were occupied: a bentspined man in a blindingly white shirt sitting beside a woman with hair too black even for Thailand, and on the third stool, a plump woman in her late fifties or early sixties, her body popping out of a black cocktail dress that might have fit her twenty years earlier. At one end of the plywood plank, a small boom box was playing “Hotel California.”
A portable bar. Wallace had seen a few of these on the sidewalks following the overnight demolition of Sukhumvit Square, but here one was in front of him, as unexpected as an oasis with camels and palm trees. He looked behind him, saw the shoppers thinning and the merchants closing, and went to the empty stool and sat. He couldn’t have run another yard if there’d been wolves chasing him.
“Beer Singha,” he said, trying to steady his breathing. Now that he was sitting, he felt his legs trembling violently. His left elbow sent up a neural yelp of pain, and the plump woman, who had gotten up to get his beer, took a second look at him and straightened. The powder on her face looked like chalk in the hard light.
“Honey,” she said. Her hands indicated the cut shirt, the blood on the cloth. “What happen?”
“Some kids,” he said, hearing the quaver in his voice. “It’s okay. I just need to sit a minute.”
“Poor baby, poor baby,” she said. “Kid. Kid no good now. Not same before.” She reached into the glass case and pulled out a relatively clean hand towel, then scooped a handful of melting ice and wrapped the towel around it. She lifted the dripping mess, gave it a professional-looking squeeze and held it out. “Here,” she said. “For...” She flexed her own left elbow and pointed at it and her forearm with her right hand.
He pressed the wet, cold cloth to his arm, and the fire of pain was banked slightly. A few of the vendors were stretching up, holding towels or potholders to unscrew the bulbs over their carts. The kids were nowhere in sight.
“You say kid…” the woman in black said. She popped the cap off a Singha. At her end of the bar was a big Chinese cleaver on a circular wooden cutting board, piled with limes. She grabbed the cleaver and expertly sliced a lime, then remembered to ask, “Glass?”
He shook his head.
“Kid how old? How many?” She dropped the lime slice back onto the board, thunked the cleaver’s edge into the wood, wiped the bottle dry and put it in front of him. Then she hoisted herself onto the stool beside him and rested her hand on his thigh in the eternal gesture of bar girls everywhere.
“Three. Not kids, really. In their twenties. Smoking…” He mimed the little pipe with his left hand. “
A fat Thai with a Chinese face waddled out of the darkness. Behind him Wallace saw an aluminum lawn chaise with a blanket on it. “We close soon,” the man said. “Order last drink, please.”
“Aaaaahhhhhh,” the man with the bent spine said. “I’ll quit now.” He put a couple of bills down and dropped some coins on top and pushed the stool back. Standing, he was no taller than he was sitting, his back as crooked as a question mark. “You,” he said to Wallace. “You oughta see a doctor. That arm’s busted.”
“I think so, too,” Wallace said.
“Little shits around here,” the other man said.
“Know we’re old. Know what days the pension checks arrive. Little fuckers. Oughta carry a gun if you’re gonna come here.”
“I won’t be back,” Wallace said.
“Smart guy. Get that arm looked at, hear?” To the woman beside him, he said, “Coming?”
“I go with you?” the woman said, doing her best to look surprised and pleased.
“Sure, sure. We talk money later, okay?”
“No problem.” She grabbed a tiny purse and darted a quick, victorious glance at the woman beside Wallace, then took the bent man’s arm, and the two of them headed for the street.
“Why you come?” asked the woman in the tight dress.
“Golden Mile,” Wallace said.
“Ah,” she said, her face softening. “Golden Mile, yes. Very good.”
“You know a girl named Jah?” Wallace asked.
He got a moment of silence as she gnawed her lower lip. “I know many Jah.”
“At Thai Heaven.”
“No,” she said. “I no work Thai Heaven. Work Tidbit Bar.”
“Mmmm,” Wallace said and knocked back half of the beer. With the bottle halfway down, he froze.
She followed his gaze and saw the three of them in a loose triangle at the edge of the lot. She pointed at them with a tilt of her chin. “Them?”
“Yes,” Wallace said.
“You stay,” the plump woman said, and faster than he would have thought possible, she was at the end of the bar and had grabbed the cleaver. Raising it high in the air, she ran toward them, small steps because of the tight dress, but a run nevertheless. The boys stepped back, and when she showed no sign of slowing, they turned and retreated out of sight, back up the street. The woman with the cleaver followed.
His hand trembled as he downed the rest of the beer.
She trotted back into sight, hair slightly disarranged, but with a smile on her face. She sank the cleaver’s edge into the side of the cutting board and said, “They go, but maybe still close. You pay, you come with me. I take you home. We go.” She waited, not sitting, until he’d put the money on the plywood, and then laced her left arm through his uninjured right and led him toward the street, in the direction opposite the one the boys had taken.
She wore a light floral perfume, something that made Wallace think of a place he and his friends had played each spring, in the hills above Carlsbad, California, slopes of blue lupine and the eye-ringing orange of California poppies tumbling down to the hard bright sun-wrinkles of the sea. Looking for the secret messages they had left there the previous fall, when the hills grew dry and prickly. Answers to questions they’d asked each other, maps to things they’d hidden.
Maps.
They were on the sidewalk now, the lights receding behind them as they moved parallel to New Petchburi Road. In the moments he’d been sitting, Wallace’s knee had stiffened, and he was limping.
He said, “How can you take me home? You don’t know where I live.”
“No problem,” she said. “I take you where you can get taxi, get tuk-tuk. Take you home.”
“Have taxi up here,” she said. “Come little bit more.” They were beneath a street light, her face suddenly blossoming from the dark.
“Jah?” Wallace said, and then she looked over her shoulder and he heard them.
“In here.” She shoved him into a narrow space between two buildings, half-illuminated by the street light, with chunks of rubble underfoot. She pushed him in front of her, and then a blue flame ignited ahead of them—the boy with the crimp in his head—and the other two came into the space behind them, the woman backing away, looking from face to face.
He’d turned to face the two who had just come in when he heard the grit of a step behind him and then something enormously hard slammed the side of his head. His vision flared orange as the thing hit him again, banging the other side of his head against the wall of the building. He was sliding, sliding somewhere, feeling a rough surface against his arm and shoulder, and then something rose up from below, very fast, and struck him on the underside of the chin, and his head snapped back so hard he thought he heard something break.
The woman was screaming in Thai, sounding not frightened but furious, and one of the boys barked a string of syllables like rocks, and she fell silent. Someone kicked him in the ribs, but he barely felt it.
There were stars up there at the top of the narrow canyon between the buildings. He hadn’t seen stars often in Bangkok.
A hand under his head, lifting it up, putting it on something soft, her leg. The woman, looking down at him, fat and powdered, her face shining with sweat. He saw the eyes, the bones, the skin—and the fat and the years melted away, and the corners of her mouth curled up, and the lacquered hair fell loose and long, and he said, “Jah.”
“I’m here,
“I looked for you,” Wallace said. The world dipped sharply down for an instant, everything going sideways,
