Gold Mountain Blues

by Ling Zhang

  Johnny could be Yin Ling’s bolthole, her means of escape. That way she need never set eyes on her mother, father, grandfather, Mrs. Sullivan or the bean sprouts again.

  To wander from one town to another, to find yourself in a new place before the streets you were in had grown familiar, to sleep under a different roof every night, to wake up to a different sky every day—that was what Johnny referred to as “skating through life.” Yin Ling wanted to skate through life, too.

  She made up her mind, and the fleas stopped jumping. The snide comments were silenced, and Yin Ling calmed down.

  Red Deer was near Calgary. You could get an early train from Vancouver and be there by the afternoon. Her luggage was very simple, a couple of changes of clothes and a watertight pair of shoes and an umbrella. Luckily it was not winter or she would have had to take the family’s suitcase, which would have attracted attention.

  Money. That was what she needed.

  Yin Ling took the piggybank from the table and emptied the coins from its mouth. It was all small change and took her an age to count. It came to eight dollars and ninety-seven cents. This was what her grandfather had saved up for her. He told her it was his tobacco money, but he had not given up smoking, so although he had kept this piggy for years, it had not grown fat. Still, it was enough for her train fare and anything left over could buy her a meal or two.

  She would wait until next week, until her mother got paid, and take two or three more dollars from her purse. Then she would go. She knew exactly where her mother kept her money. She had thought of leaving many times, but this time she was really going to do it.

  And when the money was used up, what then? Well, she would just have to cross that bridge when she came to it.

  Her mother and father were still asleep when she got up the next day. She knew her grandfather was already up because she could see the flickering red dot of his cigarette down the dark passageway. She walked past him and, in the doorway, put on her shoes.

  “Yin Ling, have some soy milk, it’s fresh,” she heard him call after her.

  “No, thanks,” she called back. But when she got out of the door, she stopped and turned back. Her grandfather handed her the cup and she drank the milk down.

  “Thanks, Granddad,” she said and felt a lump in her throat.

  Red Deer was to the north and a long way from the ocean. By the time the summer sun got that far, it had almost run out of warmth.

  When Yin Ling jumped down from the train with her bulky school bag, it was almost dark. Along the chilly street, the lighting was patchy and the dark gaps looked like the mouth of a toothless old woman. The wind frisked at her sleeves, making her shiver. Vancouver wind was a plump, fine-skinned hand which dipped itself into the ocean and rubbed moisture caressingly over houses and trees and people. But the wind in Red Deer was a calloused and heavy hand that felt rough on her face. Yin Ling was surprised but not frightened by it. The fear came much later. Just now, there was too much to arouse her curiosity and nothing could dampen her good spirits.

  Red Deer consisted of only a few streets. Yin Ling asked a couple of passersby for directions, and made her way down three short streets to the tavern. It was at the end of a lane, and had an illuminated sign outside which read “The Goldpanner.” Yin Ling sat down opposite the entrance, on a bench used by the townsfolk to rest their legs, read the paper or drink a coffee. As she sat in this strange town, on this strange bench, feeling strange eyes flicker over her, she felt every pore of her body come to life.

  Through the window she saw the room was full of men wreathed in clouds of cigar smoke. The Goldpanner was an illicit drinking hole where the coal miners and farm workers came at the end of their shifts to drink and smoke and play poker. Occasionally women would go inside, but only the sort who could charm the sweat-soaked coins from these men into their own pockets. Yin Ling knew she would have to stay outside. She was prepared to wait on the bench until morning. She had never stayed out all night, but she was fired by a fierce longing and she did not feel afraid. As she waited, her longing blazed until her heart was as pleasurably hot as peanuts roasted in a wok.

  Of all the men in the room, only one had anything to do with her. Even without looking she could hear he was there.

  Go West, where there’s endless gold

  Go West, where there’s land untold,

  Where your horse stops, hey, goldpanner

  That’s where you stake your claim, so bold.

  The guitar chords punched holes in the night sky like a handful of birdshot. He sang in a voice so raw the song sounded like it was clawing its way from his throat. The room stank of sweat and the men tapped out the rhythm with their dirt-encrusted boots on the rough pine floor. Yin Ling found her feet tapping along with them.

  It was hard to believe that on the other side of the world a bloody war was being fought. She had classmates with older brothers who had joined up and were on the front line. Their families spent the time anxiously waiting for the postman to bring them news.

  The music and the liquor lulled people, making them forget the war, the endless wait for news, and death.

  The frenzied strumming of the guitar chords eventually made Yin Ling feel tired. She lay along the bench and went to sleep.

  She was woken up by a road cleaner.

  “Miss, shouldn’t you be home at this time of night?”

  He was a kindly looking old man, thought Yin Ling, the kind that might call the police to look after a girl like her.

  “I’m waiting for my big brother. He’ll be out soon, to take me home,” she said.

  He looked doubtful, but went away.

  Yin Ling rubbed her eyes. The sky above her was an in-between confusing colour. It could be the smoky grey of dusk, or that of pre-dawn. Her clothes were damp from the dew. She looked across the street. The illuminated sign from the Goldpanner had gone out without her noticing, leaving only a dim bulb above the door while someone with a big bag on his back appeared to be locking up. Yin Ling grabbed her bag and rushed across the street, colliding with the man in the doorway.

  “Johnny.”

  The tears began to run down her cheeks.

  It was a year since she had seen him. He used to be baby-faced, but the months he had spent moving from place to place had roughened the smooth curves and given his face character. Yin Ling felt herself drawn to the new Johnny like a moth to a flame.

  Johnny’s face froze in a rictus of astonishment.

  “Yin Ling! Whatever are you doing here?”

  “Looking for you,” Yin Ling said a little hesitantly.

  “Do your parents know you’re here?”

  “Did you tell your parents when you left?”

  Johnny was taken aback for a moment, then burst out laughing. The sound ricocheted off the walls, waking the slumbering street.

  “You’re really not like other Chinese,” he said, wiping the tears from her cheeks.

  Yin Ling’s heart was no longer in her mouth. She had seen in those hazel eyes that he was touched and pleased.

  At least for the moment.

  Further than that she did not want to look.

  Johnny lived in a two-storey house no more than ten minutes’ walk from the tavern, where he had a room in the basement.

  The house was owned and occupied by a Dutch couple. The man was a lawyer and the woman, a housewife. Their children had married and left home, except for the youngest, who had joined the army and was now fighting in Europe. When Johnny arrived in Red Deer and urgently needed somewhere to stay, they agreed to rent the basement room to him. They thought he would be company, but they hardly ever saw him. He went out every afternoon, his guitar slung over his shoulder, and only came home at dawn. When they got up, he was just settling down to sleep.

  The basement room had its own entrance. When they got to the door, Johnny tucked Yin Ling under his arm as if he was carrying a cat, and quietly slipped inside with her. Yin Ling could not help laughing in the darkness, but Johnn
y quickly put his hand over her mouth.

  “Be careful. They’ve got ears as sharp as hunting dogs. Good thing their bedroom’s on the top floor,” he whispered into her ear as he put her down.

  Johnny’s breath reeked of beer and cigarette smoke. It tickled her ear and neck, and Yin Ling felt a gush of wetness along her thighs. This was what her mother meant when she scolded her for being a “slut.” But her mother was not here to keep her under control now. In fact, she hardly seemed able to keep herself under control. She lifted her lips to Johnny’s, and he covered them with his own, slurping like a duck slurps water. Yin Ling began to tremble so violently that she could hardly breathe.

  Johnny put her down on the bed. It was an old wooden cot and creaked and groaned in protest under the weight of their bodies. But Johnny paid no attention. His hands were inside Yin Ling’s clothes, not bothering with the buttons, pulling up her blouse so that it covered her face. Yin Ling could not see him any more but she could feel a pair of feverishly hot hands kneading her small, scarcely formed breasts as if they were dough.

  His hands left her breasts and pulled off her trousers. Yin Ling waited for the hands to knead the place between her legs too, but instead she felt something like an iron rod thrust into her body. She was unprepared for the searing pain, and for a moment, she was silenced. Whimpers of pain caught in her throat. Remembering the Dutch couple upstairs, she forced herself to choke them down again.

  The rod thrust itself in and out of her body a few times more, then went soft.

  “It’s always like this the first time. When we do it some more, it’ll be so good you won’t be able to get enough of it.”

  Johnny pulled Yin Ling’s blouse down and wiped the sweat from her forehead.

  The dawn came, and light filtered in through the small basement window, rippling over Johnny’s biceps. Yin Ling traced her finger down his arm and asked tentatively: “Have you done it lots of times?”

  Johnny did not answer. But when Yin Ling asked again, he said: “They come to me. You know what it’s like in this business, there are always women hanging around us.”

  Yin Ling’s heart skipped a beat. She thought to herself that she was one of those women who hung around him. But they only came once or twice for the novelty of it, she assured herself. She was not like that. She wanted to stay with him for the rest of her life. She had no father, mother or grandfather any more. She had no one. Only Johnny.

  She turned over and held him tight.

  From now on, Johnny’s home was hers too.

  It would be more accurate to call it a hidey-hole than a home. Every day they slept until the afternoon. Then Johnny went to the Goldpanner to work and Yin Ling kept hunger at bay by chewing some crusts of bread Johnny brought home from the bar. She was as quiet as she could be so that the people upstairs would not hear her. Down in the basement room, the heavy tread of their footsteps was so loud it felt like they were walking on her head, and once or twice she saw the corner of a skirt brush against the basement window—it was the wife working on the garden. It all kept Yin Ling on tenterhooks.

  When it got dark Yin Ling escaped from the basement room and made her way to Johnny’s tavern. She walked in through the empty room, where she and Johnny greeted each other, and she went straight to the kitchen. Johnny had got into the manager’s good books, and a job was found for Yin Ling making sandwiches and washing up.

  “D’you think she’s pretty?” Johnny would say when he introduced her. “Her father’s French and her mother’s Vietnamese.”

  Yin Ling had had her hair cut and waved. She learned to pluck her eyebrows into a fine line, and put on dark blue eyeshadow and pink lipstick. When she looked in the mirror she began to imagine that she really did have a few drops of French blood in her veins. She had copied this style of makeup from pinups in magazines she found lying around at the tavern. “You don’t look like a schoolgirl any more,” said Johnny. She supposed this must be a compliment.

  As time passed in Red Deer, she began to relax and was less careful about concealing her presence in the basement.

  One day, she and Johnny came home in the early hours as usual, but Johnny’s key would not open the door. After a moment or two of fumbling with the lock, Johnny was surprised when the door opened and the Dutch couple came out.

  “How long has she been living here?” asked the landlady, pointing at Yin Ling.

  Johnny started to say something in reply, but the woman interrupted:

  “My son is fighting in Europe for freedom and you bring this Chinese trash into my house and do filthy things with her under my very nose!” she raged.

  “Out!” shouted the man, his finger in Johnny’s face. There was a thud as something flew past them. It was the bag full of Johnny’s possessions.

  Before Johnny could finish saying “Her father is French.…” the door banged shut.

  As soon as it got light, Johnny and Yin Ling started looking for somewhere to stay. They knocked on every door with a To Let sign on it. Johnny’s opening gambit started as “Have you got a room to let for myself and my wife?” then changed to “Have you got a room each to let to the two of us?” and ended up as “Have you got a room to let to this young lady?” With the first approach, the householder would look meaningfully at their unadorned ring fingers. With the second and the third, the landlord’s eyes would freeze on Yin Ling’s face. There would be no questions to either of them, just the simple answer: No.

  And no again.

  Before it was time for lunch, they realized that there was nowhere in the world that would take in an unmarried couple, especially when one of them was Chinese.

  Johnny looked as deflated as a punctured football as he walked along with Yin Ling following behind. His belly rumbled along with his footsteps and he finally threw his bag down on the curb, sat down on it and lit cigarette. Yin Ling watched as he smoked it moodily, then cautiously asked: “How about I go over the road and ask?”

  She pointed at a shop opposite called the Wen Ah Tsun Store. Upstairs in a tiny attic window, there was a notice scrawled in Chinese: Nice Room To Let.

  Johnny did not say yes or no. He just got another cigarette out of his pocket and lit it from the butt of the first.

  Yin Ling entered the store. Behind the counter stood a middle-aged Chinese woman drinking a bowl of rice porridge. Yin Ling asked abruptly: “How much is the room?” The woman looked her up and down. “Where are you from? Are you a student? I know every one of the Chinese in this town but I’ve never seen you before.”

  Yin Ling said nothing. She had learned as they went from door to door today that there was no answer good enough to get her and Johnny a door key. So she chose silence instead.

  “Thirty dollars a month, not including meals.”

  The woman was bluffing. She did not imagine for a moment that Yin Ling would accept this inflated figure and expected her to bargain her down.

  But Yin Ling did not.

  She just said: “Thirty dollars it is, but if I bring a friend back, that’s not your business.”

  The woman looked startled, and hesitated.

  Yin Ling pulled some notes from her pocket and slammed them down on the counter. “I’ll give you thirty-five. Half up front, half next week. You won’t get anyone else in the world to take the room at that price.”

  The woman said nothing. She went into the back room and Yin Ling heard a muttered conversation, perhaps with her husband. After a while, she came out again and picked up the money Yin Ling had put on the counter.

  “And don’t complain we don’t turn the heating up enough in the winter.”

  As Yin Ling turned to go out, she heard the woman say in a low voice: “I couldn’t rent it to you if I had a daughter at home.”

  It was a few moments before Yin Ling understood. “If I had a daughter, I wouldn’t want her to learn bad habits from you” was what the woman was really saying.

  As Yin Ling walked away, she felt the woman’s eyes boring into her
back of her neck. The woman thought she was a prostitute.

  She was not the first person to mistake Yin Ling for a prostitute, and she would not be the last. Yin Ling was well aware that wherever she went with Johnny, apart from working at the tavern, people thought she was a whore. But she did not care. Her pressing need now was for a roof over her head—a roof to shelter them both.

  She could not care less that she had a reputation as a whore. In a few short weeks, she had grown the hide of a rhinoceros.

  She and Johnny moved into the attic room above the Wen Ah Tsun Store. This time, however, their situation was reversed. Now it was Johnny who had to steal in, and creep out. They hardly dared breathe, in fact, because this time they were living on the floor above the landlady, not on the floor beneath.

  Autumn did not last long in Red Deer. Winter and summer performed a perfunctory handover ceremony over a few rainy days. At the end of September, with the first snowfall, Yin Ling realized what the landlady had meant when she said: “Don’t complain we don’t turn the heating up enough.” The steam heater was only turned on for two short periods every day—before bedtime and after waking. Of course, Johnny and Yin Ling were on a completely different schedule than their landlady, and they always seemed to miss out on the heat.

  When Johnny and Yin Ling came home at dawn, it was to a freezing room. Without bothering to wash their faces, they would dive straight under the covers and lie, shivering, between the icy layers of quilt and mattress. Johnny would throw back the covers and sit up, then thrust frantically into Yin Ling. This was his new way of keeping warm. Yin Ling did not resist, but would try to shush him: “Remember they’re downstairs!” But Johnny’s cries grew louder with every thrust.

  “This’ll teach those Chinks to try and make a dollar out of ten cents!”

  Yin Ling gave a short laugh. “Don’t forget that those Chinks are the only people in the whole of Red Deer who were willing to give us a room.”

  Johnny suddenly went soft, and flopped onto the bed beside Yin Ling. She tried all the tricks she knew, but could not get him hard again. She pulled the covers over both of them and slid her leg over Johnny, clamping him tight to her.