Read Under the Red Flag for Free Online

boar, my old woman. We’re leaving to do business. Scramble a dozen eggs for supper. We’ll make some extra money today. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”
    “All right, you come back soon. We’ll wait for you.” The bellows in the kitchen resumed croaking while fat was sputtering in the cauldron.
    Liao set out for Leng’s house. Rapidly the boar was treading the road, whose surface of dried mud had been cut into numerous ruts by oxcarts. The air was still warm, though the crimson sun was approaching the indigo peak of the Great Emperor Mountain. Grass had pierced the soil here and there, and the cornfields, sown a few days before, looked like huge gray ribs stretching towards the end of the green sky. Everything seemed sluggish and even the air made one feel languid. In the west, a herd of sheep were slowly coming down the mountain slope like clouds lying atop the bushes. Small voices, children’s voices, were buzzing from distant places. Once every few seconds a donkey’s bray split the air.
    Leng’s house was at the northern end of Horse Village, within ten minutes’ walk. When he arrived, Liao led his boar directlyinto Leng’s yard and closed the gate behind him. He wanted to get the business done quickly, take the pay, and return home for the supper of scrambled eggs, fried dough cakes, soy paste, raw scallions, stewed hairtail, which he bought in Dismount Fort that morning after he had sold a litter of piglets there. He liked that fish best and never could have enough of it.
    To his surprise, in the middle of Leng’s yard was standing a huge white boar. Beyond it a young sow was lying on her back against a nether millstone. The boar’s owner, Ma Ding, whom Liao recognized at a glance, was talking with Leng. Second Dog, Leng’s teenage son, was shoveling manure out of the pigpen. Seeing Liao and the black boar, the boy stopped to make a face, a snouty pout, at his father and Ma Ding.
    Anger welled up in Liao. I’m taken in, he thought. Leng, you dung-eater, you have Ma here already, ahead of me.
    He wanted to walk straight to Leng and give him a round of curses that would make his ancestors squirm in their graves, but he hesitated because right in front of him was the white boar that was so large, even larger than his black boar. Shedding fierce glints, the white boar’s lozenge eyes were blinking at Liao and the black boar behind him.
    Leng realized the embarrassment he had caused. He stopped talking and turned around, coming over to calm Liao. He had hardly walked a step when Liao yelled out and was thrown to the ground. A black shadow flitted over his body and dashed to the white boar. Both Leng and Ma jumped aside instinctively. Chickens and ducks burst away in every direction, and a rooster landed on the wall, then flew off to the neighbor’s yard. Second Dog thrust the shovel into the manure heap and vaulted out of the pigpen, shouting excitedly, “Good pig, get that foreign bastard. Drive him back home!”
    The boars’ growls, louder than those sent out by a pig in a slaughterhouse when a long knife stabbed into its throat, were vibrating through the neighborhood and the village.
    Liao got up to his feet. The two pigs were already in a melee. Though the white boar was bigger and heavier, the black one was nimbler and fiercer. Watching them rolling about, Liao felt his boar was by no means inferior to that white foreign beast. Just now when the fight broke out, by instinct he had wanted to stop them, uncertain if his pig could match its enemy, but now he changed his mind. His boar had to be the master in this village at least. Let him fight to protect his territory, Liao thought, to keep his wives and concubines, to get rid of that foreign bastard, and teach both Ma and Leng a hard lesson. See if they dare to look down on me and my boar again.
    Instead of trying to separate the pigs, Liao stood there motionless and enjoyed watching them fighting. Likewise, Ma and Leng seemed also eager to see the