Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

teasing, almost as if they were all strangers. After crowding around the newly replaced statue of Venus de Milo, they raised their heads and barked together, three times. Then they spun around and ran off, including their chairman, Blackie. They’d appeared like lightning and immediately disappeared as if swept away on the wind. There I was, alone in the moon-washed square. I gazed up at Venus, whose sculpted body gave off a soft blue glow, and wondered if I was dreaming. Later on, I learned that they’d been playing a game of Flash, which was all the rage, very cool, at the time. They called themselves a “Flash mob.” I was told they did all sorts of other goofy things, but I refused to join in. I couldn’t help feeling that Dog Four’s party days were over, just as a new age dawned, one characterized by unfettered excitement and wild imagination. That’s how it was with dogs, and for the most part, with humans as well. Pang Kangmei still held her county position, and word had it that she would soon be appointed to a high position in the provincial government. But before that happened, she’d be accused by the Disciplinary Committee of the Party of “double offenses,” and would subsequently be tried by the Procuratorate and condemned to death, with a two-year reprieve.
    After your son tested into high school, I stopped accompanying him. I could have stayed home and slept or occupied myself with thoughts of the past, but that had no appeal to me. It could only speed up the aging process, body and mind, and your son wouldn’t have needed me anymore. So I began tagging along behind your wife when she went to work in the square. While I was there watching her fry and sell oil fritters, I picked up the scent of Ximen Huan in notorious hair salons, backstreet inns, and bars. In the mornings he’d walk out of the house with his schoolbag on his back, but as soon as he was out of sight, he’d jump on the back of a motor scooter taxi waiting for him at the intersection and head for the train station square. His “driver,” a big, strapping fellow with a full beard, was happy to chauffeur a high school boy around town, especially Huanhuan, who always made it worth his while. The square was Four Little Hoods territory, a place for them to eat, drink, whore, and gamble. The relationship among them was like June weather, always changing. Some of the time they were like four loving brothers, drinking and gambling together in bars, dallying with wild “chicks” in hair salons, and playing mah-jongg and smoking, arms around each other, in the public square, like four crabs strung together. But then at other times they’d split into two hostile groups and fight like gamecocks. There were also times when three of them ganged up on the fourth. Eventually they each formed their own gangs, which sometimes hung out together and sometimes fought. The one constant was that they fouled the atmosphere of the public square.
    Your wife and I witnessed one of their armed battles, though she wasn’t aware that Ximen Huan, the good kid, was the instigator. It happened on a sunny day around noon, in broad daylight, as they say. It started with an argument in a bar called Come Back Inn on the southern edge of the square, but before long, four boys with bloody heads were chased out the door by seven other boys with clubs, one of them dragging a mop behind him. The injured boys ran around the square, showing no fear or any effects of the beating they’d sustained. And there was no anger on the faces of the boys chasing them. Several of them, in fact, were laughing. At first the battle looked more like a staged play than the real thing. The four boys being chased stopped suddenly and launched a counterattack, with one of them taking out a knife to show he was that the leader of that gang. The other three whipped off their belts and twirled them over their heads. With loud shouts they took out after their pursuers, and in no time clubs were hitting heads, belts were lashing cheeks, and the square was thrown into an uproar with shouts and agonizing screams. Bystanders were by then fleeing the square; the police were on their way I saw the gang leader plunge his knife into the belly of the kid with the mop, who screamed as he fell to the ground. When they saw what had happened to their buddy, the other pursuers turned and ran. The gang leader wiped the blood from his knife on the injured boy’s clothes and, with a loud whoop, led