The Third Son (29 page)

“Oh no! I loathe agents. I came to work for Gleason,” I said.

He looked at me sideways again as I turned out of the lot onto the darkened highway. “You need to turn on your headlights.”

I paused, fumbling at the knobs. “I brought all my money. Everything depends on what I do here.”

“Did Gleason invite you?”

“Of course not,” I said. “But I need to do research this summer.”

“We’re full. We don’t need any more students.”

“I know.”

W
E DROVE WEST,
then north, the highways stretching on for a thousand miles into the darkness.

“How do you know Professor Hong?” I asked Wen-chong.

“My father was an economics professor at Peking University under the Nationalists,” he said. It was his turn to drive, and the light from the streetlamps slid rhythmically over his trim, almost childlike frame. He sat on a tote bag filled with papers so he could see over the dashboard. “He moderated the student protests there—he just opposed the civil war and the fascist nature of the government’s crackdown on the Communists. He wasn’t Communist. He was an economist, after all.

“But I’m sure you know the Nationalists don’t make such refined distinctions. One day when my father was giving a speech at a student rally, disguised government soldiers stole in and threw a hand grenade. It went over his shoulder and exploded in the hand of a poor literature student who had picked it up from the stage and tried to lob it back. A piece of the grenade lodged in my father’s neck. After that, my father took me and my mother and fled to Hong Kong. It was just in time. Shortly thereafter, as the Communists began to win the war, the Nationalists cracked down on university students and those professors who had aided them.

“In Hong Kong my father had nothing. The University of Hong Kong did not even have an economics department at that time. My mother had worked as a seamstress in Peking, and her skillful labor supported us in Hong Kong. But my father was unhappy and booked passage to Canada. It was there, at McGill University, that he heard Peng Ming-min, the Taiwanese political activist, speak about self-determination, and in the audience was our Professor Hong, although he was only a student at that time.”

“I see,” I said. “He’s a friend of your father’s.”

“Not only,” Wen-chong said. He glanced in the rearview mirror and switched lanes. “Many years later my father died. That fragment of grenade was always getting infected and he would never stop working long enough to get it removed. He said he wanted to keep it to remind himself never to become complacent. And one day the infection overwhelmed him and he died.”

I watched Wen-chong as he drove, but his expression was unreadable in the dark. So much suffering there was in the world!

“By that time my mother and I had joined him in Canada. Hong became like a father to me.” His voice became gravelly and he cleared his throat. He gestured toward the road. “And speaking of Canada, here we are.”

T
HE TRAIN WE
boarded at Winnipeg lurched a lot more than any train I’d taken on Taiwan.

“It’s the muskeg.” Wen-chong, sitting opposite me, waved toward the landscape outside, what looked like plains covered with clusters of short pine trees. “Bog, basically. The permafrost layer prevents the water from draining properly and this vegetation grows on top. There’s just gravel on top to make the tracks. Very unstable.” Our car banged around a bend, and I winced, thinking of the transmitter I’d soldered together.

“Are you sure it wouldn’t have been better to fly?” I said.

“Well,” he said. He scratched the back of his neck. “I think the components are too heavy for the plane here. It’s no Boeing 707, you know.”

I looked back out the window. The train curved away behind us, one hopper car after another, filled with grain. All along the track, wooden utility poles leaned at forty-five-degree angles, propped up by wooden poles in gangly tripod form. The utility lines stretched, unbroken, to infinity on either end, so precariously supported that one storm, one unseasonably warm day to melt the permafrost below, and communication would be lost. I could die out here and Yoshiko would never know.

I turned back to Wen-chong. He was sitting and looking at his hands in his lap, his eyelids heavy.

“Tell me about your research,” I said.

He looked up at me wearily. “Why?”

“Because,” I said. “I want to do research, not just repair your equipment.”

He sighed. “I don’t have anything to write on.”

I dug up the tote bag and pulled out a sheet of paper.

“No,” he said. “That’s our specifications and experiment design and such. You can’t use that.”

I looked at the diagram in my hand. “But this is the schematic for the transmitter! You didn’t tell me you had this!”

“Oh.” He looked sheepish. “I didn’t realize we did.”

“Well,” I said, “we don’t need it anymore.”

28

A
T LAST WE ARRIVED
at Fort Churchill, stepping into air so frigid that it burned the passages of my nose and lungs. I saw with excitement that Gleason had arrived at the station with a pickup truck. Wen-chong and I waited at the cargo car for the boxes of equipment while the pickup backed into a space near us. The tundra stretched, barren, in all directions, punctuated only by small rectangular buildings.

“Here they are,” Wen-chong said.

I grabbed the other end of a large box and looked around eagerly for Gleason. He was walking around the truck to open the tailgate, the wind ruffling the fur on the hood of his parka. He unwound a length of rope from a large ball in his hand.

The wind cut through the meager wool of my winter jacket, and I smiled at him, shivering, my hand resting on the box containing the nose cone. My fingers were already numb.

Gleason squinted up at me and cut the rope with a large knife. “What are you doing here?”

I felt a shock in my belly. I had thought him so kind.

Wen-chong stepped to my side. “He fixed the telemetry,” he said. “And he drove me up in his car to Winnipeg.”

Gleason silently wrapped the rope around the tailgate of the truck and began knotting it in place. Wen-chong went up to the truck to help him. They whispered to each other for a minute, and the wind brought their words to me.

“I can’t be babysitting—isn’t he that . . .”

“No, no, he’s the one who . . .”

“Oh, I thought he was the other fellow . . .”

I watched despondently, my arms hanging at my sides while they tightened the rope.

When they finished, Professor Gleason turned to me, his face still somber. “I remember you now, Chia-lin. Didn’t I tell you to come back when you had your master’s?”

“Yes,” I said. I trembled, only partly from the cold. “But I don’t have time to wait.”

He looked at me for a moment, drumming his fingers on the side of the pickup truck. “Get into the cab before you freeze to death.”

T
HEY FOUND ME
a spare parka and we unpacked the payload components in the blockhouse. Gleason and Wen-chong assembled the payload with their backs to me, Wen-chong throwing me nervous glances every once in a while. Had I traveled all this way to be treated as an intruder?

And then when they tested the telemetry, the dials were silent.

“Okay, wunderkind,” Gleason said. “I thought you fixed it.”

“It worked at the—” I began to say.

“The train ride,” Wen-chong said. “Some of the connections must have come loose.” He glanced at me, harshly this time. “I told you they needed to withstand strong vibrations.”

I flushed.

Gleason pulled the schematic out of the tote bag. It had my writing all over it. “What happened to this? Now we’ll never be able to fix it!”

Wen-chong looked at me.

“I did that,” I said, feeling my old righteousness welling up. “We had no other paper, and I already know the circuits in my head, so I knew we didn’t need any schematics.”

Gleason stood up and faced me. “It doesn’t pay to be arrogant, Chia-lin.”

Arrogant! The blood surged through my head, my ears, to the frozen tips of my fingers. I turned away and stepped toward the door. It was middle school all over again. I would leave these ungrateful people behind me to flounder with their own equipment. See how they would miss me then! I could have been working all this time, making money to send home—straight to Yoshiko this time, or to her parents—

What was I doing? I had fixed those circuits perfectly well. I turned back and pushed past Gleason and Wen-chong to look at the payload assembly.

“There’s nothing wrong with my connections,” I said irritably. “You just assembled the units incorrectly. The inputs are all scrambled.”

W
E WATCHED THE
launch from the blockhouse. The rocket went off smoothly, the earth literally shaking beneath our feet, and the team, including Gleason’s entire laboratory plus three Fort Churchill technicians, cheered, watching the rocket roar off into the sky.

The telemetry needles jumped to life, and Gleason patted me on the back. “That’s my boy,” he said. “If it were up to us, Vanguard would already be up there.”

“Vanguard?”

“Satellite. Guys are having a heck of a time with it. Supposed to go up in November, now they’re saying December. But they’ll do it. And imagine that—a man-made moon over our heads.”

We celebrated by bonfire. On the shores of Hudson Bay, the fire crackled, sending sparks into the growing darkness. One of the Fort Churchill technicians who had helped monitor the launch knelt by the hot coals, cooking bread in a cast-iron skillet.

“Bannock,” Gleason said. He slathered butter onto a piece and handed it to me. “The natives eat it.” And then he walked away and sat by the fire. The others closed in next to him, and I remained on the outside of their circle.

I bit into the bannock. It was crunchy on the outside, and so hot inside that the steam burned my lips. Aside from the butter, it was plain and unseasoned—a simple combination of little more than flour and water. But here, in the flickering, smoky light of the fire, by the frigid waters that had slipped past glaciers and carried ice floes up and down across the Arctic Ocean to lap these shores, it was the most delicious food I had ever tasted. I ate it up, the crumbs falling down into the folds of my borrowed parka and onto the sparse grass and pebbles at my feet. I could have eaten ten more, but there was only one skillet, and the next bannock was still cooking.

We roasted sausages on sticks, and one of the graduate students said, “This is basically what we have to eat in Churchill—bannock and sausage.”

There was general laughter. “And last week’s newspaper,” someone said.

“I’m dying for some fresh milk and a nice, fresh sirloin.”

I bit into my sausage, and the hot fat ran down my chin. It was spicy and delicious. Yoshiko would have loved it.

I stood up and left the fire.

I made my way over the rocks to the edge of the bay. The night was growing darker and the surface of the water glowed in the waning light. The wind blew, and I smelled the salt in the air, the smoke from the bonfire behind me, and the bannock.

Rocks clattered behind me and I turned around to see a dark form approach from the group, silhouetted against the fire’s light.

“You shouldn’t leave the group in a place like this.” It was Gleason. “It’s dangerous.”

I was in no mood to be chastised. I turned back to face the bay. Its surface undulated in the distance, toward the ocean.

“Those are belugas,” Gleason said, drawing up next to me. “They come here to breed.”

“They are lucky to go wherever they want,” I said. “And so are you. I would be happy to feed my family sausages and bannock.”

He was silent for a moment. The belugas disappeared, then reappeared farther away, so that I even doubted whether I saw anything at all. “Chia-lin,” Gleason said, “why did you come here?”

“My wife has tuberculosis,” I said, and then my throat stopped me.

“And you want to visit her.”

“No. Well, yes, of course. But I can’t. I wouldn’t be let back into the US.”

“You’re trying to get her here,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I can’t pay you, Chia-lin. I already filled my student positions.”

Though I knew this, hearing Gleason say it was a blow to me, as buying the car had been a calculated gamble that he might bend his rules.

“But I can give you an unpaid internship. If you’ll help us with the data from the launch, I’ll put your name on the paper.”

I thought for a moment. Getting my name on a major paper might be just the thing to get me that teaching fellowship at the School of Mines. But no income, in the most expensive country in the world . . .

“No money?” I said.

Gleason sighed. He took a step to the side and turned away. “Well, after you get your master’s . . .” He started making his way back to the fire, holding out his arms for balance.

“Wait.” I clambered after him. “I’ll take your internship.”