Street Music

by Timothy Hallinan

  As he pushes the door open, the kid glances up, grins, and sings out, “Chocolate Moose,” but then he sees the woman behind Rafferty, and the smile disappears. Before he can protest, Rafferty says, “We need to sit in the back, all the way in the back, and talk for a little while. It’s important.” He pushes a folded five-hundred-baht bill across the counter, and the kid makes it vanish, but he still looks worried.

  “If my boss come in,” he says, “you tell him I try stop you.”

  “Do you think he’ll come in?”

  “No. But I not lucky boy.”

  “Maybe tonight you will be. Maybe I’ll give you some more money.”

  “Okay. What you want?”

  “I don’t care. Something chocolate.” To the bulky woman, he says, “What about you?”

  “Banana split?” she says, and it sounds like a prayer. She looks up at him, her eyes as big as dinner plates, but are they Miaow’s eyes? “Can I have banana split?”

  “Sure.”

  “Two banana?” From her tone, it might be the key to the treasure room.

  “Have four, I don’t care.”

  “Two,” she says. She has lowered her gaze to the rows of ice cream behind the glass. Her cheeks shine with perspiration, and he realizes, with a tug of guilt, that the raincoat might as well be a portable steam room, and yet she’s said nothing, might, in fact, be completely unaware of it. Without looking up at him, she says, “I like banana.”

  “Good,” he says, feeling like an idiot.

  “How many scoop for you?” the kid asks him.

  “Three, and give her an extra, too.”

  The kid shakes his head. “Two banana and extra scoop, cannot. Bowl too small.”

  “Well,” Rafferty says, “if that turns out to be the evening’s biggest problem, I’ll be very surprised.”

  “Okay,” the kid says, with a shrug that has a lot of fatalism behind it, and at that moment, Rafferty’s phone rings. He looks at it, fails to recognize the number, and says to the woman, “Come on, let’s get out of this guy’s way. We can sit back there.” He leads her up a couple of steps to a raised area at the rear of the shop and then to a table in the far right corner, partly concealed from the street by the signs flogging the month’s special flavors. As she sits, he puts the phone to his ear and says, “Hello?”

  “Mr. Rafferty?” A woman’s voice.

  “You got him. I mean, this is he.”

  “My, my, grammar. I’m Jillian Trelawney, Mr. Campeau’s neighbor? The landlady said you might want to talk to me.” Definitely an Aussie, vowels that sounded like they were being wrung out by hand.

  “And I do,” he says, pushing his chair back under the table as the old woman pulls hers up to it. To her, he says, “Just a minute, please,” and takes the phone back through the shop and out onto the sidewalk.

  “Bad time?” Jillian Trelawney says.

  “I’m in the middle of something, but, ummmm . . . yeah, right, sorry. Go ahead.”

  “Well, I’m not sure how much Ratana, oh, sorry, I mean my landlady, told you, but I don’t really know your friend—Bob, isn’t it?—I don’t know him very well at all, just someone to nod to; he’s been, if nothing else, quiet most of the time I’ve been living there. But last night, well, I have to admit that it frightened me. I’m not exactly compressing this, am I?”

  “No, but it’s fine. I’m listening.”

  “Well, truth be told, I know him a bit better than that. When I first got here, and the heat felt like it hated me personally, my air-con went out, and that’s when it would, isn’t it? It wouldn’t wait until I was acclimated—”

  “I’ve been here nine or ten years now, and I’m nowhere near—”

  “Yes, I hear people say that, but I refuse to give up hope. So,” she says, nattering like a maniac, “Bob bumped into me in the hall—he was out in the morning for a change—and he asked how I was, and I blathered on about the air-con, and he said he could take a look at it. Well. Normally, I wouldn’t let a perfect stranger, or even a relative stranger, into my place, but Ratana had said kind things about him, and I thought, well, when if not now, I mean this is supposed to be an adventure and he’s practically elderly, even if there is something—what’s the word?—raffish about him.”

  “He’d love to know you think he’s raffish.” In the shop, the boy behind the counter is layering what looks like a foot of whipped cream on a banana split and the old lady is sitting back, shoulders slumped, gazing without interest at the top of the table, looking as suspended as someone trapped in amber. Then she raises a hand and used the back of it to scrub at the corners of her eyes.

  “So he came in and looked at it, fiddled with something or other, nodded a few times, and said my gezornenstat was all frammelled—probably not his exact words, but something impenetrable like that; he said it was a piece of piss to fix, dead easy, and that he had just the thing in his flat and he’d zip right over and fetch it.”

  “And he did?”

  “Well, yes, to cut it short just when I was getting into full swing, he did. And half an hour later, the room was miraculously below body temperature and I asked if I could pay him, and he said no, we were neighbors, and what were neighbors for? So a few days after that I baked him a little something or other and, truth be told, it was just a teensy bit burned, but he quite manfully overlooked that and even returned the dish, conspicuously empty. Am I talking too much? You have no idea what a thrill it is for me to be speaking English to someone who’s not learning it from me.”

  “No. This is a side of Bob I haven’t seen much of.”

  “Well, yes, he’s very much the wounded mystery man, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah, I guess he is.”

  “Not the cheeriest joker in the deck, but solid. So, last night—was it really just last night?”

  “Far as I know. You’re the one who heard it.”

  A movement from inside the shop draws his eye: the boy, holding up a monstrous banana split and miming carrying it up to the old lady, struggling beneath its weight, and then looking at him with his eyebrows raised. Rafferty nods, and the boy bustles around the counter toward her.

  “Well, first I heard a scream of rage or terror or pain, very King-Lear-on-the-heath, just, you know, with a lifetime of something that had been all bottled up behind it. And then a kind of high, thin whimpering, could have been him or someone else, I couldn’t—”

  “Could it have been a woman?”

  “Could have been a whooping crane, but whatever it was, it was at the far, far edge of something, and then a huge bang as an object, or maybe a person, hit the wall between his living room and mine. Knocked down a picture on my side, that’s how hard it hit, but it was something I never should have hung in the first place, the very definition of a momentary enthusiasm. And I went all quiet—I mean, I was already quiet, I’d been asleep, but I got even quieter, and then I heard weeping. Male or female, I don’t know, just a high abandoned sound, wind through leafless trees, a broken heart in the middle of the night. And then that stopped, and I just sat there and counted my goosebumps and listened.”

  “For how long?”

  “Four minutes? Five? Time goes all gummy when I’m frightened.”

  “And you heard what?”

  “Nothing much. A little mumbling, then a door slamming, not the front door, so it had to be the bathroom door, these flats are not rich in doors. And then, for a long time, nothing. So I girded my loins, which I’m sure doesn’t mean what I think it means—”

  “It means to get ready for battle, if you were an ancient Hebrew who wore a floor-length robe and didn’t want to trip over your own hem as you were about to brain a Hittite. So they tucked them up—”

  “If you’re going to pick an enemy of the Hebrews, I’ve always liked the Girgashites. It’s a name with a lot of growl built right into it. Yo
u just say, ‘I’m a Girgashite,’ you’ve already got a head start. Just make the announcement and watch your enemy flee across the plain.”

  “So you waited a minute or two and then you girded your loins and . . .”

  “Went and knocked.”

  “And?”

  “No answer. I knocked again and said, ‘Mr. Campeau? Mr. Campeau, are you all right?’ Still no answer. So I stood there for a few minutes, I suppose you could say indecisively, but the truth was that I was terrified and it actually took quite a lot of decisiveness just to stay there. There was nothing, no reply or gunshots or bumps in the night, and after a little while I went back to bed but I didn’t sleep until it was almost light. At some point I think I heard his door open and close, but I can’t be sure. In the morning I knocked again, and then I called Ratana and went to work.”

  “Does anything else occur to you?”

  “Not really, no. If anything, I think I’ve been overly complete.”

  “Well, thank you. I’ll let you know what I learn, if I learn anything. If he comes home, or if you hear anything at all in that apartment, call me immediately, okay?”

  “Promise. Maybe we could meet up sometime. I’ll buy you a coldie—sorry, a beer—and I could speak English to someone who understands it.”

  “Absolutely,” Rafferty says. “Soon. Bye.” He pockets the phone, feeling like someone from Los Angeles, the global capital of insincere commitments, and then he draws several deep breaths, and goes inside to talk with his guest.

  The banana part of the banana split is gone, and she seems only now to be getting around to the ice cream. His own ice cream, three random variations on the theme of chocolate, is midway down the road to soup, and he’s grateful to be able to simulate a little urgency and start spooning it up before he has to begin the conversation. He works it until it feels like a dodge, and then he says, “So. What’s your name?”

  She says to the sundae, “Hom.”

  “I’m Poke. Tell me why you knocked on our door.”

  She looks at him, seemingly bewildered. “Miaow.”

  “And you’re Miaow’s . . . “

  “Mama,” the old woman says, as though it were too obvious to require an answer. “You hear. She know me when she see me.”

  “Well,” he says, in Thai, “she didn’t exactly say, ‘Hi, Mom.’”

  She blots her eyes again, using the sides of her index fingers, and replies in Thai. “She was surprised. And . . . and she’s angry at me.”

  “But you think she recognized you.”

  “Ask her.”

  “I will.” He decides to back off a little. He’s operating on assumptions, and he has almost no actual information. Miaow has steadfastly declined to talk about her birth family. “But if she did recognize you, well, it kind of surprises me. That she would, I mean. She was three when—”

  “Four,” she says, holding up the requisite number of fingers. “Almost five.”

  Rafferty says, “Aha.” Miaow’s real age has been a subject of considerable speculation between him and Rose for years, and this information diverts him. “What’s her birthday?”

  “Twenty-two,” she says in Thai. “Twenty-two Preut sa pa kom.”

  “That’s May. Wow, she’s a Gemini?” Publicly, Rafferty has always scoffed at astrology but that hasn’t kept him from classifying Miaow as one of the earth-ruling signs such as Cancer, shared by Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. Or maybe a Leo, like Genghis Khan. From time to time he catches sight of a little bit of Genghis Khan in Miaow.

  “Gemini is the two babies, right?” the woman says in Thai, and then nods. “Yes, Gemini.”

  “So,” he says, “just to focus on this for a moment, she was four when you, um, saw her last, and she was with that gang for three years, maybe a little more, and she’s been with us for eight, plus a few months. Wow, that means she’s—” He pauses for a second; math is not his strong suit.

  “Fifteen,” she says in Thai at the same time he says it in English, and then they do it again, each swapping languages for the other’s convenience, and he finds himself returning her smile.

  But a smile, he thinks, can be misinterpreted, so he retreats from the moment, looks away, and says, “We’ve been wondering.”

  “But if you not know birthday,” she says in English, “how you can give her happy birthday?”

  “Oh,” he says, “right. Every New Year we let her choose a date for her birthday. A different day every year. Last year she chose two dates, and told one of them to me and the other to her”—he comes to a screeching halt and says, “to my wife.”

  The old woman bares a few yellow teeth in a sudden smile. “Yes,” she says, nodding. “This is Miaow.” And then it’s as though she hears what he’d said, and her eyes drop to the table, where she seems to be studying the ruins of her sundae. She unloads a sigh that feels like it will never end and, in English, she says, “Now she is mama for Miaow. Your wife.”

  “Yes,” Rafferty says, “yes, she is. For eight years now.” But it’s an automatic reply; the brief smile she had given him had brought Miaow to mind so strongly and clearly that he might as well have said her name aloud. “But still,” he says, fumbling for his point, “you can see why I was surprised you thought she recognized you.”

  “Baby,” she says, “always know her . . .” She breaks off, staring at her plate. “Can I have one more banana?”

  “Sure. Just tell him.”

  “Him . . . him not . . .” She doesn’t look up.

  “Right, okay.” He calls out to the boy for another banana. The boy doesn’t seem delighted, but he goes to work.

  “All right,” he says in English, and then he switches to Thai. “Before we can go any further, I need to know some things.” Her eyes come quickly up to him and then drop to the table again. “Assuming you’re who you say you are, why did you”—he has no idea what the Thai is for abandon—“leave her—leave her alone?”

  “Husband make me,” she says in English. “Him working, I—I—I working.” She licks her lips as he notes the stammer before the statement that she’d been working. “But, but get fired, him and me, we lose our—our room. Him say we . . . we cannot . . . not have money, not . . . have place to live. Not have”—she swallows loudly—“not have . . . nothing . . . for baby.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Rafferty sees the boy coming down the length of the counter, carrying a small dish with a banana on it. Rafferty raises an eyebrow and the boy stops dead and then backs up and buries the banana in whipped cream. Then, still looking at Rafferty, he dusts the snowdrifts of whipped cream with powdered chocolate, sighs, and picks up the dish again.

  “So,” Rafferty says, “you got rid of her.”

  Her eyes snap up to his, wide and angry. “Not,” she says. “Not get rid of her. I . . . I wait, I looking where she cannot see me. I looking to see where she—”

  “Let me take this in my own order,” he says in Thai, speaking over her. “There are things I need to be sure of.”

  She lowers her head. The gesture is so abject he’s instantly ashamed of himself. “Please,” he says, “please tell me how you left her and where you left her.” This is information Miaow had never volunteered to him or Rose; her shame at having been wadded up and tossed onto the sidewalk was too deep for her to share with them.

  “We want to . . . We want to . . .” She blows out a quart of air and switches to Thai. “We wanted her to be somewhere people would see her. I wanted someone to see her. To help her.”

  “So you put her where?” Although he’s seen shimmers of Miaow in her, everything depends on her answer to this question.

  “A bus bench.”

  A sudden tight flicker of anger distracts him and sends him in a direction he’d planned to avoid. “And you tied her to it.”

  Whether it’s his tone or his words,
her reaction startles him. She plants both of her thick, damaged hands on the table, fingers spread so wide that he thinks she might be about to stand up. But she doesn’t, and she leaves the hands where they are even when the boy slides the banana, now shrouded in whipped cream and dappled with chocolate, between them. When she raises her eyes to his, there is rage in them. “Traffic.” She snaps the word, in Thai, as though she wishes it were solid so she could throw it at his head. “I didn’t want her to run into traffic. She was still . . . still a baby.” And then the rage is gone and she’s crying again, and Rafferty feels like kicking himself. That explanation for the twine that tied her to the bench has never occurred to him, and he’s ashamed. He’s thought for years that it was simply a heartless convenience, to keep her from following them.

  As though she’s reading his mind, she says, still in Thai, “I could have told her to wait for a few minutes for us to come back, long enough for us to run away, and she would have. She was a good girl, she always did what . . . But then what? Sooner or later she would have tried to come after us, she would have run . . . she could have—”

  “All right,” he says, holding up a hand. It’s still horrific, the act of abandoning a child, but ever since he overheard Miaow tell the story to a girl her own age, he’s been fixated on the twine. It’s been the detail that allowed him to focus on anger, an emotion he can handle, rather than heartbreak. He has no skill with heartbreak. She sniffles and wipes her eyes again. He forces himself to say, “I’m sorry.”

  In English, she says, “I give her candy,” and then she simply falls apart, crying helplessly, both hands over her face. Rafferty gets up and flees to the counter and says, “Napkins,” and when he’s got four or five of them he goes back to the table and sits down. He reaches over and puts a hand on her shoulder.