A Clit-mat Carol

Abe Schrute grabbed the waiter by the elbow. “Where the hell’s my green onion?” he growled at the teenager. “The fried rice comes with green onion!”

The waiter tried a smile, but it was only half-hearted. He couldn’t understand a word that Abe was saying, but it appeared that the old farang had counted the grains of rice on his plate and found them lacking. The waiter didn’t know much English, but he knew that a farang who had the money to come visit Phuket should be able to afford something other than fried rice and a bottle of water. Especially on the night they called Clit-mat Eep.

Abe tired of waiting for a response. “Balls! Horseshit! If yer gonna work in a restaurant, ya gotta learn English!” The boy twisted his arm away and scampered off in fright. “Damn it. Pay 80 baht for a plate of fried rice, and no damn onion. Onion’s the best part.” He ladled generous amounts of the chilies and fish sauce, provided free in little caddies in the center of the table, onto his rice and began to eat. Abe hunched over the table, his skinny left arm wrapped around his plate as if he was afraid someone would try to steal his food. He shoveled the rice into his mouth and washed it down with gulps of water. When he was finished, he counted 100 baht in coins out of a plastic bottle he wore on a string around his neck and left them on the table.

The young waiter was seated by the door watching the TV hung over the cashier’s station. As Abe approached him the young man stood up and delivered a little bow and his best “Melly Clit-mat!” But as Abe passed, a few grains of rice sticking to the gray stubble on his chin, he shouted at the boy: “Balls! Horseshit!”

He stopped just outside the door and looked suspiciously up and down the street. The sidewalk was crowded with tourists. Abe plotted a path down the block toward the beach road, a path that would expose him to the least risk of contact with other people.

He had gone no more than ten paces when he noticed a European couple handing out money to a gaggle of excited children selling flower garlands. The tourists were both fat and sunburned, and only an enormous purse distinguished the female from the male. The children were chattering and giggling and hanging garland after garland around the necks of the foreigners, who appeared to be just as giddy as the kids. As Abe passed he pulled the sleeve of the spherical male half of the pair and said, “You know, these kids are all controlled by gangsters. That money’s just going to buy dope for some speed freak.”

The man looked at Abe with shock. “Vhat does it matter?” he said. “Look at dese kids. Look how happy dey are. I buy all dere garlands and dey get to go home early, maybe get some sleep tonight. It’s Christmas! Vhat’s wrong mit you?”

Abe spat “Balls! Horseshit!” at the tourist and stalked on down the street.

He turned left at the beach road and started south down the dark promenade. Most of the tuk tuks that passed didn’t bother to offer him a ride. The local drivers recognized him by his hunched shoulders and knobby knees. They knew he would rather walk than pay for a lift.

When he came up the driveway to the Chai Dee Bungalows Abe stood for a moment to catch his breath in the shadows outside the open-air, cement-floored space that the management liked to flatter with the name Sala Lahn Chai Seafood Restaurant. The sala was only a tin roof on some concrete pillars (it had been built originally as a car port) and it was half way up a good sized hill, across the road and at least fifty meters from the sea. On this night the place was made festive with strands of electric fairy lights strung between the joists of the roof, cardboard angels taped to the concrete pillars, and crowds of young budget travelers noisily enjoying themselves.

“Balls,” grumbled Abe from his vantage point out on the driveway. He ran a critical eye along the buffet. “Idiots. Paying 800 baht for barbecued chicken and canned cranberry sauce.” He skirted the restaurant and made his way to his bungalow, which stood pretty far up the hill, at the end of a brick path from which most of the bricks had sunk out of sight into the mud. It was the bungalow farthest from the restaurant and the road and the sea, and thus the cheapest room in the place.

He let himself into his room, turned on the light, and immediately looked around to make sure that nothing was missing. While Abe had a small fortune in a Cayman Islands bank, what few material possessions he owned were present in the bungalow: his travel clock on the bedside table, his carry-on bag in a corner, his toiletries kit next to the sink. One of his T-shirts was hanging in the closet, one hung on the drying rack in the bathroom, and one was on his back.

As he checked his wallet and passport, which were hidden under a corner of the carpet under his bed, Abe noticed an envelope on the floor which had evidently been pushed under the door while he was away at dinner. It was an air mail envelope from home, and the postmarks showed that it had followed Abe from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, Ko Samui and Krabi before finally finding him on Phuket. The return address on the envelope was that of a law firm in Des Moines, Iowa. When he saw that, Abe laughed out loud. “You guys never give up, do ya?” Throwing himself onto his bed he ran a bony finger under the envelope’s flap.

The letter was almost identical to the previous dozen or so that Abe had received in the two years since he’d left the United States. The firm of Caplan, Seidman and Pidgeon were informing Mr. Schrute that in his absence the court had found in favor of Mrs. Belle Jacob and awarded her one half of the proceeds of the sale of the Happy Bonz Dog Toy Co, once owned in partnership by Mr. Schrute and the late Mr. Jacob. Mr. Schrute was ordered hereby and forthwith to return said moneys to Mrs. Jacob, along with interest and penalties, or be in contempt of court and liable to a jail term of not less than three years, etc. etc. etc.

“Balls!” Abe wadded up the letter and threw it across the room, missing the waste basket by more than three feet. He was about to treat the envelope the same way, when he noticed that there was another piece of paper inside. The paper was small, a pale pink in color, torn from a note pad of a style that a certain kind of Midwestern woman keeps next to the phone in her kitchen. In the upper left corner of the page was a cartoon of a cat watching butterflies through a window. The handwriting was in violet ink. He read the note with a scowl.

“Abe,” this missive said, “I’m not asking for the money for myself. Tim wants to go to medical school and he’ll never be able to afford it without the money from Marty’s company. And it was Marty’s company as much as yours. Say what you will about Marty Jacob; he was always a good man of business. I’m only asking you to do the right thing. Love, Belle.”

Abe smashed the pink paper into his fist and tossed it across the room. This time he missed the waste basket by five feet. “Horseshit,” he said to the walls. “Breaks my heart 40 years ago and now she wants me to pay for little Timmy to go to school. Marty was never a good man of business. He was up to his neck in debt when he died. Carrying that debt around is what killed him. She knows that. She had to sell their damn house to pay his debts. Screw her.”

Abe paced for a minute. “I gotta have a drink,” he said to the empty room. Reaching under the bed he lifted the corner of the moldy carpet and pulled out his wallet. He carefully selected two red notes from the wallet, and just as carefully replaced the wallet under the bed. Then he went down to the restaurant.

In the Sala Lahn Chai the noise of Slavic Christmas carols was blaring out of cracked speakers. Gangs of grubby European twenty-somethings in carefully groomed dreadlocks milled around, drinking Mekhong-soda and tripping over chairs. A dog was under a table, chewing on an expensive running shoe he’d found outside the front door of somebody’s bungalow. Abe crept around the edge of the crowd until he came to the cashier. “Gimme a bottle of Seng Thip, a bag of ice, and a bottle of Sprite,” he said to her. The girl was wrapping the bottle of whiskey in newspaper and Abe was holding out his money to her, but the bills were immediately swept aside by a fat brown hand, dimpled at the knuckles.

“Doh’ you worry, Missa Eb!” said a voice at Abe’s elbow. Abe looked down into the doll-like face of Papa Boon, the proprietor of the Chai Dee Bungalows, who on this night was dressed in a red felt jacket trimmed in white cotton wool, which was too small across the shoulders and left his chest exposed. On his head was a red felt hat that stood straight up like a traffic cone. He looked to Abe like an animated garden gnome.

“You welly goot customah! Papa giff you fum Clit-mat!” The jolly old man reached over the counter and pulled a Snickers bar out of the candy display and dropped it into the bag with the whiskey, ice and soda pop. “Melly Clit-mat Missah Eb!” he said.

Abe tried to protest, saying that he wanted no favors, but Papa Boon was abruptly dragged away by a gang of happy Swedes for drinks at their table. Abe stood at the cashier’s counter for a moment, looking somewhat wistfully at the party, and then he took his bag up to his room. As he trudged up the hill he noticed that there were no lights on in any of the other bungalows. Around his lighted window there was nothing but dark jungle all the way to the top of the hill, where a pale full moon was made hazy by the humidity. He was the only person at the Chai Dee not at the party.

As he set out a glass and put the ice into a bowl, Abe listened to the sounds coming up from the restaurant. Somebody was singing “Oh, Holy Night” in French. He put the candy bar beside the glass and pulled out the Sprite and whiskey. The cashier had wrapped the bottles in pages from the previous week’s Phuket Gazette, and as Abe slowly unwound the stiff paper, his mind still on the music floating up from the restaurant, a picture caught his eye.

It was a photo of a farang man, of advanced years and nondescript features. For some reason the face looked familiar to Abe, and he read the caption to see if it was someone he might have met on the island. “Mr. Cecil Fowler, aged 64, was found dead in his condominium at Fang Sope Villa on 10 December. The medical examiner at Vachira Hospital determined the cause of death to be an overdose of pain medication, and listed the death as a suicide. Because Mr. Fowler left no will, and because of the advanced state of decomposition of the body, the Australian Embassy has ordered that the remains be cremated. There will be no memorial service.”

Abe had never met Mr. Fowler, but as he looked again at what was obviously a reproduction of Mr. Fowler’s passport photo he knew why the face was so familiar. Mr. Fowler looked a lot like Abe.

His legs felt weak and he sat down heavily. He made himself a stiff drink and tore the wrapper off the Snickers bar. Its chocolate was coated with a grey crust of decomposition. Abe put it down without taking a bite.

From his seat at the desk under the window he could see down the hill to the restaurant and past it to the empty beach road, and beyond that to the sea. Moonlight was reflected in the perfectly flat water, stretching all the way out to the horizon. A single yacht rode at anchor in the bay. Twinkling lights were strung in a dotted chevron from the stern up to the tip of the mast and then down to the prow; these lights were reflected in the water under the boat in a shimmering V. The lights looked to Abe like a pair of blinking arrows, one pointing up, one pointing down.

Abe thought about Mr. Fowler, rotting in the tropical heat on the floor of his condo. His absence from his usual haunts must have gone unnoticed by his neighbors. No friend came to check on him. The body probably wasn’t found until the rent was overdue.

As Abe finished his drink Bob Marley’s “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town” floated up the hill. He was suddenly hungry again. He hadn’t had cranberry sauce since he was a boy. “What if that was turkey,” he said aloud. “A great big turkey, and not chicken after all.” He thought he would definitely go down and join the party. He didn’t think about the price at all. But first, he thought, he would write a letter.

He pulled some paper and a pen out of the desk drawer. The paper had “Chai Dee Bungalows, Phuket, Thailand” printed on it and it had been in the drawer so long that its corners were yellow and curled. As his little clock on the bedside table beeped twelve times to greet Christmas Day, Abe wrote, ”Dear Belle. Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you, but I’ve been travelling around Thailand, and the mail’s not so good here…