Under the Red Flag (5 page)

Leng was panting hard, so Liao asked again, “How are things?”

“Not very good, Old Liao,” Leng said, coming closer. Sweat was trickling down his forehead and cheeks, and he wiped it off with his soiled hand. That turned his face into an opera-mask, full of streaks. “Old Liao, I came to beg you for help.”

“How can I help you?” Liao asked, and tilted his gray head. “Why don’t you sit down and have a cup first?”

“No, thanks,” Leng said, standing in front of Liao with both hands on his narrow hips. “Vet Bai said today is the best time for my sow, but Ma Ding, the son of a bitch in Willow Village, didn’t show up with his boar. He promised me to come at three o’clock. Damn his grandma, I washed my sow and cleaned up everything, waiting for him all the while. It’s past four already. My sow can’t wait anymore. So …”

“So what?” said Liao. He struck a match and lit a new load of tobacco.

“So I came to invite you to help.”

“No, no.” Liao waved to put out the match and exhaled two lines of smoke. “My boar will have a good time with Mu Bushao’s sow tomorrow morning. If he gives all his stuff to your sow today, he’ll be empty tomorrow and have nothing left for Mu’s sow. No, that won’t do. You know, I can’t cheat folks of our village. Even a rabbit knows not to eat the grass near its own hole.”

“I beg you, Old Liao! Please come, just for the reason we’ve been neighbors for generations, just for the respect for our old folks who were friends.”

“Just for all those, humph? Why didn’t you come here in the first place?” Liao’s cheeks turned red.

“Forgive me just this once, all right? Next time I’ll come to you first.” Leng paused, then added, “But to be fair, I’ll pay you better. How about fifteen yuan a mating? You know, five yuan more. You can buy two bottles of sorghum liquor for that money.”

“Save the five yuan for your mother!” Liao said, and knocked the bronze pot of his pipe against the stone stool under his hips. “You black-hearted men only know money. For a few yuan you’d sell your fathers’ coffin lumber. You heard that white foreign pigs grew bigger than our black native pigs, so you all take your sows to Ma Ding for a foreign fucking. Everybody knows white pigs’ pork tastes no good, but you don’t care. You only want your pigs to grow bigger and weigh more on the scale at the buying station. Where’s your heart, man? You can’t cheat the buyer, our country, like this!” Whitish foam circled Liao’s lips.

“All right, I’m in the wrong, Old Liao. Come on, we have no
time to talk like this. The sow is waiting for you at my home. Please come and finish the business.”

“Waiting for me? What makes you think I’ll come?”

“I know you will, ‘cause you understand things and you’re always good to your neighbors. If you don’t help me, who will?”

Liao’s anger seemed to be fading. He raised the cup and emptied the last drops, but he thrust the pipe into the tobacco pouch and was about to load it again.

“Come on, Brother Liao, I beg you.”

“You go first. I’ll follow you,” Liao said casually. He tied the pouch around the pipe and tucked the package behind his cloth waistband.

“Now I have your word, Old Liao. I’m running back and waiting for you, all right?”

“You can run your doggy legs off. I’ll be with you in a couple of minutes.”

As soon as Leng disappeared beyond the gate Liao went to a vat beneath the eaves. He scooped out two gourd-ladles of boiled soybeans for his boar. Before every mating he would give it some nutritious food. After all, it labored for him. In recent years it had brought him a profit equal to the amount that two farmhands could make. The mating business had been very good until Ma Ding got his white foreign boar and became a competitor, but so far Liao still had enough customers. Most households in Horse Village remained loyal to him.

“Big boy, today you’re lucky again,” he spoke to the boar, which was eating away noisily. “You’ve luck both for your mouth and your cock. I arrange weddings for you every week, aren’t you grateful? You ought to be. You happy pig, your children are spread everywhere. You should work harder for me, shouldn’t
you?” He rapped the neck of the boar twice, and it snorted back appreciatively.

He brought out a hemp rope and tied it around the boar’s neck. The door of the pigpen was lifted and the boar came out. Watching its large body that weighed over three hundred kilos, Liao couldn’t help speaking again. “I’m proud of you, boy. You brought me not only cash but also respect among the folks. With one spear you’ve conquered so many villages. No man can do as much as you did. Now, shall we go?”

“Who are you talking to over there, my old man?” his wife called out from the house.

“To our boar, my old woman. We’re leaving to do business. Scramble a dozen eggs for supper. We’ll make some extra money today. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

“All right, you come back soon. We’ll wait for you.” The bellows in the kitchen resumed croaking while fat was sputtering in the cauldron.

Liao set out for Leng’s house. Rapidly the boar was treading the road, whose surface of dried mud had been cut into numerous ruts by oxcarts. The air was still warm, though the crimson sun was approaching the indigo peak of the Great Emperor Mountain. Grass had pierced the soil here and there, and the cornfields, sown a few days before, looked like huge gray ribs stretching towards the end of the green sky. Everything seemed sluggish and even the air made one feel languid. In the west, a herd of sheep were slowly coming down the mountain slope like clouds lying atop the bushes. Small voices, children’s voices, were buzzing from distant places. Once every few seconds a donkey’s bray split the air.

Leng’s house was at the northern end of Horse Village, within ten minutes’ walk. When he arrived, Liao led his boar directly
into Leng’s yard and closed the gate behind him. He wanted to get the business done quickly, take the pay, and return home for the supper of scrambled eggs, fried dough cakes, soy paste, raw scallions, stewed hairtail, which he bought in Dismount Fort that morning after he had sold a litter of piglets there. He liked that fish best and never could have enough of it.

To his surprise, in the middle of Leng’s yard was standing a huge white boar. Beyond it a young sow was lying on her back against a nether millstone. The boar’s owner, Ma Ding, whom Liao recognized at a glance, was talking with Leng. Second Dog, Leng’s teenage son, was shoveling manure out of the pigpen. Seeing Liao and the black boar, the boy stopped to make a face, a snouty pout, at his father and Ma Ding.

Anger welled up in Liao. I’m taken in, he thought. Leng, you dung-eater, you have Ma here already, ahead of me.

He wanted to walk straight to Leng and give him a round of curses that would make his ancestors squirm in their graves, but he hesitated because right in front of him was the white boar that was so large, even larger than his black boar. Shedding fierce glints, the white boar’s lozenge eyes were blinking at Liao and the black boar behind him.

Leng realized the embarrassment he had caused. He stopped talking and turned around, coming over to calm Liao. He had hardly walked a step when Liao yelled out and was thrown to the ground. A black shadow flitted over his body and dashed to the white boar. Both Leng and Ma jumped aside instinctively. Chickens and ducks burst away in every direction, and a rooster landed on the wall, then flew off to the neighbor’s yard. Second Dog thrust the shovel into the manure heap and vaulted out of the pigpen, shouting excitedly, “Good pig, get that foreign bastard. Drive him back home!”

The boars’ growls, louder than those sent out by a pig in a slaughterhouse when a long knife stabbed into its throat, were vibrating through the neighborhood and the village.

Liao got up to his feet. The two pigs were already in a melee. Though the white boar was bigger and heavier, the black one was nimbler and fiercer. Watching them rolling about, Liao felt his boar was by no means inferior to that white foreign beast. Just now when the fight broke out, by instinct he had wanted to stop them, uncertain if his pig could match its enemy, but now he changed his mind. His boar had to be the master in this village at least. Let him fight to protect his territory, Liao thought, to keep his wives and concubines, to get rid of that foreign bastard, and teach both Ma and Leng a hard lesson. See if they dare to look down on me and my boar again.

Instead of trying to separate the pigs, Liao stood there motionless and enjoyed watching them fighting. Likewise, Ma and Leng seemed also eager to see the fight through. Unlike the men, Second Dog openly took sides, waving a wooden stick to urge the black boar on. They all forgot the sow that had escaped into the pigpen.

The white boar opened its jaws, snapping at its attacker. Its scarlet tongue was dripping blood, which the men couldn’t tell was from the wounds on the black boar or from the bleeding inside its own mouth. Again and again its flinty teeth cut through the air but missed the black boar, which seemed clever, able to parry the attacks with its snout.

After a few rounds the two pigs disengaged themselves. Each stepped back for ten feet or so, turned around facing the other for a moment, as if dazed by the hot blood pumped into their heads, then dashed toward each other and clashed with a muffled noise. Neither of them lost its balance or retreated a step. Instead
they stuck together, holding each other with their snouts, and started a kind of wrestling. The two bodies turned tense as if having shed their fat. The pigs were circling around and around rather slowly; each wanted to throw the other down, but neither was able to make it. Their columnar hind feet sank into the earth.

Suddenly the black boar passed water. A thick line of greenish liquid gushed out and fell on the ground. Liao’s heart shuddered, because he realized his boar couldn’t match the white beast in strength. He was right; in a few seconds the black boar began retreating, two deep grooves emerging under its hind feet. The ground soaked with the urine could no longer give a solid footing. The white boar pushed and pushed and pushed, till with a crushing thrust it hurled its enemy over. The black boar collapsed right in front of its master’s feet, whining and gasping. Liao felt a sharp pain in his heart and wanted to bend down to help it up, but he restrained himself, seeing a smile cross the square face of Ma Ding, who was looking at the black boar contemptuously. Anger flamed up in Liao and he kicked his pig ferociously in the flank. That sent it to its feet at once. The boar seemed to understand its master’s mind and went for its enemy again.

This time they fought differently. The black boar appeared to know its own physical inferiority and tried resorting to its teeth. With its mouth open, it snapped at the white boar, which couldn’t move fast enough to avoid every attack. Yet the white boar was so large it stood there like a bridge pier.

Liao worried. Obviously his boar had no chance of winning the fight. While he was figuring how to invent an excuse for withdrawing his force from the battle, the black boar stepped aside; then, approaching the white boar slowly, all of a sudden
it jumped into the air with its front legs upwards. The pair of pointed feet plunged and stabbed into its enemy’s face. The white boar growled wildly. Below its right eye an inch of hairy skin was torn off together with a chunk of flesh, and the cut, smeared with yellowish mud, turned scarlet instantly.

“Good pig! He sure knows how to scratch,” Leng cried.

“Kill this foreign beast,” Second Dog shouted, whacking the white boar’s rump with the stick.

“Second Dog!” Ma yelled. “You son of a rabbit, don’t abuse a pig! It’s just a dumb animal.”

Liao was pleased. Looking at Ma, he put on a smile and said, “We stop here, Old Ma, all right?”

Ma didn’t respond, as though he hadn’t heard Liao.

The two pigs went on biting each other. The white boar looked pink now, but there weren’t many wounds on its body, and it had gotten only a few short rosy furrows on its sides. Though the black boar didn’t change color, it had more wounds than its enemy. Yet its fighting spirit was not sinking. The dark snout reached for the under part of the white belly and took a solid snap at the soft area beneath the ribs. The white boar gave out a deafening howl, and blood was dripping on the ground. The black boar was stunned by the murderous sound and paused, standing there as if wondering. The white boar jumped up into the air and its cavernous mouth dived onto its enemy. The huge pink jaws crushed the dark head and struck the black boar away at least ten feet. Immediately the black boar dashed off growling, and the white boar was chasing behind. None of the men had seen how it had happened—in the dust a black ear, bigger than an open hand, was twitching and twitching like a giant bat.

The black boar rushed into the latrine and came out from the other side. The white boar followed. The poles supporting the latrine were smashed and tossed to the ground. The instant the white boar emerged from the other side the latrine collapsed.

“My outhouse! Oh, my outhouse,” Leng cried. “You two stop your pigs. They’re destroying my property.”

Second Dog picked up a pitchfork and went for the white boar, shouting, “Goddamn it, I’m going to run you through, white beast!”

“No, hold!” Ma yelled and threw up his hands.

“Second Dog, put it down!” his father ordered harshly. The boy froze and dropped the pitchfork.

The pigs couldn’t be stopped now. The black boar seemed to be recovering from the giddiness caused by the loss of the ear and stood against the adobe wall. With its entire face covered with blood, it looked so monstrous that the white boar faltered in front of the gruesome pig-face. The black boar sent out a thundering roar to the sky and started charging at the white boar that was shaken a little.

The white boar began to dodge its desperate enemy. Gradually the black boar turned to chasing the white boar, jumping about and biting away at the pink rump and flanks. By now both Liao and Ma wanted to stop the fight, but it was too late, impossible. Nobody dared come close to the pigs, because the black boar was biting at anything within reach. It pursued the white boar so incessantly that the larger pig simply didn’t have a chance to stop to put itself together for a real fight.