Street Music by Timothy Hallinan

Author:Timothy Hallinan
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2020-02-21T20:55:13+00:00

20

Twenty Kilometers

She couldn’t make the numbers work.

She was fairly good at math—she had been third-best (out of nine) in her class during her four years of school—but she couldn’t make the numbers work. Well, she could make them work in the sense that she could force them to do what they were supposed to do, come out to the right totals and everything, but she couldn’t persuade them to guarantee that she’d get home safely.

Her village was about twenty relatively flat kilometers away if she took the most direct route, but she couldn’t take the most direct route because she knew that when they woke up and found that she and Miaow were gone, they’d grab someone’s car and look for her, and where would they would look first? Along the most direct route. And the numbers didn’t work.

Taking that route, the shorter route, she figured she could make it home in a little less than five hours, moving at a brisk walking speed, say, between four and five kilometers an hour. That would get her there around eight in the morning, which was, unfortunately, about two, two and a half hours after she figured Daw and his mother would wake up and realize that she and Miaow had fled. It was all too easy for her to see herself, exhausted and limping, still several kilometers from her village, while they practically ran her over in a borrowed car.

And, the truth, of course, was that she wouldn’t actually be able to walk at anything close to that speed. She had Miaow hanging from her shoulder, which she knew would slow her down, both because of the child’s weight and the extra care with which she’d have to take her steps. One stumble in the dark, a little trip that would mean nothing more than a skinned knee to her if she were alone, could be a disaster. If the baby fell, or, even worse, if she fell on the baby, she had no idea what she could do.

So call it six to seven hours.

On the most direct route.

Which she couldn’t take.

And how long would the journey take on the other route?

Well, that depended in large part on whether she got lost.

As she did her multiplication and division she was already walking and silently kicking herself for not having gotten up even earlier. The problems with the other route were, first, that she didn’t actually know how many kilometers it added to the journey; be conservative, and call it two or three, but it might be six or eight. And second, she didn’t exactly have it mapped out in her mind. What she had was a relative certainty, based on something several people had said, that the road, or glorified path, that branched south from the main road actually did lead to one tiny village, a little dimple of rice paddies on the broad plain, to which she had once walked in a couple of hours from her own village, although she hadn’t had to walk back.

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