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.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
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.