A band played: the tinny, reedy sound of three or four village instruments. Then he heard Ugly shout, “A wedding! A wedding!” and saw the two sedan chairs side by side, two bumpkins bearing each like a stretcher; and he heard Hao-k’an gurgle a drunken laugh.
The procession halted as the bandits swept nearer, and the bandits split, some to the left and some to the right; the musicians fell silent and the people stared, paralyzed. Jake thought this was a great joke, a wedding day these people would never forget, and he was haw-hawing when the bride flung open the curtains of her chair and leaned out, bewildered, fear on her lovely face.
Jake galloped on past but his heart stuttered and for a moment he was almost sober. The face had been perfect, dark eyes sparkling and the glossy hair shining beneath an embroidered headdress: a princess it was, or a throwback, close to what he had dreamed of, hoped for, a face not quite Mongol yet more than Mongol … Jake was not thinking well, and confused flashes crossed his mind: the woman’s face, Asia, great migrations, Persians, Japanese, jewels …
A little like Mei-li. Jake roared aloud and wheeled for another look, but he was too late: Ugly had her, leaning down to pluck her out of her chair. She fought, she scratched, but she was swathed in yards of ceremonial raspberry-colored gown. The villagers cried out and ran in many directions. The bearers dropped her chair and fled. Other bearers dropped the groom’s chair and fled; he was spilled onto the road, and Momo’s pony trampled him, Momo yip-yip-yipping.
Ugly’s left arm pinned the princess to his hip, head down. A watchman in blue cotton and a mandarin hat ran bowlegged toward them, ringing an iron bell and shouting, “You will not! You will not!” Jake thought that was the funniest yet. He laughed until the tears came, and he hiccuped.
Then he saw that he was alone among the villagers; the other four had cleared out. He kicked at his pony. He slipped in the saddle but righted himself. That was some woman! A beauty. A real beauty. Bandits luck!
They rode for an hour without pursuit, Jake licking his furry lips in the cold air and squeezing the drunkenness out of his eyes. Ahead of him the woman lay still, on her belly across Ugly’s pony’s withers; Ugly squeezed her astern and laughed. Mouse called to Momo, and they giggled and passed the joke to Hao-k’an.
Jake had loved women for an hour, bought them, taken them in cars or on beaches, gloomily fighting their No! and their Oh, you bastard! but this was new, this was a kidnap and the hair of his flesh rose again: he wanted this woman. The excitement was painful.
They struck the Yarkand River and turned downstream, and soon Ugly halted them in a bowl of brush and reeds. They were half sober now, and panted, dismounting. “An interlude,” Ugly announced. “Time out from banditry!” Jake and Hao-k’an tethered the ponies, and the four lesser bandits hunkered while Ugly led the woman forward like a ringmaster. She was wailing, and covered her face with both hands.
“What a ride,” Momo said. “What a hunger I have.”
Ugly tore the headdress from the woman. “A beauty,” Mouse said. The raspberry gown was embroidered in gold and dark blue; Ugly ripped it away from her. Beneath it she wore a close-fitting shirt and loose trousers of the same stuff.
Jake’s breath steamed.
The woman fought; Ugly took her under the arms, and Hao-k’an tugged her trousers off. Ugly’s knife flashed; he slit the shirt and tore it away. She stood naked in the cold air, only a necklace and pair of red cloth shoes left to her. She covered her sex with both hands, and hunched; Ugly took her by the hair and tugged her head back.
“A beauty,” Mouse said again.
The woman was weeping now, almost without sound, streams of tears.
Abruptly, Jake’s heart closed to this.
“No fat on her,” Hao-k’an said.
“Chinese women are never fat,” Jake said, and could not keep contempt from his voice. “That is a fact.”
They stared at him. His face was sullen, he knew, and he tried to lighten his expression. “Keep her warm, at least.”
“A freezing virgin,” Ugly said softly.
“How do you know that?”
“We can find out,” Momo said.
“It was her wedding day,” Jake said sadly.
Ugly laughed. “Then she was expecting something like this.” He shrugged. “The ripe plum falls.”
The woman’s eyes were on Jake. He gazed at her body, he could not help that, the round young breasts, the cold, stiff nipples, the narrow hips and neat black bush; and then at her eyes. She pleaded. He looked away.
“Listen,” he mumbled, “let her go. We have no time for this. They will pursue.”
“Speak up, friend.” Ugly let her go and took a step toward Jake. “Pursue? Not that bunch. Farmers.”
“Yes,” Jake said, “and we are gentlemen and archers, and do not bother decent people. So you said! So you said!”
“What is this?” Ugly asked. “You blow the mustache for a woman?”
“Pay no attention to him,” Hao-k’an said, and pranced to the woman; he took her by the crotch and moaned: “Ah! Hsüüü!”
“Look at him,” Jake said. “No archer, but a pig.”
Hao-k’an dropped her and snarled, “Bugger yourself.”
“Rape,” Jake said. “Rape. I don’t like rape. I like women. They are almost the only thing I do like. I like them as a man and not as a pig.”
“Women are like locusts,” Ugly said.
“Let her go.”
“Too bad you are not a woman yourself,” Ugly said. “That would be some big blond.”
“I gave you Ying-ch’ang,” Jake said. He had no chance against the four of them; he was not afraid, but very tired. The flavor of lust was gone from his tongue, and he knew what had chased it. His mouth was full of shame, and it tasted like bad fish. And yet he ogled the woman, the forlorn breasts and frozen nipples, the chill golden skin.
“You gave us nothing,” Ugly said. “You were a dead man; you are an outcast; and the laws of men are not for you. Or for us.”
“Then you are no longer men.”
Ugly stumped up and planted himself before Jake, plenty mad, neck drawn in and angry eyes blazing under a black frown. “But not yet eunuchs. You priest! They die every day, starving, twigs for bones and hands like birds’ feet. Or beaten to death,” his voice low and fast and bitter, so that Jake, looking into the dark eyes, knew that Ugly too had swallowed his share of the universal bellyache; knew that these others were nothing, beasts, but Ugly had once been steel and had suffered his own corrosion. “Some landlords seize peasants’ daughters,” Ugly went on tightly, reining in his own rage and shame, “at twelve years of age and teach them to suck the prick. The poor eat sand and grass and their bones dissolve. A woman of my village was relieved of a tumor and it proved to be a petrified baby and she died at the quack’s hand. The rivers sweep them away and drowned children clog the narrows.” Ugly was panting now. “Armies come and go and leave mounds of dead. We are all shit and nothing matters. Not even you. So take your baby face outside this camp for an hour and do not interfere with the pleasure of your betters.”
“You don’t want her,” Jake said. “You don’t really want her.”
Ugly knocked him down. Jake blinked at the bright autumn sky and said, “She’s freezing. She’s half dead. You rape a corpse.”
Ugly hawked up a gob and spat on him.
“Good luck and prosperity,” Jake said. “Animals.”
Ugly was suddenly cheerful. “Yes, yes, animals for the moment. Listen: go stand watch. Tomorrow we will be friends again. What is one woman? And you: you have never struck a woman? Never taken a woman who cried out and fought?”
Jake’s bones burned.
“So,” Ugly said. “You see?”
“A priest,” Hao-k’an said merrily.
Jake plodded toward his pony. Behind him they fell silent. He could not look at the woman. What was a woman? They would gun him down and go back to their games.
The great white mer
chant of Central Asia. Dodds the tycoon. Selling a virgin for a day of life. He turned. “Listen,” he shouted. “We’re quits now. Quits.”
Ugly waved happily. “Quits it is. You’re one of us.”
Mouse wrestled her down, and Ugly turned to her, clapping his hands; Hao-k’an was mouthing eager gibberish. Momo, hand on his holster, smiled faintly at Jake.
The next day she drank tea; she tried to eat a strip of jerky, but gagged and then vomited. The bandits kept her warm but now and then stripped her to stare, to comment or to abuse her. Jake kept to himself and would not look at her. At night, on watch, he had remembered Mei-li and others. Also he had fallen asleep, but no harm done: he awoke at dawn to the same rolling plain, the same empty hills and clear, remote sky.
He sat apart, and heard their scufflings and cries. He considered himself. Sheepskins, weapons, a map and a compass. Binoculars and bandoleers. Four grenades. Lice. That to show for thirty years of spit and polish, courage and cowardice, medals and mistakes. He wondered how many men he had killed, how many women he had violated. It was always a violation, was it not? He rubbed his scruffy beard. His feet stank; his body was filthy, layers of crud; his breath doubtless foul. The price of freedom.
From the ridge above the bowl, where he kept watch, he could see a long way north in daylight, over the falling hills and the sparse lines of poplars. To the south the hills rose to mountains. High in the mountains snow gleamed.
The evening stars spoke to him later. They were cold, distant and neutral, and made him sad: they said to him that we are born and we suffer and we die. He believed them.
“What do you do up there,” Hao-k’an asked him, “rape your hand?”
“Dogs and worse,” Jake said gloomily. “At least bitches can fight back.”
He was one of them, so they considered this. “What would you have us do?”
“Too late now. Take her back, maybe.”
“And be killed,” Ugly said.
“Then there is no way,” Jake said.
She might have been blind. She moved like a puppet, but without expression, not even the painted smile, frown or leer of the performing doll, and no sound; only the silent tears. No one beat her. Jake would have understood a beating and been angry, but not full of horror and other emotions, new and nameless.
Or if the men had relished her. If they had taken her with thunderations and bellows, if they had stood like bulls and impaled the goddess while lightning flashed and mountains split.
No. Hao-k’an with a dirty nose said “Ha!” and pulled her onto his lap and spilled himself like a baboon. “Ah, ah, ah,” he said, “ah, ah, ah,” and flung her away.
The empty eyes accused Jake, and the bruised mouth, the gown in tatters, the chilled blue flesh. He supposed they would shoot her when they tired of her. She did not look like Mei-li, not really; she had been more beautiful than Mei-li when they took her, but now Jake could not think of the two as the same sex or even species.
He did not know her name, and did not want to. By the fourth day he was numb. Ugly had gone mad, settling so long in one camp. They would be tracked and wiped out. Jake hardly cared. The woman was shivering by the fire. The others were playing the Chinese version of scissors-paper-rock and pounding each other lackadaisically.
The woman was looking at Jake with dull eyes. He met her gaze and looked away. She sat huddled in the ruins of her bridal suit. Her hair was filthy now, long and lank, trailing on the ground behind her where she sat like a broken doll. “Foreigner,” she said softly. She had yellowed like a tooth.
Jake met her eye again but did not speak.
“Kill me,” she asked.
It had been a beautiful face.
“Kill me, foreigner.”
He had known she would ask.
“What am I?” she said through quick tears. “I am nothing. A bruised peach, a trampled pear.”
The air was cold and clean, and the hills were cold and everlasting in the late light. The woman was small, a speck; so was Jake.
“Every moment is pain and shame,” she said, “and I feel the madness coming, and I will scream and soil myself, and they will leave me here to die, or shoot me. Do it now,” she urged him, softly as a lover, “do it now.”
He looked at the men, sprawling and squatting. His elder brothers. So I have learned a trade. “I cannot,” he said. “It is too late.”
He gazed again at the woman, so as not to forget: already her eyes were hollow dead smudges; her lips were swollen, her cheeks discolored; blood stained her gown. Behind her eyes was a great void, an emptiness he had seen before behind the eyes of the poor, or the badly wounded, or prisoners.
Then for an instant the despair vanished from her face, and was replaced by a pure, lively, consuming contempt.
Jake’s innards turned to ash and clinker.
The woman drooped, hugged herself, and seemed to grow smaller, like a great-grandmother abandoned by a primitive tribe. Momo and Hao-k’an, laughing, stood up and drifted toward her. “Like a foreign wheelbarrow?” Hao-k’an could not believe it.
Jake rose as if offended by them, and passed behind the woman. He paused long enough to lay his left hand on her head in blessing and farewell.
His right hand drew the .45 and shot her dead.
They might have killed him before the echo died, pure reflex at the sight of this yellow-haired fool with his pistol out, in the middle of camp and this not a business day. They might have thrown knives, or rushed him. For the time it took to kill her, and to replace the automatic in its holster, Jake did not give a god damn.
All they did was stare. Even Ugly was shocked. They stared down at the heap of dead woman, and up at Jake’s sullen eyes.
Then Hao-k’an said, “O nourished of a harlot!” and drove at his throat with both hands. Jake knocked the hands apart and drove a left and a right to Hao-k’an’s face; Hao-k’an howled at the insult, windmilled in and took Jake about the middle like a wrestler. Jake kneed him in the chest, and bashed him hard on the back of the neck. Hao-k’an weakened and Jake kicked him off, fetching him a hard wallop on the ear as he went by. Hao-k’an’s nose was bleeding and his breath came hard. He snuffed air into him and bored back in. Jake set himself, and Momo took Jake around the neck from behind.
“God damn you,” Jake roared. He bent fast, slipping sideways to Momo, and brought his shoulder up into Momo’s chin. He rammed Momo, trying to slip Hao-k’an’s charge. Momo’s hand was on the haft of his knife; Jake smothered the move, clenched hard on Momo’s fist, and Momo shouted in pain.
Hao-k’an knocked Jake off balance and caught him with a hard backhand; Jake’s lips popped, and he felt blood spurt. At the same moment the long scratch on his ribs, where somebody’s bullet had given him a bad moment, flared into pain. The pain made him sharper. He righted himself, feinted a hook and started a kick. When he heard the shot he dropped all offensive plans and hit the deck rolling. He came up squeezing the .45, and Ugly stomped it to the ground.
Breathing hard, they glared. “You will not,” Ugly said. “‘Frequent reproofs diminish friendship.’”
“This misbegotten egg,” Hao-k’an began furiously.
“He had no right,” Momo said.
“He owes me,” Hao-k’an said.
“Time to move on,” Jake said, his voice almost shaking as matters caught up with him. “You would have killed her tomorrow. And while you tickle yourselves, the enemy closes.”
“He owes me,” Hao-k’an said again.
“He owes me too,” Ugly said, injured and melancholy. “He owes me his life and now he owes me a woman.” With interest, curiosity and an odd nod of the head he met Jake’s eye. “It was formerly all so simple,” he complained.
“Pigs defile you all,” Jake said, “I’m bleeding.” There was a line of fire down his back. “You Japanese bastard. You ripped right through these sheepskins. Mouse! Take a look at this.”
He was used to it now, the sudden truce. Among Marines, or between
Marines and soldiers, fighting would go on for half an hour and end only with departures. But here the twig flared and died, and was soon cold. Hao-k’an would joke with him over wine.
“You killed a woman,” Ugly said.
“Do not speak of it again,” Jake said. “You killed her. I gave her rest.”
“This is almost deep,” Mouse said. “I must wash it in wine.”
Jake squinted at Ugly. He refused to look at the woman but her face floated before him. “Bury her,” he said.
“Do not joke,” Ugly said. “You killed her; you bury her. You can do it tonight: I give you a double watch, the late watch and the dawn watch.”
Hao-k’an laughed. “Thus he pays.”
Jake sat down near the fire. He groaned aloud as Mouse bathed the wound.
Ugly said, “Yes, yes, the heart of man is heavy; his years are short but his days long. You are a strange animal, you are. A good deal of Kao in you, and something of Dushok, and a little of me. Well, cheer up and learn a trade. We have summered you, and now we shall winter you.”
Jake’s pony bore the body out of camp that night, and Jake kept watch a way downstream where the land was softer and less stony. He scraped out a shallow grave in the moonlight, and tried to think of the proper words, standing alone in the silvery dark, with a wind sighing up from the southeast and his pony whuffling. “He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall be surely put to death,” Jake said. It was not the sentiment he wanted but it had a bearing on this funeral. “Ashes to ashes,” he said. “Dust to dust. From everlasting to everlasting. “It was in the wrong language but it was the best he could do. After a sharp struggle with his gloom, a deep gloom and painful, he said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and swept loose dirt over the body.
He swung aboard his pony then and rode to the top of a knoll. From there he could see a long way north, even in the light of a half-moon. Except for the steady rush of mountain wind, the night lay cold and still. Jake dismounted, hobbled his pony tight, checked his M-I and .45, and made himself comfortable against his pack. The woman’s face pleaded with him. Voices spoke within him. He invented an old Chinese proverb: three bandits are one man, two bandits are half a man, one bandit is no man at all.
The Chinese Bandit Page 23