T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

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Though the table-tennis team has taken him to Japan, Malaysia, Albania, Zaire, Togoland and Botswana, Hung’s mental horizons are not expansive. He is a very literal-minded fellow. When Wang made her announcement from between clenched teeth and dusky sheets, he did not pause to consider that “Thank Chairman Mao” has become little more than a catchword or that virgin births have been known to occur in certain regions and epochs and under certain conditions or even that some more prosaic progenitor may have turned the trick. But perhaps he didn’t want to. Perhaps the shock cauterized some vital portion of the brain, some control center, and left him no vent but a species of mindless frothing rage. And what better object for such a rage than that the ice-faced universal progenitor, that kindly ubiquitous father?

The pig is swimming on its feet, drunk, ears and testicles awash, eyes crossed, nostrils dripping. It has torn the cord free from Chang’s pants and now trots an unsteady twenty paces ahead of Chang and Chou. Chou is walking his bicycle. Chang, rorschached in mud and none too steady of foot himself, limps along beside him. From time to time the two lengthen their stride in the hope of overtaking the pig, but the animal is both watchful and agile, and holds its liquor better than some.

They are by this time passing through the outskirts of the great city, winding through the ranks of shanties that cluster the hills like tumbled dominoes. The river, roiled and yellow, rushes on ahead of them. Chang is muttering curses under his breath. The pig’s ears flap rhythmically. Overhead, somewhere in the thin bleak troposphere, the rain submits to a transubstantiation and begins to fall as snow. Chang flings a stone and the porker quickens its pace.

“But it’s snowing—”

“Thirty degrees—”

“Your shingles—”

“Blood pressure—”

“Hemorrhoids—”

Mao waves them away, his aides, as if they were so many flies and mosquitoes. His face is set. Beneath the baggy khaki swimtrunks, his thin thick-veined legs, splayed feet. He slips into his slippers, pulls on a Mao tunic, and steps down the stairs, out the door and into the crowd.

They are still singing. Holding hands. Posters wave, banners flash, flakes fall. By the time Mao’s presence becomes known through the breadth of the crowd, he has already mounted an elevated platform in the back of a truck. The roar builds successively — from near to far — like mortar rounds in the hills, and those closest to him press in on the truck, ecstatic, frenzied, tears coursing down their cheeks, bowing and beaming and genuflecting.

The truck’s engine fires. Mao waves his cap. Thousands pass out. And then the truck begins to inch forward, the crowd parting gradually before it. Mao waves again. Mountains topple, icebergs plunge into the sea. With the aid of an aide he climbs still higher — to the seat of a chair mounted on the platform — and raises his hand for silence. A hush falls over the crowd: cheers choke in throats, tears gel on eyelashes, squalling infants catch their breath. The clatter of the truck’s engine becomes audible, and then, for those fortunate thousands packed against the fenders, Mao’s voice. He is saying something about the river. Three words, repeated over and over. The crowd is puzzled. The Chairman’s legs are bare. There is a towel thrown over his shoulder. And then, like the jolt of a radio dropped in bathwater, the intelligence shoots through the crowd. They take up the chant. “To the River! To the River!” The Chairman is going swimming.

Chang and Chou feel the tremor in the soles of their feet, the blast on the wind. “They’re cheering in the square,” says Chou. “Must be the celebration for Mao’s birthday.” The trousers slap round his ankles as he steps up his pace. Chang struggles to keep up, slowed by drink and toethrob, and by his rube’s sense of amaze at the city. Periodically he halts to gape at the skyscrapers that rise from the bank of shanties like pyramids stalking the desert, while people course by on either side of him — peasants, workers, Red Guards, children — all rushing off to join in the rites. Ahead of him, the back of Chou, doggedly pushing at the handlebars of his bicycle, and far beyond Chou, just visible through the thicket of thighs and calves, the seductive coiled tail of the pig. “Wait!” he calls. Chou looks back over his shoulder. “Hurry!” There is another shout. And then another. The crowd is coming toward them!

Straight-backed and stiff-lipped, propped up by his aides, Mao rides the truckbed like a marble statue of himself, his hair and shoulders gone white with a fat-flake snow. The crowd is orderly (“THE MASSES ARE THE REAL HEROES,” he is thinking), flowing out of the square and into the narrow streets with the viscous ease of lightweight oil. There is no shoving or toe-stamping. Those in front of the truck fan to the sides, remove their jackets and lay them over the white peach fuzz in the road. Then they kneel and bow their foreheads to the pavement while the black-grid tires grind over the khaki carpet. Light as milkweed, the snow-flakes spin down and whiten their backs.

The sight of the river reanimates the Chairman. He lifts his arms like a conductor and the crowd rushes with hilarity and admiration. “Long live,” etc., they cheer as he strips off his jacket to reveal his skinny-strap undershirt beneath, the swell of his belly. (At this shout, Hung, who is in the process of defacing a thirty-foot-high portrait of the Chairman in a tenement street three blocks away, pauses, puzzling. It is then that he becomes aware of the six teenagers in Mao shirts and red-starred caps. They march up to him in formation, silent, pure, austere and disciplined. Two of them restrain Hung’s hands; the others beat him with their Mao-sticks, from scalp to sole, until his flesh takes on the color and consistency of a fermenting plum.) Mao steps down from the truck, his pudgy hand spread across an aide’s shoulder, and starts jauntily off for the shoreline. People weep and laugh, applaud and cheer: a million fingers reach out to touch the Chairman’s bare legs and arms. As he reaches the water’s edge they begin to disrobe, stripping to khaki shorts and panties and brassieres, swelling hordes of them crowding the littoral, their clothes mounting faster than the languid feathery snowflakes.

Two hundred yards up the shore Chou abandons his bike along the roadway and dashes for the water, Chang hobbling behind him, both neck-stretching to catch a glimpse of the Chairman’s entourage. Somewhere behind them a band begins to play and a loudspeaker cranks out a spate of Mao’s maxims. In the confusion, Chang finds himself unbuttoning his shirt, loosing the string of his trousers, shucking the mud-caked slippers. Chou already stands poised in the gelid muck, stripped to shorts, waiting for Mao to enter the water. His mouth is a black circle, his voice lost in the boom of the crowd.

And then, miracle of miracles, Mao’s ankles are submersed in the yellow current, his calves, his knees! He pauses to slap the icy water over his chest and shoulders — and then the geriatric racing dive, the breaststroke, the square brow and circular head riding smooth over the low-lapping waves! The people go mad, Coney Island afire, and rush foaming into the chill winter water — old women, children, expectant mothers, thrilled by Mao’s heroic example, charged by the passion to share in the element which washes the Revolutionary Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.

Chou is in, Chang hesitating on the bank, the snow blowing, his arms prickled with gooseflesh. The water foams like a battle at sea. People fling themselves at the river, shouting praise of Chairman Mao. Chang shrugs and follows them.

The water is a knife. Colder than the frozen heart of the universe. The current takes him, heaves him into a tangle of stiffening limbs and shocked bodies, a mass of them clinging together like worms in a can, the air splintering in his lungs, the darkness below, a thousand hands, the mud, the cold. He does not catch a glimpse of the Chairman’s entourage, nor does he have an opportunity to admire the clean stroke, the smooth glide of the Chairman’s head over the storm-white waves, forging on.

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