The Usual Santas

by Peter Lovesey

  “Or Vietnam?”

  He nodded. “Or Vietnam.” He motioned toward the long lines at the cashier stations. “They think buying shit is living. It ain’t.”

  “What is?” I asked.

  “This,” he said.

  I followed his gaze toward the entrance. Sooki walked in, paused, and glanced around the expanse of the busy PX. When she spotted us she smiled, waved, and headed straight toward us.

  Chalee’s Nativity

  by Timothy Hallinan

  Timothy Hallinan has been nominated for the Edgar, Nero, Shamus, and Macavity awards. After years of working in the television and music industries, he now writes full-time. He divides his time between California and Thailand. He is the author of seventeen widely praised books and three critically acclaimed crime fiction series. The six Simeon Grist mysteries feature an overeducated Los Angeles private eye. The Junior Bender mysteries feature a Hollywood burglar-turned-detective for crooks, and include Crashed, Little Elvises, The Fame Thief, Herbie’s Game, King Maybe, and Fields Where They Lay. And finally, the Poke Rafferty thrillers feature an American travel writer who lives in Bangkok, Thailand, and include A Nail Through the Heart, The Fourth Watcher, Breathing Water, The Queen of Patpong, The Fear Artist, For the Dead, and The Hot Countries.

  The story that follows is set in Bangkok and features a Thai street child named Chalee, a character who emerged in the sixth Poke Rafferty novel, For the Dead. As Timothy Hallinan writes, “One of the problems of writing a series is that you can only focus on a few characters in each book. In the meantime, though, the crowd of people the reader meets only once or twice continues to grow, and they’re all living their own lives, beyond the margins of the books. This story lets me rejoin two of them for a single night, the night before Christmas.”

  Chalee is drawing.

  She’s sitting on the sidewalk near the curb with her back to the traffic, trying to solve the technical problem of sparkle. If she had her colored pencils, she thinks, she could show it with a mix of yellow and white, a little bounce of tiny lines radiating out from the glowing circle floating above the woman’s head. She sees the lines when she squints, which she does frequently because she’s nearsighted. She likes the circle better with the sparkle because without it, it looks like what it really is—a fluorescent tube—and she knows it’s supposed to be something more mysterious than neon. So she needs the sparkle in the drawing. Problem is she’s only got a regular pencil, and when she tried drawing the lines in black, Apple had leaned over her shoulder, sniffled in her ear, and said, “Is that supposed to be fur?” and Chalee had erased the lines.

  Which tore the paper, gone all damp because of the drizzle. Chalee has a stack about an inch thick that she’d boosted when she left the shelter, and it’s all getting damp. That ripples it and makes it more transparent; the black type on the reverse side begins to ghost through. The paper, the blank side of which is prized in the shelter, is donated by a company that shredded it without a thought until a marketing executive realized that they could turn their scrap into television commercials, at essentially no cost, about how the firm makes it possible for homeless children to learn to read and write. “Helping them write the page of their future” is the line that appears at the end, over a picture of some poor kid with his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth as he tries to master the curlicues of his name.

  If Chalee could read the writing, she’d learn a little bit about some new protocols developed several years ago to test drinking water for insecticides that are thought to cause birth defects. The protocols were been loudly proclaimed as an essential step forward by the branch of the government that brags for a living and assiduously ignored by the branch of the government that tests water for a living. The water in Chalee’s old home village smelled a little when she lived there. Boiling it didn’t seem to help.

  Apple says, “I’m hungry.”

  “You’re always hungry.” On her new sheet, Chalee has sketched the woman’s outline again and is using the edge of the pencil’s lead to shade the folds in her robe, postponing the glowing circle in the hope that inspiration will tap her on the shoulder. The robe is the blue Chalee remembers from her village, back before her father lost his land to the people who’d been lending him money to grow his rice. The family had rolled downhill to Bangkok like a handful of rocks, leaving only her older sister, who had—

  Chalee shakes her head sharply, and the memory of Sumalee rolls back into the slot where she keeps it, out of sight most of the time.

  “Let’s go back,” Apple says, and Chalee turns reluctantly from the woman in the lighted window to look at her temporary companion. Apple is small and dark and disappointed, a mosquito magnet whose face and arms are perpetually bumpy with bites. For the first few weeks, the kids at the shelter had appreciated the insistent hum over Apple’s cot as they lay unmolested, but then scabies broke out and the almost-nurse who looked after the shelter’s minor complaints had thoughtlessly identified Apple as the probable source. Apple’s stock had plummeted to the point that no one would speak to her. After Chalee’s only friend, a boy called Dok, had unexpectedly been taken for a trial adoption, Chalee had slipped out one night and hit the street, persuading herself it was good to be back on her own until she turned and found Apple trying to duck into a door half a block behind. That had been five nights earlier.

  “Go if you want,” she says. “I’m staying.”

  Apple’s lower lip, never out of sight for long, protrudes. She blinks a couple of times, either clearing tears or trying to work them up. Apple cries a lot. She’s wearing a boy’s plaid shirt that’s five sizes too big and a pair of men’s shorts that hang well below her scabbed knees and bunch voluminously beneath a belt with a dozen new holes punched in it. Both garments are notably dirty. She says, “If I go alone, they’ll beat me up.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Chalee says, without thinking. “Nobody wants to touch you.”

  Apple is blinking again, faster than before. She takes a step back as though Chalee had tried to slap her, and turns away. Chalee thinks she’s leaving, but after a long moment she sits on the curb with her feet, in their too-big sneakers, in the street. One of the sneakers has come untied. Her head is so far down Chalee can barely see it above the shirt’s high collar. Apple looks like a pile of discarded clothes.

  She sniffles again.

  How old is she? A big eight? A small eleven? If she’s eleven, she’s not much younger than Dok, who might have been the only person who ever loved Chalee. “I just want to finish this drawing,” Chalee says. “Then we’ll get something to eat.”

  Just as she decides Apple won’t reply, the smaller girl says, “Promise?”

  “I promise.” She goes back to her shading, thinking apprehensively about the glowing circle. The robes worn by the woman in the window are from old times but her face is the same as most of the other women in the store windows, all now so bright and full of things for sale. She looks neither Thai nor farang, as far as Chalee can see, but she can’t see much because the woman’s face is angled down, as though she’s looking at the bundled blanket in her arms. There’s a baby doll in the blanket, one bright pink arm raised stiffly toward the downturned face. Chalee recognizes the doll, a little girl named Baby Noi that was popular a few years ago, but she’s not wearing her Let’s Baby! t-shirt. In fact, inside the blanket she seems to be naked. The big thing about Baby Noi was that she wet her pants, but the woman who’s holding her doesn’t look worried.

  “Who is she?” Apple asks. She’s facing the window again, sitting, like Chalee, on the wet sidewalk. She leans toward Chalee just enough so their shoulders touch, and Chalee can smell her. Apple smells like feet.

  “She’s, um, you know Santa Claus?”

  “Everybody knows Santa Claus.” They’re both pronouncing it Santa Claut.

  “This is Mrs. Santa Claut.”

 
“Wow,” Apple says. “Her husband is so much older.”

  “And the kid,” Chalee says with a certainty she doesn’t feel, “is Baby Claut.”

  “Bet she gets a lot of presents.”

  “He,” Chalee says.

  “You know everything,” Apple says. There’s a pause as Chalee evaluates the picture and her story at the same time. Apple says, “Did you ever get presents?”

  “I got a new shirt for school,” Chalee says. “The year I went to school.”

  “That’s not the same,” Apple says. She sniffles again; she has a permanent cold. “Is it?”

  “I guess not. What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Did you ever get presents?”

  “Only when,” Apple says, and then she falls silent. Chalee has started to rough in the floating circle when Apple speaks again. “No,” she says.

  ***

  Tiny, irregular erasures in the circle, not much wider than a pencil line, do it. Kind of. The breaks in the circle make it look less solid, airy enough to explain why it doesn’t just fall on the woman’s head and maybe hit Baby Noi, and when Chalee erases outward, the rubber drags a faint smear of pencil behind it. The smears are better than the lines she drew before because they’re soft-edged, more like the sparkle she sees when she squints. Apple’s weight on Chalee’s shoulder has become permanent, and Chalee has to extend her neck to see around Apple’s head every now and then, but she’s caught up in her work, and as long as Apple doesn’t sneeze on the page, it’s all okay.

  “Wow,” Apple says for the hundredth time in five days, “you can really draw.”

  “I do it all the time.”

  “Can you draw me?”

  Chalee makes an irritated shrug. “Not now.” She’s almost got the sparkle, and at that very moment she sees what’s wrong with the woman’s eyes, but she’s running out of eraser, and she’s already bitten down twice on the tin to squeeze more out.

  Apple pulls away and says, “Oh.”

  “Let me—just let me—” What she saw in the woman’s eyes, the thing that had been missing, is fading. One time in the village, when she was four or five and fishing with her brother, Chalee had felt a tug for the first time in her life and she’d brought the line up too quickly, snapping it. It came flying up out of the water and spray had hit her face but she barely felt it. She’d seen a sudden flash of silver through the tea-colored water and then another, dimmer the second time, and then a third that might actually have been a memory, and then nothing.

  That’s what’s happening with the thing she’d glimpsed in the woman’s eyes, the thing that would have drawn a kind of invisible line between the mother and the baby. She says, “Shit.”

  “I don’t care,” Apple says. “I don’t want you to draw me anyway.”

  “Why would I want—” Chalee begins, but she breaks off as she hears her own voice. “I mean, I’m trying to―to―I mean, leave me alone for a minute, please?”

  “Sure,” Apple says. She puts both hands on the wet pavement and gets up. “I don’t like your drawing anyway. It’s dumb.” Chalee is at work on the corners of the eyes, trying to find it again, when Apple starts to walk away. She steps on her flopping shoelace and pitches forward on her hands and knees, making a little whuff sound, like someone has punched her in the stomach, and then, for the first time since she leaned against Chalee’s shoulder, she sniffles.

  “Just a couple of minutes,” Chalee says, glimpsing it again.

  “Take a year,” Apple says. She ties her shoe and wipes her bumpy cheeks, and the next time Chalee looks up, she’s gone.

  It’s there, it’s not there, it’s not there, it’s there. She finds it at last, partly in the eyes and partly in the tilt of Mrs. Claut’s head, and then she sees that Baby Noi’s hand should follow the same line as the mother’s gaze. It takes her last tiny bit of eraser, but she makes the fix, and only then does she sit back and take in all of the drawing at the same time. There’s a kind of a curve, she’s surprised to see, like a crescent moon, that flows from the circle above the woman’s head, down through her neck and shoulder and along the bent arm with its uptilted fingers that cradles the baby, and the curve is the most important part of the picture. She studies it in the picture and then looks back up at the window to confirm the accuracy of her drawing, but the curve isn’t there. In its place are two irregular angles, like the corners of half-collapsed boxes. The arm is bent so awkwardly it might belong to someone else.

  Puzzled, she scratches her head and looks back down at her picture. The curve, the thing that makes the picture seem true, is there. It’s as clear to her as the mother’s eyes. She shifts her gaze to the window just as the lights inside go out, but she has time to see that the curve―her curve, she thinks―isn’t there. It’s harder to see her drawing now that the window light has been turned off, but it’s there, the curve is there, and Chalee says out loud, “I made it.”

  She’s known since she was little that she could draw people so other people would recognize her subject, but this is new. Until now, she thinks, she’s been able to put what she saw on the page. Now she’s put in something that wasn’t there. Something that was missing.

  She wants to show it to Dok, she wants to explain it to Dok. Dok would admire it. He’d look up from the page and smile at her, his two big rat-teeth gleaming, and say something like “Only you could do this, Chalee.” You can cut it here if you like.

  Without thinking, Chalee says, “Apple?” but there’s no answer. That’s right, Apple is gone, Apple had said something when Chalee was trying to put the look in the woman’s eyes somewhere where she could find it when she needed it, and Chalee had answered her, maybe not very nicely, and Apple had gone away. After she tripped on her shoelaces, she had looked at Chalee as though Chalee had just shot her.

  “Oh, no,” Chalee said. She suddenly felt chilled, and heavy with guilt. They hadn’t eaten all day, and Apple had been hungry, and she, Chalee had promised . . .

  She puts her drawing away, into the middle of the stack of paper so it won’t get any wetter, and on the blank surface of the next page, she sees the look in Apple’s eyes after she fell down. Without even knowing she’s going to do it, she begins to slide the pencil over the page, beginning with the eyes, and then swooping up to the bird’s nest of hair, fine and dry and broken, and below that the curve of the cheek. She stops, staring at all the mosquito bumps she’s drawn, and then once again she bites down on the eraser, hard enough to make her teeth hurt, and manages to extrude a bit more. She wipes it on her sleeve, and then on the inside of her shirt because it’s dryer there―a wet eraser makes a terrible, unfixable mess―and she banishes the bumps and gives Apple cheeks as smooth as a movie star’s. The girl has, Chalee realizes as she draws them, beautiful lips when the lower one is in its natural place, and she gives special attention to the mouth, shaping it so it seems to make the paper beneath it bloom outward. Then she goes back to the eyes and removes some of the pain—not all of it because there’s not enough eraser left, but anyway, if she took it all out it wouldn’t be Apple any more.

  Five swoops of the pencil create the lines of the chin and the neck and the collar of the awful shirt. She stops, eyeing the shirt, and gives it a girly design of pale little flowers and adds diamond-cut buttons. She wants to write the girl’s name, but she’s not sure Apple will be able to read it, so in the lower right corner she pencils a small, shiny apple with a stem and a single leaf. Then she breathes out for what feels like the first time in hours.

  The new drawing has taken just a few minutes. But when Chalee looks hard at the girl on the page, it’s no one but Apple.

  ***

  She puts her new drawing safely in the middle of the stack, too, and slips the paper, careful not to wrinkle it or fold down the corners, into the torn backpack she dug out of a Dumpster one lucky night and has carried e
ver since. Her back feels stiff when she gets up, and she realizes she’s wet and cold. The drizzle creates circles of light around the streetlights like the one floating above Mrs. Claut’s head.

  For the first time since she saw the woman in the window, she surveys her surroundings. She’s on a boulevard that’s mostly stores, almost all of them full of things she’ll never have, some of them with sparkly cotton to represent the snow she’ll probably never see. She doesn’t have a watch but her sense of time is keen, and it seems to her the stores have closed early. Most of the windows have gone dark.

  There are, as always in Bangkok, people in the streets, many of them wearing Santa Claut hats that blink on and off. Some of them walk with the slow precision of too many drinks. From a store that’s still open, a ribbon of music unfurls into the street, a Thai children’s chorus.

  Jinger Ben

  Jinger Ben

  Jinger aaadawaaayyyy

  She’s heard it every Christmas since they fled the village. She hates it.

  She’s hungry. Apple was hungry. Where’s Apple?

  It takes her a moment to remember that Apple went off in the direction that was to her left when she’d been facing the window, so she goes that way, aware of the people in their blinky hats curving around her as though they might catch something, and for a moment she hopes she does have scabies and that it can jump onto them and make them scratch themselves until they bleed. The thought of scabies brings Apple to mind again, and she feels a curl of unease. The girl is sullen and maybe stupid and, let’s face it, not very attractive, but she’s young and alone and hungry, and there are people who look for girls like her. Chalee has had to deal with that, and Apple . . . Apple is too young.

  “I’m a bad friend,” she says aloud, and two passers-by stare at her.

  Two long blocks, no Apple. On a brightly lit cross street a farang entertainment district pours out a steady stream of middle-aged men accompanied by younger women, like Santa and Mrs. Claut. The girls cling to the men’s arms as though they’re afraid that the men will break the line and swim away, as Chalee’s fish had. All the women are smiling, but there are a lot of Thai smiles, and these are masks that seem to cool the night even further. There are so many people that Chalee would have to push her way through if people hadn’t noticed her and given her room.