Don Ricardo called his mother and told her that he loved her more than she could ... that weighed more than lovely little always accommodating Nok fully clothed. .... to his right and lifted his foot to dislodge the perfectly round pebble, and as his ... Twain to mind, for he had not had a drink for twelve hours, only a single tab of ...
Don Ricardo Don Ricardo called his mother and told her that he loved her more than she could imagine, which was his veiled way of saying that he did not think to call her as he had promised a week earlier, not until he gave Nok one final kiss, which came after stuffing a plane ticket to Bangkok and a box of creamy mint chocolates in her purse, and whispering, “Promise me for the sake of promising that you won’t find yourself in bed with someone as loving as me until tomorrow morning.” When his mother came on the phone, he said, “Mom, guess who?” His mother responded by saying, “My son, the oldest and most unpredictable of my three sons! When can I expect to see you, dear son of sons?” “I had in mind taking a plane that would put me by your side by tomorrow evening, mom. But it rained so hard that planes were washed off the runaways. Then when they were ready to fly I remembered that I had to pick up two dragon masks in Muang Sing that I promised to Stacey.” “Who is Stacey?” Don Ricardo scratched himself where it felt good, and before he could find the words to give his mother an answer that would make her feel good he swallowed a thin square of black opium. He had bought it an hour earlier from a woman who had dropped an earring into his noodle soup and who had a silver head piece
2 Don Ricardo that weighed more than lovely little always accommodating Nok fully clothed. As the slimy opium that brought to mind undercooked eggs slid down his throat, he said, “Mom, don’t you remember that Stacy’s the one I promised to marry if she divorced her husband? She’s the one I want to have her hair grow down to her waist, and who’s agreed to give me two sons before she gets sun wrinkles around her mouth.” “Is that all you’re asking of her?” “There’s more, mom, but you’ll have to wait until I’m at your side to reveal such intimate secrets. By the way, if Stacy agrees to my most reasonable requests, will you come to our midnight wedding in Lisbon?” “Lisbon in San Francisco? What…?” “No, mom, not that Lisbon. Mom, the Lisbon where we’ll get married is the same Lisbon where you told dad you’d divorce him if he didn’t make more wooden cabinets for your kitchen.” “Oh! Now I remember. Son, is Stacy the one with black boots with tassels who wears orchids in her ears?” Every woman he talked about, his mother festooned with flowers, those that through the years she had so carefully grown and tended in the kitchen and the upstairs bathroom with a skylight. “That’s the one. The one and only Stacey who has loved me since birth. Mom, I gotta go,” he added with the exasperation of a man who doesn’t know whether to turn left, right or just sit down and do nothing. “There’s a smell of burning horseflesh coming into my room.” “Take care of yourself, son.” “Remember me in your prayers and at morning mass and I’ll be just fine. I love you as always, mom.”
Don Ricardo 3 Two hours later, Don Ricardo found himself mesmerized by the brown and green river of water that was pouring over the porch and swamping the bamboo chair in which he was sitting. For one very long minute, he wondered if he was going to die this very day, dressed only in the oversized orange Filipino shorts he was wearing and before he had a chance to cut his fingernails, a concern that was rarely far from his mind, ever since Martini, an Indonesian girl of ten thousand charms and looping golden curls, and more promiscuous than the fourteenth queen of Ancient Egypt, had lectured him on the indescribable pleasure of an active middle finger properly manicured. At the time they met and pleasured each other for days on end, Martini was married to two men at the same time, one living in Darwin, Australia, and the other one paralyzed from the head down and dying in a hospital in Manchester, England. Neither man, Martini would never tire of telling Don Ricardo, could do what he could do in a way that few women have ever experienced. With, of course, that perfectly manicured finger of his that she swore was the longest and most beautiful love instrument she had ever encountered. Soon Don Ricardo felt renewed. The water had receded, thanks to a prolonged and strong wind that uprooted several tropical plants in front of the porch where he sat in the creaking bamboo rocker. He now found himself thinking again of his mother, and in a small way he honored all that she had given him by standing tall and filling his lungs with the clean air while his eyes fell on the dying sun, as red as a cardinal’s gown and headed for a distant clump of trees filled with nesting birds. He then turned his head and caught a glimpse of a howler monkey screaming for mercy, for a reason known only to other howler monkeys and the cryptic inch-long insects that admire howler
4 Don Ricardo monkeys for their promiscuous ways. A long minute passed and he looked beyond the edge of the porch and into a tangle of heavy green growth, and there he saw a glistening black snake with pink eyes. He followed it as it climbed to the top of a nearby banana plant in search of its next meal. Don Ricardo napped in the bamboo chair, and when he woke he began walking, past decrepit shops with people sleeping on the floor, and square and triangular lots filled with Popsicle wrappers and mango skins and a single leather shoe that belonged to a Belgian man who got drunk one night and slept among the Popsicle wrappers and mango skins, and when he woke in the morning he walked away minus one shoe. He became known here and there throughout Laos as the One Shoe Belgian Man. Suddenly, he felt a pebble lodge itself between two toes, and as he raised his leg to get a closer look an umbrella covered with Lao and Chinese postage stamps appeared out of nowhere, and inches above his head. Confused, he dropped his leg and turned to his right and lifted his foot to dislodge the perfectly round pebble, and as his foot hit the ground a young and shapely girl with marvelous Cuban hips and small, almost imperceptible nostrils, slipped her skinny fingers with American flags on the nails into his left hand. He felt flushed and suddenly full of lust, and Stacey came to mind. For Don Ricardo was a man who brought women like her to mind with uncommon frequency, to then quickly banish them from all subsequent thoughts, impediments to the pleasure that would surely follow any time his groin was filled with lust by a woman he had never seen before. I shall not sleep alone tonight! he thought, taken by her boldness and reminders of a homeland that he never failed to
Don Ricardo 5 defend before every idiot and self-anointed genius that crossed his path. He puckered his lips and smiled like a clown admiring his own makeup, and he said, “How charming of you, and what is your name? And would you by chance like this little memento from a river that turns blood red in my dreams and makes me want to read Mark Twain?” She squeezed his hand and his lust increased by an order of magnitude, which no doubt had a lot to do with the fact that Stacey would not now come to mind until the lust had subsidized and the unfolding mystery was no longer a mystery. It now occurred to Don Ricardo that he had no idea what brought Mark Twain to mind, for he had not had a drink for twelve hours, only a single tab of opium. But then his mind often went places that made no sense in the present, and even less on reflection when he was drinking and in his own mind as sane as men can be in a world that is mostly insane. He offered this young woman whose name he did not yet know the sandy pebble he had taken from between his toes, and for a reason that his always rational and reasoning mind would never be able to articulate. She took what he offered. She took it as a gift and smiled and squeezed his hand again, and then brought the pebble to her lovely mouth and placed it on one side of her lower teeth. And then she said, in English as good as one would hear from a native teacher of this language of all languages, “My name is Lae, and I want to walk with you to wherever you are walking.” “Our meeting is destiny,” Don Ricardo said, certain as he said the words that this must have been something that Mark Twain said in one of his knowing smart-ass moments. He added, “I have no doubt that you will enjoy me as much as I will enjoy
6 Don Ricardo running my fingers through your wet hair while telling you one of my stories of men chasing mice through fields of corn in search of their true identities.” She turned her face full to his face and said, “The luck of finding someone so tall and handsome is all mine. I am always lucky when the rain stops without warning and my phone goes dead.” He squeezed her hand, and he got as close to her as was possible as they continued walking. They walked faster the farther they went, and then they began running, still holding hands, children through and through to judge by how they ran and laughed without knowing why. Is there any feeling other than feeling like a child when everyone you know says you are not a child and are not supposed to behave like one? At the one-level motel of modest grays and gunmetal black, the young Lae ran to the porch on a flying hop and kicked off her near-death sandals and gave a gentle turn to the nob and a push on a slated door made in the year the first American bombs were let loose on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. She didn’t turn to see Don Ricardo’s whereabouts, because the bed with a hand-knitted red bed cover beckoned. She bounced twice and rolled onto her back and opened her arms and legs and closed her eyes, oblivious to a small frosted bulb surrounded by two hovering mosquitoes that would die at the exact moment that she climaxed and said, “Would you do that again so that I can love you forever?” Don Ricardo would respond, “Only if beginning tomorrow you sit on my lap and wrap one arm around me as we eat on the porch and promise to do this every time we are together in the morning and eating.”
Don Ricardo 7 “You ask for little,” she would respond. “Are you always so easy to satisfy?” “Only with someone as lovely as you and who has the American flag on her nails and the prettiest toes I have ever kissed.” They slept together with nary an inch between them, and in the morning while a rooster crowed and ran about before being grabbed by its neck and strangled, Lae slid out of his arms and edged off the bed and was still buttoning her simple cotton blouse as she picked up her sandals and headed down the path and toward the dirt road that would take her to the market and there walk within inches of the very rooster that slept its last night under the porch where they made love. A love of a kind that he would repeatedly bring to mind years later when making love to Stacey who had become mouthy and wanted from Don Ricardo what he and no sane man could give to any woman. Lae fried Don Ricardo three eggs and arranged them carefully on a bed of pure white rice and greens, and while she sat on his lap and he stroked her taut youthful thigh he wondered why he had never asked this favor of Nong or Bea or Fang, other Lao women to whom he had made love and while doing so imagined living with them forever in that kind of blissful state that is never more than a fool’s reverie. It occurred to him that he would never be able to ask Stacey to behave like this, and maybe this was reason enough to henceforth abandon any thought of marrying the one woman who could recite Shakespeare from memory and beat him to the top of the highest hill on a fast run, and made the best pickled herring and sauerkraut he’d ever eaten. Lae squeezed him, and she playfully sucked a young lover’s kiss from the side of his cheek, which was enough to make him
8 Don Ricardo forget any thought of Stacey for a whole week. And maybe forever, he thought. And then banished this thought, remembering his mother’s admonition to be responsible, a word that he never understood no matter how hard he tried. On the second morning at a lingering breakfast on the porch, amid a rain that made it impossible to see the adjacent bungalow, one in which four overweight English girls were asleep and in need of shampoo for their dirty and unruly hair, and two of them on the bed snoring like old men with incurable head colds, Don Ricardo asked Lae if she knew of a local opium den where they could smoke three or four pipes and then retire to a room where he would cite from memory some Latin American poetry that he once learned from a Cuban girl in Havana on a night when cops on infamous La Rampa around the corner from the very famous Havana Libre Hotel were arresting every single Cuban woman who was wearing shorts or a skirt or smoking a Cuban cigar. Her first response to the poetry which he would recite in Spanish would be: “I do not understand what it means.” “Nor do I, really,” he would say. “But that is not why I have read it to you while naked and just having satisfied my every carnal need.” “Then why?” “To make your skin prickly as I do when I kiss you behind and above your ear and you begin to shudder and beg for more.” “Then we will again and again make love to the words, will we not?” “To the spiders and scorpions most of all,” he said, “the same ones you hear me mumbling to as I slowly undress you.” “You are my magic, Don Ricardo. A man for me forever. And I do promise you that I will show you how to cook spiders
Don Ricardo 9 and scorpions so we can eat them and make babies in the afterglow.” “I see, I see,” he said. And running to other thoughts that did not follow, he said, “So then you know of a place not far away where we can go to smoke and be alone, and there too I will recite the poetry with the spiders and the scorpions listening?” “I do. But it is a dangerous place of wily young men and we may never be able to leave alive, and this would mean that I would then not be able to clean your feet before sleep as I have been doing since we met.” “You need not worry, my love. I will protect you, and we will be ready for the worst.” “Maybe they will hurt you to get all your money and I will die because you have died.” “If it be fated, so be it,” and Mark Twain came to mind, though he was now as certain as he could be that he had never read this line in anything Twain had ever written. They spent another five days together, eating and enjoying each other and talking about how to eat spiders when not making love in the shower that only dripped cold water. On one of these days, they went out twice, both times to eat and drink Beerlao and stroke each other’s leg under the table and pretend that they did not know each other. At dinner on the second of these days he pressed her to take him to the opium den she said she knew. “We could do some in your room and make love while doing what you want to do,” she said. “It is too dangerous in this very place,” he said, knowing that this was a lie and little more. Then, truthfully, as truthful as he was ever capable of being, he said in a whisper, “I also don’t have opium and the other things I need, and anyway I want the danger
10 Don Ricardo of wondering what will happen if you are right and we might get hurt. But not die for then we could not talk about it and least of all just how they killed us.” “Okay, if you like, but never my love forget my words of warning and that once there we cannot stop and after we have smoked for a while I will lie on top of you to sleep.” While they were smoking, and the thought of impending danger nowhere in sight, Lae asked him if he had another girlfriend. He said yes, and then maybe, and then no, changing his mind as he talked because with each word he wanted more and more of this Lao girl about whom he knew almost nothing. “Oh!” she said. “Is this true?” she said. “Yes,” he said, and said no more, knowing that she would not believe him and would return to the same question again and again, only reassured for mere hours after making love to her of a kind she had never known before meeting him. They continued smoking, and they sipped from their cups, and when Lae put her cup on the ground beside her feet, she said, “I want to be your girlfriend, and then your wife forever and ever.” “I will be leaving soon,” he said, as he always said to every woman in every country where he had coupled with a young woman, now as always never sure exactly what he was saying and not caring in the least that he did not know why he said what he did. “Where are you going?” she said, tears forming in the corners of her eyes, and then putting her head on his shoulder and sobbing. “To the river and then down to Cambodia by boat.”
Don Ricardo 11 “I can go with you if you will have me.” “Do you have a passport?” he asked her, knowing the answer, his politeness a lame way of assuring himself he was not the inconsiderate rake that he was and that even his mother knew him to be and for which she asked forgiveness every time she said her prayers and went to the confessional, telling the priest that she wanted to confess his sins as well as her own. “No, but I can get one in a week,” she said. “Then you can return and get me and we can get married.” “Yes, we can, my lovely Lae,” he said, telling himself to remember which question he had answered, marriage never on his agenda, a word that he associated with prison and solitary confinement and dead mosquitoes, the association between prisons and dead mosquitoes one that he could see made no sense at all and yet reoccurred with uncommon frequency on thinking about marriage or seeing a married couple. Lae smiled, an everlasting spring sweetness in her smile, and she put both of her arms around him and hugged and squeezed him as only a lover does in the first days of a love that only in a warped and childish mind never dies. The smile and the hug were so good and so warm and so believable that Don Ricardo nearly dropped the long crude pipe he was using. And then he did drop it into his groin and felt nothing and feared for one long moment that his manhood had fled and would never return. They went to a small room made of bent sticks and thatch from a thirty-five-year-old palm that succumbed to a horrendous storm that destroyed half a village. They fell onto the wormy mats on the ground and looked to the soft light showering them from above, and Don Ricardo wondered what his first girlfriend would have said to what he was now doing and he could not then
12 Don Ricardo have imagined as he took down her silky green panties and stared at her ample bush and wondered if it smelled like the roses his mother tended with more care than she ever gave to her sons. His mind slipped and these thoughts of a misguided and loving mother fled and would not return for two days because he could now hear roosters and chickens scratching about and Lae breathing as softly as an untroubled child who could imagine the impossible, not now or for the rest of her life ever really knowing the difference between what was possible and all that is impossible in an impossible world. He dozed and his head turned toward Lae and he woke long enough to kiss her on the top of her very hairy head. Stacey came to mind though he had no idea why, and he could not know that at this very moment her period began and would give her cramps so bad she would be in bed for days. And that when they were finally together she would bring forth memories of this very period and tell him, Don Ricardo never having a way to remember what he was doing in the midst of these cramps and blood that covered half a sheet. It was not long before Lae was lying on top of Don Ricardo, and as her body began working the rhythms of his body, his mind slipped into other unrecoverable places. Now she asked him to recite some poetry he had learned in Havana on a night he could barely remember. He could not do so, and the two of them were soon fast asleep, friends and lovers and soon to be gone from each other’s lives, Lae never to be forgotten and never more so than on the day that Don Ricardo made the fatal mistake of saying to Stacey, I do.
