“And what do you tell him?”
“What did you tell him?”
“Me? I’m loyal as they come. Loyal as the day is long.”
“It’s autumn.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So the days are getting shorter.”
He laughed. “Maybe your grandfather was right; maybe autumn is the best time to die.” When we got off the pavement onto the dirt road that led up the mountain to my house, he turned to me. “Watch how you choose, O.”
“I’m always careful.”
“That’s good. But careful isn’t enough anymore. You have to be right every time. Take your hands off the wheel for one second,” the car hit a rut and careened off to the side, “and it could be all over.”
“Watch where you’re going,” I said. “Other than handing out advice, what do you do all day?”
“Don’t laugh, but I’m a chief inspector now. Surprised? They did a scrub of the chiefs after Kim got here, let several of them go, and moved up some of us who had been sitting around all these years. You probably could have made chief, too, if you hadn’t been up on your mountain. What were you doing there for all those years?”
“Making wooden toys. You have to concentrate when you make toys. They’ve got to look simple. It’s a lot of work, making something look simple.”
“Is that so?”
“Like doing a ‘scrub.’ Sounds cleaner than a ‘purge.’ But that’s what it is, a purge.”
“I know what it is.” He opened his window partway. “All of a sudden, it’s stuffy in here, don’t you think? That’s my dilemma; I have to choose between stuffy air and my allergy.”
“It’s going to get cold pretty soon, a couple of weeks maybe. Then you won’t have to worry.”
“Yeah, I won’t have to worry.”
For the moment, the car was headed almost due east. The setting sun poured light across the fields in front of us.
“Did I tell you about the woman I met in Macau, the one whose voice sounded like wildflowers?”
“What kind?” Li lifted his head slightly. His nostrils flared, like an animal when it senses danger.
“You smell it, too? It must be from a wood fire,” I said. “That’s strange, because no one lives out here. The nearest village is behind us and the wind is blowing the wrong way.” I put my head out the window to get a better look. There was a glow at the top of the mountain, my mountain. “You see that?”
Li stopped the car and peered out the windshield. Then he accelerated sharply, so the tires spun in the dirt before we jumped ahead. “I hope you didn’t leave the stove on for all this time.”
“I don’t have a stove.”
We tore up the road past the abandoned guard shack and hit the steepest part of the grade going so fast I thought we might flip over. We went around turn after turn, sliding close to the edge in places, brushing against the sides of the mountain in others, going at a reckless speed that seemed to be in slow motion, a dream speed, a horror film remembered years after. When we burst into the clearing, my house was gone. The roof had caved in, and the only wall left standing was pitched at a funny angle. The remains were still smoking. The tallest of the tall pines had been chopped down; it had fallen against an outcropping of rock. The next big wind would bring it down onto the road. Another car inched away as we drove up. It stopped when it came abreast of us, and the rear window rolled down.
“A total loss,” Zhao’s voice came out from inside. “A pity. I’d come up here to see if we could do business, and I find your house in flames.”
“My grandfather’s carpentry tools were in there, you Chinese bastard.”
“Well, that’s a loss, I’d say.”
I got out and ran over to Zhao’s car. “By the time I finish with you, you’ll beg me to kill you.” It wasn’t clear what I was going to do next. I wasn’t armed, and beating on the car with my fists didn’t seem much of a follow-up.
Zhao moved closer to the window, so I could see him clearly. He stared at me for a moment; then the glass went up and the car drove away. Li got out on his side and watched as it made its way down the hill.
“Let’s get out of here, O. We can come back tomorrow or the next day, after the place cools down. They must have used gasoline. It’s going to stay hot for a while. You can feel it all the way over here.”
“I’m not leaving until I go through the ashes.”
“That’s what they’re counting on. They’ll be back, and you’d better not be here when they are.”
“Why? You think they can do any worse than this? Look at that tree. They cut it down. Can they do anything worse than that?”
“Yes.”
“Go, if you want. I’m staying. Maybe I can find something that wasn’t completely destroyed.”
Li shook his head. “Have it your way, but first we need something to eat. We’ll have to drive back to the nearest village, that’s almost fifteen kilometers away, unless you know somewhere closer. Even there, they may not have anything to give us.”
“You can drive all over the damned county. I’m staying. If Zhao comes back, I’ll rip him to shreds.”
“Easy, Inspector. You heard what he did to the Great Han. We don’t want that to happen to you.”
I started pulling away burned timbers. The ashes were still hot; in places a flame flared when it found a breath of oxygen. Li stood and watched. Finally, I touched a piece of metal. It scorched my fingers, but I didn’t care, because I knew what it was-the old wood plane that my grandfather had given me fifty, no, sixty years ago.
“Look at this, Li.” I pulled the plane from the wreckage. “My grandfather said it had been his father’s and that he wanted to give it to his son. But that wasn’t to be-he would always say that more to himself than to me. He hated to talk about what happened to his son, my father. Everyone lost someone in the war, so he didn’t want to be seen as complaining. But he felt the loss deeper than anything I could imagine then. Even now, I don’t think I can feel anything that deeply.”
Li didn’t say anything. He was listening the way people do when someone else reaches inside for the story that they never want to tell.
“It wasn’t until I was older, maybe ten or twelve, that he went into any detail about how my parents had died. He had told us right away, my brother and me, that they were dead. The same night he found out, he sat us down and told us, but he hadn’t gone into detail. We were too young, and he didn’t know what words to use. So he waited. When he finally told me, he was sanding a piece of ash. It was from a tree that had crashed through a neighbor’s house in a windstorm a few weeks before. The whole family had died. I still remember that storm.”
Li was looking down the road. He was pale.
“Something wrong?”
“No, just thinking about the wind. I grew up on the coast. When the wind blew hard, the fishing boats couldn’t go out. A few did, but they never came back.” He blinked, and his face seemed to clear. “Before the storms would come in off the sea, I would wake up. Even at three in the morning, I would wake up. Maybe it was something about the air pressure; no one could figure it out. But I always knew when a storm was
