Hour of the Rat (16 page)

T
URNS OUT WE
’
RE WAITING
for a tractor.

I sit on a little plastic stool beneath a blue tarp, in one of the makeshift workshops where they’re dismantling monitors, and I try not to breathe too much. One of the workers brings me a Coke from someplace, which I figure is probably safe to drink. I wonder why they’re being so nice to me, but all I say is, “
Ganxie nimen
”—Thank you very much—and use the Coke to wash down a Percocet. I know sometimes I take the things when I’m really stressed out or just because it feels good, but right now I take it because I’m fucking hurting.

What the fuck was all that? I try to think, but it’s hard, it’s like my thoughts are tangled up in barbed wire, my head throbbing with the pain in my leg.

Something’s
going on with New Century Seeds. I’m as sure as I can be about that without actually knowing what it is. And it’s easy to figure that the guys who attacked me are connected to that. But I can’t know for sure. With all the unrest going on, maybe they’re just touchy about having foreigners around.

Maybe there’s something they don’t want me to see. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be about New Century Seeds.

While I sit, I try to boot up my laptop. Turns out it really
is my laptop, but the casing is cracked, and when I power it up, there’s some sad whirring and then nothing but a grey screen.

The kid who retrieved it sidles up to me. He’s … I don’t know, maybe twelve? Skinny like the couple who rescued me. Oversize head. Bucktoothed. Wearing sneakers a size too large, laces flapping.

“Broken?” he asks.

I nod.

“
Pingguo?
” Apple?

“
Shi.
” It’s an old MacBook, a white plastic slab that’s taken all kinds of abuse and still works. Well, up till now.

“Can I?” the kid asks, reaching out his hand.

Sure. Why not? I hand him the laptop.

He opens it. “Late 2006 one. I can fix,” he says solemnly.

“Really.” I’m skeptical.

“Really!” He makes a fist and thumps his skinny chest.

Right about then the guy with the brick shows up in a
tuolaji
. It’s this crazy farm vehicle, a cross between a truck and a tractor that looks like it’s built out of scrap and rubber bands: two-stroke engine mounted in the front, thrusting out over two small wheels, a little truck bed in back, with a long, skinny metal beam connecting them, like it would snap in half if you jumped on it hard, something a kid would build out of Legos. The engine turns the front wheels by what looks like a giant vacuum-cleaner belt. The guy steers it with these long handlebars, his seat a cracked green vinyl cushion.

“
Lai, lai!
” he calls out. Come, come!

“My parents,” the kid says, pointing at the woman who helped me and then the guy on the tractor. “I fix the computer for you. Okay?”

“Maybe later,” I say. I mean, it would be nice, but I’m not
about to leave my laptop with this kid, even if it is just so much electronic junk, like everything else here.

The kid turns to his mom, rattles off something I don’t understand. She replies, and I don’t understand her either.

“Okay!” he says to me. “Later. I fix it.” The kid grins. “We have parts.”

S
O HERE
I
AM
sitting in the back of the little truck bed, which I’m guessing recently transported chickens, with the woman, whose name, I think, is Lau Mei Yee. Aside from the fact that I have a hard time understanding her Mandarin, the engine on this tractor is so loud that it’s like rounds of gunfire, shot off fast and right next to my ear.

“He is a good doctor!” she shouts. “Wa Keung see him before. My husband. And Moudzu, our son.”

“Oh. What was wrong?”

“
Feiyan
,” I think she says, which means pneumonia. And she says something else that might mean bronchitis, which I know only because I got that the first winter I lived in Beijing.

Now that the Percocet’s kicked in, I’m thinking there isn’t much point in seeing the doctor. What’s he going to say?
Oh, your leg’s fucked up
. I mean, what else is new?

But they picked me up in their tractor, you know? So I sort of feel obligated.

It feels like we’re going farther out into the country, which is fine with me, because I want to get as far away from that fucking place and Mr. Piggy and his thugs as I can. They have to be his thugs, right? Probably not a coincidence that I go looking for New Century Seeds, mention “David,” and people try to beat the shit out of me.

Or it’s just how they welcome foreigners who might be journalists or environmentalists in these parts.

I lean back in the little truck bed and think, Okay, this is now officially above my pay grade.

We’ve rumbled into another village—or city, I can’t tell which. Slightly less electronic crap lining the road. Open storefronts with things like tractor parts and hardware, sacks of fertilizer, feed. A farm town.

“
Zai zheli
,” Mrs. Lau says, pointing to a two-story, white-tile-faced storefront with red banners above the entrance and a white canvas curtain with a red cross hanging in the doorframe.

Wa Keung stops the tractor, and Mei Yee helps me out.

I stagger onto the curb, stumbling and almost falling against her, as Wa Keung pulls away. I guess he has to find tractor parking.

The inside of the clinic has smudged whitewashed walls, cheery health posters with cartoon doctors dispensing advice and pills. It’s a small room, stuffed full of about two dozen people sitting in plastic chairs, a dozen others leaning against the walls, waiting.

“I really feel better,” I tell Mei Yee. I don’t feel like waiting in this airless little room. Some of these people look really sick. There’s all kinds of coughing: horrible, phlegm-filled fits that sound like death rattles. Some of them are skeleton thin, pale. Others have barrel chests, bloated bellies. I remember enough of my medic training to make good guesses on some of them, but it’s not exactly a shock that you’d have a lot of respiratory and heart disease here. Have to figure the cancer rates are pretty high as well. And the kids. I don’t like seeing the little kids, their heads too big, their ribs jutting out, their skin tones pale and jaundiced.

“The doctor knows you are coming. You don’t have to wait long.”

Now I really want to leave. When you’re a military medic,
one of the things the training emphasizes is triage: You sort the casualties according to priority for treatment. Treat the serious first, leave the less urgent for later, and if there are too many patients, put aside the ones who who’ll probably die or take up too much time to save.

There’re all kinds of people here who need help more than I do.

I open my mouth to object, and as I do, a door opens and a woman comes out with a clipboard. She’s middle-aged, stout. Takes a quick look around the room and waves in my direction.

With Mei Yee’s help, I hobble over, face burning red, not wanting to look at the people who’ve been waiting in this room for God knows how long, who are really sick, who might be dying. They don’t complain, don’t stand up and yell and demand an explanation. They just sit, or stand, and wait.

It’s not right, and it’s not fair. But I go anyway.

The clinic isn’t big. There’s a short hallway. On one side a room about the size of the waiting area with a half dozen beds in it, all occupied. On the other side, a couple of closed doors, and then one that’s open, an exam room from the look of things.

A middle-aged man wearing a white coat sits on an adjustable stool there. When he sees me, he rises. His hair is thick but shot with grey. His eyes have dark pouches under them. He gives me a nod of a bow and smiles, indicates a padded table. I get myself on it, with a little boost from Mei Yee.

“Hello,” he says in English. “I am Dr. Chen. I understand you have some leg injury.”

I nod.

“If you can … take off the trousers, I can have a look.”

I feel myself flush. I don’t like people seeing my leg. I don’t like looking at it myself. But that’s why I’m here, right?

He steps out of the exam room. I’m hoping he’s going to
help someone else. The middle-aged woman with the clipboard comes in. I unbutton my jeans. She helps me get them off, me gasping from the spasms that travel from my ass down to my toes.

After she drapes a sheet across my lap, the doctor comes back in.

He bends his head over my leg, studying the ridged white scars, the withered dent in the quad where a chunk of muscle is missing.

“Ah. You have an old injury?”

“Yeah,” I say. “There’s a rod in there, in the femur, and some screws.”

There’s also a wicked-looking, purpling lump on the side of my leg, above my knee.

“How did this happen?”

I shrug. I don’t want to get into it. “Accident.”

Mei Yee launches into an explanation in the local dialect. I can’t understand it, but she pretty much acts it out for him, holding an imaginary rod in her hands, swinging it down, so I guess I’m busted.

“Ah. I see.”

The doctor probes around the area with his fingers, and he’s gentle enough, but I feel these weird electric shocks, almost, sparking up and down my leg.

“We don’t have X-ray here,” he finally says. “For this you must go to county hospital. But I think first ice, raise up. We can put on, the … the …” He can’t come up with the word he wants. “The bandages. To … to tighten it.”

“Compression bandage,” I supply.

“Yes, yes. This. But I think also you should take a rest. Try not to stand or to sit too much. Instead to lie down and raise up. And to walk now and again, for preventing … the clot.”

“Okay. Sounds good.” Like I needed a doctor to tell me any of this.

“Because … the blow maybe hit the … the screw you talk about. Can maybe cause a problem. You must take care.” He gives my leg a final look. “This was bad injury, before.”

“Yeah,” I say.

They have me lie down on one of the beds with a big ice pack on my leg for a while, and in a way I’m glad that the lady next to me is too sick to feel like talking much, because I sure don’t feel like talking to anyone. After that the woman with the clipboard wraps a compression bandage around my thigh and fits me with a pair of crutches, so I guess the visit isn’t a total waste of time. I also get a bunch of pills, which I put in my backpack and probably won’t take, given that I’m not sure what they are or what they’re for, and the quality control of Chinese medicine, like a lot of things in China, is kind of variable.

Plus, they probably aren’t painkillers.

Then I get the bill—a hundred yuan, about fourteen bucks. I pay it, plus “a charitable contribution to village health” of another hundred kuai, thank the doctor and the woman with the clipboard and crutch it outside, the coughs from the people in the waiting room following me out onto the cracked concrete slab.

Mei Yee waits for me there on the nonexistent sidewalk, texting on her phone.

“You better now?” she asks.

“
Yue lai, yue hao.
” Getting better and better.

“Wa Keung come and pick us up. Take to our home.”

“You’re too polite. It’s not necessary. I should go back to Shantou.”

She covers my hand with hers. “Come to our home. Have
a rest.” She grins at me, her smile revealing tea-stained teeth. “Moudzu can fix your computer.”

A
ND THAT
’
S HOW
I end up in the back of the tractor again, this time with my leg propped up on a couple bags of fertilizer. I really don’t want to go to these people’s home, but I can’t think of a polite way to refuse, especially after all the trouble they went to, saving me from getting my ass kicked and all.

Besides, it wouldn’t hurt to try to find out a little more about what’s going on around here.

I know I should just give up on this whole thing. Haul my gimpy ass back to Beijing and … I don’t know, deal. With the business I can’t run. With my mom, who’s going to see me on crutches and freak out or, alternatively, is so busy practicing navel denting with Anal Andy that she won’t even notice.

That’s the thing. I like having a mission.

Yeah, it’s helping a buddy, but it’s more than that. It’s having a puzzle to solve. Having something to do. Something that matters.

And maybe they’ll have beer.

Y
OU CAN STILL SEE
some of the original structure of the Laus’ farmhouse: blond brick with the texture of sand, crumbling in places, peaked grey tile roofs. Concrete smooths over the brick on a couple of the walls, and stuck on the walls here and there are little block-shaped rooms made out of cement, with flat tin roofs. Topping off the whole thing is a satellite dish, which I’d bet is aimed toward Hong Kong. There are outbuildings, sheds and a barn, and though it’s getting dark, I can catch glimpses of fields behind the house, other farmhouses in the distance.

“Welcome, welcome,” Mrs. Lau says, clasping her hands, her head bobbing up and down.

I shake off her offer of help and manage to hop over the beam across the threshold with the aid of my crutches. I’m thinking I can get by with just the one of them, really. My leg hurts, but it feels better than it did. Give me a couple of days and I’ll be as good as … well, as good as I was before this happened.

Inside, the main room has battered whitewashed walls decorated with posters, mostly of Chinese folk figures: the woman who holds up a lantern in one arm and a rabbit in the other; a big, red-faced dude with a fancy outfit and a sword; plus a print of the
Mona Lisa
. In some places the flooring is old stone—who knows how old? I can see the wear from centuries of footsteps. There’s a battered wooden table and a couple of chairs; a newish-looking TV across from a couch; a refrigerator; a water dispenser next to that; and a chest of drawers that’s painted white with gold trim and curlicues, with books stacked on top of it. I glimpse the kitchen off to one side, one of the add-on rooms, and a tiny bedroom, the entire space taken up by quilts and whatever kind of mattress is beneath them.

“You like to drink something? Some tea? Coke? Maybe beer?” Mrs. Lau asks.