A Place for Sinners Page 7

  Creature comforts. It was very easy to feel guilty for indulging, but unwinding felt even better. It’s the bomb, she thought to herself. YOLO; so why not do it in style while you can?

  She’d read that hostels were great, though hard work for those who didn’t want their trips to be dictated by the allure of the attached bar or the balcony parties going off every night—neither of which were a socially manageable feat for a deaf girl. Amity suspected that she’d be lost without Caleb by her side. And day after day, his by-her-side reliability was a lot to ask.

  It’ll be fine, you dope. Stop stressing. ENJOY YOURSELF. GO WITH THE FLOW. BELIEVE AND YOU WILL SUCCEED! You know, do all those things you read on people’s bumper stickers!

  Her cell vibrated. The comment she’d just posted was already being retweeted and favorited by many of her online buddies, sending her heart aflutter.

  Luce Goode @lbgoode

  @Amity Collins Gr8 2 hear ur havin a blast. Photos plz! We R living thru u!

  It hadn’t been until she’d stopped working that Amity realized just how hungover she was from the past year, how intoxicated she’d been by the long hours, jobs and deadlines. It had left her a paler shade of herself, and only now was that color returning to her cheeks. Smiling was easy to do when your day wasn’t full of indecisive clients, when you weren’t fighting for payments and drafting invoices between online university classes.

  Defer everything. She smiled, giddy.

  The sacrifices were over—for a while, at least. She was here, in her room, with the sensation of cool bedsheets against her sunburn. It made every effort worth it, and yes, helped to balm the blister of having left people behind. People like her mother (who, despite herself, had taken them to Ballina for their connecting flight to Sydney).

  Amity tried not to think about it. That memory evoked a color, and that color was RED.

  Corby Hans @Vdrinkaddict

  @Amity Collins Jealous much? Take me next time!

  Earlier that day, Caleb had signed to her, “You look healthier.” And that too had made her happy.

  You’ve earned this. Put that on your bumper sticker, buddy.

  Amity eased her mind back on a pillow of disbelief and was asleep within three minutes.

  2

  Phuket Town, in the southeast corner of Phuket Island, was unlike anything Caleb had ever experienced before. Natural warmth emanated from the locals, who emerged from their homes and businesses in the mornings to light incense and tokens for Buddha. They would then stroll into swarming traffic as though everyone on the road weren’t driving under their own regimes.

  Their trip from the airport to their resort had been the first of many culture shocks to leave Caleb shaking with equal parts excitement and fear. They had torn through a chaotic landscape in an overcrowded minibus at an incredible speed, leaving him clutching for a seat belt that wasn’t there.

  “Do they always drive like this?” the middle-aged woman sitting next to him had asked.

  Caleb hadn’t answered—he was too frightened. He could see his head crashing through the windshield, glass flying everywhere, and the splat of his brains across a road he couldn’t even pronounce. “I think I’m going to have a heart attack!” It was a half lie, dismissed with a laugh.

  Weaving through traffic, veering onto the opposite side of the highway, just missing trucks toting livestock. Families of six perching on a single motorcycle. Telegraph poles teeming with beards of tangled wires that sagged so low they flirted with the ground. Smoke billowing from open barbecues in the blur of passing hawker stalls.

  “This is a whole other world,” Caleb told his mother during their first Skype call after arriving. “It’s weird, you know. Now that I’ve arrived, I can’t wait to come back here! I guess that sounds strange, but it’s true. And Ma, you’re totally coming with us. I don’t care if I have to strap you to the wing of the plane.”

  “Well, I don’t think there’s much of a chance of that,” she replied, bent close to her webcam for fear of not being heard. “I don’t like flying.”

  “You’ve never even been on a plane.”

  “Oh, Caleb. I’m from the old school.”

  “For crying out loud. Ma, you’ll be fine. Trust me. I’ll slip you a glass of Lambrusco with a crushed-up Tylenol in it and you’ll be out like a light. A couple of hours later, hello Thailand!”

  “Look, if God had intended us to fly, he would have given us wings.”

  It was one mountain Caleb knew he couldn’t climb; when it came to his mother, it was becoming easier and easier to give up. And why not? In many ways she had given up on him. She thought he was going to hell, after all. In her book, it wasn’t just unloved gays who burn.

  “Sawadee kha-aaaaaa,” the local women would say to the two of them in greeting. A bowed head and palms pressed together as though in prayer. Caleb loved the sing-song sounds of the language, the way it bounced along, syllable by syllable.

  “Sawadee krup,” he would reply for them both, his voice wavering and unconfident. When he’d booked their elephant ride at the reservation, Caleb had been forced to use Google Translate on his iPhone to get his request across. “I don’t know how people used to travel before the Internet,” he’d signed to his sister.

  The Mango Coco cocktails they’d ordered on their first night out in Patong (a fifteen-minute tuk-tuk ride from their resort) arrived in oversize carafes shaped like nude women. Semifrozen packaged towels to wipe the sweat from their faces accompanied every meal.

  “I need a shower,” was Caleb’s most frequent sign.

  Phuket’s scent was a delicate mix of spice and sewage, a Molotov mixture that was by turns alluring and repulsive. One minute, Amity would be walking near the food stalls while scanning the market T-shirts, and the next—bam—she would be hit in the face by the stench of shit, so warm and tangible it was as though someone had slapped her with a fecal blanket. A flurry of hands and then it would be Amity signing that she was the one who needed a shower.

  Between the smells, the traffic, the constant offers for cheap tailoring, and locals identifying their nationality by their footwear, they were on high alert—in the best possible way. It was almost a joke, really; a lurid penny dreadful in which their lives were the punch line. Amity would wonder, much later, if their lives had been mapped out in advance by some great power or entity. If they had been lured in and laughed at, as plans fell into place and they began to fall, one by one.

  3

  Caleb jumped on the bed and pretended to smother his sister with a pillow. They faux-fought and tumbled to the floor. The laughter of one fueled the laughter of the other, a round robin of bleats.

  Amity reconsidered putting on makeup; sweat would only strip away her efforts. So they settled for vodka shots at eight, and within half an hour, the sawng tiew they’d called for at reception screeched to a stop out the front of their hotel. They took photos of each other with their iPhones, pausing to look at each image before taking the next. Caleb searched for a Wi-Fi signal to upload the photographs to Instagram but had no luck.

  Shop owners called to them as they walked the busy street. “Hellooooooo! You want dancing? You from Australia, yes?”

  Patong’s neon lights burned bright. Men and women played Connect Four with waitresses in open street bars. Sad-faced children approached them, trying to sell roses.

  The world spun, drink after drink, leaving Amity fumbling with her Thai baht at the bar. Caleb swept in to help, snatching the money from his sister’s hands and paying on her behalf. “Khob-kun-Krup!”

  Local men flicked nudie cards at the male tourists as they strutted the street, high-fiving each other and tugging at their Chang Beer singlet tops. There were Australian women just off the main drag, vomiting into gutters near a busy nightclub, faces feathered with streaks of running mascara. “I can’t believe he did that to me! The fuggin’ prick,” Caleb heard one woman say.

  “Tracey, you’re so much better than him,” said the other, wh
o was now holding back her friend’s curls as she doubled over to lurch up her dinner. “He’s a prick, but her, oh she’s nothing but a bogan slut!”

  More drinks. More baht slammed down on the bar.

  Cameras flashing. A whip crack of flame seen through an open kitchen window.

  Amity watched her brother twerk on an empty dance floor, swinging his arms through beams of blue light, spearing clouds of smoke. Amity thought he looked happy, and that made her happy.

  Tobias approached them at midnight.

  4

  It was two o’clock in the morning and the city still swung, assuming it ever wound down. Amity watched it all from within her fishbowl silence. Children giggled as they passed by on their bicycles; white, middle-aged men held hands with their rented Thai teenagers; Tobias Schubert’s lips bounced as he told some story in his semicharming, broken English.

  To Amity, deafness was like one of those black-and-white drawings in a coloring book: it was stark and honest—only the child didn’t have any crayons with which to bring the picture to life. Deafness was to be incomplete in a world that demanded completeness. And Amity had half expected Thailand to do nothing but accentuate such feelings, but in reality, it helped. Being unable to speak the native language was giving her brother a little taste of what it was like to live without the ability to communicate with others. Amity sighed; it was cruel in a way. Cruel, but necessary. It was plateauing their relationship.

  Amity almost felt normal. And then Tobias had started talking.

  The three of them sat on the curb out the front of the nightclub, half-eaten meat skewers in their hands. Caleb had given up on translating what the black, twenty-four-year-old German was saying.

  He drank up the sight of him. Tobias.

  This stranger was tall and thin, an awkward melding of nerd and handsome. Hair as dark as his skin surfed across his brow in a halfhearted quiff, framing eyes marked with imperfections. “This all happened last week,” he began, dulcet tones hazed by alcohol, his clunking accent. “And I was so scared. You may think I am tough and fit, but I am like a kitten.”

  Caleb laughed, trying to ignore his sister’s gaze.

  “I was staying with this guy in my hostel in Phuket. He was nice, but man, he was crazy and liked the drugs. His name was Matt, and he was from Ireland. All the time, he was asking, ‘When are we going to find party?’ ‘I want to go party tonight, Tobias’. It got on my nerves. I like to party, but not all the time. I’ve been traveling for two years. I’ve got no money sometimes.”

  He paused midstory to take a bite from his meat skewer and a sip of Red Bull.

  “So we go to the market together. He wants to buy a suit, because here you can get one made for you. Very cheap. Good quality sometimes. If you want to get clothes, you should be careful; people try to rip you off all the time. Very bad.

  “We were walking down the street together and this man, he calls out to us, ‘Sir, you want to buy suit?’ We go into his shop; it all looks very nice. Silk and the cottons, all of the good things. I don’t want a suit ’cause I’m, like, almost broke. But he measured me up anyways—it’s good to be polite. And Matt, he says to them straight out, ‘Where can I find some drugs? Like pot?’”

  “Hell no!” Caleb said, hastily signing to Amity in the hopes of not excluding her. “You hear horror stories about that kind of thing. Young tourists—just like us—sent to prison and left to rot. It’s a nightmare.”

  “Very scary. But Matt, he is dumb. But the funny thing is that the, uh, man who makes the suit, um…what do you call this person?”

  “The tailor.”

  “Yes. The tailor says, ‘Yes. I have some pot. Very good. Good for tourists’.”

  “Please tell me you guys hightailed it out of there, quick smart.”

  “I wish. The tailor, he takes Matt out the back door into an alley. And my hands were shaking—just like this. Shake-shake-shake. But I can’t leave him, can I? So I go out the back with him and see this man. A huge guy, very big for a Thai. He’s got this machete in his hands.”

  “Oh, good God!”

  “Yes, this is all true, I swear. And in front of this huge man is this block of wood with a brick of hash on it. You know, good stuff. I could smell it: black licorice. And Matt is like, ‘Yeah man, this is the shit. I want some’. But I was like, no way. And I know that as soon as that guy cuts the hash, we’re going to have to pay up, and I’ve got no money and I know Matt doesn’t really have any either. Matt’s crazy, he loves to risk, you know? One day he will kill someone, or himself.”

  “So what did you do?” Caleb asked. He had edged his way along the curb during the story, and his shoulder now brushed against the not-so-stranger. His back was to Amity, which Tobias noticed and rectified by shuffling forward.

  “Well, the man has this machete, and he’s bringing it down. I’m seeing it all in slow motion, like in the movies. So I run across and grab him by the wrist, just before the blade is about to cut into the hash. My eyes must have been popping out; see, his arms were the size of my head!”

  “Just incredible. I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”

  “Oh, it’s very real. I was like, oh, Matt, you are a fool.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Well, I told this man, ‘Please, no. We cannot have any pot. We’ll go now’. And wow, this man was very shitty with us. He was like, ‘You will go tell the police now’. You will do this, you will do that. I was scared. And so I jump back and grab Matt by the shirt and pull him back into the shop. Man, we ran and ran. The tailor was screaming at us, ‘You come back and buy suit, okay!’ Matt thought it was so funny. I didn’t think it was so funny, though. Shizah.”

  Caleb picked up Tobias’s Red Bull and put the can to his lips. He could taste the musky tang of saliva around the aluminum rim, sending nervous wings fluttering about inside him. He would never have been so brazen back home, but there was something about being in a country like Thailand, where there were no expectations or limits, that fueled him on. He was his own worst avatar.

  “I didn’t talk to Matt again, and I left that hostel. Besides, he was very racist. To all peoples.”

  “Really? Did he ever give you shit?”

  “Not really. But one time we was in a pub, having a good time. And this man comes up to him and asked him if he was American. Matt got very mad and screamed at him, ‘Don’t you fucking call me an American, you prick, you bastard’. Terrible. Yes. I do not miss him.”

  Tobias’s story ran itself dry, and Caleb watched him wilt under the silence left behind. Despite his lanky build and the deep bellow of his voice—despite the size of his calloused hands—there was a vulnerability to him Caleb couldn’t deny being attracted to.

  “You’re cute,” Caleb told him. Regret settled in the moment the words were aired.

  “Well, I think you are cute too.”

  “You do?”

  “Sie sind sehr attraktiv.”

  Amity watched them kiss, their faces bleached by flashing neon. Flakes of confetti twirled around them as a tide of drunken tourists walked by, not caring. She thought this was nothing more than luck. Though the company they shared, the alcohol in their systems, had freed her brother and this stranger, it frightened her to think that others on this street may not be quite so enthusiastic about, or liberated by, their public display of affection.

  Every eye was upon them. No eyes were upon them. It hurt to be caught between.

  And it wasn’t as though Amity hadn’t seen her brother hook up before. There had been a string of guys before Tobias—kisses at house parties, university balls, a discreet embrace in the back of the Evans Head Bowling Club. But the flutter of anxiety within her had nothing to do with this. It was some ingrained fear—institutionalized, maybe—that she bore for him. The fear that one day, he’d meet Mister Not-So-Right and Caleb would be infected with AIDS; or that he’d become too confident for his own good, as he was now, and some stranger would come out of the crowd and
take him down in a rain of punches. Once, she’d witnessed a grown man stab a friend with a broken beer bottle on New Year’s Eve at the local pub for far less.

  Glass, drops of blood, laid out like a reward of undeserved diamonds.

  You’re being stupid, Amity.

  No, I’m not.

  Yes, you are.

  Caleb’s back faced her again. The envious throb Amity had been fighting since Tobias’s arrival now began to knit itself within her chest—the needle stinging when his thick fingers caressed Caleb’s neck. Twisting through his blond hair.

  No, I’m really not being stupid. Caleb isn’t as tough or as strong as he’d like to think he is. Sure, he’s got a bit of muscle behind him, and some big, burly fucker with a grudge to prove would have a hard time kicking Dean Collins’s eldest to the curb, but I still worry. Just because Caleb is confident and quick on his feet doesn’t mean he is undefeatable. And despite the stubble he seems to wear with pride, day after day, regardless of the plaid shirts and bargain-store jeans he insists on living in, I just don’t think my brother is as masculine looking as he’d like to believe. Especially when he drinks, when those cringe-worthy and obvious macho barriers start to drop, one by one, and all of a sudden, the way he shifts his head seems to scream insecurity, the way a drunken laugh escaping him sends his hands into an effeminate clutching of the mouth.

  It’s the little things. They all add up.