Bangkok Noir

dark. Bars are lighted. The tuk-tuk driver brought me to the wrong place and tried to cheat me. Bangkok is changing. He walked more briskly, leaving New Petchburi farther behind, moving in the certainty that sheer decisiveness would get him where he wanted to go.

It wasn’t hard for him to imagine, in front of him, the strings of Christmas lights and the scattering of neon, the neon not as plentiful or as vulgar as at Patpong, that upstart street, but enough to lure him forward, enough to suggest the warmth and friendliness of a bar, the smell of the beer, the music of women’s voices. The softness of women’s faces. Jah’s face, the slightly overlong upper lip, the permanent upward curl at the corners of her mouth that made her look like she was always suppressing a laugh. He could almost smell her, the salt sea-smell of her secret places.

Another cross-street approached, promising in its furtiveness, but he stopped, the street slipping from his mind as he registered the floating ribbon of concrete suspended against the dark sky far, far in front of him: an elevated highway. That’s why I’m turned around, he thought. That wasn’t there before, and the moment he had articulated the thought, he saw the boys.

Three of them, maybe eighteen or nineteen years old, facing inward in a tight circle around a faint glow of light, as though they were warming themselves at a candle. Wallace felt his chest, which had begun to feel cramped, expand, felt his lungs fill with air as certainty coursed through him. Boys always knew where the action was. And he liked Thai teenagers, so open and friendly, unlike the sour, angry, overprivileged American kids with their long, dirty hair and thrift-store clothes, the ones who had sneered at him, shouted at him, when he went home. The pretty girl, her hair wild curls down her slender back, who spat at him. He felt a smile stake claim to his face.

As he approached, he called out, “Sawatdee.”

And time went wrong. The comfort and assurance and youth drained out of him as the boys turned and separated, and he saw their faces, despite his efforts to keep them young and friendly, turn old. He saw, in one blunt-force glance, the glittering eyes, the crumpled tinfoil pipe, the disposable lighter with something jammed into the jet to create a thin blue needle of flame. Smelled the sweet methamphetamine smoke curling from the sizzling pills at the bottom of the pipe.

“Hey, Papa,” one of them said. Smoke snaked out of his mouth and he squinted against it.

“Never mind,” Wallace said, shaking his head.

“No problem.” He angled across the sidewalk to the road, intending to cross. The block was dark and quite deserted, no cars in sight. Nowhere to go.

“Papa!” the man called, following. Maybe 23, 24, gaunt and dirty, with lank, greasy hair and a smile that looked stolen pasted to his face. “Papa, got money for friends? Got baht, got dollar?”

“No.” Wallace saw the other two men floating along behind the leader, one of them with the foil pipe at his lips, a red glow lighting the upper half of a misshapen face, crimped on one side as though someone had pressed it in with the heel of a hand before the bones hardened. “Go away.”

“Nowhere here to go,” the leader said, picking up his pace and angling across the soi toward Wallace.

“Give money, we take taxi, go. Okay, Papa?” He spread his hands to show they were empty. “Then no problem, yes?”

Wallace felt a flare of young man’s anger. He said, “Fuck off. Get your own money and leave me alone.”

“Oooooohhhhh, Papa,” the boy said. He called something in Thai, and the other two laughed. The one with the crimped head stuck out his chest and beat it, gorilla-style, and they all laughed again. The two who were farther away were closing in, and within a few seconds all three of them would be within striking distance.

Always move toward trouble, Wallace thought, and he drifted toward the closest boy, saying, “What is it? What is it you want?” He cupped his ear and leaned toward the boy whose grin hardened as he came up directly beside Wallace...

...who put every ounce of strength he possessed into a much-practiced but very rusty side-kick that nevertheless hit the boy square on the outside of the knee, and as he went down, yelling in pain and shock, Wallace knew the cartilage was damaged, and by the time the boy hit the pavement with all his weight on the other knee and shouted at the new pain, Wallace was running.

The soi juddered by as he strained, hoisting leaden legs—only thirty or forty feet along and already winded for Christ’s sake, but hearing no feet behind him. He dared a glance over his shoulder and saw the two other boys lifting the leader to his feet, the leader screaming after him, pointing an outstretched hand like a rifle, hopping on one leg. The other leg, the one Wallace had damaged, was lifted and bent like a stork’s. Wallace faced forward again and found a burst of speed from somewhere, although he knew in the part of his mind that was keeping score that two of them could catch up to him in a minute or less if they abandoned the injured boy and ran full out.

He came to a cross-street and slowed. From somewhere in the past, the information assembled itself: he was running on Soi Jarurat, maybe Petchburi 13. To his left, the cross-street went only a short way and hooked left again, back toward the big road. To the right, he had no idea.

Thai Heaven had been nowhere near here.

If he went left and then left again, trying to get back to the bright lights of New Petchburi Road, the boys might divide up, one staying behind him and the other two running back to the last crossstreet to meet him head- on—what he learned in the jungle to call a pincer movement. If I go right, he thought, they can’t cut me off.

He was laboring now. His lungs felt like he’d inhaled fire, and the pulse at his throat was as forceful as a tapping thumb. There had to be something to the right.

Right it was.

And he heard flip-flops slapping pavement. Two pair at a run and a third pair much more irregular and farther back.

It was what he needed. Some ancient, long-stored reserve of strength flamed into being, the soldier’s training overcoming, even if only for a few moments, the old man’s body. He stretched his stride, feeling like he could fly. Angling across the empty street, he leaped for the curb and snagged a foot on it, pitching forward, fighting to get his arms down to break the fall. He landed heavily on one elbow and one knee, knowing immediately that the elbow was a problem, and rolled over twice until he could push himself to his feet with the arm he could still bend, and then he began to move, as much at a limp as a run.

Laughter floated from the boys behind him.

The knee of his pants had torn on impact. There was blood on the cloth, making it stick to his leg. His left elbow was an independent sphere of pain, with a demonic halo of heat around it that seemed to have clamped itself to the middle of his arm and seized his nervous system by sheer force. It squeezed off a machine-gun tangle of agony every time his heart beat. Looking down at it, he saw for the first time that the stinging he’d been feeling in his left forearm was a neat slice, the sleeve of his shirt looking like it had been cut with scissors. The boy he kicked must have gotten to him with a blade as he went down.

Not much farther. He didn’t have it in him to go much farther. They could—they could have him.

But the young man inside flared up and said fuck that, and Wallace found himself running again, feeling as though he must be leaving red streaks of pain in the air behind him. Doorways and dark windows and occasional fences flowed by, and then, up ahead to the left on his side of the street, he saw light: yellowish, bright, as harsh as a snapped word, but light.

A paved area, a parking lot, but not many cars. Instead, knotted wires, carrying stolen electricity direct from the high-voltage lines above, dangled a crop of clear, naked bulbs, spherical as oranges, strung over little stands. A few cars were parked along one edge as though they’d been shoved aside to make room for this little market, just a huddle of carts selling cooked food and produce. Many of them were shutting up, closing the glass doors that kept the flies away, sprinkling water on the charcoal beneath the cooking grates. Among the few remaining shoppers, Wallace saw some farang, solitary men as old as he.

The vendors had come here as their last stop of the day, hoping to coax the farang from their apartments. Old, bent, balding. His age. Left behind when the Golden Mile disappeared.

The business farthest from the street was a glasssided cart with a long piece of plywood laid across it, perhaps seven or eight feet long, beneath a signboard that said “NOT FAR BAR.” Hand-painted below that, in letters of many sizes, was “oNe Bar ComE to YOU!” Four stools had been pulled up to the plywood. Three of them