A dissatisfactory yearend VII

So his enthusiasm for public duty was benumbed. “Why should I question the brat now?” he asked himself. He came quickly to the conclusion that he didn't have any time for the boy. It's much, much better to go to the back room at once to drink and make merry.

Why not? It's a holiday today anyway. But could Zha Daren release the scared boy? Oh, no. It's not proper. Well, the easiest thing the police officer could have done was to order the poor little kid to get on his knees on the floor for a while. “Get on your knees,” the cop commanded. While the boy was kneeling, the officer went right back to the back room. The merry-making noise in the back room got all the louder then.

After quite some time - no one knew exactly how long - the noise died down. The back room was quiet again. More than tipsy, Zha Daren was there alone. He was pleasantly drunk. While he was dreamily enjoying himself, he thought he heard a boy crying. The police officer opened his drunken eyes. He then tried to get up but his limbs didn't obey the orders from his brain after having indulged himself in bacchanalian pleasures for so long.

“Brat,” Zha Daren cursed the boy (who was still on his knees in the interrogation room). That was the only guttural and hateful sound heard in the silent back room where the cop had drunk himself to sleep. “He ruined my celestial pleasure!”

Then the cop went right back to sleep. He was taken captive by the God of Night at once. He snored in his lethargic sleep, his face beaming radiantly in the shining electric light of the back room like the typical one of a champion in his triumphant moment.

Note: Quite a number of roadside gambling games were tacitly allowed on some festive occasions while Taiwan was under Japanese occupation. One of the most popular fraudulent games that was played was known as “guessing where the pea is.” A con man would show a pea and cover it under one of three small rice bowls or tea cups put upside down. By his sleight of hand, he would mislead bettors to guess wrongly where the pea was. Of course, he would first let the dummies guess right and win to get them to bet again and guess wrong. Another popular gambling game was Chinese dominoes. Yet another one was the throwing of dice. Two dices were usually thrown by the gambling boss and players. Each die has six dots. Twelve dots is the best score and three the lowest. A pair of dots beat any unpaired sum of dots. It was a one-to-one game. A player who anted threw first. If he won, he would be paid the sum he wagered.

The next in the series on Lai He's fiction is Mr. Snake or She Xiang-sheng (蛇先生).

The Lai He Fiction serialization, sponsored by the Council for Hakka Affairs, is provided by the Central News Agency.

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