On northeastwards he went, disregarding roadmaps, knowing eventually he would come to the Mekong, which he’d settled on in the rented room to give some substance to his voyage, liking the two syllables tripping exotically off his tongue; he carefully tacked up a Lands Of The Mekong wallmap, and found that, for all the thousands of miles the river flowed through six countries, the only reasonable access point was Bangkok, which required a long traverse of countryside that he’d greedily anticipated and now greedily took in, as she discovered that large gulps of beer were magic: first swimming cold fire in her stomach, then mystifying numbness in her lips, finally delightful lightness in her head, making the coarse client across the table almost handsome and nearly amusing and sometimes she could pretty well ignore his frenzied thrustings later; at first the mamasan approved of this gambit, offering all the girls two bahts’ incentive for every beer they got emptied, to which the girls responded with sudden clumsiness, spilling an inordinate number and pouring extras out, ruses the mamasan responded to by culling a week’s pay from each girl, with twenty strokes of the rod for her, who the mamasan blamed for causing the foolishness in the first place.
A great bank of thunderclouds rushed over the Lao jungle onto the Thai riceplains, lashing the earth with sideways sheets of rain.
Fearful of storm spirits, she cowered in the karaoke shack with her sisters as the storm raged outside, kept company by chickens, a buffalo who breathed heavily and deposited clumps of steaming shit, and some dogs which she eyed hungrily as lunchtime passed and no one was willing to leave the warm group to cook in back, rain finally slackening as it grew dark, thunder fading to distant rumbling, lightning still peppering the sky and lighting up the wide spine of the river.
He left the jeep top down and drove on as the storm hit, whooping as the rain washed over him like a baptism, following the headlights through rain-reflected air, down a road that dipped and disappeared beneath torrents that nearly reached the engine block before climbing to gray vistas of warm downpour, landscape cloaked behind silver curtains, reaching a town where the road gave out, climbing out as the rain misted over to a sprinkle, wondering where he was, until dancing lightning lit up fast-gone flashes of the great river below and the land beyond, marveling to think how far he’d come; he drank beer on the river promenade, practicing Thai phrases from a damp textbook, stumbling back to his bungalow as the last of the lightning ebbed away, knocking over bottles as the amused Thai staff watched from a polite distance.
The next day she was scrubbing shit stains off the cement floor of the karaoke shack and washing her work outfits – two miniskirts, two spaghetti-strap tops – wondering if the seedlings were in the paddies and if she’d be home by harvest, as he was wandering the town half a mile away, smiling at locals who smiled back broadly and tossed English phrases “Where you go?” “You come from?” at him, taking a trail that led to cliff paintings etched by unknown tribes millennia ago, shapes of fish and fire and human hands, and he sat on the dusty trail in the midday heat looking up at them, flushed with instinctual certainty bubbling up in his veins that he had been here before, had played a part in creating these etchings, the instinct laying latent in untold generations of genes until summoned forth by the sight, until a waxy insect dangerously resembling a wasp alighted on his arm, and standing with a stumble to shake it off, the feeling vanished; he walked back to town certain he would never go home.
That evening, as she put on a miniskirt and T-shirt, brushed out her hair, and sat with the youngest sister outside the karaoke shack, he was drinking more beer and practicing more phrases draped in solitude at the same promenade restaurant, while the Christmas lights flicked on and she swatted at mosquitoes and no clients came.
But it was early. She waited.
He had more beer watching timid local couples court along the promenade, wooing in gentle tones and without touching but more obviously needful of each other than he had ever been of anyone, twin daggers of envy and loneliness stabbing him, the couples taking no notice of him walking slowly past to the jeep, thinking a drive might clear his head; he followed a road which trailed alongside the river out of town, thoughts of happy couples keeping his foot on the accelerator, until there were sudden sharp beams in his eyes and shadowy figures motioning him to pull over; she idly nudged a dozing dog and speculated at the pleasing thought that this could be a night when she had no clients; any stragglers would be scarfed up by the older sisters, and she could stay outside with the youngest sister, and no one would sweat on her.
“You, where you go?” said a cop, blinding him with a flashlight and flanked by two others. Noticing their pistols and wide unchanging smiles, he felt no menace in their voices or pose, but a cold surety something was required of him.
“I’m driving,” he said. “Just driving.”
The cop said, “Okay, okay. You drive. You see. Okay. Take cash.”
Through the cop’s thick accent, he might’ve heard “pass,” as in “passport”; “What?” he said.
The cop said, “Cash. Money. Baht. Cash.”
No guesswork this time, so he handed over a few hundred-baht bills, which the cop folded deftly into a breast pocket with a free hand.
“Okay, okay,” the cop said, and waved him on.
Down the pothole-festooned road, which veered sharply to the left, he stopped, jeep idling in fumy burbles, eyeing the murk beyond the pallid halogen pools of his flickering headlights. His skin was electric, something in the air permeating the row of shacks outlined by blinking Christmas lights, shadowy figures around them, so he jerkily engaged the clutch, feeling he must do anything but act suspicious, as though he’d coolly done this hundreds of times, driven into the dark night to park up a steep upslope in front of the second shack on the right, bathed in reality and thinking there was no reason ever to go back anywhere, headlights beaming onto two girls sitting outside with legs demurely crossed, eyes flashing silver.
The headlights blinded her like always, but, trained by rod strokes not to shield her eyes, she smiled, not moving from her perch, to allow the client to go inside for an older sister to make overtures at, which only the most brazen client would decline, to his great detriment, as the sulky rejected sister would instruct her replacement to treat the usurper poorly, a practice the mamasan had failed to stamp out, since the older sisters contemptuously stared down the upraised rod, leaving the mamasan hissing threats and muttering in the cooking area, fearful for the solvency that rested in their skillful ministrations, so the rod, needing somewhere to fall, would end on the younger sisters; and then the lights cut out, and getting out of the jeep was the last thing in all the world she could’ve expected: a boxida, a foreigner, tall pasty man with slightly bulging belly and dark hair and clean white arms with fingernails that caught the gleam of the Christmas lights as he went with a conquering stride inside, eyes running over her small frame, and she, too surprised to even look away, caught his scent, deep and musky and speaking of warmth in cold places, having before only seen flickering TV images of boxida, who, it was said, existed in numberless hordes in faraway places cold enough to crack bones, ruling the world from palaces of ice, their strange angular symbols imprinted on the very clothes she wore, their power greater than even the spirits; he went inside to shuffling and laughing and breaking glass and she abandoned her post, because she could not miss the chance to see a boxida with her own eyeballs.