Pow! (21 page)

As she took things out of her cupboard, following my mother's list, she muttered, her voice growing louder and louder: ‘Yuzhen, no one lives like you two, getting by with nothing. I'm not talking about a houseful of furniture. You don't even own a spare set of chopsticks!’

‘You know our situation,’ Mother replied with a smile, ‘how we had to put all our money into building the house.’

Her cousin looked at Father disapprovingly: ‘Part of running a household is furnishing the basics. Always borrowing what you need is not the answer.’

‘It's important for us to get on his good side,’ Mother explained. ‘He is, after all, the village head, someone who oversees…’

‘I don't know how Lao Lan thinks, but after putting in a hard day's work at this, you might well wind up eating all the food yourself,’ her cousin carried on. ‘If I were him, I wouldn't go. Not in times like these. And certainly not for a paltry meal. If you want to get on his good side, take him a red envelope filled with money.’

‘I sent Xiaotong three times before he agreed to come.’

‘That might give Xiaotong some standing, but if you're going to have him over, do it right. He'll laugh if you give him common fare. Don't invite someone if you're afraid of spending money. Since you're set on hosting him, then
go ahead and spend. I know you too well. Even small change sticks to your ribs.’

‘People aren't mountains, they can change…’ Mother's face grew red as she struggled to hold on to her temper.

‘Except it's easier to change the course of a river than a person's nature.’ Mother's cousin was intent on making things hard for her.

Sun Changsheng was the one who snapped first. ‘That's enough!’ he growled at his wife. ‘If your mouth itches, rub it against the wall. You fart three times for every time you kowtow. Your good deeds don't make up for your bad behaviour. Why must you offend your cousin who only wants to borrow a few things?’

‘I'm just looking out for them,’ Mother's cousin defended herself.

‘She hasn't offended me,’ Mother hurried to appease him. ‘I know what to expect from her. I wouldn't have come if we weren't kin. It gives her the right to talk to me like that.’

Sun Changsheng took out a packet of cigarettes and handed one to Father: ‘Yes, who doesn't have to lower their head when they're beneath an eave?’

Father nodded, with no indication of whether or not he agreed.

I revisited the furniture-borrowing episode in my mind, from beginning to end, as a means of passing an excruciatingly long time. An inch or more of kerosene had burnt off in the lamp, and a long ash had formed on the wick of the candle left over from New Year's, but there was still no sign of Lao Lan. Father turned to look at Mother.

‘Maybe we should snuff out the candle?’ he said cautiously.

‘Let it burn,’ she said as she flicked the wick with her finger and sent the ash flying. The candle flared, brightening the room and adding to the sheen of the meat on the table, especially the captivating red skin of the barbecued chicken.

Jiaojiao and I ran to the cutting board, our eyes glued to Mother's hands as she sliced up the chicken; we were fascinated by how deftly she separated the meat from the bones. One drumstick was placed on the platter, and then the second.

‘Mother,’ I asked, ‘is there such a thing as a three-legged chicken?’

‘There might be,’ she smiled, ‘but what I'd really like to see is a four-legged one. That way, you could each have one to satisfy those hungry worms in your bellies.’

It was a bird from the Dong Family shop. They prepared only local, free-range chickens—not those stupid caged birds raised on chemical feed, with meat like cotton filling and bones like rotten wood. No, their chickens are smart—they live on weeds and seeds and insects, and grow up with nice. Firm meat and solid bones. First-rate nutrition and a wonderful taste.

‘But I heard Ping Shanchuan's son, Ping Du, say that even though the Dongs raise wild chickens, they fill them with hormones when they're alive and add formaldehyde when they're dead.’

‘So?’ asked Mother as she picked off a pinch of loose meat and put it into Jiaojiao's mouth. ‘Farmers have iron stomachs.’

Jiaojiao was her lively self again, and her relationship with Mother was improving all the time. As she opened her mouth for the meat, she kept her eyes on Mother's hand. Next, Mother picked a larger piece off the back and stuffed it into my mouth, skin and all. I swallowed it without chewing, so fast it seemed to slide down my throat of its own accord. Jiaojiao licked her lips with her bright red tongue just as Mother picked off another piece of chicken and put it into her mouth.

‘Be good, patient children for just a little longer,’ she said. ‘After our guest has finished, you can have what's left.’

Jiaojiao was still staring at Mother's hand.

‘That's enough,’ Father said. ‘Don't spoil her. Children need their manners, it's no good to spoil them.’

He went out and paced the yard for a moment.

‘It doesn't look like he's coming,’ he said when he returned. ‘I must have offended him terribly.’

‘I don't think so,’ Mother said. ‘He said he'll be here, and he will. Lao Lan means what he says.’ She turned to me. ‘What did he say to you, Xiaotong?’

‘How many times do I have to tell you?’ I complained. ‘“All right,” he said. “I'll be there, for your sake. You can count on it.”’

‘Should we send Xiaotong to remind him?’ Father asked. ‘Perhaps he's forgotten.’

‘No,’ Mother insisted. ‘He won't forget.’

‘But everything's getting cold,’ I said, growing more and more annoyed. ‘He's only the head of a little village.’

Father and Mother looked at me at the same time and smiled.

The son of a bitch is more than the head of a little village. I hear that the municipal government has designated Slaughterhouse Village as a new economic development zone in order to attract foreign investment. Factories and high-rise buildings are popping up out of the ground; a vast man-made lake has appeared out of nowhere and quickly become home to tourist skiffs shaped like swans and ducks. All round the lake fancy new villas are springing up, creating a sort of fairyland. The men who live in them drive fancy cars—Mercedes, BMW, Buick, Lexus or, at the very least, Red Flag. The women parade their purebreds—Pekingese, poodles, shar peis, papillons, some that look like sheep but aren't, even one that looks more like a tiger than a dog. A pair of mastiffs once dragged a fair-skinned woman with soft, white hands and a charmingly delicate appearance down to the lakeshore. The lovely ‘vacation wife’ was on her back, like she was doing the backstroke or ploughing a field. In today's society, Wise Monk, the best that labouring people can hope for is to make enough to live a decent life. Most never even manage that, satisfied if they have enough to eat and a means of keeping warm. Only the bold, the heartless and the shameless find ways to strike it rich. Take that bastard Lao Lan. If he wants money he gets it; if he wants fame he gets it; and if he wants status he gets it—what does that say about social equality? The monk just smiles. I know my anger isn't worth anything, sort of like a beggar venting his anger by grinding his teeth, but perhaps that's where I am now, and perhaps I'll take such things more calmly after shaving my head, becoming a monk and undergoing three years of Buddhist cultivation. But for now I'm just someone who says what's on his mind, and that, Wise Monk, is reason enough to take me on as a novice. If enlightenment eludes me, you can drive me out with your staff. Look, Wise Monk, that marauding Lao Lan has had a rifle sent over. I wonder if he really has the guts to turn the Wutong Temple that his ancestors built into a slaughterhouse. I'll bet he does. I know what he's
capable of. He's taken the big-bore rifle from the hands of his sweaty, panting assistant. To be precise, it ought to be called a musket. It doesn't look like much but it's a powerful weapon. My dieh had one of those in the past. Lao Lan is spewing filth, and those yellow eyes of his look like gold-plated balls. Don't be fooled by his suit and his polished shoes—he's still a thug, through and through. He looks at the ostriches; they cock their heads and look back at him. He pulls the trigger just as a gob of bird shit lands on his nose. He tucks his neck down into his shoulders, jerks the barrel into the air and sends a musket ball in a blast of flames across a broad swath of temple eaves. Amid the dying roar of the explosion rain down shards of broken tiles just beyond the temple door, no more than a couple of paces from where we're sitting. A cry of alarm escapes my lips but the Wise Monk remains seated peacefully, as if nothing has happened. Enraged, Lao Lan flings the musket to the ground and wipes the filth off his face with tissues handed to him by his assistant. Then he looks up into the sky, which is deep blue, nearly black, except where dark clouds gather. A scattered flock of white-bellied magpies loudly announces its passage from north to south. The fouler of Lao Lan's nose is a member of that flock. ‘That's magpie shit, Boss Lan,’ his assistant says, ‘and that's a good sign.’ ‘Enough of your arse-kissing
!’
snaps Lao Lan. ‘Magpie shit is still shit. Reload the musket. I'm going to blow every fucking one of those birds out of the sky.’ An underling rushes up, kneels on one knee—his right—and lays the musket across his upturned knee—his left. He opens the sleek powder horn and pours in a measure of powder. ‘More powder,’ Lao Lan commands. ‘Fill it up, damn it. I've had nothing but bad luck today. A couple of good shots should blast that away.’ As he bites down on his lip, the underling stuffs the powder into the barrel with a ramrod as Fan Zhaoxia walks up with the girl in her arms: ‘What sort of shitty birdbrain antics are you up to? Look what you did to our poor Jiaojiao
!’
My heart lurches when I hear that name. A mixture of rage and sorrow twists and turns its way into my head. They actually named their daughter Jiaojiao, the same as my little sister? Was it deliberate? And was it kindness or malice? Images of Jiaojiao's adorable face when she was healthy and her face twisted in pain just before she died flash through my mind. One of Lao Lan's underlings, a youthful boy with a girlish face, walks up and says with respectful earnestness: ‘Boss Lan, Madam, we shouldn't be wasting time here, we should be at the ceremony site getting the
camels ready. If they perform well, the reviews will be positive. As far as the ostriches are concerned, we can try again next year.’ Fan Zhaoxia gives the young man an approving look. ‘He's got the mind of a thug,’ she says of Lao Lan. ‘So what?’ Lao Lan fires back with an angry glare. ‘Where do you think we'd be today if I didn't? A rebellion by the effete will fail, even after a decade. A rebellion by thugs succeeds with a single shot. What are you waiting for? Give me that when you're finished
!’
he barks at the fellow loading the musket. The man hands it to him carefully with both hands. ‘Take Jiaojiao out of the way,’ Lao Lan says to Fan Zhaoxia, ‘and cover her ears. I don't want to damage her eardrums.’ ‘You're like a dog that can't stop eating shit,’ she grumbles as she backs away with the girl. The girl stretches out an arm and cries out shrilly: ‘Papa, I want to shoot too
!’
Lao Lan takes aim at the ostriches. ‘You flat-feathered fiends, you ingrates,’ he mutters, ‘all I asked of you was to dance. Well, you can go report to the King of Hell
!’
A fiery yellow ball explodes in front of him, followed by a deafening roar and a cloud of black smoke. As pieces of musket fly in all directions, the figure of Lao Lan stands transfixed for an instant before falling to the ground. Fan Zhaoxia shrieks and drops the child in her arms. Lan's men are stunned for a moment. Then they snap out of their stupor and rush to him, filling the air with shouts of ‘Boss Lan
!
Boss Lan
!’

Lao Lan's aides pick him up—his hands are a bloody mess, his face black with soot. ‘My eyes
!
Damn it, my eyes
!’
he screams through his pain, ‘I can't see
!
I can't see you now, Third Uncle
!’
Third Uncle means a great deal to the lousy bastard, but why shouldn't he? Most members of the previous generation of Lans were shot, and the few who survived died during the difficult years that followed. Only this unworldly third uncle occupies an iconic spot in his mind. His aides place Lao Lan in the back seat of the Buick; Fan Zhaoxia squeezes into the front with the girl in her arms, and the car makes its unsteady way up to the highway, where, with a blast of its horn, it speeds off to the west and runs smack into a contingent of stilt-walkers who scatter in confusion. One of them barely makes it out of the way, only to have a stilt sink into the mud and topple him to the ground. Several of his fellow walkers hop across the asphalt to extricate him from his troubles. All this reminds me of a Mid-Autumn Festival a decade ago, when my little sister and I scooped up locusts that were sticking their tails into the road's hard surface to lay eggs. My mother was dead by then and my father had been arrested, which effectively orphaned my sister and me. We were on our way to South Mountain to look for mortar shells, with the white moon rising in the east and the red sun setting in the west—in other words, dusk. We were hungry and miserable. A breeze rustled the leaves of nearby crops and autumn insects chirped in the grass—all sounds of desolation. We pulled locusts off the road stretching their abdomens as far as they'd go, then scrounged together some dry kindling, built a fire and flung the misshapen locusts into the flames, where they curled up and gave off a special fragrance. Wise Monk, this was an evil deed, I know that. Eating an egg-laying female locust is the same as eating hundreds of them. But if we hadn't eaten them we'd have starved. This is a problem I've never been able to resolve. Wise Monk gives me a pointed look whose meaning escapes me. The West City stilt-walkers, all employees of a restaurant called
Xiang Man Lou, wear white uniforms and chef's hats bearing the restaurant's name. Wise Monk, it's an establishment capable of offering a complete formal banquet, featuring both Chinese and Manchu delicacies. The executive chef, a disciple of Manchu palace chefs, is as skilful as you'd imagine him to be. But he's hot-tempered. A Hong Kong restaurant once tried to lure him away with a monthly salary of twenty thousand Hong Kong dollars, but failed. Japanese and Taiwanese tourists flock to the restaurant to sample its delicacies. These are the only occasions when he deigns to appear in the kitchen; the rest of the time he occupies a seat in the restaurant and drinks oolong tea from a small dark red teapot (all that tea has turned his teeth black). Well, the stilt-walkers are ill fated, for as soon as they leave the asphalt road their stilts stick in the grassy soil, and soon their formation is thrown into disarray. Their corresponding unit from East Town is a contingent of thirty or so marchers from the Lekoufu Sausage Factory, each of whom holds a red string attached to a big, red, sausage-shaped balloon. The pull of the balloons is strong enough to send the men up onto the balls of their feet, looking as if they could float into the blue sky at any minute.