Red Sorghum

into the air. Tucking in his neck, he jumped into the ditch beneath the wall like a shot, bumping his head with a resounding thud against the frozen ground. Not sure if he was dead or alive, he tried moving his arms and legs. They were working, but barely. His crotch was all sticky. Fear raced through his heart. I’ve been hit, he thought. He sat up and stuck his hand down his pants. With his heart in his mouth, he pulled out his hand, expecting it to be all red. But it was covered with something yellow, and his nostrils twitched from the odour of rotten seedlings. He tried to rub the stuff off on the side of the ditch, but it stuck to his skin. He heard a shout from beyond the ditch: ‘Stand up!’
    He looked up to see a man in his thirties with a flat, chiselled face, yellow skin, and a long, jutting chin. He was wearing a chestnut-coloured wool cap and brandishing a black pistol! A forest of yellow-clad legs was aligned behind him, the calves wrapped in wide, crisscrossed cloth leggings. His eyes travelled slowly upward past protruding hips, stopping at dozens of alien faces, all adorned with the smug smile of a man taking a comfortable shit. A Rising Sun flag drooped under the bright-red sunrise; onion-green rays glinted off a line of bayonets. Pocky Cheng’s stomach lurched, and his nervous guts relinquished their contents.
    ‘Get up here!’ Chestnut Wool Cap barked out angrily.
    Pocky Cheng climbed out of the ditch. Not knowing what to say, he just bowed repeatedly.
    Chestnut Wool Cap was twitching right under his nose. ‘Are there Nationalist troops in the village?’ he asked.
    Pocky Cheng looked at him blankly.
    A Japanese soldier waved a bloodstained bayonet in front of Pocky Cheng’s chest and face. He heard his stomach growl and felt his intestines writhe and twist slowly; at any other moment, he would have welcomed the intensely pleasant sensation of a bowel movement. The Japanese soldier shouted something and swung the bayonet, slicing Pocky Cheng’s padded jacket down the middle and freeing the cotton wadding inside. The sharp pain of parted skin and sliced muscles leaped from his rib cage. He doubled over, all the foul liquids in his body seeming to pour out at once.
    He looked imploringly into the enraged Japanese face and began to wail.
    Chestnut Wool Cap drove the barrel of his pistol into his forehead. ‘Stop blubbering! The commander asked you a question! What village is this? Is it Saltwater Gap?’
    He nodded, trying hard to control his sobs.
    ‘Is there a man in the village who makes straw sandals?’ Chestnut Wool Cap softened his tone a little.
    Ignoring his pain, he eagerly and ingratiatingly replied, ‘Yes yes yes.’
    ‘Did he take his straw sandals to market day in Gaomi yesterday?’
    ‘Yes yes yes,’ he jabbered. Warm blood had slithered down from his chest to his belly.
    ‘How about pickles?’
    ‘I don’t know . . . don’t think so. . . .’
    Chestnut Wool Cap slapped him across the mouth and shouted: ‘Tell me! I want to know about pickles!’
    ‘Yes yes yes, your honour,’ he muttered obsequiously. ‘Commander, every family has pickles, you can find them in every pickle vat in the village.’
    ‘Stop acting like a fucking idiot. I want to know if there’s somebody called Pickles!’ Chestnut Wool Cap slapped him across the face, over and over.
    ‘Yes . . . no . . . yes . . . no . . . Your honour . . . don’t hit me. . . Please don’t hit me . . . your honour . . .’ he mumbled, reeling from the slaps.
    The Japanese said something. Chestnut Wool Cap swept the hat off his head and bowed, then turned back, the smile on his face gone in an instant. He shoved Pocky Cheng and said with a scowl, ‘We want to see all the sandal makers in the village. You lead the way.’
    Concerned about the dung basket he’d left on the wall, Pocky Cheng instinctively cocked his head in that direction. A bayonet that shone like snow flashed past his cheek. Quickly concluding that his life was worth more than a dung basket and spade, he turned his head back and set out for the village on his bandy legs. Dozens of Japs fell in behind him, their leather boots crunching across the frost-covered grass. A few grey dogs barked tentatively.
    I’m really in a fix this time, Pocky Cheng was thinking. No one else went out to collect dogshit, no one but me, and I ran into some real dogshit luck. The fact that the Japanese didn’t appreciate his good-citizen