The Dog (16 page)

Rabbit looked at Yang, who smirked at the man's obvious lie.

“We should be compensated for our donations!” another man shouted.

Yang held up his hand. The men quieted down. The year before, the factory had sent one hundred thousand yuan to the Yunnan quake relief effort, and one hundred thousand to flood relief the year before that. But this one felt different. Yang had to find the right balance: a donation large enough to calm the men, but not so large as to make it look like he had money to burn. The men complained endlessly about their wages and suspected that untold riches were piling up in vaults beneath the factory, money withheld from them expressly to scuttle their chances for advancement in the world. What if he fired them all on the spot, sold the factory to the highest bidder, and settled into a quiet life of mahjong and cold beer? And why was it his duty to compensate the men for their donations? It was the damned ingratitude that got him. How dare they hold his feet to the fire.

“Beijing Number Seven Peony Metal Fabrication, Limited, will match the donations of any and all employees,” Yang said slowly, his eyes searching for any man willing to return his gaze, “and above that amount will donate three hundred thousand yuan to the relief effort.”

That ought to shut them up, he thought. People think only of themselves, even when they believe they're helping others. It's every man for himself. Then he heard the applause. The men's faces, turned up to him like a band of starving children he'd fed from his own kitchen. Some were waving their hard hats. Amazing, he thought. But by tomorrow they'll have found a reason to turn against me. Three hundred thousand won't be enough. He turned abruptly and went into the office, the men's cheers still audible after he'd closed the door, like an ax chopping at him, breaking him up into pieces they'd throw on a fire to warm their rough hands. He fell into his leather chair and closed his eyes.

That was how Rabbit found him when he returned to the office after laying some more brotherly abuse on the men.

“Finally, you've died from stress,” Rabbit said. “Now your daughter's treasures will be mine.”

“Soon enough,” Yang said without opening his eyes. “I'm down two pints to the relief effort.”

“What a patriot. Hope you got a certificate.”

Yang opened his eyes a touch, but Rabbit had concerned himself with a towering sheaf of invoices, his fingers playing up and down the jagged ridge of paper.

“What word from the proletariat?” Yang said. The factory was coming back to life, the floor beneath his feet beginning to thrum.

Rabbit didn't respond immediately. The office was arranged so that he sat with his back to Yang. It wasn't spacious, but was large enough for their two desks, both heavy wooden Qing Dynasty knockoffs, their chrome-and-mesh swivel chairs, several banks of file cabinets, and three boxy modular chairs for visitors. A small refrigerator stocked with kimchi and beer hummed against the wall.

Rabbit's fingers hovered at a corner of paper protruding from the stack before pincering an invoice, which he held close to his face, his upper lip retracted from his incisors as he peered over the top of his glasses. “It's fine,” Rabbit said. “You know how the guys get. They say they're worried about their relatives, but mostly they're worried about their own skins, and they just want to get on with it.”

Yang sighed and closed his eyes again. “Three hundred thousand,” he said.

“It's enough. You're still a rich man no matter how much you give away,” Rabbit said. He quickly added, “But no one thinks you're holding out.”

“The men know I'm not a public speaker,” Yang said.

“Don't worry about it. The rich always have trouble communicating with the poor,” Rabbit said, dropping the page to his desk, satisfied with his inspection.

“I'm not the only rich one around here,” Yang said.

“Noted,” Rabbit said. “The difference is, I'm not the president of Beijing Number Seven Peony Metal Fabrication.”

“So?” Yang said.

“You're not one of the boys anymore. You're tall, rich, and handsome.”

“I'm supposed to apologize for being rich? I'm supposed to live in a shack and eat fried rice?” Yang said.

“No,” Rabbit said. “But stop pretending you do. You're the big frog in this pond. You have to watch over the little frogs.” Rabbit fixed his eyes on his friend. “You should have been here yesterday. You know what it sounded like? The cargo bay of a ship in a storm, creaking and groaning and everything sliding around. But the men, silent as a tomb. They were petrified, and where were you? They're your responsibility, for better or worse. That's how it is. You were absent in their time of need. You abandoned your children in their darkest hour.”

Yang picked at the button of his shirt and didn't respond.

Rabbit searched Yang's face, but, finding only the same pair of sad black eyes he'd known for forty years, he nodded and went back to his paperwork.

For the rest of the week, Yang came to work and sat in his chair. The zone chief called five, six times a day, but Yang declined to answer. At first Rabbit managed to placate the zone chief, but eventually the chief refused to speak to him. It had gotten personal. Day after day, there Yang sat, placid as a frog in the mud. Maybe it was a calculated act of rebellion, but Rabbit couldn't understand for the life of him what his partner stood to gain by antagonizing the chief. The chief could make real trouble for them. Rabbit's own patience was wearing thin. He had enough problems trying to keep the men on the floor organized without having to play nursemaid to Yang.

During this time of silence, Yang came to understand the crisis in his own way: The workers would be satisfied by nothing less than strips of flesh from his back. The country would take nothing less than everything he had. Zone Chief Zhou was now leaving messages at all hours on his cell phone. He was cursing Yang in new and creative ways, threatening to shut the factory down. Yang smiled as he listened to a message from the chief degrading his mother.

Eventually, Rabbit lost it. “Did you have a stroke? Have you gone nuts?” he shouted at Yang.

Nothing.

“I'm calling a psychologist if you don't pull it together!” Rabbit yelled.

Yang smiled.

“I'm serious, you asshole!”

At home it wasn't much better. The first night Gong had paced around her husband, consoled him. The next night she screamed at him. Then she sat across from him, gnawing at her lip.

“You're under a lot of pressure,” she said. “I understand. But that doesn't mean you have to act like a mental patient. You can't just hole up like this. Rabbit's told me what's going on. I don't want to wind up living on the street. I won't.” She waited for a glimmer of recognition, a sign of concern. He gave her nothing. “You call back the zone chief and you do what he wants,” she said. “You do exactly what he tells you to do. Why, on top of everything else, are you trying to bring the government down on our heads?”

She tilted her chin at him, waiting for an answer. When none came, she answered for him. “You are. You're trying to ruin us.”

Yang got up and turned on the TV.

“You think this is a good example for Little Li?” she said. His smile cracked just a hair. Gong threw up her hands and left the room.

The news from near the epicenter of the earthquake in Beichuan County, deep in the Longmen Mountains, was horrific. Seven thousand dead in the town of Yingxiu, population nine thousand. In Dujiangyan, southeast of the epicenter, fifty children would be entombed in the rubble for weeks before workers could exhume them. Their parents encamped atop the concrete slabs, fighting with police to watch over the bodies of their children, singing them songs at dusk, telling stories to the rubble. Some had already been imprisoned for their defiance. Starving dogs and cats wandered over the wreckage, nosing into the rubble until rescue workers ran them off. Hundred-foot lengths of asphalt road had sheared off mountainsides and slid into valleys, sweeping away hamlets with no more pause than a drop of water rolling down a windowpane.

Yang considered the loneliness of dying beneath a slab of concrete, in the dark, mouth caked with dust and stone. He'd tried to be good, to do his duty, but what had he changed?

Newscasters sobbed as they reported on missing children reunited with their parents. Yet that was not what his countrymen concerned themselves with. The day after the quake, he saw in the
United Daily News
the total amount of donations by the ten richest people in China. In one day, 32.5 million yuan. And still, public outrage swelled. It was as though the benefactors had shat on the victims' graves. No donation was enough.

Chief Zhou had ordered a massive sign erected outside the zone gates listing, by order of size of donation, the twenty-seven companies located within. The names were in blocky script on a grid, framed on either side by cascading yellow and red bunting, the board rising to a height of two stories above the sidewalk. Included was each company's phone number and the exact amount, to the fen, donated to the earthquake victims. Passersby stood in front of the sign and dialed the listed companies, yelling indignantly at whoever picked up. If they couldn't get through, they pinned angry notes to a smaller comment board on the opposite side of the gate. The first-place company got as many calls as the last-place company, Yang's Beijing Number Seven Peony Metal Fabrication.

In the end it was the office secretary, a young cousin of Rabbit's, who ripped the phone cord from the wall and refused to answer any more calls until something was done. Rabbit went to Yang.

“I'm withholding your paycheck until you call the chief and sort this out,” he said.

“So what?” Yang said.

“Just call the man,” Rabbit said.

“I don't want to.”

“Fine. I'll tell the men you're withholding our donation.”

“So? They can read the sign,” Yang said.

“They're under the impression the zone chief is putting the squeeze on you for a kickback. You want me to tell them that you're keeping the money for yourself?”

“You'd kick your own mother in the balls,” Yang said.

“My mother keeps her balls in a jar on the shelf, my friend, right next to yours.”

Chief Zhou's office kept him on hold for five minutes while Yang listened to a tinny recording touting the zone's commitment to aiding the victims of the Wenchuan earthquake. The voice also reminded him that the zone was accepting applications for factory space, which could be modified to meet tenants' needs.

“Hello?” the chief said when he finally came on the line, as if he'd just run into the office and hadn't been sitting there fuming, fantasizing about various methods by which to disembowel Yang, the entire time.

“Chief Zhou, it's Bing Yang, Beijing Number Seven Peony Metal Fabrication.”

“Bing Yang. Good to hear your voice. How have you been?” the chief said. His tone was calm and collegial, and if Yang hadn't known the man was exercising every muscle in his body to keep from reaching through the handset to crush his throat, he'd have thought they were on good terms.

“It's been busy, Chief. I'm sorry we haven't been able to speak sooner.”

“Busy man, Yang.”

“Busy.”

“Yang, let's cut the bullshit.”

“Bullshit cut, Chief,” Yang said.

“I'm urging you to make a donation through the industrial zone. You've seen the board. It's a disgrace. You're one of only two companies who haven't helped the victims, and Beijing Heavy Transmission Eight is liquidating its holdings as we speak, so I might as well take them off the board entirely. Don't tell me you're broke, too.”

“Oh, no sir, Chief. We've had better quarters, but we're okay.”

“Good. So, how much will it be? They found a little girl alive in Beichuan, did you see that? Buried four and a half days.”

“Amazing. It's a testament to the human spirit, Chief.”

“I agree, Yang. So, how much?”

“Well, Chief, I've prepared a donation of three hundred thousand,” Yang said. “We may end up bankrupt yet.”

Chief Zhou didn't laugh. “That's fine, Yang. That might be enough to help me forget your behavior so far. When should I expect it?”

“Whenever you're ready to massage my scrotum,” Yang said. Across the office, Rabbit gasped and made waving motions with his arms.

Yang waved back.

“What?” yelled Chief Zhou.

“Just cutting the bullshit, as requested.”

“You son of a bitch!” Chief Zhou's voice shook. “All this time you keep me waiting? I've got cadres from the municipal government up my ass, and you're wasting my time with this? What have I ever done to you?”

Rabbit was pale, his breathing shallow.

“Let's avoid conflict, Chief,” Yang said, holding the receiver away from his ear. “Why don't I just write a check to your personal account and we'll be done with it?”

Rabbit made a choking sound.

“You fucking hick,” Chief Zhou sputtered. The line clicked and he was gone. Yang set his handset back in its cradle.

“Oh, oh, oh,” was all Rabbit could say. He kept wiping his brow with a handkerchief.

“What's he going to do?” Yang said. “Add another zero to our tally on the big board? My conscience is clean. We'll give three hundred thousand directly to the Red Cross and we'll match the men's donations. I've given my own blood. Why is everyone so intent on draining my accounts?”

Rabbit stared at him. “You've lost your mind. Your wife calls me in tears. I'm maintaining your customers for you. Okay, my friend. That's one thing. But now you're messing with the Party. Chief Zhou is going to drop a bomb on us.”

“He just wants his cut,” Yang said.

“No shit. And he wants to keep his house and his Mercedes. If he doesn't get a donation from every company, in two weeks he'll be driving a dump truck in Xinjiang, spending Friday nights at the mosque.”