Colors of the Mountain (26 page)

Han Jian was a seaport town with two long intertwining streets. The tail of the town was on the hill while its head dipped into the water. From a distance, it looked like two snakes reaching down to drink from the sea. It wasn’t the county capital like Putien. The atmosphere was relaxing and commercial. Wealthy retirees from Hong Kong and South Asian countries roamed the streets, fanning away the summer heat with large coconut-leaf fans. The men wore colorful polyester shirts, unbuttoned, revealing their drooping nipples, and swapped stories across the narrow crowded streets, speaking in their accented Putien dialect. Some said speaking Cantonese had ruined their accents, but Dad said they had stayed too long in the wealthy capital of Hong Kong so that they talked as though they had silver coins in their mouths.

As I pedaled among the pedestrians, bikers, hawkers, kids, and trucks loaded with fruits and food heading for the seaport, excitement began
to build. I was going to live near this town for the whole summer, free from the watchful eyes of my family and able to do what my heart wished. I stopped by a cigarette kiosk and bought a pack of Flying Horse, which I would smoke later in the leisurely manner of a man with a salary.

Si met me at the gate to her factory on the edge of town. I hadn’t seen her for two months. She was wearing an attractive short hairstyle.

“The city look,” I said, smiling at her.

“You like it?” Si asked.

I nodded, patting my own hair before entering the grand entrance of the factory.

Guards with rifles slung over their shoulders patrolled the gates. They checked my sister’s badge and we were let in.

“Why the rifles?” I asked.

“People steal things all the time. The general manager was a military man.”

A group of young people on bikes flew by us, yelling and screaming my sister’s name.

“Who were they?”

“Friends, getting off work.”

When we reached her division, water treatment, her manager and her best friend greeted me with enthusiasm. The manager was a stocky man with a missing arm. The story was that it had been sawed off and dropped into a burning stove while he helplessly watched it burn. Her best friend was a fat boy of twenty, with hair on his face like a wolf. He smiled at me and both his eyes became two lines beneath his thick eyebrows. He pinched my ears and slapped my back.

“Why are they so nice to you?” I asked Si after we left the office.

“Fatty is a buddy, loyal but stubborn. And I had just bought two cartons of Flying Horse for the boss. That will be good for a month or so, then you’ll need to buy him another carton. It’s a corrupt place. Bribery is the only way to make your job safe. Everyone does it, from the general manager to the division head and team leader.”

She showed me where I would be staying, a tiny bed in a tiny, windowless cubicle behind a boiler room. There were no toilets and the light in the hallway had a nasty habit of blinking and resting whenever it wanted to. The dark smoke-colored ceiling was covered with webs. I
didn’t have to stretch my imagination far to think of rats, roaches, and nasty hungry cats lurking behind those old barrels and bits of abandoned machinery.

Si told me that occasionally there was another girl who stayed overnight in the room opposite ours. The
occasionally
prompted me to walk the surroundings outside the wobbly house. The ground was overgrown with tall grass and mangy weeds, the kind that hid all sorts of unspeakable evils and ruined the beauty of the neighborhood. I could just imagine myself alone, huddled beneath a flimsy blanket as wind and lightning clashed outside on dark nights.

Si knew I wasn’t the bravest when it came to being alone in the dark. When I was younger, Grandma had to stay with me until I fell asleep in my cot in order to keep the headless blue ghosts away from me. There wasn’t a single ghost story I hadn’t heard or read. The sad part was I believed them all. Darkness invited all these characters back into my mind, until I was cowering under the sheet, sweating and trembling.

Si said that she had been lucky to find a free place to live, and that I could bunk with Fatty if I needed to. She had to hurry to catch a truck from the factory that was heading for Yellow Stone on its delivery route. The price for the ride had been a pack of Flying Horse to the driver. As I saw her off, I couldn’t help admiring her social skills. She seemed prettier and much more capable away from Yellow Stone. People listened to her and liked her. I couldn’t believe that she used up more Flying Horses than I did. It was a Flying Horse society here. Long live Flying Horse!

The next day I reported to the drab water-treatment office. The manager wasn’t there. Fatty was playing cards with a couple of girls. He stood up and brought me over to join their poker game.

“I’m here to work, Fatty,” I protested.

“This is work, you farm boy,” Fatty said, smiling. “We wait here, watch the water tower outside, and take the measurement of the water every hour, rain or shine. That’s it.”

“Nothing else?”

“Nope. You just need to come here and sign your name. Once a week you work overnight and sleep here. The factory gives you free food for the night.”

“Gee, this is heaven,” I said.

They all laughed.

I soon came to know that the office was staffed with people from important families. Fatty’s dad was an old revolutionary who had fought in the mountains of Fujian. His mom was his third wife and his father was often mistaken for his grandpa. The short girl, Ying, was married to an army veteran who was now the deputy party chief of Han Jian. The comely girl, Ning, had a habit of sitting by the door of the office every morning waiting for the mail to come, then disappearing and reappearing red-faced whenever she got an airmail letter from her lover in Hong Kong.

They sat around gossiping about their men, knitting sweaters. They hummed lullabies out of tune, while I rotted with boredom in the corner, staring at the traffic outside the window. I volunteered to run up the water tower and check for them even when it wasn’t my turn.

“I’m so bored,” Ning said one day, arching her slender back. “Hey, I heard you play the flute. Is that true?”

“Not too well,” I said.

“If you play for us for twenty minutes, we’ll let you go out and play for the whole morning.”

“Wouldn’t I get into trouble for doing that?”

“What trouble? For entertaining us?”

“Isn’t there some sort of rule against it?”

“We make the rules here. If anyone doesn’t like it, we’ll turn off their water.”

So from then on I played my flute, doing the songs they picked. Then I got to go out around town with Fatty on his bike, and see movies. Even the manager would slouch in his chair behind the empty desk, sip his tea, and tap his finger on the table to the beat of the music.

One day he took me aside and told me that my sister had been gone too long, and he didn’t think he could cover for us much longer. The factory would never allow a fourteen-and-a-half-year-old to work here, and he could get into trouble.

After I went back to my cubicle, I checked my calendar, depressed. It had been a month, and it was Flying Horse time.

I went to town, bought him another carton, and dropped it off at his residence, saying that he had forgotten it in the office. It worked. The
next day he took me aside again and said that he would be willing to have me for as long as Si needed to work back in our commune.

I had somehow gotten used to my living arrangement. Each night I walked the long, dark, narrow road to the boiler room and down the squeaky hallway before it turned completely dark. I brought a pee-pot with me and placed it under the bed. I had hidden a small knife beneath my pillow that I grabbed whenever there was a disturbance in the house. One night, I heard a crash at around four in the morning, and I spent the rest of the night holding the knife in my hand, curled up under the blanket like a shrimp getting fried. The next morning, I saw that a huge piece of ceiling tile had dropped on top of the old boiler. The rats must have been having a party up there.

During all those lonely nights, I never heard any sound or movement from my invisible neighbor. I was hoping she would show up someday and make the place a little noisier. Anything was more welcome than being alone, but then that night finally arrived. It was drizzling, and the sea breeze was picking up. The clouds, thick and dark, were gathering on the western horizon. I had my dinner early and went back to bed, reading an old warlord story. The thought of an impending storm kept me up past midnight. As I was slipping into a dream, through my thin wall I heard laughter roaring from the hallway. The wall consisted simply of boards pasted with old newspapers to cover the cracks so soundproofing was worse than zero. A sneeze made the walls tremble. There was a man and a woman. The man mumbled something incoherent, his tongue thick, and the girl was giggling and cursing teasingly. Unsteady footsteps made the hallway shake.

I nimbly crawled out of the bed and removed a piece of tape from an existing hole, what I called my watch hole, glimpsing the back of a heavy man with an arm around the girl. His other hand was on her chest. He was a big, bearish guy and she was a shadowy, petite figure under the dim, fifteen-watt lighting. They stumbled into the wall and stopped at the door as the girl fumbled for the key. The man did something quick and the girl laughed and slapped his wrist, like a mom admonishing her naughty son. They disappeared behind the door and the light went off.
It must be her husband
, I thought, and thanked Buddha for saving me from a miserable night alone in the storm.

Soon enough, there was noise. Unbearable noise, like water falling
from a tall mountain. There was a loud moan from a desperate, helpless-sounding man and a loud cry of pain from the girl. The man was doing something rhythmic and the girl yelled to his beat. There was heavy breathing and the bed squeaked. Something was knocked off the table, dropping to the ground. It went on for four or five unbearable minutes before the man let out a cry. It sounded like he was beating the girl. Suddenly it ended. I could hear the raindrops drumming on the roof. My heart was racing and my ears echoed with my neighbors’ cries. I squatted at the foot of the wall, puzzled, worried, and curious. I wondered whether I should storm out with some sort of weapon and help her.

“Now get out of here,” I heard the girl say.

“No, please. I’m not going.”

“Get out, you drunk.”

I heard the crash of a bottle, and then heard the man stumbling into the hallway. I glued my eye to the hole. He limped and rubbed his face with his hand. I saw just his back, and the slight limp. The girl slammed the door and I heard her breath catching unevenly.

Something had gone wrong, but it wasn’t my business to interfere. I rolled into my bed and tried to think of what those desperate moans and cries had been about. I wished my brothers in Yellow Stone were here to explain. The storm began to pick up and the wind made my walls rattle. At such times I would usually curl up and paste my back to the wall, covering myself with the sheet from head to toe, but I was too preoccupied with the mystery to be scared that night. I stayed up long afterward, waiting for the man to storm back and for the girl to scream again, but there was only the rain and the sound of the girl’s snoring, light and even.

Like the face of a child, the next day the sun crawled along the window bar shamelessly, as if there had never been a drop of rain last night. I checked the alarm clock. It read seven. I jumped out of bed and flattened my nose to the crack in the wall, watching for my neighbor. Not a sound. I opened the door and looked up and down the hallway. No traces of a broken bottle. I sauntered along, hands in pockets, whistling, and slowed as I passed the girl’s room. It was quiet, like before. Then I opened the window at the head of the hallway and the sun flooded the floor. Only in the light did I see the evidence of glistening bits of broken
glass, glass that hadn’t been there yesterday. So it hadn’t been a nightmare last night. There had been a girl, a man, and a bottle. As I looked closer, there were traces of a broom having touched the surface of the dusty floor. She had tried to clean up the evidence. She had probably left before I woke up.

When I went to work, I couldn’t help telling everyone about what happened in my boiler room last night. My listeners—Ying, Ning, and Fatty—laughed at me hysterically.

Fatty smiled his silly smile, making his eyes disappear into the folds of his face. The two girls blushed and looked at each other with a secret understanding before turning away to whisper to each other.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you think it was scary?” I asked Fatty.

He shook his head and said, “Outside, not here.” He looked at the girls and his face, too, reddened.

I followed him out of the office.

He sat down on the cement steps that led to the water tower and gestured for me to sit beside him.

“You want a smoke for this one?” He pulled out a Flying Horse for himself and one for me. We lit the cigarettes with a single match.

“What is it, something funny?” I asked.

He nodded. “It’s embarrassing in front of the girls.”

“Come on, tell me. What’s so embarrassing about it?”

He drew a few long, deep puffs and said, “Do you know what a man and a woman do when they are alone at night?”

I wasn’t getting it. I smoked and shook my head.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t seen a male ox humping a female, with that long dick slipping in and out.”

I could feel my mouth drop open at the realization. “But she was crying!” I said.

“They do”—he nodded—“with pleasure.”

I felt a stir somewhere inside me. “So they were doing the cow thing?” I was overwhelmed by the discovery. I had actually overheard the whole episode of the cow thing performed by humans. It wasn’t very neighborly. The little boy in the room next door had almost come running with a knife to defend her. I felt ashamed and stirred in an odd way.

Fatty nodded, smiling with relief at my understanding.

“Does it always involve a bottle?”

“Oh, that part I don’t know.”