In the mornings, I enjoyed getting up before the kids showed up for school. I studied Thai with a cup of strong coffee at the kitchen table. At least until Bob started waking up early and coming down to join me. Bob didn't drink coffee, so he made hot cocoa.
“Studying Thai, Chief?” he said. “Yeah, I had dreams of learning the language when I first got here. I gave up. You'll give up too. You know, there's forty-four letters to their alphabet, not to mention dozens of vowel combinations. And those tones! High, low, falling, rising; I tell you, it was a lot easier to learn Arabic when I lived in Cairo.”
Monty must have heard us stirring. He came over and fixed himself a cup of coffee.
“About the alphabet,” he said. “I just wanted to correct you on one point. It's true, there are forty-four letters, but you're forgetting that some of them are obsolete.”
“Anyway, why waste your time learning the language when you're just going to go home in a year or two?”
“If you want to make it even more complicated,” said Monty, “You can think of it as twenty-one consonant phones represented by forty-four letters divided by their tones. There are nine mid, eleven high, and twenty-four low class. There are nine short vowel phones and nine long vowel phones. These are represented by twenty-five letters, with the phonetic value depending on their position in the syllable.”
“Monty,” said Bob, “You only know about ten words in Thai, and you mispronounce every one of them.”
“Okay, okay, that might be true, but that's because I'm more interested in the language infrastructure rather than the actual speaking.”
“You know, now that I think about it objectively, I suppose I had an extra incentive for learning Arabic back in Cairo. I'll explain it to you. Once word got around that there was a foreigner in town fluent in Both English and Arabic, I wasn't just marketable for great paying jobs, I was beginning to raise the eyebrows of the richest, most beautiful women in the city. I remember going to parties where these young, hot Egyptian babes all decked out in diamonds and expensive dresses would thumb their noses at me, thinking I was some tourist. But once they heard me speak Arabic, you should have seen them! It was like someone had told them I was the President's son. “Who's that? Who's that?” They bought me drinks, offered me cigarettes—those were the days! If only I had that incentive here. If I want to talk, I'll talk to you. If I want to get laid, I'll go bang a whore. Thai women are only interested in the size of your nose and your wallet.”
Outside, in the garden, the voices were quieter and the faces not made of brick or running with stale syrup. There was Gan. Gan was the next-door neighbor's live-in babysitter who watched me through the screen door and didn't have an opinion about the Thai alphabet. She sat at the stone table with me, sixteen years old in her shorts and T-shirt. She liked making funny noises and cracked herself up doing so.
“So you're only after my nose and my wallet, eh?”
Gan spoke a short stream of babble. She couldn't understand me, so she made fun of me. That was all right, too. I decided to permanently move my studying outside every morning and afternoon where I could watch Gan perform cartwheels and somersaults when I wasn't practicing a new word or letter. Gan wasn't very good at cartwheels or somersaults and often ended up skinning her knees and elbows. I later learned that she came from Khorat and had four brothers and two sisters. Her mother and father were still alive. And when I asked whether they were poor, Gan answered “Por gin, por chai..” They had enough to eat, enough to live. Then she went back to her gymnastics.
On one afternoon, I was sitting out there away from Bob and Monty, when Gan opened her screen door and stepped out. She let out a terrible scream and ran back inside. I got up and went over to see what the hell. There was a long green snake hissing on the concrete in front of the step. It's tongue flicked in and out of its mouth, while the head moved from left to right as though it had just been woken up and had to go to a shitty job. I decided not to piss it off any more. I went to get one of the maintenance men loading bricks into a wheelbarrow.
“Ngoo!” I said.
The maintenance man picked up a hoe and followed me to the porch. The snake was gone. The maintenance man poked around the garden. I wasn't about to start poking around the garden. I went in to check on Gan. She hadn't been bitten, only frightened.
There was another scream. Sort of a scream. It was actually a loud hiccup, followed by a crash. I went outside, watching my step. The snake had reappeared just as Monty was coming home. This time, the maintenance man got him. Monty had had quite a scare. He was laying belly up among broken planters, uprooted flowers, and dirt, dirt, dirt. His glasses were crooked and there was a serene look on his face as if he had seen the light at the end of the tunnel and it told him that there was a place for him, too. On the sidewalk, the maintenance man hacked the snake into seven different pieces.
“Did it bite you, Monty?”
“Did what bite me?”
“The snake.”
“Oh, no.”
“Maybe you ought to get up out of all those broken planters. On second thought, don't move.”
I ran back into the neighbor's house and brought Gan outside. I put my arm around her shoulder to stop her from shaking.
“Look, honey, snake's dead, Monty fell in the dirt, everything's back to normal.”
Gan continued to tremble, but the sight of Monty there on the ground caused a laugh to break through the fear.
“Can I get up now?” asked Monty.
The next morning, the garden was fixed, Gan was back to somersaulting, and the remains of the snake had been carried off by big black ants. Bob laughed at the story, then disappeared for a couple of hours in the afternoon. He came back at dinnertime, took off his shirt, scratched at the hair on his chest, and proclaimed loudly,
“I just banged a whore!”
“Bob, I stand corrected on the Thai alphabet,” said Monty. “Yesterday, I believe I told you that nine of the ten letters were obsolete.”
“Four hundred baht!” said Bob. “And you know, this isn't my ego talking, but I think she really enjoyed it. I think she really had a good time.”
“I've checked my information and it appears that eight of the ten letters—”
“She wasn't bad looking either. You ought to give it a whirl someday, Chief.”
Bob dropped his shorts and sat down to eat. I went outside to finish my postcard. The maintenance man walked by with his trusty hoe and nodded to me. I pointed to the door of my house and said “Farangs!” in the hope that he'd rush in and do a repeat performance. He poked at a few more leaves, then moved on to his next chore.
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