13
She’d seen him the moment he turned into the street from the Silom end, heading for the little bar he always goes to, and she’d ducked between two night-market booths to get out of the light. No point in drawing his eye. The guy who runs the stand she’s partly blocking glares at her, and she takes a couple of steps back. She realizes she’s hungry, and that reminds her that when she woke up that afternoon, the bag she’d put under what she thinks of as the boy’s tree was on the ground beside her. It was empty and clean and it had been carefully folded. That had touched her; there were always uses for a perfectly good plastic bag, but he’d brought it back and even cleaned it out. This is the fourth time he’s done it.
So, that’s good, it means that he’d eaten something. On the other hand, it means that she hasn’t. And it’s getting late. Her stomach growls so loudly she can hear it, and she shifts from foot to foot as the street vendor, who has customers approaching, gives her the smile that means get out of here. For a moment she decides to drift over to the Isaan restaurant just to see whether there’s a plastic bag hanging beside the back door, but as she backs away from the vendor’s stand she sees again the man she’s supposed to follow stepping up onto the sidewalk and pushing open the door to the little bar. And she remembers: this is the last night. She’s almost certain the Sour Man hadn’t meant what he said about the cage of hungry soi dogs, but her ear is still hot and swollen where he pierced it with his fingernails—when? Last night, it had been just last night, and tonight is the night she has to . . .
Anyway, there, he’s gone in. She’ll have to wait and eat later, after the Sour Man pays her.
But she has to follow him home first. The little girl in her stamps her foot and says a word that had once prompted her mother to take a switch to her calves, one of only three times she can remember being hit. Hurting a child, she thinks, is an unforgivable thing to—
The thought had slipped up on her from behind or she would have sidestepped it, the same way she had tried to sidestep her mother’s switch. There are certain things she can’t think about because she has no defenses against them: they sweep her sideways, pick her up and spin her around, and when they’re through with her and they drop her at last, she usually has no idea where they’ve taken her. They wipe her memory clean in the same way a fall does: they shine with such a terrible brightness that everything else fades and recedes. She usually has to find something familiar to orient herself.
She can’t afford that now. She has to stay where she is. She can’t drift; she knows that she drifts. She pats the pocket of her inner shirt, the two tablets reassuring in their predictable solidity, the familiarity of their shape. Out loud, she says, “Soi dogs.”
Groups of people are separating to pass on both sides of her, some of them turning sideways to squeeze by, unwilling to brush up against her in the thickening throng. She hears music now. From all directions the bright, cold lights of Patpong blink at her, signaling terrible things, glinting off shards of memory she has tried to crush beneath her heel for years and years and years. She doesn’t know how long it’s been when the door to the small bar opens again and closes behind the man she’s supposed to follow.
Coming out of the bar, back into the heat and the smells and the noise and the neon, he’s startled at the intensity of the worry he feels about Campeau.
Unlike most of the Vietnam vets in the bar, who have good days and bad days, it’s seemed to Rafferty for years that Campeau has bad days and worse days. For many of the men who were dropped into that meat grinder, and perhaps especially to those who volunteered, it had been devastating to realize that the entire enterprise was misconceived, mismanaged, and shrouded in lies, with everyone from the president down, as the old song said, trying to keep it from you. Vietnam was a clusterfuck on the grandest possible scale. It was an absolutely personal betrayal of the Americans who died there, of the Vietnamese who were killed and maimed there, of the millions of acres of fertile land that were bombed and poisoned into sterility, their only crop the birth defects that scarred the babies of the young women who were exposed to the best that American chemical firms had to offer.
And the vets: the knowledge of what was done to them and what they had done to others had left them with a kind of emotional scar tissue that many of still them carried. It was probably less marked in those who had remained gung ho behind the mission, those who had continued to buy the government’s myth of righteous warfare for a humane cause, those for whom the young reporters in Campeau’s book were traitors while the rich men in their unwrinkled suits back in Washington were patriots. The gung ho, Rafferty supposed, persuaded themselves that they had fought in, and their friends had been wounded and died in, the pursuit of an objective that was consistent with the shining city on a hill the men in suits were always talking about. For the others, the ones who decided never to go home again, who no longer knew where home was, the war was a brutal, pointless abattoir, a misguided spasm in the ancient and discredited global shell game of empire. It was a blunt-force con that had destroyed their lives in ways that went as deep inside them as those American poisons had into those once-green fields.
Bob was no fool. He knew that his life and all the other lives sacrificed on both sides of the battlefield had been dropped and stepped on like cigarette butts by men who never gave them a second thought.
And then he’d had his heart, or whatever remained of his heart, broken.
Rafferty made a right and headed toward Soi Kathoey.
He never looked behind him.