The Arrival of the Security Group
LATER ON I became a deckhand.
On my trips back to town, there were kids who didn’t know my name, but who followed me and heard adults call out my nickname, Kongpi. If any of them didn’t know who Kongpi was, they said: the fleet’s kongpi. And if that still didn’t do it, they added a footnote: the son of Half-Dick. It was no secret. Everyone in Milltown knew I had a strange and laughable father. He only had half a dick.
I was in good health for the first year or so. But then one day I discovered that I was walking strangely. Following my father’s scandalous act with the scissors, every time I went ashore I was careful to avoid traces of red on the ground, afraid they might be drops of his shameful blood, and I averted my eyes from white bits of rubbish, worried they could be strips of Zhao Chunmei’s mourning garb. One afternoon, as I was walking along with the sun beating down on me, I found myself staring at my shadow as it moved across the cobblestones. It looked a little like a duck, and at first I thought the distortion was caused by the angle of the sun, so I adjusted my walking style and cocked my head to see what my shadow looked like now. I watched as the outline twisted awkwardly, uglier than ever, now a goose, and suddenly I was aware that I really was walking strangely, my feet splayed outward, just like Desheng and Chunsheng. But I was nothing like those two, who went ashore barefoot. I always wore shoes. Having grown up on the water, they had developed a peculiar walking style that was well adapted to the boat’s motion. I’d walked on land for fifteen years, so why were my feet splayed like theirs? I took off my shoes, removed the insoles, shook out the sand and pebbles, and examined them inside and out. Nothing there. So I sat by the side of the road and took a good look at my feet. They were dirty, but that’s all. Strange. Why would two good feet suddenly forget how to walk the way they’d done for more than a decade? Why had they started acting as if they belonged to a duck or a goose?
Walking with splayed feet is ugly. For a woman, it’s humiliating. What kind of woman walks with her legs and feet spread out like that? Is it supposed to be some sort of come-on? And if a man walks that way, he can’t blame anyone for thinking it’s because an abnormally heavy penis and testicles get in the way.
So I sat by the side of the road and analysed the differences between my feet and those of Desheng and Chunsheng. I concluded that I was an acute splayed-feet walker who’d been influenced not by other seamen, but by my own father. Ever since his damaged penis had been restored to a degree of functionality, thanks to reconstructive surgery, I’d been burdened with the feeling that the nearly severed half was now attached to my own body, that my underwear was too tight and that my crotch was getting heavier by the day. I also felt as if my brain was affected, that splay-footed manner of walking was determined not by the feet but by the brain. Even an idiot knows the difference between a river and dry land, but my brain had merged the two and sent messages of caution to my feet: Careful, careful, use as much strength as you need to walk steadily and guard against the ground moving, against the motion of waves and undercurrents and eddies. Once I obeyed those messages, stepping cautiously on the cobblestones and vaguely noting the shadow my head cast, a mysterious image lit up in my brain, and from then on, every road on the riverbank was either my port or starboard deck, and I trod it carefully. From then on, Milltown was a camouflaged body of water, which I had to navigate slowly.
Eventually I became a true splay-footed walker. My father did not influence my general health, but I became infected with a germ called ‘halves’. As I looked at the world of the river around me, I arrived at the bizarre conclusion that only half of my world remained. Birds on the shore danced and sang as the water rushed along, but there were no dancing or singing birds around me, just rushing water, and I found that water disgusting. I rode up and down the river behind a fast-moving tug that towed our barge in a mad dash. The wind, the speed and that mysterious germ came together to launch an assault on my eyes and ears. No matter how stirringly the loudspeaker on the shore blared its messages, I only ever heard the first half, the remainder blown away by the wind. When I stood at the bow trying to take in the sights on both banks, if my eyes focused on the wheat fields to the left, I forgot about the market towns on the right and could not tell the difference between the places we’d just passed. The scenery changed with each successive day, but my hasty glances created a half-baked understanding of the triumphant socialist construction on the banks of the river. When we passed a duck farm, I saw workers laying a foundation and digging a ditch on the sandbar; I didn’t know it was the Victory Hydroelectric Station and assumed it was just an extension of the duck farm. I grumbled at the sight, wondering why the ducks were being treated so well when I didn’t even have a home on shore. When we sailed past Phoenix, I saw people building a cement pylon to the east, and all I could think was, ‘They’ve just built a hydroelectric station near the duck farm, and now here’s Phoenix building another.’ Was it a competition? I was oblivious to the fact that an identical pylon was going up on the other bank, and that Phoenix was in fact getting not a hydroelectric station but a new bridge.
The people on shore were all talking about Milltown, my hometown, and how it was undergoing a spectacular transformation and would become a key sector, the most important one in the Golden Sparrow River region. Word had it that a secret combat-readiness facility was to be constructed in Milltown, but since it was all hush-hush, no one knew for sure what sort of facility it would be, which was why everyone — on shore and on the river — was talking about it. Some thought it might be an air-raid shelter, others that it would be a missile-launching site, while some predicted that it would be a petroleum pipeline that served the Southern Combat-Readiness Base. After hearing more and more comments, I finally worked out what they meant by a ‘key sector’, but had no way of telling whose prediction was more reliable. If Father had still been in office, I’d have been privy to first-hand information. Too bad. As they say, a river flows east for thirty years, then west for the next thirty. Father and I were now the last to hear any news relating to the Golden Sparrow River region.
I never liked asking people for news, and in my personal investigation into signs relating to the military construction, I found none. The General Affairs Building was still the highest authority in Milltown. The skies were bluer than before, the air cleaner, and production on the wharf was being reorganized. The mountain of coal had been pared down; commodity storage, always haphazard, was being systematized; and relatively clean public toilets had appeared, with the smell of disinfectant lying heavy in the air. Other than that, there didn’t seem to be any earth-shaking changes or improvements in a town that was the focus of public opinion.
One day I was walking down by the piers when I passed a chemical warehouse and was surprised to see that it had been newly painted, white with red windows. A sign on the door read: ‘Pier Security Group’. I stuck my head through the door and spotted familiar faces: Scabby Five, Baldy Chen and Wang Xiaogai, each sporting a red armband with the words ‘You Zhi’ printed on them. I quickly figured out that it stood for Milltown Zhi-an, or Security Group. After the words came some Arabic numbers in parentheses, evidently their personal numbers. I knew what the armbands meant, but I was in a teasing mood. ‘Does that say “Lard-town”? Are you the lard group? If so, you belong in a wok.’