In the Lap of the Gods

by Li Miao Lovett

  He got out of the car and surveyed his surroundings. Down the hill, he spotted some construction trucks a half-mile away. The mountains gave way to a fertile plain to his right. In the distance, he saw a tiny cluster of buildings surrounded by farmland.

  “Son of a eunich.” Fang kicked dust at the tires. He popped the hood, and stared at the array of wires and tubes and casings. The car would not reveal its troubles.

  Liu had awoken and stuck his head out the window. “What’s the matter?”

  “Car died,” Fang said. “Dead as an old nag.”

  “Uh . . . what do we do?” Liu rubbed his eyes and stared at the infants in the back. His foundling was waking up from the sorghum-induced stupor.

  “Those fellows down by the trucks might be able to help,” said Fang. “But we’ve got too many babies.”

  “What shall we do with them?” Liu asked.

  “Hide them in the trunk,” Fang replied. “Two of them.”

  Liu raised his eyebrows. “How are they going to breathe?”

  “The same way you do, my friend. Don’t worry, there’s ventilation.”

  Liu flashed a skeptical look, and Fang proceeded to unhinge the back seat, remove one section, and shove it into the cavity of the trunk. He covered the gaping hole with a blanket.

  The old broker directed Liu to grab two of the babies. The twin girls, still sedated, went into the trunk. Liu’s infant started to fuss in the back seat, and the male infant stirred a little.

  “I had that custom-made,” Fang said, patting the remaining cushion.

  “Do you . . . uh... often keep them in the trunk?” asked Liu.

  “Only in the city,” Fang replied. “If a policeman stopped me, I’d be better off having a crowd of dancing girls in the car than all these babies.”

  A car rounded the bend, whizzing by close to the men. Fang told Liu to push the car to the shoulder while he steered. He would have preferred the dancing girls, but the scavenger was earning his keep.

  NOW THAT LIU WAS ALERT, HE COULD FEEL THE STING OF THE wind, which came in brisk, unpredictable gusts. He was impressed by the old man’s ingenuity. But Fang was in command of the situation once again, and Liu felt uneasy about that.

  “You stay here,” Fang said. “I’m going to head down to those construction workers. And when I come back, don’t say anything, you hear? I’ll do the talking.”

  Liu nodded, shuffling his feet in the gravel.

  After some time, Fang returned with a bulldozer driven by a construction worker in a bright yellow vest. The bulldozer blazed toward Liu, spraying clouds of gravel from its enormous tires. It was a monstrosity, with a golden claw that could devour a donkey.

  Or a man, Liu thought. He remembered old Wushan, flattened to rubble by pickaxes, sledgehammers, a thousand sticks of dynamite. He wanted to back away, to run, but he stiffened his legs instead.

  The construction worker, a scruffy fellow with mirthful eyes, hopped out of his vehicle and surveyed the scene. He heard one of the babies whimpering and peered into the back seat.

  “Who are these critters?” he asked, folding his arms across his bright vest.

  “The baby boy is my grandson. I’m taking him to the city for an operation,” said Fang.The fellow stared at the infant’s cleft palate. “The girl belongs to Liu here. His wife lives in Wanzhou.”

  The fellow seemed to buy the story. It wasn’t unusual for parents to be separated from their children when one or both had to find work in the city.

  Liu said nothing. He had this strange feeling that a new identity had been created for him. He could be a father of that baby girl, cursed because she was a girl and left to die because of it. She was helpless, but even in the course of a day she had asserted her needs, and was now asserting some small place in his life, even if it was a fabricated one.

  The construction worker could not fix their car, but told them that his boss would be showing up for an inspection. The manager might be able take them to Wanzhou, the closest city. The bulldozer kicked up a swirl of gravel and disappeared down the lonely highway.

  Fang laid out their plan—they would leave the car for now, catch a ride with the construction worker’s boss, and take two of the babies with them.

  “What about the other two?” asked Liu.

  “You’re going to take them to that little village and leave them by the road.”

  Liu was aghast. “You mean, abandon them?”

  Fang grabbed Liu by his collar. “Listen, if you play savior now, we’re all going to be in deep water.” He whisked two fingers across Liu’s neck.

  “Maybe you can come up with a good story.” Liu shuddered as the old man released his grasp.

  “What, two men running a day care? No fool’s going to believe that. We’re going to stick with the alibi, hear me?”

  Liu nodded. He resigned himself to the situation, and pushed his resentment into the shadows. Since he was younger and stronger, he would have to take the babies to the little village while Fang guarded the vehicle.

  “What if someone sees me?” Liu asked.

  “Drop down, or drop dead,” Fang replied with a sinister grin.

  Liu braced himself; it seemed that danger was constantly at hand. He moved along with little protest, taking his orders from Fang with a somber nod. But his mind remained vigilant. I’m as good as a criminal on the run, he thought.

  He took a deep breath, picked the twin girls out of the trunk, and tucked them under his arms. The village was a good stretch away. The buildings appeared like specks no bigger than his thumb-print. Liu pushed forth and felt everything around pushing him back—the strong gale sweeping across the ridge, the tall grass that entangled his feet, the leaden weight of the babies in their drugged state. The voices of reproach swirled inside his head. You are leaving them to die. You are putting them out to the wolves. You will be caught. You will answer to the gods.

  Liu broke into a run. He ran until everything around became a blur, a kaleidoscope of wind and grass and sky that heightened his senses and numbed his mind. When at last he approached the outskirts of the village, he took in big gulps of air, but his heart was still pounding. Eyes seemed to lurk all around him, in the stalks of ripened wheat, the slate-colored roof tiles in the distance, the rubble pile by the road.

  But no one was watching. The village was quiet in the light of late afternoon. No one was there to contemplate the fate of two young lives. For now, it was up to Liu.

  He placed the two infant girls side by side just off the gravel road. He adjusted a stray hood, his fingers brushing against the soft, blubbery cheek. The twin stirred, angling a pink thumb into her mouth. He reached in his pocket and placed a coin against each young breast. “Tien bao yo,” he whispered, and with the fleeting wish for their safety, he turned and ran all the way back to the highway where Fang was waiting. He was too shaken from the deed to feel anger toward the old man, who demanded unquestioning obedience, as Liu’s father once had.

  The construction supervisor showed up presently and agreed to take the men and two babies to Wanzhou, where they would catch a ferry back to their hometown. In the car, Liu spoke little, staring out the window to drown out unsettling thoughts of what could come next.

  The infant girl sat in his lap, and she was becoming more and more restless. Fang had brought along some milk powder for the long ride, as he could not pack enough homemade gruel for four infants. Now, of course, there would be plenty for the two remaining ones. When Liu’s infant began to cry, Fang took a plastic bottle out of his ditty bag and filled it with a loamy mixture of powder and water.

  “Here, give her this.” Fang handed the bottle to Liu.

  Liu fingered the rubber nipple, amused by its bulbous shape. “Is this supposed to look like . . . you know...?”

  “Yes, my friend, think of it as a wet nurse. At a fraction of the cost.” Fang chuckled. “No need to keep another woman fed and happy.”

  In Wanzhou, the supervisor dropped them off near the dock
, refusing money for his help. Liu was struck by the modern appearance of the town’s waterfront. “All new. Beats the old town,” the fellow said.

  An enormous port building pushed through the veil of scaffolding. Behind it, the assembly of hovels on the hillside seemed out of place, disheveled as beggars. As they descended the long stairway to the quay, a tram chugged alongside down the steep concrete embankment. Liu counted eight beats before the tram finished its journey.

  And then it dawned on him that the newly built dock would soon be submerged. A large sign on the embankment marked the next rising of the river in bright blue strokes: 156 METERS. This much he could read, having seen the signs that dotted the slopes of condemned villages. He glanced around at the crowd of waiting passengers, chased by ragtag porters vying for business. “When is all this going under water?”

  “In a couple of years.” said Fang. “Everything will move up again. Except for those guys.” He pointed to the hustling porters, their bamboo sticks strapped with suitcases and boxes. His prophecy gave Liu a funny feeling, a mix of dread and relief. The waters would rise again; everything was temporary, even the new parts of town. But that would mean his scavenging days were far from over.

  On the journey back to Wushan, Liu noticed that the clientele had changed dramatically from a decade and a half ago. Gone were the peasants dressed in drab blue Mao suits, smoking their cheap cigarettes. The women wore cool summer dresses that whispered as they walked by. Most of the other passengers appeared to be businessmen, some in dapper suits with stiff collars, quite a few talking into their cell phones in crisp, porcelain tones. The elderly folks were conspicuously absent. It seemed to Liu that modernity had descended over the Yangtze River, and along with the dirt and grime it had swept the shipboard clean of poverty, old age, and infirmity.

  Liu carried the baby awkwardly, not wanting to cradle her as a woman would, nor eager to look like a peasant wielding a plow. In the waning light of summer, the rusty brown water of the Yangtze became gray like spent coals. Before curfew time, the babies began to cry again, and each got a share of milk from the same bottle. Liu dreaded the thought of changing the baby’s diaper. Fang told him to pad it with paper napkins until they got back to Wushan.

  THE OVERNIGHT JOURNEY WAS A SMOOTH ONE, AND THE ferry cut through the subdued waters of the Yangtze like a silent water snake. The Yangtze River itself was a serpent, gliding through an escarpment of limestone. With the swelling of the reservoir, it had chased villages and towns, entire cities up the hillsides and across its banks to higher land.

  Liu noticed that the newest buildings near the horizon were gargantuan and uniform, as if the Communist Party had taken the Soviet-style buildings from the early days, scrunched them into vertical blocks, then stacked them together like mahjong pieces. Older buildings, dilapidated dwellings of mud and pinewood, clung to the land above the riverbank.

  “All this used to be farmland,” Fang said, pointing at the high-rise apartment buildings.

  “Where did the farmers go?” Liu asked.

  “They got shuffled out to Chongqing, and some provinces as far away as Hubei. The peasants put up a fight. Made no sense to give up all this fertile farmland.”

  Fang mentioned that the peasants from another village near Wushan had sought his help in claiming their share of the resettlement funds. He had gone to the county office in charge of distributing the funds, where he worked his way up to a chief administrator, who promised to look into the matter.

  When it came time to move, most of the villagers had not received their compensation. They surrounded the county building and demanded to be paid. An official told them to go home and pack up. And then the Public Security Bureau stepped in, descending on the crowd with clubs. The peasants left empty-handed.

  “Those damned thieves pocketed the money.” Fang shook his pipe in protest. “Rotten eggs, all of them.”

  Liu stared at Fang, curious that the old cheat had attempted to perform a public service, if only for a price.

  Fang leaned over and hissed, “those crooks should have been thrown in the river, pockets of gold and all.”

  Liu imagined the officials, their vests heavy with gold ingots from the county coffers, sinking in the deep waters of the Yangtze.

  “Did you get in trouble?” he asked.

  “Nope. I kept a low profile after that incident. Don’t take on these kinds of cases anymore.” Fang extinguished his pipe, just as the lights flickered before going out across the ship.

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, LIU AWOKE TO THE BABY GIRL’S cries. The first rays of dawn shone through the porthole, diffracted by the dusty panes into filaments of silver light. He was tired, less from the narrow cots they slept on than from her cries during the night. She had demanded to be fed, yet the pulpy concoction of cow’s milk did not sit well with her.

  Liu grimaced; he would have to change her diaper after all. In the ship’s bathroom, he whisked cold water across her exposed bottom. She wrestled with him, her ribs slipping in and out of his callused fingers. Her flesh was as red as a baboon’s from diaper rash.

  Watery excrement swirled down the drain, and Liu lurched to the side as the ship hit some turbulence. He kept a watchful eye on the baby while washing the diaper, his nose turned away in disgust.

  When the baby wriggled toward the edge of the counter, Liu reeled her in and tapped her bare bottom. The baby responded with raucous wails, her cheeks glowing red at both ends.

  Should never have found her, Liu thought. All this effort to sell a baby. This baby peddling business made him terribly uncomfortable, but giving her up had been the logical thing to do. Then he remembered the two infants he had left by the village road. A knot seized his stomach, and Liu agitated the cloth diaper feverishly.

  He took a deep breath. It was time to diaper her up. As he fussed with the squirming creature, the diaper pin drew a trickle of blood from his thumb. The baby giggled.

  Blood streaked across the diaper, mulberry red like the stain of drunken brawls. Liu pressed his thumb against his teeth. He flared his lips at the infant in a mock grimace.

  “You little brat,” he grumbled. The baby tugged at her diaper nonchalantly. Her chestnut brown eyes twinkled at him, and Liu was suddenly struck by a feeling of affection. How strange, he thought, that this unwanted creature could turn his mood around so quickly.

  When he emerged from the bathroom with the baby in his arm, a woman walked by, staring at them with amusement. The diaper was contorted in knots above one leg, and bulged like a steamed bun above the other.An unsavory streak of red showed at the edges. Liu kept his gaze down. As he slipped past the woman, he knocked over someone’s thermos, sending it to the floor with an unceremonious clatter.

  Fang had already awoken, and was staring out the window. “Look, it’s Fengjie.”

  A swelling in his chest, a quickened heartbeat, these signaled the upwelling of memories that Liu could not suppress. Fengjie was Fei Fei. It was their life together in a sunlit apartment, on a stroll through cobblestone alleyways, on the deck of his father’s barge, in a bamboo bed that gave way to his groans of pleasure and her sweet lips.The Fengjie that Liu remembered was a small town with grand old gates dating back to the Ming Dynasty.

  His elation was short lived. When he looked through the porthole, he could not recognize the town. The bold angles of Fengjie’s buildings gleamed white and silver in the early morning light.

  “This is the new town?” Liu mumbled. It left a strange taste in his mouth, like bitter melon seeds.

  “That’s right.They moved new Fengjie upriver.”

  “And the old town . . . is no more?”

  “It’s a pile of rubble at the bottom of the river.” Fang looked over at Liu. “I wouldn’t go diving in there. Worthless rock. All the good stuff’s taken.”

  The vertical lines of steel and concrete in new Fengjie were not unfamiliar to Liu, as he had seen a similar change in Wushan when the new town sprang up above the old. But the familiar la
ndmarks were gone.

  “Where’s the city gate?” he asked.

  “They took it down and moved it to Baidicheng,” Fang replied.

  Liu hoped to catch a glimpse of it downriver. When the ferry approached the mouth of Qutang Gorge, he pressed his nose against the glass.

  “The cliffs—they seem different too.” They were imposing as before, heavily robed with bamboo and pine groves, and threadbare where the rock face rose vertically. But the thickets of maidenhair fern braided into the crevices were gone. The turrets of rock fortresses, the limestone busts of old women gossiping beneath big straw hats were gone. What once lived in Fei Fei’s imagination was now underwater.

  Liu peeled his eyes away. His heart was heavy, and he sat in silence as the baby grabbed at his shirt with her waifish fingers.

  “Cheer up, my friend. Nothing is immortal,” said Fang. “You can’t believe those old wives’ tales.”

  The thought did not give Liu comfort. Fengjie was gone, and so was Fei Fei. He could not drain the great river to make old Fengjie rise from the rubble, any more than he could venture into the spirit world to reclaim his wife and unborn child.

  The infant girl settled down and snuggled against his shoulder. A great commotion seized the ship as passengers prepared to disembark.

  “When we get to Wushan, we’ll take the babies over to Mrs. Lung,” Fang said. “She’ll watch them until I get the car back.”

  Until you collect more babies for sale, Liu thought. He stroked the infant at his breastbone, and looked Fang in the eye.

  “No, Fang, I’m going home. I’m keeping this one.”

  Fang drew a puff from his pipe. “As you wish, my friend.” He chuckled, then added, “Just remember, she’ll be worth less when she gets older.”

  6

  LIU OFTEN THOUGHT ABOUT THE EVENINGS THAT HE HAD SPENT with Fei Fei in their old apartment, how he had watched her stomach grow, how she carried their unborn child, ripe as a melon, as she bustled about, as gracefully as ever. He had rested his ear against her belly, imagining this blossoming of life inside her, and as he rubbed her belly, he fancied himself bringing form to this shapeless mass. It was a godlike act, this creation of a baby. It mystified Liu, yet it had made him the more practical man.