Breathing Water

by Timothy Hallinan

  “And Pan is rocking the boat?”

  “Sure. Rich people steal from the poor and pretend they’re giving. And here he is: He was poor, he still behaves like a peasant, and he’s really giving. He’s built two hospitals in Isaan, not big hospitals but good ones, and he pays doctors to work there, to take care of people who have never seen a doctor in their lives.” She stands and goes to the sink. He looks at the day heating up through the window, hearing the clink of her spoon against the jar of instant coffee and then the flow of water as the tap goes on. “Do you remember a girl from the bar, short and a little fat, always laughing, named Jah?”

  Rafferty searches his memory. “Sort of. Maybe.”

  “You have to remember her. There was that girl, the ugly, awful one, who was dancing when you first came into the bar. She wore glasses, and you can’t tell me you’ve forgotten that.”

  Rafferty feels his face go hot.

  “So you thought she was a college student or something, and you gave her—”

  Rafferty tries to wave the rest of the story away. “I remember.”

  “—you gave her five hundred baht. Because you were a sap. And the next night when you came in, everybody was wearing glasses.”

  “Oh,” Rafferty says, the light dawning in the east. “Jah.”

  “Right. She was the one whose glasses were so strong she walked off the edge of the stage and landed on that foreign woman. Anyway, Jah tested positive.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.” Rose is right, Jah had always been laughing.

  “She’s okay.” She comes back and takes her seat again. “She got into a place here in Bangkok with about a hundred and fifty women in it. I know five or six of them. They get the drugs without having to pay for them, they have a place to sleep, they get three meals. They’re not out on the street, dying, or curled up in some shack up north, with the whole village pointing at them. Pan pays for it all.”

  Rafferty says, “Last night he was calling the women on Patpong whores.”

  “They are,” Rose says.

  “Well, yeah, I mean, sure, literally.” This is not his most comfortable subject. “But he used the word—I don’t know—contemptuously.”

  “That’s who he is. He uses the worst words he can think of. And then he goes and sets up a place like the one Jah is in.”

  “I’m ready,” Miaow says, coming into the room in her school uniform. Her hair has been meticulously reparted and slicked down, and the skin on her cheeks literally shines. She is, Rafferty thinks, the cleanest child on the face of the earth.

  “Let’s go, then,” he says, standing up.

  “Why are you taking me?” Miaow demands. “I get there by myself every day.”

  “Why not?” Rafferty says. “I’m awake, it’s time, and you’re my daughter. You said so yourself.”

  Miaow slips into the straps of her backpack. “He’s weird today,” she says to Rose.

  Rose says, “He’s weird every day.”

  FOR THE FIRST five minutes of the taxi ride, Miaow gives him the brooding silence that seems to be her new default mode.

  When she finally talks, he gets the topic he wants least. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”

  “Why would something be wrong?”

  “I saw you when you were talking on the phone. You got all tight and squinched.”

  “Squinched?”

  “That’s English,” she says. “I think.”

  “I suppose it’s closer to English than it is to anything else.”

  “Anyway, you looked like that.”

  Rafferty gazes longingly out the window, which is too small for him to escape through. In retrospect, being alone with Miaow right now is not a tremendous idea. For some obscure reason, possibly because she knows he loves her with all his heart, she thinks she can ask him about anything. And, of course, she’s right.

  He opts for selective honesty. “You know that book they mentioned in the newspaper?”

  She blows out, her upper teeth against her lower lip to create a very long and slightly irritated “Ffffffffffff” sound. “I remember. It was only half an hour ago.”

  “Well, that was someone who told me not to write it.”

  Miaow says, “Or what?”

  He should have known better. “What do you mean, ‘or what’?”

  She crosses her arms high on her chest. “People don’t tell you not to do something without saying ‘or what.’ You know that.”

  “You’ve been watching too many movies.”

  “No. He said ‘or something,’ and then you got all squinched.”

  The cab, at long last, makes the right into the street that leads to the street that leads to the street that Miaow’s school is on. Rafferty exhales heavily and says, “Jesus, this is a long ride.”

  Miaow’s not giving him an inch. “That’s because you can’t think of anything to say.”

  “Why have you been so grumpy lately?” Rafferty asks.

  “Don’t change the subject. They said ‘or something.’”

  “All right, you’re absolutely correct. They said if I wrote the book, they’d attack me with garden tools, chop me up, and make me into sandwiches.”

  “I’m not five,” Miaow says. “Why would anyone make a sandwich with garden tools?”

  “They’re farmers,” Rafferty improvises. “That’s all they have.”

  “Why don’t they just back the buffalo over you?”

  “Then they wouldn’t have the sandwiches.”

  The remark gets the silence it deserves, and Miaow allows it to stretch out. Then she puts a small brown hand on top of his, the first time she’s touched him in days. “Are you going to get us into trouble?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Very simple,” he says. “I’m not going to write the book.”

  IT TAKES ONLY a second for his life to change.

  The thrust of something hard into his back. The solid grip on his upper arm.

  “It’s a gun,” a man says in English. “Stop walking. Don’t look around.”

  “Or what?” Rafferty says, Miaow’s voice in his ears. The door to her school is a few yards behind him. She disappeared through it ten seconds ago.

  “Or I’ll blow your spine to bits.” The English is almost completely unaccented.

  “Just asking.”

  “Hold still,” the man says, and something dark brown is pulled over Rafferty’s head and he’s shoved forward. “Bend down, pull the hood away from your chest, and look at your feet. There’s an open car door in front of you. Get in. Leave the door open behind you and sit in the middle. Clear?”

  “Crystalline.”

  “Then go.”

  The car is black, and the bit of it he can see is clean and highly polished. He climbs in. It is cool and smells of leather. He slides to the center of the seat, his feet straddling the bump for the drive shaft, and waits. The front door opens, and the car dips as someone very heavy climbs in. A second later the back door to his left opens. A man gets in, and then there is another man sitting on his right. A gun probes his ribs on each side.

  “With all friendly intent,” Rafferty says, “if those bullets go through me, you’re going to be shooting each other.”

  “They won’t go through you,” says the man who had spoken before, who is now to Rafferty’s right. “They’re .22 hollow-points. They’ll just turn you to hamburger inside and stay there.”

  Rafferty says, “Good. I’d hate to worry about you.” He hears a ticking that he identifies as the turn signal, the driver preparing to enter the stream of traffic.

  “On the other hand,” the man says, “no exit wounds. You can have an open-casket funeral.”

  11

  Peep

  The baby’s name is Peep.

  The night whispered the name in Da’s ear just before she dropped off to sleep. She had spent hours, extravagantly letting her candle burn down, studying the child’s face. He is a bea
utiful baby with features of bewildering delicacy, especially the impossible miniature perfection of the nose and ears, the long, dark fringe of eyelashes, the soft curls of black hair. All of it so defenseless, all of it so new.

  “Peep” is the first sound a chick makes, when its wings are silly, useless elbows and its feathers are yellow baby fluff. It’s a small sound, breath-edged, perfect for a baby.

  So: Peep.

  Don’t drop it, the man in the office had said.

  How could she drop him?

  Early the next morning, they were jostled down the stairs and across the drying mud into the back of a pair of vans. The men and the cripples were herded into one van, the women with children into the other.

  The windows were covered with ragged pieces of sacking that had been glued to the glass. The covered windows frightened Da: Why shouldn’t they see where they were going? She pointed to the cloth and made a palms-up, questioning gesture to the deaf and dumb woman, who smiled and shook her head: Don’t worry. One of the other women, older than the others, with a skeletal, stunned-looking four- or five-year-old child clinging to her, said, “It’s so nobody can see in. People aren’t supposed to know that we get driven back and forth.”

  Da said, “Oh.” Feeling stupid, feeling naive. Feeling lost. Wishing she were back in the drowsy cluster of wooden shacks at the bend of the river that is now dry, its water stolen. The shacks empty now, knocked off balance by the big machines until they sagged drunkenly sideways. Even the dogs are gone.

  The sidewalk that has been given to her is hard and hot and dusty, another kind of dry riverbed, a river of people. The booths from which the vendors sell their wares begin half a block away, while this stretch is given to store windows, small office buildings, foot traffic, and beggars. Da sits exactly where she was put by the man who had driven the van, a thickset tree trunk of a man in a bright blue Hawaiian shirt with brown girls all over it. He had looked at her incredulously when he realized she didn’t have a bowl, and then he’d tightened his mouth and stalked away, down to the booths. When he returned, he tossed a red plastic rice bowl into her lap. It had just missed Peep.

  “You owe me eighty baht,” he’d said.

  Now she sits there, the bowl upraised, hopelessly fishing the river of people. Most of them push past her, the same way they would sidestep a hole in the pavement. Once in a while, someone—usually a woman—will slow slightly and drop a coin into the bowl, often with a glance at Peep. Every time a coin strikes the bowl, Da feels a wave of shame wash over her.

  The noise of the street is deafening.

  Everything is in motion, but nothing seems to change: The people flow past, the cars glint cruelly, the sun slams down, the noise hammers her ears. How can the world be this noisy? How can the air smell like this? How can the people who live here endure it? Sweat gathers under Da’s arms and between her breasts and runs down her body. She feels repulsively filthy.

  How will she survive this day?

  One of the problems is that everything—the noise, the people, the dust, her shame—distracts her. It breaks to pieces her sense of who she is and scatters them unrecognizably at her feet. Where she grew up, silence was always available. There was always someplace she could go to reassemble herself when her grasp on who she was became frayed by distraction or anger, or even love. And now, sitting here, she feels as soulless, as valueless, as a piece of furniture abandoned on the sidewalk.

  And she has been this way, she realizes, for days. Since her mother and father slung their packs over their shoulders and took her younger sisters by the hand and said good-bye to her and to their lives together. Since the bulldozer knocked the shacks crooked and made them unlivable. Since the moment she began the long, slow flight to Bangkok.

  She has lost herself.

  But now that she has recognized it, this is something she knows how to deal with.

  She gathers her attention, reeling in the bits of her she left here and there over the days and nights that she was moving, no, running, as blindly and absently as the people who push past her now. She focuses all her attention on the sweat coursing down her skin. Feels the separate drops, feels their faintly cooling progress toward her belly. Feels the reassuring pressure of buttock on sidewalk: There is someone here after all. Slowly she broadens her focus to include her breath. In and out, in and out. An endless cycle with something at the center of it. Something doing the breathing, or perhaps something being breathed through, that she has come to know as Da.

  The noise gradually fades.

  After an undefinable period of time, she becomes aware that Peep has stopped shifting restlessly in her lap. She looks down to find him gazing at her. His tiny eyebrows are very faintly contracted, as though he is seeing something different when he looks at her. The look that passes between them is a pulse of some sort. A fine thread of connection.

  Peep brings up one arm, fingers spread wide, and swings it up and down. It looks to Da as if he is waving at her. The thought breaks her concentration and makes her laugh.

  And she feels eyes upon her. Someone is looking fixedly at her. She can feel this kind of thing. It is the dim, warm pressure of a gaze, fainter than the most tentative breeze, as faint as the weight of light falling through an open door. From behind her.

  She turns to look, and someone stumbles into her, hard enough to knock her to an elbow and send the bowl into the air, the coins spiraling loose and ringing against the pavement. Hard enough to make her grab Peep so tightly he squeals and then begins to cry.

  Someone is gabbling at her in some language—Sorry sorry sorry—it’s English, Da realizes, and she looks up, Peep squalling against her chest, to see a thin farang woman with hair the color of copper, a color that doesn’t even pretend to be real. The woman is waving her hands around, almost in tears, loudly saying the same thing, Sorry sorry sorry. She drops to her knees and begins to pick up the coins that hit the sidewalk.

  “Okay,” Da says, embarrassed for the woman, with the sweat dripping off the tip of her long, bony nose. “Me okay. Baby, him okay.”

  “I just wasn’t looking,” the woman says. She snatches a coin just inches in advance of a man’s shoe, barely getting her raw-looking knuckles out of the way. “Are you sure he’s all right?” She looks at Peep more closely and says, “Oh, my God, he’s adorable.”

  “Him…pretty,” Da says.

  “Pretty?” the woman says. She is dropping into the bowl the coins she picked up. “He’s precious, just a real little heartbreaker. How the girls will love him—he is a boy, isn’t he?”

  Da says, “Boy.”

  “And look at those lashes. Why is it always boys who get those beautiful eyelashes? Although you didn’t exactly get shortchanged in that department either. I feel like Bigfoot,” the woman says, looking around for more coins. “Just hoofed over you like a heffalump. Honey,” she says, putting a red-nailed hand on Da’s arm, “I am so sorry.”

  “No problem,” Da says. Peep has stopped crying and is regarding the woman’s hair with wide-eyed uncertainty.

  “Look at that little angel,” the woman says. “Just look at him. Couldn’t you just eat him up?”

  Da says, “Eat?”

  “Oh, you poor thing,” the woman says. “Here I am, gabbing on and on like this. Of course you need to eat. A lot more than you need a bunch of sloppy sympathy. Here.” She unsnaps a big straw purse and pulls out a wad of red five-hundred-baht bills. “You just buy as much food as you can choke down, and get that little angel a new blanket. The one you’ve got needs a couple of hours in a good strong bleach solution.” She puts two of the notes, and then a third, into Da’s bowl.

  “Too much,” Da says.

  “Nonsense. Plenty more where that comes from.” The eyes on either side of the sunburned nose are a pale, faded blue that Thai people associate with ghosts, but they seem kind. “Look at you,” she says. “Probably never done anything wrong in your sweet little life, and here you are. I have to tell you, honey, with a
ll due respect to your beautiful country and everything, it stinks.”

  Da takes the third note out of the bowl and extends it. She says, “Please?”

  “Honey, you knock that off. Put that back, or I’ll give you a bunch more.” The woman gets to her feet. “I’m Helen,” she says. She jabs her chest with an index finger. “Helen. Me Helen.” Then she points at Da. “You?”

  “My name me, Da.”

  “Da,” Helen says. “What a pretty name. And Junior there?”

  “Sorry?”

  Helen points at Peep. “Name?”

  “Name him, Peep.”

  “Name him…” Helen says, her voice trailing off. “Oh, oh. His name, his name is Peep. Peep, right?”

  Da says, “Peep.”

  “Da and Peep,” Helen says. “Peep and Da.”

  “Happy,” Da says, and then runs the sentence through her mind once and says, “Happy meet you.”

  “Oh, well, honey,” Helen says, blinking fast, “I’m happy to meet you, too. And I’ll be back here tomorrow. I’ll be back here every day this week, and I’ll be looking for you.” She tugs her blouse straight, puts the strap of the big straw purse over her shoulder. She waves at Peep. “You take care of that little treasure,” she says. “Bye, now.”

  Da says, “Bye-bye,” and Helen is gone.

  And immediately the space is filled by the tree-trunk man in the blue shirt, who snatches the five-hundred-baht bills out of the bowl, bends down, and says furiously, “Never do that. Never. Never give money back. Do you understand me?”

  Da lowers her head. Peep begins to cry again. “I understand,” Da says.

  “You’re here to get it, not give it away.” And then the man is gone.

  Da sits there, bouncing Peep to quiet his crying, trying to reassemble the feeling she had before Helen bumped into her. But what she feels instead is the warmth of that fixed gaze.

  When she turns this time, she sees him: a spectrally slender boy of thirteen or fourteen, with a sharp-featured face and long, knotted hair. A moment later, like an animal disappearing into the brush around her village, he is gone.