Hour of the Rat
Page 22
A part of me feels like, what’s the point? I’m going to get caught eventually. I always feel like I’m going to get busted for something, when it comes down to it.
Then I think, Get a grip. If this was the DSD or Creepy John doing some weird-ass shit, or even some of the other creeps I’ve butted heads with the last few years from my own country, I’d have plenty of reasons to freak. And this whole thing with Eos, and Hongxing, and New Century Hero Rice—something’s going on there. Something a whole lot bigger than me.
But Russell? Erik? Setting me up for some cheesy pot bust?
Don’t quit, I tell myself. Keep playing.
It’s a local problem, and local police in China are really bad at coordinating with different provinces, from what I’ve heard. All I need to do is get the fuck out of Dali and out of Yunnan and back to Beijing. I’ll deal with it there.
Or, maybe, head southeast to Shenzhen, then to Hong Kong. Get the fuck out of Dodge altogether, before the bust catches up to me.
Except there’s my mom, back at my apartment. With Andy, and a toilet that may or may not flush.
“Fuck, dog,” I mutter. “Why isn’t this shit ever simple?”
The dog sits back on its haunches and thumps its tail. I stretch out my hand. It pushes its nose into my palm, and I give it a scratch behind its ears.
“Oh, okay, I get it. It is simple. For you.”
We keep walking north. To the right is the lake, deep blue shifting to slate grey when the clouds blow over it, sunlight hitting the water in fan-shaped beams.
I’d heard there were lots of artists designing and building second homes around here, and now I get why. This would be a nice place to live.
That is, if I wasn’t wanted by the Dali police.
I’m thinking about all this, the dog on one side, the lake on the other, spacing out the way I tend to do, taking in the light glinting off little waves, the sharp blue of the sky, the panting of the dog.
I don’t take in the silver Toyota pulling up alongside me until it slows and the passenger window rolls down.
“Yili. Please get in the car.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
MY HEART SLAMS INTO my throat. I don’t even know how I feel when I place the familiar voice and look over and see Creepy John leaning toward the passenger window from the driver’s seat.
He opens the passenger door.
“What do you want?” I manage.
He sighs through gritted teeth. “Just, please. Get into the car.”
“Why? What are you going to do?”
“Try to fix this mess you are in. For first thing. For second …” His eyes drift down. His head cocks back. “What is that?”
“A dog. Duh.”
The dog cocks its head back, too. Bares its teeth. A growl rumbles in its throat.
I’m liking this dog.
John does his squinty-eyed look, but this time it’s like he’s getting a headache, for real. “Why you have dog?”
“Long story.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he finally says. “Just get in car.”
“What if I don’t?”
“Then maybe you get arrested here and go to prison,” he snaps. “You want to go to prison?”
I stand there at the side of the road, the dog pressing against my leg, the wind kicking up, carrying a smell that’s like a giant aquarium, moss or algae or something.
I mean, what am I going to do? What are my choices here, really?
“The dog comes too,” I say.
SO MAYBE I’M PUSHING it, but I honestly don’t give a fuck at this point.
“We need to go to … to a … an animal doctor,” I manage in Mandarin.
“Shouyi?” John supplies.
“Yeah. That.”
“Yili …” he starts.
We’re driving down the road along the lake. I don’t have a clue where John plans to take me. The dog lies in the backseat on one side, head resting on front leg, wounded side up, which is good because it’s not bleeding all over John’s new upholstery, which I have a feeling would piss him off.
“Or get me some drugs and bandages if you want,” I say. “Whatever. But I need to do something for him.” Or her. I still don’t know.
There’s no reason he has to go along. No reason he can’t stop the car and dump the dog by the side of the road. It’s not like I have any kind of power here. Not even a little.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay. We find someone.”
WE DRIVE NORTH. MOUNTAIN on the left, lake on the right. Past little villages, creeks that empty into the lake, green fields, I don’t know of what.
I think about New Century Hero Rice.
“So how’d you find me?” I ask.
He gives a half shrug, like it’s not even worth answering.
“Come on,” I say. “My cell phone? My passport? How?”
“Not very hard,” he finally says. “We watch you, you go to train station, they see what ticket you buy, what train. Hotels report to local PSB. Easy for us to ask. We lose you a while in Yangshuo but find you again in Dali.”
“ ‘We’?”
“Just … you know, people. Some are … are officers. Others just … we pay them.” He shrugs again. “Many people work for DSD these days.”
“Huh. Like guys in polo shirts, driving a Buick?”
John frowns. “Buick? I don’t think so.”
Whatever.
“Why are you going to so much trouble? Don’t you guys have better things to do? Stop monks from lighting themselves on fire or arrest people cracking jokes on Twitter?”
His hands tighten on the steering wheel. “You know why.”
“Lao Zhang? I told you, I don’t know where he is.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving Beijing, then?”
He actually sounds hurt. Which is kind of funny and pretty bizarre.
“I can’t take a vacation with my mom?”
His head whips around, and he glares at me. “Vacation? You go to Guiyu for vacation? Without your mother? And she goes back to Beijing anyway.”
We hit something, a pothole, the car bounces and shimmies. John yanks the steering wheel to compensate. The tires squeal. The dog yelps from the backseat.
“I had some business to take care of,” I say.
“So you come here to do business with those guys, those guys with all the ganja? I did not think you were so stupid.” Now he just sounds pissed.
“No! No. I didn’t know anything about that. I was going there to meet someone else. He …”
I could tell him, I guess. Maybe he could even help. I mean, if there’s anyone who could probably track down a runaway foreigner, it’s Creepy John.
But I just don’t know what the consequences of that would be. For Jason/David. For me.
Trust Mr. Double-Dealing Secret Agent? I don’t think so.
“It’s a long story,” I say. “But it’s got nothing to do with Lao Zhang. It’s personal. Not anything you’d care about.”
WE GET TO SOME village that’s pretty cute: a lot of white with grey stone trim, black and white and grey nature scenes painted under the peaked roofs, carved wood and raw brick. Not a lot of white-tile disease. Middle-aged ladies wearing traditional dress: deep blue shifts and blouses under them, dark head wraps, sashes embroidered with pink flowers and butterflies.
“Bai people,” John says. I see a couple of Western tourists wandering through the narrow lanes, taking pictures with their iPhones.
No veterinarian, though.
We finally find a medical clinic. The doctor there, an older man, at first he doesn’t want to have anything to do with the dog, but John whips out his credential and a wad of cash and the doctor starts bobbing his head up and down and clasps his hands together and smiles like he can’t imagine a better way to be spending his time.
The dog doesn’t want to go with him. It whimpers and hugs my thigh. “It’s okay, dog,” I whisper. “I’ll come with you, all right?”
He doesn’t ask what happened to the dog. Just bandages it up and hands me a bottle of antibiotics at the end.
“Two times a day,” he says.
“Xie xie.” I pocket the pills. Hesitate. “Is it a boy or a girl?” He laughs a little. “Girl. You can have xiao gou if you want.” Puppies.
“Wo … wo buyao,” I say. I don’t want. I mean,
I don’t even want one dog.
AFTER THAT, I’M THINKING, I should get the dog something to eat, but it’s not like there’s a Petco here. Maybe we can just stop at a restaurant, get some chicken or beef, or something.
“To feed dog?” John asks with a hard sigh.
I shrug. “He … she … I don’t know when the last time she ate was.”
John checks his watch. “Okay. Lunchtime anyway.”
You can tell that this village gets tourists. We find a courtyard restaurant with an English sign that says WELCOME FOR YOU TRY XIZHOU SPECIAL FLAVORS! ENJOYING IN RETROSPECT THE EVERLASTING! John manages to squeeze in his Toyota out front, in the narrow lane.
I order the local fish and something called a poshu, a “roasting round flat cake by the wheat flour with all good color, joss-stick, and flavor,” that features “ethereal oil layering.” It’s supposed to be good for “go out to labor or tour of holding.” It all tastes pretty good, if not ethereally everlasting. But even though I haven’t eaten since last night, I’m not feeling much like eating. There’s the dog, lying in the back of John’s car, with the windows cracked. She seems pretty lethargic—doped up, I have to figure—so I’m hoping she doesn’t pee all over his new upholstery.
And there’s John, sitting across from me. Eating with a sort of angry efficiency.
We don’t talk. We just eat, in record time, leaving with a take-out order of some plain beef-and-rice dish that I figure will be easy for the dog to eat.
I try to pay. John won’t let me.
When we get back to the car, I open the take-out container and put it under the dog’s nose. She sniffs at it. Her tail thumps a little.
“Don’t you want to eat any of it? Come on, it’s got ethereal flavors.”
She lifts her head enough to nose at the beef and rice. Takes a couple of slurping bites. Lays her head back down, tail thumping weakly.
“Okay, good dog,” I say. “You can have more later.”
I close up the Styrofoam take-out container. Tie the flimsy plastic bag. John stands behind me, and I can feel him watching. I don’t have a clue what he’s thinking.
When I try to stand up, my leg’s buckling and I have to brace myself on the car seat, and even then I’m wobbling like one of those plates on top of a Chinese acrobat’s stick.
“Here,” John says. He circles his arm around my back, tucking his hand more or less in my armpit, and I, reluctantly, thread my arm across his back, my hand resting on his ribs. He slowly hoists me up. His hand remains there for a moment, beneath my arm, his fingertips grazing the side of my tit, then falls away.
We stand there next to the car.
“Did you hurt yourself?”
“Yeah. In Guiyu. Getting better, though.”
I ’M NOT SURE WHERE I expect us to go, and truthfully, I kind of space out for a while, something I still tend to do if I get too tired or too stressed out for too long—“dissociate” is the technical term.
Or maybe … I don’t know, after everything that’s happened, I’m finally feeling like I can afford to relax. Like right now I’m kind of safe.
That’s when adrenaline rushes through me like an electric shock.
Safe? With Creepy John? What am I smoking?
I look out the window, try to get my bearings. We’ve been driving north, away from Dali. Now we’re heading east, around the north end of Erhai Lake. Erhai means “Ear Sea,” I think, because the lake is kind of shaped like an ear, and it’s a big freaking lake. We’re heading around the top of it. The road is dirt now, rutted, and there are wind turbines up on the hillside, and I can’t tell how much of the bumping is from the road and how much is from the gusts of wind.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“Some place quiet,” he mutters, hands gripping the steering wheel.
“Why?”
“So you can rest. So I can … so I can decide what to do.”
My heart thumps hard in my chest. “What do you mean, ‘decide what to do’?”
He winces now, scrunches up his face like he’s in pain. “Just … just how I can fix things.”
Okay, I think, okay. He’s not going to hurt me. He’s not. He saved my ass before. He took my dog to a doctor and bought it lunch.
It’s not your dog, I remind myself.
And when it comes down to it, I have no idea what John really wants.
AS WE CURVE AROUND the top of the lake and head south, the road smooths out again. Beams of light stream through breaks in the cloud like some giant flashlight, the peaks of the little waves on the lake sparkling where they hit. There are rusting boats now and again tied up at rotting wooden posts. We blow by some Westerners on bikes struggling against the wind.
“So you really don’t know where Zhang Jianli is,” John finally says.
“No. I really don’t.” I summon up the energy to get pissed off. “I thought you were supposed to be his friend.”
“I …” He looks ashamed, and maybe he actually is. “I just have to tell them something. They think you know. And I don’t want …” His voice trails off. He stares straight ahead.
“What?”
“I don’t want you to have trouble, that’s all.”
He turns to look at me, which I wish he wouldn’t do, given the cyclists and farm trucks and motorcycle carts on the road. “Just tell me what you are doing. Then I can say it has nothing to do with Lao Zhang and they will leave you alone.”
“It’s personal. Meaning it’s none of their fucking business.”
Or yours, I want to say, but I don’t.
WE PULL IN TO this village by the side of the lake. Traditional buildings in white and grey, trimmed with wood, that look like they’ve been fixed up. A finger of land that juts out into the lake and a tiny island.
Yeah, pretty fucking quaint.
“We can stay here for a while,” John says.
I shrug. Whatever. “Okay.”
AT THE EDGE OF town, there’s a couple of crazy modern buildings, all hard angles and glass. Artists’ homes, I’m guessing. We end up at one of them, which turns out to be another boutique hotel.
The room the receptionist points us to looks out over the lake. Glass, slate, and wood. A king-size bed. Hand-woven carpets. Contemporary paintings on the walls, splashes of red against white and grey. I’m still no expert, but they go with the room, I guess.
John and I stand there in the center of the room. The dog settles down by my side. I’m surprised they’re letting the dog stay here. But maybe John showed them his badge or something.
“So what now?” I finally ask.
“You can have a shower and a rest if you want.”
“You?”
His eyes don’t meet mine. “Just got to take care of some things. I come back later.”
He looks at me for a second, gives an awkward little wave and leaves, shutting the door gently behind him.
“Well, shit, dog, what do you make of that?”
The dog yawns.
“Yeah, he’s kind of a freak, huh?” I lean over and give her a scratch behind the ears. I’m not sure what to do.
I could take off, I guess. See how far I could get. But it feels kind of pointless. He’ll just find me again.
I guess I could take that shower.
I STAND UNDER THE water for a lon
g time. It’s a nice bathroom, grey slate floors like the rest of the room, copper-clad sink, a shower with stone-studded walls, which have to be a bitch to clean but look very cool. I let the water pound my neck and shoulders for a while.
When I come out, I don’t really want to put my sweaty T-shirt and grimy jeans back on. There’s a white terry-cloth bathrobe hanging on a hook by the door. I put that on instead.
The dog’s sound asleep on the carpet by the bed. I limp past her, to the wall of windows overlooking the lake.
There’s nothing but a narrow stone walkway separating the window from the shore. Clouds have turned the water practically the color of the slate floor, with ridges of white where the wind has kicked up tiny waves, like frosting.
As I stand there, a big white bird flaps down and lands on the walkway, almost in slow motion. It takes a few steps, lifting its legs and putting them down with a weird sort of hesitant precision. Like it’s testing the ground ahead. It looks like Boba. I wonder if it’s the same kind of bird. A crane, or whatever.
Fuck, I’m tired.
I pull back the comforter on the bed and slide under the sheet. I swear, the mattress feels like a cloud.
I WAKE UP WITH a jolt. The dog, barking. It’s dark but there’s a light on. Someone standing in the room.
“It’s just me,” John says.
I let out a held breath and sit up. “It’s okay, dog,” I say. I reach out and find the scruff of the dog’s neck; she’s standing guard next to the bed.
John’s dark against the entry light. I can’t see his face. He’s got a duffel bag slung over each shoulder, a sack in his hand.
I switch on the lamp on the nightstand. “What time is it?”
“Just after seven.”
I smell food.
“Some dinner,” he says.
One of the bags he’s carrying is my duffel—olive canvas, from my deployment. His is black. He drops them on the luggage rack by the wardrobe.
“You picked up my stuff?”
“Sure.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem. Are you hungry?”
I nod. “A little.”
He stares at me for a moment, and I remember that I’m not wearing anything except the hotel bathrobe. “I … uh, give me a minute to change.”