Timothy Hallinan - The Queen of Patpong

"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?"