Bro | Chapter 3

Afraid that “Heroic Ghost Dog” might not be dead enough and would only suffer if it lingered on, Wei Qian thoughtfully brought the brick down a few more times, hard, until he had smashed the dog’s head into a complete pulp. Only then did he, panting heavily, throw down the brick and wipe the dog’s blood from his hand onto the wall.

Only now did he finally get the chance to raise his head and look over the little brat who had caused him all this extra trouble. But that little ungrateful wretch had already taken advantage of the time Wei Qian spent beating the dog to snatch the can away. He was clutching it in his arms and wolfing it down.

Probably because Wei Qian’s gaze was too murderous, the little brat visibly shuddered. He looked at Wei Qian with a pair of round, glossy black eyes, and a line of canned broth accidentally dribbled from the corner of his mouth. He immediately, in terrified alarm, reached out to catch it, then licked his hand spotlessly clean.

The nameless fire in Wei Qian’s heart flared even higher. He almost wanted to stomp the little brat’s head off and make him lick his shoes, make him lick them to his heart’s content.

When the little fellow saw how frightening Wei Qian’s eyes were, he thought Wei Qian was going to steal his canned food. He immediately became alert, hugging the can tightly, getting to his feet with his back to the wall, and striking a heroic pose as though he were prepared to defend his territory to the death.

Wei Qian immediately deflated again, thinking, why was he getting worked up with such a tiny little thing?

So he spat on the ground in bored disgust and turned to leave.

During the days he was waiting for his results, Wei Qian did not waste his precious vacation. In the daytime, he and Ma Zi and San Pang went out to hawk yellow videotapes from a street stall. At night, he found a job at the pool hall, earning ten-yuan a day as lookout money for watching the place.

He discovered that the little brat he had run into that day seemed to have settled down in the trash-filled alley. Every time Wei Qian went out, he could see him rummaging through the garbage heap in search of his dinner.

When Wei Qian passed by, if he happened to be in a good mood, he would occasionally toss the little ghost a mantou.

Wei Qian had always hated his biological parents. The first way children learn how to deal with other people in the world is through their parents, so it was hard for him not to hate society as well. His compassion was more limited than spring rain in the north. The reason he occasionally treated that little thing a bit differently was because he had observed him.

He had found that the little boy’s arms and legs were all intact, his body had no disability at all, and not only was there nothing wrong with his intelligence, he might even be smarter than ordinary children. It was hard to tell from his face, but his eyes were black and bright, so he probably did not look bad either. If he really had lost both parents and had no one to take care of him, then he should have been sent to a welfare institute. At his age, and with those conditions, people definitely would have rushed to adopt him.

Since the little boy was wandering around outside, Wei Qian guessed that either he had a guardian, but that guardian abused him and he had run away on his own, or else he had been trafficked when he was little and had only managed to escape with great difficulty.

Either way, it was running away. Either way, it meant other people had treated him badly and he had only run because he truly could not go on living like that anymore. Wei Qian understood that feeling. He would even feel a little fellow-suffering with him.

Of course, even with that sense of fellow-suffering, Wei Qian only found the little thing pitiful when he happened to be in a good mood. Most of the time, he still did an excellent job of maintaining his cold, sharp-edged heart.

And yet it was precisely these scattered moments of kindness from him that brought trouble down on his head.

That day, Wei Qian’s high school entrance exam results came out. He had done well, twenty points above the admission line for the best high school in the whole city, enough to rank in the top ten in the entire district. If it had been someone else, their parents probably would have thrown a banquet. Wei Qian had no guests to treat, so for dinner he did not buy mantou, he bought a bag of meat buns instead, which counted as a celebration.

Wei Qian felt that he ought to be happy, but he was not. It was as if two huge stones were blocking up his heart. One stone was the high cost of attending high school. The other was the bitterness of having no one to tell, no matter how good he was, no matter how outstanding.

He tried hard to make himself ignore those things, so his whole body fell into a very strange state, his head was hot, but the center of his chest was cold.

As he passed by, he casually tossed one meat bun to the little boy beside the trash heap, amusing himself with the thought: this was exactly like throwing a meat bun to a dog, gone and never coming back.

Who would have thought the little thing would not let his bun vanish forever? In two or three bites, he stuffed the bun into his stomach for safekeeping, then came running after Wei Qian relentlessly, boy and bun together.

Like a little stray cat, whoever fed him one bite of sausage became the one he fixed on.

Wei Qian turned around, stunned, and thought, this is bad, now it’s buy one get one free!

His heart had already been blocked up, and being followed irritated him even more. He kept turning back again and again to curse viciously at the little boy. He even shoved him once, knocking the little fellow down on his butt, and even made as if to hit him. But the other party still stubbornly kept following, all the way to their home.

The house Wei Qian lived in had originally belonged to his maternal grandfather, that is, his dead mother’s father. His grandfather had been pissed to death by Wei Qian’s mother, so the house had passed to her. Now she had died too, so it was finally passed down to him. It already had some years on it.

It was an old dormitory block, part of a typical urban shantytown. Downstairs there was a garbage dump, the whole place messy and chaotic. The neighbors’ quality and financial means were generally below average, and many of the people living there were not especially friendly.

Loyalty and selfishness, warm hearts and hostility, they coexisted alongside the poverty and backwardness of this residential area without any contradiction at all, in a bizarre kind of harmony.

For example, the solitary old woman living across the hall was the unfriendly sort. Every time she saw Wei Qian, she would start rolling her eyes from far away, then slam her door as if she had seen something filthy. Sometimes she would even deliberately throw garbage in front of his door.

At first, Wei Qian had been too lazy to stoop to her level. He was one big kid dragging around one little kid, and there was already more than enough for him to worry about every day. He could not be bothered with petty trifles like this.

Besides, why should poor people make life hard for other poor people?

Later, Wei Qian came to understand that poor people could only make life hard for other poor people, and only knew how to make life hard for other poor people. Otherwise, what else were they supposed to do?

His mother was a whore, and he was the son of a whore. On the level of pure logic, there was actually nothing wrong with what the old woman said.

But today was different.

He had not done anything wrong. Even judged by traditional standards, he was more outstanding than anyone else, so why was he the only one living such a hard life?

His overly excellent exam results had pulled his upper body into another world, while his lower body was still sinking in an endless swamp. They let him see the boundless, teeming world beyond, and at the same time made it impossible for him to break free from his fixed identity and class.

If he had been like San Pang and Ma Zi, a purebred little hoodlum, real social scum, then he would not have been in this much pain.

Wei Qian’s overheated mind and overcooled heart finally pushed him to a critical point. He lowered his eyes and stared at the foul-smelling garbage in front of his own door. Veins stood out in ropes along his arms. His features looked very much like his mother’s, but were far less delicate than hers. That hatred and gloom that clung to him all year round had almost become part of his native temperament, dazzlingly handsome, and oppressively gloomy.

The young Wei Qian silently crouched down and, piece by piece, picked up the fruit peels and rotten leaves from in front of his door and threw them away.

The little boy who had followed him back did not know what was happening and only watched from one side.

Wei Qian silently carried the garbage for two steps, then suddenly did not want to do this anymore. He abruptly threw the trash down at the old woman’s doorway across the hall, then turned his head and roared at the boy, “What the fuck are you looking at?!”

The little boy jumped in fright and instinctively took a step back.

Wei Qian said viciously, “Little bastard!”

The little bastard stood with his back to the corner of the wall, looking at him carefully with wide eyes.

Wei Qian took a deep breath. He wanted to force down the evil fire burning in his chest. As an “adult,” he did not want to lose control in front of the little brat.

Yet at that moment, he found that he could not hold it back. Even his eyelids were jumping without stopping… after all, he was not really an adult.

Without any warning, Wei Qian suddenly turned around, picked up a large rock from the ground, and with a crash smashed it into the old woman’s window across the hall. Broken glass came raining down all over the floor with a clatter, and a scream rang out from inside the room.

Wei Qian shouted, “Listen here, you old corpse that won’t die, I didn’t bother with you before because you’re already seventy or eighty, and you don’t have many good years left. If you come poke at my bad luck again, I’ll wipe out your whole family!”

The old woman’s fierce cursing came from inside. She clearly had not taken a half-grown boy like him seriously at all.

Without another word, Wei Qian turned around, went back into his home, and came out with a kitchen cleaver. He kicked her door hard, directly breaking the lock. Only a single metal chain was left hanging there, on the verge of snapping. The boy gripped the cleaver and hacked at that family’s door with all his strength, his face deathly pale, his eyes bloodshot, looking exactly like some deranged homicidal maniac. He actually frightened the foul-mouthed old woman into tears.

After that, the old woman started avoiding Wei Qian whenever she saw him. She spread rumors everywhere that he was a murderer, but she never again dared to curse him to his face, and she never again threw garbage in front of their door.

It seemed that bullying the weak and fearing the strong really was human nature.

But although Young Master Wei’s ghostly, life-collecting look at the time had scared the old woman into tears, it had failed to scare that little boy into crying. The little boy still stubbornly lingered in front of his door.

Once Wei Qian had finished his intimidation, he slammed his own door shut with a bang right in front of the little boy and locked him outside. The little boy wandered about alone outside for a while. In the end, he bent down, picked up the remaining bits of trash in front of Wei Qian’s door, cleaned them up, and threw them away.

He even picked up a few little twigs, tied them together, and used them to sweep the ground.

Then, like a little stray dog nobody wanted, he curled up in front of the door and slept there for the whole night.