The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu

by Tom Lin

  “Mr. Tsu,” called out the ringmaster, some ten yards ahead. “Keep close.”

  “Tsu?” came another voice, low and incredulous. A man in a broad-brimmed hat slunk out of the shadows under the gallows. A brass star gleamed on his lapel. “I’ll be damned,” the sheriff said. “Been sittin here all day hopin nothin would happen.”

  The ringmaster swore under his breath when he saw the lawman and began walking back toward Ming’s horse.

  “That ain’t Ming Tsu hanging up there, then, is it,” the sheriff said.

  “It ain’t,” Ming acknowledged.

  The sheriff fumbled at his holster and finally drew his gun. He aimed it squarely at Ming’s chest. Ming did not move.

  “Carry on,” Ming told the ringmaster. “I’ll meet you on the road. Cross the bridge and head south. I’ll follow your tracks.”

  The ringmaster didn’t move. “Don’t kill that sheriff, boy.”

  “Go,” Ming said, a hard edge in his voice now. “Get the others out of here.”

  “Get down from your horse, Chinaman,” the sheriff said.

  “Aye,” Ming said coolly.

  The ringmaster turned and began to walk away.

  “Hey,” the sheriff barked, his eyes flitting to the ringmaster. “Don’t go anywhere. You’re under arrest for aiding and abetting a fugitive. And you,” he said, his gaze settling back on Ming, “you’re under arrest for murder.”

  Ming swung down from his horse. “He ain’t involved in this. Let him go.”

  “I don’t believe that for one instant,” the sheriff said.

  “Believe it, sheriff,” Ming said. “I’ll kill him right now.”

  He drew his revolver and put a ball in the ground six inches from the ringmaster’s toes. The sheriff flinched and Ming raked back the hammer and fired again, this time next to where the sheriff stood. The lawman leapt up, his eyes fearful, and nearly dropped his gun. By then the ringmaster had taken his leave and it was just the two of them, the hanged Chinese mute and cold swaying gently above them in a haphazard breeze.

  “You’re a green one, ain’t you?” Ming said. “Didn’t nobody ever teach you to shoot when someone shoots at you?” He took a step toward the sheriff.

  The sheriff clamped both hands on his gun to steady it and shaking he pointed it at Ming, the barrel dancing with fear. “Don’t come any closer!”

  “You put your iron away,” Ming said, “and I’ll put mine away too. We’ll have us a talk and settle this like grown men.” He raised his hands above his head, his gun swinging from his finger. “See?”

  The sheriff did not lower his gun.

  “Sheriff, I know you’re green as they come,” Ming said. “That’s what you hung that poor Chinese for.” He tipped his head at the dead man strung up on the gallows. “I spose it was an honest mistake. Seen one Chinaman, seen em all, that about right?” He paused and his gaze grew hard and cold. “Or could be you’re some kind of coward, sheriff.”

  “I ain’t no coward, John,” the sheriff stammered.

  “Put that iron away and I won’t shoot you,” Ming said. “I swear it.”

  The sheriff’s eyes were huge and fearful but after a hesitation he lowered the gun.

  “Thank ye,” Ming said, and in a smooth motion he spun his gun back into his grip and shot the sheriff twice clear through his belly before the man could even begin to fall.

  The sheriff dropped his weapon and crashed to the ground. Ming walked over to where he lay writhing and with a sweep of his foot he sent the sheriff’s gun skittering out of reach. He rolled the sheriff over onto his back, planted a boot across his chest, then bent down to look at him. The man’s eyes were wild, his babbling incoherent.

  “Listen close, sheriff,” he said to the moaning man. “I’ll learn you some about doing your job.” Ming took the sheriff’s chin in one powerful hand and stared straight into his eyes. “First, never trust a criminal,” he said.

  The sheriff was breathing short and fast. His eyes filled with rage and he spat impotently up at Ming’s face, spraying blood and spittle. Ming turned his head and wiped his face clean. He gazed at the horizon awhile, leaning on his knee, his boot still pinning the sheriff to the ground. There was no one around.

  “Say, sheriff, where’s everyone gone to?”

  The sheriff gurgled and his hands clawed at Ming’s boot.

  “That’s right,” Ming said, looking back down at him. “It’s Sunday, ain’t it?” He nodded to himself. “Day of rest.” He stood and lifted his boot off the sheriff. The man rolled onto his side and coughed, blood flying out of his mouth. “I got me an idea,” Ming said. “You got a knife?” Ming patted down the sheriff’s trousers and pulled out a bowie knife. He whistled. “Good man,” he said. He took hold of the sheriff’s wrist and dragged him under the gallows until he was directly beneath the hanged man. “Wait here,” he said to the dying sheriff. He reached up and worked the bowie knife into the trapdoor hinge until the blade was jammed tight enough to bear his weight. “Be right back, sheriff,” he said, and pulled himself up and onto the gallows platform.

  Ming pulled the knife free and stood up. He came face-to-face with the hanged man. The dead Chinese’s eyes were open and bloodshot, bulging from his skull. The rope about his neck creaked as his body gently rocked in another breeze.

  “Return,” Ming murmured. Then with a few quick strokes of the blade he sawed clean through the rope above the boy’s head. The body dropped through the open trapdoor and landed with a dull thud next to the sheriff. There came a short, horrified scream. Ming leaned over the trapdoor and gazed down at the two figures crumpled on the ground. The dead Chinese’s hands were still bound tightly behind his back but his body had landed as a mess of disarticulated limbs. The sheriff was pinned under the body of the dead boy, too weak to move it off him.

  “Second, sheriff,” Ming called down, “never hang nobody what ain’t done the crime.”

  The sheriff screamed again with what breath he had left and pushed in vain against the dead body.

  Ming came down the short steps of the gallows and mounted his horse. “Afternoon, sheriff,” he said, tipping his hat with mock gallantry, and spurred his horse in the direction the stagecoach had gone.

  32

  He rode south, the sun sinking lower in the sky and the earth beneath him still dark from the rains. Burnished tracks on the mountainfaces were another hint of the storm and the old Indian trail had been all but erased in the sudden deluge, its line now mostly unreadable among a hundred other intersecting lines inscribed in silt and sand. But across these paths the stagecoach had made deep shining cuts and these Ming followed as they wound down into the vast desert.

  He moved through the broad and folded valley between Sonoma Peak and the nameless range to the west. At times he passed through huge glossy stands of crystalline water less than an inch deep in which the wheel tracks disappeared and reappeared as though the coach had been skipped across the pool like a beach pebble, draft horses and all.

  He found himself wondering what had become of the green sheriff with two neat holes punched into his gut. If he’d found help within the hour he might yet be breathing. It was never clear whether a gutshot man would live or die. Ming recalled a job he’d done for Silas years ago, before the old man had climbed to power atop the bodies of rivals Ming had cut down for him. Before anyone had spoken in hushed tones of Silas Root’s dog: the ghostly Chinaman who visited death on the houses of the foolish and the damned.

  The target had been a lawyer, perhaps a prosecutor. He couldn’t remember. What he did remember was Silas nearly knocking the door of his room down the next day, apoplectic, shouting that the man had somehow turned up at the infirmary in the wee hours of the morning, delirious and only half-dead. Ming had shot him six times in the stomach. Surely that would have been enough. He remembered the rush of relief when news came that the man had at last died, his body obliterated by fever. So it is that a body survives, and so it is that a body passes.<
br />
  Ming lost himself in the blur of the passing earth and the rhythmic jolts of his galloping horse. In his younger years he would have cut the sheriff to ribbons, tied him by the ankles to his horse, and dragged him to hell across lots. An eye for an eye, after all. But his knees had begun to pain him now, and his fingers were stiff in the mornings. He was a man out of bounds, and yet here he still was. The man they’d hung in the square had been so young. Perhaps he would ask the prophet if the sheriff had died. But it was getting late.

  Perhaps he wouldn’t.

  By the time he met the rest of them the sky had gone to black. He found them by the dim glow of their campfire. As he rode up he heard the cocking of a rifle hammer. It was Gomez, a Henry rifle in hand, gazing down the sights.

  “Easy,” Ming called out, “it’s me.”

  He dismounted and joined the others at the campfire. Gomez put aside the rifle and passed him a ration of salt beef and biscuits.

  “Did you kill him, then?” the ringmaster said.

  “Reckon so,” Ming answered. “But he warn’t dead when I left him, mind.” He broke off a piece of beef and set to gnawing at it.

  “What did you do to him?” Hazel asked.

  “Shot him.”

  “And he ain’t shot you back?” Gomez said.

  “He was green. Reckon he ain’t been sheriff longer than a month. The poor sonofabitch he hung looked nothing like me.” Ming jammed the rest of the food into his mouth and washed it down with what water was left in his canteen. He swallowed and cleared his throat. “All right,” he announced, “long day ahead of us tomorrow. Seven miles up into the mountains and through the pass.”

  “And after that?” the ringmaster asked.

  “Hell,” Proteus chimed in. He tipped his hat, deadpan, the angles of his face lit eerily by the dying fire.

  “Dun Glen,” Ming said. “Silver-mining town up in the range.”

  “Thought we were avoiding towns,” Proteus said.

  Ming spat into the sand and wiped his mouth. “Ain’t no water for miles and miles around but what wells they sunk in Dun Glen.”

  “Did you make that crooked sheriff howl?” Proteus blurted out.

  “What’s it to you?” Ming said.

  “Ain’t we deserve to hear a story?” he said, smiling, and looked around as though waiting for the others’ approval. No one else seemed to care.

  Ming swept the ground behind him clear of pebbles and spread out his bedroll. “I ain’t no storyteller,” he said. And without another word he lay down and fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  33

  The morning came upon them bright and antiseptic and through the rising dew they moved. For two hours they struck out westward, up into the mountains. They were following a disused Indian trail through the peaks now traveled only by silvercrazed prospectors. The trail jackknifed back and forth across the face of the foothills before narrowing to a razor line running hard-edged across the rockface, barely wide enough for the stagecoach to pass.

  They were on the narrow path only a short while when Hazel called out to the others to stop. Hunter was whimpering in the stagecoach. The ringmaster signed to him in the shaded cabin, his head stooped low, and the boy breathed ragged and uncertain. They conversed awhile and at last the ringmaster nodded and announced to everyone that Hunter was scared—hell, petrified—that the stagecoach would fall off the trail.

  “Can’t he walk, then?” Proteus said. “How much farther we got?”

  “Seven miles,” Ming said. “Five of them uphill.” He gestured up the path to where it wove through the pass.

  “Ain’t too far,” Proteus said. “Make him walk.”

  “He’s just a boy,” Hazel scolded.

  “Then make him stay in the coach,” the pagan said. “Don’t see what the matter is.”

  They were quiet for a moment but for the soft sound of the boy’s sobs.

  “I got an idea,” Ming said, and asked Hazel if she could ride.

  “Aye,” she said.

  “Bareback?” he added.

  She nodded. “Aye.”

  “Good. You and the boy’ll ride double. Come here.” Ming swung a leg over his horse and dismounted. He unclasped the buckles of his saddle and stripped it from the animal. Hazel and the boy picked their way up the trail to meet him, sidling past the coach, the boy’s tears drying to salt tracks in the sun. He was smiling now. The ringmaster appeared to be faintly amused.

  “Here,” Ming said, interlacing his fingers. “I’ll give you a leg up.”

  Hazel laughed and waved him off. She took a fistful of the horse’s mane and swung herself up and onto its back. The horse took a small step forward and flicked its ears. She pushed the loose strands of her hair back and grinned down at Ming. Hunter was staring up at them both. Hazel signed something to him. “Lift him up here,” she said to Ming.

  He obliged and Hazel reached down and pulled the boy up onto the horse. Hunter seemed terrified.

  “He ain’t never rode a horse before, huh,” Ming said. He flashed a warm smile up at the boy.

  “Thank you, Mr. Tsu,” the boy said in his strange inward speech.

  “Ain’t you got a hat?” Ming said to the boy, then caught himself. He glanced at Hazel. “Ain’t he got a hat?”

  The boy peered at him, uncomprehending. Ming mimed putting on a hat and then gestured uselessly at him. The boy blinked. You got a hat? A hat. Ming pointed at his own hat, then at the boy’s head again. You got a hat?

  “No, sir,” the boy said.

  “Well, that ain’t good,” Ming mused. “You’ll roast alive in an hour.” He thought for a moment and then passed his own hat up to the boy, who stared awestruck at it in his hands. “Tell him to put it on,” Ming said to Hazel.

  She snatched the hat from Hunter and placed it on his head. It was far too big. The brim pitched down his head and came to rest atop his nose.

  Hazel broke into peals of laughter—such a lovely laugh—and tipped the hat back so the boy could see. “He looks something foolish,” she said, smiling.

  “He looks like a cowboy,” Ming said with gravitas.

  The boy screwed his body round to face Hazel and the hat nearly spun clear off his head. He darted up a small hand to keep it from falling. “Won’t Mr. Tsu need his hat?” he said.

  Ming shook his head. “Naw,” he said. “Tell him it looks better on him anyways.” He turned to the others waiting behind them. “Let’s move,” he said.

  They continued up the trail in a narrow single file, Ming walking alongside the two atop his horse, the prophet on his pinto and the coach behind, the ringmaster driving the draft horses, and beside him his double sitting languid and pale. Notah and Gomez brought up the rear. The day was growing hot and the light hard and linear. No shade on the mountain. The trail wound into a barren windgap between two unnamed peaks and there they stopped to eat lunch and plan their route. It was noon. The draft horses gleamed with sweat, their nostrils flaring as they caught their breath. In the western distance stretched the endless arid basin separating this range from the next, and, beyond that, a faint gray haze, smoke from remote fires, and below this a swath of verdant green. Lovelock and its oases. There were ragged stormclouds strewn haphazard over the vast landscape and through their gray bodies sunlight shone down in pillars upon a desert patched with shadows.

  In the lurid midday heat they pierced the windgap and came down the other side of the mountains, drawing nearer to Dun Glen, visible as a smear of human activity and boiling dust. They ranged down the winding trail and the smear grew larger and larger until they were altogether swallowed up into the blot, man and beast and coach alike, wreathed top to bottom in spiral plumes of yellow dust.

  34

  I haven’t seen a Christian face since we got here.” The ringmaster was leaning against the coach, smoking a pipeful of tobacco. He took a slow drag. “I reckon there’s two, three hundred of your countrymen in this here town.”

  They were surroun
ded by scores of Chinese miners passing wordless and exhausted through the town square, going or returning, tools clinking at their waists.

  “They ain’t my countrymen.” Ming set down the pailful of water he had drawn up from the well and submerged his open canteen in it, watching the bubbles race up, feeling it grow heavy in his hand.

  “They’re Chinamen, aren’t they?” the ringmaster said.

  Ming regarded him with a cold stare. “Aye,” he said at last. When his canteen was full he corked it and tucked it away in his pack. Then he set the pail of water down for the horses.

  “And where are the gentiles?” the ringmaster said, gesturing about the town with his pipe. “The Christians. The good God-fearing men of these great United States.”

  “The whites, you mean,” Notah said.

  “The whites indeed,” the ringmaster said. “Where are they?”

  “They are gone,” the prophet cut in.

  The ringmaster looked at him. “Gone, you say?”

  “Gone.” The prophet stooped and pinched a handful of dust, tasted it. “For no silver remains buried in these hills.”

  “What are these Chinamen digging up, then?” the ringmaster asked.

  “Stones,” the prophet said. He rose to his feet and let the dust fall. “And soon even the stones will be gone.”

  “And what’ll happen to the miners then?” It was Hazel, who stared intently at the prophet, watching his blank eyes flick over the landscape.

  “And then this town will recede into the earth,” the old man said. “In time its buildings will fill with drifts of dust. In time weeds will take root in its roads, and snowmelt fill its empty mines. In time there is nothing but the passing of time.”

  They fell silent. There was only the sound of a hundred passing feet, pickaxes jostling against rockhammers.

  “Awful bleak, old man,” Proteus said.

  The ringmaster made a fuss of knocking his pipe against the coach wheels, sending a shower of embers down into the pale sand. He ground them out with the toe of his boot. “Shall we give them a show tonight?”