Gold Mountain Blues (14 page)

The man burst into a laugh so loud it set the window frame shaking.

“You wouldn't know your own granddad, would you, Ah-Sing? What kind of a song-and-dance routine is this you're giving me?”

Ah-Sing was startled. He looked up again and scrutinized the man's face carefully. It looked vaguely familiar. “Are you that … are you that…?” he began.

The man put down the bags and with his toecap hooked out a stool from under the counter with complete familiarity. Sitting down, he said: “I'm that … that Ah-Fat.”

Ah-Sing's mouth dropped open and stayed open.

“You were just a snot-nosed kid, Ah-Fat,” he finally managed to say. “You've grown so tall. And who did that gash on your face?”

“What gash? If a railroad navvy comes back alive, that's divine protection enough, isn't it?” “Red Hair and Ah-Lam went with you, didn't they? What happened to them?” asked Ah-Sing. “Red Hair's gone.” “What do you mean ‘gone'?” “How many ways of ‘going' are there? If you didn't fall to your death or get killed in an explosion, you got sick or starved to death. Red Hair's luck ran out, he was killed off by all of those.” “What about Ah-Lam, is he ‘gone' too?” “I don't know if he's dead or alive. We walked together from Savona to Port Moody, then we got separated. We only had a few rice sheets left. But we'd already agreed that whatever happened, we'd meet up again at Ah-Sing's store.”

“You walked all the way from Savona?” said Ah-Sing in astonishment. “How long did that take you?” “We started out last autumn. There were one hundred and fifty-six of us. By the time we got to Port Moody, only ninety or so were left. We'd worn out three pairs of shoes. Do you rent out places to sleep still?” “Yes I do, but not at the same prices as back then. Board and lodging is four dollars a week now.” “You're a bastard, Ah-Sing!” “Hey, prices have skyrocketed these last years, you must know that! We're just clawless crabs—we don't have any other skills to sell. Keeping the shop and renting out sleeping space is the only way I've got of earning a living!”

Ah-Fat offloaded the long bag he carried on one shoulder and handed it to Ah-Sing. “This is Red Hair's fiddle,” he said. “You keep it here for now and I'll take it back to China sometime. I'm going to move in here. Give me a few days to get the week's rent together. Give me a bit of porridge and I'll go and get work today.”

Ah-Sing scraped some rice from the bottom of the pot and heated it up in some hot water. Then he got a few pieces of pickled vegetables out of a jar. As he handed Ah-Fat the bowl, his expression tightened.

“Ah-Fat, it's not that I don't want to look after folks from back home,” he said, “but too many men come to me with the same story every day. Get work? What work? Just walk around and see how many out-of-work people there are. Haven't you seen the announcements put out by the Association telling folks from the Four Counties not to come to Gold Mountain to look for work any more? The railroad is finished and there's nothing else for ‘piglets' to do. I can't let you stay here. If I let you stay, we'll just starve quicker together.”

Ah-Fat just kept eating and did not answer. He ate slowly, as if he were counting every grain of rice in the bowl. He had lived off hard rice sheets for months and had almost forgotten what porridge tasted like. He wanted the gentle warmth of the rice to last forever—but eventually the last mouthful went down. He tucked the last piece of pickled vegetable under his tongue. Its rank, salty flavour permeated his saliva and coated his tongue from root to tip. In the end, the saliva almost made him dribble and he reluctantly swallowed it.

He put down the bowl, picked up the long bag and the small one, made a deep bow to Ah-Sing and went out into the street.

The wind had got up. It whipped round every corner and gathered in the middle of the street. It penetrated every hair of Ah-Fat's head and every bone in his body. The clouds parted, but what came down was not sunlight but snow. Fat, wet snowflakes turned into grey slush where they landed. Ah-Fat looked up. The whole sky was a dirty grey.

As he got out into the street, he heard a squelching sound as someone laboured through the slush behind him. He looked around, to see Ah-Sing running after him. When Ah-Sing caught up with him, he pulled out of his inside pocket a yellow paper packet with a red label fixed to it. “Put this into your food bag,” he said. “I sent the boy to get some in today. After all, it is the end of the old year and you should have something for the New Year. There's no work here in Chinatown. Try your luck where the
yeung fan
live. When you get work, come back and I'll let you have a place to sleep—three dollars fifty a week for you.”

Ah-Fat never imagined that this would be the way he acquired his knowledge of the city of Victoria.

Up till now, Chinatown was all he knew. It had been his whole life, providing him with a place to sleep, eat, piss and shit. While in this Gold Mountain city, he had never gone beyond Chinatown—either physically or in his imagination. He had no idea that anywhere else outside Chinatown even existed.

Now he discovered that Chinatown was only one corner of Victoria. In the time he had been away building the railroad, this Canadian town had suddenly grown from a little kid into a hale and hearty youth. In every street and alley radiating out from the steamship docks, new houses had sprung up like mushrooms after spring rain. Their walls were built of neat red or grey-black bricks. The roof tiles were more varied—terracotta red, grey, grey-green, buff, even black. There were always steps leading up to the door, at the foot of which were lawns and flowers. Once, Ah-Fat had a serious look at these gardens and came to the conclusion that they were nothing like any that he had seen before—but he knew there was an amazing variety of things on this earth. At the top of the steps were the door and windows. A wreath often hung on the door; at the windows, the linen curtains were usually drawn, revealing only shadowy figures behind
them. When the lamps were lit on dark evenings, their faces shone more brightly through the curtains than in full daylight. Despite Ah-Fat's very limited knowledge, he could see that these homes were very different from the ones in Chinatown. He wanted to describe them with words like “warmth,” “plenty” and “sweet dreams.”

Gradually Ah-Fat learned about the people who lived behind these linen-curtained windows. Every day at the time when the sun rose to the level of the forks in the tree branches, the mistress of the house would make an appearance. She came to the door to see her husband off to work and her children off to school. He watched as she came out of the front door onto the driveway. Before the horse and carriage clip-clopped away, she would bend forward from a waist nipped in so tightly that it seemed about to snap in two, and peck at the cheeks of her man and her children, in rather the same way that a hen pecks at rice grains. He learned that this pecking motion was called a “kiss.” When the sun rose to the top of the tree, it was time for lunch. This was a simple meal for the mistress of the house since her husband and children did not return: usually a slice of bread, a doughnut and a cup of tea. Things only really got busy behind the curtains when the sun started to go down—that was when the cook prepared the evening meal. Ah-Fat could guess pretty accurately by now what they would be eating and how many guests would be there.

He guessed that from the contents of their trash.

After dinner the servants threw out the household waste, and these provided rich pickings: potatoes which had sprouted, rotting tomatoes, the dirt-ingrained outer leaves of cabbage, fish heads, tails and gills, meat bones which had not been gnawed clean, a tin of caviar which still had something left at the bottom. Sometimes there would be mouldy bread. If there were guests at dinner, Ah-Fat might even find a half-empty bottle of wine.

Ah-Fat stuffed it all in the smaller of his two bags. By the time he got back to Chinatown, all the shops were shut. He would scurry through the familiar, narrow, dark streets until he got to the back door of Ah-Sing's store. There was an overhanging roof which warded off the rain and he sat down under it, pulled out the contents of the bag and heated it all up on the stove. In all Chinatown, only Ah-Sing left his stove outdoors once he had finished cooking. The stove, once extinguished, was not hot enough for Ah-Fat to
cook the food but just enough to warm it up. In any case, he never waited until it heated through to swallow it down. Nowadays, he had a cast-iron stomach which could withstand anything—hot, cold, cooked or raw.

Finishing his meal, he took off his cotton jacket, used it to cover himself, leaned against the wall and went to sleep. He could sleep through any amount of wind or rain but was instantly alert and awake at the first cockcrow. Before anyone in Chinatown was properly up, he would slink away without leaving the smallest trace that he had been there.

One night, however, Ah-Fat never made it back to Chinatown.

He had made a new discovery during his wanderings through the city, a discovery so closely connected to his belly that it was hard to say which was cause and which was effect.

He was wandering aimlessly down a small street to the west of the docks one day when he heard a slight sound. The street was stirring after its midday rest, but the slight sound which Ah-Fat suddenly caught was something different, something which he had been familiar with as a child, something which had seared itself into his childhood memories so deeply that nothing in the intervening years could efface it.

It was the sound of a hen scurrying around in search of food.

With its constant diet of rotten vegetables, Ah-Fat's belly had grown ascetic. But the sound awoke in him fierce longings for meat. And those fierce longings wriggled, as lively as hordes of worms, through his scarred and pitted guts, until every fibre of his being was seized with an uncontrollable trembling. He had always been able to keep his desires at the trembling stage. On any other day except this, he would have shouldered his bag full of rotten vegetables and made his way back to Ah-Sing's unlit back entrance, with its stinking puddles of filth, to fall asleep and dream, perhaps, of chicken meat. But today something completely unexpected occurred to upset his normal routine.

He saw a fine, fat tawny hen squeeze through a hole in its pen and skip away in the direction of the street.

Ah-Fat's hand seemed to function independently of his brain. His hand deftly grasped the hen and folded its wings back. The hen went limp and he stuffed it into his bag. He had used this neat trick as a child to persuade
his mother's chickens back into their coops. He was surprised that he could remember so well how to do it.

As he shouldered his bag, he suddenly saw two eyes watching him from behind the pen. A pair of eyes thickly fringed with lashes the colour of clear blue lake water. The eyes watched him for a few moments, then they fluttered and the lake water darkened.

“Mummy! Thief!”

Ah-Fat heard the child's shrill cry, and the door flew open. A man and a woman rushed out.

He could have made a run for it. His years of climbing the wilderness trails had given him the sure-footedness of a deer. But he stood rooted to the spot, as helpless as the captured hen that was struggling in his bag, because he had seen the long metal thing, glinting black in the sunlight, which the man held in his hand.

A bear hunter's gun.

The couple came closer and he could clearly hear them talking. He did not understand everything they were saying but he caught the gist. The woman said something about “police.” The man replied, “No, no need … lesson.…” The man waved the woman back into the house. She reappeared after a few moments holding a water jug in one hand and a basket in the other.

The couple marched him along the street, which had begun to fill with afternoon shoppers. He did not need to look around to know that an evergrowing crowd was tailing him. “Yellow monkey! Yellow monkey!” That was the children; their elders did not join in but did not stop them either. The adults remained silent but it was an oppressive silence, which seemed to conceal many different feelings.

They came to a halt by a wooden pole, from the top of which hung a gaslight. The man put down his gun and took the rope which the woman had been carrying in the basket. He pushed Ah-Fat to the ground and bound him to the pole—or rather, bound his pigtail to the pole. He fastened the rope tightly with a secure running knot, then felt around in the basket.

The basket was full of bits and pieces and it took some time for him to find what he was looking for—a tin containing nails. He spat in his palm
and began to hammer a nail through the rope into the pole. He used all of his strength, and the rope and the pole began to complain under the force of the hammer blows. Then he tugged on Ah-Fat's pigtail. It did not budge. At that point, he picked up his gun and nodded to the woman.

The woman came up and got an old wooden bowl out of the basket. She put it in front of Ah-Fat and filled it to the brim with water. Then, paying no attention to the crowd of onlookers, the pair walked away. They had not gone more than a couple of paces when the woman ran back and threw down a pair of scissors.

After a moment, Ah-Fat and the onlookers realized what was happening.

What stood between Ah-Fat and his liberty was nothing more, nothing less, than his pigtail. There was only one way for him to escape, and that was to use the scissors to cut it off.

The water in the bowl only offered a temporary respite.

A sigh rose up from the crowd. It was a sigh which expressed many things, and astonishment was only one of them.

The night, like a wolf-hair brush laden with ink, slowly daubed the trees, streets and houses until they faded from sight. The air was heavy with moisture—you could almost wring the water from it. The rain, when it came, fell first as a fine drizzle, then as spattering drops, then in steady columns, then finally as sheets which slashed the ground like a knife leaving great gashes everywhere.