Territory (28 page)

There was a wild, reckless energy in him woven of manic confidence and anger. He sat on a rock and pulled off his boots and socks, then shed his coat and vest. He found himself humming a lively tune in a minor key, and realized it was the heroine’s song from the play.
Oh, the cuckoo, she’s a pretty bird, she warbles as she flies.

He sat down cross-legged in a space of bare dry earth, arm’s length from the spilled blood, laid his hands on his knees, and stared at the ground before him.
Talk to me,
he thought.

He felt a fool, even with no one but Lung to see him. Foolish, and angry, and impatient. Only patience availed in taming horses. But he
was
the horse this time. The anger would wear him out. He had to surrender, not fight.

He tried to think the way one does before sleep, the mind skimming its contents, brushing past images and ideas but never grabbing hold of them. Pleasant, undemanding thoughts—last night’s play,
not
Mrs. Benjamin, other plays and other theaters he’d seen, the dark red stage curtain in a New York theater that reminded him of a parlor rug in his parents’ house, a big chair in that parlor, and China Mary sitting in it—no, that was another chair, or was it?—and her gold filigree nail guards, and the carpet rolled back in her long narrow room to reveal a hole that went down below the foundations of the house, with a carved oak banister and polished stairs—how did the carpet lie flat over that banister, and why didn’t people fall into the stairwell when they walked across the carpet?—and he walked down the stairs into cool, stone-scented darkness.

He saw the rough face of volcanic rock at the foot of the stairs, but kept
walking. The sparkling black flecks in the stone were the spaces where he would fit himself, expanded and fragmented and still whole. For an instant it resisted him. He claimed the stone, made it his own flesh and wrapped himself in it, and that was the end of resistance.

There was a solidness about it that felt comfortable, right. He was stronger here where he could be stone against stone, all hard, skinless strength. Not skinless, no—his skin was dry in the sun above, but here in his bones was a netting of moisture, water moving drop by drop down to join the aquifer below him and to feed the river itself. Lines and nodes of water, of silver, of copper—

—and something else, that moved in a creeping, unbroken vein. A long loop of it lay like a noose over him, binding, freezing, sealed and stagnant. Near him, very near, he could feel a tangling in the loop, cold against his bones. He didn’t think it was supposed to be cold.

The cold gave him a focus for his senses. He thought he would be lost in richness otherwise, the textures of stone and mud and water and sand, the stillness of old limestone, the memory of turbulence imprisoned in igneous rock.

There it was: two strands knotted, throttling each other. One reeked of iron and smoke; the other was poison, carrion, bitter dark. They didn’t belong here, twisting through his bones. The knot was wedged in the stone like water frozen in a pipe, crystalline and razor-edged. The edges and the temperature seemed to warn him away, to say,
This is not yours to meddle with.

This frail, corrupt thing wedged into the stone of him, not his to meddle with? If he’d had a mouth, he’d have laughed.

He possessed the earth around it, and shrugged. It felt like shrugging, anyway: a flexing of stone, a contraction around that brittle shape. It shattered.

The power it had dammed and directed was no longer stagnant. What had been cold was hot enough to melt stone. What had been sluggish roared and plunged. It swept over him, more fluid than water.

Like negative images on a photographer’s plate, he saw the storefronts of Allen Street swamped by a running, leaping darkness; he saw dark men with white eyes carrying coffins, a parade of coffins. Pain scorched his frail human hands and arms, drove a long spike into his soft human belly. The flood filled his mind, his nerves, the places where he kept his memory, his name, his self. It was endless. It was drowning him.

He couldn’t get free. He was made of inflexible stone, and the force that attacked him was part of him. Once he’d been softer, smaller. He’d had arms and legs, and could run. He’d crawled on the skin of the earth, where he’d been safe from this uncontrollable tide. There, if water closed over his head, he would swim upward, toward light, growing light, until his face broke the
surface and the sun would dazzle him blind through his closed eyelids, and his lungs would fill with sweet air—

He coughed, and opened his eyes. Then he had to blink to try to clear them of what felt like a sandstorm’s worth of grit. He wanted to rub them, but he seemed to have lost his arms somewhere.

Above him, Lung swore in Chinese.

Jesse was lying on his back on the dirt. He’d been sitting when he started, hadn’t he? He tried to sit up, and found his hands and arms attached just where they’d always been, but inclined to tremble embarrassingly when asked to work.

Lung helped prop him up. “Keep your eyes closed,” Lung said. “There is dirt in them still.”

There was dirt in his eyes? A piece of cloth swept his face. A moment later it came back with water on it, and covered the same ground. He wanted to push it away—was he a baby, that he couldn’t wipe his own face? But it was all he could do to keep from falling over.

“Better,” Lung said. “You may open your eyes.”

The view, when he did, was of himself from the chest down. Clumps of orange-brown dirt lay in every fold of his shirt and trousers. “I look as if I’ve been buried alive.” It came out as a whisper, and scraped his throat.

Lung’s silence made him look up. Lung was pale, and wore an expression Jesse had never seen on him before. “And so you should,” he said at last.

Jesse looked down again. The soil around him was loose, as if it had been dug. In anger and fear, he asked, “What did you do?”

“Nothing. I watched. You fell backward, and I was concerned. Then you began to sink into the earth, and I was afraid.”

He still was. Jesse could see it. “Go on.”

“You sank into the earth, and it closed over you. I was too frightened to move, until you were already out of sight. Then I dug into the dirt after you. I dug down until I reached stone. You were not there.” Lung swept his hands over his face, and Jesse saw that they were dirty and bleeding and broken-nailed. “I thought you had died.”

“How long?” Jesse asked.

“Longer than you could have held your breath.”

The earth had its own way of breathing. Stone didn’t need lungs. “Did anything happen while I …”

“A tremor. Then the soil began to move, as if a corpse were digging itself out of its grave. You rose up through it, lying flat and still. Then the earth closed beneath you.”

His strength was coming back. That was nice. He felt as if he ought to say something. The only thing that occurred to him was, “I want a bath.”

Lung laughed a little, but it sounded more like hysteria than amusement. “It seems that instinct may be as effective as education, after all.”

“No. No, the damned thing nearly killed me.” Jesse got himself up onto his knees, and only swayed a little. A bit more effort and he was on his feet. Yes, he was nearly back to normal. If there was any normal, anymore.

He unbuttoned his shirt, wrestled it off over his head, and shook dirt out of it. It would probably never be the same, but he thought he could get it presentable enough to wear back to town.

Lung stood. “You will need to eat.” He turned and headed upstream to where they’d left Sam and the mule.

Jesse pulled off his trousers and drawers and shook them, too. He tossed them over a branch, stepped down the bank, and waded into the San Pedro up to his knees.

The water was cool under the trees, and though the river was shrunken, it was relatively clear. In flood, it would be brown with silt chewed out of its bed and flung downstream—

He stiffened; the image was too much like what he’d felt under the earth. Another wave of fear: He had been under the earth. He had been buried alive. He had buried
himself
alive.

He plunged his head into the water and scrubbed hard at his face, dug his fingers into his scalp until it hurt. Only time would wash away the memory of drowning in power, but he’d damned well try to give time some help.

He lay in the streambed and let the water flow around him. The dropping sun blinked and flashed through the breeze-turned leaves. Slowly the fear subsided; not gone, but shrunk to a size he didn’t have to struggle against for each breath. Maybe the Baptists were right. Maybe water was grace, and its touch could wash the Devil away.

But it had felt good. He’d felt strong and
right
as part of the bedrock, as if he’d come to a place that had been made just for him.

Not unlike a grave.

Lung thought Jesse could stand up to the force that had destroyed Lily. Jesse would have to tell him he was wrong. No one could. The man who’d murdered the Chinese girl may have felt and used that power, but it had turned his mind already. Jesse wouldn’t follow him there, not even to avenge the girl. Not even to help Lung.

He fetched his shirt and scrubbed it as best he could against the river
rocks. Then he put his trousers back on, and his boots, and carried the rest of his clothes upstream, in the direction Lung had gone.

Lung sat in a pleasant, open space between three shrubby mesquite trees, above the wash they’d followed to the river. He’d tethered the mule and Sam nearby. He had a tiny fire burning in a nest of rocks, and a tin kettle propped over it. He was staring at something far away, or nothing, more likely.

Jesse took the animals down to the river to drink. When he came back, he spread his shirt over a bush to dry in the sun, and sat across the fire from Lung. That seemed to draw Lung back from wherever he’d gone.

“The water will boil in a moment. Meanwhile, here.”

Lung had unrolled a slicker and laid out a sort of Chinese picnic on it. There was sticky rice in a large, primeval-looking leaf; strips of dried, spiced chicken; and preserved vegetables in a stoneware crock.

“Now
that’s
magic,” Jesse said, but Lung didn’t smile.

Instead, he looked away through the mesquite and said, “I thought you were dead. Dead, and I had killed you. You are right to leave. Do it soon, before I have your death on my conscience and your ghost at my heels.”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

Lung turned his gaze on Jesse.
There are ghosts and ghosts,
it replied. “You asked if a death was required, to bind the earth.”

“What? Oh.”

“If I had said yes, would you have done it?”

“Cold-blooded murder? Of course not!”

Lung’s face was tight with pain. “And would you now?”

Cicadas buzzed in the trees around them. A dragonfly rose, shining and improbable, from the river. Suddenly he understood what Lung was asking; understanding swept away his anger. He shut away the memory of living, powerful and whole, in stone. “No, Lung.”

The teakettle rumbled gently, and Lung took it off the fire.

“Pass the chicken,” Jesse said.

They were both wolf-hungry, but the greatest virtue of the food was that it required attention and requests and comments. It prevented awkwardness. Jesse was pinching up the last rice grains with his chopsticks when Lung asked, “How early will you leave?”

Jesse poured more tea into his tin cup. “No. I won’t leave you sitting in this.”

“If I must, I will drug you and put you on a train in Tucson.”

“Look, Lung—” Jesse glared at the surface of his tea, but no useful words formed there. “I—what I did today, down there—I can’t do that again.”

“Do you think I wish—”

“Let me finish before you get your hackles up. I can’t do that again, but I must be good for something. Whoever killed that girl moved this … stuff around as if he were making a sand castle. And he’s crazy, which maybe goes without saying. If I leave, what do you plan to do about him?”

“Hide under the bed.”

“What?”

“Jesse, the Chinese have survived in this country as the mouse survives in the presence of the fox. If there is nothing I can do but wait this man out, I will wait him out.”

“Why don’t we both leave? Come on, we’ll go to Mexico. You can doctor the president and all the rich
gringos,
and I’ll train their horses.”

Lung poked the fire. It didn’t need poking that Jesse could see, but Lung took his time about it. At last he said, “I am needed here.”

“By whom, for what?” But Jesse suspected he already knew.

“If China Mary is the mayor of Hoptown, I am its doctor, its”—Lung smiled crookedly—“medicine man.”

“They’ll get another one.”

“In San Francisco there were many who did what I do. Here, there is only me. In San Francisco I could do as I pleased. I could be a child. Here I must be a man. They need me.”

“They” being the Chinese. It was the answer to the question Jesse had asked himself that morning. Lung might live without his queue, dress in western clothes, and eat off a western kitchen table. But at the center of him, where hard choices were made, he was Chinese. He would choose the community over himself.

Lung prodded the fire. “Ask anyone in Hoptown. They work, and save, and send money home to China. They mean to return there, as rich men, or as bones.”

“What about you?”

The silence seemed long to Jesse, before Lung said, “I will never return to China.”

The words sounded like a door closing. Jesse didn’t know if he could open it again, or if he should.

“We had fun in San Francisco,” Jesse said.

That made Lung smile again, a real one this time. “We did.”

“I can’t leave you to grow up all by yourself.”

“You could not grow up if you lived to be one hundred.”

“Can so.”

“Hah.”

“Bet you a hundred dollars.”

“Where would you get one hundred dollars?”

“That’s my problem. Fish or cut bait.”

Lung raised an eyebrow. “And who decides if you have grown up?”

“You do.”

“Just give me the hundred dollars, then.”