by Tom Lin
The man commanded Ming to set his gun on the ground nice and slow and Ming obliged. Still keeping his revolver trained on Ming the man brought his other hand up onto the table. There was a length of rope tied to his wrist, the other end a loose loop.
“Put your wrist in and draw the knot tight,” the man ordered. Ming pulled back his shirtsleeve and cinched the rope tight on his wrist. “Now stand up,” the man said. They both rose from their seats and the man pulled Ming close, bringing their bound wrists behind Ming’s back. The man dug the barrel of his gun into Ming’s side. “Walk with me.”
They left the tavern side by side, their steps odd and loping. No one seemed to notice. They walked in the ceaseless rain down the main road and turned off into an alley.
“Sheriff is that way,” Ming said.
“We ain’t going to the sheriff.”
“Where to, then?”
“Rail depot.”
They walked a bit farther down the alley. Ming stopped and blinked back through the rain at the dim streetlights some forty yards distant.
“Let’s go, Chinaman,” the man said. “Ain’t nobody knows you’re here.”
Ming broke into a wide smile. “Perfect.”
In a single explosive movement he pivoted to face the man, his arm unwinding from his back. The man pushed the gun up under Ming’s ribs and squeezed the trigger. There was the flat sound of a percussion cap firing into a dead powder charge. Water in the cylinder. Ming drove his elbow across the man’s chin and as he stumbled Ming dove past him with his bound wrist outstretched and the man spun round and went down beside him. The man had dropped his gun somewhere in the mud and as he reached for a knife in his belt Ming threw his bound wrist across the man’s chest and pulled upward and began to choke the man with his own arm. In a flash Ming drew his spike and plunged it deep into the man’s chest over and over. The rain and the mud made it almost impossible to see and Ming realized the man had managed to pull his knife only when the flashing steel swiped across their bound wrists.
The men separated, crashing into the mud. Ming rolled to his feet and the man forced himself up knife in hand, with blood running dark from the constellation of holes in his torso and Ming’s railroad spike still pinning his shirt to his chest. He lunged and Ming made to dodge but he slipped in the sucking mud and suddenly he was on his back with a knife handle sprouting from his gut. The man was clawing his way through the mud toward Ming and nearly blinded by pain Ming stood and tugged the man’s knife out of his belly. He took a fistful of the man’s hair and pulled his head backward and cut his throat clean through. The man made a hideous noise and his eyes rolled over white and his body went still.
Ming let the knife fall from his fingers and clamped his hand over the wound in his gut. In the darkness and the rain he could not tell how much he was bleeding. He bent over the dead man and pulled his railroad spike free and nearly passed out from pain. He was not far from the magic show. He could make it there. The world was beginning to go to gray. He staggered a dozen steps and fell over hard, gasping in the mud. With a transcendent effort he raised his head to look down his body at where he’d been stabbed but he could see nothing. Dimly he remembered his revolver abandoned on the floor of that wretched tavern and he closed his eyes a moment. The blood ran so warm over his fingers and the rain came down so cold. In his mouth, too, there was blood, a metallic taste mixed with the pungent grit of mud. The magic show was not far and he could make it there but he was so tired. He opened his eyes again but the world around him did not change and he wondered if he had opened his eyes at all. The blood hot between his fingers. He needed rest. He would lay his head down to rest.
29
He was lying in bed with Ada and her hair smelled of lavender and he took a lock of it in his hand and twirled it around his finger. He said her name softly to himself so as not to wake her but even so she stirred and he let go the strands of her hair and watched as she got out of bed and walked away, knowing he could not follow her.
In the den there was boundless light through the window and he could see clear to the vast barrens beyond. Ada was there in the house but somewhere else and he sat by the window pricking his ears to the sound of her feet padding across the floorboards. A rifle lay across his lap and reflexively he fingered the flintlock, running his fingernails along the grooves of filigree. There was something that he had to do but he could not remember what, could only feel the weight of a discarded obligation pressing against him, a vague and unplaceable sense of having forgotten something important. Leaving his rifle he rose from the window and called out to her but she did not reply and so he went up the stairs but when he opened the door to their chamber she was not there. He heard her soft footsteps retreating behind him and turned sharply but still she was not there. Down the stairs again and back into the den, his rifle across the empty chair by the window. Roots and creeping fingers of vines began to force their way around the doorjambs and through the windowpanes. A familiar voice rang in his ears, calling his name. A shadow flitted across the doorway and Ming grabbed his rifle and ran outside to follow it but no one was there. Still the familiar voice in his ears calling his name. In the distance the dust boiled. Men approaching.
He went inside again and up the stairs and turned corner after corner until he was back in the bedroom. Outside the windows it was somehow dark now, suddenly nighttime, and in their bed he saw his own figure cradling Ada, both of them asleep. Out the window the riders were approaching down the road by torchlight, strange and cruel weapons in their hands. They were nearly there and desperation rising in his throat Ming ran trippingly to the bed, trying to shout, to wake the lovers, and then he was in the bed himself as boots thundered up the stairwell, his mind waking up in portions. He threw the covers off and reached out to wake Ada and warn her but her side of the bed was empty, the sheets still warm as if remembering the heat of her body. He whirled toward the door to see her shadow slipping over the threshold into the dark hallway as though she had run to meet the phalanx of intruders and one of the men embraced her and she cried out for her father while the others streamed around him with cudgels in their hands and Ming steeled himself for blows and the floor beneath him opened up along a seam in the boards and engulfed him.
Now he was outside once more, standing by the open door, riders in the distance, whether coming or going he did not know. Returning to sit by the window he found the room entirely transfigured into a verdant garden. The dusty windowpanes floated in midair. Still the chair was pulled up beside them and so he sat down and peered out at the desert to the east as a great tide passed over the land and carved out canyons right before his eyes. He felt ancient, as though he had sat here a hundred thousand years and would sit here a hundred thousand more. Ada walked into the room then and he looked at her and though he knew he loved her he could not remember why. She took his hands in hers and he gazed at her indistinct face and she told him she was sorry, that she loved him, that she was sorry so sorry. For what he did not know, could not ask, his throat and tongue and lips turned to insensate stone. Would he remember her name? she said. He could not answer and she watched him a long time and at last she shook her head, a sad smile flitting across her beautiful face, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
30
He woke with a start in a dim and dusty room. It had stopped raining. The sunlight came slantwise and bloodred through small high windows. There was a dull ache in his side but where he’d been stabbed in the abdomen he found only a long thin scar. He touched it with his fingertips. Already healed. His mouth seemed full of dust and tasted faintly of metal, or flowers. There was a stiff ache in his neck and his shoulders. At the edges of his mind lingered that dull sense of obligation, of having had something to do, forever ago and oceans away, the task itself having been swallowed up in the long shadows of its own necessity. He tried to remember that terrible night, the footsteps thumping up the stairs, his turning to wake her, and even as he seemed to recall the pressure of
her hip against his hand, in truth he was no longer sure whether she had been in bed beside him that night when her father and his hired men had come to take her away.
A soft voice shook him out of his reverie. “Ming.”
It was Hazel, sitting beside him, her eyes weary with concern. She asked how he was feeling and he made to speak but no sound came out. His throat was bone-dry.
“Drink,” she said, and held out a waterskin.
Ming accepted it and drank deeply. He coughed and felt a sharp jab in his side and as he looked down he saw with alarm that his holster was empty.
“Easy now.” Hazel took the waterskin back and set it down. The prophet had come to her door two nights ago, she said, and told her Ming was dying. The old man had conveyed where to find Ming and where to take him. His gun had been found on the floor of the saloon and surrendered to the barkeep, who, after some negotiations about a finder’s fee, was persuaded to hand it over to the ringmaster. Hazel stood from her seat and walked to the door of the room, rapped on it, then returned to Ming’s bedside.
Presently the door swung open and an old Chinese man stepped in and raised his eyebrows. “The patient is awake, I see.” He shut the door behind him and turned to Ming. “I am Dr. Shih-hou Sun. We have a mutual associate, you and I. The blind old man.” The doctor motioned to Ming’s abdomen. “May I examine your wound?”
“Yes,” Ming croaked. His throat still burned.
“Lovely,” the doctor murmured, bending low to peer at the scar. “It’s healing well.”
“You done sewed me up,” Ming said, his voice rough. “How come I healed so fast?”
“Laudanum,” the doctor said.
“I had dreams, doc. Like you wouldn’t believe.” He coughed and spat. “I’ve took laudanum before. That warn’t no laudanum.”
The doctor gazed at Ming a moment. “You’re right,” he said. From his pocket he produced a small ampoule of dark liquid and pressed it into Ming’s palm. “Here. The old man says you’ll need it. Would you let the old man know that my debt has been repaid?”
“Of course,” Hazel replied.
“Wonderful. Good day, Mr. Tsu. Ma’am.” The doctor bowed slightly and left.
They sat quiet for a little while.
“You talk in your sleep,” Hazel said at last.
“Is that so.”
“You kept calling out a name: Ada.” She watched Ming’s face for a reaction.
“Ada,” he repeated flatly.
“Who was she?” Hazel asked.
“My wife,” Ming said.
“Is she who you’re going to Californie to find?”
Ming said that she was.
Hazel drew her chair nearer to his cot and took his hand in hers. “Tell me about her.”
Ming regarded Hazel a long time. At last he gave a deep sigh. “We were married only two months. We had a little house in the foothills.”
“Did she leave you?”
Ming laughed a little and felt a blunt snapping ache in his side where he’d been stabbed. He winced, shook his head, explained the story as best he could. When they’d fallen in love he’d asked her father for her hand in marriage. He’d refused, laughed at Ming. Said no daughter of his would marry a Chinaman, and a criminal at that. And besides, he told Ming, she was already spoken for. So they eloped. When her father found out he was furious. One night while they were sleeping he came into their home with his hired men, the Porter brothers, Abel and Gideon. They dragged Ming out of bed and beat him, made her watch. They would have killed him right then had Ada not begged her father to spare him. And so, instead of simply shooting Ming, Ada’s father had Charles Dixon, a deputy, arrest him and charge him with miscegenation. After Ada’s father got her back, he reckoned she needed to be made pure in the eyes of God and the law. The judge, Jeremiah Kelly, agreed, ruling that their marriage had never happened. Her father had paid him off, too, Ming was sure, and told the judge to give him a most special punishment for a most abhorrent crime. Kelly obliged.
“Ten years, workin the rails for the Central Pacific,” Ming said. “Take the railroad up through the Sierras and down across the desert.” He drained the last of the waterskin and wiped his mouth with his shirtsleeve.
Hazel asked why he hadn’t just run.
The trouble, Ming said, was that they had Silas Root dead to rights. Somehow the Porters had gotten ahold of a carton of files on every man who’d ever paid Silas Root to kill someone. And they got ahold of another carton of evidence for every man Silas and Ming ever killed together. Silas was an old man by then. If Ming ran, they told him, they’d have Silas hung. “He warn’t no saint,” Ming said, swallowing hard, “but he deserved better. So I went to work the rails. First day I was there I found the old man sittin like he always does, tellin people about their own future deaths, givin em time to think, you know. Givin em time to get ready.”
“Man out of bounds,” Hazel murmured, half to herself.
“Man out of bounds,” Ming repeated. “Ain’t no one else there spoke English but me and the prophet and them sonofabitch bosses. Every day I’d ask him if Silas Root was still alive. Every day the same answer. Till one day the answer was different.” Ming’s eyes shone and he turned his face away. “And that was the day I left.”
“Dixon and the Porter brothers.” Hazel counted the names on her fingers. “And Judge Kelly makes four scores to settle.”
“Aye,” Ming said. “Dixon’s in Unionville. He’s a sheriff there now. I reckon they sent him out to Unionville to watch the rails, let em know if he sees me comin. But he ain’t as clever as he thinks. I wager he’s let his guard down some, waitin on me for so long. Porters are in Californie. And Kelly’s the reason what takes me to Reno with you folks.”
And wasn’t he aiming to kill Ada’s father too? Hazel asked.
“I won’t do that to Ada,” Ming said.
“Do you still love her?”
“Yes,” he said. “She’s my wife.”
They were quiet for a spell.
“I was married too,” Hazel said. “A long time ago.”
“You remember that?” Ming asked.
Hazel laughed. “I see you’ve been asking the ringmaster about me,” she said. “Yes. Yes, I remember.”
“He told me Notah erased those memories,” Ming said.
“He did. But he didn’t take everything.” She held up her left hand. “I had this habit. I’d twist my wedding ring on my finger, just like this”—she spun an invisible ring round her finger—“to take my mind off things. After he passed I did it near every day, even though I wasn’t wearing the ring no more.” She folded her hands back in her lap. “Your prophet speaks the truth,” she said. “The body does not forget. Little by little, memories return. When I saw you that first night in Elko you seemed so familiar.”
“I thought you looked just like her,” Ming breathed.
“No,” Hazel said, smiling. “She looked just like me.”
Ming was lost in her face.
“You’re right, we’ve met before,” she said. “In another life.” She leaned in and kissed him. “Does it hurt?”
“The wound?”
“Yes,” she said sweetly, climbing onto Ming’s bed. She swung a leg over his hips and sat back on her heels, straddling him. “Does it hurt?” she asked again.
Ming pressed a hand to his side. He shook his head and stared up at her. “None.”
“Good,” Hazel murmured. She worked off Ming’s trousers and took him in her hands and then they were moving together, legs intertwined, a fistful of her hair in his hand—God, how it still hurt to make a fist—the whole world still but for them.
31
They returned to the tent in the receding afternoon. The oblique sunlight threw long shadows across the ground. Gomez and Notah were perched atop the stagecoach, squinting into the west. Proteus brooded in his cage. The ringmaster and the prophet rose from where they’d been sitting in conversation and walked over to greet the two of th
em.
“Ms. Lockewood,” the ringmaster said grandly. “And Mr. Tsu. Afternoon.” He took Ming’s gun out of his breast pocket and returned it to a grateful Ming. “I advise you keep a firmer grasp on your items in the future, Mr. Tsu.”
“Thank ye.” Ming holstered the weapon and addressed the prophet. “That doctor a friend of yours, old man?”
“He incurred a debt,” the prophet replied, “and it is obligation what binds man to man.” He turned his sightless eyes to Hazel. “And now his debt is repaid.”
“Enough of these riddles,” the ringmaster interjected. He looked Ming up and down. “Back in fighting shape, I presume?”
“Strange laudanum fixed me right up,” Ming said, lifting his shirt to reveal his new scar. “We best get moving on to Lovelock. Reckon the sheriff’s got his men out on my tail.”
“He does indeed,” said the ringmaster. “Or he did, anyway. Sheriff damn near tore the town apart looking for you after they happened upon the man you killed. He found himself a Chinese, all right. Poor fellow looked just like you. Had the sonofabitch in shackles by yesterday afternoon and strung up by nightfall.” He clapped Ming on the shoulder and grinned. “As far as anyone’s concerned, Mr. Tsu, you’ve already been hung.”
He laughed at his own joke, though no one else did, then called out to the stagehands for the coach to be hitched up. The two men leapt down from the coach like a pair of silent shadows and obliged.
The party made their way back through the town toward the bridge they’d crossed nights earlier. When they passed the town square Hazel covered Hunter’s eyes and bade him not to look. The others, too, averted their eyes as the stagecoach rattled on the hardpack road. But Ming could not help but stare. The hanged man dangled from his noose on those lonesome gallows, his hands bound behind his back, his head bent at an unnatural angle, his face sunken. He was but a boy, Ming saw now, seventeen at the oldest. They had strung up a child in his stead.
