Captain Zheng Runs Toward the River With a Typewriter

The Captain Took the Wrong Case

Captain Zheng stole the typewriter while my aunt was turning squid over the grill, and I chased him with a bamboo skewer still in my hand.

That was twenty-two years ago, when Ningxia Night Market smelled, to me, mostly of hot sugar and opportunities to escape homework. I was sixteen. The captain was sixty-three, though I learned that later, along with several other things I should have known before shouting “Thief!”

He moved astonishingly fast for a man carrying twelve kilograms of German machinery.

“Blue shirt!” I yelled. “Stop him!”

A woman selling papaya milk stepped into his path. He turned sideways, lifted the case over a little girl’s head, and kept going.

“Young man,” he called back, “you are making this considerably harder.”

“Put it down!”

“Then catch up!”

My aunt sold grilled squid at night and secondhand household goods whenever somebody gave her any. The typewriter had arrived that afternoon, its black enamel worn smooth beneath the space bar. She had told me not to let anyone touch it.

Now someone was taking it toward the river.

I caught his sleeve at a crossing. Traffic grumbled past; a delivery scooter smelled of scorched oil.

“My aunt will call the police.”

“Good. Tell them Dadaocheng landing. Then tell them a maintenance pontoon has broken loose.”

He pulled a small ferry captain’s license from his shirt pocket. The photograph showed the same flat eyebrows and broad nose, although the photographed man looked considerably less annoyed.

“Zheng Guowei,” he said. “You can report me properly.”

“Why do you need a typewriter?”

He looked toward the dark gap beyond the buildings.

“I don’t. I need what’s inside.”

At sixteen, that sounded exactly like something a thief would say.

Something Heavier Than Paper

I followed him because I wanted the typewriter back. I stayed beside him because he made me carry one end.

“Don’t swing it,” he said.

“Then stop running.”

Beyond the market, the air lost its frying smell. We crossed toward the riverside, where bicycles clicked over paving joints and a distant boat horn gave one flat complaint.

My phone rang. Auntie.

“I’ve got him,” I said.

“Got who?”

“The man with the typewriter.”

“Did he take the case?”

“Yes!”

“Put him on.”

I held out the phone. Captain Zheng listened while walking.

“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. We’ll sort it out afterward.”

He returned it before she could speak to me.

“She knows you?”

“She knows everybody.”

At the landing, he set the case beneath a light and snapped its catches. Inside sat the typewriter, cushioned with a striped towel.

He stared at it.

Then he said something I had never heard an adult say in front of a stranger’s child.

“What?” I demanded.

“Wrong case.”

He owned an identical one. His contained a portable marine battery, leads, and a work light. He had left it beside my aunt’s stall while buying dinner, then answered a frantic call from a maintenance worker.

“You grabbed ours.”

“Yes.”

“So you’re not stealing it.”

“An excellent discovery. Help me put it back.”

His own phone buzzed. He answered, listened, and stopped closing the lid.

“How many?” he asked.

The reply crackled loudly enough for me to hear.

“Three. The boy’s with us. We can’t get the outboard started.”

The captain looked across the water. Upstream, a white work light tilted, vanished, then appeared again.

“Stay away from the edge,” he said into the phone. “I’m coming.”

The Boat That Would Not Wake

His ferry lay at the outer berth, a small passenger boat with scraped white rails. A notice hung across its boarding gate.

OUT OF SERVICE — STARTER BATTERY FAULT

“That seems important,” I said.

“It is.”

He unlocked the gate. I brought the typewriter aboard before he could tell me not to.

From the wheelhouse he called the emergency services, giving our position and the pontoon’s last known location. Then he opened an engine hatch.

A sour, metallic warmth rose from below.

“Starter’s sound,” he said. “Battery won’t hold enough charge. I was bringing another.”

“I could run back.”

He watched the work light moving downstream.

“Not enough time.”

We could hear a man shouting now. The pontoon had been moored beside repair works upstream; something had struck its temporary mooring after dark. Two workers and one worker’s young son were aboard.

Captain Zheng tried the starter.

Clack.

Nothing.

He looked toward the ferry’s stern, then at the typewriter case.

“How well can you follow instructions?”

“Better when people explain them.”

“Fair.”

He showed me the heavy stern line, already looped around a bollard ashore. The current pressed against the ferry’s side.

“We can let her swing out on that line. Get the bow into the current. The engine has an emergency hand-start, but I need both hands below. You’ll steer.”

“I’ve never—”

“Left is left. Right is right. Small movements.”

He pulled out the hand-start mechanism. Its removable crank was missing.

For a moment neither of us spoke.

Then his eyes dropped to the typewriter’s carriage-return lever.

“Your aunt,” he said, “is going to charge me a fortune.”

With a wrench and screwdriver, he stripped off the lever and its mounting bracket.

I watched a perfectly good machine become a collection of parts.

A Narrow Piece of River

I cannot claim the typewriter lever fitted neatly. It did not. Captain Zheng clamped it to the starting shaft with a small adjustable wrench, tested it, and wrapped his palm in a rag.

“Stand clear.”

His first pull produced a cough. The second tore the rag.

On the third, the engine caught with a hammering roar.

The makeshift handle flew from his hand and struck the bulkhead.

He shut his eyes for one breath, then climbed into the wheelhouse.

“You’re bleeding,” I said.

“Later.”

We released the stern line and pushed into the current.

The pontoon appeared broadside ahead of us, its little shelter shuddering. A man in orange work clothes waved both arms. Beside him, another held a boy against his chest.

Beyond them stood a bridge pier.

Captain Zheng throttled back.

“Why are we slowing?”

“Because hitting them quickly won’t help.”

He brought the ferry alongside the pontoon’s downstream corner. Rubber fenders squealed. I threw a line, missed, hauled it back with burning palms, and threw again.

The worker caught it.

“Don’t tie us together!” the captain shouted. “Just hold us close!”

The first man climbed across. The second passed him the boy.

Then the gap opened.

I grabbed the child’s life jacket as his shoes scraped down our hull. His weight nearly pulled me over the rail.

A broad hand closed around my belt.

“Knees down,” Captain Zheng said beside my ear.

I dropped. The boy landed on top of me, gasping fish-breath into my face.

The last worker jumped.

“Let go!”

The line whipped free. Captain Zheng ran back to the controls and turned us away.

Behind us came a deep wooden crack.

I looked around once. The pontoon had struck the pier. Its shelter folded slowly, almost politely, into the river.

The Cost of a Return Lever

By the time we reached the landing, rescue lights were spilling red across the water.

The boy would not release my shirt. His father peeled his fingers loose one at a time, murmuring into his hair.

Captain Zheng gave his account, showed the officers the ruined starting crank, and accepted a dressing around his hand without looking at it.

My aunt arrived carrying his battery case.

I stepped between her and the open typewriter.

“It was necessary,” I said.

She looked at the loose screws, the bent lever, the black machine lying crookedly on its towel.

“Apparently.”

“I’ll pay,” said the captain.

“You already did.”

He frowned.

She took an envelope from her apron and handed it to him. Inside was a receipt and a sheet of thick paper.

For Captain Zheng, who gave me my first job and never once made me feel like cheap help. Happy retirement. — Shufen

He read it twice.

“You said it belonged to a customer.”

“Otherwise you’d have argued about the price.”

My aunt had worked summers on his ferry before opening her stall. He had once mentioned wanting to write down his river stories, on a machine without messages, updates, or a screen.

I stared at her.

“You told me not to let anyone touch it.”

“I meant customers.”

Captain Zheng sat on the boarding step. His bandaged hand rested on the broken case.

Then he began to laugh.

---

Years later, I helped him type those stories. The repaired carriage lever sat slightly crooked, and every return made a small metallic click.

He insisted we begin with the rescue.

“Start with your mistake,” he told me.

“Yours happened first.”

He considered that, then fed in a clean sheet.

“Good,” he said. “We already have an argument worth reading.”