by C Pam Zhang
Sweet, woody. It’s a carved carrot.
Years ago, Lucy boiled water to rinse the sickness from Sam’s body. Yet when she found the carrot in Sam’s pants, Sam looked at her with hate. That carrot was replaced with a rock. What’s replaced the rock now? Lucy doesn’t know. But in the rooms above, a stranger unknots Sam’s bandana to expose Sam’s throat. A stranger undoes the shirt and pants with their special stitching. A stranger lays aside Sam’s secret—a stranger who knows Sam more fully than Lucy does.
Lucy overheard a part of the bargaining before Sam went up. The room, the length of time, the girl, the price—almost a quarter of Sam’s gold. Sam lied. What bath could cost so dear?
Lucy marches to the girls in their pretty frames. When they stand unmoving, she grabs the nearest skirt. The rip carries through the hush, loud as a scream. Beautiful faces turn to her, for the first time losing their practiced stillness. Anger greets Lucy, and affront, fear, amusement, scorn. These girls looked at and through her when she entered. Now she thinks of what Sam said on the trail: the difference between being looked at and seen.
She raises the torn fabric. She asks for Elske.
* * *
—
Elske’s private room is plain. Two chairs, a desk, lamps in place of candles. And more books than Lucy has ever seen, stacked to the ceiling.
“Samantha said you were formidable,” Elske says when Lucy refuses the offered seat. “People like us often are.”
“I’m not—”
“I mean gold folk. The city is filled with them. These establishments were intended for men with money and desire. They value the finest restaurants. The finest gambling houses. The finest pipe dens to smoke and dream the finest dreams. My first and most generous investors were gold men. They’re remarkably open-minded, in that way. They care only for value.”
“Tell me what Sam does here.”
“Sam tells me you’re quite the reader. Can you read this?”
Elske takes a book down from her shelf, and Lucy accepts it without thinking. The cover is blank blue cloth, stained with blooms of white. Wrinkled pages. An ocean’s memory seeped through them: salt water.
Lucy opens it.
There are no words on the first page. Just a strange drawing. She flips. More drawings, much smaller, laid out in columns as orderly as words. They are words, she realizes. Each drawing is a word formed from straight lines and curved ones, dots and dashes. She stops at a drawing she recognizes. Ma’s tiger.
And then Elske takes the blue book back.
“Where did you get that?” Lucy has forgotten anger.
“From a client, as partial payment. Information can be as valuable as gold. And so, to your question—I’m not in the habit of giving facts away for free, but I might accept a trade.”
Lucy hesitates. She nods.
“Say something.” Elske leans forward. “From where you and Samantha come from. Anything.”
Lucy doesn’t say, We were born here. The greed on Elske’s face won’t be satisfied by truth. She knows what value this woman sees in her—the same value Charles saw. Only Lucy’s difference. She speaks the first words that come to her. “Nu er.”
Elske sighs. “How very beautiful. How very precious and rare.” Her head tips back, her throat exposed. Something nearly indecent about it. And then she straightens, saying, “Samantha worked for the gold men for a time. Quite successfully, it was said. I heard of a falling-out, but didn’t ask. I still count many gold men among my clients and I don’t like to get between their affairs. You see, hundreds come to buy time with my girls. Each young woman is highly paid and educated, whether in painting or poetry or conversation. Do you know what a harp is? I possess the only one in the territory. My girls are lovely and accomplished. They’re highly valued, not common, not—”
The smell is stronger in this closed room. The lap and lull of Elske’s voice drowsy-making. All of it a spell. The only way to break it is to remember anger.
“Whores,” Lucy interrupts. “You want to say they’re not common whores. I’m not a customer. Please get to your point.”
“Very well. You asked what Samantha does here? The only service Samantha requests is a bath.”
Elske’s face is sleek and pleased. She knew the trade would be unequal. The truth she gives Lucy is like an emptied-out box—its contents were already in Lucy’s possession. Sam doesn’t hide. Sam’s been Sam all along.
Lucy turns to go, feeling a fool.
“I was once a teacher,” Elske says gently, and curiosity keeps Lucy in the room. “Samantha told me you were an excellent student. If you’ll permit me a teacherly question—earlier, when you likened my girls to stories. Why did you say that?”
“They’re blank,” Lucy says, looking at the blue book. Maybe if she answers to Elske’s liking, she can trade for another look at it. She thinks of the girls with their still faces, each different and yet precisely the same. “They remind me of pages.” Or clear water. A look Lucy has seen sometimes in her own reflection.
She waits there, hoping, and Elske asks one more question.
* * *
—
Sam returns fresh but wary. Jaw stiff. This time Lucy keeps her gaze direct. She smiles, till Sam smiles shyly back.
“Until next time,” Elske says, kissing Sam’s cheek.
When Elske kisses Lucy too, the smell comes stronger than ever before. As if the woman chews it and swallows it. Bitter and sweet. Mixed with the heat of Elske’s body, it grows musky too. At last Lucy recognizes it. So much like the smell of Ma’s trunk. Distant places, a very long time ago. Did another of Elske’s clients bring the scent as he brought the book?
“Come back with or without Samantha,” Elske whispers while Sam looks on with curiosity. “Don’t forget.”
* * *
—
But wind and salt scour them. By the time they reach the harbor, Lucy’s nose knows only ocean.
The ships spread below.
All her life Lucy imagined ships as fantastical things. She was told their sails were wings, that coasts appeared from water as if by magic. And so she failed to question the facts of a ship’s making, as she failed to question dragons and tigers and buffalo. She never expected that ships would look this way: grand yet ordinary.
“What makes a ship a ship?” she asks. She shouts the answer, over and over, bouncing on her heels like a child. “Wood and water. Wood and water. Wood and water.”
Gold
Slick underfoot, the dock sways. Lucy imagines herself thrown into the gray waters, looking up from the harbor’s bottom. Sea grass waving. Fish so thick they block the light.
The ship’s captain is steady on his feet while Lucy and Sam stumble, disadvantaged already when they request two tickets. The captain counts their coin and looks at them when he’s done. Elske told true: this city sees only a person’s value.
“Come back when you’ve got the rest.”
Sam’s face darkens. “I asked you about the price last month.”
“Seas change. Repairs are costly.”
Sam empties the wallet. The last of the gold was meant for tonight’s lodging, and a place to stay across the ocean. Still the captain shakes his head. He tosses the pouch back, a nugget bouncing to the dock. Sam ducks to retrieve it, the captain already looking past. Lucy follows his gaze to a tall figure at the shore. Likely that person seeks passage too. What can she offer beyond coin?
And she thinks: a story.
She trips. Clutches the captain’s arm for balance. She steps clumsily back on the hem of her skirt, fabric pulling tight over her chest.
“I’m sorry,” Lucy says, lurching against the captain. “It makes me dizzy to see a real ship. I’ve wanted to ride one since I was a little girl. Isn’t it majestic?”
She looks yearningly at the ship. When she looks back at the
captain, some of the yearning remains. She tells about her fear of the ocean. Her hope of a strong, seasoned man to guide them. Her helpfulness. Her cookery. Sam’s strength. “We could be of service,” she says, and smiles, and pauses, and lets his eyes drag on her silence.
Elske’s girls didn’t shock her. Not truly. What she saw wasn’t new, but an old, old lesson, learned in Sweetwater, learned at the door of a long-ago parlor from her very first teacher. Beauty is a weapon.
Down the dock the figure has gone.
When, in the end, Lucy mentions their horses, the captain hands over two tickets. The paper is damp, the penmanship exquisite. Someone has taken care to edge the letters in gold.
* * *
—
A ways down the harbor, Sam punches a fist into the packet of food Elske gave them.
“She charged me extra today,” Sam says. “Damn her, she always knows how to press. Otherwise we wouldn’t have had to bargain like that.”
Lucy shrugs. She’s thinking of the blue book, and how she’ll get more like it when they arrive. She tosses a strip of jerky to Sam and commences to gnaw her own. Sam twists the strip till it breaks.
“Did she teach you that?” Sam says.
Lucy takes her time chewing. “She didn’t teach me anything most girls don’t already know. She’s not all bad. You know . . . she offered me a job.”
On Sam’s face, a shattered look.
“Not that kind,” Lucy says quickly. “Not like the other girls. She wanted me to work telling stories. Talking to men, nothing more.” She doesn’t say how Elske added, Unless you’d like to. There’s extra payment for that.
She expects Sam to rage. Instead, Sam sags.
“She made me an offer like that the first time,” Sam says, voice so small that Lucy knows Sam thinks again of the mountain man.
“Bao bei,” Lucy begins, then stops. Not the time for tenderness, now. Not the time to pick at old wounds. She rips into the hard bread. Shards of crust dig under her nails as she tears a hunk free. “None of what came before matters, alright? Once we have water behind us, it’ll be like—like—” A long-ago promise fills her mouth. Sweet and bitter. “Like a dream. We’ll wake up there and all this will have been a dream.”
“You mean it?” Sam says, voice still shrunken. “Everything we did before?”
Lucy considers the bread. It’s half-stale. They should force it down and swallow it. They should be grateful for the little they have. But. But.
She heaves the bread into the ocean, where it splashes out farther than she thought possible. And though the gulls swoop and dive, it’s a fish that rises up to claim it, longer than Lucy is tall. It could block out the sun if seen from below.
At noon their ship will sail. Till then, the night stretches before them. Apart from a few pennies in Sam’s pocket, they’ve got no coin for beds or meals. One last night in the open, the city’s hills around them.
* * *
—
That last night they are ghosts. Half of them already on the ship, halfway toward that misty place they will call home. Half disappeared as fog swallows the dock and frees them of mortal weights: the weight of missing gold, five lost years, two silver dollars, Ba’s hands, Ma’s words. That night they agree: what came before has vanished. Fog obscures. Through it, only the clink of their pennies as they sit playing gambling games.
For years after, Lucy will hold this night close to her chest. A private history, written only for herself.
Other players gather. Faces blurred by mist so that no one can ask, Who are you? Where are you from? Hard men and women, shoulders in a familiar slump, stained with sweat and whiskey and tobacco. The stink of work and despair. And hope. So much hope gleaming on that wet dock.
That night not a word is exchanged. This city has a language of clink and jingle. Their pennies started the game; their luck keeps them in. Lucy sits in the circle, Sam behind her. When Lucy reaches for the facedown cards she feels a heaviness that calls her hand, tugs her heart. Aims her like a dowsing rod to the right card again and again. She plays with eyes closed. Tapping her feet. She’s not on the dock but walking the gold of the hills in the early morning, in the early years, the best years, when Ba’s hands held only hope and a dowsing rod. They walked out, but the plume of Ma’s cook fire kept them anchored to home. Ba taught her to wait for the tug. Because gold was heavy, she needed something heavy inside her to call to it. Think of the saddest thing you can. Don’t tell me. Keep it inside, Lucy girl. Let it grow. Among the gamblers, that’s just what Lucy does. Sam’s hands on her shoulders lend the weight of what Sam carries too. Prospector’s children, both of them. Why, you feel where it is, Lucy girl. You just feel it. They swallowed sadness and they swallowed gold. Neither left their bodies but grew within them, nourishing their lengthening limbs. And that night it calls to the cards. Every card Lucy draws is the right one. The other gamblers lay down their hands one by one, in a hush. As if paying respects before a grave. They look at the two strangers in the fog and without faces to judge by—they see. Call it luck or call it a kind of haunting.
By the end of the night, a small fortune mounds high.
This is what Lucy will remember on the worst of the days to come: that for one night, at least, they made the hills hold gold.
* * *
—
Silver light pries Lucy awake. For a moment she’s twelve again, moonlight ringing off a tiger’s skull. What makes a home a home?
She lifts her head. A card peels from her cheek. The light comes from a stack of silver dollars. Sam snores beside her on the dock. The harbor is empty but for the anchored ships, a few hours left till noon. Lucy grins, watching a bubble of spit form at the corner of Sam’s mouth. She leans to pop it.
The burst shakes the world.
A hole has opened in the dock. A ragged mouth of wood, hungry ocean churning beneath. Sam scrambles. A foot, a leg, slip into the breach. Lucy screams, pulls. Drags Sam away, a hairsbreadth from falling.
Fog’s burned off. The sky has a different aspect. A hard, clear light. It shows two men at the end of the dock. One is tall and dressed in black. He holds the gun he fired—so burnished by day that the sun off metal pains her. At long last Lucy has seen the gun such men are rumored to carry. Anna claimed otherwise—but there are things Anna’s kind are blind to.
Sam doesn’t look at the hired man, or the gun. Sam watches the figure who shambles up behind. An older man, slow, enormously fat and bald. He wears white. The only color is in his cheeks, in the gold on his ringed fingers and dripping from his vest.
“We can sort this out,” Lucy says to the hired man.
Not a soul pays her mind. The fat man draws a heavy gold pocket watch from his vest. He taps its face. Looks past Lucy. Straight to Sam. “Imagine my pleasure last night when my man informed me of your return. Now let’s settle up.”
The coins they won last night are filthy with gunpowder, diminished by day. Inconsequential beside the debt the gold man names.
Lucy starts to laugh.
At last the gold man looks at her. The slow look of a man with all the time in the world. At her shorn hair, at her dirty shift, and finally at her throat. His look disassembles her. He doesn’t smile or frown, explain or menace. She understands why Sam fled from saloons where a bald head shone. This gold man is a rock. Impermeable to pleading.
And so when Lucy speaks again, she uses the language of coin. She offers last night’s winnings to buy time alone with Sam.
When the two men have retreated a ways down the harbor, Lucy grabs Sam’s face.
“What did you do, Sam?”
“I only took the gold back. What they took from honest prospectors. There was a group of us together; we agreed.”
The amount the gold man named could buy ships. Half a dozen coal mines. Far beyond what Lucy had imagined.
“What
did you spend it on?” Surely they can use it to bargain. Whatever goods Sam bought must have more worth than the spread of Sam’s brains on this dock.
“I didn’t spend it.”
“You hid it?” A trickle of hope. Sam can lead the gold man to the stash. That and Lucy’s best apologies might do the trick after all. They’ll miss today’s ship, but there’s always next month’s. Next year’s. They’ll find work in the city. Lucy will accept Elske’s offer to tell stories. They’ll make do.
“It was pure gold. Too heavy to take along.” Sam’s chin lifts. Sap begins to rise in Sam’s voice. “I split some with the others. Kept what you saw. Then I had an idea—we agreed to dump the rest into the ocean. We gave it back to the land to keep, and we all left something.” There flashes over Sam’s face that old grin. “Each of us carved a piece of gold. Some wrote their mother’s names, or the old names of rivers, or the marks of their tribes. I carved our tiger. That gold won’t wash up for ages and ages. Maybe next time someone honest will find it—someone like us. Maybe things’ll be different by then. Either way, the gold men will be dead. And the gold will be marked. It’ll be ours.”
You belong here too, Lucy girl. Never let them tell you otherwise.
Sam rolls backward on the dock, overcome with a fit of the giggles—silly as the girl Sam never was. “Dead just like the buffalo!”
No amount of bargaining or planning, no amount of smarts will get that gold back. And yet they’ve got to try. Lucy says, “We’ll ask for time. We’ll—”
The giggling stops. “They killed two of the others. My friends. And they killed Nellie. Shot her out from under me when I fled.” Sam’s voice cracks over the mare’s name. “This ain’t some game. Quit acting a child. They’ll kill me, but I figure they’ll let you go if you don’t raise a fuss.”
“If you knew—” Lucy chokes on the question. “If you knew they were this dangerous, why’d you risk going all the way to Sweetwater? You could’ve taken a ship weeks ago. Alone.”
