Fools' River

by Timothy Hallinan

  The fear peeks out at her again. He stops and inserts a card into a slot in the door—422, it reads, so she’s on the fourth floor. He withdraws the card, puts the hand with the card in it on the horizontal door handle, and pushes down. At the same time, he slips his free arm around her neck, pulls her close, and half drags her into the room. He pivots to his right and kicks the door closed behind him, knocking her sideways with his hip as he snaps the lock into place and slaps a metal hasp over an exposed latch three-quarters of the way up the door.

  I’ll have to undo both those things, she thinks automatically as she backs away, to open the door.

  The place stinks of meat.

  The bed is a heap of blankets and discarded clothes, such suggestive piles that her imagination turns them for a moment into bodies. The pillows, their cases stained with what she tries to tell herself is coffee, are partly hanging off the couch. On the table in front of the couch is a low wooden table with serving trays on it, each containing a dinner plate bearing an uneaten mess of vegetables and rice, plus the bone from a steak, gnawed to where the red meat meets the bone. She thinks, with a jolt of terror, he hasn’t let the maid into this place in—

  She sees movement out of the corner of her eye and tries to jump, but he’s on her.

  He’s got her backpack, but he’s not snatching it away, he’s squeezing the straps together, forcing her shoulders back until she cries aloud. Then one hand twists the left strap around her arm as she tries to shy to her right, and the other slips down the back of her shorts, his knuckles pressed into the base of her spine. He yanks her backward, the top half of her body folding forward from the momentum. At the moment her hands brush the carpet—trying senselessly to find something to hold on to, he hauls her, one-handed, straight up, as tightly angled as a jackknife, and lets her dangle. Things spill from the pack, and then it slips from her shoulders and hits the floor. She starts to scream, and he gives her a bone-rattling shake, as though she were a misbehaving puppy, and says, “You shut up, and I’ll be nice, right? Say ‘Right.’”

  “Right,” Lutanh says. “Right, right.” Her head is filling with blood, and her heart is pounding so hard she thinks it will explode. The cosmetics and clothes from her bag are scattered across the carpet. “Right, right.”

  “That’s better,” he says. He lowers her, but her legs won’t behave, and she crumples to her bare knees in the middle of her possessions, her weight snapping the wood in one of her wings with a sharp crack, a hot patch at her crotch telling her she’s wet her shorts. She says to his legs, not daring to look up at him, “Please.”

  “This will only take a minute,” he says. “Stand up.”

  “I can’t.”

  He says, “You have no idea what you can do,” and she gets her legs under her, leans on the edge of the wooden table, and manages to stand.

  “Look at me,” he says, and she does.

  He shakes his head and smiles, almost affectionately, and then he says, “You little faggot,” and his right arm comes up to his left shoulder, and he whips the back of his hand across her face.

  Her head snaps around, bones at the back of her neck going off like popcorn, a lightning strike of pain announcing that the scratches Ying left on her cheek have opened more deeply. She topples to her right, but before she goes all the way down, he’s knotted his hand in her hair and tugged her back up, and once she’s upright, he sweeps her feet out from under her with his right leg and lets go of her hair.

  And she’s falling sideways, nothing to grab on to, toward the table and the fat, greasy red meat, but somehow she gets an elbow down and lands on it with most of her weight, the elbow dead center in one of the plates. The plate and its tray, with her elbow still on it, skid across the surface of the table—wet, she realizes, with her own blood—toward the couch, but somehow she manages to get her other hand down, trying to stop the slide, the fall, whatever it is, and something slices into her palm. Her fingers close around it spasmodically, and she recognizes it as a knife, one of the sharp ones for steak.

  Her cry of pain is pitched so high it frightens her even more. She lets herself slide the rest of the way until she’s splayed across the table, stomach down, her back unprotected and her nose bleeding into the nearest pillow, and he grabs the back of her shorts and lifts again, and when she folds forward this time, she doesn’t resist it; instead she goes with it, and at the point where she’s hanging, head down, closest to his legs, she sinks the knife into the big muscle at the front of his thigh, and then she jerks it free and aims it at his kneecap, feeling it hit something hard and complicated before it skitters aside, but then she’s falling again, because he’s dropped her and is stumbling back, bellowing, both hands finding the slice in his thigh and then, with another bellow, getting the telegram of pain from his knee.

  On the carpet—in a defensive crouch that transports her instantly to her boyhood in the village—with the point of her knife aimed at him, Lutanh watches him back up, fast and off balance, until his hamstrings strike the edge of an armchair, and he goes down heavily into a precarious sitting position, the armchair tilting and almost going over backward, and then she’s up, screaming again, except this time it’s nothing but hatred, and she brings the edge of the knife down across his face on a diagonal, the blood coming instantly. She gets a foot under the edge of the chair and lifts, tipping him further back until it goes all the way over and slams into the floor, his howl of pain turning into a grunt, and she’s running for the door, throwing the hasp aside, hearing the chair turn over sideways as, probably, he fights himself free of it, and then she’s unsnapping the lock and yanking the door open. Then everything goes away for a moment or five or six, and she’s in the middle of a kind of opaque, pearl-colored shining, and when she returns to herself, she’s hurtling down the fire stairs: third floor, second floor, first floor, the door . . .

  . . . and through it and past the elevators, past the man who’s now sitting at the security desk, who’s leaping to his feet and shouting after her, the blood from her nose pouring over her mouth and chin, and she slows just enough to take a giant slice out of the air in his direction, him putting his hands up and backing away from the knife, and then she’s out through the hotel door and running, running, with no idea where.

  Halfway to nowhere at all, she stops as though she’s slammed into a wall and wipes blood from her face, thinking, My wings. My bag. My wings.

  11

  I Smell a Broken Heart

  “So you’ll look for his father,” Rose says. She’s lying beside him on the bed, wearing one of his ancient Sleater-Kinney T-shirts and a pair of loose cotton shorts, the glorious, heavy hair that falls to the middle of her back wrapped tightly in a damp towel, the second she’s used since he got home. He’s waiting for the air conditioner to make itself felt. Every now and then, without being obvious about it, he sneaks a sniff of her shampoo.

  “He pretends not to be scared,” he says, “but he is.”

  She says, “Mmmm,” and touches the towel, checking to see whether it’s time for the third one. She shifts a little against the ache in her back.

  “It’s going to keep me out of the house for a while.” He’s lying on his back, too, with one sock-clad foot up on the mattress and the other, the right, hanging off the edge with an untied shoe dangling from it. He straightens his knee quickly enough to flip the shoe end over end across the room, but it lands short of its mate.

  “I understand that,” Rose says, “and I appreciate it.” They’re speaking what Poke thinks of as their personal linguistic invention, a kind of Thaiglish that blends his barely passable Thai and her improving English. She says, “I’ll miss you.”

  He turns his head to look at her. “Really?”

  “Of course, I will. You know I will.”

  He goes up on one elbow and tries to kiss her on the forehead, but she lifts her chin and finds his mouth. Then she nods i
n satisfaction and lies back again. “I’m going out to lunch with Fon tomorrow.”

  “That’s good,” he says. “I worry about you being alone.”

  “I’m not—” she begins, but breaks off.

  “I know, I know.” He casts around for a new subject. “I think Miaow’s getting serious about Edward.”

  “I see that,” Rose says. “It worries me. He’s too good-looking.”

  “He doesn’t seem to realize it. The girls in Patpong were all yelling at him, and even Treasure—I mean, she said hello to him.”

  Rose turns to look at him. “First?”

  “Hard to believe.”

  She raises both eyebrows. “Maybe she’s getting better.”

  “She’s put on weight. We need to have dinner with them, with Arthit and Anna. When you feel up to it, I mean.”

  “The girls at Miaow’s school like him, too, or so she says. Maybe she’s exaggerating it.”

  “I don’t think so. When we were walking tonight, I was invisible as far as young women were concerned.”

  “You poor old thing,” she says. “Get used to it.”

  The silence stretches out in a comfortable manner. When Rafferty shifts his weight, trying to roll his left sock down his calf with his right foot, she says, “What were you and Miaow talking about in the living room?”

  “A play they’re doing at school, about a street girl who becomes a lady. I downloaded it on her laptop, and my guess is that she’s reading it in her room.” He gets the sock over his heel, then presses his right foot over the sock’s toe and pulls his left foot free.

  Rose says, “Why don’t you just sit up and take them off?”

  “Anybody can do that,” he says. “I’m different.”

  “I’ll bet she’s not reading the play,” Rose says. “She’s sitting there worrying about Edward.”

  He’s begun work on the other sock. “He wants to be in it, too.”

  Rose says, “I smell a broken heart.” She sits up, grunting a little at the pull in her back. “Last towel of the night.”

  “Then can I be the dryer guy?” Her routine involves a series of tightly rolled towels to get her hair to the point at which she can blow it dry it without turning on the heating element, and Rafferty loves to do that part for her, running the long, sleek, black hair over his forearm and watching it ripple and shine like liquid night as he directs the flow of air at it.

  “Sure,” she says. “You’ve been good.” She listens to what she’s just said. “I’m a very lucky woman,” she says, “and I know it.” She gets up, goes to the foot of the bed, and pulls his sock the rest of the way off, taking a swipe with her nails at the bottom of his very ticklish foot.

  Rafferty says, “Yikes,” and pulls his foot away. “Just throw them over near the shoes. They have things to discuss.”

  “You’re joking. These need to be washed. Maybe twice.”

  “Takes time to break in a good sock,” Rafferty says.

  “The people upstairs can probably smell them.” She picks up the other sock from the floor, letting them dangle from her fingertips, and drops both of them in the plastic hamper, which is full almost to overflowing. She squeezes the towel experimentally. “Got to do wash tomorrow.”

  “Well,” he says, giving her an innocent expression she’s certain he used often on his mother, “I’d be really happy to do it for you, but . . . you know, I’ve got to go out, to—” He stops because she’s already left the room.

  She has to go around snapping off the lights in the living room because Poke seems to believe either that electricity is free or that somewhere some luminous entity is tallying spiritual points, karmic gold stars, for those who use the most of it. The hallway light is off, but she can see the yellow strip beneath Miaow’s door, so she knocks.

  “What?” Miaow says, sounding like it’s the fiftieth interruption in ten minutes.

  “Just hello,” Rose says, continuing down the hall.

  “Oh,” Miaow says. “Hi, Mom.” The door remains closed.

  Hi, Mom, Rose thinks as she pushes open the door to the bathroom at the end of the hall. I have an American child.

  She flips on the bathroom light, unrolling the towel as she closes the door behind her. The face in the mirror is older than it used to be; in the six, almost seven years she’s been living with Poke, she’s lost what she had hoped would be an unusually prolonged youthfulness and she’s become someone who finally looks her age. And, she thinks, leaning toward the mirror and studying the barely visible wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, maybe a little more.

  It hardly seems fair. She’d had no idea she was beautiful until she was hauled down from a tiny, impoverished farming village in the northeast to work in Patpong, and now she’s fading. Meanwhile Miaow is coming into her own kind of beauty as a teenager with a dangerously handsome boyfriend, and Poke looks exactly like he did when he met her. She’s the only one who’s getting old. And she can see the fear in her face.

  Can he see it?

  She has the dryer in her hand and is fanning her hair and letting it fall through the stream of air before she remembers that she’s come in to towel-dry it and roll it up again, that she’s told Poke he could handle the dryer. Well, she thinks, he’d hear it and come to the door if he wanted to take over. She likes the way he handles her hair, never snagging on it or pulling it.

  But he doesn’t. Maybe, she half hopes, he’s fallen asleep. She sections her hair, damper than usual since she only toweled it twice, and lets the dryer range over it. The air is cool, almost cold on her shoulders, and there’s something cold inside her, too.

  And here she is. Where she chose to be all those years ago. With Poke and their adopted street child, hundreds of kilometers from home. And frightened.

  Her parents’ village was built beside a river. At some point, generations past, the people who first stopped there put up their huts and dug their rice paddies, thanking the spirits of the place for showing them a river that would provide nearly everything the village needed to remain alive. The river would water the rice and fill the wells. But in their first year, they learned that it flooded in the rainy season, washing away one of the year’s three crops, and dried to a fine, red, waterless dust in the summer, endangering the second. The people adjusted, Rose thinks, to living on one, and sometimes two, harvests less. They adjusted their expectations, which were low enough to begin with. The poor have to learn to adjust. Only the rich can be rigid.

  So there they were, in their village with their treacherous stream, and she grew up beside it, beside what they called Fools’ River. People never knew until it was too late, she thinks, whether the place where they pitched their tent was on the banks of some Fools’ River.

  When she first realized she had Poke’s child inside her, it announced itself in a dream: Fools’ River, broader and deeper than usual, was flowing past her, coming around a bend, bringing something to her. She’d awakened in the middle of the night, certain that the dream had significance, and the next morning, on the phone, her mother had told her what it meant, had told her that she’d seen Rose pregnant in the street several times now only to find, when the woman turned, that it wasn’t Rose at all. The river brought her the news of the baby.

  That alone should have been enough to put Rose on her guard.

  And now Poke is waiting for that baby. Sitting on the bank of Fools’ River and peering around the bend, waiting for it to bring him the thing he wants most in life. Trusting it. Depending on it.

  Her fingers snarl in her hair as the cramp returns. She yanks through the snarl and leans on the sink for a moment, looking at the knot of hair in her hand. Then she turns the dryer’s fan to high to drown herself out and says aloud, to her reflection, “I’m terrified.”

  12

  Ink

  This time the surface seems very far off.

&nb
sp; He needs to breathe, he needs to breathe, but he knows he’ll drown if he does. His lungs are screaming to be filled, but the water is dark and thick and swarming with unimaginable things.

  He was a swimmer once. In high school, when his life was something to look forward to. He won races; he won medals. The butterfly, the breaststroke. He’d been slender; he’d been young, he’d had a different girlfriend every week and a shelf full of trophies because he could control his breath. Winning was about breathing; breathing was everything. In the last third of the last lap, when your lungs were fire, when you saw dark paramecia, amoebas, changing shape before your eyes, when the only thing your body wanted was a breath, you didn’t break the rhythm to take one.

  He strains against the weight of the water, pulling himself through it, asking himself, Where is my fucking buoyancy?

  And then he breaks through, gasping in the dark, and opens his eyes.

  What time is it?

  Dark. The amber and yellow lights on the medical machines are blinking where they always blink. There are streetlights out there beyond the window, he knows; the upward tilt of the blinds turns their glare into pale horizontal stripes across the ceiling, straight as the lanes in a pool. He’s gasping, stretching his mouth wide to admit more air, to pull his eyes even wider open, waiting for the veils to lift.

  What the hell have they given him? This is the deepest it’s ever been. Everything that happened before he went under seems to be on the other side of a thick pane of smoked glass.

  His heart is slamming in his chest like a ball on a squash court. He slows his breathing. Pancake told him often, before she gave up on trying to help him, that slow, steady breathing would bring his heart under control and clear his head. He rubs his eyes. Pancake. He’s been awful to her. Sweet, plain, dithery Pancake. He doesn’t deserve—

  He’s rubbing his eyes.

  His right hand is free. He reaches down, and sure enough, the back of his hand hits the cuff, still dangling from the bed rail. His left is still secured.