Two-Gun & Sun

by June Hutton

  Wait. I thought you would—

  But he turned sharply, nose in the air as he set off, on the hunt for dinner, I presumed, while I was left with the image of flickering flames and nude limbs and a package the length of a rifle.

  In my mind I picked through my pockets for something sharp. The tip of a pencil. A jab to the eye, if needed.

  We walked in silence until I asked, Morris Cohen, he’s a good friend of yours?

  We reached the end of the next stretch of shacks before he answered. He’s an okay guy. He’s got our respect.

  Like your national leader?

  I could feel a smile in his pause. No, he said, not like him. Us Chinese think of Morris as a good buddy. One of our own. It was a Chinese, a restaurant owner, who was being robbed this time, and Morris came to the rescue. Knocked the guy out with a punch. Not many white guys who’d do that. And he likes to gamble, Morris. So do the Chinese, so we get along.

  You, too?

  He shifted. I could hear the movement of his arms.

  Coming here was a gamble.

  He could have been referring to himself, or to me, coming to Lousetown today.

  He continued, Morris says he’s no hero, and not much of a white man, either. He says, I’m a Jew. To an Englishman, I’m as good as Chinese.

  From under my newspaper I could see that Vincent had captured even the mannerisms of his friend, raising his shoulders and lifting his palms as he spoke.

  Just look at them.

  His chin indicated the surrounding shacks and their occupants. Chinese labourers, I gathered.

  I figured a printer like me who could read and write in English and French could do better, could get a job anywhere in the west.

  How did you learn?

  Doesn’t matter. Here I am, printing Chinese.

  And some English.

  He laughed a harsh laugh. Menus!

  More than that, if you came to the Bullet.

  I stepped around a puddle, newspaper held high, before I realized what I’d said. Did I really want him as my printer? Quickly, I asked, What part of China were you from?

  His answer wouldn’t have mattered. I knew little about the country. Rain spattered onto the newsprint. Beneath the dampening sheets that smelled of ink and something like the ocean, I listened as he continued.

  All over. My pop was a baker. Trained with the Portuguese. So did his father, but old pops was the tops. No Chinese could bake bread like he did, European-style. He was a hit with the western bosses. He worked in their kitchens and we followed them as they spread up the coast, from Hong Kong to Swatow, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo. Finally Shanghai.

  He paused and said, It’s a great city, full of internationals, French, Russian, German. American and British. Japanese, too.

  American. That was it. I could hear it in his manner of speaking, a casualness, and in his vowels, slightly drawn-out, flattened. Another accent in there as well. He said too as though it were teww. French or Chinese, I wasn’t sure.

  His arms and hands moved high and wide as he described. The French Concession has houses big as museums. Trees up and down the streets. Our leader lives there, when he’s in exile. In other parts of China they want him dead.

  I lifted the page to study him. What a complicated man, with his modern thoughts and traditional hair, and now his clear love of the foreigners in Shanghai. Weren’t they the very bosses who made his father cut his hair? Weren’t they the people his leader wanted out of China? His leader’s struggle was the sort of news I was after for The Bullet: far-reaching, thought-provoking. There had to be a way to write about him without risking his safety. I’d have to work on that.

  Some parts of Shanghai aren’t so swell, he said. Some look a lot like this. Shacks. Laundry poles. No streets, just a dirt path on a dirt bank sliding into a stream. Watch that water.

  He reached for my wrist, then pulled his hand back just as I recoiled, newspaper crushed at my waist as one hand plunged into my pocket for the pencil.

  We stared at each other for a moment, my swollen eyes fully exposed now, but they were the last thing on my mind.

  The main creek’s farther up, he said. It’s clean. This one’s a slop bucket. You want to find your own way back—follow its stink.

  I didn’t reply, wasn’t sure he was expecting me to. He kept walking and so did I, dropping the crumpled paper into the dirt. The rain had lightened to a drizzle, anyway.

  We heard this place was better, he said, but nope. Just another treaty port. English on that side, us, here. Crazy, isn’t it? To go to all that trouble to drag the worst of Shanghai here, to Black Mountain.

  His outpouring had left me feeling wrung dry.

  We were approaching the pithead now, its shithouse shape spilling dung beetles into the night. I could hear their muttered accents on the wind, see the eerie sight of their headlamps beaming fuzzily in the fog, blotting out the bodies that walked beneath them. I had left my own headlamp at home, not expecting to be out this late, and in strange company, not wanting the ridiculousness of one on my head.

  He said nothing more to me than the simple words, Monday, then.

  In a flash he had darted back into the jumble of shacks.

  So, it was decided. I had my printer.

  Crooks, Cowboys and Idiots

  It was still dark when I woke. I had slept fitfully. A swig from the bottle was of some help. I fell into dreams of home, clumps of mist rolling like tumbleweeds up the hill from the lake. White and filmy, not grey like here.

  I flipped off the wool coat that had served as my blanket, the mattress vividly striped under my arms, the sheets still not unpacked.

  Home was just a train ride away. Board at the coast in time for breakfast, roll through the valleys, sparks flying as the tracks curved around mountain sides, sometimes tunnelling right through them, branching out into spur lines for the mines, copper and coal and silver, slowing past the fields and the squat, two-storey Russian communal houses, finally reaching Nelson after breakfast the next day.

  They’d be picking the pears right now, the fruit so heavy they’d prop up the branches with rakes.

  I counted on my fingers: six of those harvests since my father seized the fruit runs to stop me from seeing that boy. John. English for Ivan. Six years, yet here I was thinking of him again.

  We had met during cherry-picking season. He had hair so blonde it looked white where he stood in the shadows of the wooden delivery doors. Our hands brushed that first time when he helped me lug in the baskets of red fruit. Sometimes I drove, but usually I was the swamper on these runs, dragging crates of fruit off the back of the truck, while Will or Robbie drove. The cherries from our region were noted for their rich colour and size, as big as plums. They were hand-sorted, the best of them laid out like jewels in small wooden boxes, eight to each, to be shipped out by train. The rest were trucked out to the factory to be cooked into jam. On the next run, before one of my brothers backed up the truck to the delivery bay, I took a cherry from the basket beside me and bit into it to redden my lips.

  Apricots were next, and the sight of them ripening made me restless. I wanted to pick them two full days before they were ready.

  August had barely begun when war was declared and my brothers enlisted, even the twins, considered too young to handle the driving but suddenly old enough to fight. Pete and Pat, always said in that order so that our father could make a joke of saying pitty-pat, but with them gone he said it a lot less. I did feel for him, then. Even so, the absence of all of my brothers meant I could drive the fruit runs. I could also see John alone. During the next weeks, over the steaming kettles of apricots, raspberries and blueberries, we stole glances. And by the time the pears had ripened, we had kissed behind the wooden doors.

  We were three-quarters of the way through the apples and plums, a bumper crop, two precious weeks left. We hadn’t talked about what would happen once those f
ourteen days ended. They stretched far off into the implausible month of October, a month that wouldn’t exist until I flipped over the page of the calendar.

  And then without warning, my father took over the runs.

  He had been an admirer of the Doukhobors when they first bought the jam factory. They were clean, industrious, and their jam was delicious.

  That was before the war. Suddenly he was saying what others in town said. They were different. They stuck together. They were allowed to buy a jam factory from an Englishman and run it as their own. They didn’t have to enlist.

  It didn’t matter that a couple of their boys had left the fold and enlisted, too. Most of them hadn’t. John hadn’t, and that was all my father could see.

  The cherries were in blossom again when I heard that John had married a Russian girl.

  All winter I had written letters to him that had gone unanswered. He’d had as much reading and writing as was needed to work on the communal land or in the jam factory, and I thought perhaps that was the problem, that he couldn’t read the letters I sent, care-of the factory. I made them simpler each time, hoping one would eventually prompt a reply. I thought of saddling up old Ruby and heading to town along the wagon road, or finding my way across the arm of the lake and hopping the train into town. But why go to that effort if he hadn’t? I would wait him out. So I was ashamed when I heard of his marriage, and then glad to read in the papers that the Doukhobors had sold the jam factory to build a new one over in Brilliant. We’d ship the fruit by train, now. I told myself I might never have to see him again.

  But I did. Even now I could see them as clearly as I had that day, it must have been the following year, from a doorway on Baker Street, red-striped awning shielding me from the sun, and them: John and his wife, a white-haired infant in her arms already. She wore a tightly-knotted kerchief and long skirts that swept the ground, like a woman from another century. And it struck me then that while other Doukhobor boys had broken with tradition and married girls from town, angliki like me, he had not, had never intended to, it seemed. Maybe I had known that all along. He had been allowed to drift from the fold for a summer, and then was lured back in with a bride.

  When my three brothers returned from the war they assumed the rest of the fruit business. It happened gradually. One crisp day I looked up to see that cutting the grass, picking the last of the fruit, and finally pruning the trees had all been done without me. Well fine. I had been absorbed in my own plans to teach even before my father’s comment about finding a way to feed myself. I had decided that I would encourage learning and reading and the broadening of horizons, and embrace the very thing John’s people had rejected. There would be satisfaction in that.

  I didn’t last a year.

  I rolled out of bed and poked about the cupboards for food. I must be hungry to be thinking of home. I found the paper bag from Parker’s and rummaged through it for the ingredients to pan fry bread. I couldn’t find any large bowls in the cupboard for mixing, just a plate. A cup of flour, dash of salt, a few spoonfuls of lard. Knead well onto the plate. I fired up the pot-bellied stove from the bucket of coal beside it, rubbed a bit of lard into a skillet and set it on top. I dropped a big dollop of batter into the pan and it sizzled nicely, though when I flipped it over I found I’d scorched it. Less time on the other side, then. I had enough for two more dollops, setting each onto the plate when it was done.

  I could poach a pear, put up preserves, boil up jars of jam. When you’re raised on an orchard you can’t help but learn to cook with fruit. I could also bake a fish or roast a leg of lamb. Those uncomplicated dishes simply required you to pull them out of the oven when they looked done, shove them back in if it turns out they weren’t. But baking required a precision that escaped me, things full of air that wouldn’t rise if you slammed the door too hard, crusts that fell apart with too little handling, or turned to shoe leather with too much. I bit into the first piece of fry bread. It tasted of cinders. The second had the consistency of glue in the middle, the last one, cement.

  I should have added water, or milk. I would have to try again some other time.

  I emptied the rest of the bag and settled on the corned beef. With my back against the wall I ate it cold from the tin, shovelled it really, great spoonfuls of it, my thoughts racing. I had to get things ready. I had to get me ready.

  I dropped the empty tin and squatted beside the tub to drink water from the tap.

  Running a bare arm over my mouth I moved to my heavy bags, at last unpacking. The bottle of whisky had already found its way out. Now came the clothing, family photographs, a bedspread of red patchwork and sheets I could have used last night, as well as a cranberry glass vase, cracked, most likely after the bags had been tossed from the ship onto the cargo pile. I turned it around and around, told myself it didn’t matter, not when, until now, I hadn’t even remembered packing it. But the crack in the glass wounded me, somehow, and I had to force myself to put the vase down. I hung my mother’s beaded evening bag over my arm and reached for my greatest indulgence, filling the bottom of the larger of the leather bags, a table globe of the world, with my nightgowns and stockings stuffed around it.

  It was only by studying this globe that I realized, with a flip of the stomach, that the place I would be moving to, and have now arrived at, was perched on the very edge of a continent washed by a body of water twice as wide, to my naked eye, as the mighty Atlantic. I gave the globe a spin and marvelled once more at the vast Pacific. I had come to the end of the world.

  With the exception of the coveralls downstairs, I bundled up Uncle’s things to send back home, and filled the shelves and hangers with my own. I flipped open Will’s old watch, then clicked it shut.

  Not even six o’clock in the morning.

  All right, then. Get washed. Get going.

  I plugged the tub, ran the taps, added a squirt of my coconut shampoo, then sat back hard on my heels. The soapy water foamed up grey as smoke. It was bad enough that I had to bathe in it. I had planned to toss in some linens, too, but this would ruin the whites, not something that normally concerned me. It was the unexpectedness of it. Under threat of tears I told myself to smarten up. What would stay white in this town, anyway? My eyes dried in an instant, seeing that Morris in his soiled white suit.

  *

  I found the press as I’d left it. Dusty, rusted, immobile. The wrench lay at the foot of the far wall where it had been sent flying when the bolt gave. Not far from the mirror, the clump of rag I’d used to scrub my knuckles and cheek. The pages of the instruction manual were bent open on the floor and my coveralls were puddled nearby as though I’d just stepped out of them. I grabbed them by the shoulders and gave two sharp snaps, then climbed in and buttoned them up while I walked about the shop, slid the wrench into a lower pocket, put the booklet on the shelf with a tray of metal bits on top to flatten the curling pages, and tossed the filthy rag with others I’d found in a bucket in the back of the shop. Above the sink was a stack of clean rags. I gathered several and headed back to the press where I began rubbing dust from every surface I could reach.

  Up the ladder, next, swinging a leg over the machine to straddle the parts, just as Vincent Cruz had. The dust here was a greasy fuzz that mere rubbing could not remove. I tipped a tin of solvent onto a rag and soaked it, then watched my fingertips turn black as I cleaned. Again, I tried to loosen some bolts with the wrench. I felt the pull between my shoulder blades, then up my neck and into my teeth. Nothing, except that I’d managed to scrape a thick layer of sludge from the bolts and the works surrounding them. I climbed down.

  The sky was lightening now. As I passed by the wall calendar I took up the pencil and stroked through Sunday, September 3.

  A hammering at the door had me dropping the pencil. I stepped back to the metal mirror and called out, Just a minute! Fingers fussing to tuck strands into the knot. At least my eyes had returned to normal. I smoothed my collar and s
hirt front as I dashed to the door, remembering only as my palms skimmed the rough fabric that I was in my coveralls, not a dress. I wrenched the door open.

  There stood a man in a vest and suit, with slicked hair and a trimmed beard. His shoulders were narrower than his chest, a shape I have always found unattractive in a man.

  He gave his name but in my surprise I didn’t catch it, though I know I introduced myself in return.

  From San Francisco, he said, and then something about mining exploration. Only when he asked about advertising rates did I come to my senses and invite him in.

  There is no paper just yet, I explained, but I can record your order.

  I stood behind the counter and pulled out the ledger. A diamond ring on his baby finger, and, through the window, a man with a walrus mustache rocking on his heels and puffing pipe smoke into the fog.

  As I scribbled I asked, Is he waiting for you?

  My friend and business associate, he explained. Come all the way from Glasgow. Here to see about opening another vein of coal. We’re looking to hire men to stake claims.

  Another vein?

  I stopped writing, interested in this bit of news.

  He said with a wink that there could be more, many more.

  Coal likes company, he explained. All ore does. Miners talk about silverleadzinc like it’s one thing. And it is, to be certain, often found running in ribbons together. Coal with uranium. Copper next to cadmium. Moly in its own vein or mixed with copper and gold.

  Molly?

  Yes, Moly. Molybdenum, Miss Sinclair. It’s like a layer cake down there. And in the streams above, pink quartz with gold nuggets clinging to it like caramel sauce on a sundae.

  You mean there could be gold here?

  I mean there’s everything here if you dig far enough.

  He leaned an elbow on the counter and studied my throat.

  What a few gems wouldn’t do for that neck, he said.

  And dropped his eyes to my coverall-ed chest.