Sightseeing (20 page)

Once we'd transported all the carcasses, Mama went back to the house to get gasoline. We set the pile on fire, then stood silently over the pyre for a while. Blue flames licked up around the carcasses' feathers. Soon, a yellowish inferno danced enthusiastically over the pile, its syncopated pops and crackles echoing down the long corridor of trees before us. Mama poked the pyre with a branch. The fire answered with hisses and cries, the sound of fat smoldering. The air began to smell of burnt
chicken-flesh, and I thought of the vendors in town with their street-side fried chicken stalls, fanning themselves with the day's paper, thick sheets of vapor rising from their fryers.

“We'll figure this out in the morning,” Mama said softly. We walked back to the house with the pyre still roaring behind us. Mama sat on the porch and picked up Saksri Bualoi. She began to pluck him, snapping fistfuls of feathers from the cock's lifeless body.

That was my first sleepless night: my father in the chicken house, the carcasses burning in the ditch, Mama outside cleaning Saksri Bualoi. I stood by my bedroom window and watched the flames dance until they became nothing but a tiny orange pinprick in the distance.

I thought about what happened to that woman who was my aunt. I thought about Papa crying on the side of the road, cradling his father's shotgun, having only made it halfway to town. I wondered if things would be different now if Papa hadn't lost his will. Would Papa have lessened the sum total of the world's suffering by killing Big Jui? Or would other Juis—Big and Little—have appeared in their place? Would I still love my father knowing he was capable of such violence? Would Mama? Where did murderous vengeance end and principled righteousness—justice—begin? Staring out my bedroom window, I loved Papa for not making it to town that night even as I despised him for losing courage. For it seemed to me that whatever had happened at the cockpit to produce that pyre of chickens might've been averted had Papa not cried like a
fucking baby by the side of the road. And as Mama finished cleaning Saksri Bualoi; as I watched the fire die out like some fallen star; as the strays' shadows emerged one by one to inspect that sizzling mess of cremated chicken parts—I wanted more than anything to return to life before Mama had told me her story about Papa's no-name sister. For I felt like Mama had pushed me violently down a one-way street with her cockamamie story, a street I never wanted to go down in the first place. There would be no turning back now, though at the time I couldn't say why or from what.

VIII

Papa had never lost like this. He'd never come home with more than two dead cocks. You can't win every time, that's what he always said; even the expert cockfighter loses once in a while. Nevertheless, losing was one thing; nine dead cocks was another altogether. He'd lost nearly half the chicken house.

The next morning we sat quietly around the kitchen table while Mama dished porridge. Papa hadn't slept much the night before, though it was difficult to distinguish the old bruises on his face from the way his eyelids sagged and swelled. He shuffled in from the chicken house, sat down, and stared out the kitchen window. Tiny chunks of straw clung to his shirt collar. Gray hair sprouted from his head in strange, unruly wisps. Thin wreaths of steam rose from our bowls. Outside, the
sun was starting to rise through the trees and I watched a stray—a gaunt, brown puppy with a stunted tail—nose the diminished mess in the ditch.

We started eating. My stomach lurched at the chunks of white meat wedged within the thick of my porridge. I asked Papa what happened. I tried to sound casual. “Nothing,” Papa muttered through a mouthful, still staring out the kitchen window. “I lost.”

“I'll say,” Mama said. She hadn't touched her breakfast yet. She just stared at Papa defiantly, waited for an explanation. Papa shoveled more porridge into his mouth. I stirred my bowl, picked out chunks of chicken and deposited them on the napkin beside me. I thought about the half-dead zombie chicken from the night before, the way it purred in my hand, skittered across the yard when I kicked it. I thought of Saksri Bualoi, his head swinging by a thimble of flesh, the way Mama plucked his feathers by the fistful. I wondered briefly if I had been dreaming the past night's events—they seemed unreal by the light of morning—but those tiny white chunks piled on my napkin told me otherwise.

“How much did you lose, Wichian?” Mama finally asked.

“Eleven thousand,” Papa said calmly.

“Oi,” Mama cried, throwing up her hands. “Goddammit, Wichian.”

“It's that Filipino kid,” Papa said, smiling weakly at Mama. “That Ramon. He's good. He knows what he's doing. And you should've seen the Filipino purebreds, Saiya. They're
huge. Almost as tall as Ladda here. I didn't think chickens got that big.”

“Oi,” Mama said again. She shoved her bowl in front of her. It teetered on the linoleum tabletop, porridge dribbling over the lip. “How could you, Wichian?”

“I'll get it back,” Papa muttered, turning to his bowl as if there was nothing he'd rather do than watch his porridge cool.

“You'd better,” Mama said.

“Well, he made nine thousand last week, Mama,” I interjected, but when I looked into Mama's eyes—saw the exasperation there—I regretted saying anything at all. I looked at Papa instead. “So, really, you only lost two thousand, right, Papa?”

“Eat your porridge, Ladda,” Mama scoffed.

“Saiya,” Papa said.

“How could you lose so much money?” Mama said. But Papa just stared at Mama, biting hard on his bottom lip. Then he got up, dismissed Mama with an impatient half-gesture, and walked out of the kitchen.

“That's right,” Mama called after him. “Walk away. Go tend to your fucking chickens.”

Then it was just me and Mama staring at one another. My mother seemed the picture of vindictiveness; even as she looked devastated by the eleven thousand lost. “What?” she asked, picking up her porridge bowl. “Stop looking at me like that.” But all I managed to say was “It's enough he lost, Mama. Go easy on him.”

Papa emerged from the chicken house with the fourteen remaining cocks. We watched him through the kitchen window. He chased them with a different kind of gait that morning. It wasn't the calm, quiet routine we were used to seeing, but a grunting, punishing one. He cursed. He kicked at the dirt. He ran the chickens with what seemed to me like fury, as if the chickens had offended him somehow. Some of the chickens eyed him cautiously, alarmed by his new persona. The sun's red orb rose high above our property; thick beads of perspiration glistened on Papa's forehead.

“Just look at him,” Mama said, collecting the bowls, moving to the sink. “Just look at your father, Ladda.” I sat there blinking at her. “He's scared,” she continued. She turned on the spigot, the water plashing against the bowls. “Your father's terrified.”

I went to my room to change for school. Papa put the cocks back in their coops. I watched him carry them one by one to the chicken house, his body slumped and heaving from the run, from their weight. He walked back to the house and soon I could hear him changing into his factory uniform on the other side of the wall. He was still cursing under his breath. He slammed the dresser drawers. I thought I heard him kick something. The sink hissed and clanked in the kitchen, tin utensils ratcheting in the basin. I heard Mama drop a bowl, heard it shatter against the kitchen floor, followed shortly by the swish and tinkle of her sweeping.

And then it was quiet. Mama finished with the dishes. Papa settled down. I inspected myself in the mirror, made sure my uniform was tucked in properly, that the bra's obscene trimmings didn't stand out against the linen. And then, still standing before the mirror, I listened to the sudden silence in our house. I wondered what Papa was doing alone in that room; I listened for any sign of him on the other side of the wall. I wondered, too, what Mama was thinking in the kitchen now. Outside, the brown puppy had left the ditch, the pile already picked over by the larger strays before him.

Mama said Papa was terrified and I wondered if she might be right. I'd never thought of Papa as a terrified man. When he told me that he, Wichian, wasn't going to be scared, I had believed him; those bruises on his face seemed to verify my conviction. But now—in that confounding pause, staring at my own image reflected strangely in the mirror—I began to have my doubts, for I never thought Papa would ever come home with nine dead chickens, never thought he'd lose eleven thousand. I never thought Little Jui and that Filipino boy would beat my father at his own game. And I knew that Papa did not anticipate this either. Things might've been better had he come home instead with a thousand more bruises.

The house came back to life again. Papa slammed the door. He walked out to the Mazda. Mama turned on the radio in the kitchen. I went to get my bicycle. As I stood in the yard strapping my schoolbag to the bike's gridiron backseat, Papa
started the truck engine. He backed the Mazda out, gravel crunching noisily. I waved to my father: a morning ritual of ours. But Papa throttled the engine and sped off to the factory, tires squealing, the truck disappearing into a thin veil of dust.

That almost broke me. I wanted to end the entire thing right then and there. I wanted to go into that chicken house and wring the neck of every goddamn cock sleeping in its coop. But instead I just got on my bike and pedaled off to school.

IX

Later that day, my friend Noon and I decided to stop for an iced coffee in town. I didn't want to be with Noon, but I didn't want to go home, either. I didn't want to be there when Miss Mayuree came to collect the bras. I despised Miss Mayuree—her gold-capped teeth glinting in that beak of a maw, her painted face, her sour gardenia perfume. But above all I hated seeing Mama bow and stoop before her—hated that submissiveness, that feigned gratitude for a paycheck. It made me wonder about our dignity. So when Noon eased up beside me on her bike after school and said, “Hey, stranger, haven't seen you in a while,” I just shrugged and said, “‘Hey, stranger' yourself.”

We'd known each other since we were girls. Noon was the lottery vendor's daughter. Her older sister, Charunee, had notoriously gone to Bangkok and come home calling herself
Charlie, like she hadn't only changed into a man, she'd also become a farang. When we were younger, before her sister decided to become a man, I'd often take Noon home on hot days and we'd scream and prance around the yard while Papa let the chickens loose and Mama pelted us with long jets of water from the hose. We no longer had that kind of friendship, however. Shortly after her sister returned from Bangkok, we both began to go through our own metamorphoses—Noon becoming a lithe, beautiful creature while I grew plump and ordinary in comparison. She gave the boys instant hard-ons; I ignored them altogether. She began to seem vapid and whorish with her relentlessly dollish ways. It was as if, with her sister going to the other side, she'd decided she needed to be twice the woman the rest of us were. For my part, I must have seemed tragic to Noon, with my pale, moonlike face and crispy, uninteresting hair; my indifference to beauty; my thick ankles; my bookishness.

We took our iced coffees to a park bench. That's when we saw Little Jui and Ramon, the Filipino boy, sitting on the sidewalk in front of Old Man Sorachai's teashop. A group of men stood around them in an attentive semicircle. Little Jui gestured dramatically with his hands, occasionally patting the Filipino boy on the back. From what I could tell, Little Jui was narrating his triumphs from the night before; the men responded intermittently with peals of laughter. The Filipino boy stared coolly ahead, tapping his feet arrhythmically against the sidewalk. He smiled every so often, his teeth straight and white
and shining in the sun. It seemed impossible that this lanky foreign boy with perfect teeth could humiliate my father. But there he was—the new champion, the boy who'd made my father curse and my mother scream, the boy who'd slaughtered nine of Papa's chickens, the boy who'd won Little Jui's money back. I turned away quickly when he caught me staring at him, but not before—to my chagrin—he beamed a toothy smile in my direction.

“Oh my God don't look,” Noon whispered, bending her head toward me. I could detect the scent of jasmine perfume on the nape of her skinny neck. “That Filipino boy is staring at you.”

“It's not me he's staring at,” I said, laughing. “It's not me he's checking out.”

“He is!” Noon insisted, giggling, sipping her coffee. “He's staring at you.”

“When did you get this way?” I said. “Don't you think about anything besides penis?”

“Don't be such a killjoy,” Noon replied curtly. She looked at the boys flailing around on the new basketball courts Big Jui had recently built for the town. For every superficial civic deed Big Jui did—a basketball court, new bulbs for the town's streetlights, sidewalks repaved, mailboxes on every third scorner—the townspeople agreed to endure his less philanthropic activities. Mama said it was like being massaged with one hand while getting punched with the other.

“He was, you know,” Noon continued, smiling idiotically again. “That boy was staring at you. Swear on my grandmama's grave.”

“Okay. Shut up about it. And leave your grandmama out of this.”

“He's kind of handsome, actually. He's cute, Ladda.” Noon licked her lips, smiled in Ramon's direction. “Nice muscles. Good teeth. Sexy lips.”

“He's yours then,” I said, slurping the last of my coffee noisily, tossing it into the garbage can beside us. “Doesn't surprise me that you haven't heard, Noon. You're so oblivious. You're so fucking stupid. That boy caused my family a lot of misery.”

“What did I ever do to you?” Noon asked, shaking her head. “When did you start hating me? We used to be friends, remember? Of course I heard about your papa; everybody's talking about it. I'm not an idiot, you know. I just thought we were having a bit of fun.”