Tua and the Elephant (6 page)

He kissed the medallion and tucked it back under his shirt.

Tua rolled over on her back in the hammock, rubbed her eyes, and stretched out her arms. When she saw Pohn-Pohn standing beside her, she squealed with delight.

“Pohn-Pohn! You’re not a dream!”

Jolted awake, Pohn-Pohn reached her trunk into the hammock as if to hit the snooze alarm and catch five more minutes of sleep.

Tua gathered the trunk in both hands, hugged it to her cheek, and slid to the ground.

Pohn-Pohn blinked her eyes and flapped her ears.

“Look at you,” Tua said, petting the rough and wrinkled skin on Pohn-Pohn’s shoulder and ribs. “You’re so beautiful.”

Pohn-Pohn acknowledged the compliment with a nod.

“Oh no, Pohn-Pohn,” Tua exclaimed suddenly when she saw, in the morning light, a scar worn around Pohn-Pohn’s foot from the heavy chain she’d been forced to wear. Tua knelt down beside the leg and gently caressed the foot. “Does it hurt?”

It had been so long since Pohn-Pohn had been shown any tenderness that her first reaction was to recoil from the approaching hand. She had only known work, brutality, and neglect since she’d been ripped from her mother’s side. But Tua’s touch recalled her mother’s loving caresses. She closed her eyes and allowed Tua to stroke her injured foot.

“I’ll never let anyone hurt you again, Pohn-Pohn,” Tua whispered. “I promise.”

Pohn-Pohn opened her eyes, reached back her trunk, and gently laid it on Tua’s shoulder.

“Hey.” Tua’s face brightened. “What do you want for breakfast? It’s the most important meal of the day, although I like lunch and dinner just as much.”

Pohn-Pohn might have said that mangos make an excellent breakfast, had Tua given her the chance. But it was Tua’s habit to spring out of bed in the morning, race into her mother’s bedroom, dive into the bed, shake her mother awake, and tell her about the dreams she’d had the night before. Mothers are more tolerant of habits like this than elephants are—especially hungry elephants. As Tua began recounting her last dream, and the one she best remembered, Pohn-Pohn turned her about with her trunk and steered her to the back of the house.

“After that,” Tua continued narrating over her shoulder, “a big door opened in the floor, and you’ll never guess what was down there …”

When Auntie Orchid entered the kitchen several minutes later, she found Tua sitting in the doorway, feeding mangos to an elephant on her back porch. She lifted the sunglasses she was wearing,
squeezed her eyes together, and waited for her vision to adjust to the light.

“Good morning, Auntie,” Tua said. “Pohn-Pohn really loves mangos.”

At the mention of Pohn-Pohn’s name, Auntie Orchid remembered how she had lobbied for a different name altogether, a queen’s name, but had settled on the one Pohn (instead of two) as a generous compromise. She began to deliver an appeal to Tua to please stop employing the superfluous Pohn when using Pohn’s name … when her memory was miraculously restored to her. Everything from the previous evening came back in an extravaganza of Olympian proportions, with herself cast in the role of the gold medal winner.

“Good morning, my darlings,” she cooed, as if consoling the runners-up.

Feeding so many mangos to Pohn-Pohn had put Tua in the mood for mangos herself. But Tua didn’t toss whole mangos into her mouth; chew them up,
peelings and all; and spit out the seeds like Pohn-Pohn did. She preferred her mangos served with sticky rice and topped with coconut cream. Tua loved sticky rice and mango as much as she loved banana rotis with chocolate sauce and condensed milk.

When Pohn-Pohn had had her fill of mangos (which coincided with her eating the last mango in the box), Tua brought up the topic of sticky rice and mango with Auntie Orchid.

“Auntie,” Tua mewed, “do you like sticky rice and mango?”

“Do I like it? I
love
it,” Auntie Orchid confessed, inspecting her figure in the full-length mirror on the wall.

So it was decided that Tua should fetch two orders of sticky rice and mango from the day market at the end of the
soi.

But that wasn’t all she found at the day market.

“We’re looking for a little girl,” Nak told the omelet vendor after making a quick inspection of the market. “We’ll have two
pad Thai
omelets with chili sauce.”

“Good morning, gentlemen,” replied the vendor. “A little girl, did you say? Little girls come in many shapes, sizes, and colors. Tall, short, fat, thin; brown, pink, white, yellow, and black.” He tucked the noodles into their eggy blankets, scooped them onto paper plates, sprinkled ground peanuts on top, and passed them over the cart. “That’ll be thirty
baht,
” he said.

Nak paid the vendor while Nang fell on his omelet like a praying mantis.

“This little girl is rather … short,” Nak said.

“And she might be traveling in the company of a—”

“Relative,” Nak finished the sentence.

“That would be our Tua. Small for a girl of ten, she is, but as smart as a watch. Stays with her auntie on soi four sometimes, Lady Orchid the actress. Now, I don’t know if you gentlemen are patrons of the performing arts or not, but that’s one show you really don’t want to miss while you’re in Chiang—Hey, where are you going? What about your
change
?”

Both mahouts had just turned away from the vendor’s cart when Nang, who had been casting his eyes about for something more to eat, saw a small girl enter the market and elbowed Nak.

“Is that your street urchin?”

Nak turned in response to the elbow rather than the question (elbows speak louder than words), and
was about to deal Nang a blow he wouldn’t soon forget, when his gaze fell upon Tua.

Tua met his gaze and froze in midstep like a chameleon.

Nak recoiled like a cobra ready to strike, pointed a bony finger across the market, and roared:

“STOP … THAT … THIEF!”

All eyes swung from the source of the roar … to the pointing finger … to Tua … to the source of the roar again. But none of the pairs of eyes knew quite how to respond. They couldn’t see a thief anywhere near where Tua was standing, so they froze as if waiting for someone to hit the “play” button on the remote control.

Tua took a tentative step backward … then another … and one more. The third backward step unloosed Nak like an arrow, and Tua dove into a pile of cabbages.

Vaulting over sacks of rice and stacks of plastic buckets, with Nang stumbling in his wake, Nak overturned tables and chairs, pots and pans,
curry bowls and flower carts, until he reached the produce section and stood panting over the pile of cabbages. He plunged his fist into the mound, plucked out a cabbage head, tossed it over his shoulder, and began digging at the pile like a dog.

Tua was clawing her way to the back of the pile when a pythonlike grip encircled her leg. Suddenly she was dangling upside down and staring into the right-side-up face of the mahout.

“Gotcha.” Nak bared his teeth and snarled.

“Put her down, you filthy brute!” cried a voice.

Nak turned to identify the speaker, a stout woman with a withering scowl and a shimmering gold tooth.

“This doesn’t concern you,” he snorted, shaking off the distraction. Tua wriggled in his grasp like a fish, and he had to resist an urge to smack her with a hard, blunt instrument. There were too many witnesses.

“Yes it does,” said the woman. “Those are my cabbages.”

“I have no interest in your cabbages. This delinquent stole my property.” And he held Tua up closer to his face as if to make a positive identification.

Taking advantage of the moment, Tua reached out and gave Nak’s nose a twist.

“Ai-yee!” he yelped, and released his grip.

Tua dropped onto the pile of cabbages and, rolling to the ground, squeezed through the legs of the gathering crowd and sprinted down the soi to Auntie Orchid’s house. She had to get Pohn-Pohn out of there and be quick about it.

Just as Tua disappeared, a policeman began pushing his way through the crowd. “What’s the rumpus? Can’t a man eat in peace?” He pulled his cap down around his ears and plucked a napkin off his chest. “Make way,” he ordered. “Step aside.”

“The very man I was hoping to see,” Nak smirked at the crowd. “Constable, this mob has aided and abetted a dangerous criminal. She’s short, has a vicious temper, and went thataway. Approach with caution—she probably hasn’t been vaccinated.”

“What sort of crime?” The officer picked his teeth.

“The blackest crimes of all, sir. Theft of private property—and attempted murder!”

The crowd gasped as the officer reached for a notebook and pen. “What are the missing items?” He heaved an indifferent sigh. “Who was the alleged victim?”

“There is but one item missing. An elephant.”

The crowd gasped again.

“And the victim stands before you,” Nak added, pointing to his swollen nose.

“I didn’t see an elephant,” said the officer.

“It’s probably hidden with the rest of her loot. She’s a cunning little devil.”

“I’ll need to see your elephant’s license.”

“Eh? Elephant’s license? Of course.” Nak began to pat his pockets and look about for Nang.

Nang had melted into the crowd and was doing a less than convincing imitation of an innocent bystander.

“Nang,” Nak called out. “May I have the elephant’s license, please?”

“No,” Nang whispered.

“Don’t tell me you’ve left it back at the hotel?” He rolled his eyes in exasperation.

“No,” Nang spoke to the ground between his feet.

“Ah,” Nak said. “It must be in the hotel safe with our other documents.”

He leaned closer to the policeman and murmured: “I wonder if I might have a word in private.”

“Hundred
baht,
” the officer replied.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Or we could go down to the station and fill out a report.”

“Of course. I see. No need to bother ourselves with troublesome paperwork, eh?” Nak winked.

“What about my cabbages?” cried the woman with the gold tooth.

“And my spilled rice?” cried another.

“And my plastic buckets?”

“And my curry bowls?”

“And my flower pots?”

“One at a time,” said the police officer. “One at a time.”