Taro Shima bowed low before Ling Chuey, who made the same traditional greeting, then straightened. He had to look down at the wily Chinese who in effect actually controlled the lives of Hop Town’s inhabitants.
“You are most welcome to my humble establishment, Taro Shima,” Ling Chuey said, speaking in English.
Taro inclined his head in acknowledgment. His stone-carved face never once betrayed surprise that Ling Chuey knew who he was. Ling Chuey knew everything and everyone, or soon would, who rode in and departed from Tombstone. “I seek to enjoy a game of mah-jongg,” he responded, likewise in English.
“So good, Shima-san,” Ling answered politely, his slit eyes probing behind Taro’s smooth facade. “The white man’s poker and the Mexican’s monte do not offer the challenge of the Oriental game.”
Taro followed the man along the long hall and down the wooden steps into the tunnel. He ignored the bodies sprawled in drowsy abandon as he passed through the main stope to another smaller room bathed in a yellow light from a filigreed oil lamp suspended from the ceiling by a gold chain. Around a low, square black table, a kotaku, sat three men, all middle-aged though they appeared eons older.
Like virtually all the men of their race living in the United States’ Western territories, they had signed on in China as youths to work in the Land of the Golden Mountain, as America was known there. Soon they were disillusioned, realizing that the wages they had hoped to send back home were needed entirely for survival. They were outcasts, spit on and reviled by the round eyes. But there in the mah-jongg parlors, in the opium dens, and in the cribs of prostitution they were the great lords they had hoped to be.
The three men rose and bowed, palms on knees, as the stranger entered with Ling Chuey. A foreigner, they knew, but obviously not of the round-eyes.
Taro crossed the tatami floor mat and took a place on one of the zebuton cushions. The mah-jongg tiles of bone were distributed among the players, and within minutes a Chinese girl dressed in a white cotton jacket and black trousers slip-stepped into the room to set china cups of pungent tea before the men. After the expected pleasantries were exchanged, the game commenced, and Taro concentrated on the complicated scoring system so that he was able to vanquish his opponents within the hour.
As if Ling Chuey knew the exact moment of the game’s termination, he rejoined the men. New cups were placed on the kotaku, this time filled with rice whiskey, sake. One by one the other three men departed, being sure to politely leave a small amount of sake in the cup. Now there were only Ling Chuey and Taro Shima left to face each other.
The two men began to speak, keeping to light subjects—the price of tea in the territory, the problems of growing the mulberry trees for a silkworm industry, the lack of respect the young people of the round-eyes displayed toward their elders. “There is no enryo—modesty—in the presence of one’s superior,” Ling announced with a heavy sigh.
Taro nodded, politely agreeing with his host. He knew he would have to be patient. Ling Chuey no doubt correctly suspected why he had come and in time would broach the subject. At last, when the cups were refilled with sake a third time, Ling said, “It is so sad that the ha-ku-jins, the round-eyes, do not know how to enjoy the worldly pleasures with moderation. The bars of Tombstone are an excellent example, are they not? The men have no self-will—cannot put aside their glasses at the right moment. The same holds true for the poppy. Even now a young woman, a round-eye, who has visited my establishment for many months lies drifting in another room on the poppy’s vapors.”
“That is too bad, Ling Chuey. The Westerners have no sense of decorum. How long has the girl been dreaming?”
Ling paused, as if counting. “Three days this time. Maybe four. She no longer returns to her place. And there is no money left to pay for the poppy.” He shrugged his shoulders elaborately. “Such is the life of a businessman. He takes chances. Now, for my generosity to this woman, I must lose.”
“What will happen to this round-eye?” Taro asked with apparent indifference.
“Most likely I will have to bear the burden of her keep. If I keep her supplied with the poppy, I can use her as a concubine. The bachelors who have contracted marriages back in the old land would take her to bed for relief. But, of course, after a while the poppy will render her useless. And then . . .” He sighed fatalistically. “We all die . . . but such a painful death in the throes of the poppy. Yes, it is such a shame the woman could not have used more good sense. Such a waste.”
“Does no one miss the foolish woman?”
“Ahh, yes, Taro Shima. There is her employer. He, likewise, enjoys the poppy dreams. He has seen her. Yesterday, I believe. He realizes the woman is an addict—too far gone for him to help her. No, the best I can do for the unworthy woman is to let her have her dreams to ease the way to death. The bachelors will be grateful and kind to her.”
Her employer. Taro knew of him. Understood him and his kind far too well. The innate sensitivity, the appreciation of beautiful things that Taro’s race had refined to such a high degree, could be sensed, though at a much lower level, in Daniel O’Rourke. Like O’Rourke, Taro could find pleasure in the beauty of every living creature . . . the male sex as well as the female. But for Taro that appreciation had come to be in most cases something remote, an appreciation through the inner senses. An appreciation that he found more often those days through meditation.
But the round-eye woman’s extraordinary beauty had captivated him. To experience her gift of love, the gift he knew she was capable of giving, was something that few human beings ever experienced. For that kind of gift he would dedicate his life.
Slowly Taro swallowed all but the last dregs of the sake. “Such a shame,” he agreed at last. “For you especially. As you have pointed out, she will not last long on the poppy dreams— and you, Ling Chuey, will not recoup your loss.”
“I could perhaps auction her off, but none of the men who frequent the House of the Golden Dreams has the kind of money it would take to make up for what I have spent to keep her.”
‘‘You could, of course, use the round-eye as a wager in a game of fan-tan,” Taro said, setting down his cup. Did his voice sound too anxious, betray too much his concern?
“Ahhh, yes. But, likewise, who could equal such a stake?”
‘‘The round-eye is not worth a high stake,” Taro pointed out. “A woman, an addict—who would want her? Still, in honor of my host, I would offer a wager that would not insult you . . . the claim to the Lotus Land Mine.”
Ling Chuey nodded sagely. ‘‘It is said the Lotus Land Mine has been a moderately successful enterprise.”
“People's words give it too much credit,” Taro said modestly.
“But the evaluation scales at the Assayer’s Office do not lie. Some silver has poured forth from your mine, Shima-san.”
Taro was not surprised that Ling Chuey knew of the mine’s productivity, no doubt to the exact dollar the silver yielded each month—though it was not as much as it could have been because of the primitive methods to which he was forced to resort.
Ling Chuey poured out more sake, an indifferent look in the black lacquered eyes. His whole demeanor as he sipped the whiskey bespoke a man giving casual consideration to a matter that did not interest him greatly. But Taro knew Ling Chuey’s reputation and knew men like Ling Chuey in Japan. Greedy, avaricious men. He knew the man who controlled Hop Town would like to add the Lotus Land Mine to his holdings. And so Taro did not partake further of the sake but sat cross-legged, focusing his energies inward, as if Ling Chuey’s decision to stake the white woman was of no consequence to him.
And yet it was of great consequence to this aesthetically oriented male. When he had first seen her at the Crystal Palace, she had riveted his attention. She was unlike any woman he had ever known—not the helpless and meek, submissive Japanese females nor even the other white women with whom he had come in contact since landing in San Francisco four years earlier. She was neither the painted harlot
of the saloons nor the pale fish-belly woman of the frontier who soon withered like the sage.
There was her extraordinary coloring . . . the sun-spun hair that actually curled of its own volition, giving the illusion of a separate entity. And then there was the vibrancy beneath the dusky gold skin. An aliveness that sheared the breath, like a quick sweep of the samurai sword, despite the dullness of the jade eyes . . . stones that needed polishing to restore their original beauty, he had often thought.
Only the wistful curve of the lips gave any indication there existed a vulnerability to the willful woman, a vulnerability that could endanger her—and, as he had feared, trailing her as he had those many nights, had endangered her.
Ling Chuey set his cup aside. Instantly the Chinese girl was there to refill it, but at the almost imperceptible shake of his head she lifted the tray and was gone, leaving the two men alone. “I have thought much on your offer, Taro Shima, and am highly honored. I feel much embarrassment that I have nothing of greater value to place as a stake except the worthless female, but if you will accept such a wager I would be more than delighted to participate in a game of chance with you. It has been such a long while that I had a challenging opponent. As the host, I will defer to your choice of games.”
Taro nodded. “Perhaps fan-tan. The round-eyes seem to like it well enough.”
And he had become quite proficient himself in playing it at the Crystal Palace. He had rarely gone into town, preferring the isolation of his mountain fastness, but sometimes the overwhelming need for human contact drove him down to the dens of civilization—drove him into the empty arms of a Chinese slave girl or the more devouring ones of the round-eyes, dance-hall girls who seemed to find him diverting, different from the bleary-eyed, unshaven souls who lumbered to the beds of paid-for passions.
He smiled thinly when he thought of the Western males who never took time to show their partner the many pleasant diversions of the sexual act. Perhaps that was why the dance-hall girls had ceased to charge him after the first of his occasional visits.
The game began with each player intent on ridding himself of the cards in his hand. It was a tedious game to the onlooker, as tedious as chess, with many decisions to be carefully thought through and plotted. Taro never once let it cross his impassive face that he held all four nines and three of the fours, unlucky numbers for the Oriental, indicating death or misfortune.
But then he had left behind in Japan the superstitious lore of his people when he signed on to work in the pineapple plantations of Hawaii. He had been chosen, along with ninety-three others, because of his strength and willingness to work. The other Japanese men who had come over in the stinking hold of the steamer had reluctantly left their famine-stricken land only temporarily in hopes of sending their wages back to starving families and of returning themselves one day to their homeland.
Not so Taro. His parents and his younger brother had yielded to starvation’s scythe. He had no reason to return, no land to claim, since his father had leased the earth they plowed. Lately, though, that desire for immortality that at one time or another teases every man had caused Taro to ponder making a marriage contract, a miai-kekkon, with some young woman back in Japan. He had enough made to send for a Japanese bride now. But curiously the idea receded, ebbing and waning like the tide moved by the moon . . . like a man moved by the sight of one certain woman.
He shook himself from his thoughts. It was not wise to dwell on the round-eye now. He would need all of his concentration to overcome the hazard of chance—and Ling Chuey’s own skillfulness with the cards. He never permitted himself to consider the possibility of what it would mean to lose the mine—that it meant more than just the wealth the mine promised. It was the land itself. Having grown up in a country where land was scarce, reserved for the war lords and the samurai warrior class, owning his own land had become paramount for him, something akin to the religious fervor of a Buddhist priest.
One by one he rid himself of the unlucky nines and fours until all he held was a three of clubs. His turn came, and with an inner sigh he placed it on the tableau.
Ling Chuey's sigh was more audible. With a bland face, the host clapped the flats of his hands against his knees. “So, Shima-san! You are a most worthy opponent! I wonder if you will find the stake you have won as worthy as your skill at playing?”
CHAPTER 36
Taro followed as Ling led him to the place where the white woman was kept—through a tunneled maze and into another stope guarded by an iron-scrolled gate. He had to bend his tall frame almost double to enter the low, timbered doorway.
“I took the precaution of removing the woman from easy accessibility to the men,” Ling explained, as he entered into another low room—this one richly draped with black velvet curtains embroidered with whorls of gold design. There was a gold enameled table topped by an exquisite porcelain vase containing an artful arrangement of dried dandelions. A delicate rice-paper screen partially concealed a bed covered in black velvet matching the drapes.
“You see, Shima-san,” Ling Chuey said, moving now to the bed, “I did not wish for the woman to give up the only bargaining power a female possesses.”
Half propped on tufted cushions in gold silk lay the woman, one arm stretched out, the lax hand holding a pipestem whose flame had long before burned out. Taro’s gaze locked on the ravaged face. A pallor had settled over its skeletal contours. The lips, dry and cracked, moved softly, inanely, so that spittle ran from the comer of the mouth. The irises were faded, lifeless half-moons. And the hair—it was matted with filth.
Taro’s sensibilities were revolted by the stench and sight of the thing on the bed, and he wondered that he had chanced the Lotus Land on the pathetic creature.
His burro's hooves wrapped in cloth to obscure the trail. Taro began the arduous journey home. Before him he cradled the round-eyed woman, Rose—a name that did not befit her, for she possessed the wild loveliness of the sacred lotus. Or, at least, at one time she had.
A scant burden she was for the burro and the man, her flesh wasted away by the seemingly harmless poppy. Indeed, her pale skin, made waxy now by the effects of the opium, resembled the lotus. The shrunken flesh was pulled tightly across her bones. The cracked and split lips concealed the once haunting beauty. But there still remained a semblance, an aura, of the vibrant good looks that had set her apart from all other women.
He halted twice during the night’s trip to trickle water into the slack mouth. More often than not the water ran back out the comers, but he was persistent, and when the few drops had been swallowed, he resumed his journey.
The sun’s first tenuous shafts brought Taro into the canyon of his Lotus Land Mine and illuminated his home, a plank-and-log structure clinging like an eagle’s nest to the steep side of a juniper-stubbled reddish-brown mountain. The burro, a jenny, took its two passengers easily along the narrow pebble-strewn path that twisted upward over precarious ridges to the small house.
Upon arrival, without resting, he set about restoring the woman’s fragile health. A soup, miso-taki, made from the vegetables he cultivated in the small patch like garden—chickpeas, ginger root, and onions were boiled along with vinegar, beer, and soy sauce in a black cast-iron kettle over the native stone fireplace.
Behind the cabin he constructed a rock domelike cave, no higher than three or four feet. It resembled the sweathouse the native Americans, the Indians, used for purifying the body, which was what he intended—to purify the woman’s body of the drugs over the long days and equally long nights that were to come.
Throughout the morning the man heated stones and toted them to the dome in large ore buckets suspended from a pole he yoked over his broad shoulders. By noon he had his bathhouse ready. He went to the woman, who lay unconscious on the straw-woven mat in a darkened corner of the room. His fingers began to work at the fastenings of the sweat- and vomit-stained clothing. First the myriad buttons of the high-necked blouse that followed the smooth line of the woman’s b
ackbone, then the heavy, wrinkled skirt and underskirt, the long corset and attaching wire-frame bustle. Lastly the Cromwell shoes, the ribbed cashmere stockings, and the camisole.
He sat back on his knees with a grunt. Not even the Japanese woman’s kimono, which took two people and forty-five minutes to don, entailed so many needless garments. The woman's almost lifeless body lay exposed to his gaze, but he neither noted the ribs and pelvic bones made prominent by lack of nourishment nor the soft, firmly rounded breasts faintly streaked with blue veins. His culture had taught him that for the ritual bath neither sex actually acknowledged the sight of the nude body. The bath ritual was set apart from the sexual desire—it had to be in his land of little space and privacy.
He easily lifted the woman and carried her to the sweathouse. For a moment he hovered over her as the dry heat enveloped the two of them. For a moment, despite the thousand years of assimilated culture, he let his gaze move over the woman in something that was other than impersonal . . . not necessarily a gaze of sexual assessment but one of intrigue.
He was intrigued by everything about her—the coloring of the tawny-gold hair, the peach-lustered glow of the skin that lay just below the waxy surface, the shape—so obviously feminine in spite of the fact that she was taller, with longer legs, than his countrywomen. Just for a moment he willed her lids to open—to see there the green-eyed gaze. The lashes fluttered, then fell motionlessly on the high sweep of the cheekbones. He moved away to hunch outside the sweathouse.
Nearly half an hour passed before he judged it time to remove the woman. Wrapping her in a woolly blanket, he carried her back to the house. But he was not yet finished with her. With a cool rag he sponged off the perspiration that beaded her skin, and for the first time she made a noise, a half-moan, half-whimper. He continued despite the moans that, had they carried more strength, would have been protests. He let her sleep then, exhausted as she was from such little administrations to her body.
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