by Clara Hume
It was then I noticed across the street was an old building with a fallen-down sign that said, "Days Inn." My eyes were scouting everything in sight, but quickly moved back to the leader of the gang.
"You might say we want something," he said with a laugh that held no goodness to it. "Whatcha got there, pops?"
Wesley was going to play along with it some. "Well, we got peaches and canned goods. Not too much this early of a summer."
The man held up his gun and said, "Surely, you got some guns? Some ammo? I think I saw some women from down the road."
Wesley stuttered a little but said, "You best be movin' along, Mister. We ain't catering to those who are out to cause us trouble."
The man laughed again, and I could see he did have a few teeth in the back of his head.
I gripped my hand on the rifle. Already, they had the advantage: more guns, more men, and one gun pointed at us already. I thought of Fran and what might happen to her if we didn't stop these guys from getting what they wanted.
"I don't think you get our drift, Mister," the leader said sarcastically. "We gonna take what we want. There ain't nothing you can do to stop us." He pointed his gun straight at the old man and pulled the trigger.
I wasn't expecting such a callous display of disrespect. What happened to the gentleman's game where you bargained or had some honor? Wesley fell quickly, unsettling the dust on the side of the road.
"Son of a bitch!" Joe said, and shot point-blank the leader with the gun held in his good arm. I raised my rifle and just began firing, no thought to it, because I was in shock and angry about Wesley. So did Kenny. I could hear Eugenia scream from the wagon. We had four of their men down when Joe took a hit on his leg and cried out. There was too much of a flurry, and suddenly I was out of ammo. I had more .30 caliber bullets in the sidecar, but had no time to get to it now. The leader appeared to be dead, and two others as well. One of the men was writhing and bleeding out his neck. The two standing seemed to be traumatized and unsure of what to do next.
"Let's just settle this," I said, "and drop your guns. We'll let you go on your way if you do. Otherwise, it's us against you and we got two more in the wagon."
One of the guys held up a shotgun. He had long, stringy hair and steely eyes.
"You killed Ben," he said.
I could see Joe pulling himself up next to me. I wasn't going to divert my eyes. I had a gun without bullets, but they didn't know that. Kenny was there too with his gun. Three against two, for all they knew.
One of the men shot his gun at us, but the bullet hit a metal strip on the wagon and ricocheted off into the produce, busting open an apple.
"Good aim, William Tell," I said with a sneer.
What happened next was not expected. I heard another shot ring out, and another. It hadn't been one of us to shoot. Both men holding guns at us dropped quickly. I was confused when little Mei emerged out from behind that fallen Days Inn sign across the road. She had a look of distress on her face and then dropped her gun and ran to us with tears running down her face.
Eugenia screamed as she hobbled off the wagon to tend to Wesley. Fran came out and threw her arms around me. Mei went straight for Joe, and I took Joe's gun to finish off the wounded on the street. I wondered if anyone around could hear our gunshots like we'd heard similar shots back in Parker.
Joe's wound was superficial, a bullet skidding off the side of his leg, and Mei had already taken off her blouse and wrapped it around him tightly to stop the bleeding. Wesley, on the other hand, wasn't so lucky. He had been shot in the chest, and was already bleeding out the mouth and ears.
Eugenia had taken off her apron and was crying out woefully, and trying to stop him from bleeding. I bent down to her and held her close. Fran held Kenny's hand, who was sobbing out of control.
The men in the street were all dead, and we had to get out of here.
There was nothing to do for Wesley. He was gone in a matter of minutes. Fran hugged Eugenia as the old woman moaned. Kenny just sat on the ground like a statue, staring into oblivion.
We put the old man in the wagon, covered him with the store canopy, and set Joe and Eugenia back there too. We packed up their belongings, and Fran drove the bike back to our camp on the river, with Kenny on the sidecar. Kenny would lead Fran and the others back to his home later, and we'd all stay there tonight. Mei and I had to pull the wagon down the road to Eugenia's home on the river.
The home was more like a camp. Unhealthy looking chickens ran amuck, and the dirty river flowed by in the distance beyond a grove of birch and willows. The seedy shack had two main rooms, a couple broom closets, and an outhouse in back. In one room was a mattress on the floor, and in another was a cookstove and kitchen items. Outside, a rickety hammock was strung between two oak trees.
There was no running water inside, but there was a camp style pump outside. I asked Mei to wait until the rest got here before testing the water to clean up Joe, and asked her to search the house for any rubbing alcohol. She nodded, still with that look of pure fright on her otherwise delicate face.
Eugenia said, "We've got a first aid kit. I'll show you." Mei followed her inside.
I picked up the old man out of the wagon and laid him on the ground on a blanket. I figured since he was dead, I could use the pump water and go ahead and make him as neat as possible. I took off his shirt, and began wiping blood off his chest. His blood had already begun to leak down to the lowest part of his body rather than circulate through his wound. I closed his eyes and then washed him down. By the time I was done, I could see the rest of my friends, along with Kenny, coming down the road.
We got Joe fixed up, and Eugenia insisted we bury Wesley, but we couldn't bury him that night. We had to stay up all night in a wake to honor the dead.
Eugenia instructed us to go through the wagon and help get stuff out of it. The produce had to go back on a windowsill in the kitchen, and her ammo and guns had to be hidden. She said we had to make a big meal and a bonfire that night.
"We need to kill two of our best chickens. Get the canned goods." She spoke between tears.
Then she turned to Kenny, who was helping Mei with Joe and said, "Son, come to me."
He ambled to his mother, towering her but humbly just the same.
"It's time to go get him, son. Tell him it's time to come."
Kenny nodded solemnly and walked away from the homestead, down the riverbank.
Mei—Chapter 17
I hid in our wagon after cleaning up Joe and took out my silk handkerchief. It was the only thing that gave me comfort. After having just killed two men, I needed reassurance. The pale blue handkerchief was my only possession from homeland and reminder of my old life. The handkerchief had embroidered on it an old Chinese proverb:
Women hold up half the sky.
My father had given it to me when I was five. We lived in a seaside town near Zhoushan, and I liked to walk in the mornings with him through our wheat field to fish on the shore. By the time I was born, the fishery in the China Sea had been ruined by pollution and over-fishing. But my father had a place we would go to sustain our family shrimp business. Away from the modern harbors, we would cast out our net to sea from our shaky old boat and use the shrimp we caught to maintain our hatchery in the tiny inlet where we lived.
Father took me because there were no others to help him. Mother was too tired and sickly. My older brothers were on their own and lived up north.
"Father, what should I be when I grow up?" I remember asking often.
"Perhaps a great shrimp captain!" he would say.
I had other ideas. I liked the sunrise mornings near the ocean with my father and the lulling noises of waves knocking about our pier, but had seen pictures in books of beautiful women who would never be caught dead near a fishing boat. When I told this to my father, he became very angry with me.
"Bah! You are in a new world, Mei. Your beauty must come not only from your skin. It's a world of survival. Your hands must get toug
h. Your skin full of sun."
I didn't argue with my father. As pleasant as he could be, his bite scared me. After that, he taught me to shoot too. Mother would have been disappointed seeing me with a gun, so we kept it a secret. I never shot animals, only pieces of wood that my father drew faces on. At age four I could almost always hit the nose.
On our boat, my skin tanned and my fingers got cut by sharp edges and shrimp shells. I used to cry, before I was five.
When running through the wheat field, I would watch my father's broad shoulders and thin, brown legs ahead of me. He would wear a straw hat and sing his favorite song.
I am not afraid of the white waves
I am rowing my boat forward
Casting the fishing net into the water
Caught a big fish and laugh, ha
I learned to sing it too, before I turned five.
One day, I awoke to my father shaking me out of my sleep. I arose and remembered that today was my fifth birthday. I recalled it now clearly, though some say you can't remember things that far back. Or that your brain revises history. But I remembered.
The morning was just growing light, and like always, I could hear the soothing sounds of the sea lapping up to shore outside our village hut. The world had moved forward in time, but I lived in a small culture not aware of much outside it.
"What is it, Father?" I asked him.
I could see tears running down his face. I had never seen him cry before, and seeing him cry frightened me.
"It is your mother, Mei. She is gone."
I didn't know that gone meant dead. And she was not loving like my father. I thought she had walked out and left us. Seeing my father so sad for her being gone made me cry, and he thought I was sad she was dead. I didn't understand it until the day unfolded and my brothers came home.
When I saw my lifeless mother laid out on a patio table, I realized that she was not alive. My brothers, Li and Quiang, both traveled home and were in charge of all the preparations, as part of our homeland's traditional filial piety.
Father said to me, "We will have guests arriving in the next two days, and you must make sure your mother is surrounded by all the flowers that our guests bring."
For once in my life, I was not getting the attention of my father. Nobody had remembered my birthday. I tried to recall anything my mother had ever said to me besides orders to wash my hands or comb my hair. I couldn't.
One of my older aunts, who reminded me of a statue, with no change in facial expressions, dressed my mother in a white robe. I arranged white irises around Mother and stayed up late watching her quiet face and delicate skin. She had not fished like me. She had not run through the wheat fields. She had sat around inside the house and kept good tea at all times. I tried to remember her smiling.
Before midnight, I fell asleep on the little chair near her flower-covered table, but Father came and lightly shook me.
"Little plum, wake up."
I sleepily awoke again, only it was dark and he was not crying.
"It is still your birthday."
I knew that it wasn't a big deal but was happy that he had remembered.
He held out a little box for me, wrapped in rice paper, with a pink bow. I unwrapped it sleepily and withdrew the handkerchief with writing on it. I could read already, and said, "Women hold up half the sky."
"That's right," he said in a comforting voice. "Do you know what it means, little plum?"
"Someone holds up the other half?"
Father chuckled and said, "Yes, you are right. But don't forget that you someday will grow up to be a woman. You will hold up equally your half as a woman, if not more."
Life was never the same after Mother died. Father grew sick soon after and had to quit his fishing business. My brothers were now grown men, and Li, the oldest, moved my father and me in with him and his wife. We lived in a crowded city apartment, and Father grew so ill he died not long after.
I would lay in bed at night thinking of how the wheat blew, how the sea looked happy under a blue canopy. When I grew up, I became my mother's daughter and sailed to the United States to live with my father's sister, Aunt Ju in Arizona. With her training, I became a proper lady. I also studied world history by reading her old books. But by now the world had changed too much for old dreams to hold much significance, and Aunt Ju and I fanned ourselves profusely day after day on her apartment's excessively hot patio. I felt that we existed in a painting, and we would never again venture outside our frame. Life was over. The storms had come. The world had changed. We were imprints, smeared on canvas, upholding old visual tradition with our fans and pale faces and black hair.
When Ju died two years ago, I left the patio and drifted with others I'd met in Phoenix. We didn't go far, and in the end my skin became brown and my hands tired. I told them I could build us a shrimp cage if we got to the Gulf of Mexico. I had once again become my father's daughter.
"Hah, ain't much shrimp left," they'd say.
Maybe not. But we had to go somewhere.
I wrung the handkerchief tightly with my hands. I needed to wash it soon before it completely got discolored. There was another wake going on tonight, and it seemed only today I had snapped out of the tragedy that happened in Swansea and began to look around me again. It might have taken two gun blasts to wake me up, but here I was, though I still felt entrenched in a nightmare. I had never killed anyone before.
I couldn't think of Swansea now. I chose to lay back in the wagon, close my eyes, and dream of my home, the home I knew before age five.
My reverie was soon broken by Joe, who looked through the back of the canvas flaps in the wagon and said, "Mei, I want to talk with you."
I sat up quickly. The last man who had approached me so suddenly, well he…I could not think of that now.
"Thanks for getting my back today. I can't understand how you did it. Caine said he thought you'd run away. They were getting a search party together. You must have run after us, but—"
He pulled himself up into the wagon. His frame was tall and muscular. I felt very small next to him. He would hold up at least three-quarters of the sky, with his one hand, I thought, but the idea of it made me humored, and I smiled weakly.
He grinned at me and said, "Look, Mei. I don't know what your story is, but you don't need to be afraid of us. I just wanted to thank you. You saved me today."
I had wanted to see where they'd been going earlier and ran after the bike. They headed down the road, and I figured they weren't going that far. Part of me did want to run away, I think. But when I came across the incident, when I saw Joe and the old man get shot, I thought of my mother dying and how little I understood so long ago. But my mother, along with my father, like these people, had protected me as a young and vulnerable girl. I felt I owed my new friends something. Thankfully, I'd had the foresight to carry a weapon, but I wasn't sure I would return or just go die and swallow my wounds in the heat.
I just nodded at Joe. I wasn't ready to say anything yet.
He asked me to come with him to help them with the wake and the cooking. I followed him out of the wagon and could sense that he was happy to walk with me by his side.
The crew had a bonfire going, and the old man laid covered on the ground nearby. I put my handkerchief into my pants pocket and went over to watch Maisie as she de-feathered a chicken. I picked up another chicken and did the same, and she smiled at me with approval. Several people acknowledged me, and they all came over to say thanks. I felt modest and humble about it all.
When darkness fell that night, I noticed other neighbors from somewhere around these parts coming by with food and prayers. They strolled in like ghosts, soft and noiseless.
"It's like another potlatch, dudes," said Buddha. He was happily digging into roasted chicken and a pie that Eugenia had baked earlier, before the death of her husband.
I watched the elderly woman as she sat near the fire and greeted guests. She looked lost and lonely. I wondered if she would die too,
like my father who had not lived long after my mother died. I sent her consoling looks. She sometimes looked at me with the acknowledgment I had done a good thing. For the first time in several years I felt I might belong. But I wasn't sure. I had felt that way before and had been wrong.
As we sat there around the fire, the others were chatty and I observed them. There was Buddha's thanksgiving for the abundance of food, and Fran trying to find the ingredients for something in Eugenia's kitchen. She was looking for instant coffee, vitamin C, and washing soda. I had no idea why. Daniel and Elena were hovering around their daughter that night, keeping a lookout for trouble-makers in the nearby woods. Even Floppy was looking out for us, though he had shown few signs of being a friendly guardian. Maisie and Caine stole off into the forest after eating. I watched the look of delight on Leo's face when Fran came out of the kitchen with a can of pork and beans.
"Hot damn," he said, with appreciation.
Then I finally looked at Jimmy, who had been drinking some. As I watched him carefully, I saw that his face turned stone-like when a stranger entered our midst.
Kenny walked in with an old man, and Eugenia said, "You found him."
Kenny said, "Where he always is, Mother."
The old man just ambled up to where the body of Wesley lay and broke down crying over it. I looked back at Jimmy, and he had tears welling up his eyes. But his face was still tense, so much that his muscles were twitching a little. I hurried over to Jimmy and handed him more whiskey.
For once in his life, the old man didn't say a thing.
Then the stranger went to hug Eugenia and said, "I am sorry, Ginny," and together they broke down again.
All this time, Jimmy looked like he would either jump out of his skin to strike the other old man or burst out crying.
Eugenia started trying to explain between sobs. "These people, if they hadn't been there today...those others would have killed me and Kenny too. They saved us. Cousin, go around and introduce yourself. I just cain't think straight."