The Queen of Patpong

Chapter 19

Men have taken her to Pattaya before, and she hated it: the bars, the noise, the streetwalkers, the dirty water. But she's never been to Phuket. All the girls have told her it's much better than Pattaya, that the beaches are clean and the water is clear and the hotels are palaces. At any other time, she'd be excited about it, but she can't be, because she's focused completely on the second half of their trip. After five days in Phuket, Howard has promised her they'll go to the village and he'll tell her parents they're getting married and pay them the dowry.

She hasn't been back to the village since she ran away. And now, to return with a rich, handsome, good-hearted farang, a man who can take care of them all, is almost too much for Rose to believe. Her parents will have their new house. Howard has drawn and redrawn it, making it bigger and more solid every time. Airier.

Her brothers and sisters will grow up differently than she did. They'll have space and light and money for nice clothes. They'll have futures. And she'll be finished with Patpong.

In her mind she's already in the back of the orange taxi with Howard, slowing at the end of the village street, with the kids assembling to parade them in. She barely registers the flight south to Phuket, even though it's the first time she's ever been in an airplane. Her lack of interest tightens Howard's eyes and turns his gaze past her, out the window. She feels the change in his mood and puts her hand on his and says, "Thank you."

He says, sounding like a kid whose surprise fell flat, "It's like you fly all the time."

"Have happy too much already," she says. "Not have room for more."

He smiles at her, and the tension in his shoulders eases. He leans over and kisses her cheek. "We'll see about that." ON THE MORNING of the fourth day, with only two more days before they leave for Isaan, he takes her to the dock, for the trip he's been talking about ever since they arrived.

He's seemed nervous the past two days. He's had trouble sleeping, and wherever they're going, whatever they're doing, he's always ready before she is, sitting on the couch, eager to move, while she scurries around getting whatever she needs. He doesn't criticize her, but his impatience is obvious: a tapping foot, an occasional needless trip to the door, just standing beside it so he'll be ready to open it the moment she's ready to go.

She feels as though he's trying to hurry time along. When she asks him about it, he tells her he's just eager to get up to Isaan, eager to meet her parents and arrange the marriage. They'll be married in the village, he says, and he'll throw a two-day feast for everyone. It seems like a dream, but still, the whole time they're in Phuket, she feels like she's running to keep up with him.

On the rickety dock, they stand side by side, his arm around her shoulders. One of the things she loves about him, she decides, is that he makes her feel short. She wraps her arm around his back and is surprised to find she can feel his heart. It's beating much more quickly than hers.

The boat rides high in the water, battered wood painted white a long time ago, with a faded, abstract brown eye on the front of the side Rose can see. About seven feet back from the prow are a big wheel and some controls, set behind a curve of plastic windscreen that has absorbed so much salt it's almost opaque. The engine is tilted up at the rear, its big propeller hanging almost a meter above the water, nicked and scarred.

An afternoon breeze, chillier than usual, blows in off the water.

"Little," Rose says, eyeing the boat.

"There are only two of us," Howard says. "Just you and me." He throws a suitcase onto the boat and turns to get the four big two-gallon bottles of water.

"This"-she levels a finger at the gray-blue horizon of the Andaman Sea, the water dark today beneath gray clouds-"this very big."

"Ahhhh," Howard says. "The Andaman is a swimming pool. Anyway, you're with me, and I can handle this thing."

"Not hard? Not hard to… to handle?" The new word comes out fine, but Howard doesn't acknowledge it.

He does arm curls with the water containers. "Easy as buttoning a shirt."

"Sometime you not so good with shirt."

Howard laughs. "Light a cigarette. It'll relax you. Oh, wait. I almost forgot." And before she can even react, he drops the water bottles to the deck, making it shake underfoot, slides his big hands under her arms, and lifts her straight up like she weighs nothing. She laughs and beats at his chest as though he's a monster, but he carries her across the pier, leans forward, and puts her down in the boat, which rocks enough beneath her weight to make her grab the side. "Trip wouldn't have been any fun without you," he says, watching her hang on. "You'll have your sea legs in no time." He turns back to the water containers.

"See legs?" she asks, raising one of hers.

"Not like 'see,' not like looking at legs." He's been pointing at his eyes to illustrate, and now he picks up a huge bottle of water in each hand and waves her away so he can lower them into the boat. "The sea," he says, nodding at the Andaman as he puts the water aboard. "That's the sea. You know, it goes"-he puts his hands in front of him palms down and makes wave motions-"like that. It can make you sick at first. When you get used to it, we say in English you've got your sea legs."

She sits on the wooden bench that runs around the passenger compartment and opens her purse. A cigarette sounds good right now. "Sea legs. You have sea legs?" She's taken to repeating every new term she hears so she can file it in memory, hoping to improve her English more quickly. In her imagination she sees herself in two or three years going to farang parties as Howard's wife, speaking perfect English.

"I don't need them," Howard says. "I'm a fish." Rose suddenly remembers Oom describing herself as "half fish" the night Rose-Kwan then-went with Captain Yodsuwan. It seems like years ago. Howard puts the other two water bottles aboard and bends to the dock to pick up the black rubber wet suit that looks to Rose like an empty person.

"Not cold," she says. She finds the pack of Marlboro Lights and shakes one out. "Water okay." She swam the day before for hours, forgetting for once about not getting dark from the sun, no longer worried about what the customers and the other girls would think. The water was much warmer than the shower back at the apartment. "Why only one?"

"You won't need one," Howard says, climbing aboard with the suit tossed over his shoulder. "And it's not for cold. It's for something else. I'll show you when I see one." He rolls the suit up and stuffs it beneath one of the benches, then straightens and shades his eyes, although the day's not bright, and squints up at the sky, dark gray in places but with one or two small, tattered patches of blue. "We left the rain in Bangkok."

"Maybe later," Rose says, watching him as she takes the first puff. He's right; the smoke makes her feel smoother. Howard, on the other hand, seems even more energetic than he has the past couple of days, as though his blood is carbonated, bubbling in his veins. There's something bristling, something sparky about him that reminds her of the first day she drank Nescafe. That buried kernel of energy. If she could see through Howard right now, she wouldn't be surprised to find a flame at his center.

In all the months she's known him, she's never seen him do a muscleman exercise like the one he just did with the water bottles. His body tells her he exercises often, but it's something he does privately, and although they've been together for three and four weeks at a stretch, she has no idea when.

Howard steps up onto the edge of the boat and makes the leap to the dock. The boat's stern swings outward behind him, but the prow stays put, anchored by a thick rope that's been passed over one of the vertical timbers that supports the dock. He pulls the loop of rope off the timber, tucks it under his arm, and jumps back onto the boat, which rocks alarmingly. He holds the rope out to Rose.

"Coil this," he says.

She says, "What?" This "coil" is not a word she knows.

"Circles," Howard says with an edge of impatience. "Just-" He makes a circular motion with his index finger, pointing down. "The rope," he says. He makes the gesture again, giving her the wide eyes she sometimes gets when she's too slow for him.

"Fine," Rose says, getting up tentatively. The boat is still rocking, and she has to put out a hand to steady herself. "Coil." She goes to the place where the rope has been knotted inside the boat and begins to feed the loose rope onto the deck in a circle. "Coil," she says again experimentally.

At the wheel, Howard mutters something and takes a long drink off a smaller bottle of water.

Rose says, "What?"

Without looking back, Howard says, "I said, Jesus Christ."

"Oh." She finishes making rope circles and drops the end, then nudges the rope with the toe of her flip-flop to make it rounder. "Why Jesus Christ?"

Howard screws the cap onto his water bottle, but he doesn't look at her. "Something I always say when I go out to sea," he answers without turning. She has to cup a hand to her ear to hear him. "Like a prayer." He turns a key beside the wheel and pushes a button, and the engine growls to life with a racketing sound, spewing gray smoke. "Sit down," Howard says, almost pushing past her. He goes to the back of the boat and releases a little catch that lets the engine drop into the water. The noise is cut in half, and the dock begins to slide by beside them. He returns to the wheel, and the boat points itself away from the dock. She grips the edge of the bench in both hands and turns back, seeing the widening V of their wake, churned greenish white in the center behind the propeller, seeing the island fall away behind them. It seems to get smaller very quickly.

"That way is India," Howard says, pointing west. He's at the wheel, and he zigzags right and left. The boat's sudden wobble makes Rose dizzy. "The old Thai boats had the engine at the end of a pipe," he says. "The long-tail boats were steered by pushing the pipe right or left."

"I see before."

He gives her a lengthy look before he replies. "Am I boring you?"

"No. Just… cold." She glances at the sky, which has turned darker, partly because the clouds have thickened and partly because the day is beginning to dim. The island is far behind them now, although she can still see it rising, pale and irregular, on the horizon.

"So get a jacket. That's why we brought the suitcase, remember?" He passes a loop over the wheel. "Do you see this?"

She gets up, feeling the wind hit her, and finds the handle of the suitcase. "Yes," she says. "See."

"You're not looking. This holds us on a straight course."

Rose says, "Yes."

"Born to be on the water," he says. "The wheel makes the keel under the boat go side to side." He demonstrates by holding his right arm straight out, pointed toward the engine, dead center in the water. "When you turn the wheel to the right, the keel goes this way"-he shifts his arm-"and the boat goes right. Turn it the other way, et cetera."

Rose says, "Et cetera." She shivers. "Cold."

Howard shakes his head. "So open the suitcase. Oh, never mind." He picks up his water bottle, unscrews the cap, and drinks. Then he pulls the suitcase away from her, puts it on the bench, and rips the zipper open. He paws through a couple of layers until he comes up with the bright pink windbreaker Rose had bought the day before. "Put it on."

"Why you angry today?"

"All I want," Howard says slowly, "is for us to have a good time. I don't want to have to say everything ten times, I don't want you shivering with cold when it's eighty fucking degrees, and I don't want you arguing with me all the time."

Rose's stomach muscles tighten the way they would if she were afraid of being punched there. "Not argue."

"Good. You steer."

"Okay," she says, holding up both hands. "I steer."

She shoves her arms through the windbreaker's sleeves and goes to the wheel. When she has both hands on it, Howard says, "Turn starboard."

"Star-"

"Right, right, for Christ's sake." He clamps his hands over hers and twists the wheel, and the boat lurches severely enough that Rose has to sidestep to remain standing. "Starboard," he says, pointing right. "Port." He points left. "Now turn to port."

"Port," Rose says, easing the wheel around. "Port, okay?"

"You know," he says, "I don't have to show you anything. I could just skip the whole fucking thing. Or do you want to learn something?"

"Want."

"Bow," he says, pointing to the front of the boat. He points back, toward the motor. "Stern."

"Bow," Rose repeats with a clamping around her heart that she almost doesn't recognize as fear. "Stern." "COME HERE," HOWARD says. He's at the wheel. They are traveling in a straight line, at an angle to the island, now a hazy break on the far surface of the sea. While they were headed directly away from Phuket, they had taken the swells head-on, but now the swells are hitting the boat from the side, and the two movements-the boat churning forward, the relentless rocking from side to side-are making Rose uneasy. She can feel her lunch, a hard, heavy ball in her stomach. It's a little like the first three or four times she'd smoked a cigarette and the room had begun to spin.

Howard locks the wheel and moves to the other side of the boat. He makes a curt "hurry up" gesture with his hand, leaning over to look down at the water. Rose gets up unsteadily, feet spread wide, and waits for the boat to do its sideways rock, then hurries across and grabs hold before the next swell rises up beneath them. She knows she doesn't want to look down at the water. She has an instinctive feeling that watching it stream by will be the final ingredient in a mix of motion that's likely to bring her lunch back up into the light of day.

"Down there," Howard says, pointing. "See them?"

She looks down and then, immediately, up again. "I can't," she says.

"What do you mean, you can't?" The words sound barbed to her.

"I get sick."

"No you won't. Just look for a minute, and then I'll give you something to make you feel better."

"What?"

"A pill. I should have given it to you before we left. You're getting seasick, is all. The pill will fix it."

"Seasick," Rose says.

"This isn't a language lesson," Howard says, "and those fucking things aren't going to be out there forever. Look." He points toward the water at about a forty-five-degree angle, and Rose searches the dark surface.

She sees nothing but the Andaman. The day is on the way out now, the clouds an angrier, deeper gray that verges on black, and the surface of the water is powder gray and oily-looking. And then she sees rounded shapes, as though the water has thickened into spheres that are barely floating, only the very tops exposed to the air.

She rips her eyes away from the water and looks up at Howard, to find him studying her intently. "Like this?" she says, and she makes a little curved motion with her hand, as though running it over the top of a ball.

"Right," Howard says. "You can only see the top, but what you need to worry about is what's underneath. They're jellyfish."

"I know jellyfish," Rose says. "I eat. You have pill?"

"In a minute. These jellyfish are different. They're sea wasps. The tentacles are a couple of feet long-"

Rose says, "Tenta…"

"Tentacles," Howard says between his teeth. "You know." He holds up his hand, curved, with the fingers pointing down, and wiggles the fingers. "Tentacles."

"Okay, okay," Rose says. "Why you yell at me?"

"Can't even have a fucking conversation."

"I speaking English," Rose says, suddenly angry herself. "You no speaking Thai."

"Why the fuck would I speak Thai? English is the world's language. Nobody speaks Thai."

"I speak Thai." She's furious enough to forget she's feeling sick. "Maybe we go home."

"When I say we go home, we go home. The sea wasps," he repeats with a bad imitation of patience. "When you brush the tentacles, they break off and stick to you, okay? They're poisonous. You know poisonous?"

Rose says, "Not stupid."

"No point in taking a vote about that, since there are only two of us. The sea wasps. You get stung once, you're going to get sick. Two or three times, you're dead."

Rose says, "Pill."

"They'll kill you."

"So I not go in water. They cannot jump in boat, na? Give me pill. Now."

Howard says, "In a minute."

"I do on you." Rose sticks a finger down her throat to make it clear, and Howard jumps back. He's swearing, she can tell that, but she doesn't know the words. He goes to the suitcase, opens the zippered compartment on the outside, and pulls out a small, foil-backed blister card with pills in it. He pushes two of the pills through the foil and hands them to Rose, and Rose grabs his water bottle to wash them down.

"No," Howard says, but it's too late. Rose takes a gulp, and then her eyes grow enormous, and she spits all of it, pills included, over the side. Then she leans over and is shudderingly sick, losing everything she ate into the Andaman. When she's finished, she wipes her chin and rounds on Howard, her fists clenched.

"You crazy? Drink vodka?"

Howard snatches the bottle from her hand, plants a hand in the center of her chest, and pushes. Rose stumbles backward until the backs of her knees hit the bench, and then her legs collapse and she falls on her rump.

"Sit the fuck down and stay there," Howard says. He points a finger at her, his eyes tiny with fury. "And shut up."

It begins to rain.

The searchlight on the front of the boat is like a finger pointing forward, making a long silver streak through the rain. They haven't spoken in more than an hour, and it's almost completely dark now, the sea barely darker than the sky, except for the trail of luminescence that's churned into a cold green glow in the boat's wake.

They're both soaked. Rose is huddled in a ball, shivering, her jacket and T-shirt a cold weight on her back and shoulders. Howard seems not to have noticed the rain.

He has drained the first bottle and is a third of the way through a second.

"Slow it down," he says aloud, and pulls back on the throttle, a handle positioned to the right of the wheel. Rose has been watching him whenever he's been turned away from her. Pushing the throttle down slows the boat. Pulling up makes it go faster. Throttle, wheel. Engine on the end of the pipe. Switch for the searchlight.

Off to the right-starboard, Rose thinks irrelevantly-is what looks like a small floating palace of brilliant white light. And behind it, or at least smaller, so probably more distant, is another. She has no way of knowing how far away they are, but they look like angels of safety out there in the dark, luminous points of refuge.

"Squid fishermen," Howard says, following her gaze. "Lanterns hung out all over the boat. Squid come to light like whores come to money." His tone is conversational, reasonable. He might be talking about the wedding. With his eyes on the distant lights, he takes another drink and looks at the glowing green navigational screen set into the wooden panel beside the wheel. Then he looks left and scans the dark surface of the sea. "Ought to be there," he says. "Don't want to find them before we see them."

He puts the water bottle down and leaps up onto the boat's side. Then, moving sideways, he edges around the plastic windscreen until he's next to the searchlight. At precisely the moment Rose gets her feet under her, her eyes on the throttle, Howard says, "Give me any kind of trouble at all, any kind, and I'll break your neck. Understand?"

Rose nods.

"Say it."

"Understand."

"She's learning," Howard says, as though there were a third person present. "She's actually learning." He sits on the deck beside the light, which is sending up ropes of steam where the rain hits the hot metal housing, and grabs the frame that surrounds it. He twists the light left and sweeps it back and forth. He says, "Damn, I'm good." Then he wiggles the light back and forth and says, "Take a look, sweetie."

Rose lets her eyes follow the beam through the darkness and the slanting rainfall until it bounces off something pale, not colorless but not a color that carries across distance, especially under these conditions. Tan, she thinks. Light brown. It's low and rounded, rising gradually out of the water, no more than a foot above it, and it's long, maybe eighty or a hundred paces in length. Smooth and featureless, as though it's been sanded down for thousands of years.

"That's the big one!" Howard shouts into the rain. "Over here is its little sister." He shifts the light to the right to reveal another stone, about half as long, and even lower, than the first, its sloping sides just peeking above the water.

"There's another one back behind the bigger one, but you can't see it. The Three Sisters. Also called the Bitches because they've ripped the bottom out of so many boats." He turns the light so it's facing front again and then scoots crablike back toward the cabin area. "At high tide," he says, "about six hours from now, they'll be underwater. Fucking everything's hit them for centuries and centuries. Chinese junks, Javanese pirate ships, the occasional fancy yacht. Great dive site, stuff all over the bottom."

He's back in the cabin, facing her. She hasn't moved from the bench. He looks down at her and then shakes his head. "You finally figured it out, didn't you?"

She responds, but her voice is almost a whisper. "Figured…" She closes her eyes, hearing Fon's voice: Clothes folded by the door, shoes on top, just scoop it all up as you go. She says, more loudly than she'd intended, "Oom."

"You're not as dumb as you seem," Howard says.

Rose says, "Why?"

"Because I can. Because God in his infinite wisdom has humored my little quirk by providing me with an endless supply of brainless whores to play with and cops who don't give a shit." He points a finger at her, eyebrows high, meaning, Don't move, and goes back to the wheel and does something that reverses the boat, pulling it back from the rocks. "Not a good idea to drift into them." He pulls the plastic bottle out from under again and drinks, then goes to the rear of the boat and picks up something heavy that's all points, on the end of a chain that's wrapped around a cylinder. He drops the object into the water and the cylinder spins as the chain unspools, the handle on one side whipping around so fast it's a blur.

"There," he says. "Finished with housekeeping." He takes a step toward her.

Rose fastens the snaps at the cuffs of her windbreaker. Maybe a layer of cloth will be enough to protect her skin. Not much she can do about her face.

"Still cold?" Howard takes another step and stops. He slips his right hand into the pocket of his jeans and comes out with a leather sheath that has a bone handle protruding from it. Rose hears the unsnapping of the little strap over the handle as loudly as she would a shot. Howard's looking at her as though she's transparent, as though he can see the bench beneath her, the edge of the boat behind her.

Shoes on top, Rose thinks.

With the same relaxed, unfocused gaze, Howard pulls out the knife.

Rose yanks her feet up, lifts them as high and as quickly as she can, pushes up with her hands against the bench, and rolls backward over the edge of the boat. Just before she hits, she sees, upside down, the golden glare of the squid boats in the far distance. Then she's in the water.

Her clothes grab at her, the jacket ballooning out, and she forces herself to remain under long enough to do the bottom two snaps. It's pink, it'll show if he shines a light down, but her long hair is black and it's billowing around her. The water feels very warm after the windy rain.

She forces herself down, pulling herself through the blackness until her shoulder touches the boat. She knows she's invisible here; the outward curvature of the hull makes it impossible for anyone on board to look down at the point at which the boat enters the water. She turns so the hull is against her back, trying to present the narrowest possible silhouette, and allows herself to float up until her head breaks free of the water. With her mouth wide open, she grabs some deep breaths while she listens to Howard banging around on the boat, throwing things and screaming either meaningless sounds or a marathon of swearwords she doesn't know. A moment later a beam hits the water two or three meters to her left and a good four or five meters away from the boat.

Not the spotlight. He's got a flashlight.

"Rose!" he calls. "Rose!" He plays the light over the water. "Come on. It's dangerous down there."

The light is moving slowly now, coming nearer, and again Howard says, drawing it out, "Rosieeeeee!" The light stops, and Rose's heart stops with it. Clearly silhouetted at her eye level, glistening in the beam, are the curved tops of several sea wasps. They're only a meter or two away. They hold the light, glowing as though from within.

"Look at those," Howard says in that same singsong voice. "You don't want to be in there. Lots of bad things down there. Underneath you, next to you, behind you. Not a place for a pretty girl." The boat rocks against her back as the light disappears. Now she can't see the sea wasps, and panic uncurls in her chest. She edges right, toward the front of the boat, then stops. For all she knows, there are a dozen of them right there. Frozen in place, she hears a splash from the other side of the boat.

Howard calls out, "That's the rope. Come on, get over here. You can pull yourself up. The rope's got knots in it. You can climb it like a ladder." The light stretches out over her head again, twitching left and right and left again over the water, pure, jittery impatience. "Come on, Rose. I'm sorry. You're right, I shouldn't have been drinking. Listen, I'm throwing the bottle overboard." Something flashes through the beam of light, and she hears a splash. It sends ripples toward her, probably bringing the sea wasps closer. "Please just get to the rope and come up. I'll help you." The light freezes at a point six or seven meters from the boat, and she can feel and hear Howard moving closer to the edge above her for a better look at whatever it is. After a moment he says, "Fuck," and the beam begins to move again.

For a minute or two, she tries to remain motionless as the sea lifts and lowers her. She peers into the darkness for the rounded shapes of the sea wasps. The boat rocks upward, which means Howard is back on the other side, probably playing the light in the direction of the rocks. He's swearing over and over in a low voice, like someone who doesn't know he's doing it out loud. Then she can hear his shoes on the deck, going past her toward the front of the boat-the wheel, she thinks-and for a moment everything is quiet. Then Howard says, "Hello?" There's a pause. "Yeah, got a problem here. How far away are you?" He waits. "How did that happen? Shit, you're no good to me. Okay, okay. See you when I see you. And leave your phone open, so I don't have to fuck around dialing you."

Rose knows she has to move. She can't stay where she is, but she can't think of anyplace safer. The water, which felt so warm when she entered it, now seems much cooler, seems to be leaching the heat from her body. And she's uncomfortably aware of the dark depths beneath her, and of the sea wasps, invisible for now, floating level with her face or just beneath the surface.

And then Howard calls, "Gotcha!" and the light shines right down the side of the boat, and Howard's face dangles down, pale in the reflection of the flashlight. He's managed to anchor his feet somehow so he can hang over the side, but the light is hitting nothing. It's focused straight down, near the motor, but Rose knows he can turn it toward her at any second, and she grabs a breath and ducks under.

If the sea wasps are like the jellyfish she dodged in Pattaya, she thinks, they usually stay on the surface or in the meter or so just below it. She forces herself down into the darkness, fighting against her buoyancy, until she can't hold her breath anymore, and she stops her stroke and lets her body right itself to the vertical again. Rising, she bends her head forward at the sharpest possible angle as her shoulders slide up the curvature of the boat, hoping that her hair will protect her if she's coming up beneath a sea wasp. When she breaks the surface, she lifts her head and grabs the biggest breath of her life, mouth wide open to make it as quiet as possible. Howard is banging around on the other side, and then she hears him go forward, probably to climb up near the spotlight and look down from the prow.

She wants to get to the stern. She pictures the stretch of black water between her and it, and suddenly she has a strategy. She pulls her hand back into the sleeve of her jacket so no skin is exposed, extends her right arm along the side of the boat, and then sweeps it stiffly away, elbow straight, toward the bright pinpoint of the squid boats. She's careful to stop when her arm is straight in front of her, terrified of sweeping a cluster of jellyfish into her face. Only when she's finished the maneuver does she ease herself right, almost as far as her arm had reached, and repeat the action.

The fourth time her arm encounters resistance, as though the water has suddenly thickened, and then she feels the dead, soft weight against her inner arm, just below the elbow. Her gasp is reflexive and, to her, deafening. She clamps her teeth together and keeps the arm moving, sweeping the cold, heavy, yielding mass aside. Then she pulls her arm down and holds her breath, shuddering violently and listening. It isn't until she hears Howard still lumbering around on the prow, not rushing toward the sound she'd made, that she moves into the space she's just cleared with her arm.

She's dizzy with fear, but there's a hard little bit of knowledge gleaming inside her: The sea wasps can't sting her through her clothes.

With three more swipes of her arm-finding nothing more floating in the water-she's at the corner, with her back still to the boat. The rain, which had lightened, begins to come down harder again, making the sea around her hiss as the drops strike. For several minutes, Howard remains relatively still, except for a couple of changes in weight, shifting from foot to foot, moving a few feet to one side or the other.

He grunts.

Grunting? Why? Lifting something? Lifting what? What's so heavy? And then she hears a sharp snap, and she knows what it is. It's the cuff of the rubber wet suit. It's not for the cold, he'd said. It's for something else. A second later there's a loud splash as he strikes the sea's surface on the other side of the boat.

The only direction that makes sense is the one she's most afraid to take: outward, away from the boat, away from the rocks, toward the fiery glow of the squid boats, maybe three or four kilometers away. She's sure he'll circle the boat first and then maybe swim toward the rocks to see whether she's clinging to the far side of one of them.

She can't endure the thought of swimming facedown, eyes and mouth open to the jellyfish coming out of the darkness, and she can't stay underwater for more than a few yards at a time. So she rolls onto her back and pulls herself away from the boat, looking up at the sky, the rain pelting her face, hoping once again that her thick, heavy hair and the jacket with its turned-up collar will protect her head and neck if she swims into anything. The rain is colder than the seawater, and she opens her mouth, letting it land sweet and cool on her tongue, closing her eyes against it and feeling it tap gently against her eyelids. She counts her heartbeats, since she has no other way to measure time.

When her heart has beaten two hundred times, she stops swimming and lets her feet dangle down into the cooler water below. Then she pulls some of her hair forward, to cover her face, which she knows will look pale above the water. She clears just enough hair from her eyes to see.

About a meter and a half from her are two or more sea wasps. She starts to move away from them but stops, reversing her arms underwater. Howard has come around the boat, swimming quietly from the bow toward the stern. She can see the light-colored bathing cap he's wearing-one of hers, taken from the suitcase-to protect his head. Halfway along the bow, he stops, apparently treading water, and then the flashlight comes on, and she realizes it's the rubber-coated one that had been upright in a bracket beside the wheel. Howard angles the light along the boat, pointing at the stern, and then slowly turns it in a half circle, and Rose pulls herself down.

Thirty heartbeats later, when she surfaces to look, Howard is gone.

She treads water, feeling the rain on her hair. He'll finish his circuit of the ship. She decides he won't swim to the rocks, as she thought at first, because it would take him too far from the boat. If she got aboard, it would be easy for her to keep him in the water-there are long poles with hooks on them, and she could swing one of those at him whenever he gets near. No, she thinks, he'll get back on board.

Through the rain she sees his head, still in the pale cap, on the deck of the boat. She hears the metallic, teeth-grating sound of the chain being wound in as he retrieves the anchor, and then the motor catches and purrs and then purrs more urgently, and the boat starts to move. Within seconds the spotlight comes on, and Rose's hopes die.

There's no way she can hide from the spotlight. Even if she were a foot underwater, he could probably pick out the bright pink of her jacket. If the spotlight hits her, he'll have her.

But the spotlight can't point behind the boat. She needs to swim behind the boat, following the man who's hunting her. At the moment he's heading to her right, parallel to the rocks, and she sees what he's going to do. He's going to make a circuit of the rocks, make sure she's not on them or behind them, and then he'll search the surrounding waters, probably in a spiral, until he catches her in the spotlight or until she's stung by a sea wasp and he finds her floating facedown.

She orients herself toward the biggest rock, closes her eyes, and starts to swim, expecting the fiery lash across her forehead and cheeks with every stroke. She's surprised at how clearly she can hear the motor when one ear is in the water. She's paying a lot of attention to it as a way of knowing how far from the boat she is, when the volume suddenly drops. She stops and orients herself again, feet downward, dark hair pulled over her face, and looks.

She's about halfway to the big rock. Howard has taken the boat behind the one to the right, which has intercepted the underwater sound of the outboard. There were three rocks, he'd said, the third hidden behind the other two. She closes her eyes and tries to visualize it. If she can get between them without swimming into a jellyfish, she might be able to stay out of sight. Even Howard can't see through rocks.

She follows the boat's route, knowing that Howard is glued to the wheel, eyes on the spotlight, carefully steering around the massive stones. He's going slowly, obviously dividing his attention between navigation and scanning the water in front of him. She realizes, as she lifts her head for a breath and looks ahead, that following the boat gives her an unexpected advantage: The wake directly behind the boat is free of sea wasps, pushed to the sides by the boat's prow.

She swims past the big rock, daring to lift her arms out of the water in an overhead crawl, knowing that she'll be seen in a minute if Howard goes to the stern and looks back. But she risks swimming a little faster anyway; the closer she is to the back of the boat, the less likely she is to swim into a sea wasp.

She pulls herself along until she's gotten around the bigger rock. She's swinging out to her right to get behind the smaller one when the engine stops.

In an instant she's floating vertically, hair pulled forward to mask her face. The boat rises above the low, flat surface of the rock, and in the stern she sees Howard, flashlight in hand, the beam transcribing arcs across the water. So it's occurred to him to look behind him after all.

Rose edges closer to the smaller rock just in case, but she stops at the sight of a cluster of sea wasps in between her and it. In fact, now that she's near enough to the rocks to see them more clearly, she sees that sea wasps have been carried to them from all directions by the water's motion. There's a ring of jellyfish, like a border of solid water, maybe two-thirds of a meter wide, wherever the rocks meet the sea.

There's no way she can get through it. She'd be stung a hundred times.

A hard core of certainty begins to form inside her. She will die here.

And something bumps against her from below.

The terror is instantaneous and all-consuming. She swims wildly, smacking the surface with her arms, not thinking about the noise she's making, swimming after the boat as though it were her refuge, putting the smaller rock to her left now and then accelerating beyond to turn around it, following in Howard's wake.

Once she's circled the second rock, she sees the boat, sliding around the far end of the third rock now, only the bottom couple of feet obscured by the stone's low-rising surface. As she watches, Howard cups his hands to his face and lights a cigarette.

All these months, she thinks, and I never knew he smoked.

The thought strikes her as absurd, and she lowers her face into the water and releases a bubble of laughter. He was like a fancy envelope, she thinks, with a toad folded inside it. She laughs again and loses some of the rest of her air. With both of her ears underwater, she's almost deafened by the grinding sound of the boat's hull scraping over rock, and she brings her head back up in time to hear Howard screaming a sustained, unvarying stream of obscenities and to see him running the length of the cabin and repeatedly slamming the side of the boat with one of the long poles, as though he's punishing it. Then he leans forward, facing her directly from the far side of the rock, shoves the end of the pole into the water, and grunts with effort. He throws his weight behind the pole again, and this time he lets loose with a scream that seems to come all the way from his belly, and as it dies away, the boat moves and he pitches forward, off balance, and has to catch himself with both hands, the pole slipping away from him and splashing on the ocean's surface as the boat floats free of the rocks. Howard runs to the wheel, cranking it hard right, accelerating to increase his distance from the underlying shelf of stone.

Rose floats there, watching him go. She thinks that he may just have opened a path for her, even if the path leads to a place she doesn't want to go. She reclines on her side and does a gliding stroke that carries her slowly down the full length of the third rock and then around it, her eyes on the receding boat most of the time, shifting only to check the surface in front of her and make certain she's not getting too close to the solid ribbon of sea wasps that surrounds the stones. As she swims, she visualizes the other side of the big rock, and slowly, methodically, like someone drawing a map from spoken directions, she assembles something that might be a plan. The idea, thin as it is, seems to buoy her up as she swims toward the place she least wants to go, the place she'll be most conspicuous, the first and last place he'll look for her. Toward the rocks.

And there it is. Floating in front of her, maybe ten meters from the first and largest of the rocks, is the long pole with the rusted hook at one end that Howard used to push the boat free. She grabs it with both hands, a surge of exultation passing through her, and scans the surface near her for a sea wasp. Sees one, about three meters away, between her and the rock. She kicks herself toward it and then puts the end of the pole under her arm, resting it against her rib cage, wraps both hands around a segment of the pole she can reach with her elbows slightly bent, and slices it sideways through the water, just beneath the surface. The resistance pushes her in the opposite direction, but she scissors her legs to stay in place, and the pole continues to ripple through the water until it hits the weight of the sea wasps. It takes almost all her strength, but Rose is able to keep the pole moving, shoving the sea wasps aside.

Four or five minutes later, gasping with exertion, she has cleared a path through the band of jellyfish surrounding the rock, and she is on her knees in the shallows, only her head and her very pink shoulders above water. The boat is a few hundred meters away, making a wide turn that might bring it back. She stumbles forward, all the way out of the water, until she is facedown on the biggest rock. She stays there for as long as she dares, watching the light, gasping for breath and luxuriating in the sensation of a solid surface beneath her. Then, without much faith in what she's about to do, she goes to work.

Fortunately, what she wants is right at the edges. Lying down, so she's out of sight below the crown of the rock, she rolls onto her back and pops open the pink jacket, then works her arms out of the sleeves and rolls off it. Lifting her arms as little as possible, she peels off the T-shirt, and then she unfastens the jeans. She tugs them down to midthigh and then rolls onto her side and brings her knees up so she can inch the jeans all the way down. They're heavy and wet, and she's sweating, despite the cool drizzle, by the time she scissors her ankles free. Then she folds her T-shirt once for protection, tucks her hands into it, and begins to gather seaweed. She's worried there might be sea wasps, or at least sea-wasp tentacles, tangled in the weed, although she sees none.

Working as fast as she can with her hands trapped in the shirt, she stuffs seaweed into the arms of her jacket and builds a mound of it in the center. She does up the snaps, looks at it for a moment, and then jams handfuls of seaweed into the jacket through the bottom. When it looks about right, she crawls another couple of meters, dragging the bulky jacket and the jeans behind her, until she hits another mass of seaweed. With one hand in the T-shirt and the other holding the jeans open, she begins to stuff the jeans, starting with the cuffs and shoving the seaweed as far as the knees, and then turning the pants around and working in stuffing from the top until the legs are full. She zips and snaps them, then pushes the remaining weed into the rear and hips, all the way up to the waistline.

It takes her five or six minutes, with frequent peeks above the rock's surface to track the movement of the boat, but at last she has the jeans convincingly stuffed, and she picks up the jacket and places it above the sodden pants. It lies there, arms splayed outward, separated from the jeans by a few centimeters, looking like someone who's been cut in half at the waist. She wants to put the T-shirt back on, but it's lighter-colored than her skin, so she leaves it at the rock's edge as she pulls herself, flat on her belly and scraping every inch of skin on the front of her body, up the gentle slope. She drags the jacket and the jeans behind her.

The boat is on its way back from whatever spot Howard investigated. If he keeps to his course, he'll be roughly where they were the first time she saw the rocks in the searchlight's glare. It seems like a lifetime ago. If he points the light toward the rock she's on, he'll see her, but she has no choice-for the next minute or two, she will have to be visible.

Before she lifts her head again, she says a prayer, and it is immediately answered. The rain begins to bucket down. She can barely see the spotlight, and the boat itself is completely hidden from sight.

She's already visualized the pose, so she works quickly. Everything depends on where the boat will be when Howard finally looks. She's betting he'll begin his new survey somewhere near the original position, which seemed to be where he was heading. She turns the back of the jacket toward the boat, with both arms drooping away down the far side of the stone to mask the fact that no hands protrude from the jacket's cuffs. She slips the waist of the jeans inside the jacket, bending them sharply at the knees and putting the upper leg over the lower so its cuff faces toward the boat. She's almost sure Howard will focus on the jacket because it's so much brighter, but she takes off the one plastic sandal that hasn't slipped off and drifted into the depths and leans it up against the cuff of the jeans, hoping that the light-colored sole will obscure the fact that there's no ankle above it.

The rain emboldens her, and she gets up and runs, bent low at the waist, to the side of the rock where the boat will be. She needs to take a look. At this distance, which is thirty or forty meters closer than Howard will be on the boat, the clothes almost look like they have a body in them, but she goes back around to the far side, drops to her stomach again, and creates a sharper bend at the waist, pulling the top part of the jacket just over the crest of the rock, away from where Howard will be. From the boat, she hopes, it will look like her head is just out of sight on the other side.

Either it's good enough or it isn't.

Now comes the part that frightens her most.

She works her way back down the rock, heading for the pole that she left there to mark the area she'd cleared of sea wasps. She squats there with the pole in her hands and leans forward to clear the few that have floated into the empty area. Then, her heart pounding, she wades naked into the water, flailing the pole in front of her, knowing that now she has nothing, not a single layer of cloth, to protect her from the stings.

A moment later she is swimming slowly away from the rock, stopping and clearing the way with the pole every meter or so. Once the rocks are twenty meters behind her, she turns to her left and begins to work her way into the open water, toward the glistening masts of the squid boats. She keeps her legs drawn up whenever she stops, expecting at every moment that whatever bumped her before will come rushing up, all teeth, to tug her into the depths. The image is so powerful that she almost floats into a sea wasp and has to pull the pole back and bat the jellyfish away. She hangs there in the water, breathing heavily until she trusts herself to swim again, out beyond the point at which Howard dropped the anchor.

The boat is gliding past her now toward the rocks, about thirty meters away, and she treads water, her hair pulled down over her face, hoping that Howard's eyes are locked on the rocks. The searchlight is picking out the smaller of the two rocks in front, and as Howard cranks the wheel, the light slides left, but it's too low-it's on the water when it passes the larger rock-and the jacket and jeans are well above the center of the beam. They slide back into the dark, but then Howard shouts, and the boat powers down. She sees him jump up onto the bow and wrench the light back, stopping it on the jacket and jeans.

For what feels like a long time, nothing happens. Howard sits there on the bow, looking at the splash of pink, at the bent leg of the jeans. At the bottom of the sandal, bone white, which Rose can see even at this distance, even with contacts washed out by the salt water.

Howard stands and cups his hands to his mouth. He calls her name. He goes all the way to the tip of the bow to call it again. He stands there, hands on hips, staring at the rocks. He even bends forward, as though those few extra inches will resolve what he's seeing.

Then he turns around and goes back into the cabin. He's out of sight for a moment, bent over to get something. Then he's back, the pale shower cap clearly visible above the black wet suit. He leans over the side of the ship nearest to Rose and calls, "Rose! I'm not fucking around. If you can hear me, move."

He leans forward again, peering through the drizzle. Then he raises a hand, points it at the rock, and Rose hears a terrific noise and sees a spurt of flame from his hand, and a little geyser of powder explodes from the rock, several feet to the left of the jacket.

Howard shouts, "Next one will be closer."

He waits, and then he goes to the wheel, and Rose hears the motor thrum into life. Howard halves the distance between the boat and the rocks and then shuts down the engine and goes to the rear.

The instant she hears the anchor splash, she begins to move.

She can't keep the pole. It slows her progress. She dives a foot or two down, closes her eyes, and pulls herself forward, then again, and then again, until her lungs are bursting. Just as she breaks the surface, she hears the splash.

She knows where to look, and the bathing cap on his head reflects light, so it's easy for her to pick Howard out. He's swimming strongly toward the rocks. Too strongly, she thinks with a jolt of panic: She doesn't have enough time. She forgets about swimming underwater and strikes out for the boat, moving as fast as she can without making too much noise. The boat doesn't seem to get bigger at first, but Howard is nearing the rocks, and with a rush of terror she kicks so hard her feet break the surface, and Howard stops swimming.

She goes under again, trying to decrease the distance to the boat, pulling herself through the water until her lungs threaten to explode. She forces herself to take another stroke, and then another, and then, at the moment when she will inhale water if she doesn't surface, she points herself up and feels a long line of flame erupt down her left arm.

She screams into the water, emptying her lungs and reflexively sucking in seawater, feeling it pour into her throat before she finds half a pint of air somewhere to blow it out again, and then she's coughing spasmodically, wasting air she doesn't have, as she summons the strength to pull herself forward in a desperate attempt not to come up beneath the sea wasp. When she surfaces, it's floating less than a meter from her, and, whimpering, she propels herself away from it, with nothing in her mind but the pain and the sea wasp. She's put two body lengths between her and it before she remembers Howard.

He's swimming again, maybe ten or fifteen meters from the rocks.

And she looks up and finds herself at the boat.

She sidestrokes to the rope and grabs it with her right arm, but the left is sluggish and heavy-feeling, as though the pain were lead flowing thickly through her veins. She forces the arm up somehow, grasps the rope, and gets both feet on a knot. With agonizing slowness she pulls herself up until she's halfway in, her feet hanging over the side, the edge cutting into her stomach, and she just rolls and falls the short distance to the floor of the cabin.

Her left arm is a wildfire of pain, radiating up into the shoulder and the side of her neck. And she's finding it difficult to draw a deep breath, as badly as she needs the air. Her lungs don't seem to be working right.

In the searchlight's beam, Howard stands up and wades onto the rock, pushing through the sea wasps in his wet suit as though they're not there. Something glints in his hand. Rose has completed only two revolutions of the handle that pulls the anchor up when she hears his scream of rage.

She manages one more crank on the handle and then has to stop, gasping for breath. She sees Howard sprint toward her across the rock and then arc out, his body straight and arrow-true, and he hits the water and begins to swim.

He swims very fast.

She manages one more turn of the handle, and then she spins and runs to the wheel. Turn ignition. She twists the key, and nothing happens. She wants to scream again, but she can't seem to draw enough air. Press ignition, she thinks, and there it is, the button. She pushes it hard enough to shove it through the panel, and the engine powers on. The boat begins to move but then jolts to a stop, and she is flung into the wheel, her forehead hitting the Plexiglas of the windscreen. The anchor has caught on something.

She runs back and tries to turn the handle on the anchor crank, but she hasn't got the strength. She puts all her weight behind it, and yet she might as well be a breeze. It won't turn.

She can hear Howard knifing through the water. He can't be far.

She has no idea how to back the boat up, which would probably free the anchor. She knows how to do one thing, and she does it: She throttles to full power. The motor churns up a tremendous amount of water, but the boat doesn't move. There's a terrifying creaking from behind her, as if the anchor assembly is going to be ripped through the rear of the boat, and she has an instantaneous vision of it taking the motor with it, so she reduces speed and then powers up again, repeating the pattern several times, trying to rock the anchor free.

She can't hear Howard swimming.

She powers down again, and the anchor snaps the boat back, and something jolts forward on the cabin floor and strikes her bare foot. It's cold and it's hard.

The boat tilts sideways, toward the rocks. The rope-why didn't she pull in the rope? — goes taut.

From the water Howard says, "Ahhhh, Rosie."

She looks down at her foot. The thing that slid into her is an automatic pistol, short and black. The one he fired at the rock. So the thing in his hand had to be-

Howard's hand slaps the top edge of the deck. Then his left hand appears, holding the knife he'd flashed before. He heaves himself upward and puts both arms inside, hanging there by his underarms. He grins at her beneath the silly-looking bathing cap.

"Baaad girl," he says. He begins to pull himself the rest of the way in, and Rose stoops down and picks up the gun and pulls the trigger.

It jumps in her hand, so hard she thinks she'll drop it, and wood chips fly up from the edge of the deck. Howard freezes, his face all eyes, and he raises a hand to stop her.

And she takes the gun in both hands this time and aims and very deliberately squeezes off two shots, and one of them hits him somewhere, because he's flung back, away from the boat, and an instant later she hears a splash. She runs to the edge of the deck, pointing the gun down, but she can't see him, so she yanks the rope out of the water with her free hand and goes back to the wheel. She powers down one more time and then gives the engine full throttle, and with a screech of wood being stretched the boat strains forward, and the anchor pulls free, and the vessel takes a leap that puts her on her back on the floor of the cabin, but she's up instantly, grabbing the wheel and cranking it all the way to the right, watching the rocks grow nearer and nearer and then begin to slide aside, and she leans there, all her weight on the wheel, sobbing and coughing, until the boat is pointed out into the empty sea. Only when she's been in motion for several minutes does she throttle down and go back to the stern to wind in the rest of the anchor chain.

Once that's done, she has to sit. Her breaths feel like they can be measured in millimeters, as though her lungs are shrinking into nothing. A band of numbness squeezes her chest. She sits on the floor of the cabin, gasping, as the boat glides slowly forward. She needs both hands to stand, one pushing down on the cabin floor and one pulling on the edge of the bench. As soon as she's up and heaving for breath, she goes back to the wheel, and in the clamp that had held the rubberized flashlight, she sees the cell phone, open and blinking. She picks it up and listens. Nothing.

Her voice an almost breathless whisper, she says, "Hello?"

A man's voice says, "Did you get the bitch?"

Rose's arm straightens automatically, as though she's just realized there's a tarantula crawling on her wrist, and the phone flies out of her hand and over the side of the boat. She's hanging on to the wheel, shuddering, when she hears it hit the water.

Fighting for air, she turns and squints back at the rocks. The rain is still coming down, but she can see him standing on the biggest stone, the wet suit a black vertical against the pale of the rocks. She thinks, with a jolt of joy that literally makes her grind her teeth, Tide's coming in. And then the rain grows heavier, and it all disappears-the rocks, the man, everything.

But she can still see the floating fire of the squid boats, and she steers directly toward it.

Two days later she checks out of the hospital in Phuket Town, where she's been treated for the sea-wasp venom, and gets on a bus to Bangkok. Her breathing has improved, although it will be months before she draws a breath without thinking about it. She has all of Howard's money and the extra clothes she had packed in the suitcase she took aboard the boat. Except for the money, everything that belonged to Howard, including the wallet and the gun, are at the bottom of the Andaman. She had given one of the squid fishermen two hundred dollars U.S., plucked from Howard's wallet, to lead her back to Phuket. He'd taken one look at her arm and poured vinegar on it, and the sting had eased a bit, but her breathing was still labored. One of his crew had piloted her as she lay in the bottom of the cabin, gasping like a fish, across the dark sea to the lights of Phuket.

Once in Bangkok, she checks into a cheap hotel miles from anywhere and sleeps for twenty hours. When she wakes, she takes the longest shower of her life and then goes down to the hotel's overpriced shop to buy tourist clothes, including a hat into which she can tuck her hair. There's no way to disguise her height, but at least she can change how she looks from a distance. A taxi delivers her to her bank, where she withdraws every penny she has deposited. Back in her room, she adds it to Howard's money and finds she has almost four thousand dollars, nearly 160,000 baht. That night, at 5:00 A.M., she is waiting across the street from her apartment when Fon and the other girls come home.

Twelve hours later, around 5:00 in the evening, she gets off a bus in Fon's village in Isaan, where she will stay for nearly four years. She pays a small amount every month to Fon's parents and mails a little money to her own. She calls Fon every week to see whether Howard has come into the bar. She asks her mother in letters to tell her whether he ever comes to her village.

He never does.

After four years, Fon calls to say she's moved to the King's Castle. When Rose returns to Bangkok, she joins her friend on the stage of the biggest bar in Patpong. Three years later Poke Rafferty walks into the place.