Unfortunately, no. There they are, pretending like they don’t see me pretending not to be looking for them.
Okay, I think. Okay. I’m just going to keep hobbling down the street here. Look for a cab. If they have a car, they’ll need some time to get back to it, and maybe that will be enough time for me to lose them.
Here’s the problem: There aren’t very many taxis in Yangshuo. None here on Xi Jie, which is pedestrians-only on this stretch. I need to walk up to the intersection, then hang a left and go up to whatever that big street is, where the buses run.
Okay.
“Miss? Bamboo raft?”
A tiny woman in traditional clothes, from whatever “ethnic minority” lives around here, thrusts her laminated tourist brochures in my face.
“No thanks.”
“Impressions show? See Ancient Village? Rock-climb?”
“Buyao!” I snap. Then think.
“Oh, you can ask those guys behind me,” I say. “They want a bamboo-raft trip. Don’t believe them if they say no. They are looking for a good deal.”
“Ah, okay, okay.”
Off she goes, like a lamprey seeking a shark.
Up ahead on my left is the Last Emperor. And I think maybe I’ve got the wooden frogs on my side, because slouching by the entrance is Kobe, fedora pulled low on his forehead, unlit cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.
“Hey, lamei.” He puts on a smile, but I don’t think he’s really that happy to see me.
“Kobe, ni hao. Listen … uh, can I use your bathroom?”
“Bathroom? You sick?”
“No, I …” I glance over my shoulder. There’s Mr. US Polo Team and his buddy in the generic windbreaker hovering on the corner, letting the tourists flow around them. I guess they weren’t tempted by a cheap bamboo-raft ride. “These two guys, they’re following me. I don’t know why. Something I saw in Shantou, or Guiyu, and …”
He frowns. “Police?”
Technically, the DSD aren’t police. “I don’t think so.”
Now Kobe looks past me, trying to spot my tails. Hesitates. Maybe he’s trying to decide if it’s a good idea to get involved.
“Okay,” he says. “Sure.”
“Is there a way out the back? I need to catch a taxi.”
He nods. “Past the bathrooms. At the end of the hall. That door, it should be open. If anyone asks, tell them I said it’s okay. If you don’t see a taxi on Pantao Road, go up to the traffic circle on the way to Moon Mountain. You can find one there.”
“Thanks.” I stand there for a moment. He’s wearing the T-shirt with the pistol-packing panda, I notice. I feel as if there’s something else I should say. It’s like I want to apologize, and I’m not sure why.
“Thanks, Kobe,” I say.
He shrugs. “No problem. Come back sometime. I make you my special drink.”
As I hobble inside, as fast as I can manage, I hear Kobe engage the guys behind me, telling them, “We have two-for-one drink today! Margarita! Sex on the Beach! Here’s a discount card!”
As before, the place is mostly empty, the dance floor dark. A waitress drops a pizza on a table where two stoned-looking Westerners sit; another waitress leans against the bar, texting on her phone. I head toward the back, to the hall where the bathrooms are. To my right is the kitchen, smelling like stale grease and ammonia. Ahead of me is the door.
“Hey, ni buneng jin nar qu!” You can’t go there.
It’s a middle-aged woman wearing a stained apron, her hair tied up and tucked under a baseball cap with a Chanel logo, waving her hand at me as I try to duck out the back door.
“Kobe said I could,” I say in Mandarin. “Because these two men, they’re bothering me.”
She follows the tilt of my head, looks over my shoulder into the bar. “Okay,” she says gruffly. “Go quickly.”
“Quickly” in my case is relative, but I walk as fast as I can, out the back door, into a little cement alcove crowded with reeking trash cans and a couple of bikes locked to the rusting rail. Up the three stairs, slick with grease, to the street above. Follow that to a broad avenue. Okay. Here’s a bus stop, in front of a Li-Ning sporting-goods store. I’m on Pantao Road. I head up the street toward the traffic circle, on the way out of town. I don’t see any cabs. I think if I don’t see one soon I’ll duck into a store or a restaurant. Stay there or sneak out another back door. Staying is sounding good, because my leg’s really hurting, swelling against the bandage, and I think I’d better ice and elevate it, but mostly what I’m passing are shops, with open storefronts or glass windows, not great places to hide, and I see a hotel, but I think I’ll have to show a passport there, and if these guys are DSD …
A taxi. Letting off a couple of girls in front of a shanzhai Juicy Couture boutique. I don’t even ask the driver if he’s available, I just slide into the backseat.
“Moon Mountain,” I say. Not that I want to go there, but I don’t have Sparrow’s card handy, and what I mainly want to do right now is get the fuck out of town.
“MOON MOUNTAIN“—YUELIANGSHAN—IS called that because of the crescent-shaped hole in the middle of it, like someone took a giant Christmas-cookie cutter and punched it out. It’s where Mom and Andy and me went to the Italian restaurant … was it a week ago? It feels like a lot longer.
First thing I do, I switch off the GPS in my phone. Think about it some more, and then I turn the phone off. They might be able to find me that way, depending on who these guys are.
I wasn’t really thinking too much when I told the cabbie to bring me here. It was just a place I knew that was down the road from Yangshuo proper and easy to get to. But as we drive, passing a fancy resort on one side of the road and then a huge billboard for a NEW SOCIALISM COUNTRY MODEL VILLAGE on the other, I realize that it’s not a bad destination. There are a fair number of tourists who come here: Chinese tour groups in buses who arrive for lunches of beer fish at farmers’ restaurants and leave afterward to go on to their river cruises or whatever, Europeans who like the “boutique hotel” where the Italian restaurant is. There are public shuttle buses that run up and down the main road outside the village, and where there are a lot of tourists, odds are there might also be a few taxis.
“You can stop here,” I tell my driver. I pay him and get out. I figure just in case those guys back in Yangshuo made this cab, better I should switch for the trip to Sparrow’s sanctuary. I’m feeling all James Bond for having thought of this.
Especially because I’m not thinking too clearly. I’m really not feeling all that great. Aside from my leg, I’m dizzy, hot. Those aren’t DVT symptoms. I don’t think. Probably just because I haven’t eaten. And I’m having a little trouble catching my breath, but that makes sense, considering that strange men are following me and I’m freaking out, right?
I should breathe into a paper bag or something.
I ignore the vendors selling flower garlands, pass the group of Chinese students on their cruiser bikes, posing for photos, walk on by a three-story farmers’ restaurant still crowded with Chinese tour groups, and go down the dirt road with stalls and shops on either side until I come to a cab parked outside some kind of paintball business called War Game (in English), with huge signboards depicting camoed soldiers with infrared goggles and M1s, plus photos of happy customers blasting the shit out of each other.
I shudder and approach the driver, who drinks tea from a glass jar.
“Ni hao,” I say. “You working now?”
SPARROW’S PLACE IS ABOUT a half hour away from Yueliangshan, first up the main road, through a town that straddles the highway, then down a series of smaller roads and dirt paths that run through tiny villages and rice paddies and tombstone-shaped mountains. I have no fucking clue where we are. I’m not sure I care at this point.
The driver has to stop a couple of times to ask directions, once in a tiny village with a rutted muddy path for a main road, a second time as we bounce between rice paddies, shouting out to a farmer taking a
break under a tree next to his fields.
Finally we come to a pass between two hills, then a turnoff into a stand of trees. There’s a chicken-wire fence and a ramshackle gate and a sign hung on the fence post with a painted bird—some kind of phoenix, I think—with long, brightly colored, curling tail feathers.
“Here,” the driver says.
“That’s a phoenix, right? Zhe shi da luan.”
He shrugs. “Could be.”
The zhegu turns into a luan—I got that in a fortune once. A little brown bird changes into a phoenix, soaring high above the clouds. You’d think this would be a good thing, but it isn’t necessarily. It just means big changes. Sometimes good, sometimes bad, depending on your actions.
Story of my fucking life.
I pay him and hobble down the path.
It looks like an old farm, a couple buildings of worn, blondish brick and curved, blackened roof tiles. There are some other, newer structures: more chicken wire, like cages, some with tin roofs. I hear things—birds, I guess—a sort of low chuckling, an occasional caw, clacking and trills. I think that’s what I’m hearing anyway. I’m drenched in sweat, and I’m pretty sure it’s not hot out.
“Can I help you?”
It’s a young guy, Chinese, tall and thin, with glasses.
“Yeah, I …” I have to stop for a minute. I wipe my forehead. “I’m here to see Sparrow.”
He looks me up and down. Like, I don’t know, there’s something funny about me. Maybe that I’m kind of leaning on my souvenir Yangshuo walking stick because I suddenly can’t stand up straight.
“Xiaoma!” he yells. “Kuai lai ba!”
I don’t exactly pass out, nothing that humiliating, but what happens is my vision blurs to white and there’s this hollow roaring in my ears, like a low ocean tide, and there are hands grasping my arms and guiding me down the path, and as I glance to one side, I swear I see this huge white bird with a red crown, like it’s wearing a skull cap—a phoenix maybe—walking alongside me, tilting its head now and again like it’s studying my face, trying to talk to me, almost.
“Hey, hi, bird,” I say.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I END UP LYING on a couch in an overstuffed office—or is it a clinic?—in the main farmhouse anyway, with my leg propped up on a couple of pillows and a rolled blanket. Apparently I did not hallucinate the white bird, because it’s followed us into the room and stands by the couch like some kind of bleached plastic lawn flamingo. There are other birds in here, too, in cages—some little songbirds, a duck, and is that a parrot on a perch?
“You should not be walking,” Sparrow says. “You need to rest.” She hands me a bottle of water.
“Yeah, yeah,” I say. I dig through my backpack for a Percocet and some aspirin, and then I think more of that on an empty stomach probably isn’t the best idea.
I take another look around. The interior walls are plastered, crumbling in places. There are paintings hung on the walls, traditional Chinese watercolors, of birds. Copies of famous pieces, probably, the kind you buy from “art students” who approach foreigners at the Forbidden City or Tiananmen, claiming they’re from the provinces and their professor is having an exhibition, will you come and take a look?
The paintings are pretty, though. Good enough copies at least.
Hanging up among them are big colored posters, birds of the world, birds of China.
The big white bird stands next to the couch staring at me. I wonder what kind it is. Maybe it’s on one of those posters.
“Is that a … a crane?”
Sparrow smiles and nods. “Yes. His name is Boba. He is hungry. Have you eaten?” she adds politely.
“I, uh … not exactly.”
Pretty rude of me, but I know I need to eat.
“Oh! I can make you some noodles. Do you like?”
“Anything is fine. Please, don’t trouble yourself.”
Sparrow rushes off. The young guy, the thin man with the glasses, pulls up a folding chair and sits next to me. His name is Han Rong, “But please call me Harold.”
“Harold. Do you work here?”
He laughs, a little nervously, it seems to me, but maybe it’s just that weird politeness disguised as social awkwardness you get in conversations here sometimes. Like you’ve stepped in something and you don’t know what.
“No. Just volunteer.”
“Oh. So I guess you like birds.” My lame attempt at a joke.
“I think they are okay. An important part of natural environment,” he adds.
“So you volunteer. For a long time?”
He hesitates. “Just a month or two.”
Jason/David left not quite two months ago.
It’s possible that I’m a little paranoid. Okay, maybe a lot. Life just keeps giving me reasons.
“What else do you do?”
He sits up straighter and smiles. “I am a student.”
“Really. What do you study?”
“The natural sciences.” He spreads his hands in a little wave around the room. “So this is extending my learning.”
“I see.”
I hear a few random chirps from the caged birds and a cackle from the parrot. Boba still stands by the couch, staring at me with his black, reptilian eyes. Then he stretches out his long neck and starts rooting around in my hair.
“Oh! Maybe he likes you!” Han Rong exclaims.
Either that or he’s looking for nest material.
I EAT THE BOWL of noodles that Sparrow made for me, probably one of those giant Cup-a-Soup things that everyone eats on the trains, but it’s good enough right now, and after I’m done the dizziness recedes somewhat, and I tell myself probably there’s nothing seriously wrong, I was just stressed out and tired and needed to get off my feet.
While I eat, a couple other volunteers wander in and out, a teenager with the English name of Sophie, chubby and serious, with pigtails like a younger girl, and a man who I’m guessing is a little older than Sparrow, rugged like a laborer, wearing a sweat-stained T-shirt and a sullen look, a grain sack slung over one shoulder.
“The feed, where do you want it?” he says to Sparrow, with a wary glance at me. “Here is good.”
As she says this, she’s crouched down in front of one of the big cages, checking on the inhabitant, one of those fishing birds. I check my dictionary. “Is that one a cormorant? Yizhi luci?”
Sparrow nods.
“What’s wrong with him?” I ask.
“The owner, when they fish, they tie a cord around the neck, near the throat. So the bird cannot swallow. This owner doesn’t know how to take care of the bird. So he ties too tight. It gets an infection. Very bad.”
“And he brought it to you?”
The guy who carried the grain sack snorts. “We liberate it,” he says with a grin.
Sparrow blushes. “We don’t steal it. We offer him a payment. Tell him a little money better than a dead bird.” She rises. “Are you feeling better? Do you want to see the sanctuary? Or maybe you should rest a while longer.”
By now it’s getting late into the afternoon, and though maybe I should rest, I figure it’s my best chance to talk to Sparrow privately.
“I’d love to see it,” I say.
I’LL ADMIT WALKING IS still not a lot of fun. These weird pings that feel like electrical shocks almost, running up and down my leg, the spasms in my back, the pain in my hip, and those, I figure, are just because I’m not walking normally, but the leg pain, it’s got to be nerve pain, right? Like the doctor said, maybe the guy hit one of the screws in my leg and the swelling is impinging on a nerve. That would make sense. Odds are that’s all it is.
Given all the shit I’ve been through with my leg, that had better be all it is.
“This is our biggest cage,” Sparrow says.
We’ve walked down a path from the main farmhouse that leads toward what looks like an old rice paddy. I don’t know enough about rice to tell if they’re growing anything there or not, but bor
dering it is a big chicken-wire enclosure that makes a dome around a gnarled tree, nearly twice as tall as I am and about the size of a basketball court in length and width. There are a couple of wooden structures in it—big birdhouses? Some tin trays and what looks like a pond. And birds. Big waterfowl like Boba. Smaller ones, doves, chickens, ducks. A bunch of little ones, I don’t know what they are. Some of them are obviously injured: limping, crooked wings flapping; a big one that I can see from here has a mangled beak. A few act almost like they’re drunk, walking and flying in wobbling circles, as if they’re tied to a pole.
“Wow,” I say. So far my plan to get Sparrow alone hasn’t worked. We’ve had a little entourage trailing us every step of the way: Han Rong and then Sophie and the macho guy toting grain sacks. It’s like they’re all tag-teaming, keeping watch, and I don’t know what that means.
“So what’s wrong with them?” I ask. “The birds, I mean.”
“Many things. Some of them injured. By people. By boats. Even cars. Others, they are sick. Parasites. Diseases. Some of them, they are poisoned, we think, with heavy metals. That’s why they act that way, why they can’t fly straight.”
Sparrow kneels by the enclosure, where a large crow has trotted up to greet her. It has a feather in its beak.
“Xiao Heizi … Ni xihuan huasheng ma?”
She reaches into a pocket and pulls out a peanut. Xiao Heizi—whose name means “Little Black One”—pokes its beak through the chicken wire, pushing the feather out toward Sparrow’s hand, releasing it onto her palm. She holds the peanut between her thumb and finger, and the crow snatches it in its beak.
“We trade gifts,” she explains.
I glance around. Sophie and Han Rong are a few yards away. Macho Man totes another big bag of feed over one shoulder, heading toward another chicken-wire cage and shed.
“What about David?” I ask.
“What about him?”
Hour of the Rat Page 15
