The Year of the Hydra

by William Broughton Burt

  Indeed there is a gas station less than a quarter mile away. I make my way through the shrubs at the forest’s edge. Arriving, I see a bright-orange seafood-delivery truck parked at the lone gas pump. No one sees me skitter into the clearing to attach the electronic bug to the underside of the truck and scurry away.

  The plan now, I tell myself, huffing back up the hillside, is to find an inconspicuous route either southeast or southwest. Away from Beijing. By the time Bellamy realizes he’s tailing a quarter ton of prawns, we’ll be impossible to find. Eventually we’ll hook up with a northbound highway and drive non-stop to Beijing.

  Nearing the garbage dump, I pause to catch my breath. One way or another, I tell myself, Bellamy and his whip antenna are beside the point. I’ve had spooks following me since the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors. The real road hazard here is Harold Sternbaum. Here’s a man who’s just had his daughter stolen. And his wife, come to think of it. As I pick my way once more through the unkempt forest, I wonder what kind of reception he may be planning for me, should our paths cross in Beijing. Let’s see if we can avoid finding out. Finally stepping into the garbage-strewn clearing and looking around, I find one thing inescapable. The Buick is gone.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  I heard a story about a rooster who one day looked up to find that his hens had vanished. He checked in the barn. He checked under the house. He checked in the treetops. No hens. The rooster went to the pig and said, “You know what happened to my hens?” The pig replied, “They tired of your attentions. They went to live with the hawk.” The rooster was surprised. “The hawk will eat them,” he said. The pig replied, “Yes, but at least it is their own choice.”

  I’m not sure why that story comes up just now. Maybe it’s because I’ve been standing in a garbage dump for most of an hour, and will continue to do so for the remains of the day and likely the whole of the night. By dawn, as the thinking goes, the fish truck will have lured Bellamy and company far enough away from here for me to safely descend to the roadside and negotiate my way to a bus depot.

  Or not.

  Actually I’m not standing in the aforementioned garbage dump so much as circling it warily. For one thing, I’m dimly hopeful of discovering something/anything approximating a ground cloth. So far, my efforts have yielded nothing beyond the following two observations. First, every direction in China is downwind. Second, nothing of value is ever, ever abandoned in this country. I don’t think a single item here would qualify for an American garbage dump. It’s more like things you’d scrape off your shoe. And I think I hear something approaching. A half-muffled gasoline engine seems to be headed this way¬—not from the highway, curiously. It’s most likely an Abrams M1A1 tank with Bellamy’s head sticking out.

  Ah. Appearing beneath my feet, partly buried beneath a rusted-out steel drum, is what appears to be a large sheet of plastic. I decide to give it a mighty tug. The sheet of plastic doesn’t budge. Finally I apply a truly heroic yank and the plastic sheet comes free. It’s covered with something very like rendered hog concentrate. Disgusted, I toss it and wipe my hands on my pants.

  I’ve touched China.

  The half-muffled gasoline engine is getting closer. Definitely not an M1A1 Abrams, I decide. More like Italian Armored Division 1946. Maybe I can hitch a ride to Palermo. All at once the approaching sound becomes a shuddering roar and I look up to see a boxy truck-looking contraption labor into the clearing. It wheels around, shifts into reverse, backs up to the rubbish pile and goes silent. Stepping out is a man in a straw hat. After stretching his back, he notices my presence and gives me a gape. I gape back. Yes there is a platinum, green-eyed, six-foot-four mutant standing in the garbage dump. And what do you intend to do about it?

  After what seems a full minute of gaping, the farmer opens the tailgate of the truck and rakes out a mound of yuck. No groundcover. Finally he tosses his rake into the truck bed and, with one more uneasy glance at me, slams the tailgate. The truck hammers away.

  Unexpected Encounters with Avenging Ghost of Environmental Responsibility and Edict.

  To my surprise, just as the truck exits the clearing, another vehicle enters. This one is GM quiet. As I watch, Phoebe Sternbaum’s Buick circles around to offer me the unlocked passenger door.

  I climb in. What would you do?

  The car begins to move. No one speaks. In the back seat, Ling is whispering to her make-up mirror. Phoebe stares straight ahead. As we approach the highway, she jerks her head toward the back seat and says, “She is make me come back here.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I reply.

  “I think you tell my daughter some crazy story,” accuses Phoebe. “Now she no listen her own mother.”

  “How much did you pay for this car?” I inquire. “I think, too much. Somebody just make this Mexico.”

  “Which way we turn?” Phoebe asks glumly at the edge of the highway.

  I point to the left. It’s a direction. “We’re driving all night,” I tell her.

  No one speaks for a good hundred kilometers. That’s what makes them good. I spend the time imagining what I might attempt to do once in Beijing, assuming we eventually get there. A change of clothes would be nice, but I mean other than that. I don’t think I’ve ever rescued anyone before. I think it begins with finding the person you’re going to rescue, preferably without placing an ad in the paper. I throw Phoebe a suspicious gaze. I’m not so sure this woman is capable of connecting me to the higher rungs of anyone’s organized crime ladder. Her rung may in fact have more to do with schoolyard cigarette extortion than influencing heads of state. But my only other option is to throw myself at the feet of Ralpho and hope he knows more about China’s power elite than about their moon bases.

  Phoebe stops the Buick at the lone pump of a rural gas station and opens her door.

  “Buy some snacks,” I tell her gruffly. “We’re not stopping for dinner.”

  Phoebe slams the door.

  As an attendant fills the tank, I survey the parking lot. No silver Toyotas in sight. I turn to glance at Ling, napping in the back, her tiny head resting against the car door. I try to picture this five-year-old convincing her mother to return to a garbage dump for a foreign devil who sits on little girls’ heads. Suddenly Ling’s eyelids roll up, displaying the whites. They seem to be looking straight through me. Shuddering, I turn away.

  The attendant has finished filling the tank. Where’s Phoebe? Irritably I survey the parking lot once more. My heart stops. Now pulling into the station is a delivery truck. Very large. Very orange. Very seafood.

  Panting, I search in every direction for a silver Toyota. None in sight. A moment later, Phoebe returns, smiling, a plastic shopping bag in her hand. “We have a problem,” I announce when she opens the door.

  Phoebe gives me a wary frown. “You start this again? Next you tell me some silver—”

  “I need to drive.”

  “You no drive my car again.”

  “Fine. Just hurry, okay?”

  Phoebe’s definition of hurry includes waking her daughter for a purple ice-cream snack in the form of someone’s left ear. It’s at least forever before we’re back on the highway. I turn to check the road behind us, and hello. There’s a silver Toyota attached to our rear bumper. The guy in the sunglasses is driving. In the passenger seat is Bellamy, his game face on.

  “Uh, Phoebe, we need to find some help.”

  She eyes me nervously. “Ju? Why you—”

  “Look in the rearview mirror.”

  “Who those men?” she asks.

  “Not the Sisters of Divine Providence. We need a town. We need witnesses, as many as possible.”

  “Don’t know nothing witness Jiangxi Province,” she replies irritably.

  The Toyota appears at our left, Bellamy’s game face inches from Phoebe’s nose. At this sight, Phoebe screams and panic-stops, whipping the wheel first one direction then the other. After a spin and a half, the Buick rocks to a stop in the exa
ct middle of the highway, pointed in the opposite direction.

  “Go! Go!” I yell, and Phoebe applies the gas.

  By the time the Toyota accomplishes a one-eighty, we’re nearly back to the filling station. I instruct her to hang a right onto a two-lane road that seems to promise the beginnings of a village.

  “Who those men?” she demands.

  “Just drive,” I answer. “Whatever you do, don’t stop.”

  Behind us, the Toyota is burning rubber. Bellamy, it would appear, has no intention of losing us again. We round a curve, and I spot a two-story building with a big red flag out front.

  I love flags.

  “Stop here,” I order, as the Toyota re-attaches to our bumper.

  “You tell me no stop,” wails Phoebe.

  “Stop, stop, stop!”

  Phoebe brakes so hard the Toyota has to veer around us. When the Buick comes to a halt, there are two smoking tires on the sidewalk. I grab Ling from the back seat. “Inside, quick!”

  The three of us hurry into the glass doorway of a governmental office where a uniformed man is seated behind a desk. He gazes at us curiously.

  “Tell him, uh—” I pant. “Tell him we need directions. Make up something.”

  Phoebe tidies her hair and laughs apologetically. I return to the door to look outside. Bellamy is opening the driver’s door of the Buick and releasing the hood latch. As Phoebe babbles with the uniformed man, I watch Bellamy remove a wire from the engine of the Buick, close the hood and walk away. That can’t be good. Bellamy is also carrying Phoebe’s purse. That can’t be very good either.

  “Tell him we’re going for a stroll,” I instruct Phoebe. Before she can get the words out, I’m dragging her and Ling toward a door at the rear of the building. We burst through the door into a narrow alley.

  “This way,” I say, lifting Ling. We run along rough cobblestones.

  “Where we go?” asks Phoebe.

  “Away,” I say, turning left then right along a maze of alleyways, suddenly finding ourselves at the edge of a canal. On the other side is a bamboo thicket and a cornfield.

  “This way,” I say, heading toward an arched footbridge.

  As we cross and enter the bamboo thicket, a footpath follows a small brook along the edge of the cornfield.

  We pick our way along the well-trodden path, passing branching side paths. Unable to carry Ling any farther, I set her down and take a look around. An almost unnoticeable footpath twists its way up a wooded hillside. “This way.”

  Minutes later, we are panting to a hillcrest overlooking a patchwork of small corn and vegetable plots. In one of them, a lone farmer, facing away, hoes fertilizer into a row of sprouts.

  Phoebe throws herself to the ground with a sob. “My husband send those men kill me, kill everybody! Aaawwwgh!”

  I glance at Ling, remarkably collected as she seats herself on a boulder.

  “We’re good,” I tell Phoebe. “We’re very good. We just need to find a ride to Beijing.”

  Phoebe shakes her head. “We need go back. I talk to Hah-row, explain everything.”

  “Back?” I say. “Back?”

  “I tell Hah-row just some big mistake, I take you see countryside and everybody get some wrong idea.”

  “Phoebe. Focus. We’ve got to get to Beijing. Once we talk to your friends—”

  “I not tell you something about this,” she says, wiping her nose on a sleeve.

  “You not tell me something about what?”

  “Not tell you something about the friends Beijing.”

  “I think I feel it coming now.”

  “Those men not my friends. I meet them because my husband know.”

  I’m staring. “Your husband know?”

  Phoebe begins to whine. “I think maybe I go there tell them he so bad to me, just forget about me go have some girlfriend, maybe they talk to him.”

  “But you told Harold—”

  “I just tell Hah-row some lie,” wails Phoebe. “Just some Chinese woman, nobody care about me.”

  I give Phoebe a minute to collect herself, trying meanwhile to construct what to say to her first. At length, I decide on, “Phoebe, there’s a difference between having connections with the Triad and your husband having connections with the Triad, especially when you’re making off with his daughter.”

  Phoebe, blowing her nose, nods.

  “I’m glad you’re getting this. What does your husband do, anyway?”

  She honks again then throws a glance at Ling. “Businessman.”

  “What kind of businessman?”

  “Is kind of businessman the wife don’t ask him this.”

  That says a lot, actually. I watch the farmer hoe his dung for a while. Even if I somehow elude the various secret services vying with one another to hominy my grits, I conclude, I probably still get a Sicilian necktie courtesy of the Chinese Mafia. It’s so unfair.

  Phoebe wags her head. “Ju, I so sorry tell you some lie. I take you to bus station now. You can—”

  “Bus station?” I explode. “Bus station? They’re chasing us with rocket launchers and zip guns and you want to drop me at the bus station?”

  “No, no,” she says, “my husband just want his daughter. We go back Shenzhen, nobody bother you, I promise this.”

  She promise this.

  “We can’t go back to your car. They did something to the engine. And they’ve got your purse.”

  Phoebe’s mouth opens. “My purse!” she squeals, collapsing once more in sobs.

  Across the fields, the dung farmer pauses to lean on his hoe.

  It’s a situation. Lil in a concentration camp. Tree locked up in Shenzhen. Bellamy on his phone calling in bloodhounds and scatterguns. And Phoebe without her purse. Yet, looking at Ling sitting poised on her boulder, I can’t quite find my agitation. Which is irritating. Puzzled, I study the child’s placid features for a moment and suddenly—

  Suddenly I think I know something. I think I know why the child’s voice was so clear in my head. In the car I thought I’d heard her voice, but the words didn’t come from her mouth. They were inside my head. I step a little closer to Ling. Her gaze is softly focused, as though upon an inner landscape. I soften my gaze, too.

  “Ju, what we do now?” asks Phoebe, dabbing at her eyes.

  I don’t reply. I’m beginning to catch sight of a fine mist surrounding the little girl on the boulder. Almost… a glow.

  “Ju?” says Phoebe, rising to dust herself. “What we do now?”

  “We stay together,” I reply, trying to probe my way into the mist that now seems to be fading. I re-adjust my eyes, trying for just the right amount of unfocus. Another moment and I see nothing at all around Ling, who now says something in Mandarin. Her mother replies sharply. They continue for a moment, Phoebe increasingly vexed. I think they’re discussing what my head might bring on the open market and whether they’d prefer large bills or small. Phoebe seems ready to settle for a TV dinner and a bicycle with a bell. Sighing, I turn away to watch the dung farmer. He stands gazing in our direction, leaning on his hoe.

  “What you tell my daughter?” demands Phoebe.

  “I didn’t tell your daughter anything.”

  “You tell my daughter something. She say go with you. Crazy go anywhere with those men—” Phoebe shudders.

  “She’s right,” I reply, studying the dung farmer now walking purposefully toward us, using his hoe as a walking stick.

  “But don’t know nobody Beijing,” whines Phoebe.

  “We’ll figure something out when we get there,” I say.

  Or I think it was me.

  Ling too watches the farmer’s approach. She says matter-of-factly, “That man will help us.”

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  The cicadas of dusk beginning their trill, Phoebe, Ling, and I follow a farmer named Yang along a pathway through tipping fields of sprouting corn and squash. At length we cross a plank footbridge over an irrigation ditch and enter a walled farmstead
shaded by three immense ginkgoes. Inside, a few smallish pigs wander among chickens.

  Washing his hands in a bucket, Yang calls out and a woman appears in a doorway. She is much like Yang, small and sturdy with a burnt-orange complexion and a thicket of graying hair. After a gape at me, she vanishes. Kitchen sounds commence.

  Drying his hands on a worn towel, Yang smiles broadly, revealing two missing molars.

  “He say,” translates Phoebe, “we drink some beers before have the dinner.”

  I’ll force myself.

  Yang seats us at a wooden table in the courtyard. His wife appears with three brown longnecks. The bottles, capped with graying corks, are warm to the touch. Homebrew. Sharp on the tongue. I quickly drain mine, and a replacement appears. Ling abandons the table to range among the animals.

  “He is tell me,” Phoebe says of Farmer Yang, “he see you think you some kind of strange animal from the mountain. His eyes not so good, so look again, see you are Westerner. This make him feel very happy.”

  Yang smiles in seeming earnest.

  “Can he help us get to Beijing?” I ask.

  “Is not polite we talk about this now,” replies Phoebe, her smile fixed. “Not so easy understand this man. In Jiangxi Province have the Kan dialect. So different.”

  I glance at Farmer Yang. Surely he must be curious. Phoebe has only told him that our car is broken and we need to get to Beijing. That we’re in a spot of trouble, I think, speaks pretty well for itself. Thus far I’m surprised at the old man’s readiness to invite total strangers into his home. Then again, his interest may turn out to be the TV dinner and the bicycle with the bell.

  You may have heard the tale of the tigress who one day looked up to discover a very large creature standing nearby. The tigress had never seen such an animal. You and I would call it a donkey. The tigress circled ever closer, sniffing and watching, alert to any movement. The donkey only munched at the foliage. The tigress finally decided that the creature was a fool. She ate the donkey.