The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu

by Tom Lin

  “Cmon now,” Ming said, stooping to face the boy, “cmon now.” He wiped the tears from Hunter’s face with his thumbs, remembering too late the iron dust still clinging to his fingers from sharpening his spike.

  Hazel laughed a little, seeing the broad smudges of gray Ming had left behind.

  “Cmere,” said Ming, pulling his sleeve over his hand to clean the boy’s face. “I got some dirt on ye.” After he cleared away the streaks he cupped Hunter’s cheeks in his hands and met his gaze. “You’ll be just fine, hear me?” Then he chuckled. “Course not.” Ming looked up at Hazel. “Could you ask him where that rib of his is?”

  Hazel signed the question to Hunter and the boy nodded and retrieved it from his coat pocket. “Here,” he said, holding the bone out to Ming. “Will you use it?”

  “Naw,” Ming said, plucking the rib from Hunter’s hand. He took out his whetstone again and bade the boy sit with him on the floor. With great care Ming set to sharpening and honing the spearpoint rib. A few pulls on the whetstone scoured away the bloodstains and a few more transformed the tip of the rib into a fine tapered stiletto. Ming brought the rib up to his eye and peered at it, then mimed blowing on it. He held it out in front of the boy’s face. “Blow on it,” he said. Hunter obliged, sending a whitish cloud of fine bone dust into the air. Ming put away his whetstone, cinched his pack shut, and stood and slung it over his shoulder.

  “Be seein you,” Hazel said, her voice soft and breaking.

  “Aye.” He bent low so his face was level with Hunter’s and he moved his hands in signs, awkward and half-remembered. I kill. Be good. Farewell.

  49

  The old metal bolt in the door had been rusted brittle by age and neglect. It gave only a feeble snap in protest as Ming forced the lock and swung the door open with the toe of his boot. The dry hinges complained but little as the door opened and made no further sound. Ming crouched against the exterior wall, gun in hand, his head leaning past the doorframe to peer into the darkened hallway of the house. He waited there a long while, crouched by the open door. He had learned patience long ago. To watch a house until the last lantern went out, and then to wait an hour more. The unexpected plays out as time elapses: one must grant such time. And time was plentiful on this still and cool desert night. Ming adjusted his grip on his gun and waited some more.

  There came a soft sound of something moving and he brought his gun to his eye, sighting down the barrel into the inky blackness. Then a small blur shot past him and he very nearly fired out of surprise. The thing leapt up into the branches of a white alder and turned two gleaming eyes back toward Ming. A housecat. Ming exhaled and waited for his pulse to slow. The hallway was clear. He rose from his crouch and crossed the threshold.

  Inside the house the moonlight entered broken and muted through dirty windows and the floorboards were dusty and creaked underfoot no matter where he stepped. He moved slowly. A slight breeze came in through the open door behind him and whistled low through the house. He glanced over his shoulder out the door. He should have closed it but at least it allowed in a little more moonlight. His eyes were adjusting to the darkness. Step after careful step, the floorboards hollow and groaning. The doorway to the kitchen was on his left, the dining table still set for one, dishes uncleaned on the table. Hung from the wall by the range a single lantern burned feebly. Ming scanned the room, the gun to his eye, and passed the doorway only when he was satisfied no one was there.

  At last he arrived at the door to the bedroom. It was slightly ajar. He reached out a hand and touched the door near the hinge so that it swung open as sedately as if a draft had shuttled through the house. The judge’s gown was draped over a wooden chair beside an empty desk. The bed was jammed into the opposite corner. Ming stole into the room, his steps slow to avoid creaking. When he reached the side of the bed he drew himself up to standing and gazed down at the man sleeping there.

  “Jeremiah Kelly,” he breathed, “you sonofabitch.”

  He holstered his gun and drew his spike. He had never aimed to shoot Kelly. A gunshot would wake the neighbors, draw the night watchman from his post at the sheriff’s office two doors down. He would have to work in silence. With the spike in a hammer grip in his right hand he hovered his left hand inches above the judge’s face, so close he could feel the man’s breathing on his palm.

  “Kelly,” he spoke aloud, and the judge’s eyes flew open.

  Ming brought his left hand down hard and viselike across the man’s mouth, clamping his jaw shut and stifling a thin scream. The judge thrashed to extricate himself from his covers and Ming bore down with his full weight onto the judge’s head and held it steady as he lifted the man’s chin and seated the point of the railroad spike below his Adam’s apple and pushed it into the judge’s throat. The judge’s body spasmed and his hands flew up to his neck and a steady drip of blood began to leak out around the edge of the spike, still sealed by iron against flesh.

  Ming leaned down close so the judge could see him. “Remember me?” he growled. He pulled the spike from the judge’s neck and as the blood began to flow in earnest Ming lifted his hand from Kelly’s mouth.

  The judge opened and closed his mouth like a fish and a soft whistling sound issued forth. His eyes were open and searching and above all full only of confusion. Ming wiped his spike clean on the last dry bit of linen at the foot of the bed and holstered it. The judge clawed at the sheets ensnaring him, eyes wild, desperately trying to free himself. Death confusion, escape reflex. With a wet thud he finally fell out of his bed and crashed to the floor, landing on his belly. In the darkness the blood looked almost black, smooth and polished like lacquer on the floorboards.

  Ming gazed down dispassionately at the judge. He squatted and studied Kelly’s face for a moment, then stood and pulled the chair over, the judge’s gown falling from it. Ming sat down beside the judge’s linen-wrapped form. “I only got the Porters left now,” he said aloud. He glanced at Kelly but could not find the man’s eyes in the darkness. For a long time he was silent. “How much did he give you to send me away?” he asked at last. “A thousand? Two thousand? What’d you spend it on?”

  The judge’s eyes roamed, unfocused, and his fingers curled weakly at the roughhewn lumber of the floorboards. He gave no reply.

  “You wretched sonofabitch,” Ming said as he stood, his voice scarcely above a whisper. “You ain’t done nothin what can’t be undone.”

  Ming went to the kitchen and took down the lantern from the wall and found a bottle of kerosene in the cabinets and returned to the bedroom where the judge lay on his belly in a widening pool of his own blood. Stepping over him Ming threw kerosene onto the judge’s bed, then splashed it across the walls, the floor, the judge’s body. When the bottle was empty and raw fumes filled the room Ming set the lantern down on the floor where the kerosene was mixing with the judge’s blood. Crouching low he removed the windcover from the lantern and pushed the naked flame under the judge’s bed, where it began to char and blacken the wooden frame. Then he stood up and walked out. At the bedroom threshold he turned, as if he expected the judge to say something to him. Kelly lay dead on the floor.

  “Your cat got out, by the way,” Ming said. A little flame worked its way up the leg of the bed, flaring and hissing as it met kerosene and blood. The room was growing lighter by the second and smoke thickened the air. Ming strode to the front door of the house and shut it behind him. Against the moonlit night smoke began to seep from the gaps in the roof joists. He walked quickly, his head down. The courthouse was not far. As he passed the sheriff’s office the ground around his feet danced with firelit shadows thrown by the grass. When he turned for a moment the judge’s house was entirely consumed in fire, flames erupting from every timber. Panicked shouts came from the sheriff’s office and then the door burst open and out ran the night watchman, followed by a band of men who looked recently woken.

  Ming crossed the road and kept walking, stealing glances from below the brim of his hat at the
field by the courthouse. The dim figures of two people stood beside two horses. He clung to the shadows. Up and down the street windows slid open and men and women leaned out from them, the night filling with curious murmurings and rising calls of alarm. Ming reached the courthouse and slipped into the darkness beside it.

  “You get him?” came a low voice. It was Hazel.

  “Yes,” came a second voice, older, gravelly. The prophet.

  “The sonofabitch is dead,” Ming said.

  He took the reins of the prophet’s pinto and found his wrinkled hand in the darkness, the skin paper-thin over his bones. He helped the old man onto his horse. Orange and red light flickered on the boundaries of the courthouse’s shadow. In the air hung the acrid smell of smoke. Ming’s eyes adjusted to the darkness and he could make out Hazel’s face, her bright eyes, her soft lips. He took the point of her chin in his hand and tilted her head and kissed her. She tasted of kerosene, sweet and sickly, and he ran his hand around to the back of her neck and pulled her closer. After a long while he drew back and gazed at her, holding her hands in his.

  “Good luck,” she whispered. Her eyes glinted with wet but she smiled at him despite herself.

  Ming let her hands fall and mounted his horse. He bade her farewell and reached over for the reins of the old man’s pinto. Then bending from his saddle he took her hand again, cold and small, and squeezed it and there was a twisting ache deep in the pit of his stomach.

  He found west and spurred hard. The sky was white with stars.

  Part Three

  50

  They rode a few miles beyond Reno in the darkness, striking out north from the railroad. The landscape around them shifted and warped and rose to meet the Sierras erupting from the western horizon. In places the trees were twisted and shrunken, as though recoiling from the touch of the desert. They could see well by the moonlight and unfaltering their horses picked a path through the dense brush. Shortly the light of the judge’s burning home disappeared over the horizon behind them and then Ming halted the two horses and bade the prophet dismount. It would be only a few hours till sunrise. They laid out their bedrolls and watched the stars revolve around them.

  “My time approaches,” the prophet said.

  Ming turned his head from the sky to look at the prophet, who was lying on his back, hands tucked behind his head, his clouded eyes open. “How soon?” Ming asked.

  “Soon enough,” came the reply. The prophet sat up and seemed to gaze out over the broken scrubland, the dark mountains in shadow to the west. He pinched some dirt between his thumb and forefinger and rubbed them together, taking stock of the way the dirt crumbled.

  Ming sat up now as well and faced the prophet.

  “There will be trouble tomorrow,” the prophet said. “Fight free.”

  “You gonna be killed, old man?”

  The prophet smiled. “Tomorrow is not yet my time. But soon, my child.”

  “Did you lie to them yesterday?” Ming said. “To Notah and Gomez?”

  “I do not remember.”

  Ming chuckled. “Course not.”

  Thin clouds darted their way over the face of the moon. With focus Ming found he could trick his own perspective, reduce the field of stars to flatness and flip the world head over heels, and in doing so he could convince himself that he was not looking up but instead straight down onto a canvas of stars, as though he clung to the roof of the world, watching the heavens proceed underfoot. A powerful vertigo ran through him and he put a hand up, or rather down, reflexively clutching at the grass by his bedroll to keep from falling. He shook his head and closed his eyes and when he opened them again the world was righted once more. He noticed the prophet staring at him.

  “If you are to cross the Sierras,” the old man said, “you shall do so by a route you do not yet know.”

  “And how is it I’ll find it?”

  The prophet ran his fingers searching through the air, as though feeling for contingencies and collapsing them. He paused. “I do not know.”

  “You got a funny way of talking, old man.”

  The prophet smiled and they fell silent.

  “My time approaches,” he repeated, after a long while. “Listen close, my child. I will give you one last prophecy.” He tapped an ancient finger on the ground and cocked his ear, listening to the sound it made. He hummed a little to himself. “This land is new,” the prophet said, “and this land is older than you know.” He seemed to be speaking from an impossible memory. “In deep time there were waters here, and in deep time hence there will be waters here again.” His face sparkled as if under the light of a younger sun. All will change, he proclaimed. As it had always changed. The earth underfoot changes. Oceans intercede when the earth is laid low, and mountains rise from the seams. In time beyond time, he said, the stars would burn out one after another and the moon would drift away. In time beyond time there would be naught to gaze upon but a black and starless night, lit by the pinprick light of the receding moon. Waters would scour the land and fires would strip the earth clean. The old man stretched out his hands and dragged them in long arcs through the dirt. The land beneath them belonged to those who would remake it in their own image, who by crossing and recrossing its breadth would come to understand its contours, its character, what remained when the day was done. The land remembers only what labors it has borne, the prophet said, and even when those works become gray and thin in the minds of those who labored, still the land bears witness to their memory.

  The night was close and cold.

  “No memory comes to us unbidden,” the old man said. “In our minds our memories sleep until woken and only then do they come.” His white and sightless eyes found Ming’s and he offered a sad smile. “Will you remember me?” he asked, almost childlike.

  Ming swore that he would.

  “Thank you,” the old man said.

  They sat together and watched the moon sinking low to the horizon. They seemed the only souls there had ever been.

  “When my time is near,” the prophet said at last, “do not approach me.”

  “Why?” Ming asked.

  “It will be clearer in the end. When my time comes,” the old man said, his voice grave and forceful, “turn and run, my child.”

  51

  In the morning they gathered their things and set off, riding abreast. The day was calm. When the sun was low and reddening in the western sky hoofbeats sounded in the distance behind them. Ming turned in his saddle and squinted at a posse of riders in a blot of boiling dust. He could not make out their features, only the long scabbards bouncing from the sides of their saddles. Rifles in those scabbards, no doubt. He tugged on the reins of the prophet’s horse and spurred his own to a canter and now they floated through the shimmering heat a murderer and a blind man jostling on their saddles. They rode past a squat mesa and turned behind it to break the riders’ line of sight and as they rounded the mesa a rider cut across their path brandishing an enormous scattergun and fired and missed and the lead shot buried itself into the redrock of the mesa. Ming’s horse reared in surprise and he pulled the reins tight and forced the animal back down, its nostrils flaring and its eyes wide with panic. Ming drew his revolver and aimed it at the man with the scattergun and was about to fire when he realized the rider seemed as surprised as Ming’s horse to see them. A look of relief washed over the man’s face and he raised his hands above his head in surrender. His hair was dark and matted and reached his shoulders and Ming guessed him to stand easily seven feet tall.

  “The hell is this?” Ming growled, his gun still steady in his hand.

  The giant laughed with his hands in the air and shook his great head. “Apologies, sir,” he said, “apologies.” He dropped one hand to shove the scattergun back into its scabbard and returned the hand above his head. “We was thinking you aimed to kill us.”

  “We?” Ming said menacingly.

  “Aye,” the man said, “the gang. If you allow me to lower my hands I can call em
out and show you we don’t mean no harm.”

  Ming lowered his gun but kept it trained on the giant. “Call em out.”

  The man dropped both hands and exhaled a sigh of relief. “Thank ye,” he said. “Boys!” he shouted. He stuck his fingers into the corners of his mouth and whistled loudly.

  From farther behind the mesa came a haggard-looking group of half a dozen men, one of whom walked with a pronounced limp. There was a tourniquet cinched around his thigh, the leg of his trousers dirtied with blood and dust.

  Ming fired a warning shot into the ground between himself and the men. “Get back,” he said.

  “You heard him,” the man said, unperturbed. He waved his hand. “Get back.”

  “We’re leavin,” Ming said, and began turning his horse.

  The giant squinted at Ming’s face and his eyes widened in recognition. Ming aimed at the man’s chest and halted his horse.

  “Do us a favor,” the man said.

  “I don’t do favors.”

  “You seen them riders behind you?”

  “What about them?”

  “They’re comin to kill us,” the man said. “My name’s Old Huxton and this here”—he gestured to the group of men behind him—“is Old Huxton’s gang. We got a price on our heads and them riders is comin to collect.”

  “That ain’t none of my concern,” Ming said.

  “I reckon it is.” A smirk spread across the outlaw giant’s face. “Reckon you ain’t got no choice. Boys,” he said theatrically, “what’s that murderin hollerin shootin Chinaman worth?”

  “Ten thousand, boss,” said one of the men behind him, a gaunt and dark-haired man who looked as though he hadn’t eaten in days.

  “Ten thousand,” Huxton repeated. “Hell,” he said to Ming, “you’re damn near famous round these parts, you know that?”

  “You got the wrong man,” Ming said. He wondered how far the riders behind them were.