Yiyun Li - The Vagrants

Before Bashi had time to react, Kwen held a long knife to his throat, the sharp blade pressed into his skin. In a cold voice Kwen told Bashi to get down on his knees.

For the next five minutes, Bashi did everything Kwen ordered him to do. He called himself all sorts of names, slapping his own face and begging for forgiveness. Kwen looked down at him with a smile. “You're a useless man, Bashi, do you know that?”

“Yes, of course,” Bashi said. It was then that Bashi noticed the suspicious stain on Kwen's crotch, near his fly, light gray on the dark corduroy overalls. Bashi moved closer, as if he wanted to let his head touch Kwen's feet, and stole another glance. Kwen could have given Bashi a thousand other explanations for the stain, but Bashi would never believe him.

It was dark when Bashi and Nini got back to town. She looked nervous, and did not reply when he suggested a meeting the next day. She was late, she said, and quickened her pace with a desperate effort; her parents might not be happy, he thought, but he decided not to ask her about the punishment she was to receive. He had enough to worry about, and would prefer not to take on her misery.

A block away, Bashi broke another bulb. He kicked the half bulb into the ditch. “You corpse rapist!” Heaven knows what else such a man could do, Bashi thought; the townspeople needed someone to watch out for them. He decided to go back and find out why Kwen had been so stubbornly guarding the body from them, but before that, he had to know Kwen's whereabouts. Think as a good detective, Bashi urged himself. He moved quietly toward Kwen's shack, and approached it facing the wind so the dog would not catch his scent. About sixty feet away, he hurled a rock in the direction of the shack. The black dog started to bark and jump at the invisible enemy. Bashi turned into a side alley quickly and heard Kwen shouting from inside the shack. After a few minutes, Kwen came out of the shack and headed to the electric plant for his night shift. All safe for him to explore, Bashi thought. Who would have imagined that he, Bashi, the man whom everybody called an idiot, would be the one to work for the town's safety on this dark night? He rubbed his ears roughly with his hands; he wished he had not forgotten to retrieve his hat from Nini.

Stumbling in the darkness, Bashi had a hard time finding the spot. He made a mental note to buy some appropriate tools the next day, a good knife, a long and slim flashlight that he had seen a safety guard carry, a compact notebook and a pen of matching color, a pair of gloves, a magnifying glass, and some other things he imagined a detective needed. It was too late to make the purchase now, but at least the moonlight on the snow and a few weak stars made the search less difficult. Bashi fumbled in his pocket and found half a matchbook. He lit a match to make sure he was in the right place, and then started to work in the near darkness. The boulders were heavy, and he had to take a break from time to time. At least he had to give that bastard Kwen credit for being a strong man despite his age.

Bashi cleaned off all the boulders and then tried to untie the strings holding the sacks, but his fingers, too tired, could not finish the task. He bent down and broke the strings between his teeth. When he peeled the burlap sack away, his hand touched something hard and cold, not the ripped prisoner's uniform he had seen earlier but the woman's frozen body. Bashi gave a little startled cry, and then laughed at himself. “You'd better get used to this from now on,” he said in a hushed voice to himself.

The body, entirely uncovered now, looked eerie in the dim light. Kwen's old towel was still around the woman's head, and Bashi thought he'd better leave it there. “Sorry, miss, I don't mean to disturb you twice,” he said. “I'm just doing my job. For your good too.”

He lit another match and bent down to check the body, and it took him a long moment to register what he saw. His hand shook hard and the match dropped onto the snow, hissing for a moment before going out. Bashi sat down and panted, his legs too weak to support the weight of his knowledge. After a while, he lit another match and checked again. He was not mistaken: The woman's breasts were cut off, and her upper body, with the initial wound from the transplant operation and the massive cuts Kwen had made, was a mess of exposed flesh, dark red and gray and white. The same mess extended down to between her legs.

The match burned Bashi's finger and he flipped it away. He half squatted beside the body for a moment and started to gag. It had been a long day and he had nothing left to throw up. Still, he coughed and retched until his face was smeared with tears and bile dribbled down his chin. After a while, he calmed down and grabbed some snow to clean up his face. He wrapped the body up in the burlap sacks and tried to put back the boulders, but his arms and legs were shaking too hard. He spread dead tree branches and dry grass on top of the body, and when he felt sure the body was concealed well enough, he sat down and panted again, then cried.

The walk back home was exhausting. A few blocks away from his house, Bashi saw the dog, Ear, run by. He shouted at it and tried to muster his last energy to kick it. The dog yelped and ran away, dropping something by the roadside.

Bashi picked it up. It was a woman's shoe, the sole worn through with a hole. Bashi aimed it at a garbage can, but missed. “The world is becoming a hell of a place,” he said to no one in particular.

THE WIND HOWLED all evening, shaking windows, seizing loose tiles from roofs and hurling them across the empty yards and alleys. Kwen's black dog, tied to his post, whined and shivered, but his suffering meant little to the world, let alone to his master, who dozed off in the small cubelike janitor's shack, an empty flask on the floor next to his feet.

Elsewhere Mrs. Hua sipped from a chipped cup the rice liquor that her husband had poured for her earlier to numb the throbbing pain in her palm, and listened to the whistling of the wind through the woods. Old Hua and Mrs. Hua had sorted bottles and paper all afternoon and evening, and it was at the very end, when she was lost in her reverie, that she punched her palm with half of a broken bottle. There was not much bleeding, her aged body having little to offer now. Her husband washed it with saltwater and then poured a cup of rice liquor for her. They did not touch alcohol often, but a bottle had always been around, kept with the iodine and the rags they cleaned and boiled; it was the best medicine they could get, and once when Old Hua had had to remove gangrene from his leg by himself, he had downed half a bottle and later poured the other half onto the cut.

How was her hand? Old Hua asked, sitting down in his chair. Unless it was necessary they did not light the kerosene lamp, and she replied in the darkness that there was little to worry about. He nodded and did not talk for a while, and she felt the hard liquor slowly warming her body. Morning Glory, Mrs. Hua said, the name of their first daughter; did he want to talk about Morning Glory? The baby had been found on a summer dawn when morning glories, pink and blue and white and purple, had taken over the wilderness outside the mountain village where the Huas had passed through as beggars. The dew had soaked the rags that were bundling the little creature, her bluish gray face cold to the touch. For a moment Mrs. Hua thought it was another baby who had died before having ever enjoyed a day of her life, but her husband was the one to notice the small lips sucking.

Old Hua lit the tobacco pipe now and inhaled. The amber-colored tip flickered, the only light in the room. What's there to talk about? he asked, more out of resignation than rebuttal. Earlier that afternoon she had told Old Hua, while they were sorting, that it was time they began to tell themselves the stories of the seven daughters, before old age wiped out their memories. Neither Old Hua nor Mrs. Hua could read or write, and already Mrs. Hua had been frustrated when one girl's face was overlapped by another's in her dreams.