A Nail Through the Heart

12

Miaow sits bolt upright as a key turns in the lock. The T-shirt is twisted between her clenched hands, her knuckles pale in the dark skin.

Rose comes in with four large bottles of drinking water clutched to her chest. She stops, looking from Rafferty to Miaow and back again. "One minute," she says in English. "I put water and go."

"No," Miaow says, looking up at her. "I want to tell you, too."

Rose colors with pleasure. "She likes us both today," she says, and Miaow produces a low-wattage smile. "Why is your friend downstairs?"

"Downstairs where?" Rafferty asks.

"In the garage," Rose says in Thai. "Asleep in somebody's jeep, with his feet out the window."

"He's waiting," Miaow says. "We've been in worse garages."

"You and Superman?" Rose settles cross-legged on the floor with her back to the glass doors. The sunlight on her hair is dazzling, a knot of rainbows.

"When I was little," Miaow says, "he found me and took me to a place where kids were making garlands. My first day I made thirty baht. Almost a dollar. I could eat. Boo-that was his name then," she informs Rose-"Boo showed me a good place to sleep. There was a number hotel that was closed. We could sleep in the garage, behind the curtains. We were dry when it rained." Number hotels, indispensable to Bangkok's sexually furtive, have curtained garages to allow customers to get out unobserved.

"We started every day at five in the morning. We sold flowers until it was dark. Boo already had four kids with him. They were my first real friends, ever. When some older kids tried to chase us out of the garage, Boo took a big piece of wood with nails in one end and hurt two of them until they ran away." She pauses for a moment to swallow. "He took care of us.

"I sold flowers every day for almost two years," she says. She is looking straight in front of her, seeing her own life unspool like a film. "Boo was always there. One night a man called me to come to his car. When I got there, he reached out and grabbed my arm. He tried to pull me into the car, right through the window. Like a bag of rice. Boo ran up and bit the man's arm. He wouldn't let go. The man dropped me and drove off, with Boo hanging from his arm, biting him deeper and deeper. We were running behind, screaming for the man to stop. The man was screaming, too. When Boo let go, he fell on the road. He got up with blood all over his face and shirt and on his elbows and knees from where he fell. He was laughing."

"Fierce heart," Rose says.

Miaow falls silent. Rafferty can see her struggling with the next words. Rose pulls a pack of cigarettes from her purse, looks at it, and drops it back in.

"Then some bigger boys showed him about yaa baa." Yaa baa is a cheap, potent variant on amphetamine that is widely sold on the streets of Southeast Asia. "Then he wasn't Boo anymore. People who smoke yaa baa don't want to eat, so he stopped helping us find food. He got mad all the time. If you smiled at him wrong, he got mad. He hit one of the girls so hard her nose broke. He was sorry later, but we were already afraid of him. One of the kids left, and then another one. After a while it was just me.

"He smoked it every morning. He smoked it all day. His hands shook. He screamed at people who didn't buy a garland. Drivers closed their windows when he came up to them, and he spit on the windows. The police got him, and I didn't see him for two weeks. When he came back from the monkey house, he took away the money I had made so he could buy yaa baa. I gave him the money when he asked, but he hit me anyway. Two days later he came again, and this time he cried and said he was sorry. He said he wasn't going to smoke anymore. The next time I saw him, he was so crazy he didn't know me."

"He was how old then?" Rafferty asks.

"A year before I met you," she says, working it out. "I was about seven. He was maybe nine or ten."

Rafferty blows out a breath he hadn't known he was holding. "Miaow," he says, "yaa baa is cheap, but if he was smoking so much, he had to have money. Where did-"

She stops him by raising the hand with the T-shirt in it, sees it, and drops it into her lap. "I'm telling you." She squares her shoulders like someone who is about to pick up something heavy and sits forward.

"He joined a bunch of boys. They stole things. They smoked and ate pills and stole things. Maybe from a food vendor or even a beggar. Sometimes they beat people up. Ten or twelve boys, who would fight them? They were bigger than Boo, but he was smarter. So he had an idea. Those men-those men who want little boys. Before, they were around Soi 8, Soi 6, you know?"

"I know," Rafferty says.

"So one of the boys would pretend he was going with the man and leave the door unlocked, and the others would all come into the room and hurt the man and take his money." She looks from Rose to Rafferty. "That was when they started to call him Superman. Then I stopped hearing about him."

"What happened to him?" Rafferty asks.

"He told me last night he went to Phuket." Her eyes come up to Rafferty's, as if assessing the impact of what she is about to say. "Phuket is full of boys."

It's not Pattaya, Rafferty knows, but it's bad enough. "What brought him back to Bangkok? The wave?"

"He won't tell me," Miaow says. "But he said it was worse than the wave."

Rose gets up and crowds onto the couch beside Miaow and wraps her in dark, slender arms. Rafferty wants to hug her himself. She could have stopped long minutes ago, with the rescue from the man in the car. She could have left the boy a hero. She didn't have to talk about the drugs. He knows what she wants, and she knows that every word she speaks makes it harder for him to say yes.

Miaow gently disengages herself and takes Rafferty's hand in her right and Rose's in her left. "After it happened, Boo ran back to Bangkok. He's too old to beg now. He sleeps in the street. He says he hasn't smoked any yaa baa in a long time." She stops, breathing heavily, as though she's just run up the stairs. She wraps her fingers around Rafferty's thumb, gripping hard. "I want him to stay with us."

"Oh, Miaow," Rafferty says, although he knew it was coming.

"He can sleep in my room," Miaow says, talking faster. Her hands are tight fists around theirs. "I'll sleep on the floor. He can have half my allowance. He doesn't eat much. He can wear my extra shoes. You already bought him a pair of pants and a shirt. I'll make him stay in the other room, out of your way, when you're home. He can help Rose." She has squeezed her eyes shut with the effort of dredging up argument after argument and also, Rafferty thinks, because she is afraid to look at his face. He presses her hand to stop the flow.

"He can fix the faucet," she says. "You always say you'll fix it, but you never do. He can get that spot out of the carpet. He can-"

Rose says, "Miaow, did he tell you to ask Poke if he could stay with us?"

Miaow's eyes open. She looks surprised. "No," she says. "I don't even know if he will."

"It's just not a good idea, Miaow," Rafferty says. "I'll try to find someplace else for him."

She drums her feet against the sofa in frustration. "That will take weeks. And he won't stay there. He needs to be here." She looks at Rafferty with an expression he has never seen on her face before. "He needs me." She brings her hands up, head high, in a prayerlike wai of supplication. "This time he needs me."

Rafferty looks at Rose, and Rose looks at Rafferty. Rose closes her eyes, seceding from the discussion. Rafferty sits back, feeling the "No" rise up in him. And then he sees Miaow being lifted through the window of a car.

"Not for long," he says. "One week, two weeks. Until he feels better and we can find a place for him to stay."

"Really?" Miaow's eyes fill half her face.

"Go get him," Rafferty says. "Let's see if we can talk him into it."