Rattawant Lapcharoensap - Sightseeing - Stories

Good night, chickens. Good night, Papa.

Then Papa started sleeping with his chickens. For my part, I began to learn how unbearable the night could be. I’d watch my bedroom wall for hours, the shifting shapes of the lantern’s glow filling me with dread. My terrors were no longer childish. I saw lewd, horrible men dancing on my walls with fangs, claws, raw red penises. I saw myself naked before them like a slab of meat quivering on a butcher’s block. I felt fingernails sinking into my breasts, rancid breath moistening my face, woolly hairs chafing my stomach. Exhaustion invariably took me, but sleep was hardly a relief. I dreamt of sex and I dreamt of decapitations and these dreams were often one and the same.

Mama and I would find Papa in the morning snoring in a bed of straw, a ring of cigarette butts scattered beside him, the cocks clucking for their morning feed. She’d nudge him with her foot. He’d open his eyes suddenly, as if he hadn’t been sleeping at all, and then silently go about his business — drizzling feed into the coops, changing water pans, stalking back to the house to take his morning bath — as if it was the most natural thing in the world for a grown man to be caught sleeping with his chickens.

People started to talk. They started to laugh. He’d become a bone for the rumormongers to gnaw. In town, the men would cluck at me, flap their elbows, and I never knew if they were making fun of Papa or making a pass at me or some strange combination of both.

“Your father’s losing it,” Mama said one morning while we were doing the day’s wash out back, up to our elbows in suds. We could hear Papa chasing the chickens through the yard for exercise, their clucks and squawks joining the chorus of early morning birds. During the week, when he wasn’t training his chickens, Papa worked at the roofing factory hammering gigantic sheets of tin. “Chickens. Money. His feeble mind. He’s losing it all.” I nodded, wringing a pair of my father’s workpants over the washbasin.

“And your breasts,” Mama sighed suddenly, reaching out with a wet hand. “My God, you’re getting huge.”

“Mama,” I muttered, swatting at her fingers. “Don’t be disgusting.”

“Don’t be such a prude,” Mama said. “I’m your mother. I gave you those things.”

“Mama!”

“Are you pregnant? That would be the end, Ladda. I’d shoot myself if some yahoo knocked you up.”

I just kept wringing my father’s pants over the washbasin, listening to the chickens squawking and flapping in the yard.

We’d seen better times. Papa used to win. He used to be the best cockfighter in town. The men used to say Papa could cast magic spells that sent his cocks into a bloodthirsty rage. Magic or no, I loved the way Papa would saunter into the house after a day at the cockpit: beaming, large, awesome with pride. He’d plop a wad of cash on the dinner table and Mama would squeal with delight. He’d let me count the money; I’d lick my fingers, judiciously flip through the bills, the way I’d seen gamblers in town fondling their cash after an evening tossing dice. We weren’t wealthy but, for a little while, we could buy things. A brand-new bicycle for me. An electric stove for Mama. Orchids for her garden. The Mazda for Papa. A bigger, better television.

But all that changed the day Little Jui showed up at the cockpit.

II

Sixteen years old, heir to Big Jui’s fortune and power, Little Jui was as notorious for being his father’s son as he was for his methamphetamine habit. He arrived at the cockpit with his bodyguards, his mind infected with the drug-addled delusion that he was no longer a young man attending a cockfight but that he was, in fact, a mangy rabid dog. He got down on all fours. He barked at the chickens. Some say he foamed at the mouth, scratched his ears with his legs, sniffed the men’s crotches. At first, nobody paid him any mind, but then some of the men picked up their coops and went home.

To make trouble with Little Jui was to make trouble with Big Jui was to offer yourself up for unfathomable cruelties. In middle school, Little Jui had picked a fight with Samat, the bartender’s skinny son, who — unaware as the young often are of the world’s lunatic ways — decided to teach Little Jui a thing or two about schoolyard kickboxing. Big Jui caught wind of the matter and we all watched in horror the next day as Little Jui led a beaten Samat through town by a leash tied to his tiny, hairless penis. There was nothing any of us could do about it.

At the cockpit, snapping occasionally out of his methamphetamine dream, Little Jui kept betting against Papa’s cocks. Little Jui kept losing. He howled with escalating rage every time another chicken left the pit with a ruptured breast, a gouged eye, a severed wing. His bodyguards, Dam and Dang — two fat, betel-chewing men — handed Papa his money with stone-faced courtesy.

Papa made six thousand baht in four matches from Little Jui alone.

That’s when Papa should’ve quit. He should’ve known better. He’d always said there was nothing so important as good manners when other people’s money starts going into your wallet. The gracious cockfighter, he used to tell me, always spares his opponent needless embarrassment and financial ruin. But Papa must’ve been thinking of what they did to Samat — how a thing like that could ruin a little boy forever — and he must’ve also been thinking of all the other people who’d suffered from the senseless abuse of Little Jui’s family through the years. So Papa kept his cocks in the pit. He kept accepting more challenges. He kept taking Little Jui’s money.

The men knew Papa had abandoned his customary cock-fighting manners for higher stakes. No one in our town had ever defied Little Jui’s family. And while this was just a cockfight, there seemed something gratifying about Little Jui losing and losing and losing again, howling like a wounded animal, while Papa’s wad of money thickened with every match. And though the men knew better than to cheer, they couldn’t suppress their sly, satisfied grins.

It got dark. The cocks had become gray shadows flapping in the night. Papa’d made nine thousand from Little Jui now — the most he’d ever made in an afternoon. The boy was enraged. He threatened to have his bodyguards cripple anyone caught smiling at his defeats. More men went home. Papa decided to do the same. He’d done enough, he thought. No use being reckless.

“Dinnertime,” Papa announced ceremoniously, picking up a few coops to take to the Mazda.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Little Jui cried, a finger pointed at Papa. Dam and Dang moved quickly to Papa’s side, thick hands reaching for his arm. “One more, old man. Double or nothing this time.”

The pit fell silent. Nobody in our town had ever wagered so much. Papa considered for a moment, blinked at Little Jui. He opened his mouth to say something, but Little Jui suddenly fell to his hands and knees, rolled around in the dirt, and began to whimper like a dog again. There must’ve been something about seeing Big Jui’s son groveling like that. There must’ve also been something about having Dam’s and Dang’s thick fingers wrapped around his skinny forearms. Something, too, about the way the men looked to him now, like he was a hero, like they were pinning unnameable hopes on Papa and his chickens. And there must’ve been something about the money that stood to be won now — another nine thousand — more than Mama made the whole season sewing fake pearls onto brassieres at home for Miss Mayuree and the lingerie company.

Pack it up, Papa. Leave. Bring those chickens home.

But Papa stayed. He began to prepare Somsak, a meter-tall Thai bantam he’d named after his own father, my grandfather. Papa rarely fought Somsak. He’d only bring the cock out for big matches. With his vermilion breast and his green crown set against a canvas of iridescent indigo feathers, Somsak was once named “Native Chicken of the Week” by one of the cockfighting magazines. We had the spread pinned to the refrigerator door. Pictures of Papa handling the cock. Somsak leaping, midair, a dazzling swirl of colors. Complex diagrams of the chicken’s imperial plumage. Somsak never lost, though he’d been close once, when an opposing chicken’s spur punctured one of his lungs. Between rounds, Papa inserted a straw through the wound and sucked out the blood filling the chicken’s chest cavity. Somsak reentered the pit energetic as ever. He won the match. Later that evening Papa sutured the wound with Mama’s sewing kit while I held the quivering chicken between my knees. The next morning Somsak was out there dashing and flapping across the yard with the rest of the chicken house.