Shoedog (4 page)

Chris and Julie dropped Constantine at the foot of Mount Tasmin and moved on. There was a rainbow coming out of the clouds, reflecting off the mountain and its main attraction, Fox Glacier. Constantine watched it for a while and walked to Fox Glacier Motor Park, a campground in the middle of a meadow. He took a room there on the end of a cinder-block row, and settled in for the night. He could not have known then that he would sleep in that room for an entire year.

What made him stay was hard to determine. He would tell himself that it was the white kitten who adopted him the next day, though he suspected it was the job he landed almost immediately (Constantine could never resist a no-tax restaurant gig) as a cook in the no-name local that sat on the edge of the campground. The pub housed two pool tables, kept a friendly staff, and had Speight’s and DB on tap. Most of the talk was about the glacier (the townies called it the “glaah-sheer”) and the daily stream of tourists it brought into town. Constantine only went up on the glaah-sheer once, led by a guide he knew named Kevin. He was surprised it wasn’t colder, standing on the ice.

Mostly he spent his mornings walking in the woods and the mountains, his days at the local, and his evenings reading popular novels left by travelers in the bar. The white kitten grew to be a slow and heavy cat; beyond that, Constantine noticed little change in himself or his surroundings, though the feeling he had then was in general a wary contentment.

That ended, too, one night behind the pub. Constantine was sweeping the kitchen when he heard a woman’s cries through the rear screen door. He walked out the door with the broom in his hand and saw a group of three young men raping a Dutch backpacker in the dirt. After that he recalled swinging the broom handle, and the sound of it as it collapsed the skull of the largest, smiling man. The pub’s staff got Constantine under control eventually, but not before he had taken the other two almost completely out, ramming one man’s skull flat into the cinder-block wall of the pub. Later, he remembered that the blood smelled like the jar of copper pennies he had kept in his room as a child.

His expulsion from the country was political—one man’s father was a prominent landowner—but it was something he did not resist He never met the Dutch girl, and was never asked to identify her attackers. The authorities told him that the wall-rammed man was critical, and that Constantine was an alien working illegally in their country, and strangely, that they would pay for his ticket of departure. Constantine pictured a map in his head, selected a place at random, and told the men that he would like to go to Thailand. Before they escorted him to the plane that would wing him to Auckland, the one cop who had remained silent throughout the ordeal finally met Constantine’s eyes, and thanked him.

Constantine had a night to kill in Auckland. He took a room in the Railton on Queen Street, a temperance hotel run by the Salvation Army that had the smell of old age and decay embedded in its lobby. After a bath he stopped at a place called Real Groovy Records, bought a pulp novel, and walked downtown with the paperback wedged in the back pocket of his jeans. He stopped at the Shakespeare Brewery and had three of the best and most potent ales he had ever tasted, Macbeth’s Red. After that it was hot beef salad and chicken larb at a side-street eatery called Mai Thai, where he washed down the fiery dishes with two Singhas, then back to Shakespeare’s for five more Macbeth’s Reds. He had a load on now, but the walk back to the hotel was long, and he stopped for a short one in a chrome-heavy bar at the top of Queen Street. At the bar Constantine met a Kiwi named Graham and his girlfriend Lovey, and the three of them got stinking drunk trading shots of ouzo and Bailey’s Irish Cream. Constantine ended the night dancing on the bar to Curtis Mayfield’s “Give Me Your Love,” a song he had selected from the jukebox. He did not remember the walk home.

He woke the next morning with a top-ten hangover, realizing suddenly with a painful smile that he was fiercely drunk and in the bowels of a temperance motel. His back hurt from the paperback that was still stuck in the pocket of his jeans. Constantine vomited, took a bath, then grabbed his backpack and fell into a cab for the Auckland airport.

He caught his flight to Thailand and rode a taxi into the heart of Bangkok. Upon exiting the cab, he realized that it was very late at night, and that he was an American and without prospect in a country of Asian faces. The streets were narrow and unevenly paved, and rats moved freely around the closed stands of vendors.

Constantine stopped the driver of a three-wheeled tuk-tuk, who told him of Soi Cowboy, the party district whose bars were largely populated by expatriate Vietnam vets. The driver took him there and dropped him in front of one such establishment, Inside, Constantine made friends over a half-dozen Mekong beers with a bushy-sideburned American named Masterson, a burnout for sure but less of one than the others in the bar.

After a couple of shots to back up the Mekongs, Masterson took Constantine to Patpong, the area noted for its commercial prostitution. Constantine was a bit surprised at the organization of it all—the tuk-tuk driver, undoubtedly with his hand in the till as well, dropped them at the “most very clean place”—and at his first sight of women onstage wearing cardboard numbers strung around their necks. Two more beefs and a joint of something sweet, and Constantine had chosen a woman who stood with a dispassionate smile on the plywood stage.

He came in her in the back of Masterson’s place, a two-room affair down another dark alley. Afterward, she pulled a crumpled piece of yellow paper from her jeans and read a poem, in English, to Constantine. Her ability to speak the language puzzled him, as she had repeated the words “No English” to him several times before they stripped off their clothes. It puzzled him, too, that she slept in his arms the entire night, until he reasoned that his room was probably nicer than anything she had to go back to. He settled with her in the morning. Later, he casually mentioned to Masterson the whore’s “No English” mantra. Masterson laughed and said, “But it don’t mean ‘no
speak
English,’ mate. It means ‘I no suck your dick.’”

Constantine left Bangkok quickly, hearing of the beautiful south and huts on the beach. After an overnight train ride and the ferry to Ko Pha-Ngen, he rented such a hut, at less than two American dollars a day, a serviceable dirt-floored living arrangement that housed a corner slab of cement with a hole drilled in the cement for excrement. The beach and green water were some of the finest he had seen, and there was a nearby eatery called the Happy Restaurant that served “special” mushroom omelettes, which kept him right for half of every day. But he soon tired of the fierce mosquitoes and the repetitive conversations of backpackers—where to eat cheap, where to sleep cheap—and after a few weeks on the Gulf of Thailand he headed north.

In the course of his travels he found a guide and trekked up into the hills close to the Burma border. Small tribes practiced slash-and-burn farming there, and each tribe had an opium professor, opium being the most prized of crops. In one village he visited the hut of the tribe’s opium professor late at night, and lay on his side on a straw mat as the professor prepared his pipe. The hut had been built up on stilts, and Constantine could hear the sound of pigs running beneath him as the mixture was carefully heated to its boiling point. Constantine did three bowls, and stared without thought at the candles in the hut until he fell to sleep.

His months in the hills were uneventful, and later he could not remember exactly what he had done to pass the time. He bathed irregularly and ate very little. In the ancient walled city of Chiang Mai he smoked some heroin offered to him by his guide, then sat in a folding chair on a riverbank, under a black sky. He sat with his guide the entire nights both of them uninterested in conversation, as the muddy river flowed by.

Eventually Constantine made his way south once again. His intention was to leave Asia and visit Europe. He spent nearly the balance of his cash on a cheap flight out of Bangkok, and took it all the way to Brussels. In Brussels, very late one night, he caught a train headed for Paris.

Constantine chose an empty compartment, but soon the compartment was filled with three backpackers—two young British women and a thin Jamaican man—and a well-dressed Parisian woman in her early twenties, a transplanted Italian named Francesca. The Brits and the Jamaican stared at Constantine with a curious, grinning contempt, but Francesca broke the discomfort with some spirited conversation, buoyed by her delight at Constantine’s command of French. Constantine confessed to her that he was now quite broke, and Francesca gave him an address where he might find some work. Soon the Brits and the Jamaican were asleep, and then Francesca’s head dropped to Constantine’s shoulder, and later her face fell full in his lap. Constantine closed his eyes, eventually nodding off with an unwanted but unshakable erection.

Constantine left the train at the station in Paris, giving Francesca a guilty kiss before he waved her off. The station was busy with well-dressed Parisians and backpackers, and the air was thick and aromatic with the smoke of Gauloise cigarettes. He hitchhiked south and was picked up by an amiable young man who was playing a cassette of Bob Dylan’s “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” loudly through his rear-mounted speakers.

The tip from Francesca led him to Tours, a university town on the Loire, on the northeast edge of central France. The address she had given him turned out to be the local orphanage, and the mention of her name brought an instant smile to the chief of staff. Apparently Francesca was some sort of angelic philanthropist, making Constantine’s lecherous thoughts from the train seem somehow even more unclean. He was hired immediately as an interpreter, with a small salary to go with his room and board.

Constantine settled in to the slow, easy life of the town. He rode an old bicycle for basic transportation, and to run errands to the local pharmacy. Mostly his job consisted of acting as an interpreter in the crucial first meeting between French child and English-speaking parent. He suspected that there was something a bit illegal in these transactions, and that there was much money being passed below the table. But he remained emotionally detached from the children and the dynamics of the adoption process, preferring to pursue perfection in the art of being alone. In general he stayed away from trouble, though he did steal a Citro?n one night, returning it to the unsuspecting owner’s parking spot before dawn.

One year after he had arrived in Tours, Constantine packed his Jansport and rode the train to Amsterdam with the intention of having a short holiday. Once there, he took a room at the Hotel My Home, a boarding house near the station run by a couple of humorless but kind old men. On the first night of his stay Constantine had a few genevas with beer chasers at the pub below the hotel, the CafÉ Simone. He was surprised to see middle-aged men smoking marijuana at the bar. Other than that the place was like any local, complete with the requisite, red-faced, cap-wearing drunk at the end of the bar doing his atonal rendition of Del Shannon’s “Runaway.” He took to Amsterdam immediately and did not return to France. A week later he took a job as a barback in a lesbian club named Homolulu’s, and a week after that he met a blonde named Petra Boone, who became his girlfriend until he left Amsterdam, quite suddenly and for no explainable reason except to travel, six months later.

He drifted south by rail into Italy, and later took the ferry from Brindisi to Patras, in Greece. A bus dropped him in Athens where Constantine checked immediately into the local hostel. Athens was no place to experiment on accommodations if one didn’t know the language. It reminded Constantine of New York City with heightened emotions.

The desk clerk at the hostel was a Greek girl named Voula, a tightly curled brunette with mahogany eyes and a small, wet mouth. The manner in which she used her hands to navigate through her broken English attracted Constantine, along with her low-stanced, hippy shape. They were friends immediately and lovers three days later, when Constantine moved into her room, the best and most private in the house.

Beyond his desk duties at the hostel, which paid his room and board, Constantine did not work during his stay in Greece. He spent his days drinking NescafÉ in the
cafeneions
and his nights in the tavernas eating rich, garlicky food washed down with Amstel and the occasional retsina. Late at night he and Voula would lie in beach chairs on the roof of the hostel, smoking cigarettes and laughing over the sounds of crazed, honking cabdrivers in the street below. He was beginning to like Greece, revising his original opinion of its people from incivility to a kind of unrestrained passion.

One day, after a rainfall, Constantine sat in the National Park Garden near Syntagma Square. He noticed a small boy crying and pointing at his tricycle, which was stuck in the middle of a large puddle on an asphalt track that surrounded a small pond. Constantine walked into the water and retrieved the bike, carrying it to the boy. The boy was wearing elastic-banded trousers and red suspenders over a striped green shirt. He said “thank you” in Greek, and receiving no response, put his arms out to hug Constantine. Constantine picked him up and held the boy to his chest, immediately feeling something that scared him, a connection to the child that brought on an odd but acutely heavy sense of loss. He realized then that the road he had taken had not been natural or right but rather the long, aimless act of a man who had no center. He realized the import of the stability mat had eluded him, and that realization frightened him. Constantine put the child down and returned to the hostel, where he loaded his pack and walked, without a good-bye to Voula, out into the street.

He drank that night, wandering from one taverna and discotheque to the next, catching an early morning cab to the airport, where he boarded a flight to New York City. Landing in JFK, the first American voice he heard was from a uniformed man who was loading luggage onto a moving belt. The voice sounded foreign to his ears.