Timothy Hallinan - A Nail Through the Heart

The boy's back is to him. Miaow's eyes come up to meet Rafferty's, and he sees her shake her head no, although he's not sure what the no means, and the boy's head snaps around. When he catches sight of Rafferty, his eyes narrow so far they almost disappear, his lips peel back from his teeth in an animal snarl, and he screams, so high it goes through Rafferty's head like a bullet. It caroms off the walls in all directions, a human distress siren.

The boy kicks out at Miaow with new urgency, the torn trouser leg flapping against the thin calf, and Miaow dodges the kicks left and right, and then, as the boy raises his right foot to kick at her head, she whips her own leg around and sweeps his left foot out from under him. The boy goes down on his back. Miaow scrambles up onto him, straddling his chest and sinking her knees into his shoulders. They fight in complete silence. The boy batters at her back with his legs, so hard that Rafferty can hear his knees strike, but Miaow bears down, and Rafferty suddenly realizes how much weight the child has gained since she started living with him. The boy, whose elbow joints are the widest part of his stick-thin arms, cannot throw her off.

Rafferty approaches from behind her and looks down at the boy's face. Confronted by an adult at such close range, the boy goes limp, a trapped animal giving up hope. He stops kicking, and his head rolls to the right. He is completely still. He seems to be studying the car's tire. His face is filthy beneath the shock of knotted hair. The eye Rafferty can see seems to be infected; it is red and swollen. Automatically, Rafferty reaches down, and Miaow slaps his hand away.

"He bites," she says in English. The boy's head rolls around at the sound of a foreign language. When he sees Rafferty's face, he freezes. Even the damaged eye looks confused. Rafferty's native English and half-Asian looks, courtesy of his Filipina mother, have bewildered the Thais since his arrival in Bangkok. "Back up." Miaow doesn't look up at him. "Not so close."

He retreats four or five steps, enough to give the boy some room but close enough to get involved if necessary. Miaow leans forward and whispers for several moments. The boy shakes his head violently, and Miaow leans in and looses a torrent of Thai, too fast for Rafferty to follow, although he can make out jai dee, which translates into "good heart" or "good person," one of the language's supreme compliments. The boy looks up at her for a long moment, the left eye swollen almost shut, and then snarls a short, bitter question. Miaow shakes her head in the negative and waits. After a good ten seconds, the boy lifts his head, and his eyes go past Miaow and settle on Rafferty. They look at him and through him. Once, for an article he was writing, Rafferty interviewed a monk who had just emerged from four years of solitude. Except for the moment when that man's eyes fell on him, he has never been looked at like this in his life.

At last the fierce eyes release him. The boy lets his head drop back on the concrete. Then he makes a minute nod, not so much assent as surrender, looking at neither of them.

Miaow slowly lifts her hands from his wrists and, keeping her eyes on the boy, climbs off. With one hand behind her, she waves for Rafferty to come closer. He does, but he is careful not to get too close to either child. The world they have inhabited for the past few minutes is not his.

Looking over Miaow's shoulder, Rafferty sees a boy who could be ten or twelve and who probably weighs less than sixty pounds. The injured eye is as red as a geranium. He has a short, broad nose; heavy, unnaturally red lips; and tight-lidded, enraged-looking eyes. A bruise, not a new one, swells on his right cheek. The neck of his T-shirt is twisted, revealing a shoulder with a bone structure as delicate as a bird's. The shirt may once have been sky blue, but now it is dark with grime and pitted with holes big enough to push a finger through. A red, irregular S has been scribbled with some kind of marker on the front of the T-shirt.

The boy glares up at Rafferty. His broad nostrils flare like those of an animal smelling blood. Rafferty thinks he should have known that the boy bites even without Miaow's warning.

Miaow steps away and offers the boy a hand up. He ignores it and stands on his own, the furious eyes still fixed on Rafferty. Miaow looks up at Rafferty, and he can see the urgency drawing tight the muscles of her face, but he does not know what it means. Most surprising, tear tracks glisten on her cheeks. Rafferty knows she could survive a cataclysm dry-eyed.

She indicates the thin, dirty boy with one hand. "This is Superman," she says. Her voice comes from a throat as constricted as her face. "He's coming with us."

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.