It was then his brother caught him from behind.
Stratton's forearms ached from steering the hard-sprung truck over what seemed an endless series of unseen hills. The pitted road twisted, like a snake. In the tepid glint of light from the dashboard, the gauge that Stratton had decided was for gas rested on its bottom mark. The one next to it-temperature?-seemed to be rising. He nudged the girl at his side.
"Wake up, Kangmei. It will be dawn soon and the truck will not go much farther."
"I was not sleeping, Thom-as, just resting." She stretched and ran her hands through the mass of tangled black hair. "Have we passed a river?"
"On a very shaky bridge, about ten minutes ago."
"Good. We are almost there."
"Where is there, Kangmei?" She had been coy about that since their escape. A safe place where they would be with friends, she had said.
"It is a commune, Thom-as. We call it Bright Star. It is the home of my mother's family. I lived there during the Cultural Revolution when my father was being punished. My uncles are among the commune leaders. They will protect us."
Stratton nodded. It had to have been something like that. He riffled through the possibilities. A commune in a backward province more than a thousand miles from Peking, and probably a century in terms of control. Once they had taught him a great deal about communes, the central fact of life for eight hundred million Chinese. The instructor's voice came back to Stratton. He had been a Spec/6, dragged from a Ph.D. program to war. Shared reward for shared work, a Marxist replacement for rural villages dominated by landlords. Now there were no more landlords, only work brigades and production teams tilling common land.
What had resisted revolution was the social makeup of the communes. Almost all who lived on a commune in China were descendants of people who had lived there centuries ago. Nearly all the children born there would also die there in toothless old age. The continuity of families remained stronger than the caprice of a distant state.
Kangmei would be safe. The family would close around her, shutting out inquiries from cadres who, knowing the system, would not press too hard. She would be safe, but also empty. What kind of life would it be for an intelligent, vivacious young woman, calf-deep in paddy muck, courted by half-literate bumpkins? Whom would she talk to? Whom would she love? Kangmei deserved better than that. Stratton made himself a private promise: She would have it. Somehow.
One day.
But would the commune shelter him as well? Probably, for a time, anyway.
"Kangmei, we're in Guangdong Province, right? How far from the coast?"
"No, this is Guangxi. And we are many hours from the sea, many hills and many people."
Guangxi. Memories worse than the cobra.
"Look, I think it would be better if-"
She had outthought him.
"You would never make it to the sea without help, Thom-as. And my family will be very proud to hide you, and to help you escape, especially when they see the wonderful gift you are bringing them."
"You?"
She laughed, a mountain stream.
"Oh, they will be glad to see me, too. But it is the truck they will prize most."
"The truck."
"But… how will they account for it?"
"They will hide it while they let all other production teams know that they have saved enough money to buy a used truck. Then one day it will appear. Imagine the celebration; the other teams will be so jealous."
"I see," Stratton said in quiet wonder.
"You will be a hero, Thom-as. My hero." She slid across the seat and kissed him with flashing tongue.
They left the truck in a copse of trees on a hillside capped by an ancient pagoda. Kangmei, bubbling with the excitement of a little girl on Christmas, led him to the hilltop. It was nearly light by the time they reached the top.
"Down there," she said, gesturing to a mist-shrouded valley.
"That is Bright Star. My family lives in the houses near the school. Soon you will see."
With exaggerated care, she installed him on a bed of needles beneath some pine trees, about a hundred yards from the dirt path that wound into the valley.
"No one will see you here. Rest. My uncles and I will come back around lunchtime, when everyone is sleeping. It will be safe then for you to come down.
It's not far." She looked at him through almond eyes without end. "You will wait for me, Thom-as. Please?"
"I will wait." He hugged her. "Here, a gift for your family." He handed her the leather-yoked keys of the truck.
When she had gone, Stratton lay with his head pillowed in his arms and watched the sky turn blue. As the tension drained from him, aches replaced adrenaline.
It had been a long time since he had been this tired. Stratton surrendered to sleep.
When he awoke it was already late morning. The sun, approaching its zenith, oppressed the pine grove. It had brought sapping humidity and a winged holiday for insects of every stinging phylum. Stratton relieved himself against a tree and crawled onto an outcropping of rock that looked onto the valley, trying not to think how hungry he was.
A picturebook scene. The commune was comprised of what had apparently been four separate villages in the space of several square miles. Around each cluster of single-story wood homes well-trod dikes led to paddies of rice. In the northern quadrant lay a bright green field of what could only have been sugarcane. To the east was a well-kept citrus grove. A patchwork of small private plots lay on the fringes of the communal fields. The nearest settlement, the one to which Kangmei must have gone, was arranged around a carp pond. The only building of substance was a low, ramshackle structure with a thatched roof and a fresh coat of whitewash. Stratton decided it must be a combination school and office for the production team.
The fields and earthen streets of the village swarmed with people. Stratton watched a double file of schoolchildren, hand-in-hand, parade in a swatch of color toward a dusty soccer field where some teenagers desultorily kicked a ball.
Stratton counted two trucks and a handful of three-wheeled contraptions that looked like misshapen lawn mowers. "Walking tractors," Kangmei called them.
The scene was peaceful and, by Chinese standards, an advertisement for rural prosperity. Stratton noted the slender cable on thin poles that dropped into the hamlet and spread ancillary arms toward a few of the nearest houses; by rule of thumb in China, if electricity has spilled down to individual production teams, a commune is well off.
At the base of the hillside path there appeared a supple girl and two stocky men in peasants' garb. As they began to climb, the girl waved diffidently, a fleeting, offhand movement, like shooing flies. Kangmei had found refuge.
Stratton decided to wait where he was. Idly, he began to trace the power line out from the settlement, across the fields and back toward its origin.
It was a mistake.
In almost the precise center of the valley, sheathed in trees, lay the administrative headquarters of the commune, the hub of which the four production teams were spokes. Stratton could see a dingy white water tower and, amid shadows, the perimeter walls of what once had been the landlord's house. He made out a strip of macadam and along it some shops, a vegetable market and a fair-sized building with a half-domed roof that might once have been a 1930s movie theater.
Stratton saw without seeing the red-starred flag that hung limply from the building. He saw a chimney thrusting unnaturally from among the trees and knew without knowing that it belonged to a homespun woodworking factory that made grapefruit crates and slatted folding chairs. He saw a glint of water through the trees and knew that, except in the rainy season, the river that flowed there could be safely forded by men five feet ten or taller.