Ecuador (7)
A group of robbers fled, scrambling and rolling as they went, leaving only Tan Guhong and Luo Jingming behind, along with a car with a blown tire.
“You carry a gun on you?”
Tan Guhong folded her arms, looking at Luo Jingming expressionlessly.
Luo Jingming said unhurriedly, “You should know that the United States is a country where guns aren’t banned.”
“That’s not a good reason.”
He smiled. “I don’t think now is a good time to quibble over that, either.”
“Fine…” She spread her hands. “Then what do we do now?”
Just now, the two of them had practically reenacted a race for their lives. They had blown through a checkpoint, blown a tire, crashed the car, and even fired a gun, only to arrive at the same outcome in the end: they had still lost their means of transportation, and she had also acquired a bruise on her arm.
“Sorry. I’ve never liked sitting around waiting to die…” He put away his gun and walked toward her. “But I’ll take responsibility for what I did.”
“What are you doing?”
She watched him half-crouch in front of her, not quite understanding at first.
“I’ll carry you. We’ll walk. It’s still eight kilometers to the town.”
She didn’t want to trouble him like this, but she couldn’t think of a better choice for the moment. A man who wasn’t even willing to negotiate peacefully with the robbers certainly wasn’t going to sit around waiting for a passing car to give them a ride when one was almost impossible to come by. Besides, her leg had been bleeding nonstop, and the white fabric of her shirt was already completely stained red.
After hesitating for a while, she sighed.
“I’m heavy.”
She wasn’t fat, but she was tall and slender. Carrying her for eight kilometers would hardly be an easy task.
“Surely you’re not heavier than a grizzly bear.”
When he saw that she still wasn’t moving, he pulled her arm over, put some strength into his grip, and had her lie against his back. After adjusting her position slightly, he straightened up and carried her entire body on his back.
“What?”
She wondered if she had misheard his comparison. Why a bear?
He carried her and strode forward, seemingly without effort. As he walked, he said, “I studied in Canada before. During the holidays, I went into the mountains with my roommate to hunt bears.”
“Aren’t bears protected animals?”
“Not in Canada. There are too many grizzly bears there, and they often injure people and livestock. The government offers rewards for hunting bears, and spring and autumn are the legal bear-hunting seasons. That bear wasn’t fully grown yet, but it still weighed close to two hundred kilograms. We were practically exhausted to the point of collapse trying to drag it back to camp.”
So in the end, he and his roommate from Russia had no choice but to butcher the bear right there. It was an extremely bloody scene.
After hearing this, Tan Guhong remained silent. For one thing, her leg hurt and she was weak, and she didn’t feel like talking. For another, she felt that she was finding it harder and harder to see through him.
Three days ago, they had been complete strangers, and she had thought she knew him inside and out.
Three days later, they seemed to have become much more familiar with each other, yet she discovered that she knew almost nothing about him.
Suddenly, he hitched her higher on his back. The movement tugged at her wound, and the pain nearly made her cry out. She couldn’t help smacking his back.
“What are you doing?!”
“Don’t fall asleep. Talk to me. You need to stay conscious.”
She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “I haven’t lost that much blood.”
She couldn’t see the expression on his face, but she could hear the smile in his voice.
“But you can’t expect me to carry you while you sleep and walk these eight kilometers all by myself, can you?”
She was helpless. “Fine.”
But now that she was supposed to talk, she didn’t know where to begin either. After thinking for a while, she slowly said, “Actually, there’s something I wanted to tell you the first time I met you, ten years ago.”
Her soft breath brushed against his ear. He paused, then asked, “What?”
“Your Mandarin was downright terrible back then.”
He was silent for a moment, then suddenly burst into uncontrollable laughter. She could feel the faint vibration of his chest from where she was on his back. In the slightly cool night breeze, the heat radiating from his body passed through his thin clothes and into hers.
“I was telling the truth.”
“I knew that already.”
“I don’t think I ever actually said that back then.”
His laughter carried a touch of helplessness. “But every time I opened my mouth, your eyes told me exactly that.”
“Oh, sorry.” She had thought she had hidden her contempt quite well, but ten years later, she tried to make up for it. “But your Mandarin is really good now. Your pronunciation is clear and precise, and you don’t have an accent at all. You’re even more standard than mine.”
“You can’t blame me. My father’s family is originally from Guangdong. He immigrated to the United States with his parents when he was very young. Back then, Mandarin hadn’t even been implemented on the mainland yet. He only knew how to speak Cantonese. Most of the Chinese friends my family associated with were from Guangdong too. When I was little, I even thought all Chinese people spoke Cantonese, and that Cantonese was standard Chinese.”
And so, ten years ago, Luo Jingming, who thought he was speaking perfectly standard Mandarin, met Tan Guhong, who had grown up in Beijing speaking a full-on Beijing accent. The two of them were practically talking past each other, unable to communicate at all.
She also remembered the details of their first meeting all those years ago and couldn’t help laughing.
Ten years ago, Old Master Liang’s seventieth birthday banquet was held at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse. Luo Jingming had returned to China with his maternal grandfather, coming to China for the first time in his life, and coming to Beijing. They were supposed to meet then, whether at the birthday banquet or through an introduction arranged by their elders. In any case, it should have been a formal and courteous occasion. Instead, through a strange twist of circumstances, they met privately ahead of time because of a disastrous blind date mix-up.
Tan Guhong’s maternal grandfather, Liao Rongguang, and Liang Nianbang’s family had been family friends for generations, their ancestors having shared a deep friendship for several generations. What the elders had originally wanted to arrange was a match between Huo Qiaodong, the older cousin who had returned from studying in Britain, and Liao Bingyan, the cousin from Tan Guhong’s maternal uncle’s family. Instead, one of them left his cousin, who was unfamiliar with the place, there by himself, while the other tricked her cousin, who had just graduated from high school, into coming out. And so, in the end, Tan Guhong and Luo Jingming found themselves staring awkwardly at each other at the appointed meeting place.
“You’re not Huo Qiaodong, are you?”
“Me a?”
“Huo, Qiao, Dong?”
“No, you’re Liu Bingnan?”
“What?”
“Liao, Bing, Nan?”
“Of course not!”
That scene was practically a disaster.
Almost every sentence had to be repeated twice between them. Through gestures and guesses, they finally pieced together what had happened.
Later, after learning that Luo Jingming, who had grown up in the United States, was returning to China for the first time, Tan Guhong extended the hospitality of a local and took him around Beijing. As for whether they actually went to the Forbidden City or the Temple of Heaven, she could no longer remember. Maybe they went to both. Maybe they went to neither, and only wandered around Qianmen and Dashilan. That year, Beijing was hosting an important event, so security was extremely tight. He had neither an ID card nor a passport with him, and could barely take a step anywhere.
Ten years. It really was an incredibly long stretch of time. Especially those ten years between one’s teens and twenties. For many people, that alone encompasses all the joys and sorrows of an entire life. She had gone from being spirited and full of promise to having her wings broken halfway through, from regaining hope to falling into complete despair. She went to university, then graduate school. She went to Argentina, went to Equatorial Guinea, and later came to Ecuador. Her life had risen and fallen dramatically, her heart tempered by ice and fire, until in the end it settled into peace. There were regrets, and there were disappointments, but all of that pain and hardship was the youth she had no regrets about.
And what about him? He, too, had grown from that gloomy-eyed boy who stumbled through Guangpu, his body carrying a melancholy that was almost morose, into the mature man he was now, gentle and refined, courteous and well-mannered. His countless thoughts and feelings were all hidden behind those gold-rimmed plano glasses. Without even thinking about it, she knew they must be full of things that could not be spoken.
How mysterious the passing of time was, and how fickle fate could be.
Her body grew colder and colder, Luo Jingming’s voice farther and farther away, and Tan Guhong’s consciousness increasingly blurred.
The very last image in her mind was of the pitch-black night, stars filling the sky. In the land of the equator, surrounded by mountains, someone carried her along an empty, lonely highway, just walking on like this, walking on and on…
……
Tan Guhong was awakened by a burst of commotion. Her consciousness gradually returned. She tried to move her body, only to be stopped by a sharp pain in her leg. With difficulty, she opened her eyes and slowly looked around.
She found herself in a fairly spacious white tent, lying on a simple folding bed. There was no one else inside the tent, but outside, there seemed to be people everywhere, with constant noise and commotion.
She listened carefully for a while and heard words like “doctor” and “surgery,” guessing that this was probably a hospital. Only then did she belatedly remember everything that had happened before she lost consciousness. She pushed herself halfway upright, pulled back the blanket, and discovered that her right leg had already been properly bandaged and immobilized.
“You’re awake?”
A shaft of sunlight suddenly streamed in. She squinted and looked up, only to see Luo Jingming lift the curtain and walk in.
He had changed into clean clothes and had just washed up. He was not wearing his glasses, and the ends of his hair over his forehead were still dripping slightly with water. Seeing her sit up, he stepped forward to help her upright and took the pillow from the side, placing it behind her back.
“How do you feel?”
“Fine.”
He unscrewed a bottle of mineral water and handed it to her. She took a few sips, moistening her throat, then asked, “Where are we?”
“The central hospital in Kunda Town. There was a magnitude 7.2 earthquake in northeastern Ecuador. All the hospitals are overcrowded now, and there aren’t enough wards, so they had no choice but to put up tents in the open spaces. Don’t worry. Your leg has already been treated. There’s a minor fracture, the doctor put in some stitches, and you were given a tetanus shot.”
She had known nothing about any of this. “How long was I unconscious?”
“One day and two nights.”
That really was a long time. Being out of contact for this long, the project team must have been frantic with worry.
Taking advantage of the hospital’s intermittent, weak signal, Tan Guhong called the project team to let them know she was safe and briefly explained her current situation. She reassured Wang Xiaoyue, who had been worried about her safety ever since hearing about the earthquake, and exchanged a few brief words with Cheng Haoran.
It seemed her trip back to China would have to be postponed for the time being.
She put down her phone and looked at Luo Jingming, who was sitting nearby, unable to stop herself from asking, “Weren’t you going back to the United States?”
“There’s nothing urgent. Besides, I couldn’t possibly leave you here by yourself.”
Tan Guhong admitted that he had a point. Things were chaotic outside, and she was grateful that he was staying here with her. It was just that some things still needed to be made clear.
“Let me see that gun.”
Luo Jingming glanced at her without saying anything. He unfastened the gun from his waist and handed it to her.
Tan Guhong took hold of the grip, running her fingers over the cold body of the gun, and smiled.
“An Italian Beretta? No wonder you shoot so accurately.”
He smiled. “Good eyes.”
Without another word, she kept moving. Slide, magazine, spring. In an instant, she had taken the gun apart into a bedful of parts, her movements clean and decisive.
His eyebrows lifted slightly, and he indicated with his eyes that she should continue.
She smiled lightly. The parts went back into her hands one after another… She installed the recoil spring, pulled the slide back into place, inserted the magazine, chambered a round, then raised her hand and aimed directly at the person in front of her, saying casually:
“Two-pound spring.”
Only then did Luo Jingming’s expression finally change slightly, though it was impossible to tell whether it was because of her movements or her words.
After holding the standoff for two seconds, Tan Guhong suddenly laughed. With a slight turn of her finger, she redirected the muzzle, engaged the safety, and tossed the gun back to him.
“That’s a movie line. Just kidding.”
Luo Jingming raised his hand and caught the gun. His eyes, no longer concealed behind his lenses, were deep and unreadable, his expression difficult to make out. After a long while, he said quietly:
“Sorry. I haven’t seen it.”
“As for me, I’m not particularly good at shooting, but at least I’ve been exposed to it since I was little.”
Old Master Liao had joined the military when he was young. He had fought through the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, and later the Vietnam War, spending half his life at war. Her eldest maternal uncle was a soldier, her second maternal uncle was also a soldier, and even her mother, when she was alive, had been a researcher in military theory. She had grown up in such a family. She played with bullets at three and went to the shooting range at five. She still had enough of an eye for these things.
The shots he had fired that night had involved virtually no time spent aiming, almost amounting to blind fire, yet he had achieved such precision. His marksmanship was already far beyond merely being “good.”
Even taking the most charitable view, even if he had been obsessed with guns since childhood and had practiced IPSC, even if he had undergone extensive professional shooting training, the psychological composure required to fire at a real person from close range without even changing expression was not something an ordinary person could possess.
Luo Jingming heard what lay beneath her words. He did not get angry, his expression remaining as calm and unruffled as ever.
“What do you want to know? I’ll tell you everything…”
She shook her head and said unhurriedly, “I’m not that curious. I don’t like prying into other people’s private affairs. Who you really are, what your past is, I’m not that interested. As far as I’m concerned, being Old Master Liang’s grandson is enough.”
“And then?” he picked up her words.
“And then? There is no then…”
She spread her hands innocently. They were not people traveling the same road. They had simply happened to accompany each other for a stretch of the journey. Where they had come from and where they were going no longer mattered.
“Oh, and then there’s one more thing. Thank you.”
He did not understand at first. “For what?”
“I said thank you for carrying me to the hospital…” She laughed. “Honestly, there really aren’t many people who can carry me.”
If she counted them all up, there were only two: a younger male cousin from her second maternal uncle’s family, and Huo Qiaonan. The former was a soldier and could lift her up and spin her around, while the latter could not even carry her three meters. All those muscles he had built at the gym had gone to waste.
A rare hint of gentleness showed through her delicate features, brought on by her weakness. He looked steadily at her for a long time, and finally the corners of his lips curved upward.
“I told you. You weigh less than a grizzly bear.”
With that, he lifted the curtain and walked out the door.
“I’m going to buy breakfast. A-Kun is outside. Call him if you need anything.”
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