《Be someone people like.》艮下

3、 Chapter Three Pink Trousers, Firecracker Scraps, and the Fall That Never Happened

　　The snow fell all night, laying a white eiderdown over the village so thick that it erased the cesspits, the pigsties, even the fresh mound of Wang Cui-hua’s grave. Every sharp smell—night-soil, swill, the raw iron of grief—was pressed flat and made innocent.

　　Tie-Dan squatted on the doorsill, waiting for the sky to pale. It was not that he refused sleep; it was that the moment his eyelids drooped the pink trousers began to drift in front of him again. The waistband gaped, white bobbin-thread trembling like feelers, as if the empty legs were saying: Don’t cry. You promised.

　　Chen Zhi-yuan arrived only after the first weak lemon smear of dawn. He carried the supermarket’s largest black plastic bag, the kind that swells like a whale when the wind catches it. Inside were disposable bowls and chopsticks meant for funerals, two kilos of pig’s-head meat the colour of bruised roses, and a bottle of Niulanshan erguotou whose label was already coming unstuck from the cold.

　　He stepped through the gate, saw the boy’s shoes aligned with neurotic precision on the stone step. Snow had melted, then frozen again, so the cracked leather shone like cheap lacquer.

　　“Not going in?”

　　Tie-Dan shook his head. His voice sounded as if someone had sawn it in half: “I’ll dirty the floor. Ma scrubbed the cement yesterday.”

　　Chen squatted, lit two cigarettes, and passed one over. They smoked in silence. Now and then the wind shook the old pagoda-tree, dislodging scraps of red firecracker paper no larger than fingernail parings. They drifted down slowly, blood-bright against the snow.

　　The village head appeared above the wall like a puppet. “Tie-Dan! We raise your mother’s coffin after lunch. The eldest son has to show his face.”

　　The boy’s answer came out as a hiccup trapped inside a syllable: “Ai—”

　　Chen clapped the dust from his gloves. “I’ll go for you.”

　　Tie-Dan stood so fast the blood deserted his legs; he pitched forward and landed on his knees. He simply stayed there and knocked his forehead three times on the packed snow. “Uncle, I’ll go. I have to. My mother’s shy of strangers.”

　　By custom the bereaved son must carry the portrait. Wang Cui-hua had never posed for a proper photograph; the only image the family possessed was the grey smudge on her second-generation ID card, taken ten years earlier in the township police station where the camera flash was broken. The clerk had enlarged the one-inch smear to eight, and the result looked like a newspaper left out in rain until the ink wept. Tie-Dan hugged the framed ghost to his chest. Every third step he lifted a corner of his sleeve, breathed on the glass, and polished, as though he were waxing an apple he intended to present to the emperor of the underworld.

　　The graveyard lay on the northern ridge where the wind arrived sharpened on the whetstone of the plain. Snow-grains needled their cheeks. Eight pall-bearers hoisted the flimsy pine coffin and chanted, “Stead—y!”

　　Tie-Dan lunged, arms locking around the coffin’s tail. “Slow! She gets carsick. Let her get used to it.”

　　The men roared with laughter that turned to fog. The village head kicked him in the rump. “Get lost, we’ll miss the hour.”

　　Tie-Dan rolled, did not bother to rise, simply knocked his head three more times on the frozen earth. Firecracker confetti stuck to the blood on his brow, blooming into a small black chrysanthemum.

　　When the moment came to scatter “money for the road,” Tie-Dan produced every coin his mother had hoarded: three thousand four hundred and sixty-seven mao, a brick of five-fen notes soft as cloth from years of handling. He flung them skyward. The wind reversed, driving the pale green notes back against his coat like a flock of exhausted moths.

　　Someone muttered, “Idiot boy, burning capital—how will he ever buy a wife?”

　　Tie-Dan turned, solemn. “My mother was my wife. I already married her.”

　　As the first clods fell, he did not weep. He snatched the spade and fed the earth himself, each impact ringing like beans in a New-Year wok. On the final scoop he drove the shovel blade upright into the mound. “Ma, take the spade. Saves your hands when you wash your smalls.”

　　When the crowd drifted away, the ridge was left with a fresh white hump, a half-buried shovel, and, tied to the handle, a faded pink trouser-cord that snapped in the wind like a miniature flag of surrender.

　　Tie-Dan sat in the snow and took out his phone. In Drafts lay one hundred and seven videos, every one titled “Daily Fall.” He deleted them one by one. At the ninety-ninth he paused. The last clip’s title line blinked, empty.

　　He lifted the lens toward the grave. Sunset had turned the snow the colour of the rose-scented bath salts his mother had bought once from a travelling salesman. “Ma, no fall today. Don’t worry.”

　　He pressed Publish. Thirty seconds later the screen pinged: one like.

　　He grinned; blood from his forehead reached the corner of his mouth, salty, but the laugh that came out was the cackle of a boy who has finally memorised the punch-line.

　　On the walk back Chen Zhi-yuan handed him a sheet of A4 folded into a perfect square: the poverty-relief form. Name: Li Tie-Dan. Assistance measures: blank.

　　“Plans?”

　　Tie-Dan fanned himself with the paper. “First I plan to be full.”

　　Chen tried again. “Stop filming yourself falling. Concussions cost money.”

　　The boy hummed agreement, then fished in his pocket and produced a plastic bag. Inside lay a two-centimetre length of firecracker fuse and half a scrap of red foil. “Brother, for you.”

　　“What would I do with it?”

　　“Ma said keep a little gunpowder for the God of Wealth, otherwise he can’t find the door.”

　　Chen tucked the relic into his wallet, between two receipts, and said nothing more.

　　That night Tie-Dan entered the house alone for the first time. The kang was an ice slab; the stove lay dark. He did not light it. Instead he folded his mother’s faded blue apron into a pillow and lay down fully dressed.

　　Outside, the moon looked like a biscuit someone had taken a bite from and abandoned among the branches of the pagoda-tree.

　　He counted the cracks in the rafters. At the seventh he remembered the doctor’s sentence—“two months”—and felt the four yuan eighty fen in his pocket, coins so thin they might have been stamped from tin-foil.

　　He sat up, delved into the deepest cavity of the kang-cupboard, and drew out the legendary “paper” – the one the township追回 years earlier: a sheet of homework that had once been glued to his bare bottom and now bore a perfect five-pointed star where the flesh had shown through. His mother had outlined the hole in red thread, turning humiliation into a crooked medal. The paper had dried to the stiffness of rawhide.

　　He lifted it to the moon; the star glowed, cruelly bright. “Ma, tomorrow I’ll trade this for money, big money. I’ll buy you a television, fifty inches, wider than a quilt.”

　　He pressed the paper to his chest, a breastplate against the dark, and slept.

　　He dreamed he stood in the centre of a circus ring. Every spectator wore the same pink trousers, applause pouring over him like warm rain. He tried to fall, to perform the pratfall that had made him briefly famous, but his soles were smeared with glue; the stage itself was a magnet. The audience grew restless, the clapping curdled into booing, and every voice merged into one enormous command: FALL, YOU LITTLE BASTARD—FALL!

　　He woke with a crack—his own skull against the beam. Moonlight had migrated; the room was a well without water. Rubbing his head, he heard his heart pounding like a shovel striking frozen earth.

　　He curled back into the apron, a snail retracting into a shell that smelled faintly of fried soy-sauce and talcum powder.

　　“Ma, I didn’t fall. Really didn’t.”

　　He waited for the next dawn the way a diver waits for the next wave, knowing the sea is cold but unable to live anywhere else.