Excerpt two

From Chapter Three - The Chicken House

A swarm of colorful, teenage girls greeted our table, each wearing a sash from shoulder to hip with the logo of a different beer company -- red for Angkor, green for Hennessy, orange for Tiger. A girl in a black and gold uniform offered cigarettes and one in purple offered French wine. A small boy in dirty shorts pointed to my shoes, while a dutiful young girl held out a plate of white jasmine flowers. Their little faces were undeniably insistent, so George bought the flower necklace for me and I submitted my ripped Birkenstock sandals to their first polish.

The company representative of the local home-brew, Angkor Beer, kept a vigilant eye on our glasses throughout supper, refilling them as she moved around the table like a gentle breeze. George sought to equalize the awkward effect of her shy servitude with a generous tip.

“No pay her,” Sovann said. “The company pay her to sell the product.”

“How much do they pay?”

“Maybe one dollar per day,” he said.

“Is that enough to live on?”

“No, sometimes the customers take her home, then she can make more,” he answered nonchalantly, then quickly added, “Only Vietnamese girls do that.” Yet among the rainbow of beer girls, every one looked and spoke Khmer. Several times I caught myself searching their features for a clue to the woman who birthed our son.

Steaming piles of rice arrived, alongside vegetables and soup that smelled at once sour and hot, salty and sweet. The smells overwhelmed my taste buds and the loud karaoke gave me a headache. I lost my appetite. The churn of Sovann’s facial muscles, crunching food between high cheekbones and a sharp, square jawline mesmerized me. He’s a thin man. Eyeing the cracks between the bamboo slats, I thought, with his waistbelt pulled tightly, he might just slip through. The sheer volume of food he ate amazed me. Watching him, with his head bowed over a plate of rice, precisely shoveling spoonful after spoonful into his small mouth, I finally had to ask, “Where do you put it all?” He looked up at me with a squirrelish grin and mumbled without spitting, “It’s in my cheeks.” That it was. The pouches of both cheeks were filled to capacity with rice. He wiped the corner of his mouth and swallowed.

“During communist regime, not enough food,” he said. “Save, eat later.” Quickly he resumed eating as though he didn’t know when the next meal would come.

Great sheets of heat lightning rumbled across the sky as we repositioned ourselves onto the moto for the return trip. Electric blue streaks outlined the storm clouds. With each flash, the clouds appeared as an explosion petrified by darkness. The night was alive. The traffic continued at its normal erratic pace over the Japanese Friendship Bridge and by the time we reached the other side, the dam of heaven itself had burst. Through the dense rain, it was hard to discern the headlights and tail lights of other vehicles -- if they had lights at all. The tension from several close calls was softened by the wetness, more a shower than a drenching, a refreshing break from the dismal heat. For the first time, Phnom Penh struck me as beautiful. With the somber guise of its bruised buildings and impoverished people rinsed clean, it became another eye-popping capital city. Under the cover of darkness, flashy neon and loud music beckoned the rich and the weary to come out and play.

On the day Ratanak left the orphanage with us, Sovann had convinced George to rent a room at Phnom Penh’s Hotel Sheraton (a rip-off version of the American brand), in close proximity to the slum where he lived, so he could easily service our every transportation need. The discothèque on the hotel’s ground floor featured an arched doorway with concentric rows of blinking, white lights and slim figures gyrating under it to a bass beat emanating from within -- boisterous and sexy, decidedly un-Khmer. With new babe in arms, nearly every morning we shared the elevator of the Hotel Sheraton with very young prostitutes. Their elliptical, brown eyes cast to the floor or the wall when we entered, their smallness filling the box with a presence of remarkable strength. The AIDS epidemic has sex shoppers pushing the demand for girls younger and younger, and Cambodia has become known on the international sex market as a pedophile’s paradise. The going rate for a virgin for a week is $600; 16-, 15- and 14-year-old girls are common; many are as young as 12, some younger still.

When Sovann strode past the Hotel Sheraton’s regular moto drivers hanging outside the entrance and greeted us with a handshake, the other drivers were visibly peeved. He was careful to park his motobike in full view, paying a street kid a few hundred riels to watch it. Sovann was a savvy street player, but George and I needed to determine if he was trustworthy. In a world where shyness is a virtue, saving face a matter of consequence, and obscurity prolongs survival, it is difficult to get a straight answer from anyone. By contrast, we sensed an unusual capacity for candor in Sovann. He was meeting us for a job interview, only he didn’t know it.

“You look tired,” I said.

“Last customer, man lady,” he answered.

“A ladies’ man?” I offered. The previous day, as it turned out, he’d driven us all day and returned us to the hotel at 10 p.m., then wrangled another customer and drove him to brothels and nightclubs all night. The traffic of outsized, foreign men -- European, American, Middle Eastern, and Asian – in the company of two or three slender, young girls, tightly outfitted and lavishing sweet affection on their customers, busied every bar in the city.

“He take three different nightclub, buy lady three times,” Sovann replied, rubbing his tired eyes, but visibly astounded by his customer’s late-night stamina. If it were physically possible, I think Sovann would work around the clock.