American Meteor

by Norman Lock

  Chen Shi was pedaling like mad on a Singer machine, illuminated by a rain-spattered skylight at the back of the depot, surrounded by bolts of cloth, lint, rubbish, and nests of threads. I watched him push a length of serge this way and that under the flying needle. After a while, he peered up at me through wire-rim spectacles; his eyes were dull and watery.

  “You want me make something nice?” he asked.

  I must’ve smirked to hear him speak. His English was broken; the words sounded like a mangle had wrung them of articulation. Later on, I gave a damned fine impersonation of Chen to a track foreman. He was a Methodist from Arkansas, who could, I thought, be counted on to share in my scorn for an inferior race. He flabbergasted me by asking if I could speak Mandarin. As if I’d want to! I found out later that his sister belonged to a missionary society on the Yellow River.

  “Dr. Durant has made me his personal steward aboard the Lincoln parlor car,” I said with the self-importance of a little man serving a writ. While I was not so inclined as formerly to put on airs, I could still lord it over a Chinaman.

  To give Chen’s ears every opportunity to take in my meaning, I pronounced each word distinctly and strikingly, as if I were stamping Lady Liberty on a half-cent piece. He was not in the least impressed. Next, I pointed to my sergeant’s stripes and my Medal of Honor. He stared at them blankly. The man’s a fool, I said to myself. Without a word, he got up from his machine and measured me with a cloth tape. His fingers were long and delicate, like a piano player’s or a cardsharp’s yellowed by cigarettes.

  “Not today,” he said. “You come next day.”

  God Almighty, what a hash! But my new uniform fit me to perfection. Admiring myself in a cheval glass next to Chen’s machine, I must’ve been preening like a girl—so taken was I by my reflection. I was used to seeing myself in worn-out blue coat and pants, when I bothered to look at all. I turned this way and that and twisted my head to see my back. Chen laughed at me! My neck grew warm with embarrassment. I wheeled on the yellow bastard and would have gone for him if something in his eyes hadn’t stopped me. What I saw was a look of amusement, such as you’d see on the face of a white man who’d just seen someone make himself ridiculous.

  “How do I look?” I asked in a tone of voice that slid from defiance to self-mockery, like a slide whistle in a vaudeville show or a trombone braying a circus “screamer.”

  “A bottle of milk,” he replied with a frankness different from what I’d have expected from a devious Asiatic.

  Chen and I got on well together, although I never felt so close to him as I would have if he’d been white. I’m sure he wished I were one of his own kind. After waiting on the “beaver hats” visiting a godforsaken railhead, I would go to the quartermaster’s to see him. Except as the company tailor, he seldom had contact with the other Caucasians. When he did, he spoke “chop-chop,” so as not to provoke them. His English was almost as good as mine, since he’d learned it at a mission school in China. I’d have thought him cowardly if not for a scar on his cheek, put there by a teamster’s whip when Chen refused to be driven from the street into a muddy slough.

  Chen shared a room near the packinghouse with four other Chinese. Two didn’t speak his dialect. He must have been lonely. Once, he invited me home (we’ll call it that, regardless of its meager comforts) to eat with him. According to his lights, to share a meal with a man was to honor him. The room was wretched, dark, and crowded, but I was unfazed, having grown up in squalor. The noise of five Chinamen squabbling while they chopped vegetables reminded me of the tenement—and a yard full of outraged turkeys. Having finished our meal (a peculiar sort of stew I didn’t much care for), we sat and smoked—the last of the general’s cigars for me, a long pipe like a Dutchman’s for Chen.

  “My mother and father,” he said, showing me a tintype portrait of a severe man wearing a quilted jacket and a skullcap and a woman staring pensively. Her eyes seemed to be asking something of me. I think I must have shivered with the uncanniness of her gaze. Chen nodded sympathetically through a cloud of tobacco smoke; perhaps her eyes penetrated him, also, each time he looked at the picture. “You seem surprised,” he said, tactfully finding a subject other than what his mother’s gaze might mean.

  “I didn’t think Chinamen had heard of cameras,” I said, happy that the conversation had veered. I had no wish to speculate on what pain a Chinese woman might feel, its causes and intensity. I didn’t understand women of my own kind, much less those that had their feet bound.

  He laughed, and I was reassured to hear a laugh like anybody else’s. We’re not the same, I thought, but we’re not unknowable or untranslatable.

  In 1866, the Chinese were more mysterious to most Americans than Negroes, Indians, or Jews, for whom the rituals of torment had been worked out long before. It takes time to perfect cruelty—to coin terms of abuse with which to belittle and defame. We had to learn to intone nigger, redskin, hymie, chink, dago, greaser, et cetera, before we could turn individual meanness into a national spite. It galled me to hear myself called a “papist Mick” and a “mackerel snapper,” but I couldn’t bloody the mouths of the whole hidebound host bent on degrading me—no, not even if I’d been the rough-and-tumble sort. Poor bastards like Chen get to know the taste of dirt long before they lie down in it to take their eternal rest.

  I remember how I’d hated the old black man at the feed and grain store. I’d wanted to choke the life out of him. I’d wanted to scream that I had lost my eye for the sole purpose of freeing him and his descendants. And Spotswood—what had I really thought of him? To this day, I do not understand rage’s (or is it envy’s or merely fear’s?) heat, which can twist a man from his true self, like an iron rod denatured in the forge.

  The Hundredth Meridian, Nebraska Territory, October 20, 1866

  At the hundredth meridian, I met a woman who must not have read Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians concerning submission and obedience: She bent for nobody and did what she pleased. A train had been made up to carry dignitaries, newspaper writers, and eastern moneymen to the Union Pacific’s latest railhead, two hundred and fifty miles west of Omaha. Durant and his gang, installed like sultans aboard the old Lincoln car, rode west with a haughty, high-toned chef from Frisco to fry their steaks and me to serve the whiskey. After nearly a year’s swanning up and down the line in my white suit, I had learned how to glare critically at the silverware, polish the crystal glasses, dust the shoulders of the bottles, and dance in attendance, like a monkey on a stick. I was a self-satisfied mug whose throat would have been cut in the Five Points just to put my nose out of joint. What else could you expect of someone who finds himself by divine accident in the midst of fabulous wealth and power? I didn’t fall into temptation so much as hurl myself at it. It was my Gilded Age, however brief.

  While the barons made speeches, heard their vision and industry praised by a pack of bootlickers, and postured for the photographers, heads behind drapes to immortalize this great milestone on the way to Utah, I ogled a redhead in boots and a lumberman’s coat buttoned over a blue satin dress. I remember her name! Kari Lund. She and her father operated a traveling store in a prairie wagon they’d driven from St. Louis. They rattled up and down the lengthening track, selling whiskey, tobacco, corned beef, potatoes, and sundries. Old man Lund could also barber and shave a man, if any required tonsorial attention. But the Irish were not overly fastidious out of doors, and the coolies, who liked to be clean and tidy, were forbidden to cut their pigtails on pain of death, should they ever return shorn to China. Foreigners have their ways; we have ours.

  Kari was not impressed by my milk white uniform or my Medal of Honor. I don’t think she thought much of me. She was a head taller, and her body outside of her clothes had a rude good health mine never did. Maybe she liked my face. Maybe she was bored. In any case, she let me have her in what passed for a bedroom inside the wagon while Papa Elof was away with the horses, replenishing the stock. It cannot be said that I “took her”; she’d
have broken my nose for me had I tried. The experience surpassed my clumsy initiation in the chaplains’ crib and the sad wreck I’d made of desire in Chicago. Love would always be an ordeal, although I would look for it, like everyone else. Maybe I’d kept company with death too long during that twelve-day journey to the grave to find it. Despite her grit, Kari was gentle while we grappled and cleaved. She might have seen herself a missionary, bringing the comforts of her ample body to men lost and baffled by yearning on the vast plains. Most men are no better than godforsaken heathens.

  When the quilt slipped from her breasts, I was startled by their soft, round fullness, so unfamiliar in that harsh country. Our skins blushed in the wavering light from the stove. The heat was luxurious. I felt a motion in my arms and legs as a river must when its ice begins to thaw. I exulted in the moment, however unreal. I knew enough of life to realize its brevity and the transience of both its pains and pleasures. We lay there while night sealed the prairie with a chill silence, its stars obedient to an ancient rule, their commotion heard only by dogs howling in the midst of a godless solitude. In their private car, warmed by brandy and cigars, Durant’s gang plotted to carve up the emptiness to their own advantage. So I imagined. From what I knew of their kind, my guess was a good one.

  Greed is not exclusive to empire builders like Durant, who believed it a necessary vice if civilization was to take root and thrive. After Mr. Lincoln was murdered, Ford’s Theatre was stripped of its seats by profiteers whose ambition did not encompass territories, but only what could be carted off in a wagon or two. I suppose, in my own modest way, I was ambitious for a larger life. I was enamored of myself each time I put on that ridiculous white uniform. I enjoyed rich men’s company. I must have flattered myself a kind of soldier sent into the land of plenty to steal as much as he could carry, like one of Sherman’s “bummers” during his ardent march to the sea. I filched their cigars, liquor, tinned meat, buffalo tongue, and oysters. Being among them as they crossed their immense kingdom, surrounded by money and luxury, I must have believed something of theirs would rub off. I’m almost sure that is how it was for me. I fancied myself an up-and-comer. Afterward, when I was no longer a steward and was once more surrounded by ordinary men, I lost my self-importance. I do owe my rich and powerful patron one thing, however: my infatuation with photography, which commenced on that cold October morning on the hundredth meridian.

  Three shrill blasts of the locomotive’s whistle woke Kari and me, the wild dogs in their holes, and the pig in its mire beside the wagon. We dressed and went outside while the eastern stars were giving way to the lightening sky. A photographer had set up his camera to capture the train’s departure on a wet-glass plate. During the ceremony, my mind had been elsewhere, but as he handled the maple box and its brass cylinder, my interest grew. I asked how it worked; he mumbled a gruff reply from under the curtain. He was too preoccupied, or hungover, or the day far too early to satisfy my curiosity.

  Kari insisted he take our picture. He withdrew his head from behind the curtain and—liking the look of her, I guess—agreed. I kept it with me until I lost my wallet at the Little Bighorn. She stood upright and stiff, as was the custom for portraits of the time. You couldn’t tell her hair was red, of course. But her face managed to relax during the exposure. She almost smiled. In the last instant before the photographer covered the lens, I turned my head, wanting to see her handsome profile, her slightly parted lips revealing a tooth. In the picture, my face was blurred. Durant and his chums were waiting on the car’s rear platform, where I had stood, often at night, with Jericho to play taps for a man whom I’d never heard speak. There was no time to take a second photograph of a lovesick boy.

  I don’t recall what Kari and I said to each other. Nothing of consequence. Until now, I haven’t been a man to unburden himself. What lay deep stayed deep. I was with her for a brief time, is all, like Odysseus in the arms of Circe, forgetting his way home. Only I had none. Lovesick! I was always ready to give my heart, yet I would never have given it entirely. Something in me wanted to keep itself secret and apart. Unless at my core, there was nothing to give.

  Feeling Kari’s heat when we lay together, I recalled the winter nights when my mother had taken me into bed beside her to stop me from shivering. She was thin and had little heat to spare. I was glad she hadn’t died of consumption: I would have blamed myself for stealing her vitality, as a cat is said to steal a baby’s breath. She always feared a Brooklyn pauper’s grave.

  “I want to be buried in the cemetery at Dún Laoghaire,” she used to say.

  She ended among the destitute on Ward’s Island. Did these morbid thoughts turn on my mind’s lathe during the night in Kari’s wagon, or is the recollection of that night darkened now by what I found on my return to Omaha?

  “Did you enjoy the lady?” Reynolds asked while I poured him his favorite whiskey.

  He was one of the moneybags, for whom I had a special loathing. He leered sufficiently to make me almost forget myself. His mockery twisted suddenly into a challenge. He fixed me with his coldest stare and waited for my reply.

  “I did, sir.”

  “You’ll forgive me, I’m sure, if I insist on hearing the details of your conquest. When old men lose their juice, their curiosity becomes inflamed.”

  He tossed the drink down his gullet, like kerosene meant to fuel the flames of a lurid imagination. In time, I would learn to understand men like him. I met enough of his kind, and their fantasies did not always concern sexual intercourse. There were others nostalgic for their robust past: for a strong body or a mind delighting in the subjugation—by fear or humiliation—of Indians, blacks, Chinese, coyotes, bison, women. Often it doesn’t matter what, so long as prejudice has an object. Some men (some women, also, to insist on equality) are impelled to cultivate the seeds of enmity—sown how, why, or by whom, it little matters. George Armstrong Custer, for instance.

  I first met him in ’74, on the Black Hills Expedition. I photographed his conquests, his triumphs, his acquisitions. I remember how, after he had killed a bear, his eyes underneath the yellow curls looked glazed and far away, like those of a man who’d just rolled off a woman’s belly. In the varnished negative, his face was gruesome, as it might have been were light to fall on it suddenly in a tomb. It is always so to see the normal tones reversed, but in Custer’s case, the effect was striking. At least, my imagination—yeasty after a disastrous winter with the Ute—found it so. Let’s say that the photograph had unmasked a man intended for an unusual destiny—an inhuman one, because it had nothing to do with ordinary men. I couldn’t foresee the Little Bighorn—I hadn’t yet met Crazy Horse—but I saw in Custer’s face the smirk of a man whose name would be writ large in our history. In that he seemed to venerate killing like a holy office, I supposed his contribution would be infamous. He had ambition, the good opinion of his superiors, and a regiment at his disposal. Otherwise, Custer was no different from a man who—his snoot full of cheap rye on a Saturday night—drags his wife by the hair around the kitchen, beats his children, kicks his dog, or wages war against a hill of ants. So perhaps Custer’s destiny was not an inhuman one after all.

  I knew a man in Santa Fe, who took offense at a horde of ants in the ground behind his house. They got on his nerves, he said; they troubled his dreams and disturbed his rest. In time, they interfered with his work and threatened his livelihood. Not that they ever came inside the house—that wasn’t it. His hatred, which swelled into a fury, was unreasoning; it had no practical point or issue. He would stomp on them as they filed in and out of the hole to their nest: a black string that he made, in his madness, into a fetish. He lay awake at night, hearing them scurry on the hard earth, plotting their extermination, rejoicing in its contemplation. But the ants were indifferent to his stratagems. Unable to destroy their race by killing them singly, he blocked the entrance, flattened the hill with a shovel, dug up the nest. But always the ants found their way out again—the tribe apparently numberless. Finally,
he soaked the ground with kerosene. The fire meant to be the ants’ holocaust burned down his house. The ants endured. A pretty fable.

  I shouldn’t have appeased Reynolds’s appetite. I ought to have spat in his eye, taken off my idiotic uniform, and reentered the world. Had I ever been in it? But those were hard times, and I was in the wilderness. It was no golden age after all, not for upstarts who might suddenly decide they could mouth off to their betters. The Declaration of Independence was not for people like me. Poverty had not been abolished, or cruelty outlawed, or greed shamed into nonexistence. Life on the frontier was harassed by savages, plagued by sickness, made miserable by hunger and cold. Out on my own, I could expect to live considerably fewer than three score years and ten. Not being Thoreau, Emerson, John Brown, Frederick Douglas, Clara Barton, Lincoln, or Frederick Aiken, I behaved in keeping with my character and age. I told Reynolds what he wanted to know. I stoked his inferno and saw how his eyes sparked, then glazed over, like a priest’s vouchsafed a glimpse of Paradise.

  Omaha, Nebraska Territory, October 24, 1866– December 4, 1866

  Where the tailors worked, a German was pedaling the Singer. I wanted to tell Chen about my night inside the wagon in the middle of nowhere, how in the morning the gray plain sprawled to the encircling horizon, and about the photographer who’d fixed—he said “forever”—the light from a Swedish woman on a pane of glass. It never occurred to me to call Chen my friend; I hadn’t the habit or knack of friendship. There isn’t the sentimental strain in me you sometimes find in men whose childhood was grim. They see themselves like an urchin in a Dickens novel: a bleak heart sweetened by suffering. They look back fondly on their mistreated youthful selves. My childhood was brief and is best forgotten.