How Much of These Hills Is Gold

by C Pam Zhang

  There are flakes like the one Sam used as payment in Sweetwater. Two nuggets near as big as what Lucy found all those years ago. And every size in between. Sam has more than enough for two tickets. To most, this gold would look like luck itself. Lucy shrinks back. She knows better.

  “Where’d you get it, Sam?”

  “Told you. I worked.”

  But they worked half their lives. Their bodies are still marked by it. The calluses, the blue flecks of coal. The hurt. That’s what they got for half a lifetime of work.

  “Sam, I know we said no questions, but this—I have to know—”

  Sam looks away. No—Sam flinches. As if Lucy’s words are blows. The shiver that started at the mention of the mountain man hasn’t ended. Despite the clothes, Sam looks for a moment more like Ma than ever—that sadness running beneath strength, like the underground shush of an unseen river. Hasn’t Lucy caused enough harm with her questions? She bites her tongue. Look at Sam’s body now, and for all its height she sees only vulnerabilities. The bandana that hides the soft throat. The pants over the secret pocket, the shirt buttoned high despite the heat. How precarious Sam seems, hidden by mere cloth.

  And so Lucy chooses quiet. By the time they set out, Sam’s hands are once more steady. They leave that question buried, as they leave the other two graves. What difference will it make in any case, once they’re far enough to make this land, and the story of how they left it, mere history?

  Gold

  West for the last time. The same mountains, the same pass.

  And then the hills, the hills.

  In reverse they chart their own course. The prospecting sites, the coal mines. Same and yet changed, as they are same and yet changed.

  Old sites litter the grass like broken beads. Travel goes quicker than the last time. Maybe on account of what they’ve left behind, maybe on account of their longer legs. Maybe on account of their rushing toward a place they want to be. What makes a home a home? The bones, the grass, the sky bleached white at its edges from heat—familiar and yet not, as if, flipping through an old book read once upon a time, they find the pages disordered, the colors melted by sun and years, the story misremembered. So that each morning dawns both known and surprising: a smoking mine, a town no larger than one crossroads and two boys loitering, white bone, a town all ashes with tiger prints in its crust, another crossroads with two girls one tall one short, a choked stream, another crossroads, a mound in the sighing grass, a stream blackened yet running, a mound in the singing grass where something might be buried, a mine where wildflowers have grown over broken earth, another crossroads, another saloon, another morning, another night, another high noon with sweat stinging their squinted eyes, another crossroads, another dusk with the wind seeming to whisper over an unmarked mound in the weeping grass where something might be buried, another crossroads, another crossroads, another crossroads, gold, grass, grass, grass, gold, grass, gold—

  Maybe the travel goes quicker on account of the two horses Sam steals. Sister, one is named, and the other, Brother. Sam swings in, then out, of the trading post. They’ve ridden half a day before Lucy sees the weight of Sam’s wallet: as plump as before.

  “They’re ours,” Sam calls back through the wind of their passage. “We’ve paid our dues.”

  Lucy lets loose a string of cusses. The grass swallows them, nodding assent. She knows what Sam means. How can they be beholden? How can they be any more outside the law? That law a treacherous thing, twisting to sink fangs into them however it can. Better to make their own rules, as Sam always has. Anyhow, they’re leaving.

  Gold grass gold grass gold grass gold grass gold

  Maybe the travel goes quicker on account of their running from pursuers. At the horizon the dry heat shivers, as if trying to lift off. Sun-blinded, her shorter hair lashing her cheeks—Lucy sees shapes, not all of them real. At the corner of her eye: A wagon? A figure waving? A dark silhouette? Look straight on and there’s nothing. Sam keeps a hand on the gun and squints for debt collectors in black. Twice they cross paths with Indian travelers and Sam dismounts to speak to them, learning that they, chased out, are searching too. Lucy does what Ma never would have: she greets them shyly, follows Sam in sharing their meager food. Their hands, dipping into one stewpot, are dusty, yes, hard-used, yes—but if at first Lucy flinches back, soon enough she sees that her own are no cleaner. In their weary faces a familiar exhaustion and hope. She eats.

  At other times she hears the screams of children playing on the wind when she and Sam are quite alone. What makes a ghost a ghost? Can a person be haunted by herself?

  Gold grass gold grass gold grass gold grass

  Maybe the travel goes quicker on account of the stories Sam tells at the campfire. No longer smooth—Sam’s adventuring stories peel back night by night. Sam tells of the Southern desert where the bite from a dragon lizard festered till a man died blackened like a weeks-old corpse. Of how men looted that ancient Indian city they found, smashed the pots and pissed in the graves, but out of a crevice in the cliffs Sam found white flowers that bloomed at night and woke the camp with scent. Of how in the North a freeze leapt down and iced half the cattle where they stood, and in the blinding snow some men went crazy and ran out stark naked and some men drew beautiful shapes in the drifts and some men called Sam chink. More rarely Sam speaks of the job with the gold men, where Sam learned the new ways of prospecting with weapons that blast hills to dust, and befriended men and women black and brown and red, and learned the names of their tribes and lands. But in the telling of these gold stories Sam’s face darkens, Sam’s gaze skitters as if fearing the boom of dynamite, till Sam’s voice fades and Sam gulps whiskey.

  Gold grass gold grass gold grass gold

  Maybe the travel goes quicker on account of the two of them being more alike than Lucy remembers. Same and yet changed. On the day Lucy tears her skirt, Sam draws needle quicker than gun. Lucy admires the clever stitchwork that affixes the bandana at Sam’s throat and keeps the buttons on Sam’s shirt from popping. Sam attentive to clothes despite a disdain for skirts, as if saying, with each tug of the needle, What people see shapes how they treat you. Meanwhile Lucy learns the hunter’s trade. Hitches her shift high with no shame and no eyes around, and chases down rabbits, squirrels, partridges with flashing spots. A few times she pulls on Sam’s spare pants. Run quick enough and she can shuck the weight of herself, as she once did by floating in a river. They catch so much game they eat only the good dark meat and leave the lean for the jackals. A grateful howling spools behind.

  They both talk, slowly, of the life they’ll have beyond the ocean. Laying their dreams out on the table, cautious at first, spooked as poker players showing their cards at the long game’s end. Lucy intends to stay on their land with only wind and grass to talk to. Sam wants to venture into the crowded streets, taste the fish, haggle with the merchants. Aren’t you sick of being looked at? / But over there they won’t just look. They’ll actually see me.

  Gold grass gold grass gold grass

  Maybe the travel goes quicker on account of the gambling games Sam teaches to pass the time. This should worry Lucy—Sam’s love for a fortune that rests on a stroke of luck. But she puts the old fears aside. She learns poker and checkers, how to lean forward with cards held close so that the man across the table will watch her chest and not her bluff.

  Gold grass gold grass gold

  Maybe the travel goes quicker on account of the buffalo. One moment they’re riding, next moment the light is half-gone. They look up through shadow. There it is. As if a piece of the hills has shifted, stepped close. Does either one breathe? Even the wind hangs still. Ancient thing with its pelt gone blond at the tips, brown body fringed with gold. Its hooves are wider than Lucy’s hand. She raises hers to compare. Keeps it raised in greeting. And then the buffalo is moving, blowing its sweet grass breath, and its coat brushes her palm. At her side, Sam holds a
hand up too. The buffalo passes, melting back into the hills that have its color and shape. I thought they were dead. / Me too.

  Gold grass gold grass

  Maybe the travel goes quicker on account of the land growing more familiar, the shapes of the hills each morning better fitted to the shapes in Lucy’s dreams. One day they hit a piece of trail and she knows with a force like a fist in her gut what will come round the bend: a rocky outcrop, wild garlic in the shade, a stream’s crooked elbow where she once found a dead snake.

  Lucy dismounts and makes Sam follow on foot, swearing and sweating, to the crest of a hill. She tells Sam to look up. The clouds begin to circle, them two at the center. Once, Lucy was taught to look from fear of being lost. But now she teaches Sam to look for beauty. As Sam’s impatience shifts to awe, the land shifts too. Same and yet changed.

  Gold grass gold

  Maybe the travel goes quicker on account of Lucy feeling a sorrow kin to love. Because though these dry yellow hills yielded nothing but pain and sweat and misplaced hope—she knows them. A part of her is buried in them, a part of her lost in them, a part of her found and born in them—so many parts belong to this land. An ache in her chest like the tug of a dowsing rod. Across the ocean the people will look like them, but they won’t know the shapes of these hills, or the soughing of grass, or the taste of muddy water—all these things that shape Lucy within as her eyes and nose shape her without. Maybe the travel goes quicker on account of Lucy mourning, already, the loss of this land.

  But she’ll have Sam.

  Gold grass

  Maybe the travel goes quicker on account of Sam’s unease hurrying them along. Sam of two faces: bold and grinning straight-on; at other times twitchy, hard-lipped, glancing round. This second Sam looks at Lucy with a mouth that opens and closes, as if a man pushes uncertainly at the door of a room he fears to enter. Tiger got your tongue? / It’s nothing. This second Sam starts at the merest rustle, the whuff of their horses settling down at night. This Sam sleeps little, sleeps sitting up. Enters a saloon only to dash out, pop-eyed, saying the man in the back—fat, bald, harmless—looks wrong. Lucy vows to ask, later—when words aren’t quite so dangerous, so liable to make Sam shake—why Sam lives so cautious. But that can wait till they’re on the ship with the ocean wide around them, and they have all the time in the world to learn a new language, one that hasn’t hurt them.

  Gold

  Salt

  The end of the West. Here. A fist of land that punches into ocean, atop which men have built a town so big some name it City.

  This land like no land Lucy has seen before. Fog greets them, curling and obscuring, making of the coast a damp gray dream. Soft and hard all at once. The wildflowers, the wind-bent cypresses, the pebbles underfoot and the gulls overhead and the boom that Lucy mistakes, at first, for the roar of a beast—till Sam tells her it’s the sound of waves against the cliffs.

  If this land is like no land, then the water is like no water. Sam takes Lucy down to the wet edge. On foot they cross the sand. The ocean is gray. Ugly under its lid of fog. Look hard enough and there’s blue, some green, a spark of distant sunlight. Mostly the water is unconcerned with beauty. Mostly it rages and beats the cliffs till they crumble, plunging unwary creatures to their deaths. The water eats at the posts of the docks, bends that wood to its knees. The water does not reflect. It is itself, and it spreads to the horizon.

  Fog fills Lucy’s mouth. She licks, and licks again: salty.

  “All this time,” she says to Sam. “All this time, I thought I belonged in Sweetwater.”

  Later she’ll learn how hard it is to live at the end of the West. Sometimes the ocean takes a life, sometimes the fog that hides lighthouse beams. Most often it’s the hills themselves that are deadly, seven of them in this city, every few years shaking houses loose as a dog shakes fleas. Later she’ll learn that down within the sea-foam are bones more numerous than the bones of buffalo. Later she’ll learn that when the fog lifts, there comes the hard, clear light.

  * * *

  —

  Sam’s gotten only more jittery as they approached the city. Hurry set them down early—their ship won’t launch till tomorrow morning.

  The remainder of the day stretches before them. Lamps glisten through the fog, and Lucy thinks of the tales Sam has told of this city: the gambling dens like mansions, the shows where men dress as women and women as men and the music is a transformation. And the food.

  “We’ve time to spare,” Lucy says. “Let’s get a bite to eat.”

  Sam frowns. Next thing Sam will be talking about taking care, keeping their heads down.

  “Come on,” Lucy coaxes. “You can’t expect we’ll spend this whole day hiding in some dark corner. Besides, no one can find us in this fog.” She extends an arm to demonstrate. Her hand goes misty at the end. “See? How about we get some of that seafood stew? I could use hot food. Or a hot bath.”

  “You really want a bath?”

  She didn’t expect that this, of all things, would sway Sam. On the trail they washed in muddy streams, and never once did Sam spend more than a few seconds in the water. Sam bathed as if scared of wet—Lucy never even saw Sam unclothed.

  Lucy nods. She senses another question under this simple one. There are secrets in the air, sharp as the salt.

  “We shouldn’t,” Sam says. Something like yearning breaks through Sam’s face. A softness that grew less and less frequent on the trail as Sam drove them faster, harder, onward. “But—”

  “We deserve a rest,” Lucy says, touching Sam’s arm.

  Sam gives a jerk of the head. Not quite a nod. Then Sam is wheeling the horse around, heading down a valley so thick with fog it looks like a bowl of steaming milk. Lucy scrambles to follow.

  Fog encircles them. Damp fingers of wind through their hair. The low world murmurs, remembering itself in snatches as fleeting as old dream: a house marked 571, a tree trunk where a marble glints, yellow flowers against a blue wall. A cracked door. The cry of a needy cat. A waiting carriage with its driver folded down in sleep. Condensation against a lit window. A child’s ankle, fleeing.

  Sam stops before a red building so long its edges disappear into fog. A strange building, windowless and featureless save for one high door. Sam turns to Lucy. Not narrow-eyed, but beseeching.

  “Remember, you asked,” Sam says, and the door opens.

  Later, Lucy will try to remember this first sight. How rich the red house seems, how endless. The dark-stained wood, the drapes and carpets, the candles set low so that their light doesn’t reach the ceiling. The building inside disappears into shadow as the building outside disappears into fog. There’s a rustling in the room, though there are no windows.

  Instead, there are girls.

  Seven girls line up against the far wall. Each stands against a square of paint. They look like drawings of princesses in storybooks, gilt-framed. And their dresses—

  Lucy steps closer. She’s never seen dresses like these, not even in the magazines Anna got from back East. These dresses aren’t made for walking or running or riding or even sitting or staying warm. Only for beauty. The nearest girl could have stepped from Lucy’s history book. A solemn drawing with this caption: Last of the Indian princesses. This girl is just as solemn, as doe-eyed, as fierce of cheek and black of hair. She wears feathers, and deerskin so buttery Lucy’s fingers itch to touch.

  There is a smell in the room, close and bitter and sweet. It deepens as a woman all in black sweeps toward them. She leans down to kiss Sam’s cheek because she stretches tall, as her full skirt stretches wide. Hard here to find her edges. In this building, around this woman, a perpetual jackal hour.

  The woman says, “Samantha.” To Lucy’s surprise Sam doesn’t scowl. The two bend their heads together, private. They walk off, leaving Lucy to examine the rest of the girls alone.

  Beside the Indian princ
ess is a girl with the look of the dark vaqueros from the desert to the South. She wears an embroidered white dress that puffs from her tiny waist. Her brown shoulders show above the fabric. The next girl is white-blond, her eyes rabbit-pink. Her dress is thinner than Lucy’s shift, thin enough that Lucy blushes. The next girl is darker than the walls, with a blue gleam to her skin. Gold rings stack her throat into a proud column. The next girl has thick wheaten hair in two braids, her cheeks pink apples, her eyes robins’ eggs, a milk pail at her feet. None of the girls move. If not for the slight rise of their chests, they might be statues. And the next girl—

  “Pretty, aren’t they?” the tall woman asks, stepping beside Lucy. “Give the visitor a whirl, girls.”

  The seven skirts flare, but the faces don’t move.

  “What do they make you think of?” the woman asks.

  Something about her imperious tone makes Lucy answer. Maybe it’s just the smell of her. Lucy tells her about the stories in Ma’s books, the drawn princesses.

  “You’re as clever as Samantha promised. My name is Elske. Will you be partaking too?”

  “I’d like a bath,” Lucy says.

  Elske’s smile is thin enough to slice. She tells Lucy to choose any girl she likes. The girls spin once more. As long, Elske says, as Lucy can pay.

  And then Lucy understands. This place may look rich, but it’s no different from the rooms above the saloons in Sweetwater, the creak of those beds that mingled with the train’s whistle. The murkiness hides Lucy’s blush. She hangs back as Sam confers again with Elske, as Sam leads a girl up the stairs. Sam doesn’t look back this time, and Lucy is glad for it.

  * * *

  —

  Lucy dozes, waiting. A clatter stirs her. A girl has set down a tray of food: bread, jerky. And a bowl of leaves topped with a strange orange flower that crunches in her teeth.