“Those are saloons,” Jim said. “Wine shops. Like your master’s. Only his is empty of customers. That’s why he bought you.
“There are sixteen hundred men in Warrens, twelve hundred Chinese, four hundred or so whites. And there are eleven women. Three are wives, two are widows, and a half dozen are hurdy gurdy girls. But they’re all white. You’ll be the only Chinese woman, an attraction that will bring men, Chinese and white, from miles around.”
Like scalding water, Jim’s words unraveled the casing of Lalu’s cocoon, and she found herself floundering. She halted her mule. From the hitching rack edging the boardwalk, between horses patiently waiting for their masters, she could clearly see the demons inside the saloons. Some simply smoked and drank or competed at squirting streams of brown tobacco juice. Others crowded around gaming tables or hopped and bounded like performing monkeys, their arms around short-skirted, painted demon women whose heeled boots pounded rhythms on crude plank floors.
Did her master expect her to dress like these half-naked, painted demon women? To dance with hairy, unwashed demon men? To lie with them, one woman among sixteen hundred men?
“If you don’t feel, nothing can hurt you.” She repeated the thin, dark girl’s words, reminding. But then she saw again the hurt in the girl’s defiant black eyes, the puckered flesh, scars real and deep.
Abruptly, Lalu kicked her mule and urged it forward, galloping past the string of mules and Jim, out of town, and across the meadow, splashing across shallow streams, snapping off low hanging branches in groves of cottonwoods edging the banks, frightening unsuspecting red squirrels, birds, a deer. Finally, the mule staggered, wheezing, blowing, and hollow eyed, its sweat-caked flanks dripping foam. Ashamed, Lalu slowed to a walk.
When the mule’s breathing evened, she stopped. Dropping her reins over the pommel so it could drink from the creek, she looked back across the blue green sea of meadow grass and camas. There was no sign of the packstring, not even a faint tinkling of the lead mule’s bells. She glanced up at the fiery sun. It would be dark before the pack mules, each one loaded down with five hundred pounds of freight, covered the same length of ground her mule had galloped, and Jim would never dare risk leaving them to pursue her. She could ride on alone, away from the future that waited for her in her master’s saloon.
Where would she go? To return to Lewiston or Portland or San Francisco would mean capture, possible mutilation, the bagnio, or perhaps even the “hospital.” Yet she could not stay out here on the open prairie or in the mountains skirted and crowned with pines. She had no food and no means to obtain it. And she had no protection against the barbarian demons who made their villages in the open spaces beyond the filthy mining camps.
Dirty and black haired, they wore strange combinations of feathers, beaded skins, and demon shirts and pants, and they lived in tents that looked like funnels turned upside down. Their voices, when they demanded liquor and trinkets, were insolent, their manners arrogant. Yet they seemed sad, their black eyes as mournful as those of the homeless refugees she had once seen pass through her village. But they were frightening too. Armed with bows and arrows, small, sharply honed hatchets, and sometimes rifles, they threatened violent death, and when any approached, she could sense angry fear in the white demons she had run from.
The woman who had taken Lalu to Portland had said the white demons were merely overgrown children, unable to control their selfish desires and passions. But Lalu knew they could not be dismissed so lightly. Armed with guns and knives, they were as quick to fight and shoot as the bandits who had snatched her from her village. Only these “bandits” had the power to make laws, laws that made people like Li Ma afraid when Lalu had thrown stones back at the demon children who had attacked them.
And there was that first day on the trail with Jim, when he had stopped to read a trail marker carved on the smoothed-out trunk of a cottonwood. The characters had warned of robberies by demons and Jim had led the packstring deep into the woods until he found another, safer trail. As they traveled, his eyes searched out more markers warning of assaults, a lynching. “Out here, there is no law,” he had said. “Every man is his own court and his revolver is judge and executioner, especially executioner.”
Later, he had pointed out China herders, demons who jumped claims for Chinese miners and guarded them while they worked. But to Lalu, the China herders had looked the same as the other demons: tall, brawny, hairy, and dirty. Like the demons in the saloons in Lewiston. The ones in the saloon where she would be forced to work.
She groaned. If only she could gather up enough gold, she could go home. But the gold she had expected to find lying everywhere was buried in hard rock or in beds of ice cold mountain streams. She would need pick, shovel, and pan. Her hand dropped to her waist. The jewelry hidden in her waistband might buy the needed outfit and, with luck, she might even find a gulch that had not already been worked clean. But without protection, she would never live to take home the gold she found.
Ding was right. She could not escape her fate. Slowly, she wound her reins around the pommel of the saddle and dismounted so the mule could graze while she waited for Jim.
By the time Jim reached the creek, the cold crescent moon had risen high in a sky bright with stars. Lalu, huddled beneath saddle blanket and bedroll, watched him unload the mules, picket two, and turn the others loose to graze.
From a distance, with his queue coiled beneath the bulge of his Stetson, his red flannel shirt, and corduroy pants stuffed into high leather boots, he could be mistaken for a demon. He even wore guns in his belt and chewed tobacco like they did. And he used a demon name. Yet he had treated her as kindly as he would a younger sister. Until today, when he had talked of Warrens, the saloon where she would work. Then his voice had been cold and hard, deliberately cruel.
He lit the pine knots Lalu had gathered from a distant grove and prepared a simple meal of rice and salt fish. They ate, the silence punctuated only by the click of their chopsticks, an occasional whinnying, the crackle of pitch oozing out of pine knots.
When Jim scooped the last grains of rice from his bowl, he built up the fire until it blazed like a bonfire in the cold night air. Lalu set her bowl, still more than half full, onto the grass and held her hands up to the flames, but they could not warm the chill inside her, and she shuddered.
“Lalu, I know the saloons gave you a bad shock. That what I said and the way I said it was brutal. But when you see a demon, you must confront it. Only then will the demon disappear.”
Lalu stared into the red orange flames. “Will the demons in the saloons disappear?”
“Most of the men in the saloons are prospectors or miners, decent men who spend weeks, sometimes months alone in the hills or gulches and canyons, so when they come into camp, they sometimes act crazy. But they don’t mean any harm. They’re just celebrating or trying to drown their disappointments and fears in drink and gambling.”
“Drink, gambling, and me,” she said, fighting back angry tears.
Jim cut a fresh quid of tobacco. For a while there was only the sound of chewing, a lone coyote’s howl which burst into fitful yaps so rapid the wild bark surrounded the camp. Then, the chaw of tobacco firmly lodged in his cheek, he said, “Eleven years ago, when I came to America, all I had was my strength. So I sold it to a company that contracted labor. At that time a healthy Chinese man marketed for four to six hundred dollars, one with extraordinary ability a thousand. It took me six angry, bitter years to work off my debt, but now I am my own man. And you will be your own woman again, I promise you.”
TWELVE
Day after day, as the packstring toiled up the steep mountain trail, Jim told Lalu more about the Gold Mountains and demon customs and drilled her in the English words she would need for her work in Hong King’s saloon. But at night, after they had eaten, Jim would build up the fire, cut himself a fresh quid of tobacco, and they would talk about themselves.
Lalu spoke of home, her sale to the bandits, her d
ream of riches, the auction block. And Jim told of his father’s death when he was not much more than a boy, his confusion and fear as each day his mother’s touch grew colder and lighter, her eyes more vacant until one day she did not move at all. He had run away then, he said. But her eyes, dark hollows in a face bleached white as mourning, pursued him. So he returned, only to find her dead, buried without her son to mourn her, and he had run again, this time to the Gold Mountains.
Long after the fire had died down, when there was only the soft crumbling of logs into ash, the tinkle of a mule’s bell, Lalu would lie wide awake, savoring the shared closeness of their talk, promise of a deeper intimacy. A promise all the more precious as each night the moon grew larger, the distance separating her from her master shorter.
Resentment swelled in her at the thought of Hong King. She had not been sold to pay for her father’s mistake, why should she now pay for the mistake of a stranger? A greedy old man who had scorned the miserable, ill-paying jobs permitted Chinese for the gamble of a demon saloon.
“He’s old, he will not misuse you, his last hope,” Jim had said. But she had heard the concern in his voice and she knew he was not sure. Nevertheless, she understood honor demanded Jim deliver her to Hong King. He was a packer. She was his freight.
In the darkness, listening to Jim’s soft, steady breathing, she thought of his promise that she would be free. He intended to buy her. Of that she was sure. But Hong King had paid twenty-five hundred dollars in gold for her, more than the cost of Jim’s entire packstring. Was that why Jim was teaching her vocabulary for use in a saloon, drilling her with an almost frightening urgency? Because he could not pay for her now? And why, when he talked of everything else, was he silent on this?
The questions tore at Lalu, surfacing each time she woke from thin, fitful slumber. But when Warrens’ unpainted shacks came into view after twelve days’ hard travel, she was as empty of answers as she had been the afternoon she had urged her mule into the futile gallop across the prairie.
“These first cabins are the Chinatown,” Jim said, bringing the packstring to a halt. He pointed across the creek to a huddle of irregular, steep-roofed shanties set down in a clearing surrounded by mountain and forest. “That’s the white section of Warrens. Hong King’s saloon is the first one on the left-hand side of the main street. You can’t miss it.”
Lalu’s eyes widened in panic. “You aren’t coming with me?”
“It wouldn’t look right if I brought my string into camp when the stores I deliver to are here.”
“But I’m part of your goods.”
Jim’s face, strong as newly carved rock, darkened as though shadowed by a cloud. “You know you’re more than that.”
“Then ride in with me now.”
“I’m a packer,” he reminded. “In camp for two, three days, gone for three weeks, a month. If you’re to survive, you must stand alone.”
So he couldn’t buy her. At least not yet.
Disappointment and fear stuck like fishbones in her throat. “Tonight, in the saloon . . .”
“I’ll be there.”
Lalu pulled short her reins, dropped them. Swift as a bird’s wing, Jim’s hand reached out. Their eyes locked.
“Remember,” he said, his voice husky. “You have a friend in me. Always.”
Not trusting her own voice, Lalu nodded. She pressed her knees against the mule. It trotted forward obediently, its hooves drumming across the wooden bridge, the sound a hollow echo in the painful emptiness of her heart.
Dust rose from the garbage-strewn, unpaved main street, but it did not hide Lalu from the knots of demons idling on the raised boardwalks, and they crowded round her, jerking the mule to a halt.
A demon lifted Lalu off the mule and set her on the ground. “Here’s Polly,” he said.
Remembering Jim’s admonition that there was nothing demon men admired so much as pluck in a woman, Lalu fought down a rising panic and drew herself up straight. “Lalu. Me Lalu.”
The men laughed. “The China doll talks.” One of them pushed open the swinging doors behind him. “Hey, Charlie,” he called. “Here’s Polly.”
A demon, bearded like the others but shorter and hatless, emerged, squinting in the sudden glare of light.
“Lalu.” She pointed to herself. “My name Lalu.”
From behind, bony hands seized her, and Lalu found herself looking into a Chinese face as cracked and creased as parchment. The fleeting moment of relief as she took in skullcap and silk robe, the dress of a gentleman, vanished when the man spoke.
“A slave does not choose her own name,” he snapped in Chinese. “From now on you are Polly. Is that understood?”
Lalu knew this man must be Hong King, that she should lower her eyes and bow assent, yet she could not. His grip hardened, the long nails digging through the thin fabric of her jacket and into her flesh.
“Yes, I understand,” she said.
Twirling the hairs sprouting from the wart on his chin, Hong King turned to the crowd that had gathered. His thin, white lips spread in a satisfied smile, exposing black stumps of teeth and sour breath. “You want look see, you come Hong King’s saloon tonight,” he said.
He turned back to Lalu. “The first taste will be mine.”
In the pale afternoon sunlight that filtered through the filthy upper window of Hong King’s shack, Hong King looked more than old. He looked dead. His skin, stretched taut over fragile bones, was the color and texture of old wax, and his mouth gaped wide, drooling spittle onto Lalu whom he clasped tightly, his long, brown stained nails scraping her flesh raw.
He blamed Lalu for his lack of arousal. Her feet were so big and her hands so coarse he thought he was in bed with a man. And her ignorance was not to be believed. Did he have to tell her everything?
Finally, his loins stirred weakly and he mounted her. And in the stain of blood that proved his victory, Lalu saw the death of yet another dream.
THIRTEEN
That night, in the narrow room behind Hong King’s saloon, the hurdy gurdy girl Hong King had paid to dress Lalu applied the last of the makeup. She stood back and admired her handiwork.
“Good. Now hair,” she said.
She crimped Lalu’s hair in the front, parting it in the middle and drawing it back behind the ears, making the ends into finger puffs on top of the head, then indicated Lalu should remove her jacket, the restrictive bodice underneath.
Lalu hesitated, thinking of the day her mother had told her she must wear the bodice to flatten her breasts or be called a wanton. What would her mother say if she knew her daughter had been forced to submit to an old man’s feeble, humiliating rutting?
She closed her eyes, trying to shut out the memory of Hong King’s demands, his naked, withered flanks, and shriveled manhood, picturing Jim instead. His skin, a pale ivory above the line of his Stetson, a dark golden beneath. The gleam of his teeth when he laughed. The ripple of his muscles when he lifted heavy packs. All warmly familiar. All lost to her now.
The hurdy gurdy girl tugged at the bodice. “I help?”
“No,” Lalu said. “I do.”
The corset which replaced her Chinese bodice squeezed the breath out of Lalu, and the whalebone stays cut into her flesh. Did demon women’s bodies naturally curve like the necks of vases or did the lacing of the corset work like footbinding cloths, changing the shape of the body after years of suffering, Lalu wondered.
She looked at the tightly corseted girl with renewed interest.
The girl smiled. “Small pretty. Good for catch husband.”
Jim had told Lalu that the hurdy gurdy girls in Warrens were recruited from Germany, that they owed the price of their passage to an agent, and that they paid it off by working at the saloon, dancing, encouraging the customers to buy more drinks. But often, a miner wanting a wife would pay off the balance due, making her free to marry. Was this girl trying to tell Lalu that tiny waists, like bound feet, were necessary for a good marriage? That marriage was sti
ll possible despite Hong King?
The girl smoothed Lalu’s red silk skirt. “My dress too long for you. I make short.”
“No.” Lalu opened the back door, letting in the sweet scent of pines. “You go. I do.”
The girl drew a derringer from inside her bodice. She nodded toward the door that led to the saloon. From the other side came the sounds of stamping feet, table thumping, shouts for Polly. “You need.”
Lalu gaped at the tiny gun. Jim had said the hurdy gurdy girls were not required to give favors. He had not told her that they had to carry guns to ensure it.
“I get,” Lalu assured the girl.
She closed the door and leaned against it. She had hoped this narrow room with just enough space for a small potbelly stove, chair, bed, and commode would be hers alone, for Hong King lived in a cabin in the Chinatown. Now she wondered if he expected her to entertain in it. A fist pounded on the opposite door, the one that opened into the saloon. She could not delay her entrance much longer.
In three steps Lalu crossed the width of the room and picked up the high-heeled boots the girl had left. Like the dress, they were too long. She wadded rags into the toes, slipped them on, and clumsily hooked together the long rows of tiny buttons.
She stood, took a step, teetered precariously, and fell. Leaning heavily on the commode, she pulled herself upright. A painted, frizzy-haired stranger with bare shoulders frowned at her from the mirror above the commode. Lalu stared. She was Hong King’s slave, his to use as was his right, but she had not yet become a whore.
Dropping back down onto the chair, she unhooked the high-heeled boots and slipped on her soft cloth shoes. She took out pitcher and washbowl from the commode and scrubbed her face clean of rouge, powder, and paint. She recombed her hair, smoothing out the silly finger puffs. Finally, she wrapped a lace shawl around her naked shoulders.
She looked at her image in the mirror. The sad-eyed woman she saw was not the girl her family had known, but the face was clean and honest. With a toss of her head, she strode to the door, twisted the knob, and plunged into the saloon.
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