by Jake Needham
It took another half hour to get back to the hotel. Anita slept the whole way. I thought several times of waking her, maybe asking her again exactly what she was trying to tell me and what it was that I should do, but I didn’t.
I should have.
Later, looking back, I realized that if I had listened to Anita right then I might have had some kind of a chance to stop everything.
But, of course, I hadn’t listened to her, I hadn’t paid any attention to her at all. And after that, it was too late.
NINE
THE NEXT MORNING Anita and I had breakfast on the desk outside our cabin and then lounged around for a while reading yesterday’s newspapers from Bangkok. That had always been one of the charms of Phuket for me. You could read yesterday’s papers instead of today’s and it didn’t make a damned bit of difference. Back in Bangkok I felt I had to be the informed man and every day I dutifully plowed through both of the local English-language newspapers and two or three international papers as well. In Phuket, I could never think of a single thing I really wanted to be informed about.
“Let’s drive over to Patong later, Jack. Want to?”
I was half dozing when Anita spoke. I didn’t respond immediately since I wasn’t absolutely sure I had heard her right. Had she really said she wanted to go to Patong?
Patong had once been a sleepy little fishing village on the west coast of Phuket, one that lay at the back of a deep bay with what had probably been one of the world’s most beautiful beaches. But now it was something else altogether. In less than a decade, the international glitterati, the famously beautiful, the notoriously stylish, and the just plain stinking rich may have seized the once drowsy tropical island of Phuket and made it their own, but they left Patong behind.
Patong had instead become ground zero for the hordes of package tourists shipped to Phuket by mass-market tour operators all over Europe, the Middle East, and Australia. The sleepy little fishing village was now mostly a jumble of travel agencies, cheesy souvenir shops, Indian tailors, all-night discos, and open-air girlie bars. Once Patong may have been the kind of gentle, palm-fringed South Seas paradise they wrote musicals about, but now it was just another nasty little hole.
“You want to go to Patong?” I asked. “Jesus, Anita, that place is a shit hole.”
“Don’t so snobby, Jack. It’s just a tourist town. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“I hate tourists.”
“Oh, I see. Then, just out of interest, how do you think the Thais see you, white boy?”
That hurt. Boy, did that hurt.
THE USUAL ROUTE from Cape Panwa followed the southern coast of the island for several miles and then abruptly swung inland and climbed through the rain forest in a series of steep switchbacks before descending again to the western beaches through another equally steep set of switchbacks. The road was slick from a light misting by a clutch of rain clouds still huddled over the center of the island and the traffic was light, but just as we crested the road’s highest point everything on the road in front of us abruptly stopped moving altogether.
We crept along for a half-mile, moving slowly through a double switchback, and then we saw the accident. A motorbike had gone down on a curve and the rider had skidded right into the path of a bus coming the other way. The mob of Taiwanese tourists from the bus was now huddled on the road’s shoulder snapping pictures of each other in front of the crumpled motorcycle. They were wearing Bermuda shorts and brightly colored golf hats and looked as if they thought the whole business might have been concocted just for their amusement.
The middle-aged Thai woman who had been riding the bike was sitting in the road just in front of where the tour bus had come to a halt. She had her legs stretched straight out in front of her and there was blood on her grease-streaked face. She held a grubby piece of cloth to the side of her head and stared off into the middle distance as one by one the Taiwanese stood in front of her and snapped pictures.
Anita shuddered and turned away. “Oh, Christ. I can’t look at that.”
“She seems to be okay. Probably more scared than hurt.”
“That’s easy for you to say, Jack.”
It was indeed, so I shut up and edged our jeep past the accident scene. Twenty minutes later we were rolling slowly through Patong searching for a parking place.
Since the whole village of Patong consists of essentially just two long streets, finding a place to park is pretty much a matter of cruising north along the ocean on Beach Road then turning around and coming back in the opposite direction on the parallel road that is about a hundred yards inland. It was barely past mid-day and we had no problem finding a spot almost immediately.
The west side of Beach Road is mercifully devoid of development and a broad concrete walkway runs along the sand for well over a mile. The beach itself isn’t all that great—the strip of sand is more khaki-colored than golden and a good deal of it is invisible under the ranks of canvas lounge chairs set out for rent by beachfront entrepreneurs—but the ocean is another matter altogether. Maybe, I grudgingly admitted to myself as we locked the Suzuki and set out walking, this hadn’t been such a bad idea after all.
The surf was rolling in as we walked, a low shore break that was useless for anyone hauling a board but otherwise suitably picturesque, and a warm breeze washed our faces with heavy salt air. The wind carried a jumble of pungent smells from which I could swear I could pick out the sharp spices of Madagascar and the moist veldt of Tanzania. Of course, I hadn’t the slightest idea what either of those things actually smelled like, but I was still pretty sure they were in there somewhere.
“You hungry, cowboy?”
I was just about to remind Anita we’d eaten breakfast pretty late and it was probably still too soon for lunch when I realized the salt air was already working its customary magic on my appetite.
“I could eat,” I said. “Where do you want to go?”
“I don’t know. What do you feel like?”
“Seafood.”
Anita laughed and the sound of it tinkled in the warm breeze like wind chimes.
“Now there’s a surprise,” she said.
We crossed Beach Road and turned north. Open-air seafood restaurants lined the sidewalk, all of them displaying the day’s inventory on beds of ice spread out in big metal tubs. Offered for inspection were local lobsters, giant prawns, mussels, calamari, oysters, and an array of whole fish that were largely unidentifiable, at least to me. Most of the restaurants also sported huge outdoor grills where the seafood was cooked after it had been selected. The cloying smell of burning coconut shells mixed with the meatier odor of charcoal tugged at the river of tourists that flowed up and down the sidewalks of Beach Road.
Young women dressed in traditional sarongs of dazzlingly colored Thai silk greeted passers-by in front of most of the restaurants. Some offered diffident wais, while others bowed and held out menus. A few cut straight to the chase with smiling shouts of “Come inside, please, sir and madam!”
Anita and I wandered past a dozen or more such places without stopping. I had never been very good at this sort of thing. The technique of picking a restaurant or a place to stay in a town I didn’t know very well was always a puzzle to me. How could I be sure a better choice didn’t lurk just a little way up the road?
Anita and I walked past something called the Pizzadelic Internet Pizzeria, which seemed pleasant enough in spite of its name. It offered a blue and white tiled outdoor bar and functional tables set up near the sidewalk underneath a mural that looked like it had been ripped off from a Grateful Dead concert.
“Want to go in here?” I asked, but Anita kept walking without bothering to reply.
A few moments later I spotted a McDonalds. It was pretty nice looking, too. The brick patio out front had some white plastic tables scattered around under a red and yellow striped awning and the place was jammed with an assortment of tourists and locals knocking back the Big Macs, reading newspapers, and generally engag
ed in what appeared to be some pretty vigorous hanging out.
I half turned toward Anita, but she spoke before I could manage to say anything.
“Don’t even think about it,” she said.
“Hey, okay, maybe it’s not all that great a place to eat, but at least you got to admit the fries have a lot going for them.”
Anita shot me a look.
“It’s not the food,” she said. “And you know it.”
“Know what?”
“You don’t see anything wrong with it, do you?’
“Wrong with what, Anita?”
“Those people.” She gestured with her head at the crowd lounging around in front of McDonalds. “Look at them.”
I looked.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “It’s mostly just tourists hanging out with their girlfriends.”
“Girlfriends?” Anita snorted. “Those women are whores, Jack.”
Ah-ha, so that was it.
“Young Thai girls hanging around with scruffy middle-aged westerners who are probably twice their age? What do you think those women are, Jack? Schoolteachers on holiday?”
“What is it that bothers you so much, Anita? Is it that those men give the girls some money while they’re here? Or is it that the men are middle-aged and the girls are young.”
Anita didn’t bother to answer, but I wasn’t ready to let her off the hook yet. I was still harboring some resentment from the dinner table conversation at Karsarkis’ party.
“Or maybe,” I pressed on, “it’s mostly that the men are white and the girls aren’t.”
“I don’t make judgments based on skin color,” Anita snapped.
“Excuse me,” I pointed out, “but you just did. Western women usually do when it comes to Thai women. You see a Thai woman with a white man and you assume the white man is there because he’s getting sex and the Thai woman is there because she’s being paid for it. And the worst part is you’re not even ashamed of assuming that.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Oh yes, it is. It’s exactly that easy. I made a deal with guys like those over there a long time ago, Anita. They don’t judge me. I don’t judge them. I figure it’s a pretty fair arrangement all around.”
Anita let the subject drop, which I took to be a pretty good sign, and we walked on for a while after that in a silence.
Eventually we came to a waist-high stone wall behind which black iron tables were scattered across a brick courtyard shaded by a thick canopy of palm trees. The tables were dressed with white linen and folded pink napkins and the whole thing made an undeniably pretty picture. When we stopped to take it in a very young woman of uncommon beauty approached with a shy smile, bobbed her head in a diffident greeting, and proffered a menu. I took it and pretended to study its offerings, but mostly I sneaked surreptitious glances at the girl.
She was wearing a traditional Thai sarong made out of green and gold silk that encased her slim figure from head to toe in a sheath of shimmering color. Her long hair was tar black and glowed with a sheen that held its own even against the vivid luminescence of her dress. She had the wide, unblinking eyes of a cat—a Siamese cat, I thought, but quickly dismissed the comparison as far too obvious—and her face formed a warm yet slightly shy smile that for the life of me I could not imagine to be purely commercial.
“That looks good, Jack. Don’t you think?”
“Yes indeed, I do.”
Anita was considerate enough not to require me to acknowledge we were referring to different things altogether.
The young woman showed us to a table positioned between two thick palms, one which had a fine view of the ocean just across the road. I ordered a bottle of some no-name white wine and we sipped it as we studied the menus. The wind rattled the palm fronds above us, the surf rolled with a basso drumming in the background, and the smells of grilling lobster drifted on the warm, salty air.
It was a nice moment, I had to admit, but not nice enough to make me stop wondering why Anita had wanted us to drive to Patong in the first place. Anita had just made it unmistakably clear that Patong was hardly her kind of place and I knew there was something on her mind other than lunch and a walk through town. I just didn’t know what it was yet.
That was the very moment Anita chose to close her menu, put it down, and tell me what was really going on.
TEN
“I THOUGHT MAYBE after lunch we could have a look in some of the real estate offices, Jack. I’ve been thinking it might be nice to buy a house down here. Someplace I could get out of Bangkok to paint.”
I examined Anita carefully. She seemed to be completely serious.
Anita’s career as an artist had recently taken off. Her London agent was a genius at PR and he had hyped Anita as an Italian woman living and painting in exotic Thailand at exactly the right time to make her sound like the next great hot find. Of course, she had a lot of talent, too, and that was probably the biggest reason for her success, but great PR never hurt anybody. Everything she painted was selling and the prices she was getting were jumping, so I had no reason to doubt the guy’s pitch that Anita was hot. That had always been exactly my own point of view.
Regardless, none of that led me to conclude we ought to be buying a house in Phuket.
“No way, Anita. Absolutely no way. We have a perfectly nice apartment in Bangkok, and don’t forget I’m just a poor business school professor. I can’t afford a vacation house in Phuket.”
“I didn’t ask you to buy a vacation house in Phuket, Jack. I said I was thinking of buying a place here to paint. It won’t be your money and it won’t be your decision.”
Uh-oh.
“I’d like your help and your support, Jack. But it’s not absolutely necessary.”
“Okay, Anita. Calm down. I’m sorry if I was a little harsh. I was just surprised, that’s all. We’ve never talked about anything like this before.”
“Well we’re talking about it now.”
We were indeed, and something about it was already making me uncomfortable as hell. The subject had only just come up, but already I had the distinct feeling we weren’t just talking about a house here. Worse, I couldn’t see exactly what it was we actually were talking about.
The rest of lunch went quietly without either of us mentioning real estate again. The palm fronds continued to rattle, the surf continued to roll, and the smell of lobster continued to drift, but everything was different all of a sudden. It felt to me like Anita had just taken several giant steps back into a place where I was not invited.
When our plates had been cleared and we had both declined coffee, Anita scooted her chair back slightly by way of preface. I had no trouble guessing what was coming next, and of course I was right.
“I’m going to walk around to a couple of the real estate offices and see what they have listed. Are you coming?”
“I’d rather not, if you don’t mind.”
“That’s fine. I won’t be long.”
Anita’s voice was matter-of-fact as she stood up.
“Where will you be?” she asked.
I looked around, but nowhere particularly interesting came to mind, so I shrugged. “I guess I’ll just have another glass of wine here,” I said. “I’ll meet you back at the jeep in…what? An hour?”
“Fine. The jeep then, in an hour.”
“You remember where it is?”
“Yes, Jack.” Anita pitched her voice in that particular way that always made me uneasy. “I can find the jeep without you holding my hand.”
“You’re sure you don’t mind me not going with you?”
“Of course not, Jack. Why would I mind?”
Why, indeed?
Anita had been gone only a few minutes when a fresh glass of wine arrived, closely followed by a busload of tourists. As the gaggle of extended families unloaded and began piling into the restaurant, the sound of their heavily accented Cantonese clearly marked them to me as Hong Kong Chinese. I decided my peaceful a
fternoon was probably at an end. Cantonese isn’t a spoken language; it’s a screamed language.
I looked around, sizing up possible escape routes, and noticed a middle-aged westerner sitting by himself at a table not far away from me. He had a straw Stetson tipped back on his head and was gazing at the invading horde of Chinese tourists with obvious bemusement. When he caught my eye, he nodded a friendly greeting.
“How you doing?” he hollered over the clamor.
“I’m doing fine,” I called back noncommittally, although of course I wasn’t.
When the man stood up, collected his beer bottle, and started toward me, I was less than thrilled. Companionship was the last thing I wanted right at that moment, much less the companionship of some yahoo sex tourist wearing a cowboy hat.
“I’ll bet you’re a Yank,” the man beamed as soon as he walked up to the table.
“You got me.”
“Well, hot damn,” he said sticking out his hand. “Me, too. My friends call me CW.”
“Jack Shepherd,” I said, shaking the man’s hand.
He eyed the chair Anita had abandoned. “Mind if I set a spell?”
I didn’t know what else to say and I didn’t want to be rude to the guy, so I shook my head. “Go ahead,” I said.
The man sank heavily into the chair, removed his hat, and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.
“I’m from Dallas myself, but I don’t mind telling you, this heat here is knocking me for a goddamned loop.”
“I guess I must be used to it.”
“Where you from?”
“I was born in the States, but I live in Bangkok now.”
“You live in Bangkok? No shit?”
“No shit.”
“What do you do there, if you don’t mind me asking.”
“I teach at Chulalongkorn University.”
“Really?” The guy bobbed his head in interest. “What do you teach?”