“Doggy,” Big Hat said, “you son of a black-hearted rich peasant, don’t stand in my way, or else we’ll smash your old man’s head next time he’s paraded through our village.” He grinned, and a star-shaped scar was revealed on his stubbly crown.
Doggy lowered his eyes and stopped moving. Indeed several weeks before, his father, a rich peasant in the old days, had been beaten in the marketplace during a denunciation. “Stop bluffing, you son of an ass!” Grandson shouted.
“Grandson,” Big Hat said, “let me go just this once. My granduncle is waiting for me at home. We have guests today.” He pointed at the squat bottle containing white spirits. “My granduncle is a sworn brother of Chairman Ding of our commune. If you let me go, I’ll tell him to help promote your dad.”
We all turned to look at Grandson. Apparently Big Hat thought Grandson’s uncle was his father.
“Tell your granduncle we all fuck him and your grandaunt too!” Grandson said.
“Come on, your old man will be the head of his workshop if you let me go just this once. My granduncle is also a friend of Director Ma of the fertilizer plant.”
“Fuck your granduncle!” Grandson plunged forward and hit Big Hat on the forehead with the cake of lead.
Big Hat dropped to the ground without making a noise, and the dung-fork sprang off and knocked down one of the bottles. Blood dripped on the front of his gray shirt. Between his eyebrows was a long clean cut as if inflicted by a knife. The air smelled of vinegar.
Big Hat was lying beneath the wall, his eyes shut and his mouth vomiting froth. We were scared and thought Grandson must have knocked him dead, but we dared not say a word.
A moment later Big Hat came to and began crying for help. Grandson went over and kicked him in the stomach. “Get up, you bum.” He clutched his collar and pulled him up on his knees. “Today you met your grandpas. You must kowtow to everybody here and call us Grandpa, or you won’t be able to go home tonight.”
We were too shocked to do anything. “Grandson,” Doggy tried to intervene, “spare his life, Grandson. Let him—”
“Stop calling me that!” Grandson yelled without looking at Doggy, then turned to Big Hat. “Do you want to call us Grandpa or not?”
“No.” Tears covered Big Hat’s face.
“All right.” Grandson stepped away, picked up the fork, and smashed all the bottles. Dark soy sauce and colorless liquor splashed on the gravel and began fading away. “All right, if you don’t, you must eat one of these.” He pointed to the horse droppings a few paces away.
“No!”
“Eat the dung,” Grandson ordered, and whacked Big Hat on the back with the fork.
“Oh, help!”
The street was unusually quiet, no grown-ups in sight. “Yes or no?” Grandson asked.
“No.”
“Say it again.”
“No!”
“Take this.” Grandson stabbed him in the leg with the fork.
“Oh! Save my life!”
One of the prongs pierced Big Hat’s calf. He was rolling on the ground, cursing, wailing, and yelling. Strangely enough, no grown-ups ever showed up.
This was too much. Surely we wanted to see that bastard’s blood, but we wouldn’t kill him and go to jail for that, so a few of us moved to stop Grandson.
“Keep back, all of you.” He wielded the fork around as if he would strike any of us. We stood still.
Grandson picked up one of the droppings with the fork and raised it to Big Hat’s lips. He threatened, “If you don’t take a bite I’ll gut you. Open your mouth.”
“Oh! You bandit,” Big Hat moaned with his eyes closed. His mouth opened a little.
“Open big,” Grandson ordered, and thrust the dung into his mouth.
“Ah!” Big Hat spat it out and rubbed his lips with his sleeves. “Fuck your mother!” he yelled, and lay on his side wailing with both hands covering his face.
Grandson threw the fork to the other side of the street; he looked around at us with his crazed eyes, then walked away without a word. His broad hips and short legs swayed as though he were stamping and crushing something.
Without any delay we all ran away, leaving Big Hat to curse and weep alone.
Shortly afterward Grandson became famous. Boys of the lower grades in our Central Elementary School would tremble at the mere sight of him. With him leading us, we could enter some other areas of town without provoking a fight. Except for us, no one dared play on Main Street any longer—the former noncombat zone was under our control now. Some of the officers’ children, a bunch of weaklings though they ate meat and white bread and wore better clothes, even begged us to protect them on their way to school and back home. They would pay us with tickets for the movies shown in the army’s theater and with tofu coupons, since Sickle Handle’s father, the old blacksmith, had lost all his teeth and liked soft food. For a short while our territory was expanding, our affairs were prosperous, and our Eastern Empire began to dominate Dismount Fort.
But a month later, Grandson’s uncle failed to renew his contract and couldn’t find work in town. We were surprised to hear that he hadn’t been a permanent, but a temporary worker in the fertilizer plant. The Lius decided to return to their home village in Tile County.
Grandson left with the family, and our empire collapsed. Because none of us was suited to be an emperor, the throne remained unoccupied. Now boys from the south even dared to play horse ride in front of our former headquarters—Benli’s house. We were unable to go to the department store at the western end of Main Street or to the marketplace to buy things for our parents and rent picture-story books. Most of us were beaten in school. Once I was caught by Big Hat’s men at the millhouse and was forced to meow for them. How we missed our old glorious days!
As time went by, we left, one after another, to serve different emperors.
Fortune
Blind Bea, a locksmith, used to be a street fortune-teller in the old days. Though his practice was banned in the New China, people in Dismount Fort had never stopped seeing him in secret. Whenever there was a wedding or a funeral, they would go to him beforehand and ask about a lucky day or a good burial place. Because of his poor sight, Bea seldom went out, but he knew what was happening in town. Some people believed he was a kind of scholar who could fathom the mysteries between heaven and earth without stepping out of his threshold. Blind Bea lived well. Except for the children who often watched him through the back window of his hovel, nobody was jealous of his eating large white bread at lunch and dinner.
Tang Hu of Sand Village heard that a month ago a peasant had lost a horse and gone to the fortune-teller to ask its whereabouts. After reading the bamboo slips, Blind Bea raised his knotted hand and boomed out, “He carried his balls to the poplar woods in the east.” The owner of the horse said it was a mare, but Bea told him to forget male or female and just go search the woods. A few men went there and found the horse.
These days Tang had been thinking of visiting Blind Bea, because he had been dogged by bad luck for the past few years. The summer before last he lost two litters of piglets, and last fall a flood ruined his cabbages and turnips. Then he had acute appendicitis and could have died if a truck hadn’t happened to be passing the village and carried him to the Commune Clinic in time. Nonetheless, the doctors opened his stomach, and Tang lost all the original wind his parents had put in him. He wondered whether these misfortunes had been caused by the graves of his ancestors which faced east instead of south.
Tang pulled up his horse cart before the locksmith’s and went inside. Blind Bea crouched over a vise filing the copper switch of a flashlight. At the sight of Tang he put down the rasp and returned to the armchair covered with a roe deer’s skin.