An Old Man With No Stories To Tell

Mr. Grosvenor stares at the ceiling over his bed and waits to die. Since the Veterans Administration built this hospital in 1949 many other old men have spent the last hours of their lives staring at that same piece of ceiling. Nobody knows exactly how many, they don’t keep those kinds of records. While he waits to die Mr. Grosvenor mumbles. He can no longer digest food, move his bowels, urinate, or walk, but he can still speak, in a papery whisper to which only he is currently listening.

“It was a beautiful city,” he says, his watery eyes fixed on the cross where four ceiling panels meet. “It was a city built around canals. The canals were clean enough that people bathed in them. Flowers grew on their edges, and walking along a canal was like walking through a greenhouse. It was a small city. Green. Quiet. Peaceful.”

A nurse comes in and checks the bags from which fluids are pumped into his body, then checks the bags which collect fluids pumped away from his body. He looks at her but doesn’t recognize her; they all look the same: chunky, solid, strong women in shapeless smocks with flowers faded pastel by countless washings in bleach. For the most part they no longer try to engage him in conversation. They all know he’s circling the drain; they make him comfortable and keep him clean. No family has ever visited. There are no personal effects by the bed, no family photographs, no Western novels, no reading glasses, no false teeth in a glass. No bible. He is the only thing in the room not owned by the Veterans Administration.

“You could get a rickshaw to take you around the city all night for a dollar,” he says as the nurse is writing something on a clipboard. “Um-hmmm,” she says, then leaves the room.

“A real rickshaw, pulled by a Chinese coolie with bare feet. They had feet like iron. He’d take you to a dance hall and wait outside, take you another and another until you found a girl, then take you to a restaurant because in those days you had to feed ‘em. Then he’d take you to a hotel and wait outside again, until morning if he had to, and take you both home when you were done. All for just a dollar.”

Voices come and go in the hallway outside his room, footsteps walk or run past his door. Alarms of different kinds go off in other rooms, a disembodied voice makes announcements from speakers at the end of the hall. Mr. Grosvenor hears none of it. His left ear still works as well as it ever did, but he’s not interested in the noises in the hallway. He’s only interested in the ceiling, and in the story he’s telling himself.

“I met her in the White Leopard. That was the swankiest dance hall in Bangkok right after the war. They weren’t supposed to let G.I.s in there, but we could bribe the kitchen staff to let us in the back way, from the alley. Once you were hooked up with a girl you could go out the front door alright. The White Leopard was supposed to be for big shots, officers and diplomats and the airline pilots. But once we were inside nobody took notice of us, long as we didn’t start fights. Everybody was there for the girls. I used to go with my friend Sam, and a few of the other fellas. We had 24 hours of liberty every week, usually on Friday. The other fellas always left with girls, but I always went back to barracks alone, because the first night I was there I saw Malee, dancin’ with some newspaper guy, and I knew I didn’t want no other girl but her.”

A young doctor comes into Mr. Grosvenor’s room and asks him some questions. Mr. Grosvenor does not respond to the questions. He looks at the doctor but mistakes him for somebody dead, and he begins to cry. The young doctor nervously leaves the room calling, “Nurse? Nurse!” As soon as he leaves Mr. Grosvenor forgets him and stares at the ceiling once again. “Course, Malee knew who was a big shot and who was just a GI. She could read a man’s clothes like I read the newspaper. Know your age, your income, your street address by the time you got done sayin’, ‘Hello, Baby.’ You ask to buy her a cola and by the time the boy brings it over she knew if you were worth her time or not. Plenty of fellas were left standin’ there alone, watching her little ass twitchin’ away, by the time the boy showed up with his tray o’ colas.”

The nervous doctor returns with a nurse. The nurse checks Mr. Grosvenor’s pulse and looks at the various bags of fluids and reassures the nervous doctor. Mr. Grosvenor does not notice them. “You had to buy ‘em a cola before they’d dance with you, and you had to pay to dance with ‘em before you could take ‘em out. I seen her plenty o’ times at the White Leopard, Hell, everybody saw Malee. She made sure everybody saw her. She was the most beautiful girl there every night, wore the best clothes, danced the best, laughed the loudest. Always danced with the biggest big shot in the room.”

“I never woulda asked her if she wanted a cola if my friend Sam hadn’t done it for me. He and the other fellas did it to embarrass me. She was with a buncha girls over by the bandstand and Sam went up to her and told her a colonel wanted to buy her a cola. He brought her over to me and everybody had a good laugh. Everybody but me and Malee. She was real pissed off at Sam for trickin’ her, I could see it in her face. She was about our age but she had a much older soul and she didn’t like being fooled with by a buncha kids. So she grabbed control of the thing and smiled real sweet at me and said, ‘You buy me cola, G.I.?’ That shut up Sam and the other fellas but good.

“I was just a kid, grew up on a farm, never been nowhere. No kind o’ big shot at all. They sent me to Siam cuz we raised pigs where I grew up and the Siamese they love their pork. They never were in the war, ya know, neutral supposedly, but they let the Japs come build a railway to Burma through their mountains and the Japanese ate ‘em outa house and home before they left. The whole last year o’ the war no supplies arrived from Japan, and no money, either, so the Japanese troops just started takin’ what they needed. At the end they just took whatever they wanted. Gangs of ‘em went house to house raidin’. Plenty of Japanese soldiers went into the prison camps in Chontaburi in 1945 with gold jewelry up their ass. By the end of the war everybody was starvin’. Wasn’t but a few pigs left in the whole country in ’46, not even enough to keep a stable gene pool goin’. Everybody was eatin’ rice with fish sauce and whatever greens they could pick outa their yard. A man can’t pull a plow through two feet of water so you can’t eat the buffalo. They were eatin’ frogs and lizards and insects. A pound of pork cost a teacher a whole week’s pay. Upcountry people were shootin’ each other over pigs. So America sent over boatloads of sows and boars from Iowa, and a bunch o’ us green farmboys to teach the Siamese better breedin’. Wasn’t no Peace Corps or United Nations back then, it was the US Army did that kind o’ thing. My friend Sam, he was from a farm in Nebraska, and he was doin’ the same thing as me. Had boys over there from Iowa and Missouri and Minnesota and Kansas with sheds full of pigs, it was a damn 4-H fair. We got there and the Siamese government said we had to put all our animals into quarantine for six months before we could take ‘em upcountry. Really they just wanted to keep the pigs in Bangkok so they could steal ‘em. So there we were, all these young boys, 18, 19 years old, none o’ us ever been off the farm before, in Bangkok with lots o’ military pay and nothin’ to do all day long but slop the hogs. Pretty soon we figured out we could pay local boys to slop the hogs for us and there we were with lots of military pay and nothin’ at all to do.”

Mr. Grosvenor rattles a dusty laugh in his throat. Nobody hears it. The laughter makes his pulse go up a few beats, and an alarm sounds over the nurse’s station down the hall. He coughs a bit and goes back to his reverie. The alarm ceases.

“We were all too young to have been in the shootin’ war, and boy did that sting. Back in the US all the G.I.’s were coming home with chests full of medals and we knew we weren’t goin’ to get any medals for teachin’ Siamese farmers how to tell when a sow is in heat. Word was gettin’ to us from Japan about how it was over there, and Tokyo was heaven for a white man with occupation scrip in his pockets, so they said. We all wanted stories to tell when we got home too, so on Friday night we’d shave, slap on cologne, shine our shoes, put on our class A’s, and head for the dance halls. That’s what Bangkok had for young boys like us, dance hall girls. These girls, they weren’t whores. Sure, they slept with men for money, but they were more like movie stars. They were celebrities. The best of ‘em were known all over the city. When you took ‘em out, people treated you better cuz you were with a famous dance hall girl. None o’ us boys had ever had girls back home, not for sex, anyway. Back in those days a good girl didn’t sleep with you unless she was married to you. So we didn’t want some whore for money, we wanted a good girl who put out. And that’s what dance hall girls were, or that’s what we wanted ‘em to be. And for the right amount of money, they’d be whatever you wanted ‘em to be.”

The sunlight coming in the windows and across Mr. Grosvenor’s little patch of ceiling has changed its quality, has become milder, more angled, dimmer. A different nurse comes in, somebody from the evening shift, somebody who has never worked with Mr. Grosvenor before. She checks his IV lines, checks the oxygen tube going up his nose, and finally lifts the blanket to check his urinary catheter. Like every nurse does the first time she sees his penis, she freezes. She swears softly under her breath. She calls out to another nurse who comes in from the hallway. “Have you seen this?” asks the first nurse.

“What? Oh, yeah, unbelievable, isn’t it? I checked his file, he never married. Easy to see why. I couldn’t face that every night of my life.”

“April, I’ve seen hundreds in my career, workin’ in the VA you’re gonna see a lot of ‘em. But I’ve never seen one like this. Not since I left the farm, anyway.” She giggles and puts the blanket back over Mr. Grosvenor, gently and with tenderness. She leaves the room shaking her head and saying, “My, oh, my…”

“While Malee had her cola I told her about myself. She only took a few sips, they weren’t really for drinkin’. Payin’ for the drink was how you paid to talk to ‘em, anyway she had her cola and I told her about myself and I guess she understood a little o’ what I said. She laughed at about everything I said, anyway. She understood whatever she needed to understand, at any rate pretty soon she put down her glass and looked around the room. There still must not have been any big shots there yet because she said, ‘Okay, G.I., you dance me now.’ She wasn’t any older than I was, but she was definitely in charge. She had the highest voice I’ve ever heard on a woman, she sounded like Minnie Mouse, but I had been in the Army nearly a year and I knew an order when I heard it, so I led her out on the dance floor and we started dancin’. Not really dancin’, because I didn’t know how to dance, just she let me hug her and sway back and forth a little.”

Mr. Grosvenor’s eyes are almost shut, his breathing is shallow, his body is completely motionless. But he is not asleep. He doesn’t really sleep any more, and he never really wakes up either. The corners of his mouth lift slightly in a smile.

“Papa’s people were Irish and German, Mama’s folks came from Sweden and Norway, we were all big kids. Worked hard on the farm growin’ up and ate good, grew almost everything we ate ourselves. I was helpin’ to butcher 200-pound hogs when I was in elementary school. Malee didn’t weigh half that much, her head only came up to my chest. She’d reach up her arms and she couldn’t put her hands all the way round my neck. Tiniest little thing you could imagine, and so soft, and she smelled so sweet. That first dance I could look right down the top o’ her dress, and she had nothin’ on underneath. Her boobs were right there and for a small gal she had these amazing big teets. I could see everything, and she knew I was lookin’ and she didn’t stop me. In fact she looked up at me over those gorgeous boobs and smiled like a cat smiles at the canary. I popped a boner right then and it was like blue steel. She felt it and at first it just made her smile more, but then it kept gettin’ bigger and she stopped smilin’. I never knew how big I was down there until I joined the Army. I thought all men were hung like me, at least my two brothers were. It was during my Army physical exam that I found out I was different. Malee stopped grinnin’ when I got fat and she sorta got this thoughtful look on her face. She rubbed her belly up against it more and it just kept gettin’ fatter and she got real serious. Suddenly she said, ‘You tay me lest-a-launt now, G.I.’

“I’d been watchin’ Malee for weeks in that place and I’d never seen her leave with anybody, not with any big shot, after just one cola and just one dance. But like I said, I knew an order when I heard one so I pulled my jacket down over the pup tent in my pants as best I could and sorta hunched over and me and Malee left outa there.”

“I took Malee to Blah Thong that night. It was the most expensive restaurant in Bangkok in those days. Hell, it was just about the only real restaurant. Normally you had to wait to get a table, but when I came in with Malee they took us to a table right away. She was that well known. Blah Thong was built out over the river on stilts, it was more like what we’d call a porch back home, but huge, maybe fifty yards on a side. Always had hundreds of people in there, almost all couples, almost all white men and Siamese gals. The regular Siamese didn’t have no money to spend on fancy restaurants in those days. All the rich Siamese were still abroad, waitin’ to see what would happen to the new King. There had been a revolution in ’32 and hadn’t been no royalty at all in the country for about 15 years, then his brother, the old King, is only in the country for two weeks before he’s found shot dead in his bed. So nobody was sure what would happen with this new King, and nobody rich wanted to be around Bangkok if it was somethin’ bad. The only people who went out after dark in Bangkok in those days were foreigners, dance hall girls, and rickshaw boys.

“The waiters wore roller skates and just flew around the place; the sound of those rubber wheels on that wooden floor was like thunder. They had a big fish tank in the middle of the restaurant with giant goldfish in it, some of ‘em 20 years old, big as footballs with foot-long tails hangin’ down like Chinese fans. Malee ordered a big meal, for a little girl she could really eat. I had plenty of money, I didn’t care, like I said you had to feed ‘em in those days. I liked Siamese food too, and they had this great beer back then, well maybe it wasn’t so great, but it was sure cheap. Had a picture of a white elephant on the label and the King owned the brewery. Malee ate and talked in her pretty little voice, about all sorts of girl stuff, but her English wasn’t too good and I didn’t catch a lot of what she said. I was listenin’ but I was also lookin’ at her and wonderin’ about what we were gonna do when dinner was over. I’d never seen a dirty magazine and I wasn’t real sure I knew what to do. She knew what I was thinkin’ o’ course. Hell, it was her job to read fella’s minds. She kept givin’ me these looks outa the tops o’ her eyes. Playful little looks, teasing me. She wouldn’t let me serve myself, she just had to pick out the best parts of the meal and put them on my plate. She had on this amazing red dress, a real ball gown. In those days they dressed up, ya see. Her hair was all piled up on top o’ her head, and she had on long gold earrings that brushed against where her shoulders met her neck. For some reason I thought that was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen. There was this crazy band playing American jazz, but with Siamese instruments, and it was the funniest thing. Blah Thong was one of the few places in Bangkok that had electricity after midnight, but not much of it, so the light was always dim and flickering. She looked so beautiful that night. Never seen a prettier woman, not before or since. “

The hallway grows more quiet with the advance of evening. The dinner trays come to other patients but not to Mr. Grosvenor. He takes his nourishment through a tube that enters above his right clavicle and ends in the superior vena cava of his heart. A nurse comes in and injects some medication into one of the IV lines and then he is alone. “After dinner she let me take her to a hotel. It was a small thing this rickshaw so we had to sit close. We went through a lot of dark stretches of road, like I said in 1946 most of Bangkok still didn’t have electricity after midnight. The city got fire bombed by American B-29s in 1944 and most of the city still hadn’t been rebuilt, so there were whole neighborhoods that were just fields of rubble. In the daytime there were still thousands of beggars on the streets with melted faces. We went through block after block of ruins. In two years nature had come back to claim the land again and it was like rolling down trails in the jungle, with every now and then a brick wall around a temple or palace that had stood up to the fire storms. There was no fuel for private cars or boats and the only movement at night was pushed down the canals with poles or pulled down the roads by coolies. It was real quiet in Bangkok at night. I thought once I heard a motor boat but it turned out to be the wings of thousands of bats flying over us. Some place along in there she took my hand and put it around her shoulders. She was so small my hand hung down all the way to her belly. She took that hand and lifted it up and put it on one o’ her boobs. First time in my life I ever touched one. Swear to God.”

No sunlight comes in the windows any longer and the lights in the hallway have been dimmed. It is quiet, no more running feet, no more overhead announcements. The sound of the 10 o’clock news comes from a TV in the dayroom down the hall and some machine goes beep… beep… beep.

“Malee let me keep my hand there, and even let me slip it under her dress and feel her naked titty. That nipple was hard as a bullet. She slipped her tiny little hand into my lap and brother let me tell ya, I was hard too and achin’. She said something when she felt my cock, I don’t know what, but it was enough to make the rickshaw coolie turn around and stare at us. I got embarrassed and pulled my hand outa Malee’s dress but she just squeezed my dick and said something to the coolie that made him laugh. He gave me a thumbs-up and ran harder.

“Mama used to do her bakin’ on Saturdays, so we’d have fresh bread for after church on Sunday, and I used to watch her and my sisters knead twelve loaves of bread at a time. Mama never worked over a hank o’ dough any harder than Malee worked over my ol’ hoss that night in the rickshaw. She used both hands, she squeezed it and stroked it and pulled on it and cooed at it like it was a baby. We went past a movie theatre marquee and under the lights she looked up at me and I swear for that moment I thought she loved me. I thought for sure it was honest-to-Gosh love I saw in her eyes. Don’t know about that any more. But it seemed so then.

“We pulled up to a hotel called Baan Rua and when I got outta the rickshaw there was no way to hide the bulge in my pants. The coolie cackled like a hen and hollered at some other rickshaw fellas that were hangin’ around the door. They all took a look and their eyes got big and they made this chirping sound like birds with their lips. They all shouted stuff at Malee and she shouted stuff back and everybody laughed. I figured wasn’t no point in trying to hide it, so I just marched up the steps into the hotel lobby like it was natural as all get out. Military pants in those days had these deep pleats and were baggy as Hell, damn thing stuck out in front o’ me like the prow of a ship. Desk clerk was this real Nancy boy, had on eye shadow even, and he gave me a wink. I didn’t mind, I’d been in Siam long enough to be used to fairies out in the open. Bellman took us up in this creaky ol’ elevator and on the way up he turned and examined his panel o’ buttons real close so Malee could give my wiener a coupla strokes. She looked up at me again with those big lovey-dovey eyes and I broke out all in a sweat.

“We went inside this real small room. Clean, but real small. Tiny little wooden bed, made o’ teak, everything was made o’ teak in those days. That’s why the city burned so well in 1944. Fire brigades never had a chance. Only buildings in the city built of stone or brick were temples and palaces. Bed in that room was only about six inches off the floor, little tiny table next to it, tiny stool, everything like in a doll house. Malee never said a word to me once we were inside that room, she just started bustlin’ around, puttin’ sheets on the bed, hangin’ the mosquito net over it. They had a bathroom down at the end o’ the hall and she took a sarong out o’ her purse and headed off there. She brushed past me on her way out and gave my Johnson a pat and told me ‘What you wait for, G.I.? Get you pants off.’ She had the prettiest voice you ever heard. So she goes out and I get undressed and put my uniform in this cabinet thing and get under the sheet. It seemed like a long, long time before she came back.”

It is very dark now. Mr. Grosvenor watches headlights swing across his patch of ceiling as an ambulance pulls into the driveway five stories below his room.

“She came back with that sarong wrapped around her, her purse in one hand and her red dress over her arm. She had her shoes in the other hand and she put them down outside the door. She moved my shoes out there too. She hung her red dress in the cabinet next to my uniform. She had let her hair down and brushed it; that must have been what took her so long. There was this oil lamp on the little table and she squatted down and blew it out. They used to have this grill work in the walls up near the ceiling in Siamese buildings in those days. It was a hot country and you needed to keep air moving, so walls were never really walls, not like we know walls. There were four guys havin’ a card party in a room down by the bathroom and we could hear their voices all night long, just like they were right in there with us. She stood up and I could still see her in the light coming in from the hallway through the grill work. She slipped off the sarong and folded it up real neat. Her hair hung all the way down her back to her little round butt. She stood over me, where I was layin’ on the bed, and we were lookin’ at each other through the mosquito net. She ran her hands over her body, from her hips up over her boobs and down again. She said, in this real tiny little voice, ‘You like me, GI?’

“Hell. Did I like her? Right then I’da gave that little girl the deed to Daddy’s farm and grandma’s gold tooth to boot. If she’da asked me right then to rob a bank for her I’da done it. I answered her ‘Yes Ma’am!’ and she giggled at that. Then she got down on her knees and crawled in under the net. She pulled the sheet offa me and reached for my cock. I didn’t know what she wanted me to do so I just laid still. She ran her hands over my dick real soft and gentle. She said something in Siamese, and I swear on Mama’s grave she was talkin’ to my dick. Talkin’ to it just like it was a baby, like she done in the rickshaw. Then she bent over and kissed it and…”

The alarm goes off over the nurse’s station. A heavy Jamaican nurse with her hair in beaded corn rows bustles into Mr. Grosvenor’s room and puts her fingertips on his wrist. She looks at her watch and says more to herself than to him, “Now whatchoo doin’ Mr. Gro’ner? Why you be all like dat now?” She moves her lips slightly as she counts his pulse and then drops his wrist; her experienced eyes have spotted something. She pulls the sheet down to his knees. “Holy Mudder o’ God!” she says. She crosses herself. She leaves the sheet down and walks briskly from the room. Mr. Grosvenor takes no notice of her coming or going. In a moment she is back with another nurse, this one white and short and stick thin. They both stare at Mr. Grosvenor’s groin.

“Jesus Fuckin’ Christ,” says the white nurse.

“Ah’m tellin’ ya, dis hyar man is eighty-tree years ol’. He ain’t got no bidness wid a chubby like dat. Not wid a catheter up in his bladder. Ain’t natur-aaahhhl.”

“No wonder his blood pressure fell through the floor. Well, nuthin’ to be done about it. Just reflex. Had a fella in here couple years back, Desert Storm vet with head trauma, he was in a coma, but he still got a woody every hour on the hour. But they’ll never believe this on the day shift.”

“Chile, you gon’ put dis in da report?”

“Hell yeah. Nothin’ else ever happens on nights to talk about.”

The two women pull the sheet back up over Mr. Grosvenor, again with gentleness and even affection. They check his tubes and lines and bags and wipe his forehead with a dry cloth. His eyes follow them as they do these things but he is seeing things that happened half a world and half a century ago. The two nurses don’t try to understand what he’s saying.

“Mama used to keep her butter churn on the back porch and send me out with a silver soup spoon mornings to fetch in butter for breakfast. On cold mornings she’d pour boiling water over the spoon and I’d run out to the porch while it was still hot, cuz the butter would have froze overnight. That spoon went into that butter the same way I went into Malee, hard pushin’ at first, then a relaxin’, then everything all slippery slidey. She screamed when I got just the head in, and I started to pull out, didn’t want to hurt her. But she wrapped her legs around me and grabbed me by the waist and pulled me into her HARD. She was crying and wailin’ fit to beat the band, craziest thing, sounded to anybody in the building like I was killin’ the poor little thing. But she wouldn’t let me draw back, kept tryin’ to pull me in deeper and deeper.

“I’d seen hogs ride the sows since long as I could remember, but it weren’t nothin’ like this. Seen every kind of farm animal there is take his mate: horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, cats, chickens. They’re all the same, male animals do it rough and mean, a bull will bellow and stamp and drive a cow to her knees but she’ll just chew her cud the while. A tomcat will bite his dam on the neck and she’ll yowl at him but all the while her eyes will be watchin’ a blue jay across the yard. Ewes don’t even lift their heads from the grass. Most female animals never act like they even know it’s happenin’.

“But Malee knew more about what was goin’ on than I did. She was certainly gettin’ more outta it. First time, o’ course, I came right away, but she didn’t even let me slip outta her. She knew I wasn’t goin’ soft, not that night, and she kept on wigglin’ and buckin’ and whimperin’ and cryin’ and beggin’ me in Siamese. Didn’t know what she was beggin’ me to do so I just kept on doin’ what I was doin’. I was only 18, fresh from boot camp. Didn’t think nothin’ of doing a hundred sit-ups, fifty push-ups, and then run a mile with a 50-pound pack on my back. I had been chewin’ tobacco since I was 11, but I’d never had a cigarette or cigar, never touched hard liquor. I had good wind, ya see. Good wind. Strong. I was Gosh-awful strong. I stayed hard and I stayed strong and I stayed inside that girl all night long, and I never stopped movin’. Coupla times she got real still and quiet, and I thought maybe she’d passed out or somethin’, but I kept givin’ it to her good and she’d come back to me, whinin’ and whimperin’ and beggin’ me for somethin’ in Siamese. Times be she’d wiggle around and show me her round little ass and take it like a mare, times be she’d lay on her side with me behind her like spoons in Mama’s kitchen drawer, times be she’d put her feet behind my ears or round my back. But most of that night we just did it normal, me on top, her on the bottom, her face in my chest and her legs wrapped around my waist. Wonder I didn’t smother that poor little gal to death. Times be I’d rear back and look down at her, and every time she’d look up at me with these big dark eyes full o’ tears and I was just certain that little girl was in love with me.”

Outside his window there is pink sky. Motion is picking up in the hallway as the shifts change, phones start ringing at the nurse’s station, alarms start going off, the hallway lights brighten up, voices get louder. Mr. Grosvenor doesn’t notice.

“In the morning she pushed me off her and we rested a bit. I may have dozed off, next thing I remember she was up and wrappin’ that sarong around her again. She went off to the bathroom and I waited for her. I took a look at my dick and wasn’t surprised to see some blood on it. That’s common with farm animals too. I sure was raw, I’ll tell ya what. Damn thing felt like it was stung by a hive o’ bees. Malee came back into the room and she gave me this sweet shy smile. Neither of us said nothin’. She had her hair piled up again and I took it from that she meant for us to get up outta there. I climbed up off the bed feelin’ like a million bucks and went to the head. Pissed like a damn race horse. Other fellas always said that’s what you should do if you lie down with a painted woman, piss like Hell when you’re done, because they may have the pox. But I knew Malee couldn’t have no pox. Not her. Not a sweet ol’ gal like that.”

A gaggle of doctors comes into Mr. Grosvenor’s room. An old, gray-haired physician who strokes his moustache and stares off into space, a woman in her 30s who reports on Mr. Grosvenor’s condition in a rapid voice of authority which hides the fact that she has not read the chart since yesterday, and three first-year residents trying not to look scared. Old Doctor hears Middle Doctor’s report, then bends over Mr. Grosvenor and looks in his eyes. “Mr. Grosvenor, can you hear me?” He leans in quite close, his ear to Mr. Grosvenor’s lips. “Who is Malee, Mr. Grosvenor? Is she somebody you want us to call?” He leans in again, then straightens up. “I’d say we’re just a few hours from the end now. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less. We’ll continue palliative care, and Carol make sure somebody posts the Do Not Resuscitate card over the bed. I don’t want them calling a code blue on this guy.” Old Doctor looks back down at Mr. Grosvenor and gives his shoulder a pat. The gaggle of doctors leaves the room.

“The rickshaw boy was asleep in his rig out front of the hotel when we came down. He woke right up and gave us a big grin. He pulled us out of there and Oh My Lord but I never felt so good in my life. Mornings was about the only time it was really cool enough to wear a uniform in Bangkok. Cool enough that Malee cuddled up against me in the rickshaw in her little red dress. We didn’t say one word the whole trip. Rickshaw fella took us down this big broad avenue, four lanes wide, jammed curb to curb with rickshaws and bicycles and a few American jeeps. Couple big black sedans that musta been up on blocks, hidden under old tarps in some rice barn upcountry through the whole war. Every bicycle had a little tinkly bell on it and they were all ringin’ their bells to beat the band. Nobody gave me and Malee a second look, wasn’t nothin’ in those days to see a beautiful girl in an evening dress ridin’ around Bangkok with some man at 6 o’clock in the morning. Pretty soon we went into a neighborhood where I never been before, blocks of ugly three-storey concrete buildings put up in the last year. Already they had red streaks down their sides where the rebar was corroding inside the concrete, somebody wasn’t too careful about the mix. Malee got out at a corner and said, ‘You good man, G.I. I sink Malee love you too muts. You come see me again nek’ Fi-day, okay?’ Then she was gone into the crowd. We were half-way back to base before I remembered that I’d never give her any money. She never asked and I plumb forgot. I tried to make the coolie go back but he wouldn’t understand me.

“I felt real bad about that. I planned to go back to the White Leopard on my next liberty but somethin’ real bad happened first. The Siamese boys we was payin’ to slop our hogs had been sellin’ the oats we’d brought with us and was feedin’ our hogs with rice hulls and table scraps from the mess hall. The hogs had suffered in the boats comin’ over, they suffered with the mosquitos and the strange water they had to drink, and there musta been buffalo dung on the rice hulls because they all started to come down with the shits real bad. Veterinarians back in Washington said it was probably the swine form o’ cholera. Boy you ain’t never seen nothin’ till you seen five hundred pigs with explosive diarrhea. Went through our sheds like the Grim Reaper himself, and before you know it we were puttin’ down ten or twenty hogs a day. The top brass said we’d made the whole mess by hirin’ local boys to do our work and they confined us to base and made us clean it up ourselves. Couldn’t use the meat, o’ course, and had to bury the carcasses with a backhoe. We were shootin’ and buryin’ pigs all day and all night. Took a week to kill ‘em all, and the last ones just died in their pens before we could get to ‘em to shoot ‘em. They decomposed real fast in that heat. The last ones we’d drag outta the sheds by their trotters and the carcasses would fall apart and leave pieces of rotten meat behind us.

“When all was said and done they shipped us outta Bangkok real quick. Some brass was embarrassed and wanted us all outta there. Bitch of it is, years later I was sittin’ in my dentist’s office readin’ a Life magazine and I read that the commies had smuggled pigs over the borders from China into all of Southeast Asia in the late 1940s. Used ‘em to bribe their way into the villages and recruit cadres. They did it over years, a few dozen pigs at a time, and of course their pigs didn’t mind the mosquitoes or buffalo shit in their food. The pigs over there now are all Chinese stock, not American. Was a good idea, we just fucked it up by trying to do it too fast, and by bein’ lazy.

“An’ I never saw little ol’ Malee again. They put us on a boat and I finished my service on a base in Texas, takin’ care of Army mules. Cuz o’ that, and cuz o’ the other thing, folks have called me ‘Mulee’ ever since. I never minded much.

“I came back to the farm in ’48. Honorable discharge, good conduct medal, nothin’ else. No stories to tell. I did use the G.I. Bill to buy the farm from Daddy in ’59. Turned it into one of the biggest hog outfits in Cedar County. I figured out once that I’ve bred, raised and slaughtered more’n half a million hogs in my life. Started out cuttin’ their throats while they hung upside down from a tree limb, ended up runnin’ ‘em through a conveyer belt by the truckload, pigs in one end and packages of hot dogs out the other.

“I sold the outfit when I was 70. I moved into the Lutheran Home, been there ever since. Always been active in the Lutheran Church, had a good voice once, sang in the choir. We went on a concert tour to the Middle West Synod Convocation in St. Paul in 1965. That and Texas and Siam are the only places I ever been outside o’ Cedar County.”

The room is full of bright daylight now. Mr. Grosvenor’s eyes do not squint. One iris is a pinpoint, the other is wide open.

“Never had no other woman. Not one. Never wanted one. I was happy with what I got. I got more than most.”

A pair of nurses, a blond and brunette, pear shaped and reminiscent of salt and pepper shakers, enter the room with their arms full of clean white bedding. Under the brilliant light from the windows the blonde takes one side of the bed and the brunette the other. They strip Mr. Grosvenor and bathe him. The brunette says, “Well, Mr. Grosvenor, I hear you had a big night.” The blonde giggles but says, “Brenda hush.” The nurses deftly roll him back and forth to change out the linen from beneath him. They examine his buttocks, heels and shoulders intently for bed sores but find none. They dust him with talcum powder, dress him in a clean gown, tenderly cover him with a clean blanket and replenish or empty his various bags of fluids. In ten minutes they’re done and they leave the room. Mr. Grosvenor is alone.

“It was a beautiful city,” he says, staring at the cross where four ceiling panels meet. “It was a city built around canals. The canals were clean enough that people bathed in them. Flowers grew on their edges, and walking along a canal was like walking through a greenhouse.”

© Steve Rosse. All rights reserved by the author.

The author can be contacted at: shavethemonkeys@gmail.com

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