Black Cat Weekly #86

Chapter 5-1

byThe dead girls returned on a night of the little rains.

It was a May Bangkok evening as the sky darkened. The humidity and pollution oozed from the earth and placed a lurid brothel glow across the city. Maybe the glow was appropriate, because if you had the money, you could buy what you wanted, with whom you wanted, pretty much anywhere in Bangkok. On Sukhumvit Road the crowds were out in full force; the tourists clutched their money futilely in fanny packs and pockets in a perennial battle with the pickpockets. If the pickpockets didn’t get their money, the long lines of sidewalk vendors would, selling their cheap textiles, T-shirts and the glistening bodies of butterflies pressed behind glass. And the girls. The tiny girls were everywhere, teetering on stiletto heels, with their smooth skin and midnight hair.

Like the insects, they were destined to become something nature hadn’t intended.

But then, hanging with the other lifer expatriates at Sam’s Place on Soi Eleven—Street Eleven—you tended to get a jaded view.

You could describe Sam’s as a hole in the wall, but a hole in the street might be a better. Years back the sidewalk had run out of space for more vendors, so Sam got the brilliant idea to put a bar in the street. He’d built his bamboo-sided hut right on the centerline of Soi Eleven and wouldn’t you know, the taxis and the locals just drove around it. The police and officials just looked away, their palms greased by Sam. Every day at four, he’d lift the awning front of the bamboo hut to expose the bar, hang his lights and set out a fake garden fence around a plot of tables in the sunshine and smog and there you go. Bar on the spot. The electricity for his fridge and lights was jury-rigged out of a neighboring building, the electric cables covered with two-by-fours run across the street.

The place was a hit with the expatriates who craved a tall cool one as respite from the sweltering heat. Ever since expats had been bellying up to the bar for bad Thai beer, tinny music from Sam’s boom-box, and spicy tandoori chicken from the Indian food stand on the corner. It was a place a forty-something guy like me could fit right in.

But tonight, the heavy clank and boom of pile drivers from the nearby construction site gave the night a thuggish heartbeat and the dead girls were back in full force. Their misty figures crowded just beyond the circle of electric tiki lights hung on precarious poles above the garden fence. It didn’t bode well.

“So, what do you think?” I asked the good-looking blond man at the bar beside me. He’d been coming to Sam’s at least as long as me. His name was Titus Sloan and he told me once that he’d been a traveling salesman in the States and was stretching his meager savings by living on the cheap in Thailand. Before sales, he’d been a teacher, but that had hadn’t worked out.

He glanced up at me with watery blue eyes as if he was surprised anyone was there. “About what?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. The weather? They’re predicting more rain tonight.”

“Course they are, Fletcher. It’s the f*****g rainy season.” He shifted his shoulder away from me and drained his beer. “f*****g cesspool.”

Sam, a short, barrel-chested Chinese Thai with a barkeep’s inscrutable face, scooped the empty up. He shook his head at me to quit bothering the guests. I scratched my five-day growth of beard as he plunked down another bottle for Titus. It began to sweat just like I was. Sweat ran in rivers down my back, past the metal strapped under my shirt.

Behind me the dead girls’ whispers grew. Beyond the tiki lights, the vague mist shimmered as if it picked up the neon from Sukhumvit Road. There were distinguishable faces this time, like I usually only saw in my dreams—darling Marcie of the sweet smile and long dark hair from Philadelphia—she was the first—Renata from Queens, Bernice from East Los Angeles, and so many others. So many I didn’t know by name, only by sight. I’d been keeping company with them since before I’d arrived. Before I’d even heard of hungry ghosts.

I turned back to the smooth teak bar. Fleetwood Mac warbled on the stereo, and to my left Glen Samuels contemplated his beer. He was an older fellow of about fifty-five, with the emaciated look of the addict—which the scars on his arms confirmed. He carried a curved Vietnam vintage scar over his skull and had a slow manner of speech, as if there’s been brain damage. He’d stood at the same spot along Sam’s bar every night since I’d arrived.

“Just trying to be neighborly,” I said, and shook my head.

Glen raised a rheumy eye to me. “People don’t come here for conversation, Fletcher. They come here to forget. Except maybe those.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder and for a moment I thought he saw the girls, too, but he was only talking about the tourists at the tables. Sam’s Place and Soi Eleven had made it into the tourist books as an offbeat bit of local color. With the tourist trade Sam’s business was booming, but it made it a little harder for the regulars to get some peace.

I took Glen’s advice and nursed my Thai beer, but the girls’ whispers grew until I could almost hear words. I refused to look at them, to be spooked like I used to be. Instead, I took another swig of formaldehyde-proofed beer and inhaled the exhaust-dingy air.

I’d been coming to Sam’s every night since arriving in Bangkok five years ago. I’d taken a room at the once elegant Royson Hotel, thinking that I wouldn’t be here for long. When I first showed up at Sam’s, I told him I was writing a book. He and his patrons just seemed to accept it—or else they didn’t care enough to question it. I’d figured that I’d be out of here in a few weeks or months at most and never see them again.

It hadn’t worked out that way. Instead of getting what I needed, proof always seemed out of reach. I’d spent more time drinking to mask my shame and frustration, and I’d become as stuck to Bangkok as the gray, pollution-muck stuck to the sides of the buildings. After five long years, each morning when I woke began a waiting period—until four p.m. mercifully came and Sam’s place opened. Sam’s place and my friends holding up the bar. As long as they were here, I had a reason for being.

But the city was changing around me, almost as if it was cutting me loose. The Royson had been a grand behemoth of a building that once had a twenty-five-meter swimming pool, rooms for five hundred a night, and terraced gardens on Sukhumvit Road. But the land had become too valuable, so the garden was paved over. Now the wrecking ball had come for the decaying hotel to allow something newer and shinier. I was living in a two-room hovel down Soi Eleven with a courtyard that flooded deeper with each passing rain.

The girls had changed, too. They’d become angrier and more insistent. Had even followed me home to crowd into the flooded courtyard, their voices like the rain in the metal gutters and dripping off the philodendron leaves. I’d become jumpy and fey, startling at the geckos that played hide and seek on my walls, growing ill at the scent of solid food and existing on rice water that my landlady brought me out of concern.

Rice water and Sam’s beer. As a consequence, my clothes hung on me. This couldn’t go on. It had to end soon. And with the pounding of the pile drivers at the old Royson site, I’d begun to dream of telltale hearts and doom. Sometimes, in the early morning, when I lay in that hypnogogic state between sleep and waking, I could hear the girls plotting. Hear Marcie’s laughter. I had to do something soon or they would come for me.

The fetid mist from the canals and the streets stirred thicker along Soi Eleven but was so far held at bay by Sam’s garden fence. In the distance came the sound of thunder. A fat raindrop plopped on my forehead when I dared poke my head out from under the awning. Rain began to fall in earnest, shattering on the tables and sending the tourists scattering in screams and whoops, their money for the beer abandoned on the tables. Overhead, low clouds congealed like rice congee. They reflected the city’s neon.

The rain increased and the evening sky flashed. Thunder rolled and the clouds released their rain in a heavy, sheeting wall of water. In minutes, eaves gushed filthy fountains into the street. Rivers ran down the gutters and overwhelmed them, so the water backed up over the pavement. The regulars just tipped their beer at the rain and drank. Poo, Sam’s skinny, surly wife whose close-set eyes held a pinched outlook on life, just collected the sodden money from the tables and joined her husband in the dry space behind the bar.

The girls lapped at the boundary of Sam’s garden fence, the rain pouring through them. I looked away from the tiki lights reflecting in the highlights of their hair. Or was it only the rain?

In the deepening dusk the sound of the old hotel’s demolition clanged and crunched and boomed in counterpoint to the thunderous rain. Water drained from the streets toward the sewers. Not that it would do much good because Bangkok was slowly but surely sinking into the Chao Phraya River mud. From the Royson site viscous yellow spotlights rose above the bamboo construction fence, spilling into the street like body fluid and illuminating the half-consumed building.

I knocked back another beer and thumped it down just as an icy touch fell on my arm.

I nearly knocked over my empty as I spun around. Sam sent me a do-I-need-to-cut-you-off look. No one stood behind me. No one stood beyond the three-foot awning, but a tremor threatened my legs, and I leaned back against the bar, glaring into the midnight mist of faces. Marcie was to the left like always—at least I hoped she was—but I looked away, afraid to meet her gaze. I’d been afraid a long time. And now the girls stood inside the picket fence. They’d never made it that far before.

The ice-cold still tingled on my right arm, like a frozen feather had been laid upon it, right where Marcie used to touch me to get my attention.

The hairs on my neck stood on end. I turned back to the bar and hefted my chin at Sam for another round just as shouts rose from beyond the construction zone’s bamboo fence even though it wasn’t quite quitting time.

Sam put down his rag and his favorite, girl-shaped bottle opener. The few remaining tourists set down their drinks and turned. The old expats paused with their beer halfway to their lips. Something was happening. Something big, because the city’s pile driver heart groaned once and stopped. It left behind only the frothy hiss of traffic noise from Sukhumvit Road and Sam’s favorite mixtape of Vietnam-war-era protest tunes.

And female whispers like a sigh.

No, that was the wail of approaching sirens. One black and white car roared past the end of the street. And another. And another. A full five cars careened past the end of Soi Eleven, their sirens suddenly silenced. Glen Samuels set down his drink and strolled to the end of the street. He came back with the news that the police were at the Royston.