Chapter Nine

Nine

Lonny woke in the changing light of dawn, still more black than gray. He lay still on the bed in the near silence, broken occasionally by the freezers compressor clicking to life with a sudden spark of vibration. He rose after some minutes and picked his clothes up from the floor. He was going to need to shop again, to buy clothes and other things if his luggage didn’t come that day.

Sitting on the toilet in Pearl's tiny bathroom he watched delicate antenna emerge from the drain in the shower floor testing the air for danger or prey. They kept coming, four inches long by the time the insect's head appeared, pulling itself up and out of the drain pipe with thorny fore legs that clawed audibly against the steel grid. As it freed itself from the hole it stood still taking in its new environment. The thing was the size of a Mars bar, the largest cockroach Lonny had ever seen and it had wings. Monstrous and disgusting it skittered from corner to corner of the shower floor without gaining any purchase to climb out.

Ever since arriving he had been experiencing an odd combination of constipation and diarrhea but it was evident after fifteen minutes of watching the bug's intermittent, frantic scramble, its legs clicking and scraping against the plastic floor, that nothing was moving inside him that morning. He folded four or five sheets of toilet paper in his hand, ripped them from the roll and reached over trapping the roach in a corner, crushing it's tough shell with a pop. He scooped the mess up in the paper, dropped the wad into the bowl and flushed the mess down.

He scrubbed himself under the surprisingly cold morning shower and brushed his teeth with Pearl's pink and gold tooth brush. Wrapped in a towel he searched for something to drink but there was nothing in the little refrigerator except some small glass vials and a couple bottles of pills. ‘Not even water? You need to keep more stuff around, what if you were sick and couldn’t go out?’ Lonny called across the room.

He got dressed and told her he was going to seven for some coffee and that he would pick up basics; juice, water, maybe some snacks. He put his shoes on at the door. ‘Right back, Ok?’ and locked up.

The streets weren’t crowded yet and the air temperature was tolerable. Traffic was still sparse in the early blue light and the streets were being hand swept by women who wore jackets, gloves and hats against the coming heat of the day.

The omnipresence of seven eleven convenience stores in the distant foreign city was something of a shock at first but was becoming a reliable resource. If someone would have told him three weeks ago he would be in a hot Asian city buying coffee and hotdogs from a west coast mini mart franchise at 5 a.m. Lonny would have laughed the man out of the house. But that’s just what he was doing and to his surprise he wasn’t the only one.

Two young women dressed in immaculate light blue uniforms had done the same but their dogs were sliced up, bagged and covered in a thick, red, sweet looking sauce that coated the chunks. They left, eating the nibblets of processed hog off the end of wooden skewers, laughing like children.

Outside he punched his mother's number into the international phone and let it ring. He counted eight times until she picked it up.

‘Ma, its Lonny.’

‘Lonny, you doin good? how’s things?’

‘ Yea, what’s going on? You sound different, the nurse there?’

‘Angel, you want a talk with him?’

‘Angel? You call him Angel now?’

‘That’s his name, what a ya want me to call him.’

‘Ok, so now you like him?’

‘Course I like him, who doesn’t like Angel?’

‘Yeah fine, anyway I might be back a little earlier.’

‘C’mon now?’

‘No but sooner, A few days sooner.’

‘Ok I’ll tell Angel, talk later.’ She hung up.

*

Climbing the stairs back to the apartment he saw the neighbor woman, Pearl’s friend coming down. He tried to duck his head and cover his face with his bags but she had already started to speak.

‘Hello Lonny’

‘Oh, yeah, Hi, good morning.’

‘Good morning’

‘You’re up early, very early, you get up.’ Lonny stumbled not sure what to say, realizing he was falling into the Tarzan English he’d overhead at the Grill between the old foreigners and their Thai women.

‘ I am go to work now, it’s quite far. Did you find what you want to buy yesterday?’

‘A yeah, it’s here now, here in the room.’

‘I think Pearl going to love it!’

‘She seems to, it’s not her favorite color, but it works.’

The woman looked surprised and asked, ‘She come back already?’

‘Oh, no. I told her about it on the phone, told her what it looked like, she’ll see it when she gets back.’

‘Ok, nice to see you, I can’t be too late now.’

‘Yeah, right, don’t be late.’

‘Bye Bye’, the woman called and disappeared down the stair case.

‘Bye Bye’ Lonny repeated waving his hand in an exaggerated way he never had before, Christ he moaned, whiping his forehead and continued up the stairs.

He put the bag from seven on the desk and sat on the edge of the bed sipping his cup of acrid coffee.

‘We gotta do something Pearl, gotta get you moved out, make travel arrangements. Get you a booking. It’s gonna be a long trip, I know but when you arrive I'll make it up to you.’

He hadn’t shut the top panel of the freezer and when he looked down at her she was covered in fat drops of water.

‘Oh shit you're melting.’ He chuckled, got a towel and slid the top open all the way to dry her off. He wiped from her face down to where her torso bent at the waist. Her pale skin looked fresh and clean in the freezer, he touched her breasts and they were cool and nearly solid. He felt the silk she lay on, it was damp but not soaked and he figured the moisture would freeze so no harm done and slid the top shut.

He needed to find a shipping company and to find a shipping company he needed to find Ed and the only place he could think to look for him was at the Grill. It was almost exclusively Americans there and one of them might know him.

‘I’m going back out,’ he said, and then not wanting her to know he was going to a bar that early in the morning, added, ‘need to see if my luggage came through, and if not buy some more clothes.’

He looked down at the polo shirt and Khaki pants Pearl had bought him the day before. Clothes that made him feel like a yuppie, like one of the summer renters who came to Great Beach in droves every July and August but no one knew him here.

‘I could get some more stuff like this, if you like it?' He asked. Hesitating for a second as if for an answer and then turned and left.

He retraced his steps from the night before. Same walk, same train ride, only in reverse. He entered the Grill and felt the same immense relief from the glaring light and burning heat as he had his first morning.

He took the corner stool he had sat on the first couple of times and the waitress recognizing him, asked if he wanted the same breakfast as before. He nodded, watching John the complainer across the bar having a one-sided conversation with a small, old man hung with a much younger but withered looking Thai woman who gave off all the signs of being a serious drug addict.

John looked haggard and seemed to be wearing the same clothes from two days before. His face was red and swollen, his hair was mused and his eyes were wild, darting around the room. He would go quiet staring at the man and then picking up some sort of conversational clue responded loudly, but what they were talking about was a mystery.

He saw Lonny now and with some bustle and crashing around gathered all his gear and pulling the old man, hooker attached, came around the bar and claimed the three seats to his right.

‘Jesus fucking Christ I’m glad to see you, what the fuck happened there, with you I mean, what happened, I know what happened to me but what happened to you?’John was in his face, flushed with booze but seemed steps beyond drunkenness.

Lonny shrugged, ‘Nothing. They took me out of the cell and just brought me to another room for a little while, asked my name, checked my ID and then told me to go.’

John grimaced and finished his whole drink in one long struggling gulp. ‘I don’t fucking understand this shit at all man. I mean I’m ready to pack my fucking bags and get the fuck out of here. This does not compute.’ He shook his head staring at the ceiling for a moment then signaled the waitress for another bloody Mary set up.

‘I haven’t been to my apartment, haven’t been to work, I called my Editor and told him what happened and he told me to stay away until he could find out what the fuck it’s all about.’

‘What happened to you?’ Lonny asked.

The complainer gave him a sick grin and chortled ‘Nothing. Same as you, not a fucking thing, ten minutes after they took you they let me out, not a word, no money, nothing.’

He made his drink from the components the girl brought, sloshed it around in his glass and then up ended it. ‘Makes no sense.’

Lonny’s breakfast came and he picked up his utensils and attacked it. The complainer went pale and turned his head. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Lonny asked.

‘I can’t watch you do that.’

‘Eat?’

‘Yeah eat.’

The complainer walked around his back to where the old man sat with the strung out woman in his lap, the two of them deep tongue kissing. Her shirt open to the naval revealing a scarred, slatted torso and a pair of tiny breasts peeking out of each side. ‘Christ, that’s even worse.’ the complainer said.

The regular old timers glared from their end of the bar, looking on with disgust as they drank their beers in front of a playoff game from the mid nineties.

The old man left off his oral exploration and the whore slipped from his lap and in a disconnected voice said something about cigarettes and left through the door into the morning light.

John introduced the old man as Scott without saying if it was his first or last name. As Lonny faced him and shook his hand he understood the odd silent conversation the complainer had been having with him. He wore a piece of medical grade cloth around his neck like an ascot covering his tracheostomy.

Scott spoke to John in a series of gasping grunts which he lip read and verbalized for Lonny.

‘He says where you from.’

‘Long Island.’ Lonny almost shouted.

The old man shook his head, and gestured violently, gasping again.

The complainer laughed. ‘He says he’s not deaf.’

Scott was drunk as well and John being the only one willing to try and understand him the two went back into their one sided conversation from which Lonny gathered from the complainer’s side of it the old man wanted his opinion about the woman he was with.

John turned to Lonny. ‘You saw her, what do you make of her, the state she’s in?’

Lonny shook his head, ‘Let me finish my food here OK.’

‘See he’s being polite, he doesn’t want to say that she looks like a diseased crack head who’s going to stab you in the guts for 500 baht when you pass out.’

The old man whispered some sounds and then made the classic hands over hour glass pantomime and stuck his tongue out and wagged it between his lips.

The complainer laughed and gagged at the same time. ‘That’s disgusting! You got plenty of money, go and find someone that’s going to take care of you.’

Scott clacked and rasped through the hole in his throat, waggling his fingers.

John translated. ‘He says he wants to get to 500 first.’

Lonny nodded again, not looking up, finishing the last of his eggs and toast. He wiped his mouth and stood up.

‘Gotta go.’

The complainer turned. ‘Where you going, I want to talk to you about this shit.’

Lonny shrugged. ‘I don’t know what happened, it’s over for me, I’m gonna go down to the beach like you said.’

He walked straight out the door, leaving John and Scott to continue their single sided communication. There seemed no way any of the habituates of The Grill knew anyone who didn’t frequent the place and Lonny couldn't believe Ed had ever set foot in the place.

The heat was dazzling again but it was a short walk to the Mansion and he felt strong after the fat filled breakfast.

He hadn’t yet made it to the corner when a tall, broad shouldered transvestite matched his pace.

‘Hello where you go?’ She purred with a curious accented tone.

Lonny said nothing, continued to walk, staring straight ahead.

She caught him by the elbow, ‘Handsome man I go with you.’

He turned and met her eye-to-eye, she would have been tall barefoot but with six inch heels she was nearly the same height as he. She wore a one-piece top and skirt that clung to her augmented curves like a film. Her huge fake breasts fell out of each side to the edge of her nipples and her ass hung completely out. Her eyes were shot with red and her pupils were the size of pencil erasers, she would have been up all night raving and smoking meth he guessed.

Lonny reflexively jerked his arm away. He had known ones like her before, aggressive and predatory. The ones who seek out the weakest and confused of men, who slink into the dark areas where lost T-girls do their business.

‘Not today’, he said and started walking again.

She touched him again along his side, picking up some kind of vibe, a sense of acceptance that he gave off.

‘ I can give you massage.’ She offered, then whispered hoarsely, ‘I suck you dick, suck you ball.’

‘Not today,’ he repeated, jerking away from her.

‘Hey’ she yelled.

He turned to look and was caught by her, wagging her cock from under the hem of her skirt at him.

‘You want-a-suck.’

He took the two steps between them and shoved her hard by the shoulders.

‘You bitch,’ he growled.

He was still moving forward when she caught him on the jaw with a roundhouse that cracked like a whip and turned him mid-stride as his legs buckled and he dropped to the filthy street.

She stood above him still holding her penis, stretching it from the tip with her fist and kicked him with the viscous points of her stripper shoes as he tried to get up.

Lonny was seeing sparks and floating amoebas of multi-colored lights in his eyes but he wasn’t numb. He felt the kicks sinking deep into his side like jabs from a truncheon. The T girl spat and he felt it rain down and spatter the side of his face. Then he heard the sound of an engine roar and brakes squeal and the clicking of heels as she ran off.

From his hands and knees he looked up to see the black Mercedes sedan with the tinted windows and the four black leather clad feet stomping around him. Hands grabbed him and again he was in the back seat, bleeding and sweat streaked.

The thug in the passenger seat turned and smiled at Lonny, handing him a cool, white face cloth still sealed in its plastic envelope from the center consul and nodded.

“What my name you?’ he asked.

Lonny took the cloth and popped the seal. The driver spoke to the passenger and Lonny heard the words ‘my’, ‘you’ and ‘name’ repeated several times. The passenger turned again, still smiling.

‘What my name?’

Lonny leaned his aching head against a little white pillow with an angel floating in a heart that was attached to the seat with Velcro and held the damp cloth against his forehead with his eyes shut.

‘I don’t know your name, man.’

The two thugs went back to discussing the proper way to ask this question and Lonny stopped paying any attention. He was getting sick of being beaten, and with seemingly more beatings in the immediate future he felt like giving them a reason to put a bullet in his head. Then he thought about Pearl. He had put her in a difficult situation, and had made promises, promises he intended to keep.

The car sped through the streets where it could, slaloming through traffic, braking hard, blowing through red lights. Avoiding attention wasn’t high on their list. They didn’t worry about citations.

They came abreast a shabby town house in a crumbling neighborhood of three story, condemnable looking buildings; gritty with pollution and streaked with rust stains. These were intersected with narrow side streets and fronted with shops each selling the same seemingly random selection of merchandise. There were rain coats and motorcycle tires hanging across the thresholds and baskets piled with odd furry looking fruits along the sidewalks. Deeper inside were potted plants and displays of Chinese looking foot wear that edged a rack of gardening tools. The interiors were filled with all manner of clothing that hung from the ceiling on long hooked bars.

The passenger got out and opened the rear curb side door and beckoned to Lonny. There was no menace in his actions, even before, when he had beaten Lonny it seemed that it was just part of his job, not personal, just another work-a-day task.

The thug led Lonny through the slim side street dodging a couple of motorbikes that ran through it at top speeds, nearly clipping him on the elbow. He looked back and shook his head and made an expression to show he too considered them crazy.

They took two flights of stairs to a third floor landing where the door had been forced in. The handle hung from its setting and the jamb was snapped at the spot where the dead bolt should have held it.

The thug held his hand out, showing Lonny in and when he bent to take his shoes off he caught him by the shoulder and with a quick head shake and a sour smile let him know there was no need.

The dark room was no bigger than Pearl’s and was laid out in the same basic plan but with none of the personal qualities she had given hers. It was sparsely furnished with a bed, a small desk and a wardrobe. Like a monastic cell except for the modern luxuries of a tiny refrigerator and the overhead air conditioning unit that churned out a cool breeze which sucked through the room and vanished into the heat through the busted door leaving the inside temperature little changed from the outside.

The place had been tossed. There were clothes on the floor and books strewn over the bed. Papers were cast around but Lonny could see this mess was in contrast to the room’s normal orderly state. The mattress had been lifted from the bed but was still made up with top sheet and thin blanket, pictures hung on the wall in a neat row, the cheap press board wardrobe had been thrown open and ransacked but the garments that remained inside were neatly pressed and hung in order, white shirts and black pants.

The toilet flushed, the bathroom door opened and out walked Toy wearing jeans that seemed sprayed on and a t-shirt that proclaimed ‘My tits are the real thing- the T shirts a fake’ overlying the image of a Coke can, topped with a high collared pink shag vest. She shook her hair out, running her fingers through the long glossy black strands and clapped her hands.

‘Lonny, you came, good, good.’

‘Hi’

‘How do I look, tell me honest Ok. I know I’m not too beautiful today, so many thing is happened. Oh my god.’

‘You look great.’ Lonny said automatically.

‘Really? Thank you! But oh, you look like he get hit again, I told Lek not to hit, are you 
face hurt’

‘No, it’s alright.’

‘You face not hurt?’

Lonny felt along his jaw line to the hot puffy knot, the swelling along his teeth where the ladyboy had clocked him. ‘Not really.’

‘But it’s killed me.’ She delivered the punch line already laughing and continued on without pause. ‘Ok. Come we have too much to do.’

She walked toward the windows at the front of the room and Lonny suddenly saw the shirtless fat man tied to a chair with a black sack over his head as if he had just slipped bodily from the solid wall.

His head hung to his chest and the edge of the hood was soaked with a mix of blood and saliva that ran down his chest. A low level keening that seemed to mark a point of exhaustion and pain just short of unconsciousness escaped through the rough weave.

‘Guess who?’ Toy jumped and spun in one gesture pointing her fingers at Lonny's chest and smiling.

Lonny scanned the photos hanging on the wall and there he was; with his family, at church, at some kind of picnic, amongst graduates wearing their mortar boards and gowns. Always dressed in the same black suit and white shirt that he wore whenever Lonny had met him.

‘Ed.’ Lonny said

At the sound of his name the flesh crawled in jerks across the expanse of his gleaming white belly. His entire body trembled in a pure fear reaction Lonny had never seen outside the animal kingdom. It was the reaction of a whipped dog seeing the instrument of its punishment or a horse picking up the scent of a cougar, the kind of unconscious reaction humans only find when the façade of civilization has been torn away and raw instinct is exposed.

On a small table of the same color and construction as the wardrobe was a leather case with slots holding an assortment of hammers. They ranged in size and utility from a cobblers ball-peen to a steam fitters mallet. All still in their respective pockets except the claw and machinists punch, which were laid atop the others. The wood handle of the claw was smeared and hairs were caught in the crags and nicks of both the heads.

‘My hammers.’ Toy announced and passed an elegant hand gesture over the selection. 

‘They are my reputation.’

‘Like your calling card?’ Lonny asked as a reaction, not really wanting to know. His throat thickened and his stomach lurched as he spoke. His face ran with sweat and he felt his pits and crotch soaking, but Toy was cool and composed.

‘Is that how you say, calling card? Emmm I like it. Sounds like in a movie.’ Toy said the phrase a couple of times over, ‘my calling card’ and changed her pose each time.

‘Jesus Christ.’ Lonny mumbled and scanned the photos of Ed’s American life on the wall again.

Eddy groaned hollowly, his neck rolled and a fresh flow of spittle thinned blood drained from inside the hood down his chest.

Toy watched Lonny turning from the photos on the wall to the now bound and battered Eddy groaning. She picked up a stack of instamatic 4x5’s from the desk.

‘You want to see Eddy other pictures?’

Lonny took the shots from her and quickly flicked through them. They were all more or less the same. Eddy centered in the frame on his knees wearing only white briefs, his arms clasped behind his back, head bowed in supplication while various middle aged Thai women shod in rubber farm boots kicked him in the crotch.

Each scene was shot in the room Ed had booked for Lonny at the Mansion. The moldering carpet Eddy kneeled on, the metal caged TV in the corner, the edge of the sagging mattress and the filthy drapes in the background, all the same. The pictures were poorly exposed; the colors faded already which lent the outdated evidence of his fetish a harsher degree of desperation. ‘Who uses Polaroid now-a-day’ Toy laughed.

Lonny tossed the pictures on the tilted mattress and they fanned along the edge across the floor forming a gallery of Eddy’s shame. ‘So you’re torturing this guy ‘cause he likes getting kicked in the nuts?’ Lonny asked.

‘C’mon, not this guy, OK. Eddy. You know Eddy, He know you. He know all about you, and Tanner, and Jerry. Where is Jerry? He didn’t come na?’

Ed began to groan again and Toy took a step forward and picked up the claw hammer. Lonny flinched back from her. She turned her head and smiled.

‘No problem, Eddy told me everything he can tell already. I don’t need this again, OK?’

She pulled a rag from under the hammer case and wiped the heads of the claw and punch clean then fitted them back in to their slots and rolled the case and fastened it with a double snap latch so that it looked like a kind of articulated insect rolled into a defensive position.

She left the folded case on the table, grabbed a sheaf of papers from the desk top, turned and began to walk out.

Lonny was left staring at Eddy slumped against his bonds. Raw, red lines cut into his chest and wrists from when he still had the strength and will to struggle against the fate that was taking him.

His heart slamming in his chest echoed through his ears as he felt the tingling in his fingers and at the base of his skull of adrenaline seeping into his blood. His stomach tensed, he rocked on the balls of his feet. He wasn’t going to be taken easy. He had left off violence and fighting since childhood but it had found him here and now he was going to meet it, he had reason to fight back.

‘You gonna-come-along Lonny? We have to talk about a lot but I need to be on-my-way.’ Toy stood in the doorway waving him over.

He walked toward her passing by the thug she had called Lek who gave him a thin smile followed by the slightest of eye movements that Lonny thought was meant to suggest some kind of innocence on his part.