Fatty asked me for the money as soon as he finished speaking. I took out five yuan, but before I gave it to him, I heard a middle-aged woman speaking in a dialect over the phone.

As Fatty paused, I took the money back. He then asked in the Fujian dialect, "Sister, why are you answering the phone in our house? What about our handsome brother?”

I didn't have Fatty's talent for language, so I couldn't understand the other person's answer, but the two people soon started to argue.

For a period of time after we left, we always got a busy tone whenever we called the house. Fatty had said that Little Brother was putting on airs in front of us and was always on the phone after we left. We later learned that as soon as we left, the aunts in the village came to our house to make long-distance calls to their sons and grandchildren, which lasted for four or five hours.

The weather was very hot and Fatty was being noisy as he argued on the phone. I was just starting to feel really irritated when I noticed that my body was soaked in sweat and my neck and ankles were starting to itch. I looked down and saw that a bunch of bugs the size of sesame seeds were sucking my blood.

When I went to check Fatty, I found that the back of his neck and arms were full of those sesame-sized black bugs. Amazingly enough, they were all on the back of his arms, behind his neck, and behind his ankles, which were hard for people to see. I rushed over and smacked them to death.

Fatty was startled, but I quickly showed him the bug remnants that were on my hand. He jumped up in fright and started slapping himself all over.

But he and I were already covered in tiny red bumps that made us look like we had a skin disease. The itching was absolutely unbearable.

Fatty suddenly became enraged and yelled into the phone, "You stupid bitch, put the phone down and tell our handsome brother to answer!"

The two of us ran out of the woods and fled back to the village. After he was done arguing, Fatty hung up the phone and said that Poker-Face wasn’t there. He asked the aunt to wait for him to come back and tell him that we had called. Fatty looked at his hands and ankles and said, "I told you we’d need him, but you didn’t believe me."

I figured he definitely wouldn’t be able to come. It would take at least a day to get from Fujian to here, and if Poker-Face was absent, that meant he was in the mountains. It usually took him about a week to go into the mountains and come back, so by the time we finished, he might not have left the mountains yet. And even though I often joked about it, I really couldn’t use him as a mosquito-repellent.

So, I unhesitatingly went back to the village wholesale station and bought shovels, ropes, candles, flashlights, waist-high rubber pants, and rubber gloves.

The jianbing (1) in the village were good, but different from those I was familiar with. They were more like very thin dry cakes. I bought a big bag of them and wrapped them in plastic bags and newspapers. Once all that was done, we carried everything back to the wild mountain slope full of graves.

As we walked, I repeatedly cross-checked the photo with the mountains in the distance. Uncle Three was really young at that time, so it should have been before he went to Xisha. I was a little dazed when I thought of my current age.

I felt like I was doing what Uncle Three had done my whole life, but with our equipment, we looked like a bunch of housewives cleaning toilets instead.

It was dark, and the light from the setting sun was hidden behind the mountains. Only a halo of light like cotton wool was peeking out from behind the silhouette of the mountains. In the distance, we could see the lights in the village were all on. It was only when we looked up that we could see the faint sky shimmering between the leaves in the forest. It was a little cooler at night, but that didn’t stop all the bugs from assaulting our heads. We covered our faces in bug spray, but that just made it even hotter. The sweat dissolved the spray, causing it to drip straight down our bodies and make us look like melted wax figures.

The shovel wasn’t a specialized drilling shovel, so we sawed off the handle and used the short end to dig. After we dug three meters down, we found that there was a ready-made grave robbers’ tunnel below. It was covered in wooden planks and had been dug very skillfully. It was spacious, and there were many pit marks in it that were lined with brick.

The tunnel had been dug diagonally so that it hit the mountain directly. Fatty tidied everything up, took out a bamboo plaque, and covered it with soil so that it looked like the ground. He then turned on the flashlight and we climbed down, covering the hole with the bamboo plaque as we went. Within twenty meters, we saw the outer wall of the tomb. The opening was blocked with new bricks that hadn’t collapsed yet.

Fatty glanced at it. There was a small stove, some wine bottles, instant noodle packages, and many hot water kettles in the small grave robbers’ tunnel outside the tomb. "So fastidious,” he said. “You can tell that this was a multi-generational operation. Maybe there’s even a place to charge your phone in here."

I tried to pry open the new bricks, but Fatty stopped me. "Wait, something’s wrong."He used a flashlight to illuminate the space where the ground met the tomb entrance. There were a lot of traces of incense ash and paper debris, many of which hadn’t been burned all the way through. He carefully looked around the tomb’s outer wall and saw some faded scarlet letters: "Tomb of loving father, Yang Gong Guilong".

"What does that mean?" Fatty asked.

"You're right,” I said. “Mr. Yang really is inside, and—" I immediately noticed some more strange things. I wiped the outer wall of the tomb with my hands, removing a thick layer of dust and revealing more inscriptions. They were all names that looked like they belonged on tombstones. There were about a dozen of them, and they were all surnamed Yang.

"The whole Yang family is inside. They all made a living off this tomb and were buried in it after they died?"

"Why?" Fatty asked. "Were they just being stingy?"

"There’s always a reason. We’ll know once we open this tomb." I went up, paid my respects, and then broke the bricks apart to expose the hole. I took the lead and went in, looking around with my flashlight.

The tomb’s vault was very short, so I could only squat as I moved forward. My first reaction was surprise. I thought it was going to be a big, thousand-year-old tomb, but a single glance showed that it wasn’t. This tomb was very recent, and I estimated that it was from the Qing Dynasty at the earliest. But as I looked at the chaotic layout, Western-style patterns, and the glazed tiles that had been pressed out by high-tech machines, I felt that it may even be a tomb from the Republic.

But strangely enough, this tomb had frescoes on the four walls. Because of their age, the frescoes were mottled but not yet oxidized. The frescoes were very exquisite, which was a stark contrast to the vault’s simple structure. I used my flashlight to illuminate the ground and saw a row of spirit tablets lying against the wall. There were rotten offerings and a lot of paper ashes in front of them, but I didn't see any coffins or bones.

"What about the goods?" Fatty asked. "Is this tomb that big?"

I could tell that he was very disappointed, but I ignored him and stared at the murals instead. There were a lot of dark clouds and lightning strikes painted on them.

****

TN Notes:

(1) A savory Chinese crêpe/pancake