Breathing Water (19 page)

S
he has no idea what time it is when Kep comes for her. The room has no windows, and she has nothing to help her gauge the passage of time. It could be midnight, it could be three in the morning when she hears the singing.

The first sound to get her attention is an engine. It can’t be the van; it’s too loud. Probably a motorbike. She hears it approaching, out on the street, and she thinks of the moto driver who brought her here, only two nights ago, kindly waiting to make sure she was in the right place. But the bike doesn’t go past and fade in the distance. It gets louder, and then it drops to an idle, and over it she can hear him singing. He is obviously drunk.

An Isaan song. It surprises her. She would have figured him for Bangkok pop, some stupid jangly song about love and pretty girls. Instead it’s an Isaan song about losing a child to the city, a daughter who has gone away.

So he likes sad music. So…tough.

She’s spent her time in the room getting to know it by touch, and she is familiar with every square inch of it. It had been used for storage by
the builders. Probably all three downstairs rooms were; probably that’s why they have doors with locks on them.

What was stored in this room was lumber, mostly scraps. Her heart had leapt when she found the wood, and she had passed her fingers over every surface in the room, hoping for a hammer, a screwdriver. A knife. But there was only wood. Not even any with nails in it.

The first thing she has to do when she hears the singing is to get Peep out of the way. He had fallen asleep in her lap, so she gets up slowly and edges four or five steps to the right, where there is a large wooden box, which she turned upside down to create a flat, raised surface. After turning it over, she had pushed it against the wall to make it more secure. She has already folded her blanket and put it there, and now she lays Peep in the center of the blanket and feels for the big pieces of wood.

Outside, Kep cuts the engine and sings louder. His voice is true, the notes solid. The child who went to the city does not send letters. Da’s mother sang this song sometimes.

The wood is right where she put it, leaning against one end of the box. Each piece is about a meter long and as thick as a man’s arm. She takes the four pieces she already selected and builds a square perimeter of wood around Peep. There’s no way to anchor them to the top of the box, but she thinks the wood will at least prevent him from rolling over the edge.

She hears boots on the steps that lead up to the building’s door.

The hinges of the door to the room are on her right and the door opens in, so it will swing to the right. There is no light in the hall, and the moon, as far as Da can remember, is just a sliver. It will be dark, unless he has brought a light with him.

No way to know about that. No advantage to worrying about it.

The piece of two-by-four, about a meter long, is propped against the wall to the left of the door. It’s heavier and rougher than she remembers, and her fingers are too short to wrap around it securely, but she’s invented a grip that works by interlocking her little fingers.

Scuffing in the hallway, like sand between teeth. In the last line of the song, the child comes home so changed that her own mother doesn’t recognize her. Kep slows it down and packs it with heartache. He sings very well.

Da steps to the left, stopping near the wall, her eyes on the bottom of the door, looking for a spill of light, anything to tell her whether he’s carrying a flashlight. If he is, he’ll see her. But he’ll also have only one hand free. She brings the two-by-four up over her right shoulder and waits.

Key in the lock.

Nothing.

Then the door opens
fast
, banging against the wall, and Da swings the piece of wood with an effort that begins at her ankles. But it sails through space, hitting nothing, until it cracks against the frame of the door, having passed straight through the place where Kep’s head should have been, and the force of the impact flips the piece of wood out of her hands, and then the flashlight comes on and blinds her.

“Awwwww,” Kep says. “You waited up for me.” He kicks the piece of wood aside. “Don’t pick it up,” he says, “or I’ll take it away and beat your teeth in with it.” He pans the room with the light, fast sweeps to right and left, and then brings it back to her face. “Where’s the little monster?” He leans to his right until his shoulder hits the doorframe, almost missing it. He’s drunker, Da thinks, than he knows.

“Asleep,” she says, backing away. There is a pile of wood behind her.

“Good. No interruptions.” He points the light at the concrete floor for a moment. “Not too comfy, huh? Where’s your blanket?”

“Under Peep.” The heel of her shoe has touched the edge of the woodpile.

“Well, up to you. He can have it or you can. You’re going to be on the bottom. You want to get your back dirty?”

“I’m not getting my back dirty.”

“Yeah? You wash the floor or something?”

“If you touch me,” she says, “I’ll mark you for life.”

“I don’t think so. Look here.” He shines the light down at himself. His left hand flashes silver, and the flash turns into a long, curved knife.

Da reaches behind her, her fingertips brushing pieces of wood, just odd pieces, nothing with any weight to it. She says, “Are you ready to kill me?”

“Oh, don’t be silly. I won’t have to kill you.” He brings the knife up and wiggles it from side to side. “You know that web between your
thumb and your first finger? You got any idea how much it hurts when that gets cut? I mean cut deep? You’re going to be very surprised. And then you’ll do anything I say not to get the other one cut.”

There’s nothing behind her that she can use. She brings both hands forward, arched into claws. Then she registers surprise, looks past him, over his shoulder.

Kep laughs. “Oh, yeah,” he says. “Right. And I turn around and look behind me, like I haven’t seen ten million stupid movies. Like I haven’t—”

Da sees a blur of dark motion and hears something that sounds like a coconut hitting the ground from a high tree, and Kep’s knees turn to water and he pitches forward flat on his face, the flashlight spinning on the floor, lighting the room, the boy from the street, the room, the boy from the street.

I
have a stomachache,” Miaow says.

It is 6:45
A.M.
, and she is fully dressed: jeans with an acute crease, which she irons in herself because she’s never satisfied with the way the laundry does it, and a bright red T-shirt featuring the Japanese teenage girl samurai Azumi. Her bunny slippers are on her feet, but her shoes are lined up beside the front door like well-trained pets. Rafferty sits at the kitchen counter, grimly waiting for the coffee to drip, and if someone challenged him to describe his own clothes without looking down, he’d fail completely.

“Sorry to hear it.” His pre-coffee voice is, as always, a croak. “Do you feel well enough to go to school?”

“I don’t think so. I really hurt.” She goes to the counter and takes the can of Coke he’s pulled out for her and pops the tab.

Rafferty says, “Alka-Seltzer? Good idea,” and watches her down about half of it and then lower the can. She burps discreetly. Breakfast.

The door to the bedroom opens, and Rose, who is rarely at her best before noon, feels her way into the living room. She regards the two of
them without conspicuous goodwill and squints defensively at the red of Miaow’s T-shirt. She is leaning against the wall, so loose-limbed she looks as though she plans to go back to sleep standing there, but she is dressed to leave the apartment, in a pair of white shorts and one of Rafferty’s freshly laundered shirts. Her hair has been slicked back with damp hands, but it’s still a gloriously anarchic tangle.

“Miaow’s not feeling good,” Rafferty says, getting up. At the sink he runs hot water into a cup that already holds two heaping tablespoons of Nescafé and stirs it quietly, trying not to make a clinking noise with the spoon.

“Me neither,” Rose says furrily. “My stomach hurts.” She watches Rafferty cross the living room with the cup in his hand. When he gives it to her, she does something with the corners of her mouth that she probably thinks is a smile.

“I’m feeling okay,” Rafferty says on his way back to the kitchen. He pours just-dripped coffee into his cup. “Did you two eat anything last night that I didn’t?”

“The spring rolls,” Miaow says.

The bottom half of Rose’s face is hidden by her cup, but she lowers it long enough to say, “Right.”

Rafferty swallows the day’s first coffee. An invisible film between him and the rest of the world begins to dissolve. “That’s probably it. You both look a little punk.” He knocks back half of the cup and picks up the pot with his other hand. Miaow goes to the door, kicking off the bunny slippers, drops to her knees, and pulls on her sneakers. Rafferty continues, “They probably sat too long, maybe under heat lamps. Maybe you guys should both go to bed for a while, see how you feel in a few hours.”

“All right,” Miaow says, opening the front door.

“Don’t make a lot of noise, okay?” Rose says. She sounds sleepy and irritable, and it’s not an act. “I want to sleep.”

“I’ll work on my notes for the book. That’ll be quiet.” He drinks again and heads for the front door, which Miaow is holding wide. “You two go to bed. Get some rest. You won’t even know I’m here. I promise.”

Rose precedes him through the door, cup in hand, and Miaow closes it quietly behind him as he punches the button for the elevator. Two
minutes later, down on the fourth floor, Rafferty inserts a new cassette and pushes “record” again.

DA WAKES ON
a village farmer’s schedule, maybe six in the morning, and finds herself on her back, looking up at a rough wooden ceiling. After a moment shaped like a vague question, she rolls over to see where she is.

The room is dim, with interruptions of brilliance. Sunlight shoulders its way through the cracks between the planks that make up the walls. When she withdraws her focus from the vertical strips of glare, the gloom resolves itself into backs, seven or eight of them, between her and the nearest wall. Peep is asleep beside her, nestled up against a child Da has never seen before.

She smells children, none too clean, but not filthy either. Just the slightly salty pungency of child’s sweat. She could be back in the village.

Suppressing a grunt of effort, she sits up and looks around. The room is full of sleeping children, literally wall to wall. The floor beneath Da’s hand is packed earth. It takes her a few seconds to assemble the pieces in her memory. The sad song, the light in Kep’s hand, the silvery fire of the knife, the blur of motion behind him, the sound of the stone hitting his head. The stone that turned out to be in the toe of a sock. And the boy standing in the doorway when Kep went down.

She had quickly picked up the flashlight and snapped it off. She was certain that the sound of the motorcycle and Kep’s singing had awakened the others in the building, and the light seemed dangerous. The boy had nodded acknowledgment and then made a cradling motion with his arms: the baby. By the time Da had Peep hugged to her chest and the blanket folded over one shoulder, the boy had pulled the ring of keys from Kep’s pocket. He rolled the man farther into the room so the door could swing shut without hitting him. Then he motioned Da into the hallway, closed the door, and locked it. She had followed him outside into the night. Without even looking back at her, he climbed onto a motorcycle that had to be Kep’s and started it with one of the keys on the ring. He waited until she climbed on. As he pulled the bike away from the building with her hanging on behind, she looked back to see the pale shapes of faces at the windows.

Then there had been miles of Bangkok unrolling on either side of her and sliding by, bright lights and tall buildings, all of it looking alike to Da. The noise of the bike, the wind filling her eyes with tears. The boy, whiplash-lean in front of her, Peep cradled to her chest. Now and then a last-minute zigzag between cars, making her gasp as the boy laughed. Then the streets had gotten narrower and darker, and they began to slope slightly downhill, and soon there was the river, broad and black and spangled with reflected light.

He had parked the bike and climbed off, then brought his arm way, way back to sling the keys in a long, high arc that ended with a splash in the water twenty or thirty yards distant. The two of them had walked from there, a kilometer or more, along the edge of a road that paralleled the river, both of them looking down the mud-slick bank, seeing the occasional rough wooden structure in the spaces between the buildings that are increasingly fencing in the River of Kings. Above one of the shacks, the boy had turned to her and taken Peep from her arms and tucked him into one elbow with a practiced gesture, then grabbed her hand with his own and led her down the path. A rusted latch, the creak of a wooden door, and then twenty, maybe twenty-five sleeping children. Here and there, half-open eyes shone at them, and she heard the soft sound of breathing.

He had not spoken a word to her the entire time. He led her, stepping over the sleeping forms, to a corner far from the door. He indicated the open space and whispered, “Sleep. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

She had whispered, “They can’t find—”

“No,” he had said. “Nobody knows we’re here.”

She had dropped off almost before she was finished making certain that Peep was comfortable.

THE DOOR TO
the shed opens, just a few inches, and the room brightens. He looks in, his eyes going straight to her. When he sees her sitting up, he puts a silencing finger to his lips and motions her to come out. Being careful not to jostle the children on either side of her and Peep, she gathers the baby to her and stands, stiff from a night on the ground, and threads her way between the sprawled children to the door. Here and there, kids roll over and mutter, but they quickly lapse back into sleep. Peep throws out an arm but doesn’t open his eyes.

“They stay up late,” the boy says after he closes the door. “They need to sleep when they can. If you have to go to the bathroom, there’s a hut around the side. I’ll wait for you.”

“Thank you,” she says. She has taken eight or nine steps when she turns back to him. “My name is Da,” she says. “What’s yours?”

The boy says, “I’m Boo.” He looks even slighter in the bright morning light. He can’t have an ounce of fat on his body, and once again she is struck by the concentration of life in the tight-cornered eyes. “When you come back, we’ll get something to eat.”

The hut is the most primitive kind of toilet, just a hole in the earth with four walls built around it and a length of cloth hanging in the open doorframe. There is no roof, but even without one the reek is overwhelming. Da looks down in the hole, as village children learn to do, not eager to squat over a snake or a poisonous spider, and is surprised to see water only a foot or so beneath the edge of the hole. Then she thinks,
The river
, and takes care of her needs. She unwraps Peep and takes off his soiled diaper, suddenly realizing that she’d left the shopping bag with the clean diapers, with the towel, with the milk and whiskey, at the beggars’ apartment house.

Well, there’s no way she can put the old one back on him. She folds it and drops it into the hole, then cleans him up with paper from the roll beside the hole and totes him back outside with his bottom bare to the breeze. When she comes around the corner, Boo sees Peep and grins. It is the first time she has seen him smile. She feels herself smile back at him, and her heart lifts. Just for a moment, she isn’t worried about anything.

“Cute butt,” Boo says.

“It works, too. I have to get some diapers and a couple of towels and some of those little packets of wet tissues, and—”

“Relax,” he says. “There’s a Foodland a few blocks that way.”

“Open this early?”

“Foodland is like Bangkok,” Boo says. “It never closes.” They are climbing the path, Boo first and Da following. The day opens around them as they get higher, the river flowing below and buildings rising ahead. The mud has a fetid smell, but as they approach the top of the bank, it gives way to the stench of exhaust. Da prefers the smell of the mud. Boo looks back over his shoulder at her. “How old are you?”

“Seventeen. What about you?”

“Fourteen. Or maybe fifteen. There was kind of a disagreement about when I was born.”

“Who disagreed?”

He glances across the road and raises his eyebrows to indicate a lane that runs off it, away from the river. “My sister and my brother.”

They cross the road and enter the lane, lined on both sides with old-style Bangkok buildings, shopfronts at street level with one or two stories rising above them. “Where are they now? Where are your parents?”

Boo says, “Gone,” in a tone that does not encourage further discussion. “Up here about half a block,” he says. “The woman makes good noodles.”

“How do the kids eat?”

He stops and waits until she is beside him, and the two walk on together. “We work with some cops,” he says. “I go to the places where the guys go who are looking for children, and I talk to them, I tell them I have what they want. Then I take them to look at the kids—the ones you saw asleep in there—and they pick out the ones they want. We get a room at a sex hotel and deliver the kids. Two minutes later the cops bang on the door.”

Da can hardly believe it. “And the men go to jail?”

“No. The cops are crooked. They take all the guy’s money and drag him to an ATM to get more, and then they tell him if he doesn’t leave Thailand the next day, they’ll lock him up forever. They pay me, maybe thirty, forty dollars, depending on how much the man had. Sometimes more. They keep most of it.”

“The man doesn’t get arrested?”

“No, but he’s out of Thailand. And the kids can eat.”

They walk as Da considers it. There’s not much traffic yet, and the lane is almost peaceful. “Who thought of it?”

“I did.”

“How did you find the cops?”

He gives her a quick glance. “You mean crooked ones?”

“Yes.”

He laughs. “What’s hard is to find straight ones.”

Small bright plastic chairs, red and blue, are drawn up on the sidewalk, flanking a sloping table covered in a burnt-orange oilcloth. A
frilly, smooth-trunked tree provides shade. Over a charcoal fire burning in a black metal drum at the curb, a wok smokes and sputters, and four people are already slurping out of faded plastic bowls. The smell of the food makes Da realize she’s starving, and that Peep must be, too. “I’ve got to get something for Peep,” she says.

“After you eat. One thing you learn on the street is to take care of yourself first. You’re no good to anyone unless you’re strong.” He waves at the woman beside the fire, broad and brown and sturdy, who gives him a bright good-morning smile and starts throwing things into the wok without asking what he wants.

“Your girlfriend?” she shouts, stirring in some chopped garlic and a handful of cilantro.

Da is surprised to see Boo blush.

“Look how shy,” the woman says, laughing. She pours liquid down the sides of the wok, and fragrant steam billows up as the others at the table, three men and a woman, laugh, too. “Such a handsome boy, if he’d only get his hair cut. Honey,” she says to Da, “cut it while he’s asleep if you have to.”

“I just need to comb it,” Boo says. His face is scarlet.

“You couldn’t comb it with a tractor,” the woman says. This time Da laughs with everyone else, and after a moment Boo smiles, too.

“I have very fresh chicken this morning,” the woman says. “An hour ago it was a customer.”

“Two of everything,” Boo says. “Except jokes.”

“You should always start the day laughing.” The woman is throwing things into the wok with both hands. “If you don’t, you’ll end it crying, my mama used to say.” She looks at Da again and says, “Isn’t
she
pretty?”

There’s unanimous agreement among the customers, and it’s Da’s turn to blush.

Da sits there, in the shade, smelling the food, watching the woman’s sure, quick hands and listening to the flow of chatter and laughter, and suddenly the entire scene blurs and ripples, and she is surprised to realize that she has to wipe her eyes.

“Don’t cry, honey,” the woman calls out. “He’s not
that
ugly.”