The Hot Countries (17 page)

 

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“Means the same to me that it probably does to you,” Rafferty says. “He wants to tell me he's behind both of these killings and that there's a third on his list.”

Arthit says, “I was thinking that, too, but then I wondered about the
three
, whether it might be an allusion to your family, the three people in—”

“I'm sure you're right. And you know what? He
wants
us to wonder. Because he's going to explain it. He's
burning
to explain it. This is just a topic for a speech. I know to the marrow of my bones that he wants me to obsess over it until he can take the stage again, and he's going to deliver that monologue if it kills him.”

Arthit folds the bag down, tight against the book's edge. “Let's hope it does,” he says.

18

The Stench of Men

All day long,
ever since the dream at Arthit's house woke her up, Treasure has been smelling men again.

For a few weeks after Dok and Chalee found her and brought her to the shelter and she discovered—to her surprise—that she could escape and didn't want to, she had stopped being aware of the smell, she had stopped
scenting
them around corners or on the things they'd touched. But now it's back.

The stench of men, the heaviness of their smell, the reek that always makes them seem even closer than they are. The throat-jamming smell that had filled her nostrils when her father dragged
her onto his knee and squeezed the pressure points on the sides of her
neck to force her to open her mouth so he could imitate her voice and make her seem to say the words he wanted to hear from her. The smell of his friends. The sharp, ammoniac smell she associated with Paul, or Varney, or whatever his name was.

It was a new dream. She was in a big room, a kind of room she'd seen only in magazines, enormous and empty and dim, with marble floors and dark pictures on the walls. She couldn't see what the pictures represented, because when she looked at them, the patterns on the canvas shifted around. The meaning would almost declare itself when she looked just past it—a face, a figure—but when she tried to make it out, the image was gone and in its place was a vertiginous smear of color.

There was some kind of music playing somewhere, maybe one of those old instruments that was almost a piano, the little ones that sound kind of tinny, that were on the covers of the classical CDs her father sometimes listened to. The music her father liked was old and jittery and fast, a lot of instruments all at once and no voices, with notes all over the place. When she liked it, which wasn't often, the notes from the tinny little piano were like handfuls of diamonds thrown into a sunny room, hard and bright and full of rainbows. When she didn't like it, the notes were needles of ice, drilling through the air almost too fast to see, driving themselves into her skin.

She didn't like these notes. They made her want to put up her hands to ward them off. She couldn't tell which of the room's doorways they were coming through. There was a big open doorway in the center of each of the three walls she could see, and the space on the other side of the doors was velvet black. She was in the center of the room with her back to the wall she couldn't see, as far from the doors as possible. She was certain that something was going to come through one of the doors.

And then she knew, all the way to her gut, that what she was afraid of was already here, in the room with her. She wanted—she needed—to turn her head and look behind her, but her neck was rigid as though her—her father was squeezing it, and then the music stopped; it didn't finish, it just
stopped
, and she heard a noise behind her, the scrape of something hard sliding over something hard. As she tried to force her head around, the room flickered and brightened for a second, growing lighter and then the light dying down, and she sensed movement above her and looked up—it took no effort to look up; her head slid up and down easily but refused to turn left or right—to see a large spider shadow on the ceiling. The spider immediately resolved itself into the shadow of a hand with the fingers outspread, curling and straightening, and then the shadow was obliterated in a flare of light, and she turned her entire body to see Paul lifting his arms toward her, opening them to
receive
her, his hands balls of flame.

Smoke enveloped her, but it didn't smell like smoke. It smelled like men. The smell got stronger and sharper, edged with whiskey, and she knew that it was her father, that her father was right behind her, in his chair, and that one step back, one step away from Paul's flaming hands, would put her in her father's lap. She felt his fingers on her bare thigh.

“You were really screaming,” Chalee says. “Even Mrs. Anna—”

“I still could smell him, after I woke up,” Treasure says. Her heart is slamming in her chest again, the way it had the previous night. “And when she came in, when Mrs. Anna came in, I could smell her
 . . .
her husband on her, like some of his smell had rubbed off.”

Treasure and Chalee sit close together on a bare canvas cot, but Dok has claimed a wooden box a few feet away, as though he knows this is really a girls' conversation and they might at any moment kick him out of the room. Chalee says, “You didn't seem afraid of him this morning.”

“I learned not to show it. My, my father
liked
it when I showed it.”

Dok says, “Can you smell
me
?”

Treasure shakes her head. “You just smell like Dok.”

“Yeah?” Dok says. He plucks his shirt to his nose and sniffs. “What do I smell like?”

“Like a friend, I guess.”

Dok ducks his head and blushes at the floor.

The three of them are crowded into the corner farthest from the stairs on the building's second floor, where the girls sleep. Like the first floor, it's big—it can accommodate thirty cots in rows of six, with a meter separating the head and foot of each pair and aisles between the rows wide enough for two girls to walk through
side by side. Like the first floor, it's dusty and hot and fragrant with mice.
Unlike
the first floor, it boasts faded curtains, actually old pillowcases, that hang limply over its windows, Boo's instinctive recognition of female modesty and the fact that there are men out there who want to see the things the girls in the shelter are modest about. Because of the curtains, the room is dim
except for the slashes of late-afternoon sunlight on the floor, light that has edged its way in through the gaps between the pillowcases.

Treasure can hear the buzz of the second floor's permanent population of flies. Other than the three of them, the room is empty except for one ragged new girl, eight or ten years old, dark-skinned and mosquito-bitten on her cheeks and forehead, who either sleeps or pretends to sleep on a cot halfway across the room.

“Can you smell all men?” Dok asks.

“Mostly. Some of them smell more. Young ones don't smell as much, or anyway not bad. Boo smells like a clean room.”

Chalee says, “I can smell the stuff he puts on his hair.”

“I smell through those things,” Treasure says. “Perfumes and stuff. I smell right through it, to the man.”

“What about Poke?” Chalee asks.

“Poke smells like
 . . .
” Treasure squints and wrinkles her nose. “I don't know. Linen? He smells a little like girls, like his wife and daughter.”

“Poke always looks so clean,” Dok says. “I'd like to look that clean.”

Chalee says, “
I
can't smell Mrs. Anna's husband.”

Treasure wraps some of her hair around an index finger and tugs. “He smells like leather.”

There's a long silence, broken by the girl on the cot, who sits up and says, “Leather?”

“Like a belt,” Treasure says. “Or a
 . . .
ummmm, a strap. A leather
 . . .
a leather strap.”

“I can't smell any of them, really,” Chalee says.

The girl on the cot says, “
Everybody
stinks,” and lies down again, her back to them.

Dok says to Treasure, “Are you really not going back with Mrs. Anna?”

Treasure closes her eyes and leans to the left, against Chalee's shoulder. Chalee smells to her like Mrs. Anna's soap. “I don't know.”

“I'm not,” Chalee says. “I wouldn't go back for anything.”

“Then I won't,” Treasure says. “I couldn't be there alone.”

“That's silly,” Chalee says. “They want
you
.”

Treasure takes her head off Chalee's shoulder. “I can't be in the house with him if you're not there, too. And I like it here. I guess.”

Dok says, “I don't.”

Treasure looks at him for a long moment. “Then why do you stay? Why not go back to
 . . .
to wherever you were before?”

Dok and Chalee exchange a look, and Chalee says, “It was no good.” Treasure starts to speak, but Chalee cuts her off. “I mean
really
no good.”

Dok says, “Men,” and then he's blinking fast and staring at the nearest curtained window as though he can see straight through it.

Between her teeth Treasure says, “I
hate
men.”

“Me, too,” says the mosquito-bitten girl on the cot. “Every one of them.”

“I like some men,” Dok says. “I like Poke and Boo and Father Bill.”

“I'd leave in a minute,” Treasure says, “if I knew someplace safe.”

To the girl on the cot, Dok says, “Where were
you
before you came here?”

“Street,” the girl says. “Don't go.”

“We've been,” Chalee says. To Treasure she says, “Mrs. Anna loves you.”

“Mrs. Anna doesn't even know me,” Treasure says. “She wants a child, and she'll settle for me. And I don't want a
 . . .
a father. Not now, not ever.”

The girl on the cot says to Treasure, “Someone wants you? Is that what you said?” Her voice is hoarse, as though she's been screaming.

“Yes,” Treasure says.

“Are they mean? Will they treat you badly?”

“Probably not.”

“Will the man bother you?”

Treasure is silent for a moment, looking up at the closed curtains. “Probably not.”

“Do they have a house? Would you have your own bed? Do they have enough to eat?”

“Yes.”

The girl says, “Then you're crazy.”

Treasure puts her hands together, palm to palm, and clasps them between her knees, leaning forward until she's bent almost double. As she straightens up, she says to Chalee, “
Will
you go back there with me? Please?”

“No,” Chalee says. She looks away. “I can't. They don't really like me.”

“Then that's it,” Treasure says. She swallows loudly. “We'll stay here.”

“But
 . . .
” Dok says, and falls silent.

“But what?” Chalee says.

“But what about that man, you know, the one who wants to take you?”

Treasure is pressing her hands together so tightly her fingers are white. “I think I have to run.”

In unison Dok and the girl on the cot say, “No.”

The afternoon is far enough along now so that the slants of light pushing between the curtains stretch almost all the way across the floor to make bright, inviting paths to nowhere. Treasure follows one of them with her eyes and says, “I won't go back.”

“The man,” Dok says again.

“They can't protect me from him,” Treasure says. “He'd kill them all—Mrs. Anna, Mrs. Anna's husband, that slow fat guy Poke hired. He could kill all of them in a minute. He could do it for fun.”

Dok says, in a whisper so the girl on the cot can't hear, “We have hiding places, near here. Even Boo doesn't know about them.”

Treasure says, mostly breath, “Show them to me.” Dok pops his lower lip out and rocks a little from side to side, considering. “Tonight,” he says. “When Boo's asleep. But just to look, not to stay.”

Chalee says, “But how are you going to tell Mrs. Anna?”

“I know how,” Treasure says, and she gets up. Chalee follows suit, and after a moment Dok gets off his box. The girl on the cot says,
“Pssshhhh,”
a sound of disgust.

As they go downstairs, the girl on the cot calls after them, “You're
all
crazy.”

Anna is writing on the whiteboard when a sort of tingling in the back of her neck tells her the energy in the room has changed. She turns to see Treasure come back in, followed by Dok and Chalee. All over the room, kids sit forward.

Treasure and Chalee are wearing old clothes as they file between the other kids' seats. Girls look at Chalee assessingly, and a couple of them put their heads together to whisper. In the lead, Treasure holds a neatly folded brown paper bag, and Anna knows what it contains. Treasure puts it carefully on Anna's desk, says, “Thank you. I hope you can get your money back,” and goes to her seat. Chalee has already sat down, without so much as a glance at Anna.

Dok is chewing on his lower lip, but when Anna looks at him, he stops and drops his gaze to the floor.

Anna's heart is pounding in her ears. She looks at Treasure, and when the girl won't meet her eyes, she turns back to the whiteboard, trying to read what she just wrote.