How Much of These Hills Is Gold

by C Pam Zhang

  In Anna’s house there are twenty-one rooms and fifteen horses, two kitchens and three fountains. Velvet and damask, silver and marble. And in the largest room, its vaulted ceiling so high that the blue tiles mimic sky, is a deed in a frame. The frame is solid gold. The deed is mere paper. Dusty edges, one corner torn. Anna’s father’s signature a snake across the bottom. This is his most precious thing, this that gives him claim to his first prospecting site. Are you hurting? Anna asked the first time she brought Lucy to see the deed. Your face—it looks— Likely Anna had little practice with the word despair. Anyhow Anna fussed over Lucy, fed her sweets, led her across the marble floors and pressed onto Lucy silver boxes of salt, velvet dresses. Anna saying all the while, The same. Those words echo through the mansion where emptiness lurks despite the maids and grooms and gardeners—Anna’s mother dead, her father always traveling—and Lucy thought she heard what sounded behind them.

  It is as if Anna waved a wand over her friend—only the wand was a dowsing rod, and the rod held by Anna’s father, and the magic only gold. Transformation into the same girl.

  It worked, for a while. They even tricked the half-blind gardener. Same dress, same curls. Lucy repeated Anna’s words, repeated her carefree laugh. Anna filled Lucy’s vision so that, passing a mirror, Lucy was startled at the face within—not green-eyed, not round. A strange, grave face with crooked nose and guarded eyes.

  The gardener said, Yes, little madam. He cut the flowers that Lucy asked for.

  The spell broke at midnight, two months back, when Lucy stayed longer than ever in Anna’s room. They lit a candle, sneaked cold biscuits though the cook could’ve whipped up a feast. A vase of cut roses heady. Pressed close on Anna’s bed, the rest of the enormous house darkened, insignificant. Anna turned in midgiggle. Her face close and flushed. She asked if Lucy would like to live in one of the twenty-one rooms. Said, You’re like a sister to me.

  For the first time since returning to an empty riverbank, Lucy imagined waking to the certainty of another. That animal smell of a second body. Truth welled up in her, muddy. She was ready to speak.

  And then the gas lamps flared on. A man stood in the doorway, asking, “Who are you?”

  Anna’s father had returned from his business trip. Lucy brushed crumbs from her dress, dipped her head to hide her exposed nose.

  Anna was born in this soft green place, but her father was of the hills. He knew true gold and wasn’t deceived. As Anna hugged him, he asked where Lucy came from. Said he’d heard of people like her from his colleagues. He listened to the lies—Orphan—Don’t know—No one—and then he asked Anna for a private word. Lucy gathered her things and left. No one called her back.

  * * *

  —

  Since then, Anna’s quit talking of their shared future. The train they’d ride to its last stop in the East, the picnics they’d eat in her father’s orchards, the rivers they’d swim, the dresses they’d buy with her father’s money. No mention of Lucy living in one of the twenty-one rooms.

  After that night beaus were sent to the mansion. Anna mocked them, complained of them, compared them to animals and furniture. But she picked a man with his own family mansion, his own wealth in gold.

  Now Anna speaks of a house with Charles, a garden with Charles, travel with Charles. Of course Lucy is invited along. Anna so pleased by her best friend and her fiancé arrayed around her that she doesn’t see how Charles’s fingers loiter at Lucy’s waist, how Charles calls Lucy our very close friend, how Charles sends gifts to the hotel where Lucy launders clothes and shows up at Lucy’s window stinking of a saloon.

  Lucy accepts invitations to dinner and sits at the table set for three. She praises the delicacies. The flowers. The kindness. Never mentioning Charles’s whispering, when Anna leaves the room, that they should take a walk alone. The place beside Anna—once wide enough to accommodate a sister—has narrowed.

  And so Lucy soaks in the river, alone as she was before. Her skin puckers into damp ridges. Still she floats. Imagining a future in which she is as wrinkled on land as she is in water, and still sitting, smiling beside her friend. What other future can there be? She’s become what she said: Orphan. No one. No fortune, no land, no horse, no family, no past, no home, no future.

  Meat

  Lucy walks back dripping. By twilight people startle at her tangled hair, the slap of her bare feet. On the steps of her boardinghouse, three girls cross her path. Fear of the tiger makes them jumpy. One flinches at the sight of Lucy, who is possessed of an urge like instinct—to move not aside but forward, leaping straight at their silliness. She could teach a lesson in real fear, the thing that snaps girls’ spines.

  She smiles, lets them pass. The air’s too still. Restless twitch at the corner of her lips. Maybe a meal will settle her.

  The landlady catches her just inside the door, saying there’s a visitor in the parlor. It must be an anxious Anna. Lucy sighs, thanks the woman.

  “A male visitor,” the landlady says, moving to block Lucy’s path. Her spit flies. After five quiet years at the boardinghouse, this rage is surprising. “Keep that door open, mind you, and no bringing him upstairs. I’ll be watching.”

  Full dark has fallen. A stalking hour. It must be Charles.

  * * *

  —

  It was night the first time she met Charles, too. Three years ago, long before Anna. A time when Lucy still woke in the dark with her feet itching, loneliness a dry scratch in her throat that no amount of water could quench. And so she walked all the way across town.

  By day decent people avoided the streets nearest the station, grimy with saloons and gambling dens, where vaqueros, gamblers, Indians, drunkards, cowboys, charlatans, disreputable women, and other unsavory types were known to congregate. By night, those same streets called to Lucy. A familiar defeat in the postures of the people there. Looking soothed Lucy as thirteen, fourteen passed. Her limbs outgrew their gawkiness, her hair smoothed, and she found people beginning to look at her too. Men, especially.

  Those dirty streets cracked open after dark like the spines of schoolbooks. You’ll understand when you’re older, Ma used to say. Lucy learned to call Ma’s glide into her step, Sam’s swagger. Playing a game that thrilled and scared her both. She learned to ignore, to respond, to spit and flee unpunished. Poor men, desperate men, rough men—and then a man who was none of these.

  He fell into Lucy as he was thrown out of a gambling den. Cusses pursued him, his expensive clothes were torn—yet he laughed, unfazed. Promised he’d be back with more to spend. Where did you come from?, he said to Lucy. Unlike the rest, he didn’t rage or sputter at her rebuff. He kept smiling. He kept coming back.

  Poor men gave up, disappeared, ran out of money and pride. He had the arrogance of wealth. One night he offered a handful of coins and Lucy turned away, shivering. Not fear—more like how a man’s hands shiver after firing a gun. She looked over her arms, her breasts, her belly. Trying to see where in that softness lay her weapon.

  She quit those streets soon after. She’d learned to angle her bonnet, control her walk, brush hair over her face. Learned to deny the ghosts that haunted the silhouette of a broken man limping down an alley, or the momentary shape of a woman turning, long-necked, in the window of a bedroom above a saloon—how to seem an ordinary girl, the one who met Anna.

  And then he reappeared beside Anna. Neatened, still smiling, named. Charles, Anna said as she introduced her fiancé, this girl is very important to me. Don’t you forget her. Charles pulled Lucy a hair too close in greeting, leaving just enough space between them to accommodate the narrow alley, the dark night, the secret they shared from Anna. He said, How could I ever forget you?

  * * *

  —

  The man who waits in the parlor is black-haired, brown-skinned. He turns toward Lucy with narrowed eyes.

  Her hand flies to her nose. It’s Ba.

/>   Though there’s no grave soil on his red shirt, no maggots crawling from his boots, something long-buried breaks open. Lucy feels the heat, the choking dust. All the years and the distance and the cleanness of her living disappear as Ba walks toward her. It’s not the Lucy of Sweetwater who stands in the parlor. It’s a younger Lucy, slight and shoeless, so much of herself laid bare. A Lucy she figured buried in that Western territory.

  She wants to run, but the tight dress constricts her ribs. She can’t breathe. And Ba’s too quick besides—the haint’s come in a younger guise. No limp, no missing teeth. Long-legged, his cheekbones could cut. He stands before her, grinning.

  And he says, “Pow.”

  That voice. Not low enough for Ba. A husky quality like Ma’s. Close-up the face looks its sixteen years.

  “Your hair,” Lucy says, voice breaking. “It’s gotten so long.”

  Last she saw, Sam had shorn that hair to the scalp. Now it falls into Sam’s eyes, curling just under the ears. Half a lifetime Lucy spent tucking that hair into a braid. She reaches for it now. Then remembers.

  “What are you doing here?” She snatches her hand back. “You left me.”

  Sam’s smile drops. Sam’s chin lifts. “You weren’t hardly around. You left first.”

  “I checked on you every day. And not one word—don’t you have any consideration? I thought you were hurt, or dead. I didn’t ask you back here. I can’t believe—”

  Some things can bring her back in an instant. Chicken shit. A dead man’s face. And this stubbornness in Sam that’s resisted the passage of the years. What Ma called sullenness. What Ba called boy. What Lucy called, with a mixture of admiration and envy, Sam’s shine.

  The door creaks wider. It’s the landlady, her disapproval shrill. Lucy turns to reassure the woman, drawing politeness over the twelve-year-old’s hurt.

  When she turns back to Sam, she feels only weary. How can she explain the way it was when Sam left? Something went out of the world. A whole piece of her was tamped down and buried so deep that no one in Sweetwater can see it. She’s changed. No longer the sister Sam knew.

  “I think you’d better go,” Lucy says.

  And then Sam says, “I’m sorry.”

  The apology chases Ba’s ghost from the room. It’s Sam alone who stands there, extending a hand.

  “Truce?”

  A common hand. Rough, calloused, and quivering, making Lucy wonder what Sam buried too. Sam holds that hand out as seconds tick by. For the first time, it seems, Lucy has something Sam wants. How long will Sam stay to get it?

  She leaves the hand hanging. “Let’s get some dinner. You’re buying.”

  * * *

  —

  Lucy chooses where they won’t bump into Anna. A grease-spotted place by the station, where Sam orders without consulting the menu. Two steaks, a sour cook, and Sam aiming a smile so wide the woman walks away stunned, her own mouth turned up seemingly against her will. Meanwhile Lucy’s appetite slunk out the door at the sight of the flypaper. She asks for water. Sam watches her wipe her dirty fork, then calls across the restaurant.

  “Miss?” Diners turn. “Miss, you with the beautiful curls.” The cook, graying hair in a twist, looks up from onions in astonishment. “We’d appreciate fresh cutlery. If you’ve got it. Thanks greatly, miss.”

  “Don’t make a fuss,” Lucy hisses, adjusting her hair over her face.

  “They’ll look no matter what.”

  Sam, as usual, makes that true. Drapes over the rickety chair as if it’s a lounge in Anna’s parlor. If Lucy learned to go unseen, then Sam spent five years polishing a natural shine brighter. Sam’s walk is bolder, Sam’s shoulders straighter. A new bandana at the throat hides Sam’s lack of Adam’s apple. Look hard and Lucy can see remnants of the pretty girl-child: long lashes, smooth skin. But it’s like trying to fix on an animal moving through the grass at the jackal hour. Your eyes make you question.

  What most people see is a man. Handsome as Ba must have been before life cut its marks in him. All Ma’s charm and grace. Likely that’s why the two steaks come so quick, why the cook flashes another gummy smile.

  Sam falls upon the food with an old ferocity. Lucy spins her water glass, remembering starvation. Damp on her fingers, a matching damp in her eyes. What Sam stirs up is unwelcome. Murky.

  Sam mistakes Lucy’s gaze. “Do you want the second steak?”

  “I can’t. I’ll ruin my dress.” Lucy brushes the white fabric, imported special by Anna’s father. She doesn’t want to explain its cost, or Anna, or Anna’s father. To distract she says, “Tell me where you’ve been.”

  Sam takes another bite, leans back. At sixteen, Sam’s voice is unaccountably deep, with a singsong rhythm. Easy in this heat to imagine Sam spinning these tales by a campfire. They have the cadence of practice, like Lucy’s orphan story. These—Lucy’s eyes prick—are stories Sam shares with strangers.

  Sam fell in with cowboys to lead a great cattle drive North. Traveled with adventurers to a lost Indian city in the South. Trekked up a mountain with a sole companion to see the world laid out from the peak. Sam chews and talks, swallows and boasts, and hunger roams in Lucy. A hunger for wild places, for paths that twist so you can’t see their ends, for fear of the kind missing along with wildness in Sweetwater. A hunger for the trail that makes unsalted oats and cold beans into a feast, the trail that sears the body awake, not this sluggish place, this orderly place where all the streets are mapped and known.

  “Where will you go now?” Lucy asks when Sam stops. The restaurant’s gone quiet, yet an echo remains—a kind of ringing inside Lucy, as when one glass strikes another and sets it in motion too. She almost doesn’t recognize it for hope. “With who?”

  Sam scrapes a fork over the empty plate. “I’m going alone this time. Had enough of traveling in packs. I’m planning to go pretty far, and I figure I won’t come back. So I figured—I figured I’d say goodbye.”

  The hunger in Lucy is grown so vast, she fears she might collapse into it. She calls for her own steak. Intends just to nibble. But the meat occupies her mouth and eyes so she doesn’t have to speak or look at Sam, doesn’t have to fear the keenness of her disappointment showing through. She lifts her plate to hide her face, and laps the bloody juices.

  Sam pushes the other two plates across. Lucy licks those clean too. Only then does she look down at her dress. It’s ruined, spattered with small pink drops.

  Sam says, “It suits you.”

  Anger clarifies. This is Sam mocking again, come through town to upturn everything—selfish through and through. She reaches for the bill when it arrives, intending to call this a goodbye gift.

  But Sam’s quicker. Like some magic trick, Sam’s brown hand slaps down—and when it lifts, there remains a flake of pure gold.

  Lucy throws both hands, a forearm, over the sight. “Have you been prospecting?” Fear hums through her. She looks around, but none of the other diners have moved. The rest of the room seems suspended in torpor. “You know you can’t. The law—”

  “I didn’t prospect for it. I was paid by some gold men I worked for.”

  “Why in the world would you do that?”

  “Didn’t you ever wonder?” The swagger leaves Sam’s voice. For the first time Sam speaks softly, conscious of the other diners. “We weren’t the only ones wronged. There’s others, Indian and brown and black. None of us think it was right, what got took from us. Didn’t you wonder what the gold men did with what honest folks dug up?”

  Up this close, Lucy sees what she missed under Sam’s charm. Beneath is the same mix of violence and bitterness and hope that killed Ba. That old history that Lucy orphaned herself from.

  “Those gold men really think this land belongs to them,” Sam says, scornful. “Isn’t that the greatest joke?”

  Lucy can’t locate her laughter. What she can locate is
the precise spot on a wall, in the biggest house in town, where a deed hangs in a frame that, if melted down and sold, could feed a hundred families. Sam may scorn it, but there it is in a place Sam could never imagine. Lucy pretends to dab at her dress. She knows the answer to Sam’s question, and it shames her. She’s seen where the gold goes. She is a guest in its house, she wears its gifts, she is its friend and walks arm in arm with it through Sweetwater.

  * * *

  —

  Something lunges at them as they step from restaurant to dark street. Lucy jerks Sam back. It’s only a kid, running by close enough to jostle their elbows. Legs flash in the streetlamps’ orange light. Raggedy kids, most of them some shade of brown, play at tigers.

  The littlest chases the others, his fingers hooked to claws. They laugh at his thin yowl and scramble away. Soon he sits alone in the street. His face puckers.

  And then from behind Lucy comes a growl that shakes her bones. A surging, uneven sound that rises and recedes, rises and recedes, till the very air rends around it. Into that suffocating night comes a cool breath of terror. The laughing children freeze. Down the block a drunkard rises, starts to pound at the nearest door. Only the littlest sits with eyes full of wonder.

  Lucy turns. There’s dread in her heart, and something else too. The growl set off another ringing.

  No beast stands behind her. Only Sam, withdrawn into shadow. Sam’s long throat ripples to produce that sound, far lower than should be possible. Bit by bit Sam quiets.

  When Lucy can speak again, she says, “There’s rumors of a tiger.”

  “I know.” Sam stays in shadow. Eyes and grin show through. “A tiger with a taste for beef.”