A Map for the Missing(47)

By the time they arrived in Hefei, the truck bed was squeezed so tightly that he could hardly move his limbs.

“How dare you! I’ll report you!” a girl’s voice screamed from the other corner.

“I didn’t mean to do that, I swear! He pushed me into you.” A boy.

“Shame on you, using this opportunity to try to touch young ladies.”

When they got into town, the truck slowed to a crawl. The main thoroughfare of the city was packed with other cars, filled with students coming in from all directions. None could move. The driver shifted into park.

Yitian looked out the window to see other students squeezed into the beds of trucks and tractors and tricycles. They exposed their own bodies to the rain in order to protect their possessions. Still, the wet students smiled and waved at the other vehicles, honking their horns as they passed. Yitian had the sensation of watching a movie in which they were all participants, of congratulating each other for being actors, together, on such a big stage.

Townspeople had set up food stands under umbrellas along the sidewalk. The smell of steamed buns, roasted yams, and coal burning was only slightly dampened by the rain. Vendors ran up to them and waved the items up to the students who held their faces out from the truck beds. “Student! Student! A bun? Only five cents for two. Made of the freshest pork, I can promise you. You must eat protein if you want to do well on the exam.”

“Bark of the Banyan tree! This is what Dong Zhongshu took himself when he sat for the imperial exams.” An old lady held up a pockmarked brown substance, which looked to Yitian like a piece of mildewed parchment.

He bought the pork buns but refused the banyan bark.

“You think you have money to buy pork?” Yishou smacked his head.

That morning, the two of them had caught a truck out of the township near Tang Family Village. They’d devised an elaborate lie to tell their father about why they’d be gone for three days, saying that Yishou wanted to visit a distant uncle of theirs who lived in a village about fifty li away. He hinted aggressively, though did not say outright, that there was a girl in the village who he wanted to see again, whom he’d met once at a market day in a nearby township. He’d take Yitian with him, not only for safety on the journey but also so that Yitian could make observations about the girl and report back to their mother and father.

Yishou had come up with the story. Yitian thought the tale was convoluted, and their father should have known Yishou already had a girl, but, unable to come up with anything better himself, he sat silently in the other room as his brother recited.

“It’s the off-season anyway, Ba, there’s nothing much for us to do here,” Yishou said. Yitian waited for his father to object to the idea of an off-season, but he only grunted and reminisced about the uncle in question.

“See, didn’t I tell you that there would be no problem with Ba? I understand him more than you, don’t I?” Yishou said to Yitian afterward.

Yitian smiled. He had to agree.

He fidgeted now at the slow crawl of the vehicle.

“We don’t have time for this,” he muttered under his breath. He wanted to do some last-minute studying that evening, but that wouldn’t be possible if they didn’t find a place where they could rest for the night soon. He was so nervous that Yishou had earlier gone to the other side of the truck bed, saying Yitian was too annoying to sit by.

Yitian called up to the driver, “Let us out here, please! We’ll walk.”

“Don’t be silly,” Yishou said. “You have no idea of where we even are! We can’t just get out here.”

Indeed, as Yitian looked out the window, he was struck by how little he knew about this city. He had no landmarks by which to navigate. Each time he’d visited a new place before, the streets had at least been partially negotiated for him by someone who knew more, usually his brother or grandfather.

The driver abruptly called to everyone that it was time to get off the truck. “Engine is making noise,” he grumbled. “Can’t go any farther.”

They were stopped, not even on a corner, but in the middle of the street. Though the other students complained at the driver’s announcement, they seemed to proceed with purpose toward destinations as soon as they got off. By the time Yitian and Yishou climbed down, half of the passengers had already turned a corner and disappeared. Yishou grabbed one of the few remaining students by the arm and asked, “Excuse me, brother—where are you all staying?”

The other boy looked annoyed. This was not their village, Yitian thought; Yishou should not have a grabbed a stranger like that.

“My parents found a relative’s house for me to stay at.”

Yitian asked, more politely, a few other students milling around. Besides one boy who said he was staying at a hotel—a luxury so unlikely that Yishou openly scoffed—everyone else had some person they knew in the city, arranged by their parents. Finally, after the last of the other students had left, Yitian and Yishou jogged to the overhang of a building across the street. All of Yitian’s previous attention to the tarp became wasted in moments, and their clothes sagged heavily down their bodies.

“Look, let’s just ask a shopkeeper if we can stay on their floor for a couple of nights. We’ll offer them some of the money we brought for food,” Yishou said.

A loud knock from the shop’s window startled them. A middle-aged woman opened the door a crack and shooed them away.