by Henry Chang
Johnny listened from the driver’s seat, not that any of it made a difference to him, as long as it worked.
“Good up to fiteen, twenny feet.” Bags grinned and pointed it in Johnny’s direction a second, then aimed it out the open window and pulled the trigger.
Johnny heard the compressed suppressed explosion—poof! — at the same time the fluorescent sign shattered, exploded, leaving jagged plastic hanging above the Jade Takeout shop.
“It’s clean right now, but it’s probably got bodies on it, know what I’m sayin’?”
Johnny nodded.
“I no keepy,” he said in his best English.
“You no keepee, you got dat right,” chortled Bags. He popped the clip and removed the bullets, handing the goods over to Johnny. He folded the cash into his pocket and said “pussy time” with a Cheshire cat grin.
“Remember,” he said, climbing out of the car, “you use it, you lose it. You get caught, you don’t know nothing. Capice?”
“No pobbum,” Johnny answered, slipping the piece under his seat.
“No pobbum, man,” he repeated, watching Bags grease down into the Blossom.
Forgiveness
Two nights went by without a word. Her cheek, which had swelled the first day, felt normal now, but the sting of it had gone far deeper than skin and muscle. On the third day Uncle Four appeared at her door, as Mona knew he would, with roses and cognac, and a diamond tennis bracelet. She allowed him a kiss on the cheek and a fleeting hug, watching him the way an alleycat watches a bulldog.
Uncle Four wasn’t apologetic, instead acted as if nothing had happened.
“It was just a misunderstanding,” he declared. “You know how it is with men, this business of bei meen, saving face.”
Mona pouted when he slipped the glittering bracelet on her wrist. He declined to summon the radio car, so they hailed a yellow cab to a fancy seafood restaurant uptown, which had a view on the Hudson River nightscape. Then he took her window-shopping along Fifth Avenue, promising her the Chanel, the Gucci, the many exquisite things he would buy her.
Mona was cool and said she’d forgotten about the incident, and before midnight came she allowed him again to enter her bedroom in the darkness above Henry Street.
She lay beneath the silk sheets, quiet after he had mounted her unsuccessfully with his horny drunk erection, finally rolling his fat weight off of her. She was pretending to be asleep.
Uncle Four was at her makeup table now, drinking again and talking on the phone with the night light on. When he was drunk this way he rambled, his voice slurring, bragging about his deals. Golo, she supposed was on the other end.
Mona lay silent, motionless, listening. She heard about the diamonds, the big deal, something about washing money and Hakka powder.
“October eleventh,” she heard, the day after the Double Ten celebration. A week away. Her eyes open in the dark now, she listened.
“The lawyer’s office. Dew keuih lo mou hei, motherfuckers. No bodyguards. Who would dare anyway? At noon.”
Uncle Four was slugging down the XO. Bragging. Laughing a pig’s chortle.
“The side elevator, on Hester Street. That’s the trick. Dew! In a plastic takeout bag from Big Wong’s. Ha! You come after, with them. Together, no, we call attention to ourselves.”
Then he hung up the phone, grunted, staggered back toward the bed, toward Mona, lying breathless and still.
He rolled in next to her, his hands already on her body, squeezing her breasts, her nipples, his fat fingers sliding down to her soft downy triangle, poking, violating her. He rubbed his flaccid flesh against her backside, licked his tongue against her neck, the stench of liquor on his breath.
She kept from recoiling, as she always did, even as he turned her in toward him. The diamonds, she thought as he pushed her head lower. The gold coins and the big cash deal. Her head was on the quivering round of his stomach. She opened her mouth.
Then she closed her mind.
Temple
Jack swung in for a late lunch at the Chinatown Arcade, and ordered Malaysian noodles with satay, peanut sauce. There was a composite sketch of the Chinatown Rapist in the window, and Jack knew it was just a matter of time before this predator of children, was caught. Trouble was, he didn’t feel it was cops who were going to nail him. The tongs had their own bounty out, and they weren’t forthcoming with information.
The shop had a small shrine containing a Kwan Kung god flanked by red Christmas bulbs, and a mirrored bot gwa octa-gram to deflect bad spirits. The shrine made him remember Pa, and he ate his noodles toward the end of his shift thinking about the Temple he was overdue to visit.
The Grace Temple of Heaven was a Buddhist order that occupied two stories above Weinstein’s Wholesale Fabrics on Orchard Street among the Yiddishe.
The entrance was a stairway on Allen Slip, and Jack ascended past the second floor where there was a dining hall and kitchen, where the monks prepared the vegetarian jaai, rice and soups, that they shared with their faithful.
He entered the temple on the third floor and looked for the monks, scanning the huge space beneath a row of gleaming crystal chandeliers. The room had a twenty-foot ceiling, which was ample height for the three ten-foot gilded Buddhas that sat on the front stage. There were prayer cushions and mats and worshippers reading from books in front of the altars, where he spotted the elder sister monk.
He went over to the table and proffered a five-dollar bill.
“Sifu,”he said, teacher, nodding respectfully at the shaved head with dot markings. She accepted the offering and he signed in. Behind her there was another room, which contained a wall of matchbook-size photographs attached to plastic tags with Chinese names. There was an altar there, and the flanking walls featured four-foot-tall Buddhas under glass-enclosed intricately carved pagodas.
There were smaller multi-faced and multi-armed Buddhas in gold and red, and a scattering of kuan yin, goddesses of mercy.
He stepped up to the altar, which was adorned with oranges and peaches, vases of gladioli, carnations, and mums. He took three sticks of incense, lit them and placed them in the lilypads of lit candles floating in a large glass urn of oil, an eternal flame.
The yellow plastic tag with Ma and Pa’s names and photos was on the upper left of the wall, fitted in with a hundred others, closer to the heavenly clouds painted on the ceiling.
The humming sound he had heard upon entering the temple turned out to be the chanting of the monks, namor namor namor, so smooth it sounded like one word, an unending om.
He bowed three times, planted the other sticks of incense on the altar and stared at his parents yellow tag. Ommmmm, and he could feel the spirits of Ma and Pa flowing through him.
Darkness
Mona turned off the lights. The place was less ugly then. She undressed herself in the dark of Johnny’s flat, then scented herself with a spray mist, sat down at the edge of his bed and waited.
Johnny stepped out of the shower, saw the blackness beyond the slit of the open door and instinctively hit the wall switch. His eyes adjusted, then he saw her clearly, seated perfectly still in the small square of moonlight that fell through the window. The only movement came from her fingers working over something hidden in her hand. He threw on a towel, watching her all the while. He heard a small humming sound coming from her as she began rocking slowly back and forth on his bed.
Water over Heaven. Auspicious sign.
Water over Heaven. Cross the river, move forward.
Buddhist, Johnny thought at first, then realized it was Taoist invocation.
When she saw him the spell broke.
The towel dropped as he approached her, the two of them falling together, onto the bed. She, warm and soft, and he, cold from the shower rinse, hard with desire. Yin crashing into Yang.
He turned on a small light, showing her the pistol as she pressed her softness against him. She peered along the barrel and silencer, squinted and imagined the target in her sight
s. She took a breath and squeezed the trigger, heard the hammer snapping down on the unloaded pistol.
“Don’t worry,” Johnny said. “You won’t be shooting far and there’s no kick.”
Mona watched as Johnny chambered a round for her, flicking on the safety, then ejected the round, explaining the slide action to her.
“All you need to do is squeeze,” he said. He passed the bed-sheet over the Titan in a quick wipe, cursory but careful enough to remove his prints.
Mona turned off the light on the night table, leaving the bedroom illuminated only by moonlight. She climbed on top of him and worked her body until he was hard again, inside her. Almost a half hour passed before she rolled off him.
“Will you help me load those extra bullets, my love,” her lips demanded just before sliding over the head of his hardness.
In the dim light he groped for and found the extra six-shot magazine, never taking his eyes off her head, then felt again for the small box of bullets, spilling them across the night table. He was in ecstasy, his mind drifting, with clammy hands slipping the little bullets into the magazine.
Her head was bobbing, eyes open, watching him, her tongue twisting inside her mouth. He tossed the loaded clip onto the night table as her lips tightened on him, her fingernails fluttering, closing on his testes. He was ready to explode, to blast himself away from Chinatown, to a sunny place far from the reaches of the mean and unforgiving city.
Double Ten
The Kuomintang banner of the Republic of China was a twelve-pointed white sun on a dark-blue rectangle, cornered on a field of blood red. It was raised on every lamppost in Chinatown and flew along with plastic American flags over all the wide two-way avenues.
October 10th, celebrated as Double Ten, was a political holiday, the Eighty-third Anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Republic, a break away from civil war and the clutches of warlord feudalism.
Uncle Four wore his best gray suit, with a small red carnation in the lapel, beneath a red, white and blue Kuomintang flag pin.
He stood on the corner of Mott and Bayard, felt the faint sun on his face and knew exactly how it was going to happen. He’d seen it every year the last thirty years. The faces changed but the routine was the same.
He let his eyes roam over the program for the celebration. There was the Chinese Calligraphy Exhibition that the Lin Sings offered annually. Once a year the Nationalists cranked up their loudspeakers and blasted the streets with martial music, marching fanfare. In the auditorium of the Community Center there was Cantonese Opera and a Chinese Music Recital, followed by a reception—by invitation only—restricted to the big shots. They ran out the schoolchildren with candlelit Chinese lanterns and the floats with beauty queens in cheong saams.
Scheduled for Day Two was a late afternoon series of the Lion Dance, performed by six traditional kung fu academies. Afterward, the Gala Anniversary Dinner at twenty dollars a head, hosted by the Silver Palace and the Harmony Palace, the biggest Chinatown restaurants. The Nationalists ritually issued threats to the Chinese Communists and vowed to retake the mainland. One year they drove an armored half-track with .50 caliber machine guns and camouflage netting down Mott Street and chewed up the asphalt. The following weekend featured the Senior Citizens’ presentation of Cantonese Opera, and the bok lo, northerners, offering Peking Opera out in Flushing. In Queens, the Nationalists from Taiwan, the Republic’s forty-five-year seat of power, provided an even greater bang-up celebration of the day. That was to be expected, Uncle Four thought, Flushing being a KMT stronghold.
The wind gusted up and Uncle Four shielded his eyes from the dust. Double Ten drew people to Chinatown, his stronghold, and was good for business. The celebration allowed the Nationalists to blow off steam, to show off their face in the Chinatown power configuration: the alliances between Associations, the tongs, the lan jai, punk-thugs, street gangs, the Kuomintang Nationalists and the triad secret societies.
The sunny morning turned gray and blustery, the October wind carrying on it an edge of wet and cold that made the beauty queens wrap their slender arms about themselves, shiver, and scrunch up their made-up faces. The marching band from the Chinese School came down the street, a platoon of old veterans from the American Legion dragging along behind it.
Uncle Four folded the program and stepped out of the wind. He’d seen it all before and none of it held any surprises for him. He turned toward the Community Center, but was thinking about the stacks of hundred-dollar bills in the plastic takeout bag, and the cache of diamonds and gold in his bedroom that Golo had entrusted to him.
Run
In the haziness of his sleep he imagined the distant beeping of his pager singing in his ear, but when he stirred from his pillow, the sound was more distinct, a tapping on his door that made his eyes focus on the faint sliver of light and shadow that seeped in under the door from the stairwell.
He rolled off the bed, tiptoeing toward the door and the tiny hushed voice calling, Jun Yee, Jun Yee!
Johnny squinted through the peephole, saw it was Mona, and unlocked the double deadbolts. She brushed past him like a cold gust, saying in a rush, “You must run, the old bastard put a contract out on you.” She looked desperate.
Was he dreaming? What? and How? were all he could manage against the force of her outpouring.
“There are loong jaai, Dragons, searching for you. Your face cannot be seen on the streets.” Her body quaked in the darkness.
“He found out about us. I don’t know how. I have left the apartment. I am going to Lor Saang, Los Angeles.” Breathless, talking to him in the night shadows, her words jumped out in a steely, angry chopping rhythm.
“I need you. I want you to meet me there.” A heartbeat passed. “Take the bus.” She gave him a ticket folder, red, from Jade Tours.
He felt his heart hammering, a dryness blotting up in his throat, anguish and dread sweeping over him.
“It’s all there,” she said, her voice expectant.
He saw the Greyhound bus ticket, the Holiday Inn reservation, and swiveled his eyes back to her.
“I will call you in three days,” she said, the moonlight flashing in her eyes. There was silence around them, his bloodshot eyes burning questions into hers.
“What’s going to happen?” he finally asked, swallowing his fear.
“Don’t worry. I have some money. We’ll be partners.” Then she turned to go and he grabbed her by the elbow. She jerked it back, tears welling up in her eyes.
“I’m going!” she cried out. “He’s not going to hurt me anymore.” She stepped toward him before he could wrap her closer and pounded her fists against his chest, angrily sobbing, suddenly pushing away. “Hurry! They’re after you!”
He watched her slip out the door, stunned, listening to her heels clatter down the rickety stairs. He went to the window and folded back the blinds. Saw nothing but night, streetlamps, and a yellow cab pulling away.
Under the cover of night, once she was beyond viewing from Johnny’s window, Mona walked to the street phone, inserted a coin. She heard the metallic rattle, then a dial tone, and tapped in Johnny’s pager sequence of eights. She took a breath, waited.
Johnny’s beeper sounded before he finished buckling the belt on his jeans. In the dark of his apartment, the luminous display on his pager read 444-4444. Death numbers all across the digital display.
The old bastard seeking him.
Just like Mona had said.
He reached under the nightlight, pulled his cash and a Ruger Magnum from the floorboards under the sink. Stuffed fugitive items into a duffel bag.
He tucked the ticket folder into his pocket, stepped out into the yellow light of the stairway, moving down the steps and thinking, Goodbye to Chinatown.
Nite cruiser
Two A.M.
Homeless predators and mental-hospital fugitives stalked the carbon-monoxide-infused spread of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, watched warily by the sex hustlers, pimps, and returning New Jerse
y johns. Two PA cops patrolled together, tense, a nervous pair of birds.
Johnny kept the neat, flat packets of fifties inside the back game-pouch of his hunting vest, covered the vest under a loose-fitting barn jacket, dark, his entire presentation colorless. The Ruger in his waistband.
He went directly to a bank of telephone booths, which carried the stench of urine and stale ugly sex, nestled the greasy handset into the bend of his neck and punched in Gee Man’s number. Held his breath for three rings, got a message machine.
“Take care of the car,” he said. “Leave me a voice message if anyone asks for me.” Stepping back from the stench, he hung up and went toward the brushed-aluminum Greyhound Star Cruiser idling at Departures.
On board he took a window seat across from the driver. The Cruiser held forty-five passengers and carried a ton of luggage in its belly hold.
He scanned the other passengers.
There were no other Chinese on the bus. Just as well. He didn’t want company, small talk, or questions. The bus rolled out, only half full.
There was a group of students, a club maybe. Baseball caps worn backwards. Jansport knapsacks. An old white couple carrying cane suitcases. A woman and her daughter who looked Mexican. Most of the rest were hard-scrabble working-class by the look of their clothes: whites, Latinos, farm laborers, construction dogs returning westward, ho.
The Lincoln Tunnel snaked them through to New Jersey. A weariness settled over them inside the bus, a surrender, a resignation known by those who came hoping to conquer but ended up stealing away, back into exile in the dead night, their spirits swallowed whole by the unrelenting, unforgiving metropolis.
Johnny saw the last of New York City fading into the receding urban nightscape. The Greyhound pushed along, seeking the Interstate, where it could cruise at seventy-five.
