“Hey Polly, where you been keeping yourself?” a high-pitched voice piped above the indistinguishable roar.
Tanned arms swept her off the floor. “Been waiting for me, huh, kimono girl?”
Stronger arms in red flannel snatched her away. “No, me. I’ll make her queen of the bull pen.”
Lalu forced herself to smile at the demon holding her. “Put me down. I working girl,” she said, using the words Jim had taught her.
“So what’re we waiting for?” he slurred, burying his beard in her neck.
Lalu did not understand the words he used, but she could feel their meaning, the scratch of his beard. She pushed the demon’s head away. “You wrong idea. I waiter girl. Nothing more.”
“Sure,” he said, swinging Lalu on top of the bar. “And here’s to the darlingest, sweetest fairybelle that Warrens ever saw.”
As he lifted his glass in a toast, she sprang free and dropped behind the bar. She crouched low, listening to the rapid pounding of her heart, the catcalls, shouts, finger snapping.
Hong King set down the scales he used for measuring the pinches of gold dust miners used to pay for their drinks.
“I didn’t pay twenty-five hundred dollars plus freight just for you to hide,” he snapped.
Ripping off her shawl, he yanked Lalu to her feet. Immediately she felt herself swung back on top of the bar. Through a gray haze of cigar smoke, she looked down at the men crowded into the saloon. Bearded demon miners in faded flannel shirts and worn corduroy pants stuffed into heavy, mudcaked boots. Smooth-faced Chinese in traditional blue cotton jackets and pants or full-sleeved, long-tailed Chinese shirts hanging out over coarse demon trousers. Gamblers and speculators gaudily dressed in satin coats and colorful vests with gold watch chains hanging across well-padded bellies. Adolescents suddenly become men bursting out of ready-made suits too tight and short. They were all the same. Hungry. Like the coyotes she heard howling in the night. And she was their prey.
“Why she’s pretty as a heart flush!”
“A little doll, no taller than a broom.”
“Give us a dance, doll!”
Lalu stood paralyzed.
“Hey booze boss, make her dance,” a demon shouted.
Hong King tapped the counter. “The men told you to dance.”
Didn’t he realize she couldn’t? That her deformed feet would not let her dance?
A demon pulled out a harmonica. “Name your tune.”
In the crowd of upturned faces, Lalu saw Jim’s. Relief washed over her. And then embarrassment. How could she meet his gaze?
Eyes downcast, she lifted her hem and pointed to her feet. “No good. No can dance.”
“Look at those chinee feet!” the demon directly in front of Lalu marveled.
He grabbed a foot and snatched off her shoe. A second demon seized her other foot and another lifted her off the bar. Pressed close to the demons, the stink of sweaty underwear and liquored breath overpowered the less offensive smells of sour tap drippings and smoking coal oil lamps.
“Put me down,” Lalu said, kicking.
“She got her spunk up!” the demon holding her laughed. He tossed her in the air.
“Wild as a mustang,” the demon who caught her agreed.
She drummed her fists against his chest, but it only made him squeeze her tighter. She squirmed, straining to see over his shoulder. Where was Jim? She knew her refusal to meet his gaze had betrayed her shame. But he had said he was her friend. Always. Then why wasn’t he helping her?
Suddenly, as she was being tossed to another demon, Lalu realized he was gone. All the Chinese had vanished. Except Hong King. And he was red with fury. At her, not the demons, she was sure.
She was alone. Just as she had been this afternoon when she rode into camp. Just as she had been since Chen took her from her home. Frantically, she searched for the word Jim had said she might need. What was it? Move? With the men tearing at her, she could not think. Run? Go? No, git! That was it!
“Git,” she cried. “Git up and dust!” But the demons only laughed harder.
“Put the girl down.”
Narrow chested and round shouldered, the demon who had spoken was shorter and far less brawny than the one holding Lalu, but as he walked toward them, his gun drawn, a path opened for him, and Lalu felt the grip on her loosen. She slid to the floor.
“No need to pull your iron Charlie, we just joshin’ her.”
Charlie’s eyes, blue as camas, flashed. Startled, Lalu recognized the shaggy red brown hair and beard, the skin more pale than the sunburned leathery faces surrounding her. He was the demon who had been called to come out and gawk at her when she arrived, the one whose eyes had flashed when Hong King shouted at her.
“You’ve had enough funning for one night,” Charlie said.
“She’s the Chinaman’s girl and he don’t mind.”
Angry voices murmured agreement. Hong King scowled. Charlie tossed a buckskin bag of gold dust onto the bar.
“Step up and liquor at my expense,” he invited.
During the rush to the bar, Charlie whisked Lalu back into her room behind the saloon. Jim was there waiting.
“Are you all right?” he asked anxiously.
“Yes, but I don’t understand.”
Jim smiled. “This is my friend, Charlie Bemis. He owns the saloon next door.”
“I’ve got to get back to the saloon,” Charlie said. “But you tell Polly to holler any time those fools get too liquored up and start getting rough and I’ll be right over.” Flashing Lalu a smile, he slipped out the back.
Jim translated. Then he explained how when he had seen her in trouble, he had gone to fetch Charlie. “No one dares mess with him, he can keep a tin can dancing in the air with his six-shooter and everyone knows it.”
“So can you.”
Jim pointed to his belt. It was free of holster and pistols. “It isn’t wise for me to wear my guns in camp.”
“Not wise? Everyone out there had a gun! Or two. At least the demons did. Even the hurdy gurdy girl Hong King paid to dress me had a gun. And she told me to get one.”
“Lalu,” Jim interrupted. “If I had tried to help you, I couldn’t have just walked in like Charlie did and say, ‘Put her down,’ I would have had to shoot to kill, and you can be sure I’d be strung up on a tree by now, with a half dozen Chinese beside me.”
“But you said the Chinese in this camp outnumber the demons.”
“The white men have the power.”
“How can you call them men when they act like demons?” Lalu exploded.
“Would you call Hong King who used you like a whore a man and the man who saved you tonight a demon?” Jim retorted.
Lalu’s eyes stung with tears. “How could I stop him?”
His voice softened. “Lalu, you did, and you will continue to do what you must in order to live. There’s no shame in that. But Charlie is a good man. Trust him, he’ll be a true friend to you.”
FOURTEEN
Lalu’s life fell into a strictly circumscribed routine revolving between the saloon and Hong King’s shack. Though she slept in her own room behind the saloon, Hong King refused her permission to talk to anyone except customers from whom he could profit and Charlie and Jim whom he did not dare refuse. But in the five months since she had ridden into Warrens, Jim had returned only four times, a total of twelve days. She lived for those days.
And her day of freedom.
Each night, after the saloon emptied, she carefully swept up the dirt clotted with tobacco juice, cigar butts, ashes, and spittle from the rough planked floor. Then, in her own room at the back of the saloon, she panned the sweepings for the gold dust the men dropped when they dipped into their pokes to pay for their drinks and gambling. Occasionally, like today, there was a nugget.
Using her hairpin as a tweezer, Lalu picked it up and added it to her cache. She ran her fingers through the little pile of clean gulch gold. In the glow of the coal oil lamp, the cold flakes glit
tered like stardust and the nuggets jingled merrily as they hit the jade button and bangle at the bottom of the leather pouch. It had taken Jim six years to buy his freedom. Would it take her as long?
“Lalu.”
She knew the person knocking was Jim, only he called her that anymore, but she could afford to take no risks. Quickly, she hid her poke in the chamber pot and shut the door of the commode before she called, “Come in.”
Frosty October wind and fallen leaves gusted into the room with Jim. He hung his hat on the nail behind the door and stamped his feet, blowing into his cupped fists. Lalu pushed the wooden box of floor sweepings and pan of water from the floor in front of the stove.
Jim stoked the fire. “Mining?” he asked with a chuckle.
Lalu laughed. “White men mine the rich claims. Chinese mine the ones that have been worked over, Hong King mines the miners, and I mine Hong King.”
Jim laughed with her. “A few years ago, in Virginia City, a man bought a saloon and burned it down. Then he hired two men with a rocker to work his claim while he stood guard with a shotgun. At the end of ten days he’d reclaimed ten thousand dollars in dust that had spilled through the cracks in the floor.”
“I’d like to burn this place down,” Lalu said, setting the chair in front of the stove for Jim.
He sat down and cut a fresh quid of tobacco. “Be careful. If Hong King finds out you’re cheating him, there’s no telling what he’ll do.”
“Every time that old fraud takes a pinch of dust for a drink, he makes sure some gets wedged beneath his long nails!” Lalu blazed. “But don’t worry, Charlie says the number of customers has quadrupled since I came, and there’s so much more dust in the sweepings I’m sure Hong King doesn’t realize I’m taking some for myself.”
Jim worked the lump of tobacco in his cheek. “You’re planning to save enough to buy your freedom and then go home, is that it?”
Lalu sat down on the bed. The ticking, stuffed with hay, rustled, making sounds like dry, anxious sighs. From the day she had run from the saloons until this moment, Jim had never again mentioned her freedom, and since her delivery to Hong King, the unkept promise had lain like a stillborn child between them. Why was he bringing it up now? How should she answer?
“When my father came back from Mongolia,” she said at last, “he made my brother and I learn the saying—The copper corner of one’s hometown is more precious than the gold or silver corner at the end of the earth.”
Jim spat. The wad hit the red-hot side of the stove, making it sizzle. “Did he also teach you—The moon is not always round, flowers do not always bloom, and men do not always have a happy reunion?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Lalu, you think of your family as they were when you left them, but by the time you’ve saved enough to go back, your brothers will be grown men, your mother and father, grandparents.”
Lalu picked at the quilt covering the bed. “So?”
Jim leaned forward. “When we were on the trail, I heard you call in your sleep for your father, and I’ve seen your face when you sneak out to hold Mrs. Saux’s baby. It’s not Melina you’re crooning nursery rhymes to, it’s your baby brother. And when you look at the sky and sniff the air and feel the wind, you’re halfway round the world again, in your father’s fields. Your family means everything to you. But you’re dead to them.”
Lalu jumped to her feet. “That’s not true.”
“Then why haven’t they responded to the letters you asked me to have written for you?”
“It’s only been five moons.”
“That’s time enough for a reply,” Jim persisted.
“The letters might have been lost. Or maybe they’re dead, or they’ve become landless refugees.”
The excuses she had rehearsed over and over to herself tumbled out in desperate denial.
Jim walked over to Lalu and gripped her shoulders, forcing her to look him in the face. “Your father sold you.”
“He had no choice,” she defended.
He shook her, his voice hard and cold as the hoarfrost coating the ground outside. “Face it! You’re dead to them,” he repeated.
“No,” she cried. “I’m their qianjin.”
He released her. “If you still believe that, you’re as much a slave to your own falsehoods as you are to Hong King.”
For a long time, neither one of them moved or spoke. Finally, Jim reached for his hat. “I just came to say good-bye. It’ll start snowing soon and Warrens will be snowbound. I won’t pack in again until the trail clears. Maybe May or June.”
“So long?” Lalu said, her lips quivering.
“With all my trips, I’m hardly here anyway,” Jim said. “Charlie will look out for you.”
“He watches over me like a China herder. If there’s any trouble, I just run out the door and wait in his back room until he straightens it out.” She paused. “But we can’t talk. Not like you and I do.”
“That way you can’t argue.”
For a moment, Lalu felt an urge to break through the veneer of their argument to the real feelings and issues running like deep currents beneath. Feelings and issues she could not label but which she sensed were far different from those their words expressed. But when she took Jim’s hat and hung it back on the nail, she simply said, “Don’t let’s part with bitter words between us.”
She poured tea from the pot on top of the stove and handed the cup to Jim. “I know you’re right. No letter is going to come.”
Small dishes of food, spirit money, smoldering incense, and freshly turned earth marked Jim’s grave. Lalu knelt and knocked her head on the ground.
Three days ago he had been alive. Then his mule had stumbled on French Creek hill near Secesh Creek. She pictured the worn trail they had traveled together. The steep ascent. The broken ridges, dark ravines, and densely wooded gulches. The bleached out bones of horses in purple canyons, the remains of those who fell. And she remembered the way her heart had lodged like a lump in her throat as the mules’ steel shoes clinked against the rocky ledges where a single misstep meant certain death. Still, she could not believe Jim’s broken body lay rotting beneath the damp earth and decaying leaves on which she knelt. He was too experienced a horseman. Too careful. Too alive to become mere memory.
She thought of their last night together, the dark sadness she had seen in his eyes. Had his mother’s eyes looked like that? Had hers when she had retreated from a reality she could not bear? The angry words they had hidden behind haunted her. Had she unwittingly helped weave his shroud?
Footsteps crunched on gravel. “When do you suppose Jim will come back to eat all that food?”
Lalu jerked up angrily. Charlie, a spray of faded, windblown columbine in one hand and fiddle in the other, loomed over her.
“When Jim come smell flowers?” she snapped.
Charlie laid the scarlet blooms beside the dishes of food. He leaned against a fallen tamarack and clinched his smooth brown fiddle between shoulder and bearded chin. “If Jim can eat and drink and smell, do you suppose he can hear too?”
“Of all my tunes, I think he liked this one best. Said it reminded him of the river near his village.”
The tune Charlie played was not mournful, but as the high, clear notes danced through the air, Lalu felt the tears she had struggled to hold back trickle down her cheeks. She wiped them off impatiently. But like a dam finally, suddenly burst, the tears became a steady stream.
Without a word, Charlie laid down his fiddle and took Lalu in his arms. She leaned against him, shaking, her body racked with huge sobs as she wept.
For Jim.
And for Lalu.
Both dead forever in a strange land.
FIFTEEN
In the chill of predawn darkness, all Warrens slept. But inside Hong King’s saloon, the coal oil lamps blazed and Polly, her face and dress damp with perspiration, searched for something else she could clean or wash or scrub.
The bottles, cigar vases, and
glasses on the shelves behind the bar glittered, and the bar itself, polished until it was slick enough for skating, glistened darkly. The towels customers used to wipe foam from mustaches and beards hung, pressed and folded, from the edge of the counter, and Polly could see her own distorted image in the shiny brass rail around the bar’s base. Beside the windows on the side and front of the saloon, the four gaming tables sat squarely, the chairs tucked beneath green felt coverings brushed up like new. The stove, freshly reblacked, gleamed in the center of the room, and the deep wooden boxes the men spat in were filled with fresh sawdust.
The odor of whiskey and stale tobacco lingered, clinging like an indelible brand to the walls and Polly’s clothes and skin. But there was nothing left to clean. To keep her from facing the black man’s words.
“You ain’t no slave, honey,” he had said. “They is no slaves in America, not fo’ ten years.”
The words should have filled her with joy. Instead, she felt a sense of betrayal as strong and deep and painful as when her father had picked up the bags of seed. For if the black man was right and she was not really a slave, why hadn’t Charlie told her?
Her limbs, overcharged with energy a moment before, felt weak, and she jerked out a chair, upsetting the piles of chips stacked at the center of the table. Automatically, Polly restacked them, then sank limply onto the chair.
She could understand why no Chinese had spoken. Those loyal to Hong King would not, and the others either did not know or did not dare to speak. And the white men and women had no reason to interfere. But Charlie? He was always reading books and newspapers so he had to know the law. In fact, he was often asked by miners to solve minor disputes, for his knowledge and reputation for honesty made his judgments respected even when disliked. Yet he had remained silent on this. Why?
She had trusted him, given herself to him, at first because he was kind and gentle and she was lonely and afraid, and then because she believed he cared. But he had betrayed her.
Thousand Pieces of Gold Page 8
