Chapter Seven

SEVEN

Toy’s underlings dropped Lonny off on the service road of a busy eight lane avenue and pointed ahead at the sky train station straddling the road. ‘BTS.’ one of them said, smiling.

Lonny nodded, just agreeing with anything to get away from the men who had brutalized him all afternoon and were now being helpful, smiling and pointing off to the entrance.

‘The train,’ the other said.

‘Traffic, too much. Train better.’ The first expanded.

‘Ok…thank you.’

Lonny shucked himself from the backseat and walked off towards the station, sweating again in the dense heat along the choked road. He labored to breathe in the exhaust heavy air, checking from the corner of his eye for the black car but it had already disappeared, mingled in with the early evening traffic glut.

At the Skytrain station he reached into his pocket for money to change and found the slip of paper with Pearl's cell number. He couldn’t go back to the Mansion, he needed to hide out, he couldn’t take any more abuse.

Pearl answered in her sweet rising tone. ‘Hello?’

‘Hey, uh Pearl this is Lonny, actually, just calling you, see if you um. Are you at work?’

‘Yes, I am working.’

‘Can you meet me when you finish, or, I mean can I meet you? Do you have time?’

‘I have.’

‘Time?’

‘Yes I have time’

‘So can you meet me somewhere, I’m at the train now, the Skytrain’

‘BTS, la, Ok you take to stop Chong Nongsi, you see on the map Chong Nongsi, You stay at Nana stop now?’

No, I’m at the end of the line, it’s,’ Lonny looked at the string of consonants with the odd vowel thrown in on the sign above the stairs and made a feeble attempt at pronunciation. 

‘Waronghstay ay?’

‘WongwianYai, I know, I wait you here, Chong Nongsi OK, ten minute.’

Lonny found the station he wanted on the map at the ticket machine and pushed the button that told him the fare and plunked his coins in the slot and got his card. More stairs to the platform, heat rose from the streets below and radiated from the buildings all around. He could feel the thermals swirling around him as he climbed. On the platform there was only one bench to sit on and it was in the sun. Almost the entire boarding area was sheltered with a steel canopy but the one place to sit was cooking in the last rays of hazy light. He leaned against the railing that separated the waiting passengers from a forty foot drop to the hard surfaces below and pondered the drop.

A low suicide rate he thought, but why? In this heat and pollution. With the crowds and traffic and what standard of living he had seen. He thought the suicide rate should be high. Maybe it was against their religion and wondered how long he would be able to hold out here. Not even working, just existing, like the old men who came to the Grill at 6 a.m. every day. How long would he be able to manage here with only that level of responsibility?

Then he thought of Pearl's voice saying ‘Hello’, and ‘working’ with the lilt at the end and how long he could he listen to that. He played the words over in his head; working, laughing, drinking. They were like a cheer when she spoke them and he thought he would never get tired of that.

The train came in sucking the air out of the station as it broke quietly and came to a steady stop exactly on the marks for embarking. Lonny didn’t have much need for the subway in New York but when he did it was all noise, the screaming of brakes vibrating on the rails, the masses of people, the dank underground tunnels even cleaned up as they have been in the last twenty years are still a horror of transportation even if it was essential.

In the car the air was icy. Every time he came from the heat to some modern enclosure was like suddenly being dipped in freezing water. As if people thought that the cold of the over air-conditioned places could be stored up and offset the debilitating heat of the city. His shirt and khakis were soaked with sweat when he boarded and within one stop he was shivering.

He would need clothes again. His new outfit ruined already. He wondered about his lost luggage, would it ever come, had it arrived and the woman behind the fence at the mansion hadn’t told him because he wouldn’t pay to have his room cleaned? Had it been sent to the other Mansion, the better Mansion?

He stepped out of the train at Chong Nongsi, and again the heat took his breath away. Like walking into the back of a bakery in a New York July and feeling the roar of the oven. Beads of sweat broke out across his forehead, his back and through his crotch as soon as he began to walk. From the vantage point of the train's platform he could look down at the intersection it spanned and spotted Pearl on the move so he wouldn’t have to cross the busy roads already clogging and soon to be mired in after work traffic.

After minutes of scanning the street he hadn’t picked her out but on each pass his eye got caught on a neon sign that lit up in stages of color to form a mug of beer running over with ice cold electric foam.

It was too much to resist. He took the stairs and entered the small café. Each table was occupied by a single man hunkered over a small glass with a large bottle of beer just within reach, they read papers and stared into phones. No one spoke, maybe because though the place was no more than twenty by twenty feet a sound system wired to massive speakers filled the room with tinny indecipherable music, the quality of the sound so bad he couldn’t tell if it was Thai or English or in some other language he hadn’t yet been exposed to. It screeched and jangled and made his sore nose throb, but he wanted his beer.

He ordered from a kid behind the counter, they had three unknown flavors and Heineken which Lonny hated so he choose one of the unknowns and the kid brought him a 40 oz bottle and a 15 oz glass.

‘You wan I?’ The kid asked.

Lonny squinted at him, shook his head, ‘I don’t understand.’

‘I?’ The kid said again.

Lonny took his bottle and glass. ‘No, no I don’t want nothing but this.’

But the beer wasn’t cold, it might have been tepid, it was hard to tell since his body was so hot and the café was so cold. He saw now that the other men all had small silver buckets sweating pools on their tables half filled with ice that they put in the little glasses before pouring the beer.

At the counter he pointed to the nearest table and asked the kid, ‘Can I have some ice.’

The boy gave him a withering glance and turned to fill one of the buckets. He handed it over and said flatly ‘I.’

At the counter that ran the length of a window looking out on the densely crowded street Lonny dropped four cubes of ice into his glass with the kind of delicate tongs he related in his mind to sugar cubes and old ladies, then poured about ten ounces of beer over it and took a long sip. The ice was cold and the beer was warm and sour the way beer gets in hot weather. He glared at the glass as he put it down, his pleasure spoiled.

As he stood glowering at the warm, rotten tasting bottle of beer two taps on the window in front of him brought his attention and there was Pearl hunched against the flow of pedestrians but smiling. She came in and heads raised and followed her to Lonny with narrowed eyes. A few of the drinkers smiled in thin tight grins that Lonny took as envy.

As soon as Pearl saw him clearly her own smile melted and her eyes went wide. ‘You face?’

Lonny touched the swollen bridge of his nose which felt like it spanned cheek bone to cheek bone.

‘And you shirt, what happened again?’

‘It’s a long, dumb story. It’s nothing, but I got nothing else to wear so I was hoping you could help me.’

‘You come to my room, clean you face, you shower. Better.’

Pearl led him out of the cafe and through the sluggish flow of people weaving along the sidewalks cluttered with merchandise laid out on folding tables or simply laid out on the walkway itself. Vendor carts and groups of people who stopped to talk and browse regardless of the hundreds of other pedestrians made commuting to work as tiresome as a jungle trek. People walked in the street between the stalled traffic and ducked under signs and awnings dripping with the fetid run-off from air-conditioners that obscured any clear patches of walk-way but then stumbled into deep sand filled crevices or over pipes that occasionally ran up and over the sidewalk and disappeared into an open steaming hole in the side of the road for some reason. The chaos of foot traffic didn’t hinder the occasional feral dog from scavenging a discarded skewered meat snack that had been flung over a shoulder still wrapped in plastic. Jogging between legs, tail stuck to its underbelly, pie bald and limping, it disappeared down a narrow alley into its hidden dark lair where it could dissect and consume its complicated treat.

Pearl held Lonny’s hand, guiding and pulling him through this mess of modernism, the chaos of Asian city life. When they arrived at her apartment she made Lonny strip off in the bathroom where she handed him two skimpy towels to dry himself while she went out and bought him some new clothes. He peeled some bills from his pinkish wad which she tucked into her purse. ‘I will get some I for you nose’ she told him.

‘Ice yes, what about a beer or two?’ He asked

‘I can, you hungry, can you eat here, with me? I can buy food for you.’

‘You want to eat here?’ Lonny looked around the small room. There was no kitchen only a cabinet sized refrigerator.

‘We can’

‘Yeah all right that would be nice, eat here.’

‘What you call this in America?’ Pearl waved her hand around.

‘Your apartment?’

‘You don’t say my room or my flat?’

‘Flat, no, I think that’s the English.’

Pearl left and Lonny got under the cool stream of water and let the relief of it wash over him. His wrists and ankles were red and chaffed from the restraints and his nose throbbed and felt like the exploded beak of an alcoholic bum slapped on to his mug. His back ached from when he fell and there was a pinching sort of strain in his thighs from standing in the lock box opposite John the Complainer.

Fatigued as his body was, the pain was secondary to the desperate thoughts he had whenever he let the day’s events creep in, flipping like some animated note pad in his mind. The keystone cop like characters pushing him around, locked up, abused, caged, humiliated, threatened, toyed with, laughed at.

He wondered what had happened to John the Complainer once he was taken away from the jail. Was he still there waiting for someone to come and negotiate with him?

There was Toy to think about. The girl was obviously deranged but that didn’t mean she wasn’t dangerous. Terrifying to know she could have the police pick him up and taken to her wrecking yard – luxury loft stronghold at a whim. That she was in control of his immediate future. Of course he should have recognized the car when they had taken him from the police station as the same that had picked Tanner up from the bar. She said Tanner was her friend. Boyfriend? And she knew Eddy, said he was no good. No good to her, for him?

He stayed under the shower thinking and trying not to think since there was no clear solution until Pearl returned.

‘You OK?’ She called through the door.

‘I’m cleaning up, can I have my clothes please?’

‘I have some cream to put on you face.’ She opened the door and giggled as Lonny leapt struggling to cover himself with both towels, knotting them over opposite hips to span his gut. ‘You have what?’

‘Some medicine, for you nose. Come sit down here.’ She stepped back into the room and patted the edge of her bed.

Self consciously he walked to the bed, sat down and let her apply the ointment to his swollen bridge.

‘You want massage?’

‘Massage? You can do massage?’

‘Every Thai lady can do, lay down I massage you back.’

He laid down and she began a slow poking probe of his back with knees, elbows and the balls of her hands.

‘You have very strong back,’ she cooed in his ear.

Her touch was soothing even as she worked the damaged spots of his back with the point of her elbow and he felt himself slipping away from the day. Within minutes he crashed into a black hole of exhausted sleep as Pearl continued to knead his flesh for her own pleasure.

Lonny sat on the edge of Pearl’s bed looking around the neat little apartment, her flat she called it and he could see why. The place was what a New York real estate agent would generously describe as a convenience apartment, smaller then a studio, slightly larger than a closet. It was tiny but spotless, all of her things put away in all the right places. A sweet scent of perfume and incense glossed over a more pungent undercurrent of cooking smells that flowed through the apartment building.

The place was a peaceful cool escape from the rotten interior of his huge dank room at the Nana Mansion. He could breath here and thought that sleeping in her hard little bed had been his best night’s sleep since he left his own house.

The room was decorated the way Lonny thought an adolescent girl might have her own room. There were photos of white faced Asian models, both male and female, cut from magazines and matted on construction paper taped to the walls. The cheap press-board and plastic furniture was hung with silk scarves and bits of embroidery with lace edges and tasseled ends. Stuffed animals were piled on the bed in a pyramid of adorability.

The shower cut off, the door thrown open and pearl appeared in the mist wrapped in a towel. Her hair piled atop her head, twisted into place with the end of a toothbrush. She smiled demurely seeing Lonny relaxed and leaning comfortably on her own bed.‘You Ok?’ Pearl asked.

‘Sure.’ Lonny smiled.

Pearl sat down in front of her desk that now acted as a vanity and began rubbing lotion into her long legs and down her arms. She turned her back letting the towel hang open in front and smeared more across her torso. Lonny watched the somewhat enlarged muscles in her back contract as she lavished the moisturizer over her mid riff.

‘Lonny?’

‘Yeah?’

‘I want to see my father mother, you want to come to see my home?’

‘To see your grandmother?’

‘No, my father and mother, to their home, it’s not so far, I not see them long time.’

‘I don’t know.’ Lonny lay back fully on the bed. There was nothing else to do, he wasn’t going to kill the boy, he had only to wait out the rest of his time here, hope to get his passport back and return home, to hell with Jerry.

‘Maybe we could go to the shore.’

Pearl turned with a puzzled expression on her face, ‘Shoal, what is?’

‘To the beach, to the ocean, I don’t want to spend my whole trip here, in Bangkok.’

'I have to work, I only have one day holiday every month. My home not Bangkok. I want to see my family I miss them so much, I want to see my father, mother, I want to see my baby.’

Pearl sat staring into the mirror over the desk examining her face in the raking light of the single overhead lamp.

Lonny heard what she had said but tried to elude the meaning, kept his eyes shut and focused on keeping his mind blank.

Pearl turned from the mirror and saw Lonny’s face pinch, his eyes shut tightly and his neck tensed, adam's apple thrumming like a piston.

‘Lonny I miss my daughter she three year already, I never have a time to see her.’

In his mind Lonny had built a wall around Pearl’s truth. A prison wall of gray granite blocks, towering and thick as a car. He had spent the better part of his life working on loading docks, in warehouses and outlying commercial roads; the forgotten, half lit areas of New York where her kind hung out and could be themselves. He had known them and as long as they stayed true to character he was able to ignore their true physical nature and enjoy what they offered. What Pearl had put to words penetrated this wall. Her invocation created a door. A bright red door, unlocked and free swinging. To go through that door was to pass from the comfortable enough position of willful ignorance into the acceptance of what she was, what she is and therefore what he was doing. That only three years ago Pearl had impregnated a woman. That he had spent the night making love to a man.

Lonny opened his eyes, 'I’ve got to go.’ He said and sat up ready to move, Pearl was staring intently at him.

‘Lonny, you know me already OK?’

‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

He got up and stepped for the door. Pearl stood from her chair blocking the way, the towel falling from around her torso catching at her waist. Her too perfect breasts sat pointing their sharply erect, slightly odd nipples at him.

‘Lonny, you know me already, you know I not real lady, I want to be real lady but am not yet. But I have same lady mind and same love as lady.’

Lonny lowered his head and tried to brush past her, Pearl grabbed his arm. The towel fell to floor exposing her to the tight blue panties she had put on in the bathroom. ‘Lonny listen me, you stay with me it not mean you same gay. I am like lady and soon I have everything same like real lady.’

‘Let go of me.’ Lonny yanked his arm clear and pushed Pearl away, taking the last steps to the door.

‘Lonny,’ Pearl shouted in a frantic high-pitched voice that was so unlike her normal soft purring he turned to face her.

Pearl pushed the waist band of her panties down and groping with her other hand fished out a stubby, almost black uncircumcised penis resting atop her emptied testicular sack. Trapping the little bulge against her belly with a snap of the waist band she walked towards Lonny with her arms open, crying. ‘This is me Lonny, same like last night when you kiss and hug me, same last night when you put you dick in my mouth and touch my tit. Same like this morning when you touch my ass. What change? You know I same. You change. You change not I.’

Lonny tried the door, but it was locked in a way he couldn’t solve right away. Yanking at the knob he searched the jam for some sort of bolt or clasp. Pearl came behind him and hugged her body against his side, he could feel the small, soft bulk of her sex. Without thinking he spun and pushed her away shouting, ‘get off of me.’

The push caught her low and with more force then he had intended. She lifted slightly from her feet and with arms pin wheeling she fell back. He watched as she fell to the floor, the corner of the desk nudging the base of her skull, jarring her head forward as she came down.

The door opened in his hand and he walked through it, into the hall, down the stairs and out into the light and heat of mid morning. The small street was congested with food carts and motorcycles flowing in near death proximity.

Lonny bulled his way into the tight pack of shambling pedestrians. Already pouring sweat, his face hot and swollen with enraged embarrassment, telling himself he had been duped. She had conned him. He had conned him.

Anger swam in his head above a deeper knowing. The knowing that was the source of his embarrassment. The rage was its cover, the rage his excuse. He ducked into an open air restaurant, down two steps and over an open gutter. The place was empty at this in between hour except for the staff of girls who sat on the floor shucking some sort of pod vegetable among plastic tubs filled with greasy water and unwashed utensils. They sat in a group staring at the hi-jinks of a dubbed Chinese soap opera on a thirty year old television perched above them. He took a seat unnoticed at one of the round concrete tables, his knees brushing the rough under-surface looking at the four girls watching the TV wide-eyed and gawk mouthed. They sat mesmerized as his throat parched and sweat pooled on the table top beneath his chin.

An old man shuffled into the dining area from the back of the shop and looked at Lonny suspiciously for a second and then called out in the flailing language Lonny was slowly becoming accustomed to, more for the time he spent with Pearl's soft patient voice, opposed to the chaotic sounds he heard around him elsewhere.

One of the girls brought a menu and dropped it on the table automatically, her attention still welded to the television. Lonny waited for her to look at him but she made no move to turn her head. Several minutes passed, the girl lent on one arm against the table in an exhausted manner, ignoring Lonny who got himself a bottle of water from a Coke cooler just inches from his seat.

The old man passed in front again and took in Lonny drinking from the bottle.

‘You eat?’, indicating his mouth with two fingers, chewing air, then pointing at the menu. Lonny shook his head ‘no’ and the old man bawled some phrase dismissing the girl back to her friends to shuck more pods.

It was incredible that anyone would run a business like this Lonny thought again watching the girls. It was one of the many instances that made him question the reason of the place and all the people who came here to retire, to vacation. In any greasy spoon truckers diner in Queens he would have had two cups of coffee and his full order served in the same time this girl had taken to get him a menu. If this is what people were looking for in their retirement they must have had it easy in their working lives.

He sat back draining the bottom inch of his no longer cold water then wiped his face with a handful of tissue paper leaving little wads clinging across his cheeks and chin.

It was a dangerous fucking game Pearl was playing and some day he was going to get hurt doing it. Not that Lonny wanted to hurt her; he hadn’t wanted to hurt him. But pulling that act, playing the role of a sweet caring woman, while actually being a screwed up, confused, sick man. Some day she was going to take a beating, he was gonna get his hump busted for sure.

That wasn’t Lonny though. He had never hit a woman and barely ever hit a man. He was going to go back and apologize. He didn’t mean to shove so hard any way. He had no hard feelings; if she just would have kept quiet about the other thing they could have had some fun together. Maybe he could give her some money and drop the whole thing.

He left some coins on the table and stepped back out into the blowtorch heat and joined the flow of sluggish foot traffic.

The door to Pearl’s room was still ajar but all was quiet; he pushed it open and found her still collapsed on the floor, her head hanging against her chest. The blood that had spread across her shoulders and over her pert breasts like a shawl was already congealing in the heat to a dark skinned gel that collected in a narrow seam at the crease of her belly.

‘Pearl?’ He squatted in front of her and lifted her face. There was no resistance and her open eyes were rolled back in her head, showing too much of their white underbellies. He took her beneath the arms to lift her. She was completely static and heavier than he had expected as he carried her, toes dragging across the tiled floor, and laid her out across the tiny bed. In the toilet he soaked a towel, wrung it damp and sat beside her to mop the blood from across her torso. Smearing it in broad strokes. After rinsing and wringing it three times the towel became a bright pink as he cleaned her up. Lonny talked to her throughout. He apologized to her, closing her sprung eyes with his fingers. He told her he hadn’t meant to hurt her, but she had taken him off guard. 'Never mind, that’s all over now,' he said. The light had changed and the room was shades darker but no cooler for that so he directed the small fan that sat near her desk to blow across her. He moved to the plastic chair she used at her desk and looked her over.

‘I better get some ice, in this heat your meat will be falling off the bone in no time, plus the stink’ he said. He took her keys and went out locking the door after him. Back out into the blaze of day and to the same sub street level restaurant where the girls still sat shucking the green pods and staring at the Chinese soap opera.

He sought out the old man from his table in the back and through pantomime and monosyllabic utterances bought as much ice scooped into one liter bags as he could carry.

In the room, ice melting across his front, he filled the bathroom sink and then lined the extra bags upright on the floor while he unfastened the shower curtain from its snap hooks. He laid the plastic sheet under Pearl, rolling her to and fro as he had with his Ma when she was bedridden after her hysterectomy, twisted up the edges to prevent run off and then surrounded her with the ice until she was dressed like a shrimp cocktail.

‘This isn’t going to last long, but we’ll come up with something else don’t worry,’ he told her as he tidied the corners of the plastic sheet. Reluctantly, not looking, he reached down and pushed the dark plug of skin she had revealed back under the elastic of her panties.

‘I gotta go for now, but I’ll be back in a little bit. Don’t worry I’m not going to let you set here and stew in your juices.’

He ambled down the stairs wondering what to do. He couldn’t let her decompose in the apartment, couldn’t risk her body being discovered at least until he was gone. The burning anger and embarrassment was replaced with calculating on how to keep here cool.

In the well between flights of stairs he hunched his shoulders to let a woman ascending by, but she turned and asked 'Lonny?’ in the now familiar L slurring to R pronunciation.

He didn’t speak, but didn’t walk on either.

‘Accuse me are you Lonny, you friend of Pearl mai?. My friend.’

‘You’re Pearl’s friend?’

‘Yes, she my friend.’ The woman nodded vigorously.

Lonny lent against the rail behind him. ‘She’s not home you know?’

‘Yes, I know,’ the girl nodded.

Lonny frowned, ‘You know she’s not at home?’

‘ Yes, I know, she go to see she mother, and she baby, she tell to me already, she very happy. You no go?’

Lonny nodded ‘Yes, I am, I'm going, that’s why I came here, she left me directions, in her apartment, I have her keys.’ He held up the clutter of plastic trinkets that secured the single door key.

‘Okay nice to meet you,’ the women turned to the stairs.

‘But she’s not here,’ Lonny repeated.

‘ I know, I go to my room, my room here,’ the women pointed.

‘You live here?’

‘The woman smiled, I live here, my room here.’

The girl turned to walk away but Lonny stopped her.

‘Excuse me, do you know where I can buy a freezer?’ He asked.