Dreams of the Red Phoenix (33 page)

Charles looked out the window at the rice paddies and wished
he could melt into the wet earth pockmarked with rain. He want
ed to get out of the stuffy compartment but knew he should relish
this moment of peace and privacy. Instead, he felt trapped and
ashamed. It would have been grand if Kathryn James had been
his girl. But she wasn't his girl. She was just some older woman
at the end of her rope. When everything was going to hell around
you, you went that way, too.

His father didn't believe in hell. He said it was an invention
of zealots intended to frighten people into believing. Reverend
Caleb Carson didn't care for mumbo-jumbo to fool the ignorant
masses.
We behave well on this earth,
he had said,
because that is
our nature. Humans are inherently good and cooperative, and when
we are not, stories of devils with pitchforks won't make us rise to our
higher selves.
Charles had heard his sermons about human good
ness all his life and had always assumed they were true. But he
wished he could show his father what he had seen over the past
weeks. Hell is real, Dad, Charles would have said. And it's here
in China.

On the muddy road beside the train track, the throngs
marched forward, stumbling and fighting their way to safety.
Charles hadn't seen any Japanese soldiers for a while but knew
they were out there. At first, the rain had come as a welcome
surprise, but already it was making matters worse. He had seen
farm trucks and the black sedans driven by officials stuck deep in
watery ruts. But somehow the people pressed onward, unyield
ing against the wind and slashing rain. The goddamn unlucky
Chinese, Charles thought. Nothing ever seemed to go their way.

How his parents had ever thought it was a good idea to live in
this country, Charles couldn't imagine. He supposed he had his
father to blame for that. But he couldn't blame him for the way
the earth had given way under him and he had died in a land
slide. Caleb Carson had been pursuing his cause, riding out into
the countryside to check on the churches up in the mountains.
His father had died doing his Christian duty.

Charles hoped that someday he would be as dedicated to a
good cause as his father had been to his. A doctor's calling was
like that—done for the sake of others but with the possibility,
Charles hoped, of a fine-looking automobile parked in the drive
way. No harm in that, he thought. He had every intention of
growing up to be like his father, but not quite so dedicated as to
get himself killed.

It was his mother Charles would never understand. The more
he thought about how she had taken off for the Red Army camp,
the less likely it seemed he would ever forgive her. His father had
sacrificed his life out of the goodness of his heart. His mother,
on the other hand, was just plain foolish, selfish, and wrong. His
jaw tightened as he used a finger to follow a raindrop down the
windowpane. Dusk descended, and he pressed his palm against
the window and removed it quickly, leaving a ghostly print sus
pended for a long moment.

He recalled how they had sat together on the window seat in
the parlor and watched rain fall in the mission courtyard. She
pressed her hand to the pane, then removed it, and in their game,
he would quickly place his own much smaller palm over the
shadow of hers. As the mark of his mother's hand faded, he had
tried to catch it before it fully disappeared. Charles assumed that
he would never hold that hand again, nor would he want to. He
squinted at the rain rolling down the window beside him and
swallowed with a dry throat again. He was on his own now with
nothing but the fast-fading memory of his parents, both gone for
good in China.

Charles felt certain that his mother must have known she was
going to stay at the Red Army camp when she had gone there.
Captain Hsu had probably convinced her. Shirley Carson wouldn't
come to Shanghai before his ship departed or even meet him later
in America. She might never return from China at all. He would
search for her in future newspaper photos standing alongside the
Communist leaders—one lone, tall American woman, her eyes
bright with zeal. It burned Charles up inside to think of how she
had been willing to sacrifice everything for the Reds.

The train jolted, and from the corridor came voices raised in
a heated altercation. The Chinese were always shouting about
something, Charles thought. The compartment door inched
open, and an ancient grandfather pushed his way inside, some
how managing to shift the suitcases piled before the door. Bent
nearly double over his cane, he shuffled toward the empty seat.
Kathryn hopped to her feet and was starting to shoo him out
when Charles spoke up.

“Tupan Feng? Is that really you?”

The old man dropped onto the bench opposite and did not
reply, his wheezing breath his only answer.

Charles whispered to Kathryn, “He's like the ghosts in Lian's
bedtime tales—he never dies.”

“Not ghost,” Tupan Feng said, his voice, like everything else
about him, surprisingly strong.

“Sure looks like one to me,” Kathryn said as she pulled the
flask again from her purse, tipped it to her lips, and took another
drink.

Tupan Feng's bony claw swept the air. He pointed at her but
said nothing more.

“Now I'm spooked,” she whispered. “Maybe he's just a fig
ment of our imaginations, the booze going to our heads.”

“Not figment,” Tupan Feng said.

“Sorry, honorable Tupan,” Charles said. “We don't mean to be
disrespectful, do we?” He nudged Kathryn.

She didn't take the hint but muttered, “What do you bet he
dies right here on the train, and we have to deal with it.”

Tupan Feng shouted, “I die when ready to die—in America!”

“America?” Kathryn asked with a laugh. “Is that so?”

Tupan Feng nodded and announced, “Charles-Boy takes me.”

Kathryn slapped Charles on the knee. “Good luck with that,
sonny.”

In every tale Lian had ever told, Charles recalled that those
who ignored the signs of the spirits met their downfall swiftly
and painfully. Han had explained to Charles many times the
importance of honoring one's elders, respecting the way fate
unfolds, and accepting that what must be must be. So although
Charles's head felt woozy, and he was getting a kick out of Kath
ryn's bad manners, he rose to his feet and bowed before the wiz
ened warlord.

“I apologize, esteemed old one, for our rudeness. We are hon
ored to have you join us here in our compartment. I will escort
you wherever you want to go.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake,” Kathryn said.

Tupan Feng looked Charles up and down. “American boy
will not die a fool.” Kathryn started to snicker until the old war
lord added, “Not so for American woman. She is putrid turtle
egg of the lowest order.”

She raised the flask to toast him, but this time, Charles took
it from her and screwed on the cap. He then helped Tupan Feng
stretch out on the bench and tucked his father's driving cap under
his head to serve as a pillow.

“You sleep now, old one,” he said.

But Tupan Feng's eyes remained opened and unnaturally
bright. “Charles-Boy, do not search skies any longer for Feng
huang. The Chinese phoenix will never land again in this coun
try. Never, I say!”

“Okay, take it easy,” Charles said. “I won't look for it again.”

“No more good fortune here! Just pain and suffering from
now on. The emperor of all birds has flown!”

Charles nodded as he laid his topcoat over the thin and trem
bling shoulders, and the old man's eyes finally shut. Then Charles
sat again beside Kathryn. She shut her eyes, and before long, she,
too, had started to snore softly.

Charles reached deep into his khakis pocket and pulled out
his father's chop. He studied the red ink-stained phoenix carved
into marble, its wings partly spread and its head thrown back in
defiance. Charles recalled that his father had used it on envelopes
and papers written with Chinese characters in his spidery pen
manship. He had seen the image stamped on files and telegrams
hidden in the secret drawer at the back of the Reverend's antique
scholar's desk, which Charles had come upon by accident when
playing at his father's feet as a boy. And Charles recalled the same
small red stencil of the phoenix flying across the wall beside the
two-way transistor hidden in the basement.

He pressed the chop into his open palm now, but it left only
a hint of pink, the red phoenix fading. An undeniable thought
billowed upward in Charles's mind along with the steam that
fogged the train window, making the countryside out there more
shadowed and indecipherable than it already seemed: his father,
and not just his mother, had most certainly been a spy. Charles
wondered how he had ever thought he knew his parents at all.

R
ain continued to stream over the lip of the cave all after
noon and evening. Caleb slept fitfully on his cot near the
back wall, his bones chilled by the change of season. Deep in the
middle of the night, he awoke and heard men whispering at the
entrance. He did not call out and interrupt their meeting. He had
already been too great a burden. He would be forever grateful to
the Eighth Route Army for seeing to his recovery and knew he
was still being cared for on the orders of Captain Hsu. Caleb had
helped the captain by gathering information about the Japanese,
but Hsu's loyalty since his accident had far outweighed Caleb's
significance as a spy.

With some difficulty, he reached across to light the lamp and
tried to see the soldiers' faces in the dimness. But the men dis
banded just then, and Caleb spotted Hsu's profile as he departed,
no doubt occupied with urgent business. Cook appeared abruptly
beside Caleb's cot and looked down on him with sorrow in his
clouded eyes.

“We must leave now,” he said. “Very sorry, Reverend.” Cook
pulled the wool blanket higher around Caleb's neck, bowed, and
started to back away.

“Wait,” Caleb called after him. “Please, what's happening?”
He tried to sit up.

“Much danger. Troops now depart. We come back when
we can. God bless Reverend. Very good Christian man.” Cook
bowed a final time and hurried out of the cave.

Rain pounded the rocky ground on the cliffside as dawn
broke over the opposite mountain. Silver rivulets caught the
first sunlight, growing wider and stronger with each passing
moment. The cascade over the cave's entrance resembled a
true waterfall, as frothing and relentless as the one Caleb
had stood under as a boy in summer in the White Mountains.
He was inside it now and tried to imagine his brothers beside
him. Their shivering bodies had been vivid with delight, un
like his body now, which shook with cold and fear. Caleb
told himself to hold close the memory of his brothers. They
had always looked after one another, and he prayed for that
now.

The lamp, he noticed, had only a small amount of ker
osene left. The fuel would burn down, but luckily dawn
was almost here at last. Caleb watched the small flame and
enjoyed the shadows it cast on the back wall. He thought
of Plato's “Allegory of the Cave” and chuckled to himself.
Of course it would come to this: a cornerstone of Western
thought reenacted here in a distant Chinese cave. He had
traveled all the way to the other side of the world, hoping to
broaden his understanding of life through Eastern ways, but
still remained saddled with a Western perspective. Though
enlightened by liberal interpretations of the Bible and an ea
ger proponent of Chinese communalism, Caleb knew he was
no different from the ancient Greeks of Plato's allegory. He
remained chained to his cave with nothing to do but watch
light flicker on the wall and long for his freedom. All knowl
edge was subjective. All life, a narrow illusion.