

  37

  Caroline hung upside down in the car in the snow, trapped by the seat belt, feeling the drip of her warm blood over her face, feeling the wind knifing in through the shattered windows, knowing she was going to die.

  She woke sweating, her T-shirt glued to her skin.

  Michael snored softly beside her. She lay for a while in the dark, listening to the scuffs and rustles from the jungle, and the murmur of the placid waves below.

  Sleep was impossible now.

  She slipped from the bed and crossed to the glass door, sliding it open far enough to pad out onto the deck, the warm gauze of the night air on her skin.

  Caroline stood at the railing and looked out. The sky was cloudless, a layered rash of stars undimmed by light pollution curving down toward the oily expanse of ocean.

  She looked to her left, and saw the twin of their house through the palms.

  A light burnt in an upper room, and she was certain she saw a shape at the window, then the light went out.

  She lifted her right leg, balancing her foot on the lower spar of the railing. She rubbed at her thigh, as if that were the source of her pain.

  But her pain was deeper, more visceral.

  The peace that had come after she had confided in Liz at lunch was gone.

  She felt exposed.

  Raw.

  As if her defenses had been breached.

  The wall she had erected after the accident had been as much to contain herself, she realized, as it had been to keep Michael out.

  She felt disoriented and dizzy, clutching the railing, fighting for breath.

  Then she lost control, and let panic drive her back into the bedroom.

  She knelt by the bureau, the dank scent of the varnished teak in her nostrils, and slid open the bottom drawer.

  Caroline reached inside, fumbling around, but she couldn’t find her pills.

  For a terrible moment she was certain that Michael had taken them.

  Then she remembered that she had moved them to the opposite side of the drawer, and buried them deeper beneath the unused sweaters and socks—clothes that were useless in this climate.

  Her fingers found the vial and she lifted it.

  She went as far as tearing open the bottle and emptying one out.

  There was enough light in the room to see the small round yellow pill lying on the palm of her hand.

  The smell of sugar and burnt marshmallows was a product of her imagination.

  She had never crushed and smoked these tablets.

  Unlike others at the facility she had attended, who had described the process in numbing detail in their endless testifying.

  It was only the memory of the agony, madness and tedium of the weeks of withdrawal that made her replace the pill and cap the bottle and roll the drawer closed.

  38

  Charlie couldn’t bloody lose.

  He kept on beating the dealer.

  And the house kept on changing the dealer.

  And it made not the slightest difference.

  Win.

  Win.

  Win.

  He was playing Pok Deng, a Thai card game that was like a bastardized version of baccarat.

  The setting resembled something out of a Graham Greene novel. An illegal casino in a ramshackle house hidden deep in a pineapple plantation in the north of the island.

  The room was crowded and smoky, loud with curses and empty promises to the spirits.

  As they placed their bets many of the gamblers rubbed the lucky gumanthong amulets that dangled around their necks—wooden likenesses of a tongue-pulling kiddy carved by Buddhist monks.

  Charlie was the only farang.

  He sat at a table with five other players and the dealer.

  The dealer called for bets and Charlie threw down twenty thousand baht.

  The dealer dealt each player two cards, face down, in a clockwise direction.

  Charlie picked up his cards and grinned.

  “Pok,” he said, announcing that his two cards had a numerical value of nine. He laid them face up.

  The dealer bust.

  He paid Charlie, who, to cheers, ordered drinks for the table.

  When he’d left Patong with the ten thousand in his pocket, he knew he should buy a few provisions and lie low in his grimy room until Liz called to tell him that it was a go.

  But the money burnt a hole in his pocket.

  Little more than three hundred U.S. it still went a long way in Thailand if you avoided the tourist traps.

  So Charlie hadn’t headed home.

  He’d pointed the Vespa north and ridden past the airport and into the rubber and pineapple fields.

  He’d been here a couple of times before, in the company of locals, who’d regarded him as something of a lucky mascot, but this was his first solo visit.

  He missed the entrance to the plantation, and had almost given up when he stumbled upon it and sent the Vespa along the rutted track.

  After a minute a pick-up truck bore down on him from behind, and he pulled over to allow it to pass.

  Charlie realized how foolhardy he had been when it stopped in a cloud of red dust and three young Thai men climbed out and advanced on him.

  But it turned out they remembered him from a previous visit and there were friendly greetings. “Khun Charlee! Khun Charlee!”

  They insisted on loading his Vespa onto the back of the truck and giving him a ride down to the house, much to the relief of his saddle-sore backside.

  And here he was, on a hot streak.

  And the ten thousand baht had swelled to nearly fifty.

  The dealer was calling for bets and Charlie lifted the stack of bank notes and was ready to stake them all when a vice-like hand grabbed his elbow and he looked up into the swollen face of Tua Hea.

  “Fucking bastard,” the Lizard said.

  He opened Charlie’s fingers and took the pile of money.

 
The table fell silent, and that silence spread in ripples across the room.

  All eyes were on them.

  The Lizard threw the bills to an underling and said, “Count it.”

  The minion flicked through the notes.

  “Forty-six thousand,” he said.

  Tua Hea held out his jewel-encrusted hand and the man gave him the money.

  The Lizard shoved it into the pants pocket of his gasoline-colored suit.

  He looked at Charlie and cleared his throat.

  “You still owe twenty-five thousand.”

  “Of course. And I’ll get it to you very soon.”

  The Lizard shook his head and smiled, his eyes dark little slits in his suety cheeks.

  “No. You play for it now. You win, no debt.”

  Charlie smiled.

  “Okay. Sure.” He turned to the dealer. “Hit me.”

  Tua Hea raised a lizard skin boot and upset the table, sending cards, money, ashtrays and glasses flying.

  The gamblers at the table shrunk back like dogs from flame.

  “Not this shit,” the Lizard said.

  He grabbed Charlie by the shirtfront and lifted him from his seat, leaving him nervously pushing his sweaty bangs from his face.

  “I have better game,” the bookie said. “Russian game!”

  At this he drew a revolver from his pocket.

  The only sound in the room was the blade whip of the ceiling fan.

  With a flick of his wrist he shook the cylinder loose, revealing that all six chambers were loaded. Upending the weapon, he let the rounds fall into the palm of his thick, hairless hand. He dumped five of the rounds into his pocket and, with great ceremony, held a single slug between thumb and forefinger.

  He loaded it into one of the chambers and smacked the cylinder home.

  The Lizard spun the cylinder and, gripping the revolver by the barrel, held it out to Charlie.

  “Play,” he said. “Play now.”

  Charlie recoiled from the weapon.

  “No,” he said. “Please. I will repay you. I promise. Just give me a few days.”

  Still standing with the revolver extended the Lizard turned to one of his men, a sinewy thug in a wife-beater, with a livid scar running from beneath his left eye to his jaw.