The knocks sounded again, loud as kicks. “Vallace? I need to hear you talking. Everybody in ze bar asks, is Vallace okay?”
Leon wasn’t going away. Leon had nothing better to do with his life than to stand in that hallway, kicking Wallace’s crappy door and singing German opera for everybody in the building to hear. One of Wallace’s life principles floated up toward him like a message in that magic eight-ball everyone used to have, Always move toward trouble, not away from it. In the jungle, don’t turn your back. On the city street, don’t turn your back.
Don’t turn your back on Leon Hofstedler. The idea of Leon being dangerous made Wallace laugh as he went back into the bedroom, heading toward the living room. Wallace had lived with dangerous day and night for three tours of sweating, steaming, leech-ridden, blood-stinking duty. The only thing Leon had ever killed was time. Wallace thought he’d like to say that to Ernie. Ernie always looked surprised before he laughed, as though it startled him that other people were funny.
“Coming, Ernie,” Wallace called. He remembered to look down at himself and was reassured to see that he’d gone to sleep fully dressed.
“Ernie?” Hofstedler bellowed though the door. “Zis is not Ernie. Ernie—mein Gott!—Ernie is a zousand years ago. You should not be alone so much.”
“I’m not alone,” Wallace said, undoing the door’s assortment of locks—a joke, given that the door itself was made of soda cracker. “I’ve got three Balinese girl scouts with me.” He opened the door on the mountain that was Leon Hofstedler.
Hofstedler, his magisterial bulk draped in one of the many-pocketed safari shirts he had made for him a dozen at a time by a Thai seamstress, narrowed his eyes as if trying to see through Wallace to the wall behind him. He said, “Ernie?”
“Been thinking about him,” Wallace said.
Hofstedler continued to study Wallace’s face. After a moment he gave a grudging grunt. “I tell zem you look okay.”
“Of course I’m okay,” Wallace said around the bloom of irritation in his chest. “Why wouldn’t I be okay?”
Hofstedler shrugged. “Zey worry. You not coming, night after night. You know, thinking maybe...” Whatever they were thinking, it was too dire for Hofstedler to voice it.
“Just a little busy,” Wallace said, putting some weight on the door. “You tell them I’m fine and say hello for me, ’kay?” He pushed the door closed on Hofstedler, completing the sentence in his mind, ... whoever they are.
A shower. That was what he needed, a shower and some clean clothes. Jah, it was Jah he wanted to see. Whip thin, tousle-haired Jah, who went with him to Don Muang Airport the first time he flew back home and cried inconsolably at the departure gate. And was there, jumping up and down like a teenager, when he came back. Running at him from thirty yards away and leaping on him, her legs twined around his waist, as all the other passengers stared.
He thought, Don Muang? Do international flights still go through Don Muang? It sounded wrong, but he shrugged it off, along with his shirt and trousers, and padded toward the shower. The girls may be professionals, he thought, but they’re still Thai. It shows respect when you come to them clean.
The road was far too wide.
He came out of the narrow corridor that led from the apartment house’s single clanking elevator, extravagantly scented with cat piss, feeling light on his feet, decisive and clear-headed, as though he were back walking point in Nam. But as the door closed behind him, he saw the road and took a stumble that forced him to step forward or fall on his face. It was six lanes wide, the road, a Mekong River of lights, the demon-red of tail-lights, the hard diamond-yellow of headlights. He stood there for a second, loose-jointed and irresolute, as the narrow soi in front of the old shophouse thinned, shimmered and disappeared, giving way to the street he’d moved to.
He said, “Sukhumvit,” identifying it, and the kernel of unease in his chest softened at the name. His own voice reassured him. “Sukhumvit.” Where was he going? Yes, Jah. Jah worked at... Thai... Thai something. Thai Paradise?
Well, he knew where it was, even if the name eluded him. He stepped to the curb, one arm upraised, palm down, a gesture of long habit. A couple of taxis slowed, but he waved them by until he could flag a tuk-tuk, which almost ran over Wallace’s foot. The driver was a skinny, dark kid with a shadowy mustache and a long fall of black hair dipping over one eye. Wallace climbed in, sat back and said, “Golden Mile.”
The tuk-tuk vibrated as its little two-stroke engine chugged and popped, but it didn’t move. The boy’s eyes found Wallace’s in the mirror. “You say where?”
“Golden Mile, the Golden Mile,” Wallace said. He smiled so his impatience wouldn’t show but got no smile in return.
“Hotel?” the boy asked.
“No, no, no. Golden Mile. Bars. New Petchburi Road.”
“Okay,” the boy said with a nod. “Golden Mile. Petchburi.”
“Thai Heaven,” Wallace said as the cab pulled out.
Jah worked at Thai Heaven.
“Okay, boss,” the boy said, his eyes on the traffic behind. “Golden Mile.”
He sat back and closed his eyes. The exhaust was perfume, the chuk-chuk of the engine, music. Oh, how he had fallen in love with Bangkok on his first R&R, after six months of duty, his feet rotting with the damp, whole colonies of exotic parasites claiming his intestines, his soul knotted with death. The girls in the villages they defended, sometimes by burning them, looked at Wallace and the others in his platoon with terror and revulsion, which the Americans occasionally earned. Three times, men he knew well had turned bestial on the floor of some thatched shack, impatiently taking turns on a girl barely out of childhood. Leaving behind, suddenly tiny on the floor, the crushed and sobbing remnant of a human being, and once even less than that.
And then, after a copter out and a few hours in a plane, he was here, in the city of joy. Smiles everywhere, food everywhere, everything cheap and easy, and girls who loved him. Girls like nutmeg, girls like cinnamon, girls who blended into a single smile, a single “no problem” as he took them, in threes and fours at first, like a starving man sweeping a whole table full of food to himself, and then, as faces and names emerged, one by one. Jah, Noi, Lek, Tuum. Sometimes staying with one of them for days on end. Falling asleep beside her on clean sheets in a cool room. Warm breath on his chest. Safe.
Hansum man, Jah called him. Teerak, Jah called him, Thai for sweetheart. Wallet, Jah called him, and he thought it was her joke until he realized that Thais couldn’t pronounce a sibilant at the end of a word, and she thought she was saying his name, the same way she said “Santa Claut.” He took to calling himself Wallet, appreciating the name’s appropriateness even if Jah didn’t understand it. He was lean and young and handsome, and the way Jah eyed the other girls when they were together made him think of someone driving into the old neighborhood at the wheel of a sports car.
The first night that she stayed with him, just as he’d been about to drop off, she’d raised herself onto one elbow, the bedside lamp creating a circle of reflected light on the smooth skin of her shoulder, and said: “This room. How much?”
He’d told her. Her eyes had gone round and her mouth had dropped open, and she’d emitted a sound like a puff of steam, and then she was up and pulling on her clothes, her shoulders high and rigid with determination. A moment later, the door closed behind her.