“McPhail, I thought I’d lost you,” said Calvino. “Don’t just take off. Check in first. We gotta make this a team effort or it’s hopeless. Let’s go.”
“Free chocolate donuts,” said McPhail.
“What’s a donut got to do with anything?”
“I want one. That’s why I’m standing in line.”
“On line.” Calvino thought about the recent lines he’d crossed, double-crossed, on the way to his bedroom. “Okay, get your donut. If that’s what makes you happy.”
McPhail pointed at a demonstrator who walked past carrying a large chocolate donut with a big bite taken out of it. He licked his lips and smiled at Calvino. “It’s only one per person. So you gotta get in line if you want one.”
“McPhail, the food’s for protesters. We’re here to find Tanny’s mom.”
“But she could be in line. Look at that donut lady ahead. I’ll show her the picture. Maybe she saw her. Or maybe this guy.” McPhail pulled out the photocopied ID card, the photo blown up to cover most of the page, and showed it to an old man in front of him. “You know her?” he asked, as if speaking broken English were somehow the equivalent of Thai. The old man smiled, sucked his lips, and shrugged his shoulders. Gaining strength, McPhail moved up the line, showing each person the photo, until he reached the table and put out his hand for a free donut. The woman, wearing an apron, sheltered from the rain under a wide blue canopy, saw McPhail’s spattered face and put a donut in his hand. “Can I have another one for my friend?” He gestured at Calvino.
“Didn’t find her. But I got you a free donut,” said McPhail as he strolled past Calvino, gnawing on his donut.
The first order of business was to get out of the rain.
As rain dripped from a canvas awning, they stood next to each other, facing the stage, eating their donuts and looking like a couple of cops in Brooklyn. A chorus of clappers rose across the compound. A new speaker stood at the podium, waving a fist, getting the crowd to its feet with an attack on the government, demanding it dissolve parliament. Surveying the size of the crowd caused a bolt of hopelessness to travel through Calvino’s gut and exit his brain, leaving him with a dull headache.
Finding Tanny’s mother at Government House in normal times would have taken a shaman and a Brahman priest working together. But that would have been a cakewalk compared to finding one person in this large mob, all wearing basically the same thing. Calvino and McPhail hadn’t raised suspicion among the rank and file or the guards who yawned as they passed; choosing two farangs who’d immediately helped themselves to the donuts would have been a sorry excuse for infiltration by the pro-government side. Since everyone else looked pretty much interchangeable, the two of them were a diversion, an amusement, a couple of farangs wandering among a sea of yellow-shirted people wearing matching yellow headbands and living like happy campers who’d found a good cult to join. Outdoor living had a way of erasing differences in size, age, and weight as everyone merged into a collective.
McPhail finished his donut, licking his fingers, which he followed with a loud belch that turned heads.
Calvino gave most of his donut to a dog, which slunk away with it, sat beside a banana tree, and wolfed it down in two gulps.
Finding Tanny’s mother meant they had to divide up and split the crowd between the two of them—a lot of haystack for one needle.
“Impossible, buddy,” said McPhail.
“If she’s here, we’ll find her,” Calvino said, without much confidence. He wanted to find her for the strange woman who had come out of his bathroom wearing nothing but a towel, holding another woman’s earring in the palm of her hand. She had given every indication, before that moment, that in her view Calvino couldn’t find his hat if it were sitting on his head. He had started to doubt himself. Maybe Tanny’s right, he thought.
TWENTY
THEY PLUNGED INTO the large mass of people, both Calvino and McPhail trying to keep dry by using photocopies of Tanny’s mother’s ID photo to cover their heads. They stopped people, showed them the photo, and asked if they’d seen this woman. None had. They walked on. Calvino stopped at a makeshift shelter made from scraps of wood, only to find the same response—a blank stare, an offer of food. He knelt down and talked to three women sitting crossed-legged inside a simple shelter built atop old tires, the gray canvas walls pulled up and fixed to the roof.
A steady stream of rainwater ran off the canvas and into the ground. They peeled and chopped garlic and onions, taking them from a large bag; one of the women sharpened a long butcher’s knife with the skill of the person assigned to maintain the readiness of the guillotine. It didn’t look like the kind of knife designed to peel garlic with.
Two hours later McPhail, pale and sweating, sat on the edge of a pallet, resting his head on his knees, moaning.
“You okay?” asked Calvino.
“Man, I don’t feel so good.” He lit a cigarette, smoke coming out of his nose and mouth, and almost immediately flicked the freshly lit cigarette into the rain. He groaned, held his stomach, as if he were a hammer and nail away from having his photo added to the Ghost Wall.
Behind McPhail a bloated four-hundred-pound wrestler of a man slept soundly on a pallet, using his hands as a pillow. From a distance he looked like a gargoyle chipped off a Gothic rampart and abandoned by thieves. Beside him was a table bearing bottles of soda for sale. The sleeping vendor could have passed as the brother of the bodyguard with the seveniron.
“Can you get me a vodka tonic? That cures just about everything,” McPhail said, turning and addressing the sleeping giant. “Vodka tonic,” McPhail repeated, but got no response.
“Guess not,” said Calvino as the man rolled over to face away from McPhail.
All around them, from inside the shantytown of wooden shelters, the TVs were tuned to ASTV—the only channel they could receive—connecting all of them to the speakers and performers working on the main stage. McPhail covered his ears. The sound was too much—the TVs turned to top volume, the thousands of clappers, and the drumming of the rain.
“You look white as a ghost,” said Calvino.
“Hey, buddy, I feel worse than shit.”
“The donut?”
McPhail nodded, fumbling for another cigarette. “You think someone poisoned it?”
Calvino shook his head, happy that he’d thrown most of his donut to the dog. “I wouldn’t take it personally.”
“I don’t know any other way to take it.”
“Let’s find—”
“A toilet,” said McPhail. “I saw you gave your donut to a dog.”
“You worried about the dog?”
McPhail groaned. “Fuck the dog. Man, I’m dying.”
Calvino helped McPhail to his feet. Slowly they walked on a pathway between the temporary shelters, looking at the demonstrators huddled inside, squatting vacant-eyed in front of the TVs like children hooked on cartoons. Calvino had his arm around McPhail, who was near collapse. A man rode toward them on a tiny bicycle. Calvino moved McPhail off the path, watching the cyclist disappear behind a cannon on the lawn, an old cannon that shot iron balls in pirate movies, only this one had a green hedge shaped like a enormous green donut around it. McPhail contemplated the rain-soaked green donut and vomited. He retched again while he was on his hands and knees, Calvino holding an umbrella over him. A couple of minutes later, Calvino assisted McPhail, who stumbled over his feet, into one of the portable toilets and closed the door. Calvino stood outside and waited, listening to McPhail moan as if he’d been shot or stabbed. As he waited, Calvino showed the photocopy to everyone who passed; soon he started to feel like a tout showing a menu of tricks in Patpong. People looked at him, hearing McPhail in the toilet screaming that he wanted to die, and hurried along. Calvino finally gave up, seeing how the protesters were giving him a wide berth as if he were personally to blame for the bloodcurdling screams coming from the toilet.
“McPhail, are you okay?”
“I want to die
.”
“You don’t look so good.”
“My guts. The motherfuckers gave me a toxic donut. I hope the army comes and shoots them all.”
“I wonder what happened to the dog,” said Calvino.
“Oh, man, don’t make me laugh.”
Calvino waited a few more minutes until the portable toilet door swung open and McPhail staggered out, zipping up his jeans. He looked like a ghost.
“I am a little shaky. But I’ve decided not to die.”
“Are you good for another hour? Then we’ll call it a day,” said Calvino.
“They’ve got poison donuts. I figure, yeah, they’ve got to have a drugstore.”
A woman with a blue whistle around her neck, who’d looked quizzical when McPhail had earlier shown her the photocopy, pointed them in the direction of the first-aid station when they asked her for medical assistance. They walked back to the main Gothic building, like the castle in Frankenstein, with the torch-carrying villagers in occupation.
People eating donuts looked away bored as they perched on the steps. McPhail retched again, balanced himself against one of the gilded columns. “I’m going to be fine,” he said, wiping his mouth. A couple of minutes later, Calvino half dragged McPhail to the front of the first-aid station, where a yellow string was suspended between two plastic traffic cones anchored with tires. A Red Cross sign was draped over the side of a table loaded with pills, potions, ointments, and bandages. Behind the table a couple of nurses worked.
A large fan rotated a few feet away. Calvino explained the problem while McPhail, doubled up with cramps, his knees rubbery, slowly dropped to the ground, knocking over one of the traffic cones. He hugged the tire like a scared child hugging a teddy bear.
“Stomachache,” said Calvino.
“Tell her I’ve got the runs.”
“He has the runs.”
“And the sweats and I’m—” He vomited. No need to tell her.
The middle-aged nurse looked over the top of her glasses at McPhail, making a diagnosis and running her hand along bookshelf-like row of boxes. Calvino tried to smooth out one of the photocopies, the image damp and wrinkled. “I’m looking for this woman.”
Calvino watched her study the photo. She nodded, half turned, and pointed. A few feet further back in the cobbled-together pharmacy, a row of cots had been set up.
On one of the cots a middle-aged woman, wrapped in a sheet, slept with her back to them. “That’s Mem. But she’s sleeping. Last night there was an attack by people from Isan. We had many casualties. We got almost no sleep. I hate these ignorant people. Why don’t they stay home where they belong?” Her face twisted into a mask of rage. She clenched her fists. It hadn’t taken much to work her up. But when people were dead tired, they were on edge, emotions raw like open sores. “Farang don’t understand.” She looked defiant in her conclusion, as if she were talking to someone beyond hope.
“I do my best,” he said.
McPhail gobbled down a handful of pills that the nurse assured him would cure his stomach. Doubled up, he rolled onto one of the vacant cots, curled into the fetal position, and fell into a coma-like sleep. Calvino had his wallet out to pay for McPhail’s medication.
“We don’t take money for medicine. Or food.”
“I’d like to talk to Mem.”
The nurse frowned, like she’d already decided not to interrupt the woman’s sleep.
“It’s important. Her daughter has a problem.” Those were the magic words in a culture where mothers were worshipped like goddesses and to have a child with a problem was an intolerable affront to their stature. She gestured for Calvino to enter the inner sanctum.
“Mem, wake up and talk to this farang about your daughter.”
Mem shifted around on her cot, raised herself up, blinking the sleep from her eyes, and looked at Calvino, who sat on a low plastic stool no more than two feet away. Her startled expression changed to perplexed. “My daughter is dead,” she said. The wrinkles around her eyes deepened, and her eyes themselves filled with tears.
Calvino shook his head. “She’s very much alive. She’s now a grown woman.” He pulled from his jacket photocopies of Tanny’s birth certificate and her passport and held them out.
She rummaged through her handbag for reading glasses. Once they were on, she flipped through the documents. She looked up as if she’d seen a ghost.
“Bum?” she whispered.
It was the first time Calvino had heard Tanny’s Thai nickname. Of course, she would have had a Thai name on her birth certificate. He wondered if she knew that her daughter’s name was Tanny Craig.
“Her new name is Tanny.”
The foreign name confused her. “My daughter Jeab died five years ago,” Mem said.
The nurse who’d been listening from behind the table chipped in, “Police kill her daughter. Police no good. Corrupt. Why you think we are here? We hate the police for what they do to us.”
The list of hatreds added another category of people along with people from Isan.
“But you had another daughter,” said Calvino.
Mem stared at him. “Bum?”
“She wants to meet you. Are you okay with that?” Calvino asked.
Mem nodded, shedding more tears. “Are you Bum’s husband?”
Calvino smiled, shaking his head. “I’m a friend.”
“I think I never see Bum again in this life. Maybe she hates me very much.”
She was fishing for information. He couldn’t blame her.
Calvino squeezed her hand. “Bum doesn’t hate you.”
“I think she does.”
“Bum has a son. That makes you a grandmother.”
The most serene smiled passed Mem’s lips. Then she opened up with a barrage of questions. Calvino found himself answering questions that were not his to answer, the kinds of questions and answers she’d have to work through with her daughter. There would be hundreds more, and it would take many days of face time before the two women could come to terms with the past. The fact was, he’d found her, though McPhail would claim, with some justification, the full credit for finding Mem in the eleven acres packed with demonstrators; without the contaminated donut, she might have slept right through their attempt to locate her.
While he waited for the pills to work on McPhail’s head, stomach, and bowels, Calvino listened to Mem, who told him the story of Tanny’s adoption and what happened to her sister. The same story she’d repeat to Tanny, using basic English to convey a lifetime of regret and sorrow.
TWENTY-ONE
CALVINO AND TANNY entered the Government House compound at dusk. Passing the long queue, Calvino said, “Keep away from the donuts.” Tanny wore a white blouse, dark slacks, and low-heeled shoes. With a yellow headband, she could have blended into the swarm as one more worker bee.
Calvino led her through the crowd, past pools of light from the individual campsites, until they finally arrived at the Red Cross station. Tanny’s mother was wrapping a bandage around the leg of a boy of about ten or eleven. He’d been running in the dark, tripped over an electric wire, and cut his ankle as he fell onto a pallet. Mem wasn’t dressed like a nurse; she wore jeans and a yellow shirt. A brown clip held her hair, streaked with gray, back. Her hands efficiently secured the bandage around his ankle.
“You be careful next time,” she said.
The boy’s mother and two other relatives looked on with worried expressions, while the kid continued to sniff back tears and snot, looking to them for sympathy.
Tanny was as anxious as a schoolgirl waiting to see the principal as they waited nearby, watching Mem finish up treating the boy; Mem patted him on the head and sent him and his family on their way. Watching her mother work as a nurse had oddly made Tanny nervous, as if she were next in line with an old, open wound that needed tending.
She nearly stumbled over one of the traffic cones as she negotiated the cots lining the area beyond the station table.
Except for an electri
c lamp beside Mem, the near darkness made it difficult to see the ground. But not so dark as to hide Tanny’s tears, and thus the first thing Mem saw was her daughter wiping away tears. She’d looked up to see the grown woman—saw an old image of herself as if in a timetraveling mirror—and then Calvino, whom she remembered from earlier in the day.
Calvino nodded. “That’s her,” he said in Thai to Mem.
“Bum?” her mother asked, not quite believing her eyes. Hearing aloud her Thai nickname had made Tanny laugh. “She named me Bum? Is that a joke? Because if it is, it’s not funny.” As in deadbeat, drunk in the gutter, a homeless person, and bag lady—a few of the associations that crossed her mind.
“It’s not a joke. It means dimpled. Not dimple. Like pressing your finger into flesh, and you take it away. That’s the Thai name for the little indent that is left. That’s bum.”
Calvino had asked Ratana to teach her how to deliver the “mother’s wai” that all Thai women give to their mothers. Mem wrapped her arms around Tanny, hugging her daughter. Calvino understood how that same decisive and unflappable impulse to deal with a situation came to be inside Tanny. In the shadows of the great Italian-designed building, mother and daughter embraced for a long time, as if to squeeze time to a fresh starting point.
Tanny caught her breath, her hands still trembling, and said, “Thanks, Vinny. I didn’t think you’d do it. But, you know, thanks.”
“I’ll leave you to catch up with your mother.” He hadn’t thought anything could have bored inside and rattled her to the core. Such a reaction wasn’t expected from someone who reined in her emotions with such skill. Finding her mother had broken the shell, humanized her, and Calvino liked the new Tanny.
“Please, stay for a while,” said Tanny. She reached out to him with a glimmer in her eye, the kind that makes a man sit, stay, and ultimately beg. He stepped forward and found a place to sit, a plastic chair at a small table in the back. Incandescent lights flickered across the way as other lights—candles, flashlights, and fluorescent tubes strung up in the canvas shelters—signaled nightfall. Darkness brought the possibility of police and military moving in to clear the demonstrators, or another attack launched by the progovernment demonstrators who were camped not far away.
The Corruptionist Page 17