Street Music

by Timothy Hallinan

  “You didn’t call me. You didn’t answer my call. You were hiding. Where is it?”

  “I don’t have any—”

  In two long steps, he’s on her, and he punches her in the face, and then she’s down, flat on her back, the world rippling through tears, and when she sniffs she tastes blood at the back of her throat.

  “Not one word,” he says, standing over her. “The bag.”

  She peels the bag off her shoulder and, still lying on her back, holds it up to him. He starts to rifle through it, giving it his attention, and she thinks, Roll away and then get up, but he’s standing on her skirt, and he feels the tug and says, “Uh-uh.”

  He pulls things out of the purse and drops them at his feet. When it’s empty he turns it upside down to shake it, and suddenly, there’s a long, silvery knife in his hand and he slits the bag open—the knife, she thinks, must be very sharp—and he pulls the lining out and then tosses the whole thing aside. He says, “Take off your clothes.”

  She says, “I’ll scream.”

  “Make one sound, and I’ll cut your throat. Where’s the money?”

  “He didn’t give me any.”

  “You had your phone off for hours. What were you doing, singing him lullabies?”

  “He didn’t give me—”

  “If that’s true, you can get dressed again. Up, up. Get out of those rags.” He backs away.

  To get up, she has to roll to her hands and knees, where she waits, head hanging down, feeling as though she’ll pass out if she stands. She wobbles to her feet and holds the pose, waiting to see whether she’s going to fall, and then, with his eyes on her, she pulls the outer skirt up and over her head, keenly aware of the stiff little rectangle of folded bills in the waistband of her underpants. She begins to ball up the skirt so she can toss it to him, but he says, “Shake it out. Four or five times. Shake it hard.”

  She does as she’s told.

  “Throw it over there, to your right, I don’t want it near me. Now the next layer. Where do you find these rags?”

  It’s a blouse. Beneath that is another blouse, and beneath that is her bra. When she’s standing there, the bare skin of her belly and back prickling with goose-flesh in the night air, he says, “Pants.”

  As she unbuttons the pants she finds her mind gliding away from him, gliding away from this moment, and she thinks, I’ll never see Miaow again, I’ll never be anyone she would want to—And then a kind of warmth comes over her, floods through her, actually, and she almost smiles. So easy.

  “Get them off,” he says. He waves the knife at her, just a reminder, a little back-and-forth. She thinks about how sharp it is. It glints, catching some stray beam of light that has infiltrated the trees, and suddenly she’s seeing the glint of the sun off the hood of Hyukk-Hyukk’s awful car, seeing him smiling at her in the rearview mirror, and she thinks, That was the last time things could have gone right for me.

  “Hurry up,” he says.

  “I’m doing it as fast as I can,” she says, peeling the pants down. She kicks them over to him, trying to keep her eyes on him, waiting for her chance, and almost going over backward. Nothing left now but the bra and the underpants with the money in them. As he bends to pick up the pants the certainty blooms in her; she thinks Now and screams something, anything, and he straightens quickly, the knife pointed directly at her, and she takes a fast step and launches herself toward the gleam of the knife. She feels it when it enters her abdomen, but it’s more like a punch than a cut, and she thinks, Sharp edge is down, and grabs his shoulders and pulls herself up, and then, for the first time, she experiences the knife as a cutting object making a deep, lengthening slice in her body. She has to let go of him because she doesn’t seem to have control of her arms anymore, but she knows that the cut is deep enough and long enough, and she closes her eyes as she slides down his slender body, suddenly slick with blood, all the way to the ground, where she folds herself as small as she can, suddenly seeing a bright rectangle of light, a rearview mirror, with a boy smiling at her, and then it’s gone and she just waits for it—whatever it is—to take her.

  31

  Standing on a Stack of Books

  This time he knows that he’s overslept even before he rolls over on the couch because he smells coffee. Weak coffee, but coffee. He turns his head to the left and opens one eye. He has, even with his eyelids down, unerringly located the cup, which is steaming happily on the glass coffee table. Behind it, and out of focus, a small figure grows smaller as it recedes toward the kitchen.

  “Thank you, Fon,” he croaks.

  “Sleep more,” she says. “You out all night, give lady money, must be you need sleep.”

  Her last word is almost drowned out by a tangle of women’s voices, electric with energy, from Rose’s room. This story will be all over Bangkok by dinnertime.

  “Someday, I’ll tell you the whole story,” he says, sitting up and draping his sheet over him.

  Pausing in the doorway to the kitchen, Fon says, “Rose wan’ egg. You wan’?”

  “No, no thanks.” Fon regards an egg yolk as a pouch of deadly poison that should be mashed into submission the moment it hits the pan and then cooked absolutely solid.

  Once she’s in the kitchen, he downs the coffee in two scalding gulps, turns the sheet into a toga, and stands up. He yawns and stretches, one hand keeping the sheet in place, and he’s turned and started for the hall before he realizes what he had glimpsed in his peripheral vision. It’s enough to make him reverse course and go back to the coffee table.

  Miaow’s copy of Pygmalion, the one she’s been using to run lines with Edward, is pretty much where it’s been since the previous evening. But the book’s back has been broken and then the book torn into two equal pieces, straight down the crease in the spine. He wraps the toga around himself more securely—he wouldn’t put it past Fon to yank it off and then call all the girls in for laughs—and pads across the room to the kitchen, stopping on what he hopes is the practical-joke-proof side of the counter. “Where’s Miaow?”

  “In room. She get up, she get orange joot, she go back to bed.”

  “What day is this?”

  “You not know?” She cracks an egg and opens it, all one-handed, dead-center in the skillet. All that flash, he thinks, and no talent.

  “If I think about it, I’ll know,” he says. “But I don’t want to think about it.”

  “Friday.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Then why you bother me?”

  “Because I can,” he says. “Because I know it irritates you. Is Rose mad at me?”

  “This question,” Fon says, smashing the egg into a viscous, undifferentiated fluid, “you answer without me.”

  “Right. Well, thanks for the coffee.”

  “I make for Rose,” she says, and he thinks, Whoops, she really is angry, but then she turns and gives him the patented Thai smile, the one that seems to start at the toes. “I grind bean this time.”

  He has to laugh.

  “I can tell,” he says. “So, she is mad at me.”

  “Who?” Fon says, the image of innocence.

  “Skip it.” He heads for the bathroom but stops to knock on Miaow’s door. He gets the kind of what? that only a teen can produce, the what? of someone who’s been interrupted at the precise moment she’s found the solution for all the ills of the world but really needs to write it down.

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “So talk.”

  He tries the doorknob, but it won’t turn. He says, “The door is locked.”

  “I know. I’m the one who locked it.”

  “Okay, fine, I’ll keep yelling so that everyone in the house can hear me.”

  She says, “Who cares?”

  “Why aren’t you at school?”

  “I’m taking a personal
day,” she says. “Isn’t that what they say in America, a personal day?”

  “What happened to your book? The one on the table.”

  “Well, as you just mentioned,” Miaow says, “it’s my book.”

  “Yeah, and I’m doing you the favor of assuming that it broke accidentally, as opposed to you being a big enough, self-absorbed enough, idiot to have done it on purpose.” To Fon and Yim and—what was the name?—Claudia, it was Claudia—who are peering down the short hallway at him, he says, “Do you mind? My daughter and I are having a crisis,” and they all pull their heads back, although he’d bet all the money he has left, after the previous evening, that they’re pressed against the wall, just an inch out of sight, with their hands cupped to their ears.

  To Miaow, he says, “I didn’t hear you.”

  “That’s an encouraging sign,” Miaow says, “because I didn’t say anything.”

  “You know,” he says, crossing his fingers, “there is a key to this door.”

  A pause. Then she says, “Is not.”

  “I’m going to get it,” he says. “The next sound you hear will be this door opening.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Fine,” he says. “But if I have to get the key, I’ll take the lock out for good.”

  “You wouldn’t even know how.”

  “Hold that thought. When the door opens, you can apologize. No one has apologized to me in days.”

  He hears a word she never would have used a year earlier, at least, not in his hearing, and then the lock pops and he pushes the door open to see her retreating backward toward the bed, as though she’d half expected him to grab her by the hair. “The book,” he says. “First, that’s not how we treat books—”

  “So that’s what you want to talk about. Not what happened last night, but a book.”

  “That’s what I want to talk about.”

  “It’s my book.” She sits at the head of the bed, as far away as possible, heavily enough to make the frame creak.

  “It’s the world’s fucking book,” he says, watching her eyes widen at the profanity, which he rarely uses when he’s talking to her. “It belongs to anyone who reads it. It belongs to people who haven’t even heard of it yet. We don’t treat books that way, not in this family. But that’s not the point, is it?”

  “You don’t—”

  “All the work you’ve done. All the progress you’ve made. You’re just going to walk away, tuck your tail between your legs, and cry weee weee weee all the way home. Who the hell do you think you are?”

  She stands up, her face scarlet with anger. “You know who I am.”

  “I didn’t ask who I thought you were. I asked who you thought you were. And now, I guess I know. You’re that poor little kid whose mom abandoned her—didn’t happen quite the way you think it did, by the way—the kid who had to sell gum on the sidewalk, and beg, and slit purses from time to time. And you think when you go onstage as Eliza, the whole audience is going to be whispering, She’s not acting, she really was a street kid, but a lot dirtier and poorer. I can hear them now, just bzzz bzzz bzzz. Maybe a giggle or two. Well, let me tell you that my heart is just breaking in two. Saddest thing I ever heard. The second thing I want to say to you is that you owe Edward an enormous apology if you think he would tell anybody in the world about what happened last night. The third thing is something an American woman named Eleanor Roosevelt once said: ‘We wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of us if we knew how seldom they do.’ The kids at your school don’t actually spend all their time thinking about you because you’re not really the center of their universe and they have other things on their minds. You know, their parents, their classes, their boyfriends and girlfriends, their grades, their complexion, their weight, their height, why they’re not more popular on WeChat or Instagram or, I don’t know, BiteMe, some bullshit like that. You’re about number twelve thousand and forty-two on their list of topics to think about.”

  She’s looking at him, but he can’t tell whether she’s listening or counting silently to fifty.

  “When I asked who you thought you were, I was trying to figure out whether you see the same Miaow your mother and I do. Not the kid whose first bath took two hours, so long I had to go down to Mrs. Pongsiri’s to pee because you just couldn’t stop warming the tub up. So, no, not that Miaow, but one of the other Miaows. Maybe the one who could just barely read her name and a few Thai and English words and who got thrown into a really difficult school, a no excuses school, where she caught up with her class level in less than a year and got permission to take a couple of classes above her level, and who stepped onto a stage for the first time in her life in Shakespeare, no less, and who was the best thing in the production. I thought maybe you thought you were that Miaow, or the one who walked away with Small Town as Julie and had your mother and me crying when you came back to say goodbye to the world. Or maybe the Miaow who Edward has fallen in love with, the one who’s brave enough to go after the part of Eliza and good enough to get it and kick the hell out of it. And you know what? Whoever you are now, my dear, however far you’ve risen, you’re fucking standing on a stack of books. So you can do what you want, you can drown in self-pity, you can make your mother unhappy, you can make Edward unhappy, you can turn into a coward and walk away from a part you were born to play and you can even decide you’ve been wrong about wanting to be an actress. When we ask ourselves who we are, I think there are only two answers: whoever I used to be, and who I am now. I don’t know who you think you are or what direction you’re going to take, but you will fix that book the best you can, and then I’ll donate it to the library if you haven’t got a use for it.”

  She’s been looking down at her lap as he talks, and she doesn’t look up at him now, but she nods once.

  “I’ll fix it,” she says to her lap. “I can use it to help Edward. I already know my lines.”

  “I pretty much assumed that.”

  “Well,” she says, looking at the disorderly heap of blankets on the bed as though it were the most interesting thing in the world, “you know how I am, I mean, that I’m not always fun.”

  “I do,” he says, “and in spite of that, I’m always proud of you.” He can hear her breathing, he can hear the whispers from the women eavesdropping around the corner. He can hear his own heartbeat. When he’s sure she’s said everything she wants to say, he adds, “There’s no key to this door. There was, but I lost it right after we moved in. You can lock it and sit in here feeling sorry for yourself or do some work or go back to sleep as long as you want. Let us know if you get hungry.”

  She’s still studying the blankets. As he’s about to turn and go, she says, “Was I really that good as Julie?” and then she shakes her head. “No, no, not that. That’s not what I want to ask. What was she—what was my mother like?”

  “You promise you’ll fix the book?”

  The doorbell rings.

  “I’ll do the best I can,” Miaow says, and now she’s looking straight at him, with an intensity he can almost feel on his skin. “Did she talk about me? What did she say? What do you mean, it wasn’t the way I thought it was?”

  The doorbell rings again, and there are male voices coming from the living room, and then he hears someone hurrying down the hall. It’s Fon, as wide-eyed as though she’d just stepped on a snake, and she says, “It’s the police.”

  32

  Help Hom

  There are two of them, both in uniform. Fon, who is standing directly in front of them, has allowed them to come in only a foot or two, not far enough to close the door. The thin, dark-complected one, who’s eyeing the apartment as though he suspects that there are booby traps beneath the carpet, wears the two-chevron insignia of a corporal. The uniform of the other, a well-fed, slow-looking man who greases his hair and combs it straight back in a style that hasn’t been popular since Rudolp
h Valentino, proclaims him to be a sergeant. Both of them seem confused by the women in the room—Yim and Claudia, who are eyeing them without much warmth, Fon, who’s blocking their way, and, coming out from the bedroom, the one who calls herself Fanta. Fanta was obviously doing her eyes when the doorbell rang because one of them is lined in black beneath a spidery fringe of false eyelashes, and the other is as naked as a baby’s bottom, giving her a permanent wink.

  Rafferty has taken a moment in Miaow’s room to wrap his sheet a bit more securely, but he knows that what they see is a farang who’s not even dressed by noon and who is surrounded by what must look like a hired harem. Sergeant Valentino, catching his eye, gives him a conspiratorial you dog, you smile and takes a step forward to navigate past Fon, but then his gaze slides to something behind Rafferty and he stops as abruptly as a mime who’s walked into a pane of glass. Rafferty doesn’t bother to look around to see what it is; it can only be Rose.

  “Let them in, Fon,” Rose says in Thai. “I’m sure they’ve got a good reason for being here, although I can’t imagine what it could be.”

  Sergeant Valentino is about to say something as he steps forward, but then his eyes shift again and his face hardens. To Rafferty, he says, in English, in an unexpected tenor voice, “How old is she?”

  “Well,” Rafferty says without bothering to turn. “Until recently, we thought she was fourteen, but it turns out she’s fifteen.”

  The sergeant flutes, “You didn’t even ask how old—”

  Miaow says to Rafferty, “I am?”

  “That’s one of the things we’ll talk about,” Rafferty says to her.

  The baby begins to cry, and Rose turns and vanishes into the bedroom. “You’ve just met my wife,” Rafferty says to the sergeant. “This is our adopted daughter, Miaow. My wife had a baby a couple of weeks ago, and her friends have come to help. If you have children, you know what I’m talking about. And I’m wearing a sheet because it’s my house and I can wear whatever the hell I want, and I haven’t had time to get dressed yet.”