She handed him a cigarette and stuck one into her own mouth.
Through the misty veil of smoke, she asked, ‘What happened to you? Get mugged?’
He was too busy watching a pair of mules to answer.
Both of them watched as a wagon drawn by the mules came their way on the mine road, which was strewn with waste rock, coal dust, broken stone slabs, and rotting lumber; as it drew near, they watched the driver, in an arrogant display of power, grip the reins in his left hand and drive the mules forward with a flick of the whip he held in his right. They were beautiful black mules. The larger of the two, seemingly blind, was strapped to the shafts; the smaller mule, not only sighted, but in possession of a pair of fiery eyes the size of bronze bells, pulled at the harness. Ao-ao-ao – wu-la-la – pull pull pull – The snaking whip snapped and crackled in the air, forcing the doughty little black mule to lurch ahead. And as the creaky wagon bounded forward, disaster struck: The little black mule lost its footing and crashed to the weedy, seedy, unforgiving ground, like a collapsed greasy black wall. The tip of the driver’s whip landed on the animal’s rump; it struggled mightily to its feet, shaking uncontrollably and rocking from side to side, piteous brays tearing at the heart of all within earshot. The driver, momentarily petrified with fear, threw down his whip, jumped off the wagon, and fell to his knees in front of the mule. He reached down and lifted out a discolored hoof – green and red and white and black all mixed together – that was wedged between two stone slabs. Ding Gou’er grabbed the female trucker’s hand and took several steps toward the scene.
Cradling the mule’s hoof in his hands, the sallow-faced driver was wailing loudly.
In the traces the older mule hung its head in silence, like a participant in a wake.
The little black mule stood on three legs; its fourth, the maimed rear leg, was thumping against a piece of rotten wood on the ground, like a mallet beating a drum, but with the difference that dark flowing blood stained the wood and the ground around it red.
Ding Gou’er, whose heart was beating wildly, turned to walk away, but Miss Alkaline had a vicelike grip on his wrist; he wasn’t going anywhere.
Everyone in the vicinity had an opinion: Some felt sorry for the little mule, others felt sorry for the driver; some blamed the driver, others blamed the rough, pitted road. A flock of quarreling ravens.
‘Make way, make way!’
Stunned by the interruption, the bemused crowd parted to let two tiny, skinny people tumble in among them out of nowhere. A close look revealed that it was two women with ghostly white faces like winter cabbages. They wore spotless white uniforms and matching caps. One carried a waxed bamboo hamper, the other a wicker basket. A pair of angels, it seemed.
‘The veterinarians are here!’
The veterinarians are here, the vets are here, stop crying, little friend, the vets are here. Hand them the mule’s hoof, hurry. They’ll reattach it for you.
The women in white hastened to explain: ‘We’re not veterinarians! We’re chefs at the guest house.’
‘Municipal officials are coming to tour the mine tomorrow, and the Mine Director has ordered us to treat them like royalty. Chicken and fish, nothing special there. And just as we were worrying ourselves sick, we heard that a mule had lost one of its hooves.’
‘Braised mule’s hoof, mule’s hoof in chicken broth.’
‘Driver, go on, sell them the mule’s hoof.’
‘No, I can’t sell it…’ The driver hugged the hoof tightly, a look of affectionate longing on his face, as if he were embracing the severed hand of his beloved.
‘Have you taken leave of your senses, you moron?’ one of the women in white demanded angrily. ‘Do you plan to reattach that somehow? Where are you going to get the money? I doubt if anyone could manage that on a person these days, let alone a beast of burden.’
‘We’ll pay top dollar.’
‘You won’t find a shop like this in the next village.’
‘How, urn, how much will you give me?’
‘Thirty yuan apiece. A good price, wouldn’t you say?’
‘You only want the hooves?’
‘Only the hooves. You can keep the rest.’
‘All four of them?’
‘All four.’
‘He’s still alive, you know.’
‘What good is he with one missing hoof?’
‘But he’s still alive…’
‘Talk talk talk. Do we have a deal or don’t we?’
‘Yes…’
‘Here’s the money! Count it.’
‘Take him out of the traces, quickly!’
Holding the money for the four hooves in his hand, the driver handed the severed hoof to one of the women in white, trembling perceptibly. She placed it gingerly in her bamboo hamper. The other woman took a knife, hatchet, and bone saw out of her wicker basket, jumped to her feet, and, in a loud voice, pressed the young driver to free the little black mule from the traces. He squatted down bow-legged, bent over at the waist, and, with trembling fingers, freed the little black mule from the harness. Slow as it sounds in the retelling, in real life what happened next was over in a flash. The woman in white raised her hatchet, took aim on the mule’s broad forehead, and swung with all her might, burying the ax blade so deeply in its head, she couldn’t pull it out, no matter how she tried. And while she was trying to remove her ax, the little black mule’s front legs buckled, carrying the rest of the animal slowly to the ground, where it spread out flat on the bumpy, pitted roadway.
Ding Gou’er breathed a long sigh.
There was still a bit of life in the little mule, as the shallow, raspy sounds of breathing proved; weak trickles of blood slid down its forehead on either side of the buried hatchet, soaking its eyelashes, nose, and lips.
Once again it was the woman who had buried the hatchet in the mule’s forehead who picked up a blue-handled knife, leaped onto the mule’s body, grabbed a hoof – a jet-black hoof in a lily-white hand – and described a brisk circle right in the curve where the hoof joined the leg; then another circle, and with a little pressure from the lily- white hand, the mule hoof and mule leg moved away from one another, attached only by a single white tendon. A final flick of the knife, and the hoof and leg parted company once and for all The lily-white hand rose into the air, and the mule hoof flew into the hand of the other woman in white.
It took only a moment to amputate the three hooves, during which time the onlookers were mesmerized by the woman’s incredible skill; no one spoke, no one coughed, no one farted. Who’d have dared take such liberties in the presence of this woman warrior?
Ding Gou’er’s palms were sweating. All he could think of was the Taoist tale of the marvelous skills of the ox- butcher Chef Ding.
The woman in white worked the hatchet until she was finally able to remove it from the forehead of the little black mule, which finally breathed its last: belly up, its legs sticking up stiffly in four directions, like machine-gun barrels.
The truck had left the winding, bumpy road of the coal mine behind; the towering mounds of waste rock and the spectral mine machinery had all but disappeared in the heavy mist behind them; the barking of the watchdog, the rumbling of trolleys, and the thumping of underground explosions could no longer be heard. But the four machine-gun legs of the mule kept floating before Ding Gou’er’s eyes, keeping him on edge. The lady trucker’s mood was also affected by the image of the little black mule, for she greeted every mile of bumpy road with crude curses; then, once she was on the highway to town, she threw the truck into high gear, opened the ventilation window, and put the pedal to the metal, keeping it there as the engine groaned under the strain. Like a Fascist bullet. Roadside trees bent in their wake as if felled by a giant ax; the ground was a whirling chess board, as the arrow on the speedometer pointed to eighty kilometers. Wind whistled, wheels spun dizzily. Every few minutes, the exhaust pipe belched out a cloud of smoke. Ding Gou’er watched her out of the corner of his eye with such admiration he gradually forgot the mule legs stretching skyward.
Not long before they reached the city, steam from the overheated radiator fogged up the windshield. Miss Alkaline had turned the radiator into a boiler. With an outburst of foul curses, she pulled to the side of the road. Ding Gou’er followed her out of the cab and, with a momentary sense of ‘I told you so,’ watched as she raised the
