PR04 - Queen of Patpong

by Timothy Hallinan

  Her father’s eyes. The way he watched her when she crossed the room to get to Teacher Suttikul. Their cold weight on her back as she and her teacher paused in the doorway to talk to Mai.

  And she knows, deep in the pit of her stomach, that the wide dark door is still open and that school is not on the other side of it.

  The moon has begun to lift itself above the hills to the east, just a sliver of silver so far, a crack in the black sky, not much thicker than a pencil line. It brings a chill, chalky light with it, and Kwan uses that light to look down at the earring in her hand, sparkling cold blue. To her own surprise, she reaches up and, working by feel, removes the little steel stud in her left ear and puts the sapphire in its place.

  It seems to throw off a sort of warmth. She imagines she can feel it, not only in her ear but down the side of her neck and across the top of her shoulder. Like a soft fall of light. She likes the feeling. Something about it loosens the tangled knot that’s squeezing her heart—not much, but some.

  Her father will not take the earring from her. She will wear it, even if people laugh at it. She’s used to being laughed at. It hurts, but it doesn’t scar.

  She has fingernails. She has teeth. She has fists. The house is full of knives. Her father will find it hard to push her through the dark door. Pocketing the stud she removed from her ear, Kwan pushes her way through the brush and takes the road back to her village.

  SHE SEES the dark shape on the wooden platform by the side of the road, the platform on which her father and his friends drink and play cards. She stops, hoping she has not been seen or heard, hoping it is not her father who sits there, but then the figure speaks.

  “Where have you been?” Nana’s voice.

  “Down the road,” Kwan says. What she felt there, what she thought there, is her secret, not to be shared even with those she trusts. And she doesn’t trust Moo. Now, with all that has happened, she remembers that she didn’t much like Moo—Nana—when she lived in the village. Moo was five years older than Kwan, a hot-tempered girl who fought with other girls frequently, usually girls smaller than she. She was fat then, and she used her weight as a weapon, bulldozing her opponents to the ground and kneeling on them, digging her knees into the most sensitive spots and bearing down. She once put her hand in a plastic bag and used it to pick up some dog droppings, which she rubbed in a smaller girl’s face. Kwan finds it difficult to see the angry fat girl in the self-possessed, attractive woman who has come back, at least temporarily, from her years in Bangkok.

  Nana says, “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “Why?” Nana hadn’t even seemed to notice Kwan on her earlier visits to the village.

  “To talk.” Nana’s voice is silky, even friendly, but it doesn’t sound personal. Nana could be talking to the night, to the rising moon. “Don’t you ever just want to talk to someone?”

  With the moon a little higher in the sky, Kwan can see that Nana is wrapped in a light blanket, probably to protect herself from mosquitoes. “I’d think Bangkok is full of people to talk to.”

  “Bangkok is . . . I can’t even tell you what Bangkok is like. You have to see it for yourself. You’d love it. But it’s not the same, the people there. They’re not from here. They don’t know what our lives were like.”

  “Are like,” Kwan says. “I still live here. And I thought all the girls like . . . like you . . . came from Isaan.”

  “Most of them do.” Nana wastes no energy on resolving the contradiction. Instead she picks up a pack of cigarettes from the platform and puts one in her mouth. She lights it with a slender, gleaming lighter not much bigger around than the cigarette. As she draws in the smoke, she glances up at Kwan and then lifts the lighter for a better look. “You’re wearing it,” she says.

  Kwan’s hand flies to her ear. “Please put out the flame.”

  “Sure.” The lighter clicks off. “Who don’t you want to see you?”

  “Everybody. I mean, anybody. I don’t want anybody to see me.”

  Nana draws deeply on the cigarette, her face gleaming a dull red in the coal’s glow. Then she releases the smoke slowly between her lips and inhales it through her nostrils. To Kwan it looks like a magic trick. “Want one?” Nana blows the smoke out and extends the pack.

  “I don’t smoke. My father smokes all the time, and then he coughs all night. I think it’s stupid.”

  “Up to you.” Nana’s eyes remain on Kwan’s face. “I remembered right,” she says. “You’re getting very pretty.”

  Kwan has to review the sentence in her mind before she actually understands its meaning. “Me? Pretty?”

  “Maybe more than pretty.” Nana slides aside and pats the platform. “Sit. You can’t stand there all night.”

  “I don’t know.” Kwan doesn’t want to go home, but she’s not comfortable with Nana either.

  “I won’t bite you,” Nana says. She smiles. “I’m not even hungry.” Then she reaches into the pocket of her blouse, finds something, and extends her hand. “Here’s the other one.”

  “Why?” Kwan makes no move to take it. “Why are you giving it to me?”

  Nana pauses and then says, “You didn’t listen to me this afternoon. When someone offers you something, take it.”

  “That’s not the way I am.”

  “You have so much?” Nana says. She sounds like a purring cat. “All your jewel boxes are full? You’re so overloaded that you couldn’t force the lid closed on a nice pair of earrings?” She drags on the cigarette again, and Kwan sees that Nana is wearing new earrings, earrings that have stones dangling on the ends of fine, thin chains.

  “How many pair do you own?” Kwan asks.

  Nana tilts her head to one side and looks up at Kwan. The little stones sway back and forth on their chains. “I have no idea.”

  “Oh.” Kwan stands there, trying to wrap her mind around the idea of not knowing how many you have of anything. Finally she says, “More than five?”

  Nana laughs with a lungful of smoke, then bends forward, coughing pale clouds into the night. When she’s got it under control, she waves her open hand side to side in front of her face, clearing away the smoke, and then wipes the corners of her eyes. “Many more than five. Probably thirty or forty. Please. Sit down. My neck is getting stiff. And take this thing or I’ll get irritated.”

  Remembering what Nana was like when she got irritated, Kwan sits. After a moment she reaches for the earring, but Nana withdraws her hand, just out of Kwan’s reach.

  “Let me,” she says. Very gently, she removes the stud from Kwan’s ear, drops it into her own lap, and inserts the post that holds the sapphire. Her hands are soft and smooth, not hard with calluses, like Kwan’s. When she’s slid the backing into place against Kwan’s lobe and the earring is secure, Nana pulls away a little and studies Kwan as if Kwan were something she had just made and she wants to check the quality of her work. Kwan drops her eyes in embarrassment. Eventually Nana nods. “Get rid of that rice-bowl haircut, feather it a little, and then let your hair grow a couple of feet,” Nana says. “Put about five kilos on you, get some decent clothes. Find some platform shoes that make you even taller.”

  Kwan says, “Taller?”

  “You idiot.” The word would hurt, but Nana is smiling. “You have no idea what you look like. I mean, just look at this.” Nana puts out a thumb and sculpts the air just above Kwan’s cheekbones, then down over her nose and across her lips. “I’d give a hundred thousand baht for your cheekbones,” she says. “You’d stop traffic in Bangkok.”

  Kwan pulls her knees up and wraps her arms around them, curving her spine into the comfort of its familiar C. “You’re making fun of me.”

  “Is that so?” Nana sticks her cigarette into her mouth. Then she puts one hand on the nape of Kwan’s neck and pulls Kwan’s head back, using the other hand to push the base of her spine forward. Kwan straightens, surprised at the contact. “There,” Nana says. “Like that.” She turns away and surveys the night, making sure n
o one is close enough to overhear. Then she hits on the cigarette again and flicks it into the darkness. It lands six or eight feet away with an eruption of red sparks. She leans toward Kwan so she can whisper into her ear. What she says is “If I’m making fun of you, why are you worth sixty thousand baht?”

  The knot around Kwan’s heart tightens again, and she feels her mouth drop open.

  “Because you’re ugly?” Nana continues, ignoring Kwan’s reaction. “Because men won’t like you?”

  “It’s not—” Kwan says. “That’s not— I mean, it won’t happen.”

  “It will, you know.” Nana sounds neutral, as though she’s talking about a third person, someone who’s not there and whom they know only slightly. She’s turning the steel stud over between the fingers of her right hand and combing the fingers of the left through her shoulder-length hair.

  Kwan wants to argue but instead says, “How do you even know about this?”

  “I didn’t until I got here. I’ll tell you the truth, though: I came back to talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  “What do you think? About going back to Bangkok with me.”

  Kwan is searching Nana’s face, looking for a hint of the joke. “Me?”

  “You don’t know,” Nana says. “Foreign men will go crazy for you.”

  “You mean . . . I’d be doing what . . . what you do?”

  Nana fills her cheeks with air and blows it out with a brusque little pop. “I was exactly like you,” she says. “I forget sometimes how much I was like you. How could those girls do all that? How could they dance around in front of men and go with them? To hotels, I mean. And in the rooms? How could they do that, with men they don’t even know? Aren’t they . . . ashamed? When they think about their lives, don’t they want to die?”

  Kwan says, “Don’t you?”

  “Actually,” Nana says, “I’ve never had so much fun in my life.” She holds the stud up between thumb and forefinger and sights the moon past it. “I was terrified at first. So they let me go slow. They had me stand outside the bar for two weeks, dressed like a schoolgirl, just trying to get men to come in. ‘One beer, eighty baht, have many beautiful girl, one beer eighty baht.’ ” She is speaking English. “Do you understand what I just said?” She takes a cigarette that’s been bent slightly, straightens it between her fingers, and fires it up.

  “Most of it.”

  “Well, I didn’t, not then. But that’s right, you’re good at school, aren’t you? All I ever did in school was think about getting out of this town. But the mama-san in the bar said the English words over and over again until I could repeat them, and then, after about a week, I got brave enough to take men by the arm and lead them into the bar. They’d be speaking English to me, or Japanese, or German, and I’d just say, ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ and sometimes, ‘You so handsome,’ which one of the dancers taught me, until one of the mama-sans got hold of the man’s other arm and took him away from me. Then I’d stand there for a minute and watch the girls dance, thinking how beautiful they were, until somebody waved me back out into the street.”

  “You can do that?” Kwan asks. “That’s allowed? You just stand there? Without having to, you know, to . . .”

  Nana is studying the side of the cigarette, where a tendril of smoke is escaping. She licks her forefinger and presses the wet finger against the tear in the paper. When she’s sure she’s sealed it, she says, “Sure. But a door girl doesn’t make any money. Just enough for noodles in the street and a bare room you share with six other girls. And they make you buy the schoolgirl’s uniform, too, and they subtract part of that money from your pay every week, so you wind up with even less.”

  “Ah.” Kwan hugs her knees more tightly but remembers to keep her back straight.

  “And you couldn’t do it anyway,” Nana says. “You’d look silly in a schoolgirl’s uniform.”

  “I look okay,” Kwan says, stung.

  Nana blows out, wafting the argument away with the smoke. “Oh, sure, for here. Who cares about here? Down there, where there are beautiful girls everywhere, you’d look stupid, like somebody too dumb to get out of seventh grade. With your height you need to be glamorous, not all little-girly.”

  Kwan says, “Glamorous?”

  Nana faces her full on. “Kwan, you have to get used to this. You’re beautiful. With a little work, I mean. You’re tall, but in Bangkok that would be good. You’d stand out, and that’s what matters. There are a lot of girls, and you have to stand out somehow. The girls who work down there learn to make as much as they can out of what they’ve got. That’s their job. They have to figure out what their best look is. Some girls are short and plump, so they act cheerful, with little bows in their hair and big plastic bracelets, teddy-bear knapsacks, things like that. Some girls are little, and they try to look young, pigtails and bangs. A lot of men like young girls best. The prettiest girls get great haircuts—I know somebody who could make your hair look amazing, by the way, even while it’s growing out.” She reaches over and rubs the ends of Kwan’s hair between her fingertips. “Perfect hair.” She stops. “What was I saying?”

  “About the pretty girls, how they—”

  Nana pats the air to show she doesn’t need the prompt. “Right, they get their hair cut just so, and they find someone to teach them about makeup, and they just go out there and look beautiful. But you—you could be the star of any bar you worked in.”

  “A star? You make it sound like the movies.”

  “It is,” Nana says. “Sort of. I mean, it’s like there are stars and there are those other actresses, the ones you see all the time, but they never play the girl the hero loves, and then there are ordinary girls, the girls who stand around in the background in the big scenes. Some girls never get taken out until everybody else is gone. Other girls, girls as beautiful as you, they’ve got men fighting over them, they’re doing three or four short-times a night. Making big money.”

  “What’s a short-time?”

  Nana closes her eyes for a second, and Kwan has the feeling she’s reproaching herself for having said too much. “A trip to a hotel. With a customer.”

  “Four of them in one night?” Kwan can feel how wide her eyes are. “You mean, with different men?”

  “Honey,” Nana says, “if there’s a man anywhere in the world who can do it four times in one night, I hope I never meet him.”

  “I have to go now,” Kwan says, and she puts both feet on the ground.

  “Two hundred dollars,” Nana says. “Maybe more. That’s how much those girls make. In one night.”

  Kwan’s head is ringing. “My father doesn’t make five hundred dollars in a year.”

  “Three nights,” Nana says. “You’d earn more in three nights than he does in a year. And you can send most of the money home. Your parents could build a new house.”

  “That’s . . . that’s twelve men.” A new house?

  “Those are the best girls. And you might not have to do that. You might be able to get more every time. But I think you’d get that kind of attention.”

  Kwan turns away, unwilling to let Nana look any more deeply into her eyes. “I could never do that. I’ve never . . . I mean, I’ve never even . . .” She can’t finish the sentence.

  “I was going to ask you about that,” Nana says. “Have you or haven’t you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Lots of us had. Before we went down, I mean. I had, twice. Well, okay, four times. But it’s better if you haven’t.”

  “It doesn’t matter—”

  “Oh, yes, it does. You could get five hundred, six hundred dollars, twenty or twenty-five thousand baht for the first time. Maybe more.”

  Once again, for the fourth or fifth time during the evening, Kwan has the sense that people are speaking some form of Thai she doesn’t understand. The first time? Six hundred dollars? “That’s not what I meant. I mean, I’m not going.”

  Nana takes the neck of Kwan’s T-shirt and gives it a
sharp tug. “Listen. You have to think about this, because if you don’t, your life might as well be over. You can come with me, to Bangkok. Day after tomorrow, we have to go day after tomorrow. I’ll pay the train fare, I’ll lend you five thousand baht. You come with me, I’ll take you into a bar, and you can start out as a waitress. All you have to do is give people their drinks and collect the money. Smile once in a while. You don’t have to go with anybody.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “I just said you wouldn’t have to.” Nana’s voice has sharpened. She pauses before she goes on, and then she takes a corner of the blanket and drapes it over Kwan’s shoulders, too, so they’re both covered. She smooths it down gently. “You can see the way things work. Get to know the girls. I’ll be there. I’ll take you to the bar where I work, so you’ll already have one friend. You can watch the girls, talk to them, see whether you think you can do it. See how much money there is down there. You can’t imagine how much money there is. See how well the girls live.” She thinks for a moment, feeling the focus of Kwan’s attention, and says, “See how much it means to them that they can help their parents and keep their brothers and sisters in school.”

  “Keep them in school?”

  “If you’re sending money home, there’s no reason for them not to stay in school.”

  “My sister Mai,” Kwan says slowly. “She’s very pretty. Not like me, really pretty.”

  “Three or four years from now, your father is going to start looking at her and seeing money.”

  “But he can’t,” Kwan says. “My teacher, she says that the police—”

  “Forget the police. I’m telling you, you have to come down to Bangkok with me. And you need to make up your mind right now, because you have to leave the day after tomorrow.”

  “But tomorrow he’ll get the money to keep me in school. Then I won’t have to worry about—”

  Nana’s hand lands on top of Kwan’s. “Be quiet and listen,” she says. “Tomorrow he’ll get the money to keep you in school. The day after tomorrow, he’ll sell you.”