Pandas on the Eastside

by Gabrielle Predergast

  I had more than a mom and a dad. I had parents. And my parents were proud.

  It was shaping up to be a pretty good day.

  Seventeen

  Anjali Singh

  Anjali Singh has the longest braid of anyone in our school. Even looped double, it is still past the middle of her back. I’ve only ever seen it unbraided once, the day her mother came in to complain that the school had asked her to cut Anjali’s hair because someone else in the class had lice. Apparently, long hair is part of Anjali’s religion. I’d wished I was part of that religion after the whole lice incident, because Mom cut my hair so short that I looked like a boy until she bought some pink barrettes at Woodwards. Anjali’s mom washed her hair with stinky shampoo instead and combed it until Anjali’s scalp ached. So that’s why she didn’t have to cut it.

  Anjali’s dad has long hair too, which he wears under a turban like Ali Baba, only I think Ali Baba was a different religion. Anjali’s dad is a repairman for the gas company. I know this because he came to our building once when the whole place started to smell like rotten eggs. It had turned out to be rotten eggs in an empty apartment on the third floor, but Anjali’s dad didn’t mind the false alarm. Mom made him a cup of tea, and they complained together about how bad our hockey team was doing, and then he left to fix a real gas leak somewhere else.

  When David and I saw Anjali talking to her dad outside the school, I thought it had to be one of three things. Someone had lice again, someone had left some eggs to go bad, or there was a gas leak. When Mr. Hartnell’s voice came over the outside speakers telling everyone that the school was closed for the day, and Anjali’s dad said goodbye to her and went into the school carrying his toolbox, I figured out it was a gas leak, which made me pretty worried, because I had heard that gas leaks make things blow up.

  Kids were cheering and screaming. Parents were moaning and looking rattled. Nancy was herding her three wild brothers back toward her home. I waved and she waved back, but she clearly had no time to talk to me because one of her brothers was halfway up a tree. Instead David and I went over to talk to Anjali, who was heading for the gate, her schoolbag over her shoulder.

  “The hot-water boiler is busted,” she said. “It’s filling the classrooms with steam.”

  “Bummer,” said David.

  “Are you going home?” I asked Anjali.

  “Yep. Mom’s there, so…” She looked at me. “Your mom works, right? You can come over if you want.”

  I’d been to Anjali’s place before. It was a large apartment over a hardware store on Clark Drive. Anjali’s grandfather and uncle ran the store, and the whole family—grandparents, uncle, Anjali, her sisters and parents—all lived in the apartment together. Anjali said it had been two apartments, but they had knocked down a wall to make one big apartment, because in her culture families lived together. I told her that in my culture families barely spoke to each other, which she seemed to think was pretty weird.

  Anjali’s place was always fun. Her grandmother let us help her make this flat, spicy bread, and we were allowed to dress up in some of her mother’s old saris, which were just super-long pieces of fabric that you wrapped around yourself like a mummy. I could barely walk in one, but Anjali looked beautiful. I thought it might be fun to go to Anjali’s now. Maybe we could dress up again.

  “Can I call my mom when I get there?” I asked.

  “Sure,” Anjali said.

  We said goodbye to David as he trudged off in the direction of his house. I felt funny that he was going home to my dad, but I couldn’t think of anything to say about it. So Anjali and I walked down toward Clark Drive, stopping to watch a train rumble into the rail yards up at the docks. I imagined one of those boxcars was full of bamboo for the pandas.

  “You’re worried about the pandas, aren’t you?” Anjali said.

  “I’m worried about everything,” I admitted. “Do you think the school will blow up?”

  “Dad says things only blow up in movies and in wars.”

  That didn’t really make me feel any better. Okay, it meant the school probably wouldn’t blow up, but there was a war on, although it was in another country. As we walked past the ice-cream factory, I thought about the last time we had been there, for a school visit. All I had cared about that day was that David had a better house than me and that I wanted two scoops, one vanilla, one strawberry. If only my life was still so simple. Now I had pandas to worry about, a dad to be confused over, a man from the Chinese government threatening me, and a school that might, but probably wouldn’t, blow up.

  “Hey, Journey,” Anjali suddenly said. “Do you want to collect some more bamboo?”

  “How? I mean, where?” I said.

  “My grandfather has a truck, and he doesn’t work in the store anymore. Maybe he could drive us around. Lots of people have bamboo in their yards down by the beach.”

  I thought it was a good idea. It was a nice day, so walking around the beach neighborhood would be fun and good exercise, which Mom is always bugging me about.

  Anjali’s grandfather was happy to drive us down to the beach. He sat in the truck while Anjali and I went door to door, asking people if they wanted to donate some bamboo for what we called a “school project.” I didn’t want to tell people about the pandas. I figured they might know about them, in which case I didn’t need to tell them. And if they didn’t know, they mustn’t read the newspaper and that meant it was their own fault. Anyway, we couldn’t waste time explaining things.

  Most people let us take one or two spears of bamboo, but one lady said, “Take the whole darn lot of it. It’s a menace.” Then she loaned us some garden clippers and we set to. In no time at all, Anjali’s grandfather’s truck was full.

  “To where are we taking it?” he asked in his singsong accent. Anjali’s grandfather looked a bit like a skinny, dark-skinned Santa Claus. He had a long white beard and twinkling eyes, and his hair was wrapped in a red turban. Anjali had told me once that her family doesn’t have Christmas. I’d thought at the time that it was kind of sad, but having a Santa grandpa in the house pretty much made up for it. He even stopped the truck on Fourth Avenue and bought a donut for us to share.

  I directed him back to the shipyard. When we got there, I started to wonder again where we should put the bamboo. The shipyard was huge, and I wanted to make sure the pandas’ keepers could find it. I was about to suggest leaving a trail from the entrance like we had before when I noticed something scrawled on a concrete wall.

  “Bear cat!” I said, pointing.

  “You can read Chinese?” Anjali said.

  Clear as anything, the Chinese letters for bear cat were painted on the wall in black spray paint.

  “Are they behind that gate?” I asked.

  Anjali’s grandfather parked the truck and got up, hoisting himself up onto a garbage can to look over the gate. He came back to the truck, shaking his head.

  “That’s just a vacant yard,” he said.

  “Darn it,” I said. “Why would they write bear cat on the wrong yard?”

  But Anjali was pointing up the road. “Journey, look!” she said.

  I looked. Painted on a tall brick wall were the letters again. Bear cat. Anjali’s grandfather started the truck, and we drove down to get a closer look. We didn’t even stop before Anjali pointed again.

  “There!” she said.

  Every hundred feet or so, there was another bear cat painted on a wall or a fence—one was even on the road. We seemed to be driving in a squiggling line, but finally we got to one warehouse right down by the water. The Chinese word was written on the door, but this time it was circled.

  “Oh my God,” I said, even though I know it’s wrong to take the Lord’s name in vain. “Do you think they’re really inside there?”

  No one answered. We started unloading the bamboo and piling it up just outside the door of the warehouse. After we had been working for a few minutes, the door opened and a young Chinese man in overalls came out.

>   “Joon Yee Soong?” he said to me.

  “Yes!” I said. “It’s me!” Then I’m not sure how I did it, but I said the Chinese word for panda. “Xiong mao?”

  “Hung maau! Yes!” he said.

  “Do you speak English?” I asked.

  “No. No. Okay?”

  It wasn’t really okay. There were a million things I wanted to say to him. And I only spoke English and a little French. But he looked so sorry that he couldn’t talk to me that I just smiled. “It’s okay,” I said. “Can I see the pandas? See hung maau?” I pointed to my eyes and said “Hung maau” over and over.

  The poor man looked miserable. “No, no,” he said. Then he said a bunch of stuff in Chinese. I didn’t recognize any words, and I started to wish that Jen Chow had come with us. Then I remembered that she spoke a different kind of Chinese anyway.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” I said, looking helplessly at Anjali and her grandfather. They just shrugged.

  Suddenly the man pulled a pencil out of his pocket and began to draw on the white door behind him. In moments there was a very good drawing of a man in a suit. The young man pointed at his drawing and said something, then opened the door and pointed inside the warehouse.

  “That man is inside?” I said. “Who is he?” When I stepped forward to take a closer look at the drawing, I thought that this young man should probably change jobs from ship worker to portrait artist, because close up there was no mistaking the person he had drawn.

  It was Mr. Cheung, the man from the Chinese government. He was inside the warehouse with the pandas.

  Eighteen

  Mrs. Bent

  I didn’t sleep that night. I couldn’t stop thinking about Mr. Cheung and the pandas. I didn’t think Mr. Cheung would hurt them or anything, but I thought it was terrible that he was in there with them, even though the boat crew obviously wanted to keep those pandas right where they were rather than let Mr. Cheung take them. Would Mr. Cheung convince them to let him take the pandas back to China? I couldn’t stomach that idea. It would mean another long boat trip, and then what? Did China have a nice zoo for them?

  After three hours of lying awake, I finally got up and crawled into bed with my mom. I tried to be quiet, but she was awake. She rolled over and turned on her lamp.

  “Nightmare?”

  “I can’t sleep.” I told her all my fears about the pandas and Mr. Cheung. “I just feel so helpless,” I said. Then I started to cry. I cried for the pandas and for Michael Booker and Nancy. I cried because Anjali had her whole family living with her and because Jen Chow had a new bike. I cried for Kellie Rae and Contrary Gary and Kentucky Jack because it was raining outside and I knew they would be cold. I cried because Patty Maguire never played with me. I cried for all the times Mr. Huang had been snippy with me and wouldn’t give me a donut. I cried because David Schuman got to live with my dad. I cried for poor Miss Bickerstaff, who had lost her brother, and for Ben Wallace, who’d had to leave his family. I cried for Officer Pete because people were scared of him. I cried for Mr. Hartnell, who was trying to run a school with a broken boiler and not enough books. And I cried for Mrs. Bent, poor Mrs. Bent, who had fallen to the floor with Miss Bickerstaff that terrible day. My knees hurt just thinking about it.

  “There’s too much sadness in the world,” I finally managed to say. Mom held me tight and whispered in my ear.

  “Sadness is the price we pay for love, Journey.”

  “A lot of people love those pandas, don’t they?” I said.

  “Of course they do,” Mom said.

  I felt real peaceful, hearing her say that. Mom seemed peaceful too. And I thought maybe wars and fights and scuffles are the things that make it hard to talk about stuff. Maybe it’s only after those things are over that you start being able to figure things out. It was one of those thoughts you get in the dark that seems to make perfect sense.

  “Mom,” I whispered. “Why did Dad leave us?”

  She was quiet for a while. “It wasn’t because he didn’t love you,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  There was another silence. Mom looked up at the ceiling before speaking again. “People do stupid things when they’re young.”

  I thought she might say more. And at first I wanted her to. But then I realized that was a pretty good answer. He was young and stupid. I could relate to that. I was young too, and I did stupid things all the time.

  I fell asleep with Mom’s arms around me, her voice singing softly in my ear.

  In the morning, before I went to school, I asked Mom if I could call Dad. She looked hurt and a little scared for a minute, but then she gave me a piece of paper with a phone number on it. I dialed the phone, stretching the cord out as long as it could go, which was into the bathroom. I closed the door.

  David answered the phone. “Hey, Journey,” he said. “I’ll get Tom.”

  MR. CHAPARRO TO YOU! I wanted to yell, but I rolled my tongue into a ball and said nothing. Dad came on the line a few seconds later.

  “Journey? What’s up?”

  “Can you come to the school with your camera today?” I said. “There’s something I want to do, and I want the newspaper to know about it. Can you be there at ten?”

  “Count on me, kid,” Dad said.

  I left for school early. Mom saw me off with a worried expression on her face, but that was nothing new.

  “Eleven o’clock?” she asked.

  “Eleven o’clock,” I said.

  Out on our street, I found Contrary Gary putting dimes into an empty newspaper box. “Isn’t that a waste of money, Gary?” I asked.

  “Keeping money is a waste, Journey. Money eats at you like a swarm of biting fish, until there’s nothing left. This way the newspaper people have to deal with it.”

  I didn’t really know how to make sense of that, so I decided to change the subject. “Gary, you should not be down at the shipyard at eleven.”

  “I go where I please, and you can’t stop me,” Gary said.

  I left him to his dimes and continued down the street. Outside the Salvation Army I found Kentucky Jack, all clean and shiny like he had been scrubbed with a scouring pad.

  “Wow, Jack, you look great,” I said.

  “Well, thank you, Journey,” Jack said. “I woke up looking like this. I’m not sure what happened.”

  I smiled to myself, knowing that the Salvation Army people must have found him passed out in the night and bathed him and washed his clothes when he was too drunk to notice.

  “Jack, can you come to the shipyard at eleven o’clock?” I asked.

  “Will drinks be served?” Jack said.

  “Well, no,” I said. “But maybe someone might give you a quarter.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Kellie Rae was harder to find. She was usually only out in the afternoon or at night, and I had no idea where she lived. I stopped in at Mr. Huang’s and asked him if he knew where she was.

  “She not here!” he snapped. “She bad girl!”

  I got real mad at him then, for no reason other than he was being stupid and unfair. “Mr. Huang, why don’t you stop pretending that you can’t speak proper English and also grow a little Christian understanding? Kellie Rae can’t help who she is. Mom says she’s just a good girl in a bad situation.”

  Mr. Huang blinked. “I’m not a Christian,” he said.

  “You’re not?” I asked.

  “No. Buddhist,” he said.

  “And how do Buddhists feel about judging people?”

  He looked ashamed then. “Bad,” he admitted. “Here, have a donut.”

  I took the donut. “If you see Kellie Rae this morning, you tell her to come to the shipyard at eleven. You come too,” I said sternly. “And bring more donuts.”

  It was getting late, and I had to get to school. I ran down Hastings Street, blending in with the crowds of kids heading up the block to our school. When I got there, my dad was already in the schoolyard, talking to Mr. Hartnell. />
  “You’re early,” I said, interrupting them.

  “Mr. Hartnell here said he’d take me around the school to get some pictures. Broken water heaters and crumbling plaster and such.”

  “We have plenty of that,” I said. “Can I talk to Mr. Hartnell privately?”

  Dad wandered off to take pictures of a swing that was hanging by one chain. Mr. Hartnell turned to me.

  “What do you want to talk about, Journey?”

  “Is Miss Bickerstaff here today?” I asked.

  “Yes, she is. It’s her first day back.”

  “Is she sad?”

  Mr. Hartnell got one of those looks, like he couldn’t quite believe someone had just come out and asked that. But I knew I had asked the right question, because he gave a great big sigh and put his hands in the pockets of his slacks.

  “She’s sad, yes. But she’ll get better slowly. You shouldn’t worry yourself about that, Journey.”

  Mom says I “size people up” sometimes. I look at them as though I’m deciding whether to trust them. Mom says I do it all the time, so much that her friends laugh about it. I knew at that moment that I was sizing Mr. Hartnell up. Was he going to go along with what I had planned? Was he on my team? I only had one way to find out.

  “Mr. Hartnell, if there was a way you could make Miss Bickerstaff happy for just a little while, I mean really happy, would you do it?”

  He thought about it for a moment. “Why, yes, Journey,” he said finally. “I believe I would.”

  I was done sizing him up. So that’s when I let Mr. Hartnell in on my plan.

  At ten o’clock I went to the office with a piece of paper, a cameraman from the TV station and my dad. Mrs. Bent was waiting for me.

  “I’m so proud of you, Journey,” she said. She leaned back and got the microphone for the announcements, put it on her desk in front of her, then turned it so it was facing me. Beside me I heard the cameraman turn his camera and tape recorder on. Dad took out his own camera and started snapping some pictures.