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At a station immediately before the destination of Nongkai the train stopped and a door opened to three villagers who were selling their fried rice and pork in Styrofoam containers. "Khao pat moo. The Laotian was still seated in front of him as before, but with a furrowed forehead and a smirking countenance as if puzzled not by what to say but on how best to say it.
He knew that he should not be brooding about a pejorative word used on this woman, a creature who seemed to flourish in the word and for all he knew might be well suited and defined by it. Still tension of his own making about how wrong the Laotian was to have uttered his pugnacious, rude, chauvinistic, and socially inappropriate word seemed to alter the air so that it was viscous and palpable.
As the Laotian would not be returning there was no need to sit here further. Furthermore, he was hungry and wanted the steam of coffee to make him into a new man. Then he suddenly felt a tap on his shoulder, human warmth, the sense of belonging to this sorry specie. The Laotian handed him a receipt. "It should be delivered by tomorrow afternoon." "All of it?" "I think so." "To your home?"
He imagined himself shaking the Laotian, kicking him on his hairy behind, and dragging him out of this annexed space. He smiled and internally laughed at such an absurd caprice. The mind was littered with such protective mines, which soared through the weightless space of ethereal consciousness. By his laughter such evil was not claimed and thus it did not make him.
There might have been poetic significance in having done this mundane job: having taken the refugee children to the zoo with seventy year old Jesus and the fifty year old Sanchez; having said the names of the animals in English and the girls giving the Vietnamese equivalent; having taken them to the social security office to get them cards with designated numbers; having taken the Cambodian boy into the clothes room of the Welcome Center to try on pants of various sizes but when he would not put them on and take them off with an adult sense of speed, having performed the unzipping and zipping herself; having taken the little Cuban girl to the Vietnamese doctor when she had a fever although the doctor only gave Gabriele the suggestion of Gatorade and crackers; and having often heard the little Laotian girl imitating Gabriele's growls through the tattered 1screen of a window although Gabriele's growls toward the girl were real ones.
When the face was ugly its foul breath was fouler, and when handsome the snoring was a nice inebriating gust that picked up Nawin's kite; but in both perspectives the brazen Laotian in his impoverished vulnerability reminded him of Jatupon. For a moment he was scared of the Laotian as if having stumbled into a den of sleeping terrorist cells but it was the self that was his only terrorist.
And what about that ugly brown wife who beat you up? Are you going without her." "Yes of course. I rarely go on vacations with ladies who bludgeon me with iron frying pans." "Didn't like you drawing nudes?" "Something like that." "He claims to be an artist," said the Laotian. "You saw the slides," said Nawin. "Yes, I did. Some naked beauties."
"A grant.... It was a grant from your country a cultural exchange with accomplished artists... I was one of the applicants who won." His words were slow and laborious as he wished not to divulge anything. "How wonderful! A famous artist of this area. Are you Laotian?" "I'm American," he said. It was the second most offensive word that he could think of. "Are you here on vacation?"
Throughout this nascent conversation with the Laotian, whoever this man was, who perhaps used a nickname-alias of Boi as an easily worn but also easily removed one word summation of himself, this pallid, young female with flowing hair, just as he liked them, had been inches near his thighs and he had barely even noticed it, as he was preoccupied with this bizarre homosexual caprice that had rushed upon him an hour earlier as zephyrs from the subconscious, and thinking of ways to repudiate any judgment of him as a homosexual that might be in the mind of the Laotian.
And although he was not terribly alarmed, he questioned whether or not the man crossing the road with him was in fact the Laotian, but as everything changed anyway he could not see that being accompanied by someone else really mattered. They sat at a second table behind two middle aged men. "Sabaidee mai?" he heard the acquaintance say to them and they reciprocated with the same greeting.
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