I noticed with a little jolt that they were not looking at Lucy.
Perhaps they couldn’t see her. Perhaps Sidonian deadlings weren’t real.
“You should have asked me to marry you,” she said then, with a regretful sigh.
“When?”
“That night on the island. What was the name of that island?”
“It didn’t have a name,” I said.
“Then we shall call it Lucy’s Island,” she said, “and a thousand years from now, lovers will still row out there, and sometimes the girl will wonder to the boy, I wonder who Lucy was, and the boy will say, I imagine that she was the first girl to fall in love on this island.”
“And would he be right?” I wondered.
“Under the stars on Lucy’s Island,” she said, “when you rowed that little rowboat across the North Bay, I thought we might well drown, and I was happy that I was to die in your arms.”
She smiled.
“Most assuredly, Mr. O’Hugh, had you asked me to marry you, I’d have married you.”
A little monkey flittered across a jungle vine, bounced along the canopy and vanished into the shadows.
“I’ll go back,” I said. “I can roam Time, Lucy. I’ll go back and tell young Watt to ask you.”
She laughed.
“I know one thing about Roamers,” she said, “from my time in my prison in the Village of Sidonia, in Montana. Only one man can change the past. Your friend with the utterly pure heart.”
“I will learn,” I said. “I will make my heart pure, and I will whisper in my own ear. And one day, young Watt will hear me. And our lives will be saved.”
Hester’s light was on in the second floor window.
“If it could be done by a man with a pure heart, wouldn’t your friend with the pure heart already have done it? I am afraid that moment in the past has hardened, like cement.”
Lucy smiled more deeply; while she was engulfed in the terrible beauty of her tragedy, she could not help but enjoy the wonderful beauty of the fleeting night, and this tiny spark of life. Her eyes closed, and a night bird sang, and it was almost a real song.
“Watt,” she said. “It is most pleasant being here, in this beautiful cool night in your criminal paradise. But you do know how difficult it is for a deadling to stay in the life.”
“Like hanging onto the edge of a cliff with your fingertips,” I whispered.
She nodded.
“That’s a way of putting it,” she agreed. “Spoken like a true deadling.”
Now she walked closer to me, and she held my hands. I could see right into her blue eyes, which glowed with the jungle stars, and the dinoflagellates. Her hands felt cool and warm and alive.
“How long?” I asked.
“Not long. I’m weakening. But I have to tell you something before I go.” Now her voice grew more matter-of-fact, and a little bit of that old Revolutionary zeal cut through the haze of death. “Sidonian Magic is making its way to the East coast,” she said. “Deadlings are on the rise in New York city. Some of my old friends – my old anarchist, bomb-throwing friends from the 1860s, you remember them? – some of these fellows think Sidonia offers a just society.”
I remembered them. Joyless, for the most part, and burdened by the world’s pain, but they dreamt marvelous dreams.
“You cannot stop Sidonia now, in 1878. But you might perhaps slow it down, and this might prevent my friends – my honorable, well-meaning friends on the isle of Manhattan – from joining the war. For if they join the war, Watt, my darling, you will have to kill them. Though misguided, they are good men and women. You will have no choice but to kill them. So avenge me, if you wish. But do what you can to slow Sidonia down, just a bit. Let my subversive allies live out their lives waving their clenched fists uselessly in the air.” She stopped for a moment, hesitated. Then a little lament, her voice cracking: “I do adore them, Watt. They are silly, as I once was, and they think the world can be a good place, although it cannot.”
“And the Falsturm?” I asked, remembering this now with some urgency.
Lucy smiled.
“The Falsturm,” she laughed. “This would fill a thousand books. The Falsturm may be defeated only by the hand of the daughter of a Queen, who was born Nephila. So do not try to touch him, my beloved. He is beyond your capacity.”
We walked a ways farther into the jungle, down by the river, where we sat together on a log which crumbled a bit beneath us.
“Do you love her the way you love me?” she asked. “Do you love her as much?
I shook my head. No. Not even half as much.
“But I am dead,” she said. “And Hester is … not-dead.”
“Not only not-dead,” I said. “Genuinely alive.”
She nodded.
“Alive,” she whispered. “That was nice. I remember that. Being that way. Alive.”
In the jungle, an ocelot leapt and struck, and a small howler monkey shrieked and died.
Lucy heard this, and a frown flitted across her face.
She put her hand on my elbow.
“Everything dies, Watt. You have my blessing.”
I nodded. I didn’t want her blessing. I wanted her love. All I’d ever wanted was her love.
I hesitated.
“When you died … were you expecting…?”
I couldn’t finish. Fawley’s child. She didn’t answer. She looked away. The baby that should have been ours. After we left New York in 1863 with Lucy’s money, and married, and lived the life we were meant to live.
“So avenge me,” she said, “if you must, my darling.”
I promised her that I would.
“And now,” she said, “would Hester mind if I asked you to kiss me?”
“I think she would,” I said softly. “I believe she would mind a great deal.”
“Then I will not ask you to kiss me,” Lucy Billings said. “Now just watch me vanish into a jungle night. A trick that I believe you will find was worth the price of admission.”
So I watched her vanish into a jungle night, and it was indeed quite a trick. Lucy faded slowly away, becoming translucent, then transparent, then almost entirely invisible – just her beautiful blue eyes were left, one last stolen glance at the world of the living.
How I loved her.
I found Hester downstairs in her nightgown, candles burning on the wall above the dark, polished mahogany bar. She poured herself a whiskey.
“I like it that you drink whiskey,” I said, a random thought.
“What did she tell you?” Hester asked me.
“You know what she said.”
I collapsed wearily into my armchair.
“She told me to go with you,” I added. “Hester, we took a marriage oath, Lucy and me, that afternoon on the Nebraska cliffs over Weedville. When she was already a deadling.” I shook my head. “This is all very confusing.”
“You know, Watt,” Hester sighed, without turning to face me. “I’m alive.”
I hesitated.
“Lucy is alive,” I whispered.
I felt I needed to clarify this.
“Not all the time,” I added. “But sometimes.”
Now she turned, and her face was relaxed, not angry.
She shook her head.
“How do you know, Watt, darling?” she asked. “I say that deadlings are just your last best guess, risen from your dreams as a walking illusion. How do you know I’m wrong?”
“How do I know that you are alive?” I asked. “That all of this, everything, isn’t a dream?” This was a bit solipsistic and epistemological (although I didn’t know it at the time) for a mudsill who had not gone to college in the 1960s to smoke “pot” and study metaphysics, but I wasn’t aiming for any sort of epiphany, I wasn’t trying to change the world. It had just occurred to me, all of sudden. Maybe I was ahead of my time.
Hester would have none of it.
“Perhaps the universe is a great wild boar,” she said, “and we are tics in the h
air follicles in its nostril. How do you know that we are not?”
I nodded.
“Hmm,” I murmured. “Um.”
This idea seemed interesting. How did I know, after all? Hair follicles? A wild boar? My world flipped on its head. A wild boar, indeed.
“I don’t see Lucy Billings as a threat to our passionate love affair, my dear friend Watt,” Hester said wearily. “You love her more than you love me, and now that she is dead, there is nothing I can do about it. She is frozen there in your heart as the woman you will always love above all others, and I want you to love her, Watt, now and always. But living in the past is causing you pain. And I don’t want to see you in pain. And Watt – if your wife is dead, you do not need to break off the marriage. It is gone. You need to see that justice is done, that her murderers are punished. Then leave a bouquet on her grave, blow her a kiss, and walk away with wet eyes, and you will have betrayed no one. One has one’s revenge. And then there is nothing more to do than to walk away.”
She kissed me sadly.
“She is not alive,” she whispered again.
“She is alive.”
She turned from me then, and she ascended the stairs.
I was alone in the dark, with the stars drifting in on the last wisps of Billy’s cigar smoke, and the noises of a South American jungle.
“I’ll tell you how I know she is alive,” I murmured to no one at all. “It’s in the eyes.”
The gateway to the soul.
I laughed.
The jungle noises were superficially soothing, like thousands of gold coins splashing into a river, but I realized tonight, more than ever, that the songs of the birds, insects and reptiles were noises of conflict and death.
Chapter 12
Yu Dai-Yung rode his brown horse with strong legs into a little Texas cow-town just as the sun was setting over hills in the far west, casting a shadow across the blanket of yellow plains, and the terrible scorching dry heat was dissolving into the orange horizon sky. The town doesn’t really exist anymore, even in 1936, as I write these words, though I think if you drove out there you’d probably be able to spy a few store fronts that haven’t collapsed from the elements some time during the last couple of decades, or whenever the last cowboy saddled up and rode out of town. I don’t remember its name, and I suppose it doesn’t matter. It was in northwestern Texas, and it was hot and dry, and just the sight of it burnt the corneas.
The town’s little tavern was starting to fill up. Master Yu tied up his horse, strolled into the tavern and sat down at the bar. His skin was dry and dark from the many weeks on the trail, following a map in a Chinese scroll south from San Francisco.
He waved to the bartender who wandered over slowly and leaned down on the bar. The bartender was a stocky man, strong but ruddy cheeked, past his prime, with a stringy beard. (This is an important detail, the stringy beard. Stringy beards can come in handy and be highly beneficial in moments of conflict, though not generally for the wearer of said beard.)
“We don’t serve Chinamen in here,” he said. “We have a no-serving-John-Chinaman-Policy.” He pointed to a sign on the wall which read: No-Serving-John-Chinaman – Saloon Policy. “I don’t make the rules. Nothing personal.”
Master Yu smiled.
“Why in Heaven would I take that personally, my friend? And it does not bother me at all, because I do not need a drink. I’m looking for information. Then I will be out of your hair, so-to-speak.”
“No information,” said the bartender, “without ordering something.”
The two men stared at each other for a moment.
Master Yu thought.
“It’s a real Hobson’s choice,” he said at last. “I would not want to violate your no-serving-John-Chinaman policy, yet I cannot get my information if I do not order something. A real Hobson’s choice, indeed.”
The bartender cocked his head to one side.
He admitted that he was not an expert in the history of medieval English livery stable owners, but he was fairly certain that the quandary he had presented was not a “Hobson’s choice.”
“I was actually just trying to get a Chinaman to go away,” the bartender said. “I was just telling you to leave. Nothing real philosophical-like. Just, you know – get out of the saloon, Chinaman.”
“I have an idea,” Master Yu announced, clapping his hands together in triumph. “You cannot serve Chinamen in here, and yet I cannot have information without ordering something. Ipso factotum: I shall order something, you shall not serve it to me, and you will give me my information.”
He slammed a gold coin on the bar.
“One whiskey!” he exclaimed. “Now, take my money.”
The bartender frowned.
“I am looking,” Master Yu exclaimed, still falsely cheery, “for a Peking Indian. I am told that a Peking Indian frequents these parts – indeed, this self-same tavern – and I am looking for a Peking Indian.” Quietly, he added, “Or should I say, I am looking for the Peking Indian. The last one. Do you know him?”
“I don’t think they ever really existed,” the bartender said.
He seemed familiar with this concept, and he had his opinion.
“I don’t think there’s such a thing as a real Peking Indian,” the bartender said.
Master Yu nodded patiently.
“Let’s say,” he continued slowly, “that I was looking for a man who believes himself to be the last of a great near-extinct tribe, known as the Peking Indians?”
A woman wandered, a little dazed, through the growing crowd of imbibing men. There were a few hoots and hollers, and she smiled uncomfortably.
“Believes himself to be ….?” the bartender mused.
“Point taken, my dear friend,” Master Yu said. “Perhaps a gentleman who claims that he is the last of a great near-extinct tribe, known as the Peking Indians? What he actually believes – gosh, I suppose you are correct. That would be speculative. I give you that. Touché, as the mandolin players say in the village of Blois.”
The bartender shook his head and made a remark that ratcheted up the racism to a level that I believe entirely unacceptable to 20th and 21st century readers, and which I therefore choose not to repeat here, and he made it generally clear that, Master Yu’s cleverness notwithstanding, the terrible poet would receive no help to-day, not in this saloon and probably not in this town. An important task at hand, and faced with no other choice, Master Yu reluctantly grabbed the bartender’s stringy beard, pulled downward, and thus slammed the bartender’s forehead on the bar. When the fat man tried to draw his pistol in self-defense, Master Yu leaped up on the bar, not releasing his grip on the bartender’s stringy beard, and kicked the pistol across the room.
Then, still crouched on the bar, he appealed to the bartender’s reasonableness as a gentleman.
“I can out-kick you,” Master Yu whispered, his pursed lips very close to the bartender’s ruddy-red ear, “and I can out-punch you, I can out-shoot any bastard in this room, and I can outride anyone who tries to catch me after I’ve killed you. You’ve helpfully told me that no one in this little shithole town shall willingly help me, so I might as well beat it out of you. All I want, you great fat lo fan, is to know where I might find a fellow who claims that he is the last of a near-extinct tribe known as the Peking Indians, and I am not leaving until you tell me. Shall I break your fingers or crush your kneecaps?”
The bartender rubbed his bald head – throbbing, but not seriously dented – and he gave Master Yu directions to a lonely Indian encampment two miles outside of town with a specificity and cultural descriptiveness that the poet found convincing.
“I will be gone from your property quickly,” the Chinese poet said, descending, “I will remain grateful for your help, and I will hold no grudge, and I hope that you will do the same. I have information from you, you have a gold coin from me, and we should part friends and allies.”
Master Yu tapped the rim of his hat in thanks, as he had seen done.
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“I’m not sure there’s really such a thing as a Peking Indian,” the bartender said again, his eyes clouding dizzily. “I really don’t think they ever existed. All yours, though.”
Master Yu found the Indian’s hut just where the bartender had said it would be, and the Indian was sitting a few yards out back, on a tree stump, just thinking and staring a little sadly at the sky. He looked near 50, but maybe that was the rough living, and all the tragedy. He was lanky and wiry, downtrodden and helpless.
Master Yu approached the man, who gestured to him to sit. Master Yu sat down on a tree stump next to the Indian.
“I have a proposition,” he said. “I need a guide. It pays well. I need a guide who is a Peking Indian.”
The Indian nodded.
“John Dead-Man, Peking Indian,” he said, and he held out his hand.
Master Yu smiled.
“Yu Dai-Yung,” he said. “Peking Chinese,” and he took the Indian’s hand, and the two men shook on it.
John Dead-Man’s home was a circular one-room mud hut, with large posts in the center and shorter posts in the perimeter and beams across the roof, covered by branches and willow leaves. Yu Dai-Yung and John Dead-Man sat in the center of the room, cross-legged on the dirt floor.
“You’re a little far south for a Peking, if I recall correctly. Aren’t you a tribe of the Dakotas?”
The Indian shook his head.
“We were a dwindling tribe of the Dakotas,” he said, “until we were defeated and absorbed by the Mandans, five hundred years ago.”
His family kept the Peking tradition and language alive. By the 1800s, they had grown back to twenty-five brave souls, including his father, mother, brother and young John. Then in 1837, when he was fifteen years old, the Mandans were near-destroyed by the white man’s small pox. A few dozen of the Mandans joined the Hidatsa to live on the banks of the Missouri River, still allowed to perform their O-keepa ceremony, the few of them that were left. But there was no space in anyone’s mind to keep the Peking Indians alive as a race, or even a memory. So he buried his mother and his little brother on a rainy afternoon, he took his new name, and he went his own way, a nomad just waiting to die, when the time came. The last of his kind.
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 16