She sighs and, in the redness of the sunset, reluctantly picks up the fish and flings it away, its tail snapping back and forth as it sails over the wall and out of sight. But the glittery golden arc it traces in the air imprints itself on my mind, where it will remain for a very long time. She walks over to where the brass basin lies, picks out a shirt and smoothes the collar, then shakes it hard, sending out waves of sound. The red shirt looks like a ball of fire in the sunset. The woman's resemblance to Aunty Wild Mule has led me to sense that there is a special and extraordinarily close relationship between us. Even though I am nearing the age of twenty, when I look at that woman I feel like a boy of seven or eight; and yet, the pounding of my heart and the stirrings of that thing between my legs declare to me that I am that child no longer. She lays the shirt on top of the cast-iron incense burner directly opposite the temple entrance, and spreads the remaining clothes on top of the still-wet wall. With rapt attention I watch how nimbly, how energetically, she jumps up to smooth out each item, over and over. Finished with her work, she walks to the temple entrance, as if it were the door to her home, throws her arms out to stretch her upper torso, then puts her hands on her hips to limber her midsection. Her buttocks shift as if rubbing against an invisible object. I don't know how I'll ever be able to take my eyes off that body, but the possibility of becoming a disciple to the Wise Monk is important enough to make me sacrifice such visual pleasures. For an instant I wonder: if she were to take my hand and lead me to some faraway place, the way Aunty Wild Mule did with my father, would I be able to refuse?
Mother told me to secure the rear hatch of the walking tractor while she went to the wall to drag over a couple of baskets of cow and goat bones. Bending down, she picked up each basket and dumped its bones into the tractor bed. These were discarded bones we'd bought, not the remains of our meals. If we'd eaten the meat off this many bones, even 1 per cent of that many, I'd have had no complaints and no need to miss my father, I'd have stood firmly beside my mother as she denounced him and Aunty Wild Mule for their crimes and their sins. There had been times when I'd felt like cracking open a couple of fresh-looking bovine leg bones just to get at the marrow, but the hawkers always cleaned them out before selling. Once they were loaded, Mother told me to help her dump in some scrap metal. This so-called scrap metal actually included intact machine parts: diesel-engine flywheels, connecting joints for construction scaffolds, even some manhole covers from the city's sewer system; a little of everything. Once we found a Japanese mortar, brought to us on the back of a mule by an old man in his eighties and an old woman in her seventies. Back when we were just starting out, we bought everything as scrap and then sold it back as scrap—at a minuscule profit. We figured things out, though, and began sorting the scrap and selling it to appropriate companies in town. We sold construction materials to builders, manhole covers to sewer industries and machine parts to hardware stores. But since we couldn't find the right buyer for the mortar, we kept it at home as a collectible. I'd made up my mind not to sell it even if we did find a buyer. A typical boy—warlike—I was fascinated by weapons. Since my father had run off with another woman, I'd not been able to raise my head round other children, but now that I owned a mortar I could walk with my back straight, cockier than those who had fathers at home. I once overheard a couple of young village bullies quietly agree to stay clear of Luo Xiaotong because his family had a mortar and he'd use it against anyone who offended him, taking lethal aim at the offender's house. POW! the place would go up in smoke, burn to the ground! You can imagine how proud that made me. I was so happy I