The Garlic Ballads (6 page)

Gao Ma wanted to smash the compound’s green gate but didn’t have the strength. He assumed that everyone in the township offices— officials, handymen, plumbers, people in charge of women’s affairs, family planners, tax collectors, news dispatchers, boozers, meat eaters, tea drinkers, smokers—more than fifty in all, had seen him get tossed out of the compound like a discarded weed or a whipped puppy. He tried to catch his breath as he wiped a bloody hand on the red letters carved into the government office’s white signboard.

The young gateman, wearing a plaid shirt, kicked him from behind. “You bastard!” Plaid Shirt railed, although Gao Ma only heard a muffled noise. “Where do you think you’re wiping that dog blood of yours? Dumb bastard! Who said you could leave your dog blood here?”

After he backed up a step or two to look at the red letters on the wooden signboard, the fires of rage burned in Gao Ma; he aimed a mouthful of bloody saliva at Plaid Shirt, who was agile, wiry—probably a martial-arts practitioner. He sprang out of the way and charged Gao Ma, who worked up another gob of bloody spit and aimed it at the man’s long, thin face.

“What are you doing out there, Li Tie?” It was the voice of authority, coming from inside the government compound.

Plaid Shirt lowered his arms compliantly.

Gao Ma spat the bloody mess on the ground and walked off without a backward glance at the gatekeeper. With the blue horizon stretched out before him, he moved haltingly down the paved country road; the eyes of an old melon peddler gleamed like phosphorescent lights.

Gao Ma slipped and fell into the gutter, and as he lay amid vines and tendrils, he gazed sadly at the gentle slope of the gutter. Certain he could not walk upright, he dropped to his knees to slink home on all fours, like a dog.

It would be a long, arduous trip; his head, drooping of its own weight, felt as if it might fall off and roll into the gutter. Thorns pricked his hands, and his back felt as if it were being peppered by poison darts.

After negotiating the slope of the gutter, he straightened up. The prickly pains in his back so tormented him that he turned to look behind him, where he saw Plaid Shirt walking up to the gateway with a bucket of water and a rag to clean the blood off the signboard. The roadside melon peddler had his back to Gao Ma, who still carried the image of the old man’s phosphorescent eyes. Even in his dazed state, he heard the shrill cry: “Melons—mushy melons.…”

The sound stabbed at his heart; all he wanted was to go home and lie quietly on his kang, like a man dead to the world.

Now someone was at the door. He tried to sit up, but his head was too heavy. Straining to open his eyes, he saw the wife of his neighbor, Yu Qiushui, watching him with pity in her eyes.

“Feeling better?” she asked.

He tried to open his mouth, but a rush of bitter liquid stopped up his throat and nose. “You were unconscious for three days,” she said. “You had us scared half to death. Even with your eyes closed you yelled, ‘Boys and girls, children on the wall!’ and The colt! The little colt!’ Big Brother Yu called the doctor, who gave you a couple of injections.”

He strained to sit up, with the help of Big Brother Yu’s wife, who put his filthy comforter behind his back. One look at her face told him she knew everything.

“Thank you, and thank Big Brother Yu.” Tears began to flow.

“Crying wont help,” she consoled him. “Don’t fool yourself into thinking it could ever work between you and Jinju. For now just worry about getting better. I’m going to my folks’ house in a few days, and I’ll find you someone as good as Jinju.”

“What about Jinju?” he asked anxiously.

“They say her family beats her every day. When the Caos and the Lius heard the news, they rushed over to mediate. But as the saying goes, you can’t force a melon to be sweet. A happy life is not in Jinju’s future.”

Suddenly agitated, Gao Ma struggled to climb down off the kang, but she stopped him. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“I have to go to Jinju.”

“You have to go to your death, you mean. The Caos and Lius are there. If you showed your face, it would be a miracle if they didn’t kill you.”

“I… I’ll kill them first!” he shouted shrilly, waving a fist in the air.

“Dear little brother,” Yu’s wife said sternly, “use your head. Don’t think like that. All you’d get for your troubles is a bullet in the head.”

Exhausted, he fell back on the kang, tears slipping down his grimy face and into his ears.

“Who cares?” he sobbed. “I have nothing to live for.”

“Come now. Don’t give up so easily. If you and Jinju have your hearts set on each other, no one can keep you apart forever. This is, after all, a new society, so sooner or later reason will prevail.”

“Will you take a message to her?”

“Not until things calm down a bit. Meanwhile, keep your temper in check and concentrate on getting well. Things will get better, don’t worry.”

The policemen emerged from the acacia grove dejected and covered with dirt, holding steel-gray pistols in their hands and fanning themselves with their hats. The stammerer’s limp had disappeared, but his trousers were ripped from his encounter with the metal pot; the torn cloth flapped like a piece of dead skin as he walked. They circled the tree and stood in front of Gao Yang. Both men had crewcuts. The stammerer, whose hair was coal black, had a head as round as a volleyball, while that of the other man, whose hair was lighter, stuck out front and back, like a bongo drum.

Gao Yang’s blind daughter tapped her way through the grove with the bamboo staff; he strained to watch her. When she reached the stand of trees behind Gao Ma’s house, she groped along, turning this way and that and wailing, “Daddy … Daddy … where’s my daddy … ?”

“Damn it!” the stammering policeman complained. “What’s the idea of letting him get away like that?”

“If you’d moved a little quicker, you might have gotten the cuff on his other wrist!” Drumhead shot back. “He couldn’t have gotten away with both hands cuffed, could he?”

“It’s this one’s fault,” the stammerer said as he put his hat back on. He reached out and touched Gao Yang’s scalp as though to rub it, then gave him a clout.

“Daddy … Daddy … why don’t you answer me?” Xinghua sobbed as she bumped a tree with her staff; when she reached out to touch it, she banged her head on a branch. Her close-cropped hair was parted like a little boy’s … eyes black as coal… the waxen face of the undernourished, like a wilting stalk of garlic … naked from the waist up, dressed only in red underpants whose elastic was so far gone they hung loosely on her hips … red plastic sandals with broken laces … “Daddy … Daddy … why don’t you answer me?” The acacia grove, like a dense cloud, became a dark backdrop for her. Gao Yang yearned to shout to her, but his throat muscles were tied in knots, and no sound emerged. I’m not crying, I’m not crying …

The policeman rapped him on the head again, but he didn’t feel it; he strained to get free and moaned, their noses detected the translucent, sticky sweat on his body—an eerie, nightmarish stench. It was the stink of suffering. They screwed up their noses, which were filled with the foul air, a dull expression spreading across their faces.

“Daddy … Daddy … why don’t you answer me?”

All right, boys and girls, hold hands, sing, twirl around, see how easy it is, the teacher calls. Xinghua stands in the middle of the road, staff in hand, then gropes her way to the schoolyard gate, where she grasps the metal fence with one hand and her bamboo staff with the other, to listen to the boys and girls sing and dance with their teacher. Chrysanthemums bloom all over the schoolyard. He tries to drag her home, but she struggles to stay put. He screams at her angrily, he kicks her…. Daddy, Mommy, hold my hand, hurry, I want to sing and dance and twirl, see how easy it is! Xinghua cries yearningly.

Unable to utter a sound, tortured by memory, Gao Yang gnawed frantically on the bark, which rubbed his lips raw until the tree was spotted with his blood. But he didn’t notice the pain. He swallowed the bitter mixture of saliva and bark juice, which brought a remarkable coolness to his throat—his vocal cords loosened, the knots unraveled. Carefully, oh so carefully, fearful that his powers of speech might leave him again: “Xinghua, Daddy’s over here …” he managed to say before his face was streaked with tears.

“Now what?” the stammering policeman asked his partner.

“Go back and get a Wanted poster issued,” Drumhead said. “He wont get away!”

“What about the village boss?”

“Slinked off long ago, like a common lout.”

“Daddy—I cant find my way out! Come get me out of here—hurry …”

Xinghua was lost in the maze of trees, and the sight of that tiny spot of red nearly broke Gao Yang’s heart. It seemed like only yesterday that he had kicked that little red behind of hers for no good reason, sending her sprawling in the middle of the yard, one hand spread out like a claw that clutched at a dark pile of chicken droppings. She had picked herself up and cowered against the wall, her lips trembling as she fought back sobs and tears welling up in her coal-black eyes. Overcome with remorse, he banged his head against the tree. “Let me go!” he screamed. “Let me go—”

Drumhead clasped him in a headlock to keep him from hurting himself while his partner walked around to unlock the manacles. “G-Gao Yang,” the stammerer said, “don’t try anything funny.”

But as soon as his hands were free, he started to fight—clawing, kicking, and biting—which left three bloody scratches on the stammerer’s face. As he wrenched free of the headlock and turned to run toward the tiny spot of red, a light flashed before his eyes, then a shower of green sparks—he dimly noticed something in the policeman’s hand giving off eerie green sparks when it touched his chest. Pins pierced his body; he screamed, twitching in agony, then slumped to the ground.

The first thing he noticed upon regaining consciousness was the pair of shiny handcuffs clamped around his wrists and digging deeply into the flesh, nearly cutting to the bone. He was too groggy to recall where he was. The stammering policeman waved the terrifying object in front of him.

“Start walking,” he said soberly. “And no fooling around!”

Meekly he followed Drumhead up the sandy embankment toward the willow grove. There they turned and trudged across the dry riverbed, where fine sand stung his injured ankle and burned the soles of his feet. He limped along, the stammerer right behind him. Xinghuas wails from the acacia grove were like a magnet that drew his head back to her. The stammerer nudged him with that awful thing, sending chills up his spine. He tucked his neck down between his shoulders; covered with goose bumps, he steeled himself for the rolling thunder of pain he knew was coming. But instead there was only a command: “Keep walking.”

As he walked, the image of the thing in the policeman’s hand took his mind off his daughter’s wails. He realized what it was: one of those electric prods he’d heard whispers about. The chills running up his spine penetrated the marrow of his bones.

After threading their way through another grove of trees, they crossed a second embankment and emerged onto an open field about fifty yards in length, which in turn led to a paved road. The policemen escorted Gao Yang into the township government compound, where Whiskers Zhu, a member of the police substation, rushed out to compliment Drumhead and his stammering partner on their good work.

Hope welled up in Gao Yang’s heart at the sight of a familiar face. Old Zhu,” he said, “where are they taking me?”