THE REVERSE CURRENT - Green Canvas Shoes

The staging for the county-wide student

The staging for the county-wide student choir performance was built out of untreated pine boards that smelled faintly of sap and chicken manure.

It flexed under the weight of forty thirteen-year-olds dressed in matching white cotton shirts that our mothers had bleached with lye and scrubbed against river rocks until our shoulders burned.I stood in the second row, third from the left, trying very hard not to move my feet.My shoes were a pair of discarded black rubber plimsolls my elder half-brother had worn down to the thread three rainy seasons ago.

The rubber across the toes had dry-rotted and split wide open.

I flexed my feet, four grey, dirt-crusted toes poked out like little blind earthworms.

I had tried wrapping black electrical tape around the fronts before leaving the house that morning, but the heat inside the school hall melted the glue, and by the time the teacher blew her pitch pipe, the tape had curled up and fallen off into the sawdust on the floorboards.Below the stage, parents and local town officials sat on folding wooden chairs, fanning themselves with rolled-up handbills.

Among them, sitting in the fourth row, was

Elena.She wasn’t in the choir.

Vance, hadn’t been able to spare the three yuan for the white uniform shirt, so she sat with the audience, wearing her usual faded blue tunic.

But her eyes weren’t on the music teacher waving his arms in front of us.

They were locked onto my feet.I saw her look down.

I saw her jaw tighten.

I pulled my feet back an inch, trying to hide them behind the heels of the boy in front of me, but the boy shifted, and there they were again—black rubber teeth gaked wide open, showing my dirty socks.When the performance ended and the crowd broke into polite, scattered applause, the choir filed off the back ramp toward the latrines.I didn’t go to the latrines.

I slipped around the side of the brick gym, behind the rusty water tower where the school dumped its broken desks and coal ash.

I sat on a overturned oil drum, pulled off the shoes, and looked at my big toe.

It was bleeding where the split rubber had pinched the skin raw during the second verse of the anthem.”Put them back on before someone steps on you,” a voice said.I looked up.

Elena was standing at the edge of the ash pile, her hands tucked behind her back.

She looked around, making sure none of the teachers were watching, then stepped over a pile of rusted iron hoops and dropped a heavy cardboard box onto my lap.It was tied with rough hemp twine.

Printed on the side in coarse blue ink was an anchor and three bold letters: PLA-87 .I didn’t open it right away.

Basin, a box that clean meant trouble. “What’s this?””Open it,” she said, her voice dropping an octave, quick and tight.I pulled the twine loose and lifted the lid.

Inside, nestled in thin grey tissue paper that smelled sharp and chemical—the smell of brand-new vulcanized rubber—was a pair of high-top green military canvas sneakers.

The thick rubber soles were bright ivory, pristine, with deep tread patterns designed for soldiers marching through mountain mud.They were twice as expensive as anything sold at the market stall on

Street.”Where did you get these?” I asked.

My fingers hovered over the stiff green canvas, not daring to touch it.”I bought them.””With what?”Elena swallowed hard.

Her throat worked under her skin, thin as a sparrow’s.

She looked away toward the timber yard across the lane. “My dad had forty yuan hidden under the mattress in a tobacco tin.

For his net repairs.”A cold weight dropped into my chest. “Elena… he’ll beat you to death.”Old

Vance wasn’t a cruel man when he was sober, but when he drank cheap sorghum liquor after a week of empty nets, his hands were heavy as river stones.

I’d seen her mother with black eyes twice that spring alone.”He won’t know,” she whispered, though her chin was trembling. “He thinks he lost the tin at the tea house on

He was too drunk to remember where he left it.

He cursed the teahouse owner for two hours this morning and then went to sleep it off.”She stepped closer, squatted down in the coal ash, and grabbed one of the green shoes.

She pushed it onto my left foot.

It was a little loose in the heel, but when she pulled the flat white laces tight, the canvas hugged my ankle like a firm hand.”There,” she said, tying a neat, double-looped bow. “Now nobody looks at your toes.”I looked at the clean green cloth against the hem of my frayed trousers.

It looked ridiculous.

It looked like a silk ribbon tied around a bag of garbage.

I took a step on the cinder heap, the rubber gripped the grit with an elastic, springy give

I had never felt in my life.”We’re going to pass the exams,” she said suddenly, sitting back on her heels and staring at me with a fierce, quiet intensity that caught me off guard. “Next year.

The senior high school in the county seat.

Chen said if we both stay in the top five, the township gives a grant for the board.

We can share a room near the bus station.

My aunt lives three streets over—she said

I can cook for her on weekends to pay for my books.”She had it all mapped out.

It was a neat, orderly little blue-print drawn in the dust by a thirteen-year-old girl who believed that if you worked hard enough and kept your shirt white, the world would play by the rules.”Yeah,” I said softly, looking down at the green rubber toe-caps. “Yeah,

Elena.”That evening, the rain came back.It wasn’t the heavy monsoon wash that clears the air, but a thick, grey drizzle that hung over the

Basin like damp gauze, smelling of wet soot and rotting river weeds.I walked into our hut and took off the green sneakers right at the door.

I wrapped them back in their tissue paper and hid the box under my straw mattress, next to my three notebooks and a broken wooden ruler.My mother was sitting on her low stool near the hearth.

There was no fire in the pit—charcoal cost four fen a catty now—and the only light came from a saucer of lard with a twisted cotton thread floating in it.She was stitching a pair of thick canvas work trousers for a timber haulage driver.

Her face was two inches from the cloth.Scritch.

Scratch.She pulled the bone needle through, her hand moving in a slow, jerky arc.

Then she stopped.

Her arm stayed frozen in the air for five seconds, six seconds, ten seconds.She didn’t make a sound.

But she dropped the bone needle.

It fell into the dirt between her feet with a faint thud .She bent down, her fingers blindly sweeping the packed earth, feeling for the tiny sliver of bone.

Her hand brushed over it twice, three times, but her eyes—wide, milky, and completely unfocused—were staring straight ahead at the smoke-blackened mud wall.”Mom,” I said.She didn’t turn her head. “Leo?

Is that you?””It’s me.”I knelt beside her and picked up the needle.

I held it out to her, but her hand stayed floating in the air, open, searching the empty space three inches to the left of my wrist.”The light’s bad tonight,” she murmured.

Her voice had no anger in it, no grief.

Just a flat, hollow tiredness that was far worse. “The oil must be bad.

It’s so dark in here.”The lamp was burning three feet from her nose.

The yellow flame was sputtering, throwing long, greasy shadows across her cheekbones.I looked at her hands.

The skin around her knuckles was split from the cold water she used for washing, and under her fingernails was a permanent crescent of black thread-wax.

Her right thumb had three fresh puncture marks where the needle had driven off-target into the meat.

The blood had dried into dark, crusty scabs.She was thirty-nine years old.I took the trousers out of her lap.

She let them go without a fight.

Her fingers curled into her apron, small and helpless like a newborn’s claws.”I’ll finish the seam,” I said.”You have your studying,

Leo,” she said, her voice trailing off as she looked toward the doorway, seeing nothing. “Mr.

Chen said you have the brain for the county school.

He said you could be a clerk in the tax office.””I finished the studying,” I lied.I took the bone needle, threaded it through the eye—it took me three tries because my own hands were shaking—and sat down on the cold dirt floor.I worked until midnight.

Every time the needle went through the stiff duck-canvas, my thumb throbbed in rhythm with my heart.

I thought about the county seat.

I thought about the bus station, and the small room

Elena had talked about, and the smell of clean paper in the senior high school library.And then

I looked at my mother, who had fallen asleep against the clay stove, her chin resting on her chest, her breath coming in thin, rattling whistles that sounded like dry leaves scraping across a stone floor.If

I went to the county seat, who would buy the lard for the saucer?

Who would pay the four fen for the salt?

Who would buy the sweet potatoes when the rain ruined the patch behind the shed?The world doesn’t care about your top-five test scores.

The world only cares about who is paying for the grease that keeps the axle turning.The next morning, the sky was the color of a bruised plum.I met

Elena by the old stone bridge where the river turned back on itself.

She was holding her school satchel against her chest, her hair pinned back with two plastic yellow clips she had bought at the

Year’s fair three years ago.When she saw me walking toward her, her face lit up.

Then she looked down at my feet.I was wearing my old black rubber plimsolls.

The split toes were visible again, gray and bare against the damp mud.She blinked, confused. “Where are the green ones?

Did you leave them at home?

Someone will steal them if you leave them in the hut.””I took them to the shoemaker near the grain depot this morning,” I said.

My voice sounded flat, even to my own ears.

I was reading the prices off a chalk-board at the salt shop.”Why?””He gave me fifteen yuan for them,” I said. “He’s going to resell them to a truck driver’s boy from the upper township.”Elena froze.

The small, hopeful smile that had been hovering on her lips flickered once and died.

Her fingers tightened around the strap of her canvas satchel until her knuckles turned white.”You… you sold them?” she whispered.”I need the fifteen yuan,” I said.

I looked at the brown water churning in the eddy below the bridge.

A dead bamboo raft was trapped in the swirl, spinning round and round, going nowhere. “My mother can’t see the needle anymore,

I’m going to work for

Harlan’s brother.

He’s taking a haulage truck down to the border next week.

He needs someone small to load the timber crates and watch the tail-gate.””No,” she said.

It wasn’t a cry; it was a small, choked sound, like a bird getting stepped on. “No,

You promised.

The exams are in two months.

Chen said—””Mr.

Chen doesn’t buy our rice,” I cut her off.

I didn’t mean to sound mean, but the words came out sharp and jagged, like broken glass. “Mr.

Chen lives in a brick house with a tin roof and drinks tea from a glass cup.

He can talk all he wants.””I gave you my father’s money!” she shouted suddenly, her voice cracking as tears spilled over her lashes, making dirty tracks down her dusty cheeks. “He hit my mother last night,

He found out the tobacco tin was gone and he hit her with a bamboo pole!

I took that beat for you!

And you sold them for fifteen yuan?!”The air between us went dead and cold.I felt a surge of hot, bitter shame rise up my neck, so violent

I was going to throw up right there on the bridge.

I wanted to reach out, to grab her shoulders, to tell her that

I had the fifteen yuan in my pocket, that

I was going to use eight of it to buy a bag of white rice and seven of it to buy her mother a bottle of safflower oil for the bruises.But

I softened now, if

I took her hand and let her cry into my shoulder,

I would stay.

I would sit in that classroom for two more months, wearing split rubber shoes, watching my mother go completely stone-blind in the dark, pretending that a piece of paper from the county seat was going to save us.”Go to school,

Elena,” I said softly, turning my back on her before she could see my own eyes. “Go to the county seat.

Get your aunt to find you a room.””I hate you,” she sobbed behind me, her voice shaking with a terrible, helpless rage. “I hate you,

I hope you drown in that river!”I didn’t turn around.

I walked down the embankment toward the timber yard, my bare toes poking out of the split rubber, feeling every sharp stone in the road.Behind me, the reverse river kept turning its dark, muddy circle, pulling everything down into the quiet where nobody has to see a thing.