Pow!

  The little boy handed the old man a shell that had been polished to a high gloss. I began to cry, and waves of heat washed over my heart. Bitter hatred and loving kindness sent hot blood racing through my veins, and only by firing the mortar could I release what bubbled inside me. So I dried my eyes and composed myself, then straddled the mortar and, instinctively estimating the distance, took aim at the western wing of Lao Lan's house, about five hundred yards ahead of us. Lao Lan and three township officials were playing mah-jongg on a Ming Dynasty table worth at least two hundred thousand RMB. One was a woman with a large, doughy face, thread-thin eyebrows and blood-red lips—an altogether disgusting sight. Let Lao Lan take her with him. Where? The Western Heaven! I took the shell from the old man, placed it into the tube and gently let go. The tube swallowed the shell, the shell slid into the tube. The first sound was soft, muted—the sound of the ignited shell touching the base of the tube. Then a detonation that nearly shattered my eardrums drove the weasels scurrying in fright. The shell tore like a siren across the sky, blazing a tail through the moonbeams, and then landed exactly where it wanted. First, a bright blue light, then a deafening POW!

  Lao Lan emerged from the cloud of gunpowder smoke, shook off the dust and sneered. He'd survived unscathed.

  I adjusted the tube until it was aimed at Yao Qi's living room, where he and Lao Lan were sitting on a leather sofa, engaged in a whispered conversation about something shameful. Good—Yao Qi, you and Lao Lan can go meet the King of the Underworld together. I took a shell from the old man and let go. It screamed out of the tube, flew across the sky, tore through the moonbeams and then hit the roof of its target with a POW! Shrapnel flew in all directions, some into the walls and some up into the ceiling. One pea-sized sliver hit Yao Qi in the gums and he screamed in pain.

  ‘You'll never get me with one of those,’ sneered Lao Lan.

  I took aim at Fan Zhaoxia's beauty salon and accepted another shell from the old man. That the first two had missed their target was a bit disheartening but I had thirty-nine to go. Sooner or later one of them would rip him to pieces. I dropped the shell down the tube. It flew out like an imp with a song on its lips. Lao Lan was sitting back in the barber's chair, his eyes closed, and Fan Zhaoxia was giving him a shave. His skin was so smooth you could wipe it with a silk rag and not produce a sound. But Fan kept shaving. Shaving. People talk about the pleasure of a good shave. This was obviously a very good shave, for Lao Lan was snoring. Over the years, he'd got into the habit of napping in the barber's chair. He suffered from insomnia; and when he did finally sleep he was visited by dreams that kept him from a deep sleep; the buzz of a mosquito was all it took to startle him awake. Sleep never comes easily to people with a guilty conscience—it's a sort of divine retribution. The mortar shell tore through the shop's ceiling and landed giddily on the terrazzo floor in the middle of a pile of prickly hair before disintegrating with an angry POW! A piece the size of a horse's tooth struck the mirror in front of the barber's chair; another, the size of a soybean, hit Fan Zhaoxia in the wrist. She dropped her razor and fell to her knees with a cry of alarm. The razor lay, cracked, beside her.

  Lao Lan's eyes snapped open. ‘Don't be afraid,’ he consoled her, ‘it's only Luo Xiaotong up to his old tricks.’

  The fourth shell was aimed at Huachang's banquet room, a place with which I was very familiar. Lao Lan was hosting a banquet for every villager over the age of eighty. It was a generous act and possessed of immense publicity potential. The three reporters I'd met were busy with their cameras, filming the five old men and three old women. In the middle of the table sat an enormous cake with a line of red candles. A young woman lit them with a lighter and asked one of the old women to blow them out. Possessed of only two teeth, she tried her best to do so as the air whistled through the gaps in her gums. I held onto the fourth shell a bit longer, worried about hurting the old villagers, but this was no time to stop. I said a silent prayer for them and spoke to the shell, asking it to hit Lao Lan on the head! To kill him and no one else. The shell screamed out of the tube, streaked across the river, hovered briefly above the banquet room and then plummeted. You can probably guess what happened next, right? Right. It landed smack in the middle of the cake. Most of the candles were extinguished, all but two. Rich, buttery frosting flew into the old people's faces and covered the lenses of the cameras.

  The fifth shell I aimed at the meat-cleansing workshop, the site of my greatest pride and deepest sorrow. The night shift was injecting water into some camels, each with a hose up its nose, making them look as strange as a clutch of witches. Lao Lan was giving the man who had usurped my position—Wan Xiaojiang—instructions; he was loud but not loud enough for me to hear what he was saying. The screech of the departing shell drowned out his words. Wan Xiaojiang, you little bastard, it was because of you that my sister and I had to leave our village. If anything, I hate you more than I hate Lao Lan, and if Heaven has eyes, then this shell has your name on it. I waited till I had calmed down a bit, then took several deep breaths and let the shell slip gently down the tube. It slipped out like a fat little boy who'd grown wings, flew towards its designated target, burst through the ceiling, landed in front of Wan Xiaojiang, smashed his right foot and then—POW! His bulging belly was carried away in the explosion but the rest of him was intact, like the quasi-magical handiwork of a master butcher.

  Lao Lan was blown away by the blast and I blanked out. When I came to, the wretch had crawled out of the fouled water he'd landed in. Except for a muddy bottom, he was unmarked.

  The desk of Township Head Hou was the target of the sixth shell. An envelope stuffed with RMB was shredded. It had been lying atop a sheet of reinforced glass under which the township head had placed photographs of him and several seductive transvestites—memories of his Thailand vacation. The glass was so hard it should have caused an explosion but didn't. Which meant that that particular shell was a peace projectile. What, you wonder, is that? I'll tell you. Some of the men who worked on this ammunition were anti-war. When their supervisors were not looking, they pissed into the shells. Though they gleamed on the outside, the powder inside was hopelessly wet, turning them mute on the day they left the armoury. There were many varieties of peace projectiles; this was but one. Another variety was stuffed with a dove instead of explosives, while yet another was filled with paper on which was written: Long live friendship between the peoples of China and Japan. This particular one was flattened like a pancake; the reinforced glass was shattered and the photographs of the township head were sucked into the flattened shell, as clear as ever, except in reverse.

  Firing the seventh shell was agonizing for me because Lao Lan was standing in front of my mother's grave. I couldn't see his face in the moonlight, only the back of his head, like a glossy watermelon, and the long shadow he cast. The words on the headstone I'd personally placed at her tomb recognized me, and her image floated up in front of my eyes, as if she were standing in front of me, blocking my mortar with her body. ‘Move away, Mother,’ I said. She wouldn't. Her silent miserable stare felt like a dull knife sawing away on my heart. The old man, who was right beside me, said, ‘Go ahead, fire!’ Sure, why not? Mother was dead, after all, and the dead have nothing to fear from a mortar shell. I shut my eyes and dropped the shell into the tube. POW! It passed through her image and flew off weeping. When it landed, it blew her tomb into pieces so small they could be used as road paving.

  Lao Lan sighed. ‘Luo Xiaotong, are you finished yet?’

  Of course not! I slammed the eighth shell angrily into the tube, which was turned in the direction of the plant kitchen. The shells were beginning to fidget after the failure of seven of their brethren. This one turned a couple of somersaults in the air, which took it slightly off course. I'd intended for it to enter the kitchen through a skylight, because Lao Lan was sitting directly beneath it enjoying a bowl of bone soup, very popular at the time as a tonic for vitality, plus a good source of calcium. Nutritionists, who blew hot an
d cold over such things, had written newspaper articles and appeared on TV, urging people to eat plenty of calcium-rich bone soup. Truth is, Lao Lan was in no need of calcium, since his bones were harder than sandalwood. Huang Biao had cooked a pot of soup with horse-leg bones for him, spicing it up with coriander and muttony pepper to mask the gamey smell, even adding some essence of chicken. He stood there with his ladle while Lao Lan dug in, sweating so much that he had to remove his sweater and drape his loosened tie over his shoulder. I tried to wish the shell right into his bowl of soup or at least into the pot. Even if it didn't kill him, the hot soup would scald him raw. But that frisky shell went right into the brick chimney behind the kitchen and POW!—the chimney collapsed on top of the roof.

  For the ninth shell, I took aim on Lao Lan's secret bedroom at the plant. A small room attached to his office, it was equipped with a king-sized bed whose new and prohibitively expensive linen was redolent with jasmine fragrance. The room lay behind a hidden door. Lao Lan had only to lightly press a button under his desk for a full-length mirror on the wall to slide open and reveal a door the same colour as the wall round it. After turning the key in the lock and opening the door, another button was pressed and the mirror slid back into place. Since I knew the location of the bedroom, I made my calculations, figuring in the resistance of moonlight and the shell's temperament to bring the probability of error down to zero and ensure that the projectile landed smack in the middle of the bed; if Lao Lan had company, then the woman had no one but herself to blame for becoming a love ghost. I held my breath, hefted the shell, which felt heavier than its eight predecessors, and then let it descend at its own pace. It slid out of the tube in a bright burst of light, soared to the very heights, then plummeted smoothly earthward. Nothing marked Lao Lan's secret room more clearly than the satellite dish he'd illegally installed. Silver-coloured and about the size of a large pot, it was highly reflective. And it was those reflections that temporarily blinded the shell's navigational system and sent it careening into the plant's dog pen, killing or maiming a dozen or more killer wolfhounds and blowing a hole in the barricade. The uninjured dogs froze for a moment before leaping through the opening as if waking from a dream, and I knew that a new threat to public safety had just been introduced in the area.

  I took the tenth shell from the old man, but my plan changed before I could send it on its way. I'd been aiming at Lao Lan's imported Lexus. The car was parked in front of a modest building; Lao Lan was sleeping in the back seat, his driver in the front. I planned for the shell to crash through the windshield and blow up in Lao Lan's lap. Even if it turned out to be a peace projectile, its inertia alone would make a nasty mess of Lao Lan's belly, and his only hope for survival would be a complete stomach transplant. But just before I fired, the car started up, drove onto the highway and sped towards town. My first last-second plan change momentarily confused me but my desperation spawned a new one. With one hand I adjusted the direction of the mortar and with the other I dropped in the shell. The subsequent blast blew waves of heat into my face and, given all the powder inside, turned the tube red hot. It would have burnt the skin right off my hands if I hadn't been wearing gloves. The shell locked on to the speeding car and, I'll be damned, landed inches behind it as a sort of send-off for Lao Lan.

  The eleventh shell was slated for a longer journey. A peasant-turned-entrepreneur had opened a hot-spring mountain resort in a wooded area between the county seat and township village, a get-away spot for the rich and powerful. They called it a mountain resort but there was no mountain nearby, not even a bump on the ground. Even the original grave mounds had been levelled. A few dozen black pines stood like so many columns of smoke, obscuring the white buildings. I detected a heavy sulphur smell on my rooftop perch. Beautiful girls in revealing miniskirts greeted visitors as they stepped into the lobby. With the slightest touch on the loosely girded cloth belts the girls were naked. They had an affected way of speaking, like parrot-talk. Lao Lan frolicked in the pool with its Venus de Milo centrepiece. Then into the sauna to sweat; after that, dressed in a pair of baggy shorts and a short-sleeved yellow robe, it was into the massage parlour for a Thai massage. A muscular girl put her arms round him, and what ensued between them looked more like a wrestling match. Lao Lan, your day of reckoning has arrived. Freshly bathed, you'll make a very clean ghost. I dropped in the shell, and thirty seconds later it carried my compliments to Lao Lan like a white dove. This shell is for you, Lao Lan. Holding on to an overhead bar, the girl stood on his back as she shifted her hips back and forth. I couldn't tell if what he uttered were yelps of pain or cries of pleasure. But once again the shell went off course and landed in the pool, sending a geyser of water into the air. The head of the plaster Venus snapped off at the neck, bringing men and women running out of the dimly lit rooms, some wearing just enough to cover their embarrassment, others not even that.

  Lao Lan, unmarked and unmoved, lay on the massage table, head turned to drink tea while the girl hid under the bed, her derriere sticking up like an ostrich with its head in the sand.

  Lao Lan and the sex-starved wife of his bodyguard were playing the beast with two backs on Huang Biao's brick bed. In the name of good manners, this was not the time or place to fire a shell. But what a way to die. To leave this world at an orgiastic moment is the height of good fortune, and that was definitely too good for Lao Lan. Yet there was that thing about manners. Not firing was not an option, so I raised the tube's elevation slightly and fired the twelfth shell. It landed in Huang Biao's yard and made a crater big enough to bury a buffalo. With a cry of alarm, Huang's wife flattened herself against Lao Lan.

  ‘Don't be scared, little darling,’ he said with a pat on her behind. ‘It's only that little creep Luo Xiaotong playing games. You needn't worry. He'll never manage to kill me. With me dead, his life loses all meaning.’

  Thirteen is supposed to be an unlucky number, making it the perfect shell to send Lao Lan up to the Western Heaven. He was on his knees praying in the Wutong Temple, our temple. There's a legend that says praying to the Wutong Spirit can double the size of a man's penis. Not only that, it can make you a man of untold riches. Lao Lan carried a joss stick and a candle into the temple by the light of the moon. The place was rumoured to be haunted by the ghost of the hanged, which kept devotees from entering with their wishes, despite knowledge of its efficacious powers. But Lao Lan had more courage than most. Never imagining that ten years later I'd be sitting in this very temple, I went ahead and took aim at it. Lao Lan knelt before the idol and lit his joss stick and candle, the flames turning his face red as a sinister ‘heh-heh’ came to him from behind the idol. That sound would have sent shivers up the spine of most people and had them rushing headlong out the door. But not Lao Lan. He responded with a ‘heh-heh’ of his own and shone his candle on a spot behind the idol. Even I could see the five spirits lined up behind Wutong. The one with a horse's body and a human head was the best-looking, a colt, of course. To its left were a pig and a goat, each with a human head. To its right a donkey and the remains of an indeterminate creature. Then a hideous, frightful face appeared, and my heart lurched and my hands went slack as the shell slid into the tube. Off it went, straight for the temple, landing with a POW! Three of the idols were destroyed, leaving only the colt with the boy's head, a lascivious or a sentimental smile frozen on its face for all eternity.

  Lao Lan emerged from the temple, his face coated with mud.

  The Xie Family Restaurant in town was justifiably famous, near and far, for its meatballs. It was run by an old woman with her son and daughter-in-law; they prepared exactly five hundred of the beefy delicacies every day. Customers signed up a week in advance. What was so special about the Xie-family meatballs? Their unique flavour. And what made the flavour unique? The choice cuts of beef. But, even more importantly, the Xie family's meatballs never came in contact with metal. The meat was sliced by sharpened bamboo strips, then laid out on cloth-washing rocks and beaten with a date-wood club int
o a meaty pulp. Special millet crumbs were kneaded into the meat before it was rolled into balls and put, along with kumquats, in earthen jars to be steamed on trays. Then the kumquats were thrown out and only the meatballs remained, a true taste sensation…I hated the thought of destroying a restaurant which produced such delicacies, especially since old Mrs Xie was such a kind woman and her son a friend of mine. Sorry, Mrs Xie and my old buddy, but killing Lao Lan is more important to me. I dropped in the fourteenth shell. It sped off into the air only to run smack into a wild goose headed in the opposite direction. Nothing but bones and feathers were left of the bird while the shell was knocked off course and landed in a pond behind the Xie house, raising a column of water and turning at least ten big crucian carp into fish paste.