PR04 - Queen of Patpong

by Timothy Hallinan

  Before she can stop herself, Kwan says, “It won’t be old age.”

  “You see,” her father says to the teacher. He looks almost pleased. “She’s probably good when she’s at school, probably got a sweet mouth, but here she’s just another sharp edge. Just looking for a slap.”

  “Thirty-six thousand baht a year,” Teacher Suttikul says. She glances at Mr. Pattison and says, “About nine hundred dollars U.S.”

  Kwan’s father sits back. Her mother stares at the teacher as though gold dust has just poured from her mouth. Out on the deck, there’s a little ripple of words from the brothers and sisters. This is more than the whole family earns in a year.

  “Okay,” her father says. He licks his lips. “Give it to me.” He actually stretches out his hand, but he leans too far forward and his wife has to grasp his shoulders to keep him from falling off the bed. He shrugs her off indignantly. “Now.”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” Mr. Pattison says. He smiles, but not broadly. “We have to make a piece of paper that says you promise that Kwan will stay in school, and then we give some of the money every month to Teacher Suttikul, and she gives it to you if Kwan’s been in class. By the end of the year, you’ll have the whole nine hundred.”

  Her father has screwed up his face, trying to see the numbers. “So in a month . . .”

  “About three thousand baht.”

  “Three thousand baht? Are you joking?” Kwan’s father lifts both hands and slaps them down on his thighs. “No more talking.” He leans forward as if to rise, and his wife reaches for him, just in case.

  But before he can push himself up, Teacher Suttikul says, “That’s more money than she could earn in most jobs.”

  “Tomorrow,” her father says. “Tomorrow I can get—” He stops talking, although his lips move for a moment. Then he shakes his head and tries to get up.

  “How much?” the teacher asks. Her mouth is all muscle. “Thirty thousand baht? Forty? And for what?”

  “Sixty,” her father says, with the satisfaction of someone playing a trump. “For working in Bangkok. And then she’ll be sending more money home right away. Sixty is just to start. A lot better than a few thousand a month, and nothing more coming in, while she learns things girls don’t need to know.”

  “And what job would that be?” the teacher asks.

  Kwan’s father shows her the back of his hand, flapping it in her direction in a way that’s nothing short of scornful, certainly nothing like the respect Kwan believes a teacher is owed. Her spine folded forward, her chin practically touching her chest, Kwan has reached her limit. She can’t endure another moment of humiliation—her teacher, whom she has worked so hard to impress, being insulted like this. She raises her head, glares at her father, and puts a foot down to stand.

  Teacher Suttikul’s voice almost takes the skin off her back. “Kwan. You stay right there.”

  Kwan turns to her and is startled by the fury in her teacher’s face. She sinks down on the stool again, and for the first time she feels a lifting in the center of her chest. Something good may happen here after all.

  “I asked what job you were thinking of,” Teacher Suttikul says. Her tone is sinuous as a snake. “Sixty thousand baht is a lot of money. For what? Waitressing? Down in Bangkok, you said?”

  Her father swallows, clears his throat, and pats his shirt pocket for a cigarette. “Something like that.”

  “Sixty thousand baht.” The teacher settles back in her chair. “For a waitress.”

  “It’s a good restaurant.” He’s already arguing.

  “For a village girl, still dusty, just down from the paddies. Someone who’s never even eaten in a good restaurant.”

  “So what? You think waitresses eat in nice places? With gold plates and, and ice cream, and lace on the table? They eat noodles in the street, like everyone else.”

  “What I think is that waitresses in good restaurants come from city families. I think they get the job because somebody knows somebody who knows somebody—”

  “That’s me,” Kwan’s father says. He stops and makes her wait as he pulls out a pack of cigarettes, extracts one between his index and middle fingers, tweezers style, and lights up. “I know somebody.”

  “Who?”

  He regards her, blinking through a cloud of smoke. “What?”

  “Who do you know?”

  “What does that—” Kwan’s father’s face is suddenly deep red. “What does that have to do with you? Who do you think you are, coming in here and asking questions like this?”

  “I think I’m Kwan’s teacher. That means I’m in charge of her welfare.”

  “You just stop there.” Kwan’s father is standing, wobbling a little, but standing. “Stork is my daughter, not yours. She’ll plow fields if I want her to, she’ll wash floors, she’ll shovel buffalo shit. She’ll go where I want and do what I want. Did you bring her into the world? Have you worked all your life to feed her, even though she eats like an ox? Have you given her a roof and a place to sleep? Here’s what you can do, you and your farang boyfriend. You can get out of my house, that’s what you can do. And you can keep going. Kwan’s out of school right now. You won’t see her again. I don’t want to see you again.” He stamps toward the door, trailing smoke like a locomotive. At the door he wheels and says, “You have to get up before you leave. Come on, up, up, up.”

  “You can leave if you want,” Teacher Suttikul says, waving him out. “We’ll keep talking.”

  “You should stay,” Mr. Pattison says.

  Kwan’s father grabs the doorjamb on both sides. “This is my house—”

  “My job,” Teacher Suttikul says, and her words cut through his. Although she has not raised her voice, there is a glittering edge to it. “My job says that I have to tell the police when a girl is taken out of school before she’s eighteen. If she’s not in school and I report it, they have to go looking for her. This is the first place they’ll come. If they don’t find her, there can be trouble.”

  Kwan’s father says, “Police?” and fails to hear Kwan ask the same question at the same time.

  “Some people,” Kwan’s teacher says, eyes wide, “actually sell their daughters. Into prostitution, I mean. They can get quite a lot of money, I’m told.”

  Kwan’s father starts to say something, darts his tongue into the corner of his mouth, and says, “You don’t—”

  “Of course not,” Teacher Suttikul says. “It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? But it happens. And there are laws against it now. It’s not like it used to be. I’ve known families, close to here, who sold their daughters and got caught, and the police took all the money away—fifty, sixty thousand baht—put the father in jail, and then sent the girl home. Good for nothing by then, of course, not even a dowry. Ruined. Nobody would marry her. And then the father had to buy his way out of jail and pay the gangsters back. Took them years.”

  Kwan’s mother lets out a quiet moan. Kwan feels like she’s been nailed to the stool. Sold? There’s a thin, high mosquito whine in her ears, and the room seems to tilt a little. Ruined?

  It’s growing dark outside.

  “May I light a lamp?” Teacher Suttikul asks, indicating the kerosene lantern on the table. “We can all see each other better.”

  Kwan’s father shakes his head, then nods. To the kids clustered around him, he says, “What’s wrong with all of you? Go somewhere. Do something. Clean under the house.” He flaps his hands at them. “Go on, go on.” They back up a couple of feet.

  “Thank you,” Teacher Suttikul says. She reaches into her old straw purse and brings out a disposable lighter, removes the lamp’s chimney, and lights the wick. It catches and sends up a thin, dark thread of smoke. “Needs trimming,” Teacher Suttikul says, replacing the chimney. The light, shining directly beneath her chin, emphasizes her broad, strong cheekbones but leaves her eyes in shadow. “There,” she says, resuming her seat as though nothing has happened. “Isn’t that better?”

  Nobody
says anything. “What I think,” she continues, “is that you should forget about Bangkok. It’s probably not a real offer. They’ll find a way to cheat you, and then they’ll make her”—her eyes flick to Kwan—“wait on people for free. What could she do? Alone, miles from home. What could you do? The people who run . . . mmm, restaurants can be very rough. Instead, permit us to give you money to let Kwan stay in school.” She glances questioningly at Mr. Pattison, who nods about a quarter of an inch. “You’ve got a lot of children to feed,” she says. “We’ll offer you something special. Forty thousand baht, and since you need money now, we’ll pay you the extra four thousand when you sign. So that’ll be seven thousand baht, and then three thousand a month for eleven more months.”

  “Ten thousand,” her father says.

  Teacher Suttikul shakes her head. “If we give you ten when you sign, you won’t get anything for the last month.”

  Kwan realizes she is holding her breath. She lets it out in a rush that draws Mr. Pattison’s faded blue eyes.

  “That’s a year from now.” Her father comes back into the room and reseats himself on the bed. He scratches at the side of his nose. “I don’t need to think about that yet.” He puts his cigarette butt between thumb and forefinger and snaps it through the open door. Children scatter out of the way. “Ten thousand.”

  “Just so you understand . . .”

  “I’m not stupid. When do we make the paper?”

  “We can do it tomorrow,” Mr. Pattison says.

  “And you’ll give me the money tomorrow?”

  “Will you be able to read it?” Mr. Pattison asks, not unkindly. “We need to know that you understand what—”

  “She can read it,” Kwan’s father says, glancing at Kwan. “If she’s so smart, she can read it.”

  “Then I don’t see any problem,” Mr. Pattison says. “We’ll come tomorrow evening, about this time.”

  “With the money.”

  “With the money.”

  “Cash,” Kwan’s father says.

  Mr. Pattison’s face doesn’t change, but he glances away, out through the door. It looks to Kwan like he is eager to be out of the room. “Of course.”

  Teacher Suttikul stands up. “I’m so glad we could talk,” she says. “I know how much you love Kwan, and this is the best thing for her. You should be proud that you’ve reached this decision.”

  Kwan’s father nods brusquely, but his wife gets up. She’s beaming. “Thank you,” she says. “Thank you so much. Kwan is—” She looks at her daughter. “Kwan is my first baby. Even though she’s bigger than I am, she’s my first baby.”

  Everyone laughs except Kwan and her father.

  Teacher Suttikul holds out an arm, and Kwan gets up and goes to her. It seems to take five minutes for her to cross the room, and she can feel her father’s eyes on her every step of the way. When she’s finally side by side with Teacher Suttikul, the teacher barely comes up to Kwan’s shoulder, and Kwan is amazed all over again that such a small, unassuming person has such strength. The teacher puts an arm around Kwan’s waist and gives her a squeeze.

  “That’s finished, then,” she says.

  Kwan can’t say anything. She feels as though her throat has been tied in a knot.

  Her teacher pulls a little flashlight from her purse. “Come on,” she says. “You can walk us past the dogs.”

  The children scatter in front of them as they come through the door. Only one of them, Mai, is slow to move, and that’s because she’s staring up at the teacher. Teacher Suttikul slows and touches Mai’s shoulder. “Your name?”

  Mai glances at Kwan for reassurance. “Mai.”

  “Good, good. How old?”

  “Thirteen.”

  Teacher Suttikul beams at her. “Then I’ll see you next year.” She turns back to the room and calls out, “I’ll look forward to seeing Mai next year.”

  Mai bobs her head and backs away. With Mr. Pattison in the lead, Kwan and her teacher go down the four steps and turn right, around the house, to get to the dirt street. Once they’re out there, the stars running like a spangled river between the dark trees, Kwan whispers, “Please turn off the light.”

  Teacher Suttikul snaps off the flashlight, and Kwan throws her arms around the woman. Hugging her teacher with all her strength, and with her own heart pounding in her ears, Kwan still hears Mr. Pattison stop to wait for them, standing alone in the dark.

  Chapter 9

  The Broad Black Door

  She can’t even smell the exhaust of Mr. Pattison’s motorbike anymore. She’s been sniffing for it, but it’s gone.

  The last she saw of them was the wide cone of light from the bike’s headlamp, bumping away from her, leaving her by herself, dead center in the red dirt of the road, staring after them. Staring at the black and white stripes of Teacher Suttikul’s terrible blouse as it recedes into the darkness and the fuzziness of the nearsighted. Gone now, leaving Kwan more alone than she’s ever felt in her seventeen years.

  They’re far enough away now to take with them even the sound of the bike, and here she is, ducking into the undergrowth to the side of the road just beyond the village, out of sight of anyone who might come looking for her, anyone who might say any word at all to her, have any kind of plan for her. She’s thinking about ghosts and wishing she could have gotten on the bike. Just climbed up, wrapped her arms around her teacher’s thick, solid waist, and zoomed through the night. Away from the broad black door that’s just swung open in front of her.

  Sold. Ruined.

  Her father’s eyes when her teacher talked about prostitution, about families who—

  She’s the center of a vortex of mosquitoes. Something moves, back in the bush. Everyone knows there are ghosts outside the village.

  A breeze rattles the dry leaves on the bushes near her. If whatever made that noise is still moving, she won’t be able to hear it. She can smell herself, the salty smell of shock and fear.

  She can’t stay here all night.

  She feels like she’s turned to stone. Her feet are too heavy to lift. And even if she could lift them, where would she go? She can’t force herself to go home. She can’t be in the same room—she can’t even share the same light—with her father.

  What she wants to do is drop to her knees and cry as she cried when she was a child, her throat wide open, her eyes running, and her nose streaming, letting out some of the grief that’s built up inside her, like smoke with no outlet. She wants to slice open the skin on her cheeks and forehead with her fingernails and then scrub dirt into the cuts, dirt that could never be washed out, that would scar her, and then nobody would ever want to . . . buy . . .

  She realizes she has her palm pressed hard over her lips and that a moan is building behind them. She straightens. Pulls her hand away. She will not moan.

  And as she feels her will strengthen, a new thought, even colder than the others, breaks over her. What had her mother known? How long had she known? Her mother.

  An hour ago, Kwan thinks, I was worried about staying in school.

  She’s aware again of the door, broad and even blacker than the night that surrounds her. She imagines something on the other side, holding out a hand to her. Or maybe it’s not a hand.

  The image makes her back prickle, and she turns slowly, seeing the dark, foamy shapes of bushes and, behind them, something bent and spavined, and she inhales quickly, the hand that had been over her mouth now pressed to the center of her chest, fingers splayed.

  From the direction of the village, off to her left, a motorbike coughs a couple of times and roars into life. Kwan looks again at the twisted shape, sees that it’s not moving, and backs deeper into the brush, farther away from the road. She keeps her eyes on the road, trying not to imagine the twisted thing opening long-fingered hands behind her. As much as she needs to know what’s coming down the road, she looks over her shoulder at the dark shape. At first she can’t give a form to anything, but then the bike’s headlamp is turned on and the
darkness thins, and she can see the bushes behind her, with nothing behind them but a spindly, dejected tree, and the roar increases in volume and whips past, dwindling into the distance. Two boys from the village, a little older than she, boys who are always in trouble for drinking and fighting. Boys without money. No one knows where they got the bike.

  There is something in her left hand, the clenched hand. She lifts it to see what it is but then remembers. It’s Nana’s earring. Brought all the way here from Bangkok.

  She sees her village with sudden clarity: Two rows of slanting, leaking houses, stinking latrines, badly chewed dogs. Dust and heat. People who are sometimes kind and sometimes cruel. Old people, young people. Working and living and dying. At the mercy of the weather, at the mercy of the rich. At the mercy of alcohol. Trapped in circles of karma that none of them can perceive, sentenced to a life of numbed endurance, voluble about nothing they care about, but slinging words bright and sharp as razors when tempers flare or the whiskey speaks. Mute as fish about the things that matter, the things they think about all the time. Hunger, work, injustice, endurance, the empty bellies of those they love.

  The problem of their daughters. The opportunity presented by their daughters.

  She could, Kwan imagines, just turn and walk down the road with the village behind her and never look back. Walk through the night until she sees a lighted window with someone behind it who needs her, someone who will take her in and let her help, let her wash and scrub and lift and carry. And never speak to her, never ask her anything. A smile in the morning, work through the day, a clean floor to sleep on at night. No one coming to the door. No one knowing her name.

  Right, she thinks. Life is a movie.

  She takes three deep, silent breaths. She’ll be able to go to school. Teacher Suttikul won. She’s got what she wanted. School, learning, working to make herself better. The story she’s been trying so hard to write, the story of a village girl who is led to a treasure by the ghost of her dead grandmother. How happy the treasure makes the girl’s poor family. The story Teacher Suttikul likes. The word Teacher Suttikul said: “college.”