The Queen of Patpong pr-4

by Timothy Hallinan

  "Stay here," she whispers, her lips practically touching Nana's ear. Kwan throws off the blanket and eases herself back so she can slip off the edge of the platform that faces away from the street. From there it's just a few fast steps to the darkness beneath the house that's behind the platform. Kwan has to bend almost double to squeeze into the space, and the rough, unfinished wood above her snatches at the threads of her T-shirt, but she keeps going until she's well past the midpoint of the house, two meters or so beyond the moonlight's milky edge. She drops to her knees, scoops dirt into her hands, and rubs it on her face. When she finally breathes, it feels as if a stone is caught in her throat.

  Nana sits on the platform, one knee drawn up like someone who could sit there forever. She is humming.

  "Well," her father says from somewhere to the right, out of Kwan's line of sight. "Look here. It's little Moo."

  "Nana. I stopped being Moo a long time ago."

  Kwan's father lurches into view. He stops in front of Nana, swaying slightly. He is as drunk as Kwan has ever seen him. He blinks heavily down at Nana as though to clear his vision. "Still Moo. Got nice clothes now, got pale skin, not so fat, but you're still dirty."

  "And you're still a drunk," Nana says, with a calm that amazes Kwan. She could never talk like that to an older man who's not a member of her family.

  Her father takes half a step back. "Little whore. Up from Bangkok, waving around your hundred-baht ass."

  Nana laughs. "A hundred baht? For a hundred baht, I wouldn't show you the bottom of my foot." She waves him off, left-handed, like she'd shoo a chicken. "Why don't you keep going wherever you were going? There's probably another bottle there."

  Kwan's father clears his throat loudly and spits. Kwan thinks the spittle may have struck Nana, but Nana doesn't move a muscle. Beyond Nana's black silhouette, Kwan can see half of her father's face, rendered in pastel by the moonlight. After a moment he says, "Your round little ass." He lifts his chin imperiously and stumbles back a step. "I got money."

  Kwan's heart is suddenly pounding at the side of her neck.

  "Not enough," Nana says. "No matter how much you have, it's nowhere near enough."

  "Got a lot."

  "Fine," Nana says. "Thirty thousand baht. Special price, just for you."

  Her father pulls his head back, as though someone has swung at him. "Thirty- 'At's a joke, right?"

  "For thirty thousand," Nana says sweetly, "I'll let you lick my shadow. It's right down there, on the dirt."

  "Little bitch." He takes a step toward her, raising one arm.

  "Hit me," Nana says. "And then I'll scream, and when everybody comes, I'll explain how you offered me thirty thousand baht to sniff my butt. And then I'll ask where you got thirty thousand baht. In fact, you don't even have to hit me. I'll scream anyway, just for fun."

  "No, no, no." Kwan's father looks reflexively in the direction of his house. "Don't."

  "Two thousand baht," Nana says. "Right now. Two thousand baht or I scream."

  A pause. "You said what?"

  "Village men," Nana says, spitting the words as though they'd caught in her throat. "I always forget how slow they are. Two thousand baht right now, from your pocket into my hand, or I scream. Was that slow enough for you?"

  Kwan's father squeezes out a bleary laugh. "Who's going to believe you? Everybody knows what you do down there."

  "You're probably right. So it'll be twenty-five hundred. For reminding me."

  Her father sways in the moonlight, looking down at Nana.

  "All right," Nana says. "Here goes." She takes a deep breath and raises both hands to her mouth.

  "Stop." Kwan's father digs into his pockets, pulls out a handful of bills, and fumbles blunt-fingered through it. "One thousand, fifteen hundred, two thousand five hundred." He puts the other bills back. It's a thick wad, and Kwan's eyes follow it, something in her chest threatening to break into sharp pieces.

  Nana withdraws her outstretched hand. "Put it on the platform," she says. "Do it politely. And not too close."

  He releases a sharp hiss between his teeth but shuffles forward and bends down to put the bills beside Nana. The movement puts his eyes level with Kwan's, and for a heart-freezing moment she thinks he's seen her, but he straightens.

  Nana picks up the money by its corners, using the tips of two fingers, and shakes it as though things are crawling on it. Then she slips it into her pocket. "Were you looking for Kwan?" she asks, as pleasantly as though they haven't exchanged a word yet.

  "Was I–I was, yes. Stork, looking for Stork. Ought to be home by now."

  "You take such good care of her," Nana says. "She's a lucky girl. She went that way." She points off toward the other end of the village. "Maybe half an hour ago, maybe more."

  "By herself?"

  "Who could she have been with? Her fiance? Her big gang of friends? Of course she was by herself."

  Kwan's father hesitates and licks his lips. "Can I have the money back?"

  "Ask me again and it'll be five thousand."

  He bares crooked teeth. "Ahhhh. Fuck you and your mother." He turns and shambles down the street in the direction Kwan indicated. "And your mother's mother," he says over his shoulder.

  "Keep talking," Nana says. "Sooner or later you'll think of something clever." She gets up from the platform and wraps the blanket around her like a big shawl, watching him go. Hunched down in the darkness, Kwan stares at her. She has never in her life heard a woman talk to a man like that. It violates everything she's been taught about men and women, about young people and their elders, but somewhere deep inside, somewhere even deeper than the heartbreak, she wants to laugh.

  "I'm going to walk the other way," Nana says very quietly, without turning toward her. "Go out on the other side of the house and take the same direction. Keep the houses between us. After the last house, I'll come to you and we'll find someplace else to sit. We have to finish talking about this." "YOU HEARD," NANA says. "You saw. The money."

  Kwan doesn't answer. They're in a small clearing fifteen or twenty meters beyond the last house in the village, a rough rectangle of pale earth, black-shadowed by trees silhouetted against the moon. This is a place Kwan knows, a place she went to sit, a place she hid in, when she was a child and wanted to be alone with her thoughts. A long time ago, before she was born, a house had stood here, but the owners went away. Over the course of years, the villagers had gradually picked the structure apart, piece by piece. Bits of it are now woven into every house in the village.

  For some reason the foliage never grew back. On hot, still days when the air was thick with sun and the electric buzz of cicadas, Kwan sat and probed the soil with a stick. She unearthed broken pieces of dishes, sharp corners of old pottery, on one memorable day a tarnished spoon, and this miscellany of litter became her treasure. After days of reburying it every time she went home, she thought, Nobody ever looks up. And so, high in a tree behind the clearing, knotted around a branch, she hung a tattered head scarf that she'd wrapped her treasure in. Feeling Nana waiting for a response, she finds herself wondering whether the treasure still hangs there.

  "He wanted me," Nana says. "What about you?" She tosses her head in the direction of Kwan's house. "Has he-"

  "No," Kwan says flatly. "He wants to. When he's drunk, he wants to. He fumbles at me sometimes. But I've never even let him put his hand under my clothes." She feels the shame rise in her. "He looks at Mai sometimes, too."

  "Mmmmm." Nana glances around the clearing. "I remember this place. Sort of."

  "I hid treasure here once." Kwan knows it sounds silly, but anything seems safer than talking about what's happened this night, what she just saw her father do, the things Nana has been saying.

  "Treasure?"

  "Stuff. Broken stuff. I dug it up from where the house used to be."

  Nana turns to her. "You hid it. Did you bury it?"

  "No. It's back there, in a tree." She thumbs over her shoulder toward the trees behind her. "It was
back there anyway."

  Nana swallows, loudly enough for Kwan to hear it. "I want to see it."

  "Nana, it's junk."

  "I want to see if it's still there."

  Kwan regards her. Nana's mouth is set in a line of determination. The moon plants tiny points of light in her eyes. "Why?"

  "If it's still there," Nana says, and then she closes her eyes tightly, "if it's still there, maybe everything will be all right for you."

  Kwan is inhaling, but her throat suddenly slams shut. She looks at Nana, her eyes still closed, and an enormous sob swells into existence inside her and pushes its way out. A moment later she is sitting on the ground with no memory of how she got there, weeping loudly, and Nana is beside her with both arms wrapped around her, saying, "Hush, hush, hush. They can hear you. Go ahead and cry, but here, here…" She puts a soft hand on Kwan's wet cheek and presses Kwan's face against the lightly fragrant silk of her blouse. "Here, baby, cry here. But quietly, quietly."

  Kwan laces her fingers behind Nana's neck, pressing her forehead against this girl she has never liked, and releases sob after sob into the darkness like black birds. She can almost feel them circling Nana and her, spiraling higher until they point themselves toward the moon and disappear.

  "It's all right, baby," Nana whispers. "It's just time to grow up. It's just growing up, that's all. You're not going to die." She smooths Kwan's hair with one hand, and then she says, "Oh, this hair. How I'd love hair like this."

  Kwan says, "You can have it," and a single laugh bubbles up. She sits back and passes her forearm over her face, blinking her eyes rapidly to force out any late-arriving tears. She's not through crying, but she'll wait until she's alone. She sniffles, loudly enough to startle herself.

  Nana reaches out and wipes the side of Kwan's neck, then dries her hand on her black silk blouse. The blouse is smeared with streaks of dirt, the dirt Kwan rubbed on her face so her father wouldn't see her. "Let's look," Nana says.

  Kwan sniffles again and says, "This is silly," but she's getting up as she speaks the words.

  "I'll bet you don't remember where you-"

  "Of course I do." She's standing, still feeling the cool dampness on her cheeks, and blots them with the backs of her hands, and then she extends a hand to Nana, who grabs hold and hauls herself upright with a little grunt, and for a moment they're both children again. Nana dusts her rear and scans the perimeter of the clearing. "Five hundred baht," she says. "Five hundred baht says you can't find it."

  "Where would I get five hundred baht?"

  "Then you'd better find it, or you'll owe me. And believe me, you don't want to owe me money."

  Kwan takes a couple of steps and stops. The edge of the clearing is black and unfamiliar. She says, "I hid it during the daytime."

  "Do I hear an excuse?"

  "Quiet. I am going to find it." She turns toward the road and reorients herself, then stretches an arm in front of her, her index finger pointing straight ahead, grabs a breath that seems to go all the way to her knees, and slowly rotates to the left. About three-quarters of the way around, she says, "There." Then she follows her finger, edging between a couple of low bushes and past a waist-high tree stump, Nana trailing behind, until she comes to a tree with a broad branch angling up to the right.

  The flare of recognition gives way to surprise. "That limb was lower when I did this."

  "So were you," Nana says.

  "I can get up there." On tiptoe, Kwan gets the palms of her hands on the top of the branch, judging its height, then bends her knees and jumps. She throws both arms over the branch, anchors herself, and then starts to swing her legs side to side until she can throw one foot over the limb. Once that's done, she gets her other foot up and locks her ankles on top of the branch so she's hanging upside down like a sloth. "I feel ten years old," she says.

  "It's okay," Nana says. "Come down before you break your neck. I believe you."

  "I want my treasure." Kwan gets one thigh on top of the branch and hauls herself up so she's flat on her stomach. The ground looks a long way off. She balances herself and peers into the darkness of the foliage. "Oh," she says, surprised in spite of herself. "Oh, I can see it." She inches forward, pulling herself along, feeling the bark scratching the tender skin on the insides of her arms. Nana is saying something beneath her, but Kwan disregards it and inches farther up, at about a twenty-degree angle, the dark, dangling shape now less than a meter away. "I don't believe it. It's still here."

  Gripping the limb tightly between her thighs, she sits up and extends both hands until they touch the rough cloth of the scarf, which feels dirty and slightly sticky. There are pointed objects inside it. Suddenly she remembers the exact knot she tied in the sunlight as the cicadas whirred, and she reaches up to undo the work of nine years ago. Her fingers find the knot and trace its shape. All she has to do is ease the scarf off the twig it hangs from and then untie the knot, but she stops, feeling her hand shake. She sits there long enough for Nana to ask a question.

  "Wait," Kwan says, not even trying to reassemble Nana's words into something she understands. The moon throws patterns of light around her, dappling her bare arms and the front of her shirt, and the leaves of the tree shiver in a breeze so slight it might be the weight of the moonlight. The forest stretches off in all directions, a village here and a village there, linked by paths she can walk blindfolded, paths she explored alone, at a time when she imagined a monster waiting at every turn. A time when monsters were imaginary. She smells the sharp tang of the fire she noticed earlier, and she knows that if she were on the other side of her village, she would see the moon below her, shining up from the water in the paddies.

  To Nana she says, "Can you hear this?" She strikes the hanging bundle with her open palm, and it makes a clattering sound, like someone shaking rocks in cupped hands.

  "Yes."

  "Well, that's it. Can you think of any other way I could have made that noise up here?"

  "No."

  Kwan hits the bundle twice more. It rattles and clatters. Dirt sifts down through the coarse weave of the cloth onto her other hand. She hits it harder, slapping at it now, feeling the muscles in her back tighten, feeling her jaw clench, and then tears are standing in her eyes. It's junk, just like she said. Her treasure is junk, crusted with dirt, trash that even the poorest, hungriest child wouldn't bend down to pick up. She sees the precision of the knot. Her eight-year-old fingers making sure her treasure wouldn't fall. Broken things. Useless things. Worthless, but hidden.

  Like her. She reaches for the bundle again, meaning to rip it loose and throw it down, but instead, holding her breath without knowing it, she passes her hands lightly over its shape. Finding an area where the pieces bulge out beneath the cloth, she pushes them back in, tracing the teardrop form of the bag beneath her palms, patting it here and there to make it symmetrical. When she takes her hands away, it's swinging back and forth slightly, and she puts one hand up, wide open, to still its movement. She lets her fingers rest against an eight-year-old's treasure, closes her eyes, and tries to feel the magic it had all those years ago. She sits there like that until her arm feels heavy and the bag is warm to the touch.

  She slips sideways off the limb and lets herself drop, feetfirst, to the ground.

  Nana says, "Where is it?"

  Kwan has to clear her throat before her voice will come. "Up there."

  Nana's eyebrows contract and then smooth again. "And you're going to leave it up there?"

  Kwan says, "Until I come back for it."

  Chapter 11

  Nowhere in Particular

  In the end it was simple. Mr. Pattison came at exactly four o'clock the next afternoon and handed Kwan's father eight one-thousand-baht bills and four five-hundreds: ten thousand baht precisely. Her father crumpled them like scrap and shoved them into his back pocket. Kwan read out loud to her mother and father the piece of paper that was meant to lock the door of the schoolhouse behind her, as though the document contained the
words of the king, unquestionable and unbreakable. Her father nodded solemnly, but Kwan's mother stayed across the room, as far from the transaction as possible. She seemed as insubstantial as smoke.

  Kwan's father signed the paper, some kind of mark that he thought looked like writing. Mr. Pattison folded and pocketed the document, made a wai to Kwan's father, and got one, more or less, in return. He patted Kwan on the shoulder and said, in English, "Glad you're going to stay with us."

  Kwan said, "Me, too. I thank you and Teacher Suttikul."

  "No problem," Mr. Pattison said, and then added, in his awful Thai, "We'll look forward to seeing Kwan at school tomorrow." He left, and the silence in the house was loud enough to drive Kwan outside.

  Her mother never met her eyes.

  The next morning Kwan left for school at the usual time, wearing her frayed uniform, the white blouse above the blue skirt with the hem her mother had let down as far as it could go to cover her daughter's endless legs, so far that there was no fold left. Stuffed beneath the papers in Kwan's book bag were two clean T-shirts and her only pair of jeans. She counted the steps down to the street while, behind her, sounding as though he were already a thousand miles away, her father asked what time she'd be home and her mother said same time as always, and her father said what time is that, and her mother said four, and her father grunted. As their voices faded, she marked the moment when she stepped free of her house's shadow and the sun struck her skin. She kept her eyes straight ahead as she walked between the rows of sagging houses, her heart beating like a drum in counterpoint to her footsteps.

  When she was safely out of sight of the village, she stopped. She stood there, nowhere in particular, loose-jointed and hollow, for three or four minutes, hearing the cicadas without listening to them and looking at a spot on the road a few meters in front of her, where a small stone lay. Then she reached into the pocket of her blouse and took out the sapphire earrings, which she had removed before going home the previous evening. She put them on by feel, still looking at the spot on the road, and then she went over to the stone and picked it up and put it in her pocket. The earrings were glittering in her ears when, a little less than halfway to school, she took a narrow path between the paddies to the bigger road and climbed into the taxi that was waiting there. The door closing behind her sounded like a cannon.