Fools' River Read online

  “Great idea,” Rafferty says. To Rose he says, “Could I have one of those? With the yogurt on it?”

  Rose says, “No.”

  “Got it,” Rafferty says. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “Yogurt for two,” Rose says. “And neither of them is you.” She softens it with a smile and then softens it further by giving him one dripping tangerine section.

  “Okay,” Edward says. He brushes the flop of hair aside as though he’s just become aware of it and then uses his index and second fingers to reposition it. “He’s not what you’d call responsible. He doesn’t really do anything except what he wants.”

  “Lucky him,” Rafferty says.

  Miaow says, “Like you slave all day.”

  “It doesn’t make him happy,” Edward says. “Nothing does. He’s always pissed off—sorry,” he says to Rose. “He’s a big spoiled brat. He’s had a trust fund his whole life, and he’s used to everything he wants sort of falling into his hand. He thinks it’s a hardship to have to go on tiptoe to reach anything.” Edward stops and looks down at the glass surface of the coffee table, like someone who’s waiting for the text to scroll up on his teleprompter.

  Rafferty says, “Where does the money come from?”

  Edward shrugs. “His father figured out something about carbonation that makes soft drinks fizz better, so the family got rich on the kind of junk he doesn’t want me to drink. He went to law school because his father made him, but then his father did him a favor and died while Dad was in his senior year, and as he puts it, he was ‘out of Harvard in a shot.’ Like that was something to be proud of. And he, you know, started a couple of businesses, but it was just a way not to get bored.”

  Rose’s eyebrows are raised. Her own father had tried to sell her into the sex trade, but she’s never spoken about him as Edward is talking about his father. She says, “You should respect him anyway.”

  “He doesn’t make it easy. He doesn’t care about anybody. I mean, he campaigns for . . . you know, the Indians in the Amazon and some species of bird that’s got problems, or regular old corn instead of whatever kind of corn, modified or whatever, they’re making now, but he’s not interested in people.”

  “What about your mother?” Rose asks.

  “Oh, her.” He has both hands clasped between his thighs now, and he’s rocking back and forth a little. “She doesn’t do much either. She was a banker for a while, or she said she was—in one of the banks my father kept his money in, so it probably wasn’t a real job. She almost never went to work. After a while she didn’t go at all. Anyway, she’s not here.”

  Rafferty says, “I’m sorry to hear—”

  “It’s not like she’s dead or anything.” Edward stops rocking and sits back carefully on the hassock, which can tip over with very little provocation and has already deposited him on the carpet once. “I just mean she’s not here. She’s in California. With my sister.”

  “How old is your sister?” Rose asks.

  “Twelve,” Edward says. He reaches for the flop again and thinks better of it. “Her name is Bessie. I mean, Elizabeth.”

  Rafferty says, “And you’re how old?”

  “Seventeen. For a month.”

  Rose says, “Happy birthday.”

  Edward looks confused for a moment and then says, “Thanks.”

  “How long since you’ve seen her?” Rose asks.

  “My sister or my mother?”

  “Either one.”

  “Almost a year.”

  “Eleven months ago. That’s when you came to my school,” Miaow says, and looks like she just bit her tongue.

  “You have a better memory than I do,” Edward says. “I guess it was eleven months. If you say so.”

  “That’s how long it’s been,” Miaow says to the top of the table.

  “You remind me of her,” Edward says. “My sister.”

  “Oh,” Miaow says. The syllable seems to Rafferty to contain eight or nine meanings. “That’s . . . that’s nice.”

  “You’re smart like her. And sort of shy. I mean, she’s shy, too.”

  Rose says, “Has she been here? Your sister, has she been in Bangkok?”

  “No.”

  “You must be lonely.”

  “I . . . uh. I get along.”

  “Why are you here,” Rose asks, “when your sister and your mother are . . . where? In America?”

  “In California. And they’ll stay there.” He looks up to find every eye in the room on him, and he sighs. “My father took a couple of vacations here in Thailand, and then, two years ago, he moved here and divorced my mother. The next year my mother sent me to live with him.” He smiles to lighten what he’s saying. “Just packed me up, like in the mail. Put my stuff in a suitcase, all the clothes I didn’t like, as it turned out, pushed me into a plane, and then emailed him to go to the airport and get me. Said she didn’t want males in the house anymore.” He reaches for the flop of hair but lets his hand fall back into his lap, then fills his cheeks with air and blows it out. “As my father says, when he’s losing an argument, we have wandered far afield, haven’t we?”

  “I didn’t know any of that part,” Miaow says. “About how your mother—”

  “No reason you should,” Edward says. “It’s not like this is my fate or anything. It’s just where I am when I’m seventeen. I even like it. Some.” When Miaow looks up at him, he says, “I like knowing you.”

  Rafferty can hear Miaow’s swallow.

  Like someone making a long-overdue announcement, Rose says, “You need to stay for dinner. Poke is very good at getting takeout.”

  “So is Auntie Pancake. We live on takeout.”

  “Is she good to you?” Rose asks.

  “She’s okay,” Edward says. He shrugs again, and Rafferty sees a lot of practice in the gesture. “No, better than that. She’s nice most of the time. She doesn’t have to be—she knows my father doesn’t want me here in Bangkok, I interfere with his lifestyle—but she is. Nice. I don’t think I’d be so nice in her position. And it’s not like she’s got it easy. It’s not like she doesn’t know that my father is . . . you know, a hound, and she stopped working—I guess that’s what you’d call it, working—”

  “That’s what you’d call it,” Rose says.

  “So she stopped because of him, to please him, you know? And she’d be totally stranded if my father dumped her,” Edward says. “And we both know, her and me, that he will when he gets bored or somebody hotter or more . . . cooperative comes along. So yeah, I like her.” He straightens his legs and looks down at them through the glass table. “My mother won’t let my sister come here because she says the whole place is—” He stops, and his right foot begins to jiggle up and down.

  “Is what?” Rafferty says.

  “A whorehouse,” Edward says with his eyes still on his nervous foot. He raises his fingers to his mouth and starts to chew on his thumbnail but then lowers it again.

  “Some men use it as one.” Rose says. To Rafferty she says, “I want larb kai and oranges and unflavored yogurt. And some maraschino cherries.”

  Edward says doubtfully, “Is that good?”

  “It’s awful,” Rose says. “But it’s what the baby seems to want.”

  After Rose essentially pushes them out of the apartment, saying she has a backache and wants a nap before dinner, they hit the sidewalk. Edward, who’s still relatively new to Bangkok, puts his hand over his mouth and nose as though to defend against the city’s distinctive perfume of heat and carbon monoxide. Glancing over at him, Miaow stifles a smile. Rafferty is in the middle, but when Miaow says something and Edward leans forward and says, “Sorry?” he moves over so the kids can chat side by side and he’s flanking Miaow on her left. They’ve gone half a block when he feels Edward’s eyes on him.

  “What?” he says.
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  “Just . . . you know, watching you.”

  “Why?”

  “You really look at things. I bet you could describe the last five people who went by.”

  Rafferty looks surprised. “I didn’t know it showed. I’ve been working on it for a while. A few years ago, Rose said I had the ‘American disease.’ When I looked at something, I compared it to something I had or something I used to have or something I wanted. But none of those things, she said, were—are—here, on this street, at this moment, and her point was that the things that are here should get my attention. She told me to think of it as the walking-and-looking meditation, just paying attention to what’s going on.”

  “Does it work?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it does. I don’t get lost anymore.” Miaow laughs, and he grins at her and says, “She’ll tell you. Four or five years ago, we’d turn two corners and I’d have to flag a cab to get back home. I carried my address everywhere, written on my palm in Thai so I wouldn’t just disappear.” They come to the Silom intersection, and he says, “Foodland is down there, with the oranges and the yogurt, and the good food stands—good for this neighborhood anyway—are up here. We could split up, get back faster.”

  Miaow says, “She doesn’t want us to get back faster.”

  “No,” Rafferty says. “Probably not.”

  “She told me yesterday she feels like she hasn’t been alone for months.”

  Rafferty says, “Well.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “I worry about her.” He pats the pockets of his pants, not knowing he’s doing it. “So,” he says, “we stick together? Take our time?”

  “I’d go for that,” Edward says. “Foodland first?”

  “Sure,” Rafferty says. “Why?”

  “You’ll get used to this if you hang around,” Miaow says to Edward. “He always thinks everyone else is wrong.”

  “Okay,” Rafferty says. “Foodland it is. Look how reasonable I am.” He heads off down the sidewalk, and Miaow and Edward hurry to catch up.

  “Edward,” he says, “why me? Your father doesn’t show up, why’d you think of me?”

  “You know why. The police are no good. And everybody at school knows what happened that night after the play. You got that guy who murdered those people.”

  “I got someone else killed, too, someone who should still be alive. I’m not proud of myself.”

  “With all due respect, Mr. Rafferty, all the people who were with you knew it was dangerous. You set it all up, and it worked.”

  “That’s what I tell him,” Miaow says.

  They walk in silence for a few yards. Then Rafferty says, “Okay, then, what else is there? We kind of sidetracked you back at the apartment, and I don’t think you were finished. You’re not worried just because your father hasn’t come back. What else happened?”

  Edward shoves both hands into his pockets and nods. “Two or three days after he split, someone broke into our house. I was at school, and Auntie Pancake was out with her friends, like she is every day when my father’s not there. When I got home, the window in the back door, the door to the kitchen, was broken, and someone had gone in through it. There are two locks, one in the knob, which they could turn by reaching in through the window, and a dead bolt, which could be opened from inside but had to be manually locked again when they left. They left the dead bolt unlatched, so I know they opened the door.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Let me see.” An oncoming sidewalk-wide group of Japanese men, undoubtedly on their way to the Japanese-only bars on Soi Thaniya, politely separates to let Rafferty and the kids get through. “He’s been gone twelve days. The last time we saw him was Friday before last. The break-in happened on Monday, my first day at school that week, so it was the third day he was gone. Nine days, that would make it, nine days ago.”

  “Did you call the cops?”

  “Yeah, sure, although Auntie Pancake said I shouldn’t have. She really hates them. Anyway, they showed up, looked at the door, and asked what was missing. I said I hadn’t noticed anything that wasn’t . . . you know, where it was supposed to be, and they went through the house, sort of picking things up and putting them down, and they asked where my father was and told me to have him call them when he came back. Then they went away.”

  “Nothing was taken?”

  “Not that I saw then. I went through the house before the cops got there and didn’t notice anything. And I looked around a little later, too. But the day before yesterday, the rent was due, so I went into my father’s office to open his safe and get his business checkbook, and it was gone. He had three checkbooks, and they were all gone, and so were a bunch of credit cards. And whoever broke in had opened the safe to get them and then closed it again. Only my father and I know the combination.”

  “Maybe it was your father. Maybe he lost his house key. Maybe he just needed—”

  “My father never uses checks except to pay bills. He lives on credit cards. He’s got three or four cards he uses all the time. And even if he did come back for a check, like if he needed some cash and didn’t want it on his credit-card record for some reason, he’d just write one and tear it out. No reason to take the whole book. Much less three books.”

  “Okay,” Rafferty says.

  “And he never would have broken that window. There’s a key hidden outside. He’s the one who hid it.”

  Miaow puts a hand on Edward’s arm. “Maybe you’re not safe there.”

  “I’m pretty sure they got what they wanted,” Edward says. “I don’t think they were after phony antiques. Shouldn’t we cross here?”

  Rafferty has been so focused on Edward that he hasn’t registered the permanent snarl of Patpong across the way. Miaow leads them into the traffic with the Bangkok native’s assurance that what seem to be hurtling projectiles of steel and glass are actually spirit images devoid of mass, and despite a few doomed gasps from Edward, they make it to the center island unscathed. Both she and Rafferty know where to part some shrubbery to reveal an opening in the railing that runs down the center of the island that separates the boulevard into two theoretically one-way thoroughfares. Once they’re on the other side of the street and they’ve dodged their way through the crowd and the booths of the night bazaar to the relative emptiness of Patpong 2, Rafferty says, “Why are you so positive they won’t come back?”

  “I got to thinking about those checkbooks,” Edward says. “Yesterday I went to all three banks. Every one of them had cashed a big check on my father’s account in the past week. One of them had cashed two.”

  Miaow says, “For how much?”

  “Altogether,” Edward says, “all four checks, a little more than thirty-six thousand dollars.”

  Rafferty says, “In twelve days.”

  “Yeah,” Edward says. “Moving fast.”

  5

  If She Likes You, You Can Hurt Her

  It’s dark and still hot—it’ll be hot all night—and she should be hurrying to make it to This or That Bar in time to put on her stage makeup with the other girls, but Lutanh is dawdling, hugging to her the moment when Dr. Srisai had said she was “excellent,” trying to rekindle the feeling that had blossomed in her chest when he said, “Very good, Lutanh, excellent.” He’d said her approach was “fresh” and “believable.” And he doesn’t usually like anything. The last scene she’d done, a couple of weeks ago, he said it looked like she was trying to imitate a robot. “If you must imitate rather than invent,” he’d finished as she sank even lower into her chair, “at least imitate a human being.” She’d stayed out of class for two days until Miaow dragged her back in.

  But he liked her Peetapan. Her Peetapan was “excel—”

  She stops walking, struck by a horrifying thought. Peetapan is a boy. Is she only any good when she plays a—

  No, it can’t be. Not
true. Not worth considering. Impossible. How can she play the Little Mermaid? How can she play her new dream role, Mulan? Her friend Betty, who dances at the Queen’s Corner bar, had given her a DVD of Mulan, the story of a beautiful Chinese girl who disguises herself as a boy so she can fight in a war. “You’ll be a girl who used to be a boy playing a girl who’s pretending to be a boy,” Betty had said, adding in English, “That’ll fuck them up.”

  But that wasn’t what Dr. Srisai had meant, that she should play boys. It couldn’t have been. For a moment she thinks she’ll go back and ask him to clarify, but as soon as she’s turned around, she realizes he’ll be gone by the time she gets back to the classroom; she’s been walking for more than ten minutes. She turns forward again, irresolute, and then wheels around, struck by the sense that someone might have been back there, someone who moved quickly when she changed direction. It’s a narrow street, badly lit, but she stands still, surveying the gloom with a kind of bristling of the tiny hairs at the top of her spine. Nothing she sees stands out in this dark, angular cityscape. No curved lines, no pale patches, no movement.

  Nothing. It was the lenses, she decides. She’s still being distracted by small details she’d never been able to see before. Or maybe a reflection, it could have been . . .

  “Not what he meant,” she says aloud in Lao. It sounds good, so she says it again. Peetapan was always played by girls. She/he had been played by a girl the first time Lutanh had seen her, in the very silly musical version that had been on the television in some customer’s hotel room, Lutanh fighting to stay near the screen as her customer wrestled her repeatedly to the bed. The fifth or sixth time she’d wriggled free, she’d improvised an imitation of Tinkabel, using the bed as a launch pad for flying, a diversion that got him laughing for a few minutes but then ended when he stopped laughing and started looking at her very differently. She knew that the look meant it was time to go to work, and by then everyone on the TV screen was back in the boring place where the children originally came from and they were all singing at one another, with nobody flying. So she gave her customer Tinkabel. He came back the next night and the night after.