Breathing Water

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Excuse me,” Da says, backing away. One of the adults sees the baby and waves them off. “No,” he says sharply, “not here.” He rises, his knee dangling, crimped at the end like a sausage, and Da backs out, into the hall.

  Huddled in the next room are old-looking children, all teeth and joints and fingers; one of them hisses at her. The room after that reeks with whiskey and is crowded with men, dangerously full of unhealthy heat. Da looks into six rooms, six separate hells, before a heavyset woman in her thirties smiles at her and waves her in. This woman, ten or twelve years older than Da, also has a baby.

  The older woman has somehow made the unfinished room feel warmer, although all she has done is lay a faded, threadbare blanket over the cement floor and made a soft mound of clothing to put her infant on. A candle burns in a bottle in the corner. Da offers a grateful wai, her palms pressed together as if in prayer, and then sets down the bag containing her new T-shirt, the blanket, the cake of soap, the milk, the small bottle of whiskey. Giving the other woman as much space as possible, Da sinks to a sitting position with the baby in her lap and says, “Thank you.”

  The woman makes a fluid movement, precise and economical, from mouth to ears. She can neither hear nor speak. She puts her hands side by side and extends them toward the baby in Da’s lap as though she wants to pour water on it. She brings her hands back to her chest and repeats the gesture, and Da realizes what it means and hands the child to the woman.

  In the woman’s arms, the heavy, stinking bundle becomes a baby. She gently unwraps the cloth, and a tiny hand emerges and opens and describes an arc through the air. The woman extends an index finger, and the baby’s fist closes on it.

  Da feels herself smile.

  The woman looks up and catches Da’s smile and returns it. At the sight of the smile, of the tiny fist around the finger, something breaks in the center of Da’s chest, something that has been hardening there for days. Her eyes fill with tears. The woman shakes her head slowly and extends her free arm, and Da creeps beneath it. With a stranger’s arm around her shoulders, Da wipes her eyes and looks down for the first time to study the face of her new child.

  9

  A Towel and a Frown

  The Day of the Telephone begins at 6:20 A.M.

  He rolls over blindly at the first ring, his hand slapping the surface of the bedside table and knocking the alarm clock to the floor, and Rose stirs and mutters beside him, although it takes more than a ringing phone and a falling clock to awaken her.

  The side of his hand hits the phone, sending it skittering to the edge of the table, but he manages to grab it before it follows the clock down. “What?” he says, his voice a frog’s croak in his ear.

  “Mr. Rafferty?” A woman’s voice.

  “Time is it?” Rafferty says.

  “Mr. Rafferty, this is Elora Weecherat with the Bangkok—”

  “Elora what?” He is rubbing scratchy eyes with his free hand.

  “Weecherat. With the Bangkok Sun.”

  “I don’t want a subscription.”

  “I’m wondering whether you have a comment about the story on page three.”

  Rafferty says, “Ummmm.”

  “Is the story accurate?”

  He hauls himself to a sitting position. “Give me a number,” he says.

  She recites a phone number, and he hangs up in the middle of it. He sits there, feeling the edge of sleep recede like the shoreline of a country he’s been forced to leave. The phone begins to ring again, and he pulls the jack out. This silences it in the bedroom, but he can hear it chirping away in the living room. He wraps himself in his robe as though it were a grievance and goes through the bedroom door, into the stuffy heat of the living room.

  The air conditioners in the bedrooms make sleep possible in the hot season, which this year seems to be twelve months long, but it makes little sense to cool the living room when no one is in it. The door to the balcony is closed, and the air is heavy with the stink of Rose’s cigarettes. For the thousandth time in his life with her, Rafferty wonders why cigarette smoke smells so much worse in the morning than it does at night. At night it has a sort of sinful razzle to it, but in the daytime it smells as toxic as asbestos. He goes to the sliding glass door and opens it. The clouds responsible for the previous evening’s drizzle have thinned to a high, pale ghosting, semitransparent as a film across the sky, a brilliant chromium heat-yellow in the east, but still a sleepy, pillow-feather gray to the west. As he checks his watch—6:25?—the phone rings again. Or, more accurately, it chirps like the world’s biggest, most aggressive cricket, the ring tone Miaow programmed into it.

  He glares at it, but it doesn’t explode, so he goes into the kitchen.

  He has taken lately to grinding the coffee beans before he goes to bed, not so much because of the noise the grinder makes in the morning, since nothing short of a collision with an asteroid would wake Rose, but as a way of shortening the amount of time it takes him to get the first gulp of coffee into his system. All he has to do now is turn on the pot, pour bottled water into the reservoir, and then stand there in suspended animation while the coffee drips. And drips. And drips.

  The phone rings four more times as he waits, his forehead pressed against the cool of the refrigerator door. As he pours his first cup, it begins again. He ignores it, sipping the hot liquid and waiting for the daily miracle, the renewal of consciousness and judgment and volition, that coffee always brings. At the twenty-fourth ring, the phone stops.

  And, with the chirping silenced, he hears his cell phone ringing. The surge from the coffee gives him the energy to go into the living room and check the display, which says ARTHIT.

  His throat tightens as the previous night comes back to him. Noi’s stash of pills. What it might mean.

  “Arthit,” he says.

  “One of our friends has been busy,” Arthit says. He sounds thick as sludge, as befits a man who drank his weight the previous evening.

  The fact that this is not about Noi sends a porous buoyancy through Rafferty and makes the day visible through the open door look less stifling. “We have friends in common?” He sucks down most of the coffee that remains in the cup.

  “One of our friends in the card game. You’re famous.”

  Rafferty says, “Well, don’t worry, I’ll still say hello to you. If we should happen to meet, I mean. However unlikely that may be.”

  After a moment Arthit says, “How much coffee have you had?”

  Rafferty looks down into the mug, which is empty. “One cup.”

  “You have a very responsive system.”

  “Some people are Ferraris,” Rafferty says, “and some are Land Rovers.”

  “And some are in the Bangkok Sun and the World,” Arthit says. “And a couple of the Thai-language papers, too.”

  “Wait. What’s in the paper?”

  “You and Pan,” Arthit says. “You’re big news.”

  Rafferty puts down the cup. “Let me go get the papers,” he says. “I’ll call you back.”

  THERE HE IS: page three in the Sun and page seven in the World. The Sun even has a dark, fuzzy picture, cribbed from the color shot on the back of Rafferty’s book Looking for Trouble in Thailand but oddly mutated by being cheaply converted into a black-and-white halftone.

  “I look like an ax murderer,” Rafferty says.

  “With all due respect,” Arthit says on the other end of the phone, “how you look is the least of your problems.”

  “No,” Rafferty says. “How you look is the least of my problems. How I look is a matter of some concern. Who talked to the press?”

  “None of them. They don’t have this kind of clout. One of them, probably Vinai, talked to someone who does have this kind of clout.”

  “Why Vinai?”

  “He’s the one who brought Pan.”

  “And why don’t you think he made the call himself?”

  “As I said, clout. By the time the game ended, the papers were coming up on deadline. I
t took somebody with weight to get the stories into the morning editions. And then look at what’s not in the story. The card game, any hint of resistance on Pan’s part—practically everything is missing except the fact that a farang has been selected to write Pan’s biography, with Pan’s blessing.”

  “So what does that mean?”

  Arthit says, “I don’t know yet.”

  Rafferty’s adopted daughter, Miaow, comes into the living room, her hair wet and pasted to her head from her morning shower, on her way to another challenging day of fourth grade. She has been detached and even sullen lately, but she’s sufficiently surprised to see Rafferty—who’s not often up at this hour—to give him a startled little wave. Then she damps down her enthusiasm and heads for the kitchen.

  “My phone’s been ringing all morning,” Rafferty says to Arthit.

  “Oh, sure. This is news. Bangkok’s most profligate billionaire, the guy who gold-plated his Rolls-Royce and is known not to care for farang, has suddenly given one of them the right to tell his story.”

  As if on cue, the other phone begins to ring.

  “There’s my public,” Rafferty says. “Do you know somebody on the Sun, a reporter called Eloise or Eleanor or something?”

  “Elora?” Arthit asks. Miaow comes into the room with a can of Coke in one hand and an orange in the other and starts toward the ringing phone. Rafferty holds up a hand to stop her.

  “That’s it,” he says to Arthit. “Elora.”

  “Elora Weecherat,” Arthit says. “Business section. Looks like a fashion model, but she’s as tough as nails.”

  Miaow tucks the orange under her chin and picks up the phone, ignoring Rafferty’s attempt to wave her off. “Yeah?” she says.

  “Is she pro or con on Pan?” Rafferty asks.

  “She’s got a kind of horrified fascination,” Arthit says. “Mainly because of all the girls.”

  Miaow says, “He’s on the other phone. This is his daughter.”

  Hearing Miaow refer to herself as his daughter makes Rafferty smile, although he knows she won’t like his smile any more than she seems to like anything else these days. “What’s she going to think when I quit?”

  “Are you going to quit?”

  “No,” Miaow says, in the put-upon tone Rafferty’s been hearing a lot of. “I won’t write down a number. I’m eating breakfast. Call him back.” She hangs up and takes the orange out from under her chin, and her eyes drift to the newspapers on the table.

  “I thought we’d decided that last night,” Rafferty says. “I’m going to call him today and tell him I changed my mind.”

  “Just checking,” Arthit says. “I didn’t know we’d come to a firm decision.”

  “All this nonsense this morning has, as the British say, stiffened my resolve. I am stiffly resolved not to do it.”

  Miaow nudges Rafferty’s arm. He glances up to see her finger pointed at his photo in the Sun. He nods, and Miaow tugs down the corners of her mouth and lifts her eyebrows, looking grudgingly impressed. At least, Rafferty thinks, it’s a reaction.

  “Well, when you tell her you’re not going to write it,” Arthit says, “give her a reason, or she’s going to think you’ve been scared off.”

  “But if Pan has given me permission to write it, why would he scare me off?”

  “There are other people,” Arthit says, “lots of other people, who would much prefer that a book, especially a sympathetic book, not be written.”

  “Who?”

  “People who are worried about his personal power base. He’s extremely popular among the poor, especially in the northeast.”

  “Why?”

  “Ask someone who’s poor,” Arthit says. “Or used to be.”

  Miaow is reading the story that accompanies the photograph. She gives a low whistle, which comes as a surprise. Rafferty hadn’t known she could whistle.

  Watching Miaow run her finger along the lines of type, Rafferty says, “What would you do if you were in my shoes?”

  “I’d take a careful look around, assess the total situation, add up the pros and cons, and then scream.”

  “Thanks. How’s Noi?”

  “We’ll talk about that later,” Arthit says, and hangs up.

  “What is this?” Miaow asks. She is rubbing the surface of the photo with her index finger as though she expects it to come off the page.

  “It’s a picture of me.”

  “You look really ugly,” Miaow says, and the door to the bedroom opens and Rose comes out, wrapped in a towel and a frown, just as the phone begins to ring.

  “Why is it so noisy?” she asks.

  “Poke’s in the paper,” Miaow says, rotating the Sun to face Rose. Then, without another word, she turns her back on both of them and heads for the kitchen.

  “What?” Rafferty says into the phone.

  “Listen to me,” says a man’s voice.

  “I have the phone at my ear and everything,” Rafferty says. “Just poised to listen.”

  Rose says, “This is a terrible picture.”

  “You will not write this book,” the man says. “If you write it, you, your wife, and your daughter will die.”

  “Who is this?” Rafferty says, and the tone of his voice brings Rose’s eyes up.

  “Did you hear me?” the man asks.

  “I asked who you were.”

  “All three of you will die,” the man says. He hangs up.

  Both Rose and Miaow, who stopped at the kitchen counter, are staring at Rafferty now. He brings up the corners of his mouth, hoping it looks like a smile, and says, “I don’t think the picture’s that bad.”

  10

  Or What?

  He’s a great man,” Rose says. She blows on her cup of Nescafé.

  “Are we talking about the same guy?” Rafferty’s on his third cup of coffee, waiting for Miaow to finish getting ready for school, since he’s decided not to let her go alone today. She has grudgingly agreed to allow him to accompany her.

  He eyes Rose’s cup of instant with resignation. He’s abandoned his two-year campaign to get her to give up Nescafé, the coffee she grew up on. He’s spent a fortune on exotic beans, coffeemakers, gold filter cones, and bottled water to convert her, and her dream cup of coffee still involves hot water run from the tap onto a heaping clot of brown powder.

  “We’re talking about Pan,” she says. “The gold car and the girls.”

  “He’s a thug. And a drunk.”

  “So what? The way he acts, he knows what he’s doing. He’s like a bone in their throats.”

  “Whose throats?”

  “The good people,” she says, and he is taken aback at the bitterness in her voice. “The big people, the people who have everything and want more. The people who take, take, take, own, own, own. The people who go to fancy parties with blood on their hands. With their expensive cars and their big houses and their beautiful clothes and their terrible, spoiled children. The people who own the streets underneath the bars the girls work in and the rooms they sleep in when they’re finished screwing tourists. And then sell them the drugs for AIDS.” She slaps the cup down, loudly enough to straighten his spine. “You know. The people who have run everything forever.”

  They are seated opposite each other at the counter that divides the kitchen from the living room. The brilliance of the new day spills into the room behind Rose, catching flyaway locks of her hair and exploding what seems like a hundred colors out of the long fall of black that stretches to the dimples at the base of her spine. He leans across and touches her wrist.

  “He drives them crazy.” She turns her hand palm up and wraps her fingers around his. “He’s dirt, up from some pigshit village, and he rubs their noses in it every day of the year. He shoved his way in here, with his awful skin and his burned hands and his one low shoulder, and grabbed a place at the dinner table without being invited, and then he pushed all their plates and glasses onto the floor, and spit on them. And then he bought everything they owned, t
wo or three of everything, and covered them with gold just to make them uglier. And he takes the most beautiful women in the country, the ones they all want, and drags them behind him like a parade.”

  “What’s the point?”

  Rose shakes her head. “To prove that someone like him can have everything they have, everything that makes them special, and then shit on it. That someone can get rich without pretending to be one of them or trying to hide where he came from. The richer he gets, the cruder he gets. It scares them. They think he does it on purpose, just to build his personal power base.”

  Power: the word Arthit had used. “Does what? Act like a pig?”

  She turns the cup in the saucer, just doing something while she thinks. “That’s one side of it. But then he also gives money away like old newspaper. He sets up what he calls ‘banks’ up north. But they’re not really banks. Real banks lend money at interest and take away houses and things. His banks make small loans, maybe three or four hundred dollars, to poor people who have an idea for a business. If the business works, they pay back a little more than they borrowed. If the business fails, they don’t owe him anything. There are weaving villages now, woodcarving villages, silver-jewelry villages. There are men who own three or four trucks that they rent to farmers whenever they’re needed.”

  “Why does that upset anyone?”

  She dips her index finger into her cup and flicks coffee at him. “You’re supposed to understand this country. You wrote a book about it, remember?”

  “I’ve never claimed to understand it. That’s why I married you.”

  She pushes the coffee aside. “It upsets people because poor people are supposed to stay poor. They’re not supposed to have papers that say they own their land. They’re not supposed to have money in the bank so they can stockpile their harvests until the prices go up. They’re not supposed to do anything except live and die, and get fucked over in between. Grow the rice and sell it for nothing. Clear the land so some godfather can kick them off it and build ugly, expensive houses. Go where they’re told and stay where they’re put. Present themselves for sacrifice on a regular basis so the rich can stay fat.”