Water Ghosts

by Shawna Yang Ryan

  He stands in only a shirt, pants at his ankles, and nods again. She grabs a rubber and slips it on. I like that blanket, he says. It’s pretty. He touches her hair; it’s almost an affectionate gesture.

  Please don’t.

  He shrugs a little. She leans back on the bed and casts an impatient eye at him. He straddles her on his knees.

  She closes her eyes to the rose-yellow walls and tries to remember how many bones there are in the human body. Two hundred and six, she thinks it is. She names to herself all the major organs—is skin considered an organ? What about the tongue? He whimpers in her ear. Is it true that cows have four stomachs? She turns her face away from his mouth, so that his breath warms her hair and not her ear. A groan and then a collapse.

  There’s a trash basket under the bed, she says. Towels up there. She gestures toward the shelf. She sits up when he does and awkwardly tries to straighten the coverlet beneath her. He unrolls, wipes, and discards. He buttons and buckles.

  Do I . . .? He hesitates.

  Pay me.

  He slips some bills from his pocket and hands them to her.

  Thank you, he says. If he had a hat, she knows, he’d tip it.

  She nods. Shut the door on your way out if you will.

  DURING THE HEAT of the day, the Yuen Chong turns off its lights. The shopgirl upstairs pulls the shades and opens the door. Downstairs, the refrigerator cases hum, even louder in the absence of the sound of the electric lights. Chloe tucks a curl behind her ear, lost in the pondering of goods. The shuff-shuff of shoes down the aisle catches her attention. It is Sofia, jar of tan lozenges in hand. Chloe measures her escape.

  They have not seen each other in weeks. The day after their kiss, Chloe sat at the side of the road selling pear seconds. Sofia had bounced by with a gaggle of kids on their way to swim under the packing shed. The group laughed, cast curses under their breath, sent thorns into Chloe’s heart. Sofia averted her eyes. For two nights, she ignored Chloe’s rattle of pebbles against her window, and the next thirteen nights Chloe was too hurt to try. Though Chloe swore she didn’t care, she kept an ear cocked to town gossip, straining for a word about Sofia. The speakers sensed her desire, kept reticent, and Chloe’s curiosity grew alongside her anger at Sofia. Sofia had disappeared from her life for fifteen days and Chloe struggles to remember the sense of her, of what it’d been like between them. Chloe heads for the milk case, but Sofia’s pull is too strong and she glances back.

  Sofia is looking at her. Embarrassment furrows her brow. Chloe knows speaking to her will bring Sofia further shame, so Chloe tries to save her the trouble. She walks away.

  Sofia comes up behind her. Wait. Hi. Hello. I was just getting some lozenges; my throat’s been killing me something awful. I think I picked up a cold at the tree. It was so damp. She talks fast. This is a friendly interaction; this is the conversation people make in grocery stores. Comments on the weather should come next.

  Chloe won’t yield. She just nods. She glazes her eyes, sets her mouth, as if Sofia is just another man coming to her with money and insults. Sofia blushes. She can’t stop talking.

  Feels like it might be getting cooler. Mama got a new fan. It really cuts the heat. Helps sleeping.

  Chloe nods again. A bit of advice tickles her tongue: You don’t know how to love yet, only how to take. But Sofia doesn’t deserve that much.

  I need to pay for this. Excuse me. She walks past Sofia. A finger of space between them; they do not even brush shoulders.

  32

  THE MAN WHO carves characters into the dirt in unsent letters home squats barefoot, toenails red with dust. His carving stick is held still, one stroke away from the character for “me.” His head hangs down. The dust swirls a little around him in the breeze, then settles.

  Strange, Poppy thinks, and continues on. It is midday, but Main Street has gone still. No one is pumping gas at the pump in front of the Foon Hop Co. Grocery; there are no dogs loping between parked cars. No children run in and out of the Yuen Chong with candy or soda. even the rumble of river traffic is gone. Poppy puts her hand on the back of her neck; the sun is already starting to burn.

  The dominoes in front of the Men’s Center have been scooped up and put away. The men on the bench stare toward the street. They do not glance at her. She is accustomed to being ignored.

  Inside the center, the lanterns are burning, but the games of poker and pai gow have faded into old men sitting stiffly on stools and benches. The cards are laid out on the felt-top tables in front of them. The light cast by the Coleman lanterns makes the scene look like it was torn from a yellowing newspaper. Poppy is not sure what is happening, but she is reluctant to break the peace.

  Happy sits on the phoenix-dragon bench. His pipe is propped on the table beside him. Smoke rises gently from it. His eyes, with irises that have gone blue like a baby’s, seem to have drifted to another place. Poppy whispers, Uncle Happy? She sits next to him. She reaches across and taps the tobacco from his pipe and into an ashtray.

  The teakettle wheezes lightly and its top rattles from the steam. She gets up and fiddles with the heat. She sits back down.

  I want to talk to you, Uncle Happy, she says. He does not blink. She sighs. She takes his hand in hers and feels sadness emanating from his warm palm to hers. No images come to her, just heat-sense. Her chest feels weak and her breath flutters out like ribbons. There’s a soft oomph! as her breath and ability to speak is taken from her. She holds on to Uncle Happy’s hand, linked by sadness. She stays with him in the dim light.

  AT FIRST, SHE cannot find the women’s boat. She shuffles carefully from tree line to waterline, hoping to stub her toe against a fragment. As her eye becomes accustomed to the varying shades of brown, she finds it topsy-turvy. only the very bottom of the hull emerges from the ground. It seems the children built sand towers, poured buckets of river water to make mud pies, and gradually the boat disappeared under collapsed dirt and sludgy ground. The tie flag is wound into the mud, with a tongue of tainted color exposed. of course, she thinks, they’ve forgotten it. A toy can be fun for only so long.

  For many years, she’s felt sure of most everything. even things she could not control, she could predict. Now she feels lost. The sight of the forgotten boat, which will fade into the ground like buried bones in a matter of months, gives her heart pangs. She has to grasp every nuance of memory or, she fears, she’ll lose Richard and all the little claps of happiness that have flashed intermittently over the years.

  When she was sixteen, she had visions of whitemen in boats as she threw out the night slop buckets. The stench of an evening’s worth of cooling human waste made her think she was looking through the hills where boys grazed water buffalo, to the sea, to a history on the water, but two days later a man came to the village, promises folded like bills in his pocket. He wore city clothes and a hat.

  A day later, he sat at the table with her father—a farmer who tended fields filled with more stones than turnips. Her mother boiled water in the shadows and cradled her newborn boy, his mouth suckling air. The man brought out a photo and laid it on the table. A laundry owner, he said, and slid the picture over to her father. Stiff-backed in black and white, dressed in Western clothing with cropped hair, unsmiling. A Gold Mountain man. And if you don’t like him, the man said, patting his pocket, I have many more. All rich. All in need of a wife. He gave Poppy kind smiles.

  At night, she heard her parents in the thin-planked loft above, her mother’s insistent voice against her father’s murmur. Then the patter of her mother’s bare feet, the slide of a trunk—her dowry trunk, she knew—the creak of hinges. Her mother exclaimed as she threw gold jewelry jangling onto the bed. Her mother said it was an opportunity; her father said the man should pay them.

  Thus it was negotiated: the man paid $250 U.S.—for them, a fortune. He said her husband would sponsor her trip to America. The gold went back into the dowry chest, saved as a gift for her brother’s future wife. And Poppy’s premonition—of whitem
en, of boats, of a mountain made of gold—became truth.

  Disembarking from the boat in her travel clothes to evenings spent gazing through the wire-covered detention barracks window, Poppy smiled. Old women scolded her, told her to cover up her big horse teeth, that no man wants a woman as brash as that. So Poppy smiled behind her hand. She was so overcome by the excitement, her premonitions failed her.

  Her husband spoke beautiful words in complicated sentences. It was only later, locked into his flat, that her euphoria of travel subsided and the visions came blaring back to her. Nothing was legal; there’d be no ceremony.

  Ignorance. Poppy climbs atop the bit of exposed hull. Her resting heels make half-moons in the dirt. Ducks play and skitter across the water. only ignorance, those lapses when her visions went dark, has given her sun-streaks of joy.

  Blindness struck again the day she met Richard. She was waiting for the herbalist to measure out her sugared ginger. The bell above the door rang. Richard walked to the counter and waited for the herbalist’s attention. Richard said to Poppy in his still-water voice, Do you know any remedies for a cold?

  There’s chicken broth, of course. And if you’re losing your voice, a beverage of boiled dried kumquats will work well.

  Poppy laughed and Richard laughed too. It burst from him like a child’s eruption of surprise. The way he maintained himself—his carefully coifed hair, cream skin, and pressed clothes—radiated the illusion of being handsome, and Poppy was not sure if she could see past all these delicate, intentional touches. He did not look like a man with a cold. She paid for her ginger and, before Richard could tell the herbalist what he needed, she touched his arm and told him he could visit two doors down. Her fingers on his arm, she saw nothing, just a wide dark future, full of possibilities. The herbalist politely ignored the exchange.

  Now she sits atop the boat and knows there should be ideas and hunches shooting through her like spasms of pain. She wants to know why and how these women have turned the town upside down. It has to be more than their numbers. Sure there are twenty men or more for every one woman. But are men such beasts that the flow of town life should be jarred? The boat is a mere dumb piece of wood. She’s ignorant again, but there’s no relief.

  33

  CORLISSA DIPS A plate into a basin of cold water. Sofia is upstairs sleeping off an illness. She’s been slightly feverish for a few days, breathing in watery gasps and coughing. When Corlissa goes to wipe Sofia’s forehead with a cool cloth, she finds her flushed, a faint smudge of dried sweat across her temples. She’s heavy-eyed and weak, like a baby that has yet to open its eyes rooting for the nipple. Corlissa feels protective, and if she puts a name on it, she might call it love. Of course she loves her daughter. She swipes water from the cleaned plate. Of course.

  The dishes go into the rack. The sun will dry them quickly. She wipes the counter down with a rag. She hangs it over the faucet. The kitchen is warming fast, so she closes the thin yellow curtains against the glare. She sits down at the table. She turns her hands—backs freckled and blue-veined, nails clipped to small crescents of white, each knuckle deeply lined, and wrinkles, small and faint, running up each finger. The pads of her fingers are still pruned from the washing. She rests her elbow on the table, her head on her palm, and sighs. She wonders what her sisters are doing, or if her mother is still alive. Corlissa’s letters to her mother had gone unanswered; after a few years, she stopped trying. The last time she saw her mother was the day Corlissa and Howar announced their intent to marry. Howar had stood in the doorway, reluctant to enter as her mother clanged pots to celebrate her daughter’s marriage to a Chinaman. Emily, the last child still at home, leaned against the wall, watching silently until she turned and left the room. Corlissa and Howar boarded the train to Nevada that afternoon.

  Everything feels so heavy—Howar’s absence, Sofia’s sleeping breath, the quiet of the women who move with whisper feet. She feels a blush rising up her face. She fans herself. She has to get out of the house.

  In the daytime, the flour mill rattles with business, backs are bent in the gardens, and the pigs slop around happily in the mud, slaughter held off for hours. Bees are drunk among the fennel and goldenrod as she passes through on her way to the tree. She supposes if she were a child she’d have a nickname for the tree, and it would hold delicious surprises, the possibility of fairy pretending or mock battles. Instead, she can see only the strength in the limbs, the bark so tough that it wouldn’t bear the friction mark of a rope. She kicks her toe at the roots, upturns the dust, exposing insects and dead grass. A discarded soda bottle lies in the tall weeds; a cork stopper in the shadow of a root. There are candy wrappers and a decaying apple core.

  She glances around to see if anyone is coming before tying her skirt into a knot between her legs and grabbing on to some low branches. She braces her feet against the trunk and pulls herself up. She stands in the first fork and decides to go higher. At the very top, the limbs become thin and tangled in each other, but there are still a good few feet to climb until then. She laughs; she has not climbed a tree since she was a child. She wonders if she noticed then the way the bark eats into the skin and the branches give under the body.

  When she has gone as high as she can go, she rests on a limb and lets her legs dangle. There are small scratches on her skin. Her hands are sticky. It feels cooler in the dark web of sticks and leaves. She wipes her forehead sweat on her dress and laughs a little more. She could watch people pass by, listen in on conversations. She twists around to see if there is a view through the branches. She can see a corner of the slough, a spot of star-shiny water, sunlit. Trees and vines cover the rest.

  Leaves and twigs break below. She tightens her hands to steady herself. The two women pass beneath. Voices clear as peals. Sai Fung leads with small energetic steps and turns her head back toward So Wai every few words. In Corlissa’s childhood game, she would be a spy, and elusive truths would be revealed in this moment. She holds her breath. Critical words spoken just as the three come into alignment like mystical planets. But the talk is plain. Sai Fung stops to poke at a flower, sniff a little, and brush her finger over the pollen.

  So hot. Doesn’t it drive people to the water? What we need is rain.

  A flood.

  Anything. Anything wet. So Wai turns her head and meets Corlissa’s eyes through the patchwork of leaves. Corlissa catches her breath. The light shifts, the leaves move, Corlissa exhales. The women walk away.

  And then they are over the hump of the hill. Dark figures disappearing beneath a horizon of land. She sees them again a few yards off, walking toward the water. They follow the edge on a soft mud trail and dissolve into a thicket around a bend. Corlissa turns to an ant that crawls across her knee. She pinches it up and drops it to the ground. The childish pleasure of tree climbing seems silly now.

  SHE HAS BRUSHES to flurry the dust from the furniture cushions, dusters to sweep across wood surfaces, long-handled bristles for the toilet, sponges for the sink. They have been chosen from the open suitcase of a traveling salesman, or checked off in a catalog order form, sent away for with money tucked in the licked-closed envelope. She has rubber gloves to protect her hands and keep them silky smooth, an apron to tie around her waist. There are a variety of cleaners and soaps—powders, liquids, bars—in tins and cardboard. on their labels there are smiling children, mustachioed men, women in aprons. She has specially treated rags that leave a gloss across the grain of her wood floors.

  She drags a cloth across drops of water. The water forms a trail; she wipes as she follows. The water puddles at the base of the sofa. She mops this up. She glances up, listening for a creak from Sofia’s room, some indication that Sofia has been up and about. There is nothing. She peels off her glove and presses into the sofa cushion. It is damp, with the water-dark imprint left by a sitting person.

  She’s been twice more to inquire about work at Jack Yang’s restaurant. And each time he has sidestepped her with claims of too many workers, not
enough money. Though many are eager to help by claiming newcomers as a long-lost sister, an actually dead brother, finding tangibles such as housing and money is more difficult. The women’s presence is the feeling of walking into a room where the sofa has shifted a foot to the left. The room is still familiar, but one bumps a knee or hip for a week before a new path is learned. Turn one way toward new open space, another way for a bruise. She feels sympathy, but also longs to walk into a room without the fright of coming upon the two women sitting in the dark, without the labor of having to sweep their salt dust from the church, and without the unsettled curiosity of wiping down wet furniture.

  THERE’S A LETTER today, the Japanese postmaster says. He reaches into the cubby marked with the Lees’ address and brings down a thin envelope with a local postmark. Scrawl like spider legs. Corlissa has nothing to post. The letter is taken with a trepidation that slows to a dawdling through town. The glare of sunlight turns the streets gaudy: the tufts of animal hair caught on a knot of fence, the raw exposed skin on gurgling chickens, dirt clinging to the drying paint on a house. The world matches the ugliness of her impending task. Inside the letter, she already knows, is the news that So Wai’s husband cannot be found, or has passed away. When she opens her mouth to tell her, she will watch her breath exhale away a whole world.

  In another church, her footsteps would echo. In this modest single room, her entrance is flat and solid. She steps over grains of white salt to the very front and takes a seat. The wooden Christ hangs His head before her. Mournful lines have been etched around His drooping mouth. His belly button is a divot scooped from below, leaving a tiny flap of wooden skin over the top. even His kneecaps have been carved with care. He is shiny, as if wailing women have stroked the wood with pleading hands. Corlissa has her own plea—that her words will not devastate.

  She turns her head at shuffling through the door. The women are surprised to see her. Her weak smile is too revealing.