The Water Beetles

by Michael Kaan

  We ate quickly then got up, bowed deeply, and thanked them both several times.

  “You were both very kind to us. We can find our way,” Leuk said.

  Mr. Ho shook his head. “No, no, I’ll take you there. I want to make sure the ferryman knows where to take you.”

  He got up and pulled a padded jacket over his sweater, and dropped the little bag into his pocket. He muttered something to himself about how sick he was of the fighting. Mrs. Ho stood with her back to us. I looked at her and she seemed to be shaking as she scrubbed an old pot over and over again.

  Mr. Ho looked at her for a moment and said, “I’ll be back by midday.” She didn’t reply. He turned and put his hands around both our shoulders, and walked us outside.

  The ferry dock was at the end of a winding path through dense trees, and I was glad Mr. Ho had insisted on taking us. Few people were out this soon after daybreak. Mr. Ho shuffled along the road with a slightly unsteady gait. At the docks, a ferryman was already waiting in his boat with a few passengers. Mr. Ho brought out the cloth bag and gave the ferryman three coins.

  “Three passengers.”

  I looked at him in surprise.

  “Just get in.” He climbed in after us and I helped him over the side into a seat. “You have to get off at another village that’s harder to find. I want to make sure you get there. After that, the road to the city is easy to get to.”

  The ferryman pushed off, and once we were moving, he and Mr. Ho began conversing like old acquaintances. They spoke in a dialect that I understood only in fragments.

  As we went around a bend in the river, gunfire started up sporadically nearby. Some of the passengers gasped, and Mr. Ho raised a hand to silence us as he leaned forward and peered ahead. The ferryman stared inexpressively into the trees along the river, steering his boat towards the right bank. He brought us in as close as he could, so close that, as we passed by a thicket of leaning trees, I could smell the reddish spherical flowers that hung low over the water as they brushed over us. I would have picked one, but I was sitting very still and feared that plucking a flower would make the branches rustle.

  The other passengers were very quiet. One of the women pulled a scarf tight around her head and leaned forward as if to disappear into the boat. Mr. Ho kept talking to the ferryman in a lowered voice. Then he began to speak more urgently and the ferryman responded with quick, wordless nods while peering intently into the trees.

  A huge explosion struck the hill somewhere farther up on our side of the bank. Mr. Ho spun around on his seat and listened after the echo. The effort seemed to draw heavily from him, and he crouched to one side as though in pain and his breath grew wheezy.

  “Don’t stop at Dong Ma,” he hissed to the ferryman. “If that was the Japanese, they’ll go after the district police station there. Keep going.” He gestured violently at the ferryman as if to push the boat forward faster, yet we drifted on with agonizing slowness.

  Mr. Ho’s face was flushed. One of the women behind us was crying and he urged her to be quiet. “Don’t be afraid,” he said to us. “I know the river well.” But he sounded worried. He was wheezing and breathed through his mouth.

  The ferryman pushed on as two more explosions struck the riverbank, followed by gunfire. All of this was taking place farther upriver, and we were heading straight into it.

  “The next docks…are very far from the village,” said Mr. Ho. He stared across the water, gripping the side of the boat with the bluish, papery skin of his hand.

  “Chung-Man, get down!” said Leuk. He slid off the bench onto the bottom of the boat, squatting in the water pooled at our feet. I looked at Mr. Ho, and he waved at me impatiently with a downward gesture and told me to listen to my brother. Then he spoke rapidly to the ferryman, who responded with a slow shake of his head.

  Farther up, on the left bank, another shell exploded and I heard trees being torn apart. This one was close enough that I felt the air shake around me. Smoke rose from the blast, and then a great tree and clumps of earth fell into the water. When the smoke cleared, I saw several Chinese soldiers on the left with mortars and rifles firing over the river. I was thrilled to see them at last, and also terrified. All the other passengers hit the floor and the ferryman crouched as low as he could. The Chinese fired their rifles over the water, and it was then that I realized we were on the Japanese side of the river.

  “Keep going, keep going!” Mr. Ho shouted. The Chinese paused for a moment and took cover as the Japanese returned fire right above us. “Just keep to the trees. They’re shooting from higher up.”

  We drifted closer and closer to the gunfire. The quiet between exchanges was eerie, with only the fading cries of birds escaping upward. I stared hard at the opposite bank. Another company of Chinese soldiers descended from higher up, carrying mortars and machine guns. They began firing across the river. They unleashed a volley far more ferocious than before, and I heard tree limbs and rocks flying through the air and into the water. Above us and to our right, where the Japanese were hiding, there was a brief silence followed by the screams of the injured. I cheered and wept. I raised my fist and shouted, “You hit them! Do it again!” Then a single burst of machine-gun fire erupted to our right just above us. We were directly between the soldiers.

  I prayed that it was over, but the Chinese returned fire when the Japanese stopped shooting. I could almost see their faces in the trees, at least two dozen Chinese. The boat drifted on. Mr. Ho was right: they were firing mostly upward at the higher land on our side.

  Something big splashed in the water nearby. A moment later a dripping hand shot up and gripped the ferry’s edge. The boat lurched to one side. A Japanese soldier was struggling in the water, barely keeping his head up. He must have rolled down the bank and fallen in. He gripped the boat and swayed in the current, trying unsuccessfully to raise himself despite the shallowness of the water. The woman behind me screamed. When he managed to get his shoulders above the weeds, I saw that his other arm was blown right off and he was bleeding heavily into the water. He didn’t even seem to know what he was doing. He looked about sixteen, and I almost reached over to take his hand. He stared at me with cloudy, half-shut eyes and his slack mouth ran with algae.

  Mr. Ho turned in his seat and tried to kick the soldier’s hand. He was wearing only plain sandals made of straw, and his first few kicks did nothing. Then he stood and raised his knee, and landed the bottom of a sandal straight on the soldier’s fingers. With a faint sob, the soldier let go and drifted into the weeds.

  Just then the whiz of rifle shots flew by us. Mr. Ho fell to the floor beside me. There was a bullet hole in his neck and the blood pulsed gently from it into the water in the bottom of the boat. He clawed the air and started plucking at the clothes around his throat, and his wheeze turned to a gurgle. Leuk and I knelt down beside him.

  “Old Master! Old Master!” I screamed. I put my hand under his head to lift it from the water, but the blood kept washing into the boat. I called him Master to show respect, thinking it would bring him back.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Just as Mr. Ho had told us, the docks were outside the village. Leuk and I chose not to walk into the village, and instead followed a sign that indicated the way to the main road. We found a bamboo grove that stood apart from the rough forest, and we stumbled into it exhausted.

  There was a pinkish wash all over my shorts and the front of my shirt. I tried rubbing the stains off with some dried grass. That didn’t work, and I didn’t want to go back to the river to wash. I tried not to look at the stain. I rubbed my hands and forearms with some of the grass and leaves, but it gave me a rash, so I stopped.

  “Chung-Man, we need to rest,” said Leuk. We sat down at the base of a slender tree. I was starving and we had no food or money. I said to Leuk that we should look for a coconut or mango tree, or any other fruit nearby, but the bamboo dominated the grove and there was little else within sight. I had no energy to go searching.

  As soo
n as we sat down, the world grew still. The only sounds were of a light breeze running through the bamboo, and thousands of insects. The river seemed far away, and even the sun was muted by the swaying, bright-green stalks surrounding us. We sank back against the tree and exhaustion spread through every inch of my body. We were silent and motionless for several minutes.

  Leuk turned his head towards me. He was fingering the buttons on his shirt and looked half asleep. His voice had fallen to a whisper again, and he looked down at the ground. “Mr. Ho was very good to us,” he said. Before replying, I watched a small red-winged bird alight, high up, at the tip of a stalk.

  “Yes, he was,” I murmured. The bamboo waved in the warm green air. I listened to the insects, but even that tired me. The breeze whispered through the leaves and I saw Mr. Ho’s face appear before me, floating in the grass until he faded away, the sound of rustling coming from his open mouth.

  “I hope the ferryman takes him back to his village,” whispered Leuk. “I hope he makes it back.”

  “I hope we do too,” I said. I had lost track of what Leuk was saying. I felt the immense weight of sleep on me, and in my chest I felt something I imagined as a whirlpool.

  There were several younger bamboo stalks next to me, and as I turned my head to rest, I watched them moving in the breeze. Two round black beetles were crawling up one of the stalks. I leaned forward to watch them. They were a deep black, though their wings had a bluish-green lustre. They had mandibles like little wrenches, and above these, protruding from the middle of their faces, were long green snouts like needles. The beetle near the top scuttled around one of the joints between the bamboo segments, gripping the stalk with its barbed limbs, and settled on a spot just above the joint.

  It tested the bamboo with its mandibles for a moment and shifted its body up the stalk. It put the tip of its needle against the young stalk and drove it in. I thought I heard the tiny cracking of the fibres as they split open. Its face was almost touching the stalk, and it was very still for a few moments except for a slight shaking of its abdomen. Then it slowly withdrew the needle and shifted over to look for a new spot. Below it, the other beetle was doing the same.

  They were sucking the sugary sap out of the young shoots. More beetles emerged from the soil and started climbing up the other stalks. I guessed that we had chased them off when we first appeared. Now they seemed content to ignore us.

  The beetle below was now drawing from its own segment, while the first was still probing for its second drink. I reached over carefully and picked it up. One of its wings fluttered beneath my finger that was holding down the other wing, and it wriggled its legs and mandibles at me. I pulled off the wings and legs and quickly put it in my mouth. I bit down. The sweet bamboo sap burst onto my tongue, and I chewed it up quickly and swallowed. Then I plucked off the other one. It was still drinking, and its needle snapped off in the stalk. While I chewed on it, a tiny drop of sap appeared at the end of the broken needle.

  I told Leuk to move over, and together we plucked the beetles off the bamboo and ate them. Others continued marching up the stalks as they probed the fibres for an opening to the sap. They traced little dark lines against the pale green, heedless of our waiting fingers. The sweetness of the sap persisted for the first several bites until a bitter taste built up in my mouth and I stopped.

  We lay there until the sun drifted into the afternoon, and we both slept in turns. I fell asleep with my hand on my buckle, and when I woke, it was still there.

  The road leading to the village intersected with a much larger one, and we heard vehicles and horses on it even before the road was in sight. I sat down on the roadside and Leuk leaned against a tree.

  Soon a truck came down the road. We hid behind two trees in case it was Japanese. From the way it roared and sputtered, we knew it couldn’t be military, and we craned our necks out to look. When the truck rounded the bend and came into view, Leuk stepped into the road and waved it down.

  It was a rattling old delivery truck with the windshield blown out. One man was behind the wheel, another had mechanic’s tools strapped to his belt. He was standing on the step outside the passenger door, hanging on to a bar. He saw us, waved back at Leuk, and told the driver to stop. Then he stepped down and asked us where we were going.

  “To Hong Kong!” said Leuk. “Or a place just outside it. I think it’s called the Chung Shan gardens.” The truck shook and backfired as it idled.

  “I know it,” said the mechanic. “We’ll give you a ride there if you want.”

  My brother and I looked briefly at each other and said yes. The mechanic went around to the back and I opened the passenger door.

  “Not in here,” said the driver. Inside, taking up the whole passenger side, was a strange contraption. They had rigged up a kind of second engine inside the cab, almost like a wood stove that fed fuel into whatever engine remained under the hood. Next to the driver were several glass whiskey bottles that, he explained, were full of alcohol that he fed slowly into the engine as he drove. The mechanic came back up front and showed off his invention proudly. He said he’d rigged it himself because of the shortage of fuel and engine parts.

  He took us to the back of the truck and helped us in. It was piled high with heavy bags of salt that reached higher than the truck walls. When we got up on top of the bags, we were well above the safety of the truck’s walls, and when I looked over the edge, the ground seemed unnervingly far down.

  “Lie as flat as you can,” said the mechanic. “Hold tight to the bags.”

  I was a little frightened of falling off at first, until Leuk shifted one of the bags to help me get a better grip. The fumes of burning alcohol stung my nose and eyes as the truck started and shook, and then we took off.

  For the first time in months, I felt free of danger. The dust from the salt burned my nostrils, so I lay with my face on my forearms and closed my eyes. In the dark, and feeling how tired my muscles were, I could think only of seeing the girls and my mother again.

  About a half-hour into the rocking, bumpy ride, I had to pee badly. I didn’t want to ask the driver to stop, so I just unbuttoned carefully while lying down and peed into the bag of salt beneath me. I poked Leuk in the arm and told him what I was doing, and he laughed hysterically. A moment later I shouted, “I’m still peeing!” and he laughed even harder. The mechanic on the outside heard us and looked over and waved, though I knew he couldn’t make out what I’d said. We giggled like idiots. Leuk wanted to do it too, and he unzipped himself and made a face, though he had peed on the roadside just before leaving and couldn’t make anything. He kept wiggling and making faces, and when he said a drop had finally passed, we laughed even harder and tears ran sideways down my face onto the bags. It never occurred to me that the salt would eventually end up in someone’s food.

  We drove for what seemed like an hour, taking just one short break where the mechanic and the driver shared their food with us. They had cold red rice mixed with dried shrimp and pickled mustard, and we each devoured a bowl of it. The truckers seemed like close friends and they teased us a lot. I said I was thirsty and the driver took one of the whiskey bottles full of fuel and pretended to take a long swig from it before holding it out to me as though I should drink some too.

  The driver took us to a stream a few yards off the road that he said was safe to drink from. The four of us walked down to it and filled water canteens and drank, and Leuk and I did our best to wash ourselves. Even when we were all wet, I don’t think we looked much better, and the driver laughed at us. He went back to the truck and returned with a cloth and a bar of soap. He got us to sit down on a rock by the stream, and from the cloth he unwrapped a straight razor. We soaped our hair as much as we could, and the driver carefully shaved our heads.

  He shaved Leuk first. When the first long, soapy lock fell on the rock with a plop, I laughed because it looked and sounded so disgusting. Leuk washed his head in the stream again while the driver shaved me. I thought I would keep l
aughing, but when I felt his left hand carefully holding my neck and scalp, gently pulling my ears, and rubbing his thumb over my skin to look for spots he’d missed, I grew very quiet and a little sleepy. He told us he’d been a barber before the war and wanted to open a shop again when it ended. When he was done, I rinsed off in the stream, and as we walked back to the truck, Leuk and I ran our hands over our heads to feel our clean skin.

  We climbed back up onto the salt bags as the mechanic started the engine. The driver said he would go for two hours now without a break. I tried to sleep, but the constant shaking of the truck and slight movement of the salt bags kept me awake. It was too loud for Leuk and me to talk.

  I had imagined what it would be like to see Hong Kong come into view, but the road took us to a side of it I didn’t know, and in any case it was dark when we arrived. We stopped just inside the gates of what had once been a separate village. The mechanic and the driver came around to the back and helped us both down. They gave us a canteen full of water to take with us.

  “Do you know where you’re going?” the driver asked.

  “To a quilt factory,” said Leuk. “Do you know it?”

  He clapped his hand on the end of a bag of salt. “No idea. But you’ll find it.”

  We thanked them again and they drove away. I waved at them until they were gone. It was so strange to be dropped off like that, and hear no sounds of warplanes or gunfire, and believe that it was safe to be on our own again. It was as though Chow had just dropped us off at the movies. I shouldered the canteen, and Leuk teased me about my bald head as we started walking.

  The northern end of Hong Kong still looked like an old farming village. The roads were dirt and the houses were older-style village dwellings like the one our aunt and uncle had in Tai Fo, and there were no tall buildings anywhere. It looked almost untouched by the war.

  We walked down the main street in the evening lamplight. Had it not been for my shoes, we would have fit in pretty well. The people out walking were more like the city people we’d grown up around, and many of them were out either enjoying the cool air or lining up at the ration station. While we walked, I got distracted by the sign over a bookstore and bumped into an older woman carrying a bag of vegetables. She turned and snapped at me before going on, and while I was turning back to apologize, I nearly ran into someone else. It reminded me of home again, the impatience, the movement of people, the voices. I half expected to reach into my pocket and find a bag of candy.