The Hot Countries (19 page)

22

Skritch-Skritch-Skritch

Treasure isn't aware
she's been asleep, but here's Dok, gently shaking her shoulder and whispering, “Shhhh.” She opens her eyes wide against the darkness of the big room. There's no moon, and the curtains absorb the city's ambient light. A mosquito whines near her ear. She bats it away as she passes her tongue over her teeth to clean them.

She can hear and smell the sleeping girls. They breathe deeply and evenly, the sound coming from all directions as though the room itself were breathing. The air is edged with sweat, dirty clothes, and unwashed hair.

But not men.

She rolls over and sits up, and the cot creaks. She'd been sleeping on her left, and her clothes there are damp and cool with perspiration.

Dok hands her something. Her shoes. He whispers, “Don't put them on,” and stands upright and begins to thread his way between the cots, heading toward the pale spill of light from the single fluorescent tube that hangs halfway down the stairs to the boy's level. She watches his silhouette, slender, straight-backed, narrow-hipped. Even at his age, he's obviously male. Still, whatever he'll be later, for now he's just Dok.

She's halfway across the room when someone seizes her wrist. She stifles a yelp and looks down at the new girl, the one with the dark skin and the mosquito bites. “Where are you going?” It's a hiss.

“Just out. We'll be back.”

A girl nearby murmurs a protest in her sleep.

“Are you running away?”

“No.”

“Are you going someplace better? I want to know. Tell me, or I'll shout.”

She shakes her arm. “We're going to look for something to sell.” That's what Dok and Chalee were doing when they found her. “Dumpsters.”

The girl says, “I want half.”

“Fine,” Treasure says. She reaches down and pries the girl's fingers from her wrist.

“If you know someplace better,” the girl says, “please take me with you.”

“We're just going out for a while.”

“If you don't come back, I'll tell.”

Treasure brushes aside the reaching hand. “We'll be back.” Dok waits at the top of the stairs, his body straining in impatience. Treasure walks toward him on the balls of her feet, the way she walked when she didn't want her father to hear her. She's good at this. Seeing her coming, Dok goes silently down the stairs.

Chalee waits below, stifling a yawn and holding a long-handled broom, a riot of ragged bristles at the bottom. She's wearing a sweatshirt with a hood and her old torn jeans. She waves Treasure to the side of the double door, locked only with a metal bar—hooked on one end—that runs through the two handles. “I looked out the windows,” she says. Instinctively she glances at the opening to Boo's office even though it's dark now, since he's sleeping on the third floor with his girlfriend, Da, and the baby she was given as a prop when she was put on the sidewalk to beg. “I didn't see anyone.”

“I'll go out first,” Dok says. “Wait here. And don't lock the door.” Chalee hands him the broom. He shoulders it like a rifle, pulls the heavy bar free, and passes it to Chalee. Then he takes a deep breath and strolls out as if there's nothing at all on his mind. He pushes the door closed from the outside, and Chalee eases it the rest of the way, the bar dangling from her hand.

Treasure goes to the window, standing a few feet back so her pale face won't emerge from the darkness for the benefit of anyone who might be watching, and waits for Dok to come into view. She says, hearing the tension in her voice, “Maybe we should have gone back to Mrs. Anna's.”

“You can go,” Chalee says. “I wouldn't blame you.”

“I can't.”

“Well,” Chalee says, with a little flicker of anger in her voice, “that's not my fault. I can't be someplace they don't want me.”

“They didn't have enough time to get to know you,” Treasure says. “In a few days—”

“Never. And anyway, you don't really want to be there.”

Treasure studies the floor at her feet. Then she says, “I'm—”

“You're afraid of him. Mrs. Anna's husband,” Chalee says.

Treasure rubs at the skin on her upper arms. “I'm afraid of all of them.”

“Not Boo.”

“No, but Boo is
 . . .
Boo is just a big boy.” Treasure shifts to her right, looking out the window at an angle. “I
still
don't see him.”

“If he doesn't want you to see him, you won't—”

“But there's only one way out of here, right? We're at the end of the alley, so he'd have to be right out there. What if somebody—” She can feel her voice rising, and she bites it off.

“There's nothing to worry about. He's okay.”

“Maybe we should go upstairs,” Treasure says. She feels the sting of Chalee's gaze and says, “We could see better from up there.”

“Go where you want,” Chalee says. “I'm staying where Dok thinks I am.”

“It's just that—” She's suddenly shuddering, shivering to the center of her bones. “He should be out there, and he's
 . . .
he's not. What if
 . . .
I mean, what if—”

Chalee's arm goes around her shoulder. “He's fine, he's fine,” she says. She hugs Treasure closer. “Come on, stop shaking. You're all right, we're all fine. He just wants to make sure we can get out of here without Poke's guy seeing us.” She draws Treasure aside and looks through the window. “We'll see him any minute.”

Treasure leans against Chalee, still shivering, and then a dark shape crosses the window, moving fast, and she gasps. Instantly Chalee clamps her free hand over Treasure's mouth. The door opens a few inches, and Dok peers in. He registers the picture in front of him—Treasure rigid and wide-eyed, Chalee behind her with the arm holding the bar wrapped around Treasure's neck and her other hand pressed over her mouth—and he frowns a question. Chalee loosens her hold on Treasure, who steps aside, looking out the window. Dok can hear her breathing, like someone who's just broken the surface after too long underwater.

“It's okay,” he whispers. His eyes go beyond them to the sleeping boys, finding the two who are awake and watching, up on one elbow. “We'll be back,” he whispers to them and then, to Chalee and Treasure, “Let's go.” He ducks back outside, and a second later his arm snakes back in to catch the door and hold it open. Chalee hooks a finger in Treasure's sleeve, pulling her along. The sudden yank pulls Treasure off balance and nearly dislodges the stiff object, tightly wrapped in a napkin stolen from Anna's house, that's tucked into Treasure's waistband and covered by her shirt. She slaps a hand over it to hold it in place. A moment later she's outside, surrounded by the relative coolness of the night.

It's drizzled recently. Through a ragged hole in the cloud cover, part of the moon's face shines down, making the filthy concrete of the alley gleam like silver, momentarily redeemed by the wet night. Dok is already waiting at the bottom of the steps, shifting nervously from foot to foot and scanning the alley as Treasure, behind Chalee's back, secures the stiff, napkin-wrapped bundle tucked into her waistband and comes down to stand beside Chalee, who's still holding the iron bar that was used to lock the door.

The shelter is a few blocks uphill from the Chao Phraya. Treasure can smell the river and the port, a mixture of diesel fuel and mud, and she can almost hear the water's whisper as it glides by below. The building where they sleep blocks the end of an elbow-shaped alley between dark warehouses. Twenty meters from their front door, the alley takes a forty-five-degree right turn and eventually ends in a narrow, badly paved street. Looking up at the fast-moving clouds, framed by the flat black roofs of the warehouses, Treasure feels a disorienting sense of motion. The tattered hole that briefly bared the moon's gaze moves on, dulling the sheen on the concrete and plunging the night into a thicker, oilier darkness. Dok says, “We're going to show you a way out that most people don't know about, and a place to hide. This way.”

She thinks he'll go forward, toward the point where the alley bends down toward the street, but instead he turns to his right, Chalee trotting along behind him. Treasure says, “Where are
 . . .
?”
but Chalee loosens a sharp-edged
“Shhhh.”

“This is a little scary,” Dok says, not whispering but keeping his voice low. “Treasure, you get in the middle and hold on to my shirt. Chalee, okay if you go last?”

“I've done it before,” Chalee says.

Dok says, “Are you all right, Treasure? Do you want to go back inside?”

“No.” Over his shoulder she's located a narrow crack of absolute darkness between the edge of the shelter and the warehouse next door, barely wide enough for one adult to pass through. Dok, apparently thinking she's staring at the broom on his shoulder, hoists it and says, “For rats.” He sweeps vigorously, back and forth in front of his feet.

“Dok is afraid of rats,” Chalee says.

“This will clear the way,” Dok says, licking his lips nervously, and something warms inside Treasure. He's braving a thing that terrifies him, and he's doing it for her sake.

“Me, too,” she says. “You keep them away from us.”

“Right,” Dok says with a downward glance at the broom's broken, uneven bristles. “Right.” He turns and walks to the black mouth of the alley, moving like he's climbing a hill. Chalee follows him, and Treasure hurries past her and takes hold of the back of Dok's shirt. A moment later she feels the weight of Chalee's hand gripping her own shirt.

“Swipe it up in the air every few steps,” Chalee says. “Spiders.”

“I'm not afraid of spiders,” Treasure says. “There were big spiders in the hedge where I hid from my, my father. If I stayed in there overnight, they made webs to keep him away from me.”

Chalee says to Dok, “Sweep anyway.”

Dok pauses at the last step before the alley. Over his shoulder Treasure can see a dim rectangle, just bright enough to be visible. It seems to be an immeasurable distance away. “How far is that?” Treasure asks.

“Maybe fifteen meters.” Dok takes a deep breath and squares his shoulders. “Maybe twenty.” Treasure hears the scrabble of the broom's bristles over concrete, and he leads them in.

The darkness presses in so closely that her ears pop. Her shoulders continually brush one rough wall or the other, and she fights down the panic that's been crouching low in her gut ever since the moment, in Boo's office, when Rafferty confirmed the shape of Paul's tattoo. It had been a huge somersault: since she'd gotten to the shelter, she'd felt that she had finally passed through some kind of doorway to a refuge, gasping in relief, only to learn that the door hadn't closed behind her. Paul is
out there
, and if he wants her, he'll get her. No one can stop him. She shivers again, and behind her, Chalee tucks the bar under one arm and uses her free hand to smooth Treasure's shoulder.

Chalee
, she thinks, and the knot in her gut loosens a little. She focuses on the patch of almost-light at the end of the alley and the
skritch-skritch-skritch
of Dok's broom. Afraid of rats, she thinks, and Dok's leading her through this rat paradise. Dok and Chalee. Every now and then Dok grunts softly, and she thinks,
Rat
, but nothing scuttles back toward her or runs over or between her feet. What she has now, all she has in the world at this moment, is the patch of light, the
skritch
of Dok's broom, his rough T-shirt rubbing between her fingers, and the sharp but not-unpleasant smell of his sweat. Boy sweat, not man sweat. And Chalee hanging on to her from behind.

Chalee whispers, “Almost there.”

“I'm fine,” Treasure says, and is surprised to find that it's nearly true. Sandwiched between her
 . . .
her
friends
, with walls practically touching her shoulders on both sides, with that dim patch at the end growing closer, with no silhouette making a man-shaped hole in the light, she feels almost safe, at least for the moment.
Running away
, she thinks suddenly, seeing herself living on the streets and in the odd corners of this enormous city, maybe even other cities, with friends who know how to survive. It would be something like freedom.

If she ran with Dok and Chalee, if they'd go with her, if she could find some way to get her hands on some of the money her father had left behind, they could hide forever. They could move from town to town, finding other kids to be with, always having enough baht for a meal or even a taxi and maybe some nice clothes once in a while. They might even ride a train. The three of them, kids with a little money and Dok and Chalee's maps of places to hide.

A little cold-water room somewhere tucked away in nowhere, a place no one would think to look for her, with a curtained shower in the corner and a door that locks. Maybe other kids in the building they could go places with, they could—she hesitates at even thinking the word—they could
play
with. “I never have,” she says, and then she realizes she's speaking out loud.