A Paper Son

Jason Buchholz

• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781440591624
• eBook ISBN: 9781440591631
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Grade school teacher and aspiring author Peregrine Long sees a Chinese family on board a ship--in his morning tea. The image inspires him to write the story of this family, but then a woman turns up at his door, claiming that he's writing her family history exactly as it happened. She doesn't like it, but she has one question: What happened to the little boy of the family, her long-lost uncle?Throughout the course of a month-long tempest that begins to wash the peninsula out from beneath them, Peregrine searches modern-day San Francisco and its surroundings--and, through his continued writing, southern China and the Pacific immigration experience of a century ago--for the missing boy. The clues uncovered lead Peregrine to question not only the nature of his writing, but also his knowledge of his own past and his understanding of his identity.

FOURTEEN

When Lucy arrived later that day my students were delighted to see her, so I wrote a recommendation extolling her natural abilities and her extensive experience with kids, and the next morning we climbed into my car and headed north to her interview. A newscast came over the radio: Sometime the previous night there had been a mudslide at the south end of China Beach and two of the backyards of the homes along Sea Cliff had collapsed onto the sand below. The reporter described the scene—a mass of grass and mud and smashed gazebo pieces atop the storm-littered beach. There were other items amid the wreckage—an oak wine barrel, several shoes, the door of a car—but it was unclear whether they were part of the mudslide or if the sea had contributed them.

We drove up and over the crest of Russian Hill and dropped down toward Lombard Street, which we found to be full of cars, their progress hampered by rain and red lights, and by the big green-and-white Golden Gate Transit buses that doddered along, swerving in and out of the right lane. We made it through the long series of stoplights and the road swung to the right and climbed and narrowed, its lanes merging and merging again as they approached the bridge’s narrow toll plaza. Drivers competed with one another for spaces that were too small for their cars; sprays of water pounced on our windshield again and again. I took it slow and held my ground and it was mostly manageable until a bus moving a bit too slowly tried to muscle into a small space just in front of me. I slammed on the brakes, expecting to hydroplane into the back of it, but my tires held. To reinforce its vehicular superiority the bus assaulted us with a steady spray from its tires, which continued until I’d dropped well behind it.

“Asshole,” Lucy said. “You’d think people would have figured out how to drive in the rain by now.” The final words of her sentence sounded strangled though, and she reached out and clutched at my sleeve. Her face was white; her eyes were wide and still, her mouth agape. She looked the same way she’d looked when she collapsed in the hallway by the side of the pool.

“What?” I said. “Lucy, what?”

“That’s him,” she said.

“Who?”

She let go of me and pointed through the windshield. Through the bus’s rear window we could see the back of a man’s head and shoulders. He was sitting by himself, wearing a dark coat and a dark cap. “How can you tell?” I said. “That could be anybody.”

“It’s him,” she said. “We have to follow him.”

“But how do you know?” I said. “What about your interview?”

And then he slowly and deliberately turned, looked right at us, and smiled. Lucy leaned forward and stared up at him, her forehead inches from the windshield. The muscles of her jaw stood out through the drawn skin of her cheeks. Her eyes were narrow and her brow thick with furrows. The windshield wipers pushed patches of shadow back and forth across her face. She stared at him like that all the way across the bridge and up through the tunnel, as though everything we were searching for might be revealed in a single small gesture of his. Traffic was moving more easily here, and we stayed on the bus’s tail, just beyond the spray of its tires, as it lumbered back down the hill. We arrived at an exit in Sausalito and the bus slowed and, without signaling, pulled into a freeway-side bus stop. A pair of signs, one on each side of the road, told us not to enter. Buses only, they said. Lucy lifted a hand as if she was about to yank on the steering wheel.

“Stay on him,” she said. The hand inched closer.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Relax. I’m on it.”

We eased in behind the bus. Lucy unbuckled her seat belt and reached for the door handle, ready to jump out if the man moved. He didn’t. We followed the bus back onto the freeway and continued north. The sequence was repeated in Marin City, and then again at Tiburon Boulevard. This time, though, the bus didn’t pull back onto the freeway. It took a right turn and headed east toward downtown Tiburon.

“There you go,” Lucy said. “Maybe we can figure this out and still make it to my interview,” she said. She chuckled. “Maybe he’s interviewing, too.”

The road curved back and forth and eventually settled along the shoreline. The bus pulled in and out of a few stops along the way, and each time we followed, but the man’s head and shoulders remained immobile, framed by the rear window. The road straightened and the homes gave way to restaurants and shops. We were reaching the end of the peninsula now, and Angel Island appeared in front of us across a narrow strait. The gray sides of Mount Livermore rose from the water, their details washed out by the rain. The commercial stretch of Tiburon Boulevard ended in a roundabout next to the marina, among the last block of shops. The bus slowed and eased into its final stop. The man rose. Lucy was out of the car before I’d even stopped it. I yanked on the emergency brake, flicked on the hazards, and followed her into the rain.

I caught up to Lucy at the bus’s door. She stood with her arms folded across her chest, leaving barely enough room for the passengers to disembark. There were only a handful of them—an old woman in a clear plastic raincoat with grocery bags, a pair of weekend commuters in business attire who gave her dirty looks as they stepped around her. The man didn’t appear. We waited for long seconds, staring up the empty stairs. “What the fuck?” she said, to nobody. She sprang up the steps, turned the corner, and peered into the darkness of the bus. She turned back to me. “It’s fucking empty, Peregrine!” she said, and darted out of sight.

The bus driver was a wiry man with a thin neat mustache and the air of a bridge-guarding troll. “Hey, I need your fare, lady!” he yelled, twisting in his seat.

I stepped onto the bottom step. “We’re just looking for someone,” I said. “It will just be a second, if that’s okay.”

“You can’t just run onto somebody’s bus like that,” he said to me, jabbing his finger at the floor, dispelling any questions about whose bus was under discussion. “It costs two dollars.”

“She’s not riding,” I said. “We’re just looking for something.”

“Well, it’s not here. Can’t lose something on a bus you ain’t ridden. I need two dollars, and I need it real quick.”

“There’s nobody!” Lucy yelled, from the middle of the bus. “There’s nothing!”

“I guess you better look somewhere else,” the driver yelled at her. He turned back to me. “You see that line right there?” He pointed to a yellow stripe at the front of the aisle.

“Yes,” I said.

“Hey, what happened to the Chinese guy?” Lucy yelled. “The guy that was sitting right there, in the back?”

“Crossing that line and I don’t have two dollars is fare dodging, which is not welcome to occur on this bus. Not when I’m driving it, anyway.” He reached down and started fumbling through a bag. I had heard that lots of taxi drivers carried guns, but a bus driver on the Tiburon route? Over two dollars? I tightened my grip on the railing that led up the steps.

“She’s getting right off,” I said. “Please, just give us a couple of seconds.”

“Where are you?” Lucy yelled into the emptiness of the bus.

The driver paused and glanced at her in the big mirror that stretched across the top of the windshield. Wipers the size of hockey sticks thumped back and forth across the glass. “Nope,” he said, shaking his little head. “Doesn’t look like she’s getting right off at all. Looks like she’s messing around in the back of my bus. Messing around on my bus definitely costs two dollars.”

I sighed and reached for my wallet. I couldn’t see what Lucy was doing, and I didn’t want to climb the stairs and put myself within the driver’s reach. Besides, it had become well worth two dollars to put an end to this conversation. I only had a five. I handed it over.

“I don’t have change,” he said.

“Um, Peregrine?” Lucy called. “Come take a look at this.”

“Be my guest,” he said, nodding toward the back. “You’re covered...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Five
• Six
• Seven
• Eight
• Nine
• Ten
• Eleven
• Twelve
• Thirteen
• Fourteen
• Fifteen
• Sixteen
• Seventeen
• Eighteen
• Nineteen
• Twenty
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright