Slash and Burn

start riding my bicycle.”
    “I’ll have nowhere to go. I’ll just be hanging around under your feet like this—day in day out. You always said you wished we could spend more time together.”
    “I don’t think I meant all of it. Couple of hours in the evening would be nice.”
    “I shall be yours twenty-four hours a day to do with as you wish. Your love slave around the clock.”
    Daeng laughed and scooped noodles into a bowl of broth. As there were no more stools, the customer collected the dish and sat with it on the bottom step of the staircase.
    “Siri, you could no more stay put for twenty-four hours than I could. You’ll be poking your nose in here, gallivanting there. And to tell you the truth, if I wanted a love slave I’d find myself a much much younger man. A body builder. I get plenty of offers, you know.”
    “Ha! He’d have to go through me first to get to you. You hear that, you lot?” he shouted. “Anyone here tempted to run off with my wife will have to fight me first.”
    “No problem,” said Pop, a wizened old bean stick whose weight more than doubled after one of Daeng’s spicy number 2s. He was probably the only customer in the shop older than Siri and he looked it. “Look at the state of you,” he said to Siri. “Barely a fortnight out of your sick bed, broken hand, scars and bruises all over. Huh. I reckon I could take you with one hand, especially if Daeng was the prize. One blow with this teaspoon and you’d be on your back.”
    “Is that right, Comrade?” Siri replied. “Then let’s see about that.”
    He grabbed a chopstick from the jar with his functioning hand and went at Pop with a fencing parry. Pop got to his feet and held out his teaspoon. A utensil duel ensued, egged on by the clatter of chopsticks against tin water mugs from all around them.
    A teenager in a white shirt stepped in off the dusty sidewalk and sidled nervously across to the noodle seller, bemused by the mêlée.
    “Comrade,” he said, “I have an urgent note for Dr. Siri Paiboun. They said I’d find him here.”
    “That’s him,” she said. “Over there. The little boy with the white hair and messy eyebrows brandishing a chopstick. They’re fighting over me, you know?”
    The boy wasn’t together at all.
    “Go ahead. Give it to him,” she told him. He reluctantly walked up behind Siri and tapped him on the shoulder. Siri turned and Pop, not one to miss an opportunity, whacked Siri on his lobeless left ear with his spoon. Siri cried in mock pain and sank to his knees. The percussion of sticks on mugs heralded Pop their champion. In the throes of an ignominious teaspoon death, Siri seized the note from the lad’s outstretched hand and died on the noodle shop floor. It was just another day at Daeng’s noodle shop.

2
    MEANWHILE, IN METRO MANILA
    Nino Sebastian had done very nicely for himself out of his stint with Air America. He’d lived frugally, made a little extra here and there by selling things that weren’t exactly his to sell, and unlike the Romeos at the Udon base, he didn’t pump his salary into the bars and massage parlours. When it was all over he’d come back to Manila, built a house and a service station, and married a girl who’d never have looked at him twice without the forty thousand dollars in his pocket. His mother and father pumped gas, his sister looked after the canteen, and he and his brother Oscar ran the garage. It was all sweet. Life. Love. Grease. There wasn’t the excitement but that wasn’t a bad thing. Excitement just meant there was a chance you’d get your testicles blown off. He could do without that kind of excitement. Here he had boxing and jai alai to get his pulse racing.
    There was a match tonight. Jets vs. Redemption. He had money on the reds. He’d take the truck over there. Pick up his cousin Poco on the way. It was a sticky night. He’d already taken a shower and put on his lucky turquoise shirt but he was sweating so bad he was thinking of taking another. He looked out the kitchen window and was pissed off to see the light on in the garage. Oscar was away in Samal so he guessed some customer had come in hoping for a rush job, had the nerve to turn on the light. Some people had more balls than manners. But no matter how much the guy offered, he wasn’t going to get service on pelota night.
    When Nino walked in the back door of the service area, a darkskinned man was standing looking under the hood at the 1961 Cadillac engine Nino