Colors of the Mountain (43 page)

I knew all the answers and had had plenty of time to check every nuance of the questions, as Peking Man had taught us to do, analytically and clearly. I wanted to take a picture of him and frame it above my
college bunk bed and pray to him. He was almost a god. They should at least make him a local god of Yellow Stone High and give him whatever he wanted from life.

That evening I ate twice as much as the day before. I was halfway through, only three more subjects to go.

I sailed through the second day like a sleek sailboat. At noon, Mom and Dad dispatched my sisters, Ke and Huang, to bring me some fruit. They went to my dorm. Since nobody knew where I was, they kicked dust and hiked uphill to the top, inquiring around and asking the lazy guard.

“The barefoot boy?” he asked my sisters. They nodded and he took them to my spot under the tree.

I was so glad to see them. There were tears in their eyes, they had been terribly worried when they couldn’t find me. Now they had discovered me studying at high noon under the hot sun. It hurt them to see this, because they loved me. I told them I was having a ball. They laughed at seeing me so happy about the tests. I asked them about Jin. They said he was doing all right. I ate half a delicious watermelon at their urging, slurping it down quickly. They were pleased when they left.

The English test came last, and it came as no surprise. I knew every word and irregular conjugation. There was a long translated article about a magic ring story. I had never felt as confident in an examination before. The large bag of exercises given to me by Professor Wei covered all the questions and more. I wanted to hug her and tell her she should become a goddess too, and that I would frame her picture and worship it every day.

When I walked out of the test room for the last time, my burden dropped to the ground. I was free.

Even the city folks began to look okay to me. I was ready to hug and embrace anyone when I saw my brother looking for me. I ran over to him and we shook hands frantically.

“How did you do?” he asked.

“Couldn’t have done better,” I said, out of breath.

He had come to pick me up and share all the details of the experience we had come through together. We forgot about our fatigue and
talked, laughed, smoked, and talked some more. We compared answers, thinking that we had gotten about 85 percent right. We were ecstatic.

We rode home in the fading sunlight. The breeze was gentle, the air cool. Our hearts were light. My brother had become my best friend. We had fought together and won. At least in our hearts we knew that we had won.

When we finally reached home that night, the whole family had been holding dinner for us. I didn’t realize how much I had missed them till I saw them again. I quickly ran upstairs to thank the gods, jumped into the river for a brief swim, then sat with the whole family around our large table and chatted until midnight. That night the moon was so big and round, hanging only a few feet above the treetops, that I felt as if I could reach out and touch it. The gentle moonlight filled me with hope and warmth. With a thankful heart, I went to sleep smiling.

The next day I woke up to the painful twisting of my ears and nose. I tried to get up but my legs were pinned down. I opened my eyes to see my four friends, making ugly faces as they tried to wake me up.

“Hey, what’s up?” I rubbed my eyes.

“We’re taking you hunting, college man,” Siang said. “I heard you did well in the tests.”

“Yeah, everyone’s talking about it.” Mo Gong gave my ear another twist.

“We’re gonna take you out for a day of fun.” Yi pulled my quilt off and lay beside me.

Sen was nudging my behind with the butt of his hunting rifle. “Wake up. We’ve got catching up to do. Who knows, you’re probably gonna be outta here in no time.”

I was surprised that Mom and Dad had sent them to my room, which was in the innermost recess of our house, and also by the fact that my buddies didn’t seem the least upset about the letter I had sent Yi a couple of months ago.

“I was having such a good time taking the tests in Putien,” I said, pulling my shirt on. “You should have seen the girls sitting next to me. Short skirts and really nice white legs.”

“Slow down there, my friend. You sat next to a pretty gal for the
whole three days? Did she smile at you?” Mo Gong was a die-hard romantic.

“She did whenever she had difficulty answering a question,” I said.

“And did you give it to her?”

“No way.”

“Well, Da, that’s stupid. Otherwise we could be on our way to visit her today. Wouldn’t it have been lovely? Success plus women. It’s your loss.”

We all burst into laughter. Mo Gong seemed sincerely sad about it.

“Don’t worry, you’ll have plenty to choose from. We’ll help you find the best,” Sen said.

“You guys never sent me a letter back,” I said to Yi.

“We didn’t know you were into the letter-writing business.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know? What do
you
mean?” He laughed, not knowing what this was about.

“Well, I sent a letter to you a while ago.”

“A letter to Yi and nothing to us?” Sen joked. “What was it about?”

“Yeah, what was it about?” Yi asked.

“Well, that’s another thing I wanted to talk to you guys about. I wrote the letter because I was concerned about a rumor. Remember the money?”

“Oh, yeah, the money,” Siang said. “You know, Da, someone was trying to smear my dad’s reputation. The shoe factory’s money was returned to the treasurer’s office a few days after it was stolen. No one confessed to anything, but the case was over.”

“Who returned the money? And how?” I asked.

Siang shook his head innocently. “Someone broke into the office at night and put the money back. Not a cent missing and there was no word. The investigation was over a long time ago.”

“I’m really glad.”

My friends were quiet. It was time to change the subject.

I spent the whole day shooting birds in the thick woods, eating fruit, and smoking. Sen had brought a bottle of liquor that we passed around. Mo Gong was a little woozy after a few greedy gulps. We sent him to pick up the fallen birds. At one point, he stumbled into wet
mud, and almost sank into a mudhole. We had to pull him out. Then he rolled on the ground till dried leaves stuck all over his body, and started dancing around like an aborigine, singing weird tunes that sounded like Japanese folk songs. I threw more leaves on him and he danced even more madly. Sen passed the bottle to him and he finished it off. Totally drunk, he started to laugh so heartily that it began to sound like crying. Then he collapsed on the floor, still in a fit of uncontrollable laughter. We had to kick him to stop his craziness. Then we carried him to the middle of a wooden bridge, and dropped him into the Dong Jing River. He continued laughing until he sank beneath the water.

We applauded, expecting to see him jump up like a fish for air. But one minute passed, then two. We looked at each other.

“Don’t worry. He’s fooling us this time.” Sen was calm.

“He could never hold his breath for that long,” I said.

“He’s a better swimmer than you are.”

“But he could be dead. He’s drunk, remember.”

“Even a drunk is always 30 percent clearheaded. Don’t let him fool you,” Yi said.

“The guy is dying! Do something! I’m going down there.” I took off my shirt and jumped into the water. My actions brought them all to the edge.

Suddenly, Mo Gong shot up like a fish and let out a wild cry. “I got you!”

“See, I told you,” Sen said.

Mo Gong swam to the edge. “I saw it all. Da was the most worried about me. Not you guys. If I’d come up and saw you still there on the bridge, smiling, I woulda quit being your friends. I really liked that, Da. Your shorts are soaked.”

We splashed water all over him and forced him into the river again.

The day’s fun ended on a sad note. Siang, in his carelessness, missed a bird and the tiny bullet went into the shoulder of a woman who was passing by. She hadn’t even been aware of it. There’d been a sharp sting and a small pearl of blood had appeared. We all went to apologize. The woman grabbed Siang’s collar and threatened to kill him with the bamboo pole she was carrying.

When she calmed down, we asked her whether it hurt. She shook her head.

Sen came over and made a deal with her. He gave her a hundred yuan; the woman was nodding and bowing to him as she left, almost singing.

“That’s sick, Sen.”

“Hey, we won the money. You know, like we promised that day?”

“How much?”

“Thousands.” There was a gleam of devious delight in their eyes. My friends were getting dangerous.

Jin’s mood waxed and waned in a daily cycle. Some days he thought he had scored well, other days he thought he had drilled holes in the boat and was sinking. For the moment, he threw himself into farm work. On a good day, he would hum and whistle, digging the field in readiness for the autumn bean season. He was the amicable old Jin everyone liked. On a bad day, he would stay in bed really late, the quilt over his head, thinking of all the questions he had missed. He used the abacus in his head and crunched the total score of his tests. But the more he crunched, the lower his scores got. He made himself miserable. We called it the Cousin Tan factor.

In the evening, I sat with him in our backyard and chatted. Mom and Dad had given me the job of encouraging him. They didn’t want to see him turn into a nut. I would pull out our bamboo abacus and play with my estimate of his scores as he remembered them. When he said 70 percent, I threw in a modest 5 percent markup. In the end, the total looked fine. He was surprised by my estimate, and wondered how I did it. I told him he was too hard on himself, then I’d go to our kitchen and pour some locally brewed liquor for him. Resistant at first, he would drink it nonetheless. It would loosen him up, and we and the rest of the family would sit talking in the moonlight, late into the night.

I was the opposite. My own estimate of my scores kept going up. Everyone in the family laughed at me. It was a pure gut feeling, but they believed me and were glad for me. No one stopped me from climbing my ladder of dreams.

On the farm, Jin was given a nickname of Fang Jin. It came from a well-known historical satire. Fang Jin lived hundreds of years ago. He
was a poor farmer who dreamed of one day passing the government civil service test held every four years to elect officials. The top scorers sometimes ended up marrying the emperor’s daughter. Lesser ones became governors of provinces and counties. Fang Jin starved himself and studied all day in his humble shack. He had taken the test five times and failed every time. By the time he took the sixth test, he was in his forties, bony, frail, and sick-looking. To everyone’s surprise, he scored so high the emperor picked him to be the governor of the county. The job promised wealth and fame. But when the messengers from the emperor arrived at his humble residence with trumpets and drums and firecrackers, Fang Jin did not appear to receive the honor.

The whole town started searching for him. He was now their hero. As darkness fell, they finally found him. He was running down the dirt street barefoot, shouting, “Fang Jin won! Fang Jin won!” The people happily joined him in shouting the slogan, but he went on and on, much to the frustration of the messenger, who couldn’t return until the honoree had received the order in person. They tried to calm him down, but Fang kept right on shouting. A local doctor was brought in. Fang Jin had gone crazy upon hearing the good news, the doctor said.

Jin accepted the nickname good-humoredly. It actually made him calmer.

A month later, rumors began to circulate that the papers had all been graded and the scores were in. The scores were low across the board. All the test-takers gossiped among themselves. Jin at this point didn’t care anymore. It only made me pray harder each night, hitting my head against the soft pillows in obeisance to all the gods I assembled in my head to whom I read off my list of wishes. The list got longer each day and the list of promises to the gods grew more generous. I went from one little piglet for each god to five piglets and two cows as sacrifices if all the items in my list came true. And I knew that if that happened I would probably have to bankrupt our family, returning all our worldly possessions back to where they came from. But that didn’t stop me. I figured we could always deliver the sacrifices slowly, or even make out an IOU with the gods on them. When all was repaid, we would add on a handsome interest. They would have no problem with that.

Dad wasn’t one to sit around waiting for our scores to arrive. He
wanted to know
now
, so he put up his antenna and whispered into the ears of all his patients, whose numbers had expanded into the hundreds. Word spread from the patients to their families, then rippled into their circle of friends, who might know someone on the Board of Education at Putien, the agency in charge of grading all the tests. Within two days, a young man showed up at our door with the name of a clerk working at the board in Putien. He was a close friend of a close friend of a family member of a patient’s sister-in-law’s aunt. Dad immediately dispatched a young teacher from Yellow Stone High, whose job was to scout the scores for all the high school graduates. His name was Chung. Carrying a letter from Dad, he rode his bike to Putien to get the scores from this distant friend.

We waited and waited. Chung didn’t return home that day. At midnight he sent a note from Putien to say that he was still waiting, staying at a hotel at the school’s expense until the next day. Our hearts were in our mouths. My family, usually noisy, was quiet. We were worried.

Next day at breakfast, my sisters asked me again what I thought my scores might be. I hiked it up another twenty points. They laughed till tears filled their eyes. I knew they wanted to believe it. Their love for me was genuine, and their hope for me was as high as the clouds hanging in the blue sky.

During the course of the morning, word leaked out about the score line. This was a line the government drew to cut off the successful applicants from the unsuccessful ones. It was based on how many slots were open for college enrollment that year: if there were only one hundred openings, the cutoff line would be set after the top one hundred scores. Everyone above that line was guaranteed a place in college, while the rest of the applicants wouldn’t be considered at all. This year’s cutoff point was 300 out of the total 500 points possible.