A Riverside Meeting

We took the 412 bus across the Han Jiang River and then the 26 电 down to a long wall.

She led me off the bus and behind the wall. Two men sat playing cards, smoking, their puffs fast and panicky like a beached steamboat. They were sitting in the light and she took me past it, past the horns and hammers, the high rise apartments, the bars and hotels and KTVs, away from the engines and shouts and the growing modern age and together we dropped down into this, Hankou’s quiet tributary. A couple was perched on stools as quiet as the dark house they faced and the man cocked an eye at me and as I passed he lowered his eye and continued to watch his house. Contained in there the sum total of his many decades on this earth.

We arrived. A dog came. Clothes hung from a powerline beside stacks of bricks and coal and I reached down and rubbed the dog’s ear as she went on ahead.

The inner door opened and dim light fell out over the dirt, slit through the barred outer door. A man his figure weathered well past his years stepped into view.

They greeted each other.

He unlatched the outer door and at sight of me teeth and black gaps overtook his mouth.

“Jín lái, jín lái.”

He waved us on and clapped me on the shoulder. We stepped inside. A white net hung over the bed. A dresser stood the distance of a child’s hand from the bed and the fridge stood the distance of an infant’s from that and the table on which they had their meals stood not even that from the fridge.

“Zuó, zuó, zuó,” he said. “Qí a me?”

He was addressing me, pretending to shovel food in his mouth.

“Qí le,” she said, but he was already up. The woman already had the watermelon. She slammed it on the table and brought a large blade down through it and then cut it into pieces, the largest and first for me, then their niece, then themselves.

“Qí qí qí,” he said, and we did.

We Qi’d.

*

I drew out the seeds with my tongue and rolled them around near my lips. The man noticed.

And pointed to the floor.

We spat our seeds as they spoke. The language a variant of Pu Tong Hua common to their hometown and common further to them. Clan upon clan forged in dialect. When we finished eating, the man’s arm stretched out over her, over her protests. I took the cigarette and he lit mine first, his second. We smoked. The three of them went on speaking.

Outside, the man put his arm around my shoulder and said something I did not catch. My wife translated. He was apologizing. For what? He was apologizing for his home being dirty.

*

The men at the gate were no longer playing cards but kept on smoking and did not look at us. We crossed the street and walked up on to the bridge. The man hooked his arm with mine and when I sped up, he slowed me down. With each passing vehicle the bridge shook a little, sometimes a lot. We crossed the river and took the stairs back down into Wuchang, where the trams were just now pulling in.

I put one foot out into traffic and the man pulled me back. My wife’s aunt had her arm. Together, we stepped across, pausing for the cars and trucks to weave around us.

We got on the tram and took a seat near the side door and they both came to it and stood there watching us. When the engine started, my wife and her aunt and uncle exchanged goodbyes and when her uncle turned to me, he raised his hand and I raised mine.

“Bai bai!” he shouted with a smile.

I returned it and waved and as we pulled out, I turned back and waved again. I settled in my seat, the window open. People got on the bus. The buildings were growing taller. Lights flashed for hotels, for bars, for restaurants, and I leaned my head near the window, his words faded as a horn sounded, echoed, filled my ears and the background well they share and a bus pulled out in front of us, choking up black smoke as it went.