by Неизвестный
There’d be more, though.
In places without women like Annie Jorgensson.
Lonegan wiped the last of the mare’s grease from his mouth, pulled his chin hair down into a point, and pulled the cake plate into his lap, started fingering it in until he realized that he was just eating the sweet off the top, like his aunt had always warned him against. It needed to be balanced with the dry cake inside.
He cut a wedge out with his knife, balanced it into his mouth, and did it again and again, until something popped under his blade, deep in the cake.
It was a half a wafer.
Lonegan stared at it, stared at it some more. Tried to control his breathing, couldn’t seem to.
Was it—was it from this Sunday’s service, or from last?
Was what was in the old man’s pocket the whole take, or just part of it?
Lonegan’s jaws slowed, then he gagged, threw up onto his chest, and looked all the way back to town, to the old man in the door, smiling now, lifting his bible to show that he knew, that he’d known, that he’d been going to get religion into his daughter’s life whether she wanted it or not.
Lonegan shook his head no, no, told the old man that—that, if she’d just waited to pull the trigger, he would have told her that it wasn’t the poppy water. But then too was dead certain he could feel the wafer inside him, burrowing like a worm for his heart, his life.
He threw up again, but it was thin now, weak.
“ . . . no,” he said, the wet strings hanging from his chin. It didn’t—it couldn’t . . . it didn’t happen this fast. Did it? Had it ever?
His fingers thick now, he sifted through the cake for another wafer, to see if he could tell which Sunday it had been from, but all the shards were too small, too broken up.
Annie. Goddamn you. Which Sunday?
But—but . . .
The oil, the barbershop oil. Hell yes. It slowed the wafers.
Lonegan stumbled up through the fire, scattering sparks, the cake plate shattering on a rock, and started falling towards the mare. To ride fast back to Gultree, back to the old man, those two blue bottles.
But the mare saw him coming, jerked her head away from the wagon wheel she was tied to.
The reins held. The spoke didn’t.
She skittered back, still sluggish from what he’d dosed her with, and Lonegan nodded, made himself slow down. Held his hat out like there was going to be something in it this time, really, come on, old gal.
The mare opened her nostrils to the night, tasting it for oats, then turned her head sideways to watch Lonegan with one eye, then shied back when he stepped forward, shaking her mane in warning, flicking her tail like she was younger than her years, and when he took another step closer, leading with the hat, she ducked him, and in this way they danced for the rest of the night, her reins always just within reach, if he could just time his steps right. Or what he thought was his reach.
The Rickshaw Pusher
Mercurio D. Rivera
When I think upon the day that Father left us, I wonder whether the passage of time has distorted my memories or whether my perceptions were skewed from the onset by the type of overactive imagination that afflicts most ten-year-old boys. To this day, Mother insists that Father was a lover of wine and women so it should have come as no surprise to anyone that he would have run off to the West with Jiao, the village slut. Her discomfort with the subject is understandable, I suppose, but I’ve always sensed that she was holding something back about the real story of Father’s abandonment of our family, about Liang, the rickshaw puller, and about that chilly night when the heavens wept fiery tears.
Liang began serving as Father’s personal rickshaw puller in the summer of 1899, the year our rice fields were markedly bountiful. Father had made deals with British shippers for the export of our rice crop but it required him to travel quite often into Qufu for meetings with the Westerners. Liang, one of the young rice field workers, waited outside our house every morning at the first glimmer of dawn to transport Father in a rickshaw on his various errands.
I suppose I admired Liang the way any child admires an older boy, wanting to imitate him and get his attention. Father scolded me—and even swatted me across the side of the head on more than one occasion—for talking to Liang during our long trips to the city, which I considered great adventures. The youth, Father had explained, was below my station. Father and I would sit pressed together in the wooden rickshaw seat while Liang pulled us along narrow streets past the fish-market and colorful storefronts. Every time we visited the city, Father would make a regular stop on the way back, just outside our village, to visit Lady Jiao, a pretty young woman who lived alone in a wooden stilted house on the slope of a hill. Father made me wait outside in the rickshaw anywhere from half an hour to forty-five minutes. It was during these brief respites, which seemed to me to last for hours, that Liang and I would walk down to the creek together where he washed his face and practiced his exercises while chanting incantations to the great spirits.
“Where did you learn this?” I asked, wide-eyed, as he took deep breaths and struck curious poses, crouching and punching the air.
“My brothers in the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists,” Liang said. “They come from honorable families like mine that have lost everything, all victims of Western imperialism.”
I nodded though I had no idea what he meant by “imperialism.” I was more interested in the stances he took, the exercises he performed.
“The Guizi have taken to calling us ‘boxers,’ though I don’t know why.”
“Don’t you get tired?” I asked.
“Yes, but the great spirits enter my body and give me strength,” he said. “And my job as rickshaw puller allows me to earn a steady income and to send money to my mother and grandmother in Yantai. Have you heard of our town?”
I shook my head.
“Once a fishing village in the Baihai Bay, now kept as a port for the British, the Germans and other Guizi.”
Liang and I would always head back to the rickshaw after a few minutes so that we’d be waiting for Father when he emerged. I never told Father about my conversations with Liang. And Father, in turn, made me promise never to tell Mother about the stops at Lady Jiao’s place. The business of men, he had explained, was inappropriate to discuss with women and the sooner I learned that truth the better. In hindsight, I suspect guilt drove Father to purchase expensive Indian silks at Qufu for Mother—which she loved—along with woven fabrics that she used to sew my clothes.
One night, as I stared out of my bedroom window, the heavens began to weep. Across the black sky dozens of stars fell, leaving behind tracks of fire.
“Father,” I screamed.
Father charged across the hallway into my bedroom. “Wei, what are you doing up at this late hour? Will you never learn obedience?” he said, before slapping me across the side of my head.
I held back the tears for although the heavens might weep, a man never should. (Not even Mother cried whenever Father struck her and sent her flying into the wall or tumbling down the front steps of our house).
“Look, Father,” I said, pointing out of my window. “Tears! Fiery tears!”
Father peeked out of the window and his mouth opened in surprise. One of the teardrops crashed into the rice fields with such thunderous force that our house shook.
After Father marched out of my room, I heard him shout at the servants to go inspect the fields. Because the moon was bright and full, I spied the two servants—Peng and Liang—from my bedroom window headed in the general direction where the blazing teardrop had fallen.
Although excited, I lay in bed and pretended to be asleep in case Father returned to my room. And in feigning sleep, the real sleep overtook me.
The next morning at breakfast I overheard Mother talking to the cook about Peng and Liang, how they’d been found dead next to a semi-buried boulder on the banks of the Yellow River.
“No! Not Liang,” I said to
her. “He can’t be dead. The great spirit soldiers protect members of the Righteous Harmony Society like him.”
“Oh, Wei.” Mother hugged me but said nothing more.
When another servant who’d been sent to bury the bodies never returned, Father decided the spot was cursed and forbade anyone else from approaching it. He directed the remaining servants to erect a fence twenty feet around the area where the boulder lay half-buried in the soil. And no one said anything when the three corpses vanished, swept away by the rising river waters during a night of heavy rain.
Imagine my shock—and Father’s—when we stepped out of the house the next morning and saw Liang standing in the courtyard, waiting for us as he had for many months. Only now he stood immobile and his skin had a sick, gray pallor. He did not utter a word or even nod at us.
Father ordered me to stay inside and, accompanied by six servants, went to confront the boy. There was a great commotion outside and while I never learned what happened, the next day when I joined Father for his regular errands to Qufu, the rickshaw had been redesigned. Liang no longer stood in front of us, facing forward, pulling the wheeled cart by twin wooden poles; now he was relegated to the rear, with wrists chained to the ends of the two poles.
“This rickshaw was imported from Japan,” Father said, with a trace of contempt in his voice. “But I’ve adapted it to match the classic Chinese style for carts. Carts like these were used at one time to transport Confucius himself.”
Liang now faced us while Father and I sat in the covered cart with our backs to him. I couldn’t resist looking over my shoulder at Liang as he growled and slobbered and tried to move towards us. Because of the two five-foot wooden rods between us, he could never get close. Instead, he pushed us forward. Father would lean left or right and Liang would push the rickshaw in that direction. When we wanted him to stop, Father tossed a horse-feed sack over Liang’s head, which prompted him to stop in his tracks. And so Liang became Father’s loyal rickshaw pusher.
After the incident with the glowing boulder on the riverbanks, Liang never grew tired so Father used the boy’s services days and nights for every conceivable errand. Every morning Mother and the servants stared from the windows, dread etched across their faces as we set out in the rickshaw. When we rode, Father advised curious onlookers to keep their distance from Liang, whom he said suffered from a form of pneumonic plague.
After several occasions when Liang ran us off the road in pursuit of passersby, Father had to put blinders on the boy’s head so he could only stare straight ahead at us.
During one of our trips back from Qufu, I dared to ask Father, “What’s happened to him? Why do pieces of Liang’s skin dangle from his face and attract flies, which he never even bothers to swat?”
“Have you heard nothing of what I’ve said? He’s suffering from a terrible malady,” Father said. “You must stay away from him as you always have, only now more than ever. If you speak to him, if you even draw near him, I will beat you raw. Do you understand?”
“But if he’s sick shouldn’t we call the doctor?”
“Don’t question me, boy!” Father scolded. “All that matters is that I no longer have to pay him for his services. This is a great boon to our family in these trying times. Now shut your mouth and stop being disrespectful.”
I nodded and closed my eyes, bracing for Father’s blow, but we had just pulled up to Lady Jiao’s house so instead he smoothed his shirt and ran his fingers through his hair. It bothered me to think about Liang’s mother and grandmother waiting for him to send them a portion of his salary, which they depended on to survive, a payment that would never come.
Before Father disappeared into Jiao’s house, he chained Liang’s leg to a tree while his wrists remained bound to the rickshaw’s two wooden poles, which he could never set down. I thought Liang must be exhausted. And how hot he must have felt with that burlap sack covering his head. Worse, I had no doubt he had overheard Father say that he would no longer be paying Liang for his services.
I snatched the key from the rickshaw cart, where Father had left it, and unlocked the chain that bound Liang’s wrists to the rickshaw poles. At last the poles fell to the ground and Liang could finally rest his weary arms. “Does that feel better? Are—are you worried about your mother and your grandmother, Liang?”
I pulled the sack off his head but instead of sitting and relaxing, Liang strained against the chain that bound his ankle to the tree and reached for me with his pale hands. I stood just out of his reach. And when I stared into his black, bottomless eyes a terrible fear overcame me, and I understood at last that the Liang I knew was gone, replaced with a snapping and violent creature that hurled itself at me repeatedly, only to come to a sudden halt as its ankle strained against the chain. Unsure of what to do, I decided to walk down to the creek to wash my face, as I normally did during these stops. I wondered how I would re-chain Liang’s wrists to the poles, how I would get close enough to throw the sack over his head again so as to hide what I’d done from Father.
When I returned fifteen minutes later, Liang was missing. In all the years that have passed, whenever I wake up at night in a cold sweat, my heart galloping, wondering whether I’d imagined it all, it is this moment that haunts me. I found the chain still hooked around the tree trunk, but at the other end of it remained only Liang’s foot, a splintered piece of bone jutting from its top. But no blood, not a trace. The front door to Lady Jiao’s house gaped wide open so I assumed that Liang had gone to confront Father. At the time, I couldn’t say I blamed him. Working full days and oftentimes at night, it didn’t seem fair that Father had decided to no longer pay him.
My memory becomes hazier now as to whether I really crept up to the house and stared through a side window. Whether I really saw Father and Lady Jiao splattered in different shades of red, their eyes wide open, unblinking. Whether Liang really knelt at the side of the bed as if at a dinner table, pulling intestines from their stomachs and shoving them into his mouth like raw squid.
I ran home and arrived just as the sun was setting. When Mother questioned me, I confessed everything.
The next morning Mother went to Lady Jiao’s house accompanied by the local authorities and when she returned later in the day, sat me down and told me that I had not seen what I thought I’d seen. That Father and Lady Jiao had, in fact, run off together. Although fear crept into her eyes on those rare occasions that she spoke about this matter, Mother explained that the Westerners had compromised Father’s morals and that I should take it as a lesson.
As for Liang, it was rumored that the Westerners at the free port in Yantai had met with resistance from members of the Society of Harmonious Fists, including one who dragged his leg and proved invulnerable to bullets and other weapons. The two other missing servants presumed dead were also spotted late one night shuffling across a gangplank and onto an English ship that never arrived at its destination in London. The stories of these resistance fighters inspired others to believe that they too might gain the favor of the great spirits through a pure life of training and prayer, that they too might be able perform extraordinary feats of magic in defense of China.
These days I bear responsibility for harvesting my father’s rice fields. With the Boxer Rebellion having been crushed long ago, I have no choice but to deal with the Guizi, though I make it a point to warn my own son about the dangers of Western influence. He’s uninterested in the subject. How my ten-year-old reminds me of myself at that age: mischievous, disobedient, and so every month I fortify the fence that cordons off the land near the banks of the Yellow River. And, when exhausted or weak I cannot resist the temptation to peek over its top at the huge boulder from the sky, which to this day remains half-buried in the acrid-smelling soil surrounded by a gray and withering vegetation that never grows and never dies.
The Revenge of Oscar Wilde
Sean Eads
“C’est lui! Dieu merci!”
“Je vous remercie, Saints, pour la santé de M
onsieur O.W.!”
He bows to acknowledge the appreciation from eight pretty damsels in distress. Two divergent groups of shambling, decomposing Lazarus men have herded them into a terrible trap in the narrow street between the Panorama du Congo and the massive, barricading left wing of the Palais du Trocadero. An hour ago, they were modern, self-assured young ladies quite unwilling to let the men, their fathers and brothers and husbands, sequester them further. They were armed, after all, and no doubt confident in the sturdiness of their parasols. Now the skeletal remains of those umbrellas lecture them on their foolishness. Shreds of fine vibrant fabric flutter off the broken, twisted ribs, mimicking the crisp, massive flags high overhead on the Palais spires. But the women’s gaze is not heavenward. If there is a god to them now, he walks this earth and his name is Oscar Wilde.
He has appeared seemingly out of nowhere and stands resplendent in an orange topcoat, a sunflower in the uppermost buttonhole and an elegant Webley Royal Irish 450 CF revolver in his right hand—the weapon a gift from his lover Bosie, the pretty poison he has picked and died from years ago. Wilde’s head is bared to the breeze, his brown hair long and unkempt as in his younger days. Standing beside him, significantly shorter and appropriately serious and somehow vibrant in matching gray pants and shirt, is Albert Ayat—as of fifteen days ago the gold medalist in fencing at this, the 1900 Olympics here in Paris.
The sword Ayat lifts in salute to the ladies now is sturdier than a traditional foil but his accuracy and speed with it are unchallenged and deadlier for the heft. It cuts a nifty whistle in the air when his wrists flick it just so.
“I do not believe any of these Lazari include the one who bit poor Bosie, Ayat. Nevertheless the ladies require our attention—how dreadful.”
“There are ten threatening from the left. I will take them,” Ayat says. Wilde listens, slow on the translation. Ayat is difficult to understand when he’s almost breathless. Wilde himself is nearly breathless just from looking at Ayat. But all that must wait. Ayat maneuvers toward the larger group of Lazarus men in that peculiar fencer’s stance that seems both noble and ridiculous. Wilde turns, his sigh quickly changing to a gasp as he weaves away from one clumsy hand. Decaying fingernails rip the sunflower from his chest and crush the petals. Three lumbering creatures growl at him and close.