I’LL LET YOU HAVE it for four hundred.”
I looked out the showroom window into the parking lot. The horizontal blinds had been pulled up, all the better for me to see what was at stake. Wen-chong stood by a sky-blue ’54 Chevy, his hand caressing the gleaming curve of its side-view mirror.
“Previous owner was an old lady. Hardly drove. That’s a great deal I’m giving you, Mr. Tong.”
I turned toward the salesman. He sat at his desk, tapping his box of cigarettes against the table. His hair was long and white and fanned out to the sides. His large brown eyes searched mine. “Four hundred. It’s a beautiful car, isn’t it? Takes a—”
“Okay.”
“What?”
“I’ll take it. Four hundred dollars.”
The sides of his mouth turned up slightly, then opened into a big wolf smile. “Well then! Nothing I like better than—” He coughed. “How much you putting down, Mr. Tong?”
“Putting . . .”
“To finance.”
“What?”
His eyes fixed on mine. “You mean you got it in cash?”
“Of course.” I patted my pocket.
The lupine smile. He pulled a sheaf of papers from his drawer. “All right. I’ll need your license.”
“No driver’s license.” No one I knew had a driver’s license back in Taiwan; it was virtually impossible to pass the exam.
The smile disappeared. He brought out his cigarette lighter from the pocket of his blazer. “Auto insurance?”
“Huh?”
I felt a sense of panic. The car would slip through my fingers. I wouldn’t be able to buy any car at all. We wouldn’t make it to Manitoba. This pink-faced man, who was trying so desperately to light the wrong end of his cigarette, was going to stand in my way because of rules I didn’t even understand.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out my wad of bills. As I counted them out on the table, the salesman’s eyes fixated on them. I thought of my father and his red envelope.
These people are obviously desperate and corrupt. There’s only one way to deal with people like that.
My father the cynic. The survivor. I gave the pile a little push toward the poor salesman. He probably had a family at home waiting around the table. Waiting for his commission. We were all caught up in the same game, just trying to stay alive.
“Four hundred,” I said.
The salesman rapped his fingers on the desk, eyeing the little pile of money. He blinked, then stuffed the money into his shirt pocket and closed the papers back into the desk. The teeth shone again. “Deal.”
WEN-CHONG SETTLED INTO the passenger seat next to me and pulled the door shut.
I fondled the steering wheel, chrome and white. I had my own rocket now.
Wen-chong looked sideways at me, his face obscured by the night. “He sold it to you even though you don’t have a license?”
“Yes.”
“That’s illegal.”
“Really?”
“And how come you had four hundred dollars in cash with you? Why did you come to Ann Arbor, anyway? Are you some kind of overseas agent?”
“Oh no! I loathe agents. I came to work for Gleason,” I said.
He looked at me sideways again as I turned out of the lot onto the darkened highway. “You need to turn on your headlights.”
I paused, fumbling at the knobs. “I brought all my money. Everything depends on what I do here.”
“Did Gleason invite you?”
“Of course not,” I said. “But I need to do research this summer.”
“We’re full. We don’t need any more students.”
“I know.”
WE DROVE WEST, then north, the highways stretching on for a thousand miles into the darkness.
“How do you know Professor Hong?” I asked Wen-chong.
“My father was an economics professor at Peking University under the Nationalists,” he said. It was his turn to drive, and the light from the streetlamps slid rhythmically over his trim, almost childlike frame. He sat on a tote bag filled with papers so he could see over the dashboard. “He moderated the student protests there—he just opposed the civil war and the fascist nature of the government’s crackdown on the Communists. He wasn’t Communist. He was an economist, after all.
“But I’m sure you know the Nationalists don’t make such refined distinctions. One day when my father was giving a speech at a student rally, disguised government soldiers stole in and threw a hand grenade. It went over his shoulder and exploded in the hand of a poor literature student who had picked it up from the stage and tried to lob it back. A piece of the grenade lodged in my father’s neck. After that, my father took me and my mother and fled to Hong Kong. It was just in time. Shortly thereafter, as the Communists began to win the war, the Nationalists cracked down on university students and those professors who had aided them.
“In Hong Kong my father had nothing. The University of Hong Kong did not even have an economics department at that time. My mother had worked as a seamstress in Peking, and her skillful labor supported us in Hong Kong. But my father was unhappy and booked passage to Canada. It was there, at McGill University, that he heard Peng Ming-min, the Taiwanese political activist, speak about self-determination, and in the audience was our Professor Hong, although he was only a student at that time.”
“I see,” I said. “He’s a friend of your father’s.”
“Not only,” Wen-chong said. He glanced in the rearview mirror and switched lanes. “Many years later my father died. That fragment of grenade was always getting infected and he would never stop working long enough to get it removed. He said he wanted to keep it to remind himself never to become complacent. And one day the infection overwhelmed him and he died.”
I watched Wen-chong as he drove, but his expression was unreadable in the dark. So much suffering there was in the world!
“By that time my mother and I had joined him in Canada. Hong became like a father to me.” His voice became gravelly and he cleared his throat. He gestured toward the road. “And speaking of Canada, here we are.”
THE TRAIN WE boarded at Winnipeg lurched a lot more than any train I’d taken on Taiwan.
“It’s the muskeg.” Wen-chong, sitting opposite me, waved toward the landscape outside, what looked like plains covered with clusters of short pine trees. “Bog, basically. The permafrost layer prevents the water from draining properly and this vegetation grows on top. There’s just gravel on top to make the tracks. Very unstable.” Our car banged around a bend, and I winced, thinking of the transmitter I’d soldered together.
“Are you sure it wouldn’t have been better to fly?” I said.
“Well,” he said. He scratched the back of his neck. “I think the components are too heavy for the plane here. It’s no Boeing 707, you know.”
I looked back out the window. The train curved away behind us, one hopper car after another, filled with grain. All along the track, wooden utility poles leaned at forty-five-degree angles, propped up by wooden poles in gangly tripod form. The utility lines stretched, unbroken, to infinity on either end, so precariously supported that one storm, one unseasonably warm day to melt the permafrost below, and communication would be lost. I could die out here and Yoshiko would never know.
I turned back to Wen-chong. He was sitting and looking at his hands in his lap, his eyelids heavy.
“Tell me about your research,” I said.
He looked up at me wearily. “Why?”
“Because,” I said. “I want to do research, not just repair your equipment.”
He sighed. “I don’t have anything to write on.”
I dug up the tote bag and pulled out a sheet of paper.
“No,” he said. “That’s our specifications and experiment design and such. You can’t use that.”
I looked at the diagram in my hand. “But this is the schematic for the transmitter! You didn’t tell me you had this!”
“Oh.” He looked sheepish. “I didn’t realize we did.”
“Well,” I said, “we don’t need it anymore.”