The editor nodded, considering it, especially the zillion shoes and the dawning oriental market. The photog had reservations.
"Even if the kid goes for it, how would we get him out? You saw the paperwork at that airport. What's he gonna use for a passport?"
"Bling's."
"Just a minute!"
"With little Bling's passport and a scarf around his throat – 'the boy cannot talk, comrade; that long run: laryngitis' – he could make it."
"Just a goddamned minute, what makes you think that little Bling is gonna hand over his passport?"
"Because the mag pays little Bling to keep quiet, put on the nice blue warm-ups with the nice hood, and catch the milk plane home to Qufu or wherever."
"Pays Bling how much?" Bling wanted to know.
"I'd say a thousand Yankee bucks would cover the flight and expenses."
Now the editor wants to wait just one goddamn minute. Bling was getting behind it, though – "With another say five hundred for the flight back?" – and the photog was already laying out a mental paste-up for Sports Illustrated: shot of kid getting off plane at Eugene, meeting Bowerman at Hayward Field, shaking hands at the state capitol, golden pioneer gleaming in the background…
"Let's have a gander at your passport picture, Bling."
"No less than three thousand Chinese yuan! That's a reasonable compromise, not much more than a thousand bucks!"
"A Chinese Communist Pittsburgh Shylock!"
"How will we make the pitch? We've got to get him off from his coaches -"
"We'll get him to come on our Great Wall tour tomorrow!" cried the photographer, adding another page to his paste-up. "What do you think, Mr. Editor?"
"For starters, Bling doesn't look a thing like him," the editor observed. "The eyes are different. The noses. Let's see the passport picture, Bling, because I think that even if you disguised the kid, a customs officer would take one look and -"
He stopped, gawking into the open passport.
"In God's name, Bling; how did you get them to allow a passport photo of you wearing those goofy glasses?"
"They're prescription," Bling explained.
When they saw the kid in the banquet hall they veered to his table and congratulated him again, each giving him the wishbone pinky handclasp of their growing conspiracy. Bling translated their invitation about the trip to the Great Wall. The boy blinked and blushed and looked at his coach for advice. The coach explained that it would not be possible; all the Chinese runners were scheduled to visit the National Agricultural Exhibition Center tomorrow. But thank you for so kind.
By the time they got to their table Bling and the writer had cooked up a number of alternative meets where they might make their pitch to the boy in private – Bling would follow him to the bathroom… Bling would tell him there was a phone call in the lobby – but it was that master of surprises, Mr. Mude, who came forward to further their fantasy.
"The coaches spoke of your thoughtful invitation to our little minority friend," Mude said as he stopped at their table. Tonight he was wearing a very informal sports jacket, no tie. "I talked to Mr. Wenlao and Mr. Quisan about it, and we all think it would make very good media for both our nations. Also, we are told our little Yang has never seen the Great Wall. China owes her young hero an excursion, don't you agree?"
They nodded agreement. Mude asked how their story was progressing. Better and better, the writer told him. Mude chatted a few moments more, then excused himself.
"Forgive me, but is that not the Tanzanian that tripped the American? I must go congratulate him. As to our young minority boy, I shall see that all the arrangements are made for your convenience. Good night."
"Oh, shit," mumbled the editor when Mude had walked on. "Oh, shit."
Mude's mood was still cheerful the next day, his outfit more informal yet – a jogging jacket and Levi's. He stopped the bus whenever the photographer asked. He laughed at Bling's acrid observations on roadside China. He beamed well-being. He knew his assignment had been successful. No bad incidents, and he had learned a good deal about Yankee ways. He was getting with it, as they say. So after their stroll back down from the Great Wall, when Bling asked would it be all right if he and Mr. Yang took a little run together before they got in the bus for the long ride back to Beijing – "to loosen the knots" – Mude responded with his most with it expression, a phrase he'd been saving for just such a time:
"All right, you guys. Do your thing."
Bling was still laughing as he and Yang jogged around the bend out of sight.
The journalists played with the swarms of school kids in the bus lot while Mr. Mude smoked with the bus driver. The tourists teemed. And the Great Wall writhed across the rugged terrain like some ambitious stone dragon, bigger than the sandworms of Dune, heavier than the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Not greater, though. Not nearly. As a World Class Wonder the Great Wall is really more awe-inspiring than uplifting. One feels that it had to take some kind of all-prevailing, ill-proportioned paranoia to drive that stone snake across three thousand miles and thirty centuries. The Great Pyramid says, I rise to the skies. The Great Wall says, I keep out the louts. China says, The twentieth century must be allowed to enter! The Wall says, Louts will be everywhere – shooting beer commercials, buying Coca-Cola, strutting their ugly stuff. The twentieth century says, I'm coming in, louts and all, wall or no… I'm coming in because Time can't just walk off and leave behind one fourth of all the people in the world, can it now?
The Wall doesn't answer.
It was almost an hour before the two runners came back into sight, walking. And Bling was no longer laughing. When his eyes met the writer's he nodded and mouthed, "He'll do it." Morosely. Somehow the kick had gone out of the conspiracy. Bling put on his blue glasses and climbed in to look out the bus window. Yang took a seat on the other side of the bus, looking at the other side of the road.
The ride back, Mude finally decided, was silent because everybody would be leaving tomorrow. It must make the heart very solemn, leaving Beijing after such short weeks. He embraced them all tenderly when he left them for the final time in the hotel lot. He told them if they ever got fed up with capitalistic landlord mentality to contact their friend Wun Mude in Beijing. He would see that China took them in.
Bling kept quiet up the steps and across the hotel lobby. In the elevator the journalists finally demanded in unison, "Well?"
"I'm to pick him up in a taxi when he goes out for his run tomorrow morning. He'll have his papers on him."
"Far out. The Prince and the Pauper do Peking."
"What did he say? When you asked…?"
"He told me a story. How his father died."
"Yea…?"
"A few years ago there was a thing – a fad, practically – started by members of the intelligentsia who had taken all the shit they could take. Doctors and lawyers and teachers. Journalists, too. They would be found guilty of some crime against the Cultural Revolution and paraded around town with nothing on but a strip of paper hanging from their necks. Their crime would be written on the paper. People – their neighbors, their families - would come out and insult them, throw dirt on the poor dudes, piss on them! We Chinese are fucking barbarians, you know? We aren't really disciplined or obedient. We've just never had any damn freedom! If we could suddenly go down to our local Beijing sporting goods store and buy guns like in the States, man, there would be lead flying and blood flowing all over town."