Street Music

by Timothy Hallinan

  She hadn’t gone back until much later, years later, after all the losses, after the pills and the alcohol, after the lost jobs, after the last time she saw her husband, after Patpong—long after the bottom fell out of everything and her husband made the final demand, the ultimate sacrifice and even that went wrong, and she deserted him and learned for the first time in her life that she had no resources left, none whatsoever. Several weeks after she’d been forced to realize that everything was gone and that none of it would ever return, she’d gone back to Jit’s restaurant, hungry this time. Jit had recognized her at once, and had grabbed her arm and hurried her through the dining area into the kitchen, away from the big windows in front. Her husband, he said, had come in twice, and when they’d thrown him out he’d waited across the way, watching the restaurant. About an hour before she’d arrived, Jit had paid a cop five dollars US to chase him off. “But he’ll be back,” Jit said. “He’s too stupid to stay away.”

  Then he showed her his secret.

  He took her out through the back door of the kitchen and into a short alley that reeked of dog shit and the sharp-edged urine of rats. Screwed into the wall beside the door, just low enough for her to reach them on tiptoe, were five metal hooks, each sticking out two or three inches. Hanging from two of them were white plastic bags, weighed down by something inside, something with corners.

  “This is food that was sent back to the kitchen,” he said, “usually by some farang who wants to prove that he can eat food that’s phet maak maak, as hot as the Thais order it. Usually it’s a man who wants to show some bar girl how strong he is. We throw away the little bit he tasted before he began gulping all the water in sight, so what’s in here is clean. You can take one of these, but only one. They won’t always be here. It’s best to get here late at night. One, but only one. Take the box out but leave the bag, or we’ll run out of bags. Do you understand?”

  “Yes. Can I take one now?”

  “Of course. And you have to make me a promise. Don’t talk about this. And don’t come in through the front door unless you have a very big problem. It’s not good for business.”

  She said, “Thank you,” but he had already opened the door to the kitchen and was going inside. It was the last time they spoke.

  At the entrance to the alley she looks left and right and then steps into the darkness, thinking about the sad, thin, drunk man she’d seen on Patpong. She should have said something. So what if he shooed her away? She’s used to that. She’s brought back to herself by the scratchy sound of a skittering rat somewhere in front of her, and she stops where she is until she can find her plastic cigarette lighter and flick it on. The rat has disappeared, but midway down the alley, on the right side, she sees the gleam of a white plastic bag, hanging almost out of reach. She thinks they must have put it out just before they closed, around midnight, or it would be gone by now. Not many people are supposed to know about this, but two times out of three the hooks are bare when she comes looking.

  On tiptoe, she eases the bag off the hook and pulls out the little cardboard box, no longer warm but satisfyingly heavy, and re-hangs the empty bag on its hook. Then she uses her free hand to rifle through the pockets of her dress and her blouse, and then the T-shirt and the man’s running shorts beneath the dress until, in the shorts’ hip pocket, her fingers slide over a folded plastic bag, about the size of the one she’d put back on the hook. The box slips easily into the bag and the loops at the top of the bag hook with no trouble over one of the buttons inside her dress. She adjusts the bag a little and buttons her outer dress to hide it. There. Out of sight. It bulges a bit but then, she thinks, so does she.

  She had dropped the little lighter into a pocket so she could deal with the bag, and now she pulls it out again and flicks it open for a moment, just to orient herself, but she gets lost in the flame, lost in the way the pale blue at its base flowers into the hot yellow at the tip. She gazes at it until the lighter begins to heat up, and she takes her thumb off it and watches the flame’s dark ghost, now imprinted deep in her eyes, dance across the alley as she looks around. There, go to the left, that’s the street. The street will lead her to the park. Blinking around the flame’s ghost, she fumbles her way out of the alley and makes the right that will take her to the park, to the bush she has been sleeping under. And, once there, she sees the evening’s second good beginning: first the food, now the hole under the fence. She knows five ways, some more difficult than others, to get over or under the fence that surrounds the park and the gates they lock at ten each evening. This is her favorite, a simple hole, roughly dug beneath the chain link, and it seems to her that someone has deepened it a little since the last time she used it. She can shove her bag through it and then follow on her stomach and elbows.

  A short time later, with the bag of food bumping reassuringly against her chest, she weaves her way into the park, which is thick with trees, crisscrossed here and there with concrete pedestrian paths, and slopes down to a small lake. The lake contains large monitor lizards, many of them as long as she is tall, fork-tongued beasts that lumber across the grass and terrified her until she’d been assured by the scattering of street people who also slept in the park that they’d never bitten a human. But a year or so ago, some city workers had come in and pulled many of them out, taking them wherever anyone could take a bunch of giant lizards, and she saw them less often now. Still, she walks with her head down, horrified of the prospect of stepping on one.

  She pauses, takes a few deep breaths, and then begins, without thinking about it, the long series of loops and double-backs that will take her across the park in the general direction of the lake: the kind of route that might be taken by someone who either has no destination in mind or has forgotten her way. It allows her to make sure no one is following her. She’d been grabbed from behind twice by small groups of boys who had knocked her down and pinned her on her back, rifling her clothes and her bag and taking everything she had in her pockets. They’d also done things to her that she didn’t want to think about now, although one time—the one she remembers most clearly—she’d grabbed the one who was standing over her, wrapped her fingers around his testicles, and yanked, pulling herself upward, her weight literally dangling from his scrotum, squeezing as he screamed. The other boys were already backing away from the noise, turning and taking flight as some of the park’s other residents appeared beneath the trees, but she held on to the kid’s balls as other park-dwellers kicked him and spat on him and hit him in the face. When she finally let go, the bleeding boy had whimpered all the way out of the park. Ever since then—when she remembers—she takes this random-seeming path that lets her verify that she has no followers, before she makes the turn that will take her to her bush.

  Nobody. She stops and counts ten heartbeats, but she’s alone. She can move on.

  But the thought of boys reminds her of the new boy, the thin, furious-eyed fourteen- or fifteen-year-old who appeared in the park a few weeks ago, and whom she has caught looking at her several times. If she still has any soft spots, she reserves them for kids about the boy’s age. Now, feeling the weight of the food carton pulling at the front of her dress as she walks, she finds herself looking for him, thinking that there’s enough food in the box to share with him. She’s never seen him eating, although, of course, he must eat sometimes, but he looks like someone who is burning himself away and not taking in anything to replace it.

  His face; what was it about—his face, last time she saw it, had long scratches running down it, the wrong kind of red. Swollen, hot-looking, probably infected. She has cotton somewhere, she has a little bottle of alcohol somewhere. She can’t afford to get infected.

  So she’s thinking about the boy as she hooks right, following the edge of the lake while staying several yards from the water, taking a detour to see whether one of the bathrooms has been left open, as they sometimes are. To her surprise, the first door she tries yields to her, and on
ce it’s closed behind her and she’s relieving herself she sends up a prayer of thanks: she’s been able to pee inside, she’s got her blanket and her plastic sheet in the bag everyone tells her says Louie on it, and she’s learned that Louie was a dead French man who made bags and clothes. And she knows where her bush is, and she’s got her pills in her pocket and another one buried under the bush, and maybe she’ll be able to give some of her food to the boy with the terrible eyes. Maybe she can make him smile. He doesn’t look like he’s ever smiled.

  Her ear itches, and when she reaches up to scratch it, her fingers find stickiness and set off a little pinwheel of pain. The Sour Man. She hasn’t thought about him since—when? Since just before she saw the old man sitting outside the bar, as slack and empty-looking as a paper bag waiting for the wind to take it somewhere.

  I should have talked to him, she thinks, wetting a paper towel to scrub the dried blood off her ear and the side of her neck. So what if he didn’t want to talk to me? Maybe I could have cheered him up.

  When she’s cleaned as much as she can without further damaging her ear, she packs everything up and goes back out into the night, heading for the bush beneath which she sleeps. The boy isn’t where he usually is under the tree to her right, although it’s hard to be certain because it’s so dark. Maybe he’ll come later and she’ll still be able to offer him some of her food. She would like, she thinks, to do something for someone. She hadn’t spoken to the empty man sitting outside the bar.

  At the bush, she kneels unsteadily to check the spot where she buried the other pill, wrapped in a bit of tinfoil. It’s undisturbed, so she buries it again and pats it flat. She opens the plastic sheet and spreads it over the damp ground before she sits all the way down. Then she folds the blanket over her crossed legs and undoes the buttons of her dress to get at the carton of food. Without being aware of it, she looks again at the tree, but the boy’s still not there.

  The moon hasn’t showed up. It seems to her that she saw it the previous night.

  With every bite she takes, she thinks about how skinny the boy is. As her physical hunger wanes, the tablets in her pocket seem to get warmer, bigger, and heavier. She closes the carton and puts it aside, carefully standing it upright so nothing will leak out and she can leave it beside his tree as soon as . . . well, as soon as she’s finished the task at hand. She pulls a flat square of tinfoil from her Louie bag and begins to mold it into a pipe. She’s not thinking about it, barely looking at her hands. Three minutes later, it’s ready, with a bowl at one end and a mouthpiece at the other.

  The pills are damp with her perspiration, making them easier to crush. She puts a piece of paper on the grass and uses two flat stones a little less than three centimeters in diameter that she keeps under the bush to grind them into a clotted powder. Then, very carefully, she folds the paper down the middle, and after one last look around, she tilts the creased page into the bowl of the pipe and taps it very lightly until the paper is clean and all the orange powder is at the bottom of the pipe.

  The pipe suddenly feels charged with energy, warmer than the night, warmer than her hand. Turning to face the bush, she leans down, shields the lighter with her left hand, and hits the pipe. Waits. Exhales. Hits it again. The fingers holding the pipe feel like they’re on fire but the pain doesn’t matter because at the same time a phantom hand squeezes her heart, which is instantly beating triple-time, fast and hard enough to bring her to her feet. A hot wall of energy hits her like a wave, pushing at her and through her, turning her into a hot wire, electrifying her; and her heart, impossibly, speeds up. She needs to move, has to move: she has to distract herself by moving, looking at things outside herself; she can’t let it take her inside, not until she’s used to being here, in the world of the pills.

  And then she remembers her two good beginnings, the food and the enlarged hole under the fence, and knows this is how she’s going to pay for it; she will skip the usual warm flood of well-being and instead will spend the rest of the night lost in the wreckage of her life, the life from which every single thing she ever loved has been weeded out, abandoned, destroyed. By her, she’s the one who . . . stop that, stop that right now. Fat, useless, stinking old cow, not a mother, not a wife, not a friend, and she needs to cut this off. She’s shifting from foot to foot: Where to go, what to do? She has to move, she has to keep busy, she has to focus outward, on the world, or she knows what will happen: she’ll wash up on the cold, empty, stony, loveless island of her life.

  And she can’t handle that, not yet, so she’s walking toward the water. Seen from a safe distance the water is dependable much of the time, there are the reflections of the city lights and the moon, except there isn’t a moon, and she feels a surge of fury at the fact that there’s no moon. She needs the moon. Looking at the moon would hold her in place until she’s built her walls against the hot, scouring wind that’s blowing through her, stripping her skin off to leave her, grotesque and red and seeping blood, for all to see.

  How long has it been? She’s been at this stage often enough to know that, even in a journey that begins this way, paradise will arrive eventually. She needs to wait it out, to crawl over the spikes. Ripples, color on the water, color that blows straight through her, a breeze off the lake that cools her, and she can feel the long plunge into the bad unknown slowing, like the elevators that so terrified her when she first arrived in Bangkok, when she still had . . .

  Look at the color, colors that seem like they were just invented and no one but her will ever see them. Look how they waver and ripple at the edges, like smoke, and maybe she should go back and crush another tablet and go for three. She’s never done three.

  Or she could just cut her head off.

  The boy, the food. She should take the rest of the food to the tree where the boy . . . maybe she could get him to clean up those scratches on his face . . .

  The breeze off the lake smells like the city, but it’s cool. Take the boy some food.

  Sometime later, she’s on the other side of the lake, looking back toward her bush and the boy’s tree and feeling like she could walk straight across the surface of the lake to get to them, lizards or no lizards. This is it, this is where she wants to be. There are no problems she can’t solve. She can organize her life, get back to who she was. She can clean out her bag, straighten things under her tree, wash her clothes in the lake, get a toothbrush. She can make everything fine.

  The elation takes her all the way around the park several times—she has no idea how many, but at various times she paused to do chores: she detours to leave the food carton under the boy’s tree and she refolds everything in her Louie bag three or four or five times, getting it perfect, and she decides to create a mental map of the park, speaking each turn aloud to herself and drawing it on the air. She’s in charge. She’s home.

  But then the whisperers begin. One or two at first, and then too many to count, and from all sides. Two tablets had been a mistake. The whisperers descend on her like mosquitoes, and they know everything and everyone she ever lost or betrayed, bringing back the dead, terrifying her with the night’s new horrors—transparent ghosts with enormous jaws and fingers longer than her legs; shadows that detach themselves from their trees and slide hissing across the grass behind her; a baby crying somewhere that gets farther away when she tries to follow the sound, and that she suddenly realizes is a demon that will sink its teeth into her breast and never let go; a gathering weight in the moonless sky that seems to get lower and lower, making her feel like she should lean down as she walks. By the time the whisperers are gone the final joke is revealed: the morning sky is actually going pale as the first light starts to rub away at the layers of darkness, and the day pushes its way in, staking its claim. So, no street music.

  She only hears the music in the dark, when she can see the colors the melodies wrap themselves around. The music makes the colors seep through the darkness and dance across its hard b
lack surface, and then, somehow, the colors make the music; and that is when it is best, when the colors pull the music out of the night. But with the weary, flat, everyday glow of dawn shouldering its way into the sky, dragging more light behind it, the colors don’t stand a chance. Not even with her eyes closed.

  By the time she gives up, she is at one of the park’s borders, looking through the fence in despair at the same ugly city she left behind, it seems, only an hour or two ago, although it must be more like five or six. As she stands there, her heart hammering, eyes closed as she fights the beginning of a headache, she’s startled to feel the ballpoint pen still clutched in her left hand, or there again. For a moment it absorbs all her attention, and she transfers it to her right and uses it to ink her name again and again on her palm, over the faded letters she had written there—when?—whenever she found the pen. When her name is thick and dark blue, she wraps her left hand around the pen again, and that brings back the stumble, the scraped knee, the pen rolling out from under the palm she’d put down to break her fall.

  Yesterday, then. It had been yesterday. So today . . . what is it about today?

  Right. Today is her last chance to find the man and follow him home. If she fails . . .