Timothy Hallinan - The Queen of Patpong

"He wanted me," Nana says. "What about you?" She tosses her head in the direction of Kwan's house. "Has he-"

"No," Kwan says flatly. "He wants to. When he's drunk, he wants to. He fumbles at me sometimes. But I've never even let him put his hand under my clothes." She feels the shame rise in her. "He looks at Mai sometimes, too."

"Mmmmm." Nana glances around the clearing. "I remember this place. Sort of."

"I hid treasure here once." Kwan knows it sounds silly, but anything seems safer than talking about what's happened this night, what she just saw her father do, the things Nana has been saying.

"Treasure?"

"Stuff. Broken stuff. I dug it up from where the house used to be."

Nana turns to her. "You hid it. Did you bury it?"

"No. It's back there, in a tree." She thumbs over her shoulder toward the trees behind her. "It was back there anyway."

Nana swallows, loudly enough for Kwan to hear it. "I want to see it."

"Nana, it's junk."

"I want to see if it's still there."

Kwan regards her. Nana's mouth is set in a line of determination. The moon plants tiny points of light in her eyes. "Why?"

"If it's still there," Nana says, and then she closes her eyes tightly, "if it's still there, maybe everything will be all right for you."

Kwan is inhaling, but her throat suddenly slams shut. She looks at Nana, her eyes still closed, and an enormous sob swells into existence inside her and pushes its way out. A moment later she is sitting on the ground with no memory of how she got there, weeping loudly, and Nana is beside her with both arms wrapped around her, saying, "Hush, hush, hush. They can hear you. Go ahead and cry, but here, here…" She puts a soft hand on Kwan's wet cheek and presses Kwan's face against the lightly fragrant silk of her blouse. "Here, baby, cry here. But quietly, quietly."

Kwan laces her fingers behind Nana's neck, pressing her forehead against this girl she has never liked, and releases sob after sob into the darkness like black birds. She can almost feel them circling Nana and her, spiraling higher until they point themselves toward the moon and disappear.

"It's all right, baby," Nana whispers. "It's just time to grow up. It's just growing up, that's all. You're not going to die." She smooths Kwan's hair with one hand, and then she says, "Oh, this hair. How I'd love hair like this."

Kwan says, "You can have it," and a single laugh bubbles up. She sits back and passes her forearm over her face, blinking her eyes rapidly to force out any late-arriving tears. She's not through crying, but she'll wait until she's alone. She sniffles, loudly enough to startle herself.

Nana reaches out and wipes the side of Kwan's neck, then dries her hand on her black silk blouse. The blouse is smeared with streaks of dirt, the dirt Kwan rubbed on her face so her father wouldn't see her. "Let's look," Nana says.

Kwan sniffles again and says, "This is silly," but she's getting up as she speaks the words.

"I'll bet you don't remember where you-"

"Of course I do." She's standing, still feeling the cool dampness on her cheeks, and blots them with the backs of her hands, and then she extends a hand to Nana, who grabs hold and hauls herself upright with a little grunt, and for a moment they're both children again. Nana dusts her rear and scans the perimeter of the clearing. "Five hundred baht," she says. "Five hundred baht says you can't find it."

"Where would I get five hundred baht?"

"Then you'd better find it, or you'll owe me. And believe me, you don't want to owe me money."

Kwan takes a couple of steps and stops. The edge of the clearing is black and unfamiliar. She says, "I hid it during the daytime."

"Do I hear an excuse?"

"Quiet. I am going to find it." She turns toward the road and reorients herself, then stretches an arm in front of her, her index finger pointing straight ahead, grabs a breath that seems to go all the way to her knees, and slowly rotates to the left. About three-quarters of the way around, she says, "There." Then she follows her finger, edging between a couple of low bushes and past a waist-high tree stump, Nana trailing behind, until she comes to a tree with a broad branch angling up to the right.

The flare of recognition gives way to surprise. "That limb was lower when I did this."

"So were you," Nana says.

"I can get up there." On tiptoe, Kwan gets the palms of her hands on the top of the branch, judging its height, then bends her knees and jumps. She throws both arms over the branch, anchors herself, and then starts to swing her legs side to side until she can throw one foot over the limb. Once that's done, she gets her other foot up and locks her ankles on top of the branch so she's hanging upside down like a sloth. "I feel ten years old," she says.

"It's okay," Nana says. "Come down before you break your neck. I believe you."

"I want my treasure." Kwan gets one thigh on top of the branch and hauls herself up so she's flat on her stomach. The ground looks a long way off. She balances herself and peers into the darkness of the foliage. "Oh," she says, surprised in spite of herself. "Oh, I can see it." She inches forward, pulling herself along, feeling the bark scratching the tender skin on the insides of her arms. Nana is saying something beneath her, but Kwan disregards it and inches farther up, at about a twenty-degree angle, the dark, dangling shape now less than a meter away. "I don't believe it. It's still here."

Gripping the limb tightly between her thighs, she sits up and extends both hands until they touch the rough cloth of the scarf, which feels dirty and slightly sticky. There are pointed objects inside it. Suddenly she remembers the exact knot she tied in the sunlight as the cicadas whirred, and she reaches up to undo the work of nine years ago. Her fingers find the knot and trace its shape. All she has to do is ease the scarf off the twig it hangs from and then untie the knot, but she stops, feeling her hand shake. She sits there long enough for Nana to ask a question.

"Wait," Kwan says, not even trying to reassemble Nana's words into something she understands. The moon throws patterns of light around her, dappling her bare arms and the front of her shirt, and the leaves of the tree shiver in a breeze so slight it might be the weight of the moonlight. The forest stretches off in all directions, a village here and a village there, linked by paths she can walk blindfolded, paths she explored alone, at a time when she imagined a monster waiting at every turn. A time when monsters were imaginary. She smells the sharp tang of the fire she noticed earlier, and she knows that if she were on the other side of her village, she would see the moon below her, shining up from the water in the paddies.

To Nana she says, "Can you hear this?" She strikes the hanging bundle with her open palm, and it makes a clattering sound, like someone shaking rocks in cupped hands.

"Yes."

"Well, that's it. Can you think of any other way I could have made that noise up here?"

"No."

Kwan hits the bundle twice more. It rattles and clatters. Dirt sifts down through the coarse weave of the cloth onto her other hand. She hits it harder, slapping at it now, feeling the muscles in her back tighten, feeling her jaw clench, and then tears are standing in her eyes. It's junk, just like she said. Her treasure is junk, crusted with dirt, trash that even the poorest, hungriest child wouldn't bend down to pick up. She sees the precision of the knot. Her eight-year-old fingers making sure her treasure wouldn't fall. Broken things. Useless things. Worthless, but hidden.

Like her. She reaches for the bundle again, meaning to rip it loose and throw it down, but instead, holding her breath without knowing it, she passes her hands lightly over its shape. Finding an area where the pieces bulge out beneath the cloth, she pushes them back in, tracing the teardrop form of the bag beneath her palms, patting it here and there to make it symmetrical. When she takes her hands away, it's swinging back and forth slightly, and she puts one hand up, wide open, to still its movement. She lets her fingers rest against an eight-year-old's treasure, closes her eyes, and tries to feel the magic it had all those years ago. She sits there like that until her arm feels heavy and the bag is warm to the touch.