Big Breasts and Wide Hips Read Online Free PDF Page B

scooped out of a pond of ink, sprawled lazily at the base of the wall, eyes closed to mere slits, seemingly dreaming peaceful dreams. The five mutes and their dogs had a particular dislike for Shangguan Shouxi, who lived in the same lane, although he could not recall where or when he had managed to offend these ten fearsome demons. But whenever he came across them, he was in for a bad time. He would flash them a smile, but that never kept the dogs from flying at him like five black arrows, and even though the attacks stopped short of physical contact, and he was never bitten, he’d be so rattled his heart would nearly stop. The mere thought of it made him shudder.
    Or he could head south, across the town’s main street, and get to Third Master Fan’s that way. But that meant he would have to pass by the church, and at this hour, the tall, heavyset, redheaded, blue-eyed Pastor Malory would be squatting beneath the prickly ash tree, with its pungent aroma, milking his old goat, the one with the scraggly chin whiskers, squeezing her red, swollen teats with large, soft, hairy hands, and sending milk so white it seemed almost blue splashing into a rusty enamel bowl. Swarms of redheaded flies always buzzed around Pastor Malory and his goat. The pungency of the prickly ash, the muttony smell of the goat, and the man’s rank body odor blended into a foul miasma that swelled in the sunlit air and polluted half the block. Nothing bothered Shangguan Shouxi more than the prospect of Pastor Malory looking up from behind his goat, both of them stinking to high heaven, and casting one of those ambiguous glances his way, even though the hint of a compassionate smile showed that it was given in friendship. When he smiled, Pastor Malory displayed teeth as white as those of a horse. He was forever dragging his dirty finger back and forth across his chest — Amen! And every time that happened, Shangguan Shouxi’s stomach lurched amid a flood of mixed feelings, until he turned tail and ran like a whipped dog. He avoided the vicious dogs at the mutes’ house out of fear; he avoided Pastor Malory and his milk goat out of disgust. What irritated him most was that his wife, Shangguan Lu, had special feelings for this redheaded devil. She was his devout follower, he was her god.
    After wrestling with his thoughts for a long moment, Shangguan Shouxi decided to take the north and east route, even though the watchtower, with Sima Ting standing on its perch, and the scene below had him in its thrall. Everything seemed normal down here, except, of course, for the steward, who was acting like a monkey. No longer petrified by the prospect of encountering Jap devils, he had to admire his mother’s ability to size up a situation. But just to be on the safe side, he bent down and picked up a couple of bricks. He heard the braying of a little donkey somewhere and a mother calling to her children.
    As he walked past the Sun compound, he was relieved to see that the wall was deserted: no mutes saddled in the breaches, no chickens perched on top, and, most importantly, no dogs sprawled lazily at the base. A low wall to begin with, the breaches brought it even closer to the ground, and that gave him an unobstructed view of the yard, where a slaughtering was in progress. The victims were the family’s proud but lonely chickens; the butcher was Aunty Sun, a woman of ample martial talents. People said that when she was young, she was a renowned bandit who could leap over eaves and walk on walls. But when she fell afoul of the law, she had no choice but to marry a stove repairman named Sun.
    Shangguan Shouxi counted the corpses of seven chickens, glossy white, with splotches of blood here and there the only traces of their death struggles. An eighth chicken, its throat cut, flew out of Aunty Sun’s hand and thudded to the ground, where it tucked in its neck, flapped its wings, and ran around in circles. The five mutes, stripped to