by Devin Murphy
“Here you go, girl,” he cooed. When she didn’t come any closer he dropped the jerky on the ground at his feet where it looked like a link of molted snakeskin.
Nipples skulked toward the bed and bowed her head for the meat. He reached his hand out. As his fingers grazed against the grain of her coarse fur she dodged her head and snapped her mouth shut over the center of his right hand. The dog’s sharp stabbing canines sunk in deep behind his knuckles. As she yanked backward, her teeth scraped against his bones and he sprang off the bed and kicked her brindled chest. When she rolled backward his hand recoiled and droplets of blood flew against his face and landed on the mattress. A red bead sank into the cloth and set like an infant’s fingerprint.
“I was just trying to pet you, you scrawny bitch,” he said, lying onto the mattress and pinning his hand to his chest. There were fatty red tracks of exposed flesh torn back from his palm and the blood felt like warm milk soaking into his shirt as he stared at the ceiling fan trying to block out the pain. He tried remembering when he named her. He admired her protruding ribs as being a lean reflection of a scavenger’s diet, a sign she would get by anywhere.
There was a tourist hospital in the new part of the city that could stitch him up and give him a tetanus shot, but he figured it wasn’t an emergency, and he could wait a bit.
“It’s all right,” he said to the dog. “We’ll be friends yet.” He cut the shirt he was wearing into thin strips with a pocketknife, wrapped the strips around the wound, and sutured the cloth together with lengths of duct tape. The fabric sponged up the blood, and he held the wadded-up hand over his head, and watched the dog shifting around his small room, which now smelled like it was wall-to-wall carpeted in dank fur.
He woke on the bed several hours later to Nipples scratching at the glass door. His bandaged hand was stained through and blackened with dried blood and his head was swimming as if he were a child in bed with fever again.
He got up and sat in the chair next to the window. It had gotten dark. He felt nauseous, and started smoking a Krong cigarette to settle his stomach. The drift of smoke blew through the crack in the sliding glass door like a slow river. The laptop was still on the patio table. He was surprised the screen was playing the Blue Earth intro of a school of fish bunching up into a swirling silver fist. He liked watching their hypnotic movements and imagined what went on beneath the ocean, as it looked endless and empty from the surface. On late-night watches he read books about the millions of fish beneath the vessel. The complexity and diversity humbled him. When he read about mouthbreeding, where some males will take their newly hatched young into their mouth to keep them safe, he felt a little nauseous imagining little fish fluttering against the inside of his cheek.
He watched the screen until he was distracted by a pack of vacationing US Navy men who descended on the golf course across the road. They screamed and tackled one another on the greens and rolled around in drunken revelry. One took the sand rake above his head, and began digging a hole beneath the spongy surface. Another grabbed the pin flag and heaved it like a javelin so far that the orange triangle flag fluttering behind it disappeared into the night. They chased after it with the same torrent of energy that brought them and ran down the road toward the bar district.
Since finishing his own tour with the navy more than ten years ago, and all the time afterward working as a merchant marine, Lewis came to recognize the ships as floating dens of horny men who operated under different moral standards when they came ashore. Most of them idealized women in their own twisted ways. The captain aboard his last ship, Russell Bartuga, had a tattoo of a naked angel with glorious wings and sweet blue-tipped breasts draped over his forearm. Once, during the night watch, he told Lewis that he liked to take girls to his room and make them wrestle with him. Then he put a pillow over their heads and punched the pillow while they were having sex. It was as if something happened to the hearts of people who were always alone at sea, such that they no longer knew how to open up to others, leaving only an ill-aligned organ at the center of their chests. Lewis worried he was finally turning into one of them—the lonely men who slipped ashore to buy and sell what they needed—coming back looking consecrated and free of something, as if only raw and carnal experience could shock their hearts to beating.
When Lewis wasn’t working he felt disorientated. Life on the ships was regimented, spelled out, and the problems he learned to protect against were tangible and immediate. He liked that—liked how many different ways there were to call for help at sea, how specific you had to be to send out SOS signals. If the ship was on fire or taking on water you held down your foghorn, fired a gun at one-minute intervals, shot your flares, and transmitted your position while calling “Mayday, Mayday.” He liked having so many ways to call for help there, because on land he could think of none.
After the navy guys ran off, he locked Nipples in and walked down the same road they had, north to the tourist strip. The muggy air filled the space between his bandage and the cut and everything in his arm was throbbing. The pain was making him feel sick. He expected more navy boys to pass him on the road at any time. Sailors knew to save their money on lodging and stay outside of the tourist strip so they could spend it all in the clubs.
He stopped at a small oceanfront bar called Tynig-Jata; maybe some food would make him feel better. He ordered a large dish with peanuts, sliced limes, chopped ginger, fresh peppers, garlic, and mango that was scooped up and wrapped in lettuce leaves. The restaurant looked out onto the distant water, where waves were frozen at their crests. As he ate, the city around him grew darker. Fierce colors began pulsating from all the shops, angry reds and burning oranges until the place was alive with the richness of its own natural beauty colliding with the dirty streets and neon bar signs.
There was a monthly Thai boxing match about to start in the back of a go-go bar that Boyet had told him he had to see. After he ate he walked past a pale gray concrete Catholic church and a bathhouse where nude women stripped off your clothes and scrubbed your body with soft, fat sponges. The streets threw off a great heat and the briny scent of fried meat, ginger, and burning trash floated through the air near the waterfront where fishing boats anchored at night. As the streets narrowed and became more crowded the racket of locals calling to each other under the flushed light of the store awnings cluttered up and grated on his aching head.
When he got to Nan’s Luck Bar, a dark-haired Thai man with an unlit, half-spent cigarette hanging from his lips sprang off a swivel barstool and met him at the door.
“Hello, my friend,” he said. “Come, come in.”
Lewis followed him to the back of the bar, where a doorframe was covered in a bead curtain. The man’s black silk shirt had an electric-green tiger embroidered across the back that swayed across his shoulders as he walked through the curtain into a warehouse-size room with a small ring surrounded by tables that were already full.
“Come, come in,” the barman said. “You want seat for the show?” The man hooked the palm of his hand around Lewis’s elbow and led him to a small table four rows back from the ring. A busload of male Japanese tourists filled the front rows of tables. There were other foreigners in the crowd. Asians, Arabs, and a few white men from around the world from what he could tell. Scattered around the bar were bored-looking girls wearing short, formfitting, one-piece dresses and glossy black or red high heels. In the ring there were already two fighters circling each other and colliding with knees, elbows, fists, and long graceful swings of their feet. Lewis heard a loud slap of the fighter in blue trunks landing a kick against the glove-protected head of his opponent followed by a chorus of rising yells from around the ring.
“Good view for fight,” the barman said, the burned tobacco end of his cigarette rising and falling from his lips as he spoke.
“This is great,” Lewis said.
“You watch fight. I’ll get you drinks first. What you like now?”
“A Singha lager and three shots of stro
ng vodka on the side.”
“Very good,” the barman said, and left Lewis at the table. The rafters of the bar were painted in smoke. The only people standing in the room were the fighters and girls walking between tables and running their fingertips across the shoulder blades of random men.
“You want to bet on fights?” the barman asked when he came back with Lewis’s drinks. “I’ll bring you lines on fight card if you like.”
“That would be fine,” Lewis said. The barman spun away and went out through the curtain. Lewis loosened the tape and T-shirt bandaging around his wrist and poured a shot of vodka down the inside of his hand. Then he spun his hand over and poured the second down the outside before he swallowed the third. The shot warmed his chest and stomach and eased the sting of the liquor flowing over the puncture marks from Nipples. He shut his eyes and let a series of slapping sounds from the ring, the smell of the smoky bar, and the vodka’s twinge at the back of his tongue settle.
“Hell of a fight, oi,” an Australian man sitting at the next table leaned over and said. Lewis nodded to him and turned back to the ring. “These two here have been going at it for six rounds already,” the Aussie said. “It’s one of the best fights I’ve seen.”
On ships Lewis met people from all over the world, and on the long watches or during meals, they told stories to pass the time, but never shared anything too honest or real. The generic language of stories was the language of the sea and Lewis heard the sea when the Aussie asked, “Care to join me?”
“Ah, good. You have friend,” the barman said, putting a fight card in front of Lewis. “You guys want some girlfriends now—huh? Or ladyboys?”
“That’s right. Euclid here will take care of us,” the Aussie said, and squeezed the barman’s butt cheek. He said something in Thai to him, to which the barman nodded and walked away.
“You been in long?” the Australian asked Lewis.
“A bit over a month now,” Lewis told him, yelling over the crowd.
“You feeling all right, mate?” the Aussie asked looking at the bloodied makeshift bandage on his hand that was now dripping vodka onto the floor.
“Yeah, I’m getting there,” Lewis said.
All the men in the bar seemed desirous of everything at once and were either yelling at the ring or flirting with the girls Euclid had shuffled into their laps. On the table in front of him Euclid had placed a match card with a long list of names and odds written by hand next to each set of fighters.
“This is a pretty wild place,” Lewis yelled to the Aussie.
“Isn’t it great?” the Australian yelled without taking his eyes off the ring. The fighters were leaning into each other, embracing, and swinging their knees high and wide into the flexed abdomens of their opponents. The Aussie yelled out something in Thai and a troubling sense of weightlessness came over Lewis, knowing he still hadn’t found a place in the world he understood or could call his own.
Lewis had been eighteen when he joined the navy. At the time he did not comprehend that going to sea would open the whole world up to him like an ugly flower and take him to all the places he’d only read about. That on leaves between contracts there would be no one telling him what to do and his time would have to be filled doing something else. That eventually he’d go to ships and feel at home, and go on leave and feel lost again. That that would become the simple rhythm of his life.
The bell rang to end the round, and both fighters went to their corners.
“Oh, here we go. This will be good, mate,” the Aussie said and pointed to the bead curtain at the entrance of the room.
A naked girl was walking into the room, and the bead strings rolled off her shoulders and swung back to the clattering tangle of the curtain. The girl took a running step and dived under the bottom rope and slid chest first onto the stained ring mat. She was no more than twenty years old and she made a show of sitting down so her bare ass hit the ring’s canvas with her legs spread akimbo and her hands behind her back. Then she brought one hand forward, and the Japanese men at the front all seemed to inch closer on their chairs when they saw the downy yellow duckling she raised over her head. Lewis’s stomach heaved up a vodka-bile taste as he glanced from the girl to the men.
The girl leaned back onto the canvas with her legs spread wide, brought the duck down, and cupped the bird against herself. Her face turned red as her hand inched the duck back and forth until it was inside of her. There was a cacophony of different languages yelling at her and to each other around the ring. The sounds corkscrewed into something clattering and confusing in Lewis’s mind and he tried to focus on anything audible coming from the girl, but she didn’t make a sound.
Lewis reached for his wallet, grabbed a handful of cash with the fingers sticking out of his wrapped hand, and tossed it on the table. The girl in the ring lifted both her empty hands and waved them in front of her like a hand model. Nothing in the bar seemed to be a part of her world as she lifted her pelvis off the ground and got into a squatting position with each hand resting on a bent knee. As Lewis turned to walk away he saw from the corner of his eyes the dark little bulge of the reemerged duckling fall out and drop free. It landed on its side, hopped up and waddled straight toward the front row, where one man emerged from the crowd and grabbed it.
“You like?” Euclid asked, standing next to Lewis again. “You can take her with you when she is done if you like.” Lewis brushed past him. “We have others too. Come, come, we’ll see,” Euclid said and grabbed Lewis by the arm and pulled him toward the back side of the bar.
“Was this the last fight?” Lewis asked.
“No, no. We have many more.”
“Do you always have intermissions like that?”
“Yes. We have lots of great shows with the girls. Come, come, I’ll show you more girls you take home.”
Lewis wanted to get a cold drink and to forget what he had seen. He looked closely at Euclid’s face as if he expected to see the green tiger climb over the man’s shoulders and swipe at his jugular.
The smell of old beer and new smoke were churning up from the sticky floor as Euclid led him to the bead curtain. Behind him was not the last fight, but one in a line that he knew would never end.
On the other side of the curtain Euclid led him through a door he had not noticed when he first entered.
“Come, look what nice girls I have for you.” The door opened into a small room full of couches. Inside were six girls. “Go in the back,” Euclid said to a pregnant girl. Her shoulders sloped over her fecund stomach. Two of the women on the couches had to help her stand up.
“I’ll take her,” Lewis said.
The pregnant girl looked nervous when Lewis pointed to her.
“Oh, good choice my friend. This one, very special,” Euclid said.
“I’ll take her,” he said again, pushing a wad of American five-dollar bills into Euclid’s hand so he could get out of there as quickly as possible.
Lewis broke back into the street with the pregnant woman at his side. As she walked, her arched back pushed her stomach forward. Her sable hair parted in the middle, hung over her shoulders, and rested above her swollen breasts. The blue neon light from the neighboring bar reflecting off her black eyes reminded him of Sterno flames. To his right the main drag of go-go bars ended at the ocean. The shore smelled like something wilted on the edge of a vast and dying place and only accelerated his encroaching sickness. An airplane was moving across the darkness. The streets were so lit up he thought of what it must look like to people looking down on the city—their foreheads pressed against serving plate–size windows as they dropped out of the clouds to view all the lights and wonder what heathen festival awaited their descent. He imagined lighting his vodka-soaked hand and waving it above his head to guide the plane down.
They walked back toward Lewis’s place along the water. There were new streamline cargo ships and dirty old freighters slowly rocking offshore. He wished he were out there. In the total darkness of open wat
er he had seen Orion throw his leg over the horizon and climb the sky, stars dripping off his shoulders and pooling into constellations of animals and heroes impaling each other in the heavens.
The woman had to stop every hundred yards. Perspiration beaded below her hairline, which reminded him of his first time in a brothel, where the sweat on a whore repulsed him, as that sweat might have been worked up from having serviced the ship that came in before his. It hinted at something fluid and human that had always made him uncomfortable.
His hand started to pound, so he held it in front of him like a boxing glove made out of a wadded-up diaper. His fever was getting worse, and he not only felt sick, but on the strange streets with the quiet pregnant woman, he also felt ugly and sick of himself.
She was probably eighteen or nineteen, and he thought Euclid said her name was Rena.
They stopped at the headlands and he smelled the water. He shut his eyes and listened to the breakers that will come until the end of time. When the woman was ready to walk again he opened his eyes and scanned the sky for satellites cutting their straight lines across the stars.
“You American?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“You work ship?”
“Yes.”
“Lots from ship come to Pattaya,” she said.
“Yes, lots.”
She pushed her hair off her collarbone, and as it swung loose he tried conjuring an odd want for her.
“No one knows you,” she said.
“What?”
“No one knows you,” she said again, this time pointing to the buildings, as if suggesting the whole world beyond them. “No one—” She searched for another word as she waddled forward.