by J. D. Brink
Russ Marshman built up a different kind of reputation. The man responsible for M&O’s book keeping was back in more civilized lands, wasting their resources on gambling, booze, and another man’s wife. He eventually cut and ran with whatever money was left, literally killing the M&O Railroad in its tracks.
But Miles, apparently, was an eye-for-an-eye kind of guy. According to legend, he hired a Creek Indian to track Russ down and cut his heart out. No one knows for sure that it happened like that, of course, but ole Russ was found in a Chicago hotel room with a big cavity in his chest.
There is a happy ending, however. Rails End was born on the spot where the railroad died. It has one of the biggest Chinatowns in the country, primarily due to the number of Chinese workers that were on the line. Restaurants, tourist shops, and bordellos fill its busy streets. It’s beautiful at night, too, with the red glow of paper lanterns and Asian hieroglyphics all lit up along the storefronts.
I come here often, usually for dinner and a bit of wandering afterward. Most times I don’t swallow even a drop of alcohol. Something tells me, though, that tonight won’t be one of those nights.
Swan’s is my regular stop. I’m not entirely sure that’s the right way to say his name, but it’s as close as and Edgar and I have gotten. I haul my library load into my favorite booth and set up shop.
But my brain’s tired of reading.
Ten minutes later, I’m halfway through a hand of solitaire and waiting for my food. (I always carry at least one pack of Caterina playing cards in my jacket pockets.) The lights are dim, save the mini-chandelier hanging above each table. That and the music gives each table a sense of privacy, every conversation masked by the mismatched sax and trombone of New Orleans jazz. The bench seats are crimson vinyl with matching tablecloths. The walls are blackened wood paneling, adorned with the typical Asian artworks of mountains and trees, dragons and phoenixes. Two fat, ogre-looking monsters seem to be juggling fireballs back and forth in the frame next to me.
There are more patrons here than usual, being a Saturday night. It keeps the trio of wait staff pretty busy, but I still get the V.I.P. treatment. Swan and his wife always take care of me personally. Maybe it’s that I’m their most regular customer. Or maybe it’s Edgar. When he’s not with me, which is most of the time, they always ask about my “chubby, funny friend.”
I play a ten of clubs on the jack of diamonds and think that I’ll have to find a face card for remembering the Swans when I’m gone.
The venerable papa-san comes out in his apron and black tie, bringing me a cup of hot and sour soup. His posture is terrible, but his feet shuffle across the floor with surprising speed and grace.
“Always playing with yourself,” he says, setting down the soup. Swan is unaware of the joke he’s just made, so I smile only to myself. “And I never see you win,” he complains, disapprovingly clucking his tongue at me.
The old man’s a friend but, like Felix, he occasionally gets the idea he might be my illegitimate father.
“I resent that,” I tell him. The four of hearts plays nicely on the five of clubs. I slide three more winking, cat-faced sovereigns off the deck and turn them over. “Besides,” I say, “it’s a challenging game.”
He shakes his head, still showing his teeth. “No challenge to sitting here. You should be out in world, out on town.” He shakes a finger of elder wisdom at me. “Out meeting the women. That is challenge, Mr. Jack. Greatest challenge of all. You should not be here... playing with yourself.”
“That’s what men do when they can’t find a woman, isn’t it?”
He catches it that time and laughs, which is only detectable in the frequency of his breathing pattern and the wrinkle of his eyes. “Besides,” I tell him, “I’ve had women in my time. They’ve either wanted to anchor me down or were so fast that I was left wondering what the hell just happened. Nah, that’s a game I’ve lost interest in.”
“You?” he asks incredulously, smiling wider now. “With women? More than one?”
“Is that so hard to believe?”
I give up the game and spread out the columns, searching. These common cards hold another purpose for me: they are my picture album, my memoir, and I can pick up a deck anywhere I go. These days, of course, it’s always a Catarina deck.
The Queen of Diamonds stands out and I hold her up for Swan.
“Jessica. College sweetheart.”
“You are a college man?” he asks.
“Almost. Sophomore year, I read Catcher in the Rye and Holden convinced me it wasn’t worthwhile.”
Swan doesn’t get the reference—he just stares, waiting for the punchline.
I continue the story: “Jessica’s daddy was a doctor. When I told her I was thinking of dropping out, all she could talk about was all the money I’d be giving up and how she couldn’t be with someone ‘too poor to love me.’ Whatever the hell that means.”
“You could not buy expensive gifts for her,” Swan suggests. “She was American girl, yes? All same.”
I shrug. “Well, her attitude ultimately cinched it for me. I quit school, and her. We were too young to know what love was anyway.” I turn the card back at myself. The queen’s ignorant eyes stare out, oblivious to the real world around her. She grips a flower because she thinks it has value, but it’ll just wilt, fade, and die. And when all those lovely petals are lying on the floor, what good will they be?
I fish out the Queen of Clubs from the cluster of cards.
“Ebony. I did the books for a club in Kansas City. She was one of the bartenders.”
“Attractive girl?”
“Oh yes.”
“Was it love?”
“I suppose love comes in many subtle shades. And all the colors of the rainbow are pretty ones, aren’t they?”
“Every woman has beauty,” he says. “You find it, you may find love. What happened with Miss Ebony?”
“She lived the night life. Every day was one big party. I couldn’t keep up, and didn’t really want to. What a pointless existence.”
“What was point of no more college?” he asks, stabbing me in the chest with his bony finger.
“I didn’t care about circular, academic arguments and hiring into the right tax bracket. There’s got to be more to life.”
“And have you found it?”
“Maybe not, but I’ve had one hell of an education, I can tell you that.”
“And what is point,” he demands, stirring the mess of digits and glyphs on my table, “of playing cards by yourself?”
Shrug again. “I don’t have an answer, oh wise one.”
He shakes the same finger at me. “You should meet my niece, Biyu. Very good girl. You two do well together.”
In an effort to avoid the way this conversation is going, I start flipping and swirling cards, building a proper deck again. The King of Spades surfaces and Swan pins him down.
“Karl Deshanko,” I say, “my mentor in Las Vegas. Taught me to see through the illusions. I might be there right now, learning more, maybe even with a show of my own, but I lost interest. Got impatient, discouraged by the hollow truth of things.”
“You do not believe in magic?” There’s a strange shine in the old man’s dark eyes when he asks me that.
“You know, you’re the second man to ask me that this week. I’m not stupid, I knew what magicians did on stage wasn’t real magic, but I thought there must be something to it, some secrets they knew that we ordinary folks didn’t. Maybe the tricks that mentalists do, but… No, things got complicated in Vegas and not in a good way, so I—”
“So you do not believe?”
“No, Papa-san,” I say, half chuckling, “no, it’s safe to say that I do not believe in magic.”
“Well, Mr. Jack, maybe magic believe in you.” That strange shine is a glaring beacon of black light now. Whatever nonsense he’s selling, the old man’s all-in.
That finger of his taps the deck of cards I’ve blindly reassembled. Another face card sit
s on top.
“That’s me,” I tell him, certain of at least one thing in this dance around weirdness. “I am the Jack of Spades: the one-eyed knave, the magician’s apprentice, nameless. In some decks, he’s the only card that holds infinity in his hand. I’ve even got it stamped on my back, now.
“You know, this depressing trip down Memory Lane has set an itch in my throat,” I add, pawing at my Adam’s apple. “Could I get a drink?”
Mrs. Swan appears from behind red curtains, a small woman with even worse posture than her husband and the same, ever-present smile. She’s carrying a bowl of rice and my plate of twice-cooked pork: mostly swine, cabbage, and carrots in a spicy brown sauce. I don’t know what she puts in it, but I can’t seem to get enough. Mrs. Swan issues orders in Mandarin and her husband scrambles to obey.
I thank her for the food and the rescue.
The old man returns when I’m just about finished eating and halfway through my second gin and tonic. He’s got an old book under his arm, its cover black and threadbare, and he sits down across from me. “I see you are reading I Ching,” he says, gesturing at my stack of books.
I nod, my mouth full of cabbage and rice.
The I Ching, I’ve discovered, is a core text of ancient Taoism: yin and yang, the Way of nature and balance of the universe, thousands of years of philosophy and ritual. Ms. Ming’s precious tiles that I’m to pick up are directly related, though I’m still figuring out how.
Swan opens his book, an old copy written in Chinese, pulls three old coins of foreign currency from his pocket, and gives me a crash course in how it all works.
The lines described on Ming’s tiles are taken from this ancient text. A solid line is yang, a broken line is yin: male and female, day and night, energy and absence. The dichotomy of the universe. Three of these lines form a trigram. There are eight possible combinations of trigrams, representing earth and heaven, thunder and wind, fire and water, mountain and lake. Two trigrams are combined to make a hexagram, which is then used to give advice. According to Swan, they are also used to divine the future.
That’s where his coins come in. A series of flipping determines yin and yang combos, though it’s not just a heads or tails thing; it’s more complex than that. He gives me a demonstration, then drops the coins in my hand. I indulge the old man and the coins determine my own personal combo of solid and broken lines. We build my hexagram from bottom to top. First comes yin-yin-yang: mountain. Then yang-yin-yang: fire. So, my divination all assembled is fire above mountain.
Swan the swami looks this up in his tattered grimoire. His shoulders shake, his breathing gets choppy: he’s laughing at me. “I should know already! Lü. Traveler. Wanderer.”
“That’s amazing,” I say playfully, sipping my drink, “considering I already told you that I was going on a trip tomorrow.”
He shakes his head at me. “It does not mean tomorrow, Mr. Jack. It means life.”
The Wanderer. It fits.
“Didn’t you tell me that this was used as an oracle, a fortune teller?”
That finger of his searches the page and he gives me tidbits, translated.
“After rise and fall of Abundance”—Swan stops then and explains at length that Abundance is the sign that comes before Traveling in the book—“one should go forward to explore new world and begin new cycle. But the traveler cares only about trivial things, so he makes his own misfortune.”
“Hey, I think I’m offended by that.” After all, I’ve been wandering around because everything else is trivial, right? I’m looking for substance. It’s not my fault there isn’t any wherever I go.
“Traveling long road,” Swan continues, “life becomes unstable and all people are strangers. Moving place to place tires body and spirit. The life of every man is journey, but until he settles to find true purpose, chances for success are few.”
“Kind of sounds like an unabridged fortune cookie.”
He grunts in agreement, but his ever-present grin is gone. This is the first time I’ve seen old Swan take something quite so seriously. I finish the last gulp of my drink and look into the cup rather than at him, perhaps a defensive action. The irregular ice cubes shift under my glare and I find I’m afraid to look back up.
Damn, I realize, the old man got under my skin. How’d he do that?
I’m far too old for fortune cookies, after all.
Mrs. Swan comes out again and packs my books in a plastic takeout bag. I leave twice what’s due on the table, as I always do, and the old couple sees me to the door.
The lights and laughter of Chinatown greet me as I exit into the chill air outside. Lucky I have my jacket. This is an easy place to lose yourself and your troubles. Tonight, I plan to do both.
Seven
The Neon Dragon is one of the more popular clubs in Chinatown; less traditional-eclectic, more trendy and cool. The attractive young people crowd hangs out here. I generally don’t, mostly because I feel like I’m too old and crusty for this scene; the creepy guy in his thirties looking to score with a twenty-one year old out celebrating her first drink. That’d be the perception, or at least how I imagine it’d go. Or, at the very least, that’s how it’d really be if Edgar were here, and sometimes he is; Rex, the bartender, keeps trying to get me to settle Eddie’s tab.
Tonight, however, I’ve wandered in anyway. Tomorrow I go on “vacation,” after all, so why not start early? The place is sweltering with my jacket on, but I suck it up. And it’s loud, with the latest and greatest goofy hit songs playing at a brain-jarring volume. Someday the world will look back on ‘80s music and say, “What the hell were they thinking?”
Eventually even the alcohol can’t convince me to stay any longer. “I’m embarrassed,” I tell the woman next me, a thin brunette who’s been very friendly for the last half an hour.
“Don’t be,” she pleads, touching my hand again. She’s been doing that all along, as if emphasizing the points on her unexciting stories, and there’s a shiny rock on the appropriate finger. She’s not quite my age, but older than the average patron here. If it wasn’t for the ring, I might be persuaded to go along, but that’s more trouble than I need. I generally conduct myself according to certain policies—not for the morality of it, but for my own survival. You don’t stay invisible as long as I have by pulling dumb shit. And screwing around with a married woman, even one as drunk and willing as this one, is a string I don’t need to tangle myself up in.
“No, really,” I say, taking her hand this time. (I’ll allow myself that tiny flirtation, at least.) “I need to be going. I’m too old for this place.”
“You’re not that old,” she says, her hand squeezing mine.
My ass falls back to the stool. Be human, a tiny voice tells me. What was it Swan the swami said? Life wandering the road is hard and lonely? Take the old man’s advice. Live a little.
My fingers brush over hers: a sensuous gesture… And then hit that hard diamond and its thorny gold setting.
The real me, the professional Wanderer, takes control again. I flip her hand around into a more formal shake and lean in enough to shout, “Have a good night.” Then I signal Rex for my belongings, which he’d been kind enough to stash behind the bar, and head out the door.
The air outside is about twenty degrees cooler than the club and it lights up my sweaty, open pores like a splash of ice water. “Yup,” I tell myself, looking at the plastic take-out bag full of library books in my hand. “I’m way too cool for that club…”
The cold air has brought me up an unexpected grade or two on the sobriety scale. I could almost walk a straight line if I had to, and it’s this uptick in awareness that allows me to pick up on the tail following me. There are other people in the street, even at this hour, but they all have partying of their own to attend to. Only three of them, all males with no mirth or stagger to their step, seem to be keeping a regular course on me. After a few blocks and a couple turns, they still pop up on my radar when I casually glance behind me.
>
Who the hell would be following me? I wonder. I’m supposed to be invisible. The dark stranger.
Alone and drunk, I decide that I don’t really want to know who they are. I’d rather lose them and keep the mystery alive for another day.
I duck into another bar, Duck’s Palace. It’s a small, quiet place that caters mostly to depressed regulars who want to pass out between working their shifts and forget the drudgery of their lives. At this hour there are only four patrons inside, all blue collar Chinese men in their forties or fifties, and at least one is unconscious. The bartender—Fu, I think his name is—gives me a puzzled look but doesn’t mutter a word as I stalk in the front door, across the room, through the tiny storeroom/hallway, and out the back.
A lone figure stands at the west end of the rear alley when I exit.
“Okay, fuck subtlety,” I mumble, gently bouncing off the dumpster, regaining my balance, and breaking into a trot.
Footsteps grind against the dirt behind me, getting closer. Fast.
My pace turns into a run, the plastic bag of books flailing in my hand and whacking against my thigh.
At the far end of Chinatown is the rail yard. A hundred years ago, someone’s dream of an empire died there. Tonight, I’m hoping that I don’t die there.
There are virtually no lights. There’s the engineers’ office, a box of sheet metal with small, dark windows, half a dozen parallel and crisscrossing paths of wood and steel, and a whole bunch of huge, silent rail cars. The whole scene strikes me as an iron elephants’ graveyard. Some of the big, square beasts are lined up, trunks gripping tails; some are off on their own tracks, waiting to die alone. A few lamp posts cast a feeble glow here and there, but end up making more shadows than light. The ground is all irregular rocks, more or less palm-size. It’s impossible to walk or run on them without making some noise.
