Riding the Snake (1998) (12 page)

"Under the circumstances, don't you think it would be a good idea to make sure his death was from natural causes?" Tanisha asked.

"I certainly do not. He had a heart attack. You people will clear out of this room immediately or I will make some big trouble," she said.

"I'm going to have to order an autopsy," Tanisha said. "Mrs. Cassidy, I know you're upset--"

"Do you? Do you have any idea what it's like to lose a son? A son who had the most wonderful future in front of him? A son who had demonstrated the most wonderful skills in business and in life . . ." She was near tears now. "Do you have any idea what it's like to have him snatched away, just taken like that? And then to have the police insinuate that something sinister was going on?"

Tanisha's mind flew back to the neighborhood street corner. Her own screams echoed in her memory as she watched the life disappear in her beloved little sister's eyes. Katherine Cassidy's voice brought her back. "You two people get out of here right now," she growled.

The interview was blown. Wheeler was half in the bag. His mother was hysterical. Tanisha decided to talk to Wheeler later. She nodded at Ray, and as they excused themselves, Wheeler gave her a lazy wave. That was when Tanisha remembered where she'd seen Wheeler Cassidy before. It was back when she was finishing her criminology degree at U
. C. L. A
. Some classmates had talked her into going to the U
. S. C
.-U
. C. L. A
. football game. They had an extra ticket and she needed a break from her twelve-hour marathon study schedule, so she'd gone along. It was half-time and a crazy bastard in a hand-painted cardinal-and-gold VW had driven out of the south turnstile of the Coliseum and squirted warm beer into the Bruin rooting section. He'd stained her blue sleeveless silk blouse. He'd given the U
. C. L. A
. rooting section that same careless wave before being chased by security police, pulled out of the car, and arrested. "Son of a bitch," she finally said, as they walked to the elevator.

"Huh?" Ray asked.

"Nothing."

"Whatta you think?" Ray said as they waited for the elevator door to open.

Tanisha was thinking about that football game fifteen years ago, remembering the drunk Trojan frat boy laughing as he drove in circles at mid-field, two dozen security men running after him. He had ruined her best silk blouse. She didn't have the money to replace it. Her world was too grim back then to understand somebody like Wheeler Cassidy, and she still thought the prank was pointless and unfunny. Then her heart softened as she remembered the look of pain in his eyes a few minutes before, as his mother lavished praise on her dead son, while heaping contempt on her living one.

"No wonder the man drinks," she finally said.

Chapter
10.

A New China

Zhang Fu Hai found his way back to Beijing's Huo Che Chang, the central railway station. He waited until after ten o'clock in the evening and then moved furtively across the tracks, looking for a boxcar that was heading south. He found a string of cars parked in the switching yard that had paper transit slips noting their destinations. The cars in this line were not hooked to an engine but were marked for transit to Shanghai. He had heard from other workers at the silk factory that the Triad which ran the immigration business in China was the Chin Lo and that its China branch was located in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province. The cars on this track were headed south to Shanghai, not the exact location he needed, but he had to take what he could get. The Master's wisdom taught him that: "It is better to make a net than yearn for fish at the edge of a pond."

The cars were padlocked and he was wondering what he would do to get inside when somebody yelled in broken Mandarin mixed with Cantonese, "Hey you, get away from there!"

Fu Hai spun and saw a burly man with an angry expressio
n m
oving toward him. He had on greasy work overalls and no shirt, even though the February night was very cold.

"What do you think you're doing?" the man growled as he moved up on Zhang Fu Hai. He was almost a foot taller and much heavier.

"I am ... I need . .

"You were trying to break into this car," the man said. "I will have to call the police."

"No. No, please. I have no travel papers. My permission slip was taken from me for no reason by a Block Warden," Fu Hai said, knowing that he would have to run to get away. This man was too big to fight.

The man reached out and unexpectedly grabbed Fu Hai's shirt, pulling him close. Fu Hai could smell coal and oil on his clothing.

"Do you have any money?" the burly man demanded.

"Why?"

"Perhaps we could make a bargain. Perhaps I could sell you a ride in one of my cars. My job is to watch to make sure nobody steals or tries to board the boxcars, but I have the keys," he said, grinning and showing teeth made brown from chewing sugarcane and brown seeds.

"I . . . I . . . how much would this cost me?" Fu Hai asked, wondering how he could ever trust this man who looked like a street thug.

"What do you have?" the man asked. "How much?"

"I can pay you fifteen yuan" Fu Hai said.

"You pay me a hundred or I will take you to the police right now."

A hundred yuan was a fortune. Two months' work at the silk factory. All the money Fu Hai had was in his pocket and added up to a little less than sixty yuan. It had to get him all the way to Guangzhou. But Fu Hai was frightened, so he pulled out the money and handed it to the rail guard, who counted it quickly.

"Is this all?" he demanded.

"It is all," Fu Hai said.

Then, without argument, the man folded the money and stuffed it into his pocket. He moved to the boxcar, took out a key and unlocked the padlock, then pulled the chain free and opened the door wide enough for Fu Hai to get inside. "I will lock it now, because the cars are inspected before the train leaves. All the doors have to be padlocked, but I will come back and unlock it before the train pulls out of the station," he said.

Fu Hai got inside the freight car, sure he could not trust the man, but before he could say anything else, the door was pulled closed and he could hear the chain rattling in the metal hasp and the big padlock was snapped shut.

Fu Hai cursed himself. He had let the man take all of his money and lock him in a rail car. He was helpless. The rail guard could just go and get a policeman. Fu Hai had been stupid, outfoxed by an uneducated brute. Fu Hai could tell by his accent that the man had no schooling. Like so many in China, the burly man had been forced into a labor market to help feed his family before he had learned pure Mandarin, as dictated by the Cultural Revolution. The man would certainly turn Fu Hai over to the police. Fu Hai would be sent to a lao gai, a work camp. He would die in prison and all of this would be for nothing. He would never get to America, never be able to get his beloved sister out of the horrible porter's room where she lived.

He looked around the car and saw that it was filled with wooden crates of "White Elephant" batteries on their way to Shanghai. Finally, he sat on the floor and put his head in his hands. His thoughts turned to his family, the way it had been when he was a child, before his father had been targeted as an enemy of the Revolution.

He remembered the first time the Red Guards had come to his father's calligraphy studio. He had been six. They accused Zhang Wei Dong of neglecting one of the "Four Bigs" which were mandated by the Cultural Revolution. They included speaking out freely, airing views fully, holding great debates, and writing "Big
Character" posters. The Red Guards said that on one of the posters he had not written Chairman Mao's name in big red letters as mandated by the government. They demanded he undergo a "struggle session." His father said the poster was not his work. He tried to explain to the soldiers that he, Zhang Wei Dong, would never violate this rule of the Revolution. After much violent shoving and shouts commanding him to confess, the Captain of the Red Guards said he had decided to show pity. He said he would not arrest Wei Dong. Instead, he had his men hold Fu Hai's father's hands on the wood table. While Fu Hai watched, the Red Guards slammed their wood batons down on his father's hands, breaking all of the finger bones. His father screamed and cried for mercy. He tried to say, through his pain, that he was a calligrapher and needed his hands to feed his family. They paid no attention and beat him until he was unconscious from the pain.

Mother is dear, Father is dear, but Chairman Mao is dearest of all.

His father's hands had healed without medical attention, but they became useless claws. He could no longer hold a brush. It had been the beginning of the end of the Zhang family's good life in Beijing. Their "rice bowl" was broken. They had no livelihood. From then on, nothing went right and the bad luck had continued for Fu Hai, right up to this moment.

Fu Hai was sound asleep on the wooden floor of the boxcar when he felt the train lurch. He woke up with a start and instantly knew that the switch engine had backed into the line of waiting cars to hook them up. He waited, listening for the door to be unlocked by the burly man, but he never came back. In five minutes, the train lurched forward and then slowly pulled out of the vast gray station.

Fu Hai was still on his feet an hour later as the train pulled out of Beijing, leaving the new construction and concrete streets behind. He wondered how he would get out of the train as it rattled and creaked along the tracks toward Shanghai. He finally sat with his back against a crate of batteries and wept.

By sun-up, he could see through a crack in the boxcars' worn slats that he was passing through the cotton, corn, and melon fields of northern China. He could smell the damp soil and see vectoring insects whirl above the colorful new crops, planted in dewy green rows, shining against the yellow earth.

He had begun to view the time he spent in the padlocked rail car as pleasant. In a way, the confinement was comforting to him. He couldn't get out, but nobody could get in. He hid behind a fort of wooden crates every time the train came to a stop. He knew that getting out of the car once they were in Shanghai would be a difficult problem, so he set his mind on it. He finally decided to empty one of the White Elephant battery crates and hide inside, but the large wooden crates were nailed shut. Furthermore, it was going to be hard to get the batteries out of the boxcar. He gave it some more thought, then lay on his back and kicked an opening in the side of the car at the worn spot in the slats. He worked feverishly, kicking splinters loose. His feet ached from the blows. His thin cloth shoes offered almost no protection, but slowly he widened the gap between the slats. Then he spent almost half a day getting the nails out of one of the crates. He started by kicking the underside of the top of the crate up with his swollen feet, loosening it slightly, until he could push it back down enough to get his teeth around the nail head. By pulling up hard, he finally got the first nail out. It took almost two more hours to remove six more nails. A few of his teeth were badly chipped by the time he was finished. Cold air stung the nearly exposed nerves in the broken teeth. The inside of his mouth was cut and bleeding when he got the top loose enough to pull it off. Slowly, he began to push the batteries out of the widened hole he had made in the rail car. He emptied the crate and made his hiding place.

At four P
. M
., the train reached the Yangtze River, which was known as the Chang Jiang, the River Without End. He looked through the slats at its huge girth and turbulent brown waters. For hours, they traveled downriver. The train rumbled along, following the rushing current to the sea.

He looked in awe at the outskirts of Shanghai as they moved into that historic city. He could see that whole sections of the town were being torn down. Turn-of-the-century colonial houses were ripped out to make way for new construction. Rubble and old broken colonial masonry were stacked all along the tracks. Farther down the river, he could see new concrete high-rise buildings being put up. It was as if China was eating her own past, chewing down the old and excreting new monuments of concrete, terrazzo, and glass.

The train rattled through the green rice fields of Jiangsu Province, where he had read in the provincial papers that people were being forcibly removed to make way for new commercial construction.

Fu Hai had known a wretched man from Jiangsu Province who had been sent to Khotan for questioning the redistribution of land in 1952. The man's house had been taken by the government. He had been made homeless, paid nothing for his family's property. When he objected that he only owned five mu of land, a little over an acre, he was told that he was a "landlord" and a "class enemy." In that part of Jiangsu, four mu was the maximum land one could own. He had been sent to Khotan for this offense. There was no redress of grievances in China. It was best to understand that and not stand before a force that could crush you without fear of reprisal.

The train finally slowed and pulled into Shanghai Station. The celebration of Chinese New Year had already begun. In the distance, the sky was lit by fireworks. He hoped the celebration would help him. He knew he had to change cars here. It was a dangerous proposition. He had heard that the train stations on the coast were patrolled by the People's Armed Police, who would look for escaping members of the floating population. They were not wanted anywhere in eastern China and were arrested on sight, then, without benefit of a hearing, were put on buses which took them to detention centers.