Mon didn’t say anything. She could only switch the hand that was propping her chin, from the left to the right.
Oan began to worry that they wouldn’t have anything for his friend to eat. The two sat down, limp, next to Mon.
“If my papa were here, we could buy some food on credit no problem because my papa’s already paid off everything he owes,” Kampol said.
“I don’t owe anything personally, but I’m scared to go,” Oan said.
“Me neither. Should we give it a try?” Kampol said, hoping to rally his friend. “We can tell Hia Chong that my papa’s going to pay on Monday.”
“Sure, let’s give it a go. But you talk.”
The two of them got up and shyly made their way to the store. Mon watched them go, her gaze hanging inertly in their direction. Her husband, it was clear, was no longer any hope for her. By now he had probably put his empty stomach in the care of some friend.
It was only seven thirty, but Chong was getting ready to close up the shop. After seeing Dum walk by again, booze in hand, he felt worn out and had lost his will to keep the store open. He wanted the battered day to end swiftly so he could start over with a new one.
The last customers popped up before he locked the gate. Two pairs of gleaming eyes were on him.
Slumping, Chong grabbed four eggs and slipped the bag through the grille.
The children sprinted off, giggling. The sound of them slowly faded.
Masseur
Kampol Changsamran, dark-skinned with large, sad eyes, drifted from one home to another without a regular place to eat or sleep. His family had been tenants in one of the rowhouses, where they’d all lived together—mother, father, and two sons. Several months ago, his mother had started an affair and now she’d run off. His father gave up their apartment because he couldn’t afford the rent, and left his baby brother, one year old, at their grandma’s. As for Kampol, his father came back to see him once a week, always promising to bring him to their new home. But in the end, he would always ask a neighbor—sometimes this person, sometimes that person—to keep an eye on his son, and Kampol was becoming more and more like an orphan with each passing day.
There were a number of children with no parents around to give them pocket money, and even the ones with parents, most of them didn’t receive allowances anyway. Because of that, the kids, regardless of what they were doing, were on a constant lookout for an opportunity to earn themselves some cash.
One day, a large man named Dang, coming home from a day of selling curries and stir-fries out of his pickup truck, beckoned for Kampol to come over to his house. Kampol’s friends simply assumed that Dang was going to feed him. But Kampol didn’t reemerge from Dang’s home for over two hours.
“What were you doing in there, Boy?”
Kampol smiled like he had something up his sleeve but didn’t say anything. He kept one hand in his shorts pocket, the twenty-baht note held tight in his fist. It took a great deal of willpower, but he refused to take the money out and buy a snack in front of his friends.
The next day, when he spotted Dang’s pickup truck at the same time, Kampol sprinted over without waiting to be summoned. It was only an hour—ten baht. Kampol was dreaming: he was going to be rich! Some days he got ten, some days twenty, but if it continued like that every day, he was going to have enough saved up for a new house. But it was important that it remain a secret. If Oan, Noi, Jua, or anyone else found out, his dream would be snuffed like a blown candle.
Kampol carried out his mission furtively and alone. He decided to increase his vigilance by keeping his distance from the others. When that time of day neared, he disappeared without a trace.
One day, at three thirty in the afternoon, Dang’s truck rolled in, his big wife sound asleep in the passenger seat. Dang stopped the vehicle and scanned the group of kids shooting marbles. He asked about Kampol, but everyone shook their head.
“In that case, one of you will do. Come over to my house—but just one person.”
The children hesitated. “What for?”
“To walk on my back for me. I’ll give you ten baht an hour.”
“I’ll go!… Me! Me!” The children fought to raise their hands, screaming over one another.
No one was willing to back down, all of them chasing after Dang’s truck, forming a tail right behind it.
At that point, Kampol, who had been crouched down next to Dang’s gardenia bush, stood up. At first he’d been scared by all the ruckus, but then his outrage won out. He’d made an effort to come wait for Dang in front of his house, but the tactic had proven wrong. Kicking dust, Kampol walked over to Chong’s store, starting to doubt whether saving his money for a house was a good idea.
“There’s no need to fight,” Dang was telling the kids. “I’ll give you each a tryout. Whoever gives the best service will get to be my regular masseur.”
Everyone went for broke. One kid went five minutes longer than everybody else, then another kid went ten minutes longer. They invented all kinds of moves, with their hands, feet, and even knees all thrown in. Dang, with his massive build, felt fantastic with the kids doing gymnastics on his back, but his wife wasn’t pleased: As one kid was giving a massage, the others were sticking their noses through the window and making a lot of noise. She and her husband had to get up every day at three a.m. to go shopping for ingredients, and then they sold the food they cooked until three in the afternoon. Only then could they come home and rest. Beyond exhausted though she was, just like every day, she couldn’t sleep with all the noise coming from the children, so eventually…
Kampol was munching on something. His pockets were empty now. He chewed listlessly, feeling obviously down. From a distance, he saw his usual crew, bunched up at Dang’s window, suddenly burst apart and run away wildly. The lady they called Aunt Fatty was standing in front of her house, hands on her hips.
“How’s a person supposed to sleep?” she shrilled. “All that yapping! Enough is enough. From now on, I’ll do the damn massages myself.”
Three days later, Kampol ran into Dang. “Do you feel like a massage?”
Dang paused, letting the gears in his head turn a little. Then he beckoned Kampol to come closer.
“Let me teach you a little trick,” he whispered. “You have to be as quiet as possible. Don’t let anybody else find out under any circumstance, you understand? Do you see the gardenia bush in front of my house? At three thirty, go hide there—get real low. Don’t let anyone see you. It’ll be our little secret. You can start tomorrow, and I’ll let you know when the next time after that will be.”
Kampol lit up, dreaming big dreams.
Hunger Might Make a Person…
Hunger makes you feel as if you have to fill your belly. With the right timing, it makes any food taste better. But left too long, it can turn a person into a thief, or even a killer; a person might be willing to destroy for a measly chicken drumstick. Vagrants are well acquainted with hunger. It starts as an endless suffering, but then it becomes a friend, a close companion you know well, one that rarely leaves your side.
“C’mon now, come and eat.” In the first days after he was left behind, all the neighbors were worried about Kampol going hungry. From sunup to sundown, voices echoed through the neighborhood, calling him to come and eat.
But later, Kampol often went without lunch, the midday hours slipping by undisturbed. He frequently lost track of time playing, but it was really because the adults forgot to yell for him, or if they didn’t forget, they each assumed another neighbor had the kid covered for the day. Kampol still hadn’t gotten to know real hunger, though, because dinner would always come to the rescue in time.
The day Kampol was first besieged by real hunger, he got woken up early in the morning at the home of a woman who worked in a factory, Aoi. The day before, Aoi’s husband, Chart, had been feeling generous and had invited Kampol over for dinner, and that evening they had put together a place for him to sleep as well. People had begun to observ
e this routine almost as a tradition: wherever Kampol ate dinner, he spent the night, followed the next morning by breakfast.
But at Aoi and Chart’s, there was never any breakfast. By six forty-five at the latest, Aoi had to be out the door to catch the factory bus, which picked her up along the side of the main road. She picked up her breakfast from the food stall right outside the plant. Chart left the house even earlier. A motorbike-taxi driver, he had to whizz off to his stand by about six a.m. He counted on the food cart that came by at seven to get something to fill his stomach.
Because of that, Kampol, still half asleep, ended up sitting outside, slumped over, bleary-eyed and feeling exposed in the damp and cool morning air. The aroma of fried fish from one kitchen or another grazed his nose, and without realizing it, he inhaled deeply. In his mind, he saw a massive fried fish, steaming on a plate. But once the smell vanished, he forgot all about it. He kept himself entertained by watching what was going on in the neighborhood, which was quickly waking up: children were going to school, adults headed to work. The only slowpokes were the security guards coming home after their night shifts. They walked as if they couldn’t care less how much time it took to get where they were going. Kampol made it through the morning without breakfast having made it into him.
Penporn, Old Noi’s youngest grandchild, who was mentally disabled, and Jua, Old Jai’s grandson, who had a bad limp, didn’t go to school, so they came and found Kampol to go play as usual. They had their regular spot, which was under the rukam tree behind Mrs. Tongjan’s large house. At noon his two friends ran home for lunch, leaving Kampol to fend for himself. Feeling like he had no energy left, he lolled on the ground. He was hungry but he didn’t understand hunger so he thought he was sick and that was why he didn’t feel like standing up or moving. A faint smell of food drifted over to him from Mrs. Tongjan’s house. As he inhaled, his mind wandered back to the imaginary fried fish from that morning, and he again dreamed he saw that fish on a plate. He’d fallen asleep, depleted.
In his dream, his father carried the plate over and put it down in front of him. The fish was enormous, golden, and fragrant. But when he went to scoop some meat with his spoon, the fish, though already fried, flapped off the plate. He chased after it; the fish kept flapping away. Finally, he almost caught it, but he was still too slow: a giant cat pounced on the fish and made off with it. Kampol broke down in tears.
Through the afternoon, Kampol went in and out of sleep beneath the rukam tree. By the time he got up, the sun was already hanging low. He staggered as he stood up, his cheeks still tear-stained. While the cook at Mrs. Tongjan’s was busy seasoning her delicacies, Kampol wandered to the window, clenching his stomach as he exhaled. His eyes just cleared the windowsill; he peered at the dishes arrayed on the kitchen table and the ones still being finished on the stove. He felt pools of saliva collect in the pockets of his cheeks; he swallowed them down. Oh, why had there been no usual holler today, the one that had grown almost banal, even to him: “C’mon now, come and eat”? But such an invitation had never come from Mrs. Tongjan’s house, and he was afraid of making a sound, so all he did was stand there and ogle, which he did for a while, until everything was ready to go, all the food carried out, nothing left in the kitchen for him to feast on with his eyes.
Kampol walked back toward the rows of tenement houses without anybody noticing him. In a bit of a daze, he stumbled to the daybed that sat under the poinciana tree across from Chong’s shop. The sky was about to lose its light. Curled up on the daybed, Kampol looked like a shadow, or perhaps an empty pile of clothes. How strange that no one had thought of him today. Even the friends he normally played with were nowhere to be found.
In hunger, he fell asleep. It was the swarm of mosquitoes around him that ended up content and full.
As Chong was closing up shop, the scraping of his metal gate woke Kampol up. He started crying when he opened his eyes to total darkness. Chong froze, listening… and then he became the first and only person that day to think of the boy.
Chong walked over to Kampol, led him back to the store, and had him sit down. All the loneliness in the world ganged up on him, beating him mercilessly. He sobbed hard. Chong spent a long time consoling him, but to no avail. In the end, when Kampol shook his head in response to his question, Chong’s heart broke: not a morsel had gotten into the boy’s stomach all day. Chong quickly brought warm milk and sliced bread with jam, but they made Kampol cry even harder: seeing the food, he realized for the first time that this was what real hunger felt like. Chong went back into the kitchen and started frying rice. Kampol was famished, but there was even more sadness in him than hunger.
When the fried rice was added to the spread, the level in the milk glass hadn’t gone down at all, and the jam-smeared bread flaunted its tastiness in vain. Chong thought, standing with his hands on his hips: Just look at the boy. You’d expect him, starved as he is, to scarf all that down until he nearly choked. He must be so sad—even his hunger is secondary. Despite the fact that his body’s suffering, his mind still prevails… And the boy’s only five… Then Chong thought of something, so he ran upstairs. He grabbed a book from the shelf, hurried back down, and sat across from Kampol. “Listen, the poem’s called ‘Toy on Target.’” He began reading in a crisp voice:
1
Dropping
toys
instead of bombs
for the Festival of the Children
that
said the market researchers
will undoubtedly make
an impression
It has made
a great
impression
on the whole world
Kampol listened, confounded, but he had stopped sniveling.
2
If the airplane
had dropped the toys
a fortnight ago
and only now the bombs
my two children
thanks to your kindness
would have had something to play with
for those two weeks
“Did the plane drop toys?” Kampol asked.
Chong gave him a hint of a smile and said, “Yes, the plane came and dropped toys for the children… Here, have some of this milk and I’ll tell you about it… They’d dropped bombs first, but then two weeks later…”
Kampol finished his milk and started on the bread. He was eating happily until he reached for the fried rice, at which point his large eyes welled up again. Unconsciously, he put the spoon down.
“They both died?”
“Yes, both of them,” Chong said quietly, looking at Kampol and the abandoned fried rice uneasily.
Kampol’s eyes had a distant look to them, and tears poured out.
Chong quickly closed the book and tiptoed upstairs to put it back.
Winning Numbers
Twice a month on lottery day, Noi, watching the scene around Mrs. Tongjan’s neighborhood, wanted to kick himself. Back when he’d lived at the market, he used to run around hawking newspapers, which had the results printed on the back page, at various intersections. The papers were five baht each: the printing house got three, he got two.
“I used to sell out fifty copies in under an hour—an easy hundred baht.”
Kampol, Oan, and Jua were in awe. Noi was a bit of a ringleader, and was a few years older. They wanted to move to the market, too, but Noi had another idea.
“If we could get someone to print sheets with the results, we could just sell them here.”
“Who could we get to print them? Maybe I could get my mama to do it?” Oan suggested.
“No, we need someone with their own printing press.”
“Couldn’t you just write them out by hand?” Kampol asked.
“Ha! Dummy, think about how long it would take to write out each sheet,” Noi said, and then he got up and walked away, feeling hopeless.
Kampol, Oan, and Jua started scheming up ways to sell lists of the winning lottery numbers.
&
nbsp; Jua’s mother worked at a paper-baling plant. When Jua asked, she started bringing home big booklets of job application forms where each page was perforated and the backs of the forms were blank. Chong dug out a couple of sheets of carbon paper for them and taught them how to use them. He also lent them his radio so they could listen to the drawings, and let them use the kitchen area in the back of the shop for their operation. The three of them didn’t say a word about it to anyone. Not even Noi knew about it.
On the first and the sixteenth of every month, in the morning the adults ran around exuberantly. They were flush with money and hope was high. On those mornings, if the children misbehaved, they were graciously forgiven. In small waves, men and women arrived on their bikes, with some parking in front of the grocery and some under the poinciana tree. The lottery display case would be folded open, and people would huddle around it. Rampeuy, the nanny who hadn’t had a child to watch for almost a year now, would jump on her bicycle and run the bets for the dealer. She only worked on the first and the sixteenth, but she made more money on those two days than she did looking after kids for a whole month.
That afternoon, the television at the grocery was invariably tuned to the channel that broadcast the national lottery draw. People from the neighborhood gathered, chatting in little groups, everyone waiting to hear the special final digits and the grand prize, the only numbers relevant to the underground lottery.
Kampol and Oan were on recording duty as the radio announced the winning numbers. Jua, with his terrible handwriting, was assigned to be the seller. Besides, with his bad leg the grown-ups would be more inclined to pity him and buy a sheet from him. Each winning number was announced twice. As close as Kampol and Oan tried to listen, two sometimes sounded an awful lot like three, and four was sometimes hard to distinguish from five. When one of them missed a number, Jua would go look at what the other one had to try and fill it in.
Immediately after the grand prize numbers were announced, the first two copies were torn from the kids’ books. Jua limped out with them in his hand. Kampol and Oan then reinserted the carbon paper and started copying all over again. Jua went around trying to sell the sheets, crying, “Three baht, three baht.” The adults looked at him, not entirely convinced he was actually selling something; most of them thought he was just fooling around. But he finally made the sales. Mon, Oan’s mother, was their first customer.
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