Bangkok Knights Read Online Free Page A

getting any younger, and when you get to feeling you’re
middle-aged, you get to thinking there isn’t a lot of time left
    And there they were, headed back to the Sandbox, leaving
one casualty behind. Stack and I, on the other hand, headed back into town
poor, but pretty happy to be alive and right in the mood for another drink.
    So Sid was dead. Sid ‘Siddiqi’ Davis. It was hard to
believe. He’d only been thirty-six years old.
    “It sure makes you think,” said my friend Stack Jackson, staring into his beer-glass. “Geez.”
    ”But what a way to go,” I said.
    “Yeah.” He brightened momentarily, and chuckled. “S till,
it really makes you think. Why, it could’ ve been any one of us. Gone — just
like that. Is this what middle age is all about?”
    Middle age! Even allowing for all the beer Stack
had put away, I had to call this malarkey.
    “That’s malarkey,” I said. “In the first place, you’re
only thirty-five years old. Nobody’s going to tell you that’s middle-aged,
unless maybe you ask a teeny-bopper. Good grief. And Sid was only thirty-six.
    “Anyway, it’s not as though he died a standard kind of
death; it was unorthodox, was old Sid’s grand finale. Colorful, you might even
say.
    “Middle age? Middle age is mortgages and Milo before bed.
Middle age is the late-movie-as-birth-control-device. Middle age is holidays
from the Middle East spent in Surrey.” I raised my glass: “No, I give you Sid
Davis, young Quantity Surveyor rampant, who came to Bangkok from the Persian Gulf on a vacation and died — reasonably happy, one hopes—beneath a woman called
Big Toy.”
    “What an epitaph,’ said Stack. “Heroic.”
    “That’s right,” I replied. “Middle-aged, my eye. This was
a young man cut down in full bloom. Tragic, it was. Sort of.”
    “Admirable, in any case,” agreed Stack. “And so okay, we
‘re not middle-aged, and we’re not one foot in the grave, maybe. But if a guy can’t
get maudlin at a wake,where can he get maudlin?”
    There were just the two of us, by then, but we were
drinking beer and mourning the dead, so I guess it was a wake, at that.
    “I reckon there’s a lesson in it all somewhere,” said
Stack. He looked thoughtful and then continued. “You know, Sid was quite a
worrier. For example, I do believe he started worrying about middle age around
the same time he first heard the expression.”
    “And he was worried about going bald from the first time I
met him,” I added. “He once told me he’d begun losing his hair when he was in
his early twenties. If that’s the case, he must’ve been quite the hairy bugger
back then, because fifteen years later he was still ‘going bald’ and, as far as
I could see, he had a long way to go yet.”
    ”Yeah, and not only that, he was always getting fat. I
knew him for six years, and he always looked the same to me. But he’d go on
about heart attacks and strokes and diets and things.”
    “I figure it was the Sandbox that was getting him down.
Five years in that environment would be enough to give anyone heart attacks.
Probably make your hair fall out as well.”
    “I had breakfast with him just last week,” Stack told me. “We
met at Boon Doc’s. I got tucked into the home fries and sausages and eggs, but
he told me he was skipping breakfasts because he was trying to lose weight.
Next thing you knew, he started rummaging around in his bag; he put together a
multicolored pile of tablets and capsules of all shapes and sized, and
proceeded to wash them down by the handful with a large Singha beer. It turned
out he’d wolfed 2000 mg. of vitamin C, two aspirins, a megadose or so of
vitamin B, vitamin A with carotene, a large dollop of vitamin E, some ginseng
and bees-pollen tablets, three varieties of anti-malarial pills, two Valiums
and a Lomotil and maybe some more I can’t remember. Volume for volume, I reckon
he ate more than I did.”
    Sid was always dieting. He’d quit smoking; he didn’t