

### The Bangkok Writers

### Tales from the Other City of Angels

### By

### DCO
The Bangkok Writers

Copyright © DCO, 2013

First Published 2013

Individual stories are copyright of their authors

Smashwords Edition

eBook Edition published by

DCO Books

Proglen Trading Co., Ltd.

Bangkok Thailand

http://ebooks.dco.co.th

ISBN 978-616-7817-22-4

All Rights Reserved

This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and other elements of the story are either the product of the author's imagination or else are used only fictitiously. Any resemblance to real characters, living or dead, or to real incidents, is entirely coincidental.

#  Contents

Foreword

**Incident at the Marhi Hotel -** _by William Page_

**Exercising an Option -** _by Roger Crutchley_

**Freedom: A Vampire of Siam Tale -** _by Jim Newport_

**Running with the Sharks -** _by James Eckardt_

**The Bird Catcher -** _S.P. Somtow_

**Pool and its Role in Asian Communism -** _by Colin Cotterill_

**Requiem for a Cockroach -** _by S. Tsow_

**Proverbs (Suphasit) -** _by Mont Redmond_

**Deep in the Heart of Bangkok, Texas -** _by Roger Beaumont_

**Boat People -** _James Eckardt_

**Nirvana Express -** _by S.P.Somtow_

**Evil in the Land Without -** _by Colin Cotterill_

The Books

#  Foreword

There is another City of Angels apart from Los Angeles. It is Bangkok, the capital city of Thailand. Its Thai name, Krung Thep, means City of Angels. For many visitors Bangkok lives up to its name far better than LA.

It is with great pleasure that I can introduce some of the best English language writers based in Bangkok over the last thirty years. Many of you will know of them already from their columns and articles in Bangkok's English language press, the _Bangkok Post_ , _The Nation_ , the long gone _Bangkok World_ and the many English language magazines that come and go.

Roger Crutchley was for many years the sports editor at the _Post_. On top of that he has had, and still has, a humourous Sunday column called _PostScript_. Over the years two collections of these columns were published. We have one available now as an ebook and another coming soon.

Staying with humourous columnists we have as ebooks the previously published books by Roger Beaumont and S. Tsow.

But the collection is more than this. In here you will find stories from S.P. Somtow who writes when he isn't conducting orchestras and writing operas. You will come across Jim Newport, the leading expert on the vampires who live in this fascinating city. He has written a story of the Vampire of Siam exclusively for this anthology.

Excerpts from the published novels of Colin Cotterill and James Eckardt are included along with a story from William Page's collection, _The Nirvana Experiments_. Not to be missed is a chapter on Thai proverbs from Mont Redmond's recently republished in both print and as an ebook, _Wondering into Thai Culture or Thai Whys and Otherwise_.

You will find in this book both humour and pathos, so please sit back and enjoy.

All of the authors now have their ebooks available on the leading retail sites. Check at the end of the book for the titles and details.

#  Incident at the Marhi Hotel

To get started here's a short story from William Page from his wonderful 1995 collection, The Nirvana Experiments. It shows yet again that east and west don't always understand each other.

**Ten years** after moving to Marhi, Ram Bahadur Nepali changed his name to Ram Bahadur Marhi, and the name of his hotel to the Marhi Hotel.

This is not to say that the establishment over which Ram Bahadur presided could be considered a hotel in the Western sense of the word. It was nothing more than a large hut with a dirt floor, walls made of piled-up rocks, and a roof made of corrugated metal. Stones on the roof kept it from blowing away in a heavy wind. Outside, stacked against the leeward wall, was a big pile of firewood which had been carried up the mountain at great effort; for Marhi, situated in a saddle of the Himalayas at 11,000 feet, was well above the timberline.

Inside, along the wall, were three little fireplaces made of mud: one for the blackened old tea kettle, one for the rice pot, and the third for the curry pot. The walls were lined with benches, and there were four rough wooden tables. In good weather, Ram Bahadur put them outside so that travelers could bask in the sunshine as they ate. But especially in the late afternoon and evening, the weather was rarely good. The winds came howling down from the Rohtang Pass, some 2,000 feet above, and there were often late-afternoon snow flurries.

At night, guests slept on the benches or, if they preferred, on the ground. At the rear of the inn were a pile of straw mats and a pile of dirty quilts. If the guests weren't carrying their own bedding, they'd wrap up in the quilts, and usually wake up in the morning with bedbug bites on their ankles. The predisposition of the bedbugs of Marhi for attacking the ankles, rather than other choice portions of the human anatomy, was an idiosyncrasy that had made its way into several guidebooks on the region.

He might have changed his name, but Ram Bahadur never forgot that he was a Nepali. He always wore his little black Nepali cap and carried his curved Gurkha knife in his belt. The knife was not just for show: he used it mainly for chopping wood and killing goats and chickens for the curry pot.

Ram Bahadur was now in his late fifties, a wizened gnome of a man with a scraggly beard and weathered features. Tourists driving up from Manali liked to take his picture, for which privilege Ram Bahadur charged them a fee of two rupees—about twenty cents in those days.

He was aided in running his hotel by his wife, Dolma. She was a plump, merry Tibetan woman in her mid-thirties, with rosy cheeks, black pigtails, and a ready laugh. She was always giggling to herself, as if at some secret joke. Dolma always wore her traditional Tibetan outfit—cotton blouse, black sleeveless robe, and colorful striped apron, together with many earrings—and when tourists wanted her to pose for pictures with Ram Bahadur, the price went up to four rupees.

There was also a gray-haired old woman in the household who must have been in her seventies. Her relationship to Ram Bahadur and Dolma was unclear. If you asked them who she was, they would just say, "She is from Kulu," or "She is our auntie." Evidently, somewhere along the line, they had "adopted" her. She helped Dolma with the cooking and the housework, but she spent a good deal of time squatting by the fireside counting her beads.

It had taken the Indian Army a good deal of time to widen and pave the road that surmounted the Rohtang Pass, but now that it was finished—an all-weather road that they kept open even during the winter with an ancient snowplow—Ram Bahadur's business had picked up considerably. His hotel had always been a favorite stopping place for mule caravans crossing the pass on their way to Manali or Ladakh. After the dirt road was built, it became a popular stop for trucks lumbering over the pass. And now that the road was paved, it was a favorite stop for buses and cars as well.

Other local entrepreneurs had been quick to notice this. And soon Marhi, which in the beginning had consisted only of Ram Bahadur's hotel and an army fuel depot, became a thriving little settlement.

One late afternoon in June, a white Maruti sedan wheezed up the mountainside and stopped outside Ram Bahadur's place. A Sikh got out. He was full-bearded and portly, wearing tweed pants, a sweater and sports jacket, and a maroon turban. He shivered as he got out of his car, and threw a down parka over his shoulders before ducking inside Ram Bahadur's hut.

"Accommodation?" he thundered at Ram Bahadur in English. "You are having accommodation?"

"Ji," Ram Bahadur replied in the affirmative, his eyes crinkling.

"What is the tariff?" the Sikh demanded.

"Ten rupees per night," Ram Bahadur replied in Hindi. "Fifteen if you want a quilt."

The Sikh surveyed the "accommodations" with a curl of his lip: dirt floor, stone walls, benches and tables, and the three little fireplaces. "This is all you are having?" he exclaimed. "No beds? No running water?"

"This is a remote area, sir," Ram Bahadur informed him mildly in Hindi. "We sleep on the benches. If you don't like the benches, there is the ground."

The Sikh looked at him with piercing eyes. "You don't speak English?"

Ram Bahadur shook his head. "Speak, but not well," he replied in English. Then he grinned and resumed in Hindi. "We are Indians. Why should we speak English?"

The Sikh nodded, but continued to speak English. "And food? What food you are serving?"

"Rice. Lentils. Curried potatoes and spinach."

"Achchha, you are not having meat? Mutton? Fish? Eggs? Chicken?"

Ram Bahadur shook his head. "Today, no meat," he said. "Maybe tomorrow."

The Sikh sighed and looked around in despair. "And this is the biggest hotel here," he grumbled. "Others are the same?"

"Others are worse," Ram Bahadur informed him with a sunny smile. "Marhi Hotel is the best. Numbarr One," he added in English.

"Okay," the Sikh agreed. "Please tell your man to get my bags out of the car." He handed Ram Bahadur his car keys and sat down on a bench.

Ram Bahadur took the keys and went out to the Maruti. A stiff wind was blowing down from the pass, kicking up an inordinate amount of gray dust. The sky was grim and overcast, promising snow flurries before long. Inside the trunk of the Sikh's car were a huge bedroll and two large suitcases. Ram Bahadur took them out, dumped them on the ground, and picked up the bedroll. As he did so, he glanced down the mountainside and noticed a girl laboring up toward him through the stones. She was a foreigner, carrying a backpack, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, with an orange bandanna tied around her head. She looked exhausted.

Ram Bahadur hoisted the bedroll up onto his shoulder and carried it into the hotel. Meanwhile the old woman, who had been sitting by the fire muttering over her beads, got up and went outside to help.

The girl, coming up over the crest of the hill, hailed her. "Hey! Is this a teahouse? Oh, yes, thank God, it's a teahouse. Shit, I'm tired."

The old woman fixed her with a piercing stare, thought a bit, then gestured to her to take off her pack. "What?" the girl exclaimed. "You want to take my pack? No, that's okay, I can carry it myself. No—" But the old woman was already taking the backpack off her shoulders and hoisting it up onto her own back. She grinned toothlessly at the girl and, speaking Hindi, ordered her to follow.

The girl wiped the sweat off her forehead and brushed aside a strand of blonde hair that had escaped from beneath her bandanna. She followed the old woman into the hut.

The Sikh was at the rear of the hut unrolling his bedroll as they entered. The girl sat on a bench and spoke to the old woman. "Tea? Do you have tea? Chai?"

The old woman put down the pack and nodded, still grinning toothlessly. The Sikh, hearing the girl speak English, straightened up and saw her. He blinked.

"Then let's have a glass of tea. Ek kup chai," the girl said in Hindi. She took off her bandanna and wiped her forehead with it. Long blonde hair cascaded about her shoulders. The Sikh, watching, blinked again. Then his eyes fell to her legs, long and golden, glistening in the firelight. His lip quivered.

The old woman nodded, went over to the fireplace, and started making tea. The Sikh sat down on a bench near the rear and looked at the girl. "What country you are coming from?" he inquired.

The girl looked up and saw him for the first time. "America," she said.

"New York? California?"

"California," the girl said. She leaned over and started fumbling with her pack. Even in the semi-darkness of the hut, the curve of her breasts was visible beneath her white T-shirt. She pulled out a red down parka and straightened up. As she threw her shoulders back to put it on, her breasts jutted forward, straining against the T-shirt; then the parka closed over them, and she zipped it up. The Sikh blinked.

"It's kinda cold up here once you stop sweating," the girl said with a brief laugh. She resumed rummaging in her pack, took out a pair of jeans, and pulled them on over her shorts. The Sikh watched as the golden legs were swallowed up in faded denim. Then she took a packet of cigarettes out of a pocket in her pack. "Cigarette?" she asked the Sikh as she lit up.

"Sikhs don't smoke," the Sikh said in a husky voice.

"Sorry, I forgot," the girl said apologetically. "Hope you don't mind me smoking."

"Not at all," the Sikh replied. "What place you are coming from in California?"

"Laguna Beach," the girl said.

"It is near San Francisco?"

"L.A.," the girl said. She drew on her cigarette, looked around for an ash tray and, finding none, tapped the ashes onto the dirt floor.

"My name is Devender Singh," the Sikh introduced himself.

"Hi," the girl said, flashing a smile. "I'm Kari."

The Sikh looked puzzled. "Cary? Like in Cary Grant? But that is man's name, isn't it?"

The girl laughed, and brushed a strand of blonde hair back over her shoulder. "No. It's a girl's name. Spelled with a K and an I."

The old woman went over to Kari and gave her a glass of tea. As the girl sipped it, the Sikh ordered a glass of tea in Hindi, and the old woman returned to the fireplace to make it.

"So, Kari, do you mind if I join you for a glass of tea?" the Sikh inquired briskly.

The girl glanced at him. "Not at all," she answered. There was a hint of reserve in her voice.

The Sikh moved ponderously from his bench to hers and sat down beside her. "So," he said with a smile. "What brings you to this remote area?" He laughed and waved his hand to take in their surroundings. "You see, this place is very backward. This hut! Very simple. The people also are simple and uneducated. And outside, nothing but stones."

Kari sipped her tea and glanced at him. Her face was still flushed from climbing the hill. She paused to drag on her cigarette. "Well," she said in measured tones, "this is gonna sound kind of silly, but..."

"Yes?" the Sikh encouraged her, smiling.

She laughed and brushed her hair back with her hand. "I'm looking for my guru."

"Achchha," the Sikh said. The old woman presented him with his glass of tea, and he took it with a nod.

Kari smiled at him. Her eyes were a deep blue, the Sikh noticed, and as he sipped his tea he spilled some on his sweater. "Damn!" he exclaimed. Hastily he brushed the spilled tea off his sweater.

"Don't you think that's silly?" the girl inquired. She was still smiling.

"Don't I think what is silly?" the Sikh asked. He examined his sweater to make sure he had wiped off all the tea.

"That I'm looking for my guru."

The Sikh regarded her gravely. "No," he replied. "I don't think it's silly. India is having rich spiritual tradition, isn't it? Whereas you people from West are having nothing. So it is natural that you should come to learn from us."

The girl's smile faded.

"But you should study Granth," the Sikh continued. "Our holy book. There you will find many marvelous truths. Granth is our guru now. Perhaps you have heard. Human guru is not necessary so long as we are having Holy Granth."

The girl took a drag on her cigarette. "I'm not into Sikhism," she said.

The Sikh sipped his tea. "Then what religion you are following?" he inquired.

At this point the old woman, stooped and bent, came forward with a plate of biscuits. She offered it to the girl, smiling and bobbing her head.

"Oh, thank you," the girl said. She smiled at the old woman and took a biscuit. The old woman offered the plate to the Sikh, but he waved her aside.

The girl nibbled her biscuit and sipped her tea. Then she took another drag on her cigarette. "I'm into Shaivism," she answered. "You know the Shiva Sangha, operating out of Delhi?"

The Sikh nodded and stroked his beard. His eyes strayed to the front of her parka. "Yes, I have heard," he said.

"Well," the girl said, "I belong to that."

The Sikh shifted his weight on the bench. "Achchha," he said.

"And in Delhi they told me something very funny," the girl continued. "You see, we have a center in L.A. I wanted to be initiated, you know? Where the swami performs a ritual and gives you a mantra and you become his disciple and he becomes your guru."

"Mantra diksh," the Sikh nodded. "I know. This is Hindu custom."

"Yeah, but—" the girl laughed, and tossed her head, making the blonde hair ripple over her shoulders. "The head swami in L.A. wouldn't initiate me. He said he wasn't my guru. He was very firm on that point. He sent me to the headquarters in Delhi."

"And there you got initiation," the Sikh interpreted. He was still eyeing the front of her parka.

"No! That's just the point," the girl said. Her cigarette was finished, and she stubbed it out on the bench. "They wouldn't initiate me either. They told me my guru was in Himachal Pradesh. That's up here."

"How they are knowing where your guru is?" the Sikh demanded.

The girl laughed and shook her head, and the blonde hair shimmered in the dim half-light of the hut. "I don't know," she said, running her hand through her hair. "It's crazy, isn't it? But the head swami, the abbot of the order—he was very explicit. 'You go to Himachal,' he said. 'Manali, Rohtang, Lahaul. There your guru is waiting.'"

The Sikh stared at her. "Himachal is big place," he noted. "How you will find guru in such vast expanse? How you will recognize him when you meet?"

The girl laughed again. "That's the crazy part," she said. "They said Manali, Rohtang, Lahaul. Well, I've been all over Manali. Now this is Rohtang. But there's nothing here. And tomorrow I'll go to Lahaul. They gave me only one clue. They said that my guru would be named Meer, Ameer, something like that."

"Ameer is Muslim name," the Sikh observed. "Why they are sending you to find Muslim guru?"

"They weren't clear on the name. They weren't clear on anything. Just what I've told you."

"How they are determining all this?" the Sikh queried. "They are reading palm? Telling fortune?"

"My horoscope," the girl replied. "They studied my horoscope. And also my physiognomy. And they meditated a lot."

The Sikh pondered this. "Well," he said, "this is the problem with Hinduism. Mind you, I'm not criticizing Hinduism. It is wonderful religion. Very profound. And all religions are one. All lead to the truth. Of this every Indian is convinced. But Hinduism is confusing. So many different traditions! So many gods! It gets all mixed up, and the result is confusion. Hinduism is hotchpotch religion. Also, they are having many superstitions. Sikh religion is much simpler, and much more clear."

The girl finished her tea, and immediately the old woman brought her another glass. "Oh, no, sorry, I don't want another glass," the girl protested. "I didn't order it." The old woman spoke a few words to the Sikh, who translated.

"She says it's free," he said. "No charge." The old woman grinned and shuffled back to her fireplace, where she sat down and started counting her beads.

"Well, that's very nice," the girl said, sipping the tea. "People up here are really kind, aren't they?"

The Sikh wrinkled his nose. "Kind, yes, but uneducated," he said. "These are simple country people."

Ram Bahadur and Dolma came into the hut with a load of wood. They had been chopping it outside. By now it was getting dark, and the wind was picking up. Snow flurries were gusting down from the summit of the pass. Ram Bahadur and his wife were laughing and talking merrily. They both started bustling about near the fireplaces.

"Soon we will eat," the Sikh observed. "You are getting hungry, Kari?" He reached over and stroked her shoulder.

She tensed perceptibly, then brushed her hair back with her hand. "Yeah. In fact, I'm starving. Anyway, I'm sure I'll recognize my guru when I see him. But some of the people in Delhi seemed doubtful. They said my guru might be up here, but they weren't sure I was ready to meet him. One of the senior devotees was really outspoken about it. He said he didn't think I'd be ready for two or three years. But I've been trying to get initiated for over a year now, and I'm tired of being put off with excuses. All I've got to do is find him. I know I'm ready, and I know I'll recognize him when I see him."

Now it was getting really dark, and the only light was from the glow of the fire. The Sikh chuckled. "Maybe I am your guru," he suggested.

She drew away from him abruptly. "Good joke," she muttered.

"No, really," the Sikh protested. "How you are knowing that I am not your guru? How you are knowing that Lord Shiva has not arranged that we should meet like this?"

At this the old woman perked up. She came over from the fireplace and spoke to the Sikh in Hindi, gesturing toward Kari. The Sikh replied, and the old woman uttered a clucking sound and hobbled toward the rear of the hut.

"What was that all about?" Kari asked. It was getting cold, even with her parka on, and she hugged herself to keep warm.

"If you are cold, you can sit closer to me," the Sikh suggested.

"Thanks," the girl said coolly. "I'll manage. So what was all that about with the old lady?"

"Ah, she likes you, it seems. She heard us talking about Lord Shiva and asked if you believed in him, and I said yes, you came from the Shiv Sangh in Delhi."

"Oh. Say, you don't have any ganja on you, do you?"

"No. Sikhs don't smoke. But we do drink. I have some Scotch in my kit. Very nice stuff. Johnnie Walker. Would you like a glass? It will warm you."

She eyed him warily. "I don't drink," she said.

"Do you mind if I do?"

"Go ahead. I wish they'd hurry up with the food."

By now Ram Bahadur had lit kerosene lanterns so that they could see in the darkness. The Sikh went to his baggage and began rummaging around. Meanwhile, the old woman approached the girl. She was grinning and holding a cheap rosary made of _rudraksha_ seeds in her gnarled hand. She bent over and pressed the rosary into the girl's hand. " _Om namah Shivaya_ , _Om namah Shivaya_ ," she chanted.

Kari seemed confused. "I don't need this," she said. She tried to hand the rosary back.

The old woman pressed the rosary back in her hand. "Om namah Shivaya," she repeated.

"Okay," Kari said. "Thanks. Om namah Shivaya." She held the rosary, looking annoyed, and the old woman returned to her seat by the fire.

Pretty soon the Sikh came over. He had a flask and a glass full of whisky. "Sure you don't want some Scotch?" he inquired.

"No. But it would be nice if we had a little weed. I'm really tired from my climb." The girl rested her head on her hand, and the blonde hair tumbled over the front of her parka.

The Sikh slid his arm around her waist and gave her a squeeze. "It will be all right," he said. "We can have a nice sleep tonight, eh?" He downed the glass of Johnnie Walker.

The girl disengaged herself from his embrace. "That old woman gave me this dirty old rosary," she said, showing it to him.

"Eh? She did, eh?" The Sikh poured himself another drink, called over to the old woman in Hindi, and got a brief reply. "Well," he said, sipping at his Scotch, "she likes you. You're a devotee of Shiva. So is she. So she gave you this mala."

"I don't want it," the girl said. "Look, the seeds are all chipped and the string is dirty. Besides, I don't use a rosary. It indicates a very low level of spiritual development."

"She's just a crazy old woman. Don't mind her," the Sikh advised. His face was beginning to flush from the whisky, and again he put his arm around the girl.

She tensed, and he pulled her toward him. "Ah, Kari, I could be a good guru for you," he crooned. "I could teach you many things."

She grasped his arm and removed it from her waist. "Come on, Mr. Singh, I don't need this sort of shit. Give me a break."

"Call me Dave," the Sikh said.

"Dave," she said. "Kindly keep your hands to yourself, okay, Dave? And we'll get along fine."

The Sikh belched and slugged down another glass of Scotch. "I could be a good guru for you," he muttered.

At this juncture Ram Bahadur and Dolma came over with two plates of rice, curried potatoes, and lentil gravy. "Dinner ees sarrved!" Ram Bahadur announced with a broad grin.

They ate as Ram Bahadur and Dolma chatted and laughed by the fireplace and the old woman sat brooding into the flames. "God, this is shit," Kari exclaimed. "But even shit tastes good when you're starving."

After supper, Dolma laid down mats on the floor. Kari got out her sleeping bag and spread it out near her bench. Devender Singh by now had consumed four straight Scotches and found it difficult to walk. But he staggered over to his baggage, picked up his bedroll, took a quilt from the stack at the rear of the hut, and carried them to the front of the hut right next to Kari's sleeping bag. Ram Bahadur and Dolma were glancing toward them curiously.

"You planning to sleep here?" Kari inquired of Devender Singh. Her voice was like ice.

"Oh, yes, my darling Kari, I want to feel your body next to mine," the Sikh sighed. He dumped the bedroll on the ground next to her sleeping bag and dropped the quilt beside it. Then he belched, took off his down parka and jacket, placed them on the bench, and, still wearing his sweater and his tweed pants, lay down on his bedroll and pulled the quilt over him. He smiled up at Kari invitingly. He was still wearing his turban.

"Yeah, well, I think I prefer the rear of the hut. It should be warmer there," Kari said. She swept up her sleeping bag and moved it to the rear of the hut. Then she returned, picked up her pack, and moved it back there too. Devender Singh raised his head groggily and tried to get up, but fell back on his bedroll. "Oh, my head aches," he moaned.

The old woman got up, hobbled over to where Devender Singh was lying, and picked up the rosary from where Kari had left it on the bench. Then, with surprising swiftness, she moved to the rear of the hut, where Kari was just zipping herself up into her sleeping bag.

The old woman leaned over Kari and glared at her. She held out the rosary. "Om namah Shivaya!" she hissed. She thrust the rosary angrily at Kari. "Om namah Shivaya!"

"Oh, for Christ's sake, all right, Om namah Shivaya!" Kari exclaimed. "God, I wish I could get some peace around here!" She snatched the rosary from the old woman's hand and put it in a pocket of her pack. Then she lay back and was almost instantly asleep.

The next morning, when Devender Singh awoke, his head was aching. It was nine o'clock. Kari was already up and packed to go, pacing back and forth inside the hut and smoking a cigarette. "I wish they would hurry up with the fucking rice," she muttered. "I want to get out of here."

Devender Singh sat up on his bedroll. "Kari? Good morneeng!" he crooned. "Oh, my head hurts."

Kari sat down on a bench. "Good morning, Dave. Listen, could you ask them what's taking so long with the rice? I mean, I've had my morning tea and I'm ready to get out of here, but I do need some breakfast, and the old woman keeps fucking around with the fire."

"Um," Devender Singh said. He got up, stretched, and put on his jacket. "Oh, my head," he groaned. He looked around. "Even they are not having place for a proper wash," he grumbled.

"There's a kerosene can outside with some water," Kari said. "You can wash there." She took another drag on her cigarette. "Now could you please ask them what's taking so long with the rice?"

Devender Singh staggered toward the door. "This is India, my dear Kari, you must learn to be more patient," he counseled. He turned back and shouted a question at the old woman in Hindi. The old woman was crouching by the fireplace, poking with a stick at the fire beneath the rice pot. She snapped a curt answer back at him.

"She says the rice isn't ready yet," Devender Singh called to Kari. He stumbled outside into the bright Himalayan sunshine and shielded his eyes with his hand. "Oh, my head," he sighed. "But it is a lovely day." He went over to the side of the road, squatted down, unzipped his fly, and urinated on the stones. "Such a beautiful day," he said to nobody in particular. Then he got up, went over to the kerosene can, and washed his face and hands.

When he went back inside, Kari was eating her rice and curry, and the old woman was squatting nearby staring at her. Ram Bahadur had taken the quilts outside to air them out, and Dolma was stacking up the sleeping mats.

Devender Singh sat down beside Kari and began eating. "Tea," he said. " _Chai_ ," he called to the old woman, and snapped his fingers. She brought him a glass of tea.

Kari was just finishing her breakfast, and as she swallowed the last mouthful the old woman came over to her. She was holding the rosary, and thrust it at Kari, glaring. "Om namah Shivaya!" she said.

Kari dropped her spoon into her plate. "Oh, Jesus Christ, what the hell is going on now? What does she want? I put that rosary in my pack. Has she been into my pack? Has that crazy old woman been into my pack?" Her voice was getting hysterical.

"Don't get excited," Devender Singh advised. He spoke to the old woman in Hindi, and the old woman quavered back in a long, querulous diatribe.

"Hm," Devender Singh said. "Well, it seems she is upset because you don't use her mala. You got up this morning. You went out and washed up and attended to the calls of nature and smoked four cigarettes and drank three glasses of tea, and it is after nine o'clock already and you haven't even chanted Lord Shiva's name once. That's what she said."

Kari stared at the old woman. "She's really been keeping tabs on me, eh?"

The Sikh nodded. "She's crazy," he said. "I told you."

"Well," Kari said. She reached out and took the rosary from the old woman. "She may have a point. Tell her that. And thank her for me." Devender Singh translated, and the old woman beamed.

"Now could you please find out how much I owe? I've got to get going," Kari said. She stuffed the rosary into her pants pocket and took out her wallet. Devender Singh called Dolma over to add up the bill. Kari paid it, and offered a five-rupee tip to the old woman. Much to her astonishment, the old woman refused. "You see?" said Devender Singh. "I told you she was crazy."

"Right," Kari said. She tied her orange bandanna around her head and put on her pack. "Okay, I'm on my way. See you around, Dave." She nodded at Dolma and the old woman and turned to leave.

"Kari, I'll be leaving myself quite soon. Wouldn't you like a ride? My car is outside," Devender Singh offered.

She smiled at him. "No, thanks. I need the exercise, and it really is a lovely day. But if you pass me on the road, stop and ask again. If the climb is more than I can handle, I might just change my mind. But you'll have to promise to behave yourself." She flashed him a final smile, turned, and headed out of the hut and up the trail.

Devender Singh got a waterpot from Dolma and went out and filled it from the kerosene can. Then he wandered down the mountainside till he found a big rock. He went behind it, dropped his pants, and squatted for his morning bowel movement. As he did so, he sniffed the fresh air and gazed upon the panoramic splendor of the mountain scenery: blue sky, rocky slopes, and evergreen forests fading away in the distance. "Such a lovely day," he murmured. "And such a lovely girl. But alas, it was not meant to be."

Back in the hut, Dolma spoke in Hindi to the old woman. "Ram Bahadurji is going to Manali today, Meera. Anything you want him to get you?"

"More rosaries," the old woman answered. "For my disciples."

#  Exercising an Option

Roger Crutchley is well known in Bangkok not only for his regular Sunday 'PostScript' column in the Bangkok Post, but also because for many years he was the sports editor at the newspaper. This was one of many jobs he did over many years on the Post and quite a few of the authors in this collection thank him for giving them work at different times. Still maybe we should take this chance to get Crutch's views on sport. This is a chapter from his second book, PostScript: Forgotten But Not Gone, now available as an ebook.

***

**Sport** is often extolled as a good way of relieving mental stress, although sometimes it might add to it.

### It's Only a Game

Anyone who has attempted to play golf doesn't need reminding what a frustrating game it is. It can turn the mildest of men into raging, babbling wrecks. One example of this was witnessed on a golf course near Bangkok.

Playing in the group was a Japanese businessman, known for his mild manner, cool temperament and total decorum. However, on this particular day his golf game was not going too well — in fact he was having the HORRORS, his ball squirting into every bunker, ditch and pond on the course. Things came to a head on the fifth hole which required clearing some water. His first shot went plop ... straight into the water. His second effort took a similar aquatic route. Finally on the third attempt he gave an almighty swing and ... the ball plopped into the water.

Enough is enough.

The normally calm businessman picked up his golf bag, strode purposefully towards the water and proceeded to fling his bag containing all the clubs into the lake. Without saying anything he stormed off back towards the clubhouse as his stunned partners looked on.

A couple of minutes later, just as the remaining players had begun to proceed with the game, the Japanese gentleman reappeared. The other players were quite relieved — they knew he wouldn't really get that upset over a stupid game of golf. And sure enough he proceeded to stride over to the pond and hauled his dripping golf bag out of the water. However, after fiddling about a bit with one of the zippers he then threw the bag and clubs back in the water and stormed off again.

It turned out that the reason he had returned was not because he had a change of heart but that he had left his car keys in the golf bag.

***

### The Bangkok Olympics

Following the 1998 Asian Games it's about time the sporting authorities recognised Bangkok as being capable of hosting its own Olympics. At the very least it could provide an extremely useful training ground.

Events for sprinters could include the 20-metres pedestrian crossing dash, always a stiff challenge even if you are an Olympian. But if they want to taste real competition then athletes should attempt to outrun drivers fleeing the scene — those boys can really move.

In Bangkok, triple jump competitors certainly wouldn't have a problem finding a place to practise. They might be surprised to learn that many Bangkok pedestrians are already qualified at the hop, skip and jump, a skill acquired negotiating yawning potholes, vendors and passing motorbikes.

Weightlifters would also find all the facilities they need. In fact anyone who could lift the collected reports on the Skytrain and Nong Ngu Hao Airport projects would most definitely break a world record ... if they didn't break their back first.

Gymnasts wouldn't have to travel far either to find a training ground. Just a quick trip upstairs to one of those Patpong sleazeries and they would be introduced to gymnastic routines which many judges would award 9.9 points for without hesitation. Not quite sure what they would make of the performing snake though.

Swimming events could take place on just about any Bangkok street after a rainstorm. Alternatively three lengths of the tub at the Happy Fingers massage parlour would be enough to exhaust even the strongest Olympic swimmers.

***

### Health Warning

Predictably the Asian Games has prompted a local outbreak of that most disturbing ailment "Running Feet" _(joggus chronicus)._ Just wander over to Lumpini Park and you'll find hundreds of lunatics thundering around, no doubt dreaming of standing on the podium with gold medals dangling from their necks.

I even noticed a geriatric neighbour tottering around in his brand new Nikes. Not entirely sure what title he has in mind but I think he'd better rule out the 100 metres sprint. Just hope he doesn't have any aspirations with the pole vault.

Fortunately this enthusiasm doesn't last for long as most of these budding athletes wind up in hospital with blisters, groin strains, ruptures and jogger's nipple. In the end, the only really meaningful exercise they get is running up a bill.

***

### Fit to Drop

After what had been a long absence, last year Crutch bravely returned to the _Bangkok Post's_ fitness centre. It is perhaps inappropriate to use the expression "working out" because that is hardly an accurate description of Crutch's performance in the gym. People like Sylvester Stallone "work out". Crutch kind of "hangs out" before he "flops out."

Quite what prompted this aberration is hard to pin down. It would be nice to pretend it was some major philosophical decision, perhaps reflecting a mid-life crisis, but in reality it probably had something to do with the maid's niece referring to me a few days before as "fatso" or words to that effect.

I started off rather tentatively on the treadmill, where you run on the spot. That was not a major triumph. The problem is that if forced to actually do some running I want to get somewhere, and see things on the way, not end up at the same place. Also I kept recalling one of those Inspector Clouseau movies in which Peter Sellers does considerable damage to himself on a similar contraption.

I also gave the "4-station Jungle Pulley" a wide berth and there's definitely no way I was getting on the "Abdominal Cruncher Bench." At this point, prospects of Crutch becoming a born-again athlete were not looking too promising.

Of course there is always the aerobics class. Now, although Crutch has never been a fitness freak, I've always reckoned aerobics was something I could handle — waving your arms about to a bit of disco music — ladies' stuff. So some years ago, when we first got the gym, I joined in with considerable enthusiasm. An hour later the enthusiasm had completely dissolved as I tottered from the floor a sweating wreck, completely knackered. Almost certainly Crutch had narrowly escaped the ignominy of becoming the first person in history to throw up on the aerobics floor. Meanwhile the ladies were still leaping about all over the place to the strains of _"Macho Man"._

***

### Farang Feet Don't Fit

As you get older you are supposed to get wiser, although in Crutch's case that does not seem to be working. Otherwise he would not have foolishly agreed to take part in a football tournament long after his sell-by date.

The first problem was that on an excursion onto the pitch earlier in the year, the previous "Running Wild" boots had disintegrated in the mud after five minutes. So Crutch was faced with the embarrassment, some might say cheek, of buying a new pair of footy boots at an age when most people would be buying retirement slippers.

The reaction of the fellow in the department store when I enquired about the boots was highly predictable. He looked over my shoulder to see who I was buying them for. Then he said, with rather unnecessary emphasis: "Are they for _you_ sir?"

I ignored that comment and grabbed a suitably cheap looking pair. After all, they are not going to be worn very often. "I'll take these in size 9," I said in no-nonsense fashion.

"Sorry sir, we don't have those in 9" said the assistant.

I picked up the next pair. "Ok, these will do."

"Sorry sir, we don't have those in 9," he repeated. I began to suspect it was the only English he knew.

"Well, what have you got in size 9?" I barked.

He promptly produced some fancy looking things with an even fancier price. "I'm not paying that much for just a stupid pair of football boots," I whined.

The assistant went on to explain that the only sizes they had that fitted _farang_ feet were the expensive ones. It was our fault for having such big feet. They had plenty of cheap size 6 boots for people with sensible feet.

After a lot of blathering I finally found a medium-priced pair and tried them on, attempting to ignore the smirks of two kids who clearly could not imagine this bulbous middle-aged creature having the nerve to run about on a football pitch.

Of course the flashy boots did not make a flashy footballer and Crutch spent the whole tournament chasing shadows, falling over, wheezing, coughing, spluttering and generally making a fool of himself. It was not a pretty sight.

#  Freedom: A Vampire of Siam Tale

Jim Newport has created brilliant series of books about the Vampire of Siam, Ramonne Delacroix. Bangkok is obviously a town well-suited to vampires, but we all knew this anyway, didn't we? Jim is both a writer and an Emmy-nominated production designer of film and TV. He has published four novels in the Vampire of Siam series, plus one, Tinsel Town, set in the Hollywood he knows so well, and one, Chasing Jimi, set during Jimi Hendrix's rise to stardom.

***

" _The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off."_

Gloria Steinem

The vampire stretched. It felt good. He'd had a good sleep. The Mercedes Sprinter van had been stripped of its rear seats to provide room for the elaborate teak coffin. Ramonne Delacroix had hardly noticed the eight hundred kilometer journey. He ascertained that night had indeed fallen and climbed out of his coffin.

The vampire stretched. It felt good. He'd had a good sleep. The Mercedes Sprinter van had been stripped of its rear seats to provide room for the elaborate teak coffin. Ramonne Delacroix had hardly noticed the eight hundred kilometer journey. He ascertained that night had indeed fallen and climbed out of his coffin.

The interior of the luxurious vehicle was more like a private jet than a limo and Ramonne availed himself of the specially stocked bar and its bottles of Bordeaux. He chose a 1999 Chateau Frerriere Margeaux and relaxed in the deep leather lounge chair.

The vehicle had crossed over the Sarasin Bridge and sailed through the sleepy island checkpoint without stopping and was now traversing a steep incline to the sea.

Phuket was one of the places in Thailand that Ramonne had heard of but never paid much attention to. Currently corruption and environmental decay made the headlines. But there had been times – the halcyon days of the early 1900's was one – when Ramonne had been tempted. But after World War II Phuket seemed destined to be strip-mined and laid to waste as the tin barons plundered the island.

The heyday of sexual fantasy tourism in the latter part of the past century was again somewhat intriguing to the vampire. It meant a plethora of easy victims. But on the one occasion that he did, in fact, escape the 'heat' (the police) in Bangkok and head south, he went to Pattaya. Phuket had always seemed too far and hardly worth the effort. But he had recently resurrected his old profession and 'hit men' go where they are assigned. When Ping Narong told Ramonne that he needed him to take care of a job in Phuket, he willingly obliged.

***

Kamala. Ramonne liked the name.

He liked Kamala. The little village wasn't Patong- the stinking sludge pit by the sea that his van had mysteriously passed through earlier in the evening. His driver was under the mistaken impression that Ramonne would appreciate its abundance of neon and wall to wall crap. Ramonne glanced through the heavily tinted windows at the destination center – Soi Bangla – and then spoke the first words of the journey.

"Our business – is it here?"

"No, Jao Nai." The driver respectfully replied. "I thought you'd want to see the red light district. Everyone does."

Ramonne scowled. "Do I look like a tourist?"

The black van sped quickly along the crowded seashore and up over a series of hills. Soon Ramonne was in another vehicle. This one was white and had no doors. It was like a golf cart on steroids and it took the vampire up another steep hill, this one luxuriously landscaped. It stopped at a massive villa overlooking Phuket's famous 'Millionaire Mile' (so named for the valuable sea view property.)

The villa was two thousand square meters of teak and marble, Ramonne thought it was a bit pretentious for him to occupy alone, but then he decided that his 185 plus years on this earth gave him a sense of entitlement that mere mortals didn't possess. He relaxed, changed his clothes and took in the view.

Within thirty minutes his contact arrived. He handed Ramonne a slim aluminum case, bowed, and left.

It was Ping Narong's modus operandi that none of his agents knew anything about their target until they were safely embedded.

Ramonne dialed the code and opened the case. A photo of a muscular, heavily tanned man stared back at him. His head was shaved clean like a cue ball.

Russian. Dimitri Kirilov. Nickname 'Eddie.' International arms trader.

There were a half dozen more pictures – at various night clubs in Europe and Russsia. Two pages gave Ramonne the details he needed.

In the bottom of the case were three gold bars. Ramonne shut the case and locked it. He took out a slim lighter and burned the photos and paperwork.

In Ramonne's head, Dimitri Kirilov was now the target.

***

Just another seedy tropical bar. Two pool tables, a half-dozen plump whores, and a half dozen foreign geezers (Ramonne liked the word.)

'He's unreachable... Except for when he visits his villa in Phuket. Here he regularly visits a small bar where he insists that his bodyguards remain while he spends a half hour in a small locked room with a local whore. This is the only available window of opportunity.'

Ramonne sat at the bar. He had ordered a glass of red wine, but he hadn't touched it. One sniff had been enough.

The music was becoming annoying. Occasional 'classic rock' (especially from that renaissance known as the 'sixties') was acceptable to Ramonne's ears (he had turned off his vampire radar – the cacophony was too much,) but the rest offended him to the point that he reached across the bar with a thousand baht note on which he had written one word 'Queen.' The girl understood and slipped the bill into her ample bosom. Soon Freddie Mercury's distinctive voice singing Bohemian Rhapsody filled the timber hut.

The target was shooting pool with his 'lady friend.' He was quite drunk. The woman seemed to care little for the man. Her arm was draped listlessly over his shoulder. He mainly cared about his drink. He put his pool cue down and walked to the bar.

"Potaskushka... I ask for Absolute vodka." He smelled the glass and snorted. "This is piss. Let me see the bottle."

The girl shrugged and handed it to him. He took one sniff and snorted again. "Pizdobal." He threw the bottle against the wall. It exploded.

The bar went silent. Only Freddie Mercury said anything.

One obvious bodyguard at the bar put his hand on the bulge at the back of his untucked Hawaiian shirt. The other, leaning against the black BMW parked at the curb, crushed out his cigarette and reached in his jacket pocket.

A very large woman emerged from the kitchen.

"Eddie."

She walked, arms extended, and embraced the target. She hugged him to her and kissed his bald head. The silence ended. Everyone relaxed. Hands slid away from weapons.

"Why you cause such a scene?"

The target looked at her with baleful eyes. "You weren't here. They tried to serve me rotgut."

"I'm here now." She snapped her fingers. A fresh bottle of Absolute appeared from beneath the bar, the seal unbroken. The Mama-San poured a tumbler glass full of the clear liquid and handed it to the target. Pacified, for the moment, he and his whore returned to the pool table.

Ramonne's boss had a vendetta with this man. Otherwise the vampire wouldn't be here. Large sums of money – Dubai skyscraper large – had to be involved. In his world (Moscow, London etc.) the target would be unreachable. But here in the tropics, as did many of the world's financially fortunate, he threw caution to the wind.

Ping Narong did his work anonymously through international channels so that his 'clients' had no idea who he was or where he was. They did business with his connections in Paris, London or New York – they had no idea he was based in Bangkok.

"Hooy na ny. No fucking way!" The target threw his pool cue onto the table as the girl sunk the eight ball. She smiled.

Ramonne smiled too. You'll never beat a bar girl at a game she plays every night.

The target latched his arm around the girl and motioned to his goon at the bar. The pair stumbled toward the kitchen. They turned right at a little corridor marked with a toilet sign.

Ramonne got up from the bar. He walked to the deck overlooking the street. The bodyguard was smoking, again.

Ramonne approached. He produced a cigarette. "Light?"

Automatically a lighter was extended. Ramonne crushed his larynx before a sound could emerge. He opened the trunk and within seconds there was no trace of the first bodyguard.

He returned to the bar. He made a decision about the second body- guard and walked determinedly to the toilet hallway. As he expected, the man got off his bar stool and followed.

Ramonne waited just outside the room with a picture of Elvis indicating it was the men's room (across the way Marilyn Monroe identified the ladies room.)

The man came around the corner and Ramonne broke his neck.

He stuffed this one in the men's room and hung an 'out of order' sign on the locked door. He waited a moment, determined no one else was approaching, and moved down the hallway.

***

The sounds emerging from the other side of the corrugated plastic door were about what he expected. A bit exaggerated, but the act of primeval pleasure is often difficult to overhear.

He pushed the door. It yielded with very little resistance, coming completely off its hinges and falling into the room.

The room looked, again, pretty much as he expected. A cheap bed with a soiled bedspread dominated the tight space. A fluorescent light cast a garish green glow over its occupants.

However, besides the whore and the target, there was an unexpected third person. A teenage girl was spread-eagle naked on the bed – her hands tied to two ringbolts in the faded plaster wall. The target, naked as well, was astride her.

The whore was holding the girl's legs. She was the first to turn to Ramonne. Her's was a look of annoyance.

"Get out." She spat.

Ramonne took a moment to force the tortured door back into the frame. Then the target turned his bald head. His look was more than annoyance. It was a look Ramonne was intimately familiar with.

Ravishment. Gluttony. Rapaciousness.

Blood dripped from the corners of his mouth and ran from the open wounds on the girl's neck. His eyes glowed with a yellow cast.

"What do you want?"

The words were not spoken. But Ramonne heard them all the same. He replied in kind.

"I'm here to kill you."

The target moved rapidly. He was off the girl and standing in front of Ramonne in an instant. He glowered at Ramonne. This time his lips moved as he spoke.

"Kill me?" He laughed. "Do you know how many have tried that?"

Ramonne replied. "No."

"Dozens. Do you know where they are now?"

Ramonne didn't bother to reply.

"In their graves."

While this brief exchange was taking place, the whore had moved behind Ramonne. She had a fire axe hidden under the bed and she moved to strike. Without looking at her, Ramonne seized the hand and then buried the axe in her forehead.

She slumped to the floor.

"Impressive." The target smiled, his hands now on his hips. Ramonne tossed him his trousers.

The target pulled them on and then extracted a cigarette pack from a pocket. He offered the pack to Ramonne who declined.

He lit the cigarette and sat on the bed. He had to move the teenage girl's right leg. The girl groaned slightly. He ignored her and motioned to the plastic chair under the air conditioner. Ramonne sat down.

"So... you're a pro. You're fast, I'll give you that."

"You don't understand, do you?"

"You've been sent by Ping Narong. He's annoyed over the stolen arms shipment to Afghanistan. He suspects me."

Ramonne shrugged. "That's not my business."

"Let me finish this cigarette and we'll step outside and settle this like men."

"We're not men. And we'll settle it here."

The target seemed to have an epiphany. He crushed out his cigarette.

"Who are you?"

"A forsaken one. An immortal."

The target's yellow eyes glowed. "You can't be."

"Why not? You are."

"Then you must know you can't kill me."

Ramonne smiled. His eyes had the same amber glow.

"Oh... but I can."

***

Ramonne waited.

He had fought another vampire before. Just once. In Angkor. That beast had been over a thousand years old and his strength was enormous. The battle had nearly cost Ramonne his existence.

This one was young. He was sure of it. Probably no more than a half century of immortality. But still he must possess the strength of a dozen mortals. Best to be cautious. Let him strike first.

He didn't have to wait long. The target sprang at Ramonne with the axe in hand. He moved so fast that no one could have seen him remove the blade from the dead whore.

But Ramonne saw it.

And reacted. He ducked the decapitating blow and dove into the man's midsection. The force was akin to a bulldozer ramming a wall. He pushed the target through the tarpaper-covered window and into the muddy canal outside. They plunged together into the murky water.

***

To kill an immortal – there must first be a decapitation. This renders the beast immobile – but not for long.

Does the target know this? Ramonne suspected he did. Perhaps he belongs to a Russian covent. A clan. They would have shared such knowledge.

Ramonne was a loner. He had met exactly one other immortal in his life (other than two females which he created – with disastrous results.) His creator - Zhoupeng - taught him only that he must feed on fresh blood and he must avoid the sunlight. The rest Ramonne learned in 150 years of existence. His world was devoid of other immortals – or so he thought.

***

They struggled in the water for at least ten minutes. Holding their breath made no difference. They didn't need oxygen. They received their sustenance through blood alone. But they would not function at full capacity without eventually taking oxygen directly into their lungs – so they both broke the surface. They each lay immobile for a few moments, floating on the tide.

They were slowly drifting to the beach where the freshwater would merge with the sea.

"Why?" The target spoke through his thoughts.

"Why what?" Ramonne replied.

"Why do you wish to destroy me?"

"Its not personal."

"Bullshit."

"It's a job."

"So... you do work for Ping Narong."

"Does it matter?"

"Yes. It fucking matters."

The target straightened himself in the muddy canal. Ramonne did the same. They faced each other, treading water.

The target motioned with his arm as he spoke. "I come to this place for pleasure. It is one of a few ports of call where I can receive sustenance without fear of reprisals.

Ramonne understood. For a century and a half Ramonne had relied on the Bangkok police to clean up after him – for a fee. He assumed the target had a similar arrangement here.

"And you would deny me that?"

"That has nothing to do with why I'm here."

They were slowly drifting closer and closer to the sea. A motor from a returning fishing boat was getting louder. The water grew shallow and finally both men stood in the mud.

Ramonne was tired of talking. He started walking. The target followed. The thick sludge and silt made it slow going.

"If you'd stand still for a moment, we could figure this out." The target yelled over the motorboat's increasing volume.

"Nothing to figure out. I told you. This isn't personal."

The target was gaining on Ramonne who had his back to him as he walked slowly to the spot where the canal joined the sea. Where the long-tailed fishing boat was slowly returning to the shore.

Long-tail boats were the standard fishing transport in the area. The motor was mounted in a manner that allowed the pilot to maneuver in shallow water by leaning on a handle that pivoted the long shaft of the propeller to whatever depth he desired.

The fisherman was oblivious to the two figures who were now in the surf as he coaxed his craft to shore.

"Do you enjoy yourself?" Ramonne stopped and addressed the target.

"Enjoy myself?"

"Yes. Do you enjoy yourself?"

"Of course I enjoy myself. I fuck, I drink, I kill... I don't die."

"That's it?"

"What else is there?"

Ramonne smiled. "You're lucky I'm here."

"I'm lucky? Stand still, you cunt, and I'll show you who's lucky."

The fisherman had just thrown his anchor over the bow and the target had caught it. He now brandished the heavy three-pronged iron fork, swinging it by its chain.

Ramonne turned his back on the target as he made his way to the stern. "I offer you something that was once offered to me. I took it willingly."

"And what is that?" As the target said the words he flung the anchor at Ramonne.

Ramonne merely ducked. As he did, he grabbed the shaft of the motor and swung it with tremendous force. The rotating blade cut through the cartilage and bone and completely severed the target's head.

"Freedom." Ramonne spoke. "I offer you freedom."

***

The sun rose right on cue. The monks had preceded it by thirty minutes. Their chanting in the seaside temple began, as always, at six A.M. Every morning the low, musical drone crept into the hills of the Millionaire's Mile. However, very few of its slumbering residents ever heard it.

Ramonne, in particular, never heard it. He had checked out of the villa in the middle of the night and was safely ensconced in the back of his luxury van on the return trip to Bangkok well before the first monk set his bare foot onto the temple floor.

By six-fifteen there were two-dozen shaven-headed, orange robed monks on their knees chanting their magical, musical rhythms. But midway into the ceremony, Khun Pho noted a disturbing commotion from the temple dogs. Usually they slept through the prayers. But they were definitely aroused. The noise was deafening. He bowed and then rose to his feet and descended the temple stairs.

Outside, the dogs were in a frenzy – fighting over what appeared to be freshly barbequed meat. Where did it come from? Khun Pho puzzled over this until a chunk of grizzle hit him on the shoulder. He looked up.

Something was frying on the temple roof.

***

As Ramonne slept he dreamed of dragging the corpse and the head up onto the deserted beach. He smiled with irony when he spotted the golden arches of the temple across the beach road. Hallowed ground. The morning sun would incinerate the body and the target would exist no more.

Ramonne awoke with a start. Not something he normally did.

He had had a bad dream. He dreamed of a Russian covent of vampires running amuck in Phuket. What was it that made him think the Russian was not alone?

As he had assessed, the target was obviously a very young vampire. His strength was scarcely equal to that of Ramonne. But he had known of the vampire's way. This meant he had been educated by another immortal.

Ramonne was well aware of the recent Russian influx into Phuket. Was this the first wave of Russian vampires?

Ramonne spent the rest of the night in fitful sleep, punctuated by disturbing dreams.

#  Running with the Sharks

James Eckardt has been a prolific writer in Thailand. Apart from writing for the Bangkok newspapers and magazines, he published two novels and five other books of short stories and tales of life here in the Land of Smiles. His first unpublished novel, Alabama Days, set during the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama, will soon be released as an ebook. Below is this first chapter of his novel, Running with the Sharks, now available as an ebook

**Pakbara** was exactly the sort of godforsaken hole Tony DeLupo had hoped it would be.

A 150-mile ride in a Mercedes-Benz taxi with five fat Chinese who ignored him and an elderly Indian who wanted to talk about God all the way in the ferry across from Penang Island to Butterworth and north to the Thai border and the Sin City of Hat Yai where Tony soon stumbled upon the Pink Lady Coffee Shop and Massage Parlor and ordered up a "sandwich" — two white-skinned northern Thai beauties and him the meat between, supine on an air-mattress and slavered with soapsuds while over and under two tiny hot giggly soapy bodies squirmed shimmied and jiggled till he shot a wad that splattered his chin — and next morning a two hour tour-bus ride through parched paddy fields, zebu and water buffalo grazing on rice stubble, to Khuankalong where the road turned to dusty red laterite and a backcountry bus, rust-eaten and windowless, packed with market women and bawling babies, hauled him another thirty miles through rubber and coconut plantations to Langu and a spavined minibus which bounced him seven miles more on a potholed coastal road straight and true at last along the blue Andaman Sea to Pakbara.

Tony unlimbered from the bus, shouldered his seabag and headed for the docks. There was not much more to Pakbara than docks. Twenty tin-roofed shacks of bamboo and nipa palm, up on stilts along the tidal flats and milling in the black mud below the usual menagerie: pigs, goats, ducks, chickens, dogs, naked children. Racks of squid and cuttlefish dried in the sun, tended by dusky women in sarongs and turbans who paused at the sight of him, stared, muttered, giggled. Tony felt back at home: the Lone White Man again.

Up ahead sprawled a long low ramshackle shop, plank walls unpainted and rain-stained, shutters hinged from the top and propped open with sticks. The sort of establishment, Tony decided, where Judge Roy Bean might hold court. On stools flanking the doorway, two bare-chested teenagers sniggered at his approach.

"You," one said. "Hello, you."

"You, you," said the other.

"That's me," Tony said, stepping between them and into the gloom of the shop. Slumped around three wooden tables, fishermen — with long hair and scraggly mustaches, tattoos and facial scars — slurped noodles, sipped iced coffee, smoked cigarettes. Alongside ran a wooden counter heaped with fishnets, floats and tackle; in one corner stood an old finger-smudged refrigerator and two gaping girls. Tony smiled at the prettier of the two and said, "Co-ca Co-la."

The girl smiled back and moved toward the fridge.

Tony set down his seabag, leaned back against the counter and met the stares of a dozen fishermen. He let his gaze linger from table to table, long enough to show he was not discomforted, but not so long as to challenge their scrutiny. _Sometimes Southeast Asia is one long spaghetti Western._ Casting his gaze upward, Tony inspected green banana bunches dangling from the low eaves, strings of onion and garlic and red pepper.

# # #

Hemp hawsers held two otter-board trawlers and a purse seiner moored beam-ends to the dock. High-prowed and thick-planked, they were bigger — 70–80 feet — than anything Tony had seen in Malaysia or Indonesia. The purse seiner even had sonar and a conning tower and triple-tiered spotlights for night fishing. Sunlight gleamed on an extravagant paint scheme: turquoise hull, yellow superstructure, crimson trim. Piled on deck was a black nylon net, four feet high, atop which crouched a silent line of crewmen spreading still more layers.

Down the dock beefy women squatted around wicker baskets stuffed with squid, shrimp, jackmackerel and mullet. An old man scuttled past, barefoot, faded check sarong swathed on bony hips. One hand gripped the gills of a silver bonito. The big-jawed head dwarfed his hand; the scimitar tail dangled to his ankles. A good forty pounds, Tony figured. Spear one of those off Koh Adang and it's soup and steaks for days.

Tony humped his seabag past an icehouse. Man-sized ice blocks rumbled down a ramp to the dock; teenagers with two-handed saws pared them down, then dollied them over to a diesel-powered ice crusher. Hoisted into a top-loader, the blocks disappeared in a crystal cascade through a trough to a line of wicker baskets. Which put Tony in mind of the tale told on the docks of Sheepshead Bay about the luckless button man of the Gambino Family who had been fed through just such a machine trigger finger first.

Away from the grinding racket, Tony reached the end of the dock and a dingy line of small stern-winch shrimpers. Some crew were hosing down decks; most lay dozing in hammocks strung under low-roofed cabins.

"Hello, _you_! Where you go?"

On the tiny foredeck of a particularly filthy 15-footer, in saggy underpants, draping a tattered and drenched sarong over a clothesline, a runty bow-legged fisherman favored Tony with a piratical grin: one trachoma-whitened eye, big yellow teeth in a sun-blackened face.

"Where you go?"

Slowly, Tony lowered the seabag to the dock. The Thai grinned wider, exposing a toothless bottom gum. Tony pointed seaward and said, "Koh Adang."

# # #

_Koh_ was a word he would have to get used to. Like _pulau_ in Malay, _hiva_ in Marquesan, _île_ in French.

His back against the seabag wedged in the prow, legs stretched out on the fish hatch, elbows braced against the boat's pitch and roll, Tony thumbed through a pocket Thai dictionary.

A couple miles astern, the harbor was fading into a low green smudge of mangrove swamp. Up in the wheelhouse, the skipper's face had assumed the vacancy proper to a long sea journey. Course was nearly due south, for the headland of an island abeam: grey cliffs at the surf line, then green jungle swarming up a steep mountain ridge to a bare stone peak.

In his notebook Tony had penned the Thai words for: hello, thank you, where?, how much?, and the numerals up to a thousand. He hadn't done badly in bargaining. Four hundred baht — 20 bucks — to reach an island 45 miles out to sea.

Now to compose his next speech: "I will stay on Koh Adang five days. Then you come and get me. I pay another four hundred baht."

The New Zealanders had paid only three hundred. But what the hell. They were the pioneers; he was only the first of the tourist wave.

Tony smiled at the thought, and the memory of the New Zealand couple. In his notebook too were their names, Kevin and Cindy, their Christchurch address, and a pencil-scrawled map of Koh Adang. An X marked the beach where they had camped for two weeks. Two weeks might suit him fine too, if only he had the company of a little honey like Cindy. Blue eyes ablaze in a lean tanned face, helmet of sun-bleached hair. Kevin and Cindy, just out of college and off on the old Aussie-Kiwi round-the-world walkabout. He'd stood them a beer in a Singapore bar and for once wished he wasn't alone.

To sleep with the natives — brown Tahitians, black Fijians, yellow Javanese — or travel in tandem with your own white bedmate? Well, you'd have to be in love. And anyway, a stiff dose of island solitude would do him good. Along the lines of a Jesuit retreat. To return to the world then, purified and randy.

For the world, just now, was too much with him. At least the Asia Tourist World: Singapore was plastic-and-glass shopping centers, somnolent white freaks moping about Bencoolen Street flophouses; Pulau Tioman: a Malay-style Holiday Inn full of drunk redneck oil riggers; Pulau Lankawi: condominiums and a casino and rat-faced Chinese croupiers; Kuantan: highrise Merlin and Hyatt hotels and geriatric Australian tour groups; Trengganu: Club Mediterranée, fashionable frogs and wops, _a gente bella_ adrape in native batik... Since setting foot on mainland Asia, Tony had mostly wasted his time.

Best to find Koh Adang, a cathedral of coral, fit place for recollection and the old Jesuit questions: who am I, why am I here, where am I going?

The boat chugged past the jungled cliffs of the headland. Hundred-foot trees clung impossibly to bare black slate, foliage brown, yellow and every shade of green, entangled with liana and vines, and scurrying on the lower slopes a whole tribe of macaques: bushy-humped papas, mamas clutching babies. A rippling splash of water nearby. Tony turned in time to see a shoal of needle-nosed bait leap into the air, fleeing some pelagic predator. Beyond the headland, a cove came in sight. Atop a densely wooded escarpment stood towers of basalt, cracked and crenelated like Mayan ruins. High above the tallest tower floated a seahawk. Tony smiled in admiration: white-tufted head and languid brown wings spiralling upward in the thermals...

As the boat bore away to the east, out of the lee of the island and into the heavy swells of the Andaman Sea, Tony felt he was heading in the right direction.

# # #

Ten miles further out, the boat passed the northern tip of Koh Tarutao: jungled peaks and ridges rearing fifteen hundred feet above the sea. The New Zealanders had told him that Tarutao, "Turtle", named for the hawksbills that once hatched there, had been a penal colony in the 1930s, a Thai Devil's Island. With the coming of the Japanese in 1942, warders and prisoners patched up their differences and banded together as pirates, preying as far afield as the Bay of Bengal. This enterprise flourished till two years after the war, when the Thai permitted a pair of British destroyers to steam north from Penang and wipe out the pirates' den. Now it was a national park.

Around a headland appeared a creek mouth, a small pier, a few thatch-roofed buildings — park headquarters? Tony saw no people. The park business seemed not to be flourishing. A wide beach, backed by coconut palm and casuarina pine, stretched southward for miles. Tony decided to go to sleep.

# # #

"Koh Adang?" he asked, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. A small swaybacked island loomed off the starboard bow. The mountains of Koh Tarutao were twenty miles astern, the sun at three o'clock.

The skipper shook his head —"Koh Ta Nga."— then rotated his forefinger and thrust it further ahead. "Eek sawng choomung mee Koh Adang."

"Right. Whatever the fuck that means." Tony curled back down on the deck.

"Koh Adang?"

"Koh Adang!"

As islands go, this one was world class. Right up there with Tahuata and Nuku Hiva. Limestone outcroppings jutted like teeth from the jungle; russet monoliths tumbled down to the beach; foliage heaved and swelled over the mad contours of foothills asprawl in the shade of a two-thousand-foot peak. The beach was deserted, backdropped by an unbroken wall of jungle thinning only toward a narrow point and a grove of fleecy-leaved casuarina. This was the southeast coast. Some miles north, behind the mountain, there was supposed to be an abandoned fishing village, though the New Zealanders had never bothered finding it. Tony kept his eye out for a waterfall. This fed a creek that led to the beach where Kevin and Cindy had camped.

He saw it soon enough, a thin silver line down a black slate cliff. Breaking through the jungle wall, the creek cut a lazy curve to the sea. Tony waved to the skipper, gestured for him to steer for the waterfall. The skipper shook his head, swept his hand around the point.

"I don't know where _you_ want to go," Tony said. " _I'm_ getting off here."

Much sign language later — heads nodding and shaking, fingers stabbing wildly in disparate directions — the skipper shrugged and wheeled the boat toward shore. Water turned from turquoise to aquamarine, splotched randomly by the darker blue of coral heads. Going over the reef, the skipper throttled the engine down, then threw it into idle as the hull slid over a white sandy bottom. The boat settled into a slow roll, twenty feet from shore. The skipper stepped out on the foredeck.

"Ha wan," Tony reminded him, holding up five fingers.

"Ha wan." _Five days_.

"Si loy baht." Tony tucked in a thumb. _Four_ _hundred_ _baht_.

The skipper nodded, smiling.

_You up the return fare later, I'm in a piss-poor bargaining position_.

Bracing himself on the rail, Tony slipped down into warm chest-deep water. He pointed to the seabag. The skipper gripped the bag's strap and yanked upward, and nearly pitched headfirst into the sea. The bag stayed on the deck. Tony laughed; the skipper laughed too. Heaving and straining, he swung the bag around till the bottom lay over the rail. Tony lowered the bag onto his head. Hands braced on each end, he turned carefully and made for shore.

" _You_!" he heard the skipper shout. "Bye bye!"

"Yeah, bye bye."

By the time he had stowed the bag under an acacia tree, the boat was already bobbing back over the reef, black smoke puffing from an exhaust pipe astern.

_Bye bye, world_.

# # #

Beyond a brown thicket of branch coral, the bottom dropped sharply. Tony sucked air through the snorkel and dove for depth.

Brain, staghorn, rose and lace coral; a magnificent fan coral, pristine white, as tall as a man, spires spread in perfect symmetry and weaving amid them opal-and-orange angelfish and a shimmering school of yellow fingerlings. A pop-eyed grouper slowly rose, then veered away as Tony plummeted past. He sailed over a rocky outcrop encrusted with acorn barnacles, cowries, fist-sized oysters. A blue crab scuttled sideways toward a summit crowned by sea urchins. Tony plunged for the bottom — more crabs, fat sea cucumbers, a purple crown-of-thorns starfish — and braked for a landing beside a brain coral. Atop its convoluted dome a pink sea anemone waved plump tentacles and darting amid them were three yellow-striped scarlet clownfish, thumbnail-sized. Tony peered closer. The clownfish skittered for shelter deep into the anemone; then, curious, stuck their heads out to look at him with black pinprick eyes. Tony waggled his fingers; they ducked back, snuck out for another look, ducked back as he waved again.

_There is nothing better than this_ , Tony thought as he kicked for the surface.

He dove, found a school of butterfly fish, gave chase, lost them, surfaced, dove again, dipped and glided aimlessly amid rocks and coral, spooked a sluggish blue-green parrot fish, caught up with the butterflies just as he was losing air, surfaced, blew out his snorkel and took deep breaths, keeping the school in sight twenty feet below and just as he was about to dive again saw, gliding out from behind the big fan coral, a silver sea bass.

He let out a little moan of joy, felt his heart kick into high gear. His lips loosened in a smile around the mouthpiece as he reached down and flipped the safety off his speargun. The sea bass, as long as his forearm, angled off toward a cluster of barrel sponge. Now how to get down and behind him?

Tony dove for the rocky outcrop, skimmed along the bottom to the fan coral. Ten feet beyond, the sea bass was wheeling around the barrel sponge. Tony stretched out his arm and sighted upward. The bass moved away. Tony followed. The bass flicked his tail for speed, then banked sideways to eye what was coming behind. Tony squeezed the trigger. The steel shaft hit the bass just behind the head, skewering him neatly, dual point flanges splaying outward to pinion him fast. Tony raced forward, hauling in line. When he grabbed the shaft, the bass was barely wiggling — his spinal cord severed. _Beautiful_.

Breaking the surface, Tony spat out the snorkel, took a great heaving lungful of air, pushed the mask up on his forehead. The beach was a couple hundred yards distant. To the west, a crimson sun hovered just over the horizon.

_Suppertime_.

As he swam for shore, he held the impaled bass up out of the water. One bit of biological lore that deeply impressed him was that a Great White Shark can sniff a drop of blood from two miles away.

Wading ashore, he headed up the beach for the creek mouth. His own Little Big Hearted River. He was proud of the order of his campsite: USMC poncho spread for a ground sheet, aluminum food chest; frying pan and grill set up over a pile of kindling, neat stack of driftwood nearby. From the low branch of an acacia dangled the mouthpiece and pressure gauge of his air regulator. Propped on the trunk, his Aqualung tank was draped with a ABLJ jacket and tied round with a 10-pound weightbelt.

The jungle suddenly erupted in a burst of cicada song. The sun was gone in the western sky, leaving a red-orange glow.

He started the fire, set a pot of creekwater to boil. A chill wind swept in from the sea, whipping the flames higher. He scaled and gutted the bass with his diving knife, chopped off the head and dropped it into the pot. Using the frying pan for a cutting board, he sliced onions, garlic, ginger, green peppers and lemon grass, and scooped them into the soup.

He was debating how to handle the main course — filet the bass and fry it in oil or just grill-roast it? — when a movement down the beach caught his eye.

_Impossible_.

He felt his jaw drop, his eyes blink comically. In the last orange light of day, not a hundred yards away, striding along the shoreline sands, big wicker basket on one hip, blond mane tousled in the wind, was a white woman.

#  The Bird Catcher

If ever there was a Bangkok Renaissance Man, surely that title would belong to the writer S.P. Somtow, or using his real name, Somtow Papinian Sucharitkul, for he is a true polymath. He has written more than 50 books across a number of genres including science fiction, fantasy and horror; he has composed symphonies, a ballet and written operas; and he has written for magazines explaining Thailand to Americans and America to Thais. Below is story taken from his collection called Dragon's Fin Soup and Other Modern Siamese Fables.

**There was** this other boy in the internment camp. His name was Jim. After the war, he made something of a name for himself. He wrote books, even a memoir of the camp that got turned into a Spielberg movie. It didn't turn out that gloriously for me.

My grandson will never know what it's like to be consumed with hunger; hunger that is heartache. Hunger that can propel you past insanity. But I know. I've been there. So has that boy Jim; that's why I really don't envy him his Spielberg movie.

After the war, my mother and I were stranded in China for a few more years. She was penniless, a lady journalist in a time when lady journalists only covered church bazaars; a single mother at a time when "bastard" was more than a bad word.

You might think that at least we had each other, but my mother and I never really intersected. Not as mother and son, not even as Americans awash in great events and oceans of Asian faces. We were both loners. We were both vulnerable.

That's how I became the boogieman's friend.

He's long dead now, but they keep him, you know, in the Museum of Horrors. Once in a generation, I visit him. Yesterday, I took my grandson Corey. Just as I took his father before him.

The destination stays the same, but the road changes every generation. The first time I had gone by boat, along the quiet back canals of the old city. Now there was an expressway. The toll was forty baht—a dollar—a month's salary that would have been, back in the fifties, in post-war Siam.

My son's in love with Bangkok—the insane skyline, the high-tech blending with the low-tech, the skyscraper shaped like a giant robot, the palatial shopping malls, the kinky sex bars, the bootleg software arcades, the whole tossed salad. And he doesn't mind the heat. He's a big-time entrepreneur here; owns a taco chain.

I live in Manhattan. It's quieter.

I can be anonymous. I can be alone. I can nurse my hunger in secret.

Christmases, though, I go to Bangkok. This Christmas, my grandson's eleventh birthday, I told my son it was time. He nodded and told me to take the chauffeur for the day.

So, to get to the place, you zigzag through the world's raunchiest traffic, then you fly along this madcap figure-eight expressway, cross the river where stone demons stand guard on the parapets of the Temple of Dawn, and then you're suddenly in this sleazy alley. Vendors hawk bowls of soup and pickled guavas. The directions are on a handwritten placard attached to a street sign with duct tape.

It's the Police Museum, upstairs from the local morgue. One wall is covered with photographs of corpses. That's not part of the museum, it's a public service display for people with missing family members to check if any of them have turned up dead. Corey didn't pay attention to the photographs; he was busy with Pokémon.

Upstairs, the feeling changed. The stairs creaked. The upstairs room was garishly lit. Glass cases along the walls were filled with medical oddities, two-headed babies and the like, each one in a jar of formaldehyde, each one meticulously labeled in Thai and English. The labels weren't printed, mind you. Handwritten. There was definitely a middle-school show-and-tell feel about the exhibits. No air-conditioning. And no more breeze from the river like in the old days; skyscrapers had stifled the city's breath.

There was a uniform, sick-yellow tinge to all the displays . . . the neutral cream paint was edged with yellow . . . the deformed livers, misshapen brains, tumorous embryos, all floating in a dull yellow fluid . . . the heaps of dry bones an orange-yellow, the rows of skulls yellowing in the cracks . . . and then there were the young novices, shaven-headed little boys in yellow robes, staring in a heat-induced stupor as their mentor droned on about the transience of all existence, the quintessence of Buddhist philosophy.

And then there was Si Ui.

He had his own glass cabinet, like a phone booth, in the middle of the room. Naked. Desiccated. A mummy. Skinny. Mud-colored, from the embalming process, I think.

A sign—handwritten, of course—explained who he was: _Si Ui. Devourer of Children's Livers in the 1950s._

My grandson reads Thai more fluently than I do. He sounded out the name right away.

Si Sui Sae Ung.

"It's the boogieman, isn't it?" Corey said. But he showed little more than a passing interest. It was the year Pokémon Gold and Silver came out. So many new monsters to catch, so many names to learn.

"He hated cages," I said.

"Got him!" Corey squealed. Then, not looking up at the dead man: "I know who he was. They did a documentary on him. Can we go now?"

"Didn't your maid tell you stories at night? To frighten you? 'Be a good boy, or Si Ui will eat your liver'?"

"Gimme a break, Grandpa. I'm too old for that shit." He paused. Still wouldn't look up at him. There were other glass booths in the room, other mummified criminals; a serial rapist down the way. But Si Ui was the star of the show.

"Okay," Corey said, "she did try to scare me once. Well, I was like five, okay? Si Ui. You watch out, he'll eat your liver, be a good boy now. Sure, I heard that before. Well, he's not gonna eat my liver now, is he? I mean, that's probably not even him; it's probably like wax or something."

He smiled at me. The dead man did not.

"I knew him," I said. "He was my friend."

"I get it!" Corey said, back to his Gameboy. "You're like me in this Pokémon game. You caught a monster once. And tamed him. You caught the most famous monster in Thailand."

"And tamed him?" I shook my head. "No, not tamed."

"Can we go to McDonald's now?"

"You're hungry."?

"I could eat the world!"

"After I tell you the whole story."

"You're gonna talk about the Chinese camp again, Grandpa? And that kid Jim, and the Spielberg movie?"

"No, Corey, this is something I've never told you about before. But I'm telling you so when I'm gone, you'll know to tell your son. And your grandson."

"Okay, Grandpa."

And finally, tearing himself away from the video game, he willed himself to look.

The dead man had no eyes; he could not stare back.

# # #

He hated cages. But his whole life was a long imprisonment. Without a cage, he did not even exist.

"Listen, Corey. I'll tell you how I met the boogieman."

Imagine I'm 11 years old, same as you are now, running wild on a leaky ship crammed with coolies. They're packed into the lower deck. We can't afford the upper deck, but when they saw we were white, they waved us on up without checking our tickets. It looks more interesting down there. And the food's got to be better. I can smell a Chinese breakfast. That oily fried bread, so crunchy on the outside, dripping with pig fat . . . yeah.

It's hot. It's boring. Mom's on the prowl. A job or a husband, whichever comes first. Everyone's fleeing the communists. We're some of the last white people to get out of China.

Someone's got a portable charcoal stove on the lower deck, and there's a toothless old woman cooking congee, fanning the stove. A whiff of opium in the air blends with the rich gingery broth. Everyone down there's clustered around the food. Except this one man. Harmless-looking. Before the Japs came, we had a gardener who looked like that. Shirtless, thin, by the railing. Stiller than a statue. And a bird on the railing. Also unmoving. The other coolies are ridiculing him, making fun of his Hakka accent, calling him simpleton.

I watch him.

"Look at the idiot," the toothless woman says. "Hasn't said a word since we left Swatow."

The man has his arms stretched out, his hands cupped. Frozen. Concentrated. I suddenly realize I've snuck down the steps myself, pushed my way through all the Chinese around the cooking pot, and I'm halfway there. Mesmerized. The man is stalking the bird, the boy stalking the man. I try not to breathe as I creep up.

He pounces. Wrings the bird's neck in one swift liquid movement; a twist of the wrist, and he's already plucking the feathers with the other hand, ignoring the death-spasms. And I'm real close now. I can smell him. Mud and sweat. Behind him, the open sea. On the deck, the feathers, a bloody snowfall.

He bites off the head and I hear the skull crunch.

I scream. He whirls around. I try to cover it up with a silly childish giggle.

He speaks in a monotone. Slowly. Sounding out each syllable, but he seems to have picked up a little pidgin. "Little white boy. You go upstairs. No belong here."

"I go where I want. They don't care."

He offers me a raw wing.

"Boy hungry?"

"Man hungry?"

I fish in my pocket, find half a liverwurst sandwich. I hold it out to him. He shakes his head. We both laugh a little. We've both known this hunger that consumes you; the agony of China is in our bones.

I say, "Me and Mom are going to Siam. On account of my dad getting killed by the Japs and we can't live in Shanghai anymore. We were in a camp and everything." He stares blankly and so I bark in Japanese, like the guards used to. And he goes crazy.

He mutters to himself in Hakka, which I don't understand that well, but it's something like, "Don't look 'em in the eye. They chop off your head. You stare at the ground, they leave you alone." He is chewing away at raw bird flesh the whole time. He adds in English, "Si Ui no like Japan man."

"Makes two of us," I say.

I've seen too much. Before the internment camp, there was Nanking. Mom was gonna do an article about the atrocities. I saw them. You think a two-year-old doesn't see anything? She carried me on her back the whole time, papoose-style.

When you've seen a river clogged with corpses, when you've looked at piles of human heads, and human livers roasting on spits, and women raped and set on fire, well, Santa and the Tooth Fairy just don't cut it. I pretended about the Tooth Fairy, though, for a long time. Because, in the camp, the ladies would pool their resources to bribe Mr. Tooth Fairy Sakamoto for a little piece of fish.

"I'm Nicholas," I say.

"Si Ui." I don't know if it's his name or something in Hakka.

I hear my mother calling from the upper deck. I turn from the strange man, the raw bird's blood trailing from his lips. "Gotta go." I turn to him, pointing at my chest, and I say, "Nicholas."

Even the upper deck is cramped. It's hotter than Shanghai, hotter even than the internment camp. We share a cabin with two Catholic priests who let us hide out there after suspecting we didn't have tickets.

Night doesn't get any cooler, and the priests snore. I'm down to a pair of shorts and I still can't sleep. So I slip away. It's easy. Nobody cares. Millions of people have been dying and I'm just some skinny kid on the wrong side of the ocean. Me and my mom have been adrift for as long as I can remember.

The ship groans and clanks. I take the steep metal stairwell down to the coolies' level. I'm wondering about the birdcatcher.

Down below, the smells are a lot more comforting. The smell of sweat and soy-stained clothing masks the odor of the sea. The charcoal stove is still burning. The old woman is simmering some stew. Maybe something magical . . . a bit of snake's blood to revive someone's limp dick, crushed tiger bones, powdered rhinoceros horn . . . to heal pretty much anything. People are starving, but you can still get those kind of ingredients. I'm 11, and I already know too much.

They are sleeping every which way, but it's easy for me to step over them, even in the dark. The camp was even more crowded than this, and a misstep could get you hurt. There's a little bit of light from the little clay stove.

I don't know what I'm looking for. Just to be alone, I guess. I can be more alone in a crowd of Chinese than up there. Mom says things will be better in Siam. I don't know.

I've threaded my way past all of them. And I'm leaning against the railing. There isn't much moonlight. It's probably past midnight, but the metal is still hot. There's a warm wind, though, and it dries away my sweat. China's too far away to see, and I can't even imagine Boston anymore.

He pounces.

Leather hands grasp my shoulders. Strong hands. Not big, but I can't squirm out of their grip. The hands twirl me around and I'm looking into Si Ui's eyes. The moonlight is in them. I'm scared. I don't know why, really, all I'd have to do is scream and they'll pull him off me. But I can't get the scream out.

I look into his eyes and I see fire. A burning village. Maybe it's just the opium haze that clings to this deck, making me feel all weird inside, seeing things. And the sounds. I think it must be the whispering of the sea, but it's not, it's voices. Hungry, you little Chink? And those leering, bucktoothed faces. Like comic book Japs. Barking. The fire blazes. And then, abruptly, it dissolves. And there's a kid standing in the smoky ruins. Me. And I'm holding out a liverwurst sandwich. Am I really that skinny, that pathetic? But the vision fades. And Si Ui's eyes become empty. Soulless.

"Si Ui catch anything, he says. "See, catch bird, catch boy. All same." And he smiles, a curiously captivating smile.

"As long as you don't eat me," I say.

"Si Ui never eat Nicholas," he says. "Nicholas friend."

Friend? In the burning wasteland of China, an angel holding out a liverwurst sandwich? It makes me smile. And suddenly angry. The anger hits me so suddenly I don't even have time to figure out what it is. It's the war: the maggots in the millet, the commandant kicking me across the yard; but more than that, it's my mom, clinging to her journalist fantasies while I dug for earthworms, letting my dad walk out to his death. I'm crying and the birdcatcher is stroking my cheek, saying, "You no cry now. Soon go back America. No one cry there." And it's the first time someone has touched me with some kind of tenderness in . . . in . . . in . . . I dunno, since before the invasion. Because Mom doesn't hug, she kind of encircles, and her arms are like the bars of a cage.

# # #

So, I'm thinking this will be my last glimpse of Si Ui. It's in the harbor at Klong Toey. You know, where Anna landed in _The King and I._ And where Joseph Conrad landed in _Youth_.

So all these coolies, and all these trapped Americans and Europeans, they're all stampeding down the gangplank, with cargo being hoisted; workmen trundling; fleets of those bicycle pedicabs called _samlors_ ; itinerant merchants with bales of silk and fruits that seem to have hair or claws; and then there's the smell that socks you in the face—gasoline and jasmine and decay and incense. Pungent salt squid drying on racks. The ever-present fish sauce blending with the odor of fresh papaya and pineapple and coconut and human sweat.

And my mother's off and running—with me barely keeping up—chasing after some waxed-mustache British doctor guy with one of those accents you think's a joke until you realize that's really how they talk.

So I'm just carried along by the mob.

"You buy bird, little boy?" I look up. It's a wall of sparrows, each one in a cramped wooden cage. Rows and rows of cages, stacked up from the concrete high as a man, more cages hanging from wires, stuffed into the branch-crooks of a mango tree. I see others buying the birds for a few coins, releasing them into the air.

"Why are they doing that?"

"Good for your karma. Buy bird, set bird free, shorten your suffering in your next life."

"Swell," I say.

Further off, the vendor's boy is catching them, coaxing them back into cages. That's got to be wrong, I'm thinking as the boy comes back with ten little cages hanging on each arm. The birds haven't gotten far. They can barely fly. Answering my silent thought, the bird seller says, "Oh, we clip wings. Must make living too, you know."

That's when I hear a sound like the thunder of a thousand wings. I think I must be dreaming. I look up. The crowd has parted. And there's a skinny shirtless man standing in the clearing—his arms spread wide like a Jesus statue—only you can barely see a square inch of him because he's all covered in sparrows. They're perched all over his arms like they're telegraph wires or something, and squatting on his head, and clinging to his baggy homespun shorts with their claws. And the birds are all chattering at once, drowning out the cacophony of the mob.

Si Ui looks at me. And in his eyes I see . . . bars. Bars of light, maybe. Prison bars. The man's trying to tell me something. I'm trapped.

The crowd that parted all of a sudden comes together and he's gone. I wonder if I'm the only one who saw. I wonder if it's just another after-effect of the opium that clogged the walkways on the ship.

But it's too late to wonder; my mom has found me, she's got me by the arm and she's yanking me back into the stream of people. And in the next few weeks I don't think about Si Ui at all. Until he shows up—just like that—in a village called Thapsakae.

# # #

After the museum, I took Corey to Baskin-Robbins and popped into Starbucks next door for a frappuccino. Visiting the boogieman is a draining thing. I wanted to let him down easy. But Corey didn't want to let go right away.

"Can we take a boat ride or something?" he said. "You know I never get to come to this part of town." It's true. The traffic in Bangkok is so bad that they sell little car toilets so you can go and do what you have to do, while you're stuck at a red light for an hour. This side of town—Thonburi, the old capital—is a lot more like the past. But no one bothers to come. The traffic, they say, always the traffic.

We left the car by a local pier, hailed a river taxi, just told him to go, anywhere, told him we wanted to ride around. Overpaid him. It served me right for being me, an old white guy in baggy slacks, with a facing-backwards-Yankees-hat, toting blond kid in tow.

When you leave the river behind, there's a network of canals, called _klongs_ , that used to be the arteries and capillaries of the old city. In Bangkok proper, they've mostly all been filled in. But not here. The further from the main waterway we floated, the further back in time. Now the _klongs_ were fragrant with jasmine, with stilted houses rearing up behind thickets of banana and bamboo. And I was remembering more.

Rain jars by the landing docks . . . lizards basking in the sun . . . young boys leaping into the water. . . .

"The water was a lot clearer," I told my grandson. "And the swimmers weren't wearing those little trunks . . . they were naked."

Recently—fearing to offend the sensibilities of tourists—the Thai government made a fuss about little boys skinny-dipping along the tourist riverboat routes. But the river is so polluted now, one wonders what difference it makes.

They were bobbing up and down around the boat. Shouting in fractured English. Wanting a lick of Corey's Baskin-Robbins. When Corey spoke to them in Thai, they swam away. Tourists who speak the language aren't tourists anymore.

"You used to do that, huh, Grandpa?"

"Yes," I said.

"I like the sports club better. The water's clean. And they make a mean chicken sandwich at the poolside bar."

I only went to the sports club once in my life. A week after we landed in Bangkok, a week of sleeping on a pew at a missionary church, a week wringing out the same clothes and ironing them over and over.

"I never thought much of the sports club," I said.

"Oh, Grandpa, you're such a prole." One of his father's words, I thought, smiling.

"Well, I did grow up in China," I said.

"Yeah," he said. "So what was it like, the sports club?"

# # #

A little piece of England in the midst of all this tropical stuff. The horse races. Cricket. My mother has a rendezvous with the doctor, the one she's been flirting with on the ship. They have tea and crumpets. They talk about the Bangkok Chinatown riots, and about money. I am reading a battered old comic that I found in the reading room.

"Well, if you don't mind going native," the doctor says, "there's a clinic, down south a bit; pay wouldn't be much, and you'll have to live with the benighted buggers, but I daresay you'll cope."

"Oh, I'll go native," Mom says, "as long as I can keep writing. I'll do anything for that. I'd give you a blowjob if that's what it takes."

"Heavens," says the doctor. "More tea?"

# # #

And so, a month later, we come to a fishing village nestled in the western crook of the Gulf of Siam, and I swear it's paradise. There's a village school taught by monks, and a little clinic where Mom works, dressing wounds, jabbing penicillin into people's buttocks; I think she's working on a novel. That doctor she was flirting with got her this job because she speaks Chinese, and the village is full of Chinese immigrants—smuggled across the sea—looking for some measure of freedom.

Thapsakae . . . it rhymes with Tupperware . . . it's always warm, but never stifling like in Bangkok . . . always a breeze from the unseen sea, shaking the ripe coconuts from the trees . . . a town of stilted dwellings, a tiny main street with storefront rowhouses, fields of neon green rice as far as the eye can see, lazy water buffalo wallowing, and always the canals running alongside the half-paved road, women beating their wet laundry with rocks in the dawn, boys diving in the noonday heat. The second day I'm there, I meet these kids, Lek and Sombun. They're my age. I can't understand a word they're saying at first. I'm watching them, leaning against a dragon-glazed rain jar, as they shuck their school uniforms and leap in. They're laughing a lot, splashing; one time they're throwing a catfish back and forth like it's some kind of volleyball, but they're like fishes themselves, silvery brown sleek things chattering in a singsong language. And I'm alone, like I was at the camp, flinging stones into the water. Except I'm not scared like I was there. There's no time I have to be home. I can reach into just about any thicket and pluck out something good to eat: bananas, mangoes, little pink sour-apples. My shorts are all torn (I still only have one pair) and my shirt is stained with the juices of exotic fruits, and I let my hair grow as long as I want.

Today I'm thinking of the birds.

You buy a bird to free yourself from the cage of karma. You free the bird, but its wings are clipped and he's inside another cage, a cage circumscribed by the fact that he can't fly far. And the boy that catches him is in another cage, apprenticed to that vendor, unable to fly free. Cages within cages within cages. I've been in a cage before; one time in the camp they hung me up in one in the commandant's office and told me to sing.

Here, I don't feel caged at all.

The Thai kids have noticed me and they pop up from the depths right next to me, staring curiously. They're not hostile. I don't know what they're saying, but I know I'm soon going to absorb this musical language. Meanwhile, they're splashing me, daring me to dive in, and in the end I throw off these filthy clothes and I'm in the water and it's clear and warm and full of fish. And we're laughing and chasing each other. And they do know a few words of English; they've picked it up in that village school, where the monks have been ramming a weird antiquated English phrasebook down their throats.

But later, after we dry off in the sun and they try to show me how to ride a water buffalo, we sneak across the _gailan_ field and I see him again. The Birdcatcher, I mean. _Gailan_ is a Chinese vegetable a bit like broccoli, only without the bushy part. The Chinese immigrants grow it here. They all work for this one rich Chinese man named Tae Pak, the one who had the refugees shipped to this town as cheap labor.

"You want to watch TV?" Sombun asks me.

I haven't had much of a chance to see TV. He takes me by the lead and pulls me along, with Lek behind him, giggling. Night has fallen. It happens really suddenly in the tropics: boom and it's dark. In the distance, past a wall of bamboo trees, we see glimmering lights. Tae Pak has electricity. Not that many private homes have. Mom and I use kerosene lamps at night. I've never been to his house, but I know we're going there.

Villagers are zeroing in on the house now, walking sure-footedly in the moonlight. The stench of night-blooming jasmine is almost choking in the compound. A little shrine to the Mother of Mercy stands by the entrance, and ahead we see what passes for a mansion here; the wooden stilts and the thatched roof with the pointed eaves, like everyone else's house, but spread out over three sides of a quadrangle, and in the center a ruined pagoda, whose origin no one remembers.

The usual pigs and chickens are running around in the space under the house, but the stairway up to the veranda is packed with people, kids mostly, and they're all gazing upward. The object of their devotion is a television set, the images on it ghostly, the sound staticky and in Thai in any case . . . but I recognize the show . . . it's "I Love Lucy." And I'm just staring and staring. Sombun pushes me up the steps. I barely remember to remove my sandals and step in the trough at the bottom of the steps to wash the river-mud off my feet. It's really true. I can't understand a word of it, but it's still funny. The kids are laughing along with the laughtrack.

Well, that's when I see Si Ui. I point at him. I try to attract his attention, but he too, sitting cross-legged on the veranda, is riveted to the screen. And when I try to whisper to Sombun that hey, I know this guy, what a weird coincidence, Sombun just whispers back, " _Jek, Jek_ ," which I know is a putdown word for a Chinaman.

"I know him," I whisper. "He catches birds. And eats them. Alive." I try to attract Si Ui's attention. But he won't look at me. He's too busy staring at Lucille Ball. I'm a little bit afraid to look at him directly, scared of what his eyes might disclose, our shared and brutal past.

Lek, whose nickname just means "tiny", shudders.

" _Jek, Jek_ ," Sombun says. The laughtrack kicks in.

# # #

Everything has changed now that I know he's here. On my reed mat, under the mosquito nets every night, I toss and turn, and I see things. I don't think they're dreams. I think it's like the time I looked into Si Ui's eyes and saw the fire. I see a Chinese boy running through a field of dead people. It's sort of all in black and white and he's screaming and behind him a village is burning.

At first it's the Chinese boy, but somehow it's me too, and I'm running, with my bare feet squishing into dead men's bowels, running over a sea of blood and shit. And I run right into someone's arms. Hard. The comic-book Japanese villain face. A human heart, still beating, in his hand.

"Hungry, you little Chink?" he says.

"Little Chink. Little _Jek_."

Intestines are writhing up out of disemboweled bodies like snakes. I saw a lot of disemboweled Japs. Their officers did it in groups, quietly, stony-faced. The honorable thing to do.

I'm screaming myself awake. And then, from the veranda, maybe, I hear the distinctive tap of my mom's battered typewriter, an old Hermes she bought in the Sunday market in Bangkok for 100 baht.

I crawl out of bed. It's already dawn.

"Hi, Mom," I say, as I breeze past her, an old _phakomaah_ wrapped around my loins.

"Wow! It talks."

"Mom, I'm going over to Sombun's house to play."

"You're getting the hang of the place, I take it."

"Yeah."

"Pick up some food, Nicholas."

"Okay." Around here, a dollar will feed me and her three square meals. But it won't take away the other hunger.

Another lazy day of running myself ragged, gorging on papaya and coconut milk; another day in paradise.

It's time to meet the serpent, I decide.

# # #

Sombun tells me someone's been killed, and we sneak over to the police station. Si Ui is there, sitting at a desk, staring at a wall. I think he's just doing some kind of alien registration thing. He has a Thai interpreter, the same toothless woman I saw on the boat. And a policeman is writing stuff down in a ledger.

There's a woman sitting on a bench, rocking back and forth. She's talking to everyone in sight. Even me and Sombun.

Sombun whispers, "That woman Daeng. Daughter die."

Daeng mumbles, "My daughter. By the railway tracks. All she was doing was running down the street for an ice-coffee. Oh, my terrible karma." She collars a passing inspector. "Help me. My daughter. Strangled, raped."

"That Inspector Jed," Sombun whispered to me. "Head of the whole place."

Inspector Jed is being polite, compassionate, and efficient at the same time. I like him. My mom should hang out with people like that, instead of the losers who are just looking for a quick lay.

The woman continues muttering to herself. "Nit, Nit, Nit, Nit, Nit," she says. That must be the girl's name. They all have nicknames like that. _Nit_ means 'tiny', too, like _lek_. "Dead, strangled," she says. "And this town is supposed to be heaven on earth. The sea, the palm trees, the sun always bright. This town has a dark heart."

Suddenly, Si Ui looks up. Stares at her. As though remembering something. Daeng is sobbing. And the policeman who's been interviewing him says, "Watch yourself, Chink. Everyone smiles here. Food falls from the trees. If a little girl's murdered, they'll file it away; they won't try to find out who did it. Because this is a perfect place, and no one gets murdered. We all love each other here . . . you little _Jek_."

Si Ui has this weird look in his eye. Mesmerized. My mother looks that way sometimes . . . when a man catches her eye and she's zeroing in for the kill. The woman's mumbling that she's going to go be a nun now, she has nothing left to live for.

"Watch your back, _Jek_ ," says the policeman. He's trying, I realize, to help this man, who he probably thinks is some kind of village idiot type. "Someone'll murder you just for being a stupid little Chink. And no one will bother to find out who did it."

"Si Ui hungry," says Si Ui.

I realize that I speak his language, and my friends do not.

"Si Ui!" I call out to him.

He freezes in his tracks, and slowly turns, and I look into his eyes for the second time, and I know that it was no illusion before.

Somehow we've seen through each other's eyes.

I am a misfit kid in a picture-perfect town with a dark heart, but I understand what he's saying, because though I look all different, I come from where he comes from. I've experienced what it's like to be Chinese. You can torture them and kill them by millions, like the Japs did, and still they endure. They just shake it off. They've outlasted everyone so far. And will till the end of time. Right now in Siam they're the coolies and the laborers, and soon they're going to end up owning the whole country. They endure. I saw their severed heads piled up like battlements, and the river choked with their corpses, and they outlasted it all.

These Thai kids will never understand.

"See Ui hungry!" the man cries.

That afternoon, I slip away from my friends at the river, and I go to the _gailan_ field where I know he works. He never acknowledges my presence, but later, he strides further and further from the house of his rich patron, towards a more densely wooded area past the fields. It's all banana trees, the little bananas that have seeds in them; you chew the whole banana and spit out the seeds, _rat-tat-tat_ , like a machine-gun. There's bamboo, too, and the jasmine bushes that grow wild, and mango trees. Si Ui doesn't talk to me, doesn't look back, but somehow I know I'm supposed to follow him.

And I do.

Through the thicket, into a private clearing, the ground overgrown with weeds, the whole thing surrounded by vegetation, and in the middle of it a tumbledown house, the thatch unpatched in places, the stilts decaying and carved with old graffiti. The steps are lined with wooden cages. There's birdshit all over the decking, over the wooden railings, even around the foot trough. Birds are chattering from the cages, from the air around us. The sun has been searing and sweat is running down my face, my chest, soaking my _phakomaah_.

We don't go up into the house. Instead, Si Ui leads me past it, towards a clump of rubber trees. He doesn't talk, just keeps beckoning me, the curious way they have of beckoning, palm pointing toward the ground.

I feel dizzy. He's standing there. Swaying a little. Then he makes a little clucking, chattering sound, barely opening his lips. The birds are gathering. He seems to know their language. They're answering him. The chirping around us increases to a screeching cacophony. Above, they're circling. They're blocking out the sun and it's suddenly chilly. I'm scared now. But I don't dare say anything. In the camp, if you said anything, they always hurt you. Si Ui keeps beckoning me: nearer, come nearer. And I creep up. The birds are shrieking. And now they're swooping down, landing, gathering at Si Ui's feet, their heads moving to and fro in a regular rhythm, like they're listening to . . . a heartbeat. Si Ui's heartbeat. My own.

An image flashes into my head. A little Chinese boy hiding in a closet . . . listening to footsteps . . . breathing nervously.

He's poised. Like a snake, coiled up, ready to strike. And then, without warning, he drops to a crouch, pulls a bird out of the sea of birds, puts it to his lips, snaps its neck with his teeth, and the blood just spurts, all over his bare skin, over the homespun wrapped around his loins, an impossible crimson. And he smiles. And throws me the bird.

I recoil. He laughs again when I let the dead bird slip through my fingers. Pounces again and gets me another.

"Birds are easy to trap," he says to me in Chinese, "easy as children, sometimes; you just have to know their language." He rips one open, pulls out a slippery liver. "You don't like them raw, I know," he says, "but come, little brother, we'll make a fire."

He waves his hand, dismisses the birds; all at once they're gone and the air is steaming again. In the heat, we make a bonfire and grill the birds' livers over it. He has become, I guess, my friend. Because he's become all talkative. "I didn't rape her," he says.

Then he talks about fleeing through the rice fields. There's a war going on around him. I guess he's my age in his story, but in Chinese they don't use past or future, everything happens in a kind of abstract now-time. I don't understand his dialect that well, but what he says matches the waking dreams I've had tossing and turning under that mosquito net. There was a Japanese soldier. He seemed kinder than the others. They were roasting something over a fire. He was handing Si Ui a morsel. A piece of liver.

"Hungry, little Chink?"

"Hungry. I understand hungry."

Human liver.

In Asia, they believe that everything that will ever happen has already happened. Is that what Si Ui is doing with me, forging a karmic chain with his own childhood, the Japanese soldier?

There's so much I want to ask him, but I can't form the thoughts, especially not in Chinese. I'm young, Corey. I'm not thinking karmic cycles. What are you trying to ask me?

# # #

"I thought Si Ui ate children's livers," said Corey. "Not some dumb old birds'."

We were still on the _klong_ , turning back now and heading towards civilization; on either side of us were crumbling temples, old houses with pointed eaves, each one with its little totemic spirit house by the front gate, pouring sweet incense into the air, the air itself dripping with humidity. But ahead, just beyond a turn in the _klong_ , a series of eighty-story condos reared up over the banana trees.

"Yes, he did," I said, "and we'll get to that part, in time. Don't be impatient."

"Grandpa, Si Ui ate children's livers. Just like Dracula bit women in the neck. Well like, it's the main part of the story. How long are you gonna make me wait?"

"So you know more than you told me before. About the maid trying to scare you one time, when you were five."

"Well, yeah, Grandpa, I saw the mini-series. It never mentioned you."

"I'm part of the secret history, Corey."

"Cool." He contemplated his Pokémon, but decided not to go back to monster trapping. "When we get back to the Bangkok side, can I get one of those caramel frappuccinos at Starbucks?"

"Decaf," I said.

# # #

That evening I go back to the house and find Mom in bed with Jed, the police detective. Suddenly, I don't like Jed anymore.

She barely looks up at me; Jed is pounding away and oblivious to it all. I don't know if Mom really knows I'm there, or just a shadow flitting beyond the mosquito netting. I know why she's doing it; she'll say that it's all about getting information for this great novel she's planning to write, or research for a major magazine article, but the truth is that it's about survival. It's no different from that concentration camp.

I think she finally does realize I'm there She mouths the words "I'm sorry" and then turns back to her work. At that moment, I hear someone tapping at the entrance, and I crawl over the squeaky floor-planks (Siamese children learn to move around on their knees so that their head isn't accidentally higher than someone of higher rank) to see Sombun on the step.

"Can you come out?" he says. "There's a _ngaan wat_."

I don't know what that is, but I don't want to stay in the house. So I throw on a shirt and go with him. I soon find out that a _ngaan wat_ is a temple fair, sort of a cross between a carnival and a church bazaar and a theatrical night out.

Even from a mile or two away, we hear the music: the tinkling of marimbas and the thud of drums, the wail of the Javanese oboe. By the time we get there, the air is drenched with the fragrance of pickled guava, peanut pork skewers, and green papaya tossed in fish sauce. A makeshift dance floor has been spread over the muddy ground, and there are dancers with rhinestone court costumes and pagoda hats, their hands bent back at an impossible angle. There's a Chinese opera troupe like I've seen in Shanghai; glittering costumes, masks painted on the faces in garish colors, boys dressed as monkeys leaping to and fro. The Thai and the Chinese striving to outdo each other in noise and brilliance. And on a grill—being tended to by a fat woman—pigeons are barbecuing, each one on a mini-spear of steel. And I'm reminded of the open fire and the sizzling of half-plucked feathers.

"You got money?" Sombun says. He thinks that all _farangs_ are rich. I fish in my pocket and pull out a few saleungs, and we stuff ourselves with pan-fried _roti_ swimming in sweet condensed milk.

The thick juice is dripping from our lips. This really is paradise. The music, the mingled scents, the warm wind. Then I see Si Ui. There aren't any birds nearby, not unless you count the pigeons charring on the grill. Si Ui is muttering to himself, but I understand Chinese, and he's saying, over and over again, "Si Ui hungry, Si Ui hungry." He says it in a little voice, and it's almost like baby talk.

We wander over to the Chinese opera troupe. They're doing something about monkeys invading heaven and stealing the apples of the gods. All these kids are somersaulting, tumbling, cartwheeling, and climbing up onto each other's shoulders. There's a little girl, nine or ten maybe, and she's watching the show. And Si Ui is watching her. And I'm watching him.

I've seen her before, know her from that night we squatted on the veranda staring at American TV shows. Was Si Ui watching her even then? I tried to remember. Couldn't be sure. Her name's Juk.

Those Chinese cymbals, with their annoying _boing-boing-boing_ sound, are clashing. A man is intoning in a weird sing-song. The monkeys are leaping. Suddenly I see, in Si Ui's face, the same expression I saw on the ship. He's utterly still inside, utterly quiet, beyond feeling. The war did that to him. I know. Just like it made my mom into a whore, and me into . . . I don't know . . . a bird without a nesting place . . . a lost boy.

And then I get this . . . irrational feeling. That the little girl is a bird, chirping to herself, hopping along the ground, not noticing the stalker.

So many people here. So much jangling, so much laughter. The town's dilapidated pagodas sparkle with reflected colors, like stone Christmas trees. Chinese opera rings in my ears. I look away. When I look back, they are gone. Sombun is preoccupied now, playing with a two-saleung top that he just bought. Somehow I feel impelled to follow. To stalk the stalker.

I duck behind a fruit stand, and then I see a golden deer. It's a toy, on four wheels, pulled along on a string. I can't help following it with my eyes as it darts between hampers full of rambutans and pomelos.

The deer darts toward the cupped hands of the little girl. I see her disappear into the crowd, but then I see Si Ui's face, too; you can't mistake the cold fire in his eyes.

She follows the toy. Si Ui pulls. I follow too, not really knowing why it's so fascinating. The toy deer weaves through the ocean of feet. Bare feet of monks and novices, their saffron robes skimming the mud. Feet in rubber flip-flops, in the wooden sandals the _Jek_ call _kiah_. I hear a voice: "Juk, Juk!" And I know there's someone else looking for the girl, too. It's a weird quartet, each one in the sequence known only to the next one. I can see Si Ui now, his head bobbing up and down in the throng because he's a little taller than the average Thai, even though he's so skinny. He's intent. Concentrated. He seems to be on wheels himself. He glides through the crowd like the toy deer does. The woman's voice, calling for Juk, is faint and distant; she hears it, I'm sure, but she's ignoring her mother or her big sister. I only hear it because my senses are sharp now. It's like the rest of the temple fair's all out of focus now, all blurry, and there's just the four of us. I see the woman now—it must be a mother or aunt, too old for a sister—collaring a _roti_ vendor and asking if he's seen the child. The vendor shakes his head, laughs. And suddenly we're all next to the pigeon barbecue, and if the woman was only looking in the right place, she'd see the little girl, giggling as she clambers through the forest of legs, as the toy zigzags over the dirt aisles. And now the deer has been yanked right up to Si Ui's feet. And the girl crawls all the way after it, seizes it, laughs, looks solemnly up at the face of the Chinaman.

"It's him! It's the Chink!" Sombun is pointing, laughing. I'd forgotten he was even with me.

Si Ui is startled. His concentration snaps. He lashes out. There's a blind rage in his eyes. Dead pigeons are flying everywhere.

"Hungry!" he screams in Chinese. "Si Ui hungry!"

He turns. There is a cloth stall nearby. Suddenly he and the girl are gone amid a flurry of billowing sarongs. And I follow.

Incense in the air, stinging my eyes. A shaman gets possessed in a side aisle, his followers hushed. A flash of red. A red sarong, embroidered with gold, a year's wages, twisting through the crowd. I follow. I see the girl's terrified eyes. I see Si Ui with the red cloth wrapped around his arms, around the girl. I see something glistening, a knife maybe. And no one sees. No one but me.

Juk! Juk!

I've lost sight of Sombun somewhere. I don't care. I thread my way through a bevy of _ramwong_ dancers, through men dressed as women and women dressed as men. Fireworks are going off. There's an ancient wall, the temple boundary, crumbling . . . and the trail of red funnels into black night . . . and I'm standing on the other side of the wall now, watching Si Ui ride away in a pedicab, into the night. There's moonlight on him. He's saying something. Even from far off, I can read his lips. He's saying it over and over: "Si Ui hungry, Si Ui hungry."

# # #

So they find her by the side of the road with her internal organs missing. And I'm there, too—all the boys are, at dawn— peering down, daring each other to touch. It's not a rape or anything, they tell us. Nothing like the other girl. Someone has seen a cowherd near the site, and he's the one they arrest. He's an Indian, you see. If there's anyone the locals despise more than the Chinese, it's the Indians. They have a saying: if you see a snake and an Indian, kill the _babu_.

Later, in the market, Detective Jed is escorting the Indian to the police station, and the villagers start pelting him with stones, and they call him a dirty Indian and a cowshit eater. They beat him up pretty badly in the jail. The country's under martial law in those days, you know. They can literally beat up anyone they want. Or shoot them.

But most people don't really notice, or care. After all, it is paradise. To say that it is not, aloud, risks making it true. That's why my mom will never belong to Thailand; she doesn't understand that everything there resides in what is left unsaid.

# # #

That afternoon, I go back to the rubber orchard. He is standing there patiently. There's a bird on a branch. Si Ui is poised. Waiting. I think he is about to pounce. But I'm too excited to wait. "The girl," I say. "The girl. She's dead, did you know?"

Si Ui whirls around in a murderous fury, and then, just as suddenly, he's smiling.

"I didn't mean to break your concentration," I say.

"Girl soft," Si Ui says. "Tender." He laughs a little.

I don't see a vicious killer. All I see is loneliness and hunger.

"Did you kill her?" I say.

"Kill?" he says. "I don't know. Si Ui hungry." He beckons me closer. I'm not afraid of him. "Do like me," he says. He crouches. I crouch, too. He stares at the bird. And so do I. "Make like a tree now," he says, and I say, "Yes. I'm a tree." He's behind me. He's breathing down my neck. Am I the next bird? But somehow I know he won't hurt me.

"Now!" he shrieks. Blindly, instinctively, I grab the sparrow in both hands. I can feel the quick heart grow cold as the bones crunch. Blood and birdshit squirt into my fists. It feels exciting, you know, down there, inside me. I killed it. The shock of death is amazing, joyous. I wonder if this is what grown-ups feel when they do things to each other in the night.

He laughs. "You and me," he says, "now we same-same."

He shows me how to lick the warm blood as it spurts. It's hotter than you think. It pulses, it quivers; the whole bird trembles as it yields up its spirit to me.

And then there's the weirdest thing. You know that hunger, the one that's gnawed at me, like a wound that won't close up, since we were dragged to that camp . . . it's suddenly gone. In it's place there's a kind of nothing.

The Buddhists here say that heaven itself is a kind of nothing. That the goal of all existence is to become as nothing.

And I feel it. For all of a second or two, I feel it. "I know why you do it," I say. "I won't tell anyone, I swear."

"Si Ui know that already."

Yes, he does. We have stood on common ground. We have shared communion flesh. Once a month, a Chinese priest used to come to the camp and celebrate mass with a hunk of maggoty mango, but he never made me feel one with anyone, let alone God.

The blood bathes my lips. The liver is succulent and bursting with juices.

Perhaps this is the first person I've ever loved.

The feeling lasts a few minutes. But then comes the hunger, swooping down on me; hunger clawed and ravenous. It will never go away, not completely.

# # #

They have called in an exorcist to pray over the railway tracks. The mother of the girl they found there has become a nun, and she stands on the gravel pathway lamenting her karma. The most recent victim has few to grieve for her. I overhear Detective Jed talking to my mother. He tells her there are two killers. The second one had her throat cut and her internal organs removed . . . the first one, strangulation, all different . . . he's been studying these cases, these ritual killers, in American psychiatry books. And the cowherd has an alibi for the first victim.

I'm only half-listening to Jed, who drones on and on about famous mad killers in Europe. Like the Butcher of Hanover, Jack the Ripper. How their victims were always chosen in a special way. How they killed over and over, always a certain way, a ritual. How they always got careless after a while, because part of what they were doing came from a hunger, a desperate need to be found out. How after a while they might leave clues . . . confide in someone . . . how he thought he had one of these cases on his hands, but the authorities in Bangkok weren't buying the idea. The village of Thapsakae just wasn't grand enough to play host to a reincarnation of Jack the Ripper.

I listen to him, but I've never been to Europe, and it's all just talk to me. I'm much more interested in the exorcist, who's a Brahmin, in white robes, hair down to his feet, all nappy and filthy, a dozen flower garlands around his neck, and amulets tinkling all over him.

"The killer might confide in someone," says Jed, "someone he thinks is in no position to betray him; someone perhaps too simple-minded to understand. Remember, the killer doesn't know he's evil. In a sense, he really can't help himself. He doesn't think the way we think. To himself, he's an innocent."

The exorcist enters his trance and sways and mumbles in unknown tongues. The villagers don't believe the killer's an innocent.

They want to lynch him.

Women washing clothes find a young girl's hand bobbing up and down, and her head a few yards downstream. Women are panicking in the marketplace. They're lynching Indians, Chinese, anyone alien. But not Si Ui; he's a simpleton, after all. The village idiot is immune from persecution because every village needs an idiot.

The exorcist gets quite a work-out, capturing spirits into baskets and jars.

Meanwhile, Si Ui has become the trusted _Jek_ , the one who cuts the _gailan_ in the fields and never cheats anyone of their two-saleung bundle of Chinese broccoli.

I keep his secret. Evenings, after I'm exhausted from swimming all day with Sombun and Lek, or lazing on the back of a water buffalo, I go to the rubber orchard and catch birds as the sun sets. I'm almost as good as him now. Sometimes he says nothing, though he'll share with me a piece of meat, cooked or uncooked. Sometimes he talks up a storm. When he talks pidgin, he sounds like he's a half-wit. When he talks Thai, it's the same way, I think. But when he goes on and on in his Hakka dialect, he's as lucid as they come. I think. Because I'm only getting it in patches.

One day he says to me, "The young ones taste the best because it's the taste of childhood. You and I, we have no childhood. Only the taste."

A bird flies onto his shoulder, head tilted, chirps a friendly song. Perhaps he will soon be dinner.

Another day, Si Ui says, "Children's livers are the sweetest, they're bursting with young life. I weep for them. They're with me always. They're my friends. Like you."

Around us, paradise is crumbling. Everyone suspects someone else. Fights are breaking out in the marketplace. One day it's the Indians, another day the Chinks, the Burmese. Hatred hangs in the air like the smell of rotten mangoes.

And Si Ui is getting hungrier.

My mother is working on her book now, thinking it'll make her fortune. She waits for the mail, which gets here sometimes by train, sometimes by oxcart. She's waiting for some letter from Simon and Schuster. It never comes, but she's having a ball, in her own way. She stumbles her way through the language, commits appalling solecisms, points her feet, even touches a monk one time, a total sacrilege . . . but they let her get away with everything. _Farangs_ , after all, are touched by a divine madness. You can expect nothing normal from them.

She questions every villager, pores over every clue. It never occurs to her to ask me what I know.

We glut ourselves on papaya and curried catfish.

"Nicholas," my mother tells me one evening, after she's offered me a hit of opium, her latest affectation, "this really is the Garden of Eden."

I don't tell her that I've already met the serpent.

# # #

"Here's how the day of reckoning happened, Corey:"

It's mid-morning and I'm wandering aimlessly. My mother has taken the train to Bangkok with Detective Jed. He's decided that her untouchable _farangness_ might get him an audience with some major official in the police department. I don't see my friends at the river or in the marketplace. But it's not planting season, and there's no school. So I'm playing by myself, but you can only flip so many pebbles into the river, and tease so many water buffaloes.

After a while I decide to go and look for Sombun. We're not close, he and I, but we're thrown together a lot. Things don't seem right without him.

I go to Sombun's house. It's a shabby place, but immaculate, a row house in the more "citified" part of the village, if you can call it that. Sombun's mother is making chili paste, pounding the spices in a stone mortar. You can smell the sweet basil and the lemongrass in the air. And the betelnut, too; she's chewing on the intoxicant. Her teeth are stained red-black from long use.

"Oh," she says, "the _farang_ boy."

"Where's Sombun?"

She doesn't know quite what to make of my Thai, which has been getting better for months. "He's not home, Little Mouse," she says. "He went to the _Jek's_ house to buy broccoli. Do you want to eat?"

"I've eaten, thanks, Auntie," I say, but for politeness' sake I'm forced to nibble on bright green _sali_ pastry.

"He's been gone a long time," she said, as she pounded. "I wonder if the Chink's going to teach him to catch birds."

"Birds?"

And I start to get this weird feeling. Because I'm the one who catches birds with the Chinaman, I'm the one who's shared his past, who understands his hunger. Not just any kid.

"Sombun told me the Chink was going to show him a special trick for catching them. Something about putting yourself into a deep state of _samadhi_ , reaching out with your mind, plucking the life-force with your mind. It sounds very spiritual, doesn't it? I always took the Chink for a moron, but maybe I'm misjudging him; Sombun seems to do a much better job," she said. "I never liked it when they came to our village, but they do work hard."

Well, when I leave Sombun's house, I'm starting to get a little mad. It's jealousy, of course, childish jealousy; I see that now. But I don't want to go there and disrupt their little bird-catching session. I'm not a spoilsport. I'm just going to pace up and down by the side of the _klong_ , doing a slow burn.

The serpent came to me! I was the only one who could see through his madness and his pain, the only one who truly knew the hunger that drove him! That's what I'm thinking. And I go back to tossing pebbles, and I tease the gibbon chained by the temple's gate, and I kick a water buffalo around. And, before I knew it, this twinge of jealousy has grown into a kind of rage. It's like I was one of those birds, only in a really big cage, and I'd been flying and flying and thinking I was free, and now I've banged into the prison bars for the first time. I'm so mad I could burst.

I'm playing by myself by the railway tracks when I see my mom and the detective walking out of the station. And that's the last straw. I want to hurt someone. I want to hurt my mom for shutting me out and letting strangers into her mosquito net at night. I want to punish Jed for thinking he knows everything. I want someone to notice me.

So that's when I run up to them and I say, "I'm the one! He confided in me! You said he was going to give himself away to someone, and it was me, it was me!"

My mom just stares at me, but Jed becomes very quiet. "The Chinaman?" he asks me.

I say, "He told me children's livers are the sweetest. I think he's after Sombun." I don't tell him that he's only going to teach Sombun to catch birds, that he taught me too, that boys are safe from him because like the detective told us, we're not the special kind of victim he seeks out. "In his house, in the rubber orchard, you'll find everything," I say. "Bones. He makes the feet into a stew," I add, improvising now, because I've never been inside that house. "He cuts off their faces and dries them on a jerky rack. And Sombun's with him."

The truth is, I'm just making trouble. I don't believe there's dried faces in the house, or human bones. I know Sombun's going to be safe, that Si Ui's only teaching him how to squeeze the life-force from the birds, how to blunt the ancient hunger. Him instead of me. They're not going to find anything but dead birds.

There's a scream. I turn. I see Sombun's mother with a basket of fish, coming from the market. She's overheard me, and she cries, "The Chink is killing my son!" Faster than thought, the street is full of people, screaming their anti-Chink epithets and pulling out butcher knives. Jed's calling for reinforcements. Street vendors are tightening their _phakomaahs_ around their waists.

"Which way?" Jed asks, and suddenly I'm at the head of an army, racing full tilt toward the rubber orchard, along the neon green of the young rice paddies, beside the canals teeming with catfish, thickets of banana trees, around the walls of the old temple, through the fields of _gailan_ . . . and this too, feeds my hunger. It's ugly. He's a Chinaman. He's the village idiot. He's different. He's an alien. Anything is possible.

We're converging on the _gailan_ field now. They're waving sticks. Harvesting sickles. Fish knives. They're shouting, "Kill the Chink, kill the Chink." Sombun's mother is shrieking and wailing, and Detective Jed has his gun out. Tae Pak, the village rich man, is vainly trying to stop the mob from trampling his broccoli. The army is unstoppable. And I'm their leader. I brought them here with my little lie. Even my mother is finally in awe.

I push through the bamboo thicket and we're standing in the clearing in the rubber orchard now. They're screaming for the _Jek's_ blood. And I'm screaming with them.

Si Ui is nowhere to be found. They're beating on the ground now, slicing it with their scythes, smashing their clubs against the trees. Sombun's mother is hysterical. The other women have caught her mood, and they're all screaming now, because someone is holding up a sandal . . . Sombun's.

A little Chinese boy hiding in a closet.

The image flashes again. I must go up into the house. I steal away, sneak up the steps—respectfully removing my sandals on the veranda—and I slip into the house.

A kerosene lamp burns. Light and shadows dance. There is a low wooden platform for a bed, a mosquito net, a woven rush mat for sleeping; off in a corner, there is a closet.

Birds everywhere. Dead birds pinned to the walls. Birds' heads piled up on plates. Blood spatters on the floor-planks. Feathers wafting. On a charcoal stove in one corner, there's a wok with some hot oil and garlic, and sizzling in that oil is a heart, too big to be the heart of a bird.

My eyes get used to the darkness. I see human bones in a pail. I see a young girl's head in a jar, the skull sawn open, half the brain gone. I see a bowl of pickled eyes.

I'm not afraid. These are familiar sights. This horror is a spectral echo of Nanking, nothing more.

"Si Ui," I whisper. "I lied to them. I know you didn't do anything to Sombun. You're one of the killers who does the same thing over and over. You don't eat boys. I know I've always been safe with you. I've always trusted you."

I hear someone crying. The whimper of a child.

"Hungry," says the voice. "Hungry."

A voice from behind the closet door.

The door opens. Si Ui is there, huddled, bone-thin, his _phakomaah_ about his loins, weeping, rocking.

Noises now. Angry voices. They're clambering up the steps. They're breaking down the wall planks. Light streams in.

"I'm sorry," I whisper. I see fire flicker in his eyes, then drain away as the mob sweeps into the room.

# # #

My grandson was hungry, too. When he said he could eat the world, he wasn't kidding. After the second decaf frappuccino, there was Italian ice-cream in the Oriental's coffee shop, and then, riding back on the Skytrain to join the chauffeur who had conveniently parked at the Sogo mall, there was a box of Smarties. Corey's mother always told me to watch the sugar, and she had plenty of Ritalin in stock—no prescription needed here—but it was always my pleasure to defy my daughter-in-law and leave her to deal with the consequences.

Corey ran wild in the skytrain station, whooping up the staircases, yelling at old ladies. No one minded. Kids are indulged in Babylon East; little blond boys are too cute to do wrong. For some, this noisy, polluted, chaotic city is still a kind of paradise.

My day of revelations ended at my son's townhouse in Sukhumvit, where maids and nannies fussed over little Corey and undressed him and got him in his Pokémon pajamas as I drained a glass of Beaujolais. My son was rarely home; the taco chain consumed all his time. My daughter-in-law was a social butterfly; she had already gone out for the evening, all pearls and Thai silk. So it fell to me to go into my grandson's room and to kiss him good-night and good-bye.

Corey's bedroom was a little piece of America, with its _Phantom Menace_ drapes and its Playstation. But on a high niche, an image of the Buddha looked down; a decaying garland still perfumed the air with a whiff of jasmine. The air conditioning was chilly; the Bangkok of the rich is a cold city; the more conspicuous the consumption, the lower the thermostat setting. I shivered, even as I missed Manhattan in January.

"Tell me a story, Grandpa?" Corey said.

"I told you one already," I said.

"Yeah, you did," he said wistfully. "About you in the Garden of Eden, and the serpent who was really a kid-eating monster."

All true. But as the years passed, I had come to see that perhaps I was the serpent. I was the one who mixed lies with the truth, and took away his innocence. He was a child, really, a hungry child. And so was I.

"Tell me what happened to him," Corey said. "Did the people lynch him?"

"No. The court ruled that he was a madman, and sentenced him to a mental home. But the military government of Field Marshal Sarit reversed the decision, and they took him away and shot him. And he didn't even kill half the kids they said he killed."

"Like the first girl, the one who was raped and strangled," Corey said, "but she didn't get eaten. Maybe that other killer's still around."

So he had been paying attention after all. I know he loves me, though he rarely says so. He had suffered an old man's ramblings for one long air conditioning-free day, without complaint. I'm proud of him, can barely believe I've held on to life long enough to get to know him.

I leaned down to kiss him. He clung to me, and, as he let go, he asked me sleepily, "Do you ever feel that hungry, Grandpa?"

I didn't want to answer him, so, without another word, I slipped quietly away.

That night, I wandered in my dreams through fields of the dead; the hunger raged; I killed, I swallowed children whole and spat them out; I burned down cities; I stood aflame in my self-made inferno, howling with elemental grief; and in the morning, without leaving a note, I took a taxi to the airport and flew back to New York.

To face the hunger.

#  Pool and its Role in Asian Communism

Colin Cotterill is today best known for his Dr. Siri Murder Mysteries set in Laos, with Dr. Siri being a police forensic expert. Colin has spent a number of years living in Thailand and Southeast Asia and Pool and its Role in Asia Communism was his second novel published here in Bangkok and predates his Dr. Siri series. Below is the beginning of the novel.

Preface

**I'm telling** you this story on account of it being personal, on account of us spending this morning at the cemetery, and on account of there ain't no-one else that wants to tell it. So if you care to hear it, looks like you and me's stuck with each other.

I don't say I can tell it as good as it should be told, and I ain't gonna win no No Bell prize, less they got a special section for books that don't got no grammar in them. But it's important it gets told. That's my opinion anyway.

I guess it all started in 1970, before I was born. There's folks wish I wasn't born at all, but it's too late now and I don't want to get on to that.

If you never heard of Indiana, then you sure as hell never would of heard of Mattfield. But this is where the story started. Back then there was a factory here. It sort of give folks a reason for living in Mattfield. Once the plant was gone there weren't a reason no more, and anyone needing work just left. It's kind of quiet now. Fact there's just me.

But this story ain't about now, it's about then. The young guys at the factory, them that couldn't get out of it, was all doing their patriotic duty in Vietnam. Most of 'em had their patriotic duties splattered across some rice field by the Viet Cong. While they was off getting themselves killed, the factory took on women and other second rate people to fill the gaps. Them years saw some odd characters on the shop floor. A lot of 'em couldn't of got work minding street poles nowhere else.

But I'm gonna tell you about two people that was about as different from each other as a lobster and a bank. The only thing they had in common was they was both outsiders, and they got kind of squeezed together by fate.

I'll tell you about what happened to these two. I'll try make it sound like a real story, you know, throw in a few jokes and make you feel like you was there too. I'm new at all this. Here goes.

A pink 63 Chevy pulled up inside a shadow in front of the factory. The driver kicked open the stuck passenger door, got out, hitched up her glittery skirt, and peed on the dust. When she was done, she stayed squatting and looked up at the black walls and the meshed-over windows.

There was two lights over the factory sign. One of 'em was throbbing like a hangover. Their job was to announce to the world that this was, 'ROUNDLY'S POOL AND BILLIARD BALL COMPANY CORP. Established 1928'. She should care less. The paint on the sign was peeling and it was kind of embarrassed by all the attention.

Squatting there with her bare ass sticking out she looked one hell of a queer sight. If she'd been that five year old kid beside a rice field in the middle of Laos, no one would of minded. It was all pretty darn normal when she was a kid. You took your bath in the rain hole with the buffalo. You get the scraps that was left for you. And you stuck out your fanny and peed wherever the mood took you.

But there was different rules in Indiana and Ohio and Pennsylvania, and all them other shit holes she'd drifted through over the past sixteen years. All that drifting was slowly rubbing away the memories of what her home had been like. She didn't have that many to start with: her one and only cloth skirt that she'd scrubbed so many times there was only hope holding it together, the sun roasting her bony back when she gathered the squeaky rice, the mosquitoes chewing away at her when she slept on the bare bamboo slats, and the old witch snoring beside her. There was only about that much left.

And time, the same time that was rubbing away the memories, was making them memories feel a lot better than they deserved to be. Cause if she compared them with what she was now, they wasn't so damn bad.

She sighed, climbed into the back seat, and tried to get some kind of sleep over the next three hours. There weren't nothing to dream about.

"Another frigging factory".

Six blocks south there was a room. It smelled of cremated hamburger cause that's what burned there earlier and smells didn't have nowhere to go. Sounds? Well, there was the ticking of a clock, the wheezing of a busted cistern, the pings of dumb insects butting the light bulb outside, and fat Waldo's watery snoring.

It was some time after three and the quietest time the room ever had. The late drunks and ragers and sex maniacs in the rooms around was all unconscious at last. The wife slappers was slapping other men's wives in their dreams. The bratty kids was smiling sweet like they'd never made no one miserable.

It'd be another 200 minutes before the morning sounds woke up; the throat clearing and screaming, the slamming, crashing, rocking and rolling, motors roaring, glasses smashing, Crispies snap, crackle and popping, coffee bubbling, and miserable babies warbling. Course, that was all other folks' business, but in a stack of apartments thin as cardboard you minded other peoples' business like it or not.

Waldo was busy dreaming about Mexico again.

He's dancing on a sombrero. His old fat legs are going at it like bee wings. You can't hardly see 'em. There ain't no music far as he can hear but he sure is making a mess of that old sombrero. It don't seem odd to him he'd be dancing on it. Hell, it's Mexico. They all dance on their hats in Mexico, right? Least that's what he thought.

But then the dream camera pulls back and all around him is this circle of mean looking Mexican hombres with black moustaches under their noses The more he dances, the more he mashes up that sorry sombrero, and fluffs of material start settling on them black mo's. The Mexicans sure don't like that, and one by one they draw these razor knives and...and that was when Waldo pulled the dream emergency cord and bailed out before it was too late.

He was back in his room swimming in sweat. Why did all his Mexico dreams end up like that? He wiped his shiny black face with the pillow. It was still early but there wasn't no way he was going back into that there dream alone. No way. He couldn't work it out. All his awake Mexico dreams was so happy, but his sleeping ones was blacker'n midnight. It didn't figure.

He walked slowly across to the bathroom. He stood himself under the water rose and turned the tap on. Water come out. It's true. That wasn't such a normal thing in Waldo's place. It only happened if you got in there early enough. The brownish water washed away the sweat and the nightmare, and left him feeling as good as he was likely to feel all day.

But he didn't care about nothing. He wouldn't have to put up with all the crap much longer. Two more months and Mexico wouldn't be a dream no more. Two more months.

Feet shuffled past the pink 63 Chevy, through the gate and into Roundly's. Waldo's feet was among 'em. All the boots made sounds, but the people in them didn't. There was some unwrit rule you had to be as miserable as sin before the siren sounded. These was folks that resented their lives being interrupted by work. They ignored each other till they was forced to be workmates.

Waldo looked at faces he'd been seeing all his life. They'd started off as little round red faces, then went through being pimply, then smooth, then hairy, till they ended up miserable, no-hope faces walking to Roundly's like they was walking to reckoning day. He remembered his grandma telling him how every time you smile at someone and they don't smile back, a bird drops out the sky.

Thirty-eight years ago he tried to smile at everyone in the morning but them faces stayed sour as unwashed milk cartons. So thirty-eight years ago he stopped smiling too. There was too few birds in the sky as it was.

After 7 you might get the odd grin. That's when folk's engines kicked in like old VW vans on cold mornings. Once they started being sociable there was the chance of a conversation or two. But don't you go confusing 'sociable' with 'friendly'. Weren't really no-one on friendly terms at Roundly's. Best buddies arriving at the plant together was likely to be knifing each other by the third week. It was just that kind of place. Some said it was the ball fumes.

Waldo got more bad feeling than most. It wasn't cause he was a nasty person. He was probably the nicest guy at Roundly's. It wasn't cause he was black. He'd been around so long, most people had forgot what color he was (and we'll get on to colour later). Only young punks passing through town tried the 'nigger' thing on him. But they didn't last long at Roundly's. No-one with the initiative to be racist could survive the mind-numbing work at that damn factory.

Waldo had been there since his 27th birthday. He'd done every job in the plant. He knew the habits of every bit of machinery and, you can't take it away from the guy, he could tell you the weight of a pool ball just by looking at it. With all his experience and patience, old Mr. Roundly's alcoholic daughter had no hesitation, or choice, but to name him Quality Control Officer (that's QCO). A position he'd held for seventeen years.

Well, I guess from what you've heard so far, you'd of worked out that the word 'quality' and the word 'Roundly's' ain't exactly kissing cousins. Wasn't nobody in Mattfield could have took the responsibility of being QCO as serious as Waldo did. He didn't let you get away with nothing shoddy. Roundly's probably lasted as long as it did thanks to Waldo. But it didn't make him the most popular guy there. Why would you want to make a billiard ball round when you get paid the same for making it egg-shaped?

Waldo wasn't nothing if he wasn't dedicated. Roundly's owed him a lot. But there comes a time for all men great and small to reach the end of their careers, and Waldo was two months away from making the workers at Roundly's real happy.

***

Waldo carried his belly over to his locker like he was a few days away from giving birth to a medicine ball. He'd had the gut for so long he couldn't imagine being without it. But recently he'd started to notice something about his health. He didn't have none. He'd eaten junk all his life and turned into a big piece of junk himself. He couldn't breath good cause of the lard around his lungs. He was tuckered out just walking the six blocks to work. But he was gonna get in shape for his retirement, starting real soon.

Stage one was diet. Into his locker he put two very long peanut butter and honey sandwiches - baguettes they call 'em - six bananas, four Snickers bars and two cans of Coke. The bananas was his idea. He figured once he got used to them, he could cut down, maybe even leave out the Snickers. The honey was Jessie Jackson's idea. In his wilder, less knowledgeable days, Waldo would of plastered jelly on his sandwich. But he heard the reverend on the wireless once saying that jelly was just fruit coloring soaked in sugar for a month. He convinced half the black mid-west that this was another white plot to incapacitate the colored masses.

So, Waldo, not wanting to be incapacitated for Judgement Day, switched to honey.Honey was after all 100% pure natural sugar with no artificial flavoring or additives. It did concern him for some time that it was pretty much just bee sick, but that was an obstacle he managed to climb over.

He took the industrial goggles and gloves out of the locker and locked it.

"Two more months," he said under his breath. "61 days, 9 1/2 hours, 33 minutes and it'll all be over." He wondered what the people at the resort in Lerdo de Tejada was doing right that minute. Probably not even up yet. Probably sleep to 7:30 or something crazy like that. Go burro-back riding before breakfast. What a life. Them burros was so close he could almost smell them.

But it turned out to be B.O. Bulokavic standing behind him.

"Move your fat arse Waldo."

"Sure, B.O."

On Mondays Bulokavic didn't stink so bad as other days. Rumour had it he even took a shower at weekends, least got close enough to soap to make a difference. Sure if you couldn't get closer 'n handshaking distance on a Monday, you never would all week. He had himself a wife at home. You're probably asking yourself how she could of stood all that stinking. Tell the truth she didn'tknow he smelt bad on account of her not having a nose. Serious.

Seems she got caught in her papa's lawn mower when she was a littl'un. It mashed her head up something horrible. They hurried her off to the hospital in South Bend and the doctors there did a pretty worthy job of stitching her back together. But there weren't nothing they could do about her nose. They reckon the chickens must of got it. So they just plugged the hole and sent her home.

She come out of it looking okay, if you don't think noses are important for looks. At high school she noticed B.O. He was a good-looking boy and she couldn't understand why the girls stayed away from him. She figured B.O was his initials. Getting wed suited the both of them. At the ceremony, B.O. read a poem he'd writ. The line everyone recalls went;

'Between her eyes and headin south, ain't nothin till you reach her mouth."

It was real pretty that. But I'm letting myself get side slapped here. This book ain't about B.O. It's about Waldo. Good story though, eh?

#  Requiem for a Cockroach

S. Tsow humorous articles were a regular delight for many years in Bangkok's English language press including both the Bangkok Post and The Nation. Requiem for a Cockroach is taken from his book called Thai Lite with cartoons also by S. Tsow. It has recently been republished as an ebook.

**The cockroach** , one of Nature's most tenacious creatures, has been with us from time immemorial. It is so superbly designed that throughout the ages it has undergone as little evolutionary modification as the great white shark. Scientists often predict that the cockroach will survive long after man has vanished from the planet.

My relationship with this hardy insect goes back to the halcyon days of yesteryear, when I was living in Taiwan. The cockroaches in Taiwan moved at amazing speed. Often they would come whizzing through the windows like small buzz-bombs. Once they had established a beachhead, they proliferated in the kitchen and the bathroom.

Occasionally it was necessary, in the interests of sanitation, to wage extermination campaigns against this admirable beast. This was an undertaking which always filled me with regret, for I dislike killing even the least of God's creatures.

Even so, when they start getting into the sugar, it is time to gird one's loins for battle.

The Taiwanese cockroaches were practically indestructible. To kill one, you would give it a good whack with a rolled-up newspaper that would splatter it all over the floor. Roachy remains would often extend several inches beyond the crushed carapace of the main corpse. Then, slowly, inexorably, unbelievably, the smashed carcass would stir, draw itself together, and stagger off.

Often, several thorough whackings were necessary to ensure death.

Here in Thailand, I am sorry to report, the cockroaches do not seem to be as hardy or as speedy as their cousins in Taiwan. At least, this applies to the ones that sometimes appear in my kitchen. They seem to have been influenced by Thai culture, in that they are more mellow and _sanuk_. When they move, it's with a stately grace appropriate to the dignity of such an ancient creature. And when they're bashed, they stay bashed. None of the frantic scrabble for survival that afflicts your hyperactive Taiwanese cockroach.

My first encounter with a Thai cockroach occurred shortly after I moved into my apartment. One night I went into the kitchen to get a glass of water, when lo! There on the stove I beheld a large cockroach, blinking from the sudden light and twitching his antennae.

I moved toward him menacingly, expecting him to flee. But he didn't budge. He just stood there, waving his antennae in a friendly manner. He was a big one, about as big as my thumb; and when he finally deigned to move, it was with a dignified self-assurance that won my heart.

I decided to let him live, and named him Sam.

On subsequent evenings, whenever I went into the kitchen for my nightly glass of water, I would see him stationed in his accustomed place, watching me gravely. Over a period of time, I became quite fond of him, especially since he, like myself, seemed to be alone in the world.

I used to engage him in profound philosophical conversations during our nocturnal encounters. Admittedly, these conversations were somewhat one-sided, but Sam always listened appreciatively to my discourses, blinking and waving his antennae to show that he understood. He was an apt student, and showed a special predilection for the finer subtleties of the _Mahaprajnaparamita Sutra_.

Sam alone was no problem. He was a distinguished, elderly cockroach who moved slowly, albeit always with the lordly aplomb of a mandarin. But I was concerned lest he multiply.

"Sam," I addressed him on one early occasion, "let's be friends, you and I."

He nodded and waggled his antennae in agreement.

"But, Sam, our friendship, and your continued existence in my kitchen, is dependent on one contingent factor, which I beg you always to bear in mind. I don't want to see any other cockroaches in here. Our relationship depends on your maintenance of a solitary bachelor mode. The minute any wives or kiddies appear, you're dead meat."

Again he twitched his antennae in concurrence.

What was my horror to behold, then, some weeks later, a smaller, more feminine-looking cockroach sitting with Sam upon the stove. They were billing and cooing like a pair of love-struck teenagers.

I was aghast.

"Sam," I reproached him, "you have failed me. You have broken our covenant. Perfidious insect! Addled by lust, you have ruptured our relationship. Is my companionship not enough? Must you rudely inject this tart, this trollop, this wanton harlot, into the monastic sanctity of our lives? I am disappointed in you, Sam. You have betrayed my trust."

Sam lowered his antennae contritely, as a sign of remorse. But his lady friend waggled her own antennae in an effort to make friends, and my stony heart melted. In a cockroachy way, she was quite attractive, I had to admit; and for an instant I thought I saw her turn to Sam and flutter her eyelashes seductively. I could readily understand how Sam, lonely as he must have been for companionship of his own kind, had been smitten.

"Well, then," I informed them both sternly, "I will make this one compromise. I accept Mrs. Sam into our little household. But, Sam and Mrs. Sam, there is one point on which I will not yield. No children! The minute any little cockroaches appear, you're both dead meat. You and your progeny together. Do you understand?"

They both waggled their antennae in acquiescence, and I thought we had a deal.

By now the reader will have noted my excessive naivete. For Mother Nature will have her way, and it is Mother Nature's way to multiply.

Predictably, some weeks later, I noticed some baby cockroaches scurrying around the sink.

My heart sank. I had given my ultimatum, and there could be no backing down, lest I appear a weakling. The babies were adorable, though, and I softened. Dreading the thought of the massacre that must inevitably ensue, I postponed the day of reckoning as long as possible.

But when the babies multiplied, and when the babies themselves started having babies, there was no turning back. Hardening my heart, I went into the kitchen one evening and smote the whole brood hip and thigh.

On the next evening, I perceived Mrs. Sam scurrying frantically about the sink, evidently in deep grief, seeking her missing children.

"Sorry, Mrs. Sam," I said, and quickly put her out of her misery.

Finally there was only Sam. On the following evening I met him at his usual station on the stove. He blinked at me sadly, and twitched his antennae in a last-ditch effort to restore our shattered friendship. I took a deep breath and rolled up a newspaper.

"Sorry, Sam," I said. "But I did warn you." And I splattered him all over the stove.

There was a tear in my eye as I scraped up Sam's gory remains and flushed them down the toilet to a watery grave. Thenceforward I resolved to dwell alone, hermit-like, with no companion to share my nocturnal musings.

But the cockroach, as I have remarked before, is a hardy creature, and does not let life go easily. A few nights later, I went into the kitchen; and there, blinking at me from the stove, was an apparition that appeared to be Sam resurrected. A closer scrutiny revealed that the cockroach in question was smaller than Sam, though with a definite family resemblance.

It was Son of Sam.

Perhaps, I thought, the son would have learned from the sins of his father. At any rate, it seemed unfair to visit the iniquities of the father upon the son. And I did miss our nightly discussions.

"Son of Sam," I said to him, "in honor of the sacred memory of your esteemed father, I'll let you live. But on one condition, Son of Sam. The minute a wife and kiddies appear. . . ."

He waggled his antennae in agreement, and I could swear I saw him smile.

#  28. Proverbs (suphasit)

### Sweetly Serrated Old Saws

This is taken from Mont Redmond's recently reprinted Wondering into Thai Culture although it first appeared in articles for The Nation back in the nineteen-nineties. To give it its full title, Wondering into Thai Culture or Thai Whys, and Otherwise, is now also available as an ebook.

**Thai is** the language of maxims. Probably no other language in the world, with the possible exception of Chinese, is better suited to deliver the short, sharp strokes of wit that the maxim demands. English sayings, though by no means deficient in content, lack the brevity and suppleness of form to which Thai monosyllabic words, virtually unencumbered by grammar, lend themselves so well. And not only do Thai proverbs often rhyme, with the last word of the first line linked to an early syllable in the next, but their vivacity of meaning and vividness of symbolism make them the ideal figures of speech, so memorable and amusing that the practical wisdom of times past tastes like candy on the tongue. It is such sugar-covered gold dust that has helped to sweeten the typically Thai frame of mind—dexterous, resilient, and ever ready to be entertained.

But Thais are not addicted to sugar; they know as well as the rest of the world that _wan pen lom khom pen ya_ —sweetness gives gas, and bitterness is medicine. Thailand already has too much of a familiar type, namely the sweet-mouthed and sour-bottomed— _pak wan kon priao_. Hypocrites are not always easily identified, although there is usually something to give them away. As in _pak wa ta khayip_ —the mouth speaks, the eye winks—it could reveal itself in a simultaneous dissonance of behavior. Or it may be plain pomposity and self- forgetfulness. One of the most ludicrous expressions for those who pretend to be something they are not is _khangkhok khuen wo_ —a toad on a palanquin. Modern Thailand is so full of these creatures we have almost lost the energy to laugh at them.It is as if the same cleverness that enables Thais to dissemble their opinions of others has sharpened the expression of their true feelings in proverbs. Like a sword in its scabbard— _khom nai fak_ —Thais have a hidden talent for apt criticisms. Thus the truly useless do not just do nothing, but they actually hinder progress, as in _mue mai pai ao thao ra nam_ —the hand does not row, and the foot is left to drag in the water. Thais have a startlingly mordant expression for ingratitude: _kin bon ruean khi bon langkha_ , or eat in the house, then shit on the roof. The gullible are parodied by _chai maeo pai fao pla yang_ , namely, having a cat watch the grilled fish.And weakness in general is exposed by a question: Can a sliver of wood pry open a log?— _mai sik rue ja ngat mai sung_. This faculty for fault-finding should have its limits, of course; otherwise everyone will be _kai hen tin ngu ngu wen nom kai_ —the chicken seeing the snake's feet, the snake seeing the chicken's nipples.

Why, then, is Thai culture so inclined to smoothen out these differences, to remove the excitement of repartee from civilized intercourse? One reason is that straightforwardness is rarely good policy; it creates an abrasive effect symbolized by the saying _lup na pa jamuk_ —stroke the face and stumble on the nose. Sharp criticism rarely produces positive results in Thailand. It could be as futile as _tak nam rot hua to_ (watering a stump) or _pao pi sai hu khwai_ (playing a flute to a buffalo). In many instances the witty retort can backfire by arousing hostility, something like looking for lice to live on one's head— _ha hao sai hua._

Thais are very often aware of how bad a situation is, and even of the reality behind that situation which prevents them from solving it. If you try to advise them when they know quite well what the matter is they will portray your efforts as _son jorakhe hai wai nam_ —teaching a crocodile how to swim. If you accuse their politicians of being short-sighted, they have the saying for that already-- _sen phom bang phukhao_ —a hair obstructing a mountain. If you grumble about officials who pretend to act after the fact (the recurrent water shortage being a classic case), Thais know exactly what to call it: _wua hai lom kok,_ or surrounding the pen when the cattle have gone. Bureaucratic waste is yet another way in which Thais ride elephants to catch grasshoppers— _khi chang jap takataen_. Elephants also figure in the typical administrative cover-up— _chang tai thang thua ao bai bua ma pit_ (covering a dead elephant with a lotus leaf). And so little happens all the while because most government agencies and political parties are engaged in highly complicated balancing maneuvers—prime examples of standing on the gunwales of two boats, or _yiap ruea song khaem_.

Because Thais of the past enjoyed abundant water resources and depended so much on rivers for transportation, many of their choicest maxims refer to navigation and water. Thus we have _jot ruea hai du fang ja nang hai du phuen_ , namely "When docking watch the bank; when sitting watch the floor." This saying alone is the epitome of Thai pragmatism. The difficulty of a subordinate position is graphically illustrated by _kin nam tai sok_ —drinking from under one's elbow. (Try it and see for yourself!) And the ephemerality of all things, especially man's intentions, is again conveyed by water; the wave strikes the shore ( _khluen krathop fang_ ) [but once]... and disappears.

Even intimate human relations in Thailand tend to bear this tint of impermanence. Some couples break up _mai than kon mo khao dam_ —before their rice pot's bottom could turn black. That is because the love that brought them together was _rak sanuk tuk sanat_ —love for fun, which tends to suffering. True love, on the other hand, requires pruning for perpetuity. _Rak yao hai ban rak san hai to_ means "To love long, curtail it; to love briefly, incite [extend] it." Loving (or helping) unwisely is warned against in the well known complaint of the exploited: _nuea mai dai kin nang mai dai rong nang ao kraduk khwaen ko_ , which translates as "I got no meat [from our relationship] to eat, no hide to sit on, but you hang the bones [of blame or responsibility] on my neck." Not even stable monogamous partnerships escape unscathed; no matter how true to form they may be, a state of union that can be characterized as _kin nam prik thuai_ _diao_ (eating from a single dish of chili) must be rather hot stuff.

Amid this instability, Thais can still be counted on to try to improve their status, rendered as "lifting the face, opening the mouth"— _nguea na a pak_. They know that _dan dai ai ot_ (the impudent win, the bashful go without). There are various degrees of comfort worth striving for, explained in _hap di kwa khon non di kwa nang_ (Having a balanced [two-basket] load is better than balancing it oneself [with one basket]; lying down is better than sitting.) And if one's condition cannot be improved, it is not for lack of trying. Maybe _khwang ngu mai phon ko_ —one cannot throw the snake (whatever that is) from one's neck.

Thais have a policy for all of this: the wisdom of moderation. _Kla nak mak muai suai nak mak sao_ means "Too much boldness brings death; too much beauty brings grief." Nothing is absolutely safe, or good. The mirages of this world invite reliance, briefly and meagerly reward it, perhaps, and then finally betray all but the least confiding. What goes round comes round, and is most succinctly expressed in this, the acme of Thai axioms: _nam ma pla kin mot nam lot mot kin pla_. "When the water comes the fish eat the ants; when the water falls the ants eat the fish." The height of true poetry is just such simplicity and truth.

#  Deep in the Heart of Bangkok, Texas

While I was assembling this anthology a friend told me that Washington Square was now just another Bangkok building site for a new shopping mall. Now what Bangkok doesn't need is another shopping mall, but the loss of the bars and restaurants that used to be in this area hurts quite a bit. Washington Square, built around the Washington cinema, is where the following story is set. It comes out of the book, What's Your Name I'm Fine Thank You, by one of the funniest writers ever to work for The Nation and the Bangkok Metro magazine. His name is Roger Beaumont and perhaps the sub-title of the book, now available as an ebook, sums up Roger's view of Thailand best. That sub-title is "Mugged by Reality in Bangkok and Beyond". The book is marvelously illustrated by Hann Win.

**To most** expats in Bangkok, Washington Square was a cinema where movies could be seen in English, the billboard was usually spelt wrong, and dogs of questionable character and motive slept on the steps. I know, because one bit me. The anti-rabies injections cost Bt3,000. The dog's still alive—and worth about a dollar—and lies waiting for me in a fake siesta by the abandoned popcorn stand. Warning!

But there's another, extraordinary world here hidden among the cracked and faded concrete along the eastern side of the cinema. Spread over three nondescript bars called The Silver Dollar, Texas Lonestar, and The Wild Country, is an enclave of America that I always thought existed, but only in other people's imagination.

On the surface, this compact environment is a world of country 'n' western, loud voices, bad vowels, the good, the bad, and the facially challenged. It's frequented by an endless stream of oil workers on R 'n' R, retirees who saw service in Korea and Vietnam, and those who didn't see anything anywhere except Patpong in a drunken haze at the height of the war, and then stayed on for the next twenty years.

There's endless banter recalling "home," as well as complaints about Bangkok and the alleged deviousness of the people they live amongst—or rather don't. Local reality seems to have escaped their notice, and Thailand is another country somewhere else. They have no interest in the culture other than a lifestyle that offers available women, a little business, and cheap rent in a decadent exile. While many have married Thai women, you never see them. Bars aren't for women; well, certainly not your own, and certainly not here.

It's a place where gossip is ripe, yet the truth a fluid concept—and intelligence appears to hum along at a redneck pace slightly below room temperature. It's a bonfire of profanities. It brims with large, bellicose men who "know the price of everything and the value of nothing," as Oscar Wilde once said. To these men, Vivaldi was not a musician, he's a gay bartender in Patpong. This environment doesn't attract attention to itself, doesn't advertise, neither needs nor wants the tourist trade, is self-contained, self-righteous, fascinating, and a fire escape to nowhere. And it became my home.

I lived above the Texas Lonestar for over a year. I am English, and to compound this problem I'm also a guitar player with my own hair. When I checked in, I felt about as popular as a vegetarian at a Dallas barbecue.

"Hey hippy, whyya grow ya hair so goddam long?" asked a bald ageing vet' with a smirk.

"Because I can," I replied with an innocent expression.

Washington Square is a place of legends, both real and imaginary; the men who tell the stories that become the legends, and the legends that become the men who tell them: Yarns from deserts in Saudi, from freezing oil rigs in Northern Russia, of battles half remembered, and of women long departed but still vivid in the memory (and if slightly embellished, what the hell); stories of very serious money earned, won, and lost; men with larger-than-life characters who know their own destinies but argue with them just the same; tales of Laos during the war; the Death Railway; the CIA; the Contra arms deal; Beirut; the Gulf War; Red Adair; and of advice to presidents, monarchs, and dictators.

When the night manager of the Lonestar discovered I liked Miles Davis, I thought he was going to shoot me. Instead, I found an important ally. He put a black arm around my shoulder and said, "Mah _maan_!"

I was in. Into what, I had no idea, but I was in. When I tentatively enquired as to the validity of these stories, he shrugged and said, " _Shoot_ boy! These guys are for real. The man sitting next to you was once the personal press secretary to Reagan. Ask him." I did. He was. Well, that's what he said.

The average age is early fifties, and amidst the raucous anecdotes and serious drinking—"you gotta _learn_ how to drink here, boy!"—there are men of quiet authority and Southern manners; serious achievers with thousand-yard stares and lived-in faces that speak of hard, disciplined lives, and upright integrity. They are well-earthed, experienced, hard to impress. They have a regular pulse. There is blood in their alcohol. They don't look for company but will accept it as long as you don't talk bullshit or golf. Their heroes are country 'n' western singers, football players, former presidents, dead generals, men who work the land, and men who truck the produce.

A sign in the Lonestar reads, " _For those who fought for it, freedom has a taste the protected will never know_." These are proud men, and although America is resented as a place of abode—its society "shot through with drugs, violence, an' welfare"—the country's character is rigorously defended. Its influence on the world rests easy in their souls; its spirit and culture as sacred as a Harley-sized Smith and Wesson.

To such men, these bars represent a taste of home; a sense of bonding and of comfort. You can smell the T-bone, feel the bourbon, fool with the women.

"You leave tip for me pleez?"

"Sure honey. Buy low, sell high."

It's a man's world. Michael Jackson is a "faggot," Clinton a young "dumbass." The only thing they have in common with the president is a taste for cigars—and where to put them. Naturally, they have never inhaled.

These men aren't in Bangkok for any altruistic reasons. There are no budding monks, no spiritual journeys. Some came to make money, some to spend it, many to waste it on a lifestyle they couldn't get away with anywhere else. I've seen money change hands over a single NBA game that an English teacher could only dream of making even if he taught Big Bird to Korean rich-kids for the next millennium.

And then there are those poor souls who've been deprived of alcohol and female company by the sheer geography of their work, and arrive in town on a mission—which usually means a serious demonstration against sobriety. I've seen the door at the Lonestar nearly ripped off its hinges as some madman—usually six foot four, wild-eyed, and crazed after six months in some scorching desert fixing giant earthmovers—hits the bar with a thirst that would make a camel blush.

One such character—let's call him "Crazy John"—who looks remarkably like a creature left over from the eighth episode of _Star Trek_ , drank with intent for 72 hours on arrival.

The night manager and I found him in an alcoholic stupor half way up the stairs at three in the morning in a position only a yoga master could appreciate—stark naked and legs akimbo.

"Mah man, we gotta get a doctor!"

"No," I said. "We gotta get a _camera_!"

And we did.

As in any community, the eccentrics and casualties balance out the seemingly stable and the relatively sober. These bars aren't only a unique microcosm of America, they're also another rich vein of expat life in this city. It may a potting shed to some, but you can find lots of things in potting sheds. I came across it by mistake, and left a year later blinking in the harsh sunlight of reality. I went back to Thailand—which was just outside the door. I made many friends, many contacts, worked hard, ate sensibly, and drank like a fish—deep in the heart of Bangkok, Texas. We come to new countries intending to do certain things, and then a whole lot of different things happen. I like that.

Only once in the entire year did I come close to death. It was late. The bar was packed, primed, and loud. It was someone's birthday. Everyone was very drunk and I kept bumping into old acquaintances who didn't recognise me, and total strangers who did. Some cowboy was wailing through the sound system and I said far too loudly that country 'n' western was just, "Three chords and a cloud of dust."

There was a deathly silence. I froze in terror. I had realised my mistake. But it was too late. I had trodden on sacred ground. I had insulted their holy music. It was like passing wind very loudly in the Vatican and then giggling.

Suddenly the bar was humming with outrage. Someone yelled, "Shoot the sonofabitch!" which soon turned into a chorus. Visualising a rope being thrown over a branch, I did the only thing left open to me; I rang the bar bell.

The drinks bill was so high it should have been delivered by a priest. I was still paying it off a year later. But hey, I'm alive. And grateful. And if you don't believe any of this, then I've got a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.

Now all I have to do is to keep my eye on that damned dog.

#  Boat People

From a hard no-punches-pulled novel by James Eckardt based on some of his experiences working for the US government in the south of Thailand, handling the incoming waves of refugees fleeing Vietnam. Boat People will make you wince and probably cry. The rapes and murders inflicted on the refugees at sea by Thai fishermen will be to Thailand's ever-lasting shame. The politics of aid is well covered in the book. The excerpt below is from one of the early chapters.

### Voyage West

**Asquat** on the kitchen floor, Mother was stirring a pot of rice porridge and in the glow from the charcoal brazier her eyes took on a strange glitter. Embarrassed, Linh looked away. Her older sister, Van, always the outspoken one, asked: "Are you crying?"

"No. Smoke in my eyes. Get the bowls and spoons."

They ate the porridge slowly, savoring chunks of pork, their first since Christmas, nine months ago.

Then Mother was checking their parcels again. She handed each a plastic rosary and a tin Miraculous Medal. At the door she grabbed their necks and pressed their faces to her flat breasts. "Go quietly. Don't look back."

The door shut behind Linh with a soft click but it struck with the finality of a gunshot. Beside her sister, she picked her way down the muddy alley. Mother was behind the door and she was ten paces away now. Mother was alone in the kitchen and she was halfway down the alley. Step by step she would travel till she was halfway around the world and she would never see Mother's face again. Tears stung her eyes, her breath came in shallow choking gasps, her steps faltered; she was about to turn, run back, fling open the door, when she felt her sister grip her upper arm, the thumb digging painfully into muscle.

"Walk, idiot. And you cry, I'll slap your face."

"Shut up. I hate you." She snatched her arm back and quickened her pace, feeling shame at her weakness, anger at her sister, and some pride too, because her words had come out so firmly, and by the time she reached the end of the alley she had blinked away her tears.

*

The southbound bus was already crowded but the sisters found seats together. People soon crammed the aisle, perched on baskets and bundles — farmers talking in the sing-song drawl of the Mekhong Delta. Mother had warned them to stay silent lest their city accents betray them but the excitement of leaving Saigon — the sight of ripening rice fields, lumbering water buffalo, the rice plain stretching away to the horizon, so much space and light, the highway wide and straight now, the bus picking up speed, passing over bridges spanning sluggish brown water — became too much for Van who began babbling happily about the time she had gone to the seashore at Vung Tau, when Father had been free and drove a red Citroen; she remembered the blue sea, the taste of Coca Cola and chocolate ice cream, sitting with Father under an umbrellaed table by the beach. "But you're too young. You don't remember anything but the city."

Linh nodded, still too timid to speak.

Van smiled at her. "You'll be seeing the sea soon."

*

Police checks, a flat front tire, ferry crossings of the Mekhong at Hung Thuan and Can Tho — the bus took nine hours to reach Rach Gia. The sisters were met by the buck-toothed woman who had sat in Mother's kitchen a month ago and, after much haggling, accepted five gold taels for their passage.

"Ten minutes more," the woman muttered irritably. "I'd have let you sleep in the station."

They trudged after her down streets meandering away from the town center. Then they halted under a mango tree where a bullock stood hitched to a high-wheeled cart. From a nearby noodle shop, wiping his lips, limped a thin old man in tattered shorts and singlet. "Get in the cart, little sisters," he murmured, giving them a toothless smile. "And keep your mouths shut."

At sunset they were bouncing down a red dirt road between a paddy field and a stand of coconut palms when they saw, up ahead, an orange sun setting over a placid green sea. But even this sight was not enough to keep them awake for long. When they were roused and helped down from the cart, the night was damp and cool and pitch black. Behind the old man's flashlight they stumbled silently down a sandy path bordered by banana trees till they reached an attap hut on stilts. Inside, dimly lit by a single kerosene lamp, a dozen families sat bunched around their bundles. A few people turned to stare at the sisters. Embarrassed, they crouched together near the doorway. The old man scuttled over, holding out two bowls of rice topped with boiled cabbage and _nan ngoc._ The sisters rapidly shoveled rice into their mouths, having eaten nothing but sugar candy since Saigon. The old man hunkered companionably beside them and lit a corn-husk cigarette. "You leave tonight. Or maybe tomorrow."

*

They were the last to leave.

On a muddy bank amid a cloud of mosquitoes they squatted together and watched the old man pole away a crowded sampan. He slid to the edge of the channel and soon disappeared into the shadow of the mangroves, his movement reflected only by a moonlit glimmer of ripples from the sampan's wake.

"Why won't you tell me your name?" the boy whispered again. In his mid-teens, with big ears and a bristly crewcut, he had volunteered to keep the sisters company.

"I've told you I'm Nguyen Xuan Tong," the boy persisted. "Why are you being rude?"

"Le Thuy Van."

Giggling, Linh poked Van with an elbow for being so bold.

"And your little sister's name?"

"Ask her yourself."

"Your name, little sister?"

Linh giggled louder.

"Quiet!" Van hissed. "Her name is Linh."

"From Saigon?"

"Yes."

"Only you two? Where are your parents?"

"Father is in prison camp. He was a colonel."

"Lieutenant colonel," Linh corrected.

"Quiet."

The boy clucked his tongue sympathetically. "Majors and colonels are getting sprung now. Maybe they'll let your father go too."

Van shook her head. "Before, when he was near Hue, the camp chief wanted twelve taels for the papers. But now he's in the North. Mother took a train three days to see him. He could only talk at the gate for ten minutes. He says he'll die soon and wants us to go to America."

"Any family there?"

"No."

"I have two uncles in Texas. Come stay with me."

Van smiled, covering her teeth with her hand. "Foolish boy."

*

The sampan glided slowly into open water, wavelets slapping the bow. Linh saw a black hull take shape in the light from a quarter moon, then faces in the windows of a tall wheelhouse astern, a mass of dark bodies lining the upswept bow. The sampan slid alongside the hull; men reached down and helped Linh, Van and Tong climb up to the deck.

"It's too _small,"_ Van whispered when they were settled on the fish hatch. The boat was no longer than ten meters. Forty men, women and children squatted haunch to haunch, jammed to the gunnels between wheelhouse and bow. "That woman promised we'd have a _big_ boat."

"But it floats, right?" Tong said. "Some people pay gold and get nothing. This is my second try." Tong's face — crewcut, pimpled cheeks, grinning teeth — was suddenly illuminated by the beam of a powerful flashlight. He threw a hand over his eyes. The light swept closer over the water. A low moan of fear rose from the crowd on deck. The light went out. From the darkness came a low hoarse cry: "Dinh! Dinh! Nguyen Chu Dinh."

"Who is it?" growled a voice up in the wheelhouse.

"Huyan Anh!"

"Motherfucker."

"I'm coming with you. With twenty boys from Tan Hoi."

"No!"

"There's no room!" a woman cried.

A long river skiff darted out of the darkness and pulled alongside. Young men clambered over the rail, stumbling over the people huddled on deck. Others tossed up rice bags and plastic water jugs.

"Off my boat!" roared the man in the wheelhouse.

"We come too, Dinh!" called a thin man at the helm of the skiff. "We don't come, we tell the police."

"Motherfucker."

More young men were scrambling aboard, cursing, laughing, smelling of homemade whiskey. They forced themselves over the hatch, shoved aside the Saigon people, squirmed and elbowed themselves into place. Tong, Van and Linh were pushed far up the bow. Scampering barefoot along the rail, the thin man approached the wheelhouse. "Dinh! Keep a cool heart, brother! We've brought ten liters of diesel."

"How did you find out?"

"Dinh! Dinh!" the thin man laughed. "Who can hide from my spies?"

*

The bow would smack into a surging wave and cold seaspray drench the people packed on the foredeck. Some yelped in shock; others laughed shyly. Along the rail some Saigon people were being sick but on the hatch the Tan Hoi boys, fishermen and farmers, were swapping bawdy jokes and laughing loudly. Astern, the mangroves were a low smudge on the horizon. The sun burned overhead in a cloudless sky and the water was clear blue and those Saigonese not seasick conversed softly among themselves, smiling in the cheerful realization that they were out of Vietnam for good now. Three hundred miles west lay the coast of Thailand.

Tong kept his arm around Linh to shield her from the spray. In his other hand he cupped an American Marlboro. As insurance against the police, he had kept three packs, worth 120 dong on the black market — a cop's monthly salary. He had given the sisters Dramamine pills and some dried mango and now they called him "em gai", older brother. He couldn't help liking Linh, such a nice, cute, dumb kid. And Van was a beauty: tall, smooth-cheeked, plump-lipped, pale skin reddening in the sun now, broad cheekbones tapering to a delicate chin, eyes set wide beneath unplucked brows and thick black bangs. Her breasts jutted high and round under a coarse blue-cotton farmer's blouse and Tong struggled to keep his eyes politely averted. Van spoke with formal pronouns and an appealing reserve, as befitted an upper class virgin, but laughed quickly enough at his stories of Saigon streetlife.

"The medicine game's not bad but you need a steady supply from America. Penicillin, tetracycline, paregoric, sulfanilamides. I managed to trade up a bit of stock in Cholon but it was all small scale. The thing is to lay up a fat supply and hustle it out in the countryside. Hicks never see so much as an aspirin and they'll even trade duck and chicken. That's where the real money is, back in Saigon. Later a Chinese kid got me into rubber sandals. His grandfather's got a factory, pays off the cops and party cadre, sends kids selling on the street. I moved quick from selling to making sandals, first piecework, then on contract with kids working for me. I can always make sandals in Texas but my uncles wrote me that I don't have to work at all, the Americans give you money to go to school. I had to quit school when I was twelve."

Curled up beside Linh, her chin resting on forearms folded on the rail, Van asked, "How old are you now?"

"Sixteen."

"Me too. I had to quit school too. They were always giving us trouble because of Father. Teachers called us 'class enemies'. Sundays they made us dig all day in the school garden. They like to punish us, make fun of us. Police are always coming to our house. Mother was a nurse at Central but after '75 she was fired, so now—"

"When do we get to Thailand?" Linh interrupted.

"Three days," Tong said. "There's a camp on the beach with plenty of food and a school to learn English. The Americans take everyone out and fly them to California. Don't you listen to the radio? They tell you everything on the BBC."

"We don't have a radio," Van said. "Mother is afraid of the police."

"Still, there are other ways. All those stories about Thai fishermen. People on the street talk."

"Mother doesn't like us talking to people. She's afraid."

Tong knew the type. After '75 some people struggled back — a newspaper editor selling pens on the street now, a police captain mending bicycle tires — but others hid in their homes, or the room or two still allotted to them, and slowly parcelled away hoarded dollars and jewelry and gold. Ripe targets for thieves, they were even more afraid of the police.

"I don't understand," Linh said. "What do people say about Thai fishermen?"

Tong shrugged and pursed his lips. How stupid can you be?

"Nothing. You meet them at sea. Sometimes they ask you for money."

*

By sundown Nguyen Chu Dinh had been at the helm for fourteen hours. He had steered a course 240° from Rach Gia, passing south of the islands of Rai and Nam Du, staying far out of the range of the big island further north, Phu Quoc, with its seaplanes and patrol boats. He was nearing Hon Tho Chau now. Another half hour and it would be dark and he would take a bearing off the island's four beacons and set course for Thailand. His brother could take over the helm then, there being nothing ahead but open sea. Next morning they would be out of Vietnamese waters.

Crowded into the wheelhouse were Dinh's wife and four children, his two brothers, their wives and children, and Huyan Anh, his skinny, shifty-eyed, worthless cousin from Tan Hoi. The women and children slept on the wide shelf behind the bench where his younger brothers were stretched out, dozing lightly. In the doorway stood Huyan Anh, smoking cigarettes and boasting slyly of the money he had made from the Tan Hoi boys.

They had all made money from this trip — the Saigon organizers had laid out 35 taels — but Dinh was wondering if anyone would live to spend it. Crammed over every surface, from wheelhouse roof to bow, were thirty men, eighteen women, twenty children. The boat was riding low in the water but the engine was good, a Noda 113, larger than necessary for such a small boat, and if 310 liters of diesel oil held out and the weather . . . the clouds ahead had better break or those people on deck were in for a long wet night.

Dinh, 37, the oldest man aboard, had begun as a boy in long-tailed skiffs purse seining trash fish along the coast and became, at nineteen, partners with his brothers in a small stern-winch trawler, chasing the shrimp schools, and then his pride ten years later, an 18 meter otterboard trawler which would sweep for weeks across the Gulf and the South China Sea till his holds were stuffed with bluewater fish: tuna, mackerel, bonito, sea bass, snapper . . . He had been smart enough to sell his big trawler a month before "Liberation Day", figuring that the new government would let him keep his ten-meter stern-winch. What he had not reckoned on was the price of diesel shooting up to ten dong a liter. You could always buy diesel at the government dock at two dong but then you had to sell your catch back to them at 600 percent below the black market price. The trick, of course, was to buy government diesel and then dump the bulk of your catch on the black market. If you were caught you'd lose your boat or go to jail or get slapped with a bribe that would break you just as easily. And the cadre on the government dock kept trying to convince him to sign over his boat and work for a salary. He evaded them as politely as possible, but someday they would grow weary of persuasion and simply confiscate his boat. Then generously offer him a job as captain.

Which wouldn't be all that bad. Though you could never feed a family on a government salary, you could deal more comfortably on the black market as a charter member of the bribery chain. But they would also station an armed seaman on board to ensure that he did not forget to return to port. Friends of his were playing host to a government "guest" whenever they shipped out. It was only a matter of time . . . So best of all: turn everything into gold and go to America and buy a new boat. Three Rach Gia men had sent letters from Louisiana with photos of their boats and houses and cars. All you had to do was get across three hundred miles of the Gulf of Thailand and not drown.

"There's a boat behind us," Huyan Anh said softly.

_"What?"_ Dinh dropped the wheel and bulled through the doorway, shoving aside Huyan Anh. It was growing dark to the east and it took Dinh a few moments to spot a black bow and wheelhouse rise on a wave crest 500 meters away.

"Motherfucker."

"They got an AK-47, we're in trouble. They might settle for gold."

"But if they're Navy and Northerners and greedy, they might want the boat."

"So?"

"Our engine's bigger and if they've got a full load in their hold . . ." Dinh opened the throttle full bore. The new engine rhythm instantly roused his two brothers.

"What's happening?"

"Trawler astern, might be after us. I'm bearing away. See if they follow." Dinh swung his boat forty degrees southeast.

Minutes later: "They're following."

"Motherfucker."

"Half hour it'll be dark. They can't chase us then."

"If we can keep ahead."

Ranked along the western horizon were red-orange cloud turrets, their upper reaches dimming to ochre and purple. The boat was slanting crossways into an oncoming sea; waves slapped the port bow and a burst of seaspray fell on the foredeck, waking those who had dozed off. Someone shouted and pointed toward starboard and everyone could see now, silhouetted against the cloudbank, a black trawler, red yellow-starred flag flapping atop the wheelhouse, and a man at the bow waving a rifle over his head.

"They're riding high. Not much in their hold."

"They got antenna too."

"Probably radioing Phu Quoc."

Dinh kept maneuvering westward. The black trawler moved parallel, still 300 meters away, barely visible in the gathering darkness.

"They'll never close now. They'll have to give up."

"If they don't have a spotlight—"

"They don't. They'd have flashed it by now."

"Ai!" Huyan Anh yelped happily. "Bye bye, Vietnam!"

Dinh pulled the wheel another twenty degrees, due west now, away from Hon Tho Chau, exposing his starboard flank. He turned and saw the trawler rise on the crest of a wave and then two flashes of light from its bow, followed by two sharp _pops,_ then a burst of popping sounds like a string of firecrackers.

"Get down!"

"Don't stop! Don't stop!"

The men crouched down in the wheelhouse; wives and children cowered deeper against the stern bulkhead. Out on the hatch people flattened themselves on the deck. At the bow a girl flew through the air, arms flailing, face exploding in a red mist of blood. She landed on the deck and the crowd screamed and shrank away, wiping blood off themselves.

*

An AK-47 bullet, copper-jacketed lead-antimony alloy, with a muzzle velocity of 4,000 feet per second, slows down over a distance of 300 meters to less than 3,500 feet per second which was still quite enough when it entered her left eyesocket to smash what little cartilage there was to Linh's flat nose and exit out the far end of her other socket, having the effect on her eyeballs of a sledge hammer upon a pair of grapes.

***

As rain lashed the deck above, they huddled in the blackness of the hold, cramped together, lurching to the whim of the waves, cold, wet, sleepless in the reek of fish and bilge and vomit and the screeching of terrified children.

Tong climbed out of the hold when the eastern sky began to lighten. Rain still fell steadily but the wind had dropped and the boat plowed steadily through a heavy grey swell. Tong lurched astern down the pitching deck. Linh lay where he had carried her: on a straw mat on the wheelhouse floor. Both the mat beneath her head and the bandages over her eyes were soaked with blood.

On the bench above, Van was rummaging through Tong's satchel. "Looking for something?" he asked.

"I'm sorry." Van's cheeks were streaked with salt tracks, smeared with blood where she had wiped away tears. "More pills?"

Tong shook his head helplessly. "What I gave her only knocks her out. When she wakes up, there'll be nothing to kill the pain."

*

All day they moved west. Clouds raced ahead over a sunny blue vault. People dehydrated from seasickness kept dipping into the water cask. At noon the captain's wife brought a cauldron of rice out on deck. The crowd surged forward, shouting, scuffling, elbowing each other. From the wheelhouse Dinh cursed them into silence. He ordered the rice rationed equally, one cup apiece, notwithstanding the grumbling of the Rach Gia people that the Saigonese had contributed nothing.

By sundown, the water cask was scraped dry. After supper, while the crowd lolled about on deck, drowsy after the long day of sunlight and salt wind, the eyeless girl began screaming.

*

Linh shrieked, gagged, moaned, thrashed about, tore at the bandages over her eyes. Van cradled the bloody head in her lap; Tong gripped Linh's hands and kept her swaddled in a blanket. Towards dawn, Linh subsided into drowsy whimpering. Van nodded off to sleep, awakening mid-morning so stiff and cramped that Tong had to help her down to the deck to wash her blood-sticky arms in seawater and exchange her gory blouse for Tong's spare teeshirt.

Crouched against the rail, Van laid her cheek on her arm, saw a speck of red against the blue horizon and barely had time to wonder if this was a ship before tumbling into a dreamless sleep.

She was awakened by a sudden eerie silence as the boat engine was shut off. Men were shouting in a strange language. A dark, stocky, barechested teenager teetered on the rail nearby, a rope in hand, his baggy brown trousers flapping in the wind. He leapt down to the crowded deck and kicked aside some children to tie the rope to a cleat. Towering alongside, a 20-meter trawler pitched and rolled: tall red prow, three tiers of blue shutters lining a white superstructure, black fishing net dangling from a boom, stacks of straw baskets on the wheelhouse roof and in the doorway a fat man waving a pistol.

" _Gold_!" he yelled in English. " _Dol-lah A-meh-ree-ka_!"

Scowling young men jumped on deck, brandishing knives, hammers, hatchets. Dinh shouted down from the wheelhouse: "Give them what they want!" Men and women handed over pieces of gold, pulled off rings and wristwatches, rummaged in their baggage for dollars. As the fishermen pocketed their loot, they grew more relaxed and cheerful.

Van was relieved to see Tong scuttle over and squat beside her. "Don't be afraid," he said, smiling weakly.

"But I have nothing to give them."

"That's okay."

"Ow beah leu leu!" Glowering down at them now was a husky young Thai with a round pockmarked face. A wispy mustache drooped over the corners of his mouth; long hair, sunstreaked and tangled, hung in greasy ringlets over his shoulders. Tattooed on his smooth brown chest was a tiger's head surmounted by lines of curlicued script. In one hand he held a rusty hammer. "Mon- _nee_!"

Tong handed up a twenty-dollar bill and a small gold ring. The fisherman paused to give Van a slow, appraising look. Tong slid his arm around her. Van stared down at the deck, at two bare brown feet, rough and cracked, the toes splayed, one big toe missing a nail. She closed her eyes, trembling. When she opened them again, the feet were gone.

Dinh held high a five-liter water jug and shouted to the fat man in the opposite wheelhouse, _"No water!"_

_"Okay, okay."_ The fat man beckoned him aboard. Dinh and his brothers returned with six full water jugs. The Thai crew reboarded their boat, cast off lines, and as the big trawler pulled away, they waved and smiled. _"Thailand! Thailand!"_ the fat man shouted, pointing his pistol westward.

At noon rice was cooked and water passed around. Three hours later, two boats appeared astern.

*

Boxed in port and starboard, secured by hawsers at bow and stern, Dinh's boat bobbed between two Thai trawlers. The hulls drifted apart, then bumped together, cushioned by tires dropped over the sides. A dozen Thai swarmed over the deck, furious that people had so little to give them. They yanked the adults to their feet, shook them, waved knives in their, faces, tore apart bundles and packs, thrust their hands into men's pockets and down women's brassieres. Belongings were strewn all over the deck.

A long-haired teenager in a faded sarong pointed at Tong and shouted in English, " _You_!" Tong was ready with pack of Marlboros and a single gold earring. The Thai reached out and unzipped Tong's Levi jeans. "Tawt gangang," he said, motioning for him to strip. As Tong waited in his underpants, the Thai checked the jean pockets, came up with a few crumpled dong notes, tossed them overboard, and slung the jeans over his shoulder. He pointed at Van and snapped his fingers.

Sitting on her heels, eyes downcast, Van opened her bundle for inspection. She watched a big brown hand toss her underwear out on the deck, her rosary, cellophane packet of identity documents, photos of her parents. Another hand slid under her chin, fingered the Miraculous Medal around her neck, then plunged down her teeshirt. She stayed motionless, her heart beating wildly, as a callused palm groped roughly over her breasts. Fingertips found her left nipple and squeezed. She flinched and cried out and heard the boy snigger. Suddenly people were screaming and stampeding off the hatch. Turning aside, the boy pulled his hand away. A wild-eyed old man was prancing around the hatch, swinging a meat cleaver in circles. He lifted a half-empty sack of rice, swung it over his head and flung it into the sea. Then, as the other Thai crewmen hooted and laughed, he heaved overboard the water jugs.

*

That night there was no food and no water.

Burning with fever, babbling in delirium, Linh gave off a foul putrescent stench. Sometime after midnight she lost consciousness.

Tong stepped down from the wheelhouse and took a deep breath of clean salt air. The sea rolled gently under a star-strewn sky; wisps of cloud scudded past the quarter moon. Van sat with her back to the rail, knees drawn up, head bowed into folded hands. At first Tong thought she was asleep but as he approached she looked up and released from her hands the tin medal.

"Praying?"

"Yes." Van gave him a wry smile. "All class enemies believe in God."

"I believe in nothing," Tong said, lowering himself to the deck. "But then, I'm only a social parasite."

Van kissed the medal and slipped it under her teeshirt.

"You really think that piece of tin will save you?" Tong asked, repenting at once as Van covered her face and released a long shuddering sob. "Ai-yah!" Tong cried in shock and pity. He put his arm around her, pressed her wet face against his chest. "Keep a cool heart now," he murmured. "Cool, cool heart . . ." Her shoulders heaved under his arm, but then she slapped his chest, sat up straight, ducked her face to wipe it on the bottom of her teeshirt.

"I was only praying for Linh," she said in a quivering voice.

"Better you pray for a doctor. Long-nose doctors meet you on the beach . . . Captain Dinh says tomorrow night, maybe, we reach Thailand." Ashamed of making her cry, Tong added: "Let me see your medal."

It was too dark to make out the figure on the medal but Tong asked who it was anyway.

"Our Lady of Lourdes."

"Who?"

"The Virgin Mary. Over a hundred years ago she appeared to Saint Bernadette in France. A spring came out of the grotto at Lourdes and since then people wash in the waters and get cured. On the walls hang ten thousand crutches to prove it. Our Lady of Lourdes has cured people of polio, and blindness, and cancer—"

Maybe she'll cure us of drowning, Tong stifled the urge to say and listened as Van prattled about Our Lady of Fatima too, her promises given with the rosary and her prophecy of three world wars and the final conversion of Russia . . . Van's head was on his shoulder now, his arm wrapped tight around her. Tong in turn told stories about the fabulous riches of Texas. He was describing one of the greatest wonders — a tape cassette you pushed into a television set that showed any movie you wanted — when he noticed that Van's breathing had turned deep and regular. He peered downward: her face was tranquil in the moonlight, mouth slack, eyes closed. My girlfriend, he thought.

He had never had a girl all to himself. On Tu Do street the last year of the war — begging, running errands for bargirls, hustling marijuana sticks to the last Americans — he had occasionally slipped his little prick into a doped-up hooker or had it sucked by one of the gang of queens who hung out near the Continental Hotel. Since then he'd rented women as he needed them — just another transaction on the street — all women lucky to have been born with something to trade. In Saigon, he would have been ignored by a girl like Van, or despised. But on this boat they were equals, and would be in America too . . .

He slid his hand lower and gently cupped Van's breast, deciding to protect her as if she were his wife. Maybe — why not? — she would be someday.

#  Nirvana Express

### Day Zero: Inner Voices

Opus 50 was S.P. Somtow's 50th book. Nirvana Express describes how he left America to become, just for a while, a Buddhist monk in Bangkok. Opus 50 is available as an ebook.

**The path** from birth to death is a journey without a road map. Destinations, geography, and weather conditions are all hidden from us. There are no signposts save those we have erected in our own minds, no tourist brochures save those we have ourselves manufactured with the tools of imagination.

This is not a story I have ever dreamed of telling.

It begins, like Dante's _Divine Comedy,_ though far less poetically, in the middle of the road of life ... more precisely, the Sacramento Freeway, an endless-seeming expressway that arrows its way through the parched hills of Western California.

It is a Friday morning in San Francisco, the morning after one of the most thrilling experiences of my career — a reception to launch my opera _Madana_ in the United States. It has been an amazing night, a artsy loft party crammed with music enthusiasts and fans as well as potential sponsors, getting to rub shoulders with opera directors and famous philanthropists — being lionized.

The next few weeks are sure to be full of exciting things. I have just made contact with a new publisher who is enthusiastic about a possible new novel. The British producer of a film based on my novel _Jasmine Nights_ has just attached a brilliant director to the project. There is talk of new operas, new horizons.

But an hour after I wake up that morning — on the drive home to Los Angeles — something very strange happens. I decide to become a Buddhist monk. Less than twenty-four hours later, I am on a plane to Thailand. A week later, I am having my head shaved and preparing to utter the first of a string of long phrases in an ancient language I can barely understand.

No one expected this to happen, least of all myself. I am very much a person attached to the physical world; I am deeply involved with worldly things. I love to party. I stay up all night discussing fine music and great literature, or pounding away at one of my computers. I devour films, plays, and gourmet cuisine. In fact, the notion of monks not being allowed to eat after twelve noon has always frightened me; that's about when I would normally wake up; I've always felt that if I had to live as a monk, I wouldn't be able to eat at all since I would never be awake at times when one is allowed to eat.

My lifestyle is very remote from what one thinks of as Buddhism — renunciation, detachment from desire, meditation, inward journeys. Though born in Thailand, I left when I was six months old, and was barely able to speak the language as a child; even now, I am at best semiliterate in it. In the moment that I hear the inner voice, I probably knew far more about the religions of the west — and even about Hinduism — than about Theravada Buddhism as it is practiced in Thailand.

And yet, that Friday morning, comes the inner voice. "You must go to Thailand and enter a monastery." It startles me, nodding off in the back seat of my friend's van, as we race down the freeway through the hills of California ... hills the same deep ochre that you find in the robes of Buddhist monks.

I am not one to obey inner voices — or even to hear them. Yet this urge is so powerful that within moments I take out my cell phone, telephone my travel agent in Los Angeles, and book a flight for the next day. That evening, I send a fax to my parents, who live in San Francisco but are on an academic summer break in Bangkok, letting them know that I intend to become a monk.

My life has been a quest without a grail... a relentless journey from country to country, gathering data, spewing out books and, sometimes to great acclaim, sometimes simply into the void ... an odyssey of sorts. Perhaps I have finally arrived at the mid-life crisis I have been avoiding for so long. After all, at my age, I am still playing at being the _enfant terrible,_ rather than the _eminence grise._ Perhaps it is time to change roles.

Truth is a sudden thing, like lightning. I know with an unparalleled clarity that it is time to embark upon a more difficult journey, to explore that which I had never yet dared explore.

At the time, I have no clue about what Buddhist monks actually _do._ I know that my parents will be pleased at my decision, but I don't really know why. I know that monkhood is a rite of passage that millions of Thai men, from the King himself all the way down to the poorest peasant, have gone through; that monkhood is a cultural bond that goes beyond the elaborate class system of Thai society. But I have never felt the need to be a part of that bond.

I know that monks walk around at dawn with begging bowls, but I have no idea what else they do. I know they sit around chanting those hypnotic Pali texts, but have no concept of what the texts mean, or who wrote them. I don't even know how one goes about becoming a monk; does one simply show up at the front door of the temple with a shaved head and a bag of robes? Had I known, I would perhaps have hesitated. Ignorance, indeed, is bliss.

I have a friend named Sharon who lives in a mountain hideaway in Georgia. Though she seldom ventures from her home, she speaks to dozens of people daily through the magic of the internet. She is a psychic. Not a professional, in that she doesn't answer questions for money; but she is noted enough to have been asked by the police to help locate a murderer ... successfully. Sharon goes into a trance and speaks (or types into her computer) in the voice of an entity named Tomm. Twice a week, she gets together with an online group of psychics, and she has what amounts to a convention, in which people sit around at their computers channeling in tandem.

Of course, one doesn't really know whether "Tomm" exists, or whether he has been created by Sharon's own perfervid mind. And yet, whatever belief system one subscribes to, Tomm always seems to have something eerily prophetic to say. She describes his messages as extremely vivid images.

For months, Sharon has been seeing an image of me. From time to time, she has been telling me about it. It's me standing beside a lotus. The lotus keeps coming closer and closer. The lotus is, of course, a Buddhist symbol, but she doesn't know this. I have told her so, but I do not see its relevance to my life. Buddhism has been the farthest thing from my mind, until this sudden epiphany.

I decide to telephone her now, from the car. "I'm going into a monastery in Thailand," I tell her.

"I know," she says. "I saw it yesterday."

Psychics can be really smug at times.

It is Sunday midnight when I get to Bangkok, and on Monday morning I go to see a very famous Jao Khun (Venerable) at one of Bangkok's most respected temples. Since I will not disturb anyone's privacy in this memoir, I will not use the name of any monk here, nor will I name the temple itself. It is not one of those huge tourist temples, but it is in the heart of old Bangkok, bordered on one side by one of the few canals that still has water; other, more celebrated tourist attractions are not far, and Khaosan Road, where the backpackers gather, is a few minutes away.

Built by the most learned of all the kings of the Ratanakosin era, the temple is reached through a labyrinth of alleyways. A solitary gilded pagoda rears up above the pointed eaves, richly tiled in crimson and viridian. The Jao Khun's kuti, or dwelling place, is a few steps away from an unpretentious noodle stand; a swinging metal gate is a secret entrance to the complex. I am destined to enter the inner world through a back door.

This particular Jao Khun has gained fame as an astrologer, and so I call him the Seer. He has dedicated his life to the monkhood since his early twenties; now in his seventies, he has created quite the fiefdom within the monastic world. He has done so by obstinately refusing to accept money, unlike some other well known clerics in Thailand; when people ask to donate large amounts of cash to his charitable projects, he tells them to keep the money in their own name, letting only the interest be used for the charities. As a result, he sits atop a towering pyramid of resources, and has endowed scholarships for poor children, built Thai temples in the U.S. and Scandinavia, and has created a temple with an accompanying school for young novices outside Bangkok. As senior monks go, he is considered something of a saint.

The Seer holds court in a modest chamber; he sits on a low bed surrounded with cushions, and lined against the walls are chairs which actually appear to be recycled car seats. It's very ecology-conscious. The Jao Khun is as large and rotund as a Chinese Ho Tai or Laughing Buddha statue, and he seems to have been expecting me. "It just so happens," he tells me, "that, even though we never take in new monks at this time, your room is ready and waiting."

Since the Seer is well known for predicting the future, this should not, I suppose, surprise me. Then the Seer says, "Well, all you have to do is memorize the ritual for admittance into the monkhood — it's only a few pages long — and we're all set."

This is my first indication that becoming a monk isn't simply a matter of ringing the bell at the temple gates and shaving one's head. It seems there is a complex ritual involved, and I must formally ask, not once but three times, to be admitted into monkhood ... and that I will be officially interrogated as to my qualifications by two senior monks. The language of all these exchanges is Pali, a language of ancient India.

The Lord Buddha didn't want to use Sanskrit, the language of the Hindu scriptures, as the language of his revolutionary new philosophy, because twenty-five hundred years ago this was already an ancient language. The idea of using Pali was that it was, at the time when Buddha walked the earth, a spoken language which people could immediately understand. The situation is somewhat analogous to the use of Latin in the Catholic Church up until the middle of the Twentieth Century; the Latin translation of the bible was called the "Vulgate" because it was in the vulgar tongue, that is to say, the language of ordinary people. As the centuries passed, these "common languages" became more and more uncommon. And thus it was that I found myself staring at a lengthy and enigmatic text, wondering when I would have it committed to memory enough to gain admittance to the inner world.

My next hurdle is an interview with the Lord Abbot of the Monastery, who wields great power within the walls of that world. The abbot is a stickler for tradition; he is also an extremely famous meditation guru, whose 7-day meditation course has earned him enormous attention in this country and even abroad. Here I shall call him the Guru.

The guru is gruff at first. He complains about my posture, my manner of performing the five-point prostration, a traditional gesture of respect towards the Buddha and his living representatives; and he tells me he won't put up with becoming a monk just for a lark. "I want you to take Buddhism seriously, and I want you to enroll in my seven-day intensive meditation workshop starting on day one," he tells me.

I explain to him how the insistent inner voice sent me on this journey, and how I really know nothing at all about what I am about to experience; my mind is a blank page.

He says, "Well, such a voice could be one of your ancestors, crying out for a descendant to put on the yellow robes to ease his lot in the afterlife."

He then launches into a fascinating story about his student days in Benares. He tells me how deceased children and sages are not cremated there, but are tossed bodily into the Ganges; sometimes they float, and the birds of prey swoop down and have at them as they bob up and down in the river. "I was sitting by the river, eating my curry," he says, "when a little piece of small intestine landed — plop — right in my dish!"

Only later do I realize that this grisly tale is intended as a prelude to the formal meditation on the impermanence of the physical body.

"I've been studying the Pali text I am supposed to say," I tell him, "but I think I probably need a couple of days."

"Nonsense," the Guru tells me, "if your heart is ready, you can learn it in a jiffy." He then sets my admission ceremony for two days hence. "And by the way," he continues, "we don't pronounce our Pali the same way as in other temples. Here, we attempt to pronounce it exactly as it was pronounced during the time of the Lord Buddha himself — retroflex consonants and all."

Then, sensing my despair, he teaches me a trick for sitting in the awkward _phabphieb_ position. At my age, and never having had to sit in those positions, it's weird, but to my astonishment, the guru's trick actually succeeds in allaying my discomfort for some minutes. I begin to suspect that beneath his punctilious exterior he is a compassionate soul, full of tenderness and concern.

Nonetheless, the Pali text, with its lilting rhythms and strange consonant clusters, almost makes me give up. As the dreaded day approaches, and my relatives all get in on the act, worrying about what I shall wear and who will supply the robes and begging-bowl, I become decidedly conflicted about the whole thing. I try placing the text under my pillow, thinking that perhaps I will absorb its contents while I sleep.

Just before dawn, I awaken from an astonishingly vivid dream.

I'm already in the temple in the dream, in a foyer or entrance hall, which is suffused with an incandescent light. Someone is exhuming a corpse, and when the coffin is opened I see the remains of flesh being stripped away until nothing is left but bones. And I hear a voice: "It's ready to be cremated now."

The bones are being tossed over the threshold, in a heap on the ground. Then I too cross the threshold. Inadvertently, I step on the pile of bones, and I hear the crack of a thigh-bone. I flinch, thinking to myself, "How disrespectful, I'm stepping on the dead."

And the voice replies, "They are nothing but old bones. They mean nothing. Let them go."

As I awaken, I realize I am no longer afraid. I have been told, with an absolute clarity, that I must incinerate the past, that I must go forth into this unknown world.

"Let them go." The dream teaches me the first and final lesson of Buddhism. The easiest to say, the hardest to put into practice. I must allow all those bones to crumble into dust ... not just the fear and the emotional turmoil, but even the good things, the successes, if I am to undergo this special kind of rebirth.

And so it is that I begin the journey, leaving behind all the familiar landmarks of a convoluted life, Although it is only for a few days, I must give up all my possessions, even my identity. The time will be short, but it will encompass a life's arc of experience, from birth to epiphany to death to rebirth.

It is time. We have parked at the back gate of the temple. I am dressed in white, the color of an unwritten page, of new beginnings.

The gate begins to creak open.

#  Evil in the Land Without

Evil in the Land Without was Colin Cotterill's second novel and the excerpt here is its first chapter. The book is a thriller stretching from the UK to East Africa and onto Burma and Thailand.

# Kawthoolei, 1978

You are to leeve this place. If you are found here when we return in seven days, you will be considered enemys of the state and distroyed.

It was a simple note, written by hand and not carefully spelt. The paper had been torn from a pad of greying report sheets and fastened to the wall of the elder's hut with brown masking tape. It hung slightly askew like a loosened tooth and flapped in a breeze that warned of an incoming storm.

Sherri stood before it and wondered at the magic of the flimsy sheet that could wipe away her history. It was indeed a powerful paper. The village had been the whole of the six years of her life. She had seen her first daylight through the bamboo slats of her family hut. She had played in each of the nine homes and grown up with the assortment of naked babies and toddlers that ran amok through the world there. She had learned from a woman so old she was unable to walk unaided to the latrine, but who was so much of a genius she could make marks on paper that spoke to the children she taught.

This was the history that the grey note with its rudely spoken words was wiping away. Thanks to old No Ay Me, she could understand the words but not the scrawl at the bottom. She was told it was the signature of a great soldier. The great soldier wore the uniform of the government and he could kill a man, they said, just by clicking his tongue against his teeth. Since she'd heard that, Sherri had been afraid to let her tongue make any sounds in her mouth. Sitting at dinner had filled her with dread as she listened to the clumsy smacking of chops as people ate.

And as she stood alone in front of the drunken paper, she wondered how there could be any other home, any other life beyond this village. To a six-year-old, what you know is your world, and any event in your life is world altering. The complete removal of that world is tantamount to erasing a life.

Everybody else—the entire population of the village, less the old teacher—was assembled down by the pond. They sat under the swaying banyan trees silently waiting for hope to arrive on the breeze. For some it was inevitable that they wouldn't be excused the displacement. For the majority who had been able to shut out the thought, this was an unwelcome reality.

"We should fight them," came one comment out of the quiet. It's speaker received no more than raised eyebrows, much more than the statement deserved. The sons and grandsons of the village had fought them and had nothing to show for it. The Karen Army had been fighting them for 33 years and had nothing to show for it. What did the small ragged band of children, women, and elderly have to fight them with?

No, it was agreed they would pack together their few belongings and begin the 18-day march to the new development zone. They knew what to expect. There they would receive small patches of infertile land and inadequate building materials, and struggle to survive. Eventually they would be forced through starvation to offer themselves as porters to the Military Council of Burma, the _Tatmadaw_ , and eventually die of exhaustion. Such was the fate they knew was awaiting them, but against which they had no remedy.

***

They were a week into the walk. Sherri had never seen death before, or at least she couldn't remember anyone being dead. But it seemed a lot like sleeping. No Ay Me lay beside the dirt track with a troubled look on her crinkly old face. It was a look of annoyance that she had been forced to leave the village. It had been on her face since they put her on the litter and started to drag her away from everything she loved. Sherri knew just how she felt.

But as for being dead. That didn't seem to trouble the old lady nearly as much as being dragged. No Ay Me had told Sherri once about how the spacemen fly away from the earth and the air gets thinner and thinner until eventually there isn't any. If they don't take bottles of air with them, they can't breath.

The further they dragged her away from her earth, the harder it became for No Ay Me to breath. Sherri walked behind and watched her chest rise and fall as she fought to catch her breath. But on the sixth day, her chest didn't rise any more. Nobody was sure how many kilometers they had dragged the corpse, but it could have been a whole day. Sherri hadn't been bold enough to tell anyone about her suspicions that the lady wasn't searching for air any more. As the sun played hide-and-seek behind the trees at the end of the day, they lay down the bamboo stretcher and announced that the teacher was gone.

Sherri was unsure about how to feel. Her teacher was still there after all. She knelt beside the body and looked at her. Her mother told her that No Ay Me had gone, but that wasn't true. She hadn't gone anywhere. She wasn't lost. She just wasn't breathing. That was all.

Sherri leaned over the old woman and whispered to her, "It's okay, Ah Ah, I can see you. You're still here. They're sorry they dragged you. You can start breathing again now."

She waited for several minutes, but there was no response except for the buzzing of flies. "Listen, Ah Ah, they're talking about what they should do with you. They say they haven't got any tools to put you under the ground, but they don't want the animals to get you. Somebody said they should set fire to you and say prayers. You're going to have to start breathing again really soon if you want me to help you."

It was the frustration of No Ay Me's reluctance to co-operate, and the loneliness away from the village that finally drew tears to Sherri's eyes. Death was still a concept too distant to grasp. But once she started to cry, she had no way of stopping the tears. From then on, death would always suggest frustration and loneliness.

There would be a cremation that evening. The elders had decided that the most appropriate end to No Ay Me would be to show her the respect she had earned while alive, in a private ceremony on the plot of dirt where she had expired. She would be burned on a pyre of bracken and distributed to the spirits of the earth.

The preparations had even begun. They cut a bed of twigs upon which No Ay Me was to lay, and had cleared away surrounding vegetation so as not to raze the whole countryside.

The elder had dispatched many a body to the beyond. Through eyes bunged up with tears, Sherri watched him prepare for the ceremony. He produced the prayer book from his cloth shoulder bag. He carefully unwrapped the white gown from his pack and hung it over a branch for the creases to drop out. And that was as far he got.

The soldiers approached in such a casual manner it seemed unlikely they had bad intent. The elder seemed unfazed also. He produced all the legal papers from his bag and summoned a smile to welcome the ranking officer of the bunch. There were eight, all silent and ragged in mismatched uniforms.

"Welcome sir," the elder greeted the young man in almost faultless Burmese, a language he only used for official duties. He knew the soldiers were unlikely to speak Karen. Most were from the central plain, sent to oppress a race they knew or cared very little about.

The officer was in his early twenties and his 'men' were barely post-pubescent themselves. He had a face so smooth and inanimate it could have been molded from river clay. He stopped a yard from the elder and focussed his yellowing eyes on the old man. Sherri had noticed the machete hanging from his hand. She watched it rise and slice through the elder's neck. In a fraction of a second it was back hanging at the soldier's side barely pink with blood. The elder's head wobbled slightly then toppled to the ground. His body, as if suddenly realizing it had no head, turned slowly in search of it, then crumpled to the dirt.

Sherri looked about her to see that the same fate had befallen the other four men in her group. There was a moment more of silence before the screams of the women brought on the screams of the children. Only the machetes of the young soldiers could quiet them. There was a flash of light inside Sherri's head that distanced her from the horror. She was numb. She was somewhere else. She looked at the scene without understanding what had happened or why. When the bloodletting was over, only five villagers remained alive; two younger women, Sherri, and another two girls her age. Each of them stood silently, hoping their silence would render them invisible to the boy soldiers and their boy officer.

#  The Books

All the authors in this collection now have ebooks at the major online retailers. Below is their current list of ebooks.

### William Page

The Nirvana Experiments

And Other Tales of Asia

_The Nirvana Experiments and Other Tales of Asia_ is a collection of ten new stories set in Thailand, India, China, Nepal, Taiwan and Afghanistan. Although the protagonists come from different backgrounds, most of them are engaged in a common venture: the quest for spiritual certitude.

### Roger Crutchley

PostScript: Forgotten But Not Gone

After his last book, _PostScript_ , many thought Crutch would do the decent thing and consent to being put out to pasture without little more than a whimper. But you can't keep an old dog down and he kept on and on and on with his Sunday column in the Outlook section of the Bangkok Post. Well, it does make good paper bag material after all.

### Jim Newport

The Vampire of Siam

Book 1 in the Vampire of Siam Series

In _The Vampire of Siam_ (Book 1) a nineteenth-century explorer, Ramonne Delacroix, encounters an ancient Chinese demon in the temples of Angkor Wat. His subsequent nocturnal transformation leads him to the capital of Siam, where he witnesses the coronation of kings and the city's metamorphosis into the modern day sin-city of Bangkok.

Ramonne

The Return of the Vampire of Siam

(Coming soon as an ebook)

Living the life of the lone hunter for the first 145 years of his incarnation as a night stalker, the vampire is reborn in _Ramonne_ (Book 2) and eventually seeks to know the true extent of his powers. As he learns, he evolves. By the second book's end, the vampire's strength is enormous and he has control of the true magic he has been vested with.

The Reckoning

A Tale of the Vampire of Siam

(Coming soon as an ebook)

In _The Reckoning_ (Book 3), armed with this newfound knowledge, Ramonne seeks the source of his powers, and journeys back to Cambodia and the ancient temples to a fateful encounter with Zhoupeng - the mighty devil who "turned him" so many years before. Ramonne vows to put an end to his reign of evil over the poor land.

The Siamese Connection

Book 4 of the Vampire of Siam

(Coming soon as an ebook)

The fourth book in the popular Vampire of Siam series. The story begins in Bangkok 1948, shortly after the end of WWII and the Japanese occupation of Siam. The vampire, Ramonne Delacroix becomes involved in a quest for a mysterious artifact, - The Oracle - hidden during the war by the Japanese. He joins forces with the famous American Expat Jim Thompson, (before he was the Silk King he was an OSS agent) and together they do battle with the nefarious Japanese Black Dragons.

Chasing Jimi

A Novel

_Chasing Jimi_ is a rock 'n' roll period piece. It spans one year - the summer of 1966 to the summer of 1967. From New York's Greenwich Village to swinging London to the stage of the Monterey Pop Festival. It follows the ascension of one Jimmy James, a struggling back-up guitar player, to the exalted throne of rock-god superstardom - which was Jimi Hendrix's destiny.

Tinsel Town

Another Rotten Day in Paradise

(Coming soon as an ebook)

A Hollywood novel by an author who has been there - done that. Jim Newport is an Emmy-nominated production designer of both film and television. His experiences in the early years of his career served as the inspiration for _Tinsel Town_.

### James Eckardt

Boat People

_Boat People_ is a panoramic novel of greed and compassion, violence and family love, desperation and hope. It is September 1981, the high tide of boat people flight from Vietnam. From the Mekong Delta port of Rach Gia, one boat, crammed with fishermen, farmers, political refugees, and urban hustlers, runs a 300-mile gauntlet of pirates and storms for the safe haven of Songkhla Refugee Camp. Here the survivors meet the West in the form of religious idealists and burnt-out aid workers. Some boat people are drawn to black market gangs; others to public service or official corruption.

Running with the Sharks

_Running with the Sharks_ is a novel of stark human conflict set in the lawless isolation of an uninhabited island off Thailand's Andaman coast.

Alabama Days

(Coming soon as an ebook)

James Eckardt's first, but as yet unpublished, novel is the story of young Roman Catholic seminary student missionaries in Birmingham, Alabama during the birth of the Civil Rights movement and the voter registration campaigns. It's a story by someone who was so obviously there. Note the great cover by Colin Cotterill.

### S.P. Somtow

Jasmine Nights

At twelve years old, Little Frog has a richly fantastic and sustaining inner life. It is 1963, his parents have disappeared, and he lives with his maiden aunts, known affectionately as the Three Fates, on a family estate in Bangkok. But, fed by a steam of books and accompanied by his pet chameleon, Little Frog refuses to accept that he is Thai; eats English food; speaks only English; and answers to the name Justin.

Dragon's Fin Soup

And Other Modern Siamese Fables

_Dragon's Fin Soup_ in the tradition of the Marx Brothers. Eight Rowdy Tales where East and West don't meet - they collide. Eight Frightening Ruminations where nothing is as it seems, and even the unreal is an illusion. Eight Delectable Servings that could only have sprung from the fevered mind of S.P. Somtow: the most unique writer of this, or any other, millennium.

Opus 50

S.P. Somtow's 50th. Book

S.P.Somtow has assembled a collection of essays, poems, and fiction - and tells all about his first published poem from 1967, which earned a lengthy shelf life when it was used as the epigraph for a best-selling autobiography by Shirley MacLaine - to his first professional fiction sale in 1977 - to stories that won major awards like the World Fantasy Award. Here, also, are some of his acerbic commentaries from Thai and US magazines, which rarely shied away from controversial subjects.

The Stone Buddha's Tears

S.P. Somtow's 2012 novel _The Stone Buddha's Tears_ was inspired by a real-life incident in 1991 in which the city of Bangkok, about to host an international conference, decided to throw up a corrugated iron fence around a slum in order to conceal it from passing delegates.

### Colin Cotterill

Pool and its Role in Asian Communism

A funny and moving tale set during the secret war in Laos. The Year is 1970. Waldo Monk is 65 years old, a widower, and two months away from retirement after a lifetime at Roundly's pool-ball factory in Mattfield, Indiana. Enter Saifon, a twenty-something Lao-American girl with an attitude, who has come to the US under mysterious circumstances. She's just arrived at Roundly's, and it's Waldo's task to train her up for his job as pool-ball quality controller. Saifon hates just about everyone, and even though Waldo is tempted to strangle her at first, a friendship grows between them. Two personal disasters in Waldo's life lead to him 'adopting' Saifon instead. But Saifon's mission at the factory is to make enough money, by hook or by crook, to get back to Laos - for she has sworn to discover the truth about her past.

Evil in the Land Without

A thrilling chase for a child abuser and murderer that spans three continents, Europe, Africa and Asia. The English detective's own family is at risk as he attempts to find a most evil man. Evil in the Land Without was Colin Cotterill's second novel published in 2003 by Asia Books.

### S. Tsow

Thai Lite

The selected scribblings of S. Tsow - linguist, theologian, philosopher and sage-in-residence of the City of Angels \- writes authoritatively and eloquently on the burning issues of our time: the scourge of cellphones, the escalating price of noodles, the inanity of political correctness, and the bad gramer and speling ov the yooth ov tooday... not to mention beer drinking, bad medicine, backpacking in the old days and the boisterous bedlam of Bangkok.

### Mont Redmond

Wondering into Thai Culture

Or Thai Whys and Otherwise

Wondering into Thai Culture explores the many facets of the debate about culture and one which can never be fairly resolved on Western terms alone. It shows what these and many other issues mean from a Thai point of view. Newcomers and tourists will encounter nuggets of information and insight that may help make their stay more interesting and enjoyable. Those who have lived here a few years already may profit from explanations of Thai behavior and attitudes that constantly baffle them. Long-term residents of the kingdom will find plenty of matter intended to provoke their laughter, tears, sneers, or even vehement agreement. People who have never come to Thailand, and possibly never will, might still want to know how it feels to have a wholly different outlook on life. And Thais too should read this book, if only as a first step on the path of self-knowledge that they, and all of us, must climb.

### Roger Beaumont

What's Your Name I'm Fine Thank You

Mugged by Reality in Bangkok and Beyond

These finely-crafted stories and articles were originally published in Bangkok Metro magazine and The Nation newspaper. Written between 1994 and 1998, they appeared in Metro under the column title "Mugged by Reality" and in The Nation as "Slightly Out of Focus". Factually sweetened, slightly surreal, occasionally critical, but always biting and hilarious, they are guaranteed to make you laugh out loud. Take a trip inside for further enlightenment on life in Bangkok and life in general...
