I exclaimed. ‘I never thought you knew stuff like that. What do the shells look like? Have you ever seen one?’
‘I served in the militia and trained in town,’ he said. ‘They had four just like this for our use. I was the second man on a team. My job was to feed ammo to the man firing the mortar.’
‘Tell me more!’ I said excitedly. ‘Tell me what the shells looked like.’
‘They were like…like…’ He picked up a stick and drew a picture of a shell with a bulging middle and a pointed tip in the sand. And tiny wings at one end. ‘Like this.’
‘Did you ever fire one?’
‘I'd have to say yes. As Number Two, my job was to hand the shells to my comrade, who took them, and…’ He bent, spread his legs and pretended to hold a shell. ‘Then dropped them in like this, and, with a pop, they were on their way.’
POW! 23
Several paint-spattered men are pushing a two-wheeled flatbed wagon up to the temple door. They have only a blurred view of us, since they're in the light and we're in the shadows, but I see them clearly. One, a tall, slightly stooped old man, mumbles: ‘I wonder when these people will stop eating.’ ‘With meat that cheap,’ one of the shorter fellows answers, ‘they'd be fools to stop before they have to.’ ‘The way I see it, the Carnivore Festival ought to be called the Waste Money and Manpower Festival,’ says a man with a pointy chin. ‘It gets bigger and louder every year, and more and more money is poured into it. But it's been ten years now and it's brought in neither more business nor more capital, not as far as I can see. What it does bring in are big-bellied people who eat like wolves.’ ‘Huang Shifu, where are we supposed to be taking this Meat God?’ the short fellow asks the stooped old man. All four, if I'm not mistaken, are from a sculpture village not far from Slaughterhouse Village. The residents have a long tradition of producing fine sculptures of religious idols, not only out of clay and hemp but out of wood as well. The Wutong Spirit in this temple was probably made by their forebears. But village traditions crumbled during the campaign against superstition, and the artisans were forced to take up new occupations: they became tile masons, carpenters, house painters, inside and out. These days, with all the temples being rebuilt, their skills have grown useful again. The old man takes a look round. ‘Let's leave him here in the temple for the time being,’ he says. ‘He'll have the Wutong Spirit to keep him company. One's hung like a horse, the other's a meat god, a match made in Heaven, wouldn't you say?’ He laughs at his own witticism. ‘But is that a good idea?’ Pointy Chin asks. ‘You can't have two tigers on a mountain or two horses at a trough, and I'm afraid two deities will be too much for a small temple like this.’ ‘No,’ the short man says, ‘these two aren't proper deities. The Wutong Spirit is the bane of beautiful women, and I hear that this one is really a boy from Slaughterhouse Village who loves to eat meat. After something terrible happened to his parents,’ sighs the fourth, lean-faced man, ‘he travelled the countryside with his mysterious airs, challenging people to meat-eating contests. They say he once finished off more than twenty feet of sausage, one pair of dog's legs and ten pigtails. Someone like that would have to become a god.’ All the while they're sharing opinions, the four men drag the clay idol—a good six feet in length and an arm-span in thickness—off the wagon and tie ropes round its neck and feet. Then they slide a pair of shoulder poles under the ropes and, with a shout, hoist it onto their shoulders. Bent at the waist, the four men struggle to move the idol through the narrow door and into the temple. The ropes have been left too long, so the idol's head bangs loudly against the threshold. I feel dizzy, as if it's my head and not the idol's that's been thumped against the door. But the stooped old man, who's carrying the feet, notices the problem and shouts at the others: ‘Lay it down, don't drag it like that!’ The two men at the front immediately take the poles off their shoulders and lay