Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [47]
As he shouldered his bag, he suddenly saw two eyes watching him from behind the pen. A pair of eyes thickly fringed with lashes the colour of clear blue lake water. The eyes watched him for a few moments, then they fluttered and the lake water darkened.
“Mummy! Thief!”
Ah-Fat heard the child’s shrill cry, and the door flew open. A man and a woman rushed out.
He could have made a run for it. His years of climbing the wilderness trails had given him the sure-footedness of a deer. But he stood rooted to the spot, as helpless as the captured hen that was struggling in his bag, because he had seen the long metal thing, glinting black in the sunlight, which the man held in his hand.
A bear hunter’s gun.
The couple came closer and he could clearly hear them talking. He did not understand everything they were saying but he caught the gist. The woman said something about “police.” The man replied, “No, no need … lesson.…” The man waved the woman back into the house. She reappeared after a few moments holding a water jug in one hand and a basket in the other.
The couple marched him along the street, which had begun to fill with afternoon shoppers. He did not need to look around to know that an evergrowing crowd was tailing him. “Yellow monkey! Yellow monkey!” That was the children; their elders did not join in but did not stop them either. The adults remained silent but it was an oppressive silence, which seemed to conceal many different feelings.
They came to a halt by a wooden pole, from the top of which hung a gaslight. The man put down his gun and took the rope which the woman had been carrying in the basket. He pushed Ah-Fat to the ground and bound him to the pole—or rather, bound his pigtail to the pole. He fastened the rope tightly with a secure running knot, then felt around in the basket.
The basket was full of bits and pieces and it took some time for him to find what he was looking for—a tin containing nails. He spat in his palm and began to hammer a nail through the rope into the pole. He used all of his strength, and the rope and the pole began to complain under the force of the hammer blows. Then he tugged on Ah-Fat’s pigtail. It did not budge. At that point, he picked up his gun and nodded to the woman.
The woman came up and got an old wooden bowl out of the basket. She put it in front of Ah-Fat and filled it to the brim with water. Then, paying no attention to the crowd of onlookers, the pair walked away. They had not gone more than a couple of paces when the woman ran back and threw down a pair of scissors.
After a moment, Ah-Fat and the onlookers realized what was happening.
What stood between Ah-Fat and his liberty was nothing more, nothing less, than his pigtail. There was only one way for him to escape, and that was to use the scissors to cut it off.
The water in the bowl only offered a temporary respite.
A sigh rose up from the crowd. It was a sigh which expressed many things, and astonishment was only one of them.
The night, like a wolf-hair brush laden with ink, slowly daubed the trees, streets and houses until they faded from sight. The air was heavy with moisture—you could almost wring the water from it. The rain, when it came, fell first as a fine drizzle, then as spattering drops, then in steady columns, then finally as sheets which slashed the ground like a knife leaving great gashes everywhere.
The rain fell on Ah-Fat, but, at first, he did not find it painful. That came later. In fact, he longed for it to come down harder—and harder still—because it put the crowd to flight like startled birds. The street filled with the pattering of retreating footsteps. Ah-Fat sat on the ground and, screened by the rainfall, relieved himself with a long piss. He had wanted to hang on until he got back to Chinatown. When he was captured, his first thought was to wonder how he was going to deal with his bursting need to piss.
Now the rain had unexpectedly come to his rescue.
The warm urine leaked from his trousers and formed a rank-smelling puddle. His body was relaxed now and,