Hour of the Rat (21 page)

The driver has to stop a couple of times to ask directions, once in a tiny village with a rutted muddy path for a main road, a second time as we bounce between rice paddies, shouting out to a farmer taking a break under a tree next to his fields.

Finally we come to a pass between two hills, then a turnoff into a stand of trees. There’s a chicken-wire fence and a ramshackle gate and a sign hung on the fence post with a painted bird—some kind of phoenix, I think—with long, brightly colored, curling tail feathers.

“Here,” the driver says.

“That’s a phoenix, right?
Zhe shi da luan
.”

He shrugs. “Could be.”

The
zhegu
turns into a
luan
—I got that in a fortune once. A little brown bird changes into a phoenix, soaring high above the clouds. You’d think this would be a good thing, but it isn’t necessarily. It just means big changes. Sometimes good, sometimes bad, depending on your actions.

Story of my fucking life.

I pay him and hobble down the path.

It looks like an old farm, a couple buildings of worn, blondish brick and curved, blackened roof tiles. There are some other, newer structures: more chicken wire, like cages, some with tin roofs. I hear things—birds, I guess—a sort of low chuckling, an occasional caw, clacking and trills. I
think
that’s what I’m hearing anyway. I’m drenched in sweat, and I’m pretty sure it’s not hot out.

“Can I help you?”

It’s a young guy, Chinese, tall and thin, with glasses.

“Yeah, I …” I have to stop for a minute. I wipe my forehead. “I’m here to see Sparrow.”

He looks me up and down. Like, I don’t know, there’s something funny about me. Maybe that I’m kind of leaning on my souvenir Yangshuo walking stick because I suddenly can’t stand up straight.

“
Xiaoma!
” he yells. “
Kuai lai ba!
”

I don’t exactly pass out, nothing that humiliating, but what happens is my vision blurs to white and there’s this hollow roaring in my ears, like a low ocean tide, and there are hands grasping my arms and guiding me down the path, and as I glance to one side, I swear I see this huge white bird with a red crown, like it’s wearing a skull cap—a phoenix maybe—walking alongside me, tilting its head now and again like it’s studying my face, trying to talk to me, almost.

“Hey, hi, bird,” I say.

I
END UP LYING
on a couch in an overstuffed office—or is it a clinic?—in the main farmhouse anyway, with my leg propped up on a couple of pillows and a rolled blanket. Apparently I did not hallucinate the white bird, because it’s followed us into the room and stands by the couch like some kind of bleached plastic lawn flamingo. There are other birds in here, too, in cages—some little songbirds, a duck, and is that a parrot on a perch?

“You should not be walking,” Sparrow says. “You need to rest.” She hands me a bottle of water.

“Yeah, yeah,” I say. I dig through my backpack for a Percocet and some aspirin, and then I think more of that on an empty stomach probably isn’t the best idea.

I take another look around. The interior walls are plastered, crumbling in places. There are paintings hung on the walls, traditional Chinese watercolors, of birds. Copies of famous pieces, probably, the kind you buy from “art students” who approach foreigners at the Forbidden City or Tiananmen, claiming they’re from the provinces and their professor is having an exhibition, will you come and take a look?

The paintings are pretty, though. Good enough copies at least.

Hanging up among them are big colored posters, birds of the world, birds of China.

The big white bird stands next to the couch staring at me. I wonder what kind it is. Maybe it’s on one of those posters.

“Is that a … a crane?”

Sparrow smiles and nods. “Yes. His name is Boba. He is hungry. Have you eaten?” she adds politely.

“I, uh … not exactly.”

Pretty rude of me, but I know I need to eat.

“Oh! I can make you some noodles. Do you like?”

“Anything is fine. Please, don’t trouble yourself.”

Sparrow rushes off. The young guy, the thin man with the glasses, pulls up a folding chair and sits next to me. His name is Han Rong, “But please call me Harold.”

“Harold. Do you work here?”

He laughs, a little nervously, it seems to me, but maybe it’s just that weird politeness disguised as social awkwardness you get in conversations here sometimes. Like you’ve stepped in something and you don’t know what.

“No. Just volunteer.”

“Oh. So I guess you like birds.” My lame attempt at a joke.

“I think they are okay. An important part of natural environment,” he adds.

“So you volunteer. For a long time?”

He hesitates. “Just a month or two.”

Jason/David left not quite two months ago.

It’s possible that I’m a little paranoid. Okay, maybe a lot. Life just keeps giving me reasons.

“What else do you do?”

He sits up straighter and smiles. “I am a student.”

“Really. What do you study?”

“The natural sciences.” He spreads his hands in a little wave around the room. “So this is extending my learning.”

“I see.”

I hear a few random chirps from the caged birds and a cackle from the parrot. Boba still stands by the couch, staring at me with his black, reptilian eyes. Then he stretches out his long neck and starts rooting around in my hair.

“Oh! Maybe he likes you!” Han Rong exclaims.

Either that or he’s looking for nest material.

I
EAT THE BOWL
of noodles that Sparrow made for me, probably one of those giant Cup-a-Soup things that everyone eats on the trains, but it’s good enough right now, and after I’m done the dizziness recedes somewhat, and I tell myself probably there’s nothing seriously wrong, I was just stressed out and tired and needed to get off my feet.

While I eat, a couple other volunteers wander in and out, a teenager with the English name of Sophie, chubby and serious, with pigtails like a younger girl, and a man who I’m guessing is a little older than Sparrow, rugged like a laborer, wearing a sweat-stained T-shirt and a sullen look, a grain sack slung over one shoulder.

“The feed, where do you want it?” he says to Sparrow, with a wary glance at me. “Here is good.”

As she says this, she’s crouched down in front of one of the big cages, checking on the inhabitant, one of those fishing birds. I check my dictionary. “Is that one a cormorant?
Yizhi luci
?”

Sparrow nods.

“What’s wrong with him?” I ask.

“The owner, when they fish, they tie a cord around the neck, near the throat. So the bird cannot swallow. This owner doesn’t
know how to take care of the bird. So he ties too tight. It gets an infection. Very bad.”

“And he brought it to you?”

The guy who carried the grain sack snorts. “We liberate it,” he says with a grin.

Sparrow blushes. “We don’t steal it. We offer him a payment. Tell him a little money better than a dead bird.” She rises. “Are you feeling better? Do you want to see the sanctuary? Or maybe you should rest a while longer.”

By now it’s getting late into the afternoon, and though maybe I should rest, I figure it’s my best chance to talk to Sparrow privately.

“I’d love to see it,” I say.

I’
LL ADMIT WALKING IS
still not a lot of fun. These weird pings that feel like electrical shocks almost, running up and down my leg, the spasms in my back, the pain in my hip, and those, I figure, are just because I’m not walking normally, but the leg pain, it’s got to be nerve pain, right? Like the doctor said, maybe the guy hit one of the screws in my leg and the swelling is impinging on a nerve. That would make sense. Odds are that’s all it is.

Given all the shit I’ve been through with my leg, that had better be all it is.

“This is our biggest cage,” Sparrow says.

We’ve walked down a path from the main farmhouse that leads toward what looks like an old rice paddy. I don’t know enough about rice to tell if they’re growing anything there or not, but bordering it is a big chicken-wire enclosure that makes a dome around a gnarled tree, nearly twice as tall as I am and about the size of a basketball court in length and width. There are a couple of wooden structures in it—big birdhouses? Some
tin trays and what looks like a pond. And birds. Big waterfowl like Boba. Smaller ones, doves, chickens, ducks. A bunch of little ones, I don’t know what they are. Some of them are obviously injured: limping, crooked wings flapping; a big one that I can see from here has a mangled beak. A few act almost like they’re drunk, walking and flying in wobbling circles, as if they’re tied to a pole.

“Wow,” I say. So far my plan to get Sparrow alone hasn’t worked. We’ve had a little entourage trailing us every step of the way: Han Rong and then Sophie and the macho guy toting grain sacks. It’s like they’re all tag-teaming, keeping watch, and I don’t know what that means.

“So what’s wrong with them?” I ask. “The birds, I mean.”

“Many things. Some of them injured. By people. By boats. Even cars. Others, they are sick. Parasites. Diseases. Some of them, they are poisoned, we think, with heavy metals. That’s why they act that way, why they can’t fly straight.”

Sparrow kneels by the enclosure, where a large crow has trotted up to greet her. It has a feather in its beak.

“
Xiao Heizi
 … 
Ni xihuan huasheng ma?
”

She reaches into a pocket and pulls out a peanut. Xiao Heizi—whose name means “Little Black One”—pokes its beak through the chicken wire, pushing the feather out toward Sparrow’s hand, releasing it onto her palm. She holds the peanut between her thumb and finger, and the crow snatches it in its beak.

“We trade gifts,” she explains.

I glance around. Sophie and Han Rong are a few yards away. Macho Man totes another big bag of feed over one shoulder, heading toward another chicken-wire cage and shed.

“What about David?” I ask.

“What about him?”

I’m still not thinking that straight, I guess. Before, I’d kept
hoping I could ask a simple, direct question and find out what I want to know, which is where the fuck
is
the guy, but I know by now that isn’t going to happen. So instead I ask a vague one and get a nonanswer. Great.

“Did he volunteer here?”

“A little.” She rises. Meets my eyes for a moment, then looks away. “I’ll show you.”

I follow her down the path. Boba follows me.

It’s colder now, or I’m just catching a chill, and I take a moment to zip up my jacket. I can see my breath on the air, mist surrounding the cone-shaped hills, lighter grey against a dark grey sky. It feels like rain is coming. There’s a sudden flapping of wings behind us, maybe from the birds that can’t fly straight.

The path we’re on leads to the cage and shed where Macho Guy was headed, I think, but I don’t see him. Maybe he’s inside.

I stop for a moment. I’m not sure I want to go any farther.

Sparrow half turns. “This way,” she says, gesturing toward the shed.

It’s a big shed, more like a small barn, really, surrounded by another chicken-wire fence. The door is closed. The front of it is featureless. Blank. I shiver in my jacket.

Sparrow opens the gate. “Come on, we just go inside.”

“I, uh …”

I’ve already been attacked, twice. Jason was here, and he’s vanished.

I just blundered out here like it was safe. Like it was a refuge. But what do I know about her? What do I know about any of these people?

Now Sparrow stops and looks at me. “You okay?” She seems genuinely concerned. Or she’s a really good actor. “You need to rest again?”

Remember the wounded antelope. You don’t want to be one.

“Oh, no, I’m fine. Just … uh, it looks like it might rain.”

“Maybe so.” She hesitates. “You don’t have to see this,” she says. “Just, you ask about David.”

I have a bunch of thoughts, like David’s dead and rotting in there, or maybe maimed, or he’s crazy and chained up to keep him from running away, or …

Well, fuck.

In for a penny, in for a pound or whatever.

Sparrow pauses by the door of the shed. “Okay, when I open, come in quickly,” she says.

She opens the door. I hesitate. And stumble into the dim interior. The door closes behind me.

I smell it before my eyes can adjust.

The unmistakable odor of cat piss.

Something bumps against my calf.

“Holy shit!”

“You don’t like cats?” Macho Man asks.