by Yasuko Thanh
Ah Sing grabbed hold of the wooden dory, helping to pull it onto the beach. A man with a red moustache that hid his upper lip got out of it with the doctor.
The doctor straightened his back.
“Good, sir. Still strong, see?” Ah Sing said, lifting a barrel from the bottom of the boat.
Ah Sing recounted what had happened the night before.
The doctor pulled a bag from the dory and withdrew a ledger of dates, names, and other notes. He looked down his spectacles.
“The one you call … Go Chou?”
“No, sir.”
“Fong Wah Yuen.”
Ah Sing shrugged. “We call him Gold Tooth. Not know his real name.”
The doctor wrote something in his ledger and turned toward the main building.
When the doctor was halfway up the slope, Ah Sing tilted his head in the direction of a termite-filigreed log to indicate he wished a word with the other man, whom the doctor had introduced as a reporter. He was wearing a hat with feathers on the side, and his pants were cinched high upon his waist. He took two steps toward the log and stood, smoothing his hands over his thighs.
Ah Sing stepped over to the log and sat down. His mouth was dry. The man was smiling, but his gaze jumped from Ah Sing to a spot beyond his head, then back to Ah Sing, then to the doctor stumbling up the gravel slope. The man continued to stand.
Ah Sing cleared his throat. “I favour you … no, me … no, you favour me.” The disease in his larynx made his voice no more than a loud whisper. “I, I have something.” He stood up and pulled the Swiss watch from his pocket, where he had been clutching it so tightly that it was slick with sweat. He wiped it against the leg of his pants. He dangled it between them, letting it catch the sun.
“This is for you,” Ah Sing said.
“Look at that.” The man removed his hat and scratched his head, squinting at the shining metal.
“Nice, yes?”
The man nodded. “This is a nice island,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. He looked from the boulders that ringed one side of the bay to the mud flats on the other. He glanced at the doctor, who was talking to Ge Shou at the main building. “I hear you men hunt, and fish, too.”
“You take.”
“No.” The man’s moustache brushed his bottom lip when he spoke. “I don’t think I should.”
“No,” Ah Sing nodded his head. “For you.”
The man looked down at the watch.
“But is gift.”
The man fingered his eyebrows.
“Gift,” Ah Sing repeated. “A gift for you. Your wife?”
On the verandah of the cabin, Ge Shou danced, circling the doctor, his long black ponytail bouncing on his back.
A sudden gust of wind blew the reporter’s hat off his head. It rolled a few feet, snagged on a log, then rolled away again with the next gust. The man chased after it, but Ah Sing bounded ahead, stopping the hat with his bare foot. Ah Sing dusted off the sand and shards of clamshell. He held the hat out toward the man.
“Oh. Well, then.” The man inched his fingertips forward. “Thank you.”
The man took his hat between his thumb and forefinger and walked to the dory. Leaning into the boat, he dropped the hat onto one of the seats. He grabbed a heavy sack. Ah Sing did the same. Sack after sack, barrel after barrel, crate after crate, the two men, Ah Sing and the reporter, worked in this way until they had unloaded the boat. When the man began rolling a barrel up the beach toward the slope, his shoes slapping on the gravel, Ah Sing rushed after him.
“Gift, you help me. Gift,” he said, his throat tightening so he could not swallow. “Please, please, you take.” He pushed out a laugh. It felt like choking on a ball of rice. “You remember Ah Sing to the CPR.”
The man stopped, his eyes focused on Ah Sing for the first time, clear blue eyes the colour of frozen ponds in the spring when the ice cracks. Ah Sing was sure he heard the man sigh. The man shifted his weight from one foot to the other and rubbed his wiry eyebrows that shot straight up.
Ah Sing held the watch in his open palm. He imagined slapping it into the man’s hand. The man would laugh and throw it over his shoulder; it would shatter into a thousand golden pieces.
“It is a beautiful timepiece,” the reporter said.
“Yes, beautiful,” Ah Sing answered. His throat was a bird’s throat, filled with small stones.
“A gift, you take.”
Ah Sing thought he saw the man quiver just a little. “Right, then. Thank you.” Almost without touching it, he dropped the watch into his jacket pocket.
Then he said, “Look, man, look what I have here.” He undid the buttons of his tweed jacket and fished around in the breast pocket of his blue shirt, the same colour as his eyes. “Here, look at this. This is a Kruger coin. All the way from the South African Republic.”
Ah Sing raised what was left of his eyebrows.
“I’ve got some others at home, a pocketful, in fact. But they’re rare, quite rare, in spite of that. You’d have to go all the way to the South African Republic; I came back with them after the Boer War.” The man stopped and buffed the coin against his chest. “If you would take this as a sign of my appreciation.”
Ah Sing stared at the coin. He felt an ache in the bottom of his stomach. It grew worse. He would vomit. He knew it. His legs tensed, waiting for the spasm. He imagined running. Running. The man would start chasing him. Would throw handfuls of Kruger coins. They would hit him on the back, handful after handful. Stinging, like golden hail. What a silly, infuriating man. Ah Sing could decorate his cabin. He could use them as sinkers when he fished.
Ah Sing held the coin between his thumb and forefinger. He spat on its tarnished surface.
The man widened his eyes.
“Superstition. It bring more money when spit. Bring good luck.”
“Oh,” the man said. He clapped his hands together. “Well, then.”
Far from shore, the steamer bobbed in the chop. A crow cawed. The waves tumbled.
The man walked to the dory and Ah Sing followed. Reaching in, the man picked up his hat from where it lay. It was a green plaid cheese cutter with yellow and orange stripes. Under the leather strap at the back he had tucked some heron feathers, and for an instant Ah Sing was reminded of the ladies of Victoria who had worn hats adorned with enough feathers to drive certain birds to extinction. The wealthy of Victoria who had called men like Ah Sing their “Celestials.” Romanticizing their roast duck, their porcelain figurines for sale in every Chinatown store, their opium pipes.
The man held his hat out to Ah Sing. “Do you like this hat?”
“It fine hat.”
“Take it.”
Ah Sing walked with the hat on his head and the coin in his pocket where the watch had been, counting his footsteps as he rolled a barrel up the slope. He fought against quick breaths, trying not to hyperventilate. He stacked the barrel in the storage shed next to the coffins and the axes.
He was walking toward the cabin, staring at his feet, when something hit his shoulder. He glanced up at the sky. A heron in the fir tree. He looked at the ground. Frog bones. And he noticed a drop of red blood that had fallen onto a green alder leaf.
In his cabin, he packed an empty burlap bag with his driftwood pieces, his buck knife, his cast-iron kettle, and his tin cup. He surveyed the room, the clothes folded on the stool by the door, the walls papered with the Daily Colonist and Chinese New Year’s decorations, their glossy gold characters jumping off the red background. Then he went back to the beach.
He sat in the loose shale by the boulders. He dug for his buck knife in his bag. Waiting, he whittled eight sticks and two larger ones. He carved notches into the two big sticks and then he fitted in the small ones, tying them each in turn. If he finished in time, he could leave the kite for Ge Shou.
Leaning against a boulder, watching the ocean, Ah Sing was reminded of his thirty-ninth year. With his back against the rock wall of Kwangtung and the South China Se
a spread out wide before him – trapped by famines in Anhui across the border, and by the dirt and drought of Jing Gang on the eastern border with Hunan – he had paid a CPR labour broker and hopped a freighter bound for Canada. He smiled now, remembering. As the journey progressed, his excitement had been replaced by tense muscles. He had felt trapped, with no breath, no arms to fight; the mountains of black waves spanned for miles in all directions. How he had trembled on the deck! How he had been convinced the waves would swallow him, the same way Gold Tooth had trembled on the verandah as he hauled his bed outside, convinced the walls would crush him – solid walls that Ah Sing himself had built. And how, on the freighter, another man from Fujian had touched Ah Sing on the shoulder. The man had said, “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
The sun shifted; the boulders cooled. In the distance he saw the reporter and the doctor. They were taking off their shoes and wading out to the dory.
“Hallo! Hallo!” Ah Sing yelled.
They nodded to him and waved.
He stood up. He threw his bag around his shoulder.
They plunged their oars into the water. They were rowing back to the Alert that pitched offshore. Ah Sing narrowed his eyes at the doctor and reporter and could feel the wind ripple across his bare neck.
He bent down and dropped his knife back into his bag. He could hear the waves, and Ge Shou singing closer to shore. He touched the coin in his pocket. His jaw tightened. He undressed so quickly his shirt got caught on his ears. He pulled down his pants and dropped his wool shirt onto the rock next to his bag.
“Hallo! Hallo!”
He dove. His breath froze inside his lungs, and his limbs seized up: he was a stone, armless and legless. He began to sink, watching the bubbles rising past his face.
Fear made a body heavy; fear made a person sink and drown. Dead bodies floated because all the fear was gone. Once, a leper had tried to swim toward the lights of Cordova Bay. His body had floated with the grace of a lotus flower back to the gravel slope. Then Ah Sing and Ge Shou had buried him, silently, beyond the goldenrods. If only he had let the water flow through him as if he were made of it, he could have floated to freedom. Another leper had once escaped D’Arcy Island by swallowing a vial of poison. He swallowed it on board the steamer, had died before even arriving at the colony.
Ah Sing thought he would never stop sinking, but then his arms and legs sprang to life. He kicked as fast as he could while whitecaps crashed around his ears. The doctor and the reporter were not waiting. He slapped the water. He cried into the wind, his eyes open against the salt and the horrifying green.
The seagulls laughed. Ah Sing sputtered, yet the two men ignored him and boarded the steamer. His breath felt scant and thread-like in his lungs. His ears rang; his head thudded.
He plunged his head under. When he surfaced, he squinted at Ge Shou standing on the rocky outcrop of beach. Ge Shou had picked up his clothes and was waving them, flag-like. Then he reached for the kite, but stopped short of picking it up.
Ah Sing swam back to shore and clung to a rock. Ge Shou looked down in silence. Ah Sing breathed deeply, filling his nostrils with salt air and water droplets that burned. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. Water remained on his lashless lids and formed prisms, through which he looked at the setting sun. Above them, oystercatchers circled and screeched.
Ge Shou lowered his hand to help Ah Sing onto the boulder. Ah Sing shook his head. He spat over his shoulder and then heaved his body out, panting as he clambered up. There he hunched forward and held himself.
After a while, he stood and picked up the hat from the rock; he put his fist in the centre and spun the hat a few times. Holding it aloft, he pulled out the heron feathers. Maybe he could use them to decorate his kite. Then he put the hat down.
He reached for the coin and put it in his mouth. It tasted like oak. His tongue moved it from one side of his mouth to the other and warmed the metal. He spat the coin back out, into his hand, and hurled it toward the ocean. It glinted in the air. When it hit the water, it skimmed the surface like a cormorant before sinking into the grey-green waves.
A breeze dimpled the ocean. Ah Sing picked up the kite frame and offered it to Ge Shou. Ge Shou rubbed his forehead.
“Don’t be scared, Ge Shou.”
Ge Shou hopped from foot to foot, holding the kite.
“Don’t cry, Ge Shou.”
Ah Sing put his arm around Ge Shou’s shoulder and stroked him up and down. He could feel the warmth of the man’s flesh through the damp cotton of his shirt. Ah Sing’s arm was covered in goose pimples. Ge Shou’s black braid tickled his armpit.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said to Ge Shou. “Do you want to help me fly the kite?”
When he was a boy, Ah Sing’s bed had been a strong rush mat and he had slept on it with his four brothers and sisters, his parents, and their parents, by the great mouth of the Yangtze River where it emptied into the East China Sea.
The sea touched everything with lapping hands, probing fingers, reaching across countries and exploring fjords with whales, bays of volcanic rock, and ancient crevasses. A single drop could eventually circumnavigate the globe.
As a boy, he would float in the warm waters of Chongwu Bay until he felt his body liquefying, his loose limbs pulled by small currents and pushed by gentle swells. He would float as if he were dead while the sun burned his back. Then he grew and fished with the older boys. He went to work in the tin mines of Malaysia. He went to the plantations of Borneo. He forgot how to turn into the sea.
The water dripping from his body had formed a puddle at his feet. Ah Sing shook the remaining drops from his limbs and stood on one leg to dry the bottom of his feet with his shirt. Then he used his shirt to towel the top of his head. He stepped into his pants. He pulled his shirt over his head and the hair that was still wet dripped water down his back. The fabric of the shirt clung to his skin.
The warmth slowly returned to his body, but the back of his head still ached with cold. He looked out over the water.
“Hey Ge Shou, here’s a riddle for you: How does one stop a drop of water from ever drying out?”
“A riddle.” Ge Shou clapped. “I love riddles.”
HUNTING IN SPANISH
“Ah, this is the life,” Chinchu says. “The sun, the waves, and licking opium off the hand of a beautiful woman.” Even after all these months in Zipolite with Chinchu, to her ears the rhythm of the Spanish language still sounds like a machine gun – rat-tat-tat – hard consonants battering the palate.
She pulls her hand away from him and begins to wrap in plastic the raw opium she’s cut into grams with the knife on her nail clippers and rolled into balls, tying the packages closed with the strands of sewing thread gripped between her teeth. She has yet to devise a way to divide the black paste without staining her fingers with a sticky residue, defiling her hands. When she is finished, she lets Chinchu take her fingers into his mouth again.
Outside their cabaña, another column of buyers is already advancing through the sandy yard. Closing the door, pretending she’s out, is futile. The addicts will thump the bamboo slats, call out like tireless automatons, rattling the bicycle chain that keeps the door locked.
She came to Mexico because she wanted to volunteer in an orphanage in the Chiapas mountains. She had imagined saucer-eyed children clinging to her skirt hems while she chanted the leftist slogans of the Popular Revolutionary Army. But then she met Chinchu, and instead she finds herself greeting an endless wave of users at her door, some who come to buy, others to trade useless items – ridiculous winter coats, stolen watches, walkmans with broken headphones. It is the price she pays for doing business in this town, where she is a foreigner and an object of curiosity. Through the open door, she watches a trio of addicts approach in whirls of kicked-up sand.
“Done,” she says to Chinchu, nodding at the opium balls. “Your turn to take care of this group.”
“Cómo quieras,” he says, but she is
already out the door. His words of easy compliance dissolve in the crashing waves of the Pacific, which she can see from the courtyard, changing from green to grey, like a cat’s eye.
In Roca Blanca, the neighbourhood where they live, their cabaña is one of four circling the central courtyard. In the hut to the left lives a fifteen-year-old mother whose six-month-old baby cries half the night. The drunk in the hut to the right weeps inexplicably whenever he sees the word February on a calendar or in a newspaper. A dirt alley separates them from another complex, where a Zapotec family with dengue-fever-ridden children live. She hates Roca Blanca, but stays for Chinchu. To respectable Zipolite citizens, Roca Blanca’s reputation for immorality is matched only by its violence and the scandalous garbage heaps that line the junction of the alley and street, where someone has hung a sign that says: Rincón del Paraíso. Paradise Corner.
Flies buzz around the seatless toilet bowl that is in full view of the courtyard and only partially shielded from the busy alley by a few bougainvillea bushes and a low cement wall. Sometimes she walks two blocks to La Choza restaurant for the luxury of a bathroom door.
Most days, she unwinds by swimming the waves, though not always when the water is safest; not during siesta, when the beach is empty and the water is calm, nor at dusk when the ocean quiets its tumbling crests. The waves crash too dangerously for her to swim at dawn, and at midday they are worse still. When she finally dives in, the current pushes and pulls and tugs at her like a mouth. The waves swell at a breakneck pace, then crash down upon her, pounding her limbs, spinning her as if she were seaweed, leaving her dizzy and incapable of propulsion.
After her swim, she goes to the Cinco de Mayo market. But today, her nerves are rattled, her whole body on edge. For weeks now Chinchu has been telling her that when Semana Santa comes the police will swoop down on the town, and unlucky dealers will find even their wrist watches confiscated; yet still she and Chinchu persist in their routines, as if believing they are protected by some kind of magic and immune to arrest. To forget her worries, she drinks on the stone steps of the church, draining the mescal bottle quickly before it has a chance to sweat its coolness all over her hand.