Night Heron (29 page)

Tianjin

The truck stop was on the southern edge of the city, asphalt crumbling into ice-frosted mud, a restaurant of sorts—Mian Wang, “Noodle King”—in a low prefabricated hut, steam drifting from vents on its roof. A dozen or so trucks idled by the highway. The first driver Peanut tried wouldn’t open the door of his cab. The second was heading the wrong way.

Now Peanut stood on the running board of a white, spattered eighteen-wheeler, pushing a wad of cash up against the glass. That got the man’s attention. Peanut climbed in the cab, which was rank with cigarette smoke and dirty blankets. The driver was a wiry thirty-something man in a stained bright-blue sweater, his hair lank and falling across a pinched, narrow face, small, close eyes. He chewed on a toothpick, his jaw working.

“Where you going?” Pinchface said, looking at the money.

“South,” said Peanut.

“South where?”

“South as far as you’re going.”

The man regarded Peanut, looked at the big shoulders. He held the toothpick, made a sucking sound.

“I’m going to Taizhou,” said Pinchface. “I’m empty so we’ll be quick.”

Taizhou. More than halfway.

“Some things you should know,” said Peanut.

The man looked away, through the windscreen into the darkness.

“Costs more, knowing things,” he said.

“There’s two of us. The other one doesn’t speak. And nor do you.”

Pinchface smirked.

“Who are you running away from, just so’s I know when not to stop.”

“Local people. Nothing for you to worry about.”

There was a silence, while the man considered.

“How much?” said Peanut.

“A thousand.”

Peanut counted out the notes.

“Each,” said the man.

Peanut waved through the window to where Mangan stood in the shadows. Mangan ran to the cab, his coat collar turned up, climbed in. Pinchface jabbed his toothpick at Mangan’s white skin, his red hair.

“That’s a foreigner,” he said.

“You’re observant,” said Peanut.

“I don’t like that, not one bit,” said Pinchface.

Peanut rounded on him.

“You took the money, now drive the fucking truck.”

Pinchface, recalculating, muttering under his breath, started the engine. Peanut pointed Mangan to a space behind the seats, where a slab of filthy foam rubber lay on the floor of the cab. Mangan pushed past him and lay down. Peanut sat next to Pinchface, took out a cigarette and lit it as the truck gathered pace on the highway.

They took the expressway south, shadowing the coast, through China’s economic resurrection. Peanut hadn’t realized. The glittering cities, mile after mile of factory, warehouse, high-rise, drawn in concrete and neon; beautiful young girls on billboards, curvy, beckoning, imploring. The traffic on the highway flashed past. Sometimes he saw oil derricks out in the fields, floodlit, their great weighted arms heaving in the night.

When he went into the camp, he had left an unsmiling country of low brick, its gray cities drifting into village, railways that wound past somnolent factories, through silent, emerald fields to a yard with a red star over the gate, a mountain of coal, a rooster. Now this.

Just after five Pinchface spoke.

“I need to stop and sleep for a while.”

Peanut caught an edge in his voice, wondered.

Pinchface said, “I’m pulling over.”

A scabrous rest stop somewhere short of Laiwu, little more than a concreted field, a stinking toilet block. The truck slowed, almost came to a halt. But Mangan, kneeling, looking over the seats, saw them first; some distance away, flashlights probing the length of a bus, blue uniforms rousing its occupants, the driver gesticulating to the uniforms. Mangan leaned forward, cast around. Plainclothes men, standing smoking. Another group of uniforms by the road, waiting.

“How the fuck,” said Peanut.

“Keep going,” said Mangan.

“I’m stopping,” said Pinchface.

“No, you’re not,” said Peanut.

“I am. They’re after you. I’m stopping.”

The knife, now, small, glinting under the sodium lamps, hovering just in front of Pinchface’s eye.

“Keep driving,” said Peanut, quietly.

The driver swore, gunned the engine; the truck picked up speed, pulled out on to the highway. After a few moments he said, “You can have the money back.”

“Keep driving,” said Peanut.

Mangan sank back on to the foam rubber. Four, five miles further, another clutch of police, another bus by the side of the road. This time they’d taken the luggage off and a dog was going through it.

“Roadblocks soon,” said Mangan.

“They know we’re here,” said Peanut.

“Yes, they know you’re here,” said Pinchface. “Look, I won’t say anything, you just get out.”

“Shut up,” said Peanut.

Mangan blinked, snapped upright.

“Do you have a mobile phone?” he said.

Peanut nodded absently.

“Is it on?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus Christ.”

They pulled over about a mile further on, Peanut with the knife to Pinchface. Mangan climbed out of the cab. The night air stung him with cold. He was in the emergency lane. A little further on he could make out an intersection, secondary roads peeling off the highway. He jogged along the hard shoulder in the darkness, ran down the exit ramp. Sparser traffic on the secondary road. And a petrol station.

He ran towards the station forecourt, breathing heavily. A man walked away from a small blue truck with an open bed. He was going in to pay.

Walk boldly, it’s less noticeable.

He strode into the light, made for the blue truck. It was full of ladders, sheets, pots of paint. A decorator, then, getting an early start. As he walked past, he took the phone—still turned on,
perhaps three or four hours of battery life left—and dropped it among the decorator’s equipment. He veered away from the truck and walked in a wide circle back into the shadows, started to run again, back up the exit ramp, towards the highway.

A few miles on they passed another three police cars moving fast in the opposite direction, flashing lights on.

Nothing after that.

But it wasn’t enough for Pinchface. Perhaps an hour later Mangan lay awake on the foam rubber and felt the truck turn and slow. He sat up. Peanut’s head was lolling against the chair. He was asleep, the hand holding the knife in his lap. Mangan saw the driver’s face in the mirror; he was biting his lip. The truck was juddering to a halt now. They were on the outskirts of a town, in a gray dawn, the traffic heavy, new buildings of white tile rising out of the fields.

“What are you doing?” said Mangan.

Peanut came awake, sat forward.

Pinchface said nothing. The truck hissed and stopped. He reached for the door handle, got it an inch open.

“Wait,” said Mangan, but Peanut had Pinchface by the collar, wrenching him back into the cab. The knife was in Peanut’s left hand, blade out.

“Where are you going?”

“Please, I just want out of this. I need to stop. You go on. I won’t say anything.” He looked sullen, dispirited.

“Not possible, now,” said Peanut.

“But you have to let me go sometime,” he said.

Peanut said nothing. Mangan could sense he didn’t know what to do.

“I have to stop. I’ve been going all night. I need to eat, piss,” said Pinchface.

Peanut leaned towards him, tightened his grip on the man’s collar.

“You’ll drive us to Fuzhou,” he said.

Pinchface looked nonplussed.

“I’m not going to Fuzhou.”

“We’ll bring you some food. You can sleep for a bit. Then you drive us to Fuzhou. We’ll pay you more.”

“That’s not what you said. Before.”

“That’s what I’m saying now.”

The man shifted against Peanut’s grip, then sat still.

“All right,” he said.

Peanut considered.

“I’ll go for food. You don’t move.”

The man nodded. Peanut held out the knife to Mangan, who shook his head. Peanut pushed it into his hand.

“If he moves, cut him,” said Peanut. Mangan felt the weight of the knife, heavy for its size. A dense thing. He was kneeling behind the driver. Peanut opened the door on the passenger side and climbed down.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” he said.

The door slammed shut. Pinchface sat still, Mangan right behind him.

“Just don’t move, all right?” said Mangan.

But the man’s right hand was feeling for something in the well between his seat and the door.

“Don’t,” said Mangan. But Pinchface had found what he was looking for and there was a metallic scrape as he brought it up. Then he was turning fast in his seat and bringing whatever it was over his head. Mangan jerked back, away from the seat. A tire iron. Pinchface’s swing was vicious but the iron caught on the roof of the cab as it arced over. It came down on Mangan’s shoulder, hitting muscle, not bone, a deadening pain. Pinchface was pulling back for another strike. His tongue was out in concentration. Mangan lashed out wildly with the knife, caught something with the tip of the blade, wasn’t sure what. Pinch-face
sat back, swore, lifted the back of his hand to his mouth. The knife had found his cheek and laid it open, and his lip, too. Blood was already running down his chin and dripping on to the seat. He took a short breath and with an
ungh
sound launched himself over the seatback, both hands on the tire iron, thrusting it forward in a stabbing motion. Now he was falling on to Mangan. The iron made contact with the side of Mangan’s head, lacerating the scalp. Mangan felt it as a hot iron ploughing a furrow in his skull, then felt the weight of the man coming down on him. With his right hand he brought the knife upwards to meet the falling man. The blade seemed to glance off something hard and then sink into something of its own accord. Pinchface bucked, dropped the tire iron and put both hands down on the foam rubber mat, taking his own weight and holding himself over Mangan, and looked down at his chest. The handle of the knife protruded from the blue sweater in the region of the solar plexus, the blade nowhere to be seen. Pinchface pushed himself up to a kneeling position, looking at the handle, then steadied himself with one hand on the seatback.

“Fuck,” he said.

Then he sat, leaning back against the wall of the cab, and looked at Mangan. His mouth was smeared with blood.

“What should I do?” he said.

Mangan swallowed, said nothing.

Pinchface looked down again. He touched the handle of the knife gingerly.

“It’s not bleeding,” he said.

Mangan didn’t move, sank his fingers into the foam rubber mat. There was silence for a moment.

“You’ll have to get a doctor,” said Pinchface. “You can get one.” His face was in shadow now. Mangan could hear his breaths coming shallow and fast.

“I think, something, inside,” he said. He made a weak gesture.
Then tried to lift his torso off the floor of the cab with his hands, making a ticking noise with his tongue.

“Starting to hurt, now,” he said.

He sat back down on the floor of the cab and leaned forward, his face in light. Mangan could see he’d gone shockingly pale, his skin shining. He reached out one arm towards Mangan, then let it fall.

“Help me now?” he said, the words feathery.

Then silence again, just his fast breathing.

“I want my kid,” he said. “My little boy.”

But his eyes had lost their depth, had gone flat and glassy. Mangan had seen it before, that death look, seen it in an Aids victim lying on a bench in a filthy rural clinic, seen it in a little girl he’d helped pull from the rubble after a quake.

Pinchface slumped to the side and lay with a
mnama
sound. What felt to Mangan like minutes passed. Pinchface said, quite plainly, “Oh, there you are.” And then nothing else.

Peanut had walked a quarter of a mile by the side of the highway. He was colder than he should be, he thought, the hunger and lack of sleep starting to tell. A café was selling rice porridge and eggs and
doujiang
. He bought full styrofoam boxes and put them in a plastic carrier bag and carried them back down the cold roadside. It was starting to get light. He opened the door to the truck and climbed in. The Englishman was sitting in the corner holding his knees, like an unhappy child. The driver was lying, asleep? No. That was a knife in his chest. The knife. My knife.

“What the fuck have you done?” Peanut said.

The Englishman just opened his mouth and shut it again. He turned his head, and Peanut saw black, matted blood in the red hair.

“He attacked me,” Mangan said, turned his head away again.

Peanut closed the cab door behind him, rubbed his chin.

“You’ll have to drive,” he said.

Mangan said something Peanut could not make out.

“You’ll have to drive us to Fuzhou,” Peanut repeated.

“I said, I don’t think I can.”

“Mang An, I don’t know how to drive. They didn’t teach us to drive in labor reform. You will have to drive.”

Mangan rubbed his eyes, shook his head as if to clear it.

Peanut, lips curled, pulled the knife out and wiped it. They covered the body, first with a blanket and then with the foam rubber mat, bumping into each other in the narrow space. Mangan stood, swaying a little, gestured to the truck’s dashboard.

“I can’t drive this,” he said.

Peanut climbed from the cab and walked away from the truck, crossing the highway towards a cluster of low buildings. A warehouse or factory, didn’t matter. In the parking lot he squatted and waited, perhaps eight or ten minutes. A white car pulled in, a Volkswagen, one of the ones made in Shanghai. Peanut, all business, walked over to it, waving, smiling. The driver, a woman in a catering uniform, got out.

“No, no, get back in the car,” said Peanut.

“What?” she said.

“Back in,” said Peanut. She saw the knife, and did so.

“Now drive over to where that white truck is,” said Peanut.

She turned on to the highway, had to go some distance and make a U-turn, Peanut yelling at her to hurry up, her knuckles white on the wheel, eyes wide, the tears coming.

At the truck Peanut got her out and forced her into the cab, made her lie curled up under the steering column, her head by the pedals, and he tied her with what he could find, a length of twine around her throat and twisted on to the brake pedal so she couldn’t move for fear of choking herself. Mangan didn’t say anything.