by Tom Lin
When they had put some distance between themselves and Carlin they paused and let Proteus out of his cage. In an instant he assumed the form of the ringmaster again. Ming paid him no mind. Repetition unmakes the remarkable.
The stagehands had procured provisions in Carlin and in the late afternoon they stopped to eat a lunch of salt beef and hardtack softened in the cold water of the river. They moved mostly in silence. When the sun set and layered darknesses over darknesses they ate supper and pitched their tents and built a fire to warm their hands by. Soon only Ming and Notah remained awake and at the fire, staring into the fading embers.
“Well?” Ming said at last. “You’re making him forget, ain’t you?”
“I suspected you’d already surmised this, Mr. Tsu.”
Ming reached into his pack and pulled out a handful of banknotes, bloodied and crumpled. “Ain’t never had a dream what paid me afterward for my trouble,” he said, and held out the wad of cash to Notah.
The Navajo took the money and carefully straightened out the bills. As he did so little flecks of dried blood flaked off the notes and shimmering they drifted downward in the red glow of the embers. Notah brushed the last bits of blood off the corners of the bills and folded them neatly in half. He handed them back to Ming, who looked at the money awhile before tucking it back into his pack.
“I knew it wasn’t no dream,” Ming said at last.
“For him,” Notah said, tilting his head toward the ringmaster’s tent, “it was better as a dream.”
“Did he ask you to make him forget?”
“Aye. Each time.”
“How many times?”
Notah stared into the embers and stretched out his rough hands to warm them. “Hundreds, perhaps.” He looked up at Ming with a wry smile. “One forgets.”
“How do you do it?” Ming asked.
“They come to me, the memories,” he said. “Like the gray dead they pass before me. I can see them.”
“And then you erase them?”
It was not quite erasing, Notah said. He merely separated memories from their kind, made them as dreams. Memories ached when they were remembered in time, he said, when they followed from the one before and laid out a bedroll for the one after. But memories cut free from time, from sequence? These became as dreams, wandering, incoherent, heavy with urgency and feeling but meaningless till the end. No, Notah said, he did not make anyone forget. He only helped them cease to remember.
The last of the embers shrank into shells of gray ash and the firepit grew cold. Notah rose to his feet.
“Wait,” Ming said. He looked up at the Navajo standing above him. The light from the waning moon cut in slantwise over the canyon tops and lit the far shore of the river in hues so dim as to render the landscape alien. Phantom faces and shapes ran amok in the darkness, pareidolia of stone and brush. Notah looked down at him. Ming watched him with wary eyes.
“Don’t make me forget anything.”
Notah nodded solemnly. “You are my friend.”
“And you don’t touch the memories of your friends.”
“Never,” Notah said. “I would not.”
“But the ringmaster’s your friend,” Ming said, “ain’t he?”
“I count no white man among my friends.”
Ming got to his feet and dusted his trousers. “Wise.”
Notah placed a hand on Ming’s shoulder. “In time you may need my services,” he said. “All men wish to forget.”
Ming shook his head. “Not me.”
“Your companion, the old man. He remembers nothing. Is that so?”
“Aye.”
“How free,” Notah murmured. With that he kicked dirt over the cold ashes and bid Ming good night.
19
Ming heard the prophet stirring before sunrise. The old man roamed about the camp barefoot, humming that same tuneless lullaby to himself, an otherworldly and somber chant that in the shaded lacunae of the canyons sounded unlike any other melody sung by men.
Ming emerged from his tent blinking into the dawn. “Old man,” he said, and the prophet stopped his ambling. “Too early for a lullaby.”
“My child,” the prophet said, “this lullaby is for more than sleeping.”
Ming regarded the prophet awhile. “Suit yourself.”
He went down to the river and stooped to the rushing water to refill his canteen. Glossy bubbles ran out of the mouth of the waterskin, bursting into a shimmering froth in the churn of the river. His mind wandered to Ada, his thoughts vague and disassembled as though arriving through frosted glass. Did she know he was coming? He tried to picture her face, how she would smile upon seeing him again. But he found only gossamer images, lacking body and weight. A voice that could have been hers, a laugh that could have been hers. Ada singing quietly to herself in the mornings, melodies filtering through the house. Ada barefoot in her nightgown. Whispered conversations, courtship conducted by moonlight. He remembered that these things were true, but the memories were now skeletal, stripped of nearly everything but the fact of their existence. And where memory failed, imagination took fire.
His hand had begun to sting with cold, pulling him from his reverie. He lifted his canteen from the water and corked it and made his way back to camp.
They ate breakfast mostly in silence. When they were finished the ringmaster uncorked his flask and took a swig. He passed it wordlessly to Proteus and watched the transformed pagan drink. Proteus suppressed a cough and handed the flask back.
“Westward,” the ringmaster said, to no one in particular.
“Aye,” his double agreed.
It was slow going alongside the river. The stagecoach’s narrow wheels squealed and complained for every riverstone ground beneath them. Ming tied the prophet’s pinto to his own horse and together the two led the party, quiet but for the hypnotic rhythm of the horses’ breathing, the hollow sound of hoof falls, the quiet creaking of the saddles. The sun pulled smoothly overhead, breaking high noon, bathing the depths of the canyon in blistering heat and light. They did not pause for supper. By close of day they had made it not farther than half a dozen miles.
In the night after the rest had fallen asleep Ming heard a stifled sobbing coming from one of the tents. He sat up from where he’d been lying sleepless in his own tent and groping in the darkness he pulled on his trousers and went outside. The night air was cool and sharp on his bare chest. Layered beneath the muted sound of weeping there was a soft, feminine voice: Hazel whispering comforts.
Ming drew near Hunter’s tent and paused. “Hazel,” he said in a low voice.
“Come in,” she said.
He ducked under the flap of the boy’s tent and entered. Hunter was crying, the kind that can be neither hastened nor delayed but must simply be endured, that comes unbidden and departs just as suddenly and leaves only the glossy residue of tears. The darkness in the tent was absolute. There was only the boy’s ragged breathing, the rustle of Hazel’s fingers moving through his hair, her soothing him so quiet she was almost inaudible. Ming sat and drew his legs under himself cross-legged. As he listened more closely he realized that Hazel was singing.
“Can he hear you?” Ming asked.
“No,” she answered, “but I don’t mind.”
“What’s he crying for?”
“He misses his mother.”
Hesitantly Ming reached out a hand into the darkness and found the boy’s small shoulder, shaking with fast sobs.
“Mr. Tsu,” the boy’s voice sounded in his head, seemingly untroubled by his crying. “I’m sorry to have woken you.”
Ming gave his shoulder a squeeze and shook his head uselessly in the darkness. He opened his mouth to speak but remembered about the boy. There was nothing he could do.
The boy’s voice again in his head: “Thank you, sir.”
“It will pass,” Hazel said. “It always does.”
A delicate hand, Hazel’s, perched on the point of Ming’s knee.
In time the boy�
��s crying grew softer and at last gave way to quiet calm breathing.
“There,” Hazel whispered, “there.” There was the sound of her body shifting in the darkness, the boy’s head being laid down gently on his bedroll. “Come outside with me,” she told Ming.
The two of them left the tent, moving gingerly so as not to wake the boy. After so long in the dark even the fading moonlight of that deep midnight seemed almost obscenely bright.
“Ain’t you cold?” Hazel asked, noticing his bare chest.
“No,” Ming said.
They wandered down the banks to the river and sat listening to the water go past.
“He ain’t got no mother,” Hazel said. She took a handful of pebbles in her hand and tossed them one by one into the black waters.
“Ain’t got no father neither,” Ming said.
“A boy can lose a father,” she said, “but not his mother.” She looked at him with intensity, her eyes clear and sparkling in the low light.
“I never met my mother,” Ming said. “My father neither.”
“Another orphan,” she murmured. “Hunter must have known.”
“It don’t trouble me,” Ming said. “I did have a caretaker. Man who taught me how to fight. And bleed. He treated me like a son. I ain’t never wanted for my father.”
Hazel considered this awhile, tossed another few stones into the river. “Circumstance can make fathers of childless men,” she said at last, “but no circumstance can restore to a son his lost mother.” She gestured to the tent where Hunter lay sleeping. “I help him when he needs me,” she said, “but I ain’t nothing like his mother.”
“The boy loves you,” Ming said.
“Aye, perhaps.” Hazel threw the last of the pebbles into the river and took up another handful. “But not as a mother.” She turned to face Ming. “Your adopted father, what was his name?”
Ming looked at her face shining in the moonlight. “Silas Root. And he warn’t my father. Always said so himself. He was my caretaker.”
“What’s the difference?”
“We were closer than blood,” he said, hearing Silas’s words tumble from his own lips. “A son don’t owe his father nothin. No reason for them to do nothin for each other besides kinship. But me and Silas, we did things for each other because we owed it to each other.” Ming clenched and unclenched his fist, feeling the old scars come alive again. “God knows I owe that man everything.”
“Did he have others?” Hazel asked.
“Others?”
“Like you. Orphans.”
Ming shook his head. “Just me.”
“Why’d he take you in?”
“He’d had his eye out for a boy like me,” Ming said. “Someone he could train up as his own, someone he could rely on. And I could do work he’d never dream of doing himself.” He paused, lost in his recollections. “When I was a kid if I did something wrong or didn’t do a job right he’d come hollering after me, swearing up and down that he’d never have taken in that little Chinese baby if he knew how much trouble I’d be. And then after I was grown he’d try hollering at me same as before and I’d laugh and laugh, and he’d quit hollering and start laughing too.” A faint smile came to his face at the memory and for a while he said nothing.
Now and again Hazel would toss another pebble into the river and there would come the sound of a little splash.
“Best man I ever knew,” Ming said at last.
“That why you heading to Californie?” asked Hazel after a moment’s silence. “To see Silas?”
“No,” Ming said flatly. “He’s dead.”
Hazel placed a hand on Ming’s knee and an electric pulse ran through his whole body. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s all right,” Ming said. “Like I was saying. It don’t trouble me none.”
And now they sat solemn in the chill night as moonlight flickered across the surface of the Humboldt.
At length Hazel rose to her feet and tossed what stones were left in her hand into the river. “Take care, Ming Tsu,” she said. “Thank you for coming to see Hunter.”
“Wait,” Ming said. “Sit down.” She hesitated. “Please,” he said.
She shook her head. “In the morning, or in the evening, or in the days beyond that. We have a long way to Reno. And ages and ages to talk again.”
“We know each other,” Ming said. “From Californie. I swear it.”
Hazel looked at him and gave a gentle smile. “I never set foot in Californie in my life,” she said. “Perhaps it was another life.” She bent low so her face was level with his and kissed him, the heat of her breath intermixing with his. “Good night, Ming Tsu,” she whispered.
20
The two Chinese rode forward of the party, Ming preoccupied, troubled, fingering the grooves in the barrel of his revolver, the prophet alongside on his pinto, his blank eyes gazing placidly ahead. From time to time Ming would turn to the stagecoach rocking back and forth behind them, the ringmaster and his double, the transformed pagan, driving the draft horses with whip and whistle. Hazel riding within, Hunter no doubt asleep on her lap.
Shortly after high noon a distant moaning reached them from somewhere down the trail. Ming gave the reins a short tug and halted, signaling with a raised hand to the party to stop as well. He drew his gun and looked to the prophet. “Old man,” he said. “What’s coming?”
“War,” the prophet said.
Ming felt the eyes of the others watching him. Wait, he mouthed, and touched a finger to his lips. Smooth and silent he swung his leg over his horse and dismounted.
“I will accompany you,” the old man said.
Ming refused the offer. The moaning in the distance continued unabated.
“It is necessary, my child,” the prophet said.
Ming stared up at the old man in his saddle for a moment. “Fine.” He extended a hand and helped the prophet down. Gomez had walked up from the party. Ming passed the reins of both horses to the Mexican. “Wait for my signal,” he said. Gomez nodded.
They moved down the path, Ming and the prophet, Ming with his gun at his chest, finger resting lightly on the trigger. Thirty yards down they found the source of the moaning. A white settler lay in the dirt, his shirt knotted in tatters around his naked torso, the corners of his lips pulled back in something halfway between a grin and a snarl. He looked up at Ming and the prophet and through grinding teeth he moaned again.
Ming uncocked his gun and holstered it. “Who are you?” he said.
The man did not respond. It seemed every muscle in his body had been torqued to breaking. The prophet stooped and placed a thin hand on the man’s heaving chest. He frowned in concentration and then withdrawing his hand he stood again. “Lockjaw,” he said, and turned to Ming. “This man will die.”
Ming regarded the man twisting on the ground. “Fine.” He drew his gun again. “This is what you meant by war, old man?” He knelt and placed the muzzle between the man’s eyes. He reached back with a thumb and cocked back the hammer. “Apologies.”
At that precise moment, inches away from Ming, an arrow sprouted from the man’s bare chest and then another and another and the man gasped, shuddering. Ming recoiled and sprang to his feet. All throughout the canyon a whooping rode on the wind. A party of Indians on horseback rounded the bend, a hundred yards and closing, two abreast, down the narrow path, the river to one side and the glazed cliff to the other. Ming counted three of them.
“Ambush!” Ming turned and shouted behind him. “Ambush!” He raised his gun and shot the two lead riders in quick succession, their riderless horses running out from underneath them and galloping panicked onward. There came a cry from behind him, Hazel screaming. They were being hit from both sides. Ming took hold of the prophet’s thin wrist and threw him over his shoulder and then they were sprinting, the old man no heavier than a shepherd dog. Four more riders were boxing in the stagecoach. The ringmaster had taken apart his cane and stood with a hand behind his back in a fencer’s p
ose, smiling strangely, the wicked point of his blade held aloft, tracking the riders as they approached. In one smooth motion Ming bent low and deposited the prophet by the canyon wall. “Don’t move,” he commanded, then ran to join the others.
Hazel and the boy held each other close in the stagecoach.
“Fight free,” the prophet was calling out, “fight free, fight free.”
“What’s the old man saying?” Notah shouted.
“Fight free,” Ming bellowed over the din of horses and war whoops. “He means no one will die today.”
The four warriors from behind were closing fast.
“Cut them down!” the ringmaster roared.
Ming fired and an Indian slumped off his horse and fell, trampled underfoot by his comrades. Three rounds left. Proteus had changed back into his pagan form and towered over the approaching Indians. In his hand was a massive stone. Notah had armed himself with a shovel. Gomez held his short trout knife. Ming shouted for them to protect the empty-handed Hazel and Hunter and the stagehands nodded and ran for the coach.
“Paiute and Shoshone veterans of the Snake War, I reckon,” the ringmaster called out. “Ain’t they heard the war’s finished?” He held his cane sword aloft and grinned madly at Ming. “Ready, boy?” he said.
Ming squeezed off another shot and toppled another rider. Two rounds left. The horses were beginning to jostle each other on the narrow trail. In smooth synchronized movements the two warriors swung low to one side of their horses and then leapt off. Proteus raised the rock in his hand and struck one of the riders in the temple as he approached and the man spasmed once and fell dead at the tattooed pagan’s feet.
“Come on, then!” the ringmaster cried with maniacal glee, twirling his cane and laughing. “Let’s dance!”
Ming heard a whoop behind him and turning too late he felt a heavy blow landing sharp on his chin. His muscles relaxed against his will and he fell to the ground dazed, his gun falling uselessly from his hand. The Indian who had surprised him raised his club to finish Ming off and then his head was jerked backward by his hair and a small hand stabbed downward into his throat again and again and the blood ran out from him and he slumped over dead onto Ming.