Free The Hot Countries by Timothy Hallinan Page A

flooring.
    A shower. That’s what he needs, a shower and some clean clothes. Jah , it’s Jah he wants to see, he realizes with a jolt of electricity. Whip-thin, tousle-haired Jah, who went with him to Don Mueang Airport the first time he flew back to ’Nam and cried inconsolably at the departure gate. And was there, jumping up and down like a teenager, when he came back. Running at him from thirty yards away and leaping on him, her legs twined around his waist, as all the other guys stared.
    Jah.
    In ’Nam the women and children had been terrified of him, afraid to meet his eyes, and he understood why. His very idea of who he was had been shattered, that easy, cheerful California boy broken into pieces one death at a time and reassembled wrong. Six months in country, his feet rotting with the damp, whole colonies of exotic parasites claiming his intestines, his soul knotted with death. The girls in the villages they defended, sometimes by burning them, looked at Wallace and the others in his platoon with the terror and revulsion the Americans occasionally earned: Twice, men Wallace knew well had turned bestial on the floor of some thatched shack, impatiently taking turns on a girl barely out of childhood. Leaving behind on the packed earth the sobbing remnant of a human being.
    And then his first R&R furlough. After a copter out and an hour or two in a plane, he was here, in the city of joy. Smiles everywhere, food everywhere, everything cheap and easy, and girls who loved him, or at least seemed to. Girls who looked at him and saw a young, handsome man, not a beast. Girls like nutmeg, girls like cinnamon, girls who blended into a single smile, a single “No problem” as he took them, in threes and fours at first, like a starving man sweeping a whole tableful of food toward himself, feeling like some fool out of Playboy but finding, in the crowded beds, a kind of life that flowed into him and filled him back up. And then one night, the bed too full to give him room to turn over, he got out and slept on the floor, waking in the morning to find that he’d been layered over with towels from the bathroom and that sleeping next to him on the carpet, curled into a ball against the chill of the air conditioner and uncovered except for a hip-length cascade of tangled hair, was a slender dark-skinned girl. When he smoothed a towel over her, she opened her eyes and smiled at him as though he were the God of Morning, and Wallace, for the first time since leaving ’Nam, felt his heart unlock. Her name was Jah, and after that it was Jah, just Jah, always Jah. Staying with her for days on end. Falling asleep beside her on clean sheets in a cool room. Warm breath on his chest. Smooth cheek against his. Crossing the river once in a long-tail boat to sleep in a musty-smelling, lantern-lighted wooden shack, not a vertical wall anywhere and overhead the dry scrabble of rats as she breathed her way into sleep. He was safe. Writing her letters from ’Nam, letters he never sent. She couldn’t read a word of English.
    But she could read him.
    Hansum man , Jah called him. Teerak , Jah called him, Thai for “sweetheart.” Wallet , Jah called him, and he’d thought it was a joke about his money until he realized that Thais can’t pronounce a sibilant at the end of a word, and she was trying to say his name. He took to calling himself Wallet, appreciating its appropriateness even if Jah didn’t understand it.
    The airport’s name nags at him. Don Mueang? Do military flights come through Don Mueang? It sounds wrong, but he shrugs it off, along with his shirt and trousers, and pads toward the shower. The women may be professionals, he thinks, but they’re still Thai, and Thais are clean. It shows respect when you come to them fresh from the shower.
    He steps into the shower still wearing the cheap watch and sees it just as the stream of water hits it. In seconds he’s out of the tiny