Floating Like the Dead

by Yasuko Thanh

Before she left the motel, she counted the money and stuffed the stacks in her luggage, jacket, underwear, boots. Abandoning Clovis’s pickup in the motel parking lot, Lula May caught a ride with a trucker into town and let him buy her breakfast.

  At the Transporte del Norte bus station on Echeveria and Garza, a man in cut-off jean shorts with a fish knife in his belt loop was purchasing a ticket to Acapulco. He noticed Lula May staring at him, and smiled. He was wearing a baseball cap advertising a New Mexico insurance company. His hands were small, so unlike Clovis’s, and his teeth reminded her of yucca flowers that belong to no one but the hills. Even as she returned his smile, she knew she could never love him, not in all the breaths of a lifetime.

  FLOATING LIKE THE DEAD

  Cleaning his ear with a long stalk of grass, Ah Sing filled his wood stove with kindling. Outside, the alder leaves were fluttering in the trees, displaying their yellow undersides, which often meant rain. Ah Sing shivered, but did not light the fire; instead, he put a rough wool jacket over his cotton shirt. His room had no hooks, but all his clothing was tidily folded and stacked on the wooden stool in the corner by the door. On top of the clothes he laid a few bone-white sticks. Sun-bleached, lighter than the pine branches he had originally whittled down for his kite, the driftwood would make a good frame. He sneezed and shivered again. He had lost his upper incisor yesterday.

  The nerves in Ah Sing’s arms and legs had grown hard as jade; he was turning into a mountain, solidifying. His face resembled a palace statue. Smooth. Hairless. The skin so taut it looked varnished. He had lost his eyelashes and three-quarters of his eyebrows; lately, his ulcerated feet left tracks of blood on the wood floor. But he refused to wear the government-issue overshoes. His extremities felt no heat, no cold, no pain, anyway. In the next life he would be a mountain, the mountain he was now turning into, eternal and unyielding.

  He had wept at the official diagnosis of leprosy.

  “They sick but I not,” Ah Sing would say in English to the doctors who accompanied the steamer Alert to the island and took flakes of skin from the backs of his hands. (Speaking English was masonry work, the words like bricks laid by hand; he spoke Cantonese with the other men on the colony, and the words flowed easily then, even when they had nothing to say.) When the doctors asked about his lost fingers, he explained, “Coal mine in Nanaimo. Frostbite.” He had difficulty pronouncing the word and it came out sounding like “flossed bite.” Grunting once or twice, he would pry an oyster off a stone with his remaining fingers and hold it up.

  “You send away Ah Sing,” he always said to the visiting doctors, “back to China.”

  Earlier today Ah Sing had fallen asleep on the beach next to his half-eaten lunch of sea urchins. Awoken by the sound of birds scavenging near his head, he had opened his eyes and was startled to see four black cormorants flying away. They reminded him of the cormorants he had felt sorry for when he was six years old and had laughed at by the age of nine, black birds circling the ancient uplifted seabeds in Chongwu Bay, catching fish they could taste but never swallow because of the white choke collars around their necks.

  Three men left on D’Arcy Island now. They lived in the main building, in four cubicles set side by side, each with its own door opening out onto a verandah facing Cordova Bay. Ge Shou hadn’t been right in the head since a tree fell on him, and he spent his nights in the woods singing. Gold Tooth, who had never told Ah Sing his real name, cried all day and then sat at the edge of the forest, dulled and deadened, refusing to move. He had a cough that possessed him like a malevolent spirit, wracking his body until he spat blood. He was the island’s newest resident.

  Gold Tooth had arrived at the colony three years ago with his bowler hat and a Swiss pocket watch on a chain. Slipping on patches of seagrass in leather shoes, over barnacle-covered stones still wet from the tide, refusing any attempts at help from the government official from Victoria. Ah Sing had laughed at his vanity, but the watch – the watch – was as round as an eye. He stared at it until he felt like he was staring into a thousand tiny suns.

  When they had the energy, Ah Sing and Ge Shou said they would murder the filthy thief while he slept. But the daily chores sapped their passion – the harvesting of clams and mussels, the chopping of firewood, the collection of rain water from below the eaves or in the summer from the bog. Most days, when Ah Sing had finished his tasks, he would sit on the boulders that ringed the bay and watch the waves, pondering Buddha’s question: How does one stop a drop of water from ever drying out?

  Now, in his room, Ah Sing picked up his buck knife and eyed the driftwood he’d been gathering every time he walked the beach. He was searching for the most evenly balanced of sticks. He would carve carefully measured slits into which he would neatly wedge two smaller sticks. He would wrap the joints with sewing thread. He would cut a tail to look like phoenix wings, or find some cormorant feathers on the beach to stand in their place.

  As shavings curled around his feet, he remembered how, as a child, he had believed the most ornate kites could talk to the spirits. The painted silk would deliver messages on behalf of the hands that held the slender thread. His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of something heavy being dragged across the wooden floor. He heard a sob. Another.

  Gold Tooth was on the verandah, dappled light sifting through the fir trees and falling in shadows across his back. Though it was hard to tell which were shadows and which were stains, for Ah Sing could not remember when Gold Tooth had last taken off the silk suit he wore. Gold Tooth’s face was flushed with terror and his eyes darted like birds in the trees, afraid of being caught.

  “Take it easy. What are you doing with your bed?”

  Gold Tooth shook off Ah Sing’s hand the way a dog shakes off water. He tried to haul the cot through the doorway, but it got stuck. “I can’t breathe,” he said. “I can’t breathe in there. The walls. They’ll crush me if, if I go to sleep.” He yanked at the bed again before stumbling backward.

  “Do you want me to hold up the walls while you pull your bed outside?”

  Gold Tooth stopped yanking.

  Ah Sing climbed over the straw mattress and into the foul-smelling room. Ever since Gold Tooth had stopped taking care of himself, he’d left his door open for the racoons to come and go as they pleased, and now half-eaten plates of food lay scattered from one side to the other.

  Ah Sing, his legs shoulder-width apart, spread his arms wide against the two walls and held them with his remaining fingers so they wouldn’t crush Gold Tooth as he dislodged the bed from the doorway and wrestled it outside.

  On the verandah, Gold Tooth nodded toward the forest then motioned to Ah Sing. “Pick up that end,” he said.

  The two men carried the wooden bed and straw mattress past roaming chickens and beyond the storage shed, where they kept the rice, sugar, flour, gardening tools, and coffins. They carried the bed beyond the withered vegetable garden. Past three graves, each marked with a pile of stones – the resting places of the men who had arrived with Ah Sing when the provincial government had left them on this island four years ago with a load of construction supplies. They carried it past the bog and into the forest. Ge Shou had been following them since they passed the garden.

  “Do you have any pigs’ feet for me?” Ge Shou asked.

  Ah Sing shook his head.

  “Can we fly your kite?”

  “When it’s ready, I promise.”

  “Washing Matilda, washing Matilda,” Ge Shou sang, “who’ll come a-washing Matilda with me?” He stopped and stretched his arms above his head. “Are you going swimming tonight, Sing, you going swimming in the ocean?”

  “No, not tonight.”

  “Swimming, swimming.” Ge Shou breaststroked the air. “Swimming in the ocean. I feel happy. Washing Matilda, you’ll come a-washing Matilda with me?”

  Ah Sing and Gold Tooth set the bed down in a clearing among the ferns and salal, where the ground was soft with pine needles. Through the trees they could see the
ditch system that ran from the bog to the garden, where they had once grown potatoes, carrots, and onions; Ge Shou was playing among the lettuce that had gone to seed. Gold Tooth tumbled onto his bed, shivering, and immediately rolled onto his side as if in a deep sleep.

  Ah Sing shook his shoulder.

  “Go away.”

  After sitting near Gold Tooth for a time, Ah Sing came to a decision. He shuffled past the crops, which had spoiled before the men with their waning appetites had been able to eat them, and the pigs rooting in the waste. He nodded to Ge Shou, who sat among the pigs. He passed the plot of land they’d cleared of birch trees two years ago for an apple orchard.

  Back in his cabin, Ah Sing filled his shoulder basket with a Hudson’s Bay blanket, a cast-iron kettle, a wok, a grouse he had killed just that morning with his shotgun, a handful of onions, some mint leaves, a cupful of cooking oil in a canning jar, and some government-issue opium. Returning to Gold Tooth, he touched his shoulder again. Gold Tooth grunted.

  Ah Sing spread the blanket over him; then he placed stones on the ground in a circle around some kindling and lit a fire with the matches in his pocket. He emptied his shoulder basket, picked up the kettle, and went to the woodshed, piling as much cedar into his basket as he could carry. The load weighed him down. He trod to the bog, sinking deep into the mud. He dipped his kettle, filling it with brown water. When he came back, Gold Tooth continued to ignore him, but Ah Sing didn’t mind. He added more branches to the fire and set the kettle upon them.

  A few minutes later, Gold Tooth said, “Why do you talk to me?”

  Ah Sing shrugged. Before the disease had made his threats to beat up the other men laughable, Gold Tooth had hoarded the best rations, stashing second barrels of salt pork in his cubicle while the others looked on with vacant eyes. But Ah Sing, at fifty-two, had himself hit a woman; had fondled the flesh of his brother’s wife; had ignored the unemployed after the smelters closed; had beaten a man when he was drunk while onlookers cheered. He sat cross-legged by the fire, poking the embers with a stick. He felt feverish, strange. Far away through the trees, he could hear Ge Shou singing.

  Ah Sing poured the oil into the wok and dried the canning jar with the hem of his shirt. He dropped two mint leaves inside the jar. The mint grew wild near the bog, and Ah Sing would gather and then hang the sprigs from his cabin’s ceiling. He poured the boiling water into the canning jar and stirred a gram of opium paste into the liquid. The steam rose and scented the air with mint. He wrapped a green maple leaf around the jar and passed it to Gold Tooth, but Gold Tooth pushed it away.

  Ah Sing put the jar on the ground. He fussed over the flames, moving the kettle to make room for the wok, then busied himself with the onions and the grouse until the aroma rose into the air, overpowering the mint.

  “I used to be a cook, you know,” Ah Sing said. “I worked for Mr. and Mrs. Edward Price in Victoria.”

  “Shit work.”

  Ah Sing moved coals and added more kindling to adjust the heat. He rotated the wok and stirred its contents with a stick, testing the mixture frequently and inhaling its scent with his eyes closed.

  Gold Tooth turned to him and snorted. “Look down. Your hand.”

  “Oh,” Ah Sing said. “I’ve burned myself.”

  A patch of flesh two inches wide was stuck to the outside of the wok.

  “No one will notice. Look at your face. Have you glanced in a mirror lately?”

  When the food was ready, Ah Sing placed the wok down between them. Gold Tooth eyed the food with a rare appetite Ah Sing had not seen in the man in weeks. Ah Sing chewed in silence, watching Gold Tooth eat; rough skinned and fused together, the nubs of his fingers as Gold Tooth scooped the mixture into his mouth were as strange and beautiful as elephant hooves.

  “It gets easier,” Ah Sing said.

  “I’m not a leper.”

  “No one wants to believe they are. I’ll tell you something. I’m going to escape. I’ve got to go back to China. To my son and wife.”

  Gold Tooth gave a disgusted grunt. “Has anyone escaped before?”

  Ah Sing didn’t answer. He told Gold Tooth he’d heard that two New York lepers had been shipped in a crate by the CPR as far west as Prince Rupert, and he thought they’d been deported to China from there. “My son,” Ah Sing said, changing the subject. “My son would be eighteen years old now. He was five the last time I saw him. It would be good if he could come to Gold Mountain. He would find work.”

  They sat looking at each other while dusk fell. Neither one said a word. Ah Sing cracked open grouse bones and sucked out the marrow. Gold Tooth lay on his back and smoked tobacco from the supply ship. The fire had turned to coals and the coals had turned to ash before Gold Tooth spoke.

  “I used to get all the girls. Best one’s name was Zao. I called her ‘Zao,’ chirp, because of the sound she made when we had sex. On hot nights she ran ice cubes up and down my spine, and on cold nights she tickled me with cotton balls. When I couldn’t sleep, she massaged my feet while humming Strauss. She polished my shoes and every morning brought me my gambling spreadsheets. The way she pencilled in her eyebrows. I’m going to give you a piece of advice. Only hit a woman when she needs it, and only with an open hand. You got to keep them in their place because they want it. You have to answer their questions for them; that’s love.”

  “Did she turn you in?” Ah Sing asked.

  “No!” Then after a moment he said, “They raided the Kwong Wo and Company Store; we were in the back, gambling.”

  It was pitch black now. Ah Sing drew a stick through the ashes. The bark caught an ember and he blew at the small flame. He threw on more kindling until the wood crackled. The only light came from the small campfire; its shadows highlighting the heavy ridges of Gold Tooth’s overgrown brow.

  “When I was a kid I found this bottle with a note inside,” Gold Tooth continued. “It’d washed up from Taiwan,” he said. “Funny thing is I don’t remember what the letter said. It was a wide, fat bottle, like a medicine bottle. It was dull, scratched up by the rocks. I remember grabbing it and trying to open it while the older boys were gambling by the fishboats, and then it started to rain and I ran under an overturned dory. I tried to pry out the cork, but it was stuck fast. Then I tried to cut it out with a broken clam shell. I ended up smashing the neck off. I remember the bottle, but not the message. Strange, huh?”

  Ah Sing drew his knees up to his chest. “Memory is a funny thing.”

  “I wonder what it said. Who knows? I don’t remember.”

  Ah Sing didn’t answer.

  “I remember lots of other things. Swimming in the Zhu Jiang River. The ducks and geese. I ate lily roots. I loved water chestnuts and dates. Have you been to the hills of Guangxi? Limestone towers. I would visit my uncle and play in the fish ponds.”

  Gold Tooth turned on his side, away from Ah Sing, and curled up in the fetal position. Ah Sing’s mother had turned on her side and died facing the wall. She had first lain in bed talking about her childhood, but as the sun rose, she turned inward and fell silent.

  “In Canton the laundry waved like flags. We threw cats into the stinking canals. My parents were dead. I stole food from the people who lived on boats along the waterfront. I ran through the alleys and when I made the cut-throat sign people feared me. I grew up to be a Tong, never did any grunt work. Laundry, houseboy, gardener. Never did any of that. I was in extortion.”

  An hour or so later, Gold Tooth started to cry, softly, under his breath. He mumbled something inaudible.

  “What?”

  “Will you send my bones back to China?”

  Ah Sing sat up.

  “You know the worst thing about it?”

  “What?”

  “I never knew her real name.”

  “Who?”

  “First it was the cotton balls, I couldn’t feel them. Then I couldn’t feel the suit against my skin. This is my best suit. My best suit.”

  “I called her Zao,” he sa
id. He started sobbing.

  Ah Sing dozed in the forest to the sound of Gold Tooth’s laboured breathing. The stretches between his exhalations grew longer, as if each breath was becoming too precious to release. A breath. Another. He clutched the life within him and refused to unleash it, greedily holding onto the air inside his lungs for ten seconds at a time, fifteen, twenty.

  Ah Sing dreamed a man holding a roomful of rice in the palm of his hand was trying to make him swallow it all, and awoke choking. Gold Tooth’s eyes appeared fixed on an immature bald eagle circling overhead, and in the dawn light he looked like he was still alive. Ah Sing rubbed his hands vigorously over his own cheeks. He closed Gold Tooth’s eyelids and touched the man’s chest. He felt along the body, found the Swiss pocket watch and slipped it into his own pocket. An object valuable enough to buy passage off the island, maybe even to pay the deportation costs back to China. Ah Sing couldn’t see clearly and stumbled toward the ocean, moving branches away from his face as he made his way through the brush.

  He ran to the beach, and raised the emergency flag on the hill.

  The Victoria Tug Company steamer Alert usually arrived quarterly to deliver supplies: tea, dried fish, axes, razors, handkerchiefs, and, in the last load, a looking glass. It was surprising to see the tug so soon; often they would raise the flag and no one would show up for weeks.

  Ah Sing had fought to bury Gold Tooth in his silk suit, but Ge Shou had slipped away with the jacket. So when the boat came, Ah Sing was digging alone near the bog, past the vegetable garden, where the ground was soft, and far enough away from Ah Sing’s cabin that even a spirit as restless as Gold Tooth’s couldn’t haunt him.

  As the steamer cut through the chop, Ah Sing flung a last shovel of soil onto the coffin he had dragged out of the storage shed. Then, brushing his hands together, he scrambled down the gravelled slope to the shore, pebbles tumbling away from the edges of his footsteps. He watched as a dory loaded with supplies was lowered from the boat and rowed toward the shore with two men aboard.