THE REVERSE CURRENT - Ten Bundles of Cash

The fever from the river took three d

The fever from the river took three days to burn itself out.It stayed in my shoulders and lower back, a deep, damp ache that made every breath taste like river silt.

I stayed inside the small back room of the safehouse behind the tile kiln, two miles north of the junction.

The room had no window, just a square sky-hole in the thatched roof where the rain dripped into an iron bucket with a slow, rhythmic ping… ping… ping .I didn’t wash the mud off my boots.

It had dried into a pale grey crust that flaked onto the concrete floor whenever

I shifted my feet on the cot.On the fourth afternoon, the wooden door latch lifted with a dry click.Seng’s uncle walked in.

He was a small, wire-thin man named

Lin, with skin the color of a dried tea leaf and a permanent squint from forty years of staring into the glare of charcoal fires.

He wore an old rubberized rain-cape that smelled of stale tobacco and wet canvas.He didn’t say hello.

He didn’t ask about the river.He set a heavy, square vinyl travel bag on the foot of my cot.

It hit the frame with a dull, dense thud that didn’t bounce.”Seng’s gone,” the old man said.

His voice was flat, devoid of anger or grief, like a clerk reading a tax roll. “They moved him from the border station at midnight.

Took him up to the provincial facility at the capital.

My nephew’s wife went down with three hundred yuan to buy him some dry trousers, but they wouldn’t let her past the gate.”I sat up slowly, my blanket pulling away from my chest.

The skin on my arms was mapped with angry red scratches from the elephant grass.”Who snitched?” I asked.Uncle

Lin spat onto the concrete floor.

A dark, amber glob of betel-nut juice slid into the dust. “Does it matter?

Blackie talked at the teahouse.

Maybe the driver’s kid wanted five hundred yuan for a fix.

When you leave a trail of lime and dead roosters across three townships, you don’t need a snitch.

The police just follow the smell.”He looked down at the vinyl bag, his calloused thumb rubbing the rusted brass zipper.”Seng told me before you went down to the river,” the old man continued, his squint tightening as he looked at my face. “He said if the deal went through, your handling fee was ten thousand.

If it fell apart and you didn’t run your mouth, he’d already locked ten bundles in my iron box.

He said you were a man who knew how to keep his jaws shut in cold water.””Seng’s in a concrete box,” I said, my throat raspy. “He doesn’t owe me a copper.””Seng’s name is on the police ledger,” Uncle

Lin said sharply, his voice dropping into a hard, brittle register. “My family’s name isn’t.

We pay our debts so the ghosts don’t sit on our porch at night.

The money is yours.

Take it and get out of the kiln house.

The brick workers are asking why the back room is locked.”He turned on his heel and walked out, leaving the heavy oak door propped open three inches.

The cold damp air from the kiln yard rushed in, carrying the bitter scent of wet clay and burning brush.I sat alone on the edge of the cot for a long time.The room was completely quiet except for the iron bucket under the sky-hole. Ping… ping… ping.I reached out and pulled the vinyl bag onto my lap.

The brass zipper was stiff, coated in green verdigris.

I yanked it back, the teeth tearing open with a sharp, dry rasp.Inside were ten rectangular bricks, each wrapped tightly in brown wax paper and secured with thick red rubber bands.I picked up one bundle.

It was heavy, dense, and slightly cold to the touch, like a brick carved out of dense river limestone.

I snapped the rubber bands off and peeled back the stiff wax paper.Hundreds.

Crisp, uncirculated hundred-dollar bills, bound in bands of ten thousand dollars each.I tipped the bag over.

The ten bundles spilled out across the grey wool blanket on my cot, forming a neat, heavy pile between my mud-crusted boots.One hundred thousand dollars.I picked up a second stack and fanned the edges with my thumb. Thrrrpp. The sound was crisp, dry, and clean, totally out of place in the damp, rotting room.

It smelled of high-grade cotton paper, chemical ink, and the sterile vault of an overseas bank.It didn’t smell like river water.

It didn’t smell like cordite or the blood that had pooled under

Blackie’s ribs on the mudbank.I laid the ten bundles out in two neat rows of five on the wool blanket.My mind started working, calculating the numbers with a cold, terrifying clarity that surprised me.In the

Basin, my mother had earned two copper coins a day for sewing canvas seams until her eyes went stone-blind.

In the timber yard,

I had hauled forty-kilo teak logs through knee-deep mud for eight yuan a shift.

Five hundred dollars from

Harlan had bought me a ticket out of the valley and six months of cobbling boots in the red dust.And here, laid out on a filthy wool blanket behind a tile kiln, was a hundred thousand dollars.I hadn’t bought a single kilo.

I hadn’t cooked a single gram of precursor chemicals.

I hadn’t even fired the short-barreled revolver sitting in my coat pocket.I had simply walked into the dark, stood in the freezing water while men screamed and died around me, and walked back out on the other side.I looked at my hands.

They were trembling slightly, but it wasn’t from fear, and it wasn’t from the fever.

It was a strange, electric vibration—a sudden, intoxicating realization that the world had no rules, no balance, and no justice.

The world only had weight.

And weight was measured in paper.Seng was gone forever into the dark maw of the state prison system.

Blackie was rotting in a ditch by the river.And

I was sitting in a room with a fortune.I reached out and ran my palm over the smooth, waxy surfaces of the stacked bills.

They didn’t feel evil.

They didn’t feel cursed.

They felt solid, absolute, and completely indifferent to how they had arrived on my bed.The moral ache—the quiet, lingering guilt over

Anna, over the clean life

I had lost in the stone house—didn’t shatter.

It simply dissolved, like a spoonful of salt dropped into a bucket of hot grease.I stood up from the cot.I pulled my old surplus coat off, folded the ten bundles back into their brown wax paper, and packed them tightly into the bottom of the vinyl bag.

I zipped it shut, the brass teeth locking together with a final, solid click.I walked over to the corner, picked up my iron rasp and my small leather kit, and dropped them into the ash pit under the tile stove.I didn’t need the cobbler’s tools anymore.

I didn’t need to fix other men’s boots or pull timber logs for eight yuan a shift.I picked up the heavy vinyl bag, slung the strap over my shoulder, and stepped out of the kiln house into the grey, rain-washed afternoon, my eyes completely clear, my heart as cold and heavy as a block of ice.