Big Mango (9786167611037) (11 page)

Winnebago leaned back as far as he could
without falling off his stool, put his hands over his eyes, and
sighed deeply. “Man, I know I’m going to regret this.”

Eddie knew that might well be true, so he
kept his mouth shut.

“When are we leaving?” Winnebago dropped his
hands and shook his head a little more, still not quite believing
what he was doing.

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? I can’t take off like that, Eddie!
I’ve got to find someone to watch the store.”

“No one’s bought a damned thing here in six
months. Just lock the door.”

“That’s a slight exaggeration,” Winnebago
grumbled, but he opened the drawer beneath the cash register and
began scraping around anyway, trying to find his keys.

***

EDDIE
walked over to Mason
to catch a cable car back to his office. The morning fog had turned
to rain while he was inside the bookstore and a few big drops were
splattering Columbus as he headed down a block and turned west on
Vallejo. There was an odor in the rain that he had never noticed
before, the smell of salt from the Pacific and something else,
something that he couldn’t put a name to.

He had spent half his life in San Francisco
and he always thought of it as like living inside a huge amusement
park. From outside the wall, somewhere over in the real world, he
could hear the thuds and crashes and the sounds of smashing
furniture, but he had made his life there inside, tucked safely
away from all that. He had let the stars spin past and the planet
whirl inexorably under him for almost twenty years, and he had
never worried all that much about what things might be like out
there beyond the wall.

Yet now here he was, about to hurl himself
across the Pacific Ocean and fly halfway around the world onboard
his personal red-eye. Something was waiting for him in Bangkok, he
knew that it was, and he was ready to trade his present for
whatever the future might offer him.

Just like that.

Eddie didn’t blame Winnebago for being
skeptical. It all must have sounded unbelievably stupid when he
tried to explain it, but he knew he could do it. He could make the
trade, and he could make it stick. He did know a guy in Bangkok
and, what’s more, the guy he knew was quite a guy.

Eddie could feel the bargain being sealed as
he trotted toward a green and yellow cable car rattling up Mason.
He reached for a brass pole, pulled himself up onto the car’s worn
steps, and paused a moment to breathe in the sweetness of the San
Francisco breeze. The high-pitched singing of the cable in its
metal groove beneath the street had never sounded quite so distinct
to him, or so lyrical.

Glancing back over his shoulder at North
Beach, he saw it as if he was peering through a great distance,
watching as it receded further and further into his past. He was
edging across an unmarked border, creeping into a new world. One
that was unknown to him certainly, maybe even unknowable.

It was wonderful.

BAR
Phillips was a New York
boy who headed west in the fifties searching for the golden life
like everybody else. But somehow he just slid right on through
California without grabbing hold of anything solid, skidded all the
way across the Pacific, and didn’t stop until he ended up in
Bangkok.

From the Big Apple to the Big Orange to the
Big Mango. It still had a kind of nutty logic to it, even when he
thought about it now, almost forty years later. He had headed west,
hadn’t he? and Bangkok was about as far west as he could get
without falling completely off the edge of the world.

On the other hand, sometimes Bar figured
that was exactly what he
had
done. What was it about Bangkok
that held him there? The place was so polluted you couldn’t
breathe; it was grid-locked with cars and crazies; hardly anyone
spoke English; it was hotter than hell; half the year the streets
were flooded, and the other half they were full of rabid dogs. No,
he couldn’t see for the life of him what kept him there. He could
only see that he would never leave.

Bar had tried going back to New York once in
the late seventies just to see if he was missing out on anything.
He quickly discovered the whole place had turned fat, ugly, mean,
and crazy. It scared the hell out of him.

He ended up in some tourist hotel on 47th
Street down almost to 10th Avenue, just sitting in his room day
after day, eating pizzas he got delivered from Ray’s, and flipping
slowly back and forth through two hundred channels of cable
television. He was too bewildered and terrorized by the city even
to go outside much and after a week of that he decided he was done.
He took a cab straight to Kennedy and sat in the terminal until
somebody got him into a seat on a flight back to Bangkok. That was
that. From then on he knew there was nothing else left for him. He
was a Bangkok lifer.

***

BAR slurped down the last of his tomato soup, ran
some water into the bowl, and dumped it in the sink. As he walked
past the only real window in his tiny condo, he stopped and
contemplated the streaky orange twilight that he thought was the
nicest thing about Bangkok.

Some people said there was so much crud in
Bangkok’s air that you should walk on it instead of trying to
breathe it, but Bar loved the way it made the sky glow just after
sunset with a luminescent, mango-colored haze. Maybe that wasn’t
the reason why some of Bangkok’s foreign residents called the place
the Big Mango, but Bar always thought it should have been.
Bangkok’s twilight radiance was what kept him believing there was
magic in the world. If the only price he had to pay for that was
sucking up a little crap with his air, he’d pay it, gladly.

From the window he could see all the way
across the city to the Chao Phraya River, its dusky surface turning
to pewter in the fading light. A long train of broad-beamed teak
rice barges was drifting slowly downriver toward the Gulf of
Thailand. They looked like a child’s wooden toys embedded forever
in a river of tin.

Part Oriental alchemy, part Western jazz,
John Coltrane played on instruments from another planet, there was
something about Bangkok that defied time and disdained reality.
That might be a romantic way to look at a city that hardly anyone
else ever thought of as romantic, either before or after sunset,
but that was the way Bar Phillips wanted to look at Bangkok, and
that was the way he
had
looked at it for most of his almost
forty years there.

***

AN
hour later, Bar got out
of a taxi on Silom Road just across the street from the Dusit Thani
Hotel, a cavernous old barn favored by airline crews and Taiwanese
tourists. He gave the driver a 100 baht note and ignored him when
he demanded 200. Ducking down a narrow alley, Bar bypassed the long
rows of carts where street vendors were setting up the night
market. Slipping past the first wave of grazing tourists, he made
for the Crown Royal.

Izzie Schultz had opened the Crown Royal in
the early seventies following a couple of years as an observer with
the Canadian Army in Vietnam, although Izzie doubted that what he
had spent his time observing was exactly what the Canadian Army had
in mind when it sent him there. He had declined to re-enlist when
he found out he was about to be sent back to Canada. With all the
warm, sticky delights of Saigon and Bangkok beckoning, he couldn’t
think of even one good reason to go back to freezing his ass off in
some God-forsaken, crappy little Canadian town.

Izzie hadn’t been much interested in politics
back then, but he had observed enough on his rounds among the
massage parlors to know that Saigon wasn’t much of a bet for
long-term retirement. That left Bangkok, so he had used all of his
savings to buy into a bar there with some friends and, in a parting
salute to his heritage, he had convinced his partners to name the
place the Crown Royal.

Good-bye Canada, you ice cold freezing
bitch. Hel-looo Bangkok.

The Crown Royal was dark and woody,
comfortably smoky. No loud music, no go-go girls, just a place
where a serious man went for a serious drink. Over twenty odd years
it had become a Bangkok institution. Although Izzie had long ago
bought out his partners, everything else was pretty much the same
as it had always been.

Bar settled into his usual seat in the last
booth at the back, facing forward. A local never sat with his back
to the door in Bangkok. Those were the seats the tourists got. They
didn’t know any better.

“Hi, baby.”

A dark girl wearing a short red dress and
pretty good counterfeit Gucci pumps put a sweating Carlsberg in
front of Bar and squeezed onto the seat next to him. She began to
massage the back of his neck with more energy than skill and he
reached around and gently removed her hands without looking at
her.

The girl affected a hurt pout. “You no love
Noi no more. You treat Noi bad.”

A large man wearing a T-shirt and khaki
shorts flopped into the booth opposite Bar and banged down a bottle
of Singha. He was balding and fleshy, his long jowls hanging down
over his collar, and he twisted his body around on the seat until
he was in a position to flick his eyes comfortably back and forth
between Bar and the front door.

Bar had some long ago night christened the
man Sydney Sidney since he claimed to be an Australian named Sidney
and no one seemed to know what his last name really was. Sidney
said he was an undercover agent for ASIS, the Australian foreign
intelligence service, but no one really believed him and Bar had
stopped trying to catch him out years ago.

Frankly, Bar didn’t even think Sidney was
Australian, but what the hell difference did it make? Bangkok was
the kind of place where, if you were foolish enough to ask anyone
who they were and what they did, the only thing you could be
certain of was that they would lie to you. Even if it didn’t
matter, and it almost never did, they would still lie to you.
Bangkok just did that to people.

“You seen Flippo around tonight, mate?”
Sidney asked.

“Nope. Just got here.”

Flippo Kurtz had worked diligently for
seventeen years on the assembly line of a Mercedes plant in
Stuttgart until he won a package tour to Bangkok in a union raffle.
After three days, he decided he would be out of his mind to go back
to Germany and he started a business in Bangkok making T-shirts for
tourists. Discovering a previously unknown genius for devising
smutty epigrams, he had prospered hugely.

“He come and he go,” Noi offered.

Sidney nodded slowly and finished his beer
with a thoughtful expression, contemplating the philosophical
nuances in Noi’s observation.

Bar’s eyes drifted to a girl stacking glasses
behind the bar. She was young, probably not more than twenty, and
had huge brown eyes that played hide-and-seek with him from behind
straight bangs that swung rhythmically from side to side as she
moved her head. When the girl realized Bar was looking at her, she
giggled and quickly raised an open hand to her mouth. It was a
gesture of spontaneous innocence that Bar thought was so charming
he briefly contemplated falling in love.

“New?” he asked Sidney, nodding toward the
girl.

Sidney twisted around and looked where Bar’s
eyes were pointing. When he turned back he was grinning. “Mine,
mate.”

“Really? That what she says?”

“She’d better. Besides, you’re too fuckin’
old for her. What are you? Sixty?”

Bar ignored Sidney as he studied the girl. In
Bangkok a man’s age didn’t count for nearly as much as it did out
in the real world.

“What’s her name?”

Sidney hesitated just an instant. “Meow.”

“Bullshit,” Bar scoffed. “You never even saw
her until I did.”

“I fucking did, too.” Sidney seemed genuinely
indignant. “I fucking did.”

“Tell you what, Sidney. Don’t worry about it.
She’s yours, old man. I’ll stay completely out of your way.”

“Piss off,” Sidney snapped, but he was
smiling. “Anyway, who you calling old, you fucking fossil?”

Sidney rapped his empty Singha bottle against
the table. Noi shifted her eyes slowly toward him and with another
little pout snatched up the bottle and slid out of the booth to get
him another beer.

“Everything okay at the paper?” Sidney asked
Bar as he followed Noi’s twitching rump with his eyes.

“Yeah…” Bar searched for exactly the right
word, but nothing came to mind so he settled for the only one that
came readily to mind “…okay.”

The paper was the Bangkok Post, the city’s
primary English-language daily and the mouthpiece for the local
establishment. The Post had been around for a long time, surviving
coups and other lesser events remarkably intact. It wasn’t the New
York Times, but Bar thought it was still a pretty good paper. On
the other hand, he had to admit that it did publish some pretty
strange things sometimes, and Bar himself was personally
responsible for one of the strangest.

His weekly column had been spread over a full
page each Saturday for nearly thirty years. It was called Bar by
Bar—a little cute maybe, but he liked it—and although few of them
would admit it without making excuses, almost every expatriate and
foreign visitor read it each week without fail. Bar was the ranking
expert on Bangkok’s nightlife, and that was a subject in which
almost every Westerner in town had far more than a passing
interest.

Bar by Bar was more than just a newspaper
column. Over the years, it had become a kind of bulletin board for
all the shipwrecked expats who had washed up on the great dirty
beach of Bangkok, a flotsam and jetsam of lost souls who were happy
as hell to be lost and only hoped no one would ever find them
again.