Sandalwood Death (13 page)

Niang once told me that a tiger manipulates Buddhist prayer beads to give the impression of goodness. She never said anything about a panther.

I backed up slowly, barely able to keep from turning and running. My wife was a snake, my dieh a panther. This house was no place for me. I’d be in real trouble if either one of them reverted back to its original form. Even if what we’d meant to each other kept them from eating me, I don’t think I could stand the crushing anxiety of doubt. I forced a smile, hoping that would keep him from getting suspicious. It was my only hope. That panther was showing its age, but its hind legs, folded into a crouch in the armchair, looked to have plenty of spring left—leaping a good five or six feet would be no problem. Sure, its teeth had worn down over the years, but those steely fangs would have no trouble crushing my throat. And let’s say I had the leg strength to get away from the panther; there’d still be the white snake. According to my niang, a snake that has gained spirit status is half a dragon and can move like the wind, faster than a racehorse. She said she’d actually seen a snake as thick as her arm and as long as a carrying pole chase down a fawn in the wild. The young deer had run and bounded through the grass, fast as an arrow off the bow. The snake? With the front half of its body raised off the ground, it parted the grass with a
whoosh
. In the end, it swallowed the fawn whole. My wife was as big around as a water bucket and had reached heights of Taoist cultivation way beyond that of the snake that ate the fawn. I could run faster than a jackrabbit and still not escape something that could soar with the clouds and mist.

“Where are you going, Xiaojia?” A gloom-laden voice sounded behind me. I turned to look. The panther had risen up out of the sandalwood chair, its forelegs pressing down on the armrests, its hind legs now touching the brick floor. I was caught in a withering glare. Heaven help me, the old-timer was ready to pounce, and could easily make it out into the yard in one leap! Don’t panic, I told myself to boost my courage; calm down. Heh-heh, I feigned a laugh. “I’m going to take care of that pig, Dieh. Pork must be sold when it’s fresh. It’s heavier on the scale and it looks better.” The panther smirked. “It’s time for you to take up a new calling, son,” the panther said. “It too involves ‘killing,’ but pig-killing is one of the three debased occupations, while man-killing has been elevated to one of the nine chosen occupations.” I kept backing up. “You’re right, Dieh. From today on, I’ll stop killing pigs and learn from you how to kill a man . . .” At that moment the white snake raised its head, a head covered with glistening, scary coin-sized scales all the way down its white neck. “Cluck cluck cluck cluck” . . . a strand of laughter sounding more like a laying hen sputtered from her mouth. “Xiaojia,” she said, “did you see it? What animal was your dieh? A wolf? A tiger? A poisonous snake?” I watched her scaly white neck rise up as the red jacket and green pants she was wearing slid off her body like a multihued snakeskin. Her red-tinged black tongue was within striking distance of my eyes. Niang! I lost it then, jumping backward in terror, and—
bang
! I heard what sounded like a thunderclap and saw stars—Niang! I passed out, foaming at the mouth. My wife later said I’d suffered an epilepsy attack. Nonsense! How can someone who’s not an epileptic suffer one of those? What happened is that in my panicky jump I hit my head on a doorjamb nail. The pain knocked me out.

A woman was calling me from far, far off: “Xiaojia . . . Xiaojia . . .” I couldn’t tell whether it was my niang or my wife. I had a splitting headache, and when I tried to open my eyes, I couldn’t—my lids were stuck shut by something gummy. There was a perfumed smell in the air, and then the smell of crushed grass, and finally the heavy, rank odor of boiled pig entrails. The calls kept coming: “Xiaojia, Xiaojia . . .” Then something cool and refreshing pelted me in the face, and my mind was abruptly as clear as a bell.

The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was a rainbow of dancing colors. Then I saw brilliant flashes of light, followed by a big, pasty face that nearly touched mine. It belonged to my wife. “Xiaojia,” I heard her say, “you scared me half to death.” She was tugging me with a hand that felt sweaty, and finally managed, very clumsily, to pull me up off the floor. I shook my head. “Where am I?” “Where are you? You’re home, you poor fool.” Home. Feeling a sense of agony, I frowned, as everything that had just happened came back in a flash. “As heaven is my witness, I don’t want that tiger’s whisker, I don’t! I’m going to throw it into the fire.” She smirked and put her mouth up close to my ear. “You big fool,” she said, “did you really think that’s a tiger’s whisker? It’s one of my hairs.” I shook my head. It hurt, it hurt like crazy. “No, that can’t be. You don’t have hair like that. But even if you did, how do you explain the fact that when I held it in my hand, I could see your true form? And I saw my dieh’s true form even when I wasn’t holding it.” “Tell me, then,” she said, her curiosity piqued, “what was I?” As I looked into that fair, fresh face, then down at her arms and legs, before glancing over at my dieh, who was slumped in his armchair, everything suddenly cleared up. I must have been dreaming. My wife as a snake, my dieh as a panther, it was all a dream. She laughed a strange little laugh. “Who knows, maybe I am a snake. Yes, that’s exactly what I am, a snake!” Her face lengthened, and her eyes turned green. “If I’m a snake,” she added venomously, “I’ll wriggle my way into your belly!” Her face grew longer and longer, her eyes a deeper and deeper green, and scales reappeared on her neck. I covered my eyes with my hands and screamed: “No, you’re not, you’re not a snake, you’re human!”

————

3

————

The gate to our compound flew open.

There stood the two yayi my father had sent packing, except that now they were gray wolves in human clothing. Hands resting on their swords, they stood one on each side of the door. Scared out of my wits, I shut my eyes in hopes that this would rescue me from my dream. When I reopened my eyes, I saw that they now had yayi faces, but the backs of their hands were coated with fur, and their fingers ended in sharp claws. I was struck by the sad realization that my wife’s hair was more powerful than any tiger’s whisker could ever be. The whisker worked its magic only when you held it in your hand, but all my wife’s hair had to do was touch your hand to hold you in its supernatural power, and then it made no difference whether you kept it or threw it away, whether you were aware of its existence or not.

After the wolf-yayi took their positions by the sides of the gate, a four-man palanquin was set down on the cobblestone street in front of the gate. The bearers—a quartet of donkeys, with big, floppy ears hidden under stovepipe caps, but with easily identifiable faces—rested their glistening front hooves on the chair shafts, slobber oozing from their mouths as their breath came in snorts. By all appearances, they had run the whole way, their hoof-encased boots covered with a thick layer of dust. The legal secretary, Diao, whom everyone called Diao Laoye—he was a pointy-faced hedgehog—grabbed a corner of the chair curtain with his pink paw and pulled it open. I knew it was Magistrate Qian’s official palanquin, the one Xiaokui had spat at to bring the wrath of its owner down on his head, and I knew that the person about to step out was Gaomi County’s Magistrate, His Eminence Qian Ding, my wife’s gandieh. Logically, that made him my gandieh as well. But when I told my wife that I’d like to go along to pay my respects to him, she flatly refused. Fairness requires me to admit that Magistrate Qian had generously exempted us from paying taxes over the years, saving us a lot of silver. But he really shouldn’t have broken Xiaokui’s leg just because he spat at his palanquin. Xiaokui was a friend of mine, after all, even though he’d said to me, “You really are a fool, Xiaojia. Magistrate Qian has given you a cuckold’s green hat, so why don’t you wear it?” Well, I went home and said to my wife, “Dear wife, Xiaokui said that Magistrate Qian has given me a green hat. What’s it look like? Why won’t you show me?” “You idiot,” she cursed, “Xiaokui is a bad person, and I don’t want you spending time with him. If you do, I won’t sleep with you anymore.” Before three days had passed, some yayi had broken Xiaokui’s leg. Breaking somebody’s leg just because he spits at you makes you a very cruel man, Magistrate Qian. So now here you are, and I want to see just what you used to be.

I watched as a white tiger head, as big as a willow basket, emerged from the palanquin. Heaven help me, Magistrate Qian was a white tiger in human form! No wonder my niang said that the Emperor is a reincarnated dragon and that high officials are reincarnated tigers. A blue official’s cap sat atop the tiger’s head, while its body was sheathed in a red official’s robe with a pair of strange-looking white birds—neither chickens nor ducks—embroidered on the chest. Bigger than my dieh, a skinny panther, this was a very fat tiger. It was doughy white, my dieh coal black. The tiger stepped down and lumbered in through our gate, taking slow, measured steps. The hedgehog dashed ahead of it into the courtyard and announced, “His Eminence the County Magistrate has arrived!”

The tiger and I were face to face. It snarled, and I shut my eyes in fear. “You must be Zhao Xiaojia.”

Bent like a shrimp, I replied, “Yes, yes, I am Zhao Xiaojia.”

While I was bent over like that, he hid the bulk of his original form, leaving only the tip of his tail showing beneath his robe and dragging it along the muddy ground. I had a very private thought: Tiger, there’s pig’s blood and dog shit in our compound mud, so pretty soon flies will be landing on your tail. My thought still hung in the air when flies resting on the wall swarmed over, buzzing and raising a din as they landed not just on the Magistrate’s tail, but on his cap, his sleeves, and his collar. “Xiaojia,” the Magistrate said amiably, “go inside and announce that the County Magistrate has come calling.”

I said, “The Magistrate can go on in. But my dieh might bite.”

The legal secretary reverted to human form and said angrily, “Are you really so reckless as to disobey the County Magistrate? Go inside and tell your dieh to come out here!”

His Eminence raised his hand to stop his secretary and, bending slightly at the waist, stepped inside. I rushed in after him, wanting to see what would happen when tiger and panther met. I hoped they would be enemies at first sight—growling, their hackles raised, green lights shooting from their eyes, white fangs bared. The white tiger glares at the panther; the panther glares right back. The white tiger circles the panther; the panther does the same. No backing down. My niang told me that wild beasts display their aggressive power to potential enemies by snarling, glaring, and showing their fangs, trying to drive them away without a fight. If one shows a hint of vulnerability by pricking up its ears or wagging its tail or lowering its eyes, the other one will snap at it a time or two, and the battle is won. But if neither is willing to back down, a savage fight is inevitable. No fight, how much fun is that? A good fight, now that’s worth waiting for. And that’s what I was doing—waiting, no, hoping, for a tiger-panther fight to the death between my dieh and Magistrate Qian. They circle one another, faster and faster, more and more aggressively, alternating black and white trails of smoke, moving from the living room out to the yard, and from there to the street beyond, round and round and round, until I am dizzy just watching them, spinning like a top. At one point the two merge, with black encircling white, like an egg, and white encircling black, like a twisted rope. They spin from the east end of the compound to the west, and from the south to the north. One minute they are up on the roof, the next down deep in the well. A sudden shriek—mountains echoing, oceans roaring, rabbits mating—until finally the settling—heaven and earth—arrives. I see a white tiger and a black panther, separated by no more than a couple of yards, sitting on their haunches as they lick the wounds on their shoulders. My mind was awhirl from watching the tiger-panther battle, and I was wild with joy, trembling from fear, and damp with sweat, all at the same time. Nothing had been resolved—no winner and no loser. While they were locked in battle, tooth and claw, I was wishing that I could help my panther dieh somehow, but I never found an opening.

Magistrate Qian glowered at my dieh, a contemptuous smirk on his face. Dieh wore a contemptuous smirk as he glowered at Magistrate Qian. In his eyes, this County Magistrate, who had ordered his lackeys to beat Xiaokui nearly to death, was beneath contempt. Dieh was panther-savage, mule-stubborn, ox-bold. The looks in the combatants’ eyes were like crossed swords, embodying clangs that produced sparks, some of which blistered my face. They held their intense gazes, neither willing to turn away, and by then my heart was in my throat, on the verge of leaping out of my body and turning into a jackrabbit, its tail sticking up as it bounded away, out of the yard and onto the street, to be chased by dogs all the way to the southern foothills to graze on fresh grass. What kind of grass? Butter grass. Eats a lot, hits the spot, too much and it grows a pot. When it returns, in my chest it’s a knot. Their muscles were taut, claws unsheathed from the folds of their paws. They could pounce at any minute and be at each other’s throat. At that critical moment, my wife walked in, bringing her feminine perfume into the room. Her smile was a rose in bloom, petals arching outward, opening wide. Her hips shifted from side to side like braiding a rope. Her original form glimmered for a brief moment, but was quickly hidden beneath fair, tender, fragrant, sweet skin. She knelt down dramatically and, in a voice dripping with honey yet sour as vinegar, said, “Sun Meiniang, a woman of the people, bows down before His Eminence the County Magistrate!”

That bow took the steam out of Magistrate Qian. He looked away and coughed, sounding like a billy goat with a cold: ahek ahek ahek ahek, ahek ahek ahek ahek. It was obviously contrived. I might have been a bit of an idiot, but I was not fooled. He sneaked a glance at my wife, willing neither to look her in the eye nor to look for long. That look was a grasshopper, bouncing all over the place, until it finally smacked into the wall. His face twitched, a pitiful sight, whether from shyness or fear I could not say. “No need for that,” he said; “please get up.”