by C Pam Zhang
“We chatted. He ran off. I’m tired of this place. Can we go?”
With effort, Lucy says, “Don’t you want to—to say goodbye to Anna?”
“Not especially.” Sam walks off, voice spreading through the leaves. “I thought she’d be more interesting, being so rich. She’s awful dull.”
Lucy laughs so hard she stumbles against Sam’s arm. She presses into that arm, that sturdy back, her laughter condensing to hiccups against Sam’s red shirt. Once they rode Nellie pressed together this way and saw half the world. Warily, Sam says, “What’s so funny?”
“Did you know,” Lucy says, muffled, “she wants to declaw a tiger.”
“Idiot,” Sam snorts. “I hope she enjoys being cursed for seven generations. What kind of a place is this? Don’t they know—”
“—the stories? Not a one. Let’s go back—to my boardinghouse.”
She almost said, home.
Wind
On their way back Sam stops at the deserted town pump. The usual crowds are dispersed tonight, leaving only the squeak of the handle. The gush of water. The hiss between Sam’s teeth as Sam puts a fist in the stream. As the dark stain on Sam’s knuckles begins to wash free.
That color—impossible to see it true in the dark. Lucy touches a smaller stain high on Sam’s sleeve. She puts her wet fingers to her nose and smells a jangling.
It’s blood.
“It ain’t mine,” Sam reassures her. “I only bloodied his nose.”
“You said you chatted with Charles.”
“He said things about you. I was protecting you.” Sam’s chin lifts. “I did right.”
“You can’t—” Lucy begins. But Sam did. Sam who doesn’t bend to the world’s rules but bends them. Sam came to town and became the impossible tiger. “I hope you broke it.”
Sam doesn’t recoil from that ugliness. Only says, “She’s not a friend to you, either, you know. However rich or pretty.”
“I know,” Lucy says, in a small voice.
“I hope you picked your other friends smarter.”
“You don’t have to worry about that.” Lucy sits down, exhausted, right there on the wet flagstones. Damp creeps up her shift. She stretches her legs out, lies all the way back with a hand pressed to her eyes. She feels rather than sees Sam bending, hovering, lying down too. For a while, there is quiet.
“Don’t you ever get bored in this place?” Sam says. Lucy stiffens. The sting goes out of the question as Sam adds, “Don’t you ever get lonely?”
All day it’s been stifling hot. Now Lucy perceives a faint breath of wind. A Westerly wind, the kind native to the hills and born at the coast. They might be laid out in the long yellow grass and looking at the stars. The best thing about stars is that you can see in them any shape you want. Make any story. Better, even, when the person beside you doesn’t see them the same way.
Lucy sits up. “Take me on your next adventure.”
“It’ll be hard going.”
“I’ve been resting for five years.”
“Your feet look awful soft.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you tried wearing boots three inches high.”
“If you do . . . it won’t be easy to turn back.”
“Why not?”
And Sam says, “I aim to go across the ocean.”
* * *
—
When they arrive at the boardinghouse to collect Lucy’s belongings, a man in black is pacing the porch.
Ignore them, Anna said of her hired men the first time Lucy saw one and stopped dead. Papa and his friends keep them as a precaution, but they mean you no harm. They don’t mean anyone harm—not good people, at least—I’ve never seen my men do worse than push a drunk aside or ask a debtor for money. They’re glorified errand boys. Here, watch this. I’ll ask him to pass the tea. And because Anna laughed, Lucy laughed too.
These silent men grew as invisible to Lucy as their purported guns. It’s true she never saw one do more than menace. But there’s something different about this man—and then it comes to her. She’s never seen a hired man without Anna to command him. He’s eerie as a shadow without its caster.
The man turns. Sam drags Lucy back around the corner, a firm hand over her mouth.
“It must be a misunderstanding,” Lucy whispers, humoring Sam. “Anna wouldn’t—it’s a mistake. Likely she sent him with a message.” Errand boys. “I’ll talk to him.”
Sam lets loose a string of hushed, unfamiliar words. Lucy recognizes only the last cuss. “Ben dan. Anna didn’t send him.”
Lucy opens her mouth to correct Sam. Then she hears it. The man’s pacing—an unerring, pitiless tempo. A long-buried part of her, stirring awake, says, Hunting. She looks at the blood on Sam’s sleeve that wouldn’t wash out. “You mean Charles sent him?”
Sam cuts Lucy a look she knows. In another life she aimed that same look at Sam—the look given to an exasperating child.
“This isn’t some lovers’ quarrel,” Sam says. “He’s here for me.”
Fear strums Lucy in earnest now. Blown in on the wind is a part of her old world. The dangerous part.
“But why—”
“He thinks I owe some money.”
Anna has spoken of how the hired men are sometimes sent to collect on debts. Lucy relaxes. “Is that all? So pay him back. I have some savings—”
“No,” Sam snarls, and Lucy flinches. A coiled violence in that voice, like a pulled-back fist. For the first time she truly believes the stories Sam told at dinner. She can see in Sam the cowboy, the mountaineer, the miner. The hardened man unknown to her. “I don’t owe anything. Never mind that. You’ll be safe enough if I leave town alone.”
“But why?” Lucy can ask, and ask, but the question is futile. That old stubbornness firms Sam’s jaw. The years make no difference—even young and pudgy, Sam never broke a silence.
Lucy’s gaze falls instead to Sam’s swollen knuckles. They mark Sam’s courage. Some things shifted tonight and can’t be taken back: the cut on Sam’s hand, the blood on Charles’s nose, Anna. Where, the wind seems to ask, is Lucy’s courage?
Her heart thuds, but Sam can’t hear that. Lucy smiles a practiced smile. Tosses her head as if she has curls to bounce. “What do I care about safe? This town is safe, and just look at it. I’m coming.”
“You don’t understand. It won’t be fun. It—”
“It’ll be an adventure. Besides, if you get hauled off into some debtors’ prison, you’ll need someone to break you out.”
She intended it as a jest, but Sam’s gaze remains distant, following the hired man, whose pattern brings him closer and closer to the corner. Sam looks ready to bolt.
“Please,” Lucy says. “I don’t care about some stupid debt—I won’t ask about it if you insist. Let’s go.”
“What about your things?”
“They’re only things.” As Lucy says it, she realizes it’s true. She thinks of the thirty pearl buttons scattered across Anna’s rug. How the ping of them against the door was like claws, gently clicking. “What makes a family a family?”
She thought that, at least, would make Sam smile.
Blood
A safe distance from Sweetwater, Sam calls a halt. All night and all morning they’ve traveled. True to Sam’s prediction, Lucy’s feet have blistered. Her eyes are gritty. She half dozes, thinking of her feather bed. She wants a rest, a bite to eat. But Sam squats by the stream they’ve followed and sinks hands into the mud.
“This isn’t the time to play around with war paint,” Lucy says as mud slathers Sam’s cheeks.
“It’s to hide our scent. In case of dogs.”
Morning’s risen on the decision Lucy made in the dark. Swift clouds race overhead. Without buildings to shrink the sky, she’s terribly exposed. This is the land freed of its frame, loosened fro
m a deed, and it is huge and whistling and uncontainable. She stands at the mercy of wind and weather. No longer brave or wild as she felt last night, but puny, sun-stunned, tired, hungry. She scurries behind Sam, whose stride loosens as they leave Sweetwater behind.
For five years Lucy let more and more of herself be buried. Sank into Sweetwater’s slow life like a mule in quicksand, too stupid to notice till it was half-drowned. While Sam, wandering, grew only more into Sam. Learning how to run, how to survive, how to escape dogs, how to spot who means them harm.
“You can still turn back,” Sam says.
Lucy glares. She slaps her hands into the mud. A familiar smell coats her, like the waters in mining country. Once she drank it down complaining. Now she makes herself breathe deep. She’s choosing this mud, as she’s choosing this life. She can no longer avoid the harder truths.
She asks, “Did you really aim to miss that banker?”
“No.”
“Why’d you lie?”
“I figured you’d leave me if I told.”
It’s Lucy’s turn to say, “I’m sorry.” Words alone seem insufficient. Remembering what Sam did in the boardinghouse, she sticks out her hand. “Pardners?”
She half meant it as a joke, but Sam’s grown-up face is solemn. Sam grips beyond Lucy’s hand, at her wrist, fingers finding the vein. Lucy finds Sam’s vein in turn. She waits till their blood grows peaceful, till their heartbeats match. They’re starting over.
“I promise I’m not leaving,” Lucy says.
“I know that now. Just—” Sam swallows. “I figured you’d run too. Because you look so much like her.”
“Who?” There’s a queer whistling in Lucy’s head, though no wind stirs. Her hands and feet gone cold. She lets go of Sam.
“I tried to tell you, ages ago. By the river. Ba told me and I figure you deserve to know too. Ma left us.”
Lucy laughs. Can’t quite manage carefree. It’s the old ha-ha-has of her childhood that heave up, the sound of cracked heat. Sam starts to speak, but Lucy puts her hands over her ears and walks downstream.
* * *
—
Alone Lucy pitches stones in the water. When tiredness makes her pause, her reflection in the still waters makes her start again.
She looks like her.
Lucy knew for years that Ba was a dead man walking after that storm. Now she knows what killed him, sure as whiskey, sure as the coal dust in his lungs. Ma put a wound in him that festered over three years.
“Sorry,” Lucy says. If Ba’s haint hears, it stays quiet.
Beauty is a weapon, Ma said. Don’t be beholden, Ma said. My smart one, Ma said. Rich in choices, Ma said. Ma who split up the gold as she split up the family. Lucy remembers the pouch hidden between Ma’s breasts. It was empty when the jackals got to it—but it wasn’t always.
Slow and stupid, eight years too late, Lucy thinks of how Ma took a handkerchief from that pouch the night the jackals came. How she held it over her mouth. How her cheek was swollen on one side, and how she didn’t open her lips again that night. How quickly that swelling went down—a swelling big as a small egg, big as a piece of gold tucked in the cheek of a woman smart enough to hide it there. The jackals never found Lucy’s nugget, which was more than enough for one ticket.
All these years Lucy carried Ma’s love like an incantation against the harder things. Now it’s become a burden. No wonder Sam leaves certain truths unspoken. Lucy sinks her head between her knees. Why did Sam tell her now?
And then, as her blood whooshes between her ears, as her head droops heavy, she remembers Ma’s trunk. The weight of it, which Sam lifted onto Nellie alone. Sam carried the burden of Ba’s love too—and Lucy didn’t help shoulder it that day. She should have. She should have stood her ground, should have stayed—that day, and the other day by the riverbank five years back, and this day. She should always have stayed with Sam. She stands. Throws a last stone into the water, breaking that image into fragments. It’s just water. She runs back the way she came.
* * *
—
She’s almost too late. Sam is packing up the campsite.
“I thought—” Sam says, the old reproach, the old guilt and old secrets and old ghosts rising. How to bury them?
Lucy pulls a knife from Sam’s pack. Asks if Sam will cut her hair.
* * *
—
Lucy is afraid as she kneels with Sam behind her. Not of the knife—of herself. These last years, her wiry hair grew in smooth and sleek at last, as Ma said it would. What if she proves as vain as Ma? As selfish?
She closes her eyes so as not to see it. As the hanks fall free, a space opens on her neck. A lightness.
There is, she is coming to see, a place that exists between the world Ba pursued and the world Ma wanted. His a lost world, doomed to make the present and future dim in comparison. Hers so narrow it could accommodate only one. A place Lucy and Sam might arrive at together. Almost a new kind of land.
Sam pauses midway. “Should I stop? I can’t see.”
Complete dark. The jackal hour, the hour of uncertainty, is past. Lucy can’t recall what creature this hour belongs to.
“Keep going.”
When Sam is done, Lucy stands. A great weight off her head. The last of her old hair slithers from her lap. She remembers: this is the hour of the snake. Her hair twists on the ground, limp, never half so important as she believed it to be. She makes to kick it. Sam holds her back.
Sam commences to dig.
Lucy joins once she understands. Ma wasn’t wrong, just as Ma wasn’t right. Beauty is a weapon, one that can strangle its wielder. It turned against Sam, and against Lucy. Down into the grave they lay that long, shining hair that Ma intended to pass to both her daughters. Before they tamp the dirt, Sam drops in a piece of silver.
* * *
—
Lucy wakes early. Springs a hand to her head. Warily, she approaches the stream.
Her hair’s been shorn to an inch below her ears, the same length all around. Not a man’s cut, not a woman’s. Not even a girl’s. A cut like a bowl turned upside down. Up till the age of five, this was the cut Lucy and Sam wore before they wore a girl’s braids.
She smiles. Her reflection smiles back. Her face is reshaped, her chin looking stronger. This is the cut of a child, androgynous still, who can grow to be anything. She takes Sam’s meaning.
Swinging her new hair, Lucy gets breakfast on. There’s meat in Sam’s pack, and tubers, dried berries. A few sticks of candy. And two surprises.
The first is a pistol, so much like Ba’s that Lucy nearly drops it. She makes herself hold it out. Surprising how it fits to her palm, how it cools and quiets. She lays it carefully back.
The second thing she cooks.
Sam raises an eyebrow at the porridge made of horse oats, but doesn’t complain. They pass the tasteless mush between them.
“I’ve been thinking about that land beyond the ocean again,” Lucy says when they’re done. “What makes a home a home? Tell me a story I can dream on.”
If Lucy were a gambler, she’d bet their blood beat the same rhythm now.
“It’s got mountains,” Sam says, haltingly. “Not like these mountains. Where we’re going the mountains are soft and green, old and full of mist. The cities around them are built with low red walls.”
Sam’s voice is rising, lilting. As if windows have been cut in a room that previously had none. Once, Anna showed Lucy an instrument her father had sent. A tube that started out thin, opened at the end into a flower. Pegs and holes along its length. The first note Lucy blew screeched, as harsh as the train. But the second—once Anna fiddled with the pegs, pulled free a plug of dust—the second note was high and clear and singing. Sam’s voice does that. It opens.
“They make lanterns from paper instead of glass. So the light on
the streets is always red-tinted. They wear their hair braided long, even the men. They’ve got buffalo too, only theirs are smaller, and gentled, and used to carry water. And they’ve got tigers. Just the same as our tigers.”
The Sam who speaks is high and sweet. A child emerging from beneath five years of grit.
“Why do you hide it?” Lucy says.
Sam coughs. Tugs at the bandana. Says, low and hoarse once more, “This is my voice. Men don’t take me seriously otherwise.”
“It’s such a shame, though. You shouldn’t have to hide yourself—not all men, surely, the good ones . . .”
“There aren’t any good ones.”
“What about the men you traveled with? The cowboys, or the adventurers, or the mountain man we met?”
“Not him, either. Not once he found out.”
“Sam?”
“He only did what Charles wanted to do to you.” Sam shrugs. “What men do to girls. I won’t get mistaken again.”
Lucy remembers the mountain man’s hunger. The prick of his eyes on her body. She touches Sam’s shoulder. But whatever windows opened when Sam spoke of the new land have slammed shut. There is the faintest of shivers through Sam, hidden by the motion of Sam leaping up to clear the breakfast things.
“Doesn’t matter anyhow,” Sam says, setting the pan down with a resounding clang. “We’re going far away. I’ve been searching to settle all these years, across the territories, and no place has ever been right. Took me a long time to figure why. I’m ready for a piece of land of our own. Not a place where we’ll have to look over our shoulders, not stolen, not belonging to buffalo or Indians, not used-up. This time, we’ll go where no one will question our buying it.”
Sam unbuttons the first few buttons of that red shirt. A flash of bandages over narrow chest—and then Sam takes out a wallet. Shakes its contents free.
Sam’s secret, like all their family’s secrets, is gold.
