Street Music

by Timothy Hallinan

  But the sleeper tricked her, cheated her out of the early start she’d imagined. It was almost noon by the time she was dressed and made up and ready to leave Miaow with Daw, telling him she was going to see about a new job, which, at least, had the virtue of being true. Even with such a late start, she was disappointed by 2 p.m.

  At her very first stop, the woman down the hall said no, she couldn’t accept the responsibility of taking Miaow, even if it was only for a week or so. An occasional afternoon or an hour or two in the evening was no problem, but no longer. There were days she could barely handle her own kids. She was still apologizing when Hom stepped back into the hallway and closed the door behind her.

  Sonya’s expression when Hom stepped through the door told her all she needed to know. Before she could even begin to ask, Sonya said, “You’re too thin. You look exhausted. You’ve got to stop, for your daughter’s sake, even if you don’t care about yourself. Do you ever think about your kid?” Hom bit back a dozen responses, took a long, slow breath, and asked whether she could leave Miaow for a week or two, saying she’d pay double.

  She was barely allowed to finish. “You must be joking,” Sonya said. “First, she’s too old to stay here now, and second, how do I know I’d ever see you again? Honestly, honey, you’ve got to get your life under control.” By that point, half a dozen kids, all younger than Miaow, were listening, fascinated, and Sonya said, “I’ve got to see to these kids. Come back when you’re yourself again.”

  In the street, Hom steadied herself with one hand on the building’s warm wall, as she trembled from head to foot and willed herself not to weep. She couldn’t ruin her makeup. At the moment, the most important thing in the world was not ruining her makeup. When she had stopped shaking and her breath was more measured, more dependable, when she was sure she had her voice under control, she set out on the walk she had made hundreds of times, back when she took the stability of her life for granted. All the worries she’d had then, all the resentments: all nonsense. She had been happy then, compared to now. As much as she disliked her mother-in-law when they lived in that cold, creaky house, she had been happy in her relationship with her daughter. Terrified as she had been in the forest, there had been a part of her that was thrilled by the adventure. If she was ever happy again, she promised herself, she wouldn’t let it slip by. She’d say a thank-you prayer every morning.

  Most of the women in the sorting room were unfamiliar to her, although the one she blamed for her firing glanced up when Hom came in, froze for a moment, and then went back to work. Across the room, the supervisor was peering at her, her mouth partly open, and then she stood up, as though she had to defend her territory.

  But before she could say a word, Hom said, “When I came to work here, you said you knew someplace else I could go, where I’d earn more money.” The supervisor held up a hand and said, “Not here,” and then she led Hom into the hallway. When she’d finished giving her the information, she added, “Tell them I sent you.”

  “Really,” Hom said, her voice rasping with unexpected fury. “Do they pay you?”

  Stepping back and opening the door to the workroom, the supervisor said, “If they take you. The way you’re looking, I’m not sure they will.”

  It was a massage parlor above a barber shop in Patpong. She had expected something along those lines, but she still stood on the sidewalk looking at the door for a few minutes before she pushed through it and climbed the stairs, every step feeling a meter high. The man who opened the door at the top of the stairs was little and balding and long nosed, and Hom immediately thought of a weasel. She gave him the supervisor’s name, and he looked her up and down in silence and then led her to a windowless little room, reeking of rubbing alcohol and men’s feet, empty but for a massage table and a clothes tree in one corner. He said, “Got a regular here, and his usual girl is out with the monthlies, so you get an audition. Take good care of him.” He opened a little cupboard at one end of the room and pulled out a white sleeveless top and white shorts. “Put these on. You can shove stuff in here.”

  Hom was shaking when the man came in. Her mouth was almost too dry to say hello, but he nodded and smiled at her and said, “Don’t worry, honey, we’ll make this quick.” It didn’t feel quick to her, though, and she was amazed later to realize he was in the room only about twenty minutes, but he seemed satisfied, and as he left, he tipped her ten dollars in American money. She sat on the table, crying, until the boss came in and said, “You did okay, but I can’t have a lot of crying, understand? It fucks with the customers’ fantasies. You want to do another one?”

  She waved it off and asked if she could come back the next day.

  “You can work a few hours, see whether you can take it. Normally, I wouldn’t give you short hours like that, but Tik has her period and you can take up part of the slack in the next couple of days. When you start regular, though—if you do—it’ll be the full shift, all twelve hours. Think you can handle it?”

  Hom said, “I won’t cry again, I promise.”

  When she left, her legs still feeling a little wobbly on the stairs, she had her tip folded into her underpants. She had no intention of sharing it with Daw. For one thing, she’d have to explain how she got it, and she knew instinctively that he’d beat her, and—possibly even worse—he’d make it about him: it would be his final humiliation, not hers. And anyway, she’d already created a kind of border in her mind, an almost tangible line between where she was now and where she would be when it was just the two of them, just her and Miaow. This money was her first step across that line; it was earmarked as partial payment on a place where she and Miaow would live.

  She was cursing herself for having wasted the first day. The second was gone now, which meant that she had only one more before they would be evicted. She needed to have a new place secured and a deposit paid. At home, she stood in line in the hallway for the shower and then stayed under the spray of water so long that someone started banging on the door. When she came out she told Daw she had a headache and spent most of the rest of the day in bed, which drove Miaow into the bathroom.

  She worked four hours the next day and collected another seventeen dollars in tips—both her customers were Americans—and when she left she asked the weasel-faced manager when she’d get her salary. He said that if she worked out, the girls were paid every Saturday. For a moment she thought her legs would go loose beneath her, but she leaned against the counter and made herself smile. “I’ll work out,” she said, and then she joined the other waiting women. One of them had told Hom there might be a room available in the place where she stayed. A second woman volunteered another address, but the others all seemed to be sleeping on the massage tables. So she had two leads. And one day before she would need to move into one of them.

  But unless one of them was the cheapest place in the world and required no guarantee, she still wouldn’t be able to move in until she was paid on Saturday, probably late on Saturday. And this was Tuesday. She did the math in her head over and over while she worked on the customers and they worked on her. She’d taken an upper to make the time go faster and to help her talk to the men (one of them did want to talk) but even with the speed’s help, she could find no way to earn enough money to make an advance payment on a place before they were thrown out of the not-hotel. And then there were four days after that, as non-negotiable as a concrete wall—Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and most of Saturday—before she’d be have the money to pay for a place. It might as well have been a year.

  She’d even asked Weasel-face whether Miaow could sleep there, with her, on a table. He’d said that she, Hom, could, if need be, but not Miaow. “Not for all the money in the world,” he said. “A kid in a place like this? All we’d need is one cop, and I’d be in jail for ten years.”

  For now, all she could do was look at the progress she’d made. Four days from now she would enter a new world. She and Miaow would hav
e a place of their own. She’d find someone to take care of the child while she was working; in less than a year, Miaow would be in school during the day.

  Hom would quit the pills and stay away from them. She would be good. She knew she could.

  In the meantime, she had two possible rooms to look at.

  The first rooming house was full and no one was scheduled to leave anytime soon. To find the second, she had to go to a neighborhood she didn’t know, and when she found the place it turned out to be a run-down wooden structure with a sagging roof and bars on the windows, and an electric lock on the door: she pushed a button and waited until someone came and lifted the curtain on the inside of the door. Then there was a buzz and a click, and the door opened into a small room with scuffed linoleum floors and a battered counter at the far end. The place smelled of mold. The woman behind the counter said they were full, but that a room would open up in a few days. Her heart pounding, Hom said, “Can I leave you a deposit?” She hadn’t even asked to see the room.

  The clerk, a plump-cheeked, dark-skinned woman in her mid-forties, had strands of silver in her hair and, Hom thought, kind eyes. She said, “How much of a deposit?”

  “Twenty-seven dollars, US?”

  The clerk shook her head. “Tell you what, sweetie. Give me twenty and keep the rest. That’ll cover two nights when the room opens up. If you want to reserve long-term—you do want to reserve long-term, right?”

  “Yes.” The rate was almost what they’d been paying at the not-hotel, but she had no time to argue. She could always move later.

  “Well, then, bring me another twenty in a day or two. If the room’s open by then, and if you’ve got another fifty to protect the owners in case you skip ahead of your scheduled time, you can move right in. If not, I’ll hold it for a week. Either way, you’ll be marked down as a long-term resident. After you stay a month, if you’ve paid on time, it’ll go down to eight dollars a night.” She put both hands on the counter and leaned very slightly in Hom’s direction. “You’re going to be able to pay the rent, right? You have a job?”

  Hom said, “Yes,” feeling her face go hot with shame.

  “Hospitality industry?” the woman said. “We’ve got a lot of girls in the hospitality industry here.”

  “What about a baby?”

  “Sorry,” the woman said. “I didn’t hear you.”

  Hom said, “What I said was—”

  “You can say it a hundred times and I won’t hear it. It’ll raise the room rate to ten per night, which means a bigger deposit, and I’m not sure you have a bigger deposit. But will you be able to cover eight a night when you move in? Does the baby cry?”

  “Yes, I can cover it,” Hom said, “and no, she won’t cry. She is bigger now.”

  “I’m Kanda,” the woman said, tearing a stub out of a little book. “If she doesn’t cry, she’s your little secret until the owners find out. This is your receipt to put the place on hold. Bring me another twenty and the fifty-dollar deposit in a day or two, and I’ll give you one for a long-term stay. From then on, you can pay by the week.”

  “Oh,” Hom said, and then she was crying. Kanda put up a hand and started to say something, but Hom bent slightly at the waist and gave her a wai so high her elbows were practically level with her eyes.

  “Please,” Kanda said. “Please.”

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Hom was saying as she backed out of the room.

  In the street she dried her eyes, smearing her eye makeup all over her face, and considered. She had a job, and she had no right to be ashamed of it; it was her path to keeping her child. She had a place to stay that would open up in a few days, maybe three or four or five. She had the room. She would have the money to pay for it. She had everything but time.

  Nor did she have the physical or emotional strength that night to defy Daw, who sat in the front room on their last night there, surrounded by the bags that the two of them were never going to be able to carry, whispering furiously that if she insisted on keeping Miaow instead of cooperating with his plan, he’d cut them both loose, leave them to cope alone. He didn’t want to, he said, but he wasn’t going to be able to be with them to protect them most of the time because he needed to be free to find work, and that was going to be difficult; his only experience was in moving, and that was closed to him. Unless she thought she could protect Miaow alone and without his help, they would have to follow his plan.

  One by one, he ticked off what he called the safety features: he had chosen a place near nice stores, even around the corner from one of the big new malls, so the people there would probably be high-class, not likely to steal a child to sell her or make her into a house slave. They would be right there, hidden, keeping watch. If the people looked wrong to her—looked wrong to both of them—he promised to run in and break it up. They could take Miaow someplace else; he’d chosen a second place, too. She sat, lips pressed tight against everything she wanted to say, and watched as he transformed himself into the person he had probably always been, the spoiled, too-handsome mother’s boy who took it for granted that he would get his way, who thought of no one but himself.

  She let him talk, hugging her secret to her: she had found a job and a place to live. She just needed a few days she wasn’t going to be given. She was, she was surprised to find, afraid to tell him about the job. He would demand that she give it up. He might hit her. And she couldn’t, she wouldn’t, give up the job. She had no alternative, and he had none to suggest.

  Or even worse, he might nod and accept it. Even though she was almost certain they were finished, she couldn’t bear the idea that he would let her be a whore to solve the problems that he had, in her opinion, created. So she sat mutely, exhausted almost beyond feeling, until he had run out of arguments, and then she went into the bathroom and dry-swallowed one of her last remaining sleepers. She didn’t expect it to work, but when she lay down, with Miaow all the way across the room, practically pressed against the wall, the drug opened beneath her like a deep cave, and she fell right in.

  In the middle of the night she was snapped awake by a thought, so complete she might have been puzzling over it for days. To Daw, Miaow was competition. All the love she gave Miaow was love he believed was rightfully his. His mother had given him all her love, all her attention; why didn’t his wife?

  She was still awake when she heard him moving around in the front room. It was seven, three hours before the deadline to empty the apartment of everything they wanted to keep. Miaow said nothing as they dressed, looking from one of them to the other, clearly aware that something unusual was happening, but when Daw told Hom to wash the child’s face, Miaow said, “I’ll do it.” By a little before eight, they were out and walking.

  No one spoke. They walked single file, Daw in front, Hom bringing up the rear, and Miaow in between. Miaow never looked left or right, never said a word. Daw only spoke to direct them to turn right or left or to wait to cross the street. Hom spent the time counting, alternating between counting her steps and the pounding of her heart, which was so heavy she could see her T-shirt moving when she looked down. When she saw that, she looked straight ahead again and went back to counting steps.

  It took some time, although Hom couldn’t have said whether it was ten minutes or an hour, before Daw stopped and said, “Over there.”

  They stood at the edge of a wide street with big stores, their windows still dark, stretching left and right. Directly opposite them was a bus stop with a heavy concrete bench: a flat seat with three upright beams, also concrete, that supported the bench back. Daw waited for a break in the traffic and led them across.

  When they got there, Miaow looked around and said, “Why are we here?”

  “You’re going to wait here a little while,” Daw said, taking something out of his pocket, the twine Hom had insisted on the previous evening; as much as she didn’t want to abandon the child, to
leave her to strangers, she was even more frightened that Miaow would chase them, running straight into traffic. But when she saw the twine in Daw’s hand, her legs weakened beneath her. She said, “Daw.”

  But he just looked at her and said, “We’ve talked about this. It’s better for her. And if it looks wrong, we can stop it the minute it happens. If we’re settled in a few days, a week or two, we can put everything back together.”

  “Four days,” Hom said, unaware that she’d said it out loud.

  “Sure, sure,” Daw said without looking up. “Four days.” He took Miaow’s hand and tied the twine around it while she looked up at him, expressionless. Then he tied it to the nearest of the uprights that supported the back of the bench, giving her a little less than a meter of slack. “See?” he said. “You can sit down and everything.”

  Hom was weeping openly by the time Daw backed away from Miaow. She took from her pocket one of the all-day candies Miaow loved and held it out, saying, “Here, sweetie. By the time you finish this, everything will be all right.”

  Miaow gazed at her, not the candy, for an unmeasurable amount of time, and then she took it in her free hand. She looked from one of them to the other and said, “You don’t want me anymore.”

  “You just wait here,” Daw said. “Someone will come get you pretty soon.”

  Miaow put the candy into her mouth. Around it, she said, “I don’t want you, either.”

  “It’s just a few days,” Daw hissed into Hom’s ear as he pulled her away. Miaow said nothing as they stepped down into the road and navigated the traffic. When they were on the other side, Hom looked back and saw that Miaow had sat on the very end of the bench, sideways so that her left shoulder was against the bench back, and she was picking at her left wrist. She was, Hom realized, ashamed of the string. She was trying to undo the knot or, failing that, to hide it. She felt a sudden surge of pride.