Bro | Chapter 20

Xiao Bao stayed in the hospital for a full week.

On the day she was admitted, a blizzard had sealed off the city. By the time she was discharged, though, the temperature had already shot up by more than ten degrees, and the warmth of spring, with flowers about to bloom, was practically in the air.

Grandma Song cooked a huge pot of dumplings at home.

Xiao Bao noticed that her eldest brother and Grandma, who had once been at each other’s throats, seemed to have miraculously eased up with each other. And with her being all weak and sickly like this, Xiao Yuan could hardly keep picking on her either, so he gave her the notes from the past few days.

In that shabby one-bedroom, one-living-room place on the third floor of the old tube-style building in the shantytown, there was suddenly a bit of the feeling of home.

Le Xiaodong was dead, and the hatred that had sat congealed in Wei Qian’s chest and would not disperse seemed to have gone with him. His whole spirit seemed to have changed quite a bit too… as for exactly where he had changed, San Pang could not really say. He only felt that Wei Qian no longer carried such a heavy aura of hostility.

No matter what, it was a good thing.

Before going to pick Ma Zi’s mother up from the hospital, San Pang brought Xiao Chutou and Wei Qian to Ma Zi’s doorstep.

San Pang spat into his palms twice and started digging under the tree. “That brat Ma Zi was like a gopher, burying everything underground. He definitely left something behind. Hey, Lord Qian, can you not just stand there with your hands stuck in your pockets watching? Could you trouble yourself to move over here and lend your noble claws to help this old Pig?”

Wei Qian scraped the caked mud off his shoes and, without even raising his head, said, “Er Shidi, Master is giving you a chance to lose weight, so stop your damn whining and get digging with all that flab swinging.”

After saying that, he pulled out a cigarette, stuck it in his mouth and lit it, then planted it upside down under the big locust tree and patted the trunk. “Been a long time since you had one, huh? It’s not a good cigarette, just make do.”

The big locust tree stood there quietly off to one side. In the faint breeze, together with the slightly crooked cigarette, it rustled softly.

It really did look a bit like Ma Zi, always standing there without making a sound. Whoever looked at him, he would just give them that silly grin, and if no one asked him anything, he would not say a word.

San Pang quickly dug up the money Ma Zi had buried underground. Inside the envelope sealed in a plastic bag, there was also a note saying that he was about to go far away to another land, so he had no choice but to shamelessly entrust his mother to his two brothers… and he had even written the “tuo” in “entrust” wrong.

That fried-dough-stick-selling illiterate, already so damn grown, and the suicide note he wrote was still worse than Xiao Yuan’s handwriting from when the kid had only been in school for two months.

Wei Qian and San Pang discussed it and decided to keep Ma Zi’s death hidden. They only handed the money and the note over to Ma Zi’s mother, and got their story straight for her. They told her that Ma Zi had gone off with some people doing business so he could save money for her treatment, that he had gone to Cambodia to resell coffee beans… the “going to Cambodia” line was San Pang’s idea, and it counted as going far away to another land, so it matched what the note said.

Ma Zi’s mother had lost one arm and one leg, and already counted as disabled. By regulation, she could apply for the Five Guarantees support program, but unfortunately it was not that easy to get everything approved. It required a long process of obtaining all kinds of certificates and running all over to handle procedures. Otherwise, back then Wei Qian could also have applied in the name of being a minor, but at the time it took too much time and effort, and he simply could not afford to run around for it.

Now he and San Pang both had the will and the ability, but they still could not get it done, because they could not get past Ma Zi’s mother herself.

When Wei Qian tried bringing it up, Ma Zi’s mother firmly believed that she already had a son who was nearly an adult and capable of working. Even though her son was not in front of her now, he was doing business abroad and had a source of income, so she should not deliberately deceive the government for that tiny bit of subsidy money.

Her moral awareness was so high it made Wei Qian’s head throb. So after he went back, he beat San Pang up hard.

It was all because of that damned fatty’s rotten idea and rotten lie. Great, now they had lifted a rock only to smash their own feet.

Wei Qian never went back to the nightclub. He did not even care anymore who took over managing the assets after Le Xiaodong died.

“Xiao Wei-ge” vanished without a trace along with the dead Le-ge, washing his hands of the whole thing. He had been a very proper thug, everyone knew he was just a vicious dog raised by Le-ge to bite people. No matter how sharp his teeth were, no one paid him any attention. They had plenty of other matters to crack each other’s skulls over.

Through San Pang’s father, Wei Qian found work at a factory as a stock checker. Well, to put it bluntly, that just meant hauling things around.

It was temporary work, paid by the piece, pure manual labor. Lunch was included, two steamed buns per person. Wei Qian had not done it for very long before both his hands were covered in huge blisters. He was filthy all day long and had to keep reading people’s moods from morning to night.

The days of being thug “Xiao Wei-ge” became a mirage in the blink of an eye.

On the third day after Wei Qian started this job, he was squatting by the roadside, using a needle to pick open the blood blisters on his hands, and he was so calm inside that even he found it surprising. He had once thought that this kind of life would bend the young backbone in him, that just thinking about the way he was now and the ten-light-year distance between it and the words “rise above the rest” would feel like knives twisting in his heart.

But it did not.

His desire to rise above the rest had not changed in the slightest. He was still a money-grubber who dreamed of getting rich even in his sleep. He still needed money, still needed to support the family. But perhaps because he had already witnessed enough splendor and extravagance, and gone through life and death deeply enough to carve it into the bone, his heart had unknowingly settled down a great deal.

The one even happier to see this was Grandma Song.

Even though Wei Qian was ordered around every day and worked like a grandson, she was still relieved and gratified that he had finally “gotten onto the right path.” She came from a farming background and did not think manual labor was anything bad. Making a living off one’s own strength was only natural and right. Being a day laborer, even if it meant eating bran and swallowing wild greens, was still better than wearing gold and silver while frequenting nightclubs.

While Grandma Song was subjectively believing that Wei Qian’s future was bright, she also finally realized that this big boy, not even eighteen yet, really and truly was holding up a whole family. So she started treating him a little better.

She somehow got hold of some medicine plaster for bruises and sprains and secretly left it on Wei Qian’s bedside table. To help Wei Qian support the household, she started getting up after three in the morning every day to boil a pot of tea eggs and corn, then went out to sell them during the time when people were heading to work. In the afternoons, she would go collect cardboard boxes, wrapping paper, and bottles to sell.

To the point that even Wei Qian had to admit that this crazy old woman was quite a remarkable person. Getting up before dawn and staying up late like that, she could still manage all three meals a day for the children at home, and still energetically fight three hundred rounds a day with that nasty old woman next door, exchanging profanity-laced battle cries that involved greetings to each other’s reproductive organs.

That nasty old woman had once been threatened by child Wei Qian waving a kitchen knife at her, so she did not dare go outside and confront them head-on. The two households would each keep the chain on their doors, leave a crack in the doorway so the sound could travel freely, and start the war.

Those two old hags had elevated their brawling into an art form. The filthy language that came flying out of their mouths was enough to make even Wei Qian, a professional hooligan, unable to stand listening.

When San Pang was not out buying stock, he would sit in the hallway, grab a handful of sunflower seeds, crack them while listening with great relish for a while, and when the battle ended, he would slap the seed shells off his hands and raise his voice in applause. His voice was so booming that by himself he could create the effect of a full house cheering.

At that point, Grandma Song and the nasty old woman would immediately present a united front against him.

Grandma Song would curse, “Little fucking brat!”

The nasty old woman would curse, “Big fucking fatty!”

San Pang had managed to round out a full “fucking idiot,” and left twisting away in complete satisfaction.

Later on, Wei Qian went over and kicked the latch on the nasty old woman’s door to pieces, then had a huge fight with Grandma Song at home and told those two bastard old women to clean up their mouths and stop corrupting perfectly good children.

…Facts proved that the two shrews could not beat him on their own, so the pair of them consciously moved their sparring time to the afternoons, when the children were at school. Weekends and statutory holidays were declared a ceasefire.

Wei Qian quit smoking. Smoking was too expensive.

Wei Zhiyuan felt that there were two smells from his childhood that had left a deep impression on him. One was the smell of cheap tobacco, and the other was the smell of bruising ointment later on.

During that period, every day when he looked up after finishing his homework, big brother would already be dead asleep on the bed from exhaustion. As the weather gradually grew warmer, Wei Qian would sleep in just a sleeveless undershirt and big shorts, with a thin blanket draped over his waist, leaving Wei Zhiyuan only his back to look at.

His life as a thug and the heavy manual labor had tempered Wei Qian until there was not an ounce of extra flesh on his waist. His long, tight muscles clung close to his body. The small of his back always dipped inward in a narrow curve, and the pair of prominent shoulder blades jutted out like a pair of spread wings, as though so long as one hid beneath them, one would never suffer any harm.

Wei Zhiyuan would glance at him once, then lower his head and write another couple of lines. He had just copied down a vocabulary term from the after-class section of a lesson. The term was “An elder brother is like a father.”

Following the teacher’s instructions, the boy wrote it out neatly five times. Then he closed his book, turned off the light, and followed the medicinal smell in the air that he had already grown used to, climbing onto the bed, climbing over Wei Qian, and skillfully burrowing into his arms. Half-awake and half-asleep, Wei Qian instinctively raised a hand and patted the child on the back, saying in a low voice thick with sleep, “Go to sleep.”

From those two words, Wei Zhiyuan could make out an affection so rich it was exactly right. Completely satisfied, he closed his eyes and enjoyed the most comfortable moment of the day.

After that, whenever the word “happiness” was mentioned, Wei Zhiyuan would think of that moment from his childhood when he curled up in his big brother’s arms, rubbing against his chest, closing his eyes and waiting to sink into deep sleep… even after he had grown big enough that his brother’s embrace could no longer hold him.

Another half year passed in a rush.

On this day, Xiao Bao and Xiao Yuan had their final exams. Once the exams were over, it meant summer vacation was about to begin.

Summer burned like fire. Wei Qian rode a second-hand bicycle he had bought for twenty-yuan to the cold-drink wholesale market. Small peddlers and vendors all got their goods here, and Wei Qian also planned to wholesale a box of ice cream to take home and satisfy the cravings of the two little brats.

A lot of households with children and heavy cold-drink consumption would come straight here to buy a whole box of ice cream. Ice creams that retailed for one or two-yuan each only cost four or five-jiao wholesale, which saved a lot of money.

While Wei Qian was looking through the product catalog, someone suddenly called out to him a little hesitantly.

“Wei Qian? You… are you Wei Qian?”

Wei Qian turned around and saw that it was a somewhat familiar middle-aged woman. He froze for a moment, then carefully looked her over before suddenly realizing. “You… you’re Miss Li?”

Miss Li hurried over in her high heels, asking one question after another. “It really is you! What happened to you? You withdrew from school without even a word of explanation. I looked for you for such a long time and never heard anything. What on earth have you been doing? What kind of earthshaking matter was it? Why didn’t you finish school?”

Three years had passed. Seeing her so suddenly, Wei Qian actually felt as if a lifetime had gone by. School? That all seemed… like something from a previous life already.

And yet, faced with his former homeroom teacher, Wei Qian still could not help lowering his head. At that moment, he was neither the brutal, vicious nightclub enforcer nor the taciturn young laborer.

He suddenly became like an ordinary middle school student, a little reserved in front of his teacher.

Wei Qian gave a bitter smile. “Teacher, that’s a long story.”

The fact that Wei Qian came home carrying a box of ice cream and a strange middle-aged woman left every member of the household stunned, because as far as they could remember, big brother had never treated anyone this politely before.

This guest was neatly dressed, wore glasses, and spoke with perfect courtesy. One look at the way she carried herself and it was obvious she was an intellectual, utterly out of place with the surroundings.

Once Grandma figured out who Miss Li was, she was so shocked she could not even speak properly. This was how the administrative divisions back in her hometown worked: first there was the province, under the province came the city, and under each city were more than a dozen counties forming an administrative region. Under a county were another seven or eight townships, and only beneath the townships came the countless little villages.

Grandma Song’s hometown was relatively remote and underdeveloped. Children in the village had to go to the township for elementary school, travel all the way to the county seat for middle school, and then for high school they had to sit on a bus for seven or eight hours to go into the city. For many years, there had not been anyone from her village who managed to get into high school.

Not to mention a high school teacher. This was the first live high school teacher she had ever seen in her life.

Grandma Song practically received Miss Li as though she were a national leader. She brought out every skill she had, made a whole table full of the highest-standard dishes, and insisted no matter what that Miss Li stayed and ate.

Miss Li really could not refuse such warm hospitality, so she had no choice but to sit down at the table. Looking at this household, she more or less understood why Wei Qian had dropped out. While dealing with Grandma Song’s enthusiastic hospitality and the nonstop food she kept putting into her bowl, Miss Li probed tentatively, “Wei Qian, I remember your grades were pretty good back then. To be honest, it really is a pity for you to stop school just like that.”

Wei Qian did not answer. He picked up a small bowl. “Teacher, let me get you some soup.”

Miss Li took it and went on, “You know, I’ve already worked at our school for more than twenty years. As a senior teacher, I have a little bit of face with the school leadership. And your uncle… oh, I mean my husband, works at the city education bureau. If you’re willing, I can have him think of a way to get your student registration restored, and place you right into the class I’m teaching now.”

The moment those words fell, everyone at the table stopped what they were doing at the exact same time.