The Rock Child

by Win Blevins

  We made music—made it white, made it Creole—for two more hours. Sir Richard was gone. I ate and drank a sherbet while Daniel smoked, and we went back to playing. This time Daniel suggested we switch instruments, and we did that. Worked out real fine. We picked and plunked until I don’t know what hour of the morning. All I remember is that Daniel saw me home, seeming no more sleepy than he was ever hungry. I fell into bed so exhausted I couldn’t even check on Sun Moon, asleep in the next room.

  Sun Moon said to Asie, “Where’s Sir Richard?”

  He opened his eyes and blinked. She saw him absorb the fact that the sun was well up, then the fact that she was standing in his bedroom. He said, “What time is it?”

  “Noon.”

  He shook his head slowly and sleepily. Then he jerked his face toward her. “Sweet gizzards,” he said, “I’m supposed to play the dinner hour at the Heritage with Daniel, and I’m due there now.”

  “Where is Sir Richard?” she repeated softly. “He not come home last night.”

  “You sure?”

  She nodded.

  Asie swung his feet onto the floor and adopted an attitude of thinking. Funny, how Americans tell things twice, once with words and once with bodies. “Don’ know,” he said.

  He threw off the sheet. She flinched before she realized he’d worn his pants to bed. She flinched again, inside, when she realized she’d wanted to see him stripped.

  “All night?”

  They also asked things twice, Americans.

  She wondered what his thoughts were. Hers were simple—whores, whisky, or opium. Though she had learned to care for Sir Richard, and to see a certain magnificence in his spirit, she saw well his spirit’s waywardness.

  She stood up and turned all the way around the room twice. She wrung her hands. She pictured Sir Richard in a siege of dissipation in this strange city. Behind him, like a huge, black shadow, loomed Porter Rockwell. Without Sir Richard the shadow would turn into a killer. Mother Mahakala, make my heart fierce. She wondered why no one but her foresaw Rockwell’s coming, and feared it. Mahakala, give me courage.

  She said to Asie, “You going find Sir Richard.”

  He stood up close to her. “I gotta go to the Heritage.” He looked at her solicitously. “You seem better.”

  “Yes,” she said, “better today.” She stepped back from him. “Please go. Find Sir Richard. We leave here soon.”

  “A week after your fever stops, that’s what the doc said.” He brushed back his black hair. She watched thoughts and emotions play on his face: Yes, I do like your company. He was almost like one of her people in his open face and simple, guileless manner. So different from most Americans and Europeans. His yearning to play music was direct, touching.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  She shook her head no.

  “Hey,” says he, “I’m gonna pick.” He pantomimed playing the banjo. “You like that.”

  “Next time.”

  “I’ll bring you some dinner when I’m done,” he said. “You’ll be OK.”

  “You find Sir Richard, please.”

  “OK. If he ain’t here. After work tonight.”

  He disappeared out the door. You have no idea, none of you do. A good heart, Asie, a grand heart, but no awareness of her world, her heart. Yes, she was better. But she was not well. She wasn’t home. She was ill, she was homesick, she was scared, and she was on the run from a maniac and murderer. Besides all that, maybe she was with child.

  “Fine,” said Daniel. “Let’s look for him in Chinatown.”

  I scratched my head. I scratched my tail. I stretched my back. I felt queasy-like about going into Chinatown, especially way after midnight like this.

  Daniel was already ambling downhill. Chinatown was below the rest of the town. I was making up excuses not to go. In this high-mountain air, I grumbled at myself, we’ll freeze just catching our breath.

  Oh, heckahoy, says I to myself—Sun Moon says I look Tibetan, maybe I’ll make Chinese friends.

  In Virginia during the day you saw Celestials (that’s what everyone called ’em) all around town, mostly selling donkey loads of wood—“One dollah load,” their cry was, crooking through the streets. They were also commonly employed as servants, cooks, laundrymen, and even physicians of a sort, going place to place with their herb and tea cures. What they might be at night in their own place, out of sight of white eyes, I didn’t know. Half of me wanted to find out, and half had the cajoolies bad. Yellow demons, said that half. Even telling myself Sun Moon was yellow, too, didn’t help none. Not after what the Celestials done to her.

  As we got there, I could smell how it was Chinese better than see it. Charcoal fires. Blood, probably from some many chickens getting their heads cut off right in the street. Spices—ginger, garlic, red pepper, angelica, and I don’t know what else. The smells of many kinds of tea. The sandalwood they burn for incense, strong odor of that. Smells I don’t have no idea of, much as I’ve since been around Celestials. And the sweet aroma I later learned was opium.

  Daniel led the way to a cut in a hillside, and within that a low door. Pulling it open, he said, “I don’t expect to find him here, actually.”

  We went through into a dugout. Inside, a dim red lamp hung from the center of the ceiling. A man that looked to be in charge sat at a table jammed with paraphernalia—horn boxes of opium, pipes, scales, spatulas, wire probes, bones covered with black dots—all opium-smoking gear, but I don’t know how some of it’s used. Two walls were stacked with bunks, and every one was chock-full of smoker. They stretched out on grass mats or old blankets. In every bunk was a little alcohol lamp burning blue, every one had a little light used to light the opium pipe. Some smokers were propped on one elbow, others sleeping, others laying back with eyes open or part-closed. Now the sweet smell was strong as poison, and had a bitter tang. They say that opium makes the brain dreamy, misty. Everything in that half-lit room was like that.

  Daniel spoke soft to the proprietor. “No white man here,” the Celestial said. He spread his arms wide, like saying, “Look for yourselves.” With his droopy sleeves he might have been a bat. I wanted to shrink away from him. Then I had a thought I didn’t like. I wondered if this was what it meant to be what Daniel called a racialist, and I was one, too.

  They exchanged a few more words in low tones, and Daniel led the way out. “We’ll try somewhere else,” he said. I thought of asking Daniel how he got so well acquainted in Chinatown. But I could feel that he didn’t like being asked personal stuff.

  The next opium den looked more like an ordinary business from the outside. Inside it was rigged about like the other one, bunks on bunks, each full of its own dreamer. Jumpin’ Jeehosaphat, opium wasn’t like liquor, it sure didn’t seem to make folks sociable.

  A couple of exchanges between Daniel and the head Celestial and we were on our way.

  “What about a saloon?” I asked. “He might be boozing.”

  “Chinatown has no liquor establishments,” says Daniel quiet-like.

  The third place looked like a parlor in a pretty decent house, and they brought us green tea. After Daniel asked a couple times for the proprietor, a meek-looking middle-aged man wearing loose shirt, baggy pants, and skullcap came out.

  “A white man, tall, with mustache?” Daniel inquired, slashing his own left cheek with a finger.

  “As you see, no one here but yourselves,” says Meek-Looking.

  “In the back room, however,” says Daniel, pointing, “there are opium smokers.” It was true—the smell was strong.

  “No, Sir.”

  “White people smoking,” says Daniel.

  “No, Sir.”

  They went another round or two in that line. Then Daniel says, “May I speak to Tommy, please?”

  “Tommy? Who Tommy?”

  A couple more rounds like that, the most polite lying you ever heard. Finally, Daniel slips something into Meek’s palm, looked like a Spanish gold coin.

  “The
gentlemen wait, please,” says Meek-Looking, bowing.

  When the fellow went out, I says to Daniel, “We don’t have to pay to find Sir Richard.”

  “I’ve been wanting to meet this fellow,” says Daniel.

  We waited and drank that bitter tea for maybe half an hour. Then in came a Chinaman, looked to be in his mid-twenties, no more, decked out in as handsome a business suit as you ever saw, gleaming silver, with scarlet silk cravat at the neck and a matching handkerchief. The stock exchange in San Francisco doesn’t sport any better. “Good evening, gentlemen, I’m Tommy Kirk. How may I help you?” Here we were a-visiting Flabbergastonia again, for his English sported a plummy accent just like Sir Richard’s.

  Since he was offering his hand, I took it and said my first name. So did Daniel.

  “We’re looking for a gent,” says Daniel. “Englishman, new to town. Strong fellow, heavy mustache, big scar here.” Daniel drew a diagonal line across his left cheek.

  “Captain Richard Burton,” says Tommy.

  Flabbergastonia some more.

  He smiled a gentleman’s smile. Except for the color of his skin, he neither looked nor sounded nor any way acted like a Chinaman.

  Daniel nodded to show understanding. “You have good sources of information in Virginia.”

  Tommy nodded, too, taking it like a compliment.

  I pushed in. “What about Sir Richard?”

  Tommy Kirk frowned slightly. “I wasn’t told he’s Sir Richard, simply Captain Burton.”

  “It’s a pet name for him,” says Daniel.

  Tommy looked at me in a kind of appraising way. I realized that he probably wasn’t showing curiosity about us because he knew all about us. I shivered, supposing that included Sun Moon, where we were staying, and where she was alone and sick. He’s a whoremaster.

  “Can you help us find him?”

  “I’m sorry, I cannot.”

  “He didn’t come back to his rooms last night, nor so far tonight. He has … vices. We thought you might know.”

  “If I had any knowledge of his whereabouts, I could not divulge them.” His smile could light up a room, but it didn’t mean a thing. He had a peculiar effect, this Tommy Kirk. He made you all at once want to come hither and go thither. Outwardly he was affable and inviting. Yet you knew something about him was deadly, like an iron bar in winter—it looked normal, but if you touched it, your hand would stick to the cold and freeze there.

  Daniel considered for a long moment. Finally he says, “I’m honored to meet you.”

  “Thank you,” says Tommy, just sitting and waiting.

  “I’m told you’re a businessman.”

  “I invest in enterprises I believe will be profitable.”

  Another long moment.

  “I have something in mind,” says Daniel.

  Tommy just smiled at him.

  “Perhaps you’d join me for a drink tomorrow?”

  “At the Heritage?” says Tommy, letting us know just how smart he was.

  Daniel nodded.

  “Three o’clock?”

  They shook on it, and we got up to leave. Tommy was still beaming at us. Meek-Looking showed us out. At the door Daniel slipped him another coin, and in return got another bow.

  Outside the stars were on fire, and so was I. “What’s going on? Who is that coon? Why does he dress like that? Where’d he get that accent?”

  Don’t know how many questions I blurted out afore Daniel cut me off with some answers. “Tommy Kirk is a most curious character,” says he. “The report is that he’s half-Chinese, half-Brit. Born in Shanghai from a liaison between one of the British diplomats and a celebrated courtesan. That may be exaggerated.” He gave me a sidelong look. “Much of this may be exaggerated. Got his schooling in the little enclave the Brits built to keep out local influence. Got his real education on the streets of one of the world’s roughest seaports. Neither side likes him, they tell it, the white or the yellow. So Tommy’s making his own way. His capital is the spirit of adventure and a complete lack of scruples.”

  Daniel shrugged and paused for breath. We were heaving back up the mountain to the respectable part of town. “What seems certain is that he’s come to Virginia with some money and the intention to make more. He arrived with a dozen female slaves, age ten to fourteen. He built that opium den for white folks only, if you can imagine that. It’s genteel. It’s said he has several dozen regular customers, including a few women. It’s also said he now owns other brothels in Chinatown, and opium dens and gambling hells, and aims to own everything.”

  Says I, “The world is most peculiar.” Those days I was keeping my word flabbergastonia to myself.

  Daniel chuckled. “And more than peculiar,” says he, “and yet more.”

  “Sirs, Sirs!”

  The voice came from behind us. We turned and saw a man as big and rough-looking as you’ll ever see. Chinaman. We waited.

  When he got within talking distance, the big fellow says, “Captain Burton is with lady. Safe. Home tomorrow.” He had an earring looked like a question mark dangling from his left ear.

  “Thank you,” said Daniel, and held out a coin.

  Question Mark just shook his head no. Then he says, “Captain Burton say I go with you. Lady need watching, he say.”

  I could have eaten a frog.

  “I bodyguard,” he said. He started walking back up the hill, and we fell in. “People call me Q Mark.”

  That’s how Sun Moon gained a watcher. Any time Sir Richard wasn’t there, Q Mark or another mean-looking Celestial was. I knew we should be more afraid of Porter Rockwell than Q Mark, but not by a lot.

  When we walked into the room, she said, “Note came from Harold.” I read it while Q Mark explained his duty to Sun Moon in Chinese.

  Dear Captain Burton, Asie, and Sun Moon—

  I am sorry, but I have set out for Salt Lake City. I looked for you twice at the hotel, after I figured out you were here. I have finished our business, and my father expects me back quickly.

  If you see Muley and Carlson, give them a raspberry for me!

  Thanks for your company—you made the trip dangerous and delightful. Would be pleasured to see any of you again. Asie, if ever you want a job, you have only to ask.

  Your friend,

  Harold Jackson

  Well, thanks for the offer, Harold, but my destiny is not Saintly.

  One day at lunchtime Sir Richard and me met Sam Clemens up at the office of the Sergeant Mine to go down and have a look. I was moderately curious about how it was done, getting all that dirt and rock and ore out of a big hole in the ground. Or, as I learned, a little hole that opens into a huge tangle of holes, like a honeycomb.

  I showed up with a sack lunch, and Sam put the kibosh on that right off. “You can’t take that down,” he informed me. “They keep down crumbs in the mine. Crumbs rot and stink, and the one thing a miner needs is to be able to smell.”

  We got into a little car set on a track and running down into the inclined shaft. It took miners down and brought ore up, Sam showed us, and ran by steam power. As we descended, there was considerable talk between Sam and Sir Richard on hoisting machinery, donkey engines, horsepower, and an eight-inch pump. I took little interest in it.

  When we got off the car and started walking, my mind was grabbed by the huge empty boxes that seemed to hold the earth itself up. Down a ways big shafts ran off in different directions, and some of them were many stories high. (Sam spoke of ore bodies forty, fifty, sixty feet wide, but my mind is not drawn to those kinds of bodies.) The question I saw was, When you dig this mammoth bunch of ground out and haul it up, how do you keep the rest from falling on your head? I am pretty sure the miners had the same question.

  The answer was, You build open boxes out of big timbers, boxes as tall as three men and just as broad. When that isn’t high or broad enough, you put them side by side and stack them right to the top. Whole shafts were supported in this way, like some giant construction a kid might
make. “Remarkable,” said Sir Richard, and other upper-crusty exclamations of wonder.

  When Sam began to talk of the money being taken out of the earth, I asked again about the miners. “How come you say the men get rich high-grading? What’s high-grading?”

  “I’ll explain when you see the bridal chamber,” says Sam.

  Sam started one of his complicated explanations of how things work. He should have been a mining engineer, or a drummer for a mining association. Sir Richard asked questions I suppose were intelligent and got answers that passed for the same. Myself, I got to watching a miner sitting on a ledge, eating his lunch, and playing with a rat.

  The critter sat on its hind legs, looking at the miner. The man’s face, not his hand. Yet the hand was holding out scraps, bread and meat it looked like. Some sort of deal was being made between the rat and the miner. I eat, you don’t whack me. I eat, you don’t grab my tail. If you get tricky, I bite your finger. Or if you’re nasty, gobble your eyes.

  At least that’s how I imagined it.

  Sam and Sir Richard noticed my fascination and stopped to watch the rat and miner.

  The rat waddled forward. It was fat, and as it came, its body swung in an S shape. It stopped. Scooted backward. Waddled forward. QUICK! made a dash for the goodies. SWOOSH! skiddooed off. Disappeared.

  “They never kill rats in a mine,” observed Sam. “Rats begin to run about queerly in advance of a cave-in. It’s the only warning the men have. Also, they clean up the scraps of food the miners leave, which keeps the air clean of putrefaction. There’s hardly a pint of air down here anyway. If you let food stink …”

  “How do the men relieve themselves then?” asked Sir Richard.

  “Can’t do it just anywhere. The way the air is, no man could work below ground. So they have ore cars for shitters. They haul it up just like the rock and ore. Howsomever,” said Sam with a grin, “that carload don’t go to the assayer.”

  I was looking at the miner’s face, which was burned blue in places. Sam noticed my look. He whispered, “Nothing more common than that in Washo. A mining fool tries to tamp his powder with an iron bar or the butt of a steel drill. Iron strikes a spark, powder flashes, and the poor bastard gets a tattoo designed by the god of chance.”