Killed at the Whim of a Hat

Two

The new owners were building a tall skinny condominium on our home so we had exactly two months to dislodge ourselves from our heritage. Thirty-four years of my junk and memories packed into cardboard boxes. And it was a journey into the unknown. All Mair had to go on was a computer-generated artist’s impression of the Gulf Bay Lovely Resort and Restaurant at Maprao in Chumphon province. I had to look it up. It’s one of those Thai provinces nobody ever goes to. You have a rough idea where it is but you couldn’t pinpoint it on a map. If it was a country it would be Liberia.

We had family powwows in that first month, each of us stating our case as to why we couldn’t possibly leave Chiang Mai. Sissi had her computer business and was certain they didn’t even have electricity in the south. Arny was in training for the Northern Adonis 2008 Bodybuilding competition. Twice he’d been a flick of a pectoral from making it to the nationals and we were all convinced this would be his year. He needed access to a weight room and steroids. Granddad Jah cited the fact there were more homicides in Nakhon Sri Thamarat than any other province in the country. (Not terribly relevant as Chumphon was two provinces removed.) And me? Damn. I was a heart attack away from my leather chair. I loved my job. I would no sooner voluntarily leave Chiang Mai than I would spend the night in a bath of weasel mucus. I couldn’t go. I wouldn’t.

Mair didn’t seem to care. Her mind had already left the smoggy northern city and was sipping iced water on a balcony overlooking the gently lapping Gulf surf.

“Don’t you all fret.” She smiled. “Your Mair’s big and ugly enough to look after herself. You all go off and have a nice time. Don’t worry about me. I can always hire staff.”

I don’t think she was being sardonic. I think she really believed she could do it all alone.

“It’s only a small resort,” she said. “Just the five rooms. No harder than bringing up four lively children.”

Unless there was something she hadn’t told us, there were only the three of us, but numbers were getting a little complicated for our Mair. In fact a lot about life was starting to confuse her. So, that’s why there we were, two months later, middle of the monsoons, victims of filial obligation, hanging on desperately to the end of the earth; Mair, me, Arny and Granddad Jah. Sissi moved into a studio apartment in Chiang Mai with her computers and her scrapbooks. She has issues, you see. One of those issues involves not being seen in public, a bit like what’s-her-name in Sunset Boulevard. And ‘public’ especially applies to sweaty rural fishing communities. She was torn between familial duty and life. This wasn’t the first time she’d been torn so she knew how to handle it.

Arny and I resiliency dedicated our deeds to looking after Mair and our words to bitching about everything wrong with our lives. We’d moved to a village surrounded by coconut groves called Maprao. That means ‘coconut’. We’re in the middle of a bay called Glang Ow, which means ‘middle of the bay’ and our nearest small town is at the mouth of a river. It’s called Pak Nam. I probably don’t need to translate that one for you. Pak Nam sits at the mouth of the Lang Suan river which runs through Lang Suan district from Lang Suan town. Lang Suan means ‘behind the garden’, so we can only assume that the river once flowed through someone’s backyard.

There are twenty-eight villages called Maprao down here, thirty Thai Bays, thirty-four Middle Bays, and thirty-nine River Mouths. In the south 1,276 villages are named after fruit and vegetables. Exactly 2,567 bear the name of a person who used to live there. It is precisely this absence of imagination that epitomizes the south for me. I doubt anyone down here would even care enough to sit in front of a computer screen and work it out. If southern Thais had colonized Australia I imagine the year 2000 would have seen the opening ceremony of the Big Harbor Olympics.

The computer-generated Gulf Bay Lovely Resort and Restaurant was terminally flattering. The actual place was a dump: girded with mosquito-ridden bogs, bombarded by monsoons three months a year, miles from the nearest tourist route, and…depressing. Each storm season the sea claimed a little more of the beach so when we arrived everything was lined up along a crest of sand with the potential to drop into the next high tide. As if ignorant of the place’s failings, Mair worked in the sparsely stocked resort shop and sang a lot. Arny managed the accommodation, and I drew the short straw and ran the kitchen. And, for almost ten months, I had tolerated, withstood, and suffered, not exactly in silence, until that wonderful day when Captain Kow rode into town on his Honda and announced that two bodies had been found buried in a VW Kombi.

After asking directions for ten minutes and not really understanding the replies, I had somehow managed to stumble upon Old Mel’s plantation. None of the palm fields are fenced down here. Anyone could pull up in a semi-trailer and make off with forty trees if they so wished. But they never did. I was sweaty and wobbly from the ride and I wheeled Mair’s bike up the sand track. There were dogs. I’m not a big dog fan and these two weren’t going out of their way to convert me. They snarled and salivated at my ankles all the way to the rear of the plot. There was a police truck parked up ahead and a gaggle of onlookers beyond it. In the U.S. you might have found a police cordon with a sentry but Pak Nam’s finest were posing for photographs in front of a rapidly expanding pit. All the neighbors had brought along a hoe or a pick and were slowly digging out the VW as if it were some long-interred dinosaur.

They’d concentrated on the front end and the driver and his companion were staring out through a surprisingly clear windscreen. I could appreciate the fact they were skeletons at this stage but they had all the appearances of a perfectly calm couple out for a weekend drive. The driver clutched the wheel, and although his seat belt buckle and his beard had long since dropped onto his lap, his plastic John Lennon cap continued to hold his long hair in place. His date hadn’t been so fortunate. She was as bald as a cue ball and only her stature and a thick lei of glass and plastic beads around her neck gave away her gender.

The diggers and posing policemen ignored me at first and I had a feeling I could have clambered all over the half-buried vehicle and taken any picture I wished. There obviously wasn’t a great deal of crime scene investigation going on. It was a situation crying out for order so I decided it was worth a try. I marched up to the policemen, stood between them and the clicking cameras, and said, “Officers, my name is Jimm Juree, deputy crime editor at the Chiang Mai Mail (I deliberately omitted tense) and I’m here to report on this case.”

There was a palpable hush from the photo takers and the diggers hoisted their weapons. I doubted the two young men had heard of the Mail or, for that matter, ever read a newspaper, but I held my ground and allowed my hand to hover like a gunslinger’s over the camera hanging from my shoulder. After several seconds I was starting to wonder whether they were mute, but the younger of the two finally spoke up.

“I’ve got a cousin in Chiang Mai,” he said. “Kovit.”

I was afraid he might ask me if I knew him but instead he surprised me by telling me his cousin was the deputy director of the zoological gardens who had turned down lucrative offers from Europe and opted to stay in Chiang Mai where they were attempting to mate pandas. He meant with one another…I think. The constable’s partner added the little known fact that pandas live for twenty years and the females only have a three-year window when they’re fertile enough to get pregnant. He added that they weren’t very fond of sex and the females decided when and where to ‘do it’.

It was all very fascinating and obviously a matter they’d discussed at great length, but would it get me an exclusive on the subterranean VW? The answer arrived in a second brown and cream truck from which stepped Police Major Mana, head of the Pak Nam station. He was a middle-aged man whose dark face seemed as polished as his shoulder badges. He was short and walked as one would imagine a panda in a very tight uniform would walk. I wondered if the two constables had the same thought.

Also stepping from the truck was a skinny young officer with an old-fashioned film camera that seemed to weigh more than he could carry. Major Mana spent several minutes putting on his hat and checking it in the side mirror, then walked past me and the constables to the dig site. He stood back and glared at the stalled excavation. The cameraman stepped up, adjusted his lenses and took what would probably be a fine photograph of his major surveying a crime scene — if it came out, if it wasn’t over- or under-exposed or the film hadn’t melted in the camera. Digital may not be for the connoisseur but at least you don’t have to wait a day to see what a cock-up you’ve made.

His duty obviously done, Major Mana removed his hat, dabbed his brow with a cloth and headed back to his truck. One of the two constables stepped forward and saluted as he passed.

“Major, sir,” he said. “This is Nong Jimm from the press in Chiang Mai.”

I hated it when they called me ‘little sibling’. It’s as if, just because you’re short and not wrinkled, you can’t possibly be as old as they are. It might have been because of the heat or a sincere respect for the fourth estate, but the major was suddenly overcome with charm. He was in such a hurry to throw his hands together in an undeserved response to my wai that he dropped his nice hat.

“Nong Jimm,” he said, stepping aside for the two constables to retrieve his hat and dust it off. “Welcome to our province. If there’s anything I can do to make your stay more comfortable you just have to ask.”

I knew his type only too well: slick as a snake in engine oil. I decided to take advantage of his misapprehension before he learned I lived a thirty-minute bicycle ride away.

“Once I’ve looked around here I’d be grateful for a few words with you,” I said. I was dazzled by the sunlight off his teeth.

“Then let me take you for a working lunch,” he said. “When you’re done here, of course.”

It suited me. It was in my interest to know my local law enforcers and perhaps I’d get something to eat that couldn’t swim, for once. A nice piece of roast pork would make the day for me. A cut of ham. A few slices of venison. I’d suffer an hour of posturing gladly in exchange for a plate of anything that, a few days earlier, had been frolicking around a field. I was losing my carnivorous je ne sais quoi.

It surprised me how much I enjoyed my morning at the VW excavation site. In my year in Chumphon, for some reason I’d not had the pleasure of hanging out with a large group of local, apparently unemployed, men. Several were around Granddad Jah’s age but they swung those picks with the strength of men who’d carried wounded cattle across their shoulders. And everything was funny to them. Digging was a complete hoot. The repartee and laughter bounced back and forth but I would have needed a northern Thai/southern Thai simultaneous translation to appreciate the half of it. By far the funniest thing that morning was the forensic disaster.

I’d taken a number of instant digital pictures of the skeletal couple that I doubted papers like the Mail would use. But I was sure I could sell them to 191, the ghoul magazine in Bangkok. Nothing was too gory for them. I was wondering how to spice up the photos somehow when Uncle Ly, the dig’s own stand-up comic, climbed down into the van through the hole in the roof and posed between the skeletons. His nephew took a picture with his cell phone and I was just lining up to do the same when the inevitable happened.

I suppose somebody should have asked why two skeletons could remain intact despite the absence of those physiological nuts and bolts that hold us all together. Whatever the answer, it was a poor glue, because as soon as Uncle Ly made his V sign over the shoulder of the driver, the latter collapsed like a stack of coins. We all fell silent. Then, as if they’d been joined by some unseen thread, the passenger — and I wasn’t the only one to see this — tilted her head slightly to the right and nodded before joining her beau on the floor of the cab like a faithful spouse. In sickness and in health and in pieces.

It was the sight of a thoroughly embarrassed Uncle Ly attempting to put the two bodies back together that had us in stitches. Constable Ma Yai and Constable Ma Lek came rushing over to the dig site and for a moment I was afraid they’d reprimand us for laughing at destroyed evidence, arrest us even. But first one, then the other officer made comments that merely stoked the hilarity of the onlookers and further flustered poor Ly. When it was clear the skeletons would never be the same again, the two young officers made a very good call. It was the vibration of the digging that had caused the couple to go to pieces, they decided. Everyone agreed. It seemed thoroughly unsociable not to. On my ride home I was mystified at how easily I’d become complicit in an act of deception. It must have been something in the air.

I arrived back at the resort at eleven fifty, which left me half an hour before my lunch date. As I’d deserted the mackerel half-gutted that morning, I broke the news to the family that this would have to be a Mama instant noodle day. I’d planned to have a shower after riding under a big-bellied sun for half an hour but the little god of electrical supply chose that exact moment to dig his trident into the celestial fuse box and the whole area was plunged back to the Ayuthaya period. This happened so often in our little dark corner of heaven that I’d long since stopped swearing under my breath. My choices were: a dip in the sea that would leave me itching through lunch, or a plastic dipper from the giant jar out back that was breeding more cultures than the natural history museum. I chose the sea.

Major Mana was as amenable as a Venus flytrap. I sat opposite him squirming in my seat as the salt dried on my skin. In my bag I had the bulk of my report written at the scene. After lunch I would make a few phone calls, type it up on my laptop and send it off from the computer game shop. Being a Saturday I could be sure of a skirmish with the teenagers but I had my first real story in a year and a few bruised children was a small price to pay. All I needed from the major were the compulsory names and ranks of all the officers involved and a quote that would instill faith in the community that the police were firmly in control. In Chiang Mai we had a stock of such quotations for the ranking officers to choose from because they were often stuck for relevant grammatical phrases. I didn’t have my list with me so I had to let Mana baffle readers with the murder/disaster/accident/suicide theory. The business side of our lunch had been concluded in ten minutes and I was eager to be away from there and send off my story. But as I was a visitor to the south from Chiang Mai, the major had ordered delicious local mackerel and sea bass and watched for my reaction as I consumed my meal. I managed a smile.

He had, as expected, presumed to have a bottle of ‘Hinnisy’ brandy placed on the table for our arrival as if it were a normal service of the restaurant. I knew from a report we’d done for the Mail that some of these fake rural liquors could cause deformities in the newborn and rot the teeth clean out of your mouth by the third glass. But Major Mana’s superglossed teeth gave me confidence and I matched him swig for swig through the meal. I can drink. I have no idea where my constitution comes from. My mother has to merely sniff a mosquito coil and she’s singing old Bird Thongchai Mclntyre ballads. So it has to be down to the genes of my mysterious missing father. Perhaps he was an alcoholic. Mair is ever mute on the subject. I have no recollection of him at all. Sissi, the eldest, remembers a handsome, funny man who came and went and came…and went. That’s all we have of ‘Dad’. No photos. No fond reminiscences from Mair. Just genes that don’t seem to match.

So, anyway, we were at the fruit plate and well down the Hinnisy and Major Mana was slurring and his volume had risen. With a wink to the restaurant owner he’d slid his chair around so he could whisper secrets into my ear. As he talked about himself the entire meal, I didn’t have to lie about where I lived. He insisted on mixing our drinks from the rack of ingredients standing beside his chair. Without exception he’d put twice as much brandy in my glass and, without exception, I’d wait till he was distracted and switch glasses on him. Twice, he’d told me that he’d booked a motel room in case I wanted to rest after lunch. All the class of a dollop of lizard dung — I mean, really. Perhaps he’d never before had a lunch date who didn’t sport fur or scales.

At one stage he failed to return from the toilet. Given the time it had taken for him to find the outhouse in the first place, I wasn’t terribly surprised. A penis is a lot smaller than a toilet. I gave him five minutes, poured the remainder of my drink into the ice bucket and walked down to the main road where I’d parked my motorcycle.

“Did you have a nice Sunday?” Mair asked.

“Yes, thanks.”

But it was Saturday.

I still hadn’t forgiven her for what she’d done to us and I’d planned a full year of social disobedience, but as always it occurred to me that my acidity didn’t get through her leaden mother casing. Most of the time she was Mair: sweet, happy to listen to our problems, unintentionally funny, just normal Mair. But there were times she frightened us. Her slide had started with little things. You’d see a trail of ants leading to a cupboard and you’d find an open caramel pudding in there.

“Mair, why isn’t the caramel pudding in the fridge?”

“It isn’t?” She’d shake her head. “That’s funny. That’s where I put it, child. I can’t think who’d have moved it.” Then there were times she’d try to change TV channels with her cell phone or to get the local radio station on the microwave. It was probably a good thing that we’d moved to southern Thailand rather than southern Chicago. Mair would pull down the shutter and go to bed and leave fifty bags of rice outside the shop for the night. I can’t think why nobody ever helped themselves.

Since we moved down here, Mair had also started to develop inappropriate relationships. To understand this Thailand of ours you have to realize that some things are endemic. A politician, for example, cannot, by the very definition of a politician, be entirely honest. Honest politicians have no influential friends to help them over the first hurdle — vote buying. Then there’s the business community. Businessmen and women have no social obligations. The whole point of being in business is to screw — politely if possible but not compulsorily — the next guy. Which brings us to dogs. Millions are born every day. In human terms, the vast majority will not make it past their nursery school graduation. Only the fit survive which means teenaged dogs are already mean and nasty and thoroughly unlovable. Helping an infant doggy, therefore, is tantamount to defying the laws of the jungle.

But something happened in the heart of Mair when we moved south. It was as if Mother Teresa had possessed her soul. In Chiang Mai, she’d been perfectly content to chase away strays with a broom. But here she suddenly couldn’t pass a crippled animal without bursting into tears. She’d stop and talk to them. I mean, words. The type of googoo language you use to confuse newborn babies. Normally a stray would flee in panic at the sight of a person but there was obviously the scent of marrow about my mother.

The first sack of bones she brought home had elbows all over. The mutt had so little meat on her she could have been the Kombi driver’s family pet. Mair fed her and nursed her to health and named her John. Within the month, John was strutting around like Bambi, not quite coordinated but with that unmistakable swagger of hope. For the next six months the dog had nothing to worry about other than how quickly she could grow into her enormous feet and how many people she could charm with her damp dog smile. She didn’t fool me. She wasn’t tethered or caged but she stayed. I tried to explain the concept of Stockholm syndrome to my mother but she insisted that the dog remained with us because she loved us.

Buoyed by this miracle of life, Mair then picked up a naked and squeaking grub-like creature from beside the road one day. If not at death’s doorstep, it was, at least, in the front garden. She recognized a potential that none of us could see and took the bundle to Dr. Somboon, the livestock specialist. Dr. Somboon had set up his after-hours veterinary clinic, not because he was fond of domestic animals, in fact he found them most unpleasant, but because very few people took their ailing cows to a clinic in the evenings. And, of course, there was much more money to be made from pets. He’d put on rubber gloves before deigning to touch Mair’s latest find. He obviously recognized the angel of death hovering over the pup because all he could prescribe was euthanasia. But Mair wasn’t having any of it. She ordered a cocktail of drugs for a menu of ailments and spent two weeks nursing the skin bag back to health. She kept it there in a basket under the counter of her shop repelling the few customers who chanced by. When chocolaty hair began to sprout, Mair named her Gogo: Thai pronunciation for Cocoa. Gogo had a stomach complaint that prevented her digesting her food. She ate more than me and shat like a buffalo. Her condition made her permanently menopausal. For reasons I could totally understand, she didn’t like me. I didn’t like her back.

So, by the eighth month of our southern incarceration, Mair had already launched a new generation of offspring which she regaled with the same love she’d afforded her children. Me and Arny were starting to hope that our services would no longer be needed. Our rival siblings were sitting either side of Mair in front of her shop when I returned from the Internet cafe. Gogo turned her back when I arrived but it didn’t faze me. I was in a good mood. I’d sent my story to three newspapers and the photos had been snapped up by 191. Thai Rat and the Mail wanted follow-up stories as soon as possible. I could see an end to the dark tunnel of selling empty bottles and used newspapers to the recycling truck. It was humiliating having to queue up there with our garbage. It was just one of the growing number of things I didn’t like about our life. I didn’t want to sound ungrateful for the opportunity to move to the backwoods marshes of Maprao but, purely for my own entertainment, I’d put together a list of my top unfavorite things about my new home.

1. Power cuts

2. The constant smell of drying squid

3. Neighbors with nothing intelligent to discuss

4. The thud of coconuts falling from trees in search of a head

5. A shallow sea so warm it breeds Jurassic life-forms

6. The drone of passing fishing boats at three a.m.

7. The close proximity of reptiles

8. No telephone line so no Internet

9. No nightlife (no daylife either)

10. Garbage from all the so-called high-class resorts being washed up on our beach.

The original list ran to sixty items but I didn’t want to look like a bitch so I parsed it down.

My household duties were laid out on a roster. The seafood invariably came to me, caught by neighbors along the bay upon which we lived. For vegetables, until I could convince the chickens to lay off my vegetable garden, I had to go to Pak Nam. Pak Nam, our nearest ‘town’ (sorry, I chuckled then), is ten kilometers from us over the Lang Suan river bridge. It’s such a dinky place it’s like driving a Humvee through LEGOland. One-man footpaths crowd in on you from both sides. Blind people on motorcycles and bicycles pop out of unseen side streets like computer game antagonists forcing you to swerve out of their way. Vendors push carts in front of you just for the fun of it. And Burmese, more Burmese than you can shake a cheroot at, all walking in the road as if they don’t have pavements in Burma: girls with ghostly powder-caked faces and boys with long checked tablecloths hanging from their waists. At last count there were two million of them loose in our country, all probably powdered and table-clothed and walking in the road.

The heart of this annoying hamlet is the 7-Eleven. It’s a bustling hub of Slurpee buying, exotic magazine browsing and self-watching in the CCTV screen above the counter. Local teenagers hang out in front on their motorcycles until seven p.m., sometimes eight p.m., largely because it’s one of the few places still lit after dark. If the 7-Eleven is too exciting for you, there’s always the post office. The concept of queuing, introduced to the rest of Thailand in the mid-1980^s, has yet to make it to the Pak Nam P.O. Elderly ladies in floppy sun hats assume you’re standing behind another customer because you’re fascinated by the curvature of their shoulder blades. They smile at you, these old biddies, and step up to the counter in front of you. And they get served. But even at its busiest you will see no more than six customers jockeying for position. Our P.O. box is number two, which shows you how much correspondence passes in and out of Pak Nam. I imagine they merely lost the key to number one.

Along the street there is a small photocopy shop which specializes in gray, fluffy versions of your original. The manager puts on her shoes whenever a customer enters the shop. Next to that is a Chinese pharmacy which allows you to sample medications right there in the shop. They’ll give you a cup of iced tea if a pill needs to be washed down, and privacy if you need to apply cream to a delicate spot. There’s a hairdresser’s with a photograph in the window that gives the false impression that Julia Roberts is a patron, and no fewer than four traditional barbershops. As this is Thailand, there are numerous food stalls and seven restaurants which all have the belief that unpainted gray wood, Happy New Year banners and glamor calendars are an acceptable style of decoration in the food and beverage industry. Despite two small establishments masquerading as coffee shops, you can’t get a decent cup of coffee or an edible cake in Pak Nam. Not that you could park anywhere long enough to eat one. The spaces not taken by motorcycles and bicycles and handcarts are occupied by trucks delivering exciting goods you never actually see on sale in the shops. On very special days in Pak Nam, the intriguing odor from the fish factories squats on the town like an unwashed swabbing mop. This, is our nearest town. Have I made my point yet?

I often complained that I had the raw end of the sausage at our place as, apart from regular shopping trips into this metropolis, I was obviously the only one doing any work. Mair was in charge of the shop, which largely entailed standing at the cash drawer gazing out at the quiet road and chatting with the two or three customers who came in to buy something they probably didn’t need. I suspect they felt sorry for Mair. Everything in stock was in cans, packets, boxes or bottles and some of the labels were written in languages they hadn’t used since King Taksin ruled the country two-hundred-odd years ago. We had nothing fresh, exotic or home-made and, more importantly, nothing you couldn’t buy from Yai Yem’s much bigger shop half a kilometer along the road.

As the resort manager, Arny was in charge of the five budget bungalows that faced a largely uneventful body of water and the five thatch-roofed tables we playfully called a restaurant. Including the hectic Songkran holiday rush in April, that year we’d averaged two overnight guests and eight diners a week. Currently, our cash cow — no offense to her — was an ornithologist from Khon Kaen University who’d booked our end room for the week. She was studying the migration of hawks on a grant and was attracted to us, not for our five-star service or our luxurious rooms, but because we were so close to a bog which, evidently, the hawks were particularly fond of. I suppose I should be berated for having a fixed image of an ornithologist in my mind. There was nothing pasty, shortsighted, spidery or matronly about our own bird fancier. She was a Thai Indiana Jones type with tight-fitting safari shorts, muscled legs, luscious thick hair and a certain attitude that I admired. I have no idea where she ate or how she spent her day as she was out of her room before sunrise and back after dark. She’d paid in advance and was the nearest thing to an income our resort had experienced since we’d moved in.

With guests like this to manage, Arny found himself with a lot of free time, so he’d set up a flotsam gym on the beach. He’d improvised with old oil drums and car tires, bamboo poles and rocks. He’d chase crabs and swim till the jellyfish forced him from the water. It was all very sad to watch him roll half coconut trees from one end of the beach to the other because we both knew he wouldn’t be attending any bodybuilding galas for some time, if ever again. After school, teenagers, both boys and girls would sit in clumps at the extremities of the beach where he turned around. They’d smile and be friendly and exchange small talk but it’s hard to know what to say to someone like Arny. I got the feeling my brother was more of an exhibit than a celebrity.

Granddad Jah was responsible for sitting on the bamboo platform opposite and overseeing our desperate resort. He may have been distracted now and then by passing trucks and motorcycles and other old men who nodded as they passed and whom he ignored. But mainly he sat for hours beneath the banana leaf canopy, wearing one of his wardrobe of coral-white undervests…and he oversaw us. If he was formulating a grand plan for our improvement he never did share it.