Well, there’s no way she can put the old one back on him. She folds it and drops it into the hole, then cleans him up with paper from the roll beside the hole and totes him back outside with his bottom bare to the breeze. When she comes around the corner, Boo sees Peep and grins. It is the first time she has seen him smile. She feels herself smile back at him, and her heart lifts. Just for a moment, she isn’t worried about anything.
“Cute butt,” Boo says.
“It works, too. I have to get some diapers and a couple of towels and some of those little packets of wet tissues, and-”
“Relax,” he says. “There’s a Foodland a few blocks that way.”
“Open this early?”
“Foodland is like Bangkok,” Boo says. “It never closes.” They are climbing the path, Boo first and Da following. The day opens around them as they get higher, the river flowing below and buildings rising ahead. The mud has a fetid smell, but as they approach the top of the bank, it gives way to the stench of exhaust. Da prefers the smell of the mud. Boo looks back over his shoulder at her. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen. What about you?”
“Fourteen. Or maybe fifteen. There was kind of a disagreement about when I was born.”
“Who disagreed?”
He glances across the road and raises his eyebrows to indicate a lane that runs off it, away from the river. “My sister and my brother.”
They cross the road and enter the lane, lined on both sides with old-style Bangkok buildings, shopfronts at street level with one or two stories rising above them. “Where are they now? Where are your parents?”
Boo says, “Gone,” in a tone that does not encourage further discussion. “Up here about half a block,” he says. “The woman makes good noodles.”
“How do the kids eat?”
He stops and waits until she is beside him, and the two walk on together. “We work with some cops,” he says. “I go to the places where the guys go who are looking for children, and I talk to them, I tell them I have what they want. Then I take them to look at the kids-the ones you saw asleep in there-and they pick out the ones they want. We get a room at a sex hotel and deliver the kids. Two minutes later the cops bang on the door.”
Da can hardly believe it. “And the men go to jail?”
“No. The cops are crooked. They take all the guy’s money and drag him to an ATM to get more, and then they tell him if he doesn’t leave Thailand the next day, they’ll lock him up forever. They pay me, maybe thirty, forty dollars, depending on how much the man had. Sometimes more. They keep most of it.”
“The man doesn’t get arrested?”
“No, but he’s out of Thailand. And the kids can eat.”
They walk as Da considers it. There’s not much traffic yet, and the lane is almost peaceful. “Who thought of it?”
“I did.”
“How did you find the cops?”
He gives her a quick glance. “You mean crooked ones?”
“Yes.”
He laughs. “What’s hard is to find straight ones.”
Small bright plastic chairs, red and blue, are drawn up on the sidewalk, flanking a sloping table covered in a burnt-orange oilcloth. A frilly, smooth-trunked tree provides shade. Over a charcoal fire burning in a black metal drum at the curb, a wok smokes and sputters, and four people are already slurping out of faded plastic bowls. The smell of the food makes Da realize she’s starving, and that Peep must be, too. “I’ve got to get something for Peep,” she says.
“After you eat. One thing you learn on the street is to take care of yourself first. You’re no good to anyone unless you’re strong.” He waves at the woman beside the fire, broad and brown and sturdy, who gives him a bright good-morning smile and starts throwing things into the wok without asking what he wants.
“Your girlfriend?” she shouts, stirring in some chopped garlic and a handful of cilantro.
Da is surprised to see Boo blush.
“Look how shy,” the woman says, laughing. She pours liquid down the sides of the wok, and fragrant steam billows up as the others at the table, three men and a woman, laugh, too. “Such a handsome boy, if he’d only get his hair cut. Honey,” she says to Da, “cut it while he’s asleep if you have to.”
“I just need to comb it,” Boo says. His face is scarlet.
“You couldn’t comb it with a tractor,” the woman says. This time Da laughs with everyone else, and after a moment Boo smiles, too.
“I have very fresh chicken this morning,” the woman says. “An hour ago it was a customer.”
“Two of everything,” Boo says. “Except jokes.”
“You should always start the day laughing.” The woman is throwing things into the wok with both hands. “If you don’t, you’ll end it crying, my mama used to say.” She looks at Da again and says, “Isn’t she pretty?”
There’s unanimous agreement among the customers, and it’s Da’s turn to blush.
Da sits there, in the shade, smelling the food, watching the woman’s sure, quick hands and listening to the flow of chatter and laughter, and suddenly the entire scene blurs and ripples, and she is surprised to realize that she has to wipe her eyes.
“Don’t cry, honey,” the woman calls out. “He’s not
