The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu

by Tom Lin

  “There’s no water anymore, is there?” Hazel said.

  “We’ve six gallons left in the coach,” the ringmaster said.

  “The horses will die,” she said.

  “Will they?” Ming asked the prophet, not looking up from the fire.

  “No,” the prophet said.

  Hazel looked at him questioningly and asked him what he meant.

  “The horses will not die,” the prophet repeated, “and there will be water tomorrow.”

  “You’ll dowse for it?” the ringmaster said.

  “A storm approaches,” the old man said, and cast his face skyward.

  They followed his gaze into the clear night sky.

  “I reckon not, old man,” scoffed the pagan.

  “Have faith,” the prophet said. “It will come.”

  “Then it’s settled,” the ringmaster said, reclining on his bedroll. “Rest easy, gentlemen.”

  Ming brushed bits of sand from his bedroll and lay down. Soon everyone else was asleep. Above him the stars wheeled in their arcs. Hazel lay beside him, her small face serene and obscured behind a shock of hair. He reached out and tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear. An old, familiar action.

  He woke with a start in the middle of the night without realizing he’d been sleeping. There next to his leg coiled a dark mass of muscle. From the pitted snout of a desert viper a tongue flicked in and out, tasting the air. Ming did not move. The snake slid alongside his body and paused before his face as though examining his features. Ming watched it. Thick rings of muscle rippled along its length. It opened its mouth and gave a soft hiss, almost conversational.

  “You won’t take me now, will you?” Ming asked aloud.

  The viper spoke in sibilants he could not understand.

  “It ain’t my time yet, sir,” Ming said. “I ain’t finished. She’s still waitin for me in Californie, I swear it.”

  For a long time the snake was quiet. Then it opened its mouth again, wider now, unhinged its jaw, thrust its fangs out, retracted them once more. At last it lowered its head to the sand and lay motionless.

  “Thank ye,” Ming said.

  Now the snake crossed over to where the coals of the fire still smoldered red like devils’ eyes and paused at the threshold of the firepit. Then it slid sedately in among the embers. A flame started up again, caught along the snake’s skin as though it were but oilcloth. The whole length of the viper burned without smoke or sound. It moved afire and arranged itself into a coiled heap in the center of the pit and then its eyes clouded over and it went still. The checkered skin flaked away in shreds of incandescent ash and then the fire spread to the striated muscles, which burned to dust. When daybreak came only the bones of the snake remained in the warm ashes, a nest of delicate ribs and interlocking vertebrae buttressing a pale and hollowed skull. And though Ming had not gone back to sleep he was not tired.

  26

  In the morning they were greeted by a gray and unsettled sky. The horses snorted uneasily, their ears flicking back and forth. There was an electric pressure building in the air. Ming’s shirt clung to his arms. The day was thick and damp already. From time to time the men would glance expectantly at the prophet, as though the rain were waiting for his word to fall. The clouds sank lower and lower, the day blending into an eerie twilight.

  “Rain,” the prophet cried out at last, and indeed it was so.

  The jagged peaks to the northwest pressed into the belly of the storm and opened a long gash in the clouds and out of this wound came the rains heavy and endless. The water cut straight down in great snapping sheets unmoved by wind or geology, faster than the earth could drink it. Below them a sucking mud. From the mountains descended graywater, first in turbid rivulets and then in broad muddy swaths from which the horses drank. Mute thunderless lightning lit the world in harsh flashes and Ming’s ears filled with the sound of a torrential downpour. The rain was a welcome relief from the heat and even as his eyes blurred with stinging water Ming found himself smiling.

  In the bucketing rain of that evening the day dissolved into night chill and clean. Building a fire was a fool’s errand. They huddled together in an impromptu shelter that Notah had strung up over the side of the stagecoach with a bolt of tentcloth. At length the rain eased somewhat. The thunderstorm had pushed westward, sparking flashes on the horizon. They were damp and weary and in the thin light of a solitary lantern only the whites of their eyes were visible.

  “Whiskey?” The ringmaster held his flask aloft.

  A pale hand darted out and took it. It was Proteus. He drank and passed it back to his double. “Thank ye,” he growled.

  “Winnemucca ain’t far off,” Gomez observed. He peered out into the darkness at the rain sliding off the canvas above them in black ropes, crystalline in the light of the lantern.

  In this weather, Ming said, gesturing at the stagecoach wheels mired in mud, it would be at least another day.

  “Faster going once this rain lets up,” Gomez said.

  “It won’t,” Notah said. He leaned out toward the rain and wrung his shirt dry. “I know storms like this. It’ll rain four, five days straight. Then nothing for weeks or months.”

  “Will you find more danger in Winnemucca, Mr. Tsu?” the ringmaster said.

  Ming chuckled. “Almost certainly.”

  “As long as it’s solely yours,” Proteus said, “and none of ours.”

  In the darkness Ming felt the pressure of a cold hand come to rest on his knee. It was Hazel, in whose lap lay the shadowed form of Hunter, sound asleep. Ming placed his hand on Hazel’s. “Won’t be no one’s danger but mine,” he said.

  The ringmaster asked him what route he planned to take them by to Reno. Ming closed his eyes and in his mind traced a remembered line through the desert. They’d need to head south, he said, down the eastern flank of Thunder Mountain. Then on to Star Peak to the west and through Unionville. After that the mountain pass south of Unionville and the Indian trails down into the foothills, and from there southwest into Lovelock.

  “Ain’t there trouble for you in Unionville and Lovelock too?” asked Proteus.

  “Nothing in Unionville but railroad offcuts and miners,” he said, “and nothing in Lovelock but brothels and gambling houses.”

  “If they got lawmen in them towns—and I reckon they do—then trouble will find you.” Proteus leaned back looking satisfied.

  Ming bristled and the air seemed suddenly chill.

  “Enough,” the ringmaster said. “The decision has already been made, Proteus, as you know. Mr. Tsu will remain with us.”

  “With him lurking about,” the pagan continued, his voice rising, “we can’t hardly put on a damn show without a sheriff knocking down our door.”

  “Our true terminus is in Reno,” the ringmaster said, louder now, ignoring him.

  “If these Chinamen keep guiding us,” Proteus snapped, “then our true terminus is all of us dead on the side of the road in one of these blasted towns.”

  “Won’t be all of us,” Ming growled, and Hazel’s hand stiffened under his.

  “Notah,” the ringmaster called out.

  The Navajo rose to his feet and stepping lightly over the lantern he crossed to where Proteus sat and struck him hard on the forehead with the heel of his hand. The pagan went slack and tipped over and Notah crouched low above him and gripped the point of his chin in his hand until his eyes rolled back white and his body returned to his old tattooed form and went still. In a moment Notah stood up and returned to where he’d been sitting, hunching to keep his head from brushing against the low canvas roof. It was silent but for the sound of the ceaseless rain.

  At length Proteus came to and sat up, rubbing his face with his hands. His eyes were clouded and glassy. The ringmaster reached out and took him by the wrist and shuddering again Proteus transformed into a second ringmaster.

  “Ain’t like you to rest your eyes when you have company,” the ringmaster said.

  Proteus seemed
dazed. He frowned, lost in thought. “Must be beat from the trail,” he said at last.

  “We’ve a long day of travel ahead of us,” the ringmaster said, to everyone now. “Best we do it rested.” He leaned back against a wheel of the stagecoach and pulled his hat down over his face.

  Soon only Ming and Notah remained awake.

  “Thought you never touched the memories of your friends,” Ming said.

  Proteus was sprawled out beneath the stagecoach, sleeping soundly.

  “He ain’t my friend,” Notah said. “Any man who spends so long wearing a white man’s skin ain’t no better than a white man.” He rolled his shirt into a makeshift pillow and laid his head down. “Evening, Mr. Tsu.”

  27

  Ming awoke with aching shoulders in a colorless dawn, an eerie gray light filtering down through the clouds. The rain had not abated. Beyond the lip of their tentcloth awning the world had been changed, ravaged by the storm. They refilled their canteens from a pellucid stream of slow water speckled with rainfall that wound its way down ahead of them. Ming’s damp trousers clung to his legs. He felt as though he hadn’t been dry for a hundred years.

  Soon the others arose and they were off again. It was raining less than it had the day before. Proteus and the ringmaster walked alongside the draft horses while Hazel and the boy sat sheltered in the cabin of the coach. Gomez and Notah trailed behind, rain running off the brims of their hats and streaming down their backs. There was no longer any danger of the horses dying of thirst and so Ming rode beside the prophet, leading the party.

  The blasted profile of Sonoma Peak was scarcely visible through the low cloudcover. With the sun gone there was no telling which way to go. Only the prophet knew. Reading west from subtle grooves in the earth he called out directions. He wore no hat and the rain cascaded unimpeded down the whole of his slight frame, his thin shirt rendered translucent, vellum clinging to him like a second skin. When they stopped for supper Ming reached up to help him dismount and felt the small bones of the old man’s hand shifting against one another, his papery skin sliding over ancient joints. They sat crammed into the stagecoach with the rest of the party, gnawing on strips of salt beef and washing it down with water they’d collected from the rain. Thin light came in through the open doors of the coach.

  “When will we get there?” Hunter asked.

  “Soon,” Ming said. He motioned to the ringmaster. “Tell him we’ll be there soon.”

  The ringmaster signed to the boy, tugging with his thumb and index finger at a phantom thread that seemed to hang down from his chin. Ming mimicked the motion with his own hands.

  “Quick learner,” the ringmaster observed.

  “Comes with my line of work,” Ming said.

  “I can tell you like the boy,” the ringmaster said. He rose from the stagecoach bench to a half stoop and rifled through his pack. At length he produced a tattered book about the size of a deck of cards. “Here,” he said, handing it to Ming.

  Ming held the cover up and read aloud: “On the language of signs.”

  “When I found the boy all those years ago,” the ringmaster said, “he didn’t know a damned thing of signs. He could talk, of course—the miracle was with him—but he couldn’t listen.” At the orphanage, the ringmaster said, the boy had carried around a slate and a bit of chalk. When people wanted to tell him something they would write it out for him. But the boy could hardly read. Every night he was forgetting something. “If I was aiming to keep him in the show,” the ringmaster said, shaking his head, “I needed him to learn his act and do it right. Poor boy couldn’t understand what I was asking of him. Just kept crying every night. He would screw his eyes shut and refuse to read. Didn’t know what the hell to do with the boy. In fact I was about ready to sell him and cut my losses. But Ms. Lockewood here told me there was a special school for deaf-mutes like our Hunter, that they’d invented a way for such children to talk to one another. A language of signs. I had some friends in New York procure me a book of it—which you now hold in your hands.”

  Ming turned the book over and opened it to the first page. “The Lord’s Prayer,” he read.

  “They might be deaf and dumb,” the ringmaster said, “but they’re far from godless. Here, follow along.” He turned to the boy and signed to him.

  “The Lord’s Prayer,” Hunter said in their minds, his voice high and clear. “Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name—”

  “No, no,” the ringmaster cut in, signing to the boy again.

  Hunter nodded and his brow furrowed in concentration. His hands began moving before him, a poetry of signs. His small hands danced nimbly across his chest, his head bowed in reverence. Ming watched, glancing between the book and the boy. Hunter reached his hands out and then brought them toward him, palms upward, fingers curling. Give us this day our daily bread. Ming was transfixed.

  Now the boy brushed his fingertips across the palm of his hand. Forgive. He crossed his wrists before his chest, his small hands clenched into fists, and pulled them apart. Deliver us. The boy hooked one finger into an invisible trigger and pulled back the bolt of a phantom rifle. Then he touched his mouth and drew his hand down. Ming looked down at the book in his hand. From evil.

  Hazel was signing too, her hands sweeping delicately through each gesture. Then she clenched them into fists and slammed them down onto an unseen table. Power. The boy’s hand moved as if in salute. Glory. Together their hands came up and drifted forward, fingers fluttering. For ever.

  Amen.

  “Amen,” the ringmaster murmured.

  For a while it was quiet but for the sound of the rain.

  “I know the Lord’s Prayer well,” the prophet said. “There is strange power in those words, and power stranger still in those signs.” His blank eyes stared into the middle distance. “Even unseen.”

  “The little tome is yours to keep,” the ringmaster said. “I have no further use for it.”

  Ming snapped the book shut and stowed it in his pack. “Thank ye.” He glanced at Hazel. “You know these signs too,” he said. “I ain’t never seen you signing to him before.”

  “You simply ain’t never noticed,” she said, and smiled. “Can’t notice something you ain’t even known was there.”

  The day bled into a cold twilight and the rains seemed to grow thicker once more as they neared Winnemucca. They had caught up to the middle of the storm. When they at last reached the Humboldt again it was swollen near to bursting. The water flashed opalescent in the dim and rain-soaked light. They ranged downstream some two miles before they encountered a bridge they could cross and by then they were traveling through a night black as pitch. Overhead the storm churned flashing and dreadful. Only the horses could still see.

  Outside Winnemucca in the sheeting rain Gomez and Notah raised the tent slowly and with great effort, the ropes slick in their hands and the vast waterlogged canvas heavy as lead. When at last they had the show tent staked and stretched Notah came round with lanterns, lighting the muddy ground below them, the canvas gleaming above them. Ming reached up to pluck a guyline with his finger and the string hummed, shaking off a fine mist of rainwater.

  “We’ll do the show tomorrow,” the ringmaster said. “All of you, to bed. As for you,” he said, turning to Ming, “stay hidden, and show your face only when you’re needed.”

  “Violence will find the man out of bounds,” the prophet intoned. “Here or elsewhere, hidden or exposed. He tugs on the world like a lodestone. There is a fight coming for you, my child. Soon.”

  “How do you mean?” the ringmaster said. “Tonight?”

  “In a matter of hours,” answered the old man.

  The ringmaster paused to consider this. “Then, Mr. Tsu,” he said, “go into town and find us when the fight is passed.”

  “Suits me,” Ming said with a practiced nonchalance. He counted the rounds in his revolver, adjusted his hat, and left.

  28

  He was sitting alone in a murky
tavern halfway through his third drink when a tall figure approached his table. Ming put down his drink and glanced up. The man wore a leather greatcoat and a wide-brimmed cowboy hat. In the dim tavern an empty shoulder holster drifted in and out of the light.

  “Mind if I take a seat?” the man said.

  “Seat’s taken,” Ming replied.

  The man sat down anyway. “Ming Tsu, ain’t it?”

  Ming set down his glass and eyed the man warily, sizing him up. No doubt this was the fight the old man had prophesied. “You got the wrong fellow,” he said.

  The man raised an eyebrow. “A Chinaman wearing no queue, wanted by the law and by the Central Pacific. For murder and desertion.” He smirked. “Reckon that’s you.”

  For a moment Ming did not speak. The tavern was just loud enough to swallow up their conversation. “Ain’t me,” he growled, his hand slipping below the level of the table and drifting toward his holster.

  The man clicked his tongue. “Don’t,” he said sharply.

  Ming recognized the click of a hammer being pulled back under the table and gave up on outdrawing his unwelcome chaperone. “That ain’t a Colt 1860 Army you’re pointin at me, now, is it?” he said, meeting the man’s gaze. The man’s expression did not change. “Union or Confederate?” he asked, squinting at the man.

  The man raised an eyebrow. “Confederate.”

  “Come to Winnemucca to lose another war?” Ming said with a dry laugh.

  “Stop talking. You’re a wanted man, John. Reward’s bigger if you’re still breathing”—he flashed a crooked grin at Ming—“but I’m taking you in dead or alive. Don’t matter much to me either way.” The man glanced around the tavern.

  “You by your lonesome?” Ming asked. “Ain’t you got no friends to help out?”

  “I said stop talking,” the man snapped. He scanned the room again. “I ain’t aimin to split that money with nobody else.” He narrowed his eyes at Ming. “I seen you in Battle Mountain. Traveling with them magic-show folks. Reckon I’d come down to Winnemucca and pick you up here. Take you on up the railroad and collect my fee.”