Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (66 page)

At supper that afternoon your wife maintained the proper attitude — not too cold and not too hot — of a deputy county chiefs wife. As enthusiastic host, Jinlong made it clear who was the head of this family. But Ximen Huan was the liveliest person at the table, and the way he dealt with banquet etiquette showed what a sharp-witted boy he was. Since disciplining his son was not a concern of Jinlong’s, Ximen Huan remained out of control. He poured himself a glass of the liquor and then another for Kaifang. “Here, Cousin Kaifang,” he said with a stiff tongue, “drink this. I want to talk to you about something—”

Your son looked over at your wife.

“Don’t look at her — we boys make up our own minds at times like this. Here, to you, a toast!”

“That’s enough, Huanhuan,” Huzhu said.

“Go ahead and touch it with your lips,” your wife said to your son.

So the two boys clinked glasses. Huanhuan tipped his head back and drained his glass, then held the empty glass out to Kaifang, and said:

“Drink out of. . . out of respect.”

So Kaifang touched his lips to the liquor and set down his glass.

“You . . . that’s not how a pal does things—”

“That’s enough,” Jinlong announced as he tapped his son on the head. “Stop there. Don’t try to force people to do something they don’t want to do. Trying to get somebody to drink doesn’t make you a man!”

“Okay, Papa . . . I’ll do as you say.” Huanhuan set down his glass, took off his wristwatch, and set it down in front of Kaifang. “This is Swiss-made, a Longines,” he said. “I swapped my slingshot to a Korean businessman for it, now I’d like to trade it for that dog of yours.”

“No way!” your son said staunchly.

Huanhuan was unhappy, of course, but he didn’t make a scene.

“I’m willing to bet,” he said just as staunchly, “that you’ll make the trade one day.”

“No more of that, son,” Huzhu said. “You’ll be going to town in a few months to start middle school, and you can see the dog when you visit your aunt.”

And so the topic of conversation around the table turned to me. “I find it hard to believe,” your mother said, “that a litter of puppies could all be so different.”

“My son and I are lucky to have this dog,” your wife said. “His dad is wrapped up in his work day and night, and I have my job, so it’s up to the dog to watch the house. He also takes Kaifang to school and picks him up in the afternoon.”

“He really is an awesome animal,” Jinlong said as he picked up a braised pig’s foot and threw it to me. “Dog Four,” he said, “don’t be a stranger just because you’re part of a well-to-do family.”

The smell of that pig’s foot was enticing, and I heard my stomach rumble. But then I looked over at my brother dogs and let it lie there.

“They really are different,” Jinlong said emotionally. “Huan-huan, you can learn some things from that dog.” He picked up two more pig’s feet with his chopsticks and tossed them to Dog One and Dog Two. “To be a real man you have to behave like a great one.”

My brothers tore into the meat they’d been given, gobbling it up so fast their throats made funny sounds. But I let mine lie there as I fixed my eyes on your wife. When she gestured it was all right to eat, I took a tentative bite and chewed it, slowly and noiselessly. Someone had to preserve a dog’s dignity.

“You’re right, Papa,” Huanhuan said as he retrieved his wrist-watch. “I want to act like someone from a great family.” He got up and went into his room. He came out again with a hunting rifle.

“Huanhuan,” Huzhu shouted in alarm, “what are you doing?” She stood up.

Ximen Jinlong just sat there unflappably, a smile on his face. “I’d like to see what my son’s made of. Is he going to shoot his uncle’s dog? That’s no way to be a virtuous man. Or will he shoot our and his aunt’s dogs? That’d be even worse!”

“You underestimate me, Papa,” Huanhuan said angrily. He shouldered the rifle, and though he could barely support it, the move showed he’d had practice, was a bit of a prodigy. Then he hung his expensive watch on the apricot tree, backed off ten paces, and expertly slammed a cartridge into the chamber. An adult sneer settled on his face. The wristwatch glittered in the bright noonday sun. I heard Huzhu’s fearful screams retreat into the distance, while the sound of the watch had a profoundly affecting quality Time and space seemed to freeze into a blinding beam of light, as the ticking sound created the image of an enormous pair of black scissors cutting the beam of light into sections. Huanhuan’s first shot went wide of the mark, leaving a white scar in the tree trunk. His second shot hit the target. As the bullet smashed the watch into a thousand pieces —

The numbers crumbled. Time was shattered.

Jinlong phoned to tell me that our mother was desperately ill. But the minute I stepped in the door, I realized he’d tricked me.

Mother was ill, all right, but not seriously. Aided by her prickly-ash cane, she made it over to a bench in the western corner of the living room. Her head, now totally gray, quaked continuously, and murky tears slid down her cheeks. Father was sitting to her right, but far enough away that a third person could sit between them. When he saw me walk in the door, he took off one of his shoes, jumped to his feet, and, with a muffled roar, slapped me across the face with its sole. My ears rang, I saw stars, and my cheek stung like crazy I couldn’t help but notice that when he jumped to his feet, his end of the bench flew up and Mother fell first to the floor and then backward. Her cane swung out straight, like a rifle aimed at my chest. I remember calling out “Mother!” and wanting to run over and help her up, but I stumbled backward instead, all the way to the door, where I sat down on the lintel. Just when I felt a pain shoot up from my tailbone, I fell backward, and just when it felt like my head was cracked on the concrete step, I wound up lying on my back, head down, feet up, half in and half out of the room.

No one offered to help, so I got up on my own. My ears were still ringing and there was a metallic taste in my mouth. I could see that Father had put so much into the slap he was reeling. But once he’d regained his balance, he charged me again with the shoe. Half his face was blue, half was purple; green sparks seemed to shoot from his eyes. He’d experienced plenty of anger over a lifetime of hardships, and I was very familiar with how he looked when he was angry. But there were lots of new emotions mixed into his anger this time: extreme sadness and immense shame, to mention just two. He hadn’t slapped me with his shoe just for show. No, he’d put everything he had into it. If I hadn’t been in the prime of my life, with good, hard bones, that slap could have changed the shape of my face. As it was, it rattled my brain, and when I got to my feet, I was not only dizzy, I even forgot for a moment where I was. The figures in front of me seemed weightless, like will-o’-the-wisps, ghostly floating images.

I think it was Jinlong who stopped the blue-faced old man from hitting me a second time. But even with a pair of arms around him, my father kept jumping up and down and squirming like a fish yanked out of the water. Then he threw the heavy black shoe at me. I didn’t try to get out of the way; my brain had fallen asleep on the job and forgot to tell my body what to do. I could only watch as the ugly thing flew at me like monster, but as if it were actually flying toward some other body It hit me in the chest and stayed there for a split second before falling clumsily to the floor. I probably thought of looking down at that strange, shoelike object, but the cobwebs in my head and the veil over my eyes kept me from doing such an inappropriate, meaningless thing. My left nostril felt hot and wet for a moment before a worm began wriggling above my upper lip. I reached up and touched it, and when I pulled my hand away, though I was still in a fog, I saw some green, oily stuff that gave off a dull glow on my finger. I heard a soft voice — was it Pang Ghunmiao?—whisper in my ear: Your nose is bleeding. As the blood flowed, a crack opened up through the fog in my brain, letting in a cool breeze that spread its coolness throughout, until I was finally able to emerge from my idiocy. My brain went back to work, my nervous system returned to normal. This was my second bloody nose within two weeks. The first was when I’d been tripped by one of Hong Taiyue’s volunteer activists in front of the county government office building, and I’d sprawled on the hard ground like a hungry dog going after a pile of shit. Ah, now I remember. I saw Baofeng help Mother to her feet. Slobber was running down her chin on the twisted half of her face.

“My son,” she said in a barely intelligible voice. “Don’t you dare hit my son—”

Mother’s prickly-ash cane lay on the floor like a dead snake. She was struggling with such astonishing strength that Baofeng couldn’t hold her without help. By the look of it, she wanted to go pick up her dead-snake cane, and when that became clear to Baofeng, she reached out her foot, without letting go of Mother, and dragged the cane closer, then quickly bent down, picked it up, and put it in Mother’s hand. The first thing she did was point the cane at Father, who was still wrapped up in Jinlong’s arms, but her arm lacked the strength to control it, and it fell to the floor again. So she abandoned violence and railed at Father, her words muffled but understandable:

“Don’t you dare hit my son, you mean . . .”

The unpleasantness continued for a while longer before peace was reestablished. The cobwebs disappeared. Father was crouching against the wall, holding his head in his hands. I couldn’t see his face, just his quill-like hair. Someone had put the bench back the way it was, and Baofeng was sitting on it, her arms still around Mother. Jinlong picked up the shoe and laid it on the floor in front of Father.

“At first I didn’t want to get involved in a scandal like this,” he said to me icily. “But when they asked me to, as a son I had no choice.” His arm described an arc from one parent to the other, and I saw that they’d done whatever they’d been moved to do, that now they were consumed with sadness and helplessness. That was when I spotted Pang Hu and Wang Leyun, who were sitting behind a table near the center of the room. The sight of them brought me crippling shame. Then I turned and saw Huang Tong and Wu Qiuxiang, sitting side by side on a bench against the eastern wall, and Huang Huzhu, who was standing behind her mother and drying her tears with her sleeve. Even in the midst of all that tension, I couldn’t help notice her captivatingly glossy, lush, thick, and mysterious hair.

“Everyone knows you want a divorce from Hezuo,” Jinlong said. “We also know all about you and Chunmiao.”

“You little blue face, you have no conscience,” Wu Qiuxiang said sobbingly as she made an attempt to come at me; Jinlong blocked her way, and Huzhu helped her sit back down. “What did my daughter ever do to you?” she asked. “And what makes you think she’s unworthy of you? Lan Jiefang, aren’t you afraid the heavens will strike you dead if you go through with this?”

“You think you can get married when you want and divorced when you want, is that it?” Huang Tong said angrily. “You were nothing when Hezuo married you, and now that you’ve had a bit of success, you want nothing more to do with us. Well, you’re not getting off that easy. We’ll take this up with the local Party Committee or the Provincial Party Committee, all the way up to the Central Committee if necessary!”

“Young brother, divorce or not, that’s your business. By law not even your own parents have the last word in that. But this whole affair touches many lives, and if word got out, there’d be hell to pay. I want you to hear what Uncle and Aunty Pang have to say.”

I tell you from the bottom of my heart that I did not put much stock in what my parents or the Huangs had to say, but in the face of the Pangs, I felt like finding a hole and crawling into it.

“I shouldn’t be calling you Jiefang anymore, I ought to be calling you Deputy Chief Lan,” Pang Hu said sarcastically. He coughed a couple of times and then turned to his wife, who had grown quite heavy. “Which year was it they came into the cotton processing plant?” Without waiting for his wife to answer, he said, “It was 1976, when you, Lan Jiefang, were just a crazy, know-nothing kid. But I took you in and taught you how to evaluate cotton, a light but highly respectable job. Lots of youngsters who were smarter, better looking, and had a better background than you carried bundles of cotton weighing a couple of hundred
jin
apiece eight hours a day, sometimes nine. They were on their feet the whole time. You should know what kind of job that was. You were a seasonal worker who should have gone back to your village home after three months, but when I thought about how good your parents had been to us, I kept you on. Then, later on, when the county commune was looking for people, I argued your case until they agreed to take you. Know what the county commune leaders said to me at the time? They said, ‘Old Pang, how come you want to send a blue-faced demonic-looking youngster to us?’ Know what I said to them? I said, ‘He’s an ugly kid, I’ll give you that, but he’s honest and trustworthy, and he can write.’ Granted, you did a good job for them and kept getting promotions, which made me happy and proud. But you have to know that without my recommendation to the county commune and Kangmei’s behind-the-scene support, you wouldn’t be where you are today. You’re well off, so you want to exchange one wife for another. That’s nothing new, and if putting your conscience aside and subjecting yourself to the taunts and curses of everyone around you don’t mean a thing to you, then go ahead, get your divorce. What difference can that make to the Pang family? But, goddamn it, you’ve gone and taken our Chunmiao ... do you know how old she is, Lan Jiefang? She’s exactly twenty years younger than you, still a child. If you go ahead with this, then you’re lower than a beast! How will you be able to face your parents if you do this? Or your in-laws? Or your wife and son? Or us?”

By this time both Pang and his wife were crying. She reached over to dry his tears; he pushed her hand away and said with a mixture of sorrow and anger, “You can destroy yourself, Deputy Chief, there’s nothing I can do about that. But you cannot take my daughter with you!”