Mo Yan - Pow!

Lao Lan sighed. ‘Luo Xiaotong, are you finished yet?’

Of course not! I slammed the eighth shell angrily into the tube, which was turned in the direction of the plant kitchen. The shells were beginning to fidget after the failure of seven of their brethren. This one turned a couple of somersaults in the air, which took it slightly off course. I'd intended for it to enter the kitchen through a skylight, because Lao Lan was sitting directly beneath it enjoying a bowl of bone soup, very popular at the time as a tonic for vitality, plus a good source of calcium. Nutritionists, who blew hot and cold over such things, had written newspaper articles and appeared on TV, urging people to eat plenty of calcium-rich bone soup. Truth is, Lao Lan was in no need of calcium, since his bones were harder than sandalwood. Huang Biao had cooked a pot of soup with horse-leg bones for him, spicing it up with coriander and muttony pepper to mask the gamey smell, even adding some essence of chicken. He stood there with his ladle while Lao Lan dug in, sweating so much that he had to remove his sweater and drape his loosened tie over his shoulder. I tried to wish the shell right into his bowl of soup or at least into the pot. Even if it didn't kill him, the hot soup would scald him raw. But that frisky shell went right into the brick chimney behind the kitchen and POW! —the chimney collapsed on top of the roof.

For the ninth shell, I took aim on Lao Lan's secret bedroom at the plant. A small room attached to his office, it was equipped with a king-sized bed whose new and prohibitively expensive linen was redolent with jasmine fragrance. The room lay behind a hidden door. Lao Lan had only to lightly press a button under his desk for a full-length mirror on the wall to slide open and reveal a door the same colour as the wall round it. After turning the key in the lock and opening the door, another button was pressed and the mirror slid back into place. Since I knew the location of the bedroom, I made my calculations, figuring in the resistance of moonlight and the shell's temperament to bring the probability of error down to zero and ensure that the projectile landed smack in the middle of the bed; if Lao Lan had company, then the woman had no one but herself to blame for becoming a love ghost. I held my breath, hefted the shell, which felt heavier than its eight predecessors, and then let it descend at its own pace. It slid out of the tube in a bright burst of light, soared to the very heights, then plummeted smoothly earthward. Nothing marked Lao Lan's secret room more clearly than the satellite dish he'd illegally installed. Silver-coloured and about the size of a large pot, it was highly reflective. And it was those reflections that temporarily blinded the shell's navigational system and sent it careening into the plant's dog pen, killing or maiming a dozen or more killer wolfhounds and blowing a hole in the barricade. The uninjured dogs froze for a moment before leaping through the opening as if waking from a dream, and I knew that a new threat to public safety had just been introduced in the area.

I took the tenth shell from the old man, but my plan changed before I could send it on its way. I'd been aiming at Lao Lan's imported Lexus. The car was parked in front of a modest building; Lao Lan was sleeping in the back seat, his driver in the front. I planned for the shell to crash through the windshield and blow up in Lao Lan's lap. Even if it turned out to be a peace projectile, its inertia alone would make a nasty mess of Lao Lan's belly, and his only hope for survival would be a complete stomach transplant. But just before I fired, the car started up, drove onto the highway and sped towards town. My first last-second plan change momentarily confused me but my desperation spawned a new one. With one hand I adjusted the direction of the mortar and with the other I dropped in the shell. The subsequent blast blew waves of heat into my face and, given all the powder inside, turned the tube red hot. It would have burnt the skin right off my hands if I hadn't been wearing gloves. The shell locked on to the speeding car and, I'll be damned, landed inches behind it as a sort of send-off for Lao Lan.

The eleventh shell was slated for a longer journey. A peasant-turned-entrepreneur had opened a hot-spring mountain resort in a wooded area between the county seat and township village, a get-away spot for the rich and powerful. They called it a mountain resort but there was no mountain nearby, not even a bump on the ground. Even the original grave mounds had been levelled. A few dozen black pines stood like so many columns of smoke, obscuring the white buildings. I detected a heavy sulphur smell on my rooftop perch. Beautiful girls in revealing miniskirts greeted visitors as they stepped into the lobby. With the slightest touch on the loosely girded cloth belts the girls were naked. They had an affected way of speaking, like parrot-talk. Lao Lan frolicked in the pool with its Venus de Milo centrepiece. Then into the sauna to sweat; after that, dressed in a pair of baggy shorts and a short-sleeved yellow robe, it was into the massage parlour for a Thai massage. A muscular girl put her arms round him, and what ensued between them looked more like a wrestling match. Lao Lan, your day of reckoning has arrived. Freshly bathed, you'll make a very clean ghost. I dropped in the shell, and thirty seconds later it carried my compliments to Lao Lan like a white dove. This shell is for you, Lao Lan. Holding on to an overhead bar, the girl stood on his back as she shifted her hips back and forth. I couldn't tell if what he uttered were yelps of pain or cries of pleasure. But once again the shell went off course and landed in the pool, sending a geyser of water into the air. The head of the plaster Venus snapped off at the neck, bringing men and women running out of the dimly lit rooms, some wearing just enough to cover their embarrassment, others not even that.

Lao Lan, unmarked and unmoved, lay on the massage table, head turned to drink tea while the girl hid under the bed, her derriere sticking up like an ostrich with its head in the sand.

Lao Lan and the sex-starved wife of his bodyguard were playing the beast with two backs on Huang Biao's brick bed. In the name of good manners, this was not the time or place to fire a shell. But what a way to die. To leave this world at an orgiastic moment is the height of good fortune, and that was definitely too good for Lao Lan. Yet there was that thing about manners. Not firing was not an option, so I raised the tube's elevation slightly and fired the twelfth shell. It landed in Huang Biao's yard and made a crater big enough to bury a buffalo. With a cry of alarm, Huang's wife flattened herself against Lao Lan.

‘Don't be scared, little darling,’ he said with a pat on her behind. ‘It's only that little creep Luo Xiaotong playing games. You needn't worry. He'll never manage to kill me. With me dead, his life loses all meaning.’

Thirteen is supposed to be an unlucky number, making it the perfect shell to send Lao Lan up to the Western Heaven. He was on his knees praying in the Wutong Temple, our temple. There's a legend that says praying to the Wutong Spirit can double the size of a man's penis. Not only that, it can make you a man of untold riches. Lao Lan carried a joss stick and a candle into the temple by the light of the moon. The place was rumoured to be haunted by the ghost of the hanged, which kept devotees from entering with their wishes, despite knowledge of its efficacious powers. But Lao Lan had more courage than most. Never imagining that ten years later I'd be sitting in this very temple, I went ahead and took aim at it. Lao Lan knelt before the idol and lit his joss stick and candle, the flames turning his face red as a sinister ‘heh-heh’ came to him from behind the idol. That sound would have sent shivers up the spine of most people and had them rushing headlong out the door. But not Lao Lan. He responded with a ‘heh-heh’ of his own and shone his candle on a spot behind the idol. Even I could see the five spirits lined up behind Wutong. The one with a horse's body and a human head was the best-looking, a colt, of course. To its left were a pig and a goat, each with a human head. To its right a donkey and the remains of an indeterminate creature. Then a hideous, frightful face appeared, and my heart lurched and my hands went slack as the shell slid into the tube. Off it went, straight for the temple, landing with a POW! Three of the idols were destroyed, leaving only the colt with the boy's head, a lascivious or a sentimental smile frozen on its face for all eternity.