by Lucy Tan
“Where are we going?” Lina finally asked when she thought there was no chance of their conversation being overheard.
“To a friend’s house,” Qiang said. “It’s not far. He lives closer to you than he does to me.”
Lina hadn’t known where the gambling would take place, but she’d expected it to be somewhere more exotic than a person’s house. They turned away from the lake, walked through the trees, and came out on a bigger, longer road. Ten minutes later, they stopped in front of a farmhouse. From the outside, it looked like any other farmhouse except for the fact that it had two floors.
“We’ll go around the side,” Qiang said.
The moment they stepped onto the property, a dog began to bark. Lina felt an impulse to take Qiang’s hand but held back. She wished he would say something to her before they went inside, just so she could hear his voice. The only other noise was the grass being crushed beneath their feet. The house was lit from within, and the closer they got to it, the longer their shadows stretched. They passed a well and a few feed buckets next to it with dried slop stuck to the tin. They passed a coop full of hens sleeping with their necks tucked into their bodies. Then they were at the door.
The windows on the property were curtained off with peach-and-tan-colored cloth. Through the side door, all they could see was the faint outline of a kitchen. The walls were thin; Lina heard low voices and the scraping of chairs coming from another room. Qiang stepped forward to knock and then back again to stand next to Lina. There was a swish of a curtain to their right, and a moment later, the door opened. Standing in front of them was a boy who looked not much older than the two of them. He glanced at Lina first, then at Qiang.
“Who is she?”
“A friend,” Qiang said. A twinge of annoyance crossed the other boy’s face, but he stepped aside to let them enter.
The kitchen was empty of people but filled with garbage. The hearth was littered with dishes and glass bottles, the floor with vegetable peels. At first, Lina thought she spotted maggots, but when she looked more closely, she found they were only cigarette butts.
“Lina,” Qiang called to her. “Stay with me.”
They followed the other boy down a hallway, approaching the sounds of voices. The room they eventually entered was lowly lit. Four men sat at a card table, and the boy who had let them in perched on a couch nearby. A few others were standing around chatting, but they all stopped talking when Qiang and Lina walked in.
“Brother Gao, I’m here,” Qiang announced, speaking to the man seated farthest from where they stood. He was the only one who hadn’t looked up from what he was doing. He was shirtless, in his thirties, and shuffling a deck of cards. It wasn’t until he had squared his stack away and plucked his cigarette from his lips that he raised his head.
“Who’s this?” he asked.
“A friend.”
“A friend?” The man laughed. He looked around at the others in the room. “Little pissy kid thinks he’s allowed to invite friends. What’s your name?” he asked, addressing Lina.
For a moment, her heart stopped.
“Relax, I’m just trying to be friendly,” he said, softening the tone of his voice. “Miss, thank you for joining us this evening, but your friend Zhen Zhiqiang has improperly invited you to a business meeting. My associate Jian Hua will take you home.” He gestured toward one of the others seated, a thick man with a strong brow. Jian Hua rose, brushing the remains of melon seed shells off his lap. He walked to the corner of the room and stood behind Lina, who felt rather than saw his presence.
“No,” Lina said. “I—”
“She won’t be comfortable with him. I’ll walk her home,” Qiang said quickly.
The shirtless man’s eyebrows went up. “Tian a, who knew our bright little Qiang was such a gentleman? It’s too bad, because we’ve kept Mr. Sheng and Mr. Ling waiting long enough already.” At this, he gestured to the two other people seated at the table. One was small and neat with a square face and hair graying at the temples. The other had long hair that he wore tied up in string.
The shirtless leader got up and gestured to his chair. “Sit,” he said.
“Brother Gao, Mr. Sheng, Mr. Lin,” Qiang said, addressing each of the players in turn. “I apologize for the inconvenience. I will see my friend home—it’ll take no more than ten minutes. I’ll be back right away.”
“Think of the impression you’re making,” Brother Gao said. The softer his voice grew, the more annoyed he sounded. “The girl will be fine. You’re acting like Jian Hua isn’t a good guy. Is that what you’re saying, Brother Qiang?”
Qiang blinked. “I know Jian Hua is a good guy. The problem is, my friend has no reason to trust that Jian Hua is a good guy.”
The man with the long hair spoke up. “I don’t know why it’s got to be so complicated. Who cares if the girl stays?”
Brother Gao sighed and scratched his head. “Jian Hua,” he said. “Please, can you ask your sister to come down here?” As Jian Hua left the room, Brother Gao clapped his hands on his thighs as if trying to revive the convivial mood of the room. “Hao! You’re right, let’s not complicate things. Enough waiting, let’s play.”
Lina watched Qiang move to the other side of the table and take Brother Gao’s vacated seat. He seemed so young, suddenly—as young as that day she’d offered him tea in her kitchen. These were not his friends, she realized. They were his bosses. Qiang looked at her for a long moment, then turned his attention to the cards that were being dealt to him.
Two other men moved to stand behind Qiang, and the rest took positions behind Mr. Sheng and Mr. Ling. Lina was left by herself near the door. A few moments later, she felt a hand touch her shoulder. She turned to face the big man called Jian Hua. “Miss,” he said. “Come with me.” Something about his voice put her immediately at ease, and she wished she’d allowed him to take her back to begin with. She didn’t like this feeling of not knowing what was about to happen.
Out in the hallway, there was a girl about Lina’s age waiting at the foot of the stairs. “This is my sister Jian Yun,” Jian Hua said. “We call her Cloudy. She’ll keep you company while we play our game. Okay?”
The girl who stood before her had deep-set eyes and her hair in two braids, like Lina’s.
“Come on,” she said, taking Lina lightly by the wrist.
Lina had no choice but to follow the girl up the stairs. It was dark at the top of the landing except for a pinkish-yellow glow coming from a room down the hall.
Stepping into that room was like entering a conch shell, or an ear canal. The walls were painted the color of warm flesh. A white wooden desk stood by one window. Long lace curtains trailed down from either side of the window’s pleated valance. Lina thought of the curtains in the kitchen, how cheap they looked in comparison to the ones in this room. The rest of what she had seen in the house was sparse and utilitarian, like all the other homes in town. Cloudy’s room was something out of a magazine.
The bed had a headboard with a column on either side of it, the tops of which were shaped to look like Western chess pieces. The bed was unmade and the pillows scattered on the floor. Cloudy picked them up and threw them onto the bed, then motioned for Lina to sit down.
“Wah,” Lina said, bouncing on it a little. “Your bed matches your name.”
“It’s this mattress my brother got for me from Hong Kong. Soft, right?” Cloudy moved some magazines aside and sat cross-legged facing Lina.
The pillows were even softer than the mattress; Cloudy explained that they were filled with goose down. She propped one against the wall, leaned back, and sighed.
“Why do they call you Cloudy?” Lina asked.
“They think I have a bad temper. I don’t, I just give them what they don’t expect. Somebody has to keep those boys in line.”
Now that Lina could see her more clearly, she suspected Cloudy was older than her by a couple of years. Or maybe it was just that she seemed more mature, the way she was leaning
back with her ankles crossed. For Cloudy, it seemed perfectly normal to be awake at two in the morning talking to a girl she’d just met. Lina wanted to know if she was in school but thought it impolite to ask.
“Where are your parents?” she asked instead.
“They haven’t been around in a while. My brothers take care of me.”
“You mean Jian Hua?”
“And Brother Gao, even though he’s really my cousin.”
Lina nodded and looked around at the room some more. On the wall to the left of the desk was a collage of magazine cutouts of movie stars from the forties and fifties. Lina admired their smooth helmet haircuts and bright lips. Cloudy had a mouth like the girls in these magazines—small in width, but as full as her eyes. Cloudy leaned over to peer into the mirror on her nightstand and took up a tube of lipstick. She smeared a rich red hue onto her lips.
“What are you doing here?” she asked Lina mid-application, as though it was the first time the thought had occurred to her. “What’s your name?”
“I’m Lina,” she said. “I’m a friend of Qiang’s. I guess I just came to watch the game.”
“Qiang.” Cloudy’s smile disappeared. She narrowed her eyes and cocked her head at Lina as if trying to see into the back of her skull. Then she pressed her sorghum lips together to make the lipstick more even, and her mouth, drawn inward like that, made her look annoyed. Lina suddenly saw her as her family must—someone whose attractiveness depended on her mood. Cloudy leaned back against the wall to study Lina from a better perspective.
“Do you know—are you friends with Qiang?” Lina asked.
“Sure, I’m friends with Qiang. I see him all the time. Sometimes when they finish early, I go down to talk to him and he tries to tell me where he keeps all those numbers in his head. That’s his special thing, you know?”
“He’s pretty good at card games.”
Just as quickly as Cloudy had distanced herself from Lina, she pulled close again. “He’s the best at card games. I can’t even keep track of all the money they’ve made. People come from three or four towns over to play with us. I think Qiang should get to keep more of it, but Brother Gao gets annoyed if I say anything. Because managing the money is his special thing. Everybody around here has to keep their eye on their own special thing, Brother Gao says, because otherwise it becomes a big mess. So we don’t like anybody who is an extra, you know?”
Here, she gave Lina a meaningful look. Just as Lina wondered if Cloudy meant to say that Lina was the one who was extra, she smiled, her teeth brilliant against her lips.
“What’s your special thing?” Lina asked.
“I already told you,” Cloudy said. “I take care of them. I keep everybody in line.”
She reached over to the nightstand and chose another tube of lipstick. Then she unscrewed it and leaned in to dab at Lina’s mouth.
“It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s not easy keeping the peace. Brother Gao wants us to go to bigger cities. He says there’s more money there. ‘Nobody wants to come out here to some nongmin town,’ he says. ‘Everybody wants to go to Hainan or Yunnan, where the underground gambling is established.’ He says we could have a real business then, instead of living here in this old house just getting by. But Jian Hua doesn’t want to leave. He doesn’t like the idea of not having a home. You know what I tell him, though? We’re a family, and as long as we stick together, home is wherever we go.”
It hadn’t occurred to Lina that Qiang might be leaving town too. The thought of it made her feel lonely, though she didn’t know why—she wouldn’t be around to miss him anyway.
Cloudy handed Lina the mirror. She saw her own thin lips outlined in a glossy strawberry red.
“I look…American,” she said.
“You do! You look like an American teenager. Now we just have to get your hair curled.”
“Can you do that too?” Lina asked.
“Not here,” Cloudy said. “You get it done in the city.” She unfastened the ties on her pigtails and combed her hair through her fingers to show Lina. “See how the ends are curly? That’s from when I permed it.”
Lina touched her hair. The ends were stiff, like sheep’s wool.
“Do you work at the silk factory with Qiang?” Lina pictured them driving off to Shanghai with the windows down, packages of raw silk tied to the cargo bed, Cloudy’s lightly curled hair blowing across his face.
Cloudy frowned. “You think I’m a laborer?”
“No,” said Lina, although she didn’t know what to think.
Cloudy returned the lipsticks to the nightstand, got into bed next to Lina, and turned off the lamp on the bedside table.
“You can sleep with me,” she said in a small voice. Though it was too hot for bedsheets, Lina got underneath them and pulled them up to her chin. She lay faceup like that until she wasn’t aware of anything anymore.
Sometime later, Lina heard the creak of a door handle and opened her eyes to see Jian Hua’s pancake-shaped face looming above her in the half-light. She sat up too quickly and made Cloudy turn in her sleep.
“We’re finished,” Jian Hua said, and he left the room. Qiang took his place in the doorway.
“Qiang!” Lina whispered as she eased herself out of bed. She wanted to hug him but instead shooed him away from the room, stepped out, and closed the door behind her.
He was flushed and happy. “Everything okay?” he asked. When she nodded, he held a finger to his lips and motioned for her to follow him out of the house. As they descended the stairs, she felt a rush of relief. The tendons along Qiang’s neck jumped with each step he took, and she was reminded of the day they had fled the silk factory and run down the stone path that led from the factory to the lake, the way the muscles in his neck had moved in the dappled light beneath the trees. She had thought then how much more fun her childhood would have been if she’d had Qiang for company. Would she have turned out differently if they had become friends earlier? Would she have found herself sitting at a card table one day too?
As they passed the room where the game had taken place, Lina peered into it. There was only Brother Gao seated there now, surrounded by empty glasses and ashtrays. He was splitting piles of money and didn’t look up as they walked by. In the kitchen, the boy who had let them into the house was sweeping the floor, but he didn’t turn around to see Qiang and Lina leave.
“What time is it?” Lina asked Qiang after they were back outside in the cool air. Night was lifting. Blackness had turned to blue and then become tinged with violet. Now that they were walking, Lina could feel herself waking up, and it stirred a kind of longing she wasn’t expecting and had never known before.
“It’s five,” Qiang said. “Are you all right? What’s on your mouth?”
Lina wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “Lipstick,” she said. “I should get this off before I go back home.”
As they made their way down the road, Qiang recapped the game for Lina. He told her he’d gotten so good at cards that it was no longer a question of whether he would win. His friends often made side bets on the game: Which visitor would be angry enough to throw the table? How long would it take for one of them to accuse Qiang of cheating?
“Cloudy says they come from other towns to play you because of your reputation,” said Lina. “Why do they come if they know they’re going to lose?”
“Because they don’t think they will. They hear that I’m a sixteen-year-old and they want to put me in my place. So they’re ready to bet enormous sums on the chance that I’ll lose. They walk in and see the place looking run-down, unclean, and think we’re all just a bunch of spoiled teenagers. So it’s easy to take their money.” His voice had become so smug that Lina found herself wanting to deflate his ego.
“How much of it do you get to keep?” she asked.
Qiang paused at this. “Enough.”
“From what Cloudy says, it seems those out-of-towners are not the only ones being taken advantage of in that house.”
“What do you know?” His voice had hardened, turning the question into a challenge.
They walked in silence until they crossed the main road.
“Wait a minute,” Lina said. “I can’t go home like this.” She led the way through the trees and to the lake. Lina crouched near the water so that she could reach it with her fingers and did her best to scrub the wax off her lips. Then she patted her chin dry with her sleeve. “Is it all off?”
Qiang leaned in close to stare at her mouth. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s hard to tell.” She could see the line of sweat along his brow and feel his breath on her neck. Lina stepped back and turned toward the lake, willing her heart to slow. From the corner of her eye, she saw Qiang turn too, so that they were standing side by side. “In a few hours you’ll be on a train,” he said. “Who knows when I might see you again.”
“I’ll be back before long.”
“But I might not be here anymore.”
When she turned to look at him, she saw that he was holding something out to her. A bracelet lay there in his palm, looking bright against the blueness of the water and woods that surrounded them.
“It’s a going-away present,” he said. “I got it last week from a guy and his wife who came to play. He works in imports, said he’d just gotten back from a trip to Africa. Africa, can you imagine? I don’t remember the name of the country. Anyway, his friend comes to our table regularly, and he brought this guy—you should have seen the kind of jewelry he was wearing. Elephant tusks around his neck and the pattern of his shirt was…tian a! We don’t have those textiles here. He said he’d been all over the world. I told Brother Gao I would rather have something from abroad than money. I said I’d like something for a girl, a friend of mine who was leaving. So for my cut, we played for one of the bracelets on the wife’s arms. It’s made of ivory, can you tell?”
As Qiang spoke, Lina turned the beads over in her fingers. She’d never seen ivory before. It was light, the color of milk. Every other bead had been carved into the shape of an animal—an elephant, a lion, a tiger, a monkey. They were separated by smaller round beads of ivory that were polished so smooth that they gleamed, even in the low light of morning.