The Lizard Cage (38 page)

He stops walking abruptly and uses the pause to light a cheroot. It’s his knee. If he’s not going to limp, he has to rest for a couple of minutes every now and then. Sein Yun’s caught sight of him; Handsome can tell by the way the palm-reader has stuck his nose out like a hungry rat. The jailer leans down and digs his thumb into the cramped muscles of his lower thigh. His whole leg aches. His knee is obviously connected to his brain, because when he thinks too much, it starts to burn. Yesterday, after the accountant jumped out the window, just before the warders on guard duty came into the office, the swollen joint buckled under his weight, and he would have fallen down if he hadn’t caught the edge of his desk. His wife says he should go to the doctor, but god only knows how much that will cost. She says, Go to the prison doctor, it’s free, but he wouldn’t let that quack touch him with a ten-foot pole.

The palm-reader talks to the guard now, gesturing in Handsome’s direction, getting permission. Good. It’s better if he comes over here anyway, away from the other men; no need for all of them to hear whatever he has to say. Sein Yun scurries around the outer edge of the garden. Along with the scent of shit-rich mud, the jailer smells Sein Yun’s excitement. He’s almost leaping over the brick chips, hitching his longyi tighter around his waist as if it’s a warrior’s belt. Fuck, he’s an ugly guy, grinning like a dark-lipped ghoul. Handsome pulls out his handkerchief again and wipes the last layer of work sweat from his upper lip and forehead. Then, stepping carefully into the torn brace of his knee, he walks toward the palm-reader.

F
ree El Salvador.” Between broken jaw and accent, the sound is
fee-a-sabado
.

The boy gives him a quizzical look. “What does that mean?”

“Those are the words on your shirt.” Teza points to the holey T-shirt, which the boy awkwardly pulls away from his body, trying to get a better look. Those straight and sticklike letters, with hardly a circle and not a single dot among them, look very unfamiliar.

“It’s a name. El Salvador. Not in Burmese but in English. And Spanish. It’s the name of another country, a small country far away, where …” Where what? Teza knows very little about El Salvador, except that it was something like Burma. The people wanted to run their own government, but the military wouldn’t let them, and so many innocent people were killed and imprisoned and disappeared. He read about it once in an old copy of
Time
. “The word at the beginning is
free
. Lut-latyeh. Because El Salvador was a prison country, like Burma, and her people wanted to be free. Because you wear that shirt, sometimes I think of that word as your name. Sabado, for short.” The obvious question strikes Teza. “What is your real name? What is the name your family gave to you?”

The boy rubs his nose to avoid the question. He has to go soon; he’s
already been here too long, as usual. He looks up again. The singer’s still staring at him. He’s seen eyes like that before, in the skulls of addicts and inmates transferred from the northern work camps, the ones who haven’t eaten enough for months. Those men are frightening too, like Teza.

But how can he be afraid of the Songbird? He squares his shoulders and looks at the thin, battered man. Why does Teza want to know his name, anyway?

Tan-see Tiger knows it, and Chit Naing, but the boy asked them please not to use it. He prefers his prison names—nyi lay, rat-killer, brat, the boy, kala-lay, any of the nicknames the men use for him. They are easier. They mean what the men want them to mean and nothing more. His real name is like his father’s tooth and his mother’s thanakha tin. He wants to keep it hidden. Safe.

How small the boy looks now, like a very young child, six or seven years old. Watching him wrestle with the question, Teza worries that he might do some shocking, normal-child thing, like burst into tears. “Never mind—Sabado’s as good a name as any, no? Sabado, don’t you want to go to school?”

The boy raises his eyebrows. “School?” How could he go to school? He’s not even sure what school looks like. It’s the same with women. This morning some of the convicts in Hall Two were talking about women, describing their bits. The men said that women don’t have cocks at all, but holes. Holes! Right between their legs. When the boy staunchly refused to believe this, the convicts laughed so hard they almost fell down. He looks inquisitively at Teza and lowers his voice. “Do women have cocks or holes?”

“What?”

“Do women have holes or cocks?” He doesn’t know why, but he’s sure the singer will tell him the truth.

Teza’s the one rubbing his nose now, thoughtfully, buying time. That the boy extracted this question from the word
school
proves he is a trapped and thwarted teenager. The singer carefully answers the question. “Holes.” Sometimes the truth sounds so crude. He tries to fix it. “Special holes.”

“Special?”

“Like your cock is special. All those hidden things we’ve got, you have
to take care of them. You protect them, they’re … special places. A woman takes care of her special place.”

“Her hole.”

That word again, so raw. Teza’s not prepared for this. “Yes, that’s right.”

“Why
don’t
women have cocks?”

Teza breathes a sigh of relief. He knows how to get out of this. “Because the woman is different from the man. She has the babies. They come out of the hole.”

“That’s why the woman is the mother!” This is the one thing the boy knows about women.

Teza nods again. “And the man is the father.” With luck, that will be the end of it. What if he asks about where babies come from? But he need not worry, because the boy suddenly sits down, heavily, on his side of the bars.

His voice is weighted with defeat. “I can’t go to school.”

“Why not?”

In a whisper, he admits it. “Because I don’t know how to read.” Each word is a scrap of sandpaper on his tongue.

Teza reaches his hand through the bars and touches the boy’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. That’s what school is for. I know a place where you can learn to read. And the people there will look after you.”

The boy tilts his head to the side and asks suspiciously, “What kind of a place?”

“It’s a monastery school. Run by an old man who was a friend of my father’s.”

“You have a father?”

“Everyone has a father. My father is dead, but … well, I still have him. And the Hsayadaw is like a father to all the children in his school.”

The boy gives the singer a doubtful look.

“Nyi Lay,” Teza leans toward him and whispers, “he would teach you how to read. I know he would. Do you know what reading is like?”

Though the boy has many thoughts on this topic, he shrugs his shoulders. He doesn’t like to talk about leaving the cage. He’s too hungry.

“It’s like flying. Reading a book can take you anywhere in the world.”

“Ko Teza?” This is the first time the boy has used his name.

“Yes?”

“I have to leave now or I’m going to get in trouble. But can I eat your rice soup before I go?”

“Of course. Go ahead.”

He watches the boy eat, his pace increasing as the gruel disappears. The spoon scrapes against the tray, a desperate crescendo. It is the sound, Teza thinks, of pure determination. The boy picks up the dirty tray and the two of them stand together.

“Tzey-zu-tin-ba-deh,” the boy thanks him politely.

“That’s all right.” It’s a gift, Little Brother, to feed a small, struggling country.

B
lack threads sew themselves along the cracks in the walls, on the ground at the edges of buildings. Twilight. To visit the nat tree before it gets too late, the boy has to hurry. He walks quickly, skirting the wall of the kitchen before slipping in to drop off the Songbird’s tray. He says hello to the dishwashers and tries to catch a glimpse of the cook. Not for more fish—he receives his payment in the morning only. He just wants to make sure the cook doesn’t see him go out to the stream. He’s not scared of the crocodiles between the high prison walls, or the ghosts, but it’s dark enough for Eggplant to be a worry.

With the cook nowhere in sight, the boy leaves the building through the back kitchen, anxious to visit the tree. He’ll be able to think there, about the Songbird and school and reading. He’ll say his prayers to the nat.

He takes off his slippers and tucks them in his sling bag, then steps into the stream. With a low clack and loud buzz of electricity, the rampart floodlights turn on, making the boy jump. He scoffs at himself—how silly, to be scared of the light. He starts walking again. Gravel gives way under his feet and his toes sink into the soft mud.

The big lizard is sleeping now. The rats rustle here and there through the shadowy grass, near the big wall. Weeks have passed since he’s gone
hunting with his stick, but the food from the singer’s parcel is finished now. He doesn’t like to think about it, but he’ll have to start killing rats again.

The water shushes and murmurs around his legs, pulling him on. The ghosts will come out soon enough, maybe even his father. His father was mean sometimes, not friendly like Chit Naing or the Songbird. But the boy is sure he would be kinder as a ghost than he was as a man. Sometimes he suspects Hpay Hpay can see him. That’s another reason that he likes to come to the stream and visit the nat tree. His father might be floating around here, drinking tea with the other dead men of the cage.

The branches of the tree are bigger in the floodlights. The tree’s shadow spreads across the prison wall like a black-limbed painting of itself. The boy steps out of the stream and shakes his wet feet.

The morning glories are tightly furled, so he can’t leave a flower tucked in the ribbons around the tree trunk. And he didn’t bring any rice to make an offering. But he kneels down.

No one can be upset with him if he puts his hands to his forehead like a Muslim, like a Buddhist too—even the Karen Christians do the same sort of thing. If everybody else can do it, why can’t he? He whispers to the tree, who has no ears but hears him through its green leaves. To the nat, who must be similar to the Buddha at the shrine, but smaller, small enough to live in the branches of the tree like an invisible monkey. The boy closes his eyes and asks for the word, the beginning word that will open up the books he wants to read. He makes a prayer for bathazaga, the spirit in language like the nat in the tree. He prays to learn the round alphabet of his mother tongue, of his mother.

And a ghost leaps, furious, onto his shoulder.

H
is scream is small, one piercing note. He yanks himself away from the claws at his neck. When the creature lets go, the boy flies through the air and falls heavily onto his side at the water’s edge. His fingers close on a missile of small rocks and silt as he looks up to take aim at his attacker.

But his hand drops back into the stream. It’s not a ghost. In the cross-angles of the floodlights, half of Jailer Handsome’s face is sharply lit, the other half is shadowed. The eye in the dark catches light like a broken window.

“You like swimming, do you?” He gives the boy a light kick in the upper thigh, not too hard, just enough to hurt him a little and push him into the water. “It’s still rainy season, you know—be careful not to catch a cold.” Handsome kicks again, harder this time, at the boy’s waist, so his body curls into itself. The jailer’s knee immediately begins to burn, but he kicks again, harder, just above the child’s belly but below his chest. The kick elicits the telltale snag of breath, the solar plexus in spasm. Funny, but logical: the coughing is quieter than the same sound in an adult man. The little shit is in the stream now, heaving.

The boy feels the cool water soak his shirt, stretch its fingers into his longyi, drenching the turquoise fabric. “Here, let me help you up.” Handsome extends a hand, but the boy scrambles to his feet, wheezing and shaking, trying to speak but unable; there’s not enough air to make the words.

Handsome takes a step toward him. The boy stumbles backward in the water. He glances over his shoulder, at the tree and its shadow on the prison wall. Then he looks to the big halls. The warders on guard duty must be watching. The nat of the tree must be watching. Why don’t they help him? “Leave me alone,” he manages in a weak voice.

“Oh, my, the rat-killer is frightened, is he?” Handsome laughs. Then hisses, “I don’t have to leave you alone. Got that? I can do whatever I want.”

The boy turns his head away from the jailer and spits a gob of phlegm over the narrow stream. Handsome leans forward and strikes, grunting with effort; the thunk of knuckles against the child’s cheekbone is surprisingly loud. The boy lands on his back again, this time in the heart of the stream, where the water is deep enough to cover him. He feels the pebbles pushing into his skin as his elbows sink into the soft silt. He lifts his head and chest out of the stream and cries out, trying to stand, but a pawlike hand thrusts him backward again. Opening his mouth to protest, he gulps water, then begins to cough.

Handsome feels a violent craving to
just get it over with
, to step into the stream and grab the child by the neck, hold his head underwater. The Chief Warden’s warning—
You have to learn to control yourself, Officer Nyunt Wai Oo
—doesn’t matter here; the stream is separate from the compound, and the guards won’t stop him. It’s the boy’s fault. The little rat-killer has been taunting him all this time. When Handsome steps like a
giant into the water, the physical relief is as palpable as orgasm. He plants his boots firmly in the mud on either side of the boy’s hips and bends forward, his arms reaching out, unstoppable. The ligament in his knee strains away from the bone, sears like a brand; the pain is excruciating but right, stoking his fury. He grabs
FREE EL SALVADOR
, cramming his fists with the threadbare cotton. He hoists the child up sharply, to get a better grip on him, then shoves him in the only direction possible, down, down, the inescapable trajectory of his life, the only choice.

Even the boy sees the inevitability in Handsome’s contorted face, a man drowning in his fury as he drowns a child in water, water in the ears, the eyes, the nose, the mouth. The man’s strength crashes against the boy’s thin, flailing legs, boxing arms all elbows. The breathless choking roars in his ears, fills his eyes with the pressure of his own blood. The roaring heaves and heaves out of him until there is no breath left for sound.