Criminals (5 page)

His son's legs, long sticks ending in buckets, the huge bright shoes they wore, that looked too heavy to lift. The ugly knot that a knee was when there was no fat: like the leg of her cadaver in Anatomy, with its petrified, scrotal skin. Her despair at the sight of those legs must have had something to do with her brothers. Years of boys, of running legs, Band-Aids, scabs, casts. That was it—more than John's wife, or his married daughter who went into a rage and stalked her, or the letter she got from his in-laws, a loyal old pair who did not believe any of it at first.

He had friends who tried to get him to change his mind; he had houses, cars, memberships. Years and years, like rings in a tree trunk, put into his work. She had the same things, really, and she
had her brothers, though when the oldest said, “It's not so bad, really, if you think of it as King Lear marrying Juliet,” she had to tell all four of them to back off. She had a mother-in-law who bragged about her and knitted her sweaters. She had a house; her signature was lying in an in-basket in the escrow office. And she had one more thing.

All of it had to be dismantled. To give birth to Tommy's child, Tommy who would no longer be her husband and would most certainly have to try to get the child away from her, kind as he was. Of course Tommy would do that, with everyone saying he should. It would make them
enemies
. Or worse, what if he did
not
try. If he gave up. Despaired. Let Amy and John take his child.

She didn't tell either one, the one who knew she was pregnant or the one who did not. She made the appointment. To the one who knew, she would say she had been worrying all along because she was spotting. She would say miscarriage.

“Certainly, come along this morning,” said the man in Zoology, with that beautiful unhurried politeness, so unlike her own “if you have time” and “it wouldn't have to be today.” “But make certain, before you pick up the skin, that the fellow is no longer associated with it.”

Snakes of all kinds, said the young man who lifted the skin out of her cardboard box with tweezers, were common in the newer housing plots that had been jungle not so long ago.

“Oh dear, yes,” he said. “It is a cobra we have here.”

An enlarged scale near the hinge of the mouth identified it. He showed her with a magnifying glass. Cobras had adapted to junk piles, dumpsters, dark shelves where amahs stored food under straw domes, crevices behind rice bins. Anywhere there were rodents. Did she know the Japanese couple in the
lorong
, who had surprised one in a linen closet where mice had been into a baby quilt?

If the snake showed itself she must call, and most certainly his department would send someone to capture it.

Panting in the heat, carrying the box under her arm and abandoning her effort to maintain the straight back of the Malay women,
she walked, reading the
Star
.
Skylab
. The satellite took up the whole front page. Satellite or space station. Crippled now. “Crippled American space station.”

A
s she entered the
lorong
the insects of midday were shrilling. The word
lorong
gave her a feeling of safety, just as his name, Woods, sometimes made her see a place where they were concealed together.

On the amah's terrace at the back she saw a dark shape. It was a dog, sprawled on the stone. It didn't move at her approach. Was it dead? She crouched. The dog's withdrawal was a mere shifting of the hide. The tongue lay on the flagstone, the lips were pulled tight by sores. A male. When she moved closer his eyes widened in powerless alarm, but he only tightened the muscle that drew his penis up against his belly.

When she brought a piece of chicken the tongue left the stone and drew the meat in sideways, while the eyes kept their forward gaze. It rolled the meat drily in its mouth. Thirst. Water. She brought water in a pan. When the dog didn't raise its head she dribbled a little onto the gray gums. The back of the tongue arched, the water ran across the stone. As if the dog had given up most of its reality, no smell rose from its body.

Dogs here were like endless rings of a telephone you could not answer. The first day one had trotted past her, a female, nude and measled, with dragging teats, not spending the energy of a sniff on the rinds and prawn shells in the drain. Wearing that beady female look of having something to do.

At a fruit wagon among the Chinese flower stalls, they were buying a pineapple with their host, Dr. Subra. The boy pared the knots from it with a few curving strokes of his long knife.

“Parasites and malnutrition,” Dr. Subra said to Amy, pointing to the dog. If he was a Hindu, it must matter to him. He could be Catholic, though, like her. Many Indians were. And about the suffering of animals, Amy thought, what is our position?

John said, “Dogs are the least of the problem.”

“Actually,” Dr. Subra said with his rueful smile, “this is the most prosperous country in this part of the world, next to Singapore.”

“Even at home these things worry Amy,” John said.

Dr. Subra said, “You have stray animals, is it? Where all the people like the dog, not as here, where some of course do not?”

“We have strays,” Amy began. “People abandon dogs. It's quite a problem, they have to be killed in droves.”

If you disparaged the United States, people here became uneasy for you and looked away. Amy knew that as well as John did. It didn't matter that all three papers carried the UPI article about the Chicago transient chewed by rats, and “Man Marries His Mother,” and “Schoolgirl Sniper,” and everybody read and enjoyed items like these about the United States every day.

Dr. Subra identified each fruit: the mangosteen, the spined rambutan hanging in red bunches, the famous durian. His pride was wonderful. She would know now to show visitors the apples and sweet onions at home, that was what they liked, not buildings. She would know to point out raccoon dens under garages. She liked the stories of fruit bats, not the stories of the Emergency. She liked to hear about the spells the
bomoh
called down on a dormitory to get rid of a demon, and the little forest-dwelling
toyol
, who stole handsome men from their beds and hid them. A husband such as hers, with that powerful hair—smiles all around, none of them had white hair—if the
toyol
took him, he would never be seen again.

A dog was unclean. Here a good Muslim would not touch a dog, and yet the Koran was kinder than the religion of St. Francis: all the animals would stand before God in the last judgment. Although perhaps this was not kind. Would they be judged for killing and eating each other?

After their hundred lashes, the Koran said, the adulterers must marry no one but other adulterers or each other.

It was John who had made the confession, not she. He had been waiting from the day he first saw her. The lengths to which he had
gone to drag her out of his mind! One day he looked up as she came down the ward, back from some disaster freckled and strong, her hair bleached white, and as he looked at her his angina started in.
It's no use
, he told himself.
Let her be. Leave her alone.

But then one day when he was lying on the hot sand in Mexico after his surgery—telling her this his face darkened as if he were holding his breath—he had come to a decision, suddenly, that he would, when he got back he would do this, he would simply go up to her and ask her if it had been his imagination, what he had seen in her eyes once years before.

Of course the real decision had been that he must live. Did she understand? He must live. He must.

There was a promise, that was all, in a restaurant. A terrible promise, chaste in the first days, that set everything in motion. Then things went so fast there was almost no time for adultery. Writs, stamped documents, licenses, immunizations, supplies. In one two-week period at the end, the visas arrived, he had his contract. She had a day to be stretched open, an hour to put her legs up and give up what she contained of the past. A day to rest, they had their chloroquine, they were ready to go, they were gone.

Next door the amah stopped sweeping the walk with her soft broom, turned her face up and scanned the sky. Amy looked, too.
Skylab
. But there was nothing against the white.

The Voice of America was going to give a precise latitude. Amy meant to get ready—at least put out napkins and make sure there was enough beer—but all she did was carry out a kitchen chair and drape a sheet up to the bush to create a patch of shade over the dog. The blue bee zoomed in as she dribbled water and offered shreds of chicken, went in to wash her hands, and came back out and did it again.

She watched the sky. She tried to decide whether they were saying “Indian Ocean” more frequently on the radio. Once, in the morning, they had said “South China Sea.” The waves of space the satellite was riding could be mapped, up to a point. Alaska would be best for the
burnup, or Australia, and probably what was best would happen, as it sometimes did with technology just when you were most bitterly accusing it.

When the news came on there was a loud snap and the electricity went off. The refrigerator chugged once, the ceiling fans drifted to a stop.
Skylab
. Had it fallen on a power line?

She went to check on the dog, which was lying in the same thrown-down position except that it had crossed its front paws. The blue bee zigzagged above it. “Get away,” she told it. “You little hyena! Get over there on your clothespin.”

They were talking about John. “He's not well, you know,” Amy said, flattening her bare feet against the tile to cool them and taking care to group her words in manageable phrases because she had had three beers in rapid succession. “Not for the pace they keep. They're so young, the doctors here.”

“Your age,” said Carruthers. Both men had leaned forward at the same time, though, with concern. But this was something triggered easily in men.

“And then—and then that monitor lizard back in there leaps out at night and scares him half to death.”

“Dear girl, that's not a monitor,” Barnes said with chuckle. “And it's a fixture around here, practically a pet.” She was not going to argue with Barnes because she had seen that he was sick. He was yellowish and thin, and newly, rapidly thin, to judge by the pleated skin on his yellow arms and the fit of his pants in the rear, hollow as windsocks, with gathers at the belt and no sign of a separation of buttocks.

Eleanor was chattering from the kitchen. “Oh dear, I do hope it wasn't bad news on the phone, just as the poor man goes off to save life and limb.” John had gone back to Accident & Emergency on the careening ambulance they sent into the lane to get him there in a hurry. “I'm just rinsing bottles in here, dear. I know our Lakshmi forgets and we've got ants. Shall I refill the treats? Oh! Charles, do tell Amy about Hari Raya! My goodness, the feast they laid out! I don't know quite how we managed to be in on the religious festivities!”

The infidel, Amy thought.

“I'd need a court language to describe it,” Barnes said tiredly.

Amy didn't answer, trailing her beer bottle against her neck.
Everything you say is in a court language. So shut up.
The electricity had been off so long there was no ice and the beer was only cool. She was starting her fourth. The others were on their second, at most. She didn't look up when Eleanor came in carrying the lone bowl, half full of the last of the chips.

The talk had gone slowly from the time they took off their shoes at the door and settled themselves under the ceiling fan. When the fans stopped the air was a medium they could not quite part with words. Then the phone rang with the staccato overseas ring, and John lunged from his chair. When he reappeared Amy saw his white lips frame the name of his son. The phone rang again and he stumbled back.

The second call was the emergency room. Already Amy could hear the siren in the
lorong
. She ran out as it wailed past the gate, missing their drive as it always did, so she could flag it down when it came back around.

Before it came to a stop John had one leg in. He called to her. “Nicky's in the ICU!” He leaned out the window as the little van spun gravel and lurched in a circle. “Messed up his potassium. They're calling back, get hold of me in the OR!”

An hour had passed. She sat staring at the men, Barnes and Carruthers. She let something flow in on the heat of the beer, some instinct. Maybe they could help her. Somehow it worked out that it was men she helped, men who helped her. Men and boys. But what did she want? Carruthers, who flirted doggedly with her as if youth were a shared hometown, winked at her legs and said, “Amy's got the right idea.” She had put on a short skirt, one she never wore here. She didn't care. It was so hot, and they were Westerners. She leaned forward and folded her hands around her crossed damp leg as if it might kick out at Carruthers. Legs are pets, she thought. The body is a pet. Stupidly doted on. Like the awful dog out in the back, blameless but unmentionable. Or not blameless. No. Not like the dog.