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Heaven
Lake by John Dalton Rating: •• (Mildly Recommended) |
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Discovery If you’re looking for another coming of age debut novel, you may want
to look at John Dalton’s Heaven
Lake. Protagonist Vincent Saunders leaves rural A muddied
seagull lighting down on a
pantiled roof. . . a tangle of bicycle frames strapped
like a teetering crown to the cab of a market van. . . an iron kettle thrust from a
third-floor window and raining water onto a box of blue and white azaleas.
These were fractional glimpses the Mainland, and Vincent could only view them
by leveraging his foot to the rail and straining up off the oak-board dock.
He stood a vexing’~ twenty yards from First,
however, he was obliged to enter a harborside
office, present his visa and declarations form, and place his bag on a long
viewing table before three tight-jawed and brooding customs officials. One
unfastened the zipper, reached inside, and gave the contents a bored squeeze.
Vincent looked on, keenly aware that he was dealing with communists.
Communists, communism, commies, he thought and sealed his lips, anxious that
he might speak these words aloud. In his mind’s eye he pictured a nation of
people in drab gray Mao jackets, a charcoal, ruinous sky punctured by fuming
smokestacks. Yet
once cleared and through the swing gate, he was reminded that F -had arrived in Guangzhou on a brilliant
spring day, a Sunday morning that found the citizens out en masse and filing
across the Pearl River along a white stone bridge. The sunlit clarity of their
procession sparked giddy, ridiculous thrill, an apprehension that he, Vincent
Saunders, had landed in The
crowd buckled and swayed. A small girl in cloth slippers, a toddler, stepped
out of her bamboo stroller and scuttled back to an asphalt abutment. At her
parents’ insistence, she squatted down and, through cotton pajamas slit open
from zipper to rear seam, peed a warm runnel of urine onto the cobblestone
sidewalk. She stood and marked its progress as it wound between stones and
disappeared into a sewer grate. Vincent saw her flash a smile of tiny pearled
teeth. Unexpected as this was, it was not
quite surprising enough. He was ready to be more thoroughly appalled or
delighted, ready for the nation of None of these items interested Vincent
personally, though he might have purchased something, a door latch, maybe,
out of atonement, out of simple gratitude for being himself and not an
indigent street vendor. But this would require an exchange of currency, of
which there were two varieties: renminbi,
otherwise known as people’s money, and Foreign Exchange Certificates, which
the Chinese sometimes called tourist money. He had arrived with Foreign
Exchange Certificates. Even though he tendered these certificates with a
patient hand, they were shunned by a street chef serving up breakfasts of
peanuts and steamed buns. Another patron eyed his certificates and barked
out an unintelligible question. Was it Cantonese or slurred Mandarin? He was
not sure which, but as he needled through the market crowd, he was solicited,
frequently, with the same blustery and muddled request. Alec had told him—warned him—that in
the matter of changing money it was best not to relinquish a bill until the
changer had handed over its equivalent in renminbi.
With this in mind, he held back and appraised each candidate, searching for
the money changer least likely to try a swindle or lunging retreat. An
elderly woman tottered forward, hindered by an arthritic limp. Her ashen
hair was short-cropped and bristly, her rheumy eyes underscored by fat swells
of pouched skin. “Chain geh money:’ she whispered
in English. He
traded a crisp ten-yuan Foreign Exchange
Certificate for thirteen yuan in renminbi, an apparent bargain, though the bills she
returned were frayed and tissue-thin. Afterward, he opened his travel guide
and consulted exchange rates. The old woman had not slighted him. More
surprising yet, he learned that he had just made his first transaction on the
Chinese black market. To celebrate, he purchased a bag of peanuts, then strolled along cracking their rough shells in his
fist. Now and then he grinned and fancied himself mixing with the underworld. For the time being, he thought it best
to trail behind a scattering of other Caucasian tourists, most of them
college-aged and saddled with nylon backpacks, in hopes that they would lead
him to a moderately priced hotel. And eventually they did. But the news at
the Overseas Chinese Hotel was discouraging. “No vacancies whatsoever:’ a
young woman in a Boston University T-shirt announced to Vincent and a group
of her companions’ waiting in the hotel lobby. He followed them several
blocks to another hotel, where the same young woman entered and returned with
a bleaker announcement. “Everything in He
set out for the Halfway through the intersection, he
felt a tug on the waistband of his blue jeans and looked down to discover
that he had been joined by a pair of children, a boy possibly ten or eleven
on his right, and on his left, a younger girl, who had pried her reedy
fingers beneath the strap of his leather belt. For a moment he thought they
wanted nothing more than to tug him inside the park and guide him eagerly
toward a monument or pagoda, a sun-dappled fishpond he might otherwise have
missed. But they were dressed in ragged clothes and tapping their chests and
then knotting their free hands into cupped fists. Clearly they were not
impetuous tour guides. They wanted, or rather demanded, money, and Vincent,
secretly belted with a fortune in traveler’s checks, was happy to give them
some. He reached into his pocket and rewarded each child with a one-yuan bill. These were snatched away and stowed inside
some secret fold of their clothing. Then, both at once, they thrust their
small hands into his front and back pockets and claimed his remaining ten or
eleven yuan in renminbi.
Digging deeper still, they managed to ferret out a paper receipt from the Tianhu and a cloth handkerchief, which the
boy shook open and tossed to the ground. Together, the three of them had become
a spectacle; he was sure of this, but when he gaped around at the throng of
people lining the park entrance, he saw only a scowl from an elderly man
raking the grass with his bamboo cane, a slit-mouthed hiss from a tousled
mother holding a swaddled infant. The children, meanwhile, had begun to pry
at the zippers of his shoulder bag. He tried a bolting escape, and they clenched
his belt with both hands and shambled after him. He tried gathering their
small hands in each of his own, squeezing their fingers, holding them at a
distance, and then sprinting away. Yet they were quick to recover and dive
for his belt. After several attempts he decided, finally, that to be
successful he would have to grab one of them, most likely the boy, and throw
him hard against the ground—a viable plan, perhaps, but as a public act it
would be nothing less than appalling. A jaunty young man in a starched shirt
and pin-striped trousers strode by. In his raised fist he wielded a magazine
rolled into a blunt, glossy club, and as he strolled past, he brought it down
full-tilt, vehemently, first onto the boy’s head and then onto the girl’s.
They both pressed their foreheads into Vincent’s hips and cringed beneath the
blow, and the young man hurried on, tapping his wristwatch to show this quick
assault was all he had time for. The children clung to Vincent’s belt
gritty-fingered and dazed, and now the tousled mother reappeared, shouldering
her baby and shrieking, cursing the children, he assumed, until he recognized
a word, a phrase, the purpose beneath her shriek: “Stay on him! Stay on him!
Stay on him!” she screamed. Panicked,
he lurched forward and entered Hunched
over, travel bag shielded in his lap, he decided to wait them out. The boy
and girl appeared relieved to take seats on either side of him. In other
circumstances they might have been sweet-featured or even beautiful children,
yet slouched against each of his shoulders their faces seemed patently slack
and wearied, grim as those of weathered old men. The woman hovered over all
of them, a doughy sneer, a mop of bedraggled hair.
All Vincent could see of her baby was one exposed leg jutting from the
swaddled blanket. She jeered instructions and the children wedged their arms
between his bag and stomach. They located his money belt and groped its fat
corners, though luckily they could not work their fingers beneath his shirts
to pry at its zipper. He
watched a steady flux of Sunday strollers mill by on
their way to a line of park vendors whose carts were laden with
packaged candies, fruit drinks, warm Coca-Cola. He
was struck suddenly by a provisional hope. He turned and considered the girl,
a spindly child, unquestionably the weaker of the
pair. “Little sister,” he said. The false tenor of the endearment pained him.
“Don’t, worry, don’t be afraid,” he said and slipped his hands under her arms
and wiggled his fingers along her rib cage and down to her small hips. She
writhed about, pedaling her skinny legs, tossing her head from side to side, doing everything
appropriate to being tickled, except, of course, laughing. He could feel a
wad of bills knotted beneath the hem of her pants. He could see them half
pinched into the elastic band of her underwear, and here he paused, aggrieved
at how unpleasant the situation bad become and how shameful the remedy. With
a single hooked index finger, he swiped his hand inside the band of her
underwear and plucked out a one-yuan bill. He set
off at once toward the vending carts, towing the children behind him. Bellied
tight to the glass case, he handed over his money and ordered two cans of
Coca-Cola. Three paces behind, the woman let out a raucous shriek. He
popped the rings and offered them to the children. “Go ahead:’ he said. “Go
ahead. It’s all right. I know you’re thirsty.” They
craned their heads up at him, stunned and suspicious. “Go
ahead:’ he said. “Please, it’s all right:’ and they took the cans into their
gritty hands, hearing the woman shriek and knowing they should not. The
rest was surprisingly easy. They each gripped his belt with a single hand,
and he batted these away and stepped back to the walkway, where the crowd was
thick and idled along with a blithe, unmindful ease. Outside the park
entrance he searched for a taxi, and found instead a young man offering
cut-rate fares for a ride on the back of his motor scooter. “Train station:’
Vincent said and swung a leg across the cushioned seat. “But
you can’t leave yet:” the young man said. “You haven’t seen all the sights of
“Already
seen them:’ Vincent said, scanning the sidewalk for the children and the
tousled mother. “The
Hall of Flowers, you’ve seen that?” “Oh
yes, I’ve seen them all and they were all very nice. Especially the flowers,
all very beautiful. And now I’m ready to leave:’ he said. “I’ve seen enough?’ At the A
short while later the train lumbered forward a few hundred yards and came to
a sudden halt. There it sat, well in sight of the station, for another two
hours. By then much of the day’s radiance had been lost. An early evening
stillness spread across the rail yard. All over Beside him, a squat, barrel-chested man
studied Vincent with a fascination that did not diminish, even as the train
finally sprang into motion and rumbled north through the city’s scattered
outer districts. The man’s stained coveralls stank of petroleum and ash. Now
and then he whispered in Cantonese, and several times he pointed to the
fanning bruises beneath Vincent’s sunglasses. What a nuisance, these bruises. If they
were not making him feel leprous, then they were provoking all sorts of
unwelcome attention. But the man’s interest only grew
sharper. He mumbled and shook his bushy head as if rehearsing a complicated
lecture. Then he turned and addressed Vincent, this time in accented
Mandarin. They spoke Mandarin differently here, with a windy inflection,
with mouthfuls of sibilant consonants. Slowly, directly, the man repeated
himself. “Why did your boss beat you?” he asked. Vincent weighed the question. There was
no reason to lie, and yet a full disclosure would be exhausting, humiliating.
“I was spending time alone with his sister:’ he said. “I shouldn’t have been
doing that?’ The man’s dark eyes flickered
sympathetically. “Yes, yes, that’s always the way it is. You’re good enough
to do sweat work six days a week, but not good enough to take a private walk
with the boss’s sister. Am I right?” “Yes:’ Vincent said. “You are.” “I thought I was. I thought I had your
story right:’ he said and, satisfied, eased back into his seat. Before long they were rolling beneath a
lavender twilight. The car swayed and bounced on its speeding undercarriage.
Somewhere behind, in the thicket of standing passengers, a child wailed. The
compartment lights would dim and waver and return to full strength. With his
eyes closed, the shuddering lights made his mind unreel in a flood of disjointed
imagery. He slept only for minutes at a time. In his dreams, small,
gritty-fingered hands reached out to seize him. Steve
Hopkins, September 25, 2004 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the October 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Heaven
Lake.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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