Street Music

by Timothy Hallinan

  It takes her a moment to work her way up to it. Then she says, “Who I am to you?”

  “Miaow,” he says. “I only took this awful, stupid part so I could be with you.”

  She’s looking directly at him as he begins the sentence, but the moment he says be with you her eyes slide past him to the wall. She’s still holding the dish.

  He says, “Are you just going to make me sit here?”

  “Well.” She very carefully puts the dish down and sits back. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know.” There’s a chorus of ooohhhs from the bedroom. “Maybe we could hug each other?”

  It seems to take her forever to slide down the couch to him, and the moment he puts his arms around her, they hear Rafferty’s key in the lock. In less than a second, they’re pressed against opposite ends of the couch like a pair of mutually repellent subatomic particles, staring at each other, and then Miaow begins to laugh. By the time Rafferty has kicked off his shoes and come into sight, they’re both laughing.

  7

  Like Struck Matches

  One bar at a time, the street is blinking out, going dark from one end to the other.

  The evening exit has crowded the road with pedestrians, driving her up onto the sidewalk, which is set one tall step up to allow people to walk, rather than wade, during the rainy season. From her perch above them, with her back pressed to a wall—which always makes her feel safer—she can see over people’s heads. As she settles back, she feels a sudden twinge of fear, like a low string plucked somewhere inside her. She’d been sitting on the sidewalk only a meter or two away when the cop appeared. He is probably still here; he probably doesn’t leave until the street has emptied out. She scans up and down the block for him and then looks again at her scraped palms, at the pen clutched in her right hand, at her name written on the left.

  She hates Patpong. She has a long list of hates, which, fortunately for her, is usually tightly folded and tucked out of sight, but Patpong is different. After all these years she still feels a hot rush of shame at what she did here, up those stairs, what she was forced to do here, what was done to her here. If she had her way, a two-story wall of filthy water would churn through it, smashing the bars as though they were cardboard, sweeping up the customers and the touts and the police and floating their corpses all the way to the Chao Phraya, where they would be carried out to the broad emptiness of the Gulf. No cremation, no funeral, no rites, no priests, no sad farewells, just howling phi tai hong, ghost-souls severed abruptly from their bodies, raging and weeping eternally as they ride the winds that scour the cold surface of the sea.

  But not the girls. The girls don’t deserve that.

  In a life that seems to have taken her from one island of unhappiness to another, Patpong stands out, a broad smear of black ash that defaces—but does not, unfortunately, obscure—a period of several months, months she tried for years to forget.

  She has avoided this street for years.

  And now she’s been ordered back here with the threat of harm and the promise of money. She’s not sure how many nights ago the Sour Man first put her here, but it seems now as though she never left; she’s seen this end-of-the-night transformation often enough for the sequence to be familiar, even predictable. First, the clash of music that comes from all directions begins to shut down and the vendors in the night market start to pack up their wares. Then the crowd in the street thickens as customers leave the bars, some of them with women beside them. After that, the bars—beginning with the few that never seem to be full—switch off the colored lights that shine on the women who dance there, and turn on the cold overhead tubes, light the color of sour milk that makes everything look smaller and dirtier and colder. People sweep, mop tables, count money.

  So much money.

  And soon, she knows, the last doors will begin to close.

  It’s beginning even now: doors slamming, people flooding the street. Everyone moving in one of two directions, depending which cross street they’re headed for, Silom or Surawong. It’s not like when the bars are open, with everyone looking everywhere, wandering from one side to the other. At this hour she can stand up here, still as a window, watching the river of people without feeling their eyes on her, without them staring at her like she’s some kind of animal and stepping aside to pass her at a distance, as though there are things living on her that might jump onto them.

  She can smell beer and wine on the breath of the men pushing their way down the street, she can see it in the glaze over their eyes. She regards them without interest or curiosity, looking at them mainly just because they’re moving; but she’s not really seeing them, simply smelling as she breathes them in and watches the flow. The man she is supposed to be waiting for will come out of a bar at the other end of the street. She should go down into the slow current and let it carry her down there.

  Except that he’s probably gone by now. That low fear-string is plucked again and she feels a twisting in her gut. She’s probably too late. The Sour Man will be angry.

  Her heart crumples like paper at the notion of his anger. He’s already hit her twice, once hard enough to knock her down. Now he may withhold the money he’s been giving her each day. And she’s sure that he knows—the thought arrives on a cold wave of dread—that she’s already turned away from two chances to do what he wants, trying to keep the baht coming. She’s gotten used to the man’s money. People don’t give her money the way they once did, when she was still pretty or looked like she had once been pretty. It takes no effort to remember (even if they’re not in order) whole successions of days when no one gave her a baht, when she either starved or ate a handful of cold food some other beggar gave her. Begging from beggars, she thinks, this is my life now.

  Without knowing she’s doing it, she transfers the pen to her other hand, reaches inside the filthy outer dress, and presses her fingertips against the pocket that contains the paper with the pills in it. Three of them, and the one she buried makes four. She’s pretty sure she’s never before possessed four of them at the same time. She’s never taken more than two at a time. A kind of vista, beautiful and terrifying, opens before her.

  Go somewhere. Back to the park. Take one. Swallow it whole or crush it and smoke it in an aluminum foil pipe she can make with her eyes closed. Then another.

  No. He’ll find her. He probably knows where she sleeps.

  He could be here now. Here in Patpong.

  She hates . . .

  She shakes her head to bring herself present and takes a tentative step, realizing that her scraped knee has stiffened. Still walking, she looks down at it, half-expecting to be able to see the stiffness surrounding it, like the ghost of the cast she wore years ago when she broke her foot and she still lived in a world that had doctors in it. At that moment someone throws open a swinging door directly in front of her, and she walks into it, banging the top of her head in a starry burst of pain. She freezes for a moment, waiting to see whether she’s going to fall down, and by the time she realizes that she won’t, she’s lost her purpose. Idly, with one hand pressed to her head, she lets her gaze sweep over the slow tide of people in the street until her vision is snagged by a glimpse of white.

  A smile.

  Smiles, she sees, are going off here and there in the crowd, like struck matches. She’s watched this procession often enough by now to know that the smiles belong to the women from the bars. As they’re towed along they gaze at nothing, or at the people coming in their direction, until the man they’re with looks down at them, and then they smile. She feels herself smile, the same absolutely meaningless smile the tall, slender woman is giving the short, tubby man who’s hauling her toward the waiting taxis. The smile is the one called yim mai ork, forced and without any spark of happiness or pleasure behind it. The young woman knows, and so does Hom, that the farang won’t see through it; to a farang, a smile is a smile. A li
ttle farther away, a younger girl, probably new to the bars, offers her suddenly attentive customer a yim sao, the smile that masks sadness. That’s the smile Hom is most familiar with; she can feel its muscle memory in her own face. Her destination forgotten for the moment, she searches for her favorite of the smiles, the one that makes her feel kinship with all these sad, beautiful girls: the yim yae-yae, the smile someone assumes when she’s facing something hopeless and is determined to make the best of it, no matter what. There it is, on the face of a woman who’s trying to match her steps to a drunken man’s stagger.

  She can feel her own smile broaden as she watches the man stumble and go down on one knee and then put both hands down to grope for his glasses. By the time he looks up again his companion for the evening has melted into the crowd.

  Hom is searching for the fleeing girl when her ear catches fire and then is yanked—hard enough, it feels, to tear it off. Her world solidifies sharply and comes to a tiny, buzzing point with the hot flame of pain at its center, and she finds herself looking up at the face of the Sour Man.

  “Idiot.” He pulls at the ear again, and this time she follows it, stumbling toward him to avoid more pain. His nails are long and yellowish, filed to points, and they’ve definitely pierced her skin; she can feel a warm trickle of blood down the side of her neck. She’s still trying to regain her balance when her right foot catches on one of his and suddenly she’s down again, landing heavily on the bloody and stiffening knee, and she hears a high sound, like something from an injured cat, escape her.

  She’s put down a scraped palm to break her stumble, and that produces another sudden pink explosion of pain. He’s bent down to follow her fall, not relinquishing her ear, and he steps on the back of the hand on the pavement and puts his weight on it. He’s leaning directly over her now, her ear still impaled by the sharp nails, and he tugs on it to pull her face up until she’s looking straight at him, diverted momentarily by the hair in his nostrils, which she’s never seen before, but then he’s talking and she knows she’s supposed to listen.

  “One more time,” he says to her. It’s as soft as a whisper and as hard as a slap. “Are you hearing me?”

  “Yes.” People in the street are slowing, turning to look, and he extends his free hand and more or less drags her to her feet, and it occurs to her, as it has before, that he’s stronger than he looks. He’s thin and starved-looking, someone who probably never got enough to eat as a child, and not much taller than she is. But it’s all bone, sinew, hatred, and nails.

  “Well,” he says, resting his right hand on her shoulder as though they’re having a chat. The left, with its nails still piercing her ear, is between her and the wall, where no one in the street can see it. “I’m not sure you are hearing me. I’m not sure you ever have. Do you understand what I just said? One more time? Do you even remember it?”

  “I—I think you . . .” She trails off and swallows what feels like a stone.

  “It means one more night.” He tugs on the ear with each syllable, turning her entire body into an escalator of pain, darting from her ear all the way down to her toes, and her knees loosen, but that just makes it worse and she forces them to lock. She’s trembling all over, and she hates it. His breath reeks of cigarettes, making her want one. “After that, it’s finished. And if you don’t succeed by tomorrow night you will be finished.” He squeezes his fingers together, digging his nails deeper into the tissue, and her knees buckle, but he’s slipped the other hand beneath her arm to hold her up. “After tomorrow night, if you haven’t done what you’re supposed to do you’ll be fed to a cage full of soi dogs, very hungry soi dogs. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what you’re supposed to do?”

  For a moment, she has an instinctive surge of hope: over his shoulder, she sees a police uniform. She hates the cops, but they routinely break up any conflict that’s visible to tourists, that might sully their memory of the Land of Smiles. But then, as fast as her hope had risen, it evaporates. It’s the fat-bellied cop who kicked her. He slows for a second and peers at her face, and then he registers who she’s talking to, touches a fingertip to the brim of his hat, and moves on. She says, “Yes.”

  The Sour Man smiles as though she’s pleased him. He’s filed one of his eye teeth, too, the left. The foot traffic in the street continues to flow: just two people talking, nothing to see. “Tell me what it is.”

  “Find him in, in—that bar . . .”

  “Which direction?”

  “Down there.” She nods toward the Silom end of the street, but she’s forgotten about his grasp on her ear, and she lets out a little yip of pain.

  He says, “Quiet. And.”

  “Follow him.”

  “And.”

  “When I get to where he lives,” she says, and then she steps back, bumping up against the still-open door behind her, and yanks her head away, sharply enough to make him lose his grip on her ear. She feels more blood on her neck, but she doesn’t reach up to stanch it.

  Something flares in his eyes, and he takes a quick step toward her, closing the gap she’s just opened. The nails find her ear again. “And then.”

  “I—I call you.”

  “Let me see the phone.”

  She has a moment of profound gratitude for not having sold the battered phone he gave her. Only terror has prevented her from doing it. She digs it out of the pocket in the men’s walking shorts she wears beneath the dress, and shows it to him.

  He checks the battery and then the screen of recent calls, which has nothing on it. Who would she call? “And then.”

  “Then I—I listen to you.”

  “And if I have to meet you?”

  “Oh,” she says. “Wait, wait a minute.”

  “Now.”

  “Around the corner.” She can hear her voice scale up. “Some kind of store.”

  “A store that sells what?”

  She says, “Ummmm.”

  She feels his fingers move on her ear and she lets out a yelp. But he surprises her by pulling his hand back and making a T—no, a cross—with his index fingers. His eyebrows go up: a question.

  “Medicine,” she says. “Drugstore.”

  “Good, good.” He reaches out once more and she flinches, but all he does is pat her cheek, a little harder than is necessary to demonstrate affection. “Follow, call, wait outside the store if you have to. Right?”

  “Right.” She takes a breath. “Why don’t you follow—”

  “Ssssssssss.” Suddenly his face is almost touching hers. “Because I have you.” It’s a hiss. He pulls back and continues as though she hadn’t spoken. “And how many more chances do you have?”

  “One.” Someone in the street bursts into laughter.

  “Two, of course, counting tonight. Guess you’d better get to work.”

  “It’s . . . it’s late.”

  He leans toward her again, and she holds her breath. He says, sounding amused, “Two chances, one of them tonight? For five thousand baht? And you’re going to waste tonight?”

  “No,” she says, and then she says again, “no, no.”

  “Well, then.” He steps back and turns away from her while she fights to keep her knees from buckling. Over his shoulder as he steps down off the curb, he says, “You’d better get down there, hadn’t you?”

  She says, “Yes,” but he’s already at the edge of the crowd’s current, and she watches as it carries him away, and she’s surprised yet again—seeing him among the others in the crowd—at how small he is.

  She’s pinching her ear between her fingers to stop the bleeding. It hurts, but she can’t be seen with blood all over her. Some cop is sure to notice and use it as an excuse to shake her down, accuse her of having done something violent, search her for money, maybe take her pills to sell, and have her hauled off to the monkey house.
>
  She’s not giving up her pills and she is not going back to the monkey house.

  So she hobbles down the sidewalk on her stiff knee, one hand raised to her ear like someone talking on an imaginary phone. The Sour Man is gone now, but he has people up and down this street at all hours, and someone is probably watching her. She’s nearing the end of the street, now; she sees the usual tangle of taxis and tuk-tuks, and, across the street . . .

  Her heart sinks.

  The lights on the little sign above the bar she was supposed to be watching have been turned off. From where she stands, her back to a club that plays very loud live music when it’s open, she makes out a rectangle of pale, chilly-looking light and identifies it as the window she’s peered through several times. Just to be sure that the man whose picture the Sour Man has showed her so many times isn’t in there—and to look like she’s being thorough in case she’s being watched—she zigzags through the thinning trickle of people, fingers still pressed to her ear, threads between two night-market booths, and steps up onto the sidewalk on the other side of the street. She looks right and left to avoid colliding with anyone, and then presses her face to the dirty window, cupping her hands around her eyes to block the light from the street.

  Behind the bar, the stocky, gray-haired woman who is always there is lining up glasses on a shelf, pulling them dripping out of the sink behind the bar, giving them a quick swab inside and out with one end of a towel that hangs over her shoulder, and placing them upside down in perfectly straight rows, with a casual, inattentive precision that says she’s done it a thousand times. The woman, Hom thinks, must be ten or fifteen years older than she is, but not battered by bad karma and exposure to too much sun and too much of the kind of dirt that won’t wash off. Most people, she is certain, would guess that she, Hom, is the older of the two. Watching the bartender dry a glass, Hom has an instant, full-color memory of a warm, dirt-floored house, its rooms smelling of food, of herself washing dishes in a big yellow plastic tub, of someone laughing in another room, and then the memory shrinks to nothing and fades like the black ghost of a camera flash, and she’s looking at the bartender again.