‘I like to keep moving, never nest anywhere for too long,’ was Hatcher’s whispered answer.
‘What brings you to Bangkok?’
‘Vacation. My driver said this was the place to come. Who knows, I might bump into an old pal.’
‘Who knows?’ the bartender answered, noncommittally.
Hatcher patted the bar, trying to keep the conversation alive, and said, ‘I’m guessing this bar didn’t come from anywhere near Thailand.’
‘You do know your bars,’ said the bartender. He stroked the worn top affectionately. This one and the mirror and old John Ford up there,’ he said, wiggling a thumb over his shoulder toward the one-eyed bison’s head, ‘came here from one of the finest saloons in the U.S.’
‘Is that a fact,’ said Hatcher.
‘Old Skoohanie was a Texas cowboy -· and one lucky Irishman. One night he wandered into a gambler’s tent in Abilene — when Abilene wasn’t much more than a passing thought — and runs forty bucks to six thousand. Ends up owning the tent, the tables, the bank, the whole megilah. That was the beginning of the Galway Roost.’ He stopped long enough to draw himself half a glass of beer.
‘Which doesn’t explain how it got here,’ said Hatcher.
‘There was this mealy-mouthed little sapenpaw name of Edgar Skoohanie in my outfit in Nam who was always bragging about this bar of his,’ the bartender went on. ‘So I told him if he ever wanted to sell out, let me know. Sure enough, one day I get a call and the voice on the other end of the hook says, “This is Edgar Skoohanie, remember me?” Like anybody with an IQ of more than ten would forget a name like Edgar Skoohanie, right, and I says sure and he says things aren’t going well for the oh Roost and he’s gonna change it into a disco! A fucking disco, for God’s sake. We kicked it back and forth and I end up with the bar and the mirror and Edgar throws in old one-eyed John Ford there and next thing you know, I’m in business. Twelve thousand purple for the lot and four thousand more to get it shipped over.’
The bartender never spoke in terms of American money, he talked of bahts, one baht being about five cents American; of purples, which were five-hundred baht notes, or browns, which were ten bahts, or greens, which were twenty, or reds, which were a hundred. He paused again, this time to draw Hatcher another beer, then said, ‘What else was there to do but open up the Longhorn?’
‘Bet a good story goes with the bullet hole in that mirror,’ said Hatcher.
‘Not as interesting as the one that goes with that voice of yours,’ the bartender answered.
‘Talked when I should have listened,’ Hatcher growled.
The barkeep responded with a barracks-room laugh. Two gold teeth gleamed from the side of his mouth. A full carat’s worth of diamond twinkled from the center of one of them.
‘I do like a man who can joke about his mistakes,’ he said, sticking out a hand big enough to crush a basketball. ‘Name’s Sweets Wilkie, I own the place.’
‘Hatch,’ Hatcher answered.
As Wilkie and Hatcher talked, two Thai girls entered from a door at the rear. They were beautiful young girls with long black hair that cascaded down their backs almost to their waists. They were dressed in cowgirl miniskirts, cobra-skin cowboy boots and fake pinto pony vests, their budlike breasts holding the vests at bay. Neither of them could have been more than fifteen. They hit Sweets Wilkie from both sides, giggling and wrapping their arms around him and kissing him on both cheeks.
‘This is Jasmine, we call her Jazz, and this is Orchid,’ Wilkie said, obviously enjoying the attention. ‘We been married about a year now.’
‘You and Orchid?’ Hatcher asked. Wilkie looked surprised and said, ‘Hell, both of ‘em.’
‘Both of them!’
‘Been married and divorced six times since I been here and I’m yet to lay out one baht for alimony. I figure this time I’ll double up — maybe I’ll get a little luckier.’
His glittering grin lit up the darkened bar. He swatted the girls on their ample derrières and they moved on down the bar.
‘Welcome to Tombstone,’ the blond man suddenly mumbled, nodding as though he were about to fall asleep, and continuing to stare into his drink.
‘Meet Johnny Prophett, the official poet laureate of Tombstone,’ Wilkie said.
‘My pleasure,’ said Hatcher.
Prophett looked over his nose at Hatcher, smiled wanly, and held out in Hatcher’s general direction a hand that was cold and lifeless.
‘How many Americans live in Bangkok?’ Hatcher asked.
Prophett stood up unsteadily hopping two or three steps on his right foot. His eyes were beginning to water and he shrugged his shoulders and scratched his arms, and Hatcher realized, seeing him on his feet, that Prophett was rail-thin, almost emaciated. Prophett held his arms out at his sides like an evangelist on a roll. ‘Four, maybe five hundred,’ he said. ‘In all shapes and sizes. Engineers, salesmen, tennis bums, stock racketeers, gamblers, walking wounded, cynics, miscreants, displaced persons, anti-socials. You name it, we are it.’
Well, thought Hatcher, than narrows the odds on finding Cody from five million to one to four hundred to one.
Wilkie said casually, ‘Just a bunch of relocated Yanks.’
‘God’s fucked up, man,’ Prophett meandered. ‘Supposed to be dead on the far side of the river. Bloody boatman hasn’t figured out what happened. Even a poet has a hard time making any sense outa that one.’
‘Right,’ Wilkie agreed and Hatcher nodded, although neither of them knew what Prophett was talking about. ‘Johnny’s doing a book,’ he said by way of explanation and winked.
‘Bombay and tonic,’ Hatcher said to Wilkie.
Wilkie took the glass, put in a handful of ice cubes, and filled it with soda water.
As Prophett rambled on, a man came from behind the beads, shaking his hands as though they were cramped. He was a bizarre sight a husky man pushing six feet, walking with a little strut, his shoulders rocking back and forth. He wore jeans and a white sleeveless T-shirt. The skull imprinted on the front had a rose in its bony teeth and Grateful Dead printed across the back. His arms were thick and muscular and his hands, although large, had slender, almost delicate fingers. Thick black hair curled around his shoulders and tumbled down over his forehead. What was bizarre was a thin, red line that ran from his forehead down across the bridge of his nose to the point of his chin. His face was painted black on one side of the line and white on the other.
‘That’s Wonderboy, our resident minstrel,’ Prophett said.
Wonderboy walked to the bar and held his hand out toward Sweets Wilkie.
‘My luck’s on vacation,’ he said. ‘The box, Maestro.’ Wilkie handed him a four-string guitar, polished and well worn, an instrument obviously cared for with great affection. The strange-looking man walked over to the Wurlitzer, pulled the plug with a booted foot, and sat down next to it.
He closed his eyes and laid his head back against the wall and started singing: “Hey Jude, don’t let her go. . .
It was a beautiful voice. Clear, deep, a touch of whiskey in its high tones, and he gave the song such a plaintive plea that one wanted to grab Jude and shake some sense into his head.
Prophett leaned over and whispered, ‘Five feet from a flame-thrower when it took a mortar. Nobody really wants to see what’s under that paint.’
As the afternoon wore on, the bar began to ff1 up. Wilkie commandeered Benny Potter to help as the bar began to stack up two deep. His eyes watering, Prophett began hunching his shoulders and absently scratching his arms. A man entered the Longhorn walking with a funny little jump step, as if he had just fallen off a two-story building and landed flat on his feet. He had the trunk and arms of a weight lifter but skinny spindles for legs. He skipped straight to Earp and whispered something to him. Earp got up and went behind the bar and through a door into the rear of the building somewhere. The man with the funny walk went up the steps and through the beads into the small alcove.