by Kien Nguyen
The guard placed his foot on her head, saying, “Magistrate Toan, give me permission to crush this she-devil's skull, sir.”
The old man clasped his hands together, dropping the gun on his lap. “No, do not do so,” he said. “Do not throw garbage out just because you have to clean up the house. You might find an opportunity to reuse it later.” He paused, and then continued, “I remember the woman who uttered those very words to me, my mother.”
Behind him, the captain of the guards exclaimed, “Truer words could not be said at a better time! The ancient one must have been a remarkable lady, possessed a great deal of wit and cleverness. You have inherited many of her superior traits.”
“Indeed I have,” the old man agreed. He fingered the gun on his knees, touching its copper barrel languorously. His rheumy eyes were clouded in gloomy reminiscence.
Then the murkiness vanished from his eyes. He dangled the gun before his face, leaning back against his chair. With a look of intense concentration, he fastened his eyes on Ven. “Bring that beast closer to me. It is time for me to reuse my trash. You all witnessed that beggar, in her insanity, kill the king's minister and his son.” He signaled to the same guard, whose foot was still planted across her head, and continued, “And fetch her knife, too.”
In the aftermath of the rain, the air was heavy with moist foreboding. The other three soldiers moved slowly across the veranda and whispered to one another. They paused while the longhaired guard bent down and grabbed a handful of Ven's mane. “Get up!” he shouted, and gave her head a mighty yank.
Ven cleared her throat and expelled a large spume of mud toward the old man. “Murderer!” she shouted. “You may be playing with justice, but your end is drawing near. I knew your plan, and I can read your evil thoughts. Do not expect my husband and me to take the blame for your murderous acts. I would die before I would admit to your accusation. As long as there is a single breath left in me, I will expose you.”
The guard's fist slammed her left cheekbone and sent her swerving a half circle in space. She collapsed on her side, coughing a black tooth onto the ground. The old man bared a smile, stained brown from opium sediment and the viscous juice of betel nuts.
“Bravo,” he cheered. “You speak eloquently, like a scholar. But now, prisoner, I must inform you that I will not satisfy your wish to be terminated from this earth. You will live, and your case will be tried in court, so that the massacre you committed can be punished, in the name of justice and for the respect due to the departed. Only then shall the judge determine your fate. I imagine your sentence would very likely be death by hanging.”
Two guards drew closer. She felt her body being lifted up from the wide plot of ground. “I would rather die than be pushed around by you animals,” she cried to the guards. In their hands, she was dragged across the yard until her face was inches away from the pointed tips of the magistrate's shoes. She stopped struggling. She wanted to stain his expensive sandals with her bloody spit, but the pain in her mouth made it impossible for her to pucker. She raised her head, wanting him to see the defiance in her. The old man took her kitchen knife from the longhaired guard. In his softest voice and most polite manner, he ordered his men, “Hold her still and pry her mouth open.”
She was the only one who did not understand what he was planning. His men seemed to recognize his intention. She was pulled to her knees. One of the soldiers seized her bound wrists and held them as another grabbed the crown of her head. Captain Sai extended his left palm across the bridge of her nose and clutched her cheekbones. His other hand parted her lips, hooked his fingers over her lower teeth, and forced her jaw downward. She found herself locked in position with her mouth gapispbg open, waiting. The hinges of her jaw screamed in agony.
The magistrate rose and bolted forward. She could smell the musty odor of his clothes. His sparse eyebrows, with hairs as long and translucent as a cat's whiskers, shrouded his eyes. He inhaled, and Ven felt there was no air left between them. The knife gleamed in his hand.
Ven tried to back away, but her captors kept her planted on the ground. Her lips were stretched wide and her chin was wet with saliva. Wide-eyed, she watched the old man and realized for the first time what was about to happen. She screamed, only to find that her voice screeched to its highest note and dissolved. The recognition of her helplessness drove her to the brink of insanity. She listened to her mind shrieking, Oh, Heaven, please let it happen quickly.
The old man seized her tongue with his thumb and forefinger, which were wrapped inside a white handkerchief. She struggled to break away, whipping her head from side to side, but the soldiers tightened their hold. She looked in fright at her tongue, wedged inside the cotton fabric. The pain of her flesh jammed in the old man's fingers caused her eyes to swell with tears. She watched him give it a few quick pulls before he tightened his fingers and flexed his arm. With each tug, Ven felt her innards being hauled up through her throat. The blade flashed through the air above her.
“You will not die,” he said to her. “But you shall hold your silence forever.”
He sliced the blade into her. At first, she did not feel the pain; her mouth was already on fire. Blood splattered into her oral cavity like a flood pouring through a collapsing dam after a heavy rain. She gasped for air when the liquid rose up to her nose. She could hear the soldiers yelling in disgust as she fell to the ground, her open mouth making a strange, hurtful howl. Her feet dug the soil in uncontrollable spasms.
The magistrate stood before her, shrunken and wrinkled like a three-day-old carcass, with the blood-splattered handkerchief in his hand. She saw a gray morsel of flesh lying on the snowy fabric. His voice seemed to come from far away as he gave an order to the captain.
“Arrest this prisoner in the name of the law. Hang her against a post for the rest of this night so that she will not escape. I want you to inform the minister's sailors about his tragic end at your first meeting with them tomorrow morning.”
“What should I tell them?” came the voice of Captain Sai.
“Tell them that you are deeply bewildered at what happened here tonight, that the minister and his son were gunned down by a lunatic who has been a runaway fugitive for the past nine years. And tell them that to carry out this arrest, I will personally escort the convict to the Purple Forbidden City. However, there is a slight probability that this female criminal may not survive the journey, since as you all may see, her mental illness causes her to commit excessive self-destructive behavior.”
His voice faded. Somewhere above her, the harvest moon showed its sallow face beyond the thickets of leaves. Ven lay still and drifted into a world of silent agony, as the darkness slowly claimed her.
It was past midnight when the time-teller made his first round along the main roads of the Cam Le Village. As usual, he was intoxicated. And as usual, the world seemed to dwindle down to one last staggering man and his creeping shadow. The quiet town seemed as isolated as a cemetery.
Big Con shook his head and cursed. His voice traveled through the hollow darkness, as if he were screaming into a bottomless well. No one responded to his vulgarity. Not a soul in the depth of night cared about his drunkenness, or the fact that he had missed his duty to announce the last two passages of time.
He lurched along, wobbling from one pothole to the next, not realizing where he was heading. The generous moon, hovering above the cornfields like the biggest lantern he had ever seen, held him spellbound with its ashen glow. Or perhaps the enormous opening that he was looking at was simply the sky's pulsating anus, spitting at him a rain of slippery, fatty, yellow excretion in its indifferent, wordless manner. He let his mind float, drawn toward the mesmerizing orb, while he held the wine bottle in his stiff fingers. The ground beneath him was littered with tiny frangipani flowers.
The stillness of his surroundings reminded Big Con of his time-telling obligation, and he reached into his pocket. Instead of the metal gong and its padded hammer, he found a handful of tobacco, mixed with
the fuzz of his garments. He sniffed at the foreign object in his palm until his nose detected the distinctive, pungent smell of tar. The puckered scars on his face relaxed in a grin of satisfaction. He stuffed the wad under his upper lip, where the skin had sunken a little because of his missing incisor. Sometimes the taste and sensation of nicotine wedged inside the gap of his gum could summon up enough vigor to ignite in him the urge to fight.
Ahead, the house of Toan was still illuminated with glinting lanterns, a sight that stirred his curiosity. Weaving down the uneven road, he abandoned the hypnotic moon and focused instead on the enchanted dwelling before him. The intermittent shine filtering through the cracks of the mansion's gates sparkled on the raindrops that clung to the corn leaves.
Big Con thought he heard a human sound coming from somewhere behind the brick wall. However, it was not singing; nor was it talking. To him, the noise was more like the sigh of the wind rasping through trees and bushes on a drizzly day.
He stood at the gate a long time, looking at it, waiting for the ferocious dog to come charging from behind the lilac shrubbery to snarl its hot breath through the keyhole. Then he recalled that the damnable beast had been dead for several years now. His toes, curling from the memory of the sharp fangs and frothy spittle, kicked the wooden gate cautiously. It felt cold against his skin, but it swung back. The courtyard glistened from the afternoon's rain. There seemed to be no one inside. The sound he had just heard must have been the wind.
He wound his way through the partial opening. The light he saw came from the main living room. Against the bright parchment, Big Con perceived several shadows moving. He paused, tilted his head, and shut his eyes for a moment. The gob of tobacco in his mouth released a constant, bitter juice that teased his tongue.
He swallowed and drew a breath. The itch to fight burned in his mind, and he sauntered forward. Tonight, he would demand an assignment from that sinister magistrate. Maybe for a few silver pieces, he could harass some of Toan's current enemies.
To Big Con, picking a fight to get hard liquor was an old addiction, much like drinking and chewing tobacco. His hazy mind vaguely recalled a hot afternoon, a violent tussle with a mean dog, and then the promise of fifty silver coins, which had changed his position in this town from that of local pest to notorious killer-for-hire. That first verbal agreement was made here on the front porch of this mansion, when he had promised Toan he would eliminate a police officer.
He touched the depression on his upper lip, wincing at the unexpected surge of memory. It amazed him sometimes how his intoxicated brain could still retain such details after all these years. And yet he could not remember whether or not he had collected that money. The sudden recognition that he might have been swindled whirled up a wave of anger, like three evil spirits rushing through his body. Ah, that slick old fossil!
He paused on the hard pavement to throw his head back, unhinge his jaws, and tilt the bottle into his mouth. In his irritation, Con accidentally swallowed the tobacco leaves. “Not tonight!” he mumbled. “You are not going to cross me anymore. I have kept my end of the bargain. That Officer Dao was dead, was he not?”
No one argued with him, except for a slight moan that seemed to rise from inside his head. He closed his eyes and listened. The sound came again, relentless and agonizing. Fear tiptoed up his back, choking him. It was impossible. Could the dead have come searching for revenge tonight? He turned to flee the Toan property, slurring incoherent phrases as he ran. On his way out, before he could see the dark scarecrow hanging on a pole opposite the magistrate's house, he tripped and fell into its dangling body.
“I did not kill you, Officer Dao,” he whined. “It was an accident.”
The bottle slipped from his hand and rolled along the earthy embankment until it disappeared inside the field, leaving a trail of liquid. Big Con buried his face in his hands. The puffy scars were rough against his callused fingers. His thoughts returned to that fateful day when he had gone looking for Dao, excited by the shiny silver pieces in the magistrate's hands. His mutilated face was still oozing blood when he reached his old enemy's home at the south end of town, behind the last rice field.
The officer he had encountered that late afternoon was no longer the fit, sinister policeman who had sentenced him to the endless torture of the prison plantation. The man he found was as taut and rotund as a watermelon.
Big Con had come up to the front door, looked inside with his red, drunken eyes, and bellowed out a curse upon Dao's three generations. His hand shook the neck of a broken bottle in the air. Its sharp edges were stained with his own blood.
He remembered watching the way the angry man stormed from his dining corner. In his hand he flaunted a well-polished ebony club.
Officer Dao knocked him down. Con emitted the deep bellow of a wounded cow, until the obese man kicked him in the face with the metal tips of his leather shoes. Con remembered spitting out his front tooth while grabbing one of the officer's legs.
Suddenly, a portion of the ruddy sky was blocked away from his vision, replaced by a mound of shuddering flesh. He pushed the mass off of himself and struggled to crawl away, but curiosity prompted him to look back. The policeman thrashed in the dirt next to his children's broken toys, clutching his chest. Blood drained from his face, turning it the color of young grass in early spring. The time-teller got to his feet and stood over the officer. It was his first and foremost unexpected triumph.
Since then he had become a new demon to the citizens of the Cam Le Village. Even though Dao had clearly died from a heart attack, Con's malignant aura became something people feared. As for him, the incident was buried deep inside his foggy mind, dulled by countless bottles of rice wine. However, from time to time, a villager would find him drunk and disheveled, sobbing and begging the gods for their forgiveness, just as he did now.
He touched the scarecrow's bare feet, banging his face against its toes. “Forgive me” was all he could say over and over again. As if in response, the dummy above him writhed feebly. In the calm of the night, he heard it moaning, and he realized with horror that the noise was not coming from inside his head. The bundle of rags resolved itself into a female shape. He could not tell if her hazy outline was a result of his tears, or if she was a vision. Gradually, he recognized her face. It was the beggar woman, dangling over him as if she had just descended from Heaven.
“—ep,” she uttered in a voice like the keening of a desperate eagle looking for its young. Big Con noticed her black mouth, and his senses were overwhelmed with the tangy smell of blood. The beggar jerked against a wooden pole, tossing her head, and Con noticed the thick ropes that bound her. He fell backward, stunned. All at once, her body sagged forward, resuming the scarecrow position as if what the time-teller had just witnessed was nothing more than a hallucination.
He drew closer, touching her hair. The beggar responded with a slow upward twist of her head. He slid closer still; his fingers brushed past her hair and caressed her face. Like a cat rubbing against a piece of furniture, she pushed her head against his hand and tilted her face so that the moonlight could illuminate her open mouth. The darkness that was caked inside grew redder before him until it turned into a pool of blood. Some of it had coagulated and was affecting her breathing. He could hear the air rattle in her throat.
Without a word, he untied the ropes and received her in his arms. And when, after a long time, the whole world was melting away, and there was this sluggish, sullen woman against him, an excitement he had long forgotten slithered in, slowly at first. Then it burst through him, rousing every nerve in his body with a new rush of intoxication. With a hoarse cry, he pressed his burning face into her hair.
They walked across the fields, heading toward his hut. Her arm was wrapped over his shoulders while he clung to her waist, lifting her with every step. The alcohol seemed to have evaporated from his brain, and he no longer felt its influence on his limbs. He hesitated in confusion: what right had he to rescue a prisoner from the hous
e of Toan? The question taunted him like a scornful parental voice, which he chose to ignore.
As they passed street after street, he held on to her body, feeling the soft and womanly curves, and his rough hand lingered. The bamboo forest circled them into its thickets. Big Con listened to the footsteps of the woman upon dried leaves, and he felt as though he had walked this road with her a thousand times before.
He took her to a small creek in the woods a short distance from his cabin. There, on a remote bank, they came to a thick bamboo floor he had built during the days when he was sober and needed to keep busy. Con laid the woman on her back. Her hair fell through the gaps of the platform, soaring along with the brook's current below. She looked at him with eyes filled with a silent despair that nearly brought him to tears. He understood that hopeless look, and there was nothing he could say to her.
Slowly, he unfastened her soiled blouse, unable to keep his fingers steady. After he peeled her tattered garments away, his hands glided across her skin, searching for the source of her bleeding. But her body showed no visible injury. Around them, the air was warm after the rain. The moon peeked through the broad branches and spied on the two of them. The beggar's anguished face was bathed in a light that turned her skin the color of ashes, yet she made no effort to push his hands away.
She lay before him, her head turned toward the water; his presence was beyond the range of her blinking vision. In this strange, awkward silence, she held her legs together, arms crossed shyly over her breasts. The time-teller took a deep breath, conscious only of the rise and fall of her chest. He was incapable of looking away. She, too, was trembling, as if anticipating a blow. She coughed, spitting some blood on the slick surface of the stand.
“Tell me, where are you hurt?” he asked her.
She turned to face him, but said nothing. Her mouth was open, like a hollow in a tree. A slight rattle seeped from it.
