The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu

by Tom Lin

  Gomez and Notah nodded and began to take down the canvas from the coach.

  The ringmaster waved them off. “No need for the show tent tonight. Put up the wing curtains and pitch the small tent for Ms. Lockewood to dress after her miracle.” He winked at Hazel.

  The men set to work. Proteus clambered back into his cage and in a flash was returned to his pagan form. No one paid him any mind. The sun was low to the horizon now, twilight gathering in the eaves of the cabins, the pit of the well. The ringmaster whistled to himself as he lit lamps and ringed them about in a primitive stage. Miners began to linger at the edges of the light, peering at the party of strangers loitering beside the well.

  “Let them know we’re having a show, won’t you, Mr. Tsu?” the ringmaster called out.

  “We’re having a show,” Ming repeated to the crowd. Blank faces.

  “In Chinese,” the ringmaster said.

  “I ain’t speak a lick of that,” Ming said.

  The ringmaster shook his head, chuckling in disbelief. “Course not. How absurd of me to think that you would. What about you, old man?” the ringmaster said to the prophet.

  “No,” the prophet said.

  “You spoke it well enough in the Sierras,” Ming said.

  “And so I did,” the prophet said. He turned his sightless gaze on the ringmaster. “But I have forgotten.”

  “All right,” the ringmaster said, “I’ll do it myself.” He beckoned to the small audience of miners gathering beyond the pool of light. “You sittee,” he said, “you sittee.” No one moved. “Come look see look see,” he clucked.

  Still no one moved.

  “Mr. Tsu,” the ringmaster said, “why don’t you have a seat and demonstrate for these folks how they’re meant to behave for a magic show.”

  “You ain’t unpacked the seats yet,” Ming said.

  “Well then,” the ringmaster said, “I spose you’ll have to sit on the damn dirt.”

  Ming stared at the ringmaster a little while. At length he swept the area by his feet clean with his boots and sat down.

  The ringmaster swung his cane in a flourish and clacked it across the spokes of the coach wheel nearest him. He outstretched his arms again to the miners and with diffident steps they approached, eyes shining in the darkness, faces black with dirt. They found seats pell-mell on the hardpack dirt.

  “First miracle!” the ringmaster announced.

  The stagehands dragged out Proteus’s cage and stepped back. A rush of strange speech ran through the crowd. The miners leaned forward to peer at Proteus hunched over in his cage. As the miners watched he drew himself up to his full and towering height and the miners shrank back.

  “Ming,” the ringmaster called out. “Come on up here. We need a volunteer to show these fine gentlemen what Proteus is capable of.”

  Ming stood and dusted his trousers. He made his way through the crowd to the little clearing of the stage and approached Proteus in his cage. The pagan’s eyes seemed to glow huge and black in the dim lamplight.

  “Watch!” the ringmaster boomed to the audience. Then, reverting to pidgin, he said, “Lookee him,” and pointed at Proteus, then shot Ming a grin.

  Ming faced Proteus and slowly raised his arm. The massive arm of the tattooed pagan followed at a trace. The one brought his hand to his jaw, moved it, the other the same. Ming blinked and Proteus was changed into a Chinese man. The audience stirred. Ming narrowed his eyes. The form Proteus had taken was nothing like his own. Ming caught his gaze and shook his head quick and controlled. Proteus did the same and in an instant he changed once more, this time into a different Chinese man, still nothing like Ming. Again Proteus transformed. Again an inexact replica. The miners began murmuring among themselves.

  “That ain’t me,” Ming blurted out.

  The ringmaster strode up to the cage and peered in at the small Chinese man now standing naked in the cage. “Proteus,” the ringmaster whispered fiercely. “Have you lost it?”

  The Chinese in the cage shook his head and changed again, this time into a spindly Chinese man with a tightly braided queue running down his back.

  “For God’s sake, man,” the ringmaster muttered, “that ain’t even close.”

  Ming stepped away from the cage and the man in the cage watched him go.

  The ringmaster took Ming’s place and locked eyes with the pagan. Proteus did not move. “Change!” the ringmaster roared, striking the iron bars with his cane.

  Proteus doubled over as though in pain and sank to the floor, his body flashing through a multitude of forms before finally settling on his original shape. Between ragged breaths he looked up at the ringmaster looming over him. At last his breathing slowed and he rose again to his feet.

  “Change,” the ringmaster ordered, his voice cold.

  The miners were silent. Proteus snaked a tattooed arm through the bars and held his hand flat out. The ringmaster passed his cane to his left hand and with his right grasped the pagan’s hand in a firm handshake. Proteus shuddered and then changed again, this time into the ringmaster’s double. The two men stood for a moment, seeming for all the world a man staring at his own uncanny reflection. The ringmaster let go and Proteus took a faltering half step back and slumped in the corner of his cage, exhausted. Notah and Gomez emerged from the darkness and pulled the cage back beyond the lamplight. It was silent but for the dry sound of the heavy iron cage sliding across the dirt.

  “Don’t you Chinamen know when to applaud?” the ringmaster snarled, his composure momentarily broken. He forced a smile, gestured to Ming, and clapped a few times as though to demonstrate, the sound odd and empty in the night air. “Mr. Tsu, it seems your countrymen are unimpressed. Perhaps they’ll enjoy the next act more.” He motioned for Ming to be seated. “Now then,” he said, taking his cane in his right hand again and striding to center stage. Looking timid Hunter joined him onstage. The ringmaster pointed at the boy with his cane and addressed the crowd in that tortured pidgin of his. “Lookee miracle two!”

  “My name is Hunter Reed,” the boy said. The men in the audience whirled their heads round, trying in vain to find the source of the boy’s voice. “When I was a child I took ill with ague,” the boy continued. “My parents made preparations to bury me.”

  The ringmaster tapped Hunter on the shoulder and signed to him—no use speaking English to the miners. So the boy turned to face the audience again and began to sing in a clear, thin voice. His lips did not move. The man sitting in front of Ming turned around and asked him a question he couldn’t understand. Ming stared back at him uncomprehending. The man repeated himself, pointed at Ming, then at the prophet standing in the wings, mute and lapped in darkness. He spoke more Chinese, the sound of his words curving in the shape of a question. Ming shook his head. He assumed everyone else’s head, like his, was full of the sound of the boy’s singing. A miner not far from Ming called out to Hunter in Chinese, his words met and extinguished by the boy’s deafnesses to sound and Chinese both.

  The ringmaster plugged his ears, mimed speech without sound, pointed to his mouth. “He no hear, no speakee.”

  Hunter finished his song and made a small bow. The ringmaster clapped again. No one else did. The ringmaster shook his head in irritation at the assembly of miners. Hazel lingered at the edge of the lighted stage, waiting for her cue.

  “This concludes our show,” the ringmaster announced, waving off Hazel. “We finishee,” he said, his face contorted into a cruel and mocking expression. The miners did not move. “Finishee!” the ringmaster shouted.

  At last the audience began to rise and flow away. Soon the town square was deserted but for Ming and the magic show.

  “No third miracle?” Ming said. He was still seated.

  The ringmaster waved his hand at the receding miners. “It would be a waste of damn kerosene on these celestials.”

  “If you reckon,” Ming said. He stood and stretched his cramped limbs. “We’ll rest some and get everything loaded up and travel
by moonlight. Too hot now to move in the day.”

  The ringmaster considered this and agreed and the others retired to their bedrolls. Soon only Ming, the prophet, and the ringmaster were left. Ming bade him good evening and beckoned the old man follow him to the stagecoach to fetch their own bedrolls.

  “Surprised you don’t want to stay the night here, Mr. Tsu,” the ringmaster called after him. “With your countrymen.”

  Ming stopped and told the prophet to go on. He walked back to where the ringmaster was standing and stared him in the face. In a flash of movement like he was but picking up a newborn kitten Ming clamped his hand over the back of the ringmaster’s neck and forced him down into a crooked stoop, his fingers crushing the delicate nerves at the base of the ringmaster’s skull. He bent low so that he was speaking directly into the ringmaster’s ear. “You paid me well to take you safe to Reno,” he whispered. “And I will. But it ain’t like I’m hurtin too bad for that money, you hear?” He pulled the ringmaster back up, his hand still clamped so hard around the back of the man’s neck that the thin skin over the ringmaster’s throat was drawn taut and strangling. “I got someone to see to in Unionville. But I ain’t opposed to doing you in first, if you keep running your damn mouth. So listen to me good, man. Don’t you ever call them Chinese my countrymen again,” Ming growled. “And God help you—God help you—if I ever hear you call me one. Understood?”

  “Yes,” the ringmaster choked out.

  “Excellent.” He let the ringmaster go and stepped back. The man broke into a coughing fit, his hand rubbing the back of his neck. Ming smiled and gave him a powerful clap on the shoulder, nearly knocking him over. “Glad we understand each other.”

  The ringmaster had an odd look on his face. For a while neither man spoke. At last the ringmaster met Ming’s gaze and abruptly grinned. “Mr. Tsu,” he said, “I admire a man who speaks his mind.”

  35

  In the full moonlight Notah lashed the barrels of water to the stagecoach and they set off again. They swept down the dry ravines from Dun Glen and spilled out onto the shimmering basin. Their ears were filled with the ceaseless roar of wind unchecked by tree or boulder. The air was chill and sharp. Hazel let the boy sleep in the stagecoach and came up alongside Ming, the prophet following behind on his pinto. Ming began to dismount, offering Hazel a ride, but she waved him off and bade him stay in his saddle. She wanted to stretch her legs. After this exchange they walked in silence for a while, the night unfolding before them, the wind dusting clean their footprints from the hardpack alkali flats.

  It is known that by moonlight the world takes on a secondary cast, sounding in registers lower than men can hear. The stagecoach rattles in a shifted key. The trail coils and uncoils like a headless serpent. It is never quite light enough; the hollows of the world flicker through reduplicated gradations, shadows upon shadows. The earth forgets itself.

  And so it is a kind of pilgrimage to move through such a landscape. The western horizon recedes endlessly in perfect lockstep with the man who strives toward it. There is, on certain days, a sense of transiting a world already depleted, a world of attenuated color and breath. The barren earthworks built of stone and dust are unreadable, monuments unmoored from any memory of their creation. From the right angle, when the light is just about to fade, the traveler can find epiphanies: that the world he crosses represents only the atavisms of some elder, long-evaporated god, the fading echoes of some enormous, transcendent effort that in the end came to nothing.

  Only the desert remains, circumscribing an infinite lack.

  “Do you still love your husband?” Ming asked without preamble.

  “Yes,” she said without hesitation.

  “What was his name?”

  She gave a sad smile. “Don’t remember.”

  “Notah got you good, huh.”

  “Yes,” she said, and tapped the side of her head. “The Navajo’s work ain’t perfect, but he did take away his name.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too.”

  For a long time neither said a word. The moon had arced beyond its zenith and was now sliding down to earth.

  “Don’t it trouble you none, layin with a murderer?” Ming asked.

  Hazel laughed. “Not in the slightest.”

  Ming opened his mouth to speak and then decided against it. There was no use telling her.

  But Hazel intuited it anyway. “It troubled her,” she said. “Your wife.”

  “It did,” Ming said. “But that ain’t all on her. I thought maybe I could get by without ever telling her, and she’d never have to know. When she found out, hell…” He trailed off, overtaken by memory. Ada had been hanging pictures, little watercolors of flowers. Her hammer knocked hollow on the false walls, sturdy on the real ones. He should have known better. She was so clever, she had always been so clever, it was one of the things he loved about her. It took her only an afternoon to puzzle together how the walls could swing open on their hidden hinges and then he was as good as found out. He came home to wads of money pulled out from where they’d been stuffed into the small spaces between the timber framing. Ada sat on the floor with a blank expression, surrounded by scattered bills, documents, little mementos from so many jobs for so many pounds of flesh. Too many, she had said.

  Ming settled his gaze on the shadowy horizon. “She said maybe she ain’t never known me at all. Said I had tricked her. And she said other things too—screamed em, really.”

  The two were silent a moment.

  “I oughta told her,” he said, half to himself. He cleared his throat, turned his eyes back westward. “Ada knew somethin of what I did for Silas. Her father did a good job keepin her out of his business, though. Ain’t nobody even knew he had a daughter before he debuted her, and by then she’d already been promised to Gideon.”

  He found himself remembering the first time he’d met Ada’s father, years ago now, long before the rails were even an idea in someone’s head. He had been but a child then, still shooting at cast-iron plates with the air rifle, still ranging in orchard rows instead of yards. Ada’s father had come by the ranch to meet with Silas about hiring him to run a few jobs in Sacramento. Ming had run into Silas’s office during their meeting—his air rifle had jammed, and he needed Silas’s help recharging the air tanks anyway—but when he realized he’d interrupted them he ducked red-faced behind Silas and apologized. Silas introduced him then, and Ming said what he had been taught to say when meeting Silas’s clients. Ada’s father eyed him with a disaffected curiosity before remarking to Silas that this dog of his was a quick learner, and that his English was better than he might have expected. What followed was one of the few times Ming recalled ever seeing Silas lose his temper. Silas refused the jobs, threw Ada’s father out. Ain’t nobody talks like that to you in your own home, boy. Ming wouldn’t see the man again until years and years on, after he and Ada had gotten together.

  “What was his business?” Hazel asked, jolting him from his thoughts.

  “Money,” Ming said. “What else.” He gestured out across the desert, past the dark horizon. “They say there’s riches like you wouldn’t believe in them rails. All kinda money in the buildin and the gradin and the blastin and the layin. Money in the land them rails run over and the land right next to that too. About the only thing there ain’t money in is them Chinese’s pockets. Porters knew it. Ada’s father knew it. The Central Pacific knew it too, and they hired him to know it. He was much bigger than what Silas was running in Sacramento. Playin with more zeros. He always protected Ada from the uglier side of things, though. Reckon that’s why she was so troubled by what I done. Murderer, she called me. Devil.”

  “You know, you’re layin with a murderer too,” Hazel said.

  “Beg pardon?” Ming said.

  She had killed a man once, Hazel said. Long ago, in Omaha. It had been late at night. She’d finished up her show and her husband had gone to the saloon. She was counting up the night’s earnings. Some drun
k came at her, grabbed her wrist. He’d caught her act at the show earlier that evening and told her he wanted to see her naked in her burned-up dress again. Then he emptied a bottle of whiskey over her head, undid his belt, and let his trousers fall to his ankles. Hazel made a face of disgust now and shuddered. The man had told her to go to the fire and set her clothes burning again so he could see her naked. So she pulled him into the fire and held him there. Two, three minutes. The man was too drunk to cry out. Hazel had her hand on the back of his head, pressing his face into the coals.

  She mimed the action now. “It made such a sound,” she said. “I told the sheriff I warn’t there when it happened. And he looked at this man with his face all black and blistered in the firepit and shook his head. Drunks fall into fires, he said, and there ain’t nobody to blame for that but themselves.” Hazel glanced up at Ming. “Pass me down that canteen, would you?” she said. “I’m mighty parched.”

  Ming undid the belt clasp of his canteen and handed it to Hazel. She drank and wiped her mouth and handed the canteen back to him.

  “You killed anyone before or since?” Ming asked.

  “No,” she said, “just the one. I ain’t done as much as you.”

  He peered down at her. In the moon-dim blueness her expression was inscrutable. “Two hundred,” he said in a low voice. He squinted farther into the darkness to no avail. “By my reckoning I done two hundred or so.” He could make out the crown of her head bobbing alongside his stirrup. Now she looked up at him, her eyes glinting where they caught moonlight. “That don’t trouble you?”

  “You’re a good man, Ming,” Hazel said.

  “I ain’t.”

  “I know a good man when I see one,” she said, “and you’re a good one. There are things on this earth far worse than the simple livin and dyin of men.”

  36