Water Ghosts

by Shawna Yang Ryan

  But there are lights behind the fluttering yellow curtains. Some laughter. A little noise. She wonders about what goes on in there. Desperate men? Forbidden white girls? She steps a little closer. A small beating distracts her. Above, on the yellow bulb. Moths clustered and fighting toward the diffused glow. Their wings collage over the glass.

  The blast of an overnight boat carrying cargo down the river reminds her of the time. She turns down the alley past the Lucky Fortune, the walls that pose as dead shell. Howar taught her a famous couplet about love in the later days of their courtship: A silkworm spins until death; a candle weeps itself dry.

  10

  CHLOE WAITS UNTIL nightfall to look for Sofia. She waits until the lights go dark up and down the street. She knows who George is sweet on, and they make an exchange: his secret for hers.

  Someone walks down the alley ahead of her. She pulls back, leans against the side of the gambling hall, and waits. Things should be quiet by ten. It’s rare for her to happen upon another person wandering the alleys. Dead center of the planked alleyway is the quietest.

  Before going to Sofia’s window, she pauses at the church. She has not seen the boat-women since their arrival. The room exists only in shades of blue and gray. In blue light, the women sprawl on the floor, woven in and out of lumped blankets. They shine with relief and exaltation. No lights are on, but Chloe can see their settled faces, their limp hands. They cast their own blue haze into the dark church, where even Jesus-onthe-cross is in the shadows. Chloe grips the sill and presses closer to the window. They are so close, held away by mere glass. The bubbles in the glass trap the blue light. Runaway prostitutes, some have said. Despite the speculation, they are without pasts or stories. They could be anyone. And here, in Locke, they’ve found sleeping sanctuary in the church.

  She walks around the church and looks up at Sofia’s dark window on the second floor. A light shines behind the curtained back-door window, and Chloe glides away to avoid its cast. The yellow house, attached to the church, sits on a circle of lawn that bleeds over into the neighbor’s. There is no fence, no front or back. The light switches off. Chloe gives twenty seconds for the person to move from kitchen to bedroom. She imagines running for the door. Knob held tight, turned slow. She presses her body to the door as she pushes it open without a creak. She’s never been inside. She imagines dark yellow linoleum floors. Rag drying over the lip of the sink. She drags her fingers across the wall to guide herself through the night-blind hallway. The bump of a light switch. Shape of a door, then free air. The stairs. Above, the challenge will be to find the right bedroom. Will Sofia’s door be hung with some plaque? Painted wood with the Lord’s Prayer in pretty flower script? Indeed it is. The door isn’t latched. A gentle push, and it swings open silently. Sofia is sitting up in bed, blanket pulled up to her chin, waiting for the intruder whom she has sensed for minutes now.

  Chloe’s fear ends her fantasy. She creeps a little closer, as if sizing up the house, then leans against a tree. The light in the kitchen still shines. Should she wake Sofia? She and Sofia have been sneaking out for a month now, nightgowned and barefoot into the summer nights. Chloe can think of no better relief for the monotony than this scrap of brightness, running around with the wine-haired girl who was the first girl outside the brothel to talk to her. Sofia had sat right next to her, Coke in hand, on the bench outside of the Yuen Chong Market, and asked if Chloe was visiting. She was a half woman in girl’s clothes—tanned and freckled, white-socked and dirty-kneed, with a kitten mouth and coffee-colored eyes. Her tantrums made Chloe smile.

  She waits for some nudge at the window that will show that Sofia too is waiting, but even after the kitchen light switches off, Sofia’s room stays dark.

  THE HOWLING OF the coyotes in the pear orchard haunts Chloe’s sleep. They race among the pear trees, trample rotting pears, track the sweet juice behind them. She’s among them. She runs too, across the acres of pears, across the dirt road that cleaves the orchard. She leaves funnels of dust behind her. When she reaches the post-and-barbed-wire border, she turns back and lopes up the road that leads to the Locke family home. It’s built on Indian burial ground. Beneath her paws, the rocky dirt turns to soft dust, fed by blood and bones. She circles the house and sniffs the scent of sleeping people inside. She squeezes beneath the porch, beneath the lattice, and digs. There is her own breath huffing hot in the dark, the whine of her anxiety as her nails scratch at the dirt. She uncovers a tiny skull. She clenches it in her mouth, and eases her way back out from under the house. She runs back down the road and into the trees. The other coyotes follow her. She leads, dizzied by the sound of feet trampling grass behind her.

  11

  UNDERNEATH RICHARD’S WORDS, Poppy knows there are things unspoken. He wouldn’t have come otherwise. Is she pleasing you? When you kiss her, does she wet your lips with her saliva? Does she cry real tears? And when you fuck her . . . ?

  But these are questions too intimate to ask. So she tells him the things she knows, the things he doesn’t need to tell her. When Richard tells her she is thinking not as a seer, but as a businesswoman, she tells him the problem (the threat, the danger) is more than competition. Richard scoffs. Finally, he sinks into one of the plum velvet chairs and ends the conversation with a dismissive laugh and asks to see Chloe.

  After Richard leaves, Poppy sits with her indignation. She does know things. After her arrival in America, she’d befriended a woman from New orleans who also worked with the singsong girls. The girls sang, danced, and served, and then, when only strong white liquor was left and toasts were done, during the digesting period of nursing drinks, their boss presented Sarah.

  He introduced her as a native princess, rubbed her pink nipples with coal, dressed her in long blue feathers and uneven wooden beads, and made her dance around and around the tables. Sarah was his highest-paid dancer, adding exoticism to his already exotic stock with her lemon-green eyes and burnt-butter skin.

  Their boss, a whiteman catering to whitemen, advertised Chinese courtesans and a real African princess in posters that ran wild with ink illustrations and swooping letters. The spectacle traveled from city to city, banquet to banquet, the women treated little better than finely dressed whores. And they did not cater only to society’s lowest. Some of the richest hired the troupe (the fiction of their title!) as well, and brought their wives, who giggled over snifters of brandy, the lust growing in their pale citified eyes.

  The boss narrated a tale about a captured African princess brought before the emperor of China. Poppy, barely into her twenties, was the emperor—dressed in royal yellow robes and coiled black hair. She wore a fake mustache and beard, which she twirled between her fingers as she swung her other loose-sleeved arm in passionate exclamations at Sarah. Then he made them do things Poppy had heard about only in whispers about women who loved women. She thought them mythical creatures, these women, like phoenixes, but here was Poppy, her mouth on Sarah’s breast, or between her legs, as whitewomen in furs and with corseted breasts gasped in a horror that was excitement.

  Later, in a back room off of the kitchen, the women undressed. Sarah wiped the coal from her body and Poppy peeled away her mustache and beard. Sarah accompanied each motion with a sigh until Poppy comforted her with the promise of better things.

  How do you know? Sarah asked, and Poppy told her about her premonitions and dreams.

  And you can tell my future?

  I can try.

  Do you need to see my palm?

  What for?

  To see my future. Can’t you read my palm?

  Poppy tried to explain that it was more than the creases in one’s palm. It was the heat below the skin, the sense of a person through their touch and smell and beyond that, a feeling that could be explained only as faith. Poppy asked for a piece of Sarah’s clothing to sleep with. The scent could inspire dreams.

  As the caravan traveled through the night, they slept on bunks inside a wagon, Poppy with Sarah’s shirt smelling s
weet and faintly of mildew beneath her head. She never dreamed the absurd ephemera she’d heard peppered the sleep of others. She distinguished her premonitions from her dreams by the clear logical narratives of the former, no matter how surprising the discovered information.

  In her sleep, she saw: Sarah, in her twenties, on a turn through oakland meets a man, a butcher, with glasses so thick they stretch his eyes to watery lengths. He is a tall and pasty man with jutting shoulders and no upper lip. Yet there is something about him that assures Sarah—a fatherly glance over the counter, the extra strips of bacon or lean meat he slips into her order before he rolls it up in crackling white paper.

  Sarah becomes carnivorous, and returns to the butcher’s every day, if only for soup bones. She returns for ten minutes of conversation across a glass meat case until he invites her for an evening drive to the hills.

  With the lights emanating from the hills to the sea in lines, and San Francisco in the glowing distance, they eat olives and drink homemade wine. (Black market trading, he confides, I traded a lot of beef for this.) She feels his knobby fingers on the back of her neck and is not naive enough to wonder where this leads. She knows, and so she leads, with only a glancing thought to the gold band he wears.

  The night on the hill is followed by free cuts of meat: T-bone, pork loin, filet mignon, pig knuckles, rump roast. When she finishes cleaning houses, and he finishes slicing and selling meat, they share the evening.

  She knows, she knows he has a wife, but she also knows she deserves this little love he bestows upon her. She can’t be blamed if a woman can’t keep her own man. And so when he says, Will you marry me? and offers her a tarnished emerald ring, she says yes. They marry at city hall and he kisses her and says he can’t bring her home. Not just yet.

  Then there is the part that Sarah would not see, but Poppy did: the butcher’s return home to his wife and two sons. The wife, Hannah, is also thin and knobby and older, just like the butcher. Her hair, flat and stick-straight, is nearly all gray and cut into a severe bob. She also works hard, maintaining a home with a small green yard where her boys had played in a tub of cold water during a summer years before. Her two sons hold the promise of good looks lacking in either of their parents.

  Childhood sweethearts. It would take a childhood sweetheart, Hannah thinks, to tolerate his idiosyncrasies. The butcher shaves his legs and armpits, and his hands always smell of meat about to turn. She is not so lovesick as to think she loves these things about him, but she tolerates them.

  So when he returns home and tells her bluntly that he no longer loves her, she feels she deserves a bit more. But when he tells her he’s given her emerald ring to a twenty-five-year-old maid, her heart stops. He watches her blankly as she cries and screams. She lifts a hand at him, which he calmly grabs and holds to her side.

  Hannah throws herself on the bed (their bed their bed) and the butcher sits awkwardly beside her. He considers offering her a comforting hand, just a touch on the back, but stops himself. As she drifts off to tear-exhausted sleep, she murmurs, I won’t give you a divorce.

  To the butcher, this is the most outrageous declaration of the evening. She won’t grant him a divorce! He goes to the garage to search for a solution. He finds it in a hammer hanging on the wall. He rushes back to the house to catch Hannah still in sleep. He sees only her back and her head cradled in her crossed arms like a reprimanded child. I won’t give you a divorce. The singularity of the statement. What selfishness—to not allow his happiness because of her own unhappiness! After seventeen years of marriage. He swings the hammer and drives it into the back of her skull.

  When Sarah awoke and sought out Poppy’s revelation—would she leave this troupe, would she marry, would she be rich?—Poppy told her as honestly as she could, You will find true love.

  What Poppy would like to tell Richard, as she fumes in the wake of his leaving, is that years after she escaped the traveling show, she opened the Sacramento Bee to a picture of Sarah. She was older and wore a large hat. Her head tipped back, her mouth straight and haughty—a face that said, I won the man. And below the picture, the story of a butcher who killed his wife with a hammer for the love of a woman with burnt-butter skin.

  RICHARD HAS GONE to the red room again. even with her hands over her ears, Poppy hears voices. The whole house vibrates with them—not only in that room, but all of the others that line the hall. And even deeper than these, voices of people who came before—no one has died in the house, but echoes remain of words said with passion. Sound waves that endlessly bounce against the walls, trapped. Her senses are getting sharper. As a young woman, she’d been able only to see things. Through her twenties, the other abilities had intensified: now she can hear the people crying out from their graves or back from the future, and can sniff out a person’s secrets. She longs to break down Chloe’s world with a word to the preacher’s wife, but first she must go see Uncle Happy.

  EVERY SUNNY DAY, a man squats at the side of the road and writes characters in the dirt. Top to bottom, right to left. The scrape of the stick in the dirt whittles it to a fine point. Children peer around corners and laugh. Poppy passes him on her way to the Men’s Center. It is whispered that he suffers from the lack of a wife.

  Poppy stands a moment in the doorway of the center to allow her eyes to adjust to the dim light inside. A man sitting on a bench next to the door watches her.

  Hey, you old whore! You can’t go in there. Men’s Center, can’t you read?

  Poppy spits past his feet and steps into the room. She squints into the darkness. Happy sits near the back, reading the paper. The bench he sits on was carved with dancing dragons and phoenixes by Happy himself and the wood has gone smooth and shiny, the flared scales on the dragons eased and rounded.

  She takes the kettle off the warmer and offers him more hot water for his tea. She pours some for herself and joins Happy on his bench.

  She takes his hand in hers. He has been thinking of opium, the occasional ball of it pressed into the bowl of his pipe. His intense desire followed by guilt and an impassioned letter home, yet another for his wife to add to the pile of correspondences from a husband she has not seen since 1866. He cannot even remember her face; the image faded only a few years after his arrival and so he clings to this: the soft rusk of his fingertips across her red silk veil on their wedding night. He hears her giggle, and supposes the presence of his nervous erection. But everything is so long ago, he feels like a split river, a branch far from the confluence and flowing helplessly to sea. Poppy lets go. From her handbag, she pulls a cigarette box and offers it to Happy; he waves his hand. She lights a cigarette.

  Uncle Happy, you haven’t been in to see us!

  I’m too old.

  One is never too old.

  I can’t even pack my own pipe anymore.

  We can pack your pipe.

  Happy laughs. Seeing one of your girls pack my pipe might give me a heart attack.

  Poppy tips her head and gives him a demure look. She takes a drink of tea.

  Still having dreams? he asks.

  Always.

  And what do they say now?

  You know the women who came?

  Everybody’s been talking of them. Talking talking talking—the buzzing in my ear won’t stop. They are young? Beautiful? Unmarried? What kind of refugees are they?

  One claims to be Fong Man Gum’s wife.

  And is she?

  Yes.

  And your dreams?

  I think—Poppy taps her nail on her cup—I’m not sure, but I don’t think they are who they claim to be.

  That sounds like the protest of a jealous woman.

  Poppy smiles, relents: Sometimes it’s hard to tell when a dream is just that. I mean, I think they are ghosts.

  Happy nods as he puts fresh tobacco into his pipe. He says, There are ghosts up and down the Delta. Locke is the least of their hauntings. Ten thousand dead between here and Suisun alone. Ten thousand! Hell, the Locke house itself is built
on an Indian burial ground.

  These aren’t Indian ghosts.

  The rippled scratch of a match struck: I saw men go myself. When we were reclaiming the land, we had no place to bury them. We lived in the camps, moving around, so we just stuck them in the ground wherever we were working. Some are in the levees, their bones worked into the peat, into the dirt. I’d imagine many of them are unhappy. Maybe they’re looking for me. Happy sucks on his pipe. He rolls the smoke around in his mouth, blows it out. Then, as if remembering China is just one step from remembering building the levees, Happy rubs his scalp and says, You know, my wife is still in Chungshan? Have I told you this? Sixty-two years I haven’t seen her.

  Yes, Uncle Happy.

  Yes, I have told you. But I’m too poor, too old now. He smiles and sighs.

  The ghosts, she reminds him. every plank of wood—from floor to ceiling—ghosts. Babies, adults, old people. And they’ve been here longer. My own wife is in Chungshan, you know. eighty-three years old. No children. Ghost or not, let them be. A man deserves his wife. My own wife—such little feet you could cup in a hand. In just one hand! Tiny, bundled up like small . . . thrushes. No, sparrows. No. No. Hummingbirds. Like small limp hummingbirds. She came from a good family. I ruined her. The money. everything. What good are those beautiful feet now?