Fools' River Page 2

  Sniffling because of the tears, Lutanh says, “Can I have a mirror?” She closes her eyes so hard that her nose wrinkles, and she then opens them, and when she does, the mirror is in front of her. “Oh,” she says, and then she says, “Oh,” again and starts to cry. “They’re perfect.”

  The woman holds out a tissue and says, “Here. Don’t ruin your makeup. And you haven’t even looked at the world yet.”

  “At the, uhh . . .” Lutanh says, and, dabbing at her cheeks, she looks up at the far wall of the shop, and her jaw drops. “Is this how everything . . . I see edge,” she says. “Everything edge. I never see . . . I see so much little thing, even from here.”

  The woman shares a quick smile with Miaow and says, “Look out the window.”

  Lutanh turns her head to look and then quickly gets up, her violet skirt sticking to the backs of her thighs, which are damp with nervous perspiration. She says, “Ohhhhh,” and then again, “Ohhhhh.” Her fingertips go up to her temples like she’s afraid her head will explode. “Oh, my God,” she says, in English, pronouncing it Oh, my Gos. “He’s prettier than I am,” and Miaow follows her gaze to see, looking in through the glass at her, a boy she recognizes instantly.

  “It’s Edward,” she says. “What’s he doing here?”

  “You know him?” Grabbing at her knapsack, Lutanh says, “Whatever he doing, tell him wait for me.”

  3

  The Triangle’s Wayward Third Point

  There’s an awkward, protracted silence when Lutanh joins them after fanning an uncounted, but obviously more than sufficient, wad of bills atop the counter and chasing Miaow out of the store. The three of them stand there in an extremely irregular triangle. Miaow and Edward—who’d been talking when Lutanh came out with her knapsack and a new bag bearing the optical shop’s logo—are close enough to each other so that the people sweating their way down the sidewalk can’t squeeze in between them, and Lutanh is quite a bit farther off, the triangle’s wayward third point. She’s hanging back, staring at Edward as though she expects him to shimmer and vanish in a cloud of white light and music, her weight on her left foot and the right foot raised and hooked behind the left ankle. One glance at the pose takes Miaow back to the time when she was much younger, freshly discarded on a sidewalk and only marginally welcome anywhere.

  A bulky farang in a tight white T-shirt and shorts baring heavily tattooed calves cruises between Lutanh and Miaow, slowing as he comes, his eyes on Lutanh, and he turns to glance back at her when he’s passed. When he’s out of earshot, Miaow breaks the silence to say, “Lutanh, Edward. You guys can say hello to each other. You’ve already met.”

  Simultaneously but in different languages, Edward and Lutanh say, “No. I’d remember.”

  Miaow says, “You both said the same thing.”

  Lutanh says in English, “I know,” and Edward says, “We did?”

  “But that’s right, you wouldn’t remember each other.” Miaow says to Edward, “Lutanh was in disguise, and you were in makeup. With your hair parted in the middle. For the play.”

  “The play?” Edward says, frowning, as Lutanh says, in Thai, “The play?”

  Miaow says, “The play, Edward, the one and only—”

  “I know which play,” Edward says. He says to Lutanh, “I’m sorry if I don’t remember. It was a very confusing night.”

  “Too much confuse,” Lutanh says in English. She takes a couple of quick steps toward him. “That night, me . . . man, crazy man, boxing me here.” She mimes several punches at her expensive little nose and then crosses her eyes and rolls her head back, her tongue in the corner of her mouth, absorbing the blow. When the pantomime is over, she takes a step toward Edward, gesturing at her nose to drive the point home. “Wery bad man.”

  “Yes, I’m . . . I’m sure he was.” He looks up and then down the street. “Excuse me,” he says to Lutanh. “I’m going to have to be rude. Miaow, I need to go home with you.”

  “Okeydoke,” Lutanh says. “We go Miaow’s—”

  But Edward hasn’t finished talking. “I need to talk to your father.”

  Miaow says, “To Poke?”

  “Yes, Poke.” He licks his lips, starts to say something, shakes his head, and says instead, “Your father, okay?”

  “Well,” Miaow says, thinking about acting class.

  “It’s important. I wouldn’t be bothering you if it weren’t . . .”

  “You not bothering,” Lutanh says. “Okay,” she says to Miaow. “We go your house.” She gives Edward her best smile, the one she practiced secretly for years in her mother’s cracked and ever-dusty mirror, almost the only times she ever smiled when she was a boy. “Miaow papa, him wery brave.”

  “You have to go to Dr. Srisai’s class,” Miaow says to her. “This is your scene day.”

  “Oh.” Lutanh’s smile evaporates. “Peetapan.”

  “We take an acting class together,” Miaow tells Edward. “She’s very good.”

  “Today I Peetapan,” Lutanh says. “When Tinkabel is dying, na? I want to play Tinkabel, but in this scene Peetapan number one. Tinkabel, she dying? And Peetapan say everybody need to believe in fairy.” She fans her face with one hand. “Woh. Wery sad.”

  Edward says, “Isn’t Peter Pan a boy?”

  “No problem,” Lutanh says. “I beautiful boy.” She picks up her bag and pulls out one of the protruding objects, a piece of cane that’s been bent into a teardrop shape and then covered tightly in plastic wrap. Delicate veins have been traced on the plastic with some kind of marker. “Wing,” she says, presenting it one-handed as she struggles to free its mate. She holds them both up. “I make.” She looks at them, and doubt creases her face. “Good, no good?”

  “Uh, good,” Edward says. “But Peter Pan doesn’t have wings.”

  “My Peetapan have wing,” Lutanh says with a bit of steel in her voice. “Him fly, him have wing.” She waves the wings in the air. They catch the sunlight nicely, and Lutanh nods satisfaction and then says to Miaow, in English, “You not come?”

  “I can’t,” Miaow says. “Tell Dr. Srisai I’m sorry. A friend had an emergency.” To Edward she says, “This is an emergency, right?”

  “It is.”

  “Okeydoke,” Lutanh says with a shrug. She starts to jam the wings into her bag. To Edward she says, “I show you Peetapan later.”

  “Good,” Edward says. “Great.”

  “I helped her a little,” Miaow says. “Just remember the arms.” She holds her arms above her head, slightly bent at the elbows, then slowly turns her palms and her elbows outward.

  “I do,” Lutanh says. “I do one hundred time. Make everybody cry.”

  “It might,” Miaow says dubiously.

  “No, in my club,” Lutanh says. “Make everybody cry, my club. Girl cry everywhere, cry, cry, cry. Well,” she adds, obviously in the interest of accuracy, “half girl cry. Half girl—” She tilts her head back and brushes the tip of her nose upward with her index finger, “snob” in any language. With a grunt she throws the pack over her shoulder, the optical bag dangling from one finger, and says to Edward, “My name Lutanh.”

  “Yeah, I . . . uh, I know,” Edward says. “Miaow told me—”

  “And you Edwudd. I say name okay? Edwudd?”

  “Edwudd,” Edward says, nodding.

  “Okay. I see you after, Edwudd.”

  Edward says, “After what?”

  “She means later,” Miaow says. “See you later, Lutanh. And good luck.”

  “See you . . . later,” Lutanh says. She turns and throws the bag over her shoulder. Looking back, she calls out, “Edwudd. You wery pretty.”

  “Bar girl,” Edward says. Lutanh has threaded her way through the crowd like some exotic iridescent butterfly set loose in a cloud of cabbage moths, and Edward and Miaow have begun to walk. They’re half an arm’s length apar
t so they can hear each other, and Miaow occasionally finds herself drifting closer, even on such a hot day. “Right?” he says when she fails to answer. “Bar girl?”

  “Not exactly,” Miaow says, a little stung by his tone. Her adopted mother had been, after all, a bar girl, according to many the most beautiful of any of them. The sun has slipped below the tops of the buildings, and Silom is draped in the unconvincing urban dusk that announces to city dwellers the coming of the real thing. She glances over at him, taking in the fine, regular profile, the long eyelashes, and what she sees as his unreasonably beautiful, wavy light brown hair—wasted on a boy—that, taken in tandem with the profile, had inspired an almost audible buzz among the girls at school when he appeared on the fourth or fifth day of the previous semester, materializing in the hallways like a surprise delivery from another dimension, one where everybody always smells good. One of the things she likes about him is that he seems to be indifferent to his good looks. He’s not, for example, a preener. She’s never seen him check himself out in a shop window, and when he messes with the flop of hair on his forehead, it usually seems to be because it’s irritating him. “But why do you say that? What makes you think she’s a bar girl?”

  “That makeup,” he says. “The dyed hair, the dress, those ridiculous blue eyes.”

  “I like the eyes,” Miaow says, as though her own taste is being criticized. “We just bought them for her.”

  “Okay, I take it back. Nice eyes.”

  “And they’re not blue, they’re violet. She’s always wanted violet eyes. Why shouldn’t she—”

  He turns to look at her, apparently puzzled by her tone. “And I’ve always wanted to be tall enough to play basketball, but I’m not.”

  “Some people,” Miaow says, “have the guts to become who they want to be.”

  “Yikes,” he says. He looks forward again and slips his hands into his pockets. “I stepped in it, whatever it was. She’s your friend, I guess.”

  They walk in silence for a few steps, and Miaow slows her pace so he gets ahead of her and has to wait. She says, “I like her. She’s brave.”

  “Good. I mean, good. Friends are important.”

  “And I don’t have a lot of friends.”

  He says, “That’s your fault.”

  The response surprises her, and she thinks she’ll let it pass but then hears herself asking, “What does that mean?”

  “You hide in your cave,” he says. “Every time someone even says hi, it’s like you pull away into the dark, and by the time you say hi back, if you even do, whoever talked to you is a mile off.”

  “I do not.”

  He shrugs. “Up to you. So, if your friend—what’s her name?”

  “Lutanh.”

  “If Lutanh isn’t a bar girl, what is she?”

  “She . . . she works in a club. You heard her.”

  “What kind of club?”

  “A horse riders’ club,” Miaow says irritably. “Guys who ride horses the whole day, after all that time in a saddle they need a place to sit on a regular chair and talk to girls.”

  He stops walking again. “Really. Are there a lot of these clubs?”

  “They’re everywhere.”

  “The things I don’t know. Where are the horses? I haven’t really seen a lot of . . .” When it becomes obvious she’s not going to rise to the bait, he looks around to see how far they’ve come. “Aren’t you going to call your father? How do you know where he is?”

  “He’s home. He’s always home. Rose—my mom—is in her fourth month. I mean, she’s pregnant, and he follows her around all day. Drives her crazy.”

  Edward says, “That’s kind of nice.”

  “She says she married him for better or for worse, but not for lunch.” Edward laughs, and Miaow says, “Do I?”

  “Do you what?”

  “What you said. What you said about the cave.”

  They’ve stopped at the turn to Soi Pipat, where Miaow’s apartment is. The sidewalk has gotten more crowded as people pour out of the office buildings, but Miaow is barely aware of them. Edward closes his eyes for a moment, and when he opens them, he’s looking at a point just slightly above her head, as though her gaze would break his concentration.

  “It’s like I said, you hide.” He’s choosing his words. “As though you think you can make yourself . . . invisible, like no one can see you, when you’re just . . . I don’t know, walking in the hall, as solid as everybody else. And when someone says hello? You look surprised and you retreat, sort of go all octopus, like you want to change color and disappear.”

  “But I act,” she says. “I get up on the stage in front of the whole world. How could I do that if—”

  “When you act,” he says, “you’re not Miaow.”

  She glances at him, startled, but he’s still focused on a point somewhere above her. “So,” she says, unable to think of any other subject, “why do you need to talk to Poke?”

  4

  Where I Am When I’m Seventeen

  “It’s been twelve days, I think,” Edward says. He’s on the white hassock where Poke usually sits, and Poke is beside Rose on the couch, a little closer than she looks like she wants him to be. Miaow is sitting on the floor, midway between Rose’s bare feet and Edward’s running shoes, so immaculate it’s as though they never touch the sidewalk. The four of them are dead center in a cloud of citrus fragrance, courtesy of a half-eaten tangerine, a fruit Miaow learned to like when the family spent some time hiding in a hotel that ran out of her usual favorite, oranges. Rose is dredging tangerine sections through an open container of unflavored yogurt—a pregnancy enthusiasm—and Edward has glanced at the ritual a couple of times.

  “Has he disappeared before?” Poke asks.

  “Not this long. I mean, he’s gone all the time, but not for more than a couple of—” He stops, considering the question in Poke’s expression, and says, “You know about my—his—our living situation, right?”

  “I do?” Rafferty asks.

  Edward glances over at Miaow. “Miaow hasn’t told you?”

  “Why would I?” Miaow says, blushing. “It was your business.”

  “You were embarrassed,” Edward says, looking at her. “For me.”

  “She’s much more sensitive than she seems,” Rafferty says, earning a glare from Miaow and a smile, quickly hidden, from Rose.

  “I know how sensitive she is,” Edward says. “We were just talking about it.”

  Sitting forward attentively, Poke says, “Really.”

  Miaow says, “And let’s stop talking about it.”

  “At the play,” Edward says to Rose, “you met my Auntie Pancake. She talked about you later.”

  “I remember her,” Rose says in English, her tone careful. Waiting in the lobby for Miaow’s school play, Small Town, to begin, she had tried to talk with the woman, but Edward’s father had bristled and shoved his way into the conversation whenever the two of them spoke Thai. At one point he’d stiffened a blunt index finger and poked Auntie Pancake, who was in her well-upholstered mid-forties, on her upper arm, hard enough to make her take a step to the side. At that point Rose had said, in Thai, “You can do better than this,” but Auntie Pancake had laughed as though it had been a joke and looped her arm through Edward’s father’s, her eyes not merry at all.

  “So,” Rafferty says, sidestepping one awkward topic and bumping into another one, “has your father been . . . well, fighting with Auntie . . . Auntie . . .”

  “Pancake,” Rose says. She puts a possessive hand on her belly, just perceptibly fuller than it was four months ago, and arches her back slightly. “It was a popular nickname when I was younger. There was an older woman named Pancake in my village. She had worked in Bangkok, in the bars, I think, and she brought the name back with her.”

  “So did Auntie Pancake,” Edward says.
“Work in the bars, I mean. So did all my aunties. No, they haven’t been fighting. Nobody fights with my father. They either do what he says or they go away.”

  Rafferty says, “All your aunties?”

  “Four,” Edward says. He’s not looking at anybody. He begins to straighten one finger at a time to accompany the names he ticks off. “Auntie Pancake, Auntie Bai, Auntie Baby, and Auntie Aspirin.” He looks at his hand and puts it between his thighs.

  Miaow opens her mouth to ask a question and closes it again.

  “All in the . . . uh, the same house?” Poke asks.

  “No, three houses. And miles apart. I live in the main house, where my father lives most of the time, with Auntie Pancake. Auntie Bai and Auntie Baby live together. I think they’re . . . you know, girlfriends. My father likes that kind of thing. Auntie Aspirin hates all the other aunties and everyone else in the world, so she lives alone.”

  “I see,” Rafferty says.

  “He, like, rotates. He’s with us—Auntie Pancake and me—Monday through Wednesday, and then he’s at the other houses Thursday through Sunday, two days each. Usually. And then some nights he’s not in any of those places, he’s in some hotel with somebody else, so he’s gone a lot. Two weeks ago Friday was the last time I saw him. He came back for some money.” He counts on his fingers. “This is Wednesday, so yeah, he’s been gone twelve days.”

  “Have you checked with all the aunties?”

  “Sure. I called Auntie Bai and Auntie Baby when he’d been gone five days, and they hadn’t seen him that weekend. Auntie Aspirin didn’t answer, so I figured, okay, he’s with her, and she’s probably thrown both their phones in the toilet. She does stuff like that. But then, the day before yesterday, she called me back and said she’d been up north where her phone didn’t work, and she hadn’t heard from him in days and days.”

  “What about his phone?”

  “No answer, but there never is. He says he won’t jump every time a cheap circuit calls his name. That’s a quote, or almost a quote, and his phone does call him—it says his name in a kind of cheesy female voice, ‘Oh, Buuuddeee.’” He rubs his eyes and the bridge of his nose, as though the thought of his father’s ringtone exhausts him. “It doesn’t occur to him that the person who makes the call might actually need something.” Edward regards Poke and Rose, as though trying to gauge their reactions. “You know, maybe I should just tell you about my father. It might make things easier.”