Pace had been deeply impressed by the scene in the film Lawrence of Arabia where Lawrence is seized by the notion of approaching Aqaba by land, crossing an expanse of desert known by the Bedu as The Devil’s Anvil. The Turkish guns in Aqaba face the sea; therefore, he reasons, Prince Faisal’s army, with whom the British are allied, could blind side the enemy. To carry out this audacious enterprise, Lawrence takes fifty men, who, against all odds, cross the forbidden Nafud desert, then—aided by a rogue Arab tribe—attack the Turks from the rear and conquer Aqaba. Thesiger was a chance-taker in this mold, possibly the last of his kind. Pace would have liked to have been an explorer with a purpose: like Lawrence, fighting to unite the Arabs; or Thesiger, mapping previously uncharted territory. Unfortunately for him, this was not to be—not written, as the Arabs say. Even acts of ingenuity and bravery unravel given time and political chicanery. T.E. Lawrence was betrayed by his government and by himself; Thesiger was put out of business by the ways of the world. Life itself was a cautionary tale, and Pace’s difficult conclusion was that he had lived his too cautiously. Men such as Lawrence and Thesiger had a measure of greatness in them; by what stick, Pace wondered, would his life be measured?
After having had his coffee, blueberry muffin and a banana, Pace went for a walk in the woods; as always, since the almost-fatal shooting mishap of several years before, keeping an eye out for rogue hunters. He did not, however, expect to encounter a dozen young Chinese women bound together by a thick, tight rope in the middle of the clearing where the spaceship bearing the small grays had landed. The women were wearing only thin black jackets and pants; they were crying and shivering, having apparently spent the previous night exposed to the elements. All of them looked to be in their teens or early twenties. When they saw Pace approaching, they began talking loudly to him all at once in Mandarin.
“Please, I don’t understand Chinese,” he told them, gesturing as he came closer with his arms extended, trying to calm them down. “Do any of you speak English?”
“Yes,” said one. “We slave girl, come bottom ship. Men put in truck, make stay until come back.”
Pace took out his pocket knife and cut the rope strand by strand as he spoke to her.
“What is your name?”
“Li. Man bring Ah Kung. Buy girl China family. All afraid.”
“Do you know where Ah Kung is taking you?”
“Work city. New York.”
Pace had almost severed the rope and was trying to decide what to do about the women when he heard a tractor-trailer truck drive up and come to a stop on the dirt road at the eastern side of the woods that bordered the field. Two men, one Chinese, one white, entered the clearing on foot. The white man was carrying a rifle. The women’s wailing increased. Pace continued cutting the rope as the two men advanced toward the group.
“What’re you doin’ here?” the white man shouted at him.
“I own this land. You’re trespassing.”
“Just comin’ to pick up our property,” the man said, “then we’ll be on our way. Best you leave off workin’ on that rope.”
Pace cut through the last strand and stood up straight, facing the men. He folded his pocket knife and put it in his coat pocket. The Chinese man began barking at the women. They all stood up.
“He Ah Kung,” Li told Pace. “Say he own, must go him.”
The snakehead was a small man dressed in a blue suit and white shirt without a tie, wearing a New York Mets baseball cap. It was hard to tell how old he was. Pace guessed forty. The man with the rifle was big, more than six feet tall, two hundred and fifty pounds, with a thick reddish-brown beard. He had on a long, black leather coat and a floppy leather hat.
“These women are illegals, aren’t they?” Pace said.
“Ain’t none of your business, mister,” said the bearded man. “Get on your way and so will we and that’ll be the end of it.”
“They’re on my land, so I’m responsible for them now. You two can go, but I’ll take care of your cargo.”
Ah Kung started shouting louder and was shoving the women, motioning for them to walk toward the path through the woods by which he and the other man had entered the clearing.
“The hell you will,” the big man said to Pace, and pointed his rifle at Pace’s chest.
The snakehead struck Li across the face and twisted one of her arms. There was nothing Pace could do to prevent the two smugglers from herding the women toward their truck without risking his own safety. He half-expected the big guy to shoot him anyway. Pace watched them all march away, but walked quickly in the same direction after Ah Kung and his accomplice disappeared into the thicket. He kept out of sight until the women had been loaded into the container and the men had boarded the cab of the truck, then crept closer, took out a pen and small wire notebook from his coat pocket, and copied down the license number on the truck as well as the code letters and model number on the container.
Pace hurried back to his cottage, called the Highway Patrol and gave the information to an officer. He had done the only thing he reasonably could do. Li and the other women were no doubt intended to be forced into prostitution or to work in sweat shops in New York’s Chinatown. Pace searched the internet for news of female trafficking from China, hoping to find out something about Ah Kung that might be of help to the FBI or INS. The only mention of a man by that name was an article from the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper, dated September 23, 1912:
Chinatown was stirred into uneasiness last night by the news, quickly learned by every Chinese, that a secret meeting of representatives of the tongs engaged in slave girl traffic had been held and that a price of $2000 had been set upon the head of the man who is believed to have betrayed the presence of three slave girls rescued from 5 St. Louis Alley a few days ago by Sergeant Arthur Layne and Captain Frank Ainsworth of the Immigration Bureau. As a result Sergeant Layne at Central Station dispatched a detail of uniformed men into the alleys to assist the Chinatown Squad. The spectacular raid by Layne which resulted in the capture of Ah Kung, in addition to the three slave girls, valued at $3500 each, was the culmination of a number of similar rescues, each of which, rumor has it, resulted from betrayal by Chinese “stool pigeons.” The tong men have sought to discover the informer and the action of offering $2000 for certain identification is expected to cause trouble. That the presence of three slave girls was betrayed to Captain Ainsworth first, instead of to the police, caused suspicion to fall on Loy Yee, proprietor of a disorderly house at 7 St. Louis Alley, running in competition to the one raided. Loy Yee quickly took cover after protesting his innocence to Ray Gatchalian of the Chinatown Squad.
Pace never did hear back from the Highway Patrol or read anything about the Chinese women hidden in his woods. Was it possible that this Ah Kung could be a descendant of the Ah Kung arrested in San Francisco for slave girl trafficking more than a century ago? Pace was dazed by this latest bizarre experience. First the gathering of small grays, and now a dozen Chinese slave girls, all of them aliens. Strange, he thought, how that same word was used to designate human beings from his own planet as well as extraterrestrials; and both had by some crazy coincidence appeared within days in the same small clearing in the woods behind his house in North Carolina.
“Mama,” he said, “this is more than weird. I sure do hope I get the chance to tell you about it.”
5
Pace’s dreams consumed him. Lula appeared in most of them, usually as her older self and often in need of his help, which in reality was almost never the case. His mother remained mobile and able to care for herself until the end of her life. Others who were featured, in various contexts, were Rhoda, Marnie, Perfume James, Gagool, the devilish Rattler brothers, who were killed when Pace was a teenager, Phil Reãl, Beany Thorn, his grandmama Marietta, and, of course, Sailor.
The situations involved family gatherings, reunions with old friends and adversaries, and occasio
nal encounters with unrecognizable people, all relatively benign. The worst dreams were those in which Pace was by himself in an airport or train station in a foreign country and had lost his ticket or passport; he was stranded without money or identification, in the midst of a fast-moving crowd of travellers speaking languages unknown to him.
Pace thought these dreams foretold what awaited him after death, both the good and the bad, neither heaven nor hell; only a kind of restless netherworld, not the sanctuary he desired. It did not matter what a person had done during his or her lifetime, Pace decided, whether they had helped or hindered or hurt others; death, also, would pass.
* * *
It was Angelina who found Pace’s body lying on the ground next to the woodpile. She had brought a freshly killed chicken, broccoli and chocolate ice cream for his Thursday dinner. After Angelina phoned Tercero and gave him la dolorosa, as he called it, the bad news, she put the groceries into the refrigerator in the cottage, made a pot of coffee, and sat down at the kitchen table to wait for her husband.
Six days later, a letter arrived for Pace that was never opened and not returned to sender by the post office in Bay St. Clement for lack of a return address.
Dear Mister Pace Ripley,
I dearly hope this letter gets to you even though I don’t have your proper address. I figure the p.o. in Bay St. Clement will know and deliver it. I never have forgot your tenderness to me when I was a runaway little girl you never saw before. That girl is now in Los Angeles. No she is not a famous singer or movie star. Not yet! She is working as a hostess in a restaurant in Santa Monica and taking singing and dancing and acting lessons. Her daddy is in Atlanta but he had a stroke last year and can’t preach any more. He still goes to the First Ethiopian Church of the Queen of Sheba and sits and listens and prays. Mostly for his daughter he says. The people there take good care of him and she calls him every Saturday morning. Ray-Ray puts you in his prayers too. His daughter is sure he would like you to know that. Mr. Ripley I am all right but I do get sad a lot. I don’t know if my mama is alive or the drugs got her. I get nightmares sometimes about what I done to Bee Sting. It’s very hard for me to get really close to anybody a boy or a girl. You probably understand this problem because you are so smart. I hope this will change some day. I want you to know you are always in my own prayers right at the top along with Daddy. If you ever pray pray for me too okay. One more thing I don’t use the name Gagool out here it was too strange. Now my name is Cassie short for Cassiopeia who was a black queen of Ethiopia like Sheba. There is a star named after her.
Cassie (Gagool) Angola
CODA
Pace Ripley’s writings were found by Angelina when she was packing up his possessions. She gave them to Tercero, who contacted Marnie Kowalski, in the hope she would know what to do with them. Marnie asked Tercero to please send the manuscripts to her in New Orleans, which he did. In his will, Pace had left the Delahoussaye property to Tercero and Angelina, which was a complete surprise to them; a most welcome one since she was pregnant and they were soon to be in need of more ample living quarters.
Marnie read every word Pace had written: both the 2,500 pages about the lives of Sailor and Lula, and his 1,700 page memoir recorded in the form of a diary. She showed the Sailor and Lula manuscript to one of her regular customers at Magdalena’s who was a professor in the English department at Tulane University. He read and recommended it to a publisher he knew in New York, who liked it and edited Pace’s enormous novel and published it. Very few people bought the book, but Marnie was thrilled, just as she knew Pace would have been. She sincerely believed there were people out there in the world who would discover and be as profoundly moved by it as she was. After all, it was a genuine true-love story, and there could never be too many of those. Pace’s memoir Marnie kept to herself; it was too personal, she felt, for anyone who had not known him intimately to read. The diary was his truth, and the truth is always best kept to one’s self.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Barry Gifford’s fiction, non-fiction and poetry have been published in twenty-eight languages. His novel Night People was awarded the Premio Brancati, established by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alberto Moravia, in Italy, and he has been the recipient of awards from PEN, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Library Association, the Writers Guild of America, and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. His books Sailor’s Holiday and The Phantom Father were each named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times, and his book Wyoming was named a Novel of the Year by the Los Angeles Times. He has written librettos for operas by the composers Toru Takemitsu, Ichiro Nodaira and Olga Neuwirth. Gifford’s work has appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, Punch, Esquire, La Nouvelle Revue Française, El País, La Repubblica, Rolling Stone, Brick, Film Comment, El Universal, Projections, and the New York Times. His film credits include Wild at Heart, Perdita Durango, Lost Highway, City of Ghosts, Ball Lightning, and The Phantom Father. Barry Gifford’s most recent books are Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels, Sad Stories of the Death of Kings, Imagining Paradise: New & Selected Poems and The Roy Stories. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. For more information visit www.BarryGifford.com.
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