While they’re still shooting, Arthit spreads his arms wide, leans forward, and rushes Clemente, Rafferty, and Anand, bulldozing them away from the open door, toward the street side of the building. When they’re out of the line of fire, he says to Anand and Clemente, “Both of you, come with me. Poke, the action, if there is any outside the building, is going to be on that side, between here and the canal. I want you right here, on the street side of this building, hugging a wall and away from the windows, away from all of it, and I want you to stay there until you hear me call you.”
A little cluster of shots comes from inside the building, followed by some confused-sounding shouting.
“Now,” Arthit says, grabbing Rafferty’s shoulder and pushing. “Get around that corner and stay there, do you hear me?”
“Sure, but—”
“Go,” Arthit says, giving him another shove, one that almost knocks him off his feet. He has to take a few steps to remain upright, and then he lets that turn into a run that carries him around the corner at the end of the building. He stops there a moment between the building and the little road, breathing heavily and seeing lights going on in windows that must belong to Trinity House. He hopes that’s all about getting kids out of the line of fire. And then, as he shakes his head and steadies his breathing and works his shoulders to loosen them up, he hears glass breaking somewhere above him.
Buddy is on his knees in the middle of the hallway, clutching his jeans to his chest, having been caught unaware by an enormous wave, a tsunami, that took him off his feet and down onto the point of one elbow, the pain bringing him back but also telling him broken. And as badly as it hurts, he knows that the drugs, which must be opioids, are shielding him from the worst of it.
Below him Lala is shouting at Kang, and Kang makes some strangled reply, and then Buddy hears pounding on the downstairs door—no, on both doors—and a head-to-toe pulse of terror brings him to his feet, the elbow forgotten, and he opens the door and barges through, dragging the heavy, weighted cast, to find himself, bewilderingly, back in his room—the bed, the machines—and he knows he’s been turned around, that he must have lost it again when he fell, and as another wave of bone-shredding weariness picks him up and rocks him, he bites down on his tongue, hard, and he finds his way back into that hallway. The door he wants is opposite this one, on the other side of the hallway.
What sound like a million shots are fired below.
He pulls himself into focus and wobbles across the hall, dragging the jeans behind him without even being aware of it, hurrying for the first time without worrying about the thump of the cast. At the door he tries the knob. And—there is a God—it’s unlocked.
Below him people pound up and down the hall, shouting at one another, kicking in what must be doors, and then there’s a volley of gunfire, like amplified popcorn, followed by a command that sounds both furious and terrified, and he hears heavy feet, booted feet, at least two people, hammering their way up the stairs. He steps into the new room and locks the door behind him as they make the turn on the stairs, and then time goes away again, and the next thing he knows, he’s standing in front of the closed, dusty window, which (God is still here) isn’t locked; the latch is harmlessly unengaged. But the window won’t move, it won’t budge. It’s been painted closed.
The men who were coming up the stairs are on the second floor now. He hears the door of the room he was in bang against the wall, hears men speculating about the hospital bed and opening the closet, and then someone tries the knob of the door he’s just come through, the door that’s keeping them from him. There’s an enraged burst of Thai and a heavy kick and then another kick, and someone hurls himself against the door, and Buddy has no way to open the window.
He wraps his hand in the jeans and swings at the glass with all his strength, but it’s not enough, and the glass holds and the jeans slide over the window’s smooth surface and he lurches forward, off balance, and his broken elbow hits the wall. Once again the pain sharpens him, but for what? The door behind him shivers in its frame again as he comes face-to-face with the end of everything: one thin, transparent pane of glass between him and the entire world, and he has nothing he can use to break it.
But he does, of course, he does. He puts a shoulder against the wall to steady himself, raises the foot with the extremely heavy cast on it, and puts it through the windowpane.
A hand lands heavily on Rafferty’s shoulder as the glass rains down, and he turns to see a cop he doesn’t know. The cop’s gun is unholstered, not pointing directly at Rafferty but close enough to cause discomfort. The cop, looking quickly back over his shoulder for reinforcements, nervously demands, in barely passable English, to know who Rafferty is and what he’s doing there. It’s obvious that the last thing he was expecting was a farang, and he’s uncertain about the protocol.
The only thing that comes into Rafferty’s mind is a game he used to play with Miaow when she was learning English and he was learning Thai, a quick-spoken mix-up of the two languages, nonsense but with enough badly pronounced Thai words laced into the English to keep her listening until she realized it was meaningless and started to laugh. All Rafferty wants to do is confuse the man further, keep the gun pointing away from him, but instead the man seems to be listening, leaning closer to Rafferty, his face screwed up with the strain of comprehending a stream of gibberish with just enough mangled Thai to make him think the failure to understand might be his, and as Rafferty is running out of inspiration, a shout goes up from the other side of the house, the side with the canal on it. More shouting, three or four voices now, and the cop shifts his weight from foot to foot and then makes a grab at Rafferty’s arm, gets his sleeve but nothing more, and turns and runs to see what he’s missing.
The sound of the glass forgotten in the aftermath of the encounter, Rafferty moves to follow, thinking Arthit or the others might need help. As he reaches the corner of the house, he hears an impact behind him, the kind of sound a fifty-kilo bag of rice might make when it falls from a truck, accompanied by the percussive whuff of someone having the breath knocked clean out of him, and he turns to see a man wearing a T-shirt, no trousers, and what seems to be a white boot pull himself up and take off at a limping, unsteady run around the far corner of the house, leaving a pair of jeans on the grass.
Startled and distracted by a concentrated burst of gunfire from the other side of the house and his concern about Arthit and the others, it takes Rafferty just a moment too long to put it together, to recognize what he’s looking at.
Yes, it’s a canal. He was right all along, fuck her and her blinds, it was reflected water, and there’s a knot of policemen off to his right, most of the way toward the door to the apartment house he just jumped out of, but they’re all focused on something a little more than halfway between the house and the canal, a little garden or something with a wire fence around it. He knows, if they should see him, that he can’t outrun them, but there’s no one who can keep up with him in the water, so he accelerates toward it. His adrenaline and a now-unfamiliar surge of hope are fighting the drugs, allowing him to keep his goal in sight, letting him coordinate his legs so that even with the cast he’s doing a pretty good imitation of a run. He lopes to his left to get a little farther from the cluster of cops surrounding the garden, recognizing the pig-faced man, seeing him bend down and pull up a big plant or something, like a box of dirt, and then he steps aside and there’s an outburst of gunfire and a long, wavering female scream. But now Buddy is scrambling to the top of the low wall beside the canal and feeling the muscles of his body, his young, undamaged, unmarked body, stretch themselves into the ideal racing dive, muscles lengthening, his entire frame elongating into the perfect dive, an arrow that will pierce the surface of the water without a splash, with virtually no loss of momentum, but he can’t straighten one arm, there’s a whole fireworks show of pain from the elbow, and he staggers, and his foot slips, and his momentum pulls h
im in sideways, and there’s something wrong with the water, it’s black and thick and foul, and he’s not swimming, he’s being pulled down, and something heavy heavy heavy on his right foot is pulling . . .
It’s a tunnel. They’re shooting into a tunnel. Four of them, just emptying their guns like hunters spotting their first prey very late in the season. They’re so intent on blowing to smithereens whoever’s in there—and it can only be Kang or Lala or both—that they don’t even glance at Rafferty as he hurtles past, wanting to call out to the man in the cast—Buddy, it has to be Buddy—but afraid of attracting their attention. He sees Buddy pull himself up onto the low wall and then totter and flail and go over, and his heart sinks at the thought of the water, but then he’s on top of the barrier and over it and into the air, but he’s already lost sight of Buddy. Buddy is down there in the dark, in the opaque muck of that awful water, and then, just as he feels a vibration in his pocket, Rafferty hits it, and it’s colder than he expected, and he just has time to gasp before he goes under.
Paralyzingly dark, viscous, even lumpy in ways he absolutely refuses to think about, and he makes a few flailing, circling sweeps with his hands, hoping to touch Buddy, but then he needs to breathe; he had shut off the gasp because he was afraid of inhaling this water, and his lungs hadn’t filled, so he pushes to the surface and scans frantically for a landmark of some kind, but the wall looks the same from yard to yard, and he doesn’t even know which direction he’s facing. There was a tree, he remembers, where they crossed on the bridge, but it’s still quite a ways off even though he’s moving slowly toward it, so there’s one question answered: the path of the current. It’s flowing toward the tree. Whatever that’s worth. The moon reappears, right on cue, to show him that the tree is to his right now; it was to his left when he jumped in, but now it’s to his right, so he must have turned around while he was under. It looked to him like Buddy hit the water only a foot or two away from the wall, but he could have drifted anywhere by now—across the canal, farther down toward the tree, he could be anywhere.
No.
The boot. The boot is weighted. It will drag him down.
The current has taken Rafferty six to eight feet from where he jumped in, and now that there’s moonlight, he can see that the wall is darker and wetter where he and Buddy went in, and he strokes toward the splash marks, grabs a huge breath, and forces himself down into the dark, eyes tightly closed, waving his arms like a conductor, trying to explore the largest possible area, and just as he begins to surface again, his forearm hits something hard. With his lungs bursting, he brings the other arm around and finds cold skin—a shoulder maybe, and yes, above it a neck and a head—and fingers find his arm as he gets the man’s neck into the crook of his arm and pushes for the surface.
But Dell is clawing at him, ripping at his skin with his nails, and when their heads break water, he screams and fights blindly, his eyes squeezed closed, and Rafferty tightens the arm around the man’s neck and says, “Edward. Edward sent me, Edward.”
The man goes absolutely inert. With his arm still around Buddy Dell’s neck, Rafferty sidestrokes—dragging Dell behind him, just deadweight—toward the wall, where he sees Anand bending down toward them, his eyes enormous, and ten or fifteen meters behind him, in a circle of flashlights, Arthit in a heated discussion with Teerapat. In the scrubby little garden, a cop kneels to drag someone, a woman, from a cave of some kind. Anand reaches down, and Rafferty gives him Buddy Dell’s arm, and Anand pulls him out.
Once he’s on top of the wall, Rafferty watches the cop pick up the woman, who has the floppy jointlessness that comes only with death, by the ankles. He carries her, upside down, to the edge of the garden and drops her headfirst. She lands in a heap. It has to be Lala, but she’s so much smaller than she’d been in his imagination. From here she looks like a child.
There’s a choke and a cough from behind him, and Buddy Dell says, “Edward.”
37
From Here
The knob twists beneath his hand while he’s still trying to unlock it, and Miaow is standing there, index finger raised to her lips, but her eyes double as they appraise him—his filthy, dripping clothes, the pool of water at his feet, and then she takes a huge step back, raising a hand to cover her nose and mouth and using the other to fan the air away from her and toward him again.
He says, “Has she come—” but Miaow is already nodding, moving even farther from him and hissing, “But shhhhhhhhh.”
“She’s okay?”
“Yes, she’s—” Miaow is halfway into the living room by now, with one hand still over her nose, and she’s using a fierce whisper. “She’s . . . Everything is okay, but she needs to sleep. I even called you, but—”
Rafferty holds up his right hand and uses his left to pull his phone, dark, dead, and dripping, from his pocket. He shows it to her and shrugs.
She takes another step back at the sight of the phone. “Where were you, in a pile of poop?”
“Yes,” Rafferty says. “Just hold your goddamn nose and—”
She’s waving her free hand, palm down, meaning too loud. “You have to let her sleep. She’s . . . um, she’s had a hard day.”
“And . . . and . . . and she’s okay, I mean . . .” He runs out of words. “She’s—”
“Yes and yes. How can you possibly smell like—”
“It was Edward’s father. But what about—”
“You found him?” Instinctively, she takes a step toward him but then backs away again. “Is he alive? I mean . . . does he smell as bad as you do?”
“Exactly the same.” Without even being aware of if, he takes a step toward her. “Miaow, the baby?”
“Oh,” she says, stepping backward and bumping into the edge of the flat-screen. “I would have told you if anything—”
He sloshes his way toward the couch, dropping the phone on the coffee table. “Thank God.”
“You’re not going to sit there, are you?”
“I’d thought about it.”
“Don’t. We’ll have to throw it away.”
He tilts his head down and sniffs. “I guess I’m getting used to it.”
“When I was seven,” Rose says, and they both turn to see her standing in the bedroom door. “My Uncle Paithoon, who weighed about a hundred and fifty kilos, sat on the board over the outhouse pit, and it broke under his weight. He went over backward, and we had to pull him out by his feet. I thought I would never smell anything like that again, but I was wrong.”
“Go back to bed,” Miaow says.
“I will, I am. Come in with me, Poke. As terrible as you smell, I need to talk to you.”
“I can shower.”
“I want to do this now. I need to do it now.”
She turns, puts a hand on the doorframe to steady herself, and goes back in.
Miaow whispers, “Don’t you dare close that door.” Then she says, “You’re a hero, even if you do stink. Edward will be so happy.”
“I try to be useful,” he says, and he goes into the bedroom.
Rose is already in bed, the covers pulled protectively up to her chin, even though the room isn’t cold. “Sit on the clothes basket,” she says. “It’s plastic, and I can wash it tomorrow.”
“I’ll wash it.”
“I know,” she says as he sits. “I was just being nice. And put it a little farther away.”
“Done.” He backs it up, almost to the wall, and sits again, and they regard each other in silence. He’s about to speak, but Rose holds up a hand.
“Today,” she says, “I almost lost the baby.”
He says, “I figured. I’ve been looking up your symptoms for weeks.”
She turns her head aside a bit, but her eyes are fixed on his. “You didn’t tell me you knew.”
“I was afraid that—this sounds silly—that if I said it, it would become real.�
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She nods, clears her throat, but then she swallows. Without looking at him, she says, “I’ve lied to you.”
“From how frightened you’ve been,” he says, “I thought maybe you’d . . . umm, been through this before.”
She says, “Twice.” She clears her throat again. “I lost both babies.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“The fathers . . .” she says, and then she lets it trail off. After a moment of silence, he hears her swallow.
He says, “You were working, right? When you were pregnant those times, you were working.”
Her eyes have changed. They’re so much more distant she might as well have taken several steps back. “Is that a question? Yes, I was working.”
“So—” Rafferty says, and he breaks off and raises one hand. “You’ve got to let me get through this. See, the fact that you were working, what that means—to me anyway—is that those guys . . . well, they weren’t with you.”
“With me? I doubt they remembered my name.”
“Well, I am,” he says. “I’m with you.”
She looks at him as though she’s waiting for something.
“We’re a team,” he says. “We’re the baby-keeping team. You and me.”
Rose opens her mouth, but from the living room Miaow says, “What about me?”
“You’re on it, too,” Rafferty says. “You’re our center of gravity; you’re what Rose and I revolve around. We couldn’t do it without you.” He looks up to find her standing in the doorway, one hand still over her nose.
Rose says, “Oh.” She looks at Miaow, and says, again, “Oh.”
Miaow seizes the moment. “I ate your maraschino cherries.”
Fools' River Page 33