Sightseeing Read online

  “Your father was different in those days,” Mama said, staring blankly into the tumbler. “He wanted to be a pilot—did you know that? He wanted to fly planes. I’d sit with him in the schoolyard during lunch and he wouldn’t shut up about jets and flight controls and horsepower. Your father was going to be the Thai Charles Lindbergh. That’s what he liked to say. We were going to move to Bangkok. He was going to fly me across the Pacific.” Mama chuckled at the idea, swallowed another sip of whiskey. “So when your father went to officer school in Bangkok, there was nobody to take care of his sister.”

  An engine echoed down the road. Mama stood up to see if it might be Papa. But it was just a farmer puttering by in his tractor. She sat back down on the porch and we watched the tractor’s dim shadow moving by the house like some enormous barge inching down a dark river.

  “So what happened, Mama?”

  “Awful things,” Mama said, shaking her head. “Unspeakable things. She started hanging around the teashops. The men thought it was funny at first. They’d make her sing and dance in her unfortunate ways for small change. And she’d be happy about it, too. She didn’t know better. I tried to talk to the men. I told them to leave her alone. But it was already too late. The girl was convinced she’d made some new friends.

  “Little Jui’s father was one of those men. We call him Big Jui now, but back then he was Little Jui as well. He was just a teenager. He started the whole despicable business. One thing led to another. Soon, she wasn’t just singing and dancing anymore. I once walked by the teashop and saw your father’s sister down on all fours. All the men laughed while Big Jui sat there patting her head. It made me want to scream.”

  “My God.”

  “I didn’t have the heart to write to your father about it; I didn’t want him to worry over something he couldn’t change. So I tried to talk to your grandparents. I came to this very house,” Mama said, gesturing with a half-nod around us. “I stood on this porch and told them what the men were doing to their daughter. But your grandmother just called me a slut and told me to mind my own business. You should count your blessings you never got to meet your grandparents, Ladda. Those people were savages.”

  It was dark now. As my mother talked, I’d managed to pack the rest of the bras without even realizing it. Mama hung her legs over the porch, poured herself another dram. I joined her there and we both looked down the road, waiting for Papa’s Mazda.

  “Done,” I said softly. “The bras are ready to go.”

  “Good.”

  “Papa should be home soon,” I said. Mama took another sip of her whiskey, stared out into the rubber trees, and it was as if there, in that grove of tall, spindly trunks, was the picture of the past she’d just been conjuring.

  “So what happened to Papa’s sister?”

  “One of the men in the teashop was a doctor,” Mama said. “He told Big Jui that—given the way she was—your father’s sister was probably sterile.”

  “No.”

  “If there’s one thing you should know by now, Ladda, it’s that men are monsters,” Mama said. “They have no decency. The best a woman can do is learn to tolerate one barbaric thing to the next.”

  Mama looked at me, paused to pour another dram. She held out the tumbler and I took a few more sips before passing it back to her. “Anyhow,” she continued, “your father came home for the summer. A week later, he saw his sister and Big Jui in one of the town alleys. He tried to attack Big Jui, but his witless sister just kept on wailing and grunting, telling your father that Big Jui was her man now. They were in love, she said. They were going to get married. Your father tried to drag his sister away, but she refused to leave Big Jui’s side. She slapped him. Big Jui started laughing then. Your father told me later it was like hearing the devil’s laughter.

  “Your father went home, got his father’s gun, and started walking back into town, hell-bent on killing Big Jui. His mother tried to talk him out of it, but your father wouldn’t listen. She called to tell me and I went biking around town looking for him. I found your father on the main road, halfway to town. He was crying, cradling his father’s shotgun like it was a baby. And that,” Mama said, turning to look at me severely, “was the only time I’ve ever seen your father cry.

  “He never went back to officer school. He shut himself up in this house. He refused to go into town. That’s when he started cockfighting. I rarely saw him those first few months, but I’d see his sister walking around town. She no longer went home. She slept in the park. She was long gone by then. She followed Big Jui wherever he went, cooing and sidling up to him. He started avoiding her and soon she moved on to the other men, tried to fondle them on the street in broad daylight, though people said you could still hear her wailing outside Big Jui’s window every night. Later that year, she was found dead of malnutrition on one of the park benches.”

  Mama got up, teetering a bit, and started walking back to the house to put the whiskey away. As she stood in the doorway, holding the tumbler and the flask, she turned to me and said:

  “I suppose she was your aunt, Ladda. I guess that’s why I’m telling you all this. I don’t know what difference it makes, though. I hadn’t thought about that girl for so long, but I’ve thought about her a lot lately. Can’t help but wonder if this cockfighting thing has something to do with her. Even if your father refuses to admit it. Even if nobody likes to remember her now.”

  Then Mama went inside the house. I heard her fumbling in the kitchen, the water hissing in the sink, the tumbler clanking against the porcelain basin. I watched the fireflies for a little while. I listened to the strays. Fruit bats circled above the yard. I thought about what my mother had just told me, tried to picture this aunt of mine and her witless love for Big Jui. I got up, put the boxes in order, stacked them neatly against the wall. Just then, far down the road, I saw the Mazda’s head-lights veer around the bend. For a few seconds, those golden shafts of light cutting through the dark filled me with relief and astonishment, even as I began to feel sick with anguish. And so I yelled out to my mother to say Papa was finally home.

  VII

  We stood on the porch and watched the Mazda ease into the driveway. Papa’s shadow emerged from the car. “See?” he said. “Nothing to be afraid of, Saiya. I’m safe. I’m home.” He walked back to the flatbed to gather up the coops. All was fine, far as we could tell. I went to help him. But as I got closer, I noticed Papa staring pensively into the flatbed. Something was wrong. “Hey,” Papa said, turning to smile at me. “Did you guys finish the bras?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good,” he replied absentmindedly, staring back into the flatbed.

  When I got to the truck, Papa put an arm around my shoulder. I smelled it before I saw anything: chicken blood, sweet and sick and unmistakable. I peered over the edge of the truck and there, in the pit of the flatbed, I saw a mound of dead cocks—a messy heap of feathers and innards and mangled wings piled high against the cab. They seemed like the singular body of some monstrous creature devastated beyond repair. Dull rivulets of blood carved their way along the flatbed. Some of the chickens, I noticed, were still alive; something in the mound twitched sporadically. I felt then as if that pile of carcasses was winking at me. I wanted to run away. I wanted to go back to my mother on the porch. But I just stood there bewitched by that convulsing half-dead pile. Papa tightened his grip around my shoulder. I wanted to return the embrace even as I longed to strike him with all my might, for I felt like Papa was forcing me now with his firm, insistent hold to look at the carnage.

  “I’m sorry, Papa” was all I managed to say. “Sometimes you win,” he said, letting go of my shoulder, bending down to pick up the surviving chickens. “And sometimes you lose.”

  “Wichian,” Mama said grimly, walking toward us. “What happened?” But Papa just picked up the coops and walked toward the chicken house, the surviving cocks shuffling clumsily in their wicker coops. “Hey, cockfighter,” Mama called after him, “what the hell do
we do with the dead ones?” But Papa had already disappeared into the chicken house and we wouldn’t see him again until morning.

  Mama saved one for the next day’s breakfast, the plumpest she could find, a creature I recognized by its plumage as Saksri Bualoi. She picked up Saksri’s body, deposited it on the porch steps, the cock’s head swinging by a thin tether of flesh. Saksri was named after the welterweight champion of the world at the time, a boy who grew up in a nearby town—the only Thai world champion of anything, according to Mama. We’d been watching the real Saksri Bualoi pummel a fat Russian challenger on television years ago when Papa said that if chickens had a left hook, the new hatchling he’d just bought was just like Saksri Bualoi, and that’s how the cock got its name. But Saksri Bualoi would not be fighting anymore. He would be going into our breakfast now.

  We carried the rest of the carcasses to the ditch marking our property. As I carried one, I felt its bloody, slithery neck wriggling in my hand, heard the thing purr like a frightened kitten. I quickly dropped it to the ground and—panicking—kicked it. The cock’s body skipped across the yard like a football. Then, to my horror, the chicken got on its feet and ran a few short paces before collapsing dead once and for all.

  “It’s still got a little juice!” Mama said, laughing. “Don’t be scared, Ladda. It can’t hurt you now.”

  But I didn’t want to touch it anymore. All I could do was nudge the carcass with my foot, flipping it across the yard, making slow and cautious progress toward the ditch, expecting the thing to get up and run around again. In the distance, I saw Mama toss a couple of carcasses like they were small, feathery sacks of garbage, their bodies thudding in the ditch.

  Once we’d transported all the carcasses, Mama went back to the house to get gasoline. We set the pile on fire, then stood silently over the pyre for a while. Blue flames licked up around the carcasses’ feathers. Soon, a yellowish inferno danced enthusiastically over the pile, its syncopated pops and crackles echoing down the long corridor of trees before us. Mama poked the pyre with a branch. The fire answered with hisses and cries, the sound of fat smoldering. The air began to smell of burnt chicken-flesh, and I thought of the vendors in town with their street-side fried chicken stalls, fanning themselves with the day’s paper, thick sheets of vapor rising from their fryers.

  “We’ll figure this out in the morning,” Mama said softly. We walked back to the house with the pyre still roaring behind us. Mama sat on the porch and picked up Saksri Bualoi. She began to pluck him, snapping fistfuls of feathers from the cock’s lifeless body.

  That was my first sleepless night: my father in the chicken house, the carcasses burning in the ditch, Mama outside cleaning Saksri Bualoi. I stood by my bedroom window and watched the flames dance until they became nothing but a tiny orange pinprick in the distance.

  I thought about what happened to that woman who was my aunt. I thought about Papa crying on the side of the road, cradling his father’s shotgun, having only made it halfway to town. I wondered if things would be different now if Papa hadn’t lost his will. Would Papa have lessened the sum total of the world’s suffering by killing Big Jui? Or would other Juis—Big and Little—have appeared in their place? Would I still love my father knowing he was capable of such violence? Would Mama? Where did murderous vengeance end and principled righteousness—justice—begin? Staring out my bedroom window, I loved Papa for not making it to town that night even as I despised him for losing courage. For it seemed to me that whatever had happened at the cockpit to produce that pyre of chickens might’ve been averted had Papa not cried like a fucking baby by the side of the road. And as Mama finished cleaning Saksri Bualoi; as I watched the fire die out like some fallen star; as the strays’ shadows emerged one by one to inspect that sizzling mess of cremated chicken parts—I wanted more than anything to return to life before Mama had told me her story about Papa’s no-name sister. For I felt like Mama had pushed me violently down a one-way street with her cockamamie story, a street I never wanted to go down in the first place. There would be no turning back now, though at the time I couldn’t say why or from what.

  VIII

  Papa had never lost like this. He’d never come home with more than two dead cocks. You can’t win every time, that’s what he always said; even the expert cockfighter loses once in a while. Nevertheless, losing was one thing; nine dead cocks was another altogether. He’d lost nearly half the chicken house.

  The next morning we sat quietly around the kitchen table while Mama dished porridge. Papa hadn’t slept much the night before, though it was difficult to distinguish the old bruises on his face from the way his eyelids sagged and swelled. He shuffled in from the chicken house, sat down, and stared out the kitchen window. Tiny chunks of straw clung to his shirt collar. Gray hair sprouted from his head in strange, unruly wisps. Thin wreaths of steam rose from our bowls. Outside, the sun was starting to rise through the trees and I watched a stray—a gaunt, brown puppy with a stunted tail—nose the diminished mess in the ditch.

  We started eating. My stomach lurched at the chunks of white meat wedged within the thick of my porridge. I asked Papa what happened. I tried to sound casual. “Nothing,” Papa muttered through a mouthful, still staring out the kitchen window. “I lost.”

  “I’ll say,” Mama said. She hadn’t touched her breakfast yet. She just stared at Papa defiantly, waited for an explanation. Papa shoveled more porridge into his mouth. I stirred my bowl, picked out chunks of chicken and deposited them on the napkin beside me. I thought about the half-dead zombie chicken from the night before, the way it purred in my hand, skittered across the yard when I kicked it. I thought of Saksri Bualoi, his head swinging by a thimble of flesh, the way Mama plucked his feathers by the fistful. I wondered briefly if I had been dreaming the past night’s events—they seemed unreal by the light of morning—but those tiny white chunks piled on my napkin told me otherwise.

  “How much did you lose, Wichian?” Mama finally asked.

  “Eleven thousand,” Papa said calmly.

  “Oi,” Mama cried, throwing up her hands. “Goddammit, Wichian.”

  “It’s that Filipino kid,” Papa said, smiling weakly at Mama. “That Ramon. He’s good. He knows what he’s doing. And you should’ve seen the Filipino purebreds, Saiya. They’re huge. Almost as tall as Ladda here. I didn’t think chickens got that big.”

  “Oi,” Mama said again. She shoved her bowl in front of her. It teetered on the linoleum tabletop, porridge dribbling over the lip. “How could you, Wichian?”

  “I’ll get it back,” Papa muttered, turning to his bowl as if there was nothing he’d rather do than watch his porridge cool.

  “You’d better,” Mama said.

  “Well, he made nine thousand last week, Mama,” I interjected, but when I looked into Mama’s eyes—saw the exasperation there—I regretted saying anything at all. I looked at Papa instead. “So, really, you only lost two thousand, right, Papa?”

  “Eat your porridge, Ladda,” Mama scoffed.

  “Saiya,” Papa said.

  “How could you lose so much money?” Mama said. But Papa just stared at Mama, biting hard on his bottom lip. Then he got up, dismissed Mama with an impatient half-gesture, and walked out of the kitchen.

  “That’s right,” Mama called after him. “Walk away. Go tend to your fucking chickens.”

  Then it was just me and Mama staring at one another. My mother seemed the picture of vindictiveness; even as she looked devastated by the eleven thousand lost. “What?” she asked, picking up her porridge bowl. “Stop looking at me like that.” But all I managed to say was “It’s enough he lost, Mama. Go easy on him.”

  Papa emerged from the chicken house with the fourteen remaining cocks. We watched him through the kitchen window. He chased them with a different kind of gait that morning. It wasn’t the calm, quiet routine we were used to seeing, but a grunting, punishing one. He cursed. He kicked at the dirt. He ran the chickens with what seemed to me like fury, as if the c
hickens had offended him somehow. Some of the chickens eyed him cautiously, alarmed by his new persona. The sun’s red orb rose high above our property; thick beads of perspiration glistened on Papa’s forehead.

  “Just look at him,” Mama said, collecting the bowls, moving to the sink. “Just look at your father, Ladda.” I sat there blinking at her. “He’s scared,” she continued. She turned on the spigot, the water plashing against the bowls. “Your father’s terrified.”

  I went to my room to change for school. Papa put the cocks back in their coops. I watched him carry them one by one to the chicken house, his body slumped and heaving from the run, from their weight. He walked back to the house and soon I could hear him changing into his factory uniform on the other side of the wall. He was still cursing under his breath. He slammed the dresser drawers. I thought I heard him kick something. The sink hissed and clanked in the kitchen, tin utensils ratcheting in the basin. I heard Mama drop a bowl, heard it shatter against the kitchen floor, followed shortly by the swish and tinkle of her sweeping.

  And then it was quiet. Mama finished with the dishes. Papa settled down. I inspected myself in the mirror, made sure my uniform was tucked in properly, that the bra’s obscene trimmings didn’t stand out against the linen. And then, still standing before the mirror, I listened to the sudden silence in our house. I wondered what Papa was doing alone in that room; I listened for any sign of him on the other side of the wall. I wondered, too, what Mama was thinking in the kitchen now. Outside, the brown puppy had left the ditch, the pile already picked over by the larger strays before him.