Gao Ma; he aimed a mouthful of bloody saliva at Plaid Shirt, who was agile, wiry-probably a martial-arts practitioner. He sprang out of the way and charged Gao Ma, who worked up another gob of bloody spit and aimed it at the man’s long, thin face.
“What are you doing out there, Li Tie?” It was the voice of authority, coming from inside the government compound.
Plaid Shirt lowered his arms compliantly.
Gao Ma spat the bloody mess on the ground and walked off without a backward glance at the gatekeeper. With the blue horizon stretched out before him, he moved haltingly down the paved country road; the eyes of an old melon peddler gleamed like phosphorescent lights.
Gao Ma slipped and fell into the gutter, and as he lay amid vines and tendrils, he gazed sadly at the gentle slope of the gutter. Certain he could not walk upright, he dropped to his knees to slink home on all fours, like a dog.
It would be a long, arduous trip; his head, drooping of its own weight, felt as if it might fall off and roll into the gutter. Thorns pricked his hands, and his back felt as if it were being peppered by poison darts.
After negotiating the slope of the gutter, he straightened up. The prickly pains in his back so tormented him that he turned to look behind him, where he saw Plaid Shirt walking up to the gateway with a bucket of water and a rag to clean the blood off the signboard. The roadside melon peddler had his back to Gao Ma, who still carried the image of the old man’s phosphorescent eyes. Even in his dazed state, he heard the shrill cry: “Melons-mushy melons…”
The sound stabbed at his heart; all he wanted was to go home and lie quietly on his kang, like a man dead to the world.
Now someone was at the door. He tried to sit up, but his head was too heavy. Straining to open his eyes, he saw the wife of his neighbor, Yu Qiushui, watching him with pity in her eyes.
“Feeling better?” she asked.
He tried to open his mouth, but a rush of bitter liquid stopped up his throat and nose. “You were unconscious for three days,” she said. “You had us scared half to death. Even with your eyes closed you yelled, ‘Boys and girls, children on the wall!’ and The colt! The little colt!’ Big Brother Yu called the doctor, who gave you a couple of injections.”
He strained to sit up, with the help of Big Brother Yu’s wife, who put his filthy comforter behind his back. One look at her face told him she knew everything.
“Thank you, and thank Big Brother Yu.” Tears began to flow.
“Crying wont help,” she consoled him. “Don’t fool yourself into thinking it could ever work between you and Jinju. For now just worry about getting better. I’m going to my folks’ house in a few days, and I’ll find you someone as good as Jinju.”
“What about Jinju?” he asked anxiously.
“They say her family beats her every day. When the Caos and the Lius heard the news, they rushed over to mediate. But as the saying goes, you can’t force a melon to be sweet. A happy life is not in Jinju’s future.”
Suddenly agitated, Gao Ma struggled to climb down off the kang, but she stopped him. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I have to go to Jinju.”
“You have to go to your death, you mean. The Caos and Lius are there. If you showed your face, it would be a miracle if they didn’t kill you.”
“I… I’ll kill them first!” he shouted shrilly, waving a fist in the air.
“Dear little brother,” Yu’s wife said sternly, “use your head. Don’t think like that. All you’d get for your troubles is a bullet in the head.”
Exhausted, he fell back on the kang, tears slipping down his grimy face and into his ears.
“Who cares?” he sobbed. “I have nothing to live for.”
“Come now. Don’t give up so easily. If you and Jinju have your hearts set on each other, no one can keep you apart forever. This is, after all, a new society, so sooner or later reason will prevail.”
“Will you take a message to her?”
“Not until things calm down a bit. Meanwhile, keep your temper in check and concentrate on getting well. Things will get better, don’t worry.”
CHAPTER 3
– from a ballad sung in May 1987 by Zhang Kou, the blind minstrel, on Blackstone Avenue in the county seat
1.
The policemen emerged from the acacia grove dejected and covered with dirt, holding steel-gray pistols in their hands and fanning themselves with their hats. The stammerer’s limp had disappeared, but his trousers were ripped from his encounter with the metal pot; the torn cloth flapped like a piece of dead skin as he walked. They circled the tree and stood in front of Gao Yang. Both men had crewcuts. The stammerer, whose hair was coal black, had a head as round as a volleyball, while that of the other man, whose hair was lighter, stuck out front and back, like a bongo drum.
Gao Yang’s blind daughter tapped her way through the grove with the bamboo staff; he strained to watch her. When she reached the stand of trees behind Gao Ma’s house, she groped along, turning this way and that and wailing, “Daddy… Daddy… where’s my daddy…?”
“Damn it!” the stammering policeman complained. “What’s the idea of letting him get away like that?”
“If you’d moved a little quicker, you might have gotten the cuff on his other wrist!” Drumhead shot back. “He couldn’t have gotten away with both hands cuffed, could he?”
“It’s this one’s fault,” the stammerer said as he put his hat back on. He reached out and touched Gao Yang’s scalp as though to rub it, then gave him a clout.
“Daddy… Daddy… why don’t you answer me?” Xinghua sobbed as she bumped a tree with her staff; when she reached out to touch it, she banged her head on a branch. Her close-cropped hair was parted like a little boy’s… eyes black as coal… the waxen face of the undernourished, like a wilting stalk of garlic… naked from the waist up, dressed only in red underpants whose elastic was so far gone they hung loosely on her hips… red plastic sandals with broken laces… “Daddy… Daddy… why don’t you answer me?” The acacia grove, like a dense cloud, became a dark backdrop for her. Gao Yang yearned to shout to her, but his throat muscles were tied in knots, and no sound emerged. I’m not crying, I’m not crying…
The policeman rapped him on the head again, but he didn’t feel it; he strained to get free and moaned, their noses detected the translucent, sticky sweat on his body-an eerie, nightmarish stench. It was the stink of suffering. They screwed up their noses, which were filled with the foul air, a dull expression spreading across their faces.
“Daddy… Daddy… why don’t you answer me?”
