Read Online Shadowboxer by Tricia Sullivan - Free Book Online Page B

erased. The language was hard to pronounce and I was struggling to say even simple things, to act the way people were supposed to act here. It was the opposite of everything I knew. I think somehow, when I came here I thought it was going to be like going back to San Cristobal, where everybody knows me. Where things are familiar. In Bangkok, nothing was familiar.
    So I threw myself into training. Every morning we ran, then trained for two or three hours, ate, slept through the heat of the day, and trained again in the evening. Then ate again and slept. There was no chit-chat, not with my limited command of the Thai language. No TV, no video games, no Twitter. The insides of my nostrils were black from diesel fumes. And the inside of my head started to go quiet.
    Back home, I was used to thinking of myself as hard up. We never had much money, even before my mom ran away from my dad. He put her through a lot of shit, and I didn’t make it any easier by acting so much like him. Malu’s folks stayed married, got good jobs and ended up doing real well for themselves, and I knew that Malu was on a fast track to a better life. But that left me looking around at all the money and trying to figure out how to get me some. Isn’t it funny how the people who talk about material things not being important are always the people with plenty of options?
    In Thailand, I wasn’t broke. My little bit of money that I paid Coat, it wasn’t a little bit of money to the camp. The kids I was training with had nothing. Half of them were orphans. Everybody’s sneakers had holes in them. There were soap operas on Pook’s little TV that showed rich people in designer clothes weeping on each other and living in fancy houses, but the people in our neighborhood made their living selling stuff on the street, including their bodies. The kids hoped to make their living beating each other up in public.
    And people smiled a lot here.
    It made me wonder. Maybe ‘tough’ wasn’t what I thought.
    One afternoon in between training sessions I’d gone looking for a clean t-shirt. Pook had just come back from her job in a restaurant to cook and do laundry for the camp. She had laid out washing lines for everyone’s clothes to dry, but in this humidity they were always damp. As I reached up to take down my shirt, Waldo started winding around my legs like cats do. Getting all flirty with me.
    ‘Hey, chico guapo ,’ I said. ‘Are you my only friend here?’
    Waldo sat on his haunches and looked up at me, blinking. Like I told Malu, he wasn’t a typical curly-tailed slum cat like I’d seen around here. He was long-bodied, long-haired, all black with golden eyes. He had a kingly way about him.
    I reached down to pet him. Waldo rose to head-butt my hand, making a purring cry of greeting.
    I startled when I heard Pook’s voice from the other side of a set of bed sheets.
    ‘That’s not an ordinary cat. He must be pedigree. Maybe he got lost from a high rise.’
    I was stunned. Pook never spoke to me unless she had to.
    ‘He reminds me of Kala Sriha,’ she added, a laugh in her voice.
    ‘Kala Sriha?’ I echoed. My Thai was improving, but I didn’t know these words.
    ‘Kala Sriha. From legend,’ she said. ‘He’s a lion but they say he doesn’t eat meat. This cat likes fruit, did you notice?’
    She was probably pulling my leg. But I said, ‘Like mango?’
    Pook bundled up the washing and started to go in. I guess that was the end of the conversation. She didn’t like me. I felt my loneliness like I felt the rain falling.
    ‘Figs,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘They are his favorite. I have been feeding him for a few days now.’
    She opened the door to the dorm. I heard myself say, a little desperately, ‘Please, I help you? I not busy.’
    She turned and looked at me but I couldn’t read her expression.
    ‘There’s always work to do,’ she said with a wry face. Almost a smile.

 
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