Ghost Month (14 page)

Rain fell as thick as metal chopsticks, and water sizzled on the pavement. The owner of Beyond Human stepped out, looked up and frowned. Business had never been too good, and the Ghost Month specials weren’t moving. His grotesque demon and dragon sculptures sat in his front display cases, as ugly and undatable as his target demographic.

Dwayne stepped out into the rain, umbrella in hand, for a walk and a smoke. Frankie put out the octopus skewers, our most perishable ones, for prep grilling. If they didn’t get bought today, we could put them in a stew tomorrow.

Frankie always kept himself busy.

I
N THE WANING DAYS
of the civil war in 1949, when the Communists won land as quickly as they could march through the Chinese mainland, people who were aligned with the Nationalists escaped to Taiwan by plane, if they could afford it, or by boat. The island was one hundred miles away from China and looked like the last refuge available.

Many families weren’t able to come over intact. Some children were sent over by themselves. Soldiers brought over their women.

Frankie was only eight years old when his teacher led the class out of school and onto a navy vessel. Most of his classmates eventually reunited with their families in Taiwan. Frankie never saw his
family again and grew up in a group home in a
juancun
village, singing songs that glorified the KMT and foretold the death of all the “land bandit” Communists on the mainland.

Frankie was told Mao’s soldiers had killed his mother and father and jailed his older brother. When he was only twelve, he left school to train in a brigade set up by the KMT comprising orphaned kids—a group that trained as hard as adult men because they had a personal vendetta against the Reds.

Frankie was the standout. He could run the fastest, shoot the most accurately and hold his breath even longer than his commanding officer. Before he met Chiang Kai-shek at a special inspection and dinner honoring the boys, he had his arms tattooed to match those of the KMT veterans: “Kill Zhu and Weed Out Mao” on the left arm and “Anti-Communist and Anti-Russia” on the right. Frankie broke protocol when he rolled up his sleeves to show Chiang. The Generalissimo was stunned, and then offered one of his tight-lipped smiles of unbreakable resolve and gave Frankie an arms-length hug on the shoulders.

“This boy!” was all Chiang said.

Frankie and the other top orphans joined the elite frogmen for suicidal propaganda missions. KMT boats brought them to within two miles of China’s coast. The frogmen swam the rest of the way into Fujian Province. They planted the KMT flag on the tops of difficult-to-climb cliffs and blew up power stations. They tried to avoid detection, but killed Communist guards when it was unavoidable. Most of the frogmen were killed by enemy fire and by drowning.

In 1960 Frankie was allowed to march in the parade that welcomed Eisenhower.

The next year, he turned twenty and it all fell apart.

KMT intelligence discovered that Frankie’s brother had not only joined the Communists, but was an officer. How would it look for the KMT to use Frankie as one of its public faces when his very own brother was a high-ranking Red?

They arrested Frankie in the early morning, before he had a chance to get dressed. He never even had a trial. Frankie was transferred from cell to cell, finally landing in Green Island, the
infamous offshore prison that housed inmates judged to be the most dangerous. Frankie was there because of his tactical skills, but other prisoners were influential human-rights activists who had organized against the KMT regime.

My father told me that for several months Frankie was kept in a cell that filled halfway with seawater at high tide.

After more than a decade of imprisonment, Frankie was released. The KMT had discovered that his brother wasn’t a Communist officer at all. He was actually living in Burma with other Chinese refugees. The mix-up was that the wife the brother had abandoned had remarried a Communist officer.

The military offered to take Frankie back, but he refused. He attended an official discharge ceremony in Taipei and then wandered through the city until it turned dark. He came upon the Shilin Night Market and saw crowds of people eating and laughing. Happy people. He stopped at a stand called Tastes Good run by a father and son and asked how to set up a food stall. It turned into a job interview, and my grandfather hired Frankie. It was the three of them for many years, until my father got married. We hired Dwayne when my grandfather got sick.

My father told me Frankie had a Vietnamese wife he didn’t talk about and that I should never ask him about the woman.

D
WAYNE CAME BACK FROM
his break and showed Frankie and me a video he’d just shot on his phone of an elderly man playing a nose flute to a group of people taking shelter under a canopy.

“Sounds like two flutes,” said Frankie.

“That’s pretty neat,” I said.

“It helped my ears recover from your crappy music,” said Dwayne. “That guy’s from the Paiwan tribe. They were bad as hell, man.”

“Is there a Paiwan stall now?” I asked.

“Naw,” said Dwayne as he chuckled a little. “When he was done playing he launched into this whole thing about how Ghost Month was offensive to the one true god and that we were all welcome to join the Presbyterian Church.”

The rain began to taper off and we got back to work. I got a
group of Canadians to come over. To my surprise, I found out that they grew up on farms and had no problem coming in and chowing down on stewed pig intestines.

You meet all kinds of people at the night market.

Everybody from everywhere is here. I’ve met people from Egypt and even North Korea. But no matter where you’re from, you learn immediately to walk slowly, try everything and take your time.

It’s annoying to see anybody in a rush and getting pushy, more so when a young man does it with his face and neck smeared in blood. It was still fairly early in the night, around 10
P.M
., when he showed up on my stretch of the night market. The rain had stopped by then and he was skidding on water, shoving aside anyone in his way. He was on Dabei and approaching my business.

The man’s black T-shirt was covered in dark splotches. His baggy black slacks didn’t do him any favors. When a pocket in the crowd opened up, he ran through but tripped when the material got caught in the tines of a knee-level sales rack and a wall of iPhone accessories crashed onto his back. He went down but scrambled back to his feet, throwing off the rack like a cartoon turtle ditching its shell in order to run faster.

When the man got to the intersection, he turned right on Dadong and squatted down. I kept him in view and tried to see whom he was running from. Dancing Jenny was making her way over to me.

“That guy’s head is slashed!” she yelled.

“Wow, what the fuck!” shouted Dwayne as he came out to the street.

My guess was that the man had tried to shoplift and got more than he had bargained for from the store owners. Dwayne marched over to him and Jenny and I followed.

The man was tired out. He slipped from his squat and sat on the wet street, panting. He seemed to be about twenty years old, and it had been a rough twenty years. He was probably living the same sort of
liumang
, petty-criminal, life that Ah-tien had been. So it was probably fitting that Ah-tien was calling out to him.

“Yang-yang! Yang-yang!”

Dwayne stood over Yang-yang. Jenny and I were behind him. I became conscious that we were holding hands tightly. Ah-tien made
his way to the other side of Yang-yang and touched his shoulder. Blood was seeping through the collar of his shirt, as if Yang-yang’s head was the end of a roll cake filled with strawberry jam.

I heard a commotion coming from behind us and it became pretty obvious that a number of people were after him. Men were yelling to be let through.

Three beefy guys wearing shades and black, short-sleeved oxfords muscled their way from different areas of the crowd and fell upon him. Cops. People who ran less-reputable carts covered their pirated DVDs with T-shirts and pieces of cardboard.

One of the cops elbowed Dwayne, possibly on purpose, and grunted,
“Gan ni niang!”
Literally, it means “do your mother,” but the figurative meaning is decidedly worse.

I thought Dwayne was going to punch the guy’s lights out, cop or no cop. It would have been a fair fight. But the guy had two equally big friends. Dwayne crossed his arms and flared his nostrils. The runner scrambled to get up, but one of the blackshirts, a guy with a bruise on his left cheek, kicked his feet out from under him. I noticed Ah-tien had split.

“Thought you could get away, huh?” the bruised guy yelled down at the runner. He and another man picked up their quarry and each twisted an arm back as they hustled him away. The third man, the one who had elbowed Dwayne, followed behind.

“He’s a criminal!” the elbower yelled to the crowd. “We’re here to take him away! Don’t let it ruin your evening! So sorry!” When he passed by Jenny and me, I noticed he was wearing a vest under his shirt.

The crowd melted away. Dwayne bent over and picked up the iPhone-accessories rack for a grateful older woman. She patted his arms and said, “Fuck those cops. Don’t pay any attention to them.”

Everybody thought the three men had been policemen until a cop actually showed up about half an hour later. I was already back at my front grill.

The cop was a thin veteran with short, white hair bristles and a chip on his shoulder about not having been promoted from his beat by now. He came up to me and tapped his keys against the glass of my sneeze guard.

“What did you see happen over here?” he asked.

“Some guy came in, and some other guys picked him up and took him away,” I said.

The cop was staring at some beef-tripe skewers and tugging at his windbreaker as if ready to molt. “These any good?” he asked.

“They’re the best,” I said, tilting my head. “If you
buy
two, I’ll throw another in free.”

A pained look came over his face. “I’m on duty now, I really shouldn’t eat.” He licked his lips. “Anybody else I should talk to?”

“Talk to Dancing Jenny over there.” I pointed my tongs at Belle Amour.

“Oh, her,” he sighed. “Never mind, I know where I should go.” He strode off to Big Shot Hot Pot.

“Jing-nan,” said Dwayne. “Go see what this guy is up to. Something’s up.”

I followed the cop, who had gained a confident swagger by the time he entered Kuilan’s business. He pointed at Ah-tien. “Hey, you little hooligan, what happened here tonight?” he boomed.

Ah-tien wiped the chopped garlic chives from his hands. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Some
liumang
came running through here, but the gang of heavies caught up with him, right? I’ll bet they were people you know, or at least recognize.”

Ah-tien didn’t even look up to reply. “I didn’t see anything. Go ask somebody else.”

“I’m asking you, little cocksucker!”

Kuilan stepped up as her husband crossed his arms. “Leave my son alone, officer. If he says he didn’t see anything, then he didn’t.”

“Leave him alone, huh? What about the time I had to come over to your house to break up a fight between your husband and this little dirtbag? You begged me to help you then! I took him in to jail for a night to scare him straight, didn’t I?” The cop smiled and rocked on his feet. He was getting off on this.

“I didn’t ask for you to beat him up!” said Kuilan.

“Nobody beat him up. As I tried to explain to you before, the kid knocked his own head into the wall to make me look bad. Anyway, it seems to have worked a little. It’s nice to see him all
cowed like this.” I had forgotten how bad cops could be. There was this guy in Wanhua District who used to harass my friends and me while I was growing up. The
jiaotous
helped us by showing us shortcuts through alleys and building basements where we could lie low for a while. For the most part, cops didn’t seem to be around, unless there was a huge demonstration. They liked to stay in the air-conditioned station rather than walk beats and prevent crime with their presence. One block in the Ximending area of Wanhua District had been classified as a high-crime area because of a karaoke bar frequented by members of different gangs who wanted to drink and fight over girls. There had been shootings in the street outside. Instead of posting officers there, the police merely installed more security cameras. It was safer for the cops to investigate
after
whatever assault had occurred by reviewing footage.

No wonder the Huangs weren’t happy with the investigation into Julia’s death. With faulty camera footage, the police probably had no idea how to go about solving the crime.

As I watched the cop leer at Ah-tien and Kuilan, I felt someone brush up against my right elbow. It was Jenny. She was always good about keeping one eye on the street.

Ah-tien was still chopping up chives with a metal cleaver. It was pretty clear that if the cop continued egging him on like this, Ah-tien’s next chop would be just above the knot of the officer’s dark blue tie. The cop knew what he was doing. He had one hand on his truncheon. I hadn’t thought they carried those anymore.

“Ah-tien, do you like being here?” the cop taunted. “I think you’re quite suited for women’s work.”

I didn’t say anything. Maybe a part of me wanted to see Ah-tien cut the guy. But Jenny spoke up. “Hey, you lousy cop, leave him alone! He doesn’t know anything!”

He whirled around. “Oh, it’s you, huh? Still doing porn?”

Jenny put up her phone and began to record video. His smile died instantly.

“Well, if any of you hear any more about this incident, then please call the station. Good night.” He nodded and marched down Dabei Road.

“Are you all right, Ah-tien?” Jenny asked.

He shrugged, still chopping in a detached manner. “Yeah,” he said.

“Thank you, Jenny,” said Kuilan’s husband.

“That was very smart of you, to use the phone camera,” Kuilan added.

“The lens is broken, but it still makes a good prop.”

“I know it’s probably best not to get involved,” said Kuilan’s husband, “but do you think we’re safe here? What if the
liumangs
come back?”