Sandalwood Death (12 page)

My wife was as good as her word—she brought me a tiger’s whisker the next night. It had a golden-yellow tip. “Don’t let it fly away,” she said as she handed it to me. Then she doubled over laughing. My heart beat wildly as I clutched my whisker. A treasure I’d longed for most of my life, how could it have come so easily? Well, I examined it closely. It was just as Uncle He had described, curly with a golden-yellow tip. I held it between my fingers till my wrist tingled. It felt heavy in my hand. I looked up and said to my wife, “Let’s see what you really are.” She curled her lip. “Sure,” she said with a smile, “take a good look and tell me if I’m a phoenix or a peacock.” “Uncle He says you’re a white tiger.” Her face colored. “So it was that lousy maggot who told you,” she cursed. “I’m going to have my gandieh drag him over to the yamen tomorrow and see that he gets two hundred whacks with the paddle. He’ll know what it feels like to have his ass turned into fried bamboo shoots and meat!”

Still clutching the tiger’s whisker in the lighted room, I stared at her. My heart was racing, my wrist shaking. Now, with heaven’s help, I was going to see my wife’s true form! She was an animal, but which one? A pig? A dog? A rabbit? A goat? A fox? A hedgehog? I didn’t care what she was, as long as it wasn’t a snake. I’ve been afraid of snakes since I was a little boy, and I’m more afraid of them now than ever before. If I so much as step on a rope, I jump three feet in the air. My niang said that snakes usually turn into women, and that most beautiful women are transformed snakes. Sooner or later, one of those snake-women will suck dry the brain of any man who sleeps with her, she told me. Don’t let me down, heaven. I don’t care what my wife is, even a toad or a gecko, just so it isn’t a snake. And if she is, well, I’ll pick up my butcher’s tools and run off with my tail between my legs. So with all those wild thoughts scrambling the landscape in my head, I sized up my wife, who turned the lamp up as high as it would go, until the wick was as red as a pomegranate and really lit up the room. Her hair was so black it was almost blue, as if oiled. Her shiny forehead was as bright as the belly of a porcelain vase. Her brows arched and curved like a pair of willow leaves. Her nose was so white it was nearly transparent, as if carved from a tender lotus root. Her limpid eyes looked like grapes floating in egg white. Her mouth, which was a little too big for her face, curled upward at the corners, like water chestnuts, the lips naturally red. I could have looked till my eyes ached and not known what she was before she was a woman.

She curled her lips into a sneer and said with palpable sarcasm, “Well? Tell me, what am I?”

Bewildered, I shook my head. “I don’t know, you’re just you. How can this treasure lose its effectiveness when it’s in my hand?”

She reached out and tapped me on the forehead with one finger. “You’re possessed,” she said. “You’ve let a whisker take control of your life. Your niang told you a story one time, and you elevated it into your life’s work, like treating a stick as a needle. Are you ready to finally give it up now?”

I shook my head again. “You’re wrong. My niang wouldn’t lie to me. The rest of the world might, but not her.”

“Then why doesn’t it let you see what I am? I don’t need a tiger’s whisker to show me what you are—you’re a pig, a big, stupid pig.”

I knew this was her way to make me feel bad. She couldn’t possibly see my true form without a tiger’s whisker. But why wasn’t I able to see hers, either, even
with
one? Why wasn’t my little treasure working? Oh, no! Uncle He had said that if I mentioned his name, the thing wouldn’t work. And that’s what I’d just done without realizing it. I was crushed. How stupid could I have been, ruining something I’d worked so hard to get? I stood there with the whisker in my hand, in a daze. Hot tears streamed from my eyes.

My wife sighed when she saw me crying. “You fool, when will you grow up?” She sat up, snatched the whisker out of my hand, and, with a single puff, blew it out of sight. “My treasure—!” I shrieked tearfully. She wrapped her arms around my neck and tried to calm me down. “There, now, don’t be foolish. Here, let me hold you, and we can get some sleep.” But I fought my way out of her grip. “My tiger’s whisker! It’s mine!” Frantically, I groped all over the bed trying to find it. Oh, how I hated her at that moment. “I want my tiger’s whisker! You owe me!” I went over and picked up the lamp to help me look for my treasure, cursing and crying the whole time. She just sat there watching me, shaking her head one minute and sighing the next. “Stop looking,” she said at last. “It’s right here.” I was thrilled. “Where? Where is it?” With her thumb and index finger, she held the curly tiger’s whisker with its golden-yellow tip and laid it across my palm. “Do a better job of holding on to it this time,” she said. “If you lose it again, don’t blame me.” I curled my fingers tightly around it. It might not do what I wanted it to do, but it was still a treasure. But why wouldn’t it work for me? I needed to try again. So once again, I stared into my wife’s face. If it works this time, I was thinking, if she turns out to be a snake, then so be it. But once again she was just my wife, nothing more.

“Hear me out, my foolish husband. My niang told me the same story yours told you. She said the whisker doesn’t work all the time, only at critical moments. Otherwise, it would be nothing but trouble. How would you live if all you ever saw were animals? So listen to me and put that thing in a safe place, where you can retrieve it at a critical moment. It’ll work then.”

“Honest? You’re not lying, are you?”

She nodded. “Why would I want to lie to my beloved husband?”

I believed her. After scaring up a piece of red cloth, I wrapped up my treasure, tied it tight with string, and hid it in a crack in the wall.

————

2

————

My dieh is a force unto himself. He sent Magistrate Qian’s two yayi back to the yamen empty-handed. You might not know what the Magistrate is capable of, Dieh, but I do. When Xiaokui from the Dongguan oil mill spat at his palanquin as it passed by, a pair of yayi dragged him off in chains. Two weeks later, his father sold two acres of land to pay someone to stand as guarantor to get his son back. But by then one of Xiaokui’s legs was shorter than the other, and he not only walked with a limp, but the toes of one foot dragged along the ground. They started calling him the foreigner, because the lines he scraped in the dirt looked like foreign writing. After that, any time he heard the name “Magistrate Qian,” he foamed at the mouth and fainted. Xiaokui knew what Magistrate Qian was capable of. Not only doesn’t he dare spit at the palanquin when it passes by anymore, but the minute he sees it, he wraps his arms around his head, turns tail, and hobbles off. What you’ve done today, Dieh, is a lot worse than spitting at his palanquin. I may be a fool in other things, but where Magistrate Qian is concerned, I’m as smart as I need to be. Even though my wife is the Magistrate’s little pet, he is strictly impartial. How could he let you get away with what you’ve done when he went and arrested that disappointing gongdieh of mine?

On the other hand, I could see that my dieh was no pushover. He was hard as nails, not soft as bean curd, a man who’d done and seen plenty in the nation’s capital, where he’d lopped off a truckload—maybe a shipload—of heads; a power struggle between him and Magistrate Qian would be like a fight between a dragon and a tiger, and I could not say who would come out ahead. Now, at this critical moment, I was suddenly reminded of my tiger’s whisker. Truth is, that treasure was never far from my mind. According to my wife, it was my amulet, which could turn bad luck into good as long as I kept it with me. So I jumped onto the bed, reached over to the wall, and retrieved my red bundle, which I frantically unwrapped to make sure the curly, golden-tipped tiger’s whisker was still there. It was. As my little treasure lay in my hand, I felt it move, little flicks, sort of like a hornet’s stinger, against my palm.

A huge white snake, as big around as a water bucket, stood in front of the bed and thrust its head toward me, a purple forked tongue darting in and out between its red lips. “Xiaojia.” It was my wife’s voice! “What do you think you’re doing?” Heaven help me, how could you do this to me? You know I’m afraid of snakes, and so you made sure that’s what my wife is. Someone I’ve frolicked in bed with for the last ten years without knowing she was a snake. My own wife, a reincarnated white snake. Of course,
The Legend of the White Snake
, now I get it. Back when she was on the stage, she played the part of the white snake, and I’m the scholar she married, Xu Xian. But why hasn’t she sucked out my brains? Because she isn’t all snake. She has a snake’s head, but arms and legs, too, and breasts. And there’s hair on her head. Still, well and truly frightened, I flung the whisker away like a piece of hot charcoal and broke out in a full-body sweat.

My wife stood there sneering at me. Since I’d just had a glimpse of her true form, seeing her now as my wife was both strange and unsettling. That big, fleshy snake living inside her could break through the flimsy skin covering and take its true form any time it wanted. Maybe she already knew that I’d seen her true form, which would have explained the strange, forced smile on her lips. “Well, did you see it?” she asked. “What am I behind this human façade?” Cold rays of light shot from her eyes, eyes once beautiful but now ugly and malignant, the eyes of a snake.

A foolish grin was the best I could manage to mask my terror. My lips had stopped doing my bidding; my skin tingled. She must have released a cloud of noxious airs onto my face. “No, I didn’t,” I stammered, “I saw nothing.”

“Liar,” she said with a sneer, “I’m sure you saw something.” A chilling, foul odor emerging from her mouth—snake’s breath—hit me square in the face.

“Tell me the truth, what am I beneath all this?” She smiled in a peculiar way, and light glinted off the shiny, scaly things on her face. I could not tell the truth, not without harm to myself, and I was suddenly no longer the fool I’d always been. “Really, I didn’t see a thing.” “You can’t fool me, Xiaojia, you’re a terrible liar. Your face is red, and you’re sweating. So, come on, tell me. Am I a fox? Or maybe a weasel. Or how about a white eel?” White eels are members of the snake family, real close members. She was trying to trick me. But I was not about to be fooled. The only way I’d let my tongue betray me was if she came out and admitted that in reality she was a white snake. The surest way to have her take on her true form was to tell her I’d seen that she was a reincarnated white snake. She’d open that bloody mouth wide and swallow me up. No, she knew I always carried a knife, and if I wound up inside her, I’d slice her open. That would be the end of her. So instead, she’d open a hole in my head with her tongue, which was harder than a woodpecker’s beak, and suck out my brains. Then she’d suck the marrow from my bones, followed by my blood, reducing me to a pile of hollow bones wrapped in human skin. You cannot pry the words out of me, not even in your dreams. My niang used to say to me, “Pretend you know nothing, and the spirits will have no control over you.” “Honest, I saw nothing.” This time she reacted by laughing and changing form. Laughing made her look more human and less snake-like. Pretty much all human. She began crawling out of the room, her body soft and pliable, saying on her way out, “Take that treasure of yours and see what animal your dieh is after spending forty-four years killing people. This is just a guess, but I’ll say eight or nine chances out of ten, he’s a poisonous snake.” More talk of snakes! I knew she was like the fleeing bandit who yells “Stop, thief!” and I was not about to be fooled by that.

I put my treasure back in its hiding place in the wall, beginning to wish I’d never gotten it in the first place. The less you know, the better, most of the time. Knowledge only gets you into trouble. Knowing a person’s true form is especially dangerous, because that’s something you cannot get past. Now that I’d seen what my wife really was, that was the end of it for me. If I’d been ignorant of her snake background, nothing could have stopped me from wrapping my arms around her in bed. Think I’d dare do that now? That was reason enough not to want to know what my dieh was. I was already pretty much a loner, and now that my wife was a snake, my dieh was all I had.

So I hid my treasure and went into the living room, where I got the shock of my life. Heaven help me, there on my dieh’s sandalwood chair sat an emaciated panther! It turned to look at me out of the corner of its eye. I’d seen that look before, and it didn’t take a genius to know that it was in fact my dieh in an earlier form. It opened its mouth, making its whiskers twitch. “Son,” it said, “so now you know. Your dieh was the preeminent executioner at the Great Qing Court, the recipient of accolades from the Empress Dowager Herself. It is a calling that must stay in the family.”

My heart skipped a beat. Heaven help me, what was
that
all about? In the story my niang told me about the tiger’s whisker, she said that after the man hid the whisker he’d gone up north to get, he could only see people as people—his dieh was not a horse and his niang was not a dog. I’d tucked my whisker back into a crack in the wall, so why was I now seeing my dieh as a panther? My eyes must have been deceiving me. Maybe the effects of that thing lingered on my hand. I was already having trouble accepting the fact that my wife was a white snake, and now that I’d discovered that my dieh was a panther, well, for me the road ahead was a dead end. In a state of panic, I ran into the yard, where I scooped up a pail of water and frantically washed my hands and rinsed out my eyes. Then I buried my head in the water. One weird occurrence after another that day had swelled my head, and I was hoping that a cold-water bath would bring it down to size.

I returned to the living room, only to find the panther still sitting in my dieh’s sandalwood armchair. There was a look of disdain in those eyes, disappointment that I hadn’t made much of myself. A red-tasseled skullcap was perched atop its large, furry head; two hairy ears were pricked straight up in a state of vigilance. Dozens of long, wiry whiskers fanned out from the sides of its wide mouth. After licking its chops and the tip of its nose with a spiky, slurpy tongue, it yawned with red grandeur. It was wearing a tea-colored short jacket over a long robe, from whose wide sleeves fleshy, clawed paws emerged. It was such a strange, comical scene, I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. At the moment, those claws were deftly manipulating a string of sandalwood prayer beads.