A Nail Through the Heart

3

The boy's glare says, This close but no closer. Every minute or so, he turns back to look at Rafferty. If the distance has narrowed, the boy speeds up, as though he is keeping an iron rod between the two of them. Miaow has her hand on the boy's elbow, which startles Rafferty; Miaow does not touch people often.

Dusk has fallen, a wash of gray tinted with the cold, electric spectrum of neon. People glance at the thickening sky, at their watches, at the lighted shop windows. Groups of foreign men plow the sidewalk, beginning the long nighttime prowl that will take them to the girl-packed bars of Patpong Road, dead ahead.

Seen from Rafferty's perspective, six feet back, the children look like a cautionary UNICEF poster: the well-nourished child and the starving one. Superman probably weighs twenty pounds less than Miaow, even though he is two inches taller. The skin on his neck and arms is mottled with camouflage patches of dirt and an irregular pattern of bumpy, red irritation. With a rush of irritation of his own, Rafferty thinks, Scabies.

He feels a cool hand on his arm.

"What's this about?" Rose asks. He looks back to see an unanswerable argument for the effectiveness of evolution: six elegant feet of perfectly assembled Thai womanhood. She wears one of Rafferty's white shirts, blindingly clean and as unwrinkled as an angel's robe, a pair of faded jeans, and the inevitable outsize pink plastic watch. She looks as though she has never perspired in her life. Her eyes are on the children.

"He's coming with us," Rafferty says, unconsciously mimicking Miaow's tone. They are speaking Thai.

Rose nods once. "I see." Her tone could cool the entire block. She is extremely choosy about who comes into the apartment they sometimes share.

Rafferty looks down at the bagful of vegetables and noodles dangling from Rose's hand and changes the subject. "You did the shopping."

"Someone has to." She has removed her hand from his arm now, and they walk on together, maintaining their distance from the children and a proper separation from each other. In public, Rose is always proper. "Especially if you're going to bring home someone new every time you go out," she says. When Rafferty does not reply, she adds neutrally, "He's extremely dirty."

"It's Miaow's idea. I thought I'd stop at Siam Drug and get some shampoo for lice and some skin ointment. See if we can't get rid of whatever's hitching a ride."

"I'll do it," Rose says. Her tone does not invite discussion. "You just take them home and get him into the tub. Burn his clothes. Don't let him sit anywhere. He's riddled with bugs."

"I think it's better if you do it." Rafferty lowers his voice, although there is no sign that the children are listening. "He doesn't like me."

Ahead of them the boy turns back again to check on Rafferty and does a literal double take when he registers Rose. He looks away for a second, like someone trying to shake off a mirage, and, to Rafferty's surprise, Rose slips her hand into his, in defiance of her own rules. The boy looks back again and gazes at them for a long moment, letting Miaow guide him. Some of the rigidity goes out of his face. His shoulders drop a full inch as his spine relaxes. In place of the "stop right there" glare, there is assessment. He says something to Miaow, and she hits him playfully on the head, a mock insult. For the first time, the boy smiles. He socks her on the shoulder, and she grabs her shoulder and hops on one leg, pretending it hurts.

"What's all that mean?" Rafferty demands. Miaow doesn't jump up and down on one leg and hug her arm when he pretends to sock her on the shoulder.

"He's afraid of men," Rose interprets. "He looks at you and sees you with me, and suddenly you're not the kind of man he's afraid of. What do you think it means?"

"Oh," Rafferty says. Even after more than eighteen months in Bangkok, he still fails to see things that are obvious to Rose. In her twenty-three years, she has been a village child, a grade-school student, a Patpong go-go dancer and prostitute, and now a hopeful businesswoman who is trying to set up an apartment-cleaning service while refusing support from the foreigner-Rafferty-who loves her. "But he's just a kid." Even as he says the words, he knows how stupid they are.

"There's something between them." Rose is watching the two children, who are whispering now, Miaow's shiny-clean hair next to Superman's snarled thatch. "She's deferring to him."

As Rafferty follows Rose's eyes, he can see that Miaow has curled her spine and drawn in her head to make herself shorter. He can hear only snatches of what she is saying, but she has pitched her voice slightly higher, emphasizing its girlishness. The charade puzzles him; she has plucked the boy from the street, but she is apologizing for it, exaggerating the boy's dominance.

The crowd of pedestrians parts momentarily, and Rafferty spots a boy to their right. Since Miaow came into his life, he sees street children everywhere, but they have multiplied since the tsunami ravaged Phuket and Phang Nga three months earlier, a wave of children washed all the way to Bangkok, leaving behind an island many Thais believe is now haunted by scores of anguished ghosts. The boy to their right wears the threadbare, oversize uniform of the street, stained as brown as a used tea bag. He sags against a building as though it is the only thing holding him up. Rafferty watches as the child notices Miaow-as always, he wonders, does this child know her? — and sees him look beyond her to Superman. The boy straightens instantly, a single, electrified movement, and cranes his head forward, narrowing his eyes. Then, very slowly, he begins to walk, parallel with Miaow's path, his eyes glued to Superman. When Superman senses the scrutiny and glances over, the boy freezes. Then he turns and runs as though all of Phuket's ghosts are after him.

With profound conviction, Rafferty says, "Oh, shit."

"He's terrified," Rose says. She turns to watch the boy run. "What are you getting us into?"

Patpong Road opens up on their right, the neon signs above the bars just beginning to snap on. The young women who dance in the clubs push their way up the street in jeans and loose T-shirts, their black hair wet and gleaming. "Get them home," he says. "I'll go to the pharmacy here and pick up the stuff. Can you think of anything else we'll need?"

"Shirt and pants," she says, sizing the boy up. "Size ten." She gives Patpong an unfriendly glance; she was once the top girl at the King's Castle bar, probably the most famous of them all. "Blue," she adds, glancing back at the children.

Above them the sign for yet another bar blooms bright pink with a sizzle of juice. "Only shopping, right?" Three girls shoulder by them, laughing their way to work, two of them giving Rafferty a practiced eye. "No bars."

"Of course," Rafferty says. "No bars." He gazes at Superman's bruised and sullen face, and the child turns away to stare into the traffic.

"On the other hand," Rose says, "the bars might be safer than this boy."