Bling kept quiet up the steps and across the hotel lobby. In the elevator the journalists finally demanded in unison, "Well?"
"I'm to pick him up in a taxi when he goes out for his run tomorrow morning. He'll have his papers on him."
"Far out. The Prince and the Pauper do Peking."
"What did he say? When you asked…?"
"He told me a story. How his father died."
"Yea…?"
"A few years ago there was a thing – a fad, practically – started by members of the intelligentsia who had taken all the shit they could take. Doctors and lawyers and teachers. Journalists, too. They would be found guilty of some crime against the Cultural Revolution and paraded around town with nothing on but a strip of paper hanging from their necks. Their crime would be written on the paper. People – their neighbors, their families - would come out and insult them, throw dirt on the poor dudes, piss on them! We Chinese are fucking barbarians, you know? We aren't really disciplined or obedient. We've just never had any damn freedom! If we could suddenly go down to our local Beijing sporting goods store and buy guns like in the States, man, there would be lead flying and blood flowing all over town."
"Bling! What about the kid?"
"A fad, like. Here in Beijing it was doctors. They were catching a lot of crap for catering to the landlord element, treating bourgeoisie heart attacks and so forth. Finally, twenty top physicians, the cream of the nation's doctors, man, poisoned themselves by way of protest."
"Some protest."
"Yeah, well, in Yang's province it was teachers. The kid's father was a professor of poetry. He was condemned to humiliation for teaching some damn out-of-favor tome or other. After enough insults he and a dozen other maligned colleagues walked into the provincial university gymnasium in the middle of a Ping-Pong tournament… walked in, lined up, took out their swords, and staged a protest."
"Like dominoes."
Bling nodded. "The man at the end of the line had to do double duty: first dispatch the man in front of him, then do himself. They tried to keep it out of the papers, but there were pictures. And things like that get talked around even in China."
"Jesus."
"That anchor man was the kid's father."
"And that's why the kid went for our plot?"
"That and, of course, the stipend of three thousand huyen… that may have had some influence."
They waited for their Prince and Pauper as long as they dared the next morning. The photographer fiddled with his aluminum camera cases. The writer checked his pockets again to be sure he'd flushed all the wild wanna. The editor paid the phone bill.
They finally ordered a cab.
"I begin to suspect that we've seen the last of Bling, Yang, and your thousand clams."
The editor nodded glumly. "I wonder if the kid gets a cut?"
"I wonder if the kid even got the pitch. Bling may have put a hummer on all of us. Who can tell with these inscrutable pricks?"
The plane was delayed for two hours – emergency work for the flood victims – and they were drinking Chinese beer on the terminal mezzanine when they saw the taxi.
"Hey, look! Here he by God comes!"
"So he does, by God, so he does," the editor admitted, not too much relieved. "And, by God, with those glasses and that cap – he does look a lot like Bling."
The photographer lowered his long-range lens. "That's because it is Bling."
They couldn't get seats together until after the takeoff. "You did what with my money?"
"You heard me. Your three Chinese grand went into young Yang's travel fund to fly him to next year's Nike marathon in Eugene."
"Wait'll bookkeeping comes across that."
"Cheer up. He can still defect when he gets to Oregon."
"But what about you, Bling? Your education, your career?"
"When I got back to my dorm room last night I found I'd been moved out, girly books and all. You know who was in my bed, all coiled up like a black snake? That damn Tanzanian. Mude must've liked his style. So I decided it might be time for me to do some myself. Tripping."
"Listen, Bling. Be straight with us. Did you even ask the kid, or is this all a shuck?"
"I will not be tempted by doubt." Bling sniffed. He pushed the recliner button and leaned back, fingers laced behind his neck. "Besides, you'll get your money's worth."
"A thousand bucks for a thirty-year-old Pekingese punk? With times most high school girls can beat?"
"Ah! Good houseboy, me. Wash missy's underdrawers. Velly handy."
Yang did not wait for the bus from the Qufu airport. He left his bag and his coat with Zhoa. He would get them later at school.
He loped off down the puddled runway, east, in the direction of his village, feeling very happy to be back in the country. The sweepers smiled at him. The workers in the fields waved to him. Perhaps that was the difference: in Beijing there had been no smile of greeting on the streets. People moved past people, eyes forward to avoid contact. Perhaps it was merely the difference between country and city life, not between governments or nations or races. Perhaps there were only two peoples, city and country.
He rattled over the plank bridge crossing the canal and leaped the hedge of brush. Through the damp air he could see the fengs rising against the descending twilight, and his grandfather there like a scribble of dark calligraphy on the top, contorting through his ancient exercises.