by Tom Lin
By nightfall, nearly a day since departing the ravine, he had left behind the foothills and begun tracing a path into the Sierras proper. In the space between sunset and moonrise the world was black and broken and in these hours Ming sat down on the pine forest floor and laid out the contents of his pack, seeing with his fingertips. The cold iron of the barrel of his revolver. The knurled brass ringing his spyglass. Cold and misshapen lead ingots. His worn powderhorn that made a sound like rainwater when he turned it over in his hands. Abruptly a memory tumbled into his mind. The sound of rainwater falling onto the eaves, a fire burning in the hearth, Ada warming herself beside. He brought the powderhorn close to his ear and turned it over again and the rushing sound came once more and he closed his eyes and now only gray and half-formed shapes condensed in his memory. He turned the powderhorn over once more and heard that rushing sound of rainwater on the eaves and then even as he leaned into the memory the room in his mind disintegrated into the cold air. He opened his eyes and breathed a cloud of vapor into the chill mountain night. The powderhorn was still in his hands. He set it down and as he did he heard the rushing sound again but this time it was only the sound of the grains of powder tumbling past one another.
No memory comes to us unbidden.
The moon rose vast and tea-stained and lopsided over the east. In the uncertain light Ming feathered his fingers over his belongings and counted them. It was still too dark to see. His eyes adjusted and readjusted and still failing he began to see things that were not truly there, edges and contours and volumes of phantom trees and stones. The imagined world shifted and shimmered and he closed his eyes and now in blacker hues the imagined world made and remade itself before him. He cleaned his gun by rote, his fingers feeling for the loading lever and cylinder pin. It eased his mind. When he was finished cleaning his gun he loaded it and then holstered it. At last he opened his eyes. The moon was brighter now. He could make out the trees and the stones and the texture of the pine needles tufting the ground.
He gathered his things and stowed them away in his pack, then stood and brushed the clinging needles from his trousers. The polestar burned clear and blue. His fingertips were numb with cold and he clapped his hands together a few times to work the blood back into them. As he moved that unsettling feeling came over him once more, subdued and low. There was a slow gnawing in the pit of his stomach. He hadn’t eaten in days.
Exhaustion found him, suddenly and without warning, in the late afternoon of the following day as he came to the top of the last pass before the true giants of the Sierras. He sat down to drink some water from his canteen and when he was done he simply could not stand up. He lay back on the rough ground and draped his forearm over his eyes to blot out the sun. When he closed his eyes to rest the bottom fell out of the world and half-waking and half-sleeping he began to dream in memories. They came to him without order or reason, presenting themselves one after another like resurrected ghosts.
He was there in the mountains with a sledge in hand as James Ellis paced across the grade shouting at them to work faster, and the numberless and faceless Chinese around him sounded out a rhythm in hammerblows and footsteps. He felt the weight of the gun hidden deep in his pocket and saw Ellis’s cruel smile and heard his jeering and he remembered lowering his sledge and pretending to warm his hands in his pockets as he fingered the action of the revolver and imagined shooting Ellis through the nape of his neck when he turned his back.
The snow of those recalled mountains melted away and now he was in the endless farms east of Sacramento shooting a man dead as he opened the front door to his house. Gunfire from the second-floor window peppered the ground around him and he looked up at two men firing wildly at him and turned and ran. He could almost feel the bullets landing behind him, his feet driving into the soft earth as he sprinted for cover. They hunted him through a boundless field of grain. And though this was his memory he felt as though he had entered some other person’s dream, as though he were watching someone else relive time gone by. He reached an empty cabin and there took shelter from the men, lying on the floor as round after round punched through the wall and sunlight streamed in, the air filling with dust. The floorboards cut into his chest and his pulse thundered in his ears and the gun was heavy and reassuring in his hand. The two men approached on foot, shouting to each other, their footsteps muffled on the dirt, shadows flitting past the cracks between the timbers. And he looked up from the floor and saw an image of the world outside projected inverted and ghostly through the bullet holes in the wall. Ringed with colors the overlapping shapes of the men moved wraithlike through each other, guns in hand, like phantoms of diffracted light. He turned his head to one side, righting the image cast on the darkness of the far wall, tracking the projections of his pursuers, at last shooting one in the gut as he came through the door and the other as he bobbed his head up in the window.
And now the roof of the cabin peeled away and he was lying back with Hazel there astride him, the points of her hips tracing slow and deep arcs in the air, her body dotted with lamplight. He had not forgotten that he was dreaming this memory but still he reached up and pulled her close and fit his thumbs into the crook of her body where her thighs met her hips and guided her where he wanted her and she breathed hot and fast in his ear and he kissed her and then the memory began to warp and disappear and he tightened his grip on her body and begged her not to go and the ground rose up underneath him and the weight of his forearm across his eyes returned and the cold night air washed over his skin and as quickly as he had fallen into this half-sleep he was awake again, lying alone on a high pass in the Sierras under a young evening sky.
56
At altitude time passes differently. Darkness before sunset, the land not going to morning until long after the sky has bleached blue and bonewhite. The days lose their order. The mountains know their own way. He who traverses these slopes passes through a realm not entirely his own. In the rarefied air his breath comes quick and shallow and he pants as he climbs. And all around him the world pulls down down and down again, endless goings-down, avalanche and rockslide and filthy lahars kicked off by thunderstorms that carry whole forests down into the valley in their boiling wake. He sees this going-down everywhere he looks, he feels the stones sliding beneath his feet. In the rivers and in the rocks invisible undertows drag all things ultimately out to sea.
Ming traveled out of step with the rising and setting of the sun. He slept when he was tired and walked when he was not. His hunger had ceased to come in pangs and now traveled with him as a continuous gnashing in the pit of his stomach. He could not remember the last time he had eaten anything. With what clean snow he could find he refilled his canteen, tucking it into his breast pocket to melt. Beyond each windgap he pierced there rose before him always another. Hydra of granite and ice. A thousand routes traced over the slopes, some by animals, some by men. He was no longer sure where he was, had begun to lose his way, but in his transcendent exhaustion and hunger the rising panic that accompanies being lost did not arrive. He charted his bearings by a hundred identical landmarks, navigated through a cacophony of peaks and valleys. His hunger burned hot and clean.
He summited an ice-glazed col and surveyed the mountains before him, first quickly, squinting into the daylight, and then meticulously, with spyglass and compass. Then he sensed something—a flash of iron through the valley, the look of a pine tree, its needles underlit by the rising sun, the taste of ice in the air—and in a flash he knew precisely where he was. On the facing slope a line traced straight and true across the granite barrens, black and gleaming, cleared of snow.
Ming started toward it and a dim memory blazed to life. He was looking at a surveyor’s map of the Sierras, his forefinger running over the textured paper, the wind screaming through the gaps in the canvas tent, the lamplight flickering and faint. The prophet was there beside him, his ancient eyes the color of hardpack snow. Heatless and minute the sun crested the snowcapped peaks. Silas had just died.
He remembered parting the canvas doors and stealing out into the frost, his breath fogging in the air. He remembered an ice-covered pine high on the far slope, its needles shining white against the still-darkened sky. He remembered finding east, where he would track down Ambrose, and he remembered the intense and unrelenting cold.
Now he raised his head and peered up at the great and broken ponderosa above him, solitary on a nameless peak. This was the tree he had seen the day he learned of Silas Root’s death. At last he knew where he was.
Across the valley glinted the iron rails. The memory of the map etched its lines and grades into his mind and for the first time Ming envisaged the path he would take through the mountains. With his spyglass he plotted a route that ran down the side of the ridge and joined up with the railroad. He would walk along and below the tracks, keeping them to his side, listening for oncoming trains and diving to the ground when they passed. And when he could see California in the distance he would leap aboard a train and ride it to Sacramento, where he would finish what he had started.
He laid his spyglass on the ground with care and drew his rail spike and picked at the ice around him, chipping off a wedge to put in his mouth and other chunks to refill his canteen. The morning sun had arced high in the sky and it threw color and light where it touched the fragments of ice still scattered about the ground. Ming lifted a piece, chill and heavy in his palm, and twisted his hand this way and that, the colors flowing across his calloused skin. The ice shrank at the heat of his palm and with the gleaming tip of his rail spike he nudged the ice around in a musical clinking. When it was nearly gone he tipped his hand forward and the remaining fragments skated over their own meltwater and fell out of his hand, which he shook dry and wiped on his trousers.
The route stretched on before him, waiting for the pressure of a footstep to come to life. Ming stowed his items in his pack and holstered his rail spike. He was slinging his pack over his shoulder when a rush of vertigo stopped him, a haze of gray tightening his field of vision. When it passed he fastened his pack over his back and rubbed his face with his hands. His hunger was beginning to drain him.
He was descending the slope of the mountain when he noticed a strange boulder covered in snow some hundred yards down from the rails. When he reached it he saw that it was a man, clearly dead, though for how long Ming couldn’t tell. The body was frozen solid, the man’s skin bleached a ghastly white by the sun and the ice. Whatever snowcover had sheltered the body from thaw must have only recently receded. A wind sidled along the snowdrifts as Ming regarded the shape.
They were in a bowl formed by the intersection of three peaks. Clouds from the Pacific pushed up overhead and evaporated in the rarefied air. The man had died facedown in the snow and his limbs were frozen in place where they draped over the small boulder on which he had ultimately come to rest. Ming crouched by the body, inspecting it. Then he took the man by the wrist and turned him over. The body stiff and cold as marble rocked back and forth on the curve of the man’s back, his arms and legs hugging a phantom, moving like a wooden life-sized doll. There was something unsettlingly infantile about the way the body had been frozen.
Even in the absence of color in the dead man’s face Ming could see that he was Chinese. Rags clung to his body in tatters. Scavengers had plucked out his eyes and his tongue. His throat had been bloodied ages ago by some carrion eater and the blood had frozen before it could dry, a violent smear of red ice welded to his alabaster skin. He stared up with sightless sockets at the infinite blue of the Sierra sky. Ming guessed the man was no more than twenty. He brushed a thin covering of snow from a nearby stone and sat down, gazing at the dead man. The world was quiet but for the sound of the wind combing through the trees.
Up the grade, where the granite near the tracks had been sheared from the rock face by powder and fuse, it was fresh and unoxidized. In geologic time the bluff had been blasted yesterday. Ming couldn’t remember having worked this cut, couldn’t remember this dead and frozen Chinese. And yet he knew the man must have been there. He reconstituted a false memory. There would have been days of labor drilling holes into the raw face of the slope, then careful packing of those holes with black powder. Fuse lines running down the side of the mountain. Then the report of the blast, and the secondary reports of its echoes ricocheting around the range. A mass of rock and snow sent flowing like water. The snow crystals shimmering in the light. Snowslide, a thousand tons of white crashing down the mountain, sweeping the dead Chinese off his feet, casting him down onto these lonely and shifting slopes, leaving him to scavengers before subsequent slides entombed him in snow that would not melt for years. The memory was good and he could see it in his mind.
The dead Chinese glittered in the sunlight. Ming couldn’t decide whether to bury him. Overhead a vulture circled lazily.
It is through labor that men remember anything at all, he imagined the prophet telling him. But he had no spade with which to dig a grave and the ground here was already too frost-hardened to yield to the blade of a shovel anyway. Ming stood from the rock he’d been sitting on and started off along his route again, cutting across the slope to the railroad. He made it only a dozen paces before he stopped, troubled by something he couldn’t quite name. The body of the dead Chinese swayed gently on the point of the man’s spine, moving with the wind.
Ming turned and went back to the dead Chinese. “I’m sorry,” he said, startled by the sound of his own voice. He had been too long in silence. He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I don’t know what I’m sposed to do.” He glanced around, trying not to look directly at the dead man’s ravaged face. “I ain’t got nothin to bury you with.”
The Chinese rocked a little and was still. The wind had died down. Ming took the body by one icy ankle and dragged it a ways toward the shade of the nearby pines. The skin of the dead man’s ankle began to thaw in his grip and with a sickening lurch Ming felt it soften enough to slide over the bones of his ankles and he nearly let go the body. He shook his head as if to steady his thoughts and pulled the man into a clearing shaded by pines and shuddering he released the ankle. His hand was numb with cold and dripping with melted ice. He bent down and pinched some snow between his fingers and rubbed it between his palms to wash his hands. The dead man’s frozen spine had carved a shallow rut in the snow as he’d been dragged. Still he hugged the remembered boulder, his arms and legs locked in a death embrace. With a wary hand Ming gingerly tipped the Chinese over onto his side. The dead man’s fingers dipped into the thin early-season snow on the ground and left shallow divots. Sunlight filtered down through the cathedral of pines.
Ming gathered some fallen branches whose needles had gone yellow and brittle and laid them down on top of the Chinese. There were not enough to cover the body and through the gaps in the branches came flashes of pearlwhite and crimson, skin and blood. Ming unclasped his pack and set it down and went back to where he’d first found the man sprawled atop that fallen boulder and from the rubble that had come down from the blast he began collecting stones. When his arms were full he returned to the body and heaped the rocks on the dead Chinese. It was not enough. Still the man’s ghoulish face gazed through the trees. Ming needed more stones.
It took him six trips, each time returning laden with stones, before he had enough to cover him. He kicked his boots into the trunk of a pine to work blood back into his feet and shoved his hands in his pockets to warm, clenching and unclenching them, feeling his freezing fingertips digging into the soft skin of his palm. When he had regained feeling enough he drew his hands from his pockets and sat down cross-legged by the body obscured with fallen branches and stones. The man’s arms and legs were locked in their sockets and try as he might Ming could not move them, could not force the Chinese’s frozen legs to lie down straight, nor cross his thin wrists over his sunken chest. The body might as well have been carved from stone.
Ming placed a branch over the man’s hollow eye sockets and used the remaining ones to f
ill the empty space between the man’s limbs that the boulder had once occupied. He began to build a great cairn, stone locked against stone, a heap of fractured granite and black shale and waxy chips of green-gray chert. By the time he was finished the sky was beginning to darken, the temperature dropping with each passing moment, and he gazed upon the cairn in the deepening evening. He opened his mouth to say something—hail and farewell, perhaps—but could find no words. He wondered if the dead Chinese beneath the stones would have been able to understand him in life. He wondered if the dead Chinese had family across the sea, waiting for word of his successes. And he wondered if the dead Chinese would have thanked him for dragging his body into the forest, for heaping him with stones, for standing now mute and pale over his frozen body, at last bearing witness to his death.
To die nameless and unremembered and unmourned on a frozen embankment in a land far from home. What was it the old man had said over the ringmaster’s grave on that distant shore?
Ming stretched his frozen hands over the stones in the failing light, breathing vapor into the chill night air. “Return,” he murmured. He held his hands aloft a moment longer and then jammed them back into his pockets, his fingers burning as they warmed.