Pong had their schedules memorized, and he knew they wouldn’t get up for another forty minutes, when they changed shifts. No one in the entire prison was paying attention.
Pong had never thought about escaping Namwon before, but now the opportunity lurched up like a mudskipper and slapped him across the face with its tail. He could get out of Namwon. Not when he was thirteen. Now.
Without pausing to think, Pong tipped the basket and climbed inside. He took one last gulp of semifresh air and wriggled down under the trash. He nearly threw up as he pushed the durian skins, orange rinds, and banana peels up around him, packing them over his head, covering his face.
He breathed through his mouth as shallowly as he could. With one eye pressed against the straw weave of the basket, he could see a blurry, golden view of what was happening outside.
He froze when he heard footsteps coming closer. Someone swung open the basket lid and held it open for a long time. Pong listened but couldn’t tell who stood there. Somkit? A guard? Whoever it was, they shut the lid and walked away.
Surely Somkit would wonder where he’d gone. Surely he would start asking if anyone had seen Pong. But no one called for him. And Somkit never came back.
Pong sat gagging in the basket, stinky juice dripping off his hair and down the bridge of his nose. He didn’t know if he could make it until the trashman came back. The whole thing began to feel like a really bad idea. Pong was ready to give up and get out, but now the guards had moved back into position and would see him if he climbed out of the basket. He’d have to wait until sundown for the next shift change.
As the sun began to set, the trashman arrived. When Pong heard him whistling, he was seized with terror. He was sure that when the man lifted the basket, he’d realize it was too heavy.
Pong’s nervous stomach writhed like a bowl of eels. What had he been thinking? He was going to get caught any moment. And then what would he say? I fell into the basket, you see. I tried to call for help, but no one heard me. Please don’t put me into solitary confinement. Being inside a basket of durian is punishment enough.
One benefit of being underfed is that you don’t weigh much. The trashman lifted the basket with just a little more effort than usual, hauled it to the river dock, and plopped it into his boat.
Pong couldn’t see much of what was happening, but he swore he spotted his friend’s silhouette standing at the gate. Suddenly, he realized everything he was leaving behind. No! Wait! he thought. I can’t go without Somkit!
But it was too late. The trashman shoved the boat away from the dock with his bare foot and they were off, down the river.
Pong crouched inside the basket, one eye pressed against the straw, trying to see the world outside. By now the sun had gone down, and it was difficult to make anything out. Even inside the basket, he felt too exposed, like he was naked. He scooted farther down, wincing as the spiky durian rinds jabbed into his skin.
The zippy whir of the trashman’s small orb motor rose in pitch as he steered the boat out into the central channel of the river. If Somkit were there, he’d know what model the motor was just from the sound.
Larger boats with more powerful motors passed by, throwing up waves that rocked the little boat. Pong could make out hazy pinpricks of light beaming from the houses lining the riverbanks. The lights and the boats grew in number as they moved downriver.
Pong’s stomach now churned with excitement more than fear. Finally, he was going to see the city up close.
He heard it first. The buzz of the orb lights sounded like a swarm of bees flying toward him. He heard shouting and laughing on the shore, a band playing music, and a woman’s voice singing, “Take my hand, oh, my darling, take my hand and dance with me . . .”
And then the darkness lit up like the inside of a star.
They’d reached the heart of Chattana.
Homes, stores, and restaurants lined the water’s edge, stacked one on top of the other, lit ceiling to floor in a rainbow of orb lights that blurred together through Pong’s tiny basket window. He could hear customers shouting orders, people haggling over prices, babies wailing for their mothers. He smelled sizzling catfish skin and vegetable dumplings and the human odors of too many bodies living too close together.
A herd of bare feet pounded against wood planks. Children shrieked as they ran down one of the gangways that lined the river. Pong heard their laughter, then a dozen splashes close to the boat.
“Hey, you kids, get outta my way!” shouted the trashman, cutting off his motor. “Lazy brats! When I was your age, I already had a job!”
The trashman used his oar to turn the boat down a canal that led away from the main flow of the river. Chattana was a city built on water, with canals serving the place of roads. People got around by boat or used the crowded gangways and bridges that crossed the canals.
The trashman turned them down another canal, then another, picking up more baskets of rotting garbage before returning to the wide highway of traffic on the river. The boat dipped up and down on the wake of barges as they crossed to the western shore. The West Side of Chattana was also lit up bright as a sunrise, but with a difference. Unlike the rainbow chaos of the East Side, the charged orbs of the West Side were all Gold.
Pong’s heart ached at the sight. He realized that this side of town was what he and Somkit had seen from the river gate every night when they dreamed of someday walking free under all those lights. And now here he was, almost close enough to touch them.
The West Side was so quiet. The orbs hanging off the trees barely hummed, and the music played softly. Even the smells were sweet and clean. Canals branched out from the main river, just like on the East Side, but here, the sidewalks weren’t nearly so crowded. Pong could just make out the tidy rows of buildings through his pinprick window in the basket.
The trashman also got very quiet as he pulled alongside one of the docks. Servants loaded baskets into the boat without a word. The trashman kicked up his orb motor and they were off again, downriver.
The boat rocked up and down, and up and down. Pong felt those eels in his stomach writhing again, but this time it was seasickness.
Don’t throw up. Don’t throw up, he told his stomach. Sadly, his stomach didn’t listen. He clutched the sides of the basket, lost in a woozy fog.
Back and forth the boat went, crossing the river as the trashman made his way south to all his stops. Pong’s mind clouded over in a haze of seasickness, and he didn’t notice until too late that the boat had stopped.
His eyes popped open in time to realize that his basket was being picked up and tipped over the side. Rotten durian rinds showered over him as he tumbled into the black water.
Pong, who’d lived his whole life inches from the river, didn’t know how to swim.
His feet kicked and his hands clawed at the dim glow of the surface. He managed to fight hard enough to get his face above the water. He sucked in a breath of air and a pint of river as his head went back down. Pong didn’t care about getting caught and taken back to prison anymore. In fact, he was splashing and glugging and waving his arms as high above the water as he could.
But the trashman was eager to drop off his cargo and get back to the lights of the city. He revved his motor and sped back upriver. He didn’t see or hear Pong’s pitiful splashes.
According to law, the trashman had to dump his baskets outside the city limits, where the river made a wide bend. Here, the current was slow and the water clogged with trash of all sorts: fruit rinds, broken boxes, torn fishing nets, empty rice sacks, nine-year-old prison escapees.
Pong was so exhausted that he gave up trying to swim. But the trash wedged itself under his armpits and the balls of his feet, as if it wanted to be useful one last time before sinking into the silt at the bottom. Pong’s fingers gripped the edge of a sheet of plywood. Ready to sink, he found instead that he was floating, buoyed up by the garbage.
The current carried him around the bend, where the river narrowed again and
flowed a little faster. Pong held tight to his wooden life preserver as he drifted downstream. Seeing his chance, he kicked and wiggled his body, aiming for the bank.
By the time he reached the shore, he’d floated out of sight of the city. He climbed up the long muddy bank, out of breath and shivering in the wet clothes clinging to his body. He looked up at the stars, dim and tiny compared to the lights of Chattana.
Pong had done it. He had escaped. He was out in the world for the first time.
He knelt in the mud in the dark in the trash and cried.
Pong woke up to a chicken pecking his foot.
“Ah! Get away!” he shrieked, kicking the scrawny bird.
The chicken squawked and fluttered into the brush. Pong cradled his injured foot in his lap. To be fair to the chicken, Pong’s skin was so wrinkled and white from lying in the soggy mud that it did look like a maggot.
Pong stood up and looked out across the gray-green water. The other side of the river was thick with trees. He looked up. This side of the river was thick with trees. There was no city, no buildings, nobody. In truth, Pong had drifted only a few miles south of Chattana, but to him it seemed as if he’d entered an impenetrable wilderness. He imagined tigers ripping the flesh off his bones and pythons strangling him slowly.
What was he going to do? Where was he going to go? The sides of his empty stomach smacked together. Somkit must be having breakfast right now, he thought.
He’d never been without his friend for more than a few minutes. To realize how far away they were from each other gave him an itchy, panicky feeling.
A horn sounded upriver, and a large cargo barge floated slowly into view. Pong flattened himself onto the mud. As he waited for it to pass, his eyes went to his left wrist. He rubbed his thumb over the bright-blue ink of his prison mark, as if that could make it disappear.
All prisoners in Chattana were tattooed with the name of their prison. Pong and Somkit had gotten theirs when they were babies. The ink was permanent, set with the light from a powerful Gold orb owned by the Governor’s office. No one could make it disappear except maybe the Governor himself.
If anyone saw it, they’d know immediately that he’d run away. When a prisoner was released, the prison crossed out their mark with a line and added a little star symbol. Without that bright-blue symbol, Pong was a fugitive. If he got caught, they’d take him right back. Worse, they might take him to Banglad, the men’s prison. From the stories the guards told, Banglad made Namwon seem like a fancy hotel. The Governor’s words pounded in Pong’s temples: Those who are born in darkness always return.
Pong shivered and rubbed his bare arms. His journey in the trash boat might be the closest he’d ever get to walking free under Chattana’s lights. Now he’d be lucky if he could manage to avoid being arrested.
Heavy clouds hung overhead. The rainy season would arrive any day, swelling the river and washing out the roads. He needed to get moving. But where to?
He couldn’t go back to the city, but if he followed the river downstream, he knew it would eventually lead to the sea. The Governor, the police, the warden, none of them had any power over him once he stepped off the sand. He could get on a boat that would take him out of their reach forever, where no one would have heard of Namwon or know what his tattoo meant.
Pong had seen a picture of the ocean once, in a book. In the picture, the water wasn’t gray-green, like the river. It was blue. That color of blue filled Pong’s mind as he put his head down and started walking south.
He kept to the ditch along the river road so that he could duck out of sight whenever a rare oxcart came rumbling by. The day turned hot and sticky. Sweat rolled down the side of his nose and dripped into his mouth. Now he begged the rains to start, so he could have something to drink. He did manage to find a clutch of hard green bananas growing along the road, but by midday, his hunger hurt so bad he thought he would faint from it.
All morning he had been drawing closer and closer to a cluster of small mountains — lumpy and green at the top, with sheer gray sides where the rock was too steep for the jungle to cling to. The road made a bend to the right, then back to the left, and then all of a sudden the mountains loomed right above Pong. Here, the road split. The main road turned inland, away from the river. A narrower track, barely wide enough for an oxcart, continued on, straight toward the mountains.
Pong frowned. Could this be right? Those dumb mountains seemed to be perched right along the river, standing smack between him and the sea. He didn’t like the idea of climbing a mountain with nothing but green bananas in his belly. But what if the main road never led him to the sea at all? What if it led to a town? What if people stopped him and asked questions? If anyone saw his tattoo, he didn’t think he’d have the strength to run away.
Pong chose the mountain track.
Good decision, he told himself as he huffed up and up the track, as it wound around the mountain, as the river got farther and farther below the gray cliffs.
Very good decision, he thought as night fell, as he curled into a ball under a bush, half on the road, half off it, as the clouds finally cracked open and released a river of rain.
Pong opened his eyes. He was hungry, wet, muddy, and cold, in that order. The rain had stopped, and the sky was just beginning to lighten. He sat up. He smelled something.
Cooked fat.
That smell drew him in like a fish with a hook in its nose. He followed it up the road, around a curve, to a small wooden house set among the trees. The house was little more than a shack, but Pong stared at it in wonder. The front was lit by a soft, golden glow.
The only orb lights they’d had at Namwon were Violet (for the courtyard and classrooms) and Crimson (for cooking and boiling the laundry). On his journey past Chattana City, Pong had gotten a brief view of the other colors, too: Blue, Amber, Jade, and — on the West Side — Gold.
But the light in front of the house behaved strangely. It seemed to shift and dance around. It was soft and warm at the same time, with no buzz. Instead, Pong heard a different sound: a crackle.
He crept a little closer, hiding behind a plant with leaves shaped like elephant ears.
A short man with a round belly stood in front of the house with his back to Pong. He flipped his wrists and something sizzled. Then Pong noticed the smoke drifting up into the dark sky. His jaw fell open.
The man was cooking over a fire.
Pong had never seen one before. After the Great Fire and the arrival of the Governor, flame of any kind had been outlawed in the city. Pong’s schooling at Namwon was fairly pitiful, but one lesson was drilled into the prison children over and over again: the greatest danger in the world was fire.
Pong watched entranced as the flames licked the sticks of meat. He opened his mouth and let the pork-flavored air settle on his tongue.
“Don’t just stand there!” shouted a woman’s voice. Startled, Pong ducked farther behind the bush. “You’d better get going or you’re going to miss them!”
“I’m hurrying as fast as I can!” said the potbellied man. “Here, hand me that dish. I think it’s ready.”
Pong peered through the elephant ears. The man picked up the skewers of meat off the smoking grill and piled them onto a wooden dish. Greasy bits dripped down and sizzled on the coals. Pong gasped to see the man putting his hand just inches from the flames.
A woman with a face caked in half-wet baby powder came out of the house. She dressed the dish with some green onion and herbs and then slapped the man’s back. “Go on, get. The monks will already be back at the temple. You’ll have to take this straight there.”
“Yes, yes, I’m going, I’m going,” said the man as he slipped on his shoes.
He shuffled out of his yard and up the dirt road. Pong waited a few seconds, then followed behind, staying in the bushes.
The tall pile of meat teetered on the man’s dish as he huffed up the mountain. Pong wished with all his might that one of the skewers would fall off. But the man w
as like a juggler, never dropping any of it. The dirt lane wound through the jungle and met up with a larger road. There were houses here, but not many, and Pong was able to stay hidden in the vegetation and the early-morning shadows.
The trees and the road opened up all at once to reveal the grounds of a temple. The cluster of buildings all had stacked-tile roofs that sloped steeply to the sky. Pong had never been to a temple before, but based on what he’d seen in books, this one was on the plain side. Only the roofs were painted, and there weren’t any statues or fine carvings around the grounds.
Pong caught the scent of incense cutting through the glorious pork smell. The man puffed up the steps of one of the temple halls. Pong stayed at the bottom of the steps and watched him.
The man set his dish of meat on a low table in the center of the hall, next to other bowls of food donated to the temple monks: garlicky vegetables, fried chicken, and mysterious morsels wrapped in shiny banana leaves. The monks must have already been on their morning walk through their village and brought the food back here.
The man bowed low and respectfully, even though no one was there to see. Pong could hear the deep voices of men chanting farther back in one of the other buildings.
The man stood up with a groan. He jogged back down the steps and disappeared down the dark road. Pong’s mouth watered. The monks would be taking their morning meal soon. He didn’t have much time.
He leaped up the steps and snatched two skewers of meat off the dish on the table. With one in his hand and one in his teeth, he whirled around to find a face caked in baby powder staring at him in shock.
The old woman stood frozen, the basket of sticky rice her husband had forgotten swinging from her fingertips. The baby powder flaked off her cheeks as her shock turned to outrage. “Are. You. Stealing that? From the monks?”
A Wish in the Dark Page 3