The Bangkok Asset: A novel (15 page)

“Your wife practically begged me to talk to you about this, which is why we’re here, but I didn’t think it would hit me this way.” She gestures toward the picture with the amputee. “You don’t realize how soft you get—I could take it when I was twenty, but not anymore.” She looks me in the eyes. “And you have to think about my strategy as a mother. How easy would it have been to show you a picture of a man you would never meet?”

She is right. I really cannot get my mind around the idea that the man in the picture is my father, and yet remains unreachable. I try to think which of the old men in the ward he most resembles, and realize the attempt is useless. Even without bandages a man of seventy or so does not necessarily resemble that same man aged twenty—the distance is too great, the changes wrought by a harsh world too extreme. Maybe some kind of clever isometric software would do it, but I feel helpless. Maybe Chanya was right after all: in some part of me I really don’t want to know. Nong is watching my features, reading me effortlessly.

Despite her reluctance, she hands me another photo. Unlike the other pictures, it has been taken surreptitiously and seems at first to make no sense. It was taken through the open door of what appeared to be a hospital ward or activities area, but there is only one human figure. I cannot say for sure who it is, for it could have been any man—which was just another way of saying it is
him:
a man still evidently young sitting in a tubular chair, bent forward, turned slightly to the camera with both hands pressed insanely against his ears so that his whole face is squashed as if lamenting the loss of his soul. There are a pile of medications on the table next to him.

Now I really cannot take any more. Nong nudges me and shoves under my nose the photo of her and my father and his friend in the very early days together.

“Look, will you!” She puts her finger on my father, aged about twenty. “Is that an angel or an alien, I never could decide?” I look at the bright—
too
bright—face, that full smile that seems like an exaggeration to non-Americans; the expression suggests he was wired more into the higher cosmos rather than the Earth. “See, Bobby da Silva is innocent, too, but it’s a different kind. He’s in his body and sex is not a source of torment for him, it’s a thirst he knows how to quench.”

I borrow a cigarette from her, which she lights for me. I lie back on the futon, take a toke on the cigarette, and then raise myself for a good long slug of the rice whiskey.

“So, you were living with my father but not screwing him?”

She shrugs. “Living with? He and Bobby were staying at a cheap hotel while he was on R&R. This all happened in the space of a few days.”

I nod. “Okay. So what happened?”

“What happened? What always happens when a man is confused in that way? All of a sudden, the night before we were supposed to say goodbye, he snapped and jumped on me. It was totally clumsy and he was finished in less than a minute, the whole buildup of the past five days popped in a single spasm. Blood, pain, and sperm is what happened. Then he was gone. But he’d come inside me. Good boys are always the most dangerous. A whoremonger would have banged me the first night and used protection and we all would have lived happily ever after.”

Of course, that makes me feel just great. She catches my forlorn eye and leans over to pat my head. “But then I would never have had you, would I?”

I grunt.

“And I thought afterward the bump that was growing in my womb was a kind of claim of ownership by a man who didn’t want to admit he was made of flesh and blood.”

I cannot say I am overly thrilled to be the product of an incompetently managed spasm that lasted maybe ten seconds—exactly the kind the girls in the bar make fun of after they’ve been paid and the john’s gone home. On the other hand, I wonder who on earth is not the end result of an unsatisfactory beginning. Were you planned, yourself, R?

“So he left you like that? Did he send money?”

“Sure. This was an honorable white boy, sure he sent money. He sent the little money the army gave him, and he even found a close friend in the States who wired me five thousand dollars, which was a huge sum for a Thai girl at that time—and of course I had half the money he’d paid the
mamasan.
And he wrote every day. Promised he would come see me the minute they discharged him—or the war ended.” She pauses and stares into space. “I couldn’t believe it. Every single day he tells me he’s totally crazy about me, keeps my picture next to his heart, I’m the only reason he can carry on fighting in the filthy war. To a Thai country girl, this is Hollywood dreamland stuff. I couldn’t believe he was serious.”

“But you replied?”

“Sure.”

“But you told me you didn’t know his family name.”

She makes a scoffing noise. “Don’t turn into a junior detective all over again. I had enough of that when you were at the academy. Listen: I didn’t know his family name because I didn’t know about
farang
family names, and anyway I couldn’t write in English any more than I could speak it. You know very well I still don’t write it. I had someone read me the letters.”

“Who?”

“I took them to the Wat and asked Phra Tatatika—you remember that
farang
monk?”

I remember: her favorite monk was an American former marine, almost the first in a trickle that became a steady stream of
farang
men looking for a way of escape in a Thai monastery. I guess a former marine would not have been shocked by my father’s letters.

“But you said you replied?”

She takes a pen out of her box. Carefully and slowly she writes down one of the few phrases she knows in written English on the back of one of the envelopes:
I miss you.
I smile. It is a translation of exactly the Thai phrase she would have used. We tend to say
I miss you
where
farang
might say
I’m crazy about you.

“That’s all you wrote, each time?”

“Once a week. There was no use writing in Thai, was there?”

“And during that time, were you—”

“No, I wasn’t. So long as he sent money and paid my bar fine after the down payment ran out, I didn’t work. I was a good Buddhist girl, a deal is a deal.”

“But the envelope,” I exclaim triumphantly. “How did you write the address?”

“Huh! Some detective after all! You need to check your facts. Nobody in the world could remember such an address, with all those military numbers, codes, stuff like that. He sent stamped addressed envelopes, the military stuff was already printed on the front.”

“Every day?”

She opens her arms. “Maybe there was nothing else to do. You know what they say about war, ninety-nine percent boredom, one percent terror? He couldn’t keep writing to his mother to tell her not to worry and that he’d be home soon.”

“But he did write, just like he said he would. He did love you?”

“Was it love? I don’t know. I’m not sure either of us was mature enough to use that word, but we were very excited by each other. And of course I thought I’d escaped the poverty trap for life on my very first night on the game. I was in a kind of dream.”

I give her time to review the memory. When she fails to continue, I say, “So, I still don’t understand. You had everything you wanted, you scored the jackpot in your first week, he thought he’d bagged the most fantastic woman in the world. It doesn’t sound tragic. He was writing to you every day, telling you how much he adored you.” I raise my hands and shoulders.

She takes the wad of photos from her box and flips through them until she comes to the one with Bobby da Silva in a wheelchair. “That happened.”

Now she shows me the inside of the box where letters are neatly stacked. “See, this is before.” A pile of jagged envelopes where she had opened them. “And this is after”: perhaps as many as a hundred unopened envelopes.

“You didn’t open them?”

“I got sick of what he was saying. I couldn’t stand it.” She looks me in the eye. “You have to remember, I couldn’t read English. I was embarrassed to have someone else read me that junk.”

Now she is finally ready to deliver her punch line. “It was a different man with a different name. He told me I may as well keep calling him
Jack,
but in fact he had changed identity. I may have been a no-good bar girl with poor karma, but I was still a Buddhist. I couldn’t take all that hatred, that endless poisoning of his mind, all those promises to ‘get back at Charlie for me and Bobby.’ And the killing of the ‘gooks’ and the ‘slope-heads.’ ” She stares at me. “He didn’t seem to notice the Vietnamese were almost the same race as me. He had volunteered for Special Forces. When I say he was a different man, I mean totally different, unrecognizable. I had the instincts of a new mother. I didn’t want my child contaminated. I told him he wasn’t going to see you anymore. I told him I didn’t want you to inherit a murderer’s karma.”

It is a hot day here in the garden. A cold shiver shakes me to the bones. “But he visited you afterward—or not?”

She has straightened her back and is sitting cross-legged like an Isaan girl, her strong chin jutting, her eyes closed. “This is as much as I can take, Sonchai. I don’t want to talk about it anymore today. You have enough to go on for the moment.”

I see that she has made up her mind to say no more. But when I prepare to leave she starts talking again. It is strange behavior. She does not look at me and could have been complaining to the Bodhi tree.

“So, Roberto Eduardo Santos Tavares Melo da Silva lost his legs, this was tragic, a catastrophe, very, very hard to look at. But in war men lose limbs. Thai men don’t totally give up on who they are just because their best friend lost his legs. It’s because something happened that the white man couldn’t control. The gooks were winning—that’s what he couldn’t stand. The one thing that never occurred to any of them until it was too late, that they might actually lose the war.”

“What happened to da Silva?”

“Bobby? I’ll tell you what happened to Bobby. He borrowed money from his family to come back here to Bangkok, where he drank and whored himself to death—deliberately. But by then he and your father weren’t talking. See, even da Silva hated what your father turned into. He never wanted revenge, he only wanted his legs back, and when he couldn’t achieve that, he decided to go out with a bang. Lots of them.”

There is no point trying to press her for more information; when Mama Nong says
no,
it means just that. I will have to return for more answers when her mood has changed. I hardly need to point out, R, that the man she has just described bears no resemblance to the “prize buffalo” who would “tear the shed down” if deprived of sex. I seemed to have at least two natural fathers, according to Mum. But by the time I reach the end of the
soi,
my passion for more knowledge overcomes me. I buy an iced lemon tea at the 7-Eleven on the corner, down it, and walk slowly back.

She is waiting for me. I snuck around the side, using my key to the garden door, but she is not surprised when I appear before her, blocking her view of the pool where she sits cross-legged on her mat. She looks up to stare at me, sees something in my eyes that was not there before, and nods.

“You’re not leveling,” I say. “There’s something else. There has to be. Something direct and personal that made you ashamed. That made you not want to tell me the truth. That made you want to break with him totally. It must have been serious—this was the guy who took you to America, right?”

“Did you bring dope?”

“No.”

“What are you going to use for anesthetic?”

“Nothing.”

She raises her eyes, then gestures for me to sit with her. “Of course, you’ve guessed he came back?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. So he came back.”

She pauses for so long, staring at the Bodhi tree, a gnarled triumph of persistent life that hangs over the dead blue pool, that I have to say, “Yes?”

She grunts. “It is all so long ago.” She stares at the pool. “He’d changed, but so had I. The war was coming to an end. You were about eleven months old, growing fast. Obviously, only a year had passed, but that’s a long time in war and people change quickly when they see their loved ones shredded. He wrote to me, but I had stopped replying. A woman in the position I was in then is interested in hearing from the father of her child only if he has something practical to offer. Money would have been great, but even a reliable presence might have been helpful. I wasn’t interested in confessions of guilt and how bad he felt about leaving me and how he still had such strong feelings for me.” She checks my eyes.

“I thought you didn’t read those letters.”

She smiles. “Only one in ten. A girl gets curious, after all. And there was some small gratification that he felt so bad—that he was still thinking of me at all. Frankly, a Thai man in his position would not have stayed in touch.” She lights a Marlboro Red, inhales gratefully, exhales.

She swallows. “He came back after about a year and he was exactly the kind of man I had expected him to be on the first date. Oversexed, tough, willful, physically incredibly strong, wired, hyper-alert—a killer. We had the affair we should have had the first time round, but neither of us had known how. I’d been selling my body and he’d been hiring flesh in Vietnam—lots and lots of it. So we both knew everything there is to know about sex. I was still young, in my early twenties, he was only a year older, but you could say it was an affair made in hell. We simply went wild. Like all such things, it lasted maybe a month, then when we cooled down we didn’t like what we saw. We didn’t like each other and we certainly didn’t like the face in the mirror in the morning. The passion died like a damp firework and it was all over. At least as far as anything physical was concerned.”

“This is when he took you to America?”

“Yes. You wouldn’t remember, but your aunt Mimi looked after you for a month.”

“But how was he over there?”

She pauses and then nods. “Stressed, I suppose, although I was too young to look at it like that. He was angry as hell at the way vets were being treated.” She looks at me. “He kept getting into fights—except that other men could see what he was and were scared of him. At least five times I had to hold him back—beg him, even. I knew in my bones how easy it would have been for him to kill. I kept telling him I was a Buddhist, I didn’t believe in solving problems that way. It was one of the things that broke us up.” She gives me a shy look. “That and sex.”