Street Music

by Timothy Hallinan

  Rose pulls him into the room and closes the door. She says, in a whisper, “Not you, too. I go out one time, the world ends.”

  “I’m just happy to be home. With you. Someplace safe.” He sniffles.

  She leans toward him and wipes away the dampness beneath his eyes. She whispers, “Well, just be glad you weren’t here. If you had been, you might have gone someplace else.”

  He starts to sniffle again but cuts it off and swallows instead. “Miaow?”

  “I’ve never seen her like that. She was everything no one ever wants to be. She was frightened, heartbroken, embarrassed, even guilty. But mostly, I think, she was embarrassed. Wanted us to move tomorrow, wanted poor Edward to go away, wanted—”

  “Edward didn’t even see her.” He backs away to sniff again and decides he’s missed a bet all these years by not whispering in her ear. It’s intimate in a new way, and it gives him an opportunity to inhale her various fragrances without looking like an eager dog.

  “Yes, he did,” she says. She tows him to the foot of the bed and they both sit. With her lips practically touching his ear, she says, “He went to the door and looked out while you were walking her to the stairs. Fon and I saw him as we got off the elevator. The door to the stairs was just closing. I was carrying the baby, and we waved to Edward to hold the door open, and that’s when Miaow, who had apparently hidden in her room, came out and caught him looking down the hall. She acted crazy, like she wanted to kill him. We were trying to get through the door and she was actually trying to push him out into the hall.”

  “Poor baby.”

  “Which one?” Rose asks.

  “Well . . .” He hadn’t expected the question. “Miaow.”

  She pulls away and gives him a look that he hasn’t seen often, and it’s not admiring. “Really? That’s what you think?”

  “Oh, well,” he says, backing off instantly. “She’d had a shock, and—”

  “Fon ripped her to pieces, with Edward right there. Called her a heartless little snob, asked what it had to do with her if her mother was poor and homeless, asked whether she was embarrassed by me and by her—I mean, Fon—because we were prostitutes, after all, what about that? This was in Thai and pretty fast, so Edward didn’t get it, but Miaow went as white as a sheet and Fon asked whether any of us were good enough for her, said maybe she should apply for adoption by the royal family—”

  Rafferty laughs out loud and then covers his mouth and looks over at the crib. The baby hasn’t even taken his thumb out of his mouth.

  “He’s dead to the world,” Rose says. “First there was the restaurant, with all the people in Thailand, and half of them coming by for a closer look at him. The people have spoken, by the way. He’s a pretty baby.”

  “How could he not be?”

  “And then he comes home to a room where people are doing practically everything except shooting each other, and now it’s official. He’s his father’s son. People crying and screaming at each other. It was bad enough to bring old Mrs. Pongsiri down the hall to see if anyone needed help, and she’s as deaf as a tree. And Frank is just all big eyes, taking it in, staring at whoever is screaming the loudest. Looking like he wanted to get in and break it up.”

  He says, “Put your lips closer to my ear.”

  “Not yet,” she says. “But in a couple of weeks I’m going to take about five years off your life. On this very bed.”

  “Promise? I’m going to start crossing off days on the calendar.”

  She takes his hair in her fist and pulls as she falls all the way back until her head is on the pillow, and he follows. When they’re side by side, looking at the ceiling, she says, “So our daughter is a snob, poor thing. How was she?”

  “You mean Miaow’s mother?”

  “Of course, I mean mom. That’s who you’ve been with, right?”

  “Sad. Dirty. Broken. Abandoned. Lost, hopeless. And, after Miaow’s reaction tonight, heartbroken all over again.”

  “Living on the street. Begging?”

  “When the cops will let her keep it.”

  “Fuckers,” Rose says in English. “What did she want?”

  “Well, at first I thought she wanted to see Miaow, and I’m sure she did. Miaow’s reaction turned her inside out. And yes, if that’s the real question, she wanted money, but it wasn’t actually for herself.” Rose is silent, turning her head to look at him when he tells her about the Sour Man and the kid from Superman’s old gang. “She was being used. She had no idea she was going to see Miaow until about three minutes before that door opened.”

  “She still abandoned her daughter. Did you give her any?”

  “Um,” he said.

  “How much?”

  “Well, she was told to ask for a hundred thousand.”

  “How much?” Rose says again.

  “Not so much. Enough to get her away from the guy who—”

  “Forty? Fifty?”

  “Are you kidding? Forty or fifty? Please.”

  “How much?”

  “Thirty.” She pulls back far enough to look at his eyes, and he says, “Thousand.”

  The silence is so thick it feels gelatinous. Rose says, “So, if she had asked for two hundred thousand would you have given her sixty?”

  “No. Don’t be silly.”

  “Oh, I’m being silly. Well, then, why wouldn’t you have given her sixty?”

  “Because we don’t have sixty. I mean, not where I can get it without—”

  Rose says something under her breath in Thai, too fast for him to catch, and then asks, “And are you going to give her more?”

  Poke says, “No?”

  “Good guess,” she says. When he doesn’t reply, she says, “We have a baby now, Poke. That one, over there. The one in the crib. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one in the house who remembers that he’s here. Babies get sick. Babies cost money. This woman abandoned her own child—”

  “It wasn’t exactly the way we thought it was.”

  She props herself up on one elbow. “No, I’m sure it wasn’t. She’s had years to invent new stories. She probably even believes them.”

  “I believe her.”

  “You have a big fat soft heart. There’s nothing you won’t believe. It’s one of the reasons I married you.”

  “But.”

  “But you and Miaow and Frank and I are what matter now. This woman could drain you for—”

  “I’m worried about her.”

  “Worry about us.”

  “I’m frightened for her. And whoever she is now, she used to be Miaow’s mother.”

  Rose says, “I don’t believe this.”

  Maybe it’s the tension that’s been building in him since the moment Miaow screamed, but he says, “I can’t help what you believe or don’t believe.”

  Rose regards him with her mouth slightly open as though she thinks she misheard him. Rafferty is about to apologize when Frank begins to whimper in his crib.

  “I’ve got to take care of this,” Rose says, getting up. The temperature in the room has plummeted.

  “Can I help?”

  “Sure, you can,” she says with her back to him. “You can remember who you’re supposed to be taking care of. I can handle the baby, which is a good thing, considering how often members of the baby’s own family volunteer to help, but you’ve got to take care of the rest of us. And one of the things that means is not giving away our money.” She’s bending down to pick up Frank, who has turned up the volume.

  Rafferty rolls off the bed. “I am sorry. We can talk tomorrow. Or in a few minutes, when Frank’s asleep again, if you want.”

  Bouncing Frank up and down in her arms, Rose says, “About what?” and the words might as well be etched in ice. Rafferty hasn’t heard this tone often from Rose. He leaves the room and quietly closes th
e door.

  Since he’s right there, he checks Miaow’s door again, sees that the light is still on, looks at his watch, and very, very softly, knocks.

  And hears, “Go away.”

  So he turns around and wanders aimlessly into the living room, where he stops, shifting from foot to foot as he wonders how to make things right and where to begin, and finds himself gazing down at the couch.

  Like so much else in his life, it looks lumpy.

  30

  Whatever It Is

  She hadn’t intended to go back to the park. What she had intended to do was to fold the money as tightly as possible, wedge it beneath her innermost layer of clothing, choose a direction at random, and walk until daylight. For the second time, it seems to her, she is walking through the night to a new life.

  Maybe this new life, which she isn’t even trying to envision beyond the notion of a long bath and a real bed, will be the one that works, the one that will let her live like a human being again.

  He had been a surprise, the man who Miaow lived with now. Except for the men in the massage parlor, she’d never really talked with a farang for any length of time. Most of the men whom she met on the table were sad and kind of lost in spite of their money and their passports and their white skin, people who had everything except some notion about what to do with it. They climbed the stairs and went into the room not even knowing who would be waiting there, as though the massage tables and the girls were interchangeable, one pretty much like the others. They came in, they either chatted easily or talked in nervous fits and starts, or stayed silent while she did what they wanted her to do, and then they tipped her, most of them, and left. Not many of them requested her again, even though they all asked her what her name was the first time. She made up a non-Thai name she thought they would remember, Star, but while most of the other girls had customers coming back and asking for them by name, few asked for her.

  For the first month or two, she’d slept on the table where she worked; she didn’t have the heart to move into the place she’d chosen for Miaow and her. She rarely even went down the stairs to the street, except to buy pills—in part because she was worried about running into her husband—until it became obvious to everyone that she wasn’t going to be one of the parlor’s top attractions, pretty though she was, and they told her she could keep working there but she’d have to find another place to stay. That turned out to be several steps down from the place where Kanda had been so sweet to her, a tiny, filthy room that she shared with an absolutely gigantic and fearless rat that she called Daw. “I’m home, Daw,” she’d announce when she came in, and it wouldn’t even run for its hole at the base of the wall. When she left in the morning, she put out a bowl of water and told him she hoped he’d have a good day.

  After most of a year they fired her because (if she’s being honest with herself) the pills, especially the pain pills, got out of hand again and she started showing up late or not at all, and some customers complained about her. Several of them said she was obviously using drugs. Without the money she’d been earning she’d had to give up the little room and Daw, too. She’d grown fond of Daw, but come on, she’d asked herself, who takes a rat with her? And anyway, he had a good deal where he was: regular crumbs on the floor, cozy hole in the wall, no cats. She hoped the next person who lived in the room would be kind to him.

  The human Daw had gone home to his mother’s house, she had learned in a letter from her sister, and had found a new wife. Hom’s only reaction when she read the letter was to wish the new one better luck than she had enjoyed. Between the mother-in-law and Daw’s pills, she would need it.

  She hasn’t thought about Daw in years.

  Three or four years after she’d lost Miaow, she saw one of the kids from the gang who had taken her in, and he said that Miaow had been loaned to one of the adult gangs who put kids on the sidewalk to sell things to tourists. He’d told Hom which sidewalks, but by then she was sleeping on the streets, mostly under bridges, just as Daw had said they would. Her memory had begun to stutter and the world had gotten foggier and foggier. There was no way she could take care of a child. She could barely take care of herself. Miaow was probably better off on her own. And it struck her, just then, that her memory had been better since the boy in Patpong told her that he’d seen Miaow and that she apparently had a family. She thinks, Maybe I just needed something worth remembering. Instantly, she has a picture of herself, scrubbed clean and pill-free, meeting her daughter again: some tears, a hug, some kind of promise for the future. In that instant she makes a decision. She reaches into her shirt pocket, takes out the fold of paper with the pills in it. Then she drops them to the pavement and grinds them to powder under her heel.

  She looks around. Where is she? Oh, right, she’s here. Pretty much where she’d decided not to go.

  It’s got to be almost 1 a.m. What she should do, she thinks again, trying to convince herself, is turn around and go in the other direction, any other direction, just keep the park at her back until she can vanish into some poor area of Bangkok miles from here.

  But look where she is. At the same time that she’s been commanding herself to disappear from Patpong—from this whole part of the city—another voice has been arguing that the Sour Man has no idea where she sleeps; she’s only seen him in Patpong, and that applies, too, to the boy who brought her to the Sour Man’s attention. Even if they know, or guess, that she sleeps in Lumphini some nights, Lumphini is big.

  And she’s only going to be there a minute or two. In, dig, out. She needs to do this.

  Looking around, she decides that she can take advantage of the fact that she and the farang, in going from ATM to ATM, had strayed far from her usual route. She decides to circle even farther around the park and come in from a completely new direction. In a matter of minutes its relative darkness looms up in front of her. There’s a bit of broken fence, low enough for her to climb, nearby. She’s been looking behind her all evening, ever since she and the farang set off for the ice cream place. No one seems to be following. She grabs a deep breath and walks quickly to the sagging fence and then into the trees. She sticks to the trees wherever she can, avoiding the open spaces, keeping well back from the edge of the lake. She stumbles a couple of times; she knows every obstacle and awkward step on her usual route, but this isn’t that path, and she swears sharply once as she almost goes down.

  One minute. That’s all she needs, one minute at most, and she’ll be gone, as though the world swallowed her up.

  The phone in her pocket vibrates.

  It hasn’t buzzed since they left the first ATM. But it’s buzzing now. What does that mean?

  Instantly, she envisions the Sour Man pacing the dark Patpong sidewalk between Silom and Surawong, swearing with every step, waiting for her. He must be furious by now.

  The image energizes her. Get this errand done and get out of here. She moves faster now, not quite so worried about silence, and within a few minutes she’s on the gentle rise where the boy’s tree stands, looking down on the place where she sleeps.

  The boy is not there, as far as she can tell, and neither is anyone else. Quickly, now: she lifts the hem of her skirts in her right hand and hurries down the slope, fishing with her left hand for the digging spoon in the Louie bag.

  At the bush, she sees her extra plastic sheet, folded tightly and wadded beneath the bush’s lowest branches, right where she left it, and a rectangle of white that turns out to be the take-out bag from the Isaan restaurant that she had left for the boy with the furious eyes. She takes three paces toward a small round stone she had half buried there, however long ago it was, drops to her knees and sticks the spoon into the earth, and the phone buzzes again.

  She drops the spoon and is fumbling for the phone, thinking about throwing it as far as she can, when a man says, “You’re not taking calls?” and then something that has to be a boot hits the center of her back
and she sprawls forward, the spoon flying from her hand.

  The Sour Man says, “Burying something?”

  She’s flat on her stomach with one side of her face on the cold, wet grass.

  He says, “Get up.”

  She finds her way to her hands and knees and then she feels again the flare of pain from her ear that announces that he’s clamped it between his fingernails. “Up,” he says, tugging her ear sharply enough to make her whimper. “Up, up, up.”

  Instead, she rolls to the right, feeling the flesh in her ear tearing, and then, with no plan in mind, she crawls away from him as fast as she can. When she gets unsteadily to her feet, he is a couple of meters away, looking at her in a way that seems half-amused and almost affectionate. Small as he is, he terrifies her. He steps toward her, but she backs up, and he shakes his head as though to note that she hasn’t learned anything yet. Standing where she dropped the spoon, he slides a boot over the earth and bends down to look, and it feels like her heart has stopped. But then he shakes his head and straightens to bring his eyes back to her. “Well,” he says, “if you buried anything here, it was a long time ago, so you’ve still got what I want. Give it to me.”

  “He didn’t give me anything.”

  “Why were you hiding?”

  “I wasn’t hiding.” There’s a warm, feathery touch at the side of her neck, and she knows it’s her own blood.