The Vagrants

Every afternoon after school, Tong went to the city square, where the day's newspapers were displayed in glass cases. There were more than a dozen to choose from, newspapers printed both in Beijing and in the provincial capital, but for Tong, the most important one was Muddy River Daily,

from which he copied the temperatures of the local weather forecast into his journal. Tong had read, in an outdated copy of Children's Quarterly,

that Old Hua had found a few weeks earlier, about a boy who had for years recorded temperatures three times a day in a nature journal. The year the boy turned thirteen, he noticed a change in the temperature pattern and successfully predicted an earthquake, earning him the title of “Science Hero” for saving people's lives. The story did not say what kind of change the boy had noticed, leaving Tong to construct his own theory about that, but the article showed him a new way to become a hero. His parents, of course, would say they did not have money idling in their pocket for a thermometer, so Tong did not ask. Instead, he decided to use the local newspaper. When Old Hua heard about the nature journal, he wondered why anyone needed to rely on the numbers at all, when one's own skin was the best way to detect minute changes in the air temperature. Tong did not tell the old man of his plan, holding on to the secret and hoping that one day Muddy River would thank him for his vigilance.

According to the weather forecast, the temperature had climbed above the freezing point on March 22, the day after the denunciation ceremony, and the wind in the midafternoon no longer felt like a razor on one's face. Children left school bareheaded, some throwing their hats high into the sky and then catching them as they fell. Ear came home in the evening with a girl's pink mitten, a hole in the tip of the thumb; Tong tried it on, the right size for his hand, and he wiggled his thumb out of the hole, pretending it was a puppet. He told Ear that they would put the mitten by Chairman Mao's statue the following morning, in case the girl, like himself, liked the city square.

The next morning, Tong went out into the alley and saw leaflets posted on the wall, within his reach if he stood on a stack of bricks. Tong peeled one off the wall and read it. The leaflet talked about things that Tong did not understand, and two days later, another leaflet found its way to their alley. The secretive way they came to his door alarmed Tong. They reminded him of the stories he had learned in school, about underground Communist Party members risking their lives to spread the truth to the people, but in the new China, where everybody lived as happily as if in a jar of honey, like it said in the new song they had just learned at school, what use did they have for the leaflets?

Tong wondered whom he could talk to. His parents would not be interested in listening to him, and his schoolteacher taught as if nothing had happened. He patted Ear and said they should team up and solve the mystery together. “Show me anything suspicious,” Tong said. “Nothing is too small.”

Ear circled Tong agitatedly. Tong did not know that Ear had heard, the previous nights, muffled steps in the alley, stopping and then continuing. Ear had jumped as high as he could and then stood with his front paws on the fence, sniffing, but his latest training prevented him from sounding the alarm. Both nights it was the same person, whose scent, of earth and horse manure and winter hay stacks and harvested wheat, reminded Ear of his home village. Like Tong and Ear himself, the night stranger had come from the countryside, where Ear had once chased a squealing piglet until he bumped into the mountainlike body of a sow unperturbed by her baby's dilemma, and where he had barked many times at the passing horse wagon, on which sat a hitchhiking peddler, his rattle drum flipped briskly in his skillful hand, the plimp-plump, plimp-plump never overpowered by the barking of Ear and his companions. In the past six months, Ear had gotten used to the villagers from the mountains who brought with them the smell of stale snow and ancient pine trees, of freshly skinned hares and newly gathered mushrooms, but they were different from the smell of his home on the plain. The stranger at night made Ear fretful.