The Garlic Ballads

be damned—and sat down, leaning against the rail. His eyelids felt weighted down, but he forced himself to stay awake. By then they were on sandy soil; the roadside foliage was unchanged from the night before, except that the absence of moonlight kept the leaves from shining. Also unchanged, and interminable, were the chirps of katydids and crickets.
    Another incline placed an even greater strain on the donkey, which began to sound like an asthmatic old man. Gao Yang got off the cart and walked on the road, lessening the animal’s wheezing a bit. Fourth Uncle stayed on his cart and let his pregnant cow pull him up the incline, whatever the strain; that did not go unnoticed by Gao Yang. I thought he had a kinder heart than that, he mused, reminding himself to have as little as possible to do with people like him from now on.
    About halfway up the slope, the moon made an appearance in the eastern sky, barely clearing the lowland way off in the distance. Gao Yang was familiar enough with the laws of nature to know that tonight’s moonrise was a tad later than last night’s, and that tonight’s moon was a tad smaller. It was sallow, with a hint of pink: there it was, a chewed-up, sallow, slightly pink, flimsy, turbid, feeble, sleepy half-moon, a tad smaller than the night before, and a tad larger than it would be tomorrow. Its beams were so frail they seemed to fall short of the sandy hill, the foliage, and the highway. He slapped the donkey on the sweaty ridge of its back; the wheels turned slowly on axles that squealed and protested from a lack of grease. Every once in a while Fourth Uncle sang a snatch of some bawdy popular tune, then just as abruptly stopped, with no discernible pattern. In reality, the moonbeams did reach them—what was dancing on the leaves around them if not moonlight? If that wasn’t moonlight shimmering on the crickets’ wings like slivers of glass, what was it? Who would deny that the warm scent of moonlight was mixed with the cold odor of garlic? A heavy mist hung over the lowland; light breezes swept over the outcroppings.
    Fourth Uncle began swearing—hard to say if he was swearing at something or someone: “You child of a whore—dog spawn—as soon as you pull up your pants, you think you’re so respectable!” Gao Yang didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.
    Just then two blinding rays of light came at them from the top of the hill—high one moment, low the next; now left, now right, like a pair of pinking shears moving across fabric—followed by the urgent roar of an engine. Gao Yang wrapped his arms around his donkey’s cold, sweaty head and nudged it and the cart over to the side of the road. Framed in the light beams, Fourth Uncle’s cow looked like a scrawny rabbit. He jumped off his cart, grabbed the harness, and guided her to the side of the road. They both seemed to disintegrate in the light beams.
    What happened next was a joke, a dream, a common shit, a leisurely piss.
    Gao Yang would later recall that the car barreled down on them like an avalanche, making violent, crunching noises, as the darkness swallowed up Fourth Uncle’s cow, his cart, his garlic, and him. Standing there wide-eyed, Gao Yang saw two middle-aged faces frozen behind a windshield: one fat, puffy, and smiling; the other skinny and twisted in a grimace. Gao Yang and his donkey were nearly smothered by the car’s heat.
    He would recall watching the car surge toward them, hearing Fourth Uncle’s cow bellow, and seeing Fourth Uncle wrap his arms around the animal’s neck. Fourth Uncle’s head shrank in size until it looked like a tiny metallic bead reflecting yellow and blue light. Fourth Uncle, his eyes mere slits, his mouth a gaping hole, looked terrified and pathetic. The white light shone right through his protruding ears. With unhurried inevitability the car’s bumper smashed into the legs of Fourth Uncle and his cow, driving his torso forward for an instant before he was airborne, his arms outstretched like wings, his shirt flapping behind him like tailfeathers. He landed in a clump of wax reeds. As her neck twisted, his cow fell to the ground on her belly The car kept coming. After pushing the cow and the cart ahead of it a short distance, it ran up over them.
    And then? Then the fat man shouted, “Let’s get out of here!” The skinny man tried to back the car up but couldn’t. Jamming the pedal to the floor, he lurched backwards. Then he spun the car around, skirted the spot