Two-Gun & Sun (6 page)

Another fight to get the leggings pulled up. Back inside the shack, to the right of the doorway, a jug of water and a bowl on a stand. I washed my face with my hands, dried it on my hem as there was no towel, emptied the bowl out the door, then looked up into a rusted mirror.

Hooded eyes, still. But to a stranger, perhaps normal. I could relax, now. Hold my head up. My shirtfront was filthy, but there was nothing I could do about that.

An abrasion on my forehead as well. I tugged down a lock of hair, poured more water and cupped it into my hands, swished it around in my mouth, then opened the door and spat a stream into the yard. If I were a man I could have just stood in the doorway and relieved myself from here. I recalled that man by the saloon, aiming his spray into the street.

Just one day in this place and look what I'd come to.

*

We set out, and the skies opened.

You want this? Vincent handed me a folded newspaper.

Night had fallen, and in his other hand he carried a lamp to guide us. No headlamp for him, and I remembered why. No holes.

I walked between them, the newspaper a tent over my head, raindrops tapping. I glanced up to see if I could read the columns but as Parker had said, they were in Chinese print, except for the masthead
The Chinese Times.

I turned to Morris, curious, newspaper crinkling about my head, and found him to be shorter than I had expected, our eyes almost level.

I saw you earlier, I said. Twice, actually, when your friends were carrying you, and when you were being prodded down the street by what looked like a posse. This must have been after that fight? So, it was about something else?

Yes, it was another matter entirely.

I had fed him that answer, and scolded my careless self.

I swivelled around to the printer, but he was gazing at the sky.

My next comment wasn't aimed at anyone in particular, though the sight of him looking up had prompted it.

Black Mountain is an odd place, I said, always in darkness.

Black Mountain, Morris remarked, is no darker than the streets of New York or the alleys of London. Where we have hills, they have tall buildings. And don't forget their pea soup.

The great mists of Shanghai, Vincent added. It's built on a bog.

However, this is no city, Morris said. Careful, or you'll wind up bushed.

I'm from a small place, I replied.

He nodded. Yes, but that was home, you had distractions. Dinners and parties. A theatre, perhaps?

Now I was nodding. There isn't even a library here, I told him.

And your home, it was where?

Nelson, I said. In the Kootenays.

Doukhobor country!

His response had the effect of a set of truck headlights, turned suddenly onto John and me by the factory doors.

Good God we were never so glad as when they left Saskatchewan for your Kootenays. Prancing around, naked as jaybirds. Shedding their worldly possessions to be closer to God.

The Shanghai Russians were nothing like that.

The printer's voice, incredulous, and I turned to him.

No, no, I said. That was just one sect. The radicals. Freedomites. Most aren't like that.

But what an eyeful those few gave us! Have you seen one of their protests, my dear?

—No, I said.

Because I had and I hadn't.

Count yourself lucky, Morris said. I've never beheld such a spectacle. No wonder the Russians kicked them out.

It was a mutual agreement, I said, because they're pacifists.

Naked as the day they were born.

Only in Canada, not Russia. They didn't begin those protests until Saskatchewan. I don't think so, at least.

Lucky us. It would be one thing if they were young and beautiful. But a group of grannies in the altogether, their ancient husbands, too, stripped bare!

As abruptly as his outburst had begun, Morris switched to a new topic entirely.

Well, I'm off on a mission, he said. Vincenzo will see you the rest of the way.

Wait. I thought you would—

But he turned sharply, nose in the air as he set off, on the hunt for dinner, I presumed, while I was left with the image of flickering flames and nude limbs and a package the length of a rifle.

In my mind I picked through my pockets for something sharp. The tip of a pencil. A jab to the eye, if needed.

We walked in silence until I asked, Morris Cohen, he's a good friend of yours?

We reached the end of the next stretch of shacks before he answered. He's an okay guy. He's got our respect.

Like your national leader?

I could feel a smile in his pause. No, he said, not like him. Us Chinese think of Morris as a good buddy. One of our own. It was a Chinese, a restaurant owner, who was being robbed this time, and Morris came to the rescue. Knocked the guy out with a punch. Not many white guys who'd do that. And he likes to gamble, Morris. So do the Chinese, so we get along.

You, too?

He shifted. I could hear the movement of his arms.

Coming here was a gamble.

He could have been referring to himself, or to me, coming to Lousetown today.

He continued, Morris says he's no hero, and not much of a white man, either. He says, I'm a Jew. To an Englishman, I'm as good as Chinese.

From under my newspaper I could see that Vincent had captured even the mannerisms of his friend, raising his shoulders and lifting his palms as he spoke.

Just look at
them
.

His chin indicated the surrounding shacks and their occupants. Chinese labourers, I gathered.

I figured a printer like me who could read and write in English and French could do better, could get a job anywhere in the west.

How did you learn?

Doesn't matter. Here I am, printing Chinese.

And some English.

He laughed a harsh laugh. Menus!

More than that, if you came to the
Bullet
.

I stepped around a puddle, newspaper held high, before I realized what I'd said. Did I really want him as my printer? Quickly, I asked, What part of China were you from?

His answer wouldn't have mattered. I knew little about the country. Rain spattered onto the newsprint. Beneath the dampening sheets that smelled of ink and something like the ocean, I listened as he continued.

All over. My pop was a baker. Trained with the Portuguese. So did his father, but old pops was the tops. No Chinese could bake bread like he did, European-style. He was a hit with the western bosses. He worked in their kitchens and we followed them as they spread up the coast, from Hong Kong to Swatow, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo. Finally Shanghai.

He paused and said, It's a great city, full of internationals, French, Russian, German. American and British. Japanese, too.

American. That was it. I could hear it in his manner of speaking, a casualness, and in his vowels, slightly drawn-out, flattened. Another accent in there as well. He said
too
as though it were
teww
. French or Chinese, I wasn't sure.

His arms and hands moved high and wide as he described. The French Concession has houses big as museums. Trees up and down the streets. Our leader lives there, when he's in exile. In other parts of China they want him dead.

I lifted the page to study him. What a complicated man, with his modern thoughts and traditional hair, and now his clear love of the foreigners in Shanghai. Weren't they the very bosses who made his father cut his hair? Weren't they the people his leader wanted out of China? His leader's struggle was the sort of news I was after for
The Bullet:
far-reaching, thought-provoking
.
There had to be a way to write about him without risking his safety. I'd have to work on that.

Some parts of Shanghai aren't so swell, he said. Some look a lot like this. Shacks. Laundry poles. No streets, just a dirt path on a dirt bank sliding into a stream. Watch that water.

He reached for my wrist, then pulled his hand back just as I recoiled, newspaper crushed at my waist as one hand plunged into my pocket for the pencil.

We stared at each other for a moment, my swollen eyes fully exposed now, but they were the last thing on my mind.

The main creek's farther up, he said. It's clean. This one's a slop bucket. You want to find your own way back—follow its stink.

I didn't reply, wasn't sure he was expecting me to. He kept walking and so did I, dropping the crumpled paper into the dirt. The rain had lightened to a drizzle, anyway.

We heard this place was better, he said, but nope. Just another treaty port. English on that side, us, here. Crazy, isn't it? To go to all that trouble to drag the worst of Shanghai here, to Black Mountain.

His outpouring had left me feeling wrung dry.

We were approaching the pithead now, its shithouse shape spilling dung beetles into the night. I could hear their muttered accents on the wind, see the eerie sight of their headlamps beaming fuzzily in the fog, blotting out the bodies that walked beneath them. I had left my own headlamp at home, not expecting to be out this late, and in strange company, not wanting the ridiculousness of one on my head.

He said nothing more to me than the simple words, Monday, then.

In a flash he had darted back into the jumble of shacks.

So, it was decided. I had my printer.

It was still dark when I woke. I had slept fitfully. A swig from the bottle was of some help. I fell into dreams of home, clumps of mist rolling like tumbleweeds up the hill from the lake. White and filmy, not grey like here.

I flipped off the wool coat that had served as my blanket, the mattress vividly striped under my arms, the sheets still not unpacked.

Home was just a train ride away. Board at the coast in time for breakfast, roll through the valleys, sparks flying as the tracks curved around mountain sides, sometimes tunnelling right through them, branching out into spur lines for the mines, copper and coal and silver, slowing past the fields and the squat, two-storey Russian communal houses, finally reaching Nelson after breakfast the next day.

They'd be picking the pears right now, the fruit so heavy they'd prop up the branches with rakes.

I counted on my fingers: six of those harvests since my father seized the fruit runs to stop me from seeing that boy. John. English for Ivan. Six years, yet here I was thinking of him again.

We had met during cherry-picking season. He had hair so blonde it looked white where he stood in the shadows of the wooden delivery doors. Our hands brushed that first time when he helped me lug in the baskets of red fruit. Sometimes I drove, but usually I was the swamper on these runs, dragging crates of fruit off the back of the truck, while Will or Robbie drove. The cherries from our region were noted for their rich colour and size, as big as plums. They were hand-sorted, the best of them laid out like jewels in small wooden boxes, eight to each, to be shipped out by train. The rest were trucked out to the factory to be cooked into jam. On the next run, before one of my brothers backed up the truck to the delivery bay, I took a cherry from the basket beside me and bit into it to redden my lips.

Apricots were next, and the sight of them ripening made me restless. I wanted to pick them two full days before they were ready.

August had barely begun when war was declared and my brothers enlisted, even the twins, considered too young to handle the driving but suddenly old enough to fight. Pete and Pat, always said in that order so that our father could make a joke of saying pitty-pat, but with them gone he said it a lot less. I did feel for him, then. Even so, the absence of all of my brothers meant I could drive the fruit runs. I could also see John alone. During the next weeks, over the steaming kettles of apricots, raspberries and blueberries, we stole glances. And by the time the pears had ripened, we had kissed behind the wooden doors.

We were three-quarters of the way through the apples and plums, a bumper crop, two precious weeks left. We hadn't talked about what would happen once those fourteen days ended. They stretched far off into the implausible month of October, a month that wouldn't exist until I flipped over the page of the calendar.

And then without warning, my father took over the runs.

He had been an admirer of the Doukhobors when they first bought the jam factory. They were clean, industrious, and their jam was delicious.

That was before the war. Suddenly he was saying what others in town said. They were different. They stuck together. They were allowed to buy a jam factory from an Englishman and run it as their own. They didn't have to enlist.

It didn't matter that a couple of their boys had left the fold and enlisted, too. Most of them hadn't. John hadn't, and that was all my father could see.

The cherries were in blossom again when I heard that John had married a Russian girl.

All winter I had written letters to him that had gone unanswered. He'd had as much reading and writing as was needed to work on the communal land or in the jam factory, and I thought perhaps that was the problem, that he couldn't read the letters I sent, care-of the factory. I made them simpler each time, hoping one would eventually prompt a reply. I thought of saddling up old Ruby and heading to town along the wagon road, or finding my way across the arm of the lake and hopping the train into town. But why go to that effort if he hadn't? I would wait him out. So I was ashamed when I heard of his marriage, and then glad to read in the papers that the Doukhobors had sold the jam factory to build a new one over in Brilliant. We'd ship the fruit by train, now. I told myself I might never have to see him again.

But I did. Even now I could see them as clearly as I had that day, it must have been the following year, from a doorway on Baker Street, red-striped awning shielding me from the sun, and them: John and his wife, a white-haired infant in her arms already. She wore a tightly-knotted kerchief and long skirts that swept the ground, like a woman from another century. And it struck me then that while other Doukhobor boys had broken with tradition and married girls from town,
angliki
like me, he had not, had never intended to, it seemed. Maybe I had known that all along. He had been allowed to drift from the fold for a summer, and then was lured back in with a bride.