The Queen of Patpong pr-4

by Timothy Hallinan

  A loud noise right now would, he thinks, break him in pieces.

  The dustpan and the broom are exactly where they should be. There's a sort of smugness to them, an implicit criticism of everyone and everything else in an apartment where nothing seems to be where, or the way, it should be. He picks up the items carefully, as if they were made of hundred-year-old crystal, and carries them into the living room, making a detour to the door to slip into his shoes. The shards of brown bottle glass cover a roughly semicircular area of carpet in a radius of about two feet. Some larger pieces glitter even farther away. The neck, widening at its base into a jagged crown, would make a formidable weapon. He picks it up. If he'd broken the soda bottle on John's head, he would have been holding something as lethal as this. It's easy to imagine bringing it up, the neck clenched firmly in his fist, to cut long, deep, bleeding scores in John's flesh. Parallel, like rows in a field, spouting blood wherever the furrow intersected an artery.

  On the whole, he decides, looking down at his knuckles, gone white on the bottle's neck, he's glad the soda bottle remained intact. He'd been angry enough to cut John, cut him badly. Instead all he'd done was inflict temporary damage on the man's mucous membranes. And he wasn't happy with himself even about that.

  He isn't really happy with anyone.

  A bag. He needs a paper bag now, doesn't he? There's not much fucking point, he thinks-and then goes back and deletes the "fucking"-there's not much point in picking up a few hundred pieces of broken glass without having something to put them in.

  He gets up, hearing his knees pop in a way they didn't used to, and returns to the kitchen. The paper supermarket bags are neatly folded into thirds and pressed flat, then jammed by Rose into the space between the side of the stove and the counter, in such high numbers that they've reached the kind of superdensity that Rafferty associates with collapsed stars. It takes him three or four minutes to tease one out, and when he's worked the corner free and is tugging it, it promptly tears off in his hand. The rest of the bag remains, pristine and unmolested, in the cramp of brown paper between the oven and the counter.

  He crouches there, the kitchen floor vaguely tacky under the soles of his shoes, and looks down at the little corner of bag in his hand. Then he gets up, deliberately drops the tiny piece of paper on the floor, and grinds it beneath his shoe. That chore done, he puts both hands against the edge of the stove and shoves it with every ounce of strength he possesses, into the side of the pantry.

  The stove has only a couple of inches to travel, but it accelerates surprisingly and creates a rewarding wham when it hits the pantry wall. The smell of old grease wafts invisibly upward. Lazily, as if in slow motion, the bags that had been jammed between the counter and the side of the stove fan out like a hand in gin rummy and then spill onto the kitchen floor in a slippery cascade. Some of them manage to slide all the way to the counter on the room's far side.

  Isn't gin rummy an alcoholic-sounding game? Rafferty thinks as he uses the soles of his shoes to stretch, mark, and tear as many of the bags as possible. Gin and rum, all in one game-and a game that kids play, at that. Have to look into the origins of the name sometime. This is precisely the kind of thing the Oxford English Dictionary is for, not that he has an Oxford English Dictionary. What he has, at the moment at least, is an apartment that is easy to visualize as a map, complete with borders, heavily defended borders, dividing the independent nations that fight over the space: Roseland, Miaowistan, and the Kingdom of Poke. Crossing these borders involves negotiation, checkpoints, and body-cavity searches. And even then you might be turned away.

  "I didn't sign on for this," he says aloud.

  He picks up the single bag that's survived his shoes-obviously the sturdiest bag of all, and it has to be sturdy to hold this much broken glass without shredding, so he can tell Rose, assuming he ever speaks to her again, that he was testing the bags to find the one that would keep them safe from the shards. Safe from the shards, safe from the shards. He totes the shard-safe bag into the living room, where he sees the broom and dustpan right where he put them a year or two ago, and he sets the bag down, sweeps some glass into the dustpan, tries three times to sweep in one larger piece that doesn't want to be swept, bends down to shove it into the dustpan, and…

  … slices the pad of his thumb.

  In one white-hot movement, he drops the piece of glass, drops the dustpan, grabs his thumb and squeezes it, all the while straightening his knees and his back, coming up until he's standing and whirling in a circle against the pain, swinging the bleeding thumb fast enough to create a zigzag Jackson Pollock lighting strike of blood on the white wall beside the door. He steps sideways and bangs his bandaged elbow against the wall to his left, and the next thing he knows, he's kicking the dustpan as hard as he can and it's sailing across the room straight and true, shedding splinters of glass as it gains altitude, until it bangs up against the door to the bedroom. It flips over and spills all the glass he's swept up, directly onto the carpet in front of the bedroom door.

  A moment later the door opens, and Rose stands there. She sees the blood on the wall, sees him folded over in pain, and steps into the room at the precise instant he realizes that she's barefoot.

  "No!" he shouts.

  Rose says "Uuuuiiiii, uuuuiiiii!" and grabs her right foot. She looks at the bottom of the foot, and she's bleeding.

  Rafferty feels something swell inside him, low in his belly, and then there's some kind of pressure forcing its way up, and suddenly he's laughing. The laughter reaches down and brings more laughter with it, and he's standing there, still bent over, injured elbow tight against his side, squeezing his sliced thumb, simultaneously laughing like a fool and blinking away tears as Rose, her foot still in her hand, glares down at the hazardous litter on the carpet in front of her, clenches her teeth, bends the knee of the leg she's standing on, and jumps over the spill of glass. She lands on one leg, windmills her free arm to stay up, and manages to remain standing, and then she's laughing, too, and Rafferty moves crablike, still bent forward, across the room to her, and he puts his unbandaged arm around her, pointing the bleeding thumb away to keep the blood off her clothes, and the two of them lean against each other and laugh until Rose starts to cry.

  Very slowly, very carefully, Rafferty maneuvers her to the couch, Rose taking small, backward, one-legged hops, and gets her seated. He kneels in front of her and cups her face in his hands, painting a bright brushstroke of blood across her cheek, as she closes her eyes and weeps, bringing her own hands up to hold his wrists. He leans toward her until their foreheads are touching, his hands still cradling her face. She makes an enormous snuffling sound, and he laughs again, although his own cheeks are cool and wet. Rose's sobbing turns into a laugh and then a hiccup, and Rafferty says, "Look at us."

  Rose pulls back enough to pass her arm over her cheeks and sees the blood she's smeared on her arm. "We're both bleeding."

  Rafferty says, "Are we ever."

  He feels a presence and turns to his left to see Miaow and Pim standing there, staring at them, eyes wide and faces wide open.

  Rose snuffles again and then wipes her nose on the back of her hand. "Okay," she says. "It's time."

  Pim backs away from the crying, laughing people on the couch. She puts a hand behind her for the doorknob and says, "Thank you for a nice afternoon."

  "You might as well stay," Rose says. "You need to hear this as much as they do."

  "But I have to-"

  Rose sails over her with a single breath. "No you don't. You need to know about this. You must be hungry, right? Well, Poke's going to bandage his thumb and bring me a bandage for my foot, and then he's going down to get us all some takeout from the street vendors. You and Miaow can go down with him to help him carry it all. Get a lot, because this is going to take a long time."

  Miaow looks suspicious. "What're you going to do?"

  Rose reaches over and brushes Rafferty's hair off his forehead, then raises her hand as though she's
going to swat him. "Be Poke's wife," she says. "Wipe blood off walls. Sweep glass."

  PART II

  1997 THE SEA CHANGE

  Chapter 8

  The Shoes

  Afternoon sunlight sparkles off the stones on her fingers and at her wrists.

  Kwan watches as the young woman leads a small parade of children, the bolder ones pushing forward for a closer look as though she's fallen to the dust from outer space, as though some of them hadn't known her when she was as brown and filthy as they are. The children wear patched shorts and dirt-brown T-shirts, liberally ventilated with holes. Their feet are bare or slap along on rubber flip-flops. Scabs define their knees, and their legs are lumped and mottled from insect bites. One of them, not one of the bolder ones, is Kwan's next-youngest sister, Mai. At thirteen, Mai is one of the tallest children in the queue, but that's because she's older than most of them. She hasn't yet had the growth spurt her mother dreads, the spurt that says that Mai may yet become as freakishly tall as Kwan.

  As tall as the Stork.

  The boy bringing up the end of the line proudly tows a small bright pink suitcase. It has wheels, and they get snagged in the holes that pit the road every few feet, so the boy doing the honors has to yank the wheels free every time and then catch up with the parade. In the background, at the village's edge, the dented orange taxi that first drew the children's attention finishes a jerky turnaround-back and forth, back and forth, trying not to bump two rickety houses it could bulldoze flat without denting its fenders-and bounces over the rutted track leading back toward the railroad station, kicking up a plume of reddish dust that drifts across the village in a dry parody of fog.

  The woman the children follow shimmers like an exotic tropical bird that's landed among the rice sparrows. She wears a loose blouse the color of sunset-silk, from the way the air drapes and redrapes it-and a short, tight, glittery black skirt. Shiny high heels in a leopard-skin pattern puncture the dust of the road between the houses. The woman's skin, paler than Kwan remembers it, looks polished, as though it's been slowly rubbed smooth. The highlights in her shaped and tapered hair, bright enough to have been shellacked, are almost blinding in the slanting sun. She pays no attention to the kids, but as she passes Kwan's house, she looks up and smiles.

  Kwan feels like she's been caught spying. She pulls back, ducking behind the damp clothes that hang on the line strung above the deck around her sagging wooden house. The deck and the house are raised about a meter above the dirt to keep the floors dry in the rainy season. Kwan reads the name of the rice company printed on the inside of one of her mother's dresses before she realizes how rude she's being, and she pushes aside the stiffening and now-dusty clothes and does her best to return Moo's smile.

  "We should talk while I'm here," Moo says, looking up at Kwan Then, as though she's remembering something, she says, more politely, "Are you well? Have you had rice yet?"

  "I'm fine, thank you," Kwan says. She knows she's blushing. Moo has never once spoken to her in the four summers since she went down to Bangkok, never even seemed to notice her. Now that they're speaking, Kwan has no idea what to say.

  "Straighten up," Moo says severely. "You're tall. You can't fool anybody by bending over like that. You just look crippled. Stand up and be proud of it. Some men will like it."

  Now Kwan's face is aflame. This is her least favorite topic. "Nobody likes it," she says. "I look like a giraffe."

  Moo nods, but she's not listening. The nod is polite dismissal. "Maybe tonight," she says. "We'll talk." She starts to move away but stops, and some of the kids who were already in motion behind her bump into each other. She reaches up to her left ear and fiddles with something for a moment. Then she mimes a little underhand throwing motion, and Kwan brings her hands up, and on the second pass Moo actually does throw something, something that flashes blue in the air as it flies and then lands, small, hard, and sharp, between Kwan's panicky, hurriedly clasped hands. An earring.

  A sapphire earring.

  The stone is the size of a small raisin, dark blue as the new-moon sky, mounted on a straight gold post. A little tangle of gold wire that looks like one of the symbols in written music that Kwan has seen in school-a clef, the bass clef, for low music, Teacher Suttikul calls it-is stuck on the post, where it secures the earring to the lobe and holds it in place. The earring probably cost more money than her father earns in two years.

  Kwan says, "Oh, Moo. I can't-"

  "Not Moo," the woman says, and her smile goes muscular, just something her face is doing, with nothing behind it. "Not Moo anymore. My name is Nana."

  "Nana," Kwan corrects herself. She knows that. Moo has called herself Nana for years now, ever since the first time she came back. Kwan wants to kick herself. She never gets anything right. Tall, awkward, tall, stupid, tall.

  "Put it on," Nana says. "After we talk, I'll give you the other one."

  "No, no. You don't need to give me anything just to talk to me. I'm happy to-"

  "When somebody gives you something, you take it," Nana says, without smiling. "They don't teach you that in school, so I've made this whole long trip here to say it to you. And this way we'll be sure to talk." She makes a little side-to-side bye-bye wave, more brisk than friendly, checks the location of the child hauling her suitcase, and resumes her procession down the red ribbon of dust that separates the run-down houses on Kwan's side of the village from the run-down houses on the other side. The children are towed into motion behind her, like ducklings.

  Kwan tears her eyes from the blue stone in her hand to Moo's leopard-spotted shoes. Yellow and black, impossibly pointed in the toe, they send thin yellow straps spiraling almost all the way up to the knee. They seem to have been made by someone who has never seen a foot. How does Moo-Nana-how does Nana walk in them? The heels must be five inches high. The village road is uneven, with holes everywhere, hidden beneath the dust. How does she keep from breaking her ankles?

  Something warm seems to flood through Kwan's veins. Unconsciously, she slides her foot out of her rubber flip-flop, a man's size medium, worn cardboard-thin beneath the ball of her foot, and points her toes straight down. How would it feel to wear shoes like that?

  Tall is how it would feel. Even taller than she is now. Tall enough to talk to birds. Tall enough to see the sun rise half an hour before anybody else, to eat the tender top leaves of trees. Tall enough to have men tilt their heads way back to look up at her and then grab their necks in pretended pain. And then laugh.

  Of course, they already do that.

  The parade is long gone, and the street is settling into the slow cooling that ushers in the evening. The warped, mismatched wood of Kwan's house, and of the houses on both sides of the street, begins to rehearse its little orchestra of groans and creaks, just a tune-up for the ensemble piece of contracting and settling to come, when the sun is down. Her house makes so much noise that it seems to Kwan it must shrink two or three inches every evening. She wishes it were that easy for people.

  Longer shadows, stiller air. The late sun scatters reddish light across the tops of the trees. Some people are finishing the sleep in which they hid from the day's hottest time, and a few voices, pitched low in conversation, create a sort of ribbon of sound, a little like the murmur of the stream behind the houses during the months it flows-here now, gone a moment later, then back again. No words, just voices, tones, laughter, lazy emotion. Across the street, above a sprawled dog, a sparse column of flies spirals slowly, its members probably half asleep on the wing. A sudden sharp smell of garlic tossed into hot oil.

  The weathered wood of the railing beneath her elbows is warm and smooth, but her back hurts. The railing, comfortable for everyone else to lean on, is too low for her. The tops of the village's doors, some of them, are too low for her. When the young people gather in the evening to watch the village's one television, Kwan is pushed to the rear so people don't grumble. And she can barely see the screen from back there. She has a suspicion, growing stronger over
the past few years, that she needs glasses. Glasses. They might as well be diamonds for all the likelihood she'll ever get them.

  If it weren't for Teacher Suttikul seating her in front of the class and to the side, she wouldn't be able to read the blackboard either. The other kids call her desk "the Stork's nest."

  School. The thought cuts through her like a red-hot knife.

  The blue earring that Moo-Nana-threw to her is punching a hole in her palm, and she relaxes her fist. She doesn't dare put it in her ear. Her father would probably rip it out to sell it.

  Kwan knows that the town is pitifully small and poor, not from having been anywhere else but from the few times she's been able to get near enough to the television to turn the shifting, blurred patterns into identifiable shapes. She's seen the bustling sidewalks and spiky skyline of Bangkok, watched the gleaming cars glide through the streets, seen rich, beautiful, unhappy people double-cross each other in palatial bedrooms and candlelit restaurants where she doesn't even recognize the food. She's seen other, even richer and more beautiful but equally unhappy people double-cross each other in a paradise that's apparently called Korea, where all the women are ravishing and wear astonishing clothes, nicer even than Nana's, and all the men are impossibly princely, and some of them even seem to be tall. Some of them-not the women, but the men-seem as tall as Kwan.

  How could people who have everything be unhappy? Kwan wants to know, but there's no one she can ask, since no one she knows has anything.

  Except Nana, and she hardly knows Nana anymore.

  She has no idea how long she's been standing there, but the stiffness in her back says it's been an hour or more. So she's not completely surprised when she hears the low voices from the other side of the house and then the feet on the steps leading up to the door.