Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (43 page)

In the blindingly bright light of the naked two-hundred-watt bulb that lit up the generator I saw Ximen Jinlong on the brick floor, leaning against the wall with his legs stretched out in front of him, his feet pointing upward, drops of oil from the generator spraying onto his toenails and the backs of his feet, looking like sticky dog’s blood. His shirt was open to expose a purple vest. His hair was uncombed, his eyes bloodshot, like a madman, yet sort of cool. He probably wanted to drink himself to death, because I saw an empty liquor bottle lying next to his leg and a half-empty bottle in his hand . . . and if the youngster didn’t drink himself to death he’d surely drink himself stupid.

Mo Yan was standing beside him, squinting. “You’ve had enough, brother Jinlong,” he said. “Secretary Hong is waiting to give you hell.”

“Secretary Hong?” Jinlong looked up out of the corner of his eye. “Secretary Hong’s a prick! I’ll give
him
hell!”

“Brother,” Mo Yan said wickedly, “Jiefang saw what you and Huzhu were doing up in the apricot tree and went nuts. A dozen strong young men tried but failed to restrain him. He actually bit through a thick steel rod. You should go see him. After all, he’s your blood brother.”

“My blood brother? Who are you talking about? You’re the one who’s his blood brother!”

“Whether you go see him or not is your business, Jinlong,” Mo Yan said. “I’ve done my job by telling you.”

But Mo Yan seemed in no hurry to leave. He kicked the bottle on the ground, then bent down and picked it up. He squinted and looked inside; seeing some green contents, he tipped his head back and drained it, then licked his lips noisily. “Good stuff,” he said, “worthy of its name.”

Jinlong raised the bottle in his hand and drank deeply. The room filled with the aroma of strong liquor as he flung the bottle at Mo Yan, who raised his bottle. When bottle met bottle, shards of exploding glass rained down to the ground. Now the aroma was stronger than ever. “Get lost!” Jinlong bellowed. “Get the hell out of here!” As Mo Yan backed up, Jinlong picked up a shoe, a screwdriver, and some other stuff, and threw them at him, one after the other. “You goddamn spy, you little prick, get out of my sight!” “You’re crazy!” Mo Yan muttered as he dodged the missiles. “You’ve gone nuts before he even comes out of it!”

Jinlong stood up shakily and wobbled back and forth, like one of those tip-over dolls. The moment Mo Yan stepped out the door, the moonlight lit up his shaved head and turned it into a honeydew melon. I was watching the two weirdoes from my hiding place behind the tree, worried sick that Jinlong might fall onto the generator belt and be crushed. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. Instead, he stepped over it, then stepped back. “Crazy!” he screamed. “Crazy! Everybody’s gone goddamned crazy—” He picked up a broom from the corner and threw it out, then followed that with a tin bucket used for diesel oil, the smell of which spread beneath the moonlight and merged with the aroma of apricot blossoms. Jinlong stumbled over to the generator and bent down as if to engage the turbine in a conversation. Be careful, son! I shouted inwardly as my muscles tightened and I prepared to run over and rescue him if necessary. He was bent so low his nose was nearly touching the belt. Be careful, son! Another inch and you’ll have no nose. But that tragedy didn’t happen either. He put his hand on the throttle and pressed it all the way down. The generator screeched like a man when you squeeze his balls. The machine shuddered and sent oil flying in all directions. Black smoke poured out of the exhaust, while the bolts securing the generator to its wooden base began to shudder and seemed in danger of pulling loose altogether. At the same time, the needle on the power gauge shot past the danger mark and the high-wattage bulb above them lit up before it popped and sent slivers of glass flying into the wall and up to the rafters. I didn’t know till later that when the bulb in the generator room blew, so did all the lights in the pig farm. The next thing I heard was the loud slap the belt made when it hit the wall, followed by Jinlong’s terrified screams. My heart sank. That’s it, I figured; my son, Ximen Jinlong was probably a goner.

Slowly the darkness gave way to the light of the moon and I saw Mo Yan, down on his hands and knees, rear end sticking up in the air, just like an ostrich; scared stiff, he slowly got to his feet. Curious but cowardly, virtually useless yet pigheaded, stupid and cunning at the same time, he was incapable of doing anything worthwhile and unwilling to do anything spectacularly bad; in other words, someone who was always causing trouble and forever complaining about his lot. I knew about all the scandals he’d been involved in and could pretty much read his mind. He slipped cautiously back into the moonlit generator room, where Ximen Jinlong was sprawled on the floor, striped by moonlight filtering in through the slats in the window. One of the moonbeams fell on his head, including his hair, of course, from which threads of blue-tinted blood seeped down across his face, like a millipede. Mo Yan bent down, mouth agape, and touched the wet, sticky blood with two fingers that were black as a pig’s tail. First he examined it with his eyes, then with his nose, and finally with his mouth. What the hell was he doing? Whatever it was, it was strange, to say the least, so bizarre that even an intelligent pig like me couldn’t figure it out. He couldn’t tell if Ximen Jinlong was dead or alive just by looking at, smelling, or tasting his blood, could he? Or maybe this was his involved way of determining whether the blood on his fingers was real or fake. So there I was, trying to decipher his strange behavior, when, like someone who’s just emerged from a nightmare, he screeched, then jumped high in the air and ran out of the generator room.

“Come over here, everybody! Ximen Jinlong’s dead!” he shouted in a voice that sounded joyful.

Maybe he saw me hiding behind an apricot tree, maybe not. The moonlit trees and mottled leaves had a dizzying effect on people’s eyes. The sudden death of Jinlong was probably the first and most noteworthy news he’d ever had the opportunity to spread. He had no interest in talking to the apricot trees as he ran, shouting at the top of his lungs. I started following him after he’d tripped on a pile of pig shit and fallen headfirst to the ground.

People emerged from the buildings, their faces taking on a pale hue in the moonlight. The absence of screams inside the room proved that the sedatives had taken effect on Jiefang. Baofeng was holding an alcohol-soaked pad of cotton to her cheek, which had been cut by flying glass when the lightbulb exploded. A faint scar would be left after the wound healed, living testimony to the unbelievable chaos of that night.

People came running, some stumbling along, some nearly falling, and all of them horribly flustered. In a word, a disorderly crowd ran toward the generator room, following Mo Yan, who kept turning sideways to describe with showy exaggeration what he’d seen. I had the feeling that whoever it was, whether Ximen Jinlong’s kin or those with no familial ties to him, felt disgust toward the gabby youngster. Shut your filthy mouth! I took several quick steps and hid behind a tree, where I picked a piece of tile up out of the mud with my mouth — it was bigger than I wanted, so I bit it in two — grasped it in the cleft of my right front hoof, stood up humanlike on my hind legs, took aim at Mo Yan’s shiny scalp, and flung the tile as I landed on my front legs. I miscalculated the distance, and instead of hitting Mo Yan, the missile struck Yingchun in the forehead. The loud crack froze my heart and awoke slumbering memories. Oh, Yingchun, my virtuous wife, tonight you are the unluckiest person on earth! Two sons, one of them mad, the other dead, a daughter with an injured face, and now I’ve nearly killed you!

Heartbroken, I let out a long
oink
and buried my snout in the ground, remorse driving me to chew the remaining half of the tile into powder. Like a scene from one of those high-speed movie cameras, I saw Yingchun’s mouth open to release a scream like a silver snake dancing in the moonlight as she fell backward like a figurine. Don’t think for a minute that just because I’m a pig I don’t know what a high-speed camera is. Hell, these days anyone can be a film director! All you need is a light-filtering lens and a high-speed camera that you use to get a full shot or a closeup. The tile broke into pieces when it hit Yingchun’s forehead and flew in all directions, followed immediately by drops of blood. Onlookers looked on in jaw-dropping astonishment. . . . Yingchun lay on the ground. Mom! Ximen Baofeng was shouting. She kneeled by her mother and laid her medical kit on the ground. With her right arm around Yingchun’s neck, she studied the wound on her forehead. What happened, Mom? . . . Who did this? Hong Taiyue bellowed as he ran over to the spot where the tile had been launched. I didn’t even try to hide, knowing I could disappear any time I wanted to. I had really messed up this time, no matter how good my intentions were, and I deserved to be punished. Hong Taiyue was the first to go looking for the rotten individual who had injured one of the villagers with a piece of tile, but he wasn’t the one who discovered me standing behind the apricot tree. Getting on in years, he wasn’t as sprightly as he’d once been. No, the first to come around the tree and find me was Mo Yan, whose stealthy movements perfectly matched his almost pathological curiosity. Here’s who did it! he gleefully announced to the swarm of people behind him. I sat there stiffly, a low guttural sound in my throat declaring my remorse and my readiness to receive the punishment I deserved. The puzzled looks on the people’s faces showed up clear in the moonlight. He’s the one, I guarantee it! Mo Yan said to the crowd. With my own eyes I once saw him write on the ground with a twig. Hong Taiyue thumped him on the shoulder.

“Old man,” he mocked Mo Yan, “have you also seen him take a knife in his hoof and carve a seal for your dad, using the plum-blossom style of calligraphy?”

As someone who didn’t know what was good for him, Mo Yan continued shooting off his mouth, so the third brother of the Sun family ran up and, like the bully he was, grabbed Mo Yan by the ear and kneed him in the rear end.

“Buddy,” he said as he dragged him away from the scene, “keep that beak of yours shut!”

“Who let this boar out of its pen?” Hong Taiyue asked angrily. “Who’s responsible for taking care of the pigs? Somebody has a terrible work ethic and ought to be docked some work points!”

Moving as fast as possible on her tiny, bound feet, Ximen Bai tottered up from the roadway, which was paved in moonlight, scattering apricot blossoms that looked like snowflakes as she came. Memories that had lain deep in the sediment of my mind were once again stirred up, like mud on a riverbed, and began squeezing my heart.

“Get that pig back in his pen!” Hong Taiyue growled. “This is ridiculous! Totally ridiculous!” With a phlegmatic cough he walked over to the generator room.

I think it must have been concern for her son that made it possible for Yingchun to come around so quickly; she struggled to stand. “Mom . . . ,” Baofeng cried out as she put her arm under Yingchun’s neck and opened her medical kit. Huang Huzhu, a look of detachment on her face, knew what to do: she picked up an alcohol-soaked cotton ball with a pair of tweezers and handed it to Baofeng. “My Jinlong . . .” Yingchun pushed Baofeng’s arm away and propped herself up. Her movements were jerky, her balance precarious; clearly she was still lightheaded. But she stood and, with an agonizing cry on her lips, staggered off toward the generator room.

She was not the first to enter the room, nor was Hong Taiyue. Huang Huzhu beat them both. Next in was neither Yingchun nor Hong; it was Mo Yan, who had already been badly treated by Sun Three and mocked by Hong Taiyue. None of that appeared to bother him, for after breaking free from Sun’s grip, he slipped back into the generator room, no more than a step behind Huang Huzhu, who threw herself on Jinlong’s body, like a mother protecting her offspring, the moment she spotted him lying there, bathed in moonlight, his forehead bloodied. Powerful feelings and sadness at what had befallen him drove all thoughts of modesty and decorum out of her mind.

At about the same time, Ximen Bai staggered up to me. As I looked into her sweaty face, I heard her gasp:

“Pig Sixteen, how did you get out of your pen?”

She patted me on the head. “Be good now and come back with me. Secretary Hong blamed me for letting you loose. You know I was a landlord’s wife, not a good thing to be these days, and Secretary Hong has done me a favor by letting me tend to you. You mustn’t act up, that will only bring me trouble!”

What a tangle of thoughts ran through my mind as tears welled up in my eyes and dripped to the ground.

“Are you crying, Pig Sixteen?” Surprised? Yes, she was. But also saddened. Stroking my ears, she looked up at the moon. “My husband,” she said, “with Jinlong dead, the Ximen family has truly come to its end ...”

Jinlong, of course, was not dead. If he’d died, the curtain would have fallen on this drama. Baofeng’s medical skills brought him back from certain death, only to have him rant and rave, leaping and jumping, eyes bloodshot, wanting nothing to do with friends or family. “I don’t want to live!” he shouted. “No more for me. . . .” He clutched his chest. “I feel terrible, I can’t stand it, I want to die, Mother. . . .” Hong Taiyue stepped up, grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. “Jinlong!” he roared. “What do you think you’re doing? You call yourself a member of the Communist Party? The branch secretary of the Youth League? You disappoint me. You embarrass me!” Yingchun rushed up and pulled Hong’s arms away, then stood between them. “I won’t let you treat my son like that!” she threatened. Then she turned and threw her arms around Jinlong, who was a head taller than she, rubbed his face, and murmured, “Good boy, don’t be afraid, Mother’s here, she won’t let them hurt you. . . .”

Jinlong pushed her away and forced the others, who tried to block his way, to back off; lowering his shoulder, he ran out. The moonlight settled on his arms like a blue curtain of gauze that gently laid him down on the ground, where he rolled around like an overworked donkey. “Mother, I can’t stand it, I want to die. Bring me two more bottles of liquor, two more bottles, two more . . .” “Is he crazy or is he drunk?” Hong asked Baofeng sternly. Her mouth twitched. “Drunk, I expect,” she said with a sneer. With a look at Yingchun, Huang Tong, Qiuxiang, Hezuo, and Huzhu, Hong Taiyue could only shake his head, like a powerless father. He sighed. “You people have really let me down.” He turned and walked off, swaying slightly, but instead of heading toward the village, he went into the apricot grove, leaving light blue footprints in the carpet of apricot petals.