Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (70 page)

The woman laughed as she pushed out into the middle of the river and headed downriver like a flying fish. Fenghuang took off her shoes and socks and sat on the boat’s edge to dip her feet in the water.

Before we went ashore at Lüdian Township, Fenghuang generously gave the woman more than she expected, which made her nervous.

We had no trouble finding where you were living, and when we knocked at your door, we were greeted by looks of shame and shock. You glared angrily at me; I barked twice out of embarrassment. What I wanted to convey was: Please forgive me, Lan Jiefang, but since you left home, you’re no longer my master. That role has been taken over by your son, and it’s my duty to do as he says.

Fenghuang took the lid off a little metal bucket and splashed the contents — paint — all over Chunmiao.

“You’re a whore, Aunty,” Fenghuang said to Chunmiao, who stood there dumbstruck. Then she turned to your son and, like a commanding officer, waved her hand in the air and said: “Let’s go!”

I accompanied Fenghuang and your son over to the township Party office, where she located Du Luwen and said — ordered is more like it:

“I am Pang Kangmei’s daughter. I want you to call for a car to take us back to the county town.”

— Du Luwen came over to our paint-spattered Eden and stammered:

“In my humble opinion, I think you two should get as far away from here as possible.”

He gave us some clean clothes and an envelope containing a thousand yuan.

“This is a loan, so don’t say no.”

Chunmiao just looked at me, wide-eyed and helpless.

“Give me ten minutes to think this over,” I said to Du as I offered him a cigarette. We sat down to smoke, but my cigarette had barely burned down halfway when I stood up and said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d pick us up at seven o’clock tonight and drive us to the Jiao County train station.”

That night we boarded the Qingdao-Xi’an train. It was 9:30 when we reached the Gaomi station. Pressing our faces up against the grimy windows, we gazed out at all the waiting passengers, most carrying their heavy belongings on their backs, and a smattering of station personnel with blank expressions on their faces. Lights in the distant city sparkled, while in the square in front of the station, drivers waited by their illegal taxis amid the shouts of food vendors. Gaomi, will we ever be able to return as proper citizens?

In Xi’an we went to see Mo Yan, who had taken a job as a journalist for a local newspaper after graduating from a special writer’s workshop. He set us up in the run-down room he rented in the Henan Villa, saying he could bed down in his office. With a wicked grin, he handed us a box of Japanese extra-thin condoms and said:

“I’m afraid this is all I have, but it’s a gift from the heart. Please take it.”

Over the summer holidays your son and Fenghuang again ordered me to follow you, so I led them to the train station and barked in the direction of a train heading west: the scent, like those railroad tracks, stretched far off in the distance, too far for my nose to be of any use.

By the summer of 1996, you’d been on the run for five years. During that time, Mo Yan, who had risen to the position of editorial director of the local newspaper, gave you a job as an editor and found work for Pang Chunmiao in the dining hall. Your wife and son were aware of these developments, but had, it seemed, forgotten all about you. She was still frying oil fritters, her taste for which was as strong as ever; your son was a studious first-year student in the local high school. Pang Fenghuang and Ximen Huan were in the same grade as he. Neither of them had grades that could compare with your son’s, but one of them was the daughter of the highest-ranking official in the county, the other the son of the man who created the Jinlong Scholarship Fund with half a million yuan of his own money; the school gate would have been open to them if they had scored zero on their exams.

Ximen Huan had been sent to the county seat for his first year in middle school, and his mother, Huzhu, came along to look after him. They lived with you, instilling some life into a cheerless, long-deserted house — a little too much life, some would say.

Ximen Huan was not student material; he’d caused more trouble and created more mischief during those five years than anyone could count. The first year he was relatively well behaved, but then he took up with three young hooligans, and in time they became known by the police as the “Four Little Hoods.” Beyond being involved in all the antisocial behaviors one normally associated with his age, he was guilty of a good many adult crimes. But to look at him you’d never believe he was a bad boy. His clothes — name brands only — were neat and clean, and there was always a good smell about him. He kept his hair cut short and his face clean; he sported a thin, dark mustache to show he was past childhood, and even his boyhood cross-eyed look had vanished. He was friendly to people and kind to animals, his speech was replete with fine words and honeyed phrases, and he was especially polite in his dealings with your wife, as if she were his favorite relative. So when your son said, “Ma, send Huanhuan away, he’s a bad kid,” she spoke up for him:

“He seems like a good boy to me. He has a way of taking care of things and dealing with people, and he’s well-spoken. I admit he doesn’t do well in school, but he’s just not gifted that way In the future he’ll probably do better than you. You’re just like your father, always moping around as if the world owes you something.”

“You don’t know him, Ma. What you see is all an act.”

“Kaifang,” she said, “even if he is a bad kid, as you say, if he gets into trouble, his dad can bail him out. Besides, his mother and I are sisters, twins in fact, so how could I tell him to leave? You’ll just have to put up with him for a few more years. Once you’re out of high school, you’ll go your own ways, and even if we wanted him to stay with us then, he probably wouldn’t want to. Your uncle is so rich he can build a mansion for him in town without missing the money at all. The only reason he’s staying with us is so we can all look after one another. That’s how your grandparents want it.”

Nothing your son could say could win out over your wife’s practical arguments.

Huanhuan may have been able to get away with his shenanigans with your wife and his mother, but my nose knew better. By then I was a thirteen-year-old dog, and though my sense of smell was feeling the effects of age, I had no trouble differentiating the smells of people around me and the traces they left elsewhere. I might as well tell you that I’d already given up my chairmanship of the County Dog Association. My successor was a German shepherd named Blackie, owing to the color of fur on his back. In the county canine realm, German shepherds enjoyed undisputed leadership roles. After stepping down, I seldom attended the gatherings in Tianhua Square, since the few times I did go they had little to offer. My generation had celebrated the gatherings with singing, dancing, drinking, eating, and mating. But the new breed of youngsters were engaged in unusual and, to me, inexplicable behaviors. Here, I’ll give you an example: Blackie once urged me to go so I could be part of, according to him, the most exciting, most mysterious, most romantic event imaginable. So I showed up in time to see hundreds of dogs converge from all directions. No shouts or greetings, no flirting or teasing, almost as if they were all strangers. After crowding around the newly replaced statue of Venus de Milo, they raised their heads and barked together, three times. Then they spun around and ran off, including their chairman, Blackie. They’d appeared like lightning and immediately disappeared as if swept away on the wind. There I was, alone in the moon-washed square. I gazed up at Venus, whose sculpted body gave off a soft blue glow, and wondered if I was dreaming. Later on, I learned that they’d been playing a game of Flash, which was all the rage, very cool, at the time. They called themselves a “Flash mob.” I was told they did all sorts of other goofy things, but I refused to join in. I couldn’t help feeling that Dog Four’s party days were over, just as a new age dawned, one characterized by unfettered excitement and wild imagination. That’s how it was with dogs, and for the most part, with humans as well. Pang Kangmei still held her county position, and word had it that she would soon be appointed to a high position in the provincial government. But before that happened, she’d be accused by the Disciplinary Committee of the Party of “double offenses,” and would subsequently be tried by the Procuratorate and condemned to death, with a two-year reprieve.

After your son tested into high school, I stopped accompanying him. I could have stayed home and slept or occupied myself with thoughts of the past, but that had no appeal to me. It could only speed up the aging process, body and mind, and your son wouldn’t have needed me anymore. So I began tagging along behind your wife when she went to work in the square. While I was there watching her fry and sell oil fritters, I picked up the scent of Ximen Huan in notorious hair salons, backstreet inns, and bars. In the mornings he’d walk out of the house with his schoolbag on his back, but as soon as he was out of sight, he’d jump on the back of a motor scooter taxi waiting for him at the intersection and head for the train station square. His “driver,” a big, strapping fellow with a full beard, was happy to chauffeur a high school boy around town, especially Huanhuan, who always made it worth his while. The square was Four Little Hoods territory, a place for them to eat, drink, whore, and gamble. The relationship among them was like June weather, always changing. Some of the time they were like four loving brothers, drinking and gambling together in bars, dallying with wild “chicks” in hair salons, and playing mah-jongg and smoking, arms around each other, in the public square, like four crabs strung together. But then at other times they’d split into two hostile groups and fight like gamecocks. There were also times when three of them ganged up on the fourth. Eventually they each formed their own gangs, which sometimes hung out together and sometimes fought. The one constant was that they fouled the atmosphere of the public square.

Your wife and I witnessed one of their armed battles, though she wasn’t aware that Ximen Huan, the good kid, was the instigator. It happened on a sunny day around noon, in broad daylight, as they say. It started with an argument in a bar called Come Back Inn on the southern edge of the square, but before long, four boys with bloody heads were chased out the door by seven other boys with clubs, one of them dragging a mop behind him. The injured boys ran around the square, showing no fear or any effects of the beating they’d sustained. And there was no anger on the faces of the boys chasing them. Several of them, in fact, were laughing. At first the battle looked more like a staged play than the real thing. The four boys being chased stopped suddenly and launched a counterattack, with one of them taking out a knife to show he was that the leader of that gang. The other three whipped off their belts and twirled them over their heads. With loud shouts they took out after their pursuers, and in no time clubs were hitting heads, belts were lashing cheeks, and the square was thrown into an uproar with shouts and agonizing screams. Bystanders were by then fleeing the square; the police were on their way I saw the gang leader plunge his knife into the belly of the kid with the mop, who screamed as he fell to the ground. When they saw what had happened to their buddy, the other pursuers turned and ran. The gang leader wiped the blood from his knife on the injured boy’s clothes and, with a loud whoop, led his gang down the western edge of the square; they ran off to the south.

While the fight was going on outside, I spotted Ximen Huan, in dark sunglasses, sitting at a window inside the Immortal, a bar next to Come Back Inn, casually smoking a cigarette. Your wife, who watched the fight with her heart in her mouth, never did see him, but even if she had, she’d never have believed that her fair-skinned boy could have been the instigator. He reached into his pocket and took out one of the latest cell phones, flipped it open, punched in some numbers, and raised it to his mouth. A few words were all he spoke before sitting back and continuing to enjoy his cigarette, with grace and expertise, like the gangster bosses in movies from Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Now let me relate another incident involving Ximen Huan, this one occurring in your yard after he’d spent three days in the local police station over a fight he was involved in.

Huang Huzhu was so enraged she tore at his clothes and shook him.

“Huanhuan,” she said through tears of anguish, “my Huanhuan, you don’t know how you disappoint me. I’ve done everything I could and sacrificed so much to be here and take care of you. Your father has spared no expense to give you everything you need to go to school, but you pay us back by . . .”

As his mother stood there crying, Ximen Huan coolly patted her on the shoulder and said nonchalantly:

“Don’t cry, Mother, dry your eyes. It’s not what you think. I didn’t do anything wrong. I wasn’t to blame, no matter what they said. Look at me, do I look like a bad kid? I’m not, Mother, I’m a good kid.”

Well, this good kid went out and danced and sang like a paragon of innocence. And it worked. Huzhu’s tears were quickly replaced by smiles. Me? I was disgusted.

When Ximen Jinlong heard the news, he came running, fit to be tied. But his son’s honeyed words quickly had him smiling too. I hadn’t seen Ximen Jinlong in a long time. Time had not been kind to him — rich or poor, everyone ages. His hair was much thinner, his eyesight much dimmer, his paunch much bigger.

“Don’t worry about me, Father. You have more important things to worry about,” Ximen Huan said with a fetching smile. “No one knows a son better than his father, as they say. You know me well. I have my faults: I’m a little too much of a smooth talker, I like to eat, I’m sort of lazy, and pretty girls drive me crazy. But how does that make me any different from you?”

“You might be able to fool your mother, son, but not me. If I couldn’t see though this little act of yours, I wouldn’t be able to get anything done in this society. Over the past few years, you’ve done all the bad things you’re capable of. Doing something bad is easy. What’s hard is spending your life doing only bad things. So I think it’s time for you to start doing good things.”