The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu

by Tom Lin

  “Yes,” Hunter said.

  “Two of my three miracles,” the ringmaster said, and cast a wary glance in Proteus’s direction. “I’m a businessman, Mr. Tsu. The most important thing I can do is protect my assets. And by democratic procedure they elect to keep you around. Take us through to Reno.” He signaled to Gomez and Notah to begin taking down the tent and the two stagehands nodded and left. Since the lawmen had seen Ming from the railroad, the ringmaster said, they couldn’t risk that again. They’d need to go a different way to Winnemucca, a path far from the railroad.

  Ming left and in a moment he returned with his notebook and opened to the map he’d been examining the night before. There was a cattle trail about seventy miles south of the railroad, he said, and ran his finger along the dotted line to show the ringmaster. West through Copper Basin, then south around Antler Peak and on toward Sonoma Peak. Ming squinted at the map awhile and indicated a couple of places they could get water. On the morning of the fifth day, he reckoned, they would need to take on extra water for the horses, and drive them slow and easy the rest of the way. They would reach Winnemucca in a week or so, given good weather and clear trails.

  “And we’ll need provisions,” Ming said. “No more trout fishing. Five hours or not, I spose I can’t show my face in town. But I need lead and powder, four pounds each.”

  The ringmaster studied the map himself, then straightened up and called out to the rest of the party: “All of you. Make your preparations.” He turned to Ming. “I’ll gather provisions. Lead and powder too. We leave at once.”

  Part Two

  23

  The cattle trail was narrow and winding and paved with the hoofprints of numberless beasts. The prophet said they were following the tracks of some antediluvian flood that had come through before there were men to tell of its coming. He said that the flood had carved these vast flats into what had once been a lofty plateau, and that it carried with it in its unfathomable depths boulders as big as houses. That in the churning violence of its waters these boulders were ground to sand, bleached white as bone, and scattered widely over the land, fragmentary relics of the Arctic lakeshores that first bore and bodied the flood. How the old man knew this—if, as he said, there was no one to see that ancient flood—was the ringmaster’s question. And at this the prophet smiled and swept his arm out across all the land and said that this was a history wrought into the earth itself, laid bare for all men to read.

  They moved downward across the skin of the land, passing the exhausted mine pits dug by copper prospectors who had found no riches and abandoned the place. On the horizon behind them the dark blot of Battle Mountain shrank and shrank until it dissolved into the shimmering haze rising from the desert floor. They crept through the heat, squinting into the sun.

  Then in the gathering gloom of a summer twilight they made silent camp and at Ming’s instruction Notah built a roaring fire that shot embers ten feet into the sky. In an iron pan Ming melted the lead the ringmaster had fetched and with sweat beading from his forehead he ladled the metal out into molds for bullets. Hunter watched him entranced, his face lit unevenly by the fire. When Ming was finished he dug a small pit in the sand, wet its walls with water from his canteen, and poured the remaining lead into the hole, where it snapped and hissed.

  They ate rations of salt beef and hardtack as the fire shrank to coals. After he had eaten Ming worked his calloused fingers around the lump of lead in the ground and dug it out, brushing grains of sand from its stippled surface. He offered the still-warm ingot to the boy, who took it and turned it this way and that by the dim red glow of the embers. How the light warped and flared.

  Hazel stood up and tapped the boy on the shoulder, motioning to their tents and miming sleep. Time to go. Reluctantly the boy passed the lump of lead back to Ming and the two of them bid the rest good night. In the firepit the embers worked themselves into little cocoons of ash, dimming all the while. Notah and Gomez retired to their tents, followed shortly by the prophet and Proteus. Only the ringmaster and Ming were left fireside.

  The ringmaster was drinking whiskey from his tarnished silver flask, polishing it on his vest in between drams until he’d worked one corner of the flask to a dull luster. “Small sips,” he said, as though giving himself instruction, “small sips to keep this rotgut down.” He tipped more into his mouth, suppressed a cough, and then, shaking his head, forced the liquor down. The ringmaster closed an eye and sighted down the flask into the firepit. He corked his flask and regarded Ming. “Mr. Tsu,” he said, “how many people have you killed?”

  “Even if I knew,” Ming answered, “and I don’t, I wouldn’t care to say.”

  The ringmaster chuckled. “Fair. How about an exchange, then? An answer for an answer.”

  Ming considered this awhile, digging a fingernail into the lead and prying out a few grains of sand. “Fine.”

  “Very well.” The ringmaster spat a little on his flask and set to polishing another corner. “How many people do you reckon you’ve killed?”

  “About two hundred, I’d wager.”

  The ringmaster whistled. “Who was your first?”

  Ming clicked his tongue. “My turn.” He was tumbling the lead ingot end over end in his hands, examining it. “Where’d you find Hazel?”

  Omaha, the ringmaster told him. Hazel had been running a sideshow act with her husband. He’d offered them protection and they agreed to work with him. They were attacked by Indians in Green River and her husband was killed. The ringmaster lost three of his own men. A bloody day. But Hazel stayed with him—his first miracle, and for a while, before he found Hunter Reed, the only one.

  So Ming had lain with a widow, then. He glanced in the direction of Hazel’s tent as though to check if she’d overheard them, or perhaps to ensure that she hadn’t. It was too dark to tell either way. Unsure what to make of the ringmaster’s account he busied himself with inspecting the lump of lead in his hands. There was a stubborn bit of earth wedged into a crevice in the ingot and drawing his spike he began levering out the dirt with great patience. “Your turn,” he said.

  “Your English is as good as mine,” the ringmaster said. “How’d you come to speak it?”

  “Always have.”

  “A satisfactory answer for a satisfactory answer, Mr. Tsu. This is our agreement. You must elaborate.”

  Ming put down the lead and his spike and looked at the ringmaster. “Fair.” He reached down to a loose ball he’d cast earlier and tested its temperature. Cool to the touch now. He began to collect the lead balls in his hand. He was an orphan, he told the ringmaster. His parents had come from China, and his mother had died here in childbirth. His father, not knowing what to do with a baby, had given him up to an orphanage. Ming had been raised by a caretaker, a man by the name of Silas Root.

  “Ah, yes,” the ringmaster said. “An American. I recall Ms. Lockewood and I spoke of this Silas Root.”

  “So you already know,” Ming said. “No point in telling you twice.”

  “I wanted to hear it from the horse’s mouth.” The ringmaster grinned. “So Silas Root learned you how to speak English?”

  “Aye.” Ming brought his face close to the dwindling light from the fire and opened his mouth. “Look,” he said, and curled his tongue upward.

  The ringmaster leaned in to see. A thin silvery scar ran down the underside of Ming’s tongue. He closed his mouth and sat back.

  For a long time, Ming said, he couldn’t speak. Some said he was mute. But Silas knew he was only tongue-tied. One night when he was still very young a surgeon came to see him. He gave Ming a rag soaked in whiskey and told him to hold it under his tongue. Ming bit a block of wood and rawhide and then the surgeon cut his tongue free. For six days he spat blood. On the seventh, Ming said, he could speak. He picked up the last of the cast bullets and tucked them into a drawstring pouch.

  “Silas found me in the orphanage,” Ming said. “He saved me from a life of misery.”

  “Good ma
n.”

  “Aye, but not for that. He took me in for his own reasons. His own ends.”

  “Murder.”

  “Aye,” Ming said, his voice quieter, softer. “Don’t sound so noble of him, does it.” He picked at a pebble lodged in his boot sole, rolled it between his fingers. “Ain’t nobody ever paid attention to a Chinaman mindin his own business, he’d say, and there sure as hell ain’t nobody ever remember enough to pick em out for the sheriff. To the law, ain’t none of us different from any other. Hell, out in the Sierras, they ain’t ever even wrote our names down, just kept countin heads. Well, save for Ellis. That sonofabitch cut my queue specially so he could pick me out from the others.” He paused, his thoughts briefly elsewhere. “And the old man was right like he was always. Folks never paid me no mind.” He found himself recalling Silas, and Sacramento, the darkened houses he had crept through, his hands slick with blood not his own. With a start he caught himself and shook his head as though dislodging memories. “Silas was a good man,” he said. “And he’s dead, anyway.” He met the ringmaster’s gaze. “Satisfied?”

  “Remarkable,” the ringmaster breathed. “Your turn.”

  Ming asked if Hazel spoke often of her husband.

  “She used to. And for a long time after he died she did not wish to perform. At last I sent Notah to see to her.”

  “To make her forget.”

  “It was what she wanted. It was merely that she did not know to ask. I let her mourn as long as I could, but enough was enough.”

  Ming stared at the ringmaster a long time, unsure of what to say. He wanted to shake the ringmaster by his tattered lapels, demand by what right he thought it his place to darken Hazel’s memories. And yet there also rose in him a feeling of relief, bare and shameful, that she might not remember her husband any longer. He glanced in the direction of Hazel’s tent. It was too dark. There was nothing to see.

  “My turn,” the ringmaster said. “How did you come to be so skilled in your trade?”

  “No more,” Ming said. He rose and brushed the dirt off his trousers. “Good night.”

  The ringmaster pitched a handful of sand over the embers and nodded. “Good night, then, Mr. Tsu.”

  24

  They crossed into the lengthening shadow of Antler Peak in the annealing afternoon heat of the third day. At the foothills of the range they followed strange markings in the stones to a shaded pit beneath a blackstone bluff and there they found water pooling cold and clean, just as Ming’s copied map had promised. Railroad surveyors always did careful work. The horses watched parched and anxious while the party filled their canteens and only then were the animals allowed to approach the pool and drink and in a matter of minutes they drained all that remained in the small wellspring. Ming sat on the running board of the stagecoach and worked his railroad spike to a mirror finish, iron scraping against whetstone. Night fell upon them suddenly. They ringed the fire in a tight circle, their backs hunched against the desert chill. Hazel and the boy had gone to their tents. The prophet was humming to himself.

  “What’s that tune, old man?” Proteus asked gruffly.

  The prophet stopped and smiled. He fixed his clouded eyes on the ringmaster’s double. “An old elegy,” he said, and resumed humming.

  “The hell’s an elegy?” Gomez cut in.

  “A song for the dead,” the ringmaster replied. He plucked a burning twig from the fire and lit his pipe.

  “There any words in them songs?” Gomez asked.

  The prophet shook his head. “In time all songs lose their words. And in time beyond time most lose even their music. Songs without language or melody become as dreams, persisting in the mind without reason, without substance. There is only the memory of the song once having been.”

  “Who’s it for?” Gomez said.

  “Every dead,” the prophet answered.

  The ringmaster pulled deeply from his pipe and regarded the prophet with a kind of reverence. “Your companion Mr. Tsu tells me you have no memory,” he said.

  “Yes,” the prophet said.

  “What good is an elegy sung by a man who cannot remember?”

  “And you, sir,” the prophet said, “can you remember?”

  “Of course,” the ringmaster said.

  “And you?” the prophet asked Gomez.

  “Aye,” the Mexican said.

  “And you.” To Proteus.

  The pagan nodded. “Aye.”

  “Even you,” the prophet said, gazing sightlessly at Notah, “you who change men’s memories?”

  “Yes,” the Navajo said.

  The prophet fell silent for a moment, then said, “It is not so. No man truly remembers the past. Those who claim to are mistaken. Remembrance is the burden of the body, not of the mind. True memory is not to be recollected. It is a rite to be performed.” He turned to Notah. “You,” he said. “Are there not memories impossible to erase?”

  “Aye,” Notah said, “memories of place, and routine.”

  “These are true memories,” the prophet said. “The past enacted continuously in the present. Rituals. Habits. True memories sound on registers below what the mind can touch. Men can misremember. Men can lie. But the body cannot forget. It has no means of forgetting.” He extended a withered arm and pulled back his sleeve to reveal a spiderweb of thin white scars encircling his wrist. “Flesh rubbed raw from irons,” he murmured. “My body remembers a time when it was in chains, even while I cannot.”

  The ringmaster seemed to take this in. He stretched out his hands and warmed them, moving them this way and that in the low light from the dwindling fire. There were scars there too, over his knuckles, pale lines across the grain of the skin of his palms. From where Ming sat the scars seemed to shine.

  “You asked me,” the prophet said, “what good an elegy is when sung by a man who cannot remember. But all men cannot remember.” His voice was clear and lucid. “An elegy is good merely because it is sung. And when its words are lost, it is still good, because it is sung. And when its melody, too, has been washed away, it is still good, because it was once sung.” He rose to his feet and cast his blind eyes over the men sitting round the fire. “To sing at all is to labor, and it is only by labor that men living recall the shadows of men passed. This is what it means to remember.”

  At this the prophet turned and was swallowed up by the darkness.

  25

  It was shortly after noon on the fifth day when Ming, in a scout position beyond the others, ran back and told them to halt. “Could be trouble,” he said, and looked at the prophet, mounted high in the saddle of his pinto. “What do you see comin, old man?”

  “No harm,” the prophet said after a pause.

  Ming commanded everyone to wait in any case. “Don’t move until I give the word,” he said, and set out back down the trail, his gun drawn.

  When he was close to what he’d seen he lay down and flattened himself out on the earth and began to crawl, slow and deliberate. Soon he encountered it again. A tree, blasted and lonesome, skeletal against the sky. There was fresh water near here. Or would have been. Doubtless the spring was poisoned now. For from one of the tree’s blackened boughs there hung a short length of rope, and from this rope hung a body.

  Ming kept crawling on his belly until he was forty paces from the tree. He held his gun before him, one eye trained down the sights. He’d heard tell of Indian ambushes like this one. People said Indians would take a settler prisoner and ride him out into the barrens, scalp him, and string him up as a lure for passersby. And when God-fearing men came to cut him down the Indians would emerge from their hiding places and spring upon those unlucky bastards. This and worse Ming had heard. In truth he put little stock in things he had heard and not seen. But he had been through one ambush already on this wretched trail, so he lay on his belly and waited.

  Nothing moved but for the body swinging slowly in the wind. He could not say how long he waited there, only that the day had begun to cool when he was at last sati
sfied that he and the body were truly alone. He approached the tree, still somewhat warily, his sun-warmed gun cocked in his hand. Up close Ming could see that the hanged man was no white settler but in fact an Indian. He was suspended by his ankles like a slaughtered carcass. A single iron hook black with dried blood had been forced through the spaces behind his Achilles tendons and from this hook his body dangled down.

  The warrior had been stripped nude, exposing a broad chest perforated with rifleball. With hollow sockets he stared at an inverted landscape, tracks of dried blood running up his forehead. His throat was ragged and torn. How similar the work of vultures and coyotes was to the violence of men. The man had been scalped and his exposed skull shone white and garish in the afternoon sunlight, a disc of bone ringed by skin that had begun to curl in the endless heat.

  Suddenly the wind shifted and threw the putrid scent of death toward Ming and he staggered backward retching. He turned and stumbled a half dozen steps and fell to his hands and knees. Staring into the blue distance he vomited nothing, his body wracking with each dry heave, nothing but thin yellow bile dribbling down onto the parched sand. When he was finished he wiped his mouth with his sleeve and pushed sand over where he’d vomited until the bile disappeared. He eased to his feet and picked up his gun, his body still pulsing with fading shudders.

  Then he walked back to the others and told them what he’d witnessed. Hunter heard not a word of it, did not understand why Ming lifted him up into the stagecoach and clambered in after him and for a little while pressed the boy’s face into the rough fabric of his shirt.

  They kept moving deep into the night, well past the poisoned spring, out into the vast expanse between Antler and Sonoma Peaks. When they at last stopped to make camp they were too exhausted to even raise their tents. Notah built a small fire and around it they laid out their bedrolls. They would sleep under the stars tonight.