Angela Sloan

by James Whorton

  I left her standing in the high grass beside the road.

  33

  It was a relief to have the scowling Asian out of my Scamp. I crossed a bridge over a reservoir, and she was history. With no passport her prospects were bad, but there is a saying, No es mi problema. Anyway I’d left her a hundred smackers ahead.

  For some reason I turned to look at the back seat, where she’d been. There on the white vinyl was Benjamin Franklin, about to slide down the crack. The sly Chinese had left my gift behind. Was this some special Far Eastern brand of insult? Or was it a way to free her conscience?

  Well, I didn’t want her conscience freed. I had bought that Chinese waitress, and I meant for her to stay bought. But when I got back over the bridge to the spot where I had left her, she was gone. No traffic had passed, so I took the hundred with me down a wide trail into the woods, calling, “Hey! Chinese girl!”

  I emerged at the edge of the reservoir. On the narrow gray beach, on the moss of a fallen tree trunk, I found Ray’s pack of Raleighs.

  I looked all around me for a long time. No Chinese girl. But then I did see her, or only her head, ten yards out in the water with the sun on it, one hand up with a cigarette between the fingers.

  “What in the heck are you doing out there?”

  “Smoke cigarette! Go away!”

  “Go away? This is weird! Where are your clothes?”

  “I have them.”

  “You have them?”

  She put the cigarette in her mouth, and I saw her shirt cuff. She was wearing her shirt.

  “This is a new extreme of modesty,” I said. “You are bathing alone in a deserted lake in the woods in all of your clothes.” I looked again and saw the marks of her rubber-soled slippers leading into the water. What about that? She had her shoes on, too.

  “Why have you come here? Go.”

  “I came to bring you this money back.” I shook the bill.

  “Don’t want it!”

  “You will need it,” I said. “Also, you do want it. You bargained with me for it.”

  After a silent half minute she said, “Leave it on the tree.”

  “When I bribe somebody, I mean for her to stay bribed!”

  “Leave on tree!”

  “It will blow away.”

  “Put a rock on top!”

  “I am not leaving this one-hundred-dollar bill on a tree trunk with a rock on it. Suppose you were to drown out there! Can you swim, Chinese? What are you doing, standing on the bottom of the lake? I never heard of somebody smoking a cigarette while swimming. Is that how you do it in Taiwan?”

  The head came closer. That was creepy to see. She had taken her braids out, and the wet hair clung to her neck like seaweed. She rose toward the shore in Creature from the Black Lagoon fashion, dark water streaming. The heavy pants pulled at her hips. She pinched the cigarette in her mouth and scooped handfuls of gray sand from both her pants pockets.

  “Why do you have sand in your pockets?”

  She only scowled at me and wouldn’t answer.

  “Turn them inside out,” I suggested.

  But the pockets weren’t lined, so they couldn’t be turned inside out. She kept scooping.

  “You are an odd thing,” I said.

  “Always go swim with sand in my pockets. Make the lungs work.”

  “Now your clothes are soaking wet and your pockets have sand in them, nut job.”

  Something burst out of her mouth. I first thought it was a sneeze, but no, it was her language. She went off on a long, mad tear of mush-like syllables, knee-deep in the murky reservoir. She turned her back and worked her arms. Heaven knows what she was saying. It might have been classical Confucian mottoes, or there again, it might have been a Chinese form of gibberish. It seems natural to me that a Chinese person’s gibberish would also sound Chinese, just like Tintin’s dog when he barks sounds Belgian. “Wooah wooah!”

  When the thing was done being said, whatever it was, she waded up to the beach and snatched the hundred from my grip. She pushed the stiff bill into her wet, sandy pants pocket. “Now can go shopping!”

  “Excuse me. What have I done?”

  She glowered. For her it wasn’t enough to be an obstacle impeding my progress: she had to be unpleasant as well.

  34

  That morning at Sears and Roebuck I had bought myself a patchwork print dress in yellow, red, and brown with a short skirt, puffy sleeves, and a green collar. I allowed the Chinese girl to put it on. It fit her all right. She was only a little taller than I and somewhat fuller through the hips. She wouldn’t tell her age.

  I drove west. “I bet you are hungry,” I said. “Swimming always makes me hungry.” I found the highway and stopped at a Stuckey’s. She didn’t know what to order, so I got us two BLTs. She took hers apart and devoured the bacon first. Then she ate the pickle spear and a parsley sprig that probably had not been washed, since it was a garnish and not meant to be eaten. Then she ate the lettuce, after using a butter knife to scrape the mayonnaise off.

  The tabletop was made of white Formica with glitter in it and a dull band of aluminum around the edge. The Chinese girl rubbed her finger on the Formica as though trying to determine how the glitter was stuck on. She handled everything: the bottle of ketchup with its grimy white cap, the chrome napkin dispenser, the stamped-metal ashtray, and the bowl made of lacquered wood chips that held the sugar packets.

  “Anyway, what is your name?” I said.

  “Baydee.”

  “Baydee?”

  “Baydee. Like Baydee Graybo.”

  “Betty?”

  “Yeah. Baydee.”

  She knocked a blob of ketchup onto her plate and dipped the edge of a tomato slice in it. Her bites were small and cautious, but she chewed fast.

  A woman followed me into the ladies’ room and asked where I was from.

  “I only meant it making conversation,” she said when I didn’t answer. “Fran and I left Augusta at daylight, and I’m so bored I could scream!” Fran was her husband. He made a habit of driving under the speed limit because he believed it to be easier on the vehicle. “But it is harder on the wife,” she said. “I would rather put the wear on the Oldsmobile than spend one extra minute shut inside it not allowed to remark on things I notice.” She asked where my parents were.

  “Home.”

  “You don’t mean to tell me you are traveling alone!”

  I told her I was traveling with my chaperone. Just then Betty came in and began flushing out her mouth with water noisily.

  The woman from Augusta pressed the heels of her blue patent-leather shoes together, waiting for the sink. Betty dried off neatly with a single paper towel and left without having said a word or looking once at either of us.

  “I would not like to have an Oriental chaperone,” the woman from Augusta said.

  “Tell me why you won’t go to Chinatown,” I said to Betty when we were back in the Scamp.

  “Wang will find me there.”

  “Is Wang the one who brought you from Taiwan?”

  “Wang and some other. They have arrange for me to come to U.S., but I have to work here to pay. Work me like a donkey because I have not got any paper. I will be an old woman broke to pieces when I pay that money.”

  She was smoking another Raleigh now, tapping the ash at the top of the window.

  She saw me looking at her and looked back awhile. I had to look away first, since I was driving.

  “You get some makeup, you can maybe look more grown,” she said. “Change your hair. When you push this hair behind your ear, like this”—she touched the spot on my head with her finger—“that make you look like a little girl. You can maybe part your hair on this side and pull it back away from forehead. Make you look older. Get some older-looking shoes, too. You have one of this?” She smacked her chest with both hands.

  “I have two of that.”

  “I mean garment. What you wear here.”

  “A brassiere?”

&nbs
p; “If you will get brassiere and maybe put two small towel in it. Your bottom too small, too. Maybe you can put on seven eight underwear, make you bottom seem more big.”

  “Mm.”

  “You can sew?”

  “Anybody can sew a little bit.”

  “No. I will maybe sew you some pad for your hips. Give you some big hips, not so straight like a pencil. You never will fool somebody that have some sense, but most people don’t have any sense. You will be surprise. That is how I live, by so many people don’t have sense.”

  I asked to know what she meant by that.

  “People supposed to have paper to live here. I don’t have paper. Supposed to give tax. I don’t give tax. Work for cash. In Golden Monkey, many time people will buy food and will not eat. Come for lunch, buy two bowl, eat one bowl and say throw that other bowl out. I will eat it. Look at me, I don’t have money but I am so fat.” She held up her arm and slapped at the upper part with her hand. It was not fat by any means, but she was healthy enough. “I eat meat, vegetable, anything. People have so easy life, nobody really show maybe very much attention. I find some money on the sidewalk. I will eat better from throw away food than some powerful Chinese official will eat. Nobody starve in this country. In China if not for starve we have a lot more people. In all of Chinese history, lot of starve.”

  Abruptly she leaned forward and switched on the radio.

  35

  The Philadelphia boarding school evaporated. It just went away. I’d been outplayed and did not rush to replace my first cockamamie tall tale with a second.

  I drove for hours, waiting for an idea to enter my head. I didn’t know where to go. Betty became alert once when we passed a pig farm, and once again when I tried to pass a milk truck on a curve. Otherwise she maintained a half-napping state. If she needed something, she told me. “I am thirsty,” she would announce. I’d pull over and get her a Coke, and then she’d be silent for another forty-five minutes.

  At last I had to stop. I chose a place called the King’s Way Motor Court—eight cinder-block cottages all facing different directions. The rate was nine dollars a night.

  Cottage 6 at the King’s Way made the room at the Fletcher seem downright well appointed. There was one tiny bed, not even a true single, and a rollaway folded by the wall. Betty took one look and said she was going for a walk. I was tired from driving and thought, Maybe she won’t come back.

  But she did. I was lying on top of the sheet, having stripped the dusty bedspread off. She stood in the doorway, looking.

  I got up to help her unfold the rollaway. When we lowered the two halves, a reek of must and ammonia rolled out. Some hundred or so flat insects teemed over the blue and tan ticking.

  Betty let out a groan, and for my own part, I nearly vomited. The bugs were little black things running here and there. We closed the bed and shoved it out the door at a run. The rolling bed cleared two concrete steps before coming to rest on all four wheels.

  Betty wanted to have it out with the management, but I reminded her she was on the lam from Wang. “Don’t give a clerk a reason to remember you.” This would be my tactic again in days to come. Whenever we needed to practice clandestinity, which was almost all the time, I would tell Betty it was for her sake.

  We bunked together in the miniature single bed. The sentence that kept running through my brain was, There is a Chinese in the bed with me.

  I tried not to think about Ray. No one was looking after him now, but indulging my worries and fears would not help me to deserve the confidence he had placed in me.

  36

  I awoke and sat up, remembering where I was. The Chinese was gone. From the window I saw that the Scamp was still there.

  I pulled on my tunic dress and walked to a concrete picnic table at the far end of the parking lot. One end of the table was under a mulberry branch, and the berries had made purple stains on it.

  Way in the distance, there was my yellow, red, and brown patchwork print dress walking toward me with Betty inside it. Her tawny arms and legs became distinct. I’d been thinking about this Chinese lady-girl and how strange it was, her stowing away in my car just after we’d cut Henry loose. The dress had pockets on the sides, and before she sat she emptied them of five or six plums.

  “How’s your handler?” I said.

  “My what?”

  “The case officer you just now reported to.”

  I watched her neck and face for color. No change. She unfolded a paper napkin and rubbed at the skin of a plum.

  “I’m talking about your spymaster,” I said.

  “You think I will spy on you?” She gave me the plum and began polishing another.

  “Could be!”

  “You are right. Your boarding school teacher are very worry, girl. They tell me watch out for you.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Sure. They say, ‘Make that girl eat a lot of plum. Too skinny.’”

  She touched one of her eyes as though to get something out of it. She blinked a couple of times.

  This followed.

  ME: It’s time for you to come clean.

  BETTY: What do you mean, come clean?

  ME: I know you don’t work for my boarding school, because I made it up. Tell me the truth.

  BETTY: I come from mainland.

  ME: What?

  BETTY: Not from Taiwan.

  ME: You mean to tell me you come from Red China?

  BETTY: [She glared at me.]

  ME: How did you wind up in Baltimore?

  BETTY: Complicated.

  ME: Tell it!

  BETTY: Wang’s people bring me here from Hong Kong.

  ME: Do they know you are from the mainland?

  BETTY: Yeah. Can’t lie about that.

  ME: You lied to me about it.

  BETTY: You are not Chinese. For me to lie to Chinese, that will be like you say you are from Texas. Any white people can tell you are not from Texas, right? Chinese people, if they are been around, can maybe tell I am from Peking. Wang have travel around and he can tell. So he will have that on my head all the time.

  ME: Who has your passport?

  BETTY: Real one is gone. I will never get that.

  ME: How did you escape Red China without it?

  BETTY: A man have it. It is complicated.

  ME: I can see it is complicated. Tell me all of it, and make it the true version this time, or I will report you to some people who will make Mr. Wang and his mother look like the Neighborhood Welcome Committee.

  BETTY: I have travel with Chinese table tennis team. I was a translator.

  ME: I hope you were the second string.

  BETTY: What string? I don’t know what you are talking about.

  ME: Your English is not so good.

  BETTY: I know! I should not go, but someone have make me go!

  ME: Settle down. When you get warmed up like that, I can’t understand what you’re saying. Just tell me the truth, all right?

  BETTY: You beat my brow too much.

  ME: Go on and tell it.

  BETTY: I have had adult relationship with one party official who will travel with table tennis players. He has preferred me as his translator because we were a special friend. This is true. I tell him, I don’t like to translate, I might make a bad impression or maybe will get some word wrong. But he will like to travel with me. I cannot say more because I am ashame.

  ME: You are talking about a sexual entanglement.

  BETTY: [She nodded once with a look like she had bitten a lime.]

  ME: I don’t need to know each detail of that part. This party official brought you to Hong Kong as his special friend. Then what?

  BETTY: Then we have a bad fight. I tell him again, I do not like this way. I am ashame. He have family. People know and are discuss me. I am look down. For me it is bad. I was a good student. I have work very hard on the farm, but I study school, go to Peking University. Very good university. Study English. I think I will learn to speak English very we
ll. I have copy and recite many hours every day. Don’t want to go back to farm. Mm. I become involve with this man—one stupid mistake. Then, in Hong Kong he said something that has made me feel very angry. I ran out. I could not go back then. Two stupid mistake. I am now like a dead person. Maybe it is as though I have jump off a bridge. Can’t jump back up. Even if I will have a passport, it will be no good. I am out of this world. Like a wild animal, no home, no name, no connection to anyone. Like a snake living alone inside a narrow hole. Just quiet all the time, don’t tell anybody anything, don’t have someone to tell something to. I am glad I told you. If you tell someone this I will get send back to People’s Republic of China, maybe put on prison farm to work all my life. I am no good to my country anymore. Very sad, let people down for be licentious. I am sad.

  Now her neck was red and she cried awhile. She cried like she ate, in many small bites. It went on until she lit a Raleigh.

  ME: Your situation is not so bad. Refugees from Communist nations often seek U.S. asylum.

  BETTY: I don’t want U.S. asylum. I am not a refugee. I am a revolutionary!

  37

  I found I could not stop staring at this wiry brown creature. I don’t think I can describe the uneasy feeling it gave me. It was bedbugs all over again, only this time it was bedbugs of the mind.

  She was not just the enemy but the pure stock, straight out of Peking! And yet here she was, a helpless mess, negligible in size, with plum on her mouth, in tears.

  They were the confused tears of a Communist. I reminded myself of this. The hard little fists in front of me on the concrete were like the hard paws of a fox or coyote. She was a vicious pack animal, too small to do much killing by herself, but able to bite and scratch and do serious harm.

  “You must feel very lost,” I said. “I imagine life is different here, compared to Peking, China.”

  “Mm. Yes.”

  A minor breeze caused the branch at the end of the picnic table to lose a long mulberry. It rolled an inch on the concrete surface. There were ants on the table, too, walking in curves, and a beetlelike insect, and gray lichen, and bits of twig.