A Haunting Smile Read online

  “Home run,” he said to himself.

  He did a little dance on the river bank. The villagers laughed and clapped, but some looked fearful and ran away, thinking Tuttle was drunk from the home brew. Only Tuttle wasn’t drunk. The game was over.

  “Why are you afraid?” asked Tuttle.

  One of the villagers who didn’t run, a boy in a dirty T-shirt and shorts, told him, “This place here has a curse.” The boy tapped the dirt with his hands.

  “I landed on a cursed place?” asked Tuttle.

  The boy smiled at him and nodded.

  “And I should be afraid?”

  Again the boy nodded.

  “Tell me about the curse,” said Tuttle.

  The boy told him the story of Daeng, a village girl who had once been attacked by a dog on the very spot. When he talked with the old woman who cried hot tears about the whereabouts of her daughter Daeng and confirmed the curse, he knew his journey had been rewarded with a purpose. Here was a gap in the continuity of the life of this old woman and the village; and Tuttle got it into his head that he could find a way to repair what had been broken.

  Tuttle climbed into his kayak and with the paddle pushed away from the muddy bank. Not long after, his kayak caught up with the human flotsam he had thrown from the river bank. His paddle dragged through a cluster of the bones. It made a weird knocking noise, like someone clicking their tongue in disapproval. How many dead had surrounded his kayak? He marveled as he looked around. His kayak was encircled by floating bones. He pulled his paddle clacked against them in the water, laid it across his kayak. Some village boys ran along the bank, shouting, farang, farang. The old woman struggled to keep up with the boys, she ran flat footed, running with her dress hiked up to her knees. She started to fall behind, she kicked the dust with her foot, cupped her hands around her old cracked lips and cried,

  “Find my Daeng, farang,” she cried. Then she was out of sight as his kayak followed a bend in the river.

  Half an hour downstream, he switched on the shortwave. The bone escort had broken up, vanished. He sought comfort from the sound of an English voice broadcasting the news from London.

  “This is the world news,” said the voice.

  Top billing was killing in the streets of Bangkok.

  He turned up the volume. More than bareback riders were at risk; the city had exploded.

  An unexpected answer to the request for the generals to step aside. Who would have expected the military to be killing demonstrators in Bangkok? Expectations become warped with questions and answers, he thought. He had not expected the Army to open fire on the demonstrators. This was madness. There were no details. No names of those who had been killed. He listened closely, moving the shortwave radio to his ear. He had picked up a familiar voice—George Snow who was reporting from the Royal Hotel. Snow was in a room overlooking the Paan Fah Bridge. This was a live feed to the BBC half way around the world. How had Snow ever in a zillion years landed this with the BBC? In the background was the akkkakkk of automatic gunfire.

  “Soldiers have once again opened up on demonstrators in Bangkok. We have no confirmed figures. The number of killed and injured appears substantial. From what this reporter can see—”Akkkkakkkk. “Shit. Sorry about that. Someone put holes in my wallpaper. The soldiers are firing directly into the crowds outside the Royal Hotel. I have just had an unconfirmed report that the numbers of dead and wounded are running into the scores. Maybe the hundreds. This is George Snow, reporting from the Thai capital, Bangkok.”

  Snow was back in Bangkok and on the air. Getting himself on the BBC would make him insufferable for months. The BBC report ended. Why end? He was in the middle of nowhere. Didn’t the fucking Brits in London understand that the rest of the world news didn’t matter? Why had they cut off Snow? Why not let him continue to report until . . . until Tuttle was back in Bangkok? Until he could confirm what had gone wrong in a street demonstration at Sanam Luang—trace the path of the soldiers’ bullets. File a report on that fraction of a second between the pull of the trigger and passage of life irrevocably into death.

  6

  AS THE LATE afternoon sky cooled to a burnished copper, Tuttle was on the highway with his gear, hitching a ride back to Bangkok. A ten-wheel truck pulled to a stop and he climbed in. The driver was wild-eyed on Captagon—“Dr. Cap”—and planned to drive non-stop until he reached the capital. Half an hour later, Tuttle dozed in and out of sleep. In his dream he saw Harry Purcell and Denny Addison squatting, as the villagers had done earlier that day. Addison was filming Tuttle with his kayak stuffed with floating bones. Harry was joking, drinking and glancing down at him. Tuttle pulled himself up on one elbow and inched closer to listen to their conversation. Harry was explaining something in a hushed tone. Putting the shortwave radio next to his ear, Tuttle could hear Snow reading a script written by Harry Purcell.

  “Cortez surveyed the vast salt lake and everywhere he looked he saw the floating bodies of the Aztecs who had tried to escape the slaughter. The Aztec shamans had read omens before Cortez arrived. The water in the rivers had boiled. Perhaps what they had seen was the salt lake boiling with the bodies of their own people. Rivers, lakes, and oceans boiling with the dead. The omen surfaced once again...all seers will remember the Aztec’s prediction about the invasion of Mexico and into the East—the omen predicted an invasion of a new force of ideas into Thailand. Bodies will again be buried in water.”

  Twelve hours later, it was pitch dark outside when Tuttle woke from the dream, and looked out the window. Lights along the highway streaked into a patchy blur as the truck hurtled at great speed. Insects were atomized into blood dots with antennae smashed on the windshield. Dr. Cap had kept the driver wired high. His eyes were wide open, the whites having turned yellowish, his hands a little shaky on the wheel but this went with the territory where Dr.Cap worked his magic. He stared through the blood. Dr. Cap pushed the driver’s foot hard on the gas pedal, jamming it flush to the floor for hours and hours. Until they had reached the outskirts of Bangkok, where the driver eased up on the gas. Tuttle sat upright, yawning, and switched on the shortwave radio; the newscast reported more than twenty demonstrators had been killed the night before in Bangkok. The worst of not knowing was imagining where and how Asanee must have spent the night. Christ, she would have made a point of being at the head of the killing line. Why couldn’t his own daughter be more like Meow the katoey ? Rub her nipples with powerful drugs, go for personal gain, leave the politics of dying to the idealists.

  The headman had said crazy things. One or two things had stuck in his memory as he returned to the river—his kayak had been filled with the spirits of the dead. This was an omen, the headman had said. Omens brought dreams, and they brought fresh death. The young boy said he had landed on a cursed spot. The headman was no longer laughing. The bones in the mind of the headman were living entities. They had sought out Tuttle for a reason. What reason? That was for Tuttle to discover on his return to Bangkok. The unexpected answer was awaiting him in HQ where the working girls of the night were taking a political stand. Or so one or two said.

  For a purple an HQ girl would oblige you and read any script you wanted to hear about any subject you held dear. For a few moments he forgot about the young runaway from the village—Daeng, the girl with the half-moon scar, the girl who had been connected to the curse on the village river bank.

  7

  TUTTLE ROLLED DOWN his window. The night air was muggy, thick with an organic, rancid, decaying smell and as hopeless as a dead man’s promise to pay his debts. Bangkok streets were stripped clean of the great night throng of bodies; nothing much moved along the deserted road as the truck entered the city. He rolled the window back up and watched the empty, dark streets. Traffic lights had been broken, and glass was scattered across the streets. The truck rumbled down the ramp off the Expressway, and the headlights swept over the sign marking the Din Daeng exit. There was a strange quietness. The metal gates of the shop houses had be
en pulled down; behind the padlocked gates, people continued their uninterrupted existence of eating, sleeping, fucking, complaining and dying. They huddled together, waiting for the storm to pass. Then Tuttle saw the first sign of violence in the shadows—smashed public call boxes the umbilical phone-cords coiled on to the pavement. Few people were on the street; those he saw walked quickly, turning around, looking for someone following. The buses, taxis, and tuk-tuks had been swallowed up by forces unseen and unheard; all that remained was the street litter—suggesting people had come and gone. The faces he saw were drawn, tense; the land of smiles had disappeared, and its place was a strangely new expression—faces of fear, faces of the frightened and confused.

  There was a distant sound of gunfire and the driver stopped his truck and told Tuttle he was turning back. Dr. Cap had made the driver edgy, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his throat. Heading back upcountry was the driver’s instinct; at least in the country, you knew who wanted to kill you and why. The driver had been listening to the Thai radio; the military radio station said that Bangkok was safe, the Army was in control, and that a few troublemakers causing the disturbance would soon be apprehended. It didn’t look that way from the truck. “Bangkok has gone mad,” said the driver, as they watched a pick-up packed with plainclothes men open fire on a Honda motorcycle. Tuttle thought this was the most sane statement the driver had made during the entire journey.

  The radio announced a curfew. Anyone found on the street would be considered hostile and all means would be used to stop such a person.

  The driver pulled over to the curb, reached over and opened the door.

  “This is where I get out, I guess,” he said to the driver, offering him money. The driver looked terrified, shook his head, and popped another Dr. Cap before he reached over and slammed the door. Tuttle, with a five-hundred-baht note stuffed in his hand, watched as the large truck make a ten-point U-turn, almost tipping over. Then the shattering crunch of gears, as the truck accelerated down the street.

  The killing had not stopped as Tuttle walked along streets too silent and empty of people. As he approached the Soi Asoke intersection, another pick-up truck with men in the back opened fire on a motorcycle rider. M-16s sounded from his left. Several rounds whizzed overhead. He heard the roar of an unmuffed motorcycle at full throttle. He saw the headlights of a pick-up, and then the driver gunned it through the intersection. Muzzle flashes from the M-16s streaked through the sky. He thought about the fire on the river. An omen. The pick-up vanished. It was over in an instant. Had any of the bullets found the target? He would never know, he thought, as he walked down Sukhumvit Road. He had decided to seek refuge at HQ. This was the place where information could be obtained; the hardcore would have heard some news of the true status. All the lights had been broken at Asoke. The police booth had been gutted and blackened by flames. The distant sound of gunfire was easily within earshot as he ran across Asoke. He wished his daughter was as near. He quickened his step. He had come back from a river of floating stones to a city filled with violent death.

  A few taxis were parked in the alley behind HQ. There were few people waiting for the dawn. The lights from the hotel behind disclosed an empty, narrow passage devoid of life. The hardcore called it the “Alley of Revenge.” Personal revenge was part of HQ life, part of the grand scheme of things. An HQ girl was rumored once or twice to have stuck a knife into the guts of a middle-aged farang, then twisted the blade; it was the twisting part which rang true. Revenge waited for a farang who violated the hardcore cardinal rule—never promise love in a moment of passion, and then take another girl the following night. The violation caused a girl’s face to shatter into a thousand pieces and there was only one way to recover that face. . . . Every hardcore knew the outer limits, beyond which the journey down the alley to HQ was his trip to the gallows, a condemned man with no right of appeal. It would be over before he knew what or why. But she would make certain that he knew who.

  It was after five in the morning when Tuttle passed through the back entrance of HQ. Several girls were putting on make-up before the cracked mirrors. On their right a couple of drunks, propped up with one arm pushed against the yellow tiled wall, staggered as they pissed into ancient stalls, squinting at old, faded oil company decals, and talking in low tones about spending the night holed up in HQ.

  One of the girls spotted him in the mirror. She dropped the bar of soap in the sink. She looked surprised, all nerves as she held her wet hands up in a wai, they dripped water onto the floor.

  “Papa, we think you dead.”

  Her friend, smoking a cigarette, looked more together. “No one see you in a long time. We think maybe the Army kill you dead. Bang, bang,” she laughed, her red mouth open in the mirror.

  This was HQ. One girl gave the traditional wai; the other had given him the verbal bird.

  Tuttle, who fitted the HQ hardcore profile, had been absent from the scene for months. Denny Addison had started the Papa business. Tuttle despaired of the fact that Addison had turned him into an HQ clown with a red nose, white face, bushy eyebrows—Addison was living with his daughter, exploiting her, flashing her nude photos on the walls of their apartment. He had consigned Tuttle’s writing to the ash heap of history, and converted Tuttle into a father figure for the working girls. The HQ girls had started to call Tuttle, “Papa.” They giggled, turned coy, and ran away laughing. Asanee said it had nothing to do with Denny—defending him as always—that being called Papa was revenge on the hardcore by the new generation. One night strolling down the alley, the HQ girls flipped in their image perception of him.

  “A spontaneous narrative shift,” as Addison called it. One night you strolled through the back entrance of HQ, a desirable customer, a young man, and the next night lightning struck, the image changed, the situation in which they saw the man altered irreversibly, converting him into that most dreaded of HQ categories. He had become one of the “old guys.”

  He had been tagged as he passed the sink, “Papa Tuttle.” The words knocked Tuttle off his feet. His status was destroyed not only with the girls but inside his own perception about his place inside the ring of space time.

  “Papa Tuttle,” another girl said at the stairs, pulling at his arm. “I’m scared, Papa.”

  “Everyone’s scared, Lek,” he said, giving her a brief hug.

  “Sia jai, Papa Tuttle,” said another girl, threading her arm through Tuttle’s. Little girls with sad hearts and smiling faces. They were sorry he had become old so suddenly. Just the other day, he was Tuttle, the young man coming down the stairs. ...Now the Army was killing people in the streets. Everyone and everything had been turned upside down. Tuttle had been a center of gravity at HQ, he had gone missing in action, and he had become an old man. Yeah, the HQ girls huddled in a terrified clump, clinging to each other. They didn’t care who was right or wrong; it didn’t matter, such distinctions never had any meaning to lose. They lived from night to night, flashing their smiles, holding in their rage, hopelessness, and depression; and working the floor, hoping to latch onto a romantic john, one who believed the girl actually liked his personality, charm, jokes, and good looks. It wasn’t difficult for the girls to exploit such men. Tuttle had seen the scene played out hundreds of times. But on many nights no such johns were around. The HQ girls nervously circled around the tables of hardcores. Men they knew. And far worse, men who knew the score. These farang bargained the fee for sex, and ordered off the old-hand sex menu in advance of taking the girl. The hardcore had become hardcore once he could no longer be exploited by love or sentiment. A hardcore was a person cured of romance.

  A constellation of forces had swept through all of Tuttle’s relationships and through Thailand, as he had paddled down the Nan River, packed up his kayak, and hitched a ride back to the city. The city had changed. Gunfire gave a new weight to the night. He looked around the nearly filled room. Sex was not on anyone’s mind. This was no happy homecoming. No one at HQ had seen Asanee or he
r friends. He didn’t know if she was alive or dead. Or if some soldier was riding her bareback before firing a round into her head. He wanted to find his daughter and tell her about the floating stones. She would laugh with him and the world would once again come right.

  “You know a girl from Nan named Daeng?” he asked one of the old crones, who hustled young girls from the bench near the main door.

  She smiled, “Her face cut here?” She drew a half-moon-shaped scar on her right cheek.

  That was her. And the old crone told Tuttle the story of how she had left HQ the night before. It seems Snow had checked into HQ briefly, and found the old crone who just happened to have a new girl she was breaking into the business. The new girl’s name was Daeng. Snow had asked the old crone, “Short-time or all night?” and the old crone had whispered something into Daeng’s ear, and she had blushed. The regular had asked Snow how much he was going to pay for a fresh girl.

  “The usual purple plus taxi fare.”

  “She’s a new girl,” the old crone had said.

  “She had a kid? I don’t want her taking off her clothes and finding her skin looks like it’s been transplanted with corduroy.”

  The old crone had said, “She no have baby.”

  Daeng had said nothing, looking away at the floor. It was the same old script old crones taught the new girls.

  “Okay, okay. Then I’ll keep her until the shooting stops. Think she can handle that?”

  The old crone hadn’t answered immediately. This was a line she hadn’t heard before; what did it mean, until the shooting stops? Anyway Daeng was warming up to Snow who had worked his hand onto her knee under the table. A fresh girl, a new girl never warmed up with a knee massage; they recoiled in fear and embarrassment. “Free room and board,” said Snow. “Grass and rock ’n roll. What else does a girl want?”