“More like four for four.” He makes a pun of the homonyms.
Sz
for
sz
.
Four for death.
“They’ve got blister rust.”
She waves a hand sourly. “Five for five.
They’re still good. Better than good. Picked just before.” She wields a gleaming machete and chops the durian in half, revealing the clean yellow slime of its interior with its fat gleaming pits. The sickly sweet scent of fresh durian boils up and envelopes them.
“See! Inside good. Picked just in time. Still safe.”
“I might buy one.” He can’t afford any. But he can’t help replying. It feels too good to be seen as a buyer.
It is his suit, he realizes. The Hwang Brothers have raised him in this woman’s eyes. She wouldn’t have spoken if not for the suit. Wouldn’t have even started the conversation.
“Buy more! The more you buy, the more you save.”
He forces a grin, wondering how to get away from the bargaining he should never have started. “I’m only one old man. I don’t need so much.”
“One skinny old man.
Eat more. Get fat!”
She says this and they both laugh. He searches for a response, something to keep their comradely interaction alive, but his tongue fails him. She sees the helplessness in his eyes.
She shakes her head. “Ah, grandfather. It is hard times for everyone. Too many of you all at once. No one thought it would get so bad down there.”
Tranh ducks his head, embarrassed. “I’ve troubled you. I should go.”
“Wait. Here.” She offers him the durian half. “Take it.”
“I can’t afford it.”
She makes an impatient gesture. “Take it. It’s lucky for me to help someone from the old country.” She grins. “And the blister rust looks too bad to sell to anyone else.”
“You’re kind. Buddha smile on you.” But as he takes her gift he again notices the great durian pile behind her. All neatly stacked with their blotches and their bloody weals of blister rust.
Just like stacked Chinese heads in Malacca: his wife and daughter mouths staring out at him, accusatory. He drops the durian and kicks it away, frantically scraping his hands on his jacket, trying to get the blood off his palms.
“Ai! You’ll waste it!”
Tranh barely hears the woman’s cry. He staggers back from the fallen durian, staring at its ragged surface. Its gut-spilled interior. He looks around wildly. He has to get out of the crowds. Has to get away from the jostling bodies and the durian reek that’s all around, thick in his throat, gagging him. He puts a hand to his mouth and runs, clawing at the other shoppers, fighting through their press.
“Where you go? Come back!
Huilai!”
But the woman’s words are quickly drowned. Tranh shoves through the throng, pushing aside women with shopping baskets full of white lotus root and purple eggplants, dodging farmers and their clattering bamboo hand carts, twisting past tubs of squid and serpent head fish. He pelts down the market alley like a thief identified, scrambling and dodging, running without thought or knowledge of where he is going, but running anyway, desperate to escape the stacked heads of his family and countrymen.
He runs and runs.
And bursts into the open thoroughfare of Charoen Krung Road.
Powdered dung dust and hot sunlight wash over him. Cycle rickshaws clatter past.
Palms and squat banana trees shimmer green in the bright open air.
As quickly as it seized him, Tranh’s panic fades. He stops short, hands on his knees, catching his breath and cursing himself.
Fool. Fool. If you don’t eat, you die.
He straightens and tries to turn back but the stacked durians flash in his mind and he stumbles away from the alley, gagging again.
He can’t go back. Can’t face those bloody piles. He doubles over and his stomach heaves but his empty guts bring up nothing but strings of drool.
Finally he wipes his mouth on a Hwang Brothers sleeve and forces himself to straighten and confront the foreign faces all around. The sea of foreigners that he must learn to swim amongst, and who all call him
farang.
It repels him to think of it. And to think that in Malacca, with twenty generations of family and clan well-rooted in that city, he was just as much an interloper. That his clan’s esteemed history is nothing but a footnote for a Chinese expansion that has proven as transient as nighttime cool. That his people were nothing but an accidental spillage of rice on a map, now wiped up much more carefully than they were scattered down.
Tranh unloads U-Tex Brand RedSilks deep into the night, offerings to Potato God. A lucky job. A lucky moment, even if his knees have become loose and wobbly and feel as if they must soon give way. A lucky job, even if his arms are shaking from catching the heavy sacks as they come down off the megodonts. Tonight, he reaps not just pay but also the opportunity to steal from the harvest. Even if the RedSilk potatoes are small and harvested early to avoid a new sweep of scabis mold
—
the fourth genetic variation this year
—
they are still good. And their small size means their enhanced nutrition falls easily into his pockets.
Hu crouches above him, lowering down the potatoes. As the massive elephantine megodonts shuffle and grunt, waiting for their great wagons to be unloaded, Tranh catches Hu’s offerings with his hand hooks and lowers the sacks the last step to the ground. Hook, catch, swing, and lower. Again and again and again.
He is not alone in his work. Women from the tower slums crowd around his ladder. They reach up and caress each sack as he lowers it to the ground. Their fingers quest along hemp and burlap, testing for holes, for slight tears, for lucky gifts. A thousand times they stroke his burdens, reverently following the seams, only drawing away when coolie men shove between them to heft the sacks and haul them to Potato God.
After the first hour of his work, Tranh’s arms are shaking. After three, he can barely stand. He teeters on his creaking ladder as he lowers each new sack, and gasps and shakes his head to clear sweat from his eyes as he waits for the next one to come down.
Hu peers down from above. “Are you all right?”
Tranh glances warily over his shoulder. Potato God is watching, counting the sacks as they are carried into the warehouse. His eyes occasionally flick up to the wagons and trace across Tranh. Beyond him, fifty unlucky men watch silently from the shadows, any one of them far more observant than Potato God can ever be. Tranh straightens and reaches up to accept the next sack, trying not to think about the watching eyes. How politely they wait. How silent. How hungry.
“I’m fine. Just fine.”
Hu shrugs and pushes the next burlap load over the wagon’s lip. Hu has the better place, but Tranh cannot resent it.
One or the other must suffer. And Hu found the job. Hu has the right to the best place. To rest a moment before the next sack moves. After all, Hu collected Tranh for the job when he should have starved tonight. It is fair.
Tranh takes the sack and lowers it into the forest of waiting women’s hands, releases his hooks with a twist, and drops the bag to the ground. His joints feel loose and rubbery, as if femur and tibia will skid apart at any moment. He is dizzy with heat, but he dares not ask to slow the pace.
Another potato sack comes down. Women’s hands rise up like tangling strands of seaweed, touching, prodding, hungering. He cannot force them back. Even if he shouts at them they return. They are like devil cats; they cannot help themselves. He drops the sack the last few feet to the ground and reaches up for another as it comes over the wagon’s lip.
As he hooks the sack, his ladder creaks and suddenly slides. It chatters down the side of the wagon, then catches abruptly. Tranh sways, juggling the potato sack, trying to regain his center of gravity. Hands are all around him, tugging at the bag, pulling, prodding. “Watch out—”
The ladder skids again. He drops like a stone. Women scatter as he plunges. He hits the ground and pain explodes in his knee. The potato sack bursts. For a moment he worries what Potato God will say but then he hears screams all around him. He rolls onto his back. Above him, the wagon is swaying, shuddering. People are shouting and fleeing. The megodont lunges forward and the wagon heaves. Bamboo ladders fall like rain, slapping the pavement with bright firecracker retorts. The beast reverses itself and the wagon skids past Tranh, grinding the ladders to splinters. It is impossibly fast, even with wagon’s weight still hampering it. The megodont’s great maw opens and suddenly it is screaming, a sound as high and panicked as a human’s.
All around them, other megodonts respond in a chorus. Their cacophony swamps the street.
The megodont surges onto its hind legs, an explosion of muscle and velocity that breaks the wagon’s traces and flips it like a toy. Men cartwheel from it, blossoms shaken from a cherry tree. Maddened, the beast rears again and kicks the wagon. Sends it skidding sidewise. It slams past Tranh, missing him by inches.
Tranh tries to rise but his leg won’t work. The wagon smashes into a wall. Bamboo and teak crackle and explode, the wagon disintegrating as the megodont drags and kicks it, trying to win free completely. Tranh drags himself away from the flying wagon, hand over hand, hauling his useless leg behind him. All around, men are shouting instructions, trying to control the beast, but he doesn’t look back. He focuses on the cobbles ahead, on getting out of reach. His leg won’t work. It refuses him. It seems to hate him.
Finally he makes it into the shelter of a protective wall. He hauls himself upright. “I’m fine,” he tells himself. “Fine.” Gingerly he tests his leg, setting weight on it. It’s wobbly, but he feels no real pain, not now.
“Mei wenti. Mei wenti,”
he whispers. “Not a problem. Just cracked it. Not a problem.”
The men are still shouting and the megodont is still screaming, but all he can see is his brittle old knee.
He lets go of the wall. Takes a step, testing his weight, and collapses like a shadow puppet with strings gone slack.
Gritting his teeth, he again hauls himself up off the cobbles. He props himself against the wall, massaging his knee and watching the bedlam. Men are throwing ropes over the back of the struggling megodont, pulling it down, immobilizing it, finally. More than a score of men are working to hobble it.
The wagon’s frame has shattered completely and potatoes are spilled everywhere. A thick mash coats the ground. Women scramble on their knees, clawing through the mess, fighting with one another to hoard pulped tubers. They scrape it up from the street. Some of their scavenge is stained red, but no one seems to care. Their squabbling continues. The red bloom spreads.
At the
blossom’s center, a man’s trousers protrude from the muck
Tranh frowns. He drags himself upright again and hops on his one good leg toward the broken wagon. He catches up against its shattered frame, staring. Hu’s body is a savage ruin, awash in megodont dung and potato mash. And now that Tranh is close, he can see that the struggling megodont’s great gray feet are gory with his friend.
Someone is calling for a doctor but it is half-hearted, a habit from a time when they were not yellow cards.
Tranh tests his weight again but his knee provides the same queer jointless failure. He catches up against the wagon’s splintered planking and hauls himself back upright. He works the leg, trying to understand why it collapses. The knee bends, it doesn’t even hurt particularly, but it will not support his weight. He tests it again, with the same result.
With the megodont restrained, order in the unloading area is restored.
Hu’s body is dragged aside. Devil cats gather near his blood pool, feline shimmers under methane glow. Their tracks pock the potato grime in growing numbers. More paw impressions appear in the muck, closing from all directions on Hu’s discarded body.
Tranh sighs. So we all go, he thinks. We all die. Even those of us who took our aging treatments and our tiger penis and kept ourselves strong are subject to the Hell journey. He promises to burn money for Hu, to ease his way in the afterlife, then catches himself and remembers that he is not the man he was. That even paper Hell Money is out of reach.
Potato God, disheveled and angry, comes and studies him. He frowns suspiciously. “Can you still work?”
“I can.” Tranh tries to walk but stumbles once again and catches up against the wagon’s shattered frame.
Potato God shakes his head. “I will pay you for the hours you worked.”
He waves to a young man, fresh and grinning from binding the megodont. “You! You’re a quick one. Haul the rest of these sacks into the warehouse.”
Already, other workers are lining up and grabbing loads from within the broken wagon. As the new man comes out with his first sack, his eyes dart to Tranh and then flick away, hiding his relief at Tranh’s incapacity.
Potato God watches with satisfaction and heads back to the warehouse.
“Double pay,” Tranh calls after Potato God’s retreating back. “Give me double pay. I lost my leg for you.”
The manager looks back at Tranh with pity, then glances at Hu’s body and shrugs. It is an easy acquiescence. Hu will demand no reparation.