The Garlic Ballads (22 page)

“I give up,” she heard Father say. “Tell Gao Ma to bring me ten thousand yuan. We’ll hand over the girl when he gives us the cash.”

Jinju smiled.

Gao Ma’s scowling son roared, “Let me out of here! Let me out this minute! What kind of mother wouldn’t even let her own son out?”

Her eyes bled. Pushing away the cool head of the chestnut colt, she said, “Don’t come out, child. Mother knows what’s best for you. What do you plan to do out here? Do you have any idea how tough life is?”

He stopped struggling. “What’s it like out there? Tell me.”

The chestnut colt tried to lick her face with its warm, purplish tongue. “Can you hear the cries of the parakeets, child?” she asked. “Listen carefully.”

His ears stood straight up as he concentrated on the sound. “Those are parakeets in Gao Zhileng’s yard—yellow ones, red ones, blue ones, every imaginable color. They’ve got curved beaks and topknots on their crowns. They eat meat, drink blood, and suck brains. Do you still have the nerve to come out, child?”

This struck fear into the boy, who drew into himself.

“Look, child, see how that broad expanse of garlic looks like a nest of poisonous serpents, all intertwined? They’re also meat eaters, blood drinkers, and brain suckers. Do you still have the nerve to come out, child?”

His hands and feet curled inward; his eyes frosted over.

“I wanted to come out and see the world when I was like you, child, but once I got here, I ate pig slops and dog food, I worked like an ox and a horse, I was beaten and kicked, I was even strung up and whipped by your grandfather. Do you still want to come out, child?”

He scrunched his neck down between his shoulders, becoming a virtual ball with staring, pathetic eyes.

“Child, your father’s a fugitive from justice, and his family is so poor they cant even raise rats. Your grandfather was struck down by a car, your grandmother has been arrested, and your uncles have divided up all our property. The family no longer exists—some members are gone, others are dead, and there’s no one to turn to. Do you still want to come out, child?”

The boy closed his eyes.

The chestnut colt stuck its head in through the open window to lick her hand with its warm tongue. The bell around its neck clanged loudly. She stroked its smooth head and sunken eyes with her free hand. The colt’s hide had the cool sheen of costly satin. Tears welled up in her eyes; there were also tears in the colt’s eyes.

The boy began to squirm again. “Mother,” he said, squinting, “I want to come out and look around. I saw a spinning fireball.”

“That’s the sun, child.”

“I want to look at the sun.”

“You can’t do that, child—its flames burn your mother’s flesh and skin.”

“I saw flowers in the fields, and smelled their perfume.”

“Those flowers are poisonous, child, and their perfume is a miasma. They will cause your mother’s death!’’

“Mother, I want to come out and stroke the red colt’s head.”

She reached up and slapped the horse, momentarily stunning it before it withdrew its head from the window and galloped away.

“There’s no colt, child—it’s an apparition.”

The boy squeezed his eyes shut and stopped moving.

She found some rope in the corner, tossed it over a beam, and made a noose in the other end. Then she fetched a stool and stood on it. The coarse fibers of the rope pricked her fingers. Maybe she should rub some oil on it. She was beginning to waver. Then she heard the colt whinny outside the window, and to protect the boy from any further shocks, she thrust her head through the noose and kicked the stool away. The colt stuck its head through the window again. She wanted to reach out and stroke its cool, glossy forehead, but she couldn’t lift her arms.

As Gao Ma scrambled over the wall, two shots rang out, raising puffs of smoke and sending tiny shards of the mud wall down on him. He stumbled into a pigpen, scattering muck in all directions and causing a couple of startled pigs to squeal and run around in panic. Not knowing which way to turn, he quickly crawled into the covered area. A loud buzz erupted above his head, and sharp pains tore at his cheeks and scalp. He jerked his head up and saw that he had disturbed a hornets’ nest hanging from the sorghum-stalk covering. With hundreds of agitated hornets descending on him like a yellow cloud, he flattened out in the muck, afraid to move. But, reminded that the police were right on his heels, he wrapped his arms around his head, wriggled back outside, grabbed the enclosure fence, and leapt over it, landing behind a woodpile. He quickly rolled out into the yard, jumped to his feet, and turned to head east, when someone grabbed him by the arm and held him fast. Panic-stricken, he looked up into the face of a fair-skinned man. Recognition set in almost at once: it was Schoolmaster Zhu from the local elementary school. Having suffered a broken pelvis at the hands of the Red Guards, Zhu could no longer stand straight; the frames of his glasses were held together with tape.

Gao Ma fell to his knees, like an actor in a soap opera, and pleaded for Schoolmaster Zhu to save him from the police, who were trying to arrest him in connection with the garlic incident.

Zhu grabbed his hand and led him into a dark room where chicken feathers and garlic leaves nearly covered the floor and a pickling vat filled with sweet-potato slops stood in the corner. “Climb in,” Zhu said.

Undeterred by the stench, Gao Ma climbed into the vat and squatted down, raising the level of slops to the rim, where it frothed noisily. He was up to his neck in the stuff, but Schoolmaster Zhu pushed him until it covered his mouth. “Dont make a sound,” Zhu said, “and hold your breath.” He covered Gao Mas head with a well-used gourd, then slid a battered lid over the vat, leaving just a crack.

Footsteps sounded in the yard. Gao Ma raised his head to listen. He could tell the police had reached the sty. “You … you’re hiding in the p-pigpen, don’t think I wont f-find you. C-come out of there.”

“Come out or well shoot!”

“Comrades, what’s going on out here?” Zhu asked them.

“C-catching a c- counterrevolutionary ! ”

“In my pigpen?”

“Stay out of the way. We’ll get to you after we’ve caught him,” the policeman demanded. “Come out of there, or we’ll shoot! We can use deadly force if you resist arrest.”

“Comrades, is this a joke or something?”

“W-who’s joking?” the stammerer said. “I’m going in to see for myself.”

With his hands on the low wall, he leapfrogged into the pigpen, then waded into the covered area and stuck his head in, where he was greeted by a couple of hornets that stung him on the mouth.

“Comrades,” Schoolmaster Zhu said, “what do you take me for, a Nationalist spy? Do you really think I’d try to put something over on you? I heard shots, and when my pigs started to squeal, I came out to see what was going on, just in time to spot a dark figure running like hell toward the southern wall.”

“Aiding a fugitive is a felony,” the policeman said. “I want you to be clear on that score.”

“I know,” Zhu replied.

“W-what’s your name?” the stammerer asked.

“Zhu Santian.”

“Y-you say you spotted a dark figure running toward the southern wall?”

“That’s right.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a teacher.”

“A p-party member?”

“I was in the Nationalist Party before Liberation.”

“The Nationalist Party? That must have been the life. I’m t-telling you. if you’re 1-lying, you’ll be up on charges, no matter what party you belong to.”

“I understand.”

Both policemen jumped out of the pigpen and ran toward the southern wall in search of the dark figure. Gao Ma knew that the lane beyond the southern wall dead-ended at a noodle mill alongside a ditch of putrid stagnant water.

Schoolmaster Zhu removed the beat-up gourd from Gao Mas head and said urgently, “Get moving. Head east down the lane.”

Gao Ma pulled himself out of the gooey slops. He was covered with rotting sweet-potato leaves, and a dark-red liquid dripped from his arms and legs. The room was filled with the stink. Again he bent over as if wanting to kneel in front of Schoolmaster Zhu to show his gratitude. “None of that,” Zhu said. “Get moving!”

Dripping wet, Gao Ma was greeted in the yard by a chilling wind as he tore through Schoolmaster Zhu’s gate and headed east down a narrow lane that opened into a wider north-south lane after about fifty paces. He paused at the intersection, fearful that a hard leather boot was waiting for him no matter which way he ran. The wide lane appeared to be deserted. He stood for a moment in front of a waist-high bamboo fence, then took a step backward for leverage and shot forward, clearing the fence and landing in a field of coriander about two hands high, emerald green in color, and sweedy redolent. It was wonderful. But this was no time to sightsee, so he jumped up and headed east down a field dike as fast as his legs would carry him. White-haired old Gao Ping-chuan, unseeing, crouched on his hands and knees, tending some cabbages. Another bamboo fence blocked his way, so once again he leapt over it. This time he wasn’t so lucky. The handcuff dangling from his wrist caught on a sorghum stalk, which snapped in two. “Who’s there?” Gao Pingchuan called out.

Gao Ma didn’t linger, but entered another broad north-south lane, where a group of women sitting under a shade tree at the southern end were enjoying a noisy visit. Since a row of linked houses blocked his way east, he headed north, reaching the sandy riverbank in a minute or so; after stumbling into a grove of red willows, he turned east instinctively. The untended grove was like a maze, with branches growing every which way, their limbs serving as home for millions of light-brown poisonous caterpillars the locals called “scar creepers.” Just touching their little brisdes turned the skin all red and puffy and made it itch horribly. Gao Ma didnt realize he’d encountered the scar creepers until he was well past them, and far too busy trampling over the puncture vines that grew in wild profusion on the sandbar to notice their stings; even now, running barefoot over the vines, he felt no pain.

His sudden passage startled jackrabbits out of their hiding places in the willow grove, and even though they ran beside him, he quickly outdistanced them all. As he reached the end of the willow grove, a tottering cobblestone bridge resting on wooden stanchions appeared on his left. Built for horse carts, it linked the eastern edge of the village with the fields. Fearful of being seen, he cut across a patch of ground dotted with holes dug by village thieves and rushed into a woods where mulberry and acacia trees grew side by side. The acacias were just blooming, and the air was stiflingly heavy with their fragrance. He kept running, his legs feeling more and more like lead weights, his vision blurring, his skin stinging painfully, his breath coming in pants. The gnarled tree trunks—white mulberry and rich brown acacia—formed a perilous and nearly impenetrable net. As soon as a path opened up, it was closed off by the next tree, and in one of his sudden lurches he crashed headlong to the ground.

Gao Ma regained consciousness sometime around dusk, and his first sensation was a parched thirst that made even his belly burn, followed by an awareness of painful itches all over—wherever he pressed the skin with his finger, a gloomy breath of cool air seeped into the pores. His eyes were nearly swollen shut, but it wasn’t until he actually touched the puny skin that he vaguely recalled diving into Schoolmaster Zhu’s pigpen and banging a hornets’ nest with his head.

The sun, a red wheel, was sinking slowly in the west. Besides being spectacularly beautiful, the early-summer sunset was exceedingly soft and gentle: black mulberry leaves turned as red as roses; pristine white acacia petals shed an enshrouding pale-green aura. Mild evening breezes made both the mulberry leaves and the acacia petals dance and whirl, filling the woods with a soft rusde.

He stood up by holding on to a mulberry branch, even though every joint in his body cried out in pain. His legs were swollen, as were his feet, and his sinuses felt as if they might explode. He desperately needed some water. For a moment he wresded with his. thoughts to determine whether the events of that afternoon had actually happened or were just a bad dream. Dried bits of pig slops sticking to him and the glistening bracelets dangling from his left wrist were all the proof he needed that he was in fact a fugitive from justice. And he knew the crime for which they wanted to arrest him. He had been nervously expecting it to happen for over a month, which was why he had stopped securing the latch on his window. Debilitating thirst and the painful tautness of his skin made calm thought impossible, so he continued through the stand of mulberry and acacia trees heading north toward the dry riverbed where, he recalled, Gao Qunjia and his son had dug a well that spring.

In order to avoid stepping on more puncture vines growing in the sandy soil, he was forced to walk among prickly reed-grass that was only slighdy less painful to the soles of his feet. Bright red ribbons of light filtering through the acacia flowers and mulberry leaves settled on his bare skin, and as he examined his nakedness, especially his arms and chest, he saw that he was a mass of angry red blisters: mementos bestowed upon him by the scar creepers.

The gleaming sand of the dry riverbed nearly blinded him as he emerged from the wooded area; the descending fireball crackled as it picked up speed, painting the sky to look like a celestial flower garden. But Gao Ma was too busy scanning the area for a sign of the well to notice. Finally, amid the seemingly endless red-and-yellow sand of the riverbed, he spotted some mounds of chocolate-colored earth and staggered toward them.