by Tom Lin
He picked up his pack from where he’d set it down and slung it over his back, clasping it with numb and clumsy fingertips. Half-moon rising over the east. Shivering he set off westward again and it was hours before the heat of exertion finally beat back the frigid mountain air. Every step drained him. He was starving. He moved more and more slowly through the dwindling night and in the small hours before dawn when his feet stumbled dead and wooden underneath him he tipped forward with scarcely the energy to put out his hands and break his fall before he crashed to the ground, his arms trapped uselessly beneath him and slivers of ice and snow clinging to his face. He tried to get up but could no longer move his limbs. The sky was just beginning to lighten. Birdsong in the trees. His skin burned where it touched the snow. With an enormous effort he managed to roll over onto his back and his arms fell limp by his sides. His pack dug into the small of his back. Morning came in a thousand thousand minute gradations of blue-white upon blue-white. He lay panting and in the cold air his breath gathered weightless above him and through it he gazed up to the endless sky beyond, the contents of his mind evaporating into nothingness.
“I ain’t ready yet,” he murmured, though he was no longer sure he could speak at all.
Birdsong relentless in the pines now, melodies overlaying melodies, dissonances and harmonies all together at once. His eyes drifted shut and with a soft grunt he forced them open again and gazed into the morning sky. A half thought formed in his head. Would someone build for him a cairn of stones?
“It ain’t my time, sir,” he said. To whom he did not know.
And now his eyelids felt heavy as lead. He did not want to go but he finally closed his eyes and powerless he sank down and down, slipping underneath the skin of the world.
57
He was woken by something wet and rough scraping over his cheeks. The heat of breath washed over his face. He opened his eyes and on its haunches licking his face sat a red-eyed albino cougar. In the darkness of that night when it had led him to water so long ago he had not seen how red the cougar’s eyes blazed.
Ming flinched and the cougar recoiled, as if surprised at his sudden life. With the little strength he had left he sat up groaning, his back glazed with ice and half-melted snow. The cougar’s mouth was bloodied and for a moment Ming thought he might be already half-eaten but an inspection of his person revealed it to be still whole. A low and continuous rumbling emanated from the cougar’s chest. The cat was purring. It rose from its haunches and circled Ming once, then butted its head into his shoulders, pushing him forward. He extended an uncertain arm and lightly placed his hand on the animal’s withers. The cat stiffened and pressed back against his hand and he stood, leaning on the cougar, waiting for his vertigo of hunger and fatigue to subside.
The cougar growled—playfully, it seemed—and slipped out from under his hand. He almost fell over again, catching himself with a jolting half step. The cat looked back at him and then padded a short ways into the pines. Ming followed, his feet dragging in the snow. They wove through the alpine forest man after beast until they came upon a little clearing in the snow, sheltered by a thick canopy, where bare dirt lay exposed at the surface. On the ground sprawled a young fawn, its tongue hanging grotesquely from its open mouth, bloody holes punched into the column of its neck. Its white belly had been torn open and its entrails were scattered over the forest floor. The cougar lay down by its kill and began to gnaw at the carcass’s shoulder, tearing great pieces of venison free.
When Ming made to crouch by the fawn’s hindquarters his strength failed him and he fell alongside it. He drew Huxton’s bowie knife from his waist and began to carve into the carcass. At length he managed to cut away a broad fillet of venison and he ran the knife flat along the pearlescent fascia connecting meat and hide, stripping the one from the other. The knife had become slick with blood and he panted from the effort. The cougar stopped eating and watched him. The slab of venison was still warm in his hands.
“Thank ye,” he said.
The cougar closed its eyes and seemed to bow its head. Ming lay on the dirt leaning against the thin bones of the dead fawn and ate slowly, paring off pieces of meat with the bowie knife as he chewed. The meat was rich and sweet and as the strength returned to his body he began to eat almost greedily, relishing the metallic aftertaste of blood, the pungent streaks of fat melting on his tongue. When he finished he carved himself another side of venison, more quickly this time, not bothering even to strip the hide away, simply lifting chunks off the slab with quick circular movements of his knife and eating them nearly whole. Once he was at last sated he wiped his hands and knife clean on the fawn’s matted hide and returned the knife to its sheath. Between the two of them he and the cougar had reduced the carcass to a tangled heap of bones.
The cougar tore at a final piece of meat, severing what sinews still connected it to the carcass, and with a flick of its powerful neck swallowed the meat whole. Then it lowered its head and gazed at Ming with eyes the color of breathing embers. Against the bloodwet dirt its white fur seemed to shine. The sun slunk down through the pine canopy from on high. It was noon in the mountains. The air was beginning to warm. Ming rose and brushed the dirt and ice that clung to his trousers. The cougar purred, its red eyes following Ming.
“Thank ye,” he said again. He began to leave and then turned back to the sleek white animal. “What are you?” he asked.
The cougar opened its mouth as if to speak and then, as though deciding against it after all, simply yawned widely, pink ropes of blood and saliva pulling taut between its yellow teeth. Then it shut its mouth and licked its nose. It had nothing to say.
Ming left the cougar behind and came down the slope to where he had first fallen and found west again. The route through the mountains was almost complete. On the far slope across the ragged valley the unmistakable and unnatural straightedge of the railroad appeared. There was a soft padding through the trees on the ridgeline above him and he felt himself being watched, a feeling that continued through the afternoon and into the evening. From time to time he would whirl his head and stare into the pines, hoping to catch his pursuer out. Each time finding nothing. Only once, as the world was going to black, did he see it. The small and sleek figure of a cougar as white as the snow over which it passed, its eyes shining in the gathering darkness.
That night Ming made camp in an alcove beneath a snow-topped spur of granite jutting out from the mountainside. And as he lay beneath that spur he saw that it was twice jointed along its length, its discontinuous segments welded together by ancient pressures, and in that early moonless twilight it seemed like a great finger pointing west, a dactyl of ice and stone.
58
In the morning he rose with the sun and set off again. The landscape around him shifted and rolled in almost imperceptible transmutations. Yet every few miles, glancing up to take a new bearing on a new peak, he found that he was moving across shallower slopes, cutting through flatter valleys. These the decapitated peaks of elder ranges. He was entering the western foothills.
California at last.
He tracked the railroad and followed it down and as he bled off altitude his own route and the railroad began to converge. In the late afternoon he scaled a small bluff and from its slight peak glassed the railroad. At length a locomotive horn issued its lonesome wail and shortly thereafter a train emerged from a cleft between the shallow foothills. The smokestack put out a thin gray haze as it descended the grade, dragging five six seven passenger cabins and behind those three empty freight cars. Through his spyglass he watched the train slow to a halt by a rail depot some three miles farther. The locomotive was taking on more water, more wood. After half an hour the distant blast of the train horn splashed its echo over the land and the train began to churn westward once more, a vast plume of steam and woodsmoke rising from the engine.
It was nearly fifty miles more to Sacramento and Ming knew the route well, knew that it would bring him through a multitude of jurisdiction
s full of men eager to kill him and drag his body to the Porter brothers, who no doubt knew by now that he was coming. He had killed near every sheriff between Utah Territory and the Sierras. He would take the train. He stowed his spyglass back in his pack and climbed down from the bluff. In the new flatness of the earth the rails all but disappeared.
By nightfall he lay waiting for the train on his belly in the tall grass by the rail depot. In a matter of hours he would be in Sacramento. Patience was easy. As the moon rose pale and sickle-shaped over the Sierras the rails began to hum. Soon the train was before him, the hot skin of the locomotive sending shimmers into the cool night air. He heard the sound of men calling to one another, the sound of logs being tossed into the fuel car, the low rumble of water filling the engine tank. He got to his feet and glanced around the dim night and seeing no one he leapt into the open door of the trailing freight car. In a dim corner of that iron box he sat down and leaned his head against the cold metal wall. Shortly he heard the hiss of steam and with a lurch the train started, its wheels grinding on the rails, the freight car rocking sedately amid the noise. Ming closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep.
He awoke to the shadowy figure of a railman standing over him holding a lantern, the man’s other hand resting on a cudgel at his belt. Ming scanned the railman’s waist, the way his jacket moved as he swung his lantern down near Ming’s face. Apart from the club he was unarmed.
“Boy,” the railman said. “You aim to go home?”
Ming snapped his eyes shut, feigning sleep, and did not answer.
The railman stooped low and squinted at Ming’s face by the dim glow of his lantern. He didn’t seem to recognize him. The railman stood up and kicked Ming’s foot. “Wake up!” he barked.
Ming opened his eyes to the railman’s grimy face.
“Ain’t no free rides out west,” the railman said. “Only scoundrels and murderers hitch rides on these trains. Which is you, Chinaman?”
“Ain’t neither.”
The railman narrowed his eyes. After a moment he turned abruptly and left, taking the lantern with him. The car fell back into blue darkness. Ming drew his revolver and cocked it.
Shortly the railman was back, this time accompanied by a man with a sixgun at his bulging waist. A lawman, fat and slow.
The lawman rested one hand on the holster of his pistol and the other he slid along the railing of the car for balance as the train leaned left and right. “John,” he said.
“That ain’t my name,” Ming said.
“Reckon it ain’t,” the lawman said. He peered through the dim lamplight at Ming’s face. Recognition flashed across his face. “I know who you are,” he said.
“Is that right,” Ming said.
The lawman drew his revolver and with his free hand pushed the railman behind him. The lantern disappeared behind the lawman’s corpulent figure and Ming vanished into the darkness and the lawman snatched the railman’s lantern hand by the wrist and moved it to throw light on Ming in the corner of the freight car. “Get out,” he commanded, and cocked the hammer of his gun.
Ming did not move.
“I said get.” The lawman motioned with his gun toward the scrubland flashing past the open bay doors.
The moon hung high in the sky. What little was visible had a ghostly cast to it. Beyond the door some nameless oblivion.
“Train’s movin,” Ming said.
“Don’t matter none to me,” the lawman said, and strode toward Ming, keeping his gun trained on his chest.
Ming rose to a low crouch and the lawman stopped short.
“It’s a mercy he don’t just kill you right here,” the railman called out, a scarcely concealed twinge of fear in his voice.
“Last chance, you celestial sonofabitch,” the lawman bellowed, bending to grab Ming by the arm.
Ming shot the lawman through his soft belly and the lawman cried out in surprise and took one half step backward before going down onto the floor of the railcar, his head bouncing hard. His gun went off and the bullet cracked past Ming’s body, tracing a useless arc out into the desert and burying itself in the ground. Ming kicked the lawman’s gun out the bay doors, recocked his own gun, and shot the railman square in the throat. The lantern slipped from the railman’s hands and crashed to the floor. He staggered backward and collapsed, clapping his hands over his gushing neck as blood dark in the moonlight cascaded down the front of his shirt. The smell of kerosene filled the air and then the floor erupted with sliding flames. Behind Ming the lawman came to and moaning he rolled over onto his side and opened his eyes to brilliant firelight. His hand closed around the memory of his revolver and found nothing. Ming holstered his gun and drew his railroad spike. He closed the distance between them in two strides and sank the spike into the chest of the lawman, who whimpered only a little before blood rose thick out of his mouth and nose and the life ran out of him. Ming pulled the spike out and wiped it clean on the lawman’s shirt and sheathed it. The writhing tongues of the kerosene fire were swaying toward him but then the fire sputtered and vanished almost as quickly as it had come on, its fuel adulterated with blood. The pressure of its heat on his face disappeared.
Cold air. He blinked and the world swung past.
Working quickly Ming stripped the two dead men down to their underwear. He spread their singed coats and shirts on the floor of the railcar and patted them down. Nothing of much use in these ratty pockets: a plug of tobacco, a small whittling knife, a half-carved balsawood bird, detritus. He rolled the enormous body of the lawman over to the doors of the railcar and with the heel of his boot sent it tumbling down the embankment. The thin railman weighed hardly anything and judging by the ashen face pockmarked by adolescence could not have been older than nineteen. The bullet had shattered his Adam’s apple, punched clear through the nape of his neck. Ming gripped a bony wrist and dragged the railman’s body to the doors. Small black flecks of dried blood flaked off the dead boy’s skin like soot from a chimney flue. The air was filled with the rhythmic rattling of the train. Ming closed the boy’s eyes and then sent this body, too, rolling out of the train and watched until a spray of dust appeared where his limp and angular form finally came to rest. The train kept moving and in a few moments the puff of dust faded to a grimy smudge receding on the horizon and then to nothing at all, just a field of stars and ragged clouds in the enveloping sky.
Ming sat down and closed his eyes and tried to doze. When he opened his eyes a gray dawn was breaking. The sun came rolling over the east, its clean light glinting off irrigation canals that stretched like spidery cracks into the blackness ahead of the train. His hands fluttered down his body, confirming the presence of gun, notebook, spike. His pack beside him. Already the wind had cleansed the car of the smell of kerosene.
He rose and went to the open bay doors and gazed out over the impossible flatness of the Central Valley in the dim, then leaned out the side and sighted down the rails westward to a shimmering point of distant streetlights. He stood there for a moment leaning out over the edge of the railcar as the single point of light began to fragment into many and bright yellow stars settled to earth. And now the city proper began to come into clearer view, cutting a silhouette of walls and roofs against a dawn-bleaching sky.
The train shuddered and the brakes began to sing. When the train had slowed to the pace of a brisk walk Ming put his pack on and squatted by the door with his boots hanging off the edge and with a little push he went tumbling down the embankment, his body straight as a tamping rod, spinning and spinning until he came to a stop at the base of the grade. After a little while he collected himself and dashing the dust from his trousers and his work shirt he stood up at last.
He took out his spyglass and blew the dust from the lenses and sighted it, hoping it had survived his jump. The image was clear and unmarred. He glassed Sacramento in the distance—two, maybe three miles—and returned the spyglass to his pack, glancing up the slope of the embankment to the railroad and planning his route. H
e checked himself for gun, spike, knife. All there. His work was almost done. He would see her soon.
For a little while he stood there motionless, as though waiting for some great flywheel deep in his body to catch up to speed. And then, noiseless, lethal, he was on the move again.
59
It was full daylight when he arrived in Sacramento. He kept his hat brim drawn low to his face as he walked, parsing those alphanumeric streets into old remembered paths. He felt gazes clinging to him, following him down the alleyways and the empty roads. The streets sank lower and lower into the earth and water clear and mirror-flat began to rise up from the road. His boots darkened with wet. He turned onto an equally flooded side street and sloshed through the shallow water, stealing glances left and right to check if he was being followed.
No one paid him any mind here. He had crossed into China Slough and now dozens of Chinese with faces like his own bustled through the streets, a hundred boots splashing through the flooded streets. He had become at last unremarkable. He arrived at a ramshackle two-story building with its windows boarded over that seemed to have been abandoned for at least a hundred years. The water here was gray and clouded and it lapped up at the cracked wooden stairs leading up to the ancient front door. Ming stepped up and gave a sharp knock.
A slit opened in the door at eye level and two wizened eyes peered out into the sunlight.
“I’m a friend,” Ming said.
“I know,” the voice replied. The slit snapped shut followed by the sound of an iron deadbolt being withdrawn. The door opened a crack. “Come in, my child,” the voice beckoned.
Ming scanned the street to see if anyone was watching. No one was. He pushed the door open a bit wider and slipped inside. Only a few lanterns hung from the wall, burning weakly, illuminating by shadows and gleamings a multitude of weapons hanging from pegs on the wall, rifles and revolvers and scatterguns by the dozen. The air was musty and damp. Slowly Ming’s eyes adjusted to the darkness.
