by Tom Lin
Ming dropped the empty scattergun and walked toward the crying. He pressed his ear to the door. Joined with the baby’s crying was the sound of someone breathing heavily. “Ada,” he called out.
There was no reply.
“Ada,” he said again. He turned the doorknob and eased open the door.
She was standing there as beautiful as Ming had ever remembered her, slick with sweat. She held a scattergun and stood before a crib, the source of the crying baby. Aside from the child there was only the sound of her breathing and the fading ringing of gunshots in his ears.
“Ada,” Ming breathed.
“You,” she said, her voice shaking. He started toward her and frantic she brought the scattergun to her shoulder and drew a bead on him. “Don’t come any closer!”
“It’s me,” Ming said softly. “Ada, it’s me.”
“I know,” she spat. Her face twisted and her breath caught in her throat in small half sobs. The barrel of the gun bobbed unsteadily. She took a hand off her scattergun and angrily wiped her face of tears. Ming made to step toward her again and in a flash she returned her hand to the gun and fired at the ground between them. Ming stopped. “I ain’t kiddin,” she said. Her tears were flowing now, shining tracks down her cheeks.
“I did it,” Ming said. “We can be together again.”
“Why’d you have to come here?” Ada cried. “Why the hell’d you have to come here?”
Behind her the baby’s cries continued.
“I ain’t never had a choice,” Ming said. “I had to, they stole you away—”
He was interrupted by a tortured wail from Ada. “I asked them to!” she cried. “I loved you, I loved you, I loved you.” Her eyes were fierce and bright. “But how could I raise a child with a murderer?”
“But Gideon—” he began.
“You killed him! You killed my baby’s father!” Her face was contorted into a mask of grief and rage. Her body shook but she still clutched the gun tight, pointing it at Ming through her tears. She drew a few deep breaths and steadied herself.
“You asked them to?” Ming said.
“I was so scared of you,” Ada said, her voice cold and calm now.
“Baby,” he murmured. His pulse slowed and the world pressed sharp and heavy against him.
“Did you know they wanted to kill you?” she said. “I begged them not to, begged them to find another way. Because I love you.” She inhaled deeply and let out her breath a little at a time, her fingers adjusting their grip on the gun. “Loved you. But I ain’t about to make that mistake again,” she said, cocking back the hammer of the scattergun.
“Don’t do it,” Ming said, his voice breaking. “Don’t make me do it.”
Ada closed one eye and leaned her head against the stock of the scattergun, sighting down the barrel at Ming’s chest. Her finger curled against the trigger.
He thought he might have felt rage, or fury, or loss. But no heat passed through his body and no ache torqued his chest. He was spent. Ada’s face hardened and she steadied the barrel of the scattergun, and he felt his movements smooth and sure and practiced, the same movements he had made countless times before, his body answering to the vagaries of an evaporating obligation, a gun bucking in a hand that seemed no longer his own. The rage was gone out of him. The lust for revenge. Everything was gone out of him. There was left only the originating impulse at the kernel of all men that pulls a body down, down, and down again.
She fell gracelessly, a jumble of limbs and hair and metal, blood streaming from the small and perfect hole that had appeared so suddenly in her cheek. The shot from her scattergun went wide, blasting through the ceiling, letting in the rich late-afternoon light.
For a long time he stood there in the sunlit room and watched the blood roll glossy and clean across the floor, moving in neat parallel channels along the seams between the floorboards. The ringing in his ears subsided and in time even the baby’s crying quieted. He walked over to Ada and crouched low before her body and examined her ruined face, studying her unblinking eyes in the dusty air as a seep of blood washed down her cheeks. Her face was familiar and yet strange, as though she were someone he’d seen before at a remove, someone else’s dream, maybe, someone else’s memory. He stared at her until her face no longer seemed a face at all, only an inchoate assembly of features he might have recognized long ago. He knew he had at last begun to forget and with this realization came a dull ache, of relief, perhaps, or a draining of grief. He holstered his gun and scrubbed his face with his hands and now images came to him unbidden, quiet and calm. The prophet’s glassy stare. The ringmaster blindfolded in his grave. Proteus, that shifting giant, and the stagehands, the strange power of hands, the works of hands. Hunter, a sharpened rib in his hands. And Hazel, her form and her face, engulfed in tongues of flame.
Again that sense of ancient obligation.
Ada’s eyes were still open. He reached out and drew her eyelids down over her sightless eyes, leaving long smears of blood on her face. It occurred to him to say something and he found a word already waiting. He stretched out his hands over her body and held them there awhile.
“Return,” he murmured.
And now Ming rose and looked down at her body, her blood-soaked dress, the crib behind her, where an orphan slept—an orphan just like him—one whose face he knew he could not bear to see. In his mouth he tasted metal and flowers. He felt as though he had not slept in a hundred years, or perhaps as though he were at last waking from an ancient dream.
And then he turned, and in a moment he was gone.
Epilogue
The rails begin to hum long before the train appears, a low, long hum punctuated by the intermittent clicking and grinding of iron on iron, far away. The man stands with a leather pack slung low and close over his shoulder and watches the east with dark eyes, gazing down the tracks. The others on the platform give him space, whisper to one another—about him, no doubt, though he cannot hear them. Perhaps the train is late. He leaves trackside and walks over to the ticket booth to see if the clerk has returned. The shutters are still closed. No matter. He can pay the fare on the train. He leans back against the booth beside a mother and her child and she pulls her son close, casting him a wary glance.
The boy peers up at the man. “Is that a real gun, sir?”
The mother, horrified, pulls the boy yet closer. She tells him to hush.
The man looks down at the boy and flashes him a smile. “Aye,” he says.
The boy asks if he can touch the gun.
“Quiet,” the mother warns. Then, to the man: “Sorry he’s botherin you, sir.”
“He ain’t botherin nobody,” the man says good-naturedly. He unholsters his gun and in a practiced movement pops the cylinder out and pockets it. He passes the gun into his other hand and offers it to the boy, who takes it with reverent awe.
The boy turns it over in his hands, fingers the trigger, raises it and aims down its sights.
The man places a sure and heavy hand on the barrel and pushes it down. “Careful now,” he cautions the boy. “It ain’t no toy.”
“Give him his gun back,” the boy’s mother says. The boy shakes his head and cradles the gun to his chest and his mother reaches down and tugs the revolver out of his small hands. She passes it back to the man and thanks him.
“Ain’t no problem, ma’am,” he says. He replaces the cylinder in the gun and holsters it again.
“Are you famous, sir?” the boy asks.
“No,” he says.
“You sure you ain’t famous, sir?” the boy asks again. “I seen your face somewhere.”
The man gazes down at him and thinks awhile. “Must be someone out there who looks just like me,” he says.
The distant blast of a horn signals the approaching train. The man nods to the boy and his mother and walks over by the tracks again, his skin prickling under the new dawn sun. A shimmering on the horizon grows to a fine gray haze as the locomotive draws near. The man peers dow
n at his hand and wipes a bit of dried blood off his knuckles. He reaches into his pocket and takes out a crumpled wad of bills, straightens them one by one before folding them in half and returning them to his pocket. The locomotive hisses to a squealing stop and the fireman comes down from the cab, his face and arms black with soot, sweat glinting on his brow.
Down the line the conductor leans out the door of a traincar and squints at his pocketwatch a moment before he returns it to his pocket. “Six thirty-nine to Promontory,” the conductor calls. “All aboard.”
There is a rustle of activity as faceless men and women begin to enter the traincars, bags and chests and boxes in tow.
The man waits and when there is no one left on the platform he approaches the door of the traincar where the conductor is standing and gets on. “I ain’t got no ticket,” he explains. “The clerk warn’t in the booth.”
The conductor nods, looks him up and down. “You can pay the fare with me,” he says. “Where you headed, Chinaman?”
The man meets the conductor’s gaze with a strange expression and a weary smile.
“Reno.”
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank: Jonathan Lethem, Lisa Queen, Ben George, Gregg Kulick, Ben Allen, Marie Mundaca, Alyssa Persons, Kimberly Sheu, Laura Mamelok, Evan Hansen-Bundy, Massey Barner, Bruce Nichols, Arden Reed, Wen Yue, Lin Jianhao, Li Xiuhua, Wen Guanglie, Lin Guomin, Chen Yaxiang, and Pia Struzzieri. This book was written on the land of the Patwin people.
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About the Author
TOM LIN was born in China and immigrated to the United States when he was four. A graduate of Pomona College, he is currently in the PhD program at the University of California, Davis. This is his first novel.
