The Trail to Buddha_s Mirror nc-2

by Don Winslow

  “Then we will know it is safe. You then take him on more touring to confuse the issue and send him home. End the howling of his American friends.”

  “And if he doesn’t see her?”

  “Then it doesn’t matter.”

  So the conversation had gone precisely as Peng had wished, and he had been in such a fine mood until he found Carey and Wu, inebriated and still drinking on the hotel terrace. The rudeness of the American bastard, the foolishness of Wu, to be running around outside the prescribed schedule! What if Carey had spotted the other American? What then?

  Xao wasn’t furious, but he was sad. The plan would work, of course, his plans always worked, but now he would have to put in effect the operation he had so hoped wouldn’t be necessary. He had hoped to do this all without more loss of life, and now there would have to be a sacrifice.

  Because of poor, stupid, disloyal Peng. It would be different if Peng had betrayed him out of political conviction, but that was not the case. Peng was merely treacherous and ambitious, with the poisonous jealousy of small minds. He had set his paltry trap, just as Xao wanted, but the trap would need bait, and Xao saw no way for the bait to survive the springing of the trap.

  Neal drank two of the beers in the bathtub and sipped on the last one while he packed Mr. Frazier’s country clothes. His big night out on the town was over, and in the morning they were going to haul him down to some bucolic commune and show him around. Or show him off. So what was on the farm? What’s on any farm? Farmers, of course, pigs, cows, chickens, manure… crops… fertilizer…

  Fertilizer? Super chickenshit? Pendleton? Li Lan?

  He worked on the beer and Roderick Random for another hour before falling asleep.

  16

  His breakfast arrived shortly before dawn, so whatever they were going to do with him, they were in a hurry to get started.

  The coffee went right to his head, grabbed his hangover, and slapped it around a little. The throbbing stopped, and there was enough Catholic in him to feel better for having endured this act of penance. It’s hard to tell which an Irishman enjoys more, he mused, the high or the hangover.

  Wu looked green around the edges when he came through the door, and his smile was somewhat constrained. He was decked out for the country in a white short-sleeved shirt and brown cotton trousers, although he was still wearing the stiff black leather business shoes. He carried a blue nylon windbreaker and a bright yellow nylon tube bag.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  “Some night.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “You want some eggs?”

  Wu made a face of horrified disgust.

  “Coffee?”

  “I’ll try some. But we must hurry.”

  They hurried, and were down in the car in ten minutes. Neal was surprised to see Peng in the backseat. Wu got in front with the driver.

  “Do you own a car?” Peng asked Neal, apparently as a form of greeting.

  “No.”

  “I thought all Americans owned their own cars.”

  “And I thought all Chinese played Ping-Pong. Do you play Ping-Pong?”

  “I am quite good at it.”

  “Well, I am quite bad at driving.”

  “You joke.”

  “Okay, let me take the wheel.”

  The driver put it in gear and pulled out of the parking lot before Peng could take Neal up on it. He eased onto South Renmin Road and headed south. The route took them through some industrial suburbs, past the airport, and quickly into the countryside.

  “How long a drive do we have?” Neal asked.

  “Perhaps three hours,” Wu answered automatically before looking deferentially at Peng.

  “Three hours,” Peng said.

  “Three hours it is,” Neal said. “Who brought the cards?”

  “Perhaps,” said Peng, “you would do better to learn from the peasants than waste your time in decadent bourgeois pastimes.”

  Man, you have some vocabulary for a guy who didn’t speak English just a day ago. And don’t call me bourgeois. Where I grew up, the bourgeoisie was anybody less than two months behind on the rent.

  “Sure. What would you like me to learn?”

  “What it means to labor for your food.”

  You never worked for Joe Graham, pal.

  “Do you know, Mr. Peng, what it means to labor for your food?”

  “Both my parents were peasants. And yours?”

  Wu jumped in. “Have you noticed the mulberry trees, Mr. Frazier? The silkworms feed-”

  “I suppose your parents were intellectuals,” Peng said, pronouncing intellectuals as if the word had a bad smell.

  “Sure. My mother graduated Summa Cum Stoned from Needle U., and my old man was an overnight success.”

  “You are very rude, Mr. Carey.”

  “Frazier. The name is Frazier.”

  Peng hit him with one of those laser looks, the kind meant to burn right through you. Neal was discovering that people in China were either very calm or very angry, without a lot of middle range. He intended to push Mr. Peng into the very-angry zone. Very angry people make very stupid mistakes.

  “Thank you for correcting me,” Peng said, “Mr. Frazier.”

  “Don’t mention it. I just don’t want to get fucked up again by someone being careless.”

  Wu started to do little hops in the front seat. He was trying to think of something to say to change the subject, but nothing very clever was coming to him.

  “Pretty country,” Neal said as he turned his back on Peng and looked out the window.

  The terrain was flat for a mile or so on each side of the narrow road. Low dikes, with tall, spindly mulberry trees, divided rice paddies into neat geometric patterns. In the background a range of hills rose from the plain. Their neat rows of terraces made them look almost like Central American pyramids overgrown with vegetation.

  “Tea,” Wu explained. “Some of the very best tea in the world comes from the hills. Have you heard of Oolong tea?”

  “I think so.”

  “It is grown there.”

  “Is that some of the stuff we used to trade you dope for?”

  Neal watched Peng squirm a little.

  “‘Dope’?” Wu asked.

  “Opium.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  “You guys had quite a little jones-addiction-going there, didn’t you?”

  Peng stared straight ahead as he said, “The problem of opium addiction-created by foreign imperialists-has been eradicated in the People’s Republic of China.”

  “Yeah, well, if you just shoot them instead of shooting them up. ..”

  “We treated them in much the same manner as we treated you after you had acquired the disease of addiction in the capitalist enclave of Hong Kong.”

  “I didn’t think you had that many hotel rooms.”

  “Oolong tea is exported all over the world,” Wu said.

  The landscape was dotted with oval ponds about the size of large swimming pools.

  “Fishponds,” Wu said. “An excellent source of protein.”

  “No space can be wasted,” Peng elaborated.

  This is certainly true, thought Neal. As far as he could see, every bit of ground was being used in some way. Most of the flat land was flooded for rice cultivation, and the hills were terraced to the very tops. Every hollow seemed to hold a fishpond, and vegetable patches clung to the ground in between.

  “China has four times the population of the United States, but only one-third the arable land,” Wu said. “Much of China is desert or mountain. So we must make the best use of all the arable land. Sichuan Province is often called the Rice Bowl of China, because it is a fertile plain surrounded by high mountains. You are now in the middle of the Rice Bowl.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Neal said, addressing himself specifically to Wu.

  “Yes, it is,” Wu answered happily.

  It was so beautiful that Neal forgot his skirmishing with Peng for a while a
nd just took in the scenery. He hadn’t seen such open spaces since his days on the Yorkshire moor, days that seemed like a distant memory now. And while the moor was vast and lonely, the Sichuan Plain was vast and peopled. It wasn’t crowded, but it was definitely occupied. Lines of people moved slowly across rice paddies, children led buffalo along dikes, men in wide straw hats pushed wheelbarrows on narrow dirt roads. Old women, their heads wrapped in black turbans, sat beside the vegetable patches and smoked long-stemmed pipes as they scolded birds away. Younger women, often with babies slung on their backs, stacked piles of rice husks along the roadside. Just as every bit of land was used, thought Neal, every person on it was useful.

  And where the moor was brown, southwest China was green. The paddies were green, the vegetable gardens were green, the hills of tea on the horizon were green. Here and there a metal rooftop shone silver, or a pond sparkled in blue, but they were like buttons on a gigantic emerald cloak.

  “The rice in this area,” Wu said, “produces two crops a year, so the peasants are always busy planting, harvesting, or tending their fields. Two crops a year is wonderful! If we could ever find a way to grow three, there would be no growling stomachs in China ever!”

  He laughed at what seemed to be an old joke.

  “Three crops,” Peng muttered. “A typical Sichuanese dream. We do not need more harvests, we need more factories.”

  After a couple of hours they came to a sharp bend in the road where a small teahouse and a few shacks were clustered.

  “Do you need to use the toilet?” Wu asked Neal.

  “Wouldn’t mind.”

  Wu led him around the back of the teahouse. A bamboo fence screened the lavatory from view. The toilet was an open trench about three feet deep, graded so that the urine ran down a slope but the feces remained. Neal discovered the physics of the operation as he relieved himself of the morning’s coffee and Wu squatted down to do something more serious.

  “What do they do?” Neal asked. “Burn it off every day?”

  “Oh, no. The shit is valuable fertilizer. The night-soil removers come with buckets and carry it into the fields.”

  “Is there a lot of competition for that job?”

  “It is assigned by class.” Wu’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Very often, intellectuals or their families who were exiled from the city perform this job. My father was a night-soil remover after he was freed from prison.”

  “Is it a punishment?”

  “Not really. It is just that city people do not know the skills of farming, and this is something simple they can do. It is very hard work, though.”

  So, after a few thousand years of taking shit from the gentry, Neal thought, the peasants are giving it back, literally.

  “We cannot waste anything in China,” Wu said. “What do you do with shit in America?”

  “Send it to Washington.”

  “That is a joke.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  Wu stood up pulled his trousers up. “Yet you purged President Nixon and sent him to the countryside.”

  “I don’t think he’s lugging around buckets of night soil, although it’s an appealing image.”

  “President Nixon is a very great man. You should rehabilitate him.”

  The stuff you hear in men’s rooms.

  “Perhaps if he corrects his thinking,” Neal answered. “Does Peng ever have to piss, or is he really a robot?”

  “You should not fight with Mr. Peng. He is an important man.”

  “That’s why I’m fighting with him, Xiao Wu.”

  “I do not understand.”

  Neither do I, Wu, but I’m beginning to.

  “Dwaizhou Production Brigade Central Committee Headquarters,” Wu translated from the signpost at the road junction.

  Neal didn’t see anything that looked remotely like a Production Brigade Central Committee Headquarters, just a long, straight dirt road that stretched through rice paddies and wheatfields and disappeared into some low hills on the horizon.

  They drove down the road for about three miles before coming to an S-curve among a copse of trees. On the other side, the road dropped into a valley in which Neal could see several villages, a dozen concrete grain silos, and a group of larger buildings that resembled a town center: the Production Brigade Central Committee Headquarters.

  The car pulled into a parking lot in front of the largest building. A greeting committee of sorts had formed, and met Neal with broad smiles and an array of bows as he stepped out of the car.

  “Mr. Frazier, please meet Mr. Zhu,” Wu said.

  “Welcome, welcome,” said Zhu.

  “Thank you very much,” Neal answered. “Xie xie ni.”

  Zhu smiled at Neal’s attempted Chinese, took him lightly by the wrist, and repeated, “Welcome, welcome.”

  Let the games begin, Neal thought as he looked around at his new surroundings. The building in front of him was a concrete and brick structure, three stories tall, with a broad set of concrete steps and a front landing. To the left, about a hundred feet away, was a single-story brick building that looked like a dining hall. To his left, surrounded by a cement patio with several wrought-iron, umbrella-shaded tables, was a swimming pool.

  “Does Mr. Zhu speak English?” Neal asked Wu.

  “Only ‘welcome, welcome.’”

  “Why is he holding my wrist?”

  “He likes you. It is a traditional greeting in this part of the country.”

  “Who is he?”

  “The Production Brigade leader.”

  “He looks too young.”

  “Everyone calls him ‘Old Zhu.’”

  Old Zhu led Neal over to the patio, reached into a barrel, and came out with a bamboo fishing pole, which he handed to Neal. He pointed to the swimming pool, which Neal then saw wasn’t a swimming pool at all, but a fishpond. A closer look revealed that it was crammed with carp; the whole bottom of the pond looked like it was moving.

  Zhu took a pole of his own, fixed a large breadcrumb on the hook, and cast it into the middle of the pond. A carp hit it right away. Zhu dragged in the fish, unhooked it, and handed it to a young man who was standing by for just that purpose. The boy ran to the dining hall with the fish. Zhu gestured for Neal to do the same, and by the time Neal had baited his hook, Wu and Peng already had their lines in the water and were waiting intently for the carp to strike. Neal thought of asking for a rifle, so that it would be exactly like shooting fish in a barrel, but didn’t want to hurt Zhu’s feelings. So he dropped his hook in and watched it land on a carp’s head. The fish tapped at the bait with no great enthusiasm, and Neal watched Wu, whooping with delight, haul in his catch. Peng caught one too, and broke his wooden demeanor with a triumphant yell as the boy came running back from the dining hall to collect the catch of the day.

  Just my luck to get a racist carp, Neal thought.

  “Fresh fish for lunch!” Wu called to him.

  “Wonderful!” Neal answered, fervently hoping they weren’t going to hunt their own fresh pork for dinner.

  They repaired to the dining hall, a utilitarian rectangle with a linoleum floor and wooden tables. The fish was prepared quickly, and they ate it with some greens Neal didn’t recognize, along with bowls of sticky white rice. Some bottles of beer made a quick appearance and departed just as quickly in the midafternoon heat. Peng, who had announced only the night before that he did not drink beer, drained one with little difficulty. After lunch, the group went to a second-floor meeting room in the headquarters building so that Zhu could answer Mr. Frazier’s questions about the Dwaizhou Production Brigade.

  Neal didn’t ask the only question he was really interested in: What am I doing here at the Dwaizhou Production Brigade? Instead he launched a battery of interrogatives and nodded sagely as if he understood or even cared about the answers that Wu worked so hard to translate. What is the annual rice yield? How many people work on the brigade? How many families are there? How is it organized? What crops besides r
ice do you grow? How many hogs? How many chickens? How is silk produced?

  Zhu seemed particularly proud of his new fish-farming project, explaining that the pool out front was just for the recreation of party cadres; the real ponds were harvested with nets, and were an enormous success. Neal said that he would like to see them, and was rewarded with a huge smile and a promise that they would do so that very afternoon.

  Even Peng was pleased with Neal’s performance, nodding and even smiling at Neal’s questions, then nodding vigorously at Zhu’s answers and listening intently to Wu’s translation. He apparently thought the whole dog-and-pony show was so wonderful that he passed cigarettes out to everybody. The three Chinese men smoked solemnly while Neal sucked on some hard candy.

  Neal also thought that the show was pretty good, especially Mr. Zhu’s eloquent soliloquies on agriculture. The guy seemed to care passionately about farming in general and this farm in particular. His eyes shone with pleasure when he discussed gains in food production, and went dull and sad when he spoke about the lack of modern equipment and fertilizers. Neal figured that Zhu was either a terrific actor-sort of an Oriental Mr. Greenjeans-or that he wasn’t in on the whole “Mr. Frazier” scam.

  Why should he be? Neal wondered. I’m not in on the whole “Mr. Frazier” scam, and I’m “Mr. Frazier.”

  “I really want to see those fishponds!” Neal said before the boys could light up another round.

  He saw the fishponds, which were actually huge, square, sunken concrete tanks with plank catwalks. He saw the rice paddies and learned how rice was planted, harvested, chaffed, packaged, and transported. He saw fields of wheat, sorghum, and sunflowers, and received instruction in the fine art of chewing sunflower seeds and spitting out the hulls. He saw chicken coops, duck ponds, and hog pens, and learned that pork was a major part of the Chinese diet. He saw water buffalo, petted water buffalo, and reluctantly rode on a buffalo while its little girl owner sobbed in anxiety for her pet. He saw a twenty-acre square of uncultivated land-woods and brush-and learned that it was set aside to encourage the rabbits that were a major game crop. He saw a party of hunters, armed with ancient, muzzle-loading, curve-stocked rifles, go into the wood and emerge with several rabbits. He saw the complicated, integrated, and enormous effort it took for the people of this area to feed themselves and try to get ahead a little bit at the end of the year. He saw the tranquil beauty of the countryside.