Street Music

by Timothy Hallinan

  A voice startles him. “How can anyone help her?” a man says in Thai. “It’s too late.”

  Rafferty looks up to see a very thin man in, perhaps, his battered forties, his graying, receding hair chopped, apparently aimlessly, to half a dozen lengths. He wears a random-looking assortment of clothes that seem to have been dragged for miles behind a truck. Rafferty says, “We can find out who did it.”

  “And how will that help her? Maybe you should have done something when she was alive. I don’t think many people will want to talk to you. Whoever killed her, it would be better not to make him angry. She was ready to go, anyway.”

  “She clawed his face,” Rafferty says. “I’ll interpret that as a no vote.”

  The man looks down at him for a moment, and then he says, “You’re still young. You don’t know yet that even people who are sick of life usually fight to keep it. It’s the animal in us. When we’re cornered, it’s all claws and fangs.”

  “Thanks for the thought. I’ll stay here anyway.”

  “Got a cigarette? Or three or four?”

  “No, sorry.”

  “Only the poor smoke,” the man says. “The only people who need cigarettes are the ones who can’t afford them.”

  “Did you know if she was afraid of anyone? Did she talk about—”

  “We don’t talk about things like that here. We talk about food, we talk about alcohol or dope, about a good dumpster we’ve found. Things we need. If you start to talk about what you’re afraid of you’ll be alone in no time, and if somebody stays with you it’s probably because he wants to take something after everyone else is gone.”

  “What did you know about her?”

  The man looks over at the bush and Rafferty follows suit. “She was here. She wasn’t as old as she looked. Some days she had trouble remembering things. She liked chocolate.”

  Rafferty reaches into his pocket and comes up with a hundred-baht note. “Tell people who knew her that I’d like to talk to them, would you?”

  “Sure, but I won’t tell them about this,” he says, pocketing the bill. “People who never heard of her will be lining up.”

  “Fine. Thanks. People who knew her, then.”

  The man turns to go. Over his shoulder, he says, “Good luck.”

  During the next half hour or so, he sees ten or twelve people, all Thai, some in family groups, who give him a wide berth. One kid, a boy of thirteen or so, nicely dressed and wearing horn-rimmed glasses so big they look like they could conceal a secret identity, detaches himself from his group to say, in English, “Who Hom?”

  “Thai woman,” Rafferty says.

  “Well, duh,” the boy says. He squints for a moment, evidently assembling his next remark. “American kid, do they still say duh, or no?”

  “No. They stopped saying it when I was your age. You need to get some new DVDs.”

  One of the women in the boy’s group—three young teens and two harried-looking adults—calls him.

  “Okay,” the boy says to Rafferty. “Nice to rap with you.”

  “Rap on,” Rafferty says, pointing a fist in the air.

  “You joking me,” the boy says. “Bye-bye.”

  There’s a lull during which Rafferty is alone with his sign, the bush, and the mosquitoes. Only one homeless person reads the sign and stops, but she had disliked Hom and has nothing to tell him. He uses the time to think about Miaow, about how this may yet affect her, about the potential for delayed emotional explosions. His daughter keeps everything in, and that makes her especially vulnerable to slow fuses. He sighs and looks around. It’s definitely on the edge of getting dark. Giving in to a persistent itch of curiosity, he goes to the bush, kneels down, and pulls out the sheet of plastic.

  Someone behind him, whose approach he has not heard, half whispers in Thai, “Nothing there,” and Rafferty is so startled that he jumps to his feet, sustaining several scratches from the bush on his arms and cheeks.

  It’s an emaciated teenager, nothing to him but bones and, judging from his eyes, anger. He has a snarl of long dark hair and a deep dimple in one cheek that’s visible even though he’s not smiling. It looks like it was put there with a nail. He wears a filthy T-shirt that began its life as blue, a pair of jeans so big on him that the waistband is ruffled beneath his battered belt, and mismatched rubber flip-flops, one of which is held on his foot with twine. He has something white in his hand.

  The kid says, “Who are you?”

  “Someone who wants to find out what happened.”

  “Why?” The boy’s voice sounds scratchy from lack of use. “And where did you learn to speak Thai? What do you care what happened to her? She was just an old drunk who took dope at night.”

  After the boy runs out of words, Rafferty says, “Are you finished?”

  The kid just watches him.

  “What’s that?” Rafferty is looking at the white rectangle in the boy’s hand.

  “Why do you care?” the kid says.

  Rafferty takes him in, the sheer boniness of him, the fire in his eyes. He looks like someone whom someone else periodically tried to beat to death without ever quite succeeding, and all that’s been left to stalk through the world are skin and bones, held together by fury. Rafferty says, “It’s a bag that had food in it, isn’t it? There was one down here, too, but it’s been taken away. By the cops.”

  At the word cops, the kid spits. Then he says, “So?”

  “Okay,” Rafferty says. “Why do I speak Thai? I’m married to a Thai woman. Why am I here, why do I care what happened? My wife and I adopted a kid off the street, a little girl, a few years ago, and it turns out that she—Hom, I mean, this woman—was my daughter’s real, I mean, first mother, the one who gave birth to her.”

  The kid rocks back on his heels once or twice, as though he might be shifting his weight to turn and run, but instead, he says, “And you just found that out?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s your daughter’s name?”

  His stare is almost impossible for Rafferty to meet, but he forces himself to do it as he considers the question. He can’t find a reason not to answer it. “Miaow.”

  After a moment, the kid looks down at his pitiful flip-flops. Then, after a long, charged silence, he sighs and sits on his haunches, on the other side of the mound from Rafferty’s cushion—just, Rafferty thinks, inches beyond slapping distance.

  Rafferty takes his seat again and waits for him to begin. When he doesn’t, Rafferty slowly holds out a hand and says, “May I see that?” The kid hands the bag over, so reluctantly it might have been the last of its kind on earth. When he has it, Rafferty turns it over and makes a guess. “You gave her the one that was here when she was killed. It was folded just like this.”

  The boy swallows, loudly enough for Rafferty to hear it. “She gave it to me, first,” he says. “When it had food in it.”

  “You, ummm . . .” Rather than looking into the boy’s eyes, he studies the bag in his hand. “You folded it very carefully.”

  “I was . . .” His voice trails off. “I was trying to show respect.”

  “Did she feed you often?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe five times, maybe six. More than anyone else.”

  “Did you talk to her much?”

  “Never.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t like to talk.”

  “But she gave you—”

  “When she talked she was mostly loaded on yaa baa. She didn’t even know she was speaking out loud. Sometimes when she got really high I followed her around to make sure nobody hurt her.”

  “And that’s when she mentioned Miaow?”

  “Yes. A lot of times.”

  “Mentioned her in what way? Did she talk about why she had to—” He breaks off, looking for a word. “Why she had to part from her?”
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  The boy is studying the ground between his feet. “She didn’t talk like that. She was rattling. She talked to trees, she talked to people who weren’t there. Miaow was one of them. It wasn’t like she was telling stories.” The tone is scornful, but he seems calm, even distracted: he’s pushing his index finger through the soft dirt of the mound. When he gets to the stone, he taps on it twice with a long, dirty fingernail.

  Rafferty says, “But you heard her say Miaow’s name.”

  A silence. Then the boy says, “That’s why I sat down.”

  “Where do you stay?”

  The boy regards him so long that Rafferty thinks there won’t be an answer, but the gaze feels as though the boy barely sees him; he’s focused on something inside. Finally, with the reluctance of someone who is divulging a secret, he says, “You were standing under me. Before. When you were up on the hill.”

  Rafferty looks past him, looks at the hill. Standing at its high point, almost glimmering with energy, is the tree. For the first time in his life, Rafferty has the impression that his heart has literally skipped a beat and then accelerated to catch up. He starts to speak but swallows instead, and when he’s sure he’s got his voice under control, he says, “You saw it.”

  The world has gone dark while he wasn’t paying attention. What illumination there is comes from a low reef of clouds, bouncing a fraction of Bangkok’s ambient light back down at them, a pale gray, sky-wide, low-wattage lamp that brings solid objects into a kind of dull and shadowy relief. Here and there, through a gap in the foliage, a bright fragment of neon sizzles its way across the night to remind him that the city is still there, but the nearer world, the small world in which the boy is talking, is just silhouettes. If anyone other than the two of them has come near, Rafferty isn’t aware of it. What the boy is saying is the only thing that matters. The boy’s name is Lamon, which means gentle, but Rafferty can’t reconcile the name with the hate in the boy’s eyes. If the kid dialed it up, Rafferty thinks, he could melt lead just by looking at it.

  “She knew I was somewhere near the hill,” Lamon says. He is telling the story his way, and Rafferty has no intention of breaking the flow, not even with a question. “She put food near the tree a few times, probably when she couldn’t finish it. But she never seemed to look up at the tree. I don’t think she knew I spend the first part of every night in it. I think she put the bag there just because the tree is the only thing up there. She had to put the bag somewhere, and the tree is the only place that’s different from the rest of the hill. So she left it there.”

  There’s a silence that Rafferty steps into, partly to keep Lamon talking, and partly to make sure he understands. “You’re there the first part of each night?”

  The way Lamon is sitting, Rafferty is looking at his profile: the small, delicate nose, the shock of hair. Except for those unnerving stares, he seems to ration out eye contact. “It’s hard for me to sleep,” he says. “When it’s light, I’m on the street. When it gets dark, I need a place to go where no one can see me. I can’t sleep when there are people moving around anywhere near me. When it gets dark, I climb into the tree. There’s a place to sit up there. I have to wait until I know that anyone who’s here is asleep. Then I come down and sleep until the first light begins and people start to wake up.”

  “Sleep where?”

  A pause. “Over there.” He lifts his chin to his right, just indicating a general direction.

  “But last night, you were still up there.”

  “It wasn’t time for me to move yet. So I was there when she came. I heard her, talking to herself, before I saw her. I have dog’s ears. I hear everything.”

  “When did you see him?”

  “After she came. She came a different way than usual, from a different direction. Over the hill. She stood under me and looked down, like she was making sure no one was there. Then she went down and got something from under the bush. She had to pull the sheet out to get it. And then she came here, where we are, and got down on her knees. And then he was there, behind her, and before I could shout to warn her, he kicked her, and it all started. It happened pretty fast.”

  “At some point he had her take her clothes off, so it couldn’t have been all that fast. But you didn’t do anything?”

  The boy closes his eyes. “If you were in that tree right now, where I was,” he says, “you’d see a little rise behind the bush, maybe fifteen meters away. He had two guys up there, a big one and a little one, just in case he got into trouble. It was dark, but the big one was wearing a light-colored shirt. Once I saw him, I spotted the little one because he moved.”

  Rafferty starts to speak, but Lamon holds up a hand. “Even if I hadn’t known they were there, I wouldn’t have done anything. I thought he was just going to take something, maybe beat her up a little just for fun or to make a point. I’ve thought about it all night and all day, and I still don’t think he wanted to kill her. The way she jumped, it was like she was aiming for the knife. He even tried to back away, but he couldn’t move fast enough. I’ve seen it over and over again in my mind, and it still feels to me like he didn’t come to kill her. It was like she used him to kill herself.”

  Rafferty says, “That doesn’t mean he should stay alive.”

  A shrug. “Big talk.”

  “I’m not trying to make an impression,” Rafferty says. “Besides killing her, the cops say he did something to her ear.”

  Lamon leans forward and pulls back the thick bush of hair. The top of his left ear ripples with scar tissue. “He likes to do that. With his nails. He grows them long and files them sharp. Usually it’s ears. But once I saw him cut a guy’s tongue off. With a knife, I mean. The guy had talked to some people. You have no idea how much a tongue bleeds.”

  Rafferty sits back and then shifts his weight on the cushion. “You saw this. So you know who he is.” Lamon nods and lightly rubs his fingers over the stone. He seems interested only in its surface, as though something is written there, something Rafferty can’t see.

  “Why would anyone do something like that?”

  “He was making an impression. He was showing us what would happen if we didn’t do what he said.”

  “Who was us?”

  This time the pause is so long that Rafferty has inhaled to ask his question again by the time Lamon answers him. “Just us. Kids. Thirteen, fourteen years old. He had us doing something we weren’t supposed to do. For him, I mean. He was the boss. Six of us. Girls, too. That’s all I’m going to say. But he would have been in big trouble if he got caught, so he cut the guy’s tongue.”

  “Can you give me his name?”

  “Sure,” Lamon says. “But it’s a nickname. Yai.”

  “Would you point him out to me?”

  “If I can do it from a distance, if I can do it from somewhere he couldn’t see me. For her, I mean.” He swallows loudly. “Or for her daughter.”

  “But not for the cops.”

  “Fuck the cops. If that was me all bloody down here? They’d have turned me upside down to shake the change out of my pockets, then gone to have a drink. If I tell them who the guy with the knife is, you know what they’ll do? They’ll take what’s in his pockets, kick him in the butt, and sell him my name or the name of whoever tipped them.”

  “Then the name is fine. I can find him from that.”

  Lamon says, “Now you tell me something. What did he want? What he took was small. My guess was money. But where would she get it?”

  Rafferty knows that the light reflecting off the clouds can’t have gotten brighter, but he seems to be seeing more clearly, and he can follow Lamon’s hand as he plucks a mosquito out of the air for the eleventh or twelfth time. “So she knocked on your door. How did your daughter feel about that, seeing her like that?”

  “I can tell you how she acted,” Rafferty says, “but I actually have no idea how she felt.”
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  “And Yai sent Hom to you. And she tried to keep the money. Bad idea. Asshole.”

  “I’m going to do something about him.”

  “Easy to say.” He’s running his fingers through the loose dirt on the mound.

  “What makes it even worse is that I don’t have anywhere near as much money as he tried to get.”

  “I didn’t say he was smart.”

  Rafferty says, “Where are your parents?”

  Lamon leans over and spits into the dirt. Then he says, “Maybe one of the reasons she came to your door was that she still loved her daughter.”

  “I suppose it’s possible. The way she told the story, she didn’t want to abandon her.”

  “But you didn’t believe her.”

  “I don’t know what to believe. I’m pretty sure my daughter doesn’t believe it.”

  Lamon says, “Look.” He shifts himself around until he’s facing Rafferty, and picks up the smooth stone. “This is a marker,” he says. “I saw her dig here, with a spoon, over and over. One night when she was still out on the street, I looked to see what it was. When she came back last night, this is where she went, right here. I think it’s what she came back for, and I think she’d want you to have it.” He scrabbles through the dirt and comes out with a small plastic bag, tightly folded, and hands it to Rafferty.

  Rafferty unfolds the bag, takes out the piece of paper inside, which is the size of a playing card, and turns it over. The boy snaps a lighter and Rafferty finds himself looking at the long-lost first act.

  The color has faded and one of the corners has broken off, but that doesn’t diminish the heartbreak. Three people on a bench in front of something dark and featureless, a backdrop, maybe. A barely recognizable Hom is on the left, young and beautiful, sitting straight-spined with a proprietary air that says that the whole thing was her idea. On the right is a guy Rafferty dislikes at sight, someone, he thinks, he could spot in a high school yearbook as the class jerk. Must be the father, better-looking than was good for him, broad-shouldered, and, apparently, moments from standing up and stalking off.