I took the tenth shell from the old man, but my plan changed before I could send it on its way. I'd been aiming at Lao Lan's imported Lexus. The car was parked in front of a modest building; Lao Lan was sleeping in the back seat, his driver in the front. I planned for the shell to crash through the windshield and blow up in Lao Lan's lap. Even if it turned out to be a peace projectile, its inertia alone would make a nasty mess of Lao Lan's belly, and his only hope for survival would be a complete stomach transplant. But just before I fired, the car started up, drove onto the highway and sped towards town. My first last-second plan change momentarily confused me but my desperation spawned a new one. With one hand I adjusted the direction of the mortar and with the other I dropped in the shell. The subsequent blast blew waves of heat into my face and, given all the powder inside, turned the tube red hot. It would have burnt the skin right off my hands if I hadn't been wearing gloves. The shell locked on to the speeding car and, I'll be damned, landed inches behind it as a sort of send-off for Lao Lan.
The eleventh shell was slated for a longer journey. A peasant-turned-entrepreneur had opened a hot-spring mountain resort in a wooded area between the county seat and township village, a get-away spot for the rich and powerful. They called it a mountain resort but there was no mountain nearby, not even a bump on the ground. Even the original grave mounds had been levelled. A few dozen black pines stood like so many columns of smoke, obscuring the white buildings. I detected a heavy sulphur smell on my rooftop perch. Beautiful girls in revealing miniskirts greeted visitors as they stepped into the lobby. With the slightest touch on the loosely girded cloth belts the girls were naked. They had an affected way of speaking, like parrot-talk. Lao Lan frolicked in the pool with its Venus de Milo centrepiece. Then into the sauna to sweat; after that, dressed in a pair of baggy shorts and a short-sleeved yellow robe, it was into the massage parlour for a Thai massage. A muscular girl put her arms round him, and what ensued between them looked more like a wrestling match. Lao Lan, your day of reckoning has arrived. Freshly bathed, you'll make a very clean ghost. I dropped in the shell, and thirty seconds later it carried my compliments to Lao Lan like a white dove. This shell is for you, Lao Lan. Holding on to an overhead bar, the girl stood on his back as she shifted her hips back and forth. I couldn't tell if what he uttered were yelps of pain or cries of pleasure. But once again the shell went off course and landed in the pool, sending a geyser of water into the air. The head of the plaster Venus snapped off at the neck, bringing men and women running out of the dimly lit rooms, some wearing just enough to cover their embarrassment, others not even that.
Lao Lan, unmarked and unmoved, lay on the massage table, head turned to drink tea while the girl hid under the bed, her derriere sticking up like an ostrich with its head in the sand.
Lao Lan and the sex-starved wife of his bodyguard were playing the beast with two backs on Huang Biao's brick bed. In the name of good manners, this was not the time or place to fire a shell. But what a way to die. To leave this world at an orgiastic moment is the height of good fortune, and that was definitely too good for Lao Lan. Yet there was that thing about manners. Not firing was not an option, so I raised the tube's elevation slightly and fired the twelfth shell. It landed in Huang Biao's yard and made a crater big enough to bury a buffalo. With a cry of alarm, Huang's wife flattened herself against Lao Lan.
‘Don't be scared, little darling,’ he said with a pat on her behind. ‘It's only that little creep Luo Xiaotong playing games. You needn't worry. He'll never manage to kill me. With me dead, his life loses all meaning.’
Thirteen is supposed to be an unlucky number, making it the perfect shell to send Lao Lan up to the Western Heaven. He was on his knees praying in the Wutong Temple, our temple. There's a legend that says praying to the Wutong Spirit can double the size of a man's penis. Not only that, it can make you a man of untold riches. Lao Lan carried a joss stick and a candle into the temple by the light of the moon. The place was rumoured to be haunted by the ghost of the hanged, which kept devotees from entering with their wishes, despite knowledge of its efficacious powers. But Lao Lan had more courage than most. Never imagining that ten years later I'd be sitting in this very temple, I went ahead and took aim at it. Lao Lan knelt before the idol and lit his joss stick and candle, the flames turning his face red as a sinister ‘heh-heh’ came to him from behind the idol. That sound would have sent shivers up the spine of most people and had them rushing headlong out the door. But not Lao Lan. He responded with a ‘heh-heh’ of his own and shone his candle on a spot behind the idol. Even I could see the five spirits lined up behind Wutong. The one with a horse's body and a human head was the best-looking, a colt, of course. To its left were a pig and a goat, each with a human head. To its right a donkey and the remains of an indeterminate creature. Then a hideous, frightful face appeared, and my heart lurched and my hands went slack as the shell slid into the tube. Off it went, straight for the temple, landing with a POW! Three of the idols were destroyed, leaving only the colt with the boy's head, a lascivious or a sentimental smile frozen on its face for all eternity.
Lao Lan emerged from the temple, his face coated with mud.
The Xie Family Restaurant in town was justifiably famous, near and far, for its meatballs. It was run by an old woman with her son and daughter-in-law; they prepared exactly five hundred of the beefy delicacies every day. Customers signed up a week in advance. What was so special about the Xie-family meatballs? Their unique flavour. And what made the flavour unique? The choice cuts of beef. But, even more importantly, the Xie family's meatballs never came in contact with metal. The meat was sliced by sharpened bamboo strips, then laid out on cloth-washing rocks and beaten with a date-wood club into a meaty pulp. Special millet crumbs were kneaded into the meat before it was rolled into balls and put, along with kumquats, in earthen jars to be steamed on trays. Then the kumquats were thrown out and only the meatballs remained, a true taste sensation…I hated the thought of destroying a restaurant which produced such delicacies, especially since old Mrs Xie was such a kind woman and her son a friend of mine. Sorry, Mrs Xie and my old buddy, but killing Lao Lan is more important to me. I dropped in the fourteenth shell. It sped off into the air only to run smack into a wild goose headed in the opposite direction. Nothing but bones and feathers were left of the bird while the shell was knocked off course and landed in a pond behind the Xie house, raising a column of water and turning at least ten big crucian carp into fish paste.
The township's most notorious female free spirit, whose name was Jiena but whom everyone called Little Black Girl, had a remarkable voice. Her songs had been broadcast daily over the loudspeakers in the days of the Cultural Revolution. A bad family background stood in the way of a splendid future, and she had been forced to marry a dyer from a working-class family. He went out every day on his bicycle to pick up clothes to be dyed. High-quality fabric was in short supply in those days, so young people tore up old white cloth and had it dyed green to resemble faddish army gear. Even caustic soda was ineffective in cleaning the green stains from the dyer's hands, and what that would have meant for Jiena's milky white breasts is not hard to contemplate. And so Jiena strayed from her marriage vows. Her relationship with Lao Lan went back a long time, so when he made his fortune she looked him up. I'd always liked this charming woman. She had a captivating voice, thanks to her musical past. But I could not let that stop me from aiming the fifteenth shell at her house, where she and Lao Lan were reminiscing, teary-eyed, over a shared bottle and indulging in pillow talk. The missile landed in an old dye vat, sending green dye flying everywhere. The dyer would not only wear the green hat of a cuckold but also live in the green house of one.