The Ghost War (24 page)
“We shoulda come in with another squad,” Gaffan said. He looked at the prisoner, who sat hog-tied against the side of the mountain. “So who’s he?”
“Good question.” Wells nudged the Russian. “Who are you?” The prisoner strained against the flexcuffs.
“Take these off and I will show you who I am.”
“He went soft in the cave and it looks like he’s not too happy about it,” Wells said. “All I know is his name isn’t Vladimir. It’s Sergei. Who are you, Sergei? Tell us about yourself.”
PART 3
18
THE STEWPOT BUBBLED AND BURPED ABOVE A LOW FIRE,
filling the hut with the rich aroma of chicken and carrots and potatoes melting together. Jordan reached for the pot, but his mother swiped his arm away. No, she said. First your father eats. She sat above him on a wooden throne, reaching an impossibly long arm down to stir the pot. Saliva filled Jordan’s mouth and the hole in his stomach swelled to the size of a basketball. He looked around but didn’t see his father.
filling the hut with the rich aroma of chicken and carrots and potatoes melting together. Jordan reached for the pot, but his mother swiped his arm away. No, she said. First your father eats. She sat above him on a wooden throne, reaching an impossibly long arm down to stir the pot. Saliva filled Jordan’s mouth and the hole in his stomach swelled to the size of a basketball. He looked around but didn’t see his father.
A scoop, its thin aluminum handle twisted from years of use, lay by the pot. Jordan grabbed it. Wait, his mother said. He’s come back. He’s right behind you. Jordan turned and saw his father, a blush of purple tumors crawling across his face. The old man reached out with a skeletal hand. And though he knew he shouldn’t, Jordan wanted to keep this wrecked, dying man from dirtying the stew. He blocked his father from the pot and reached in with the scoop. But the pot was empty, aside from a tiny chicken wing. As Jordan watched, the wing fluttered out of the pot, a final insult.
“No,” he said aloud.
Jordan opened his eyes and looked around. The stew—along with his poor dead parents—vanished as he woke. Nothing had changed. On the concrete highway above him, trucks rumbled. The morning air was hot and humid. Song and Yu slept under a thin woolen blanket, Yu clutching an empty bottle of Red Star.
The stew was gone, but Jordan’s hunger stayed with him as he pushed himself to his feet. Nothing metaphorical about this feeling. Jordan didn’t want love or hugs or a pony. He wanted food. All day, every day, his stomach ached.
In the mornings, if he managed to earn a half-loaf of stale bread and a cup of tea sweeping the sidewalk for a friendly storekeeper, his cravings faded to a low growl, background noise. But in the afternoons, the emptiness in his belly overwhelmed him. He drank water then, ate vegetables that were more brown than green, anything to fill his stomach. The cigarettes helped too, though he knew he couldn’t afford them. A pack of cigarettes cost as much as a bag of potatoes.
Worst of all were the hours before bed. Then his belly ached so badly that he wanted to cry, though he never did. To keep him smiling, Song and Yu told tales about girls they’d known, peasant girls who sneaked off in the dark to lie with them.
“Once this missus and I, you know, we were ready to—” Song leered, his mouth opening in a gap-toothed smile. “I pulled up her dress and put her on the ground and she yelped.” Song moaned, a passable imitation of a teenage girl. “Turned out her bum had ended up in a chunk of horse dung. I would have gone ahead straightaway—she was none too clean even before that—but she made me take her home. Silly girl. We could have had a bit of pleasure, and that’s too rare in this world.”
Song and Yu howled with laughter and even Jordan found himself smiling. He didn’t know if the stories were true, and he didn’t care. The words distracted him. Song and Yu gave him food too, when they had any. If not for them he didn’t know what he would have done. Yet he wasn’t even sure why they liked him. Maybe because neither had a son, or even a daughter, and they saw him as a substitute.
Each morning, Jordan fought through his daily routine of a hundred sit-ups and push-ups. Even with his belly empty, he never skipped his workout—and it never failed to amuse Song and Yu. “Arnud Schwarzenga,” they called him. More seriously, they told him to conserve his strength, that the exercises wasted energy he couldn’t spare.
He knew they were right, but he refused to quit. He had once heard his hero Michael Jordan say that he worked out even if he could hardly move. “Every day,” Michael had said, with that famous grin. So Jordan stuck to his exercises. Despite his troubles, he had somehow managed to stay optimistic. He never stopped to think about why. Unlike most sixteen-year-olds in America or Europe, he had seen enough death to know that just being alive was a privilege, one everyone lost eventually. While he had it, he would do his best to honor his father and mother.
“Ninety-nine . . . a hundred.” Jordan finished his last push-up and stood.
“Arnud . . . Arnud. . . .” Song smirked. “One day you have big muscles too, Jiang.” They didn’t call him Jordan. He’d kept that name to himself, for himself.
“Come on, Master Song,” Jordan said. “Let’s go.”
Song dragged himself up and pulled the blanket off Yu. “Up, fatty. No work means no Red Star tonight.”
Yu grumbled and tossed the blanket aside. He was filthy, his sweatshirt stained and his pants frayed. Jordan tried not to imagine what his mother would think of the way he lived. Poor as they’d been, she’d always kept their home clean. She swept every day and made him wash himself every morning, even in the winter when the cold water stung him and made his privates shrivel so he could hardly see them. Jordan brushed the dirt off his clothes as best he could. If he found work today, he would buy soap, even a little bottle of shampoo. He couldn’t believe he wanted anything more than food, but he did. He wanted to be clean.
In the meantime he pulled his lucky Bulls hat over his greasy black hair and away they went. Song had heard of a new job site, an apartment building being demolished downtown, with plenty of work.
THE SUN WAS JUST VISIBLE
when they reached the entrance to the Guangzhou subway. With no money for the fare, they skipped over the electronic turnstiles instead of buying a ticket. In theory the cops could arrest them, but in reality they’d just be shoved off the train at the next stop if they were caught; the police didn’t want anything to do with them.
when they reached the entrance to the Guangzhou subway. With no money for the fare, they skipped over the electronic turnstiles instead of buying a ticket. In theory the cops could arrest them, but in reality they’d just be shoved off the train at the next stop if they were caught; the police didn’t want anything to do with them.
Fifteen minutes later they reached their stop. Jordan felt himself sag as he walked up the steps to the street. The world went gray and he stumbled backward. Song wrapped an arm around him and gently set him down.
“Jiang?”
“I just need a cigarette.”
“A roast pig too, by the looks of it,” Yu said. He dug into his pocket for a coin. “Come on, Song, let’s get the boy some bread at least.”
They found a vendor and bought Jordan a small ripe orange. He wanted to force the whole sphere into his mouth at once. Instead he peeled it slowly, offering slices to Song and Yu. Though he knew he ought to share—they’d bought it for him, after all—he felt a pang with each piece he gave up. The vendor watched him eat and when he was finished handed him another orange and a pear too. He waved aside Song’s fumbling effort to pay. Usually Jordan didn’t like taking charity, but today he didn’t mind. The fruit filled his belly and gave him a jolt of energy.
“Feeling better?”
Jordan nodded.
“Now let’s win this job.” They cut through a narrow pedestrian mall hemmed in on both sides by concrete apartment buildings. Some stores were already open. Inside a butcher shop, men in dirty aprons shooed flies away from slabs of meat strung from ceiling hooks. Next door, in a store filled with glass jars that brimmed with crumbly green tea, two old men haggled over a plastic bag of leaves. Farther down, the aroma of honey-filled dumplings wafted from a pastry store. Jordan forced himself to look away from the pastries before he spent the last of his money, the emergency money in his Bulls hat.
Two blocks down, they turned left onto a crowded avenue. Song looked at the signs. “This way,” he said. A dozen or so equally dirty men were walking in the same direction. They made a right, and after a short block, turned onto a street blocked by police sawhorses.
“Dammit,” Song said. Scores of men, a hundred or more in all, milled around. So much for finding easy work.
“You woke me for this?” Yu spat onto the pavement. On their right, the steel skeleton of a half-finished skyscraper rose, the construction site blocked by barbed wire, its gates locked. The other side of the street held the apartment building slated for demolition. Two giant cranes stood beside it, wrecking balls poised to tuck into the eight-story brick building like hungry men slicing up a steak.
But the building wasn’t empty, Jordan saw. On the fifth floor an old woman leaned out, shouting to the street. “Don’t do the capitalist roader’s work! We poor people must stay together!”
Yu laughed. “Capitalist roader? That old missus probably thinks Mao’s still alive. Didn’t anyone tell her we’re all on our own these days?”
“See, Jiang?” Song asked. “They want us to clean everyone out so the cranes can knock down the building. It’s dirty work, but we’ll eat tonight.”
“Dirty work,” Yu said. “Yes, it is.”
A Mercedes sedan and two police cars rolled past the sawhorses and onto the street, forcing the men to make way. A stocky young man in a black T-shirt and slacks stepped out of the Mercedes and raised a bullhorn.
“Ten yuan”—hardly more than a dollar—“for every man who rids the building of these squatters,” he yelled.
“Ten yuan?” Song said. “He must think we’re desperate.”
“He’s right,” Yu said.
“You snake!” the old woman yelled down. “We’re not squatters. I’ve lived here longer than you’ve been alive.”
“And now it’s time for you to go.”
The woman disappeared. When she came back, she held a metal pot.
“Swine!” she yelled. She lobbed the pot at the Mercedes. The men scattered as the pot shattered the sedan’s windshield.
“Crazy old bitch!” the man yelled. Another pot flew out of the window and smacked the hood of the Mercedes, denting the shiny black metal. Two police officers stepped out of their cars and ran into the building.
A low rumble passed through the crowd. “Dirty work,” a couple of men said. “Dirty work.” More faces appeared in the building’s windows. “You can’t throw us out,” voices shouted. Sirens screeched, at first distantly, but growing louder.
“Twenty yuan!” the man in the black T-shirt yelled. “I’ll pay twenty!”
“It’s blood money,” Song said. Jordan felt light-headed at his words. Blood money. His father had died for blood money. “Don’t be afraid,” his father’s spirit said to him, not in his head but for real on the street. He looked around, but the spirit was gone.
“Are you all right?” Song said to him.
“Fine, Master Song.”
“You should leave. You don’t need to be involved in this.”
“Not unless you come too.”
“Then let’s all stay and see what happens. We’ve been pushed around too long.” Song’s eyes were hard and shiny as pebbles. “Dirty work!” he yelled at the Mercedes.
“It’s honest work,” the man yelled back. “If you don’t like it, starve.”
FOR A FEW MINUTES,
not much happened. The man in the black T-shirt raised his offer to thirty yuan, and a couple of the laborers stepped toward the building. But the other men on the street blocked them from going inside and they gave up. Then three more police cars appeared, sirens screaming. A dozen cops stepped out, tapping nightsticks against their thighs. A paddy wagon blocked off the street from the other direction. More migrants had shown up, and the street was thick with men now, milling around the police cars.
not much happened. The man in the black T-shirt raised his offer to thirty yuan, and a couple of the laborers stepped toward the building. But the other men on the street blocked them from going inside and they gave up. Then three more police cars appeared, sirens screaming. A dozen cops stepped out, tapping nightsticks against their thighs. A paddy wagon blocked off the street from the other direction. More migrants had shown up, and the street was thick with men now, milling around the police cars.
From the fifth floor the old woman yelled, “Leave me! Leave me!” as a policeman dragged her from the window.
“Leave her!” a laborer yelled.
Holding bricks and rebar rods, trash from the construction site, the migrants surged toward the police. A police officer grabbed the bullhorn from the man in the black T-shirt.
“Get out now or we’ll arrest all of you roaches.”
Song stepped forward. “We’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Not another word from you.” The officer raised his truncheon.
“Let him alone,” Jordan said.
The officer smirked. “And who are you? Skinny little migrant.” The cop shoved Jordan and grabbed his Bulls cap.
All I have,
Jordan thought. The hat was everything, his money, his luck, his connection to his father—
All I have,
Jordan thought. The hat was everything, his money, his luck, his connection to his father—
“Officer—” Song put a hand on the cop’s shoulder. Without a word, the cop swung his nightstick, catching Song in the ribs. As Song doubled over, the cop brought the stick down on Song’s skull. Song’s eyes rolled up and he dropped like a sack of potatoes.
“Murderer!” an old man shouted from the apartment building. “You killed him!” A clay pot flew out of the building and smashed on the roof of a police car.
“Murderers! Murderers!” The chant rumbled through the crowd, wavering like a fire trying to catch. For five seconds, then ten, the police and the migrants stared at each other, no one quite ready for more violence.
“Order!” the officer with the bullhorn said, and the crowd took a half-step back. “Go on now.” On the ground, Song groaned.
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