Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

Bai’s nose, didn’t touch her, showing what an expert the man is. The thieving, depraved bastard — a gluttonous, hard-drinking, whoremongering, chain-smoking gambler — squandered what his father left him, made his mother’s life such a misery that she hanged herself from a roof beam, and here he was, a redder-than-red poor peasant, a frontline revolutionary. I was going to drive a fist right into his face — actually, I don’t have a fist, so I’d have had to kick him or bite him with my big donkey teeth. Yang Qi, you bastard, with your scraggly chin hairs and dangling cigarette and willow switch, one of these days, I, Ximen Donkey, am going to take a big bite out of you.
    My master jerked me back by the rope, saving that gangster Yang Qi from a bad ending. So I raised up and kicked with my hind legs, striking something soft — Yang Qi’s belly. Since becoming a donkey, I’ve been able to take in a lot more with my eyes than Ximen Nao ever could — I can see what goes on behind me. I watched as that bastard Yang Qi hit the ground hard, and I saw his face turn ashen. It took him a long moment to catch his breath, and when he did he called out for his mother. You bastard, your mother hanged herself because of you! Calling for her won’t do you any good!
    My master threw down the rope and rushed over to help Yang Qi up. Back on his feet, Yang picked up the switch to hit me over the head, but my master grabbed his wrist. “I’m the only person who can do that, Yang Qi,” my master said. “Fuck you, Lan Lian!” Yang Qi roared. “You, with your cozy relationship with Ximen Nao, are a bad element who’s wormed his way into the class ranks. I’ll use this switch on you too!” But my master tightened his grip on the man’s wrist, drawing yelps of pain from someone who had abused his body by bedding all the loose women in town; finally he let the switch fall to the ground. With a shove that sent Yang stumbling backward, my master said, “Consider yourself lucky my donkey doesn’t have iron shoes yet.”
    My master turned and led me out through the southern gate, where yellowing bristlegrass atop the wall swayed in the wind. That was the local co-op’s first day, and the day I reached adulthood. “Donkey,” my master said, “today I’m going to have you shod to protect you from stones in the road and keep sharp objects from cutting your hooves. It’ll make you an adult, and I can put you to work.” Every donkey’s fate, I surmised. So I raised my head and brayed, Hee-haw, hee-haw — It was the first time I’d actually made the sound aloud, so loud and crisp my startled master beamed.
    The local blacksmith was a master at making shoes for horses and donkeys. He had a black face, a red nose, and beetle brows without a hair on them; there were no lashes above his red, puffy eyes, but three deep worry wrinkles across his forehead, repositories for coal ash. His apprentice’s face, as I could see, was pale under a mass of lines created by runnels of sweat. There was so much sweat running down the boy’s body, I worried that he was about to dry up. As for the blacksmith himself, his skin was so parched it looked like years of high heat had baked all the water out of it. The boy was operating a bellows with his left hand and wielding a pair of fire tongs with his right. He removed steel from the forge when it was white-hot, then he and the blacksmith hammered it into the desired shape, first with a sledge, then a finishing hammer. The bang-bang, clang-clang sound bouncing off the walls and the flying sparks had me spellbound.
    The pale, handsome boy should have been on the stage, winning over pretty girls with sweet talk and tender words of love, not hammering steel in a blacksmith shop. But I was impressed by his strength, watching as he wielded an eighteen-pound sledge that I’d thought only the bull-like blacksmith could manage with such ease; it was like an extension of the boy’s young body. The hot steel was like a lump of clay waiting to be turned into whatever the blacksmith and his apprentice desired. After hammering a pillow-sized clump of steel into a straw cutter, a farmer’s biggest hand tool, they stopped to rest. “Master Jin,” my master said to the blacksmith, “I’d like to enlist your services to make a set of shoes for my donkey.” The blacksmith took a deep drag on his cigarette and blew the smoke out through his nose and his ears. His apprentice was gulping water