Playing with fire

My friend Dario and I went up to the airport yesterday to look for Russian planes. Rumors have been circulating on Phuket for a year about Russian planes passing through Phuket on their way from India to Bangkok. The rumors say that their cargo is chemical weapons, so Dario and I took a pair of binoculars up onto the hill overlooking the airport, and while we didn’t see any planes with obvious Russian markings, we did see some crews smoking while they were taking on fuel. “Dey notta concerned wit’ safety,” said Dario yesterday. He should talk.

A long time ago, I lived in a set of row houses on Kata Beach. On one side of me lived Phi Noi, who managed the Monkey Bar, where her two young daughters were employed as Designated Virgins: honey to draw the flies which the older girls would snap up like hungry lizards. On the other side of me lived Dario and Phi Lin. Dario is the heir to a shoe factory in Milan. He suffers from Manic-Depressive Disorder and lives on an allowance of fifty thousand baht per month that his family sends him on condition that he never return to Italy. Phi Lin was Laotian, had been sneaked across the border as a child, sold into a brothel as a teenager, and saw in the wine-soaked bowl of overcooked pasta that was Dario a chance at a better life. They had a very volatile relationship, fueled by his hot Latin temper and psychosis and by her fierce self-respect, a pride that had survived countless assaults by both unfeeling farang and by Thais who look down their noses at their country cousins the Laotians.

One day, when Phi Lin was about five months pregnant with Dario’s child (his Catholic upbringing would allow for no abortion, which was fine with Phi Lin, since in Thai she referred to the pregnancy as “earning my share of his allowance”), they had an altercation that in Milan would have registered at about force five: violent enough to be interesting but nothing serious enough to bother the cops about. Phi Lin drove Dario out the front door of their place with a broom; he twisted the broom away from her and, grabbing a handful of long black hair, aimed a kick at her ample butt. Unfortunately, at that moment she squirmed around so that he caught her square on the belly with his size 9 triple-E foot. Dario swore and immediately ceased hostilities, no doubt imagining the Dantean circle in Hell reserved for fetucides.

Phi Lin shot back into the house, and Dario pursued stammering apologies in three languages, only to reappear running for his life, spurting blood from a neat gash on the back of his head, Phi Lin in hot pursuit waving a huge kitchen knife. Dario ducked into the first available door (mine), and slammed it behind him, whereupon a squad of sob sisters converged on Phi Lin, to unburden her of the knife and the juicier bits of gossip concerning what had led up to the fight.

So I sneaked Dario out the back and drove him to the clinic. I held him down while a bored nurse put seven stitches into his scalp, sewing generous amounts of hair into the wound. Dario talked throughout the operation, a thick drunken spiel meant, I think, to cover up the sound of the curved upholstery needle scraping bone, all of it along the lines of “I tink I’ma gonna hafta killa dis girl. I’m notta man I don’ killa dis girl.”

I paid the nurse an amount fifty baht less than I had paid her the week before to neuter my dog. By the time we got home we were both caked in dried blood, and Phi Lin was nowhere to be seen. I took a long shower, and when I came out on my porch to smoke, the first thing I noticed was that all the other stoops were empty. In fact you could hear doors still slamming in succession along the length of the soi. The second thing I noticed was the reason why the whole neighborhood was diving for cover.

Dario was in front of his place, trying desperately to light some wooden matches off a box in his hand. He was standing over a pile he’d made of Phi Lin’s possessions: movie magazines, clothes, cosmetics, stuffed animals and, topping the stack, about a dozen pairs of expensive Italian shoes, still in their boxes. There was the smell of gasoline in the air, and Dario’s paleolithic MTX motorcycle stood at an angle on its kick-stand, leaning over the pile, its fuel tank open and a length of garden hose siphoning a steady stream of gasoline onto the pyre.

Dario was still covered in clots and smears of blood, swaying at the knees and muttering away in Italian. Every second swipe at the matchbox missed or broke the match, every third word was fungo. I hit him with my best American Football Flying Tackle, which knocked off my towel and carried us both, me naked, him retching and cursing, into the neighborhood garbage pit. A completely unnecessary and melodramatic act, as it turned out, since Dario had gone swimming with that same box of matches in his pocket the day before. I dragged him inside, helped him wash off the blood and eggshells and old tea bags, fed him a drink and three Valium, and watched him pass out on my floor.

Yesterday Dario asked me if I was going to run down onto the airfield and try to save the Russian crewmen from their own carelessness. I told him that I thought not. If one of those planes does blow up in Phuket, with the wind out of the east as it is at this time of year, the toxic cloud will just blow back towards India. Poetic justice. And if one blows up in Bangkok, well, who’d notice?

© Steve Rosse. All rights reserved by the author.