And it reeked of shit. When she went into the bathroom she understood why: there were farang on the train, and the only place to move your bowels was a Thai squat toilet. From the look of the floor, many farang, some of whom had probably just eaten the spiciest food of their lives, had been squatting with nothing to hold on to when the train suddenly lurched, and they’d had to duckwalk, mid-function, to get back to the hole.
For the first few hours Daw made excuses, saying that he’d saved money with the cheaper tickets and that they’d need it in Bangkok to make sure they could afford a place that would be safe for Miaow, and that Hom would see, things would be fine once they got there: he had friends, and the man with the restaurant would steer them to good jobs. But the enormity of the lie about the train—the very first thing he’d promised her about their journey—filled her with a kind of dread, and she stopped listening. After a while he seemed to understand that, because he got up and navigated the corridor between the seats as the train swayed until he was out of sight. When he came back he had a pleasant-looking woman dressed in the train worker’s uniform with him. He introduced her to Hom as Khun Siriporn and explained that from then on, all Hom had to do when she needed the bathroom or had to change Miaow’s diaper was to go up through two cars and into the third, and Khun Siriporn would take her to a better bathroom. Khun Siriporn had nodded agreement, although Hom thought she saw disappointment in the woman’s eyes at the revelation that the favor Daw needed was for his wife and child. Still, she had said yes and she rose to the occasion by giving Hom the name of the other attendant who would be up there if she, Siriporn, was on a break or had been called elsewhere. From then on, when another stop was announced, Daw would take Miaow and walk up and down with her until the train was in motion again. Often, Siriporn would drift in during the stops, and when the cars were in motion again, Daw and Siriporn would walk back up the aisle and into the forward cars, talking like people who had known each other for years, his fingers touching the crook of her elbow as though he were the one who’d been on trains half his life, and she the one who might need steadying.
When he came back he had a sandwich for Hom on very white, very soft bread with some kind of meat in it, a banana for Miaow, and a glass of something that smelled like the stuff her father drank on weekends. A little later, he got up and went into the forward car, as though the rules simply didn’t apply to him, and returned with another drink. Hom watched him slip into a doze, head back, mouth open. Not so handsome at the moment, but still better-looking than any of the boys she’d grown up with. She watched him sleep for what felt like a long time, and something cold and heavy seemed slowly to replace her heart. At one point she wanted to get up and move around to dispel the sensation, and she was startled to find his fingers wrapped around her wrist before she’d even slipped past him and into the aisle.
“I just want to walk a little,” she said.
“The train might make a sudden turn,” he said. “I’ll take the baby.”
She was amazed at how little she wanted to hand Miaow to him, but she did it, and for the next thirty or forty minutes she paced the length of the car, watching Miaow sleep at his chest, watching his gaze follow her beneath his half-closed eyelids. They barely spoke for the rest of the journey.
She smelled Bangkok long before she saw it. It smelled like trucks.
He was asleep, or so it seemed. He slept much more lightly than she did. Twice in the night when she needed to go to the bathroom, once to change Miaow and once for herself, his eyes opened the moment she stirred. Both times, he insisted on accompanying them, waiting outside the bathroom until they were done, and then following them back to their seats, where he would—it seemed—instantly fall asleep, only to open his eyes whenever she changed her position.
She supposed she could persuade herself that he was worried about them.
When she looked out the window after spoon-feeding Miaow most of her remaining food, the black, empty countryside had given way to lights. They were in motion everywhere, some high in the air, or rather, as it turned out, on roads magically hung ten meters above the ground, and other lights were taking long downward slopes to, she supposed, an airport. Some of the lights took the form of pale rectangles, the windows of the poor-looking houses and low, cheaply built structures along the tracks, glowing even at this hour, which must have been a little before five in the morning. People who got up early or went to bed late. People who, for all she knew, stayed up all night. Rhythms must be different in the city, she thought, than they were in the countryside.
The buildings grew closer together and higher. The sky brightened. The train began to slow. She couldn’t open her window to look ahead and see what was coming, but whatever it was, it let out a lot of light.
Whatever it was—good or bad, she supposed—it was her new life.
The moment the train stopped, Miaow began to cry.
The nice place to live turned out to have a dirt floor beneath three walls of plastic sheeting stretched over rotted wooden beams in an inconceivably filthy, rat-infested slum built on a downward slope near the port. They would share the space, he said, with three other families in eight-hour shifts. Food was cooked, or at least warmed, on a tiny Sterno stove positioned dead center on the dirt floor to keep the heat away from the plastic walls. The crib, which apparently belonged to one of the other families, had a wire mesh cover stretched across the open top to keep the rats off the baby. Never had she been expected to be grateful for something so horrifying. Her first night there, she never closed her eyes.
The Isaan restaurant, which they found after a long roundabout search several days after they arrived, turned out to be a cramped, smoky place run by an irritable little man who actually sighed at them the first time he saw them. The sigh sounded to her like exhaustion. On the other hand, they left with two white plastic bags of food that was so good that Hom burst into tears at the first mouthful: it took her straight back home and into her mother’s kitchen, which now felt thousands of miles away. While Daw was in the restaurant’s bathroom (and for quite a while; it hadn’t escaped her that he had only once left her alone in the hut to use the community latrine, and she wasn’t sure whether it was to protect her or to keep her from running away) the restaurant owner had changed his tone somewhat, had grown more gentle. She would, he said, have to be strong. She was in for a difficult, possibly dangerous, often dirty experience, but thousands of people had gone through the ordeal just in the time he personally had been in Bangkok, and most of them had survived, had moved on to jobs and families and apartments. “Not palaces,” he said, “but clean—or at least as clean as they make them—and safe. Doors you can lock, although Bangkok isn’t all that terrible. People do steal, though, they do that everywhere I’ve been.” He looked out the window at the street. “The people who have been here the shortest time have the best hearts,” he said. “The city changes people. Maybe all cities do. If you really need to trust someone, it might be better to trust someone who hasn’t been here too long.” He drew a breath and was about to say something else, she thought, but then he glanced past her and she realized that Daw was standing behind her, having come out of the bathroom without making a sound.
After they left, she followed Daw along the sidewalk of an impossibly crowded street called Silom, and she realized that she was seeing more people in a single block, just on her side of the street, than lived in her entire village. Most of the passersby avoided her eyes; over the course of a long, jammed block, she got only three or four nods or smiles. It was enough to make her feel like a ghost; even with Daw walking beside her she felt alone in a whole new way. And it wasn’t just the males or the older people. Even the girls her own age seemed to have walls around them; girl after girl looked at no one, kept her gaze unfocused, went past her as though she were invisible. If one of them did look at her, she seemed to be judging Hom’s clothes, her hair, her lack of makeup, possibly evaluating her as
competition.
Suddenly, a tall, thin woman stopped right in front of Hom, clasped her hands at the level of her heart, and said, “Oh, what a beautiful baby, she’s perfect.” The woman put out a very long finger with a manicure that had probably cost more than all the clothes Hom owned put together, and Miaow reached out and grabbed the finger and laughed, and the tall woman said, “Oh, my GOD, what an angel, just look at those eyes,” and from nowhere Daw appeared, knocking the woman’s hand away and saying, “Get away from her, get away. Tutsii! Tutsii!”
The woman backed away, saying to Daw, “You’re pretty, darling, but you’re stupid,” and to Hom, “Sorry, sweetie. Beautiful baby. Looks like you, thank God,” and then she flipped her hair at Daw. To Hom, as she walked away, she said, “You can do better, teerak. You’re a beautiful girl.”
“Ladyboy,” Daw said, almost spitting it as he watched her go. The woman glanced back and exaggerated the swing of her hips. “Dirty. They steal things. He—he sleeps with men.”
“He? But he’s—I mean, she’s—”
“No, no. It’s a man. There are lots of them here. Farang men like them. He’s just a whore.”
“He thought Miaow was beautiful,” she said, suddenly resentful.
“They steal,” he repeated. “They come here, to this street, to . . .” He let the thought trail off.
She peered at the street that had opened up to their left, short, straight, drab, ordinary enough except for the night market being built down its center, and then a neon sign came on, followed by another, and she said, “Oh. I know about this place. A girl in our village came down here, and—”
“Girls from all over Thailand come down here,” he said sourly. “Boys, too.”
“The girl in our village, the one who came here, she married a farang she met here and now she lives someplace cold and sends her parents clocks and things. Let’s go look at—”
He said, “No” and took her arm.
“Stop that,” she said, tugging her arm free. “I’m here with you, I’m your daughter’s mother, but I’m not your slave. I wouldn’t take it at your mother’s house, and I won’t take it here.”
He said, “You’re my wife.”
“Well,” she said, “I could also say you’re my husband. It doesn’t mean we own each other.”
“People said you were too pretty,” he said. “They told me you were spoiled. But what’s done is done. You’re going to have to listen to me. You don’t know this place. People here will steal from you. They’ll hurt you. That kathoey could have cut you, she could have picked your pocket—”
Her cheeks felt hot enough to fry an egg on. “There’s nothing in my pocket. You haven’t given me anything to put in it.”
Men were going past them now, mostly alone, headed up the little street where the lights were coming on. They were focused on where they were going and paid no attention to her and Daw. “I’m going to go look at this,” she said. “You can come with me or not, I don’t care.”
“You could never find your way home.”
“Home?” she said, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. “You call that home?”
He said, “Stop. Please stop.” And his tone did in fact stop her, cut her off before she could let out everything she’d been holding in since the moment she saw the inside of the train car and knew she’d been lied to. He didn’t sound angry or assertive. He sounded tired. Much more surprising, he sounded sad. “Listen to me. Please. We’re married. We have a child. You’ve come with me to a big city where you don’t know anyone. You’re angry with me because the place we’re staying in is filthy and probably dangerous, but I promise to protect you. I’ll do my best to protect you. You heard the man in the restaurant. Everybody starts like this. Within a week, I promise you, I’ll have a job. You’ll have a job—”
“How can I have a job? Miaow—”
“I have the names of some women who take care of babies while their mothers work.”
“I’m not giving—”
“You can talk to the women. You can talk to the mothers whose kids they take care of. It’s going to be harder for me to get a job than it is for you. I could get you a job tomorrow, folding clothes in a laundry that takes care of some of the big hotels. I already know who to call. Long work, but not hard. Lots of women to talk to. I’m going to have to get a bottom-level job, probably in building, lifting things, moving them around. Sometimes the men who hire workers make them work for a week or two and then fire them without paying them. So here’s the truth. It’s going to be hard.”
“I’m not giving Miaow—”
“Meet the woman first. I have three names, you can meet all of them. Bangkok is full of mothers who are working and have to let someone take care of the babies. It’ll cost something, but she’ll be someplace clean and safe. You’ll have a job, it’ll help, it’ll help us get our feet under us until things get better. It’ll give us time to learn more about living here. Everybody starts this way, Hom. We can do this, but only if we do it together. We can’t go back to the village now. Your parents want to be alone, the only place I have is with my mother—I know, I know, you don’t have to say it. I feel the same way. We’re here, now. We came here together. Together, I think we can do it. I know we can. But together.”
In the entire nineteen years of her life, no one had ever told her she was essential to something important. No one had ever said that his success or failure could depend on her. There was Miaow, of course; every baby depends on its mother, but to be the key to an adult’s life, especially an adult who seemed, at times, anyway, to love her . . . well, that was something completely new. And it was Daw who needed her help. Looking at him now, she saw more of the boy she’d thought she’d been marrying and less of the martinet he had become at his mother’s house. It felt, at that moment, as though that boy had returned.
She said, “Tomorrow. We’ll meet them tomorrow.”
He lowered his eyes to the sidewalk, and she thought for a moment that he was embarrassed that she had seen how much her agreement meant to him, but when he looked back up, his eyes were clear and calm. “So,” he said, indicating the street with a wave of his hand, “do you still want to take a walk?”
She turned away to see more men, all farang except for a few who could have been Japanese or Chinese, most of them middle-aged, many of them overweight and unattractive, most of them alone, and she saw the girls waving them in from the doorways, and she thought how sad it was that the men didn’t have wives they could work with to build something strong, and how unhappy the girls’ lives probably were, and she said, “No. Let’s go home.”
In the years that followed, she would ask herself why she hadn’t just found a way to kill all three of them, right then and there. And she would ask it again and again and again.
24
Smelled Pretty Much Like Hers
On Miaow’s second birthday, Hom persuaded Daw to spend a little of their rapidly dwindling savings on something to commemorate the day. She’d already located the photographer, who had a little shop, so inconspicuous she’d walked past it twice looking for it. Its dusty, unlit windows were full of pictures of brides, so faded they looked like ghosts, and they’d startled her so that she’d slowed for a moment to get up the courage to go in. The photographer was old and bent, and his hands shook so badly she wondered how he could hold the camera still, but when she’d bathed Miaow and washed her hair and slicked it down and they were finally sitting there in front of a huge white sheet of paper, she’d seen that the camera was a big wooden box with legs and that he clicked it to take the pictures with something he held in his hand.
And the pictures had been beautiful. She could afford only two prints, in the smallest and cheapest size. She’d sent one to her mother and kept the other in a small zippered bag with an elephant embroidered on it that she’d been given on her sixteenth birthday. In it she kept
her state identity card, a photograph of her mother, and whatever small amount of money she had. Instinctively, she rarely brought it out in front of Daw.
By the time they went to the photographer’s studio, they had been living for several months in a sagging, creaking former hotel, a tinder-dry potential bonfire that, thanks to a series of well-placed bribes, no longer officially existed; it was shown on the city records as having been demolished. The owner, who had paid the bribes for its imaginary demolition, was a developer who had for some time been buying every structure on three narrow, obscure sois that intersected in the middle, like the horizontal cross-bar in a capital H. Once he owned everything on all three sois, he bribed his friends in the city government to get those structures condemned as well, and then he paid another round of bribes to begin actual demolition. Only then, when all three sois were depopulated and reduced to rubble, would he announce his grand project and wait for open palms to be extended by the officials who would have to approve it. He had seen the future, and it was shopping malls. It was a low-risk game because he was displacing only the poor, who had nothing to drop into those perpetually outstretched government palms.
In the meantime, the nonexistent hotel was now a nonexistent boarding house, of sorts: one family to a room, at least theoretically. One working bathroom—which is to say, actually connected to the plumbing—for each floor, no electricity in the rooms, and no cooking allowed on the premises, a restriction everyone got around with canisters of propane and portable grills. In order to make the fiction that the building was empty sufficiently plausible to let the beat cops deny they’d been bribed, all the windows on the three sides visible from the street had been nailed closed and thickly painted over, and the front entrance was barred and chained behind big signs that said closed and no admittance. The tenants came and went through a rear door that was still labeled employees only in Thai and opened into what had been the hotel’s kitchen. Beyond that lay the lobby, and both of these big areas were now home to the place’s cheapest living spaces, a maze of rectangular compartments divided by pieces of rough-cut, splinter-bristling, shoulder-high plywood. On the bright side, relatively speaking, there were three bathrooms on the ground floor, and they all worked.
Street Music Page 20
