When the monsoon begins to fall, pretty plinking on the tin top of our shack, doing a number on the drums of buckets upturned in the dirt, the three of us are outside putting up the last length of our rainwall. The wall is garbage mixed with sand, and it encircles our shack like a mother's arms. In our slum, the rain will wash unwary dwellers away in the night, lulled and sleepy-eyed into another life as something better suited to Bangkok's wet season, some khlong-swimming creature like a frog or a snake. Or something like us: strayboys. We learnt early how to survive—build high, build walls, or hold fast—and we mean to see our shack weather its first monsoon.
"Here it comes," Top says, clapping the sand off his hands. He leans his head back into the rain.
I move my stool under the shack's tin awning and light up a cigarette. Big is testing his new rain boots, but his fat puddles at his ankles and he has to roll the black rubber up his legs like stockings. Big's the only strayboy with enough gumption to get fat on what little we put away in the way of boiled rice and vegetables now that the mothers aren't cooking meat. They renounced chicken, pig, and all the other little animals that made little dying sounds when you snapped their necks for dinnertime.
“The rain won't breach these boots,” Big boasts.
Top leans on the screen door to stop the wind from whipping it. “That's too bad,” he says. “It might wash that shit smell off your feet.”
“These toes are cleaner than your teeth. Have a sniff.” Big holds his foot up to Top. “No?” He shrugs and returns to digging around in the garbage wall beside me.
My cigarette's caked in mud, so I stub it out on the gummy face of Big's left boot.
“That's money you're hole-punching,” Big says.
“You didn't buy them.”
“Didn't say it was my money.”
Big found the boots yesterday, bobbing in our khlong. Now that rain has juiced its waters back to chest depth, the khlong is murky enough to mask the riverbed rubbish. It's also heavy enough to truck treasure from upstream, where it feeds into a moneyed neighbourhood of sunny homes with sunny coloured rowboats bleeding their sky-blue into the water. Sometimes those upstream people paddle down to this end. They like to stare. Our shack stands beside the bush and bramble wall that hides the rest of the slum. It's right out of a TV soap, wooden slabs hitched to metal sheets—simple, but it catches their rich imaginations. Their stumped eyes make me want to bite them, a snake tearing into some pretty polly-bird come up from Australia for a holiday.
Big uproots an umbrella and spreads its torn hood. He walks into the rain watching his feet. Mud wells around him and the water soaks his wide head.
“There's a leak in the left one,” Big says, pointing.
Top pulls out his kuay for a piss. “Stand here and find out for sure.” He laughs and shoots into the mouth of a buried oil drum.
The bushes rustle. On instinct, I reach for a broom handle, but what barges through isn't a beast. It's two boys on monster bicycles in glossy red and blue, like soda cans shiny in the rain. Each bike has enough gears, springs and metal to match a war machine. My broom feels like a toothpick. Their tires gouge the slop as they slow.
One boy is white with yellow hair crisp and curled as jiewed eggs. The other's luk-kreung but too broad in the chest and arms to count as half of us, Thai, not even in the way of Big, who's barrelled around the middle.
“Hi,” the white one says in English.
Nothing but quiet pitter patter.
Here's your man, me, on his toe-points teetering about what to do with the broom. There's Top clutching his kuay like a piece of fruit. Big's umbrella wilts above his head. It's not their brawn or bikes that has our trio dumbstruck, peeking from afar, thinking, Really? It's the teaming of those tires on this turf; their clean clothes beside our broken abode. It's them against us. And what them says is: Hi. It's enough to give any strayboy pause.
The boys look curiously at Top, who finally puts his peanut away, and then with whirring wheels set off in the direction of monopoly-ville. The colours of their bicycles dissolve into the grey wash of rain.
In a slum the size of ours, some hundred mothers (we number fathers by their absence, and you can't count homes when the dividing walls are tumbledown), you would expect a healthy helping of sexy, suay daughters. And I mean slum suay, the so-ripe-she's-bruised kind that end up in the sex bars. So you can understand our outrage when we're only gifted one. Sarai. One for all the hungry looks. Where Sarai walks us strayboys plant ourselves in rows like street-side weeds, heads swinging with the passing leg traffic. Sarai's sixteen. This is the age, we've noticed, when girls attain enlightenment (impossible combinations of firm and soft, slim and rounded), only to begin the descent to dirt, recalled from the pink paradise to an afterlife as another mother among the collective.
“The heavens open up and—” Top says, throwing his arms out in the direction of Sarai. She's smoking a cigarette under the awning of Apah's shop. We mince in her direction, the three of us cooped under Big's broken umbrella.
“Hey,” Big says. We bunch in beside Sarai, water plip-plopping off our noses, and arrange our hair: plastered flat (Big), spiked in tufts like a rice field (Top), slick side parting (that's me). A second's jostling and we line up, me in the middle and Sarai beside Big. We peer sideways, trying to trace the contours of Sarai's curves through the soaked cotton shit.
“What is this, a peep show?” Sarai asks.
We lean back into line.
I find something to say: “We talked to two farang boys just now.”
She's surprised. “I didn't know you could speak English.”
“Mys name ids Modt,” I say in English.
“Whaas you name?” Top adds, trying to do Teacher Pea proud with his pronunciation.
Our English exhausted, Top and Big look at me.
“Well, we didn't talk to them for long,” I say. “They seemed scared of us.”
“They biked over by our shack,” Big says, nodding.
“The infamous Big-Top-Modt shack,” Sarai mocks. “So where did you set up the thing, anyway?”
Guarded glances between the three of us.
“Sworn to secrecy,” Big says.
Sarai snorts. Then she looks down, rubbing her arms. “Nice boots.”
We look at Big's boots. He rocks back onto his heels and puffs his cheeks modestly.
“I picked them myself,” Big says.
“They leak,” I say.
“What, you don't like nice clothing, Modt?” Sarai asks.
Top tries to tuck me behind him with two fingers on my arm.
“I think they're suay,” Top says. “About as suay as—”
“What do you think, Modt?” Sarai looks at me.
“Sure, they're suay. Nice,” I say.
“You must have good taste,” she says. “There's talk that you three are now earning money?”
Top takes his place at the end of the line. Big holds his breath and arches away, backward out of the path of Sarai's question.
“Maybe you'll pick out something for me one of these days?” Sarai glances down at her wet shirt.
“You mean clothes?” I ask. “Like a skirt?”
“I'd like a skirt.”
“Well, okay.”
“Big, is that an umbrella that you're not using?” Sarai asks.
Big sees the umbrella still in his hand. He gives it to her and she walks into the rain, leaving us stranded outside Apah's shop.
From inside, Apah yells, “You boys go somewhere else! You're scaring away the customers.”
“Old man, there are no customers in this monsoon!” Top says, but we take off our shoes and shirts, ball them in our hands, and run out.
“You didn't have the sense to find an umbrella?” Mother Anisa asks, seeing us in the doorway. “I just mopped the floor, so you wipe yourselves off before you come in. I don't want to see a spot of mud in here.”
We take turns slapping the slop from one another's legs.
“What's for dinner?” Big asks.
“Mother Pranee is cooking rice soup with jiewed eggs and cabbage,” Mother Anisa says.
“Same old shit,” Top mutters.
We slip our wet shirts into the basket outside the kitchen and go upstairs into the bedroom. There are twenty beds stacked like ladders under a roof awash with the sound of rain. The wood-board walls hum and the wind makes hushing sounds as it skulks in through the spaces. The other boys are already there. Their heads snap up from their circle in the corner. It's the collective's mothers that make them jittery, not us three. The boys are clustered around playing cards cut out from cardboard, a pile of cigarettes (strayboy wealth) in the middle. Gambling, like sex, drinking, and drugs, is banned in house. It can get you booted out the door, which, after being in this homey haven (minus the meatlessness), is not what any strayboy is looking for. For entry, half of us here paid a pretty price: past lives built on beatings, drugs, or jailed parents. It's not a brew we'll go back to willingly. The other half is made up of the sons of one or the other of the collective's mothers. With that half—the Fatherless, they've theatrically dubbed themselves—it's hard to say who is whose child because the mothers, of former Sarai-calibre beauty, are tight lipped about their histories. All we know is they once tried to rise above the slum, but have since come down.
“Got anything to gamble?” Op asks. Op's the unspoken leader, and not because he's older than all of us—seventeen—but because he's the unspoken son of Mother Gai, our household's head hen.
Top takes two bent cigarettes from his pocket and looks at me, but I shake my head. The boys return to the round, reaching over heads and hands to lay their cards.
“You were at your hideout, weren't you?” This is one of the Fatherless boys, barely ten. He's already out of the round. He bets cigarettes but doesn't smoke them. I've seen the small stash in a tin beside his mattress.
“We might've been,” I say. We sit down beyond the circle. Our wet shorts spread damp shadows on the floor.
“Whatever,” the boy says. “Your hideout's boring. What do you do there, anyway?”
“Some farangs let us ride their bicycles,” Top tells him.
“Whose bicycles?” he asks.
“Two farang boys from that neighbourhood up the khlong,” Top says.
“How come they let you?”
“What the fuck do you care? Their bikes are taller than you,” Top says.
“Even I took a turn, and I hate exercise,” Big says.
“I don't believe you,” the boy says. “What colour were they?”
“Red and blue,” Top says.
“Can I ride one too?”
The round ends and the other boys turn to us.
“What kind of bikes?”
“I say we go joy-ride through their neighbourhood.”
“How much you think we could sell one for?”
“What, a bike or a boy? It depends. How white are we talking? I know a buyer who pays a pretty rate for pearly white skin.”
“Liar, no you don't.”
Op cuts through the clamour: “The farangs are trouble, so don't bring their trouble here or you strayboys,”—Op says like he's not one of us—“will be out on the street before your next meal. You three, you're bound for trouble.”
Op is all about fortune telling. He deals out doom like we're toeing the rules to a game he invented. It's a lose-lose game. That's okay. We're familiar with those outcomes. We know what it is to lose everything and keep playing. There's some power in Op's prophesizing though. Eventually, we all prove him right. If not by a rule-breaking mishap, then simply by puttering along at the pace of life, gaining on the finish line: fifteen-years-old. That's the age, the mothers concluded back when they put up an ante on their futures and pooled their efforts into this house, that boys become men, and are man enough to make their own money. But Op has the biggest trump card of all: he won't ever leave the collective. His fifteenth passed him by. We didn't need to bring up the business about the unspoken son of Mother Gai. We all know who he is. In this house, Op's as permanent as boiled rice, as the mould clutching the corner tiles in the showers. Op's a fungus when it comes to fun. He's also what we have in the way of a father. I'll be fifteen in a month.
The mothers live downstairs where the walls are concrete, where it's cooler in the hot season and quieter in the rainy. We eat on two long tables off the kitchen. Tonight, Top, Big, and I are the centre of chitchat, stirring up the suppertime sup-sip like we haven't since that time Big fell into a khlong and crawled out with a moneyed man's wristwatch caught on his shoelaces. The others have heard about our recent wealth; now they want to help us spend it.
“You should loan the money out. My own Pa did that before some fucker decided they'd rather give him the knife than what they owed.”
“Where'd you steal it, anyway?”
“Some diamond-eared woman got off the wrong bus, probably, and they mugged her.”
“Thugs.”
“Shut up. Those fancy women don't ride buses. They don't even leave the house except at night.”
“You know that?”
“I do. It's in the skin. You think the sun has ever seen that skin? It's butter. Soft butter like Bpaa Tong puts on my rotis.”
“Those fancy women can butter my roti anytime.”
“Who asked you?”
“What are you three going to do with it—the money?”
“Get the hell out of here.”
“You could buy a street-food stall. ‘Pork noodles! Fish-ball noodles!' for the rest of your fucking life. Ha!”
“At least you'd never be hungry again.”
“And your kids would have long arms and legs and live forever. That's what noodles do to people. My grandma told me before she died. She died because she didn't eat enough noodles when she was a kid. She only ate rice, so she was fat and short.”
“But we only eat rice.”
“So?”
“Just shut up.”
The talks dries up. Nobody scours the pot for the last scoops of boiled rice, as we usually do. Mother Gai comes in to tell us that the mothers will wash the dishes tonight. We have a treat, she says, a visitor.
“The older boys might remember Pee Song, who left us nearly ten years ago,” Mother Gai says. “He's a police officer now, in our own district.” Pee Song steps through from the kitchen, bowing under the low beam and then straightening like a returning hero. That's how the mothers see him. We make our wais and bows because the mothers want to see that too. His grey-green uniform is tight around his stomach. He's tall for someone who grew up hungry.
Op goes to the front, but the other boys back away. It's fear, not respect, especially among those of us who haven't harboured here long. I arrived late, at twelve, and I'll tell you there isn't an honest job for a strayboy out there. We know the world this man polices, and we know that the police are the worst of it. I don't care that Pee Song spent a few upstanding years in this house; once you're bent, no ironing will shape you up. This one is crooked at his core. It takes a broken boy to spot a broken boy, and twelve years under my father's boot will break the best of boys. I'm not the best.
This happened the year I moved into the house. I found myself winning in a fight, frozen above the boy and raising the broken end of a glass bottle. For what? Cigarettes for Father. Not that I cared about his cravings, but you would be surprised what a cigarette could do for my chances of sleeping safely through the night. Stick one in his mouth and he deflated for the time it took him to torch that two inches of tobacco. I tried to keep him smoking forever. It was on a cigarette hunt that I got into the tussle with a boy. I'm not muscled by anyone's measure, but there I was with a bashed bottle to hand, and there he was beneath me, the raised cords of his neck beneath me. I tell myself I was beat, bloodied, berserk. Mostly, I didn't know what else to do. Plunk plunk, like strumming a guitar. His pretty pink spurted over my nails. I left him choking. Maybe he made it out. I don't know. I didn't know the boy. Maybe he disappeared into the khlongs with the rest of the city's debris.
Pee Song tells us what he does, and how he shares the money he makes with the mothers who once fended for him. The mothers expect a return on us. Why a house for boys? Because only pretty girls can earn money, and with all the farang men swooping in from the first world, there aren't many pretty girls left. And why strayboys? Because we make our own way.
Pee Song beckons me over afterwards and asks how old I am.
“Fourteen.”
“Almost out,” he says. “When you're out—when any of you are out,” he says, bringing in Big and Top with a wave, “and you need a job, come find me.”
“I don't want to be a policeman,” I tell him.
He laughs. “I didn't mean a job as a policeman. Understand?”
Big's neck wobbles as he nods.
“Yes. Understood,” Big and Top say.
Those two are proper strayboys like me, not Fatherless kids who grew up cushy. They're afraid of Pee Song.
“Modt?”
“I understand,” I say. But when I age out of the collective, I'm not taking up under Pee Song's wing no matter the pickings, the winnings, the boxes of cigarettes on offer. I'll choose where to lay my bets. Twelve years is enough time to know what type of work I don't want to go back to, not for a top spot on the food chain, not to be the big fish like Pee Song.
Pee Song draws us into a smaller huddle with his hands and I can smell the garlic and chilli in his teeth. “I hear you've already started a little business of your own.” He smiles at our surprise. “I like that. Men with initiative. We could use your type when the time comes.”
“It's not a business,” I say. “And it's not illegal.”
“Yes, of course. I understand the hush hush. I won't breathe a word of it, okay?” He kneads my neck with his fingers. “Just remember you've got your older brothers, like me, watching over you. And I always like to know what my little brothers are up to, that they're not straying from the path.”
Visits bring out the bravado. As we climb the stairs, it's the Fatherless boys who talk biggest.
“I'll own a whole building. My name across the side in bright fucking white.”
“Whoever makes a million first has to buy us a new house and we'll all live there.”
“I'm not living with you.”
“I'm living alone.”
Op the prophet keeps quiet through this.
One of the other fourteen-year-olds turns to me on the stairs. “Pee Song liked you, Modt. You can ask him for work after you age out.”
“I'm not asking him for anything,” I say.
“What, you too proud? Too busy playing with your farang friends? Where are your bikes, anyway. Show us the bikes.”
“We don't want the bikes,” Top says. He pulls his shirt off for bed. “We're making our own future.”
“If you're talking about that shack on the waterside, you're dreaming. It won't last the monsoon,” the boy says.
“It will,” Big says. “Right, Modt?”
“It will.”
“It's not a shack,” Big continues. “It's a business.”
“Three little businessmen. What do you know?” The boy climbs into bed. “Just three shits in a rain-washed khlong. You're better off with someone who can swim, like Pee Song.”
The boy from the next bunk turns to me. “I'll buy my own bikes someday. What do you want, Pee Modt? What will you buy?”
I lie back thinking of Sarai.
We have three crates full of glass soda bottles and five garbage bags of crushed plastic bottles—a week's worth of wealth from combing the khlong. Using a wheelbarrow we made from a plank and spare bicycle tires, we take the bottles to Apah's shop.
“How much?” I ask Apah.
He taps each bottle he counts, meandering back and forth up the rows.
“I told you, I counted them already,” I say.
“Weigh the plastic for me,” Apah says.
Big has already picked out a popsicle, but he's waiting for Apah to finish before he unwraps it.
“Good,” the old man says, and hands me the money. It's less than half of what he'll get for recycling them, I know, but it's enough for now.
“Where do you find them?” Apah asks. “None of the other boys bring back this much.”
“What does it matter?”
“Some people ask questions. Some people don't like it when boys make their own money,” he says.
“Tell them they can come ask me.”
In the week since Pee Song's well wishes, we've been warned twice now about our new trade. Two days ago Mother Anisa took me away from washing duty to tell me that I was a clever child, yes, smart from the start, but whatever my trio was up to, it was drawing bad attention, and she had heard. I told her it was legal.
We had started scouring the khlong a couple months ago when we found the empty plot behind the high bushes. At first we were looking for supplies to build the shack. Boards, beams, bits of metal—we took whatever washed up with the surf. But we didn't stop after the shack had taken shape. There was wealth below the sediment that blanketed the khlong. We strung a badminton net across the water and raked in the bottles that ran the bottom. Now we do this every morning, Top wading to the far side of the khlong to retie the net.
“Apah,” I say, glancing at Top and Big sucking their popsicles outside. “Can I see the clothes you have for sale?”
Apah points up at the t-shirts hanging on hooks from the ceiling.
“No, uh, the women's clothing.”
He shows me a wooden container brimming with plumes and pieces of neck- and hair-wear. Not much for clothing. I root around with my hand and come out with a short black skirt with a strip of silver stars stretching around the hem. It probably belonged to a little girl. Apah sells me the skirt for more than anyone's ever paid for it.
Sarai halts outside the shack. “This will stay standing?”
I open the door and follow her in. “We built it ourselves.”
“And that's a good thing? Where are your boys, anyway?” She strokes the wind chime we made with cut-up soda cans.
“Top went back to the house to change. A monitor lizard shat all over him when he tried to move it from a tree. Big went with him.” I light a cigarette.
“Could you sleep on this?” Sarai asks, bouncing on the wooden boards beneath us. “Bet you could dance on it.” She demonstrates, twisting, bowing at the waist. She steps up to me, places her fingertips across my lips, plucks the cigarette out and drops it. She leans into me.
“Careful! Don't burn us down.” I move around her to crush the cigarette. “We worked hard on this.”
“That's what I like about you,” Sarai says, walking her fingers playfully up my arm. “You're making money, but it's clean work. At least, you seem clean. But what do I know?” She looks down and brings her feet together. “I mean, look at the length of this skirt you bought me. You would think I was trying to seduce somebody.”
I had taken the skirt to Sarai at her house. She had me wait in the front room while she wriggled into it in the back. The door between the rooms dragged on the swollen floorboards. She didn't shut it completely, instead leaving a slice of light shining through, enough for me to see the fabric slide up the bell of her hips. She turned and looked at me before coming back through.
“We'll put in window shutters next.” I tap the empty frames. “And proper lighting for the night.”
Sarai sighs. “So, Mr Business. Why start this? Why not just put yourselves in Pee Song's pocket? No lizard shit there, I would think.”
“We'll make our own home. This one will be ours from the ground up.”
“Big boy in a small man's world. So,” she says, backing me into a wall this time, her lips on the line of my chin. Her fingers find my skin beneath the t-shirt, her thumb in the socket of my navel as she pushes down.
She handles the buckle of my pants with one hand, the other around my neck, pulling my mouth into her. Her clothes come off in what seems a single swoop from the floor up.
“Except this,” she says, flicking up the front trim of the skirt. “I like this.”
She straddles me, whispering, “You can touch me.”
But I don't know where. “I've never—”
“Oh.” Sarai stops. “You're just a boy after all, aren't you, Modt?” She reaches between her legs. “Ah, there.” But she lingers above me, close enough that I can feel the brush of the wet hair between her legs. Her expression is playful, as if she's waiting for me to move. She holds me down when I try to thrust upwards. Her grip belongs to a slum girl, a hand to keep the chicken's head on the block.
“I know what I can do for you,”—she lowers herself an inch—“but what can you do for me?” Her hips roll forward, slowly, then back. “What will you give for more of me?”
“Anything.”
“Give me a price, Modt,” she breathes, pushing down onto me. “How much am I worth?”
Three weeks into the season and our khlong has shed its banks. At night the water climbs against our rainwall, reclaiming the garbage. We spend the mornings fortifying the shack and waiting for the noontime ebb. Already one of the other khlongs that crosses our slum has taken two homes, three lives, and a baby. The baby was a boy. He would have grown up to be like us, but now he'll get a chance to be something else.
If I could have a guarantee of what I'd be reborn as, I'd consider it. I sit by the khlong and watch the birds. But when I asked the morning monks, as I offered up food, one of them told me that rebirth doesn't work that way, that I should learn to see beyond my immediate concerns. Obviously, the monks know nothing. They don't even earn their own food. They would have an answer if they slept hungry as often as we do, so I stopped offering alms. What I see is the earth between my toes. But the birds—it's all sky up there, and even they shit onto the ground.
At noon it's still raining. The khlong is heavy and its middle tow quickly swallows the sticks we throw in to test for speed.
“Can you swim it?” Big asks Top.
Top is ankle-deep in the water. He's naked except for the white underwear that's plastered against him. The end of the badminton net is tied around his flat stomach.
“Do I want to swim it?”
“Maybe if you start farther upstream,” I say.
“Maybe I won't drown, you mean?”
“We have to take risks if we want to get anywhere,” I tell him.
Top turns to me. “Yes, but who is taking the fucking risks?”
“We can tie you,” Big suggests, tugging a coil of rope free from the garbage wall. “We'll tie one end around you and the other end around something solid.” Big looks around. The only trees that haven't been cut up for walls and floorboards are saplings, and they bow under the burden of the rain. Our shack is about as solid as our garbage wall, and no stones or stakes will stay anchored in this mud, the monsoon having eroded the certainty of the ground.
“Big,” I say. “We'll tie it around Big. He's the sturdiest thing in the slum.”
“That's mean,” Big says.
“Big?” Top says, but I'm already circling the rope around the globe of Big's belly. I tie a knot and tighten it like a belt.
“Hey! Go easy.”
“You sure, Big?” Top says again. “We can wait a day. The khlong may be slower tomorrow.”
That's a day's earning away from what I'll buy Sarai next, a beautiful piece for her hair.
I say, “Just do it, before the water rises further.”
The khlong has crawled up within arm's reach of the rainwall by the time we're ready. Big stands dumbly with the cord extended from his belly button. Top's behind him, braced for a running start. I'm downstream from them, standing near the shack and across from the place where Top will swim to.
Top shivers. “I think I'm cold.”
“Just go,” I say. “The swim will warm you.”
“Ready, Big?” Top tugs again at the two ropes now laced around his stomach, looks at Big, and takes off running, his bare feet leaving empty pockets in the mud.
Top's body strikes the water and immediately shoots downstream. The ropes snap taut, jerking Big onto his face.
I yell at Top to come back, but his arms furiously work at the water, trying to move forwards. He's been carried past me, but he doesn't seem to know it. The current begins to twist Top so that the net spools around his body like he's spider's prey, caught and bound.
“Stop!” I run to Big who's down on his knees trying to anchor the rope as it drags him into the shallows. “Let it go! He's getting caught in it.”
Big blinks the mud from his eyes and releases the rope in his hands, but it's still tied around his waist and he falls sideways, winded, groaning as the knot burrows into his flesh.
“Hold it. Hold the rope while I untie it.” I dig my fingers into the bulge of Big's flesh. The knot is a clenched fist and I can't pry it apart.
I hear people coming through the bramble behind me, attracted by our shouts.
I look up. It's Pee Song and another policeman. My fingers are on Big's stomach. His swell stills as he holds his breath.
“He's drowning,” the other policeman observes.
Top writhes in the water. The netting is crossed around his face and I imagine him laid out wide-eyed on ice like a market fish, his pungent smell turning into something unknown, lacking the familiar reek of life.
“Help him,” I say.
Pee Song signals and the other man reels Top in with long pulls. Top is dragged into the shallows, garbage ensnared alongside him in the net. His body becomes another piece of the riverbank, adorned with punctured cans, plastic bags clinging to his skin. He chokes up water and breathes.
Pee Song squats beside Top and draws his knife. “Looks like this net belongs to a badminton court. I can't let you keep stolen goods.” Top sees the blade and curls into the mud, covering his ears with his hands. He coughs into his knees. Pee Song cuts away the net and holds it out for the current to take away.
“We didn't fucking steal it.” I try to grab the net but the other policeman pushes me back.
“Risky business you boys have. Whose idea was this?” Pee Song asks, the fang of his knife still bared.
“I told you, we didn't steal it. We're not doing anything illegal.”
“Have you studied the law?” Pee Song stands. “Do you know, for example, that all businesses have to pay a tax?”
“It's not a business,” Big mumbles.
“What?”
“It's not a business,” I say.
“Old Apah says you've made money. Sounds like a business to me,” Pee Song says. “It's been a month now. Or more? The police force is a public service, but we only offer protection to those who pay taxes.”
“I'm a strayboy. I make my own way.”
Pee Song laughs. “No, you don't.”
I look past Pee Song. “Top, get up,” I say.
Top climbs to his knees. Pee Song lays his hand on Top's shoulder, a fatherly gesture except for the knife that brushes Top's cheek. Carefully, as if he were laying a child into a cradle, Pee Song presses Top back into the mud.
“We don't have any money,” Big tells him. “We spent it all already.”
“Did you?”
Top groans as Pee Song presses him deeper into the earth. The mud rolls up around him, yielding to his body.
“Stop it.” I say. “We don't have the money.”
“Earn it back,” Pee Song says simply.
“You threw away our net. And it will take us weeks before we can collect enough to pay you.”
Pee Song releases Top and steps away. “There are other ways.” And although he doesn't say it, I know that the other strayboys have mentioned the bikes to Pee Song.
“You want me to steal.”
“Who's asking you to steal? I'm asking you to pay what you owe. Afterwards, we'll leave you to your business.”
Pee Song watches Big kneel to rub the mud out of Top's eyes.
“One little favour. Yes?” He turns to me for an answer.
There's no answer. We all know we'll never make it as far as the promise of Pee Song's business protection. If Pee Song and the police wanted money, they would have taken it already, as it was being earned. This isn't a tax, it's conscription. I'll tell you what will happen.
I'll go. The fences in that neighbourhood are easy climbing, kids' stuff. I know because we clambered on broken ones as boys. The bike will be behind the cars. An automatic bulb blinks on. No chains, no angry dogs. My scratching soles the only sound. I'll find the switch for the mechanised gate. It makes a click clapping noise as it unlocks, and the doors swing wide for me to wheel the bike out.
The police might take me right away. It's more likely, though, that they'll want me in the slum as a power play, a spectacle for the wealthy ones who don't understand that these police come from our turf, not theirs. So maybe I'll make it back to the shack. The monsoon will be falling heavy on the hard roof. I'll want to be out under the rain, watching as the khlong brushes aside our garbage dam and laps against the walls of our shack, forcing the boards apart, undoing our work.
The police will dawdle. They will have been drinking or drugging. They'll know I won't run. I'll be let off for the minor theft. For that small service, for the time not spent in a boys' prison, I'll owe Pee Song. A debt of time. Not a lot, but enough; enough that I'll belong to them if they need me. They'll find a need, because there's always work for another soldier on their stomping ground.
But before I finally hear the boots coming through the bramble, I'll take the bike and heave it into the rain swells, the thick monsoon khlong, hoping that some luckier boys downriver might someday haul out my red plunder and keep it for themselves.