Hour of the Rat (42 page)

I
SET AN ALARM
, get up early, drink some coffee. Go downstairs at 7:30
A
.
M
. and meet the driver I hired yesterday.

The places in the video, they’re all near Kaili, I’m told. Most of them famous, at least around here. Xijiang, the Thousand-Family Village. Shiqiao, known for its handmade paper. Other places whose names I don’t remember but that I have written down on a piece of paper.

“Can we visit them all in one day?” I ask the driver.

He looks at my list, compiled by the folks in yesterday’s restaurant. Frowns. “Maybe a day and a half.”

“I don’t have a lot of time.”

“We can try to hurry.”

W
E GO FIRST TO
Xijiang. It’s a tourist trap, with a hundred-kuai entrance fee, but a beautiful one. Wooden buildings with carved doors and windows, rising up a hillside in layers, like a beehive. Wooden signboards shaped like butterflies. A quiet river winds through the center of town. Stone streets. Noodle stalls and souvenir stands. And ATMs and a place to buy phone cards. We enter at a long wooden bridge, grey roof tiles supported by wooden poles, carved beams, a balcony up on top, and are greeted
by lines of old men and women, singing and playing pipes, offering shallow bowls of rice wine, which I’m wishing were coffee given how early it is. I have a cup anyway—you know, to be polite.

I see a sign for a coffee place, but it’s closed.

I wander around the town for a while, up the hill to the next level, until my leg starts aching, and then I sit and try to think it through. I watch a small group of Chinese tourists pass by, led by a guide wielding a pennant flag. Thankfully, no bullhorn.

Would Jason be in a place like this? A Disneyfied Miao Minority village? With entrance gates and ticket takers?

I know
I
wouldn’t be, if I were him.

I limp down to the teahouse where the driver waits.

“Let’s go,” I say.

W
E DRIVE A WAYS
. To Shiqiao, a village where they make paper by hand. The mountains look just like the video, I think. Jagged and draped with mist. Those white banners, whatever they are—grave markers? prayer flags?—they’re everywhere. Stuck into the earth. Tied onto tree branches. Some of them have red dots in the middle, the edges blurred by the bleed of the paint into the white.

I walk through the main street of the village, green mountain rising behind it. It’s quiet. There are walls made up of unmortared, uneven grey brick. A satellite dish on an old tiled roof. New wooden houses here and there, with fresh window carvings. I can smell the wood sap. Bunches of yellow corn hang in the eaves. A rooster and chickens.

I glance inside one wooden building with an open front. There’s a young guy in there, bending over scarred wooden troughs, and it smells like wet paste, like kindergarten. He’s making paper, I guess.

No sign of foreigners, other than me.

W
E DRIVE UP MOUNTAIN
roads. The air smells like pine and mist. Rice paddies spill in terraces below us. A lone peasant in a round hat ambles along the side of the road, carry pole with wire baskets full of cabbage on either end draped across his shoulders.

I can’t really take it all in. All this … I don’t know, nature or whatever. Yangshuo was stunning, but not like this. Not wild.

I keep expecting the director to yell “Cut!” and stagehands to drag it all away.

We keep driving.

We stop at a village. Have some late lunch. Women weave at this village, at handmade looms. They want to sell me cloth and silver bracelets. I buy a simple bracelet, to be polite. Out on the main street, there are men crouched by birdcages. “The birds fight,” the driver explains.

I don’t really get this. They look like songbirds.

“They take them out of the cages?” I ask.

“No.”

So … what, it’s a sing-off?

I never do find out.

Finally we come to a village that starts in a valley, winds up a hill. Wooden buildings, like Xijiang’s, but not as fixed up. Bunches of corn and peppers hanging in the eaves. There’s a fancy wooden bridge with three shingled roofs crossing a stream, and something that looks like a waterwheel made from bamboo and old logs. A few of those prayer flags, or grave markers, or whatever they are, stuck in mounds on the hillside.

I recognize this place from the end of the video.

“I want to take a walk here,” I tell the driver.

I
HOBBLE ALONG THE
stone path. Shallow steps lead up into the village. Chickens and a dog and an occasional cat scamper by. But it’s very quiet. Hardly any people. An old woman who sits out on her stoop working on some embroidery. An old man smoking a pipe. Something snorts and snuffles in a shuttered, dark bottom floor of one of the old wooden houses. A pig? A crazy person? Who knows?

Farther up the path, the village widens out into kind of a plaza. There’s a bunch of buildings, some in the familiar white tile and cement stained by green mold. A school, I think, and maybe a police station or a village government building. There’s a basketball hoop off to one side. Black-and-white paintings of Karl Marx, Mao, and Deng Xiaoping hanging on the two-story school building. Still no kids. It’s practically a ghost town.

I keep walking up the path. I hear a couple drifting notes of a wood flute, shaky, like the person doesn’t really know how to play it.

Here’s a brick-and-wood building with a cross on top. A Christian church, I’m pretty sure. Farther on, another plaza, surrounded by more wooden buildings, and wooden benches shaded by a peaked roof. There’s a pole in the center, with a carving of what looks like a cow skull stuck on top.

“This is where they do the old dances,” someone says.

In English.

I turn, and there he is.

Jason/David/Langhai.

I
T
’
S WEIRD SEEING HIM
after all this time. His hair’s lighter than the photo I have—bleached, I guess, but cut short. He’s clean-shaven, and his cheeks have lost some of that fullness. He looks thinner and older.

The eyes, though, they look the same, toffee-brown with those flecks of gold.

“I’m Ellie McEnroe,” I say.

“I figured.” He’s holding a wooden flute, and he uses it to gesture toward a bench at the far end of the plaza. “You want to sit? It’s a nice view.”

“Sure.”

I follow him over to the bench. He’s wearing jeans and a battered North Face jacket, probably counterfeit, though it’s getting harder to tell.

He sits, facing away from the plaza. He’s right: The view is amazing. Below us is a valley. Terraced fields climb up the opposite hill, and they’re different colors, all these shades of green, some of them white, like maybe they’re planted with flowers. I can’t really tell from here. There are clumps of dark trees among the fields, a cluster of wooden houses. White smoke rises up from a controlled burn, meeting the white mist
drifting down from the peaks. And those torn white flags on crooked sticks, fluttering in the breeze.

“You’re a friend of my brother’s?”

“Yeah. From the Sandbox.” I mean, he knows that already, right?

“Why’ve you been looking for me?”

“Doug asked me to,” I say. “He’s not doing so good. And he’s worried about you. He wants you to come home.”

Jason makes a sigh of a laugh. “Yeah.”

It’s almost like he doesn’t care. But I don’t know how much he knows, about what’s going on with Dog right now. If he didn’t get the email I sent, maybe none of it.

He fingers the wooden flute. I hope he isn’t going to start playing it.

“So … is he worse?” he finally asks. “Or is it just the same old tragedy?”

I can feel myself bristle. It pisses me off, hearing him talk like that. What the fuck does Jason know about what Dog went through? About what
any
of us went through? Sitting on his ass in some coffeehouse playing his flute.

“He’s in the hospital. He’s had some seizures. They’re not sure what’s causing it.”

Jason doesn’t say anything. He’s looking at the valley below us. Maybe at the peasant in the field across the way, plowing through the mud behind a water buffalo. Just like they’ve been doing it for the last five thousand years.

“And he wants me to come home. Why? So I can get what’s coming to me? Go to prison?” He laughs again, and now it’s hard. “He can go off to Iraq and Afghanistan and fight for oil or whatever. And that’s fine. That’s patriotic. Me fighting for the future of the planet? I’m some kind of deluded, stupid freak.”

“He doesn’t think that.”

“How the fuck would
you
know?”

“Because he told me, dickhead,” I snap back. “He said he thinks the charges are bogus.”

“That’s new,” he says. “I guess it’s true, brain injuries change your personality.”

“God, you’re really a little turd,” I say, and I have to admit I’m surprised. I thought he was going to be different. You know, idealistic and all.

I mean, shit. I nearly got killed chasing after this kid.

“Yeah, that’s one of Doug’s nickname’s for me.” He grins slightly.

“Fine, whatever. You’re fighting for the future of the planet. You still can’t go burning people’s shit down.”

“Tell that to the people in Afghanistan we blew up with our drones.”

“Okay, I’m done.” I stand up, slower than I’d like, waiting for the spasm in my leg to ease up so I can walk out of there.

Mission accomplished. Fuck you, asshole.

“I didn’t burn anything down,” he says suddenly. “We had a plant in our group. FBI or Eos security. I don’t know which. He got people pumped up. Kept pushing everybody. That night we went to the Eos facility, it was supposed to be a nonviolent action. Stickers and stencils. I still don’t know what happened. I think he set the fire himself.”

“Burned down his own company’s lab? Destroyed company property?”

“Sure, why not? It’s just one facility. They had all the data backed up. They do that, they can discredit the movement, put a bunch of us in jail, make everyone think it’s okay to treat Greens like terrorists—”

I’m getting that hollow feeling in my gut again. The one I get when I’m hearing something I don’t want to hear, because I know it’s true.

“We threaten them because we’re telling the truth, and they can’t stand that. They don’t want people to know. They just want to keep poisoning the planet and counting their profits, and that’s all they give a shit about. Not about you, not about me, not about a bunch of farmers in China, or India, or the US. We’re fucking roadkill to them.”

Jason’s rigid, tensed up, ready to fight. Now I see the passion that drove him into the mess he’s in. The kid I thought he was.

And then he just deflates.

He’s too young to look this exhausted. This defeated.

Then I remember how
I
looked when I was his age.

“Anyway, I can’t go home,” he says.

“Yeah. I get that.”

We sit and watch the farmer in the paddy below us, slogging through mud behind his water buffalo, against that backdrop of emerald hills covered with white flowers. I think I can smell them, the flowers, a hint of sweet in the sharp scent of pine.