The Dog (15 page)

He set out for the post office, stopping to pick up an egg-and-scallion crepe from a street vendor he knew, and still arrived before the doors were opened. Bicycle postmen streamed out of the alley adjoining the building. By the time the doors opened at eight, he was surrounded by a crowd of early birds balancing parcels in their arms. They all went inside together and assembled in a rough line, each one ready to dash for the window should this tenuous civility break down. In February the year before, the government had declared the eleventh of every month Queuing Day, an attempt to reduce the scrums that formed wherever people congregated to wait their turn at a window. It was May, and as the summer Olympics got closer, rhetoric had increased, and people did their best to satisfy the rules, but no one expected the newfound order to survive once the foreigners had gone home.

Only one window was open, and Yang kept eyeing a wooden table set up in the corner of the lobby. When it was Yang's turn, he told the clerk what he was there for and she called into the back, then directed Yang to the table. Another postal worker struggled through a door with a steel voting box held to his chest. He crashed it onto the wooden table, the steel biting into the wood, the metal table legs scraping across the stone floor. The worker settled into the chair behind the table, sighed, and motioned for Yang to step up.

“Donations for the Red Cross?” Yang said.

The employee behind the table nodded mournfully. Yang wondered if he had lost relatives in the earthquake. Or maybe he'd merely gotten into character when his boss told him to man the donation box. Some people were like that. Given a chore, there was no limit to what they'd do to succeed. Yang had planned to give three hundred, but he stuffed one thousand yuan into the slot and left without a word.

While he'd been waiting inside, the PLA had erected three green canvas canopies on the sidewalk, each one bearing a poster-board sign with blood types. A young man in fatigues and a Red Cross armband ran up to him.

“Sir, what blood type?”

“I've just made a donation,” Yang said.

The young man narrowed his eyes. “Blood?”

“Money. To the Red Cross,” Yang said, pointing at the soldier's armband. “I gave blood yesterday.”

“You gave blood yesterday?”

“At Beida. Beida Hospital.”

The soldier leaned in to Yang like a prosecutor trying to catch a witness in a lie. “At Beida Hospital?”

“That's what I said.”

“Whole blood or plasma?”

“What do you mean?” Yang asked.

“Which did you donate?” the recruit said, his voice rising. “Blood or plasma?”

Yang wasn't entirely sure, but he said, “Whole blood.”

“Good. You can donate plasma.”

Yang pulled up his sleeve to show the bruise.

Glancing down at Yang's arm only long enough to confirm that it was, in fact, an arm, the recruit said, “You're the picture of health. Why are you trying to wriggle out of this? Don't you care about your comrades in Sichuan?” People were staring. Comrades? Who used that word anymore?

“Where do I go?” Yang said. The recruit grabbed his arm and pulled him over to an officer in a lab coat, then double-timed it back to the sidewalk.

“Quite a trapper you have there,” Yang said.

“Blood type,” the lab coat said.

All business, Yang thought.

The lab coat had to stick his arm four times to get a vein, and by the time the needle was in, Yang was ready to strangle the stone-faced bastard. An hour later, he was unceremoniously dismissed, his right hand pressing a hunk of gauze to his arm, the left clutching a bean cake. He couldn't stop yawning and his stomach was an empty pit, and he got in line at the nearest noodle shop. The TV was going in the corner: scenes of rubble, children's backpacks, more footage of distraught mothers throwing themselves against blank-faced fathers. Yang tried not to watch.

A construction crew was hunched shoulder to shoulder around the shop's flimsy linoleum tables. They parted to allow Yang a place without breaking the shoveling motion of their chopsticks. Yang nosed into his bowl.

The heat from the smooth porcelain warmed his fingers, and after he'd eaten most of the noodles, he began to feel more like himself. He wished someone would turn off the television, and he tried to tune it out as he ate, but it was hard to ignore. Then his phone began to ring.

“Better get it,” his neighbor said, smiling. “Might be the office.” Some other guys laughed. It was an offhand remark, but Yang understood its meaning, and it set his teeth on edge. The men sharing the table with him wore dusty canvas jackets with heavy gloves jammed into the chest pockets, and here he was in a button-down shirt and pressed trousers. But his arms were as sinewed as any man's at the table. He made a fist. He could teach anyone there to operate a thirty-ton H-frame press. He hadn't forgotten.

The phone stopped, then started up again.

“Sounds urgent,” the construction worker said.

Yang backed away from the table to take the call.

It was Gong. “Back's better?” she said.

“Ah, it's better, thanks.”

“Where are you?”

“On my way to work.” On a normal day he'd have been at the factory since just after dawn, plowing through production logs and calling customers.

“Where are you?”

“Noodle shop,” Yang said.

“You sound funny,” Gong said.

Yang knew the construction workers were listening. “On my way,” he said, and hung up. Then, as a precaution, he turned the phone off.

The TV droned on over the slurping of noodles. Back in the kitchen, the cook was whipping a rope of dough through the air, strands multiplying as he strung the noodles like yarn on his fingers, then a twist and smack against the counter and into the boil. The cook's arms were loose, extensions of the noodles themselves, and he proceeded through the operation with so little attention to what he was doing that Yang felt no shame in staring. There was an automatic quality to his movements, the thoughtless perfection of repetitive motion, the perfect state, Yang thought, of doing without thinking. All his life, thinking had gotten him in trouble. When he'd acted on impulse, he'd always been rewarded.

He hadn't noticed that one of the construction workers was standing next to him.

“This is sick stuff, eh?” the man said, pointing at the television.

“Yeah,” Yang said, still watching the cook.

“I'd have expected better from Yao Ming. But he probably eats white bread and speaks English at home,” the man said.

Yang nodded absently. “Now,” he ventured slowly, “what is it that Yao's done?” he said, only just then turning to see that the basketball star was on-screen.

“Cheap bastard's only pledged five hundred thousand yuan to the relief effort.”

“I see,” Yang said.

“He's going to miss five hundred thou like I'd miss a fen.”

“True,” Yang said. “He's in a hard position.”

The man cocked his head and took in Yang's clothes and shoes. “I don't see what's so hard about it,” he said. “But I guess you guys have got to stick together.”

“I haven't played ball in years,” Yang said, but the construction worker didn't laugh. He hadn't meant to defend Yao, but Yang suddenly felt that he'd rather be misunderstood. “What a man does with his money is his own business,” Yang said.

“How much have you given?” the man said.

Yang looked back at him blankly. He presented both arms and pulled up his sleeves.

“Blood?” His mates turned around and Yang was aware of their eyes on him.

“You look like you might be good for five hundred thousand,” one of them said.

“I've already made my donation,” Yang said, moving toward the door. “I've done my part.”

“Keep walking, asshole,” someone shouted as he hustled out the door. “Say hi to Yao Ming for us.”

Yang walked back to the post office and donated another two thousand yuan.

Then he caught the 451 bus to the industrial park in Fengtai District, where his factory was located.

His partner, Rabbit, a middle-aged number cruncher whose round black glasses would have been more at home on a French painter, met him at the industrial park gate. Rabbit seemed always to be bathed in light sweat, no matter the temperature, which made customers nervous, but he was good under pressure and had an elephant's memory. His hair was neatly combed in the front but in back looked slept-on. Every day he wore the same brown tie that, with the perennial bags beneath his eyes, gave him the harried air of a salaryman who'd barely survived his latest bender. Yang and Rabbit had known each other since childhood and Yang recognized that it was all a ruse, Rabbit's mannered fumbling, the rumpled bedsheets he called clothes. Rabbit was a hard, calculating man. He'd worked the same fields as Yang in the days when school had consisted of memorizing passages of revolutionary poetry. In another life, he'd have become a professor of mathematics, but history had conspired against him. Yang understood the machines and tended to customers and Rabbit kept the books and dealt with the men on the floor. He had the common touch.

“What's the good word?” Yang said.

“Come on, come on,” Rabbit said, holding Yang's arm as they walked toward the factory. “You picked the wrong day to leave for lunch, pal. You should have seen this place. The lights were swaying like a fat lady's tits. I can't believe you weren't here. Sounded like a tank battalion rolling through the place. The boys were scared to death. Zone Chief Zhou's been calling for you.”

“What's he want?”

“Donations. The zone committee's hitting up the workers when they leave at the end of shift, and the workers' union has a separate donation drive. These guys' danweis are pushing for donations, and their kids all came home from school yesterday asking for money. It's chaos in there. There was a fistfight in the locker room this morning—one of the Huis said that he'd donate five kuai but no more because none of his people lived in Sichuan, and Brother Chu—you know Chu Pi, from Baiduizi—he slams this Hui against a locker and next thing you know, Brother Chu has a broken nose and half the room's standing on top of the Hui. This isn't good. We're going to end up all over the papers.”

“Idiots,” Yang said, quickening his pace. “I thought Chu Pi had some sense.”

“He claims it was his patriotic duty,” Rabbit said. “Meanwhile, we're losing ten thousand an hour while they're standing around waving their dicks at each other.” Rabbit pushed through a pair of heavy fire doors and looked over at Yang. “You hear about Yao Ming?” he said, a wry grin on his face.

“I heard,” Yang said.

“Cheap bastard,” Rabbit muttered as he pushed through another pair of doors and they hustled past the men's toilets and the men's locker room, through another pair of fire doors that opened to the factory floor. The space was heavy with silence. Lit like a subway car and as long as a soccer field, the factory floor usually vibrated slightly. Searing noise forced everyone to wear ear protection, but without the mechanical thrum that marked time twenty-four hours a day at full production, the workers' voices rose and fell like winking stars in the black sky.

Yang and Rabbit climbed the metal stairs to the platform outside their office. Yang rapped his knuckles against the metal railing until the workers milling around below turned their faces upward, most squinting as if looking into the sun. A couple of the guys took off their hard hats.

“Where's Brother Chu Pi?” Yang shouted, surveying the crowd.

“At the hospital,” someone shouted back.

Yang nodded. “Gentlemen,” he began. He had no idea what he was going to say to still the men's spirits. This made about as much sense as trying to talk away the rain. Yang heard the purring of an air compressor and, somewhere in the thermoforming area, the tinging of cooling metal. He cleared his throat and began again. “Gentlemen, our country is suffering. We are lucky to have been spared—” He stopped, aware that among his men there would be those with relatives in the South. “Those of you who are concerned for your families—I am concerned for your families, too. Don't ignore the fact that our factory is still standing and we have our lives. We can help best by keeping production high.”

Some of the men clapped weakly.

“That is the best thing for China. Maintain production,” Yang said, drawing out the words.

“Why?” came a voice from the back.

“Isn't it obvious?” Yang said. But it wasn't obvious even to him, and at that moment he caught a whiff of his own woolly sweat wafting up, and found himself considering a wild notion: he should bus the entire workforce to Sichuan to aid in the recovery effort. But by the time they got there, the men would have been drunk for two days. They'd have beaten each other to a pulp and would get off the bus in worse shape than the quake survivors. “If we fight about small things,” he shouted, “we miss opportunities to help. This is not about fighting. This is about helping.”

Rabbit pushed his glasses up onto his nose, leaned over the railing, and shouted, “And you're all going to help run this factory out of business if you don't get your lazy asses back to work, and then where will you be?”

A wave of laughter went up from the men. Rabbit had a way with them. A balled-up rag flew out of the crowd. Rabbit snatched it from the air and dramatically shook his fist at the men. “Get back to work before we call in the riot police on you assholes,” he said.

“What are you going to do to aid the victims?” someone shouted.

“We're doing plenty,” Rabbit shouted back.

“This isn't funny! We're making personal donations,” the worker shouted, “so where's yours?”

Another man said, “My wife's factory is covering her personal donations!”