His eyes open. “Good idea,” he says. “Two in English and two in Thai. All morning papers, and one of them should be the
The children who joined the boy in the alley have eaten their fill at a roadside soup stand, and the boy has given each of them a small amount of money for the needs of the following day. The little ones are already curled up on old blankets spread over the dirt floor close to the damp wooden walls, since they go to sleep earliest. The older kids take the middle of the room, with the biggest ones in front, near the door, next to lengths of two-by-four with nails driven through them at one end.
Just in case.
The boy steps outside into the misting rain, pushing the shack’s wooden door closed behind him. The mud, thick beneath his flip-flops, slopes down toward the edge of the river, which is low at this season. A cloud of mosquitoes orbit him, but he waves them off and makes his way up to the boulevard, where he flags down a motorcycle taxi.
There’s a one-in-three chance that he’s guessed right about where the village girl with the baby will end up. She came out of Wichat’s building, and Wichat maintains three holding pens, or at least three the boy knows about. There could be more.
But his luck is good. He is sheltered in a doorway when another moto-taxi bounces over the ruts and stops in front of the empty-looking building across the street. She is on the backseat, the baby at her chest and a white plastic bag dangling from her free hand. He retreats into the darkness as she climbs off and takes her first real look at her destination.
PARTWAY ACROSS THE stretch of mud, Da stops.
Six or seven steps distant, seen through the gaping doorway, the hall is ghost-dark. To Da’s heightened senses, the building teems with spirits. It is roofed but unfinished, surrounded by an expanse of mud behind a rusted chain-link fence. Pitting its surface are dark, empty windows that look to Da like missing teeth. Patches of plaster have peeled from the walls, exposing sagging layers of crude, handmade mud bricks. The place smells of piss and abandonment.
Da takes two more steps, peering into the hall that yawns in front of her. There is enough city light reflecting off the low clouds to dilute the blackness of the hall into a kind of darkness in suspension, like a glass of water into which a writing brush has been dipped repeatedly. A long pool of black rainwater has collected against the left wall. Dimly visible at the hall’s far end is a staircase.
The baby sleeps, heavy and loose-limbed, in her left arm, curled against her chest. The baby’s blanket stinks of ammonia. A heavy plastic shopping bag cuts into the fingers of her right hand. Behind her she can hear the mechanical heartbeat of the motorcycle taxi that brought her, as the driver waits to make sure she’s in the right place before he abandons her.
A thin wash of light dances on the ceiling of one of the rooms on the second floor. A candle. So someone
Then she hoists the baby higher, takes a deep breath, climbs three steps, and passes through the doorway.
Instantly something scuttles away from her along the opposite wall, the one to her left, creating a V-shaped wake in the water: a rat. Da doesn’t like rats, but she’s lived with them all her life. There are worse things than rats.
The only doors in the hall are on the left, but they are closed, and nothing could make Da step into the water. That leaves the stairs.
Da has climbed stairs more frightening than this one.
On the edge of her village in the northeast was the house where the woman died. It was the largest house in the village, with two stories above the ground, this in a town where most families shared a single wooden room.
The woman had lived alone. She was not born in the village, and she was not friendly. She moved through the streets without talking to the other women. She didn’t use the town shops. The shutters over her windows were kept closed.
So no one knocked on her door. And when she died, when Da was eleven, it was more than a week before the smell announced it, and two of the village men forced their way in and came out running, their hands over their noses and mouths.
In the year that followed, people gave the house a wide berth. One of the village grannies, a woman who had dreamed several winning lottery numbers, said she heard the sound of weeping coming from the house. No one else heard it, but no one else had dreamed winning lottery numbers either.
