David sat back down in the dark, breathless. This was more than he expected. He had only seen the minute-long tribute to the king of Thailand which precedes the showing of every film throughout the kingdom, but David was confirmed in the very secret suspicion that he shared with every other thirteen-year-old in the world: that God and his parents really did wish to deprive him of the best pleasures in life.
All this even before the show began.
My sources told me: David grew into a tall, skinny, strong young man, with his father's moss-green eyes and his mother's tomato-red skin. Because he grew so fast in adolescence, his pants and shirts were always half an inch too short for him, making him seem taller still, and because in Thailand no doorway and no chair is made for somebody almost six feet three inches tall, he developed a permanent slouch, bending slightly at the waist and curling down at the neck. His dark hair was inevitably uncombed. They told me: David was good with languages, like everyone in his family. By the time he was done with high school, his Thai was nearly perfect, like his English, almost as good as his Dyalo — the language in which he thought and dreamed. He wasn't an excellent student, but he got by. He was well liked in high school but didn't have a best friend. He went on chaste, chaperoned dates with another missionary's daughter. He would juggle whatever small objects were at hand. He was one of those kids with a bottomless pit for a stomach, and sometimes he'd eat dinner at home, then at Aunt Helena's house, then stop at the noodle stall for a bowl of noodles.
Jai-yen. That was the Thai phrase the Walkers used to describe David. It means "cool-hearted," which means easygoing, mellow, not too excitable, the kind of guy who saves his energy for things that count. If you've been saving birthday and Christmas money now for almost four years, and you've just got a new Honda motor scooter for your seventeenth birthday one week ago, and you've parked it in front of the market, and some drunk in a pickup trying to parallel park smashes into the side of it, knocks over your brand-new bike, breaks the rearview mirror, and scratches to heck the yellow paint job — and the first thing you do when you see the guy is smile, then you're jai-yen. David smiled, not just because he was in Thailand, where, of course, you smile when someone smashes up your bike, but also because that was the kind of guy David really was. It was just a motorbike. With those long, floppy limbs, and that Adam's apple one size too big for his adolescent throat and bobbing like a tea bag, the mussed-up hair, and the uneven stubble covering his chin but not yet branching up seamlessly to the mustache, the XXL T-shirts ("Chiang Mai Baptist Church 1975 Christian Youth Outing!"), the shorts with all the pockets; with the way he had of cricking his neck from side to side, that slow, thoughtful way of talking in his low but unsteady voice; never in a hurry, never sweating, even in the height of the hot season, when even the bronze Buddhas in the temples had to wipe the perspiration from their golden brows — all in all, he was just your calm, good-natured kind of kid. The kid you didn't have to worry about, because he had a level head. The kid you didn't have to take care of, because he'd make himself a sandwich or get himself some noodles or pick up Laura's prescription at the pharmacy without even being asked. The kid you didn't have to remind to do his homework, because he was pretty much on top of the situation. The kid you didn't have to tell to come home before midnight. (That was his sister Linda-Lee.) The kid who didn't get caught coming out of one of those massage parlor places. (That was David's cousin, whose name has been withheld because it was a long time ago.) David was the kid who bought his mother a goldfish tank for Mother's Day, because she'd had one, she once remarked, as a little girl, and there was nothing so calming as watching fish swim.
And in a household with three teenage girls — Ruth-Marie and Linda-Lee and David's little sister Margaret, who was twelve going on twenty-two — David was a relief. Sometimes, Norma thought, her head could just explode with the chaos in her household, especially on those hot, steamy tropical days, when she'd think that if she'd stayed in Wheaton, it would be twenty-eight degrees right now with a soft, quiet snow falling. But here she was in Thailand, her husband off in the mountains somewhere charming who-knows-who into doing who-knows-what; Ruth-Marie and Linda-Lee were having another one of their knock-down, drag-out fights; Margaret just bought her first tube of lipstick; little Paul had a fever; Laura wanted to show her once again how to can mangoes — and bedraggled and sweaty, she'd knock on the door of her son's room and say, "David, can I just come in here and close the door behind me?"
Of course, David's room would be a mess; the kid didn't — he couldn't — keep anything neat: heaps of papers from school on the floor, all his old clothes piled up and perhaps a little ripe, puzzles and games in the corner which he had long outgrown but which his grandparents in America still thought were to his taste and sent him, the guitar which he was forever plucking lying on his unmade bed, sheets tangled on the floor. But for Norma, the room was dry land when the good ship SS Walker Family Mission seemed in danger of going under. Five kids in the jungle was easy compared to five adolescents in Chiang Mai. And the nice thing about David was, he got it. He really did. He'd laugh his rumbling not-quite-sure-what-my-voice-box-will-do-next laugh and say, "They're driving you nuts, huh? Come on in, Mom, you can hide out in here."
Just a really good calm kid.
But of course there was another side to things as well. That family was a pressure cooker, like the rice steamer in the kitchen, always on, always hot. Aunt Helena, who is the family's informal psychologist and the only Walker I met who in any way could see things from an outsider's perspective, said that in retrospect the big fight wasn't about those trips to the Kamtoey Theater at all. There was simply so much pressure on David, she said. She told me that I couldn't imagine what it was like to grow up the oldest son of a great preacher, the grandson of another, with so much real achievement on a boy's shoulders, and so many people's hopes. When David was a little boy, nobody ever asked him, "What are you going to be when you grow up?" They asked him, "Are you going to preach the Gospel like your daddy? Are you going to save souls too?" And what could David do but smile his sweet little-boy smile and say, "Yes, when I'm big enough." They told David, "God has chosen you." Somewhere along the way, the people in David's life just started telling him how beautiful it was that he was giving his life to Christ. When all the other kids at school started after-school prep sessions for the SAT, thinking about college back in America, Thomas just said, right in front of David, what his own dad had said a long time ago: "Why bother? It's just tits on a bull." Norma thought maybe David might want to go to Bible college for a couple of years, as she had; she had never regretted her education. But that was the most extreme suggestion anyone in the Walker family offered David for his future.