The Garlic Ballads (17 page)

“I can’t walk anymore. My legs hurt.”

“No flimsy excuses now.”

“And I’m sleepy.”

First scratching his head, then shaking it, Gao Ma said, “We can’t live the rest of our lives in this jute field.”

“I don’t care, I’m not moving while the suns out.”

“Then we’ll wait till tonight.” He helped her to her feet. “But let’s move inside a little. It’s too dangerous here.”

“I …”

“I know, you can’t walk anymore.” He knelt in front of her. “I’ll carry you piggyback.” After handing her his bundle, he reached back and wrapped his arms around the back of her knees. She glided effortlessly up onto his back.

Before long he was huffing and puffing, his dark neck thrust out at a sharp angle. Beginning to take pity on him, she prodded him with her knees. “Put me down,” she said. “I can walk now.”

Without a word in reply, Gao Ma slid his hands upward until they were cupped around her buttocks, which he gentìy squeezed. A feeling as if her organs were blossoming like fresh flowers spread through her body. She moaned and lightly pummeled Gao Ma’s neck, he tripped, and they fell in a heap.

The jute plants trembled uneasily—only a few at first, but they were soon joined by the others as a wind rose, and all the sounds in the world were swallowed up by the booming yet surprisingly gende noise of jute leaves and branches scraping against one another.

Early the following morning, Jinju and Gao Ma, their clothes dusty and wet with dew, walked up to the Pale Horse County long-distance bus station.

It was a tall, handsome building—on the outside, at least—whose colorfully shaded lights above the gate illuminated both the large red letters of the signboard and the pale-green plaster façade. Pushcarts that opened after dark formed two rows leading up to the gate, like a long eorridor. Sleepy-eyed vendors, male and female, stood wearily behind their carts. Jinju watched a young vendor in her twenties cover up a yawn with her hand; when she was finished, tears stood in her eyes, which looked like lethargic tadpoles in the reflected blue flames from a sizzling gas lantern.

“Sweet pears … sweet pears … want some sweet pears?” a woman called to them from behind her pushcart. “Grapes … grapes … buy these fine grapes!” a man called from behind his. Apples, autumn peaches, honeyed dates: whatever you could desire, they sold. The smell of overripe fruit hung in the air, and the ground was littered with waste paper, the rotting skins of various fruits, and human excrement.

Jinju imagined something hidden behind the vendors’ benign looks. Deep down they’re cursing or laughing at me, she thought. They know who I am, and they know the things ? ve done over the past couple of days. That one over there, she can see the mud stains on my back and the crushed jute leaves on my clothes. And that old bastard over there, staring at me like I’m one of
those
women…. Overwhelmed by a powerful sense of degradation, Jinju shrank inward until her legs froze and her lips were tightly shut. Lowering her head in abject shame, she held on to Gao Ma’s jacket. Feelings of remorse returned, and a sense that the road ahead was sealed to her. Thoughts of the future were terrifying.

Meekly she followed Gao Ma up the stairs and stood beside him on the filthy tiled floor, finally breathing a sigh of relief. The vendors, quiet now, were beginning to doze off. It was probably just my imagination, she comforted herself. They didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. But then a frazzled, slovenly old woman walked out of the building and, with loathing in her dark eyes, glared at Jinju, whose heart shuddered in her chest cavity. The old woman walked down the steps, sought out a secluded corner, dropped her pants, and peed on the ground.

When Gao Ma wrapped his hand around the door handle, slick from coundess thousands of greasy hands, Jinju’s heart shuddered strangely again. The door creaked as he opened it a crack, releasing a blast of hot, nauseating air into Jinju’s face that nearly sent her reeling. Still, she followed him into the station, where someone who looked like an attendant yawned grandly as she crossed the floor. Gao Ma dragged Jinju over to the person, who turned out to be a very pregnant woman with a faceful of moles.

“Comrade, when does the bus for Lanji leave?” he asked.

The attendant scratched her protruding belly and looked at Gao Ma and Jinju out of the corner of her eye. “Don’t know. Try the ticket counter.” She was nice-looking and soft-spoken. “Over there,” she added, pointing with her hand.

Gao Ma nodded and said “Thank you”—three times.

The line was short, and he was at the ticket window in no time. A moment later he had their tickets in hand. Jinju, who hadn’t let go of his jacket all the while he was buying the tickets, sneezed once.

As she stood in the doorway of the huge waiting room, Jinju was terrified by the thought that everyone was looking at her, studying her grimy clothes and mud-spattered shoes. Gao Ma led her into the waiting room, whose floor was carpeted with melon-seed husks, candy wrappers, fruit skins, gobs of phlegm, and standing water. The oppressively hot air carried the stink of farts and sweat and other nameless foul odors that nearly bowled her over; but within a few minutes she had gotten used to it.

Gao Ma led her in search of seats. Three rows of benches painted an unknowable color, running the length of the room, were filled with sleeping people and a few seated passengers squeezed in among them. Gao Ma and Jinju spotted an empty place on a bench next to a bulletin board for newspapers, but upon closer inspection they saw that it was all wet, as if a child had peed on it. She balked, but he just brushed the water off with his hand. “Sit down,” he said. “ ‘Conveniences at home, trouble on the road.’ You’ll feel better once you get off your feet.”

Gao Ma sat down first, followed by a scowling Jinju with her swollen, puffy legs. Sure enough, she soon felt much better. For now she could lean back and present a smaller target for prying eyes. When Gao Ma told her to get some sleep, since their bus wasn’t due to leave for an hour and a half, she shut her eyes, even though she wasn’t sleepy. Transported back to the field, she found herself surrounded by jute stalks on the sides and the sharp outlines of leaves and the cold gleam of the sky above. Sleep was out of the question.

Three of the four glass panes over the gray-green bulletin board were broken, and a couple of sheets of yellowed newspaper hung from shards of broken glass. A middle-aged man walked up and tore off a corner of one of them, all the while looking around furtively. A moment later, the pungent odor of burning tobacco drifted over, and Jinju realized that the newspaper was serving as the man’s roll-your-own paper. Why didn’t I think to use it to dry the bench before we sat down? she wondered, as she looked down at her shoes. The caked-on mud was dried and splitting, so she scraped it off with her finger.

Gao Ma leaned over and asked softly, “Hungry?”

She shook her head.

“I’m going to get something to eat,” he said.

“Why? We’ll have plenty of opportunities to spend our money from here on out.”

“People are iron,” he said, “and food is steel. I need to keep up my strength to find work. Save my seat.”

After he laid his bundle beside her on the bench, Jinju had the sinking feeling that he was not coming back. She knew she was just being foolish—he wouldn’t leave her there, he wasn’t that kind of man. The image of him in the field with headphones over his ears—the first real impression he had made on her—flooded her mind. It seemed at turns to be happening right now and ages ago. She opened the bundle and took out the cassette player to listen to some music. But, afraid people might laugh at her, she shoved it back in and retied the bundle.

A woman looking like a wax figurine sat on a deck chair across from Jinju: her jet-black shoulder-length hair framed an ivory complexion and matched her thin, crescent-shaped eyebrows. She had astonishingly long lashes and lips like ripe cherries, dark red and luminous. She was wearing a skirt the color of the red flag, and her breasts jutted out so pertly they made Jinju feel bashful; reminded of talk that city girls wore padded bras, she thought about her own sagging breasts. I always knew they’d grow big and ugly, and that’s exactly what happened, she thought. But city girls wait in vain for theirs to grow big and sexy. Life is full of mysteries. Her girlfriends had warned her not to let men touch her breasts, or they’d rise like leavened bread in a matter of days. They were right: that’s just what had happened.

A man—also outlandish looking, of course—had lain his permed head in the lap of the woman in red, who was running her pale, tapered fingers through his hair, combing out the springy curls. She looked up and caught Jinju staring at her, so embarrassing Jinju that she lowered her head and looked away, like a thief caught in the act.

At some point during all this, the room brightened and the loudspeakers blared an announcement for Taizhen passengers to line up at Gate 10 to have their tickets punched. The heavily accented female voice on the PA system was so jarring it set Jinju’s teeth on edge. Bench sleepers began to stir, and in no time a stream of passengers—bundles and baskets in hand, wives and children in tow—descended on Gate 10 like a swarm of bees. They formed a colorful mob, short and stubby.

The couple opposite her acted as if there were no one else around.

A pair of attendants walked up to the rows of benches and began nudging sleepers’ buttocks and thighs with broom handles. “Get up,” they insisted. “All of you get up.” Most of the targets of these nudges sat up, rubbed their eyes, and fished out cigarettes; but some merely started the process, then lay back to continue their interrupted nap as soon as the attendants had moved on.

For some reason, though, the attendants were reluctant to disturb the curly-haired man. The woman in red, still running her fingers through his hair, looked up at the bedraggled attendants and asked in a loud, assured voice, “What time does the Pingdao bus leave, miss?”

Her perfect Beijing accent established her credentials, and Jinju, as if given a glimpse of Paradise, sighed appreciatively over both her good looks and her lovely way of speaking.

The attendants responded politely, “Eight-thirty.”

In contrast to the well-spoken woman in red, the attendants were beneath Jinju’s contempt. They began sweeping the floor, from one end of the room to the other. It seemed to Jinju that every man and half the women were puffing on cigarettes and pipes, whose smoke slowly filled the room and led to a round of coughing and spitting.

Gao Ma returned with a bulging cellophane bag. “Is everything all right?” he asked when he saw the look on her face. She said it was, so he sat down, reached into the bag, and pulled out a pear. “The local restaurants were all closed, so I bought you some fruit.” He offered her the pear.

“I told you not to spend so much,” she groused.

He wiped the pear on his jacket and took a noisy bite. “Here,” he said, handing it to her. “I’ve got more.”

A ragamuffin was walking up and down the rows of benches begging from anyone who was awake. Stopping in front of a young military officer, who glanced at him out of the corner of his eye, he struck a pitiful pose and said, Officer, Colonel, could you spare a little change?”

“I don’t have any money!” the moon-faced officer snapped in reply, rolling his eyes to show his displeasure.

“Anything will do,” the young beggar pleaded. “Wont you take pity on me?”

“Youre old enough to work. Why don’t you get a job?”

“Work makes me dizzy.”

The officer fished out a pack of cigarettes, opened it, removed one, and stuck it between his lips.

“If you wont give me money, Colonel, how about a smoke?”

“Do you know what land of cigarettes these are?” The officer looked him in the eye as he whipped out a shiny cigarette lighter and—
click
—flipped it on. Instead of touching the flame to the tip of his cigarette right away, he just let it blaze.

“Foreign, Colonel—they’re foreign cigarettes.”

“Know where they came from?”

“No.”

“My father-in-law brought them back from Hong Kong, that’s where. And look at this lighter.”

“You’re lucky to have a father-in-law like that, Colonel. I can see that life has smiled on you. Your father-in-law must be a big official, and his son-in-law will be one himself one of these days. Big officials are well-heeled and generous. So how about a smoke, Colonel?”

The young officer thought it over for a moment, then said, “No, I’d rather give you money.”

Jinju watched him fish out a shiny aluminum two-fen piece and hand it to the beggar, who wore a pained grin as he accepted the paltry gift with both hands and bowed deeply.

Now the beggar was walking this way, sizing up people as he came. Passing on Jinju and Gao Ma, he went up to the woman in red and her permed young man, who had just sat up. Jinju saw skin show through the beggar’s worn trousers when he bowed.

“Madam, sir, take pity on a man who’s down on his luck and give me some spare change.”

“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” the woman in red asked sanctimoniously. “A healthy young man like you should be out working. Don’t you have any self-respect?”

“Madam, I don’t understand a word you’re saying. I’m only asking for a little change.”

“Would you bark like a dog for it?” the permed fellow asked the beggar. “I’ll give you one yuan for every bark.”

“Sure. What do you prefer, a big dog or a little one?”

The permed young man turned to the woman in red and smiled. “That’s up to you.”

The young beggar coughed and cleared his throat, then began to bark, sounding remarkably doglike: “Arf arf—arf arf arf—-arf arf arf arf arf arf arf arf arf, arf, arf, arf arf, arf arf arf arf arf arf arf arf! That was a little dog. Twenty-six barks. Ruff! Ruff ruff! Ruff ruff! Ruff ruff ruff! Ruff ruff ruff ruff ruff ruff ruff ruff ruff ruff! Ruff ruff ruff! Ruff ruff!! Ruff!!! That was a big dog, twenty-four barks. Big and little together comes to fifty barks, at one yuan apiece, for a total of fifty yuan, sir, madam,”