The Journey Prize Stories 21

by Various

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

  The Victoria Tug Company steamer Alert delivered quarterly 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. 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 was lowered from the boat, loaded with supplies, and rowed toward the shore.

  Ah Sing grabbed hold of the wooden dory with two men aboard, helping to pull it onto the beach. A man with a red moustache that hid his upper lip got out of it with the doctor.

  The doctor straightened his back.

  “Good, sir. Still strong, see?” Ah Sing said, lifting a barrel from the bottom of the boat.

  Ah Sing recounted what had happened the night before. The doctor pulled a bag from the dory and withdrew a ledger of dates, names, and other notes. He looked down his spectacles.

  “The one you call … Go Chou?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Fong Wah Yuen.”

  Ah Sing nodded.

  The doctor wrote something on his ledger and turned toward the main building. When he was halfway up the slope, Ah Sing tilted his head toward a termite-filigreed log to indicate he wished a word with the other man, whom the doctor had introduced as a reporter. The man’s pants were cinched high upon his waist. He took two steps toward the log and stood, smoothing his hands over his thighs.

  Ah Sing stepped over to the log and sat down. His mouth was dry. The man was smiling, but his gaze jumped from Ah Sing to a spot beyond his head, then back to Ah Sing, then to the doctor stumbling up the gravel slope. The man did not sit.

  Ah Sing cleared his throat. “I favour you … no, me … no, you favour me.” The disease in his larynx made his voice no more than a loud whisper. “I, I have something.” He stood up and pulled the Swiss watch from his pocket, where he had been clutching it so tightly that it was slick with sweat. He wiped it against the leg of his pants. He dangled it between them, letting it catch the sun. “This is for you,” Ah Sing said.

  “Look at that.” The man scratched his head and smiled.

  “Nice, yes?”

  The man nodded. “This is a nice island,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. He looked from the boulders that ringed one side of the bay to the mud flats on the other. He glanced at the doctor, who was talking to Ge Shou at the main building. “I hear you men hunt, and fish, too.”

  “You take.”

  “No.” The man’s moustache brushed his bottom lip when he smiled. “I don’t think I should.”

  “No,” Ah Sing nodded his head. “For you.”

  The man looked down at the watch.

  “But is gift.”

  The man fingered his eyebrows.

  “Gift,” Ah Sing repeated. “A gift for you. Your wife?”

  On the verandah of the cabin, Ge Shou danced, circling the doctor, his long black ponytail bouncing on his back.

  A sudden gust of wind blew the reporter’s hat off his head. It rolled a few feet, snagged on a log, then rolled again with the next gust. The man chased it but Ah Sing bounded ahead, stopping the hat with his bare foot. Ah Sing dusted off the sand and shards of clamshell. He held the hat toward the man.

  “Oh. Well, then.” The man inched his fingertips forward. “Thank you.”

  The man took his hat between his thumb and forefinger and walked to the dory. Leaning into the boat, he dropped the hat onto one of its wooden benches. He grabbed a heavy sack. Ah Sing did the same. Sack after sack, barrel after barrel, crate after crate, the two men, Ah Sing and the reporter, worked in this way until they were done unloading. When the man began rolling a barrel up the beach toward the slope, his shoes slapping on the gravel, Ah Sing rushed after him.

  “Gift, you help me. Gift,” he said, his throat tightening so he could not swallow. “Please, please, you take.” He pushed out a laugh. It felt like choking on a ball of rice. “You remember Ah Sing to the OPR.”

  The man stopped, his eyes focused on Ah Sing for the first time, clear blue eyes the colour of frozen ponds in the spring when the ice cracks. Ah Sing was sure he heard the man sigh. The man shifted his weight from one foot to the other and rubbed his wiry eyebrows that shot straight up. Ah Sing held the watch in his open palm.

  He imagined slapping it into the man’s hand. The man would laugh and throw it over his shoulder; it would shatter into a thousand golden pieces.

  “It is a beautiful timepiece,” the man said.

  “Yes, beautiful,” Ah Sing answered. His throat was a bird’s throat, filled with small stones.

  “A gift, you take.”

  The man smiled. “Right, then. Thank you.” The man dropped it almost without touching it into his jacket pocket.

  Then he said, “Look, man, look what I have here.” He undid the buttons of his tweed jacket and fished around in the breast pocket of his blue shirt, the same colour as his eyes. “Here, look at this. This is a Kruger coin. It’s all the way from the South African Republic.”

  Ah Sing raised what was left of his eyebrows.

  “I’ve got some others at home, a pocketful, in fact. But they’re rare, quite rare, in spite of that. You’d have to go all the way to the South African Republic; I came back with them after the Boer War.” The man stopped and buffed the coin against his chest. “If you would take this to show my appreciation.”

  Ah Sing stared at it. He felt an ache in the bottom of his stomach. It grew worse. He would vomit. He knew it. His legs tensed, waiting for it. He imagined running. Running. The man would start chasing him. Would throw handfuls of Kruger coins. They would hit him on the back, handful after handful. Stinging, like golden hail. What a silly, infuriating man. Ah Sing could decorate his cabin. He could use them as sinkers when he fished.

  Ah Sing held the coin between his thumb and forefinger. He spat on its tarnished surface.

  The man widened his eyes.

  “Superstition. It bring more money when spit. Bring good luck.”

  “Oh,” the man said. He clapped his hands together. “Well,

  then.”

  Far from shore, the steamer bobbed in the chop. A crow cawed. The waves tumbled.

  The man walked to the dory and Ah Sing followed. Reaching in, the man picked up his hat from where it lay. It was a green plaid cheese cutter, wool, with yellow and orange stripes. Under the leather strap at the back he had tucked some heron feathers, and for an instant Ah Sing was reminded of the ladies of Victoria who had worn hats adorned with enough feathers to drive certain birds to extinction. These wealthy of Victoria who had called men like Ah Sing their “Celestials.” Romanticizing their roast duck, their porcelain figurines for sale in every Chinatown store, their opium pipes.

  The man held his hat out to Ah Sing. “Do you like this hat?”

  “It’s fine hat.”

  “Take it.”

  Ah Sing walked with the coin in his pocket where the watch had been and the hat on his head, counting his footsteps as he rolled the barrel up the slope. He fought against quick breaths, trying not to hyperventilate. He stacked the barrel in the storage shed next to the coffins and the axes.

  He was walking toward the cabin, looking at the ground, when something hit his shoulder. He looked up. A heron in the fir tree. He looked at the ground. Frog bones. And he noticed a drop of red blood that had fallen onto a green alder leaf.

  In his cabin, he packed an empty burlap bag, his driftwoo
d pieces, his Buck knife, his cast-iron kettle, and his tin cup. He looked around the cabin, at the clothes folded on the stool by the door, the walls papered with the Daily Colonist and Chinese New Year’s decorations, their glossy black characters jumping off the red background. Then he went back to the beach.

  He sat in the loose shale by the boulders. He dug for his Buck knife in his bag. Waiting, he whittled eight sticks and two larger ones. He carved grooves into the two big sticks and then he fitted in the small ones, trying them each in turn. If he finished in time, he could leave the kite for Ge Shou.

  Leaning against a boulder, watching the ocean, Ah Sing was reminded of his thirty-ninth year. With his back against the rock wall of Kwangtung and the South China Sea spread out wide before him – trapped by famines in Anhui across the border, and by the dirt and drought of Jing Gang on the eastern border with Hunan – he had paid a OPR labour broker and hopped a freighter bound for Canada. He smiled now, remembering. As the journey progressed, his excitement had been replaced by tense muscles. He had felt trapped, with no breath, no arms to fight; the mountains of black waves spanned for miles in any direction. How he had trembled on the deck! How he had been convinced the waves would swallow him, the same way Gold Tooth had trembled on the verandah as he heaved his bed outside, convinced the walls would crush him – solid walls that Ah Sing himself had built. And how, on the freighter, another man from Fujien had touched Ah Sing on the shoulder. The man had said, “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  The sun shifted; the boulders cooled. In the distance, he saw the reporter and the doctor. They were taking off their shoes and wading out to the dory.

  “Hallo! Hallo!” Ah Sing yelled.

  They nodded to him and waved.

  He stood up. He threw his bag around his shoulder.

  They plunged their oars into the water. They were rowing back to the Alert that pitched offshore. Ah Sing narrowed his eyes at the doctor and reporter and could feel the hot sun falling onto his back.

  He bent down and dropped his knife back into his bag. He could hear the waves, and Ge Shou singing in the background. He touched the coin in his pocket. His jaw tightened. He undressed so quickly his shirt got caught on his ears. He pulled down his pants and dropped his wool shirt onto the rock next to his bag.

  “Hallo! Hallo!”

  He dove. His breath froze inside his lungs, and his limbs froze, too: he was a stone, armless and legless. He began to sink, watching the bubbles rising past his face.

  Fear made a body heavy; fear made a person sink and drown. Dead bodies floated because all the fear was gone. Once, a leper had swum toward the lights of Cordova Bay. His body had floated with the grace of a lotus flower back to the gravel slope. Then Ah Sing and Ge Shou had buried him, silently, beyond the goldenrods. If only he had let the water flow through him as if he were made of it, he could have floated to freedom. Another leper had once escaped D’Arcy Island by swallowing a vial of poison. He swallowed it on board the steamer, had died before even arriving at the colony.

  Ah Sing thought he would never stop sinking, but then his arms and legs sprang to life. He kicked as fast as he could while whitecaps crashed around his ears. The doctor and the reporter were not stopping. He slapped the water. He cried into the wind, his eyes open against the salt and the horrifying green.

  The seagulls laughed. Ah Sing sputtered, yet the two men ignored him and boarded the steamer. His breath felt scant and thread-like in his lungs. His ears rang, his head thudded.

  He plunged his head under. When he surfaced, he squinted at Ge Shou standing on the rocky outcrop of beach, who had picked up his clothes and was waving them, flag-like. Then Ge Shou reached for the kite but stopped short of picking it up.

  Ah Sing swam back to shore and clung to a rock. Ge Shou looked down in silence. Ah Sing breathed deeply, filling his nostrils with salt air and water droplets that burned. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. Water remained on his lashless lids and formed prisms, through which he looked at the setting sun. Oystercatchers circled and screeched.

  Ge Shou lowered his hand to help Ah Sing onto the boulder. Ah Sing shook his head. He spat over his shoulder and then heaved his body out, panting as he clambered up. There he hunched forward and held himself.

  After a while, he stood up and took the hat from the rock; he spun it around on his hand a few times. Holding it aloft, he pulled out the heron feathers. Then he tossed the hat into the ocean.

  He reached for the coin. He put it in his mouth. It tasted like oak. His tongue moved it from one side of his mouth to the other and warmed the metal. He spat the coin back out, into his hand. He hurled it toward the ocean. It glinted in the air. When it hit the water, it skimmed like a cormorant before sinking into the grey-green waves.

  A breeze dimpled the ocean. Ah Sing picked up the kite frame and offered it to Ge Shou. Ge Shou rubbed his forehead. “Don’t be scared, Ge Shou.”

  Ge Shou hopped from foot to foot, holding the kite.

  “Don’t cry, Ge Shou.”

  Ah Sing put his arm around Ge Shou’s shoulder. He stroked him up and down. He could feel the warmth of his flesh through the damp cotton of his shirt. Ah Sing’s arm was covered in goose pimples. Ge Shou’s black braid tickled his armpit.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said to Ge Shou. “Do you want to help me fly the kite?”

  When he was a boy, Ah Sing’s bed had been a strong rush mat, and he had slept on it with his four brothers and sisters, his parents, and their parents, by the great mouth of the Yangtze River where it emptied into the East China Sea.

  The sea touched everything with lapping hands, probing fingers, reaching across countries and exploring fjords with whales, bays of volcanic rock, and ancient crevasses. A single drop could circumnavigate the globe in five thousand years.

  As a boy, he would float in the warm waters of Chongwu Bay until he felt his body liquefying, his loose limbs pulled by small currents and pushed by gentle swells. He would float as if dead while the sun burned his back. He grew and fished with the older boys. He went to work in the tin mines of Malaysia. He went to the plantations of Borneo. He forgot how to turn into the sea.

  The water dripping from his body had formed a puddle at his feet. Ah Sing shook the remaining drops from his limbs and stood on one leg to dry the bottom of his feet with his shirt. Then he used his shirt to towel the top of his head. He stepped into his pants. He pulled his shirt over his neck and the hair that was still wet dripped down his back. The fabric of the shirt stuck to his skin.

  The warmth was returning to his body, but the back of his head still ached with cold. He looked out over the water.

  “Hey Ge Shou, here’s a riddle for you: How does one stop a drop of water from ever drying out?”

  “A riddle.” Ge Shou clapped. “I love riddles.”

  SARAH L. TAGGART

  DEAF

  The mother believes in making healthy dinners for the whole family. She will not be like their babysitter across the street who makes herself steak but gives the kids plastic bowls of Kraft Dinner. Sometimes the orange kind, sometimes the white kind. The son is smart enough not to ask for junk like that at home but the child always looks disappointed with supper after a day spent across the street.

  The mother watches her from behind. The child doesn’t speak. The clack of plastic and marbles from the one-girl game of Hungry Hungry Hippos becomes such a din it starts to fade. She would close the spare-room door to cut the noise. Keep things manageable until dinner. But if the husband comes home and finds that she shut the child in a room alone, he will yell.

  The last time the babysitter watched the kids was Friday. The mother returned from dropping them off to find the husband pulling his Audi into the driveway. He didn’t shut off the engine. She tapped the driver’s side window.

  “We should take the Firefly. It looks better,” she said. They were going to an appointment with the loan manager at the bank. She checked her reflection in his avia
tors.

  “Sheryl, get in.”

  The husband wanted to start a new business, wanted to be part of the housing boom he said was coming to Calgary. He had started using words like capital. He used to say things like, “You’re being eccentric on purpose.” She liked that better.

  “I need to get back to work A-sap.” He wrapped and rewrapped his fingers around the steering wheel.

  “Is that the Hugo Boss suit?”

  “What? Yes. For God’s sake,” he said and put the car in reverse.

  Things went shrill. “You paid nearly a grand for that suit –” Then he said shut up, said get in.

  At the bank, he sat stone-faced while the loan manager went over numbers that didn’t add up in their favour. The answer was no. Afterward, she stepped out of the Audi in low heels chosen specifically for the meeting. The husband scraped the undercarriage when he left their driveway.

  Back across the street, Wendy the babysitter opened her door, all smiles and sweatpants. The son scooted around the woman’s ample backside, skipped down the stairs and trotted home. He had always been quick like that.

  “Jenny’s sure slow with the talking, eh?” said Wendy. The mother had once corrected Wendy, had told her not to call the child Jenny because that wasn’t her name. But it didn’t stick. Wendy sometimes said inappropriate things like this. The mother swallowed words. Free babysitting was worth something.

  “Yes. She’s very shy.” Beyond Wendy, the mother could see the white-blond back of the child’s head. She sat on the carpet – unvacuumed from the looks of things – watching the fish tank. The mother squeezed past Wendy, walked into the house. It smelled like cat.

  “Come,” she said to the child. Nothing. The mother stepped closer and put a hand solidly around the child’s arm. “Come!”

  The girl’s head popped up. She pointed to the fish tank.

  Wendy said, “Jenny, you can come back whenever you like and look at the fishies.”