Colors of the Mountain (28 page)

One day I announced to Fatty that I was leaving to go back to school. He asked me to drop by his place before heading home.

When Si came to replace me early one morning, she looked so tanned that her teeth shone, white like a crescent moon in a dark sky when she smiled.

“I’m glad you didn’t lose my job.”

I smiled and told her that there was fish for her dinner that I had prepared, and plenty of rice left. She was very proud of me. Right before I took her bike and started my journey home, I brought her aside and told her quietly about the girl and the presence of a man. But that was all I said. Showing her a piece of thick tree trunk I had picked up from the roadside, I told her that she could use it to jam against her flimsy door each night and that she should hide the knife under her pillow just as I had.

Si looked at me oddly and thanked me, probably thinking that I had become affected by my solitary nights. I felt like a big brother, unwilling to leave my innocent little sister in such a horrible, dangerous place. Slowly, I climbed onto the bike and rode off to Fatty’s to say good-bye.

Not surprisingly, Fatty was waiting for me at his door. Two large bags sat at his feet.

“Here, let’s load this on your bike,” Fatty said.

“What is it?”

“The driver, my friend, dropped this off last night. All fresh. Bring them home to your family and say ‘hi.’”

I parked the bike and opened up one of the bags. It was full of red
lychees, plump and fresh. It smelled like the Yellow Stone orchard that I had left behind. Each bag must have weighed fifty pounds. “I can’t take this.”

“Of course you can. You’re an employee of the factory, so you’re entitled.” He laughed. “Everyone steals in this town.”

“I don’t want to be chased by a bunch of factory security guards.”

“You won’t. This is outside the factory’s territory. Besides, you could have gotten them anywhere, and I couldn’t eat the whole lot. They’d all go bad.” He rolled up his sleeves and helped me. When I opened my thin arms to give him a brotherly good-bye, my fingers couldn’t reach all the way around. Fatty would always remain fat. He wore a confused look on his face, a little lost and sad. I asked him to visit me often and soon.

I rode all the way home against a head wind, not daring to stop for fear of getting caught with the loot.

My mom, dad, sisters, and brother were delighted to see me and the lychees surprised them. Mom wasn’t quite sure about them, but Dad said the choice was simple: either we ate them or we dumped them. We sat around our table and feasted.

I took ten pounds of the lychees to my four friends, who hugged me so hard I couldn’t breathe.

We ate and chatted. Mo Gong was ready for another romance. I told them about my encounter in the night and they were all quiet afterward. Like me, they didn’t know whether to be turned on or off. They all wanted to know who the girl was, but I had to leave the story without an ending.

Yi, who was on holiday from his city job, related the last chapter of his own hopeless romance with his teacher’s daughter. She had refused to come home for the arranged wedding with the town’s party chief, and instead had eloped with a fellow-actor in the commune’s troupe. He was a young and handsome man, whose father had fled to Hong Kong and had become a hotel owner in Kowlong. The newlyweds were building a big house facing a lake. We were all happy that this angel had flown out of her cage and was now gliding freely on her own wings.

“I guess she wasn’t meant for you, Yi.”

He shook his head, smiling, while making his tobacco roll, thick and round as usual.

Just as usual, Yellow Stone was quiet. I felt glad to be home, but a small emptiness lingered at leaving a busy town like Han Jian. But soon all those young and lively faces became a memory, belonging to another time and age. They were people who were happier living in a more complicated world. I missed them, but on the other hand I didn’t have to sneak into my room early anymore. I had my bunk bed back in the attic.

Before going to sleep that night, I stared at my textbook for a long while and wondered when Professor Wei was going to start my lessons. My heart beat faster at the thought of going to college, of maybe one day growing up and joining those young people out beyond the boundaries of Yellow Stone, and leaving this quiet, sleepy town that had no electricity.

In late August, the lotus leaves floated lazily on the calm surface of the Dong Jing River. The clouds seemed distant, and in the fields, drab after the harvest, buffalo ducked their horns and pulled the heavy plows, bearing the weight on their callused shoulders, tossing up the flattened soil in readiness for the new plantings. They mooed—a sound the farmers interpreted as a prediction of rain for the following day. Their brethren, a few acres away, joined in, and soon the whole buffalo community was mooing, like foxes howling in the high western mountains on a night lit by a full moon. Autumn filled me with emptiness, as if my heart knew the bleak winter was near. The sound of the buffalo always seemed to me the lonesome song of Yellow Stone’s autumn. I used to sit by the river and stare at the buffalo in the distance, letting their song take me back to the distant memory of the summer now behind me, leaving me forlorn and melancholy.

One morning, Mom woke me and told me to put on a clean shirt because Professor Wei would like to start her lessons with me. I jumped out of bed like a young fish frolicking in shallow waters under the sun. I washed my face with soap, brushed my teeth three times, with a double load of toothpaste, and combed my hair into neat furrows, parted on the right. I even looked into details such as nose hair and earwax for five minutes in front of the broken half-mirror in my room. My
brother and sisters laughed at me as I walked into our dining room, but I told them that I now knew about manners after a stint in the big city of Han Jian. High-class people dressed nicely and behaved with dignity.

I ate my breakfast carefully, trying to prevent the soupy porridge from splashing all over my clean shirt or the pickled green vegetables from catching in the tricky cracks of my teeth. I brushed my teeth once more and put on a pair of plastic sandals, the most formal of all footwear, to my knowledge, to ever walk the street of Yellow Stone.

I carried my English book in my schoolbag and walked along the deserted alley instead of the broad street for fear of getting teased by my friends, who usually took up their positions at the bridge and laughed at every soul who passed. If they saw me, they would have roughed up my hair and tried to make me smoke until I smelled like a smokestack.

As I neared the western end of town, I became more self-conscious. My voice would sound too loud or too provincial. Even my toes seemed funny, sticking out of the sandals. The breeze had blown my way and no doubt my hair looked like a bird’s nest by now. I touched it lightly with my fingers. It felt all wrong. I squatted by the river and checked my wavering image in the water. A few strands of hair were sticking up. I pasted them down with water, and opened my mouth wide to make sure no food was stuck in my teeth. Then I ran along until I stood in front of the forbidding door to the Weis’ estate. Only after I had caught my breath did I knock, cautiously.

I heard the low rumble of a dog. It was sniffing away behind the door, becoming excited as it caught my scent. It seemed to say
“Welcome to the Wei estate, and could I have your ass for lunch?”
I took a step backward and almost peed in my pants.

I had long heard about this dog’s reputation, how it would lurk behind the wall, ready to kill with those sharp yellow teeth. Thieves stayed away from the estate not because a couple of old ladies there said their prayers day and night, but because the beast walked the beat. In the daytime, he chased the birds in the garden. At night, he ran after the cats that ran after the rats. The guy was the man of the house.

“Shh…be polite.” A gentle female voice came from behind the door. The dog growled some more and barked grumpily. I took another step back. Politeness was not quite the issue here; he wanted to eat me.

“You are a naughty dog today, go sit in your house.” The voice became firmer this time. Gee, how about locking him up? He was only a flesh-eating animal. He dragged his feet away, shuffling along the ground, reluctantly leaving. No doubt his eyes still lingered on the door, no doubt he was still full of evil thoughts about having me for lunch. After all, it was a man-eat-dog or dog-eat-man world out there.

The door opened and a white-haired Professor Wei smiled like a white lily in full bloom.

“Come in, please,” she said in English.

My mind rapidly searched for an answer. I knew “Sit down, please.” Our teacher used to say that sarcastically whenever I stood scratching my head, unable to answer any of his questions. Professor Wei wanted me to do something, but I did not know what. I didn’t know whether to step forward or backward, to nod or to shake my head, until she gestured with her hand for me to come in.

“Thank you, thank you.” I used up the only other two English words I knew in one single sentence, then cut my eyes left and right, looking for the fabled animal who was probably whetting his teeth on stone and racheting his appetite up for my skinny behind.

“It should not be ‘Tank you.’ It should be ‘Thank you,’ with the tip of your tongue between your teeth,” she said as I followed her into the garden.

It was the first time I had opened my big mouth and I had already tanked her instead of thanking her. This was going to be great. She might as well return me to the other side of the wall where I belonged.

But she smiled, showing a shallow dimple in her lined face, like a sweet little girl trapped inside wrinkled makeup. “I like your hair. Nowadays, kids just don’t comb their hair like they used to.” I blushed like a mute getting smacked in the face. I understood her this time, she had switched to Chinese.

Had it not been for the river outside, my hair would have been sticking out like a sprouting onion garden. I was thankful. First impressions were important. I wondered what she would have said had my hair been less than perfect. Then there would surely have been nothing positive left about me in her eyes. She was doing this because she felt she and her sister owed my dad. That was it. I wouldn’t be surprised if she told me after the first lesson that I was as impossible to educate as that
dog out there. He probably understood more English than I did after all the eavesdropping he did from his own little house.

A narrow path paved with pebbles of various shapes and colors led us to the garden. It was rambling, with shapely trees and wildflowers creeping all over the ground. There were arching trees and a gazebo covered with red flowers. At the lower end, some clear water had collected into a natural pond, where young lotus plants floated. Although the garden rambled, there was a certain discipline about it that was neat and orderly, just like Professor Wei herself.

She guided me to the white house behind the garden. I watched her tiny five-foot form move gently in front of me, admiring the knowledge she had stored away in that white head. She was a walking English dictionary.

Educate me, I prayed. Teach me, enlighten me. Make something out of nothing.

The red tile on the floor looked as if it had been swept and mopped twice a day, 365 days a year, for the last hundred years. The antique furniture was polished, and shone in the sunlight bathing the living room. The impression was of elegance, simple and neat. I stopped at the threshold, stared at the soles of my sandals, and thought of the dirty road I had just walked along outside the wall. Dirt or no dirt, I wasn’t going inside wearing those sandals. But if I took them off, my naked feet would look vulgar and ugly, touching tiles where only pale uncallused toes had been. I would leave dirty, sweaty marks everywhere. The cleaning lady would kill me.

“Come on in, don’t worry about the floor, and sit down here.” She pointed to a cozy couch.

Good thing she spoke in Chinese or I would have mistaken it as an order to take off my sandals and crawl on my knees to avoid touching her floors with my dirty feet. I tiptoed across the living room, making my footprints as faint as possible. As I sank into the sofa, I was surprised how deep down I went. It wrapped my bottom snugly like no other chair I had ever sat in. I felt cradled by the touch of something soft and velvety. A sense of undeserved comfort swept over me.

Professor Wei pulled a chair over next to me. I straightened up from my own like a puppet pulled by its strings. She put her hand on mine to keep me from jumping out of my seat.

“I was very glad to hear from your lovely dad that you wanted to study English with me. What a refreshing idea!” She tossed her silver head and her eyes filled with a soft glow. Then her voice changed ever so slightly. “Nowadays, kids out there only do bad things like smoking, gambling, fighting, and worse, talking about girls at such young ages.”

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat and felt the pack of Flying Horse in my back pocket; I was going to light a cigarette just as soon as I was out of here. The urge to smoke was alive and kicking.

“I’m sure you are not that type of a boy.” Professor Wei looked at me sharply and patted my knee as if to congratulate me. I sat in silence and gave her a nervous little nod.

“Now, why don’t you show me how much English you know and I’ll design a program for you.” She crossed her legs and placed her hands one on top of the other on her knees, comfortable in her role as audience.

I knew the time of embarrassment had come. I fumbled in my schoolbag and fished out the untouched English book. I regretted not tearing out the second page, all scribbled over with caricatures of my English teacher.

“Read me the alphabet.”

That wasn’t a bad place to start.

I cranked along with my rusty pronunciation, more and more unsure the further I went. I was red-faced at
G
, sweating at
H
, trembling at
I
, and lightheaded at
J.
The English sounds seemed to block my air passage and my lips went dry. I almost choked on those strange, cord-twisting letters. She stopped me just in time.