The Republic of Wine

one of the women in white, trembling perceptibly. She placed it gingerly in her bamboo hamper. The other woman took a knife, hatchet, and bone saw out of her wicker basket, jumped to her feet, and, in a loud voice, pressed the young driver to free the little black mule from the traces. He squatted down bow-legged, bent over at the waist, and, with trembling fingers, freed the little black mule from the harness. Slow as it sounds in the retelling, in real life what happened next was over in a flash. The woman in white raised her hatchet, took aim on the mule’s broad forehead, and swung with all her might, burying the ax blade so deeply in its head, she couldn’t pull it out, no matter how she tried. And while she was trying to remove her ax, the little black mule’s front legs buckled, carrying the rest of the animal slowly to the ground, where it spread out flat on the bumpy, pitted roadway.
    Ding Gou’er breathed a long sigh.
    There was still a bit of life in the little mule, as the shallow, raspy sounds of breathing proved; weak trickles of blood slid down its forehead on either side of the buried hatchet, soaking its eyelashes, nose, and lips.
    Once again it was the woman who had buried the hatchet in the mule’s forehead who picked up a blue-handled knife, leaped onto the mule’s body, grabbed a hoof - a jet-black hoof in a lily-white hand - and described a brisk circle right in the curve where the hoof joined the leg; then another circle, and with a little pressure from the lily-white hand, the mule hoof and mule leg moved away from one another, attached only by a single white tendon. A final flick of the knife, and the hoof and leg parted company once and for all The lily-white hand rose into the air, and the mule hoof flew into the hand of the other woman in white.
    It took only a moment to amputate the three hooves, during which time the onlookers were mesmerized by the woman’s incredible skill; no one spoke, no one coughed, no one farted. Who’d have dared take such liberties in the presence of this woman warrior?
    Ding Gou’er’s palms were sweating. All he could think of was the Taoist tale of the marvelous skills of the ox-butcher Chef Ding.
    The woman in white worked the hatchet until she was finally able to remove it from the forehead of the little black mule, which finally breathed its last: belly up, its legs sticking up stiffly in four directions, like machine-gun barrels.
    The truck had left the winding, bumpy road of the coal mine behind; the towering mounds of waste rock and the spectral mine machinery had all but disappeared in the heavy mist behind them; the barking of the watchdog, the rumbling of trolleys, and the thumping of underground explosions could no longer be heard. But the four machine-gun legs of the mule kept floating before Ding Gou’er’s eyes, keeping him on edge. The lady trucker’s mood was also affected by the image of the little black mule, for she greeted every mile of bumpy road with crude curses; then, once she was on the highway to town, she threw the truck into high gear, opened the ventilation window, and put the pedal to the metal, keeping it there as the engine groaned under the strain. Like a Fascist bullet. Roadside trees bent in their wake as if felled by a giant ax; the ground was a whirling chess board, as the arrow on the speedometer pointed to eighty kilometers. Wind whistled, wheels spun dizzily. Every few minutes, the exhaust pipe belched out a cloud of smoke. Ding Gou’er watched her out of the corner of his eye with such admiration he gradually forgot the mule legs stretching skyward.
    Not long before they reached the city, steam from the overheated radiator fogged up the windshield. Miss Alkaline had turned the radiator into a boiler. With an outburst of foul curses, she pulled to the side of the road. Ding Gou’er followed her out of the cab and, with a momentary sense of ‘I told you so,’ watched as she raised the hood to let the engine cool off in the breezes. The heat nearly bowled him over; what water remained in the radiator hissed and gurgled. As she unscrewed the radiator cap using her glove, he noticed that her face was radiant as a sunset.
    She removed a tin bucket from under the truck. ‘Go!’ she commanded angrily. ‘Get me some water!’
    Neither daring nor willing to disobey, Ding Gou’er took the bucket and, playing the fool, said, ‘You won’t drive off while Fm out getting water, will you? When rescuing someone,