The soi juddered by as he strained, hoisting leaden legs—only thirty or forty feet along and already winded for Christ’s sake, but hearing no feet behind him. He dared a glance over his shoulder and saw the two other boys lifting the leader to his feet, the leader screaming after him, pointing an outstretched hand like a rifle, hopping on one leg. The other leg, the one Wallace had damaged, was lifted and bent like a stork’s. Wallace faced forward again and found a burst of speed from somewhere, although he knew in the part of his mind that was keeping score that two of them could catch up to him in a minute or less if they abandoned the injured boy and ran full out.
He came to a cross-street and slowed. From somewhere in the past, the information assembled itself: he was running on Soi Jarurat, maybe Petchburi 13. To his left, the cross-street went only a short way and hooked left again, back toward the big road. To the right, he had no idea.
Thai Heaven had been nowhere near here.
If he went left and then left again, trying to get back to the bright lights of New Petchburi Road, the boys might divide up, one staying behind him and the other two running back to the last crossstreet to meet him head-on—what he learned in the jungle to call a pincer movement. If I go right, he thought, they can’t cut me off.
He was laboring now. His lungs felt like he’d inhaled fire, and the pulse at his throat was as forceful as a tapping thumb. There had to be something to the right.
Right it was.
And he heard flip-flops slapping pavement. Two pair at a run and a third pair much more irregular and farther back.
It was what he needed. Some ancient, long-stored reserve of strength flamed into being, the soldier’s training overcoming, even if only for a few moments, the old man’s body. He stretched his stride, feeling like he could fly. Angling across the empty street, he leaped for the curb and snagged a foot on it, pitching forward, fighting to get his arms down to break the fall. He landed heavily on one elbow and one knee, knowing immediately that the elbow was a problem, and rolled over twice until he could push himself to his feet with the arm he could still bend, and then he began to move, as much at a limp as a run.
Laughter floated from the boys behind him.
The knee of his pants had torn on impact. There was blood on the cloth, making it stick to his leg. His left elbow was an independent sphere of pain, with a demonic halo of heat around it that seemed to have clamped itself to the middle of his arm and seized his nervous system by sheer force. It squeezed off a machine-gun tangle of agony every time his heart beat. Looking down at it, he saw for the first time that the stinging he’d been feeling in his left forearm was a neat slice, the sleeve of his shirt looking like it had been cut with scissors. The boy he kicked must have gotten to him with a blade as he went down.
Not much farther. He didn’t have it in him to go much farther. They could—they could have him.
But the young man inside flared up and said fuck that, and Wallace found himself running again, feeling as though he must be leaving red streaks of pain in the air behind him. Doorways and dark windows and occasional fences flowed by, and then, up ahead to the left on his side of the street, he saw light: yellowish, bright, as harsh as a snapped word, but light.
A paved area, a parking lot, but not many cars. Instead, knotted wires, carrying stolen electricity direct from the high-voltage lines above, dangled a crop of clear, naked bulbs, spherical as oranges, strung over little stands. A few cars were parked along one edge as though they’d been shoved aside to make room for this little market, just a huddle of carts selling cooked food and produce. Many of them were shutting up, closing the glass doors that kept the flies away, sprinkling water on the charcoal beneath the cooking grates. Among the few remaining shoppers, Wallace saw some farang, solitary men as old as he.
The vendors had come here as their last stop of the day, hoping to coax the farang from their apartments. Old, bent, balding. His age. Left behind when the Golden Mile disappeared.
The business farthest from the street was a glasssided cart with a long piece of plywood laid across it, perhaps seven or eight feet long, beneath a signboard that said “NOT FAR BAR.” Hand-painted below that, in letters of many sizes, was “oNe Bar ComE to YOU!” Four stools had been pulled up to the plywood. Three of them were occupied: a bentspined man in a blindingly white shirt sitting beside a woman with hair too black even for Thailand, and on the third stool, a plump woman in her late fifties or early sixties, her body popping out of a black cocktail dress that might have fit her twenty years earlier. At one end of the plywood plank, a small boom box was playing “Hotel California.”
A portable bar. Wallace had seen a few of these on the sidewalks following the overnight demolition of Sukhumvit Square, but here one was in front of him, as unexpected as an oasis with camels and palm trees. He looked behind him, saw the shoppers thinning and the merchants closing, and went to the empty stool and sat. He couldn’t have run another yard if there’d been wolves chasing him.
“Beer Singha,” he said, trying to steady his breathing. Now that he was sitting, he felt his legs trembling violently. His left elbow sent up a neural yelp of pain, and the plump woman, who had gotten up to get his beer, took a second look at him and straightened. The powder on her face looked like chalk in the hard light.
“Honey,” she said. Her hands indicated the cut shirt, the blood on the cloth. “What happen?”
“Some kids,” he said, hearing the quaver in his voice. “It’s okay. I just need to sit a minute.”
“Poor baby, poor baby,” she said. “Kid. Kid no good now. Not same before.” She reached into the glass case and pulled out a relatively clean hand towel, then scooped a handful of melting ice and wrapped the towel around it. She lifted the dripping mess, gave it a professional-looking squeeze and held it out. “Here,” she said. “For...” She flexed her own left elbow and pointed at it and her forearm with her right hand.
He pressed the wet, cold cloth to his arm, and the fire of pain was banked slightly. A few of the vendors were stretching up, holding towels or potholders to unscrew the bulbs over their carts. The kids were nowhere in sight.
“You say kid…” the woman in black said. She popped the cap off a Singha. At her end of the bar was a big Chinese cleaver on a circular wooden cutting board, piled with limes. She grabbed the cleaver and expertly sliced a lime, then remembered to ask, “Glass?”
He shook his head.
“Kid how old? How many?” She dropped the lime slice back onto the board, thunked the cleaver’s edge into the wood, wiped the bottle dry and put it in front of him. Then she hoisted herself onto the stool beside him and rested her hand on his thigh in the eternal gesture of bar girls everywhere.
“Three. Not kids, really. In their twenties. Smoking…” He mimed the little pipe with his left hand. “Yaa baa,” she said. She nodded. “I see before. Bangkok now no good.”
A fat Thai with a Chinese face waddled out of the darkness. Behind him Wallace saw an aluminum lawn chaise with a blanket on it. “We close soon,” the man said. “Order last drink, please.”
“Aaaaahhhhhh,” the man with the bent spine said. “I’ll quit now.” He put a couple of bills down and dropped some coins on top and pushed the stool back. Standing, he was no taller than he was sitting, his back as crooked as a question mark. “You,” he said to Wallace. “You oughta see a doctor. That arm’s busted.”