Father heard a sudden crack of gunfire from the sorghum field north of the tracks and saw a tall Jap soldier on one of the flatcars sway momentarily, then tumble headlong to the ground. The howl of a wolf sounded from one of the blockhouses, and the people, those disembarking and those waiting to board the train, scattered. The police dogs barked furiously; the machine guns on top of the blockhouses began spraying the area to the north. The train started up amid the confusion, belching puffs of black smoke and sending a shower of ashes onto the platform.
Granddad grabbed Father’s hand and dragged him quickly down a dark lane. He pushed open a half-closed gate and walked into a tiny courtyard, where a small red paper lantern hung from the eave of the house. A woman stood in the doorway, her face so heavily powdered you couldn’t tell her age. She was grinning broadly through painted lips; her teeth glistened. Black hair was piled up on her head, and she wore a silk flower behind her ear.
‘My dear elder brother!’ she called out with affected sweetness. ‘Now that you’re a commander, you don’t give a second thought to your little sister.’ She threw her arms around Granddad’s neck like a little girl.
‘Don’t do that,’ he complained. ‘Not in front of my son. I can’t waste time with you today! Are you still playing games with Fifth Brother?’
The woman stormed over to the gate and shut it, then took down the lantern and walked inside. ‘Fifth Brother was caught and beaten by the garrison command,’ she said with a pout.
‘Isn’t Song Shun of the garrison command his sworn brother?’
‘Do you really think you can trust fair-weather friends like that? After what happened at Qingdao, I’ve been sitting on the razor’s edge.’
‘Fifth Brother would never give you away. He proved that when he was grilled by Nine Dreams Cao.’
‘What are you doing here? They say you fought some Japanese armoured troops.’
‘It was a fiasco! I’m going to murder that motherfucking Pocky Leng!’
‘Don’t mess with that slippery toad. He’s too much for you.’
Granddad took the silver dollars out of his pocket and tossed them down on the table. ‘I want five hundred red-jacketed bullets.’
‘Red-jacketed, blue-jacketed, I got rid of them all when Fifth Brother was arrested. I can’t make bullets out of thin air.’
‘Don’t give me that! Here’s fifty dollars. Tell me, have I, Yu Zhan’ao, ever treated you wrong?’
‘My dear elder brother,’ the woman said, ‘what kind of talk is that? Don’t treat your little sister like a stranger.’
‘Then don’t get me mad!’ threatened Granddad.
‘You’ll never get out of town.’
‘That’s my problem, not yours. I want five hundred large cartridges and fifty small ones.’
The woman walked out into the yard to see if anyone was around, then returned to the house, opened a secret door in the wall, and took out a box of shells that shone like gold.
Granddad picked up a sack and stuffed bullets inside, then tied it around his waist. ‘Let’s go!’ he said.
The woman stopped him. ‘How do you plan to get away?’
‘By crawling across the tracks near the train station.’
‘No good,’ she said. ‘There are blockhouses there, with searchlights, dogs, and guards.’
‘We’ll give it a try,’ Granddad said mockingly. ‘If it doesn’t work, we’ll be back.’
Granddad and Father made their way down the dark lane towards the train station and hid alongside the wall of a blacksmith shop; from here they had a clear view of the brightly lit platform and the sentries standing on it. Granddad led Father to the western end of the station, where there was a freight yard. A barbed-wire fence ran from the station all the way to the city wall, and searchlights on top of the blockhouses swept the area, illuminating a dozen or more sets of tracks.
They crawled up next to the barbed-wire fence and tugged on it, hoping to open a hole big enough to crawl through. But it was too taut, and one of the barbs punctured the palm of Father’s hand. He whimpered.
‘What’s wrong?’ Granddad whispered.
‘I cut my hand, Dad,’ Father whispered back.
‘We can’t get through. Let’s go back!’
‘If we had our guns…’
‘We still couldn’t make it.’
‘We could shoot out the lights!’
They retreated into the shadows, where Granddad picked up a brick and threw it towards the tracks. One of the sentries shrieked in alarm and fired. The searchlight spun around and swept the area as a machine gun opened fire, the sound so loud that Father nearly went deaf. Sparks flew from bullets ricocheting off the tracks.
The fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, the Mid-Autumn Festival, is one of the biggest market days in Gaomi County. The people still had to go on living, even though it was wartime. Business was business. The roads were filled with people at eight o’clock in the morning, when a young man named Gao Rong manned his post at the northern gate to search and question those entering and leaving town. He knew the Japanese soldier was watching him with ill-concealed disgust.
An old man in his fifties and a teenage boy were driving a goat out of town. The old man’s face was dark, his eyes steely; the boy’s face was red and he was sweating, as from a case of nerves.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Leaving town. Going home,’ the old man replied.
‘Not going to market?’
‘Already been. Bought this half-dead goat. Cheap.’
‘When did you come into town?’
‘Yesterday afternoon. We stayed with a relative. Bought the goat first thing this morning.’
‘Now where are you going?’
‘Leaving town. Going home.’
‘Okay, you can pass!’
The goat’s belly was so big it could barely walk. When Granddad whipped it with a broken-off sorghum stalk, it cried out in agony.
They stopped at the gravesite to retrieve their weapons.
‘Shall we let the goat go, Dad?’
‘No. Let’s take it with us. We’ll kill it when we get home, so we can celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival.’
They arrived at the village entrance at noon, near the tall black-earth wall that had been repaired not many years before. A hail of gunfire erupted from the heart of the village and beyond, and Granddad immediately knew that what they’d been dreading had finally happened. He was reminded of the premonition he’d had for the past several days, and was glad he’d decided to go into town that morning. They’d fought the odds and accomplished their task; that was all anyone could ask of them.
Granddad and Father hurriedly picked up the half-dead goat and carried it into the sorghum field, where Father cut the hemp they’d used to sew up its rectum. They’d stuffed 550 bullets up the goat’s ass in that woman’s house, until its belly drooped like a crescent moon. During the trip back, Father had been worried that the bullets would split the goat’s belly or that the animal would somehow digest them.
As soon as the hemp was cut, the goat’s rectum opened up like a plum flower, and pellets came pouring out. After relieving itself violently, the goat crumpled to the ground. ‘Oh no, Dad!’ Father cried in alarm. ‘The bullets have turned into goat pellets.’
Granddad grabbed the goat by its horns and jerked it to its feet, then bounced it up and down. Shiny bullets came spilling out. They scooped up the bullets, loaded their weapons, and stuffed the rest of the ammunition into their pockets. Not worrying whether the goat was dead or alive, they ran through the sorghum field straight for the village.