she strikes out reflexively with fists and fingernails.
'I was frightened all the time,' she says. 'I hurt. I remember when I lost one shoe in the summer and my bare foot got so burned on the pavement I couldn't walk. There were holes in my skin. I found a piece of wood in the street and put it under my foot and tied it with a plastic bag. It made me limp because it didn't bend, and people thought I was crippled. I got more money then, so I put a cloth around it, like a bandage.' She breaks off, listening to herself. 'It was a pink shoe,' she says regretfully. 'I looked everywhere for it.'
She rests her hand on his forearm and keeps it there, fingers open and palm up. She rarely touches him. Her voice changes and softens. Up until now she has been talking to the room; now her words are aimed directly at him. 'What I wanted then was to sleep at night and have food and a place to get clean. I was dirty all the time. Just like Superman. I never thought I would live this high above the sidewalk. In the air. I never thought I would go to school.'
Rafferty does not trust himself to speak. Finally he says, 'You deserve everything, Miaow. You give me more than I give you.'
'Nuh-uh,' she says, and adds in English, 'I make problems for you.'
'I love you,' he says. 'You make me happy.'
For a moment she leans her head against his arm, and Rafferty feels as though his heart will dissolve. It lasts only a second or two, and then she is sitting upright again, and he can hear her swallow.
'One day this boy came up to me with a handful of flowers, and he said, 'Come with me.''
'Superman,' Rafferty says.
She gives him a long look. 'His name then was Boo.'
'Okay, Boo.'
'He took me to a room,' she says, 'on a little soi. There was a big woman there, a really fat woman. She had gold bracelets. And a whole bunch of little kids on the floor, making garlands out of the flowers.' She pauses, working out the order of the story she wants to tell.
'So you sold the flowers,' Rafferty prompts. Bangkok's garland sellers, children of five and six, work the city's busiest intersections, approaching drivers at stoplights to sell the fragrant loops of flowers offered at shrines. It is filthy, dangerous work. The children breathe carbon monoxide all day. Occasionally they are hit by cars. 'For how long?'
'A long time,' Miaow says.
'And were things better then?'
'I had some money. I could eat every day, and I had a place to sleep. But then-' She withdraws her hand. 'Then everything was bad again.'
'What happened?'
She takes the bag from his lap and pulls the T-shirt out. She looks at him and then at it. Very carefully, she folds it into the smallest possible square. Then she unfolds it slowly, as though she hopes to find some answer written on it. 'What happened,' she says, 'is that Boo went crazy.'
12
Miaow sits bolt upright as a key turns in the lock. The T-shirt is twisted between her clenched hands, her knuckles pale in the dark skin.
Rose comes in with four large bottles of drinking water clutched to her chest. She stops, looking from Rafferty to Miaow and back again. 'One minute,' she says in English. 'I put water and go.'
'No,' Miaow says, looking up at her. 'I want to tell you, too.'
Rose colors with pleasure. 'She likes us both today,' she says, and Miaow produces a low-wattage smile. 'Why is your friend downstairs?'
'Downstairs where?' Rafferty asks.
'In the garage,' Rose says in Thai. 'Asleep in somebody's jeep, with his feet out the window.'
'He's waiting,' Miaow says. 'We've been in worse garages.'
'You and Superman?' Rose settles cross-legged on the floor with her back to the glass doors. The sunlight on her hair is dazzling, a knot of rainbows.
'When I was little,' Miaow says, 'he found me and took me to a place where kids were making garlands. My first day I made thirty baht. Almost a dollar. I could eat. Boo-that was his name then,' she informs Rose-'Boo showed me a good place to sleep. There was a number hotel that was closed. We could sleep in the garage, behind the curtains. We were dry when it rained.' Number hotels, indispensable to Bangkok's sexually furtive, have curtained garages to allow customers to get out unobserved.
'We started every day at five in the morning. We sold flowers until it was dark. Boo already had four kids with him. They were my first real friends, ever. When some older kids tried to chase us out of the garage, Boo took a big piece of wood with nails in one end and hurt two of them until they ran away.' She pauses for a moment to swallow. 'He took care of us.
'I sold flowers every day for almost two years,' she says. She is looking straight in front of her, seeing her own life unspool like a film. 'Boo was always there. One night a man called me to come to his car. When I got there, he reached out and grabbed my arm. He tried to pull me into the car, right through the window. Like a bag of rice. Boo ran up and bit the man's arm. He wouldn't let go. The man dropped me and drove off, with Boo hanging from his arm, biting him deeper and deeper. We were running behind, screaming for the man to stop. The man was screaming, too. When Boo let go, he fell on the road. He got up with blood all over his face and shirt and on his elbows and knees from where he fell. He was laughing.'
'Fierce heart,' Rose says.
Miaow falls silent. Rafferty can see her struggling with the next words. Rose pulls a pack of cigarettes from her purse, looks at it, and drops it back in.
'Then some bigger boys showed him about yaa baa.' Yaa baa is a cheap, potent variant on amphetamine that is widely sold on the streets of Southeast Asia. 'Then he wasn't Boo anymore. People who smoke yaa baa don't want to eat, so he stopped helping us find food. He got mad all the time. If you smiled at him wrong, he got mad. He hit one of the girls so hard her nose broke. He was sorry later, but we were already afraid of him. One of the kids left, and then another one. After a while it was just me.
'He smoked it every morning. He smoked it all day. His hands shook. He screamed at people who didn't buy a garland. Drivers closed their windows when he came up to them, and he spit on the windows. The police got him, and I didn't see him for two weeks. When he came back from the monkey house, he took away the money I had made so he could buy yaa baa. I gave him the money when he asked, but he hit me anyway. Two days later he came again, and this time he cried and said he was sorry. He said he wasn't going to smoke anymore. The next time I saw him, he was so crazy he didn't know me.'
'He was how old then?' Rafferty asks.
'A year before I met you,' she says, working it out. 'I was about seven. He was maybe nine or ten.'
Rafferty blows out a breath he hadn't known he was holding. 'Miaow,' he says, 'yaa baa is cheap, but if he was smoking so much, he had to have money. Where did-'
She stops him by raising the hand with the T-shirt in it, sees it, and drops it into her lap. 'I'm telling you.' She squares her shoulders like someone who is about to pick up something heavy and sits forward.
'He joined a bunch of boys. They stole things. They smoked and ate pills and stole things. Maybe from a food vendor or even a beggar. Sometimes they beat people up. Ten or twelve boys, who would fight them? They were bigger than Boo, but he was smarter. So he had an idea. Those men-those men who want little boys. Before, they were around Soi 8, Soi 6, you know?'
'I know,' Rafferty says.
'So one of the boys would pretend he was going with the man and leave the door unlocked, and the others would all come into the room and hurt the man and take his money.' She looks from Rose to Rafferty. 'That was when they started to call him Superman. Then I stopped hearing about him.'
