by Susan Conley
I stopped the old Renault, and the girl climbed into my backseat without seeing who I was. She wore nylon shorts with a flower design and a tank top, and I could have been anyone picking her up in my car. Movie trailers began to play in my mind of her being hurt by different men, and these trailers reminded me of the murders I used to imagine in our house at night in Maine.
“It’s not safe out here,” I said very clearly to her. “How did you get here?”
She said she wasn’t sure, and her talking wasn’t slurred, but she couldn’t sit up straight or keep her head upright except by pressing it against the car window.
“I still don’t understand why you’re out here,” I said and asked her again where her friends were.
Then she tried to get out of the car while it was moving, so I locked her in from the inside and she didn’t protest and her passiveness made me feel ill. I knew I would have been like that, too, if I was as high as she was—I would have acted like everything was a little funny. But whether she was aware or not, things were still happening to her. We were still driving down behind the hospital. When I was drunk in the morning in Beijing, things were still happening. My girls still called for me from their beds down the hall, and their heart muscles pumped blood through their veins to keep them alive.
I stopped the car and unlocked it, and the girl got out and tried to take a wool blanket from my car and a novel about an arranged marriage in India in the 1920s. I put the car in park and climbed out and stood in the street next to her. “Give me my things,” I said.
She looked confused.
“Why are you taking my things?” I felt a different kind of anger than when I’d seen the movie trailers of the men doing unspeakable things to her. I took my novel from her and the blanket and said like she was a child again, “These things are mine.”
I was tiring of her, and I wonder if this is how Lukas felt when I didn’t stop drinking after the first time he came home and saw me lying like a starfish in our bed.
She probably didn’t live in the white apartment building across from the chicken processing plant where she said she did. Maybe she’d been left at the cemetery to sell her body. That seemed to be the reason, and it was easier to leave her after she’d tried to take my things. I said some warning words and tried to be strict and serious and ended with “Don’t ever do this again.”
She wasn’t listening and didn’t seem to hear me. I couldn’t know how hard the people who loved her tried to help her, or if she even had people. I got back in my car and drove home, and I never saw her again.
· 45 ·
A wet mist settled over the temple like smoke, and I couldn’t see ten feet in front of me. Then the rain came, and the wind made the whooshing sound it makes when it’s gathering. Justice found me at the fir tree and said he didn’t like the wind and that we needed to leave. “Sand is coming,” he said. How did he know that? He wanted us to walk down the mountain a mile to Yinfu, where Mr. Liu would have a van.
Mei stood under the pagoda with the ancient bell, and she looked very worried when I got there. Hunter also came and stood by the bell—many of us did, to get out of the rain. Hunter put his arm on Mei’s shoulder, and this was when I saw that they were going to sleep together, and it interested me more than the storm.
Justice made us leave the pagoda and cross the field and get back up on the wall, which became slippery. After the first thunder, he pointed to a stone staircase on the side of the wall, and we all climbed down again. The path we were on was steep, and Mei struggled in a pair of Nikes that Tasmin loaned her that were too big.
“I am not liking the storm,” she said, and I thought she might cry.
“We will be okay. Really, we will be okay.”
“You just say that. You just say things to make people feel better. It is very American of you.”
The thunder seemed like it was directly over our heads, and there was sand with the rain that landed in our eyes and mouth. I tried to walk carefully. I didn’t want either of us to fall. It got colder and the day turned to dusk, and you couldn’t hear to talk. Mei held on to my arm, and when the lightning hit maybe a hundred yards away, she started yelling in Mandarin and took off. I could see her small ponytail and then I couldn’t.
Justice called out that she had to stay with the group. “It is safer!”
Hunter ran after her, and when I caught up thirty minutes later they were walking in the rain and holding hands and something had shifted between them.
· 46 ·
“Why.” Andre stomped past me in the mud. “Are we even here? Why are we doing this?”
It was the first time I’d seen him angry, and it surprised me. What were we doing there? The weather pulled me out of my worry over my arm. I kept losing my footing. Most of us left the path at this point and walked on the rocks and brush along the side where it was drier. It was still too windy to really talk, and my heart pounded. We were on the mountain next to the mountain Shashan was on, and it had the same view of low-lying hills and the reservoir and clay rooftops, but we couldn’t see any of that through the rain.
When Tasmin fell, it didn’t look like a problem at first. She was one of the only people who hadn’t gotten off the mud path. But once she fell, she began sliding. She screamed several times, and all Mei and I could do was stand to the side and watch. To really slide down the whole mountain would have meant a long way and many rocks, but there was nothing for her to hold on to. Her feet were out in front, and she was half on her side, half on her back, ponytail in the mud. She tried to stop herself on some of the larger rocks, but they were too big to hold on to.
Andre was near the front, and he threw himself at her and got her around the stomach. Then we all sidestepped down. The rain fell on her face, and she didn’t move at first. Her poor arm was bent awkwardly, with her hand folded under her wrist.
Tree kneeled and wiped some of the mud off her cheek, and Tasmin said, “I’m the sickest I’ve been in years.”
Ulla took her head in her lap and held it. “Silly woman. Why didn’t you tell us you were sick?” It was the most affectionate I’d ever seen Ulla.
Then Tasmin turned over on her side and vomited. Her arm was still bent, and when Justice kneeled and tried to move her, she yelled, and Ulla said the men needed to carry her.
They took turns doing this, and I talked to her while they walked with her and told her that we were almost there. I said I’d find her some Sprite, because Sprite had always helped me when I was sick. “We’re lucky,” I said, “that Sprite seems like one of China’s national beverages, and I’m determined to get you some.” The rain kept coming, and Tasmin never opened her eyes.
· 47 ·
We got to Yinfu, and I left Tasmin with Ulla and Tree on a bench next to the fiberglass exercise park. Bright red geraniums had been planted in the dirt along the road. I didn’t see any stores. Justice pointed me toward a house with a thin, coyote-looking dog tied up outside, and I knocked on the door while the dog growled. An old woman in a blazer opened the door and stared, and I smiled in the rain while she decided whether to let me in. She had American and Chinese sodas on a low wooden bench, and Chinese cheese puffs and taffy with neon-pink cartoon drawings on the packaging that my girls loved. I bought the two bottles of Sprite and carried them back to Tasmin, whose tracksuit was soaked and looked like latex. She was alive, though, and I opened a Sprite and brought it to her mouth and told her to drink, and she obeyed.
She took two more sips, and I put the top back on the bottle and handed it to Ulla, who tried to give me orders about how to walk through the village looking for a car. “Go now, Elsey.” She spoke tersely and with a nasal tone, maybe the affect of her Swedish accent. “Quickly, Elsey.” She didn’t try to hide her annoyance with me. “Move more quickly. You must go through the village.”
Ulla must have been like this in her job so
metimes. So impatient she couldn’t mask it. But no villager in Yinfu was going to give me their car. Was she out of her mind? It was hard to get anyone to even talk to me, and there were few cars in the town to begin with.
Tasmin placed her wrist on her chest and kept it still, but she was moaning. I stood up from the bench and told Ulla first I’d go find Justice, who’d walked off to look for help. “Based on what Justice tells me, I’ll begin to look for a car.”
“I am going inside now,” Mei said then. “You are being crazy if you think I am going to stay outside in this storm.”
There was a pool hall two doors down from the exercise park, and she went in there to get out of the rain, and Hunter followed her. Then me. The hall was run by an old woman in a burlap dress who sat on a bench inside the door. It was dark and dry and warm in there, and I went back outside and got Ulla and Tree, and we laid Tasmin down on the bench next to the woman. The others followed, and it became crowded and was quite dark, until our eyes adjusted to the kerosene lamps. The ceiling and walls white stucco and the floor dark wood. A pool table took up most of the room.
“Chips?” I said to the woman in Mandarin. “Dried fried pork? Tofu? Almonds? Apricots?”
She took both of my hands in hers and raised them up and down in the air several times and smiled. Then she walked into a small closet behind the pool table and came out with plastic bags of Fritos. Justice grabbed pool cues off the wall and handed them to Hunter and Toby and Maeve. Tree clapped whenever Justice sank a ball, and her excitement seemed to be more about Justice than about the pool. When she ordered a round of Tsingtao, I hadn’t expected it. I hadn’t considered it.
The grandmother brought out eight bottles on a white plastic tray, and I could have drunk one of the beers in a swallow and nothing bad would have happened to me.
Tsingtao was one of the national brands I didn’t really like, but I wanted to drink one of the beers. I wanted it almost as much as I’d wanted to be the person to get Lukas the glass of water in the dance club. One beer in a pool hall. Everyone else was casual with their beers and sipped them like the beer was good but not something they’d risk husbands and two small girls on.
I moved away from the one beer left on the tray, which was my beer, so I was standing closer to the door when two men came into the hall and called out to the grandmother, and she brought them clear alcohol in thick shot glasses. I’m not sure if the grandmother had just put it on, but stringy zithers played from a tape recorder, and Tree walked over to the two red-faced Chinese men and began to dance. She’d drunk her beer and also mine, and the two men smiled at her, but it was more like leering. One pulled her close so they were slow-dancing, but the man was making a mockery of it with his facial expressions.
Justice and the kang sleepers kept playing pool, and Hunter and Mei stood in the corner of the hall farthest away from the door. They weren’t holding hands but were connected by how close their faces were and how their shoulders touched, and it looked sexual without being explicitly sexual.
Ulla said, “Elsey, I think you should come sit down now.”
How Ulla knew this, I didn’t know. But it has stayed with me that she understood the room and wanted to help me, because the man who was dancing with Tree grabbed the tray our beers had been on and then threw it against the wall where Mei and Hunter stood.
“Now why did you do that?” Tree opened her eyes. “We were having such a nice time.”
· 48 ·
Justice put down his pool cue and walked to the man who’d thrown the tray, and the man lunged at him but was so drunk he fell on the floor. The other drunk man went to Hunter in the corner and tried to wrestle him and pressed his body into Hunter and used Hunter to help keep his balance. The grandmother waved her arms and repeated something I couldn’t understand. Ulla got Tasmin to stand and put her arm around Ulla’s shoulder. We moved her to the doorway, which had strips of clear plastic hanging that brushed against my face, and this was when Mei’s husband, Leng, opened the door from the street side, so we had to move back to allow him in.
The fighting stopped when he got there. He was wearing the camouflage you buy in the malls that looks like real Chinese Army material. Mei came to him by the pool table and spoke loudly in Mandarin about why she was leaving him.
“I am no longer afraid,” she said at the end. “I was never afraid. I was just ignorant.” And he didn’t touch her during this time and listened to her for several minutes. Then he took a butterfly knife out of his back pocket and unfolded it and began to move it around her face.
I tried not to shift any part of my body. Leng called out to the two drunk men and made Mei translate. “The stupid American will leave with my two friends before I kill him. And he will drive away with them. And if”—Mei spoke louder now—“I hear that he has seen my wife again or speaks to her, my friends and I will kill him.”
“No,” she corrected herself. “I said that in English wrong. It is me who will be being killed. Not Hunter.” She smiled. The knife was still close to her chin. “He is not,” Mei added slowly, “going to stand by and watch a dirty American fuck his wife.”
No one said anything after that for maybe a minute, and I didn’t want to take my eyes off the knife, but I also wanted to look at Leng’s face to see if he meant it, because how could he mean it, but he meant it.
“Hunter, my friend,” Justice said. “I think it is time you walked out of the hall and did as Leng says.”
“It is with pleasure,” Hunter said, but he seemed much older and vulnerable then, not only because of Leng and the knife but also because of the humiliation of being the one asked to leave. You could tell he wanted to stay.
Leng kept the knife pointed at Mei’s chin and did not look at Hunter, only at Mei.
I wanted very much to leave with Hunter. I took Tasmin’s good arm, and Ulla and I walked her toward the door with the strips of plastic, and neither of us asked Leng for permission. We were behind him now. Maybe two feet from Mei, but closer to the door, and I could reach out and touch the plastic strips. Justice rammed his shoulder into Leng’s back, and the knife fell on the floor and Andre lay down and curled himself around it.
· 49 ·
Outside, the storm had passed, and the sun seemed brighter for how dark it was in the pool hall. Ulla and Tasmin and I stood in a small dirt area next to the hall a few feet from the road.
“Jesus.” Tasmin closed her eyes and reached for my arm. “Will someone turn the lights down and get me home?”
Leng walked out. Justice behind him. No knife. The two didn’t speak. Justice turned at the door and went to Tasmin and took her wrist and asked her to bend it first one way and then the other, and these movements were very hard for her. Mei came out next, and Tree and Andre and the kang sleepers. Mei’s face gave nothing away. She stood near me, closest to the road, and when Leng lit a cigarette and began walking, she turned from him and told Justice it was time to get out of Yinfu.
“It’s true,” Ulla said. “We should leave now, Justice. I see no need to remain here any longer. We cannot wait for a car.”
But then the mayor arrived, and several villagers I hadn’t seen in the food canteen across the street crossed over. This happened a lot in China—the expats like a spectator sport. The mayor said we couldn’t stay, and he began making a clicking sound and shooing us, so we started walking back down the road past the exercise park. The air got thicker and more humid, and Mei didn’t speak. No one spoke, really. I had never been in a fight, which is testament to some part of my privilege and to the unpopulated state I’m from, so what happened in the pool hall was something dreamlike to me while it was going on and also afterward.
Once we left the village entirely, trees were almost all we saw for an hour. The road moved in switchbacks wide enough for two cars, and sometimes it seemed like we were going north again in order to go south. I thought we migh
t see Hunter in a car by the side of the road, but we didn’t see any cars. I also waited for Leng to come for us, because it seemed he would, and that this was the dangerous place he and Mei went together. I believed it was what they did.
I wasn’t sure Tasmin could make it back to Shashan if her wrist was broken, because the pain would pull her whole arm and shoulder down, and it would be hard for her to walk. I slowed so I was next to her on the side of the road, and I told her that her arm would be okay if we could just get her back to the Lius’. Tears leaked down the sides of her face, so I rubbed her back while we walked and wanted her to know I noticed her.
· 50 ·
After some time, a white van passed and pulled over, and Mr. Liu got out and unlocked the back door. We put Tasmin up front with him, and the nine of us climbed into the back and sat on the floor. The insides were black with coal dust, and we leaned on one another and pressed our hands against the sides to stop from falling over. Mei didn’t speak during the ride. Even Maeve and Toby and Adrian seemed solemn. We parked in the clearing below Shashan and got out, and when I put my hand on Tasmin’s forehead, her fever felt worse, but it was already dark so we decided to get her up to the Lius’ and take her to the hospital in the morning.
Very few stars were out that night and I don’t remember a moon, but maybe there was one. To carry Tasmin up the mountain Justice tried having her climb on him piggyback, and this almost worked because she was able to hold on to his neck. They kept switching off—Justice and then Andre and Toby and Adrian. I waited for Leng to step out from behind one of the houses where the dogs were tied, but that didn’t happen, and I waited for Hunter to be on the terrace when we got there, and this didn’t happen either.