The Savage Boy

41



THE BOY HAD drawn a story wherever the Chinese general had placed his finger on Sergeant Presley’s map. If the Boy had been there or knew something about the place, he had rendered it in charcoal across the walls of the general’s study.

“One day,” said the general, “we must go to these places and find what is left there. Not to conquer as our current leaders wish and which will only bring the wrath of the barbarians down on us as it has already. But we must go to these places in order that we might make something new. What you tell me in your drawings may one day make a difference to those that must go to these places on the wall.”

And each day she had brought them tea in the afternoon.

And one day . . .

After she set the tea down and while the general stood close to the wall studying a picture of Little Rock, Arkansas, in which the Boy skinned a deer with trembling hands, the girl moved next to the Boy.

In the picture, the Boy was laying out the heart and liver on a crumbling table inside a large building, a library perhaps, by the look of the collapsed bookshelves. There was a river passing outside shattered and dirty windows. Among the collapsed shelves of books, the black man built a fire from fallen volumes. There was hunger on both of their faces.

The general said little once the picture was finished and as he studied it. He stood silently before it, consuming its every detail. Today, the girl did not leave as she usually did once she placed the tray of tea on the large and very old desk.

The Boy, because the day was cold and his withered side was stiff, reached for the tea, already inhaling its hot jasmine aroma. And she caught his hand just before he grasped the cup.

He looked into her eyes.

She squeezed his hand.

He was frozen.

His heart did not beat.

He was sweating.

And he squeezed back. Hard. Almost too hard.

“Jin,” she whispered.

The general called her Jin. He had learned that much.

She squeezed his hand once more and took a cup of tea to the general.

After that, she left and did not look at him, as the general had turned from the picture and was now talking to the Boy. Words in the English. Words the Boy did not understand because he could not concentrate on anything other than the moment of her touch. His face felt as though it were on fire.

“Is there no place that survived in some part beyond a mere day-to-day existence?” asked the general.

The Boy was watching the girl named Jin, though she had already left the room.

“She is the only one who believes in my work,” said the general, watching the Boy’s eyes. “She is the only one who, like me, wants to know what happened out there. She is not afraid of it. She is not bothered by the harsh reality of these times like so many of our people, who simply wish to live behind their gates and keep themselves from the ‘contamination’ as they call it, of the world as it is now. They require only that their lives be beautiful and a reminder of a homeland that is gone. They willingly live a lie, simply because it is fragrant.”

The general paused and sipped at the tea he had taken up in his two liver-spotted hands.

“Jin and I seek the truth because the truth holds its own beauty. In my opinion, it is the lies of our past that have brought about the current state of destruction. Late in my life, I vowed never to live another lie. My only sadness is that I made the vow after the world had been burned and poisoned by a rain of nuclear radiation.”

The Boy watched the general.

“Sometimes I think she merely humors an old man,” said the general, lost in the map again. “But she is a good granddaughter and I feel that she can look past the damage and the rubble and the warmongering of our collective past, both China and America, and find what was noble and beautiful about us.”

He fell to mumbling when his eyes found some new, previously unconsidered mark on the map, “I was saying . . .”

THAT NIGHT THE Boy lay on the floor of the shack near the brazier. It was exceptionally cold outside. His side ached. His hand was cramped and black from the charcoal he used to draw pictures on the walls of the general’s study.

Horse stirred as the fire popped.

The Boy was watching the lines.

He was watching Jin.

Horse complains for a moment as if sensing an animal outside in the cold wind and the dark night.

There was a moment of quiet that threatened to go on forever.

And then . . .

There was a knock at the back door that led out to the two-plank dock.

The Boy opened the door.

Jin pressed her mouth into his and he could feel her cold, soft cheeks grow warm. Her slender body melted into his arms, alive and living within his grasp. He felt her arms about him, clutching at his shoulders. And for a moment one hand slipped down to his withered arm, caressing him there.

“I am Jin,” she said haltingly. “I do not . . . speak American”—she said something in Chinese—“very well.” Then, “But I am learning.”

He closed the door and brought her to the fire. She stood warming herself while he got the bearskin and wrapped it around her.

“What is your . . . name?” she asked.

The Boy looked at her.

In the light from the glowing brazier, wrapped in the skin of the bear, she was even more beautiful. She looked at him expectantly, her eyes shining in the firelight.

“What do they call me? What do your people call me?”

“They call . . . you . . . the Messenger.”

“Why?”

“You brought . . . the news of the Barbarians. I do not want . . . I do not want to call . . . you the Messenger.”

“Why?”

She kissed him again and again until their intensity threatened to consume them. Breathlessly she broke from his hungry embrace, panting, “It . . . cannot be.”

Later, they sat staring into the fire, she reclining against him, the two of them almost sleeping, dreaming.

“Why?” asked the Boy.

She drew her fingers along his powerful arm.

He liked that.

Later she said, “You know that this is . . . not done?”

He held her hands, resting them on her belly.

“If you were my woman, then it would be all right.”

“No, that can never . . . be.”

“Why?”

She took up his withered hand. She turned to face him. Her dark eyes caught the firelight.

“I . . . can know . . . can tell. I can tell . . . you are brave. To me you are very . . . pretty . . . no . . . handsome. You are . . . clean. ‘Whole’ is the word? To me. But our leaders will not let those who live inside the gate . . . I do not like this word . . . it’s . . . is their . . . but they say ‘sully’ . . . you know . . . to be unclean? With the barbarians.”

She sighed deeply, her eyes searching the darkened rafters for the right words. For the story. For the explanation.

“Even before we came . . . to here. To this place, America. We were separate and apart from others. Mandarin and Cantonese. Government and peasant. Not the same, do you understand? But after the war . . . even more so, there were many . . . defects. Many of the survivors from other places . . . Americans . . . were like you.”

He understood. She was perfectly formed. Perfectly beautiful, and he was not. It would be wrong of him to make her his woman. It would be wrong in this place.

“Even our people . . . were affected by the radiation from . . . bombs. But those children . . . how do you say . . .” She searched the room, her eyes casting about and finding nothing. “Never existed?”

The Boy nodded, understanding.

“They made them disappear. They made . . . rules, laws, I mean. No intermarrying with those who are sick . . . unclean. Now, they cannot even stand . . . to have them inside . . . the gate.”

She watched his eyes, searching to find the wound her words, the truth, had caused him.

But he remained steady, his gaze never wavering from her deep brown eyes.

“To me you . . . it does not matter, you are whole, to me,” she said again.

The Boy looked at her for a long time.

In his eyes she saw the question.

“Is that why I had to wear the suit beyond the gate?”

“Yes . . . they fear you will contaminate . . . them. They understand little and are afraid . . . much.” Then, “It is not wise of them. They do not have . . . wisdom.”

“Wisdom changes things. I knew a man who was very wise. But he is gone now . . . I need wisdom.”

“We . . . all . . . do,” she whispered.

An hour before dawn he led her to the dock. A slender boat, tied to the wooden planks, bobbed atop choppy wavelets.

As he helped her down into the tiny boat, he felt a sudden moment of terror, as if he were casting something valuable, something precious—his tomahawk, his best blanket, food even—down into a pit. Or an ocean. Or an abyss.

And I am hoping it will come back to me.

And.

She is more valuable than my tomahawk or a blanket or even food.

Why?

“Will you be safe?” he asked her.

Why was she valuable?

“Yes. I’ll use the boat to . . . go around . . . the point and then come close to the wall. I know my way over . . . and our home is just . . . just on the other side.”

He leaned down to untie the boat.

“When you stood . . .” she began, “in front of our leaders . . . in your mask . . . and at the wall . . . you were not afraid to tell them . . . the truth. They are . . . always . . . have been . . . afraid of truth.” She looked at him. She shook her head slightly. “You are not afraid . . . of anything . . . even of the truth.”

And.

“I also . . . am not afraid,” she said finally, and turned the boat toward open water.

She looked small and helpless in the boat and he watched as she paddled out and away from him, rounding the point and finally disappearing. He watched the water for a long time, until he almost felt frozen inside. Within the shack he lay down on the bearskin in front of the fire.

Why?

Because she saw me when she looked at me.

Without horror.

Without fear.

Without pity.

And because she did not look away when she let me see that she was beautiful.

Thinking he was still awake, he slept. When he awoke with a start, wondering what was real and what was not, he smelled jasmine.