Bangkok Knights by Collin Piprell

drawback to a woman who’s three feet
tall, or even a bit more, as #37 was — when she starts swinging a straight
razor, the targets of first opportunity are somewhat unfortunate ones, at least
from the point of view of the guy whose targets are hanging right there within
easy reach.
    “She just missed, too. Took a dozen goddammed stitches to
close up my leg. Dozen more in my face.
    “And I liked that girl, never mind it was like
sleeping with a gravel crusher. Goddammit. Why’d she ever want to go and do
like she did?”
    Trying to talk without moving any muscle in his face the
way he was, what should’ve been a fairly poignant or maybe even downright
heart-breaking utterance sounded more like the voice circuit in a cartoon
robot.
    Maybe the same thought had occurred to Big Toy and Dinky
Toy, because they were having trouble keeping merry looks of delight off their
faces, from what I could see. In fact, they gave up trying, and retired to the
other end of the bar for a minute to chirrup away, every now and then firing
something akin to looks of malicious satisfaction up towards Dexy. Dexy didn’t
even notice. But if he had, he probably would’ve told you it was more evidence
they were all in it together. These women.
    “Women!” he said. “I’ll be glad to get back to the
platform. There I was, talking to a few of the boys down at Skipjacks, and
there was this girl, one of Skipjacks’. And Thirty-seven, she cuts this girl— I
don’t really know this girl, don’t even know her name, I’m just fooling
around, being friendly, like. She cuts this girl across the face and then whips
the razor back and slashes her right across her tits. Jesus, there’s blood
everywhere and the girls are all screaming...
    “Some of us are lookin’ to grab Thirty-seven, only she’s
turned into a regular little tornado with that there razor, and no one is real
happy about getting in too close. Finally I move in on her, though, and I’m
trying to tell her she’s gonna get herself into big trouble, and she’s never
gonna get to go to hair-dressing school if she’s not careful, when she catches
just a piece of my face with that thing. Well, I was surprised—it stopped me
cold, for a minute, and that’s when she went for my...
    “And after all the times I laid awake all night listening
to her grinding her teeth. And I paid for dentists and everything. You just
never know.”
    Dexy had to fly back to Jakarta in two days, he told us,
and then it was back out to the oil platform for another month of ‘sour’ — to
complement all the ‘sweet’ he’d just enjoyed in Bangkok, of course. In fact,
you got the feeling he was ambivalent about going back, this time, just as he
was ambivalent about staying. So he drank twice as much as he usually did,
which was already twice as much as anybody else ever could, and he concentrated
on not wincing too much.
    Eventually, he got quite maudlin, and he and Leary swopped
tales of the old days and traded wisdom on Life and Women, with Leary generally
taking the ‘pro’ side of things, and Dexy arguing the’con’. Nobody had ever
seen Dexy pass out before; Leary and I carried him into the back room where Doc
kept a cot for those nights he couldn’t go home.
    Doc never did show up. In fact, nobody had seen him since
before the Orphan Party.

IV.
    Eddie signed up for a Tae Kwon Do course on Sukhumvit Road two days ago. And he’s already popped a knee while demonstrating a
round-house kick, half-pissed, at Boon Doc’s yesterday afternoon. Right now
he’s going around on a cane, his leg all taped up. He also has a plaster on his
cheek from where he hit the edge of the bar as he went down. His eye was
already black, but I believe it’s even blacker, now. Added to the scars and
bruises of his violent encounter with Dexy the other night, all this gives
Eddie a certain dash.
    When I dropped around the Cheri-Tone Guesthouse today to
check on the martial artist, I found his wife Lek and his