Adult-FanFiction.org : Comics

Canary Air	By : Nos4a2 Category: DC Verse Comics > Birds Of Prey Views: 7065 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Birds of Prey,nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 1
- 2
- 3
CHAPTER TWO
I go over the room slowly, dividing it all up into sections in my mind. The bathroom and its foul-smelling awfulness, the half-filled bags of yaa baa lining the edge of the tub. The bedroom, with the rumpled bed and discarded condom wrappers. I try to guess how many girls Ollie had in here, and even a modest estimate puts the number at least two. There’s lipstick on one of the generic hotel glasses, the kind that come with little paper wrappers sealing off the edges of the glass from a stranger’s mouth. A tampon in the garbage. And, in the crack between the nightstand and the wall, a book of matches with a club name on it. Pussy Go-Go.
The Thais are nothing if not subtle.
I sink down into a chair, shutting my eyes against the fading light filtering in from behind the window shade, trying to remember Oliver Queen. I’d loved him, once, but so many years had passed by since those days. Life has a way of canceling out who we were when we were young. Things that seemed obvious then are a mystery to me now. He was unfaithful. Loyal, but given to lapses in both judgment and feeling. I think Ollie’s problem was that he spent too much time thinking with the part of his mind Thais build sculptures to in hotel gardens. It doesn’t mean he never loved me, I guess, but it means that it was nearly impossible to love him.
“You there?”
Oracle again. I hold back a groan, opening my eyes, surprised to find that night has fallen on Bangkok while I’ve been communing with old ghosts. “In spirit,” I reply softly, thinking that this room looks old and sad in the dim light.
“What did you find?”
“Yaa baa. Ollie hasn’t changed.”
Barbara is surprised. “He’s using drugs?”
I shrug. “Looks that way. Might have just been the girls, though.”
“Girls plural?”
I forget sometimes what a young kid Barbara Gordon is. Sure, we’re both pushing thirty, but we’ve led very different lives. She was never a Hard Traveling Hero. She spent her life locked onto a certain path: that of a Gotham vigilante. They breed ’em different there. Moral. Righteous. Uncompromising. None of those words ever applied to me, or to Ollie.
“Don’t sound so surprised,” I try to joke, but it sounds as if I’m begging her. “He always did like theies.ies.”
“But-”
“Oracle,” I say sharply, rising. “Grow up.”
I cut transmission.
***************
I’m back out on the street in front of the massive Hilton hotel, waiting for another motorcycle taxi to ferry me back into the heart of Bangkok. As if on cue, a young boy appears on a Honda, offering his services. He’s alt it interchangeable with the one who brought me here. This is a Buddhist country; life is impermanent. All souls are in transition and I marvel at how that philosophy is manifested in the total disregard for safety or conditions of law and order. Even the traffic is a state abo about the fragility and ultimately unimportant nature of life, youeninening commute as prayer.
I clutch the boy’s torso as he weaves in and out among lumbering buses overburdened with passengers, some of whom ride on the roof or hang over the side or out the window supported by one arm. Carts are pulled by donkeys or small horses. Flashy Mercedes and Jaguars, owned perhaps by drug dealers or Bangkok’s famously corrupt police force, crowd next to them. And thousands of motorcycles, like the one I ride, take Western tourists anywhere they want to go. And most of them go to Bang Kwan.
The red-light district in a country geared almost exclusively towards the sex industry is like something out of a neon nightmare. Everywhere there are signs promoting man’s oldest profession in a symphony of brilliant blues, deep greens and eye-burning reds. Lips, breasts, vaginas, cocks, all rendered in neon tubing and flickering on and off like candles being snuffed out and relit in constant cycles. There are gay clubs here too, although those signs are harder to read. Written in small-type Thai, they look almost Puritan in comparison to the flashy insinuations of the conventional brothels.
I can’t help but grin, thinking how square Las V is is going to look after this place.
“Pussy Go-Go,” I direct my driver, who nods, piloting the bike down and through the narrow streets, avoiding pedestrians as an after-thought. He comes to a stop in front of a club that resembles all the others in its cheerful exploitation of the flesh inside. I pay the kid, climb off the bike, and adjust my clothing. The heavy, polluted air has settled against my skin like a birth cowl and I long for a hot bath.
But as always, there’s work to do.
I enter the club already wincing, preparing myself. Throbbing techno is pumped out of countless speakers, deafening me. The baseline hits me in the stomach, making me feel slightly ill as it throbs inside - ba da ba - wailing beneath the moans and sighs of the female singer. It is dark in the club, strobe lights illuminating tatroatrons for a brief moment, frozen between slashes of darkness. Girls, nude but for nearly invisible G-strings, dance on the T-shaped runway, grinding themselves against metal poles sunk into the bar. I shrug at that; the place is like a strip club back in the States, the girls performing the same old moves with that hard, hollow look all sex-trade workers develop after a while. Detachment, I’d call it, if it didn’t so closely resemble the look I see in the mirror some mornings. Resignation, then.
The girls are young, slim, almost girlish. Small by Western standards. They are dwarfed by the American and European men, who gaze up at them from their seats around the bar, selecting. The men are mostly middle-age, balding, with big potbellies, wearing suits that wilted hours ago in the repressive heat of this country. They are drunk, oafish, and loud. A group of college kids cluster in the corner, paying for their week of debauchery with Mommy or Daddy’s credit card.pan>
I long for my mother, suddenly.
My presence in the bar attracts some attention, as it always does in such places. I’m blonde, athletic, gorgeous, but I’m not what these men are looking for. I’ve never really understood the Western fascination with Asian women. Men seem to find the implied submissiveness an ideal contrast to pushy American broads. That thought makes me smile as I watch the men offer handfuls of purple baht bills to the go-go girls. Who’s submissive to whom?
Then I remember that Shado was Japanese, and the smile drains from my face.
I sit quietly at the end of the bar, watching, waiting. I keep expecting to hear Oracle’s voice in my ear. But the line is silent. I doubt she’s mad… probably just giving me my space. She does that, when Ollie’s name comes up. As if I haven’t been over him for years. Not everyone spends their entire life pining after someone they fell for at nineteen, but try explaining that to Barbara Gordon.
She’s lucky. Dick’s always been easy to love.
I feel someone staring, and incline my head, meeting her eyes across the bar. One of the strippers is watching me. I narrow my eyes, but she doesn’t look away. A moment later she saunters down the runway to stand before me, bending at the waist, exposing the slim expanse of her buttocks and hips. She wears knee-high white vinyl go-go boots unseen since my mother’s day. The green neon is reflected against the cheap plastic and I stare at her boots rather than her comfortable nudity. She locks eyes with me again, upside down, smooth, soft hair fal aro around her head. Her face is perfect, a China doll, the eyes brown and closed to me.
“You want dance?” she asks, her accent wrong, exaggerated somehow. I wonder if it’s for effect, that hump-hump sailor stereotype American movies made so popular back in the ’70s when Asian and Western culture really began to clash. I shake my head.
“I’m looking for someone,” I say, fanning a series of thousand-baht notes at her. Whatever her language ability, she understands the thick wad of purple bills, nodding. She lands on the bar, the impact making her tiny breasts jiggle slightly. Her eyes are now wide and expressive. A child’s face. She spreads her legs, and I keep my eyes carefully on her face.
“Boyfriend?” she asks, the accent softer this time. She has to yell above the pounding dance music.
Again, I shake my head.p>
“Husband?” she asks again, raising one long, slender leg, extending it over her head, her hand moving slowly down the limb, caressing.
“No,” I tell her. “Just a man. He was in here, maybe last night. A few of the girls went with him.”
Her eyes give nothing away. She pivots, her bare flesh sliding easily on the polished wood of the bar. I forget how that works: I think they powder themselves before they start, or use sheepskin rugs to wipe down the bar and wear down the resistance of the wood.
“What he look like?”
I close my eyes, picturing Oliver’s face. Angular, handsome, aristocratic; a blond goatee with sharp, ice-blue eyes, locked to some distant target. Strong hands. Beautiful mouth.
“American,” I tell her, paring everything down. The essentials. “Blue eyes, blond hair,” I say, touching my own mane, hoping she understands.
“Old man?” the girl wants to know. I shake my head.
“Not so old.” Except maybe his eyes.
“I think I see him,” the girl hints, on her knees now, turned away from me. She addresses me over her shoulder, shaking her hips a little. “You pay, I tell you.”
I fold the wad of cash into the band of her G-string, smacking her on the butt to send her off to the other customers, noting how soft and firm her skin felt. Mine isn’t like that, not anymore. Too much scar tissue.
“You wait, half hour. I got date. I come back, you pay bar fine, we go. Okay?”
I nod and she stands, blowing me a kiss. The trust-fund group of college kids has been watching our exchange, and one of them, obviously drunk, is rubbing himself through his pants. I shrug as if bored, glad the conversation helped the girl get a few dates, wondering why men find the idea of two women together so appealing. Must be like the Asian thing, some short-circuit in the male brain that invests everything with sexual significance.
That too makes me think of Ollie. I guess the problem isn’t exclusively a male one.
*********************
It’s an hour and a half before the girl comes back; by then I’ve learned her name. Nong. The mamasan, what they call the house Madame in this country, has told me her name means ‘flower’. I nurse a rum and coke, waiting for my informant to finish with her customers. She took two of the college kids with her. The one who’d been playing pocket pool has fallen asleep at the bar.
She returns, clad in a tube-top and a miniskirt, white to match her boots. Her hair falls to her waist and she wears no makeup. Nong takes my arm, maneuvering me out of the bar and onto the street. Her touch is casual, as if we are friends or sisters. Beneath the contact I can feel her tremble, and I wonder what exactlythouthousand baht has bought.
“We talk my place, okay?” she requests, and in answer I flag down a taxi, a real one.
“My hotel,” I say, climbing in the back of the car to miss her nod or refusal. She hesitates and the driver barks something in Thai. Finally, Nong climbs into the back seat.
/p>
She crosses her legs, the decision made, and something has fallen away from her. A shroud of some kind. Suddenly she is confident, relaxed, defiant. Did she think I wanted a sudden display of piety? Of fear, or uncertainty?
I get the feeling that Nong is an accomplished actress.
The ride through Bang Kwan is slow, laborious. Though small by American standards, the taxi is too large to maneuver through these streets as easily as the motorcycles I’ve taken, and so our progress is measured by increments and angry shouts from the driver, who makes a great show of honking his horn and yelling for pedestrians to clear the way.
Nong looks out the window, glancing at me sometimes, curiosity in her eyes. I look at her too, wondering about her. Sometimes I think it’s easier for a man and a woman to breach cultural divides. Sex has a way of leveling differences between people, because at least in that respect we all speak the same language.
“Where you from?” she asks me in her broken bar-girl English, which I know by now is just an act. Nong isn’t what she seems, and neither is her country. There are secrets in this place and all the neon in the world can’t hide them.
“America,” I tell her. She nods as if fascinated, but I can tell she’s counting the minutes as efficiently as the taxi’s meter. “Gotham City.”
Her eyes widen. That, at least, has impressed her. “You know Batman?”
I can’t help it: I grin. I want to tell her that, in person, the great Detective isn’t all that impressive. Just sad, lonely. Like we all are.
“He was here,” she tells me in a hushed voice. I raise an eyebrow.
“In Bangkok?”
She wrinkles her nose; I’ve displeased her. “That is not our name for this city, farang.” Her eyes flash something I don’t quite understand.
“What do you call it?” I ask.
She sighs at my ignorance, back to thuty uty little-girl act. “Krung Thep. And the Batman was here. He came for the children.”
>
I file the information away, resolving to ask Barbara about it later. It doesn’t surprise me. As far-reaching as the Oracle’s operations are, they haven’t extended as far as his have. I think that bugs Barbara, a little.
“You like my country?” she asks, her hand on my bare leg. I’m wearing the same shorts and T-shirt I had on during the flight from Paris.
“It’s different,” I admit, telling her the truth. This place is nothing like Japan or China or Malaysia or anywhere else I’ve ever been. Thailand is closer, somehow, to the great heartbeat of Southwest Asia, a throbbing nest of secret possibilitieaybeaybe it is Asia.
Her hand strokes my thigh.
I feel like a tourist.
we we wait for the traffic to clear.
**********************
Wireless Road is paved. Streetlights dot the landscape at regular intervals. There is order here, in the form of concrete, traffic signs, structural steel and building codes. All of it is here, of course, for the benefit of the American Embassy, a white, looming structure about a half-mile away from my hotel. The buildings on this road are different too, several stories high, with small balconies and air-conditioners. Western apartments for the foreign correspondents and Embassy staff, all of whom live on this street during the week and then head for the countryside (and their mistress’ homes) on the weekends.
We pull up to my hotel, I pay the driver and Nong walks ahead of me, into the lobby, past the front desk and up the staircase leading to a bank of elevators. I check in.
The hallway is deserted; it’s the middle of the Thai winter and tourism is at a low ebb. Things will pick up when the American schools let out for spring break in a few weeks. I let us into my hotel room and Nong sacks out on the couch, her skirt riding up her thighs, the boots flashing white in the dim light of the room.
“We talk,” Nong says, and I nod, grabbing a Coke out of the mini fridge. The soft drink costs $3 US (clearly an act of highway robbery) but Babs is picking up the tab. I glance back at Nong, who looks at me pleadingly. I hand her a Coke, too.
I grab a picture of Oliver off the hotel-issue fax machine on the desk. Barbara thinks of everything. It’s a recent photo, some all-inclusive JLA fete last Christmas. Ollie looks older, more serious than I remember. I hand the girl the picture.
She studies it, sipping the Coke, her legs drawn up around her. I wonder how old she is, guessing her to be anywhere from 16 to 30. Fly, ly, she looks up.
“He came last night. Took two girls, Mali and Sumalee. Very friendly man.”
There’s more, but she’s hesitating. I sit beside her on the couch and Nong unfolds her legs, taking off the boots to massage her tired feet. I wonder how long she was dancing before I came in.
“Tell me,” I say, but she shakes her head. She touches my hair, letting the strands run between her fingertips, curious about the color.
“You like men?”
I frown, wondering what game she’s playing. She knows I didn’t ask her here for sex.
“Yes,” I tell her, and this time she frowns, shaking her head.
“No,” she denies. “I don’t believe you. Not in your heart. Men have hurt you.”
I don’t have a response to that. The answer seems obvious: of course they have. Men hurt women, and women hurt men. That’s the central equation of life.
She slides closer on the couch, her bare leg touching mine. “Tell me,” she invites. I stare her down, waiting for some emotion, some flicker of impatience or boredom, in her almond eyes. There’s nothing, just a surface of glass.
“I was raped,” I tell her, swallowing hard. “The men who did it…they hurt me. I couldn’t have children. And it took a long time to heal. When I finally did, the man I loved had left me.”
Nong nods, understanding, channeling sympathy for me through her hands, which are stroking the tops of my thighs. “This man?” she asks, stopping to point at the photograph of Oliver Queen.
“It was a long time ago,” I say, wanting to get up. I’m fairly certain that Nong has her own sad story to tell, and her sympathy makes me uncomfortable. As bad as things have been for me in the past, I never had to resort to selling my body.
“But you’re looking for him now, even though he left?”
“It wasn’t his fault,” I say, hoarsely. “He left for other reasons. He…there was a child. Not mine.”
She touches my face, looking into my eyes, studying me as carefully has she’d studied Ollie’s picture. “You wish it had been yours.”
I’m surprised to feel wetness on my cheeks, and Nong wipes my tears away, kissing me softly on the lips. Her touch isn’t sexual. Instead it’s comforting, in an odd way, and as she breaks contact I sigh. Nong grins, pushing back.
“You Americans,” she smiles, shaking her head. I want in on the joke. Her teeth flash, small and white. “Always looking for nirvana inside someone’s thighs. How can you live like that?”
I notice her English is suddenly much improved.
“What do you mean?”
<%'>She rises, stretching like a cat. “The American men, in the bar. They find girl, pay her fine, take her back to hotel. Suddenly, they can’t get her out of their mind. Think of her all the time. Dream of her. They come to bar every night, take her home. Or watch her with other men, wanting to save her. So, one day, they ask girl to marry them. Come to America, they say. And because she is very young and very foolish, girl say ‘yes’. She come back in a year.”
“This happened to you?” I ask. Nong snorts, laughing with a cosmic irony that is lost on me. She throws her arms around my neck and I’m forced back down onto the couch, Nong in my lap. Her face is very close to my own, and her breath smells like Listerine.
“I was never so young and foolish,” she smiles into my face, fascinated with my eyes, my breasts. Different from her own. She touches me, her finbrusbrushing over my nipple. I’m not entirely sure why I allow the contact, beyond the factat mat maybe Thailand has gotten under my skin a little.
“What will you do, to find this man?” she asks me, her mood shifting again, serious.
“Anything,” I tell her.
Nong nods, considering my face. “How much?”
I’m relieved to find it’s a question of money after all. “You tell me.”
She runs her tongue over her lips, one of those gestures the Western men she described probably dream of. “Half million baht,” she informs me. I nod, slowly, and Nong frowns, probably wishing she had asked for more.
“How can you help me find him?” I ask her.
She stands, shucking her clothes dispassionately. Soon she is nude before me, her body that of a woman but small, tight, compact. Exotic, like Thailand. Familiar and yet unknown to me. She comes close again, setting one foot on my knee to balance on the carpet, pointing at her hip.
The tattoo is small, in the shape of a circle. I squint, picking out the details. A snake’s head, eating its own tail. There’s a Western name for it, something I’ve forgotten. But I’ve spent enough time in the Golden Triangle to know what it means in Thailand, Viet Nam, Cambodia.
The Khmer Rouge.
***************
- 1
- 2
- 3
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

Canary Air