Colors of the Mountain (36 page)

Dad had suggested another option. He said if you promised any god a thousand kowtows, you could actually just do a hundred really big ones and tell the god that each of the big ones stood for ten. I knew he said it to try and rein in my suicidal zest. At times I was tempted, but then I thought about the formula of input and output: what you put in was what you got back. If I aimed at a fancy college in Beijing, I had better be doing some serious banging with my thick skull. No discounts. No hanky-panky. After kowtowing to twelve gods, I dragged my exhausted body to our living room and sank into a chair. By this time, my sisters and brother were up, and I extended my sore hand on the armrest as they willingly dropped their monetary contribution into it, an exchange for the hundreds of kowtows I had done on their behalf while they had snored away the early hours of New Year’s Day. They smiled at me and I kept curling my fingers to indicate more contributions. I felt like a boxer, bruised and raw, back from fighting for my siblings. I was worth every penny they gave me, and more.

When I’d eaten the noodles that were traditionally served as the first meal of the year, and after spending the kowtow money on five packs of Flying Horse at Liang’s black market, I headed for Yi’s workshop.

The gang was already there. They roughed up my hair and pinched my ears and nose, paying me back for all the times I had been too busy for them. I loved these guys. They were always the same: gruff, sincere, and caring in their own very charming way. When they felt jealous or neglected, they shouted at me and slapped my head, then their irritation was over. Like the Dong Jing, full to its brim with pure rainwater, their hearts were generous with love.

“Fucking piece of shit, you look pale and weak. What’s the matter with you, college man?” Mo Gong made the welcome speech for the gang. Sen, Yi, and Siang searched my coat pockets, split up the cigarettes, and laughingly enjoyed their first good smoke of the year.

“I brought these for you guys because I wanted to apologize for all the neglect.”

“Shut up and have one yourself.” Sen threw me a pack of Wing cigarettes with filters. I lit one. It felt good to be back.

Nothing in the room had changed much. The tools were still hanging on the rough dirt walls. There were traces of sawdust. A bunch of tobacco leaves still dangled in the dark corner, hidden away from the sun. And the place still smelled like a school dorm, except now there was the added smell of mold. The place had been shut up since Yi had left for his job in the big city. It was opened once in a while, whenever Yi was back in town. Mo Gong, Sen, and Siang had been on the road a great deal. Old habits were hard to kick. Gambling, stealing, traveling on the old bike, they were still outcasts. Sen patted my shoulder and sat next to me on Yi’s old work stool. “Brother, you missed out on a helluva lot of fun when you were hittin’ those books.”

“What the hell have you guys been doing?” I asked.

“Take a look.” Mo Gong threw a thick heap of money on the bench and nodded. It was supposed to mean something to me. I had never seen that much money before. The butcher next door always carried a wad to the commune bank at the end of every day, but this neatly stacked pile was twice as thick.

“Where did you get it? Did you steal it?” I couldn’t believe my eyes.

The four gave me another roughing up and pinched my ears and nose again. I struggled free before any more damage was done. They all smiled the same Buddha smile, silent and mysterious.

“We went to Yi’s city for ten days and won it,” Sen said.

“How?”

“Well, we set up two gambling tables in a rented hut near Yi’s factory. Half of Yi’s colleagues came, just for the entertainment. Those rich city folks! We robbed them raw and stole them blind. Yi played stranger, and we three ran the two tables. Before word got out, we moved, and here we are. Nine hundred and thirty yuan!”

I trembled. The figure was so large, it was almost criminal. I knew my rich cousin Yan made thirty-two yuan a month. My friends had just raked in two-and-a-half years’ profit in just a few days! That was stealing at its best.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” Sen asked, smiling.

“It’s so much. You know, we could build an eight-bedroom house with that.”

The four nodded. They’d probably been smiling ever since they got
the money. Why not, who wouldn’t? If it had been my money, I would smell it every second, smile at it all day long, and slip it under my pillow to dream about at night.

“But we’re not building houses. Here,” Sen took half an inch from the stack and threw it to me. “Listen, this is our money. Let’s use it wisely and clean everyone out. Then we’ll have tens of thousands.” Sen was good with numbers. He meant the sugarcane fields, where we had met for the first time.

“What do you mean, ours?”

“The money is ours, yours as well as mine. You’re still our brother. We’ll use the money as seed money to gamble some more, and soon we’ll all be rich and maybe buy ourselves some wives,” Mo Gong said, lights dancing in his eyes. He winked at the end of the sentence. Money first, then a wife. It was Mo Gong being totally honest about his worldly outlook.

I felt touched by the inclusion. The brother thing still caused a tightening in my gut. We were bound by our sworn allegiance, but when money came into it, things changed somehow. I felt uncomfortable. We were meant to stick together in friendship and love, not for money. No one had inserted any clause about money. It was a spiritual alliance, not a financial one.

Something about them had changed. These guys were no longer kids. They had all begun to wear rough beards. Their voices were deeper and huskier. They were grown-ups with grown-up desires and ideas. They had seen the city and gambled there with the big guys. Now there was this pot of money. Who knew what was next? Maybe the cops were after them.

“Are you sure this money is clean?” I asked, stern-faced.

“Smug little rascal.” Mo Gong grabbed my neck and planted a wet kiss on my forehead. “Don’t worry about a thing. Money is always clean.”

He picked up the stack and planted a kiss on that, too. “We’re rich. Let’s hit the fields. The losers are waiting for us to wipe them out.”

“This time we’re the big guys,” Sen said. “Only big hands are welcome from now on. The penny business is over. Da, you come with us, even if it’s just for a day or two, then you can go back to your studies.”

“You have to come. Just spend some time with us, okay?” Siang said. “And we’ve got some love stories for you to hear.”

The temptation was high. It was New Year’s Day. No one could say anything about my taking a day off from my studies. God made this day for men to play. I deserved it. Four pairs of eyes were waiting for me.

I bit my lips. “I really need to study every night to make it to college, I swear. I’d love to come with you and wipe them out, or even just be with you guys and boast, but I really can’t go.” It was the pact I had made with my family and Buddha. I had better stick to it.

There was disappointment in their eyes.

Sen was a man of reason. “Well, we’re all grown up now. If you gotta do it, then go do it. Let’s have a drink tonight, though.”

“I’ll be here with all the food you can eat. You guys go make big money, and we’ll celebrate tonight.”

“You better be hitting the books or else I’ll crack your skull,” Mo Gong threatened affectionately. He would have made a great law-enforcement officer.

Yi and Siang both kicked my behind as I left them.

On my way home, I thought about them and the money. Things used to be simpler. There had been no college to dream about, and my friends had just been lightweight neighborhood hooligans, walking their beat on the street of Yellow Stone. A puff of smoke would have made them content and a good joke could last for days. Tobacco had been sweet and liquor charming. Now I was turning down their offer of adventure to hit my tedious books, while they headed out on a mission to clean out the whole town. The thought wedged in the middle of my heart. I sighed as I entered our house and crept into my room, where my books were waiting patiently for me. I closed my eyes before opening the first book to study the first item on the agenda for the day. There was peace within me. The excitement of the New Year belonged out there, on the street of Yellow Stone.

I was going for the English major, so I acted like one. I decorated the walls of my room with English words and phrases. I also made cards with English words on one side and Chinese on the other. I carried a thick stack in my coat pocket wherever I went. I’d mumble to myself, trying to memorize the words. It was a way of immersing myself in the
world of English. I’d do it while shopping, walking, eating, and doing the big one in the bathroom.

Once I stopped by a peanut stand for some hot fried peanuts laced with brown sugar, a favorite of mine. I leaned over the old man’s cart and pointed at the smallest bag I could afford, still muttering an English word from my card stack. The sweaty old man stood there with a puzzled look on his face and asked me what I meant. I said I wanted a bag of peanuts. Why was that so hard to understand? He said I had said something funny. I asked him to ignore it, it was an English word. He handed me my peanuts and said I was crazy. Another time I walked through our crowded living room, which was filled with my dad’s patients, absentmindedly practicing a difficult English phrase I was studying. Later, a concerned female patient took my mom aside and asked earnestly whether I was all right up there, pointing at her own head. “Not all the time,” Mom said.

On that New Year’s Day, I took Dad’s constant advice to review the old lessons before heading for the new. What better time than today to go over all the word cards of the past year? I searched around my study. The cards were scattered around my room—under the pillow, on the windowsill, in matchboxes. There were hundreds of them.

I laid them out on the desk, the Chinese characters face up, and painfully searched my memory for the English words to match them. To my joy and relief, my young mind still cranked along the way it should have. For a long while, I had been afraid that my brain had aged into a fossil from all the liquor I had soaked it with and all the smoke I had sucked in. But no, the brain was still a heaving pile of jelly, alive and bubbling. I could remember 99 percent of the strange English spellings, months after my first encounter. I slipped to my knees and gave my many gods a deep, head-banging kowtow, which I was sure spilled a dozen words from my memory. By noon, I was done reviewing and I reported to Mom, who was dozing off on her kitchen stool. It was the custom, on New Year’s Day, for humans first to thank gods for their good deeds, then humans to thank humans to whom they felt grateful. I needed to bow my New Year’s greetings to my saintly Professor Wei.

I touched Mom’s shoulder and woke her. She smiled guiltily. “Did I fall asleep?”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Yes, I did.” She rubbed her cheeks and shook her head. “Let’s go to the backyard.”

In Mom’s book of virtues, sleeping was no minor felony. Her life was about work, work, and more work. The only time she slept late was when she was rolling in bed, crying her guts out from the pain of her ulcer. It happened twice a year, when the weather changed. Then the whole family would stand around her bed gloomily.

I followed Mom to the backyard, where the hungry chickens surrounded us with high hopes of lunch.

“You take that one.” She pointed at the tallest rooster. It studied me with an intellectual chirp. I called the rooster
Leader
because he had stood out from the rest of the flock when he was young. Only the best for Professor Wei.

I whistled to him and he moved toward me with trust, his stride awkward. Leader was my pal and hero. Last summer I had sent him to fight for the honor of all the Chens’ chickens against our neighbors’ roosters. Not only did he defeat all his male counterparts, he also victimized all the desirable females in the wake of his victories. I could have laid claim to all the eggs that appeared afterward. Leader’s legacy lived on the lips of all who had witnessed his feat. But it had cost him something: Leader lost a big chunk of his red comb, which made him look even more rugged and handsome. Soon, he didn’t have to fight for the females anymore. They came to him willingly.

But today Leader, the stud, was going to become a gift to my dear teacher. It would be a totally different world out there. No more wars against other roosters, lots of space to run around among flowers, plants, and fruit trees. Who knows? He might turn artistic and start singing like some of the females he used to hump. His only opponent would be the dog. But Leader was the top choice for the job. He could run faster and jump higher than the dog. There wasn’t a thing to worry about. And with any luck, his sharp beak would poke the dog’s eyes out and make him a visually challenged animal. Wasn’t that a happy thought to start the new year with? I wouldn’t have to worry about the evil, sniffing hound anymore. A blind hound was as good as a dead hound. I needed to put in some good words for Leader, so that Professor Wei would delay his arrival on the dinner table.

When Leader shoved his head under my hand, I patted him gently,
then grabbed his wings and tied them up. In the meantime, Mom got hold of a fat hen and tied up her wings too. I caged the pair in a bamboo basket with little windows, added two bottles of fine locally brewed grain liquor, and was on my way.

In our neighborhood, live chickens were at the top of the gift list. Liquor was sent to wash the meat down. When a man asked a girl to marry him, he had to carry a pair of chickens tied with red bows when he went to the girl’s family to ask for her hand.

I bowed deep and long before Professor Wei and greeted her with “Happy New Year” in English. The two chickens made a big fuss. I had to kick the cage twice to quiet them.

Professor Wei returned the greetings in her gentle voice and asked, “What are those chickens doing here?”

“I hoped that you would teach the chickens some English and some manners.”

“The dog will take care of the manners,” she said, smiling, “and we’ll see about English. You really shouldn’t have.”