Eventually they left him at a tower sheathed in the same unrusting corrugated iron as roofed their lean-to. A deafening roar and chatter came from within. A breaker, one of dozens that rose here and there across the floor of the immense pit. The rock came up out of the pits, where most of the prisoners were working, in big diesel dump trucks. From them, it went up a power conveyor to the top of the breaker.
A very old, tottering, rail-thin Chinese with a mask over his mouth and nose shepherded Teddy up steel stairs slick with powdery grit to a platform near the top. There, gigantic steel rollers rotated ceaselessly, shaking the whole building. The din was deafening. Huge driven wheels chewed the ore into progressively smaller pieces as it descended. The air seethed with powdered rock, so thick he could see only eleven or twelve feet in any direction. The old man handed him a rag, and gestured to him to tie it around his face. Pointed to the air, and grasped both hands to his neck in the universal symbol for choking. His hands were withered, scarred, and covered with nodule-like, whitish growths. He patted his own chest. “Lew.”
“Teddy.”
“Ted-ti?”
“Close enough. Ted-ti it is.”
Old Lew closed his fingers around the handle of a push broom leaning in a corner and began acting out what to do. The ore emerged from the mill crushed to a gritty, sparkling powder, the particles like coarse, dirty sea salt. Carried along on a wide rubberized belt, it passed under a bank of electromagnets. Switched on, the magnets sucked up grains of a reddish-brown mineral out of the passing ore. At intervals, a mechanism extended a tray, the current in the magnets was switched off, and the reddish matter dropped into the tray. Teddy’s task was to walk from one side of the breaker to the other with the push broom, brushing away what was left sticking to the magnets after the current cut off. Finally, Lew gathered the filings, or shavings, up with the broom, and ran them along the catch tray into a hole at the end.
He handed Teddy the broom and looked expectant. “Ni mingbai ma, Ted-ti?”
“Shid-eh,” Teddy said. He took the broom and brushed a few grains off the magnets, then pushed them into the hole.
The old man beamed as if he’d just graduated med school. “Tway. Ting hao! Ting hao!”
“Ting hao,” Teddy said, bowing. “Manwei bowgow.”
The old guy grabbed his gut, bent over, guffawing so hard Teddy was afraid he was going to choke. “Manwei bowgow! Bu, bu. Wo bushi yigi huwei.”
He ran the broom all that morning as the rollers rumbled like Niagara and the metal siding around him reverberated with distant booms. Until, at noon by the sun, a whistle blew, echoing from bluff to bluff down the length of the immense pit.
The breaker shut down, first the diesels that ran the conveyors chugging down the scale, then the rollers and the gearing that drove them rumbling to a halt.
A bell clanged. Dozens of workers streamed out from nooks and machinery onto the ladders. Teddy followed, but slowly, supporting his weight on a handrail. At the bottom of the breaker, in the open air, a wooden table held two tureens. One was the white mush, the other a doubtful-smelling vegetable soup. The powder-fog was dissipating, blown away by a thin wind. He shivered. Even at noon, the breeze was cold outside the tower. Four husky Chinese immediately plumped down, pulling up empty wooden cable-spools as seats. They planted their elbows as old Lew dealt metal bowls from a rolling chest that also held wrenches, screwdrivers, saws. There were only five bowls. Teddy tried to sit down too, but they elbowed him back, chortling. At last Lew said something and they grudgingly let him dip a bowl, but Lew stopped him and poured half of it back. “Bu, bu. Bing hao,” he said. “Ni pàng, ni bìng bù xuyào tài duo de shíwù.” He pointed halfway down the bowl. The husky guys guffawed and slapped their thighs, grinning at him.
Fuck this. He wasn’t going to survive on two mouthfuls of corn mush and rotten veggies. His mouth was bleeding again. No way to clean his teeth since Yongxing. He was going to lose them soon. But he let the thugs push him away, folded himself into a corner, and slurped his mush with his fingers. Eat everything they give you, they’d said at SERE. Yeah, but even there he’d lost ten pounds. His legs were starting to look wasted. His hands were numb most of the time. Too many hours in steel cuffs.
Teddy looked over at old Lew, whose hands dangled too, all but useless. When he grinned, just one blackened tooth showed. The guy wasn’t actually that old. He might even be Teddy’s age.
“Ted-ti,” said Lew, grasping his shoulder and turning him toward the rest of the breaker gang. They frowned over their bowls. “May-guo sheebing,” he added. Two or three registered, but most just blinked, then went back to eating.
When the whistle droned again everyone got up and headed for the ladders. Still ravenously hungry, Teddy followed, though more slowly, dragging his foot.
Over the next weeks, it got colder. Now and then, back in the hills, at night, the howling of wolves echoed eerily as the searchlights swung this way and that. Also, two other Americans arrived at Chu Shan, which Teddy learned was another name for Camp 576. Or maybe that was the name of the town whose lights he could see in the distance. Both were airmen, shot down over the Taiwan Strait. Teddy managed to get across to his production brigade leader, the squint-eyed guy with the stick, that they wanted to hut together. That made seven in the cave: Oberg; Pritchard; the three Vietnamese, Trinh, Vu, and Phung; and the airmen, Fierros and Shepard. Now it was cramped, but it wasn’t important where you crawled to sleep, or where you worked.
What mattered was more basic.
Little lizards darted down occasionally from what might be greener pastures for them, at the top of the cliff. They were wary, but a thrown rock could stun them long enough to be picked up and have their heads bitten off. He sucked the juices before cramming them into his mouth and chewing them whole, skin and all. The salty crunch reminded him of Fritos.
Old Lew apparently lived outside the camp, or in some privileged area of it. He would bring a little can of rice, and sometimes fish or radishes, for his lunch. Teddy spent anguished hours at the top of the breaker, raking magnetized ore and mulling over how and whether to steal the lunch can. The prisoners never saw rice. But if he antagonized Lew, lost this easy job, he’d go to the pits with the others. Or worse.
And those guys weren’t doing so well. It was pick-and-shovel work, with a quota of ten cubic meters a day. Like Teddy at the breaker, the others got mush and soup at lunchtime, and another bowl at knockoff. The toll of heavy labor and lack of nutrients was clear in their wasting arms, their drawn, bony faces. The Viets seemed to be taking it better than Pritchard. The Australian rolled off the truck at the end of the day, crawled to the hut, and lay with his eyes closed. As weeks passed, he began coughing, a nagging hack that brought up gray oysters.