Street Music

by Timothy Hallinan

  21

  Wherever That Was Now

  As the day warmed and brightened and the spirit world receded, drawn away on the tide of the darkness, the things that had kept her moving—anger at first, when she stepped out of the house, replaced by uncertainty as she looked for the turnoff to the longer route, and then fear as she picked her way through the ghost-ridden forest—turned to an uneasy mixture of eagerness and doubt. She was reasonably certain that she was only a few kilometers from Hyukk-Hyukk’s village, and for all she knew, he was still there, with his sweet, beautiful midnight eyes and his stupid laugh, and probably that same clattering car, held together with tape and wire, with a passenger door that he’d had to tie closed with a length of rope, knotted around the posts of two missing windows.

  He had liked her, she’d known it. Although her sister Lawan, the flirt in the family, had squeezed into the middle, between her and Hyukk-Hyukk, he’d leaned past Lawan several times to talk to Hom, and, a few kilometers into the trip, he’d tilted the rearview mirror so they could see each other in it. When he did that, Lawan had pinched Hom’s thigh, hard. Hom had let out a little yip, and Hyukk-Hyukk had asked if something was wrong, and she’d said, no, no, it was just that he was such a good driver. She’d met his eyes in the mirror then, seeing that he’d gone scarlet and that Lawan was glaring straight through the windshield like some ancient queen being taken to the place where her head would be cut off. Hom had burst into laughter and heard the answering hyukk-hyukk, and then Lawan had begun to giggle, too, and for a few kilometers the world had been perfect. They were young, they were beautiful, they were free, and even that awful car, with its broken windows and the occasional bang it let out from the exhaust, as though it was practicing for a real explosion, was part of the story, a story that could have ended in any of a dozen ways, all of them happy.

  Instead—she cut the thought short as though with a pair of shears, maybe the old but amazingly sharp ones their mother used when she made clothes. She was here, she had survived the forest, she was almost home, she had the world’s best baby.

  And there it was, wasn’t it?

  When she saw Hyukk-Hyukk and his midnight-black eyes again, if she saw him again, she’d be carrying a baby. That was, of course, a completely different story. Not so many possible endings, not so many of them happy. He could be married, she suddenly thought, surprised at the pang of regret that accompanied the notion. She’d barely known him. It had been years ago. She was married. She was carrying a baby.

  She was in a new world, one with no clearly marked exit.

  What had she done to her life?

  This was, she supposed, what her mother had meant when she talked about growing up, that mysterious stage of life when she would have responsibilities, when people would depend upon her, when she could no longer claim not to know better. Now, she supposed, she knew better, and what she had learned was that some doors, when closed, could not be reopened, and that the doors that locked most permanently of all were the ones between you and the times when you were happiest. The surprise, it turned out, about knowing better was that it was mostly for the worst. Time only moved in one direction. It moved away from when you were happiest, and it dragged you with it.

  So the boy might still be in the village, he might still have the world’s darkest eyes, but she was no longer someone who could catch those eyes in a rearview mirror and ask herself, even lightly, whether he was her future. The future was here, and in it she was a woman with a child and a husband and a mother-in-law. She was a woman who hadn’t laughed in months and who seemed to have lost the map to anyplace where she could laugh.

  On the other hand, here was Miaow, this warm, shifting weight in her arms, with eyes that were seeing everything for the first time, dropped like a stone into a world that had no place set aside for her, that could roll over her and crush her and move on without slowing, this child she had caught as it fell into life, and whose diaper, she suddenly realized, stank to heaven and who, Hom knew, had the power to break her heart in whole new ways, ways she had never dreamed of before. And to whom she was, for the present, everything.

  And so, in the end, when she saw the village, his village, she skirted it, head down like someone who had stolen something there long ago and was afraid she’d be recognized. Once she was safely on the other side, she drew the deepest breath of her life, kissed her smelly child’s forehead and struck out for home, whatever and wherever that was now.

  22

  The Ticket

  Of course, after a few days, he came for her.

  She’d felt, during that time, like an intruder in her own house, even though her mother had melted over the baby, and her sisters had briefly abandoned their own husbands to come see her and to coo about Miaow, how she had Hom’s father’s coal-black eyes and the little dimple in the center of his chin that they’d always teased him about. The dimple, as it happened, would disappear sometime during Miaow’s early childhood, but that, combined with her black eyes, had won her grandfather’s heart. He was a man who had sired nothing but daughters, all of whom resembled the beauty he had married; and Miaow, even though she was a girl, had delighted him by paying him the long-delayed courtesy of looking like his side of the family.

  The village grannies had streamed in to pay their respects and had made a point, in response to whispered instructions from Hom’s mother, of complimenting Hom’s father on his strength and vigor, planting his resemblance across the leap of a whole generation. And here, in this house and this village, there was no reluctance to tell Hom how beautiful the baby was, even if the praises were whispered to avoid provoking the envy of the spirits. The story of Miaow’s magical silence during their passage through that long dark night was shared and marveled over, and it marked her, many believed (or said that they believed), as an exceptional child, one with potent spirit guardians.

  Also expressed—at least, by those who were unaware that Hom could hear them though the house’s thin walls—was a certain disapproval that she had abandoned her husband after such a relatively short time. She had answered their questions honestly: no, he had not been a drunkard; no, he hadn’t actually beaten her, just a few slaps (and some of the women gave tiny nods of recognition); no, he hadn’t appeared to be a butterfly, flitting from woman to woman. So he had a difficult mother. At this piece of information, most of the married women glanced at the other married women. Whose mother-in-law wasn’t difficult? Many of them, in fact, had become difficult mothers-in-law themselves and were aware, perhaps even a little proud, of the fact. Who among them had a son who had chosen a girl who was worthy of him? And even if she was worthy of him, what did she know about life, about marriage, about the superior wisdom, the breadth of experience, of mothers-in-law?

  Hom, they whispered (although not quietly enough, in that small house), had been the baby of her family, the spoiled one, the willful one who had always demanded her own way and the too-pretty one who usually got it. Her mother-in-law, they agreed, was probably simply set in her ways; the newly married couple was, after all, living in her house, which spoke well of Hom’s husband. He had not abandoned his widowed mother. How bad could she be, asked these women (whose greatest fear was being left alone and penniless) if her son had stayed beside her to protect and care for her in her old age? On the whole, many of them thought—remembering the first year or so with their own daughters-in-law—there were at least two sides to every story.

  So, in the familiar room she had reclaimed (which seemed smaller now than she had remembered), Hom heard some of this, heard her own mother agree that Hom had always wanted things her way. Hearing those words, she hugged Miaow so hard that the baby cried out, and waited for the knock at the door, the one she dreaded to hear.

  When it came, at dusk on her twelfth evening there, she was asleep beside Miaow after an active day. Snatched from a good dream, shaken awake by her mother to learn that real life had just s
houldered its way in, she told her mother not to let Daw in but to keep him at the door while she put on clean clothes and threw water in her face, not to clean it but to sharpen her wits, bring her the rest of the way back from her dream.

  Her father stood aside when he heard her coming, but Daw did not come in. He had even, she saw, politely bent his back a little so he didn’t tower over her father quite so much. He had combed his hair, put on his best shirt, making him look more like someone who had come courting than a man intent on reclaiming a wayward wife. And, rather than barging into the house, he asked Hom’s father whether he and Hom could go for a short walk and talk outside. He had bothered them too much already, he said. Would her father consent?

  Hom realized she was staring at him and lowered her eyes. He’d never behaved so deferentially, and she didn’t want him to see her confusion.

  “She’s not only my daughter, now,” her father said. “She’s your wife. I think you should ask her.”

  “I want my father to hear what you say,” Hom said. She still hadn’t met his eyes,

  Her father said, “This is between you and your husband.” But he stayed where he was.

  Daw took a step forward, just inside the doorframe, and startled her by saying, “Yoot duang jai,” or “dearest heart,” which he hadn’t called her since the day she said she’d marry him. Even her father’s eyebrows went up. “Please? We can stay close enough so your father can see us.”

  Her father asked her, “Daughter?”

  Hom said, “How far away is your motorbike?”

  “I borrowed a car.” He pointed down the street, at a battered and peeling Honda with a cracked windshield, four houses away. “I parked it there. I thought it would make you more comfortable if it wasn’t so close.”

  This was, for an instant, anyway, the Daw she’d thought she had married. When she met him, when he first rode his motorcycle into her village to see the girl people said was so beautiful, one of the first things Hom had liked about him was his name, which meant bright shining star. It hadn’t hurt his cause that he was strikingly handsome and that a couple of other girls in the village got a little silly about him, and that even one of her own sisters (already married) had stood stock-still, watching as he approached the house and said, “Hmmmmmmm,” in the precise tone their mother used when she saw something in the market that she really wanted.

  And, back then, he’d shown her a kind of gentleness that went with his name and that set him apart from the boys in the neighborhood, who seemed to take it for granted that she’d eventually fall into one local set of calloused hands or another, and who regarded the competition as a sort of sporting event in which she was the trophy. She’d seen enough trophies won to know that their value faded the moment they were put on the shelf.

  So he seemed to value her, and—another advantage—she hadn’t had to watch him grow up, through baby teeth and plump cheeks to acne, peach fuzz, and an Adam’s apple; he wasn’t someone whose jokes she had heard a hundred times; he wasn’t bone-wearyingly familiar, like the village she wanted so deeply to leave. That was perhaps the best thing: in addition to his beauty and his bright new shininess and the luster of his name, he was a ticket to somewhere else—even somewhere, he hinted, as unthinkable, as exotic, as Bangkok.

  “There’s the bench,” Hom said, pointing at a sagging, splinter-filled seat that her father had built long before she was born. It was only a few meters from the door. “We can sit there.”

  Daw stood aside to let her pass, and Hom squeezed past her father and down the step, into the deepening evening. Instantly, mosquitoes whined at her, but she got bitten much less than most people while mosquitoes seemed to regard Daw as a gourmet meal, so she allowed herself a tiny twinge of satisfaction and took a place on the end of the bench closer to the house. Since the ground sloped downward away from the front door, it would lessen the difference in their height, too. In the house, Miaow began to cry.

  “I only have a few minutes,” Hom said.

  “She sounds healthy,” Daw said.

  “Yes, she’s getting enough to eat now.”

  He slapped at his neck and waved his hand in the air to dispel the friends of the one he had killed, and said, “I came to say I’m sorry.”

  “Well,” she said. “Thank you for that.”

  “My mother is not an easy person. She used to be different, but life has not been kind to her.”

  “That’s not a reason,” Hom said, “to take it out on everyone else.”

  “No, no, it isn’t. And I’m sorry I didn’t take your side more often.”

  “It wasn’t my side,” Hom said. “It was Miaow’s.”

  In the doorway, her father cleared his throat.

  “I want us to start over,” Daw said, slapping his neck again. “In Bangkok.”

  This wasn’t what she’d expected. On the other hand, it wasn’t like she hadn’t heard it already. With her father behind her and her mother-in-law some twenty kilometers away, she felt she could safely challenge him. “You said that before, and we never—”

  “Here.” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out two long rectangles of tan paper with green print on them. Passing his index finger under the line that read Bangkok, he said, “This is the fast train, supposed to be nine and a half hours. It’s more expensive, but for you and Miaow, it’s worth it. The slow one can take seventeen or eighteen, stops everywhere.” He pointed at the date. “Five days from now.”

  She felt a flare of irritation. “How do you know I’ll go? Maybe you wasted your money.”

  “I can get it back,” he said, and she dropped her eyes to hide the sudden and surprising wave of disappointment.

  “But I don’t want to give it back.” He took her hand and opened it and put the tickets inside. “What I want to do is keep my promise. I want to give you a new life. Away from this village, from my village. From my mother.”

  Her father cleared his throat again, and Hom knew that it was a prompt. When all was said and done, this was no longer her home. Her parents were past babies, past drama, past conflict. They wanted, as her father had said to her, to hold each other’s hands as the sun set. And she was in the way here.

  Daw rested a finger, so lightly she barely felt it, on the hand with the ticket in it. “I’m giving these to you. Both of them. That way, you’ll know that I meant it, even if you decide not to go with me.” He looked at her, lowering his head so he could see her eyes, and said, “I might ask for mine back, though. But you . . . you keep yours one way or the other.”

  In the house, Miaow, who had stopped crying, began again, and Daw stood and extended his hands to help Hom get up. After a moment, she took them and rose to her feet, avoiding looking at him. “I want to see her,” he said. “I’ve missed her. Is it all right with you,” he called to her father, “for me to go in and look at the baby for a minute or two?”

  “Fine with me,” her father said. “What about you, daughter?”

  “Ummmm,” she said, trying to think of a reason to say no. “I guess so.” Daw took a step forward, and she put a hand, fingers spread, in the center of his chest. It took no pressure to bring him to a halt. “I’ll lead you in,” she said. “She hasn’t seen you in a while.”

  Something flinty kindled in his eyes, but then it passed and he said, “Good idea. I wouldn’t want to frighten her.”

  So, with her heart thundering in her chest, she led him in, past Hom’s mother and two of the village grannies, eyebrows raised almost to their hairlines, and past them into the tiny hallway that led to the room she grew up in, which she had been sharing with Miaow. Behind them, one of the grannies whispered a short, sharp remark and the other women laughed, and she knew it was something earthy about how handsome Daw was. As long as she’d known him, older women had all but patted their chests, as though they needed help breathing, when they saw him. Even the women in his
own village, the ones who didn’t particularly like him, had to admit he was a good-looking man. One of them, without knowing that Hom could hear her, said it was like gold-plating shit. She’d been crestfallen when Hom burst into laughter, but then the two of them had locked eyes and giggled until they had to hold each other up.

  When they came into the room, Miaow stretched her arms out toward her mother, still crying, but Daw stepped up to the bed and picked the baby up, holding her to his chest and bouncing her up and down a little. Miaow stopped crying, and her eyes were enormous as she looked up at her father’s face. “There, there, there, there,” Daw said, “everything is all right. And what a pretty, pretty baby you are.” To Hom, he said, “She’s so pretty.”

  This was new territory. What she wanted to do was take the baby away from him, but instead she tilted her head to the left and looked from Miaow to Daw, suddenly noticing something she had never seen before. In the baby’s upper lip and the curve of her chin, there was an echo of Daw’s mother.

  “She’s beautiful,” Hom said, holding out her hands. He gave her the baby, but Miaow’s eyes stayed on Daw’s face.

  “The tickets are for five days from today,” he said again. “I hope you’ll come with me. If I haven’t heard from you on the day before, I’ll stop by and get mine.”

  “Here,” she said, handing one of them to him. “If I don’t go, this will spare you the trip.”

  23

  But Together

  But it wasn’t the fast train, after all. It took sixteen hours. It stopped in places where Hom didn’t even see a village. The promised luxurious seats were actually cramped benches that amplified every uneven join in the tracks, and the jolts and the noise kept Miaow up, waving her fists and squalling, for much of the trip.