Shifu, You'll Do Anything For a Laugh (6 page)

Around noon, several couples in bathing suits and large towels draped over their shoulders walked over from the lake, looking very much like lovers in search of a spot to get naked together. But when they passed by him, he suddenly became tongue-tied, and all those catchy phrases that Lü Xiaohu had created and that he had committed to memory stuck in his throat. Hearing the sounds the couples made in the dense woods, all roughly the same, but discernibly individual, was like seeing his own folding money swept away by the wind, filling his heart with a mixture of regret and despondence.

That night he went to see his apprentice and, with considerable embarrassment, told him what had happened during the day.

“Shifu,” Lü Xiaohu said with a laugh, “what's there for a laid-off worker to be embarrassed about?”

He scratched his head. “Little Hu, you know I'm a grade-seven worker who's spent most of his life in the company of-iron and steel. I never thought I'd come to this in my old age.”

“If you don't mind my saying so, Shifu, you still don't know what it means to be hungry. If that day comes, you'll know that in a contest between face and belly, your belly will win every time!”

“I see what you're saying, but for some reason I can't open my mouth.”

“It's not your fault,” his apprentice said with another laugh. “You're a grade-seven worker, after all. Tell you what, Shifu, I've got a plan….”

At noon the following day, old Ding returned to the spot he'd picked out the day before, carrying a piece of wood on his back. Anyone entering the cemetery from the hill had to pass this way. Though it was a secluded area, it was surrounded by open space. From where he sat, in the mottled shadows of a tall poplar, he had a clear view of people swimming in the lake. With all the birds off somewhere, the only sound was the constant chirping of crickets, which sent their cool droppings down on him like raindrops.

Finally, a couple came walking up the path. They were in full view: the woman was wearing a sky-blue bikini, her milky white skin glistening between the leafy shadows; the man wore a pair of stretch trunks and had a hairy chest and legs. Giggling as their hands roamed all over each other, they drew nearer and nearer; the sight of all that cleavage and the mole on her belly made old Ding feel like a voyeur. He also noticed with disgust that the man's belly button protruded instead of sinking in and that his trunks looked as if he'd hidden a potato in the front. When they were only a few feet from him, he picked up the piece of wood at his feet and raised it up high enough to cover his face, which felt as if it were on fire. The red lettering was aimed at the couple. He watched the woman's long, slender legs and the man's hairy ones stop in their tracks and listened as the man read the sign aloud:

“A quiet, secluded, safe cottage in the woods. Ten yuan per hour, includes two soft drinks.”

The woman giggled.

“Hey, there, old man, where's this cottage of yours?” the man asked audaciously.

Old Ding lowered the board to reveal the top half of his face. “There,” he stammered, “over there.”

“Can we take a look?” The man grinned at the woman and said, “I am a little thirsty.”

The woman gave him a seductive look out of the corner of her eye. “You can die of thirst for all I care!”

With a sly look and a smile at the woman, the man turned to old Ding and said:

“Take us over to see the place, old man.”

He stood, noticeably agitated, picked up his stool, put the board under his arm and led them through the cemetery to the abandoned bus.

“This is your little cottage?” the man exclaimed. “It's a damned iron coffin!”

Old Ding unlocked the brass lock and swung the heavy door open.

The man bent at the waist and went inside.

“Hey, Ping'er,” he shouted, “it's goddamned cool in here!”

The woman looked askance at old Ding, a slight blush on her face, before sticking her head in to take a look. Then she went in.

The man stuck his head out. “It's too dark in here. I can't see a thing!”

Old Ding handed him a disposable lighter.

“There's a candle on the table,” he said.

The candle cast its yellow light on the inside of the bus. He watched as the woman took a drink from the soda bottle in her hand. Her still wet hair streamed down her back like a horse's tail, nearly covering her high, jutting buttocks.

The man stepped out of the bus and made a sweep of the area. “Say, old man,” he asked in a soft voice, “do you guarantee nobody comes around here?”

“There's a lock inside,” he said. “You've got my guarantee.”

“We'd like to take a nap,” the man said, “and we don't want any interruptions.”

Old Ding nodded.

The man went back inside.

Old Ding heard the door being locked.

After walking over to a little grove of locust trees, he looked at his ancient pocket watch, in its metal casing, like a coach on the sidelines. At first, there was no sound inside the bus, but about ten minutes later, the woman began to shout. Because the bus was sealed up so tightly, the shouts sounded as if they came up from under the ground. Old Ding was on pins and needles, as images of the woman's tender white skin swirled inside his head. He thumped his own leg and muttered:

“Don't be thinking about things like that, you old fart!”

But the woman's pale flesh had attached itself to his brain and wouldn't let go. Then the smiling face and cleavage of the woman buying piglets came to join the party.

Fifty minutes later, the steel door swung open and out stepped the woman, now dressed in street clothes. Her face was red, her eyes bright, the look of a hen that's just laid an egg. She glanced off to the side, as if she didn't even know he was there, and walked off toward the cemetery. Then the man emerged, a bath towel draped over his arm and a bottle of soda in his hand. He walked up to the man and said timidly:

“Fifty minutes .. .”

“How much?”

“It's up to you …”

The man, also in street clothes, reached into his pocket and pulled out a fifty-yuan bill. He handed it to old Ding, whose hand shook; his heart was racing.

“I don't have any change,” he said.

“Keep it,” the man said airily. “We're coming back tomorrow.”

Crushing the bill in his fist, he thought he might burst into tears.

“Old man, you're really something!” the man said as he tossed the empty bottle away. “You ought to stock the place with condoms,” he said softly. “That and some cigarettes and beer. Then double the price.”

Old Ding responded with a deep bow.

7

Acting on the man's suggestion, he outfitted his little love cottage with everything couples might need for their trysts, as well as beer, soft drinks, and snacks of dried fish slices and preserved plums. The first time he went to the pharmacy for condoms, he was so embarrassed he couldn't hold his head up or make clear what it was he wanted, to the utter contempt of the young woman behind the counter. As he slinked out of the store with his prophylactic purchase, he heard her say to another clerk behind her:

“Hey, who'd have thought an old geezer like that still had use for those …”

But as his business grew with each passing day, so did his nerve and his business sense. No longer flushed with embarrassment when he made his purchases at the pharmacy, he even tried to get the clerk to come down on the price. Brazenly, she remarked:

“Old man, if you're not some kind of sex fiend, you must be engaged in black market trade in condoms.”

“I'm both a sex fiend and a black marketer,” he shot back naughtily, looking directly at the woman's scarlet lips.

Over the three months of summer, he netted forty-eight hundred yuan. And as his purse grew fatter, he grew more cheerful and physically robust by the day. Joints that had turned rusty limbered up, as if newly lubricated, and his eyes, which had seemed frozen in place, were now filled with life. And once his eyes and ears grew attuned to the sights and sounds of his new environment, the torch of intimacy, long extinguished, ignited anew. After he had taken his wife to bed more than once, to her incredible astonishment, she asked him, “What sort of tonic have you been taking, you old fart? Trying to kill yourself?”

At ten-thirty every morning, he climbed onto his bike and rode over to the cottage, where he first cleaned the place up, dumping all the trash from the previous day into a plastic bag, which he made sure to double-knot. As someone who placed great importance on social conscience, he would never throw his trash just anywhere; no, he carried it into town and properly disposed of it in a trash receptacle. After cleaning up the place, he replenished his stock of drinks, snacks, and other items. That done, he locked the door, picked up his stool, and found a place to wait for the day's clientele, leisurely smoking a cigarette to pass the time. His taste in cigarettes had improved. In the past, he'd smoked only unfiltered Golden City, but now he'd switched to filtered Flying Swallows. In the past, he couldn't bring himself to look his clients in the eye; now he studied them intently. As he gained more experience, he found he could pretty much predict which couples were likely to use his service and which were not. Most of his customers were birds on the prowl, intent on enjoying each other's bodies illicitly; but once in a while a curious married couple or two people in a committed relationship dropped by. There were at least a dozen repeat customers; he always gave them a cut-rate price, usually 20 percent off, but sometimes as much as 50 percent. Some of his customers were the talkative type, and after they'd finished their business, they'd talk his ear off; others were the bashful type, who took off as soon as they'd handed over the money. His storehouse of knowledge about the sex life of young couples was greatly enriched, thanks to his ears alone. The endless variety of sounds, male and female, emerging from the cottage created at least as many pictures in his mind, sort of like throwing open a window onto a vast panorama. One seemingly sickly couple bounced and thudded around the bus so noisily you'd have thought it was a pair of mating elephants in there, not copulating humans. Then there was the couple who started out by shouting and carrying on and ended by slugging it out and smashing beer bottles. But there was nothing he could do about it, since breaking in on them at a time like that could bring nothing but bad luck. The man emerged with a bloody head, the woman with her hair looking like a rat's nest. He felt sorry enough for them to give them a freebie, but the man actually grandstanded by tossing a hundred-yuan note on the ground before strutting off. When he ran after him to give him change, the man turned and spat in his face. The man had thin, sparse eyebrows, sunken eyes, and a mean look; one glare sent old Ding scurrying off abjectly.

With the arrival of autumn, the poplar leaves began to fall and pine needles darkened. Fewer and fewer people came to swim in the lake, seriously affecting his business; but no day passed without a few clients, especially on Sundays and holidays. This gave him a chance to take it easy, and income was income, even though there might be less of it. It all added up. He came down with a cold about then, but that didn't stop him from going to work. Not wanting to part with his money for cold preparations, he let his wife cook up a pot of ginger soup. He drank down three bowlfuls of the stuff, then covered himself from head to toe and sweated it out. You couldn't ask for a better folk remedy. His plan was to save up as much money as possible for his old age while he was still able. Now that the factory had given him all the severance pay he had coming, the government couldn't be counted on, since even teachers’ pay was slow in coming and the government had to take out loans to pay cadres’ salaries. It was every man for himself, not all that different from grabbing what you could after a natural disaster. There were times when he felt uncomfortable, uncertain if he was a saint or a sinner. One night he dreamed that the police came for him, and he woke up in a cold sweat, his heart racing. He met with his apprentice, Lü Xiaohu, in a quiet little wine shop, and told him what was bothering him.

“Shifu,” Hu said, “you're not getting goofy on me again, are you? Don't tell me you think your cottage is the only reason those people do it! They'll keep doing it, with or without your cottage. In the woods, in the cemetery, somewhere. Young folks these days are always talking about returning to nature and free love, and who are we to say there's anything wrong with that? They're people, just like us. I told you at the beginning, just pretend you've set up a public toilet in the wild, for which you have every right to charge a modest fee. Shifu, you're head and shoulders above those people who flood the market with their phony alcohol and fake medicine. You have absolutely no reason to be so hard on yourself. Being on good terms with money is more important than trying to be a good son. Without money, you can forget about a loving mother and father, and even your old lady will turn her back on you. Shifu, show some spunk and get on with your business. If there's any trouble, just leave everything to me!”

Old Ding could find nothing wrong with his apprentice's argument. He's right, he concluded. Sure, there was nothing saintly about what he was doing, but one saint was plenty in this world. Any more was just asking for trouble. The last thing Ding Shikou wanted was to be a saint. Besides, he couldn't even if he wanted to. Ding Shikou, he was thinking, you're doing the government a big favor. Being the master of a love cottage in the woods may not bring you honor, but it's a lot better than causing a scene in front of the government headquarters. This thought brought a smile to his face, which flabbergasted his wife, who was shucking peanuts at the table.

“What are you smiling about, you old fart?” she asked him. “Do you have any idea how scary a smile like that looks?”

“Scary?”

“Yes, scary.”

“Well, today that's exactly what I want to do, scare you.”

“Just what do you have in mind, you old fart?” she asked as she backed away, holding a handful of peanut shells. Lightning split the sky outside, heralding a downpour. Cool, damp air seeped into the room, causing the atmosphere inside to actually heat up. He removed his clothes as he bore down on his wife, tossing them behind him; she cowered against the wall, her face turning scarlet, her normally gloomy eyes shining like those of a girl in her prime. Cornered, she flung the peanut shells in his face. “You old fart,” she muttered, “the older you get, the crazier you are .. . the middle of the day. .. what do you think you're doing. … The lord of thunder and mother of lightning are looking at you.” He grabbed her around the waist and bent her backward. “You old fart!” she screamed. “Old fart… not so hard … you're going to break me in half. .. .”