Free The Boat to Redemption by Su Tong Page B

he’d have been the one drinking the DDT.’
    I’d have liked to keep the debate with Liu going, but I glanced down at the pier, where Zhao Chunmei was still looking daggers
     at me. Thrown off stride, I reacted with foul language. ‘What’s that cunt up to? Her old man’s dead, so that’s the end of
     it. Don’t tell me my dad has a blood debt. And even if he did, what’s that got to do with me?’
    ‘What kind of gutter talk is that?’ Liu said with a frown. ‘A comrade who’s just lost her husband doesn’t deserve to be spoken
     about like that. Nobody’s asking your dad to repay a blood debt. She’s backed herself into a corner, and all she can do is
     come down to the pier to get him to put on mourning attire and pay his respects at Little Tang’s grave.’
    This was probably the only useful thing Liu said to me up there, because now the sight of Zhao Chunmei down below was more
     terrifying than ever. I’d have liked to stay up there in the cage, but Liu sent me back down, saying that safety regulations
     did not permit idlers, though the real reason was his unhappiness over my gutter talk.
    As soon as I was back on the ground, Zhao Chunmei walked towards me, taking a strip of white cloth out of her overcoat pocket
     and waving it in the air. ‘Ku Wenxuan’s whelp,’ she shouted. ‘Since your dad’s not here, you can wear this.’
    I was horrified. She must be crazy to think I’d wear something like that. ‘Dream on!’ I said, before taking off and running
     up the mountain of coal. She ran after me for a few steps, but when she realized she’d never catch me, she turned and headed
     back tothe pier to wait for my dad, grumbling to herself and tucking the white sash back into her pocket.
    I spent the rest of the morning on top of the coal, waiting for the fleet to return, while Zhao Chunmei waited down below.
     Two enemies, each with their own thoughts, awaited the return of the same person – my father.
    Finally, the sun got up the nerve to climb into the sky, making the piers shimmer. Off in the distance I heard the toot of
     a tugboat and saw the hazy outlines of the fleet. From where I stood, the string of barges looked like an archipelago, eleven
     floating islands approaching in an orderly fashion. I assumed they were carrying cargo from the town of Wufu. Goods from most
     places could be shipped uncovered, making them easy to identify. But Wufu commodities were different. The barges approached
     the piers, their cargo covered by dark-green tarpaulins, and I knew there would be large sealed crates with no delivery addresses
     under the tarps. They’d be marked with coded Arabic numerals and foreign lettering. I knew without looking that this cargo
     was destined to wind up at the Southern Combat Readiness Base.
    From where I stood I could see barge number seven, and there was my father. The other barges were shrouded in green tarps,
     like a secretive collective body; number seven stood out from the others by the way its decks were open to the sky. The forward
     hold was packed with squirming black and white animals. At first I couldn’t tell what they were, but soon I realized it was
     a boatful of pigs – our barge was transporting thirty or forty pigs! My father, bent at the waist beside the hold, was trying
     to control a boatload of black, white and spotted pigs. After driving me off the barge, he’d gone off to pick up some honoured
     guests. Now, days later, he was bringing a boatload of live pigs to Milltown.
    It was around eight in the morning. The loudspeakers were blaring callisthenics music that drowned out the tugboat’s whistle.
     The barges were ready to dock, sending water splashing in alldirections and galvanizing the crews into action – they dropped anchor and secured the boats with hawsers. I saw my father
     standing in the bow, not knowing what to do until Desheng ran up and helped him drop anchor. A husky man’s voice came over
     the loudspeaker –