Street Music

by Timothy Hallinan

  That night, she snapped awake a good four or five minutes before Miaow stirred, and she had on hand something better than the usual pacifier to keep the child quiet: little balls of soft rice, flavored with the overripe bananas that she hung up in their room for just this purpose. The child’s relationship with ripe, even browning, bananas—a carefully guarded secret between mother and daughter—was a passionate one: when Miaow ate them, she made low, barely audible moans deep in her throat, so extravagantly satisfied that they sounded almost feral.

  While Miaow was adrift on waves of banana bliss, Hom sat at the edge of her cot in the oil-scented, spider-ridden tool room where Miaow had drawn her first breath. Rubbing her hand gently over the center of her chest and willing her heart to stop pounding, Hom listened and, without knowing it, counted off the seconds. At last, at the absolute edge of hearing, she isolated the sleep-sounds made by Daw, who somehow snored with his mouth closed. Still, even after she heard it, she hesitated, asking herself questions, answering them, one by one, in the negative, and instinctively popping more banana rice balls into the baby’s mouth the moment she had swallowed the previous one.

  She released a sigh that felt like it came all the way from her feet. Given the answers to her questions, she couldn’t stay here all night long. She couldn’t stay here at all. In the end it turned out to be a blessing that she and Miaow had been banished to the shed: the floors of all the other rooms in the old wooden house sang out every time a foot pressed down on them. Within a couple of weeks after her arrival, Hom had learned to map out which rooms people were moving through just by the sounds they made. The floor in the shed, though, was poured concrete, as solid as it was silent, and it was placed only one high, awkward step above the street, so she didn’t even have to worry about the stairs, which played melodies of their own.

  Before she had gone to bed that evening, she had changed into her lightest and most comfortable clothes and set out her most trustworthy pair of shoes, the only ones without at least one flapping sole to trip her in the dark or one hole just the right size for a snake’s fangs. After she slipped into the shoes, she had very little left to do to take the steps that would change her life completely, that would bring an end to the chapter that she’d thought—had even, at one point, hoped—would last the rest of her life. All that remained was to take her child and pass through a door that squealed like a ghost in a trap, close it behind her, and start walking.

  From a hook on the wall she took down an over-the-shoulder canvas bag she had partly filled with rice from the cooker in the kitchen, and then she surveyed the room one last time. Ugly, lonely, spidery, and smelly as it was, this was where her child had come safely into the world here, and she closed her eyes and said a silent thank-you to the spirits of the room. Carefully, she picked up Miaow, still working happily on her latest rice ball, and seated her in a sort of sling, just a loop of cloth she had cut from her bedsheet and double-folded for strength. Giving the child another tiny mouthful of the sweet rice to keep her occupied, she held her breath, bent her knees and slipped her arm through the loop in the sling, then straightened slowly so that Miaow was dangling from her left shoulder, the one that didn’t have the rice hanging from it. She stood there, congratulating herself on the fit. She’d been careful when she cut it out, but it was still a relief to see that the baby was sitting precisely where she sat when she straddled her mother’s hip. This was important, because it meant that she would be able to shift the baby’s weight from her shoulder to her hip and back again whenever she grew tired. The sling, now that it had the baby in it, was surprisingly heavy; in spite of the miserly meals she’d been given, Miaow had put on weight, and Hom was facing a long walk.

  She said a prayer, a call to the good spirits of the night world she was about to enter. She didn’t bother with the bad ones: they would know she was there no matter what she did, and it was useless to try to placate them.

  With the fingertip of her right hand resting on the inside of her left wrist, she counted ten heartbeats—not as fast as they might have been—and then she lifted up on the door handle to keep the hinges from squealing, and tugged inward. Immediately, she saw the moon, plump and almost full, floating a few hours above the horizon to the west, waiting for her to follow it into the night. Easing the door closed behind her, she stood perfectly still, listening to the house one last time. No one seemed to be moving inside. With her eyes on the yellowing moon that would guide her, at least at first, she took a deep, deep breath, and said a silent goodbye to the husband, who, whatever else he was, was Miaow’s father. Then she lifted her right foot to take the first step of her journey.

  20

  Twenty Kilometers

  She couldn’t make the numbers work.

  She was fairly good at math—she had been third-best (out of nine) in her class during her four years of school—but she couldn’t make the numbers work. Well, she could make them work in the sense that she could force them to do what they were supposed to do, come out to the right totals and everything, but she couldn’t persuade them to guarantee that she’d get home safely.

  Her village was about twenty relatively flat kilometers away if she took the most direct route, but she couldn’t take the most direct route because she knew that when they woke up and found that she and Miaow were gone, they’d grab someone’s car and look for her, and where would they would look first? Along the most direct route. And the numbers didn’t work.

  Taking that route, the shorter route, she figured she could make it home in a little less than five hours, moving at a brisk walking speed, say, between four and five kilometers an hour. That would get her there around eight in the morning, which was, unfortunately, about two, two and a half hours after she figured Daw and his mother would wake up and realize that she and Miaow had fled. It was all too easy for her to see herself, exhausted and limping, still several kilometers from her village, while they practically ran her over in a borrowed car.

  And, the truth, of course, was that she wouldn’t actually be able to walk at anything close to that speed. She had Miaow hanging from her shoulder, which she knew would slow her down, both because of the child’s weight and the extra care with which she’d have to take her steps. One stumble in the dark, a little trip that would mean nothing more than a skinned knee to her if she were alone, could be a disaster. If the baby fell, or, even worse, if she fell on the baby, she had no idea what she could do.

  So call it six to seven hours.

  On the most direct route.

  Which she couldn’t take.

  And how long would the journey take on the other route?

  Well, that depended in large part on whether she got lost.

  As she did her multiplication and division she was already walking and silently kicking herself for not having gotten up even earlier. The problems with the other route were, first, that she didn’t actually know how many kilometers it added to the journey; be conservative, and call it two or three, but it might be six or eight. And second, she didn’t exactly have it mapped out in her mind. What she had was a relative certainty, based on something several people had said, that the road, or glorified path, that branched south from the main road actually did lead to one tiny village, a little dimple of rice paddies on the broad plain, to which she had once walked in a couple of hours from her own village, although she hadn’t had to walk back. Some boy had given her and her sister Lawan a ride home because it was getting dark, a sweet, handsome village boy with night-black eyes, but when he laughed he went hyukk hyukk hyukk, like, she’d thought, something that lived in a tree. And Lawan and she, sitting in his rattling car, had avoided each other’s eyes so they wouldn’t burst out laughing themselves. They both knew that once they started to laugh, they wouldn’t be able to stop.

  Such a sweet boy. Imagine not liking a boy because of the way he laughed.

  Imagine not being able to stop laughing.

 
; Imagine laughing.

  Her family’s village was west of the one she was leaving, which meant that, at the moment, all she had to do was walk toward the setting moon. If she’d been able to strike out along the route she couldn’t take, she had no question that she could find her way home; she’d traveled it four times now, on the back of Daw’s motorcycle, twice in each direction, and once in a car when she took the few things she owned to his mother’s house. All she knew for certain about the other route was that stretches of it were too narrow for automobiles, that it dipped south, in other words, to her left if she was facing west, and it eventually would lead to Hyukk-Hyukk’s village, which she had once walked to, but not from. Years ago.

  She almost laughed out loud. What could possibly go wrong?

  But, on the other hand, she was who she was. She was Hom, the prettiest girl in the village, the third-smartest girl in her school, the mother of the world’s most perfect baby. She’d made one mistake, that was all; she’d married someone without knowing that his mother was a monster who would eat her son’s strength and starve her own grandchild. She hadn’t known that, in his mother’s presence, her strong-seeming husband would hang his head and stare at the floor like a child caught with a piece of stolen honeycomb.

  She had made a mistake, just one wretched mistake, and now she was walking her way out of that mistake.

  Her eyes scanning the moonlit ground in front of her, she walked on, looking for stones and holes and revisiting the most recent two years of her life, trying to understand how she could have so badly misread the man she married. Had any of it been her fault? Should she have seen what kind of woman his mother was before marrying into her family? Should she have been more assertive when she first moved into her mother-in-law’s house? Should she have known it was time to cut her losses and go, just from the way the woman reacted to the problems that arose during Miaow’s birth? Should she have tried to shame Daw into taking a stand? Should she have created alliances in the village? Many of the women there disliked her mother-in-law. Should she have—

  But she didn’t complete the thought because, in the sling at her hip, Miaow sneezed.

  The sound brought Hom back to herself. She reached down into the sling and picked the baby up and held her close, jiggling her up and down a little, a movement Miaow loved, and then Hom realized, looking around, that she didn’t exactly know where she was. There was the moon, a little lower than she expected it to be, but still in front of her, where it should be. Here was the rutted, uneven road, and back there, behind her, was the village. But how long had she been walking? Half an hour? An hour? Could she have passed, without seeing it, the branch to the left, to the south, that would take her to Hyukk-Hyukk’s village? Could she already be trapped on the straight route, the direct route, where sooner or later they’d come rattling up behind her in some old car?

  No, she decided. Life was not that cruel. Well, maybe it was that cruel, but it should have used up its cruelty toward her for the time being, after all she and her baby had been through in that woman’s house. Hom believed she was a good person; she should trust her karma—which would surely not have abandoned her at such a point in her life—and keep walking. The alternative, turning around, would eventually lead her back to the town she was fleeing. Things would be fine, she told herself, if she just kept going; the branch that led southward was still ahead of her, it had to be.

  She was certain of it.

  She put Miaow on her hip, one arm under the child’s bottom, and used her free hand to fish from her pocket the next-to-last of the banana rice balls, which she popped into Miaow’s mouth. Almost immediately she was rewarded by a little moan of pleasure.

  With Miaow moaning happily at her hip, Hom put her faith in the fairness of the world and walked on.

  All the promises.

  She was getting tired now, the moon was nearly down, and she wasn’t looking forward to the deepening of the darkness. The Thai night is full of ghosts, most of which are merciless and on the verge of starvation all the time. On the other hand, there was one good bit of news: she’d come upon the branch to the left and she’d followed it. So far, it seemed to be taking her in the right direction. But the moon was going down.

  She was again carrying Miaow, who had taken the regular rhythm of her walking as a kind of rocking and had fallen fast asleep in her arms. It was almost too much to hope for, her baby being this quiet as they moved through the darkness. Of all the ghosts that prowl the Thai night, the one she most feared was the ravenous Krasue, with her floating head surrounded by ribbon-like intestines, who shuffled off her ordinary-looking daytime body and took to the air at night to seek newborn children or pregnant women to devour. Hom knew that there was no way to escape Krasue if she came for them, and she was putting her faith in her knowledge that she was not pregnant and her slightly shaky conviction that Miaow no longer qualified as a newborn, although she had no idea how Krasue defined that term. With that uncertainty suddenly glaring at her, all her anxiety at being on the wrong road and being overtaken by her husband began to feel almost trivial.

  But Miaow was still asleep, so at least there was that.

  The road had dwindled and roughened. It was too narrow and too bumpy to be called a real road, and too wide to be a path. She remained in its center as best she could, staying away from the vegetation on either side. For one thing, dark as it was getting on the track she was following as the moon sank, it was even darker beneath the canopy of trees and vines, and she felt instinctively that the forest spirits were most likely to be in there, away from the powdery stretch of stars that would help her stay on the road when the moon finally disappeared, which would probably happen in the next half hour or so. Soon enough, though, the sky behind her would begin to pale. All she needed to do was stay beneath the stars until the new day arrived.

  Don’t think about Krasue.

  So she followed the stars, lost in her thoughts and her regrets, looking from the heavens to the ground in front of her, searching always for the thing that could trip her. She was sure she could fall in a way that would keep Miaow safe from harm, but even so, she was terrified at the thought of the cries of alarm the child would send up. They would broadcast an invitation into the night, rippling outward from them in a circle like the one made by a stone dropped in water, a call to the starving spirits.

  Do not think about the spirits.

  All the promises. He had made so many promises. They were going to stay with his mother just until the baby was old enough to travel, and he had described to her many times their journey to a different world, to Bangkok, on one of the fast trains, so smooth and silent, he said, that you have to look out the window to make sure you’re really moving. And the seats were so clean, so soft, that people slept through the trip instead of looking out the windows as the world streaked by. He had said that Bangkok was so big that you traveled through its outskirts a full hour, even at that speed, before you reached its center.

  And he had friends there, he’d said, who would help them. He’d talked about the man who had gotten rich running a restaurant that served their food, Isaan food, and how that man would help them find a place to stay, a place that would be perfect for Miaow to grow up in, how he would find jobs for them—for him first, until Miaow was old enough to be left with someone, and after that, for Hom, too—jobs that paid real money, money enough to send some home to her own mother and father. She could help her mother and father.

  She could get away from the endless drudgery, the endless sweat, the same faces, the net of gossip, the whine of the mosquitoes, the sameness of the landscape, the sense that she was missing everything that was going on in the real world, where real people lived. Life, she was sure, was supposed to be a banquet, and she had been sentenced to a lifetime of thin gruel, one flavorless meal after another, until she died.

  She had seen only three villages in her life: her own, her husband’
s, and the one that Hyukk-Hyukk lived in. You could walk from one end to the other of any of them in less than ten minutes and see nothing interesting enough to slow you down; just peeling, run-down houses, owned by people everyone knew. A few dusty little businesses, run by the same people. A few spaces to park motorbikes. Ugly black electrical cables dividing up the sky into straight lines. Around each village, the flat paddies, stretching away in all directions. She was young, she was strong, she was pretty, she was, she believed, reasonably smart. And she was living in a place where the only thing on that list that mattered was that she was strong. The same thing people admired in a water buffalo. Oh, yes, and she’d been told she had a wide pelvis, which, she supposed, meant that she could bring other water buffalo into the world. That’s what she had been in her marriage: a water buffalo. She lowered her head and whispered to Miaow, “My little water buffalo.” Miaow made a sharp sucking sound with her mouth, although she’d been weaned for months and months, and the sound frightened Hom, stopped her where she was, and set her to scanning the trees, trying to penetrate the deep gloom of the landscape, and realizing that, in fact, it wasn’t all that gloomy. While she’d been trudging along and chasing her thoughts, the sky had gone from black to a deep gray, lightest behind her, to the east. The lace of the trees had begun to appear; in a few minutes, she’d be casting a shadow. The night was over.

  Precisely at that moment, Miaow let out a whimper, practically the first real noise she’d made in the three hours or so that they’d been walking. She had waited to cry, waited until the evil spirits had fled with the night. She’d waited until they were safe.

  “Best baby in the world,” Hom said. “I will never, ever leave you.”