Hainan Dao

Book I Chapter 05

HAINAN DAO BOOK I

CHAPTER 05

The ride became bumpy. By the time we passed the official gate to Sanjia Village, we had left the idea of finished roads far behind us. The path that we were on now, was really nothing more than a dirt trail that snaked its way between the trees, and only happened to be wide enough to allow our car passage. I had never gone galloping on a horse before, but I imagined that the experience would not have been much different. With the untamed tree roots that barred our path like speed bumps, the car kept jostling as it rolled along, sending the bunch of us inside it bouncing up and down like pieces of chicken in a shake-and-bake bag. I kept hitting my head on the ceiling and wishing I had brought a helmet.

I squinted down the road. “How much further?”

“Not much. Ten minutes or so to your house.”

I nodded. I tried closing my eyes but that just made it worse.

As we approached the end of the ten-minute mark, I began to feel a faint uneasiness in my middle. I didn’t know what it was at the time, and just put it down to the ride in the car.

“Almost there,” Wei said. “Just over the next hill.”

The uneasiness grew.

I felt a rumbling in the ground.

Cresting over the last rise of hill and earth, I lifted my eyes and saw ahead of me a front of massive squirming bodies spanning my field of vision, though I couldn’t identify it at first.

Before I could even voice the question in my mind, Wei had already driven us right up to the phenomenon and pulled to a stop. Amid billowing clouds of dust and dirt, he yanked up on the handbrake and turned off the engine.

A new silence.

In it, I licked my lips as I peered around me through the windows. I blinked my widened eyes. I closed my open jaw again to swallow.

From one end of the horizon to the other, as far as I could make out, were teems and teems of people, all rubbing shoulders against each other, trying to edge their way forward to get a better view of the car. Now, thinking back, of course, it couldn’t have been more than a few hundred of them at the most, but at that moment, it seemed to me that the whole world was filled with the uncircumcised masses, thousands upon thousands of them, all wanting a piece of the car, or maybe even worse—a piece of me.

Squirming, I tried to burrow into my seat. I turned my head and stared at Wei.

As he smiled at me, he went to open the door on his side.

Shooting my hand out, I seized the man by the shoulder and whirled him toward me. “Hey…! What…what are you doing?”

He looked at me like I was speaking Cantonese. “I don’t understand. I’m getting off.”

“Here?”

“Yes. Here, of course!”

“But…”

He smiled and shook his head. “Come on!”

Shoving his door open, he stepped out.

I held my breath. My eyes followed him as he strolled around to my side and tried to open the door. He couldn’t. It was locked. He motioned for me to unlock it.

I blinked. I stared at him.

He asked me to unlock the door again.

I blinked some more.