Money Boy Read Free

“Back off!
Want to die?”
    With a dull thud, the scaffold crashes to the
ground, along with half of the upper frame.
    â€œI told you, but you didn’t listen!” Uncle Bei
laughs so hard that his teeth are going to fly out. “You measured wrong for your
batch of concrete. Look at my posts! Nothing wrong with them!”
    â€œYou should have stopped me!” Ba mutters. “This is
blood-and-sweat money wasted.”
    Ba’s face falls apart from disbelief. It’s not a
look I see often. My father thinks he is close to perfection.
    This collapse will enrage him, coming so soon after
the failure of his fitness studio. Good.
    A car door slams in the driveway. Niang has come
home to shower and change from slacks into a dress for the evening. She enters
the backyard.
    Uncle Bei dances over, laughing all the while.
    â€œLook at that dumb melon husband of yours,” he
gloats. “I told him to follow me in mixing the concrete, but he didn’t
listen.”
    If Niang starts to chuckle, I may join in. Ba will
be humiliated. She told him several times to hire real carpenters. She doubted
that his English was good enough to read the instructions.
    Niang walks around the wrecked bandstand. She tugs
at the standing posts, testing their strength.
    I am edging away when she says to Ba, “What are you
waiting for? We need to move the metal off the wood.”
    She hollers for me, and I move quickly. I never
give her any reason to scold me. Niang gets things done quickly, which is good
for a house of lazy guys. As a teenager, she trekked alone into the city to look
for wage work. After several hungry days, she started washing dishes in the
laneway behind a restaurant. Then she learned the business by watching.
    â€œYour daughter, Yan, brought friends to the
restaurant,” she tells Uncle Bei.
    Together, the four of us lift the aluminum off the
wood. No one knows which way we should go.
    â€œI told them not to pay,” Niang continues, “but
they wouldn’t listen. They left a stack of cash behind.”
    â€œStupid girl,” Uncle Bei grunts. “You should remind
her that she’s spending my money.”
    â€œShe needs foreigner friends.”
    â€œShe’ll make them at university.”
    â€œShe should broaden her circle now.”
    Ba orders us to lean the scaffold against the fence
in order to prevent damage to his precious lawn. Head down, he trudges inside.
    â€œI have to make a phone call,” he mumbles.
    He’s trying to save face, that’s all.
    â€œGood thing you’re not building the Beijing
Stadium,” Uncle Bei calls. “Otherwise our Olympic Games would have been
cancelled this year!”
    I get back to the raid just in time. Monkey and
Long Range are angry.
    Shit Egg, you will regret
jerking us around.
    You Dog Fart, go play
elsewhere if you can’t be on time.
    No time to explain. Long Range and I are stronger,
so we row the skiff. The sea is calm. It’s so dark that the enemy can’t see us,
nor can we see them. We almost crash into the warships.
    The signal comes, Monkey strikes the flint, and
Long Range shoots flaming arrows at the ships.
    We hear loud splashes and then our retreat signal.
Enemy Water Warriors are coming!
    We’re rowing as fast as we can when a dark figure
swings aboard our skiff. I charge forward with my sword. He twists to the side.
We both sway.
    Long Range has one last arrow, but she can’t see in
the dark. If she shoots blindly, then there’s a fifty-fifty chance that she’ll
kill me. And Monkey is too far away to help.

TWO
    Next day, I rush home after school. Music and graphics are sharper and clearer on the desktop, so I’d rather play my games there.
    This morning, Central’s navy sailed into our harbor, using two damaged ships as shields against our fireballs. One ship was the one my team attacked yesterday. We should have sunk it by diving underwater and drilling