Street Music

by Timothy Hallinan

  “How do you think I found the picture so fast?” The bedroom door closes behind Rose, and he sits on the couch and sees that Miaow is still waiting for an answer. “Not as much as I used to, but yeah, sometimes.”

  “When it happens to you, what are you afraid of?”

  “Losing what I love. You, your mom, the baby. Our lives, just the way they are. I used to believe in evil spirits that would sense when you were too happy, same way a moth finds a light, and swoop down and eat the happiness, leave an empty hole.”

  “Not very cheerful.”

  “I’m Irish,” he says. “We’re always mentally running out of potatoes. And since most Irish are also Catholic, there’s always a new baby to feed.”

  As if it had heard its cue, the baby stops crying. “She must be breast-feeding him,” he says. “She couldn’t have gotten the bottle ready that fast.”

  Miaow says, “You always call the baby him or it or the baby, never his name.”

  “Well, don’t tell your mother, but I’m not crazy about the name. I think I’m going to call him Buster.”

  “I’d like to be called Buster.”

  “Too late. Why don’t you leave your door open when you go to sleep? That way, we’d be, I don’t know, closer. Sort of.”

  “I never had a door before I came here.” She closes the book and puts it on the table, beside her paperback of Pygmalion, which is still open and facedown. “Well, I had doors, but there were a lot of people behind them with me. I didn’t get to decide whether they’d be open or shut. This is my first very own door.” She reaches out and uses her index finger to push the paperback a few inches farther away. “So I close it. I suppose I do it because I can.”

  “Well,” he says, “I’ll be right out here all night for the next eight or ten years, and you can always wander on out and talk to me. I won’t be asleep.”

  She grins at him, and the sudden smile almost breaks his heart. “You won’t be asleep. You’re as much of a phony as I am. I get up to go to the bathroom every single night, and you’re snoring in here like the buzzer on my alarm clock.”

  “I do that on purpose, just for you,” he says. “Just letting you know that it’s safe to sleep. And that the couch is actually really—”

  “It’s not always safe,” she says, and she gets up and goes around the table, where she flabbergasts him by kissing, very quickly, the top of his head. “You’re right, Edward and I were—what did you call it?”

  “Well, my mother called it canoodling.”

  “And we were,” she says, heading for the hallway. “So you know my secret. I’m a canoodler. Thanks for the talk.”

  “Any time,” he says as she disappears into the hall, but a moment later she peers around the corner at him, just half of her face in sight.

  “I know you mean that,” she says. “When you say any time? I know you mean it. And I know why you mean it, too.” And then she’s gone again, and he sits there feeling a warmth so definite, so unmistakable, that he thinks it might be what he’d feel in the first few moments of getting microwaved.

  9

  The Face Trees

  A toe-popper explodes beneath his boot.

  It was the thing he’d most dreaded, death from below—a cheap Russian land mine, a fucking snake, a punji pit, whatever: you can get smoked and catch it in the gonads, all at the same time. His eyes snap wide, wide open.

  No jungle, no steaming air. A dark street, a hard sidewalk, the grainy smell of beer. A cop stands over him, thick-necked in his tight brown shirt, with a gelatinous-looking belly that spills over his pants. “Cannot,” he says.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cannot do fuck-all. Go away.”

  The cop raises his foot to kick the sole of Campeau’s shoe again, and Campeau pulls his leg back, obviously surprising the cop, who takes a little stutter-step back to regain his balance, and Campeau thinks, He’s drunk. Drunk cops are dangerous, and Campeau immediately parks the notion of getting up; he isn’t very tall, but he’s taller than the cop. He takes a more submissive tone. “Sorry,” he says in Thai. “I was waiting for someone.”

  “Waiting,” the cop says scornfully. “You sleep.” He stretches his foot out again, and this time he tips over the bottle of Singha, which topples to the sidewalk with a musical sound, rolls at a dignified rate to the edge of the curb, and disappears. There’s a sound of breaking glass and a little geyser of beer.

  “See?” Campeau says, reverting to English “I didn’t even drink it.”

  In English, the cop says, “What hotel, you? You stay where?”

  “No hotel. I—”

  “You sleep in street? You no money?” During the last decade, both here and in Cambodia, homeless Westerners have become a problem, men who came looking for their notion of paradise and couldn’t handle it when they found it. Filthy, often toothless, and frequently scrambled by drugs, they’re an international embarrassment, begging in the street and swiping leftovers off people’s dishes in food courts. Some of them, like the man who walks an invisible tightrope between fast-moving vehicles on Sukhumvit and screams about Jesus to the startled drivers, are clearly psychotic.

  “No, no,” Campeau says. “I have an apartment. I just—I was just waiting for somebody. Look, I’ll get up and—” He tries to get his feet under him, but the cop leans forward and puts a hand on top of Campeau’s head, and Campeau sits back down.

  The cop, his face only a few feet from Campeau’s, exhales a cloud of fumes—the distinctive, oddly rumlike smell of Mekong whiskey—and demands, slowly and with quite a bit of emphasis, “You no money?”

  “Ahhhh, right. Sure. Money. Given the cheap shit you’ve been drinking, it’s a reasonable question. Hang on a minute.” He slides his right hand into his pants pocket, difficult to do in his semi-collapsed seated position, and tries to work a single bill free; it’s not good policy to show too much money to a cop, who is likely to regard it as being his by the simple, unarguable Code of the Uniform. Campeau keeps his money strictly organized, folded once into a single wad with bigger bills on the outside, a holdover from his first days in Thailand, when the money all looked the same to him and he occasionally overpaid substantially, mistaking the surprised smile for Thai good manners until he realized, usually quite a bit later, that he’d forked over something like ten times what had been required. It takes him a moment to slip aside the four bills on the outside of the wad, which, he’s sure, are purplish five-hundred-baht notes, and then to tug out the one below them. It’s not until he sees it between his fingers that he realizes it’s an American twenty and remembers that he’s still got a wad of American money on him.

  “See?” Campeau says, internally kicking himself as the bill seems to launch itself out of his hand and into the cop’s. The twenty is worth about five bucks more than the purple note he’d been trying to avoid. “Make friends with it,” he says. “Say hi. Fold it, sniff it. Sing it a song. Practice your English on it. What the hell, take a bite out of it. Show it to your grandkids, if you live long enough to have any.”

  The cop says, “Quiet.” He folds the bill and tucks it into his shirt pocket. “I come back, maybe twenty minute. You not here, okay?”

  It’s not actually a question, and Campeau lets it pass until the cop kicks his foot again. “Okay, okay,” he says. “You meet crappy people on this street anyway.”

  “Twenty minute,” the cop says. “You here, I look your pocket.” He tugs his trousers up over the bottom of his belly-bulge, but they immediately roll back down. And then he’s off, heading up toward Surawong.

  “Land of Smiles,” Campeau says in the W. C. Fields voice that always got laughs in Nam. Nobody even knows who W. C. Fields is, these days. No wonder the world is so fucked up. He waits until the cop has turned the corner, and then he scoots on his palms and his butt until he’s at the edge of the curb, looking down. Sure enough, the bottle is broken. He
sits there, just inhaling the beer, and suddenly he’s thinking about Malee, about the sad brown eyes, the softness of her voice, and the sudden laugh that seemed to come out of nowhere as though a much happier person occasionally peeked out from behind the woman he thought he knew. About how often she literally laughed until there were tears in her eyes, and, for the ten thousandth time, about the night he’d been beaten up by a three-pack of Marines—he’d picked a lot of stupid fights in the bad old days, unable to let go of the war he’d lost—and how she’d furiously run a warm bath for him and washed the places where he’d been cut or scraped, swearing at him in Thai and English as she pressed a cold compress, with superhuman delicacy, against his broken nose, and gradually turned the water colder to reduce his swelling. How she’d put lemongrass and spearmint leaves into the water, just for the fragrance. How he’d drifted in the tub, the pain waning, breathing in the fragrance, and watching the grace of her slender fingers as she ministered to him. How, when she was finished and she’d bandaged the open cuts and put salve on the scratches, she erupted in anger, berating him for being so stupid, for fighting like that and frightening her so badly. “You not young man,” she had said. (He’d thought he was.) How, the next morning, she’d looked at his swollen face and broken into laughter that had her gasping and gripping her sides. How he’d made monster faces at her, feeling the pain as he contorted his features, until she ran for the bathroom. When she laughed too hard, she sometimes needed to run for the bathroom.

  How he’d known her so well that he knew even that.

  How she’d swindled him on the house and emptied their bank account and fled Bangkok for almost a year. She never came back to Patpong; instead, she worked the other “entertainment areas.”

  Several people have told him recently that she’s working in one of the outdoor bars at Nana Plaza, playing mother hen to the younger waitresses. She must be in her late sixties, maybe even her early seventies, by now. He’s thought dozens of times of walking by, free as a bird in the open air, just to see if it’s true. He’s thought of confronting her and demanding his money, even though it’s been long spent, dropped into the bottomless hole of mama-papa, and she’s obviously been reduced to cadging a small percentage of the waitresses’ tips. He’s also thought about going in and telling her he loves her.

  Fucking Patpong.

  How many weeks, how many months, how many years, has he spent on this stubby little shithole of a street? He half-closes his eyes, trying to remember it as he’d first seen it on R&R from Nam. It had been cleaner, more respectable-looking, dotted with little businesses: airline offices, shops of various kinds, a few relatively decorous bars, Mizu’s Kitchen at the far end, where it has been, probably, since Columbus bumped into America. On the same side of the street, Madrid, and the Expat Bar—now Leon and Toot’s—the only original joints that are still here. A small number of bars with girls in them, farm girls just down from the country, and a barbershop with an infamous massage parlor on the second floor, where paradise came cheap. Then, after ten days in a dream, it was back to the meat grinder.

  By the time he returned, a year later, there were more bars and fewer offices, and now the women in the bars were dancing, although they were all clothed, if somewhat scantily: the “upstairs” bars, ratholes that had nothing to recommend them but nudity, hadn’t opened until later. One night, in one of the downstairs bars, he’d broken out of the Nam funk he was in and looked up to see a young woman who didn’t seem to belong there. She had something reserved about her; she looked embarrassed about being on the stage and she gazed at the floor or at the air above the customers’ heads while she danced. The other dancers gave her space; she got none of the joking, roughhousing camaraderie they shared with each other. When she wasn’t dancing she sat at the bench closest to the stage, hands folded in her lap, as far from the customers as possible, making no effort to cadge the drinks that would earn her a small commission. While she was sitting there, she kept her eyes on the floor. She might as well have been alone in the room.

  He’d called one of the other dancers over and told her he wanted to buy a drink for the girl by the stage, but he didn’t want her to know who’d sent it. One wall of the bar was mirrored, and he’d sat with his back to the girl, watching her reflection as the cola was delivered, seeing the indifference of the woman who took it to her—no smile, no joking congratulations, she just put the glass down and retreated, offering a shrug when the girl asked who’d bought it. He’d focused on his glass of beer as the girl searched the room, trying to spot her benefactor, and out of those bits and pieces he’d constructed a small-scale tragedy: a young, inexperienced woman who didn’t want to work there, who was ashamed of her new station in life as a prostitute, who was alone in Bangkok, dancing isolated on a stage with no friends on it, too shy to approach the men whose patronage she needed if she was going to send home the money she’d left her village to earn.

  Looking back at it all later, when some of the pain had faded, he realized it had all been true, virtually every detail. He’d been right about all of it, and he’d seen it because he was so weary of war and loss and killing and the stink of blood that there was a part of him that simply demanded tenderness, and here was someone to whom he could offer it. And, even though it was true, even if he’d gotten her story largely right the first time he saw her, he’d simplified her, painted her in two dimensions. He’d taken a complicated, conflicted, unhappy, humiliated young woman and turned her into a doll like the ones his little sister loved, the ones whose clothes she could change, whose hair she could style, to whom she could give multiple names: Marilyn with her hair this way, Tammy with it that way, Anita when she was wearing the blue dress, but always the same doll underneath it all, the doll that had come out of the box. The changes were an illusion. With people, he learned, it didn’t work that way. People were moving targets.

  Eventually he sat beside her, chatted awkwardly with her, got her to smile, paid her bar fine, and took her to the little hotel on Patpong Two. After the second time he made her his only Bangkok girlfriend. Each time he came back to Bangkok over the next year and a half of the war, he went straight to her, arriving just a few minutes after the bar opened. And he continued to see her as the same person she’d been when he left her, although she’d obviously changed: she was less lost, more certain, more instinctive about what would please him. Her English improved in his absence, and that made him uneasy. She had, of course, learned it from customers. But to him, she was still the doll out of the box: the details—the externals—might be different, but she was still Malee, the girl who got so furious at him when he was hurt.

  He’d seen other guys fall in love with bar workers, talk about them as they would about some presumably virginal “good girl,” some pillar of virtue, some small-town banker’s daughter back in Iowa, and he’d had those same bar workers hit on him when their boyfriends were back in the field. He’d felt sorry for those guys.

  What a fucking idiot.

  He gets up, surprised, as always lately, at the stiffness in his joints and the heaviness of his legs, and he looks up the street, seeing its cold, drab ugliness. For the thousandth time, he asks himself what he’s doing here. It’s not the women anymore; they’ve become more trouble than they’re worth. And they’ve changed, as he’s complained to Rafferty and anyone else who will listen: they’ve gotten harder and older and brassier and, well, more independent. Decades ago, he’d felt like a few of them were delighted when he walked into a bar he hadn’t been in for a while. Whereas now, if he’s honest, he has to admit that they don’t remember his name. And if he’s really honest, he has to admit that he’s changed even more than they have. The handsome young kid they had smiled at, all that time ago, had been wrapped inside this aging, increasingly creaky husk for years.

  Malee, he thinks.

  He takes a couple of aimless steps and then turns so he’s facing the right way. Go home. Take a sleeping pill.<
br />
  Take two.

  Hom shouldn’t have smoked two. Big mistake.

  The night had begun well, which should have warned her. Things stopped beginning well for her a long time ago. Good beginnings just raised her spirits so they’d have further to fall when the truth finally grinned at her to reveal the sharp, irregular gleam of its teeth.

  But it had begun well. Halfway to the park, she’d stopped, shaken her head, and turned around to go back to Silom, steered helplessly by her stomach, which had turned into a fist-like knot to remind her that she hadn’t eaten all day long. As late as it was she knew of only one place where she might find something. If he remembered her. If it hadn’t all been taken already, as it so often had been.

  When she had first come down to Bangkok, her husband—the man she had thought of as her husband—had taken her to a restaurant on a little soi just off Silom, not far from the park. The restaurant was called Isaan and was run by a man from an Isaan village not far from Hom’s home, a man whose life was a success story, told over and over to young people who were brave enough, or foolish enough, to think about leaving the rice paddies behind and striking out toward a new life in the capital. The famous man’s nickname was Jit. He had started, everyone said, with a small sidewalk food cart and in five years he owned a restaurant that served the food Hom had grown up with, the food her mother had made. Jit was talked about in the villages as a man who was willing to help those who followed him down to Bangkok or had been driven down by hunger and hopelessness. He was still Isaan in his heart, people said. The city was full of sharks, they said, but Jit would help you. She’d envisioned him as a beaming, benevolent man, fat on his own food, who would welcome them, comfort them, reassure them.

  So she’d been unprepared for the dark, knife-thin man who had glared at them when she, her husband, and the baby had come through the door. Not happy to see them at all; in a hurry, in fact, to get rid of them. But he’d told them, his eyes going to the door every time the bell rang, of a place where they could probably stay, a rundown tumble of shanties where a few baht would buy them a night or two on someone’s floor. Those people could teach them the tricks of life in the city. They could mention his name, he said. As he’d shooed them out, she’d been surprised for a second time when a woman bustled out of the kitchen with two small boxes of hot food. Hom’s husband had grabbed the cartons and Hom had said thank you, the courtesy winning her a new glare from Jit, but she’d smiled at him, and his glare became a brief crinkling around his eyes, although the smile didn’t quite reach his mouth.