So maybe it would not be so bad if all of them were to die, was the point she was making, I supposed. And I supposed I might not shed many tears for a dead Sidonian, depending on which Sidonian we were talking about.
“Foot soldiers?” I asked.
“Maybe there are a few cogwheels, but they’re filthy, rusty cogwheels. They know what they’re doing, whom they’re serving. I don’t imagine anyone who came West seeking a job as an office clerk will be on that train, Watt. They all have dirty hands; they’re all ugly customers.”
She paused, hesitated.
“You know all about Sidonia, don’t you?” she asked. “The Sidonians?”
“I hate it,” I said, “and it hates me. Of course I know.” It was the reason I was hiding in the desert, I admitted. It was the reason I drank whiskey every second of the day. An ostensible social movement designed to make the world a better, fairer, happier place, it had destroyed everything I had ever cared about, and I hated it. I didn’t know whether I needed to forget it or let my yearnings for vengeance rule me for the rest of my life.
She touched the side of my face, affectionately, seriously.
She left her cool hand there, and I didn’t mind.
“There’s more than money on that train, Watt.”
As a matter of fact, she noted, a two thousand year old secret was buried in that train’s safe. If it were to reach New York City and fall into the hands of a certain band of previously harmless subversives – these were gentlemen and the occasional lady who, burdened and misled by a bit of theoretical high-class education, thought it possible to construct a Utopia that included humans, and who thought that the Sidonian secessionist movement in Montana was building in earnest the theoretical Utopia they’d studied in school – if this cargo reached the innocent, well-meaning hands of that group of subversives, many people would die, devastation would reign over New York City, which would burst into flames, hatred, death, war and utter destruction, and when the smoke cleared, millions would be dead, and the city would be a Sidonian police state. As a fascistic political movement ate the continent like a swarm of locusts, the subversives would stand by, powerless and aghast, wondering what their beautiful and perfect dreams had wrought. Watt O’Hugh – of all people! – should remember the havoc the Sidonians could loose on the world, Hester pointed out, and also, by the way, the terrible anger of an unfettered New York City mob.
I was silent, mulling this over.
“If the secret on this train makes it East,” she said, her voice flat, “it will bury New York, and then it will put Darryl Fawley on a throne, and then he will bury the world. Can you live in a world ruled by Darryl Fawley? J.P. Morgan will help you stop them. Will you stop them?”
Hester’s eyes were sad.
“My dear,” she said. “I’ve given you an excuse.”
Watt O’Hugh, she noted, always needed to know that he was doing good. All the dime novels insisted on it.
“And your ghosts expect it, nay? If you don’t do good, they will leave you. They will no longer protect you. They will no longer steady your aim.”
She told me that I should feel reassured that I would be doing good, essential good. I would be saving many people, the way I had failed to save so many people, back in those dark days of ’63.
She leaned in closer.
“You mourn the little ones you failed to save in ’63, but there is one you failed to save in ’75 who haunts your waking dreams.”
I could feel my face darkening.
“These are the men,” she whispered, “who killed Lucy Billings. They lured her with dreams of a perfect world, they played with her conscience – their leader, Darryl Fawley, even went so far as to marry her! – and they used her as bait to trap you. And then they killed her. You loved her so much, and this man, who loved money and power more … this man, Darryl Fawley, had the blessing to marry this jewel, this flower, this treasure that belongs to you, a blessing whose value he didn’t even recognize. And he threw that away, and he let her die – like dropping the world’s most beautiful and valuable diamond into the middle of the ocean – and he went on with his life without a care. She died with his child in her womb, in a lonely abandoned jail in a Nebraska ghost town.
“Lucy Billings, whom you loved, who walks the earth upon rare occasion as a deadling, a shadow of what she once was. Darryl Fawley eats ostrich pâté en croûte in a castle in a Montana valley, while Watt O’Hugh, the greatest shootist in the West, hides out drunk in a smelly shack and does nothing to bring Fawley to justice, nor to stop his success from growing. Nothing. Watt, I ask you, is that right?
She placed a locket on the soft grass beside me. I recognized it. I didn’t know how she’d acquired it. I didn’t need to open it. I imagined the smooth white skin that had once warmed this locket, and the heartbeat that had once enlivened it, this little locket. It made me angry that this locket had no owner to wear it and to cherish it, and to become even more beautiful because of it. The locket lay in the grass beside me, and my anger grew.
“What’s in the envelope, Watt?”
I opened it, and I showed her. Troop movements, weaknesses in Sidonia’s defenses, proposed or perhaps even actual maneuvers on a day not so far in the future – that is, the future back in the 1870s – when the U.S. cavalry would attack. “I know exactly what will happen every second of that day.” I imagined myself there. I imagined myself killing men responsible for the death of the woman who had once worn that locket. But were I to show up on the day of battle, an angry, cursing Watt O’Hugh, whom all Sidonia recognized, I wouldn’t make it one inch inside the city gates. I would die, bloody and angry and cursing the murderers within the city.
“Watt. Once the train is robbed, J.P. Morgan will send his soldiers over the Sidonian mountains, and I will put you beside Darryl Fawley. Watt O’Hugh, right next to him. As close as I am to you. To do as you will. To set things right. I will put you there beside him. I promise you this, Watt. This is our deal. This is our covenant. I am giving you an excuse for your vengeance, something to tell your ghosts.”
Then silence.
I could feel Hester’s breath. I could hear fear in her silence.
A fish splashed in the tranquil sea, and a hairless beast, the size of a dog, scurried into the baby forest behind us.
She ran a hand gently through my hair, and she brushed my brow.
“Tormented, storm-tossed, unloved Watt,” she whispered. “I am the one who consoles you.”
“I didn’t really need much convincing, truth be told.”
I told her that if she could really promise to put me next to Darryl Fawley – so close to Darryl Fawley that I could put the barrel on his skull and squeeze the trigger – then I would rob her train for her.
In the distance, a small black cloud formed on the very far horizon, casting a small shadow over our perfect, star-speckled ocean. Hester squeezed my hand, as rain and even hail pelted the far sea-edge. “Well,” I whispered, “we cannot stay here forever,” even though, right then, I wished that we could, and so we stood. I bent a few saplings to form a makeshift and highly temporary doorway to crawl through, and we drifted softly back to our world, where we landed with a gentle thud on the angry-hot sand of the dead valley this paradise would become.
Chapter 2
I am a Roamer, as I have mentioned before, and with one notable exception, Roamers cannot change anything about the past or the future. What roaming can give us is information, and while it is information we cannot use, it is nevertheless information that can haunt us. For example, I have recently, after much hesitation, taken a peek at my death and have learned to my chagrin that I am fated to die on January 1, 1937, which is less than a year from now. I would prefer not to die, but if I must die, I would prefer not to be forgotten forever, and so I’ve been rather quickly scribbling out my memories a letter at a time,[8] sitting here on the front porch of my ranch near a little town in one of those big, under-populated Western cow states, which I w
ill not name out of respect for the citizens here, who have treated me well but would prefer to be known for their fine cuts of beef rather than the ravings of a lunatic, which the adults here all believe me to be, though harmless, in their view. The children like my stories and never doubt that they are true, which indeed they are.
This bundle of words that you hold in your hands isn’t a novel, but rather a memoir, which, as they taught you at Yale, is Frog language for memory, which means that when I remember something, I write it down, and what I don’t remember, I don’t write down. It also means that it’s all one-hundred percent true, though some of it’s a little hazy, what with the passage of time and all the corn juice that I’ve imbibed over the years, and the corn juice that I am imbibing right now, as I write these words. Still, I can remember a few facts about myself through the whiskey fog, which might be helpful for you to know before we continue: I was a Union soldier in the War Between the States, during which I defended Fort Comfort in the battle of Plymouth, a great Confederate victory that you may have studied in school, which left me with a bullet lodged in my right leg, something I could mildly feel when it rained or snowed till I turned 70 years of age, at which point that ache was subsumed by others more painful, and I never noticed it again. In my younger years, the yellow journalists and dime novelists alleged that I was a true-blue Western paladin, almost a knight-of-the-round-table (with just a little effort, you can read all about my purportedly heroic exploits in Blue Rock, which is what spawned the series of dime novels), and subsequently and consequently the star of an eponymous Wild West show bankrolled by J.P. Morgan, which took me all the way to New York City’s Great Roman Hippodrome (a grand castle, which many years ago stood briefly on Mr. Madison’s Avenue and 26th Street), before I collapsed into infamy, or maybe just ignominy. By 1878, that was where I thought my story would end, before Hester knocked down my door.
There is one other thing that I think is relevant to add here before I continue. One evening out in the canyons of Utah, my traveling companion, a one-legged counter-Revolutionary, told me a story about a man named (unfortunately) Yu Dai-Yung. Master Yu was a handsome poet (but a terrible one) and a man destined to become my friend and fellow soldier in the battle against Sidonia, though I did not know it then.
He was also a man on an important but ill-defined mission in America for China’s surly Empress Dowager.
And thus, not so very long before Hester Smith pounded at my door in the desert just West of Lida, Yu Dai-Yung embarked on his secret mission, because one doesn’t refuse one’s Empress, after all. A Peking riverboat took him south to Taishan, where he boarded the Pacific Mail steamship S.S. China, which upon departure seemed crammed to bursting with a few dozen merchants from America and a thousand illiterate commoners from the south of China, who had fled famine and looming civil war. All of them were men, and so for the coming months, Master Yu was to hear not even the hint of a woman’s laugh. The last port of call for the S.S. China would be the Market Street wharf in San Francisco. The Golden Mountain of America loomed like the Jade Emperor over the farms of Taishan.
The great smelly hulk of a vessel left the Chinese port, and within 24 hours it had slipped and wobbled through the Pacific Ocean into stormy waters. The ship lurched to and fro, yet when the storm had cleared some hours later, and the passengers found themselves miraculously alive, Master Yu felt only marginally better. For the next few months, he kept to himself, reading his books and frequently vomiting. While re-reading Volume 3 of The Dream of the Red Chamber, he fell asleep and dreamed nostalgically of the red chambers of home. [9]
After a great deal of time, Master Yu reached his destination, and the SS China pulled into the San Francisco harbor past midnight on February 11, 1878, which was a chilly and overcast night.
The Harbor consisted of a series of piers, a wooden shed for horse-drawn carriages, a row of cavernous warehouses, and a few noisy saloons that screamed into the night down Market Street, even now that the rest of the city of San Francisco was dark and fast asleep. Master Yu stepped off the ship, pressed on all sides by the crowd of peasantry, holding his small travel bag in his left hand, feeling plain and unembroidered in his simple dark surcoat, which he hugged to his body as he felt the full force of the chilly harbor wind. His face handsome, still unlined, albeit a bit wind-chapped.
Yu Dai-Yung sighed. Had not the seers of royal China proclaimed him reincarnation of the son of Yang Hsiung, the great 1st Century poet to Wang Mang, the Emperor anointed by one thousand dragons? Was not Master Yu thus born to be an acclaimed poet, to sit in the imperial court, to eat golden pheasant with expensive dancing girls in youth, and to marry well in early middle age?
How had his life come to this?
A little hint of bile tickled and threatened the back of his throat. He took a deep breath. His hat blew off his head, landed in the sea and quickly washed away. Black water thumped against the side of the steamer, and dark clouds covered the moon.
Lantern light burst through the darkness from the east. Yu Dai-Yung backed into the shadows and vanished behind a warehouse filled with Chinese silks and vases. A dozen fat white customs house officers with bushy mustaches gathered up Chinamen disembarking from the steamship, searched them, questioned them, marked them with chalk and tossed them and their baggage onto a contingent of horse-drawn express wagons, which then clattered away down Market Street.
Yu Dai-Yung waited, barely breathing, until the officers had ridden off with the Chinamen, and only the noise of the rowdy saloons still disturbed the night.
A man approached. He was Chinese. He wore a purple, silk-lined and embroidered robe. The stranger was neither young nor old. He had a thin beard, and his face was distinguished yet friendly. The Chinese man called out gently to Master Yu, wished him a good evening, called him friend.
Master Yu stepped nervously into the light.
The man took Master Yu’s hand, offered to buy him a drink, a good old Chinese drink the way he remembered it from the homeland, just to welcome Yu Dai-Yung to San Francisco after such a long, exhausting and treacherous journey. He smiled, and he implored Master Yu to follow him. All of this would raise suspicions among most visitors to a new city in an unfriendly country, but the man spoke the northern dialect perfectly, with a flawless accent, something Master Yu had missed so terribly during the previous long months. After months breathing the stench of the common man, he indeed needed to sanitize his body with some fine moutai. And so, like a child soothed by a lullaby, he followed the gentleman from the shadows of the warehouses towards the lights of the harbor bars.
A loud, tough female voice shattered this brief moment of peace.
“Crimp!” she shouted in English, and the other Chinaman shrunk a bit in shame. “Fung, you crimp!”
Now she came into the light, a young pretty Chinese girl of about nineteen, but wrathy and fierce, the victim of a hard life, it seemed to Master Yu at first glance, and worst of all, as far as he was concerned, she spoke with a grating, goat-braying Southern China accent, which scratched and pounded like nails on the soft velvet cushion of his eardrums, even after all these months.
“You would crimp another Chinese, your own people!” the girl shouted. “But this man is not any Chinese, Fung! This man is an emissary of the Empress Dowager! And you would crimp him!”
The man shrugged helplessly, and he now seemed quite a bit less elegant than he had a moment before. Master Yu now noticed for the first time that the emblems on Fung’s robe were ridiculous forgeries.
“I didn’t know, Li-Ling,” Fung said softly. Even his accent now seemed merely the parody of a true gentleman. “How was I to know?”
Li-Ling pinched Master Yu’s cheek.
“Look at this pale skin!” she shouted.
Li-Ling grabbed Master Yu’s right hand and waved it in front of the penitent Fung.
“Look at this soft, effete hand!” she screamed. “He is not a peasant, Fung!”
Fung looked down at his feet.
“Can’t you see?” she added now, in a softer voice, apparently touched by Fung’s shame. “He is weak and soft. You see?”
“I just wanted to make some money, Li-Ling,” Fung said.
“You should have recognized this the moment you saw this man hiding at the wharf. He is not strong and hard like us. He is a little bowl of congee. Not even a man at all. Anyone with a brain would see that a specimen like this could not survive for five minutes in the world unless he were nobility, someone of importance. Someone you cannot crimp if you want to keep your head attached to your shoulders.”
Clearly, the treachery bothered Li-Ling, but the stupidity seemed to bother her even more.
“My wife has not been well,” Fung said, and he ventured an excruciatingly detailed explanation of the specific symptoms of this illness, which I mostly will spare you, except to note briefly that it involved pus, scabs and thick white fluid flecked with blood, and to add that it inspired some genuine sympathy even in Master Yu, Fung’s intended victim, who could not help shuddering along with Fung. This was evidently a most unpleasant illness, not least for the husband of the sufferer.
“My children have the dropsy,” Fung added. After a moment: “And brain fever,” he suddenly remembered.
“Sit by their bedsides and do not show your face for three weeks,” Li-Ling said softly. “And perhaps we will forget about this offense, and we will not have you killed.”
“Thank you, Li-Ling,” Fung said, and he bowed obsequiously, and he then disappeared into the night and out of our story forever.
The poet from Peking climbed upon the Southern peasant girl’s lopsided rickety wagon, and she cracked the reins on the lopsided rickety mule pulling the lopsided rickety wagon, and together they descended from the cloudy starless harbor night to the tree-lined streets that led into San Francisco’s business district. The lights of Davis Street blazed on the horizon in the North and glittered on the black rocky night sea, but around them, all was dark and quiet.
Watt O'Hugh Underground: Being the Second Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh III Book 2) Page 4