Timothy Hallinan - The Fourth Watcher

He snaps the phone shut and asks himself again: home or somewhere here?

His decision arrives in the form of a typical Thai raindrop, perhaps half a pint of warm water, that smacks the top of his forehead much as a Zen master might clobber a meditating student whose attention has wandered. Before he can blink, thunder rumbles and the sky flickers: lights on, off, then on again, and suddenly it’s much darker than before. A giant burps high overhead, a noise like someone rolling cannonballs in a huge pan. Rafferty has learned respect for Thai rainstorms, which can empty an Olympic swimming pool on one’s head in a matter of minutes, and he hurries toward the intersection, hoping to flag a tuktuk before the deluge strikes.

Hope, as is so often the case, is disappointed. Poke hasn’t gone ten yards before the drain opens in heaven, tons of water falling, the drops so fat and heavy that their splashes reach his knees. A whiplash of light precedes by scant seconds a sound like the sky cracking in half. The rain increases in volume, slapping his shoulders sharply enough to sting. His world shrinks to a circle a few yards wide with himself at its soaked center. It is literally impossible to see across the street.

Rain means the same thing in what the tour books call “exotic Bangkok” that it means in more prosaic cities around the world. It means that there will not be a taxi within miles. It means Rafferty could stand on the curb for hours, stark naked, painted fuchsia, and waving a million-baht note, and no one would hit the brakes. It means he has a chance to find out whether his new jeans are really preshrunk or just Bangkok preshrunk, meaning that some seamstress spent several minutes painstakingly sewing on a label that says “preshrunk,” which is usually the item that shrinks first.

He’s running by now, the phone folded and sheltered in his fist, looking for a restaurant, coffee shop, bar-anyplace he can wait out the rain. As if on cue, golden lights bloom to his right, haloed in the rain. A bell rings as he pushes his way through the door, into a small bakery and coffee shop. He is alone, facing a long glass case full of pastries frosted in an improbable yellow the color of Barbie’s hair. The air is thick with coffee, and stools line the window, framing a gray rectangle of rain. He takes a seat and drips contentedly onto the floor, watching the water fall.

As a native of California, where a cloudy day makes the TV news, Rafferty is thrilled by Thailand’s enormous weather. Its sheer magnitude seems a kind of wealth, spending itself extravagantly day after day: thunderous rain, blinding heat, clouds as greasy and dark as oil shale. Nothing makes him happier than being in his apartment with Miaow, all the lights on in midafternoon, as monsoon-force winds lash the rain around and rattle the glass door to the balcony.

And now Rose will be there, too. As his wife.

The lie he told Rose in bed that morning nags at him. In fact, he had tried to find his father. Within two weeks of his graduation from UCLA, he had returned to Lancaster and ransacked his father’s metal box. Two days later he was on a plane to Hong Kong. Once there, he used the decades-old names and addresses he had copied into his notebook to track his father across China, where he ultimately found the woman-fat and blowsy now-for whose decades-old memory Frank Rafferty had left his wife and son behind.

His father had refused to see him.

The only thing Rafferty owes his father is that the search had brought him to Asia, where he has been more or less ever since.

Frank has a yellow heart, his fierce mother had said, the one time she allowed Rafferty to raise the subject of his father’s disappearance. At the time he’d thought she meant he was a coward. Only after he realized that he, too, had a yellow heart did he grasp that his father simply loved Asia, could not live anywhere but Asia. Rafferty’s mother, half Filipina herself, had understood her husband, although that didn’t stop her from hating him later, with that special talent for hatred that Filipinos carry in their blood, mixed in with gaiety and music.

A yellow heart, he thinks.

“Sawadee, kha,” someone says behind him. He turns to see a girl, perhaps ten years old. She wears a pair of shorts more or less the same yellow as the pastries behind the glass and a much-laundered T-shirt that says happy together above a picture of two fat hippies whom Rafferty recognizes as the singers in an old-time band called the Turtles. She is as brown as a paper bag.

“Sawadee, khrap,” Rafferty says. “Caffee lon, okay?”

“One hot coffee,” Happy Together says. “It will coming up.” She looks past him at the rain, and her lips move experimentally. Then she narrows her eyes and takes the plunge. “Have raining, yes?”

“Have raining, yes,” Rafferty says. “Have raining mak-mak. ” The Thai phrase for “a lot.”

“Hokay,” Happy Together says proudly. “Talking English, na? ”

“More or less. You speak it well.”

“Ho, no,” she says. “Only little bit.” It sounds like “leeten bit.” “Where you come from?”

“U.S.A.”

She raises an index finger as though she is going to lecture him, but the message is mathematical. She says, “U.S.A. numbah one.”

“No,” Rafferty says. “Thailand is number one.”

“Hah.” Her grin is enormously white. He has passed the national test. “Caffee lon now.” She disappears behind the counter, only the top of her head visible. She is no taller than Miaow.

Miaow, he thinks . Miaow is Rafferty’s family now. Rose is Rafferty’s family now. It has taken him years to assemble a home, and now he has one. I’m really hasip-hasip now, he thinks. I have a Thai family. With his mother’s Filipina blood evident in the high bones of his face and his straight black hair, he has often been mistaken for half Thai, although he’s only one-quarter Asian. Still, he thinks, he’s genetically entitled to his yellow heart.

The coffee, when it is slapped down in front of him, is thick enough to whip. He lifts the heavy china mug and stares at the rain.

“Think too much,” Happy Together says, standing beside him. “Think too much, no good.”

“Thinking about good things,” Rafferty says. “I’ve got a little girl at home just like you.”

“Thai girl?” Happy Together gives the operatic rain a disdainful glance. She’s used to it.

“One hundred percent,” Rafferty says.

Happy Together glances at his face, looks again. “You, what? Hasiphasip? ”

“Part Filipino.”

“I know where Pipinenes are,” she says, pointing more or less east. “Over there.” It comes out “Oweh dah.”

“My daughter’s smart, too.”

She thinks for a second, pushing her lower lip out. “Some farang no have baby, right?”

“Right.” He has been asked this question before. Most Thais cannot imagine an adult choosing not to have children.

“Why? Why not have baby? No have baby, not happy.”

“I don’t know. But you’re right. Babies are necessary.”

Happy Together fills her cheeks with air as she checks the dictionary in her head and then squints at him. “You say what?”

“Necessary,” Rafferty repeats, following it with the Thai word.

“Word too big,” she says decisively.

“Not for you. You’re smart.”

She goes up on tiptoes. “You know twelve times twelve?”

“One hundred thirty-eight.”

“Ho.” She punches him on the leg, hard enough to raise a lump. “You joking me.”

“See how smart you are? And look, you’ve already got your own shop.”