“Good,” Colleen said with a firm nod, “Did they suffer, like my parents did?”
“Worse, and they don’t have anyone who will remember them the way you’ll remember your Mom and Dad.”
Spot nodded to Ben from the foot of the bed.
Colleen and Ben sat in silence for a long time. Smudge pressed her head into his lap, and he pulled on her silky ears and smiled down at his sensitive dog. Spot walked up the bed and circled around behind him. He sat down on the pillow and rested his chin on Ben’s shoulder.
“Thanks, Ben,” Colleen said, “You’re a real sweetheart. I appreciate you talking with me. I might want to talk again. Maybe even go up there someday.”
“Anytime,” Ben said, “I’m sure my friend Christa would love to show you around. I might even come up, too.”
“I’d like that,” Colleen said, “Give those puppies a squeeze for me. Goodnight.”
Ben did just that.
Chapter 19
Jewel Mwale hummed as she spun the big round wheel of the old chibwantu machine while her sons fought over the bucket catching the ground maize that fell from the bottom. It looked like a large coffee grinder, and as she dumped raw dried corn in the top hopper coarse cornmeal chugged out from the chute at the bottom.
“If you drop that you’re going to answer to your father, and I saw him buying a new belt yesterday,” she said as the boys stopped pushing and held the pail straight.
She shared the grinder with several families in the farming community, and was chatting with two mothers waiting for their turn. They were fretting over the drought, and the poor crops, and how their men were trying to make extra money.
“Crap is what that is,” a round woman said as she removed a woven basket filled with raw corn from her head and dropped it at her feet. She started to slowly swing her bulk, rocking a baby slung over her front.
There were three more children playing at her feet.
She said, “My Dada’s been away for three nights and he came back empty handed. There are no more black lechwe in the dried up swamps. All the antelope are gone. If you want to get poach moneys you need to go to the big parks now.”
“Yebo,” Jewel agreed with a nod, “And then the man he doesn’t come back. And if he do come back he has to go to Lusaka to sell it, and then he not come back for a different reason.”
The women laughed and nodded. A young mother fanning herself next to Jewel said, “My John got a leopard last fall, came home from the capital and told me it was worth twenty thousand. We ate like kings and he bought me two cows. Rarina’s man had gone with him. He handed his wife seventy thousand. Under me choking him my John say the tax man took our missing fifty.”
The woman howled and beat their thighs. “Yebo,” Jewel said, “The tax on those hule women, dice rolling, and that shake-shake beer is awful steep in town.”
“My man has always been one to support our local businesses,” the young woman said, shaking her head, “And speak of the devils. Here go your Fulfort, and his strappy father.”
The men walked under the thatched roof of the corn grinding station and her husband bent to give Jewel a big kiss. The other women smiled and made kissing sounds.
“Stop that,” the round mother said, “You got three already.” She unslung the baby and held her out to Jewel.
Before Jewel broke their embrace she straightened the thin leather strap of Fulfort’s necklace, and the copper coin dangling from it. It was a one ngwee penny with a hole drilled in it, with the president of Zambia on the front and an aardvark on the back. She had given it to him after their second date, when he had proposed marriage. She had laughed and said it was his dowry. Jewel was an orphan and had no family to present him with a small gift when she made him the traditional icisumina nsalamu, a chicken dinner that made her happy acceptance of his proposal official.
Fulfort had not been able to hide his excitement when she accepted. She saw it on his face, and elsewhere. Jewel was from Ba Kaonde in north western Zambia where the women are famed to be as beautiful as they were proficient at keeping a husband happy.
Upon meeting her for the first time Fisho had joked if she was half as good in bed as she was pretty he’d have ten grandchildren.
Jewel was used to the looks she received from admiring men and jealous woman, especially when the made-up wives from Lusaka or tourist wives from the falls would venture into the bushlands. They would keep their men close, and their dagger eyes sharpened.
When she slipped her hands from Fulfort’s neck she sniffed her fingers and crinkled her nose. She immediately looked at her smiling father-in-law after smelling the hint of cow dung.
As the family left the shade carrying their ground corn and wooden hoes the round woman smiled with both teeth at Fisho, and he nodded politely back.
When they reached the edge of the tiny village and turned towards home Jewel said, “Fisho, that Laata is given you the serious eye. She wants an all-time man. Her dada is gone most times, and spends what little he takes from the hunt on everything but her.”
“That’s exactly what we need,” Fisho said, “Four more mouths to feed.”
“Yebo,” Fulfort added, “And one of them is a plenty big mouth.”
Jewel struck her husband on the backside with her walking stick.
Later that evening Fisho came from their hut and joined the couple on the low benches around their fire. The father handed his son a plastic cup filled with chibuku, a thick beer made from sorghum that tasted like a sour milkshake. The young father made a face every time he took a sip from it.
As her half-asleep baby suckled, Jewel sung a song to her and swung slowly back and forth.
For a long while no one spoke but eventually Fisho looked at the young parents and said, “We need to do discuss it.”
“There’s nothing to discuss,” Jewel said, “The answer is no. It was no last week, and it will still be no next week.”
“Maybe we can wait and see,” Fulfort said as he stared into the fire and avoided his father’s raised eyebrow, “I still think we’ll get rain.”
“And if we don’t?” Fisho said, “Even if it pours we’ll still come up short. We could lose the farm this summer. Tell me where we’ll be then, son?”
Jewel started to cry and said, “You can’t go. You won’t come back. If you come back, you’ll be sick.”
Fulfort went to his wife and held her. He took the baby from her lap and carried the sleeping girl into their hut.
“My son doesn’t like us to argue,” Fulfort said, “But I don’t like us to starve. There are only three ways for us, Jewel, and you know this. You tell me which you’d rather have. We could move to the dangerous city and try to get jobs that don’t exist in a place where we can’t afford to live. We could move to the more dangerous mines and try to get jobs that don’t exist in a place where we can’t afford to—”
“The third option is no good,” Jewel said, cutting him off. She looked at their small cluster of huts and lowered her voice, “My husband is a good man, but he’s not a strong man in that way. You know this. He wouldn’t do well in the bush.”
“He’s stronger than you give him credit for,” Fisho said, “and I’ll be with him. The only way for us to remain safe is for both of us to go. We can watch out for each other. I’ve been on hunts before but I’m getting old and I need him with me.”
As his daughter-in-law stood up Fisho caught her hand and said, “The last thing I want is for my son to be harmed, or for you and the young ones to be alone. I promise you, I will bring him home to you.”
Jewel pulled away from him and picked up her husband’s cup of beer. She downed it and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“The answer is no, Fisho,” the pretty young mother said, “No.”
She left the fire to join her husband in their small hut.
Chapter 20
Harley slid into the empty side of the booth and nodded to a waitress as he pointed at Tian’s glass of beer.
&nbs
p; “Hey cousin,” Harley said, pulling off his sunglasses and tossing them on the table, “Why do you look like someone pissed in your ale?”
“You know full well,” Tian said without looking up, “You always know everything. Your spies have spies.” He drew the tip of his finger around in the sweat ring left by his glass and said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t just one big circle, everyone watching everyone else.”
“So depressingly Zen of you,” Harley said. He thanked the waitress and watched her backside as she returned to the bar. “To being single,” he said, raising his glass.
Tian didn’t raise his.
Harley clinked his glass to Tian’s anyway, drank, and said, “You don’t need her, cousin. She was just holding you back.”
“I love her,” Tian said, “Maybe she was holding me back from becoming you.”
Harley nodded and said, “Exactly, and you should be so fortunate.”
An ancient, tall man in a crisp black high collared suit walked from the back room of the restaurant and moved gracefully to the bar. Even though he was well over two meters tall he moved like a cat with his heels barely touching the floor. He was gaunt, and turned his skeletal head slowly to nod at the cousins’ table.
They slid out of their booth and joined the man, following him to the back of the restaurant and down a hallway that took them past the kitchen. Plates clinked and chefs chopped loudly from somewhere inside as they passed the swinging double doors.
As the cousins walked behind the tall man Harley imitated his gliding walk and sucked in his face as he wagged his eyebrows. Tian smacked Harley on the back of the head and shoved him playfully.
Tian had seen pictures of this man from the early Kowloon slum days and thought Harley would not be so disrespectful if he’d met the former assassin in a dark alley fifty years ago. Tian could still see a tiger’s walk in the old man’s step. It contained a balance and poise that Tian recognized in his own gate. This relic of tougher times would have no problem kicking Harley’s pudgy ass even today.
At the end of the hallway the man held a metal exit door open for them. He nodded and smiled warmly at Tian as they entered a small, private parking garage.
Beyond a row of expensive cars was a pair of stainless steel elevator doors flanked by two large stone temple guardian dog statues. The base of each statue was carved with the Tiandihui triangle and tree symbol. The dogs had lion like facial features, flat noses, and rounded foreheads. Each had a raised front paw with a world globe under its claws.
They entered the elevator, and after the man entered a code for the top floor they started to rise quickly. The glass elevator moved past cinder blocks for a few floors before breaking through the dark to a view of the top of the restaurant and the lights of the busy street below. They whisked up the side of a tall glass office building. It was a clear night and they could see from the tram heading up Victoria Peak to the junk boats ferrying tourist along the Tsim Sha waterfront.
The lift went dark as it slipped back into the building where it widened at the top floor. When they exited the elevator the man smiled at Tian again before disappearing through a side door with a bow.
Harley and Tian walked to a curved outside wall of windows that looked down on the beautifully lit Kowloon City Park.
The current park occupied the grounds of the former Kowloon Walled City slum. It was the birthplace of the Tiandihui gang started by his grandfather and granduncles after China reclaimed the city from the Japanese. By the fifties the walled city was one of the most densely packed urban environments in the eastern hemisphere. Layer upon layer of tiny apartments jammed next to each other. Built up over decades with no real plan, they were a jumbled puzzle of people and concrete. The alleys were often less than a meter wide, and little light and fresh air made it down twenty stories to the lower levels.
The walled city was a maze, and virtually ungoverned. Fifty thousand people crammed into three hectares. More than half of them were squatters. Out of necessity the Tongs and their offshoot gangs like the Tiandihui sprung up to provide security for the extended, tight knit families living in Kowloon. They ran everything from legitimate businesses to protection, drugs, gambling, and prostitution. It wasn’t long before the walled city became the base from which they controlled all of Hong Kong, and then Shenzen, and Guangzhou, and then most of southern China.
Tian’s grandmother once told him power had equaled life in the early days. Tian thought that had been true, but he also thought eventually power just equaled money.
Tian was born the year Kowloon Walled City was torn down. By then his family had a firm hold on the underbelly of the city, and were raking in millions. They moved into the upscale businesses and apartments surrounding the new park, and expanded their illegal operations globally. His grandfather was now called Dalao, the equivalent of godfather, and Tian had grown up in a strange world of new wealth and old fashioned violence.
He had the lightning bolt tattooed on his neck the night of his father’s funeral. Dalao had summoned him after the service and told the twenty-two year old Tian it was time for him to take his father’s place, and it was also time for Tian to take the thirty-five oaths. He expected Tian to avenge his father and inherit his seat in the family business.
His father had been the family’s Vanguard, or operations officer. He was second in command reporting only to Dalao, the Mountain Master. His job was to oversee the administration and enforcement of the family’s interests, and he was killed making a routine stop to collect protection dues owed. Not unlike the stop Harley and Tian had made that had ended in the alley.
Tian’s parents had kept his spoiled, rebellious behavior a secret from Dalao. The grandfather was shocked by Tian’s refusal to take the oaths. Tian fired back, questioning his grandfather openly and accusing him of being responsible for his father’s death. He wanted to know why they hadn’t moved away from illegal activities once they had enough money, and why the family clung to the old ways that were polluting Hong Kong and destroying their people.
Dalao had said nothing. The godfather just turned and left the funeral without a word. His mother and Harley had tried to comfort Tian but he ran away into the Hong Kong streets. For the first and last time he had gotten drunk, and at some point that night had gotten the lightning bolt tattoo.
The thirty-five oaths were a series of commitments taken when assuming lifelong membership in the Tiandihui gang. The oaths centered around promises to put the family above all else, to not lie to an officer, not steal from a brother, or disgrace the family. Punishment for not following one of the oaths was clearly spelled out and involved being struck down by a lightning bolt. The ceremony concluded with the new Tiandihui member getting a tattoo on their neck, just below the ear. The triangle symbolized the trinity of heaven and earth, and the tree symbolized longevity and strength.
Tian’s lightning bolt tattoo, his declaration of rebellion, was effectively eliminated by Dalao simply dictating his foolishness should be ignored. No one in the family ever mentioned, or even looked at the tattoo. Even Tian’s five year old cousin avoided looking at his neck, and his cousin Harley was careful to whisper on the rare occasions he was drunk or pissed enough to say something about it.
Du Wen asked him about his tattoo on their first date. Tian said it was the result of a shameful night of stupidity. She noted that he hadn’t had it removed, or covered up, and she knew full well what that symbol meant.
As they started to date seriously she challenged him, saying he had to realize there was a part of him that liked the lifestyle. The parties, the attention, the freedom from the mundane. Tian had gone to classes during the week but often ran with Harley on the weekends. He told her the fighting was only to protect his cousins, and done out of loyalty to the family. Du Wen had laughed in his face and made him admit he really liked kicking ass. She pointed out he had worked very hard to become good at it. His acting like a trapped outside observer didn’t work on her. She forced him to s
ee he was observing from so close he was actually in knee deep. Still, she saw his internal conflict was very real. He was a good person, wrapped in a lethal shell and dipped in generations of criminal rationalizations. She also openly faced the part of herself that liked having a bad ass gangster with a heart of gold for a boyfriend. It was intoxicating. Du Wen told him on that night she would never meet his family or set foot in their home, and he moved in with her the next day.
Tian felt they made a great couple mostly due to her ability to see straight through both of their self-deceiving bullshit.
As Harley and Tian stood together in silence and watched the lights of the city park far below, a long section of the curved wall behind them slid away. Tian’s three other cousins stepped out of Dalao’s reception room. They all shook hands, hugged, and clapped backs.
It was rare for them to all be together at the same time lately. Tian’s cousins each ran a different part of the business and they travelled often.
All of them sported the triangle tattoo. Now that Tian’s younger brother Liko was dead Harley was the baby of the group. He was also the last to have taken the thirty-five oaths.
The cousins had gathered a few months ago for Liko and Mina’s memorial, and they were gathered again for Jia’s.
“Sorry about your mother, Tian,” Boba Tzeng said as the huge man smothered him with another long hug, “Liko and Aunty Mina, and now this. It’s horrible.” He put his chubby hand on the back of Harley’s neck, pulled them both into his ample chest, and held them there.
Only the cousins got away with calling the big man Boba, which was slang for boobs, which he had.
“Thanks, Boba,” Tian mumbled into his cousin’s fat, “You were always her favorite.”
“I think we all know that’s a lie,” Jixi Tzeng said as she pulled them apart, “There’s only one favorite here.” She grabbed Tian’s ponytail and pulled him down as she slipped her arms around his strong shoulders. Rising up on her toes, she give him a big kiss on the cheek. The pretty young woman was five foot nothing in heels, but when she rose up her cannonball shaped calves rivaled Tian’s. If it hadn’t been for an injury Jixi could have gone all the way as a gymnast. She and Tian had trained together every day when they were in secondary school, and still made a point to spar every few weeks. As good as she was on the pommel horse she was even better at shattering an opponent’s patella with a devastating front push kick. She enjoyed hearing a bone snap far more than hearing the applause of a crowd.
Let Slip the Pups of War: Spot and Smudge - Book Three Page 9