—Hey, Lu! Why are you wearing so little clothing? Chu said, calling him back to the present. Funny; only a week before, right here in this hut, he’d asked a similar question of Jade. And yet, though very little time had passed, that question now tasted like vinegar bottled in another century. Lu Beiping surveyed the gang, noting the post-work attire of his re-ed comrades: sleeveless white undershirts and blue-striped sailors’ shirts, pants of army green or navy blue, “commando” sandals cut from used truck tires, straw hats sporting chipper slogans: “Wide Horizons, Bigger Dreams!” “Together, We Can Move the Mountains!” In the flickering firelight Lu Beiping’s own sunburned, sinewy frame must have looked to them like the silhouette of a prehistoric animal.
Whap! Someone flattened a mosquito against his cheek, then exclaimed:
—God, look at the size of that thing! Lu, how do you keep from getting bitten to death out here with nothing but a pair of shorts on?
The others chimed in:
—Yeah! And it must be freezing at night! Aren’t you afraid of getting sick?
—Take care of yourself, huh? Once the unit’s gone on campaign there’ll nobody here to look after you.
Finally, something to talk about, Lu Beiping thought. With a cavalier wave he said:
—I’m used to it. Once your skin’s good and tanned and you’ve built up plenty of light energy, the bugs won’t touch you.
He knew those were not his own words, but Jade’s; yet they slipped so easily out of his mouth.
—Right on, tough man, a few murmured in assent, and Chu quipped: What are you, Lu, some kind of monk?
They were on completely different wavelengths, he and these young men. Listening to their laughter fade down the hillside, watching their flashlight beams play among the trees till the voluminous black silence of the jungle subsumed them, Lu Beiping felt suddenly regretful, worrying that he’d thrown a bucket of cold water on his friends’ pre-campaign high. He hadn’t meant to snub them. He bore them no ill will, these old mess-hall companions with whom he’d been friendly to varying degrees. But though he’d wracked his brains trying to find some shared topic of conversation, some angle by which to jump into the old-time banter, he’d come up short. Mudkettle Mountain, Lu Beiping was beginning to think, exerted a strange and powerful influence upon its inhabitants, stripping them of some part of themselves. What it took, though, and what it gave back—that he wasn’t yet sure.
But the odd sense of remove that Lu Beiping felt as he stood by the fire dissipated briefly at the end of the evening, and for a moment reality jutted through the fog. As the other boys sloshed merrily across the creek, Chu grabbed Lu Beiping by the shoulder and pulled him aside, into the shadows.
—Listen, he whispered, there’s something fishy about Han. Be careful, Lu. Just before we left camp, Choi cornered me and muttered a bunch of weird things about how terrible it was that you got ghost-married, how you should never have been sent up here into the hills. Whatever happened to that girl, it must have been shady.
Han. Who was this girl? Lu Beiping wondered. Who was this “wife” he’d been saddled with? Ever since Smudge had drawn him into the world of the driftfolk, he’d all but forgotten about his ghostly spouse. As he stood by the door of his hut, lantern in hand, watching the last glimmer of his friends’ flashlights disappear into the dark valley, he realized that Han, a ghost, a phantom, was his last remaining bridge to the outside world. A specter from the netherworld had become a trail beckoning him back to the real one. Curiosity ate at him. He hung the lantern from the gate of the corral, tossed a few armfuls of hay through the fence slats, and stood gazing in the eerie, phosphorescent light at the dark forms of the cattle slumbering inside. A few lowed at him genially out of half sleep. Alyosha’s face, with its jaunty white blaze, glowed with a warm, halo-like light, while Judas’s gaunt countenance looked wintry and ominous. Lu Beiping felt as if he were standing at the gates of the shadow kingdom, peering in at its horned inhabitants. For a moment Han’s face flashed through his mind, and he shuddered.
A yellow mist glided in, smelling faintly of mold. Lu Beiping ducked back into his hut; it was best to avoid such noxious vapors. Already he’d forgotten that the jungle could also harbor this kind of insidious influence.
The hourlaters are a special kind of rainshower unique to summers in the Hainan highlands. First, in the early afternoon, the heat builds to an almost unbearable point, so hot it could melt steel like butter, render the fat out of pig iron. In the morning, when the sun has just shown its face, the dew pitpatting down from the trees is still refreshingly cool, but once the sun has climbed a hand’s breadth, the dry leaves and grass become banks of bristling blades. The slightest breeze sets the forest clashing, enveloping you in a murderous, saber-rattling gust of heat. If you’re unfortunate enough to be in the forest at this hour, you’ll feel as if you’re being flash-fried in chili oil, a chicken at the mercy of a Sichuanese chef. Hot, spicy, numb—you’ll escape none of these treatments. Even the shade is a deviously designed trap. When you’re out in the sun, your sweat dries the moment it exits your flesh, like breath freezing in an arctic winter. But the instant you set foot in the shade your sweat comes gushing out in viscous torrents, plugging your pores like starchy water. Soon you’re a potsticker in a bubbling vat, stifled in your own bodily fluids, unable even to spit. Then, as the sun mounts higher, the air hangs around you like a white-hot steel curtain, and you begin to fear that it will sear off the outer layer of your skin. Even the glittering, crystal-hard sky seems too flimsy to withstand the punishing force of the heat. Then, at a certain hour—always an hour later than the previous day, like clockwork, in a cycle that repeats every four or five days—the first shred of cloud to glide over the valley releases a rapturous downpour, pummeling your face and causing the parched soil around you to hiss audibly. If you’re lucky, it’ll be a good-sized cloud, and the deluge will cool the air for the rest of the day. But more often than not, the shower is a tad stingy, and kicks up humid billows of fog that make the hours before sunset all the more unbearable. Oh, the hourlaters: boon and bane of Hainan summers, arouser and dasher of hopes, malicious temptress: how many young cowherds have your punctual dousings caused to whoop with joy, then wail with despair?
One afternoon, after the rain, Lu Beiping decided to drive his animals back to the mature rubber stands near the second bend of the creek. Lately, the heat had made the animals almost impossible to manage. They would slump down in the grass when Lu Beiping gave the order to march, then run off helter-skelter into the trees when he tried to rally them to return to the corral for the night. There wasn’t a single patch of grass in the whole sweltering jungle where the cattle would settle down and graze cooperatively. Usually he didn’t take them into the old groves, where the grass was too thin to sustain the herd for long; but the tall trees gave plenty of shade, and the wide orchard lanes promised cool cross-breezes. Plus, he was concerned about Maria, the pregnant heifer, who had been staggering around drunkenly and foaming at the mouth as she hauled her ponderous belly through the pitiless heat. On several occasions she’d plunked herself down by the creek and refused to budge. He worried that she’d die from heatstroke, and hoped to find a shady spot where she could rest, and maybe give birth, if the moment came. Also, he knew that the camp was almost vacant—everybody was off clearing forestland for the big Total Mobilization Agrec-Op—and it wouldn’t be hard to avoid the few workers who remained. Even the slanderous rumors circulating about the “shadow-wed boy” didn’t deter him, though the riddle of Han’s death still gnawed at his heart. It would be difficult, of course, to revisit those leafy orchard lanes without being reminded of his old life horsing around with Fong and Chu. But in this hellish month, post-rain cool was hard to come by, and if taking advantage of it meant crossing paths with members of the prying masses—well, that was a risk he’d have to take.
Sure enough, as soon as the animals set foot in the grov
e they began lowing happily and hunkered down in small clusters around the recently tapped rubber trees, injecting a playful atmosphere into the solemn green geometries of the orchard. Lu Beiping fished out one of his long-neglected books—Le Père Goriot, in the Fu Lei translation—and started to read, but before long the pages were damp with his own sweat. He remembered his harmonica, also long neglected, and dug it out of the bottom of his bag. But after a few warm-up chords his music practice was cut short by a sudden commotion among the cattle, prompted by a faint noise somewhere off in the trees.
He cocked his head, listening, waiting for the sound to repeat itself, but there was nothing to hear amid the cicadas’ usual racket. The cattle, though, were stirring excitedly, bumping and jostling against one another as they crowded off in the direction from which the noise had come. Soon, however, they lost interest, and hanging their heads they moseyed listlessly back into the shade. Whatever had caught their interest had moved on, apparently.
It must be some wild animal, Lu Beiping thought. Shortly afterward, a familiar, unpleasant odor began seeping through the air, a distinctly human smell that one noticed frequently in the groves, which Lu Beiping had happily forgotten about during his long sojourn in the wilderness. Lu Beiping guessed that it was a mixture of stale sweat, the sour tang of congealed rubbermilk, and the odor of the manure used to fertilize the groves. Wherever the scent was strong one saw an abundance of flies and roaches, and almost never wild animals. Sure enough, in a matter of minutes a big, bottle-green fly appeared—this was a species Lu Beiping hadn’t seen much of in the jungle—and began batting insistently at Lu Beiping’s nose, defying his attempts to wave it away and making him lose his place repeatedly. Sighing, Lu Beiping put down the book. Then he noticed that the cattle were stirring again, crowding toward the same spot at the edge of the grove, toward the source of whatever sound (movement? smell?) had caught their attention earlier.
Feeling suspicious, Lu Beiping stood up and strode over to Alyosha. Then he noticed, through the windbreak of lace pines that bordered the grove, a wild, weedy clearing lying in thick shade, looking strangely out of place amid the uniform tracts of rubber forest.
Peering through a net of vines, Lu Beiping made out of a swath of star groundsel dotted with yellow cottonball-like flowers, surrounded by tall stands of henfeather and fishreek, two of the cattle’s favorite varieties of grass. What a pleasant surprise, Lu Beiping thought. In the early August heat, a lush, shady grazing spot like this was a godsend. No wonder the animals were so excited.
—Alyosha! Andrei! Natasha! Lu Beiping cried, summoning the animals. Look at all that tasty groundsel! Look, henfeather and fishreek! Go on, eat it!
A strange thing happened. The animals trooped through the windbreak and then halted at the edge of the clearing, where they stood stock still, gazing hesitantly out at the verdant jungle grass.
—What’s wrong? Go on!
Lu Beiping whacked Alyosha’s spotted rump with the thin branch he used as a switch. But Alyosha, to his surprise, began lowing shrilly, and soon the others joined in, their anxious cries echoing sharply in the silence of the forest.
(To this day, Lu Beiping told Tsung, the cattle’s behavior remains a mystery to me. What did they see? What did they sense? No amount of prodding or yelling could convince them to go into that clearing. Normally, at the sight of such delectable grass they’d have charged in and fought over it like mad. But this time they’d clearly made up their minds. They wouldn’t touch it.)
Lu Beiping strode through the pines and out into the waist-high grass, where he stood, pondering.
This was a wild, overgrown field bordered on three sides by mature rubber forest and on the fourth by the lace pine wind-break. At the far end of the clearing, the pool formed by the creek’s second bend glinted through the trees. Surrounded as it was by cultivated forestland, the clearing appeared strikingly man-made. It must have been planted with rubber trees once, then allowed to go fallow. Recalling that the plantation’s groves were numbered, Lu Beiping counted them off as best he could remember: Sector 8, Sector 9, Sector 10 . . .
the stand on the far side of the creek was Sector 12, so this must be Sector 11. Now, protruding here and there from the tall grass, Lu Beiping noticed the stumps of dead rubber trees. Had this sector been destroyed by a typhoon? Or burnt down in a forest fire? Puzzling over this, he stood gazing up at the blue rectangle of sky visible through the treetops, through which a single scarlet snakecloud had begun slowly to unwind.
The shrill moans of the cattle echoing in the trees made this place seem all the more desolate. Lu Beiping thought of the other weedy clearing, the one in which he had encountered Smudge, and an eerie premonition slithered up into his chest, filling him with dread.
The cattle began jostling and fussing again, and Lu Beiping stiffened in alarm. This time, he heard the noise:
Leeleelooloowah! . . . Leeleelooloowaaaaaaaaaah! . . .
Someone, hidden among the trees on the meadow’s far side, directly beneath that crimson twist of snakecloud, was making weird, low-pitched, yodeling cries, quiet but piercing, at times lazy sounding, at other times sharp and urgent. The cattle pricked up their ears again. Then, before Lu Beiping knew what was happening, Alyosha had gone trotting off along the edge of the clearing in the direction of the cries, lowing merrily and drawing the whole herd after him.
—Hey! Lu Beiping yelled indignantly. Alyosha! Stop it! Get back here! What are you doing? Peter! . . . Judas! . . . Stop it!
(Years later, describing this scene to Tsung, Lu Beiping said: It never crossed my mind that cattle, like humans, could experience a crisis of loyalty. I didn’t know it at the time, but those animals were being torn between two opposing allegiances.)
Suddenly Alyosha stopped, then turned and looked at Lu Beiping with a look of nervousness and reluctance on his mottled brown face. Lu Beiping could hear him snorting in agitation. Noticing their leader’s hesitation, the rest of the herd halted mid-rush and stood, their heads swishing like a field of windmills, awaiting the signal to continue.
Leeleelooloowah! . . . Leeleelooloowaaaaaaaaaah! . . .
The ululating cry, which sounded to Lu Beiping’s ears like a swine call, echoed again in the forest, this time louder, more brazen. Alyosha’s snorts crescendoed to a shrill bugling:
Ngaugh—AUUGH! Ngaugh—AUUGH!
With a decisive toss of the head, Alyosha cast off his new master, and the whole herd rumbled away from Lu Beiping like an army of battle wagons.
Lu Beiping shuddered. Far off, at the edge of the clearing, he saw a thin, dark figure emerge from the trees. Lu Beiping heard the man laugh, then saw him reach out an arm and beckon with one finger.
—Friend Lu! he called. Come here!
By now the man was surrounded by a sea of bobbing bovine heads, which made his silhouette seem even more sinister. Lu Beiping was reminded of the night before, when he’d peered into the corral by the light of the lantern and fancied he saw, as if through the gates of the underworld, an army of horned demons.
The man was none other than the cattle’s former master, Gaffer Kam—Kambugger.
Steeling himself, Lu Beiping strode toward the old man, who stood motionless amid the tall grass.
—Come, the Gaffer repeated mysteriously. Come here, friend Lu.
The cattle crowded round the old man, cocking their heads and lowing affectionately. Glancing back, Lu Beiping noticed with a pang of sorrow that of the entire herd, only Maria hadn’t betrayed him. Huge-bellied, she lingered a good distance behind him, remaining in the shade of the pine trees.
—Gaffer! Was that you taunting the cattle with that weird call?
—Wasn’t me, the Gaffer said, shaking his head, an inscrutable look on his dark, leathery face. Must’ve been a haunt, friend. A ghost brought you here. The spirits are doing your business.
—Quit playing around, Gaffer. Tell me,
did you follow me here? Did you follow me and the cattle?
—Heh. Mercy me, friend Lu.
The Gaffer pointed into the grass.
—Take a look, right here . . . Hey! Stripey!—the Gaffer barked at Alyosha, calling him by his old name—settle down! You too, Shitbelly!
Instantly the cattle grew docile. Lu Beiping’s eyes followed the man’s outstretched arm, but the grass lay in deep shadow, and he saw nothing but the gold globes of the groundsel flowers glittering in the low sunlight.
—Stop screwing with me, said Lu Beiping, raising his voice. You can’t scare me with that crap.
The Gaffer exploded into a fit of high-pitched laughter.
—Can’t scare you, eh? Can’t scare you? If it wasn’t a haunt that brought you here, how’d you manage to find this place? Do you know where we are? Only a ghost would dare bring you here!
The Gaffer ogled him meaningfully.
—This is Han’s grave! Your ghost wife brought you here, friend Lu, sure as shingles.
He padded gingerly through the flowers, reached down to pull aside a clump of leaves, then yelped, sprang back, lost his balance, and plopped down in the grass.
—Heavens above! he cried, his face white as a sheet. This place is witched! It’s gone—where is it? Where’s her grave marker?
In the slanting sunlight, beneath the yellow, glinting flowers, Lu Beiping made out a small weed-covered mound; then, in front of it, a shallow notch in the soil. Off in the trees the creek whispered hoarsely.
The Invisible Valley Page 11