Chapter 17 Someone at the Door
Winter came fast. A few blasts of north wind, and the temperature dropped hard.
My dump of a place had no heat. It was cold as an ice cellar.
When I was young, I had fire in me. I could tough it out.
Now the years had caught up, plus the problems I had picked up in prison. I really could not take this damp cold.
I gritted my teeth, pulled a few bills from savings that were already tight, and went to the wholesale market. I bought two of the thickest down jackets, puffy as a bear.
I added a cheap electric blanket. That was enough to scrape by.
That day I carried the new down jackets and some cheap vegetables, my feet frozen stiff, shuffling back to my place.
I had just reached the stairwell when I saw a figure curled up at my door.
It was a half-grown kid in a thin jacket, shaking with cold. His chestnut hair looked messy in the wind.
A fat woven sack sat by his feet.
He kept stamping, blowing into palms that had gone red from the freeze.
When he heard my footsteps, he jerked his head up.
The second he saw me, those roundish eyes lit up, like he had spotted a savior.
"Qin Ye!"
He called out, his voice shaking with a wronged tremor.
It was Tang Xiaomang.
He and Lao Zhang had both been my cellmates back then.
Lao Zhang had gone in for bribery. The man behind it had nearly had him silenced.
I was the one who saved him.
Tang Xiaomang had gone in because he had killed someone by accident.
The man he killed was his dad.
His dad had been a gambler and a drunk. Whenever he got wasted, he beat Tang Xiaomang's mom.
One day his dad lost money and started beating her at home again.
Tang Xiaomang stepped in to stop it, could not control his strength, and killed his dad by accident.
Luckily he had still been under eighteen when it happened. He ended up with six years.
When he first went in, we were not in the same cell. But I kept running into him getting pushed around by the others.
I did not know why. Every time I saw him hunch his shoulders and swallow it, I would think of Ji Yanli at sixteen, getting beaten too.
I steeled myself and started looking out for him.
Once we got familiar, he insisted on taking me as his older brother, and even went to the warden to request a cell transfer.
In the end we became bunkmates, one up, one down.
He finished his sentence half a year before I did, and got out first.