Don Winslow - The Trail to Buddha_s Mirror

Just my luck to get a racist carp, Neal thought.

“Fresh fish for lunch!” Wu called to him.

“Wonderful!” Neal answered, fervently hoping they weren’t going to hunt their own fresh pork for dinner.

They repaired to the dining hall, a utilitarian rectangle with a linoleum floor and wooden tables. The fish was prepared quickly, and they ate it with some greens Neal didn’t recognize, along with bowls of sticky white rice. Some bottles of beer made a quick appearance and departed just as quickly in the midafternoon heat. Peng, who had announced only the night before that he did not drink beer, drained one with little difficulty. After lunch, the group went to a second-floor meeting room in the headquarters building so that Zhu could answer Mr. Frazier’s questions about the Dwaizhou Production Brigade.

Neal didn’t ask the only question he was really interested in: What am I doing here at the Dwaizhou Production Brigade? Instead he launched a battery of interrogatives and nodded sagely as if he understood or even cared about the answers that Wu worked so hard to translate. What is the annual rice yield? How many people work on the brigade? How many families are there? How is it organized? What crops besides rice do you grow? How many hogs? How many chickens? How is silk produced?

Zhu seemed particularly proud of his new fish-farming project, explaining that the pool out front was just for the recreation of party cadres; the real ponds were harvested with nets, and were an enormous success. Neal said that he would like to see them, and was rewarded with a huge smile and a promise that they would do so that very afternoon.

Even Peng was pleased with Neal’s performance, nodding and even smiling at Neal’s questions, then nodding vigorously at Zhu’s answers and listening intently to Wu’s translation. He apparently thought the whole dog-and-pony show was so wonderful that he passed cigarettes out to everybody. The three Chinese men smoked solemnly while Neal sucked on some hard candy.

Neal also thought that the show was pretty good, especially Mr. Zhu’s eloquent soliloquies on agriculture. The guy seemed to care passionately about farming in general and this farm in particular. His eyes shone with pleasure when he discussed gains in food production, and went dull and sad when he spoke about the lack of modern equipment and fertilizers. Neal figured that Zhu was either a terrific actor-sort of an Oriental Mr. Greenjeans-or that he wasn’t in on the whole “Mr. Frazier” scam.

Why should he be? Neal wondered. I’m not in on the whole “Mr. Frazier” scam, and I’m “Mr. Frazier.”

“I really want to see those fishponds!” Neal said before the boys could light up another round.

He saw the fishponds, which were actually huge, square, sunken concrete tanks with plank catwalks. He saw the rice paddies and learned how rice was planted, harvested, chaffed, packaged, and transported. He saw fields of wheat, sorghum, and sunflowers, and received instruction in the fine art of chewing sunflower seeds and spitting out the hulls. He saw chicken coops, duck ponds, and hog pens, and learned that pork was a major part of the Chinese diet. He saw water buffalo, petted water buffalo, and reluctantly rode on a buffalo while its little girl owner sobbed in anxiety for her pet. He saw a twenty-acre square of uncultivated land-woods and brush-and learned that it was set aside to encourage the rabbits that were a major game crop. He saw a party of hunters, armed with ancient, muzzle-loading, curve-stocked rifles, go into the wood and emerge with several rabbits. He saw the complicated, integrated, and enormous effort it took for the people of this area to feed themselves and try to get ahead a little bit at the end of the year. He saw the tranquil beauty of the countryside.

He saw a maintenance shop where mechanics cannibalized the older trucks and tractors for the benefit of the newer trucks and tractors. He saw a clinic where a “barefoot doctor”-a woman paraprofessional-dispensed a combination of acupuncture, traditional herbs, and rare Western pharmaceuticals. He saw a school where male and female teachers handled enormous groups of uniformed children without apparent strain. He saw the presentation that the elementary kids had cooked up for him, a charming montage of song, dance, and parade that left him laughing and touched at the same time.

He saw Li Lan.

She was in a classroom, bent over a little girl, guiding the girl’s hand and paintbrush over a sheet of white paper. She wore a plain, loose-fitting white blouse over blue “Mao” pants and rubber sandals. She wore no makeup, and her hair was tied into two braids with red ribbons. She looked up, saw Neal, and shook her head almost imperceptibly.

Neal moved on to the next classroom.

Because then he understood it. Not all of it, but enough. He sleepwalked his way through the rest of the tour, putting the whole thing together in his head. He didn’t know where everybody fit in, but at least he knew now what he had to do.

Nothing.

Nothing, he told himself. Do nothing and just shut up.

Which was something he had never done before.

Neal finally figured out how to work the kerosene lantern and then fell into bed. What did they call it? A kang. A straw mattress on a low platform covered with a cotton quilt and remarkably comfortable. Zhu had offered to put him up in the little recreational club the cadres used, but Neal opted to stay in a typical peasant house. So the boys drove him into the middle of the commune somewhere and left him with a nice family, whose house had an interior courtyard full of chickens and pigs, a big charcoal-burning stove, and about a dozen kids who played with him until the simple dinner was served and they went to bed. He had walked about a million miles over the commune, and his body wanted to drop right into the arms of Morpheus, but his mind still wanted to pace around.

So Li Lan had made it home, he thought. Home was in Sichuan, where she had learned to cook, not surprisingly, Sichuanese food. Home was on a farm, and that was why she’d taken Pendleton. Doctor Bob didn’t make herbicides, idiot. Simms’s story was a cover, which Pendleton mimicked perfectly. Neal thought back to his drunken evening at the Kendalls’, to Olivia’s request for Pendleton to kill the weeds. That’s not my line, he’d said. I only know how to make stuff grow. Like rice, maybe? Like three crops a year, maybe? No more growling stomachs in China. The same old Sichuan dream.

But why have they brought me here? Why go to all that trouble and then bring me here where I can see her? And where is Doctor Bob? Why did Li Lan shake me off this afternoon? Was I supposed to see her and not see her? How do I resolve that contradiction? What the hell do they want?

Make up your mind, guys, he thought.

No, not “mind”… minds.

Yeah.

He picked up Random and worked on it for an hour before crashing into sleep.

Peng squeezed the trigger. The pellet smacked into the paper target with a satisfying thwack. Along with the fishing pool, the BB gun range was his favorite part of visiting Dwaizhou. He had gotten the key from Zhu, opened up the big room, and liberated some beer and cigarettes from the locker. There were, after all, privileges that came with his high position and heavy responsibilities. He shot again, and the pellet hit the silhouette target right in the forehead.

“Good shot,” the American said.

“If only you had shot as well,” Peng observed.

The American shrugged.

Peng couldn’t help rubbing it in. He didn’t like the American, and the American had been drinking heavily.

“You missed,” Peng said. “You shot at the wrong man, and then you missed.”

“It could happen to anybody.”