even though one was a boy, the other a girl. I patted him on the head. ‘You're doing a terrific job. You're my number three artilleryman.’
‘Do you think I could fire one?’ he asked me shyly, after he'd finished cleaning the shells. ‘No problem,’ I said. ‘Maybe you'll be the one to blow Lao Lan to bits. I led him over to the mortar, handed him a shell and said, ‘The twenty-eighth shell. The target—Lao Lan. Distance—eight hundred. Ready—fire!’ ‘I hit him, I hit him!’ the boy shouted, clapping joyfully. Lao Lan had in fact been knocked to the ground. But he jumped to his feet, panther-quick, and took cover in the packaging workshop. Tasting blood, the boy asked if he could fire another. I agreed.
I left him on his own for the twenty-ninth shell, which veered off course and landed in a pile of coal at the little train station's abandoned freight yard. Coal dust and gunpowder smoke blotted out great swaths of moonlight.
Embarrassed by this mistake, he scratched his head and went back to his cleaning station.
This gave Lao Lan time to change into blue work clothes, then stand on a pile of cardboard boxes and shout: ‘Give it up, Luo Xiaotong. Save the remaining shells for hunting rabbits.’ That really pissed me off, so I took aim at his head and fired the thirtieth shell. He sprinted into the workshop and shut the door behind him, thereby saving himself from injury once again.
The thirty-first shell tore a hole in the workshop roof and landed in a pile of cardboard boxes, shredding at least a dozen of them and turning camel steaks into a meaty pulp, then searing it in the superheated air. The smell of burnt flesh merged with that of gunpowder.
Lao Lan's arrogance made me lose my bearings, and I forgot to conserve my ammunition. In rapid succession I fired off shells thirty-two, thirty-three and thirty-four to form a tight triangular pattern, as taught in artillery courses. They did not succeed in killing Lao Lan, but they did blow up the packaging workshop just as an earlier shell had blown up the kill room.
The old man, like a child, asked to fire off a few rounds. I wanted to say no but he was my elder and the one who had supplied the mortar shells; I had no excuse to refuse his request. He took a position alongside the tube, raised his thumb and shut his eye to gauge the distance. This thirty-fifth shell would take out the guardhouse beside the main gate. POW! No more guardhouse. With shell thirty-six, the newly erected water tower. POW! An enormous hole opened up halfway down the tower, releasing a powerful jet of water. The world-renowned Huachang United Meatpacking Ltd lay in ruins. But then I realized that six of the cases now stood empty, leaving only the last one with its five shells.
Night-shift workers were running pell-mell amid the ruins, stepping in bloodied water. Some of the workers may even have been trapped in the rubble. A red fire truck, siren blaring, was on its way from the county seat, followed by a white ambulance and a yellow motor crane. Orange tongues of flame licked the air here and there, probably from torn electric wires. Amid the chaos, Lao Lan climbed up the rebirth platform in the northeast corner of the yard. Once the highest structure in the compound, now that the workshop and water tower had been levelled, it looked taller and more impressive than ever, seemingly able to reach the stars and touch the moon. You're encroaching on my father's domain, Lao Lan. What are you doing up there? Without a second thought, I fired shell thirty-seven at the platform, some eight hundred and fifty yards away.
The shell passed through the gaps in the trees and struck an enclosing wall made of bricks taken from gravesites. A fireball blew a hole in the wall. I'd once heard a story about something that had occurred during a tomb-opening campaign; I had not been born and was thus denied the opportunity to witness the madness. A crowd had gathered in front of an old tomb with statues of men and horses—Lao Lan's ancestral tombs—holding handkerchiefs over their noses as they watched men carry out a rusted piece of artillery. A specialist from the urban Institute for Archaeological Studies commented that he'd never seen anyone buried with a cannon. Which posed the question: Why here? No credible explanation had