Big Breasts and Wide Hips (22 page)

The man standing before them was Sima Ku, assistant steward of Felicity Manor. “What are you doing out here?” He supplied his own answer before they could reply. “Ah, trying to break a hole in the ice. That's no job for girls!” He turned and shouted to the men in the sleighs, “Climb down off there, all of you, and help my neighbors chop a hole in the ice. We'll water these Mongol ponies while we're at it.”

Dozens of bloated-looking men climbed down off the sleighs, coughing and spitting. Several of them knelt down, took out hatchets, and attacked the ice —
pa pa.
Splinters flew as cracks opened up. One of the men, whose face sported whiskers, felt the edge of his hatchet and, after blowing his nose, said, “Brother Sima, at this rate, we could work till it was dark and not break through the ice.” Sima Ku knelt down, took out his own hatchet, and attempted a few tentative whacks on the ice. “Damn!” he cursed. “It's like steel plate.” The whiskered man said, “Elder brother, if we all empty our bladders on one spot, it'll melt open a hole.” “You dumb prick!” Sima Ku cursed just as exhilaration swept over him. He smacked himself on his rear end — his lips cracked open, for the wound in his backside hadn't yet completely healed — and said, “I've got it. Technician Jiang, come over here.” A bony little man walked up and looked into Sima Ku's face, not saying a word. But his expression made it clear that he was waiting for orders. “Can that thing you've got cut through ice?” Jiang grinned contemptuously and said in a squeaky, ladylike voice, “Like smashing an egg with an iron hammer.”

“Hurry up, then,” Sima Ku said excitedly, “and give me sixty-four — that's eight times eight — holes in this river of ice. Let my fellow villagers benefit from the presence of Sima Ku.” He turned to my sisters. “You girls stay put.”

Technician Jiang pulled back the canvas tarp covering the third sleigh, revealing two iron objects, painted green, in the shape of enormous artillery shells. With practiced movements, he freed a long plastic tube and wrapped it around the head of one of the objects. Then he looked at the round clock face; two pencil-thin red hands were ticking rhythmically. Finally, he put on a pair of canvas gloves, clicked a metal object that looked like a big opium pipe, attached to two rubber tubes, and gave it a twist. The thing sputtered into life. The technician's helper, a skinny boy who could not have been more than fifteen, lit a match and touched it to the sputtering ends of the tubes. Blue flames the thickness of silkworm chrysalises shot out with a loud
whoosh.
He shouted an order to the youngster, who climbed onto the sleigh and twisted the heads of the two objects, quickly turning the blue flames blindingly white, brighter than sunlight. Technician Jiang picked up one of the intimidating objects and looked over at Sima Ku, who squinted as he raised his hand high, then sliced it down. “Start cutting!” he shouted.

Jiang bent over at the waist and aimed the white flame at the frozen surface. Milky white steam jetted a foot or more into the air, accompanied by loud sizzles. His arm controlled the action of his wrist; his wrist controlled the direction of the enormous opium pipe; and the opium pipe spat out white flames that burned a hole in the ice. He looked up. “There's your hole,” he announced.

Somewhat doubtfully, Sima Ku bent down to look at the ice, and, sure enough, a chunk of ice the size of a millstone, surrounded by little chips, had been burned out of the surface, with river water swirling around it. Jiang then burned a cross in the chunk of ice with the white flame, dividing it into four pieces. When he stepped down on the detached pieces, each was carried away by the river below. Blue water gushed up from the neat hole.

“Neat,” Sima Ku praised the man, who was also the beneficiary of congratulatory looks from the men standing around him. “Now make some more holes for us,” Sima ordered.

Putting all his skills to work, Technician Jiang burned dozens of holes in the two-foot-thick ice covering the Flood Dragon River. They emerged in a variety of shapes: circles, squares, rectangles, triangles, trapezoids, octagons, and pear-blossom, all laid out like a page in a geometry textbook.

“Technician Jiang,” Sima Ku said, “you've tasted success! All right, men, back up on the sleds. We need to reach the bridge before dark. But first we'll water the horses from the Flood Dragon River!”

The men led their horses up to the holes to drink from the river, as Sima Ku turned to Second Sister. “You're the second daughter, aren't you? Well, go home and tell your mother that one of these days I'm going to crush that donkey bastard Sha Yueliang and return your elder sister to the mute.”

“Do you know where she is?” my sister asked boldly.

“Sha Yueliang took her with him to sell opium. Him and that donkey-shit band of his.”

Not daring to ask any more, Second Sister watched as Sima Ku climbed up on his sled and headed off toward the west at full speed, followed by the other eleven sleds. They made a turn at the stone bridge over the Flood Dragon River and shot out of sight.

My sisters, still immersed in the miraculous sight they had just witnessed, no longer felt the cold. They stared at all the holes in the ice, from triangles to ovals, from ovals to squares, and from squares to rectangles … as the river water soaked their shoes and quickly turned to ice. The fresh air rising out of the holes filled their lungs. Feelings of reverence for Sima Ku washed over my second, third, and fourth sisters. Now that my eldest sister had served as a glorious model, a thought began to form in Second Sister's immature brain — she would marry Sima Ku! But someone, it seemed, had warned her coldly that Sima Ku had three wives. All right, then, she thought, I'll be his fourth! Just then Fourth Sister shouted: “Sister, a big meat stick!”

The so-called meat stick was in fact a silver-skinned eel that had risen to the surface and was writhing clumsily in the water. Its snakelike head was the size of a fist, its eyes cold and menacing, like those of a ferocious snake. As its head broke the surface, bubbles oozing from its mouth popped in the air. “It's an eel!” Second Sister shouted, picking up her bamboo carrying pole and crashing it down on the head, the hook on the end sending water splashing. The eel's head fell below the surface, but floated right back up. Its eyes were smashed. Second Sister swung again; this time the eel's movements slowed and it stretched out stiffly. Throwing down her pole, Second Sister grabbed the head and dragged the eel out of the water. By then it was frozen stiff; it had indeed turned into a meat stick. The girls trudged home, with Third and Fourth Sisters carrying water and Second Sister carrying the hammer in one hand and the eel in the other.

Mother sawed off the eel's tail and cut the body into eighteen parts, each severed chunk hitting the floor with a thunk. Then she boiled the Flood Dragon River eel in Flood Dragon River water and produced a mouthwatering soup. Beginning that day, Mother's breasts were youthful again, though scars from the wrinkles mentioned earlier remained on the tips, like the crumpled pages of a book.

That night the delicious soup also lightened Mother's mood and put a saintly look back on her face, like the merciful expression of the Guanyin Bodhisattva or the Virgin Mary, with my sisters seated around her lotus perch. Her loving children were with her on that peaceful night. Northern winds howled over the Flood Dragon River, turning our chimney into a whistle. Ice-covered branches of the trees in the yard cracked as they swayed in the wind; an icicle broke free of the house eave and shattered crisply on the laundry stone below.

On that same wonderful night, Sima Ku was crossing the metal railroad bridge over the Flood Dragon River, some thirty li from the village, and on the verge of adding a new chapter to the history of Northeast Gaomi Township. That rail line was the Jiaoji Line, built by the Germans. The Wolf and Tiger Brigade warriors had fought a heroic, bloody battle, employing every conceivable tactic to slow down the construction, but in the end they'd been unable to stop the unyielding steel road from slicing through the soft underbelly of Northeast Gaomi Township, dividing it in two. In the words of their forebear Sima the Urn: Goddamn it, that's the same as slicing open the bellies of our women! The metal dragon had belched thick black smoke as it rolled through Northeast Gaomi, as if rolling right across our chests. Now the rail line was in the hands of the Japanese, who turned it to transport coal and cotton, ultimately for weapons and gunpowder to be turned on us.

Orion's Belt was drifting west; a crescent moon hung just above the treetops. A punishing west wind swept over the frozen river, evoking creaks and groans from the steel bridge as it swayed. It was a bitterly, almost demonically, cold night, so cold that the ice kept cracking to create cobwebs over the surface of the river. The cracks were louder than gunfire. Sima Ku's sled brigade reached the foot of the bridge and stopped at the river's edge. Sima Ku jumped down off his sled, his backside feeling as if it had been clawed by a cat. Dim starlight made the river glimmer slightly, but the sky between the stars and the ice was so black you couldn't see the fingers of your hand. He clapped his hands, the sound echoing around him from other clapping hands. The mysterious darkness energized and excited him. Later, when asked how he'd felt before destroying the bridge, he'd said, “Great, just like New Year's.”

His troops groped hand in hand up to the bridge, where Sima Ku climbed onto one of the stanchions, took a pickax from his belt, and hacked away at one of the supports. Sparks flew and loud clangs rang out. “Legs of a whore!” he cursed. ” Nothing but steel.” A shooting star streaked across the sky, trailing a long tail and hissing as it filled the sky with lovely blue sparks, momentarily lighting up the space between heaven and earth. Thanks to the light of the shooting star, he had a good look at the cement stanchion and steel supports. “Technician Jiang,” he shouted, “come up here!” With a boost from his comrades, Jiang climbed onto the stanchion, followed by his young apprentice. Clumps of ice clung to the stanchion like mushrooms, and as Sima Ku reached out to take the boy's hand, he slipped on the ice and crashed to the ground; the boy managed to stay atop the stanchion. Sima fell right on his backside, from which blood and pus had never stopped seeping out. “Oh, mother —” he screamed. “Dear mother, that hurts like hell!” His men ran up and helped him up off the ice. But that did not stop the screams of pain, screams loud enough to reach the heavens. “Elder brother,” one of them said, “you're going to have to bear it as best you can. Don't expose yourself.” That brought an end to the screams. As he stood there shuddering, Sima barked out an order: “Get on with it, Technician Jiang. Just make cuts in a few of them and we'll leave. The painkilling medication that damned Sha Yueliang gave me is only making it worse.” One of his men said, “Elder brother, I think that's what he had in mind, and you fell for it.” Sima replied testily, “Don't tell me you've never heard the saying that ‘when you're sick, any doctor will do'?” “Bear it the best you can, elder brother,” the man repeated. “I'll take care of the problem once we get home. There's nothing better for burns than badger oil. Works every time.”

Whoosh.
An explosion of blue sparks, white around the edges, erupted amid the bridge supports, so bright it brought tears to the men's eyes. Gaps in the bridge, bridge stanchions, steel supports, dogskin overcoats, foxskin caps, yellow sleds and Mongol ponies, and everything around the bridge came into full view, even a single hair that had fallen onto the ice. The two people on the bridge, Technician Jiang and the young apprentice, were hunkering down on the steel support like a pair of monkeys, their “big opium pipe” spewing white-hot flames as it cut into the metal. White smoke curled upward as the riverbed gave off the strangely fragrant odor of burning metal. Sima Ku watched the sparks and arc lights in rapt fascination, forgetting the pain in his backside. The sparking flames ate through the metal like silkworms consuming mulberry leaves. In hardly any time at all, a piece of the support fell from the bridge and stuck at an angle in the thick ice below. “Cut, cut, cut the fucking thing to pieces!” Sima Ku bellowed.

“It's nearly time, elder brother,” the man applying the badger oil to Sima Ku's injured backside said. “The train is due just before dawn.” A dozen or more randomly located steel bridge supports had been cut with the torch, which was still spewing blue and white flames under the bridge. “Those fuckers are getting off easy!” Sima Ku cursed. “Are you sure the bridge will collapse under the weight of the train?” “If I cut any more, I'm afraid the bridge might collapse of its own weight before the train even reaches it.” “All right, you can come down now. As for you men,” he said to the others, “help those two hardy fellows down and reward them each with a bottle of our liquor.” The blue sparks died out. The brigade members helped Technician Jiang and his apprentice down off the stanchion and onto one of the sleds. In the darkness just before dawn, the winds died out, turning the air bone-chilling cold. The Mongol ponies pulled the sleds tentatively through the darkness across the ice. Before they'd gone a mile, Sima Ku called them to a halt. “After a hard night's work,” he said, “it's time to sit back and watch the show.”

The sun had barely turned the edge of the sky red when the cargo train steamed up. The river glistened, the trees on both banks were glazed with gold and silver, the steel bridge sprawled silently across the river. Sima Ku rubbed his hands nervously as curses dripped from his mouth. The train clanged menacingly as it pressed down on them; when it neared the bridge, a loud whistle resounded between heaven and earth. Black smoke spewed from the engine, white mist flew from its wheels, the grinding of steel on steel made the men shudder in fear as the icy surface of the river trembled. The brigade members watched the train fitfully, the horses' ears pressed back against the mane on their necks. The loutish, vulgar train rushed up onto the bridge, which seemed to stand there loftish and unyielding. In a matter of seconds, the faces of Sima Ku and his men turned ashen, but seconds later, they were jumping up and down on the ice, whooping it up. Sima Ku's joyous shouts were the loudest of all, his jumps the highest, even given the seriousness of the injuries to his backside. The bridge collapsed in a matter of seconds, sending the engine and the load of railroad ties, steel rails, sand, and mud straight down. The engine hit one of the pilings, which also collapsed. The sound was deafening as chunks of ice bathed in the morning light, along with huge rocks, twisted metal, and shattered ties, flew high into the sky. Dozens of loaded rail cars accordioned up behind the engine with a roar; some fell into the river below, others sprawled across the tracks at rakish angles. Explosions began to erupt, starting from a car carrying high explosives and followed by detonated ammunition. The icy surface of the river split open, sending the water beneath gushing upward. Mixed with the water were fish, shrimp, even some green-shelled turtles. A booted human leg landed on the head of one of the Mongol ponies, nearly knocking it senseless and causing its front legs to crumple. A wheel from the train, which weighed hundreds of pounds, crashed into the ice, raising a geyser of water that fell muddily back to the surface. Powerful waves of sound turned Sima Ku deaf as he watched the Mongol ponies run crazily across the ice, dragging their sleds behind them. The brigade troops stood or sat in a daze, dark blood seeping out of some of their ears. He was shouting at the top of his lungs, but he couldn't hear himself; his men's mouths were open, as if they too were shouting, but he couldn't hear them either …