Timothy Hallinan - The Queen of Patpong

She slips sideways off the limb and lets herself drop, feetfirst, to the ground.

Nana says, "Where is it?"

Kwan has to clear her throat before her voice will come. "Up there."

Nana's eyebrows contract and then smooth again. "And you're going to leave it up there?"

Kwan says, "Until I come back for it."

In the end it was simple. Mr. Pattison came at exactly four o'clock the next afternoon and handed Kwan's father eight one-thousand-baht bills and four five-hundreds: ten thousand baht precisely. Her father crumpled them like scrap and shoved them into his back pocket. Kwan read out loud to her mother and father the piece of paper that was meant to lock the door of the schoolhouse behind her, as though the document contained the words of the king, unquestionable and unbreakable. Her father nodded solemnly, but Kwan's mother stayed across the room, as far from the transaction as possible. She seemed as insubstantial as smoke.

Kwan's father signed the paper, some kind of mark that he thought looked like writing. Mr. Pattison folded and pocketed the document, made a wai to Kwan's father, and got one, more or less, in return. He patted Kwan on the shoulder and said, in English, "Glad you're going to stay with us."

Kwan said, "Me, too. I thank you and Teacher Suttikul."

"No problem," Mr. Pattison said, and then added, in his awful Thai, "We'll look forward to seeing Kwan at school tomorrow." He left, and the silence in the house was loud enough to drive Kwan outside.

Her mother never met her eyes.

The next morning Kwan left for school at the usual time, wearing her frayed uniform, the white blouse above the blue skirt with the hem her mother had let down as far as it could go to cover her daughter's endless legs, so far that there was no fold left. Stuffed beneath the papers in Kwan's book bag were two clean T-shirts and her only pair of jeans. She counted the steps down to the street while, behind her, sounding as though he were already a thousand miles away, her father asked what time she'd be home and her mother said same time as always, and her father said what time is that, and her mother said four, and her father grunted. As their voices faded, she marked the moment when she stepped free of her house's shadow and the sun struck her skin. She kept her eyes straight ahead as she walked between the rows of sagging houses, her heart beating like a drum in counterpoint to her footsteps.

When she was safely out of sight of the village, she stopped. She stood there, nowhere in particular, loose-jointed and hollow, for three or four minutes, hearing the cicadas without listening to them and looking at a spot on the road a few meters in front of her, where a small stone lay. Then she reached into the pocket of her blouse and took out the sapphire earrings, which she had removed before going home the previous evening. She put them on by feel, still looking at the spot on the road, and then she went over to the stone and picked it up and put it in her pocket. The earrings were glittering in her ears when, a little less than halfway to school, she took a narrow path between the paddies to the bigger road and climbed into the taxi that was waiting there. The door closing behind her sounded like a cannon.

Nana slid aside on the backseat to make room for her. She was dressed to travel, in the black skirt she'd worn on the day she arrived and a tight red top that looped up over one brown shoulder and left the other bare. The leopard-spotted shoes were back on her feet.

Kwan said, "You look beautiful."

"You're going to be a lot more beautiful than I've ever been."

The driver's eyes flicked to Kwan's in the rearview mirror, and then he shifted with a grinding of gears, and the car bumped down the road.

"Before I get on the train," Kwan said, leaning against the door to increase the distance between them. She had rehearsed the demand in bed the previous night. "I need to know that everything was true. About the house in Bangkok."

"It's worse," Nana said. "You remember what I told you about what would happen to your father's money."

"You mean, the-" But Nana waved her silent before Kwan said the word "police" and lifted her chin toward the back of the driver's head.

"Yes," Nana said. "Them. They would have taken half, and your father would have gone to the bank for more. To get back what he lost. Do you understand what I mean by the bank?"

"Yes," Kwan said. She turned away from Nana to look out the window.

"He drinks, he plays cards. He'd have gone to the bank three or four times. Every time he gets more money, it takes longer to pay-"

Kwan rolled down her window. "I said I understand." SHE'S HEARD the train passing by all her life, but she's never been on one. Nana climbs on board as though the whole thing, all thirty cars of it, has been sent just for her, and she hoists her bright pink bag up onto a shelf above the seats. To Kwan she says, "The bathroom."

"I forgot." The car is dingier than she imagined it would be. The floor has the advanced filthiness of a surface that's been spit on repeatedly. The windows are so dirty that the world outside looks like she's seeing it through a glass of tea, and the seats are worn bare wood, wide enough for three narrow rear ends. Hugging her book bag to her chest, she goes to the end of the car, but there's no bathroom there. She looks back at Nana, who waves briskly for her to keep going. She's in midstride in the third car, threading the narrow corridor between the rows of seats, when the train lurches into motion and sends her sprawling back, onto a hard wooden seat on her right, the book bag squirting up from beneath her arms. She flails at it and grabs it, and a young man, not handsome but wearing immaculate clothing, looks at her in amused surprise as he scoots toward the window.

"I'm… I'm sorry," Kwan says, her face hot as fire.

He smiles at her, a nice smile that contains nothing to be afraid of. "Why? You didn't start the train."

"But I… I fell here, and you… um, you had to move, and-"

"It's fine. Really. Trains do that. If they didn't, we'd never get anyplace, would we?"

Absolutely no words come to her mind. "The… um, the…"

"The bathroom? Down there." He points toward the end of the car. "Put your hands on the backs of the seats as you walk. That way when the train goes around a curve, you won't fall down again."

"This thing," Kwan says, lifting the book bag as though he hasn't seen it and immediately feeling even more stupid.

"One hand, then," he says patiently. "Hold the bag under your left arm and use the right to grab the seat backs."

Kwan nods but still can't think of anything to say. The train is shuddering beneath her feet and making a clacking sound like something chewing rocks. She's starting to haul herself onto her feet again when he says, "Where are you going?"

Where is she going? She hasn't actually asked Nana. "Um," she says. "Bangkok." She manages at the last moment not to turn the word into a question.

"Where in Bangkok? It's a big city."

Kwan nods and says, "Really big." And then, since he seems to expect more, she adds, "My aunt's house."

His eyes travel to the sapphire in her right ear and then come back. "That's good. You've got someone waiting for you, then."

"Oh, yes. My… my aunt." She wants to fan her face, but she won't do it.

"So you said." He lifts his eyebrows and lets them drop. "Well."

"Well," Kwan says, searching desperately for something to say. "Thank you."

He smiles again. "I didn't do anything."

"You taught me… um, how to walk. On the train, I mean."

"You'd have figured it out. So." The eyebrows go up and down again. "The bathroom."

"The bathroom." And then she's up, the bag trapped beneath her left arm, taking it one cautious row at a time, her right hand grasping the backs of the seats.