Territory (5 page)

“So using your name would be false humility?”

“Exactly,” Lung said, beaming.

“You’re a madman,” Jesse told him.

Sam tossed his head. Jesse realized his hands had tightened on the reins. “Sorry,” he said, and stroked Sam’s neck. He slid out of the saddle before he’d quite decided he would do it. Someone else might own the sign now. But at least he could ask the someone else if he knew Chow Lung, lately a physician in San Francisco.

A Chinese boy of about ten stepped out the door with a broom in his hands. He saw Jesse and stared. Jesse tried a smile. The boy dropped the broom and ducked back through the door, shouting in Chinese too quick for Jesse to understand.

Now what did I do?
He had an urge to throw himself back in the saddle and gallop off.

Then Chow Lung stuck his head out the door, squinting into the sunlight. “Ah. There you are,” he said in Chinese. “You took uncommonly long to arrive.”

For a moment, he doubted; this was another fish in the school. But Lung stood in the door, tall and square-shouldered as the warlords in old Chinese tapestries, his arms folded over his chest. There was something unfamiliar in the shape of his head, half-hidden by the dark doorway.

Jesse wanted to say so many things at once, he couldn’t speak at all. The
most pressing was,
How could I have taken uncommonly long to get to someplace I didn’t know I was going?

Lung raised his eyebrows, a silent, satirical question.

“I happiness see you?” Jesse offered in Chinese.

Lung covered his eyes with one hand, but Jesse saw the grin under it. “Oh, for the patience of the Buddha. You have forgotten everything I taught you.”

“I no practice since … so long! San Francisco after. I—it—return.” As he said it, he wondered why he had. It was like the newspaper office: the assumption that he would be here long enough for his Chinese to come back.

“It cannot do so too soon. You make my ears bleed.”

Jesse bowed in the Chinese fashion, very low, and said in English, “A thousand thanks, Chow Lung, revered doctor and son of dragons.”

Lung burst into laughter and English. “Go to hell, you jackass.” He turned to shout back into the shop. “Chu! Take the respected Mr. Fox’s horse to the livery stable. Let no one else lay hands upon it, but tend it yourself as you would the mount of the Emperor.”

Lung stepped back and the boy, Chu, popped into the street. He gazed eagerly at Sam, shyly at Jesse.

“Cool down, water …” Jesse’s Chinese deserted him, and he asked in English, rather desperately, “Grooming? You understand?”

“Yes, sir. Brush, hoof pick, dry straw, best alfalfa hay!” Chu replied in the same language, and stroked Sam’s nose reverently.

“He is not good at anything but horses, but he is very good at those,” Lung said.

Chu looked sidelong at Lung and made a noise that, in a society that taught respectful behavior to its young, was disconcerting. Jesse thought Lung pretended not to hear.

“Now,” said Lung, “will you come in? Or will you sit down in the street like a Hindoo cow?”

A day’s ride to the border. A day’s ride was the other side of the world. He was shackled by his own weariness. Jesse untied his saddlebags and handed the reins to Chu, took off his spectacles, and stepped over the threshold of Lung’s house.

It was the second floor of the building in San Francisco all over again. The smell was the same: medicinal herbs, sandalwood, cedar, lamp oil. The light was the same, dim and restful, from the lamps and from the specks of sun that got through the pierced-wood shutters. Lung’s black lacquer herb chest stood against one wall, drawer knobs gleaming, like a blocky warrior in studded armor. It was the only Chinese furniture. The rest was western: a square wooden
table, a pair of straight-backed chairs, and incongruously, a wicker rocker. A teakettle rumbled on a black iron stove against the back wall. Beside it, a curtained doorway led to the rear of the building, and probably the stairs.

“At last I can make the tea,” Lung sighed happily, taking a teapot down from a shelf.

When Lung turned away, Jesse realized what he’d seen, or hadn’t seen, in the shadow of the door. “Why is there no year of the donkey in Chinese astrology?”

“If there were, I am sure you would have been born in one.”

“I might have at that. What happened to your hair?”

Lung brushed a hand over his short-cropped hair, as if to make sure it was there, as if his hand made the gesture without his mind’s connivance. He folded the paper back from one corner of a brick of tea and grated some into the pot, carefully, as if he could not, in fact, make tea in pitch-darkness while half asleep.

“One cannot wear the queue in prison,” he said finally, with a shrug. “It is the law.” Then he surveyed Jesse, a grin pinched in the corners of his mouth. “But I see you are making up my loss.”

“You were in jail? Why didn’t you write? I’d have come and got you out.”

Lung snorted. “As if I cannot get myself out of prison.”

“Well, you couldn’t, could you?”

“It only took a little time. Why make a fuss and waste money if time will do everything?”

“Money exists to save time. And I like making a ruckus.”

“It is past now. And the past is illusion.”

“Bullshit.”

Lung leaned over the pot and sniffed the steam. “Ah. I cannot imagine why I waited until you came.”

“Because you didn’t know I was coming?”

“I expected you days ago. But you have always been stubborn as a pig.”

“What happened to ‘the respected Mr. Fox’?”

“That was only to set Chu a good example. Besides, he would be disappointed if he thought you were an insignificant person, after he had been made to watch for you for days.”

Jesse felt a surge of irritation. “Lung, leave off the hocus-pocus and say, ‘Hello, how’ve you been, what a surprise to see you here.’ ”

Lung carried the teapot to the table in silence. Then he said, “You told me yourself about your sister.”

Jesse hadn’t expected that. If he’d had his guard up, it wouldn’t have hurt. “My sister … isn’t well. If I made it sound like anything else, I was probably drinking.”

“We were both drinking. So?”

“So my sister is irrelevant.” Jesse saw Lung frown, his gaze suddenly unfocused. He sighed and explained, “She has nothing to do with this conversation.”

“Ah, thank you.” Lung grinned. “Have I told you recently that you have a vile and unmusical language?”

“Not in the last three years, no. I’m sure absence was all that stopped you.”

“I apologize for speaking of your sister. But she is the best proof of what you are.”

Jesse’s hands clenched around the porcelain cup. “What, likely to inherent the family weakness?”

Lung reached across the table and drew the spectacles from the breast pocket of Jesse’s coat. “Your eyes still trouble you?”

Jesse yanked the spectacles back. “Dark lenses make people nervous. I like that.”

Lung held his gaze; Jesse had to look away.

“Yes,” he said. “Sometimes.”

After a long silence, Lung said, “When one pours boiling water into a pottery jar, it cracks. But a porcelain jar, that appears so frail”—Lung took the cup from Jesse’s rigid fingers and held it before him—”will not break.”

“Coefficient of thermal expansion,” Jesse said, as if each word were a flung pebble. Lung only watched and looked patient. “All right. What the hell do you mean?”

“That your sister is pottery. You, however, may prove to be porcelain.”

“I appear frail?” Lung only raised his eyebrows. “Which makes the boiling water … ?”

“You know what it is.”

Jesse’s skin prickled. The flame climbed the air in the lamp beside him, but the room grew slowly darker. Lung’s face, across the table, was fixed, frowning, his eyes closed. Jesse fought down panic as Lung’s lips parted, as he whispered a word.

Jesse sat frozen in perfect darkness.

“Stop it,” he said sharply. The room glowed around them, as it had moments before.

Lung smiled crookedly, painfully. “You are a disaster in the making. I wish I were not a conscientious man.”

“It’s rude to mesmerize your guests.” His heart was still racing.

“Drink your tea. Have you eaten?”

Jesse consulted the empty space in the middle of himself.
Or maybe that’s why the room went dark.
But he couldn’t stay.

“Wait here.” Lung rose and went out the front door. For a moment the racket from the street, the sun, the smells, invaded the room. Then the door closed and shut the real world out.

Or so it seemed to Jesse. Like Lung’s rooms in San Francisco, this was half temple, half fortress, and not fully part of the city around it. The longer he stayed, the more he’d be drawn into what happened here. He shivered and swallowed tea.
I’m going to Mexico,
he reminded himself.
Nothing here has anything to do with me.

When Lung stepped back in, carrying a basket, Jesse said, “Why are you here, Lung?”

“That can wait until we have eaten.”

“I can eat and talk at the same time.”

“It is bad for your stomach.” Lung set the basket on the floor and unloaded it onto the table: steaming white hemispheres of
bao,
thick soup smelling of pepper and vinegar.

The pang of hunger in Jesse’s stomach nearly turned it inside out. He bit deep into the
bao
to the filling of savory shredded pork.

Lung watched and nodded. “My neighbor. He makes very good barbarian food, too.” He poured soup into two green-glazed bowls. “I am here because in San Francisco I went to jail, and though I was released, the embarrassment proved unexpectedly lasting.” He ran his palm over his shorn hair again and grimaced.

“What were you in jail for?”

“I was accused of poisoning a white man.” He said the last two words with care. Jesse would have noticed them anyway; Lung always preferred “barbarian.”

“Did you?”

Lung glared. “I am offended.”

“Does that mean you didn’t poison him?”

“I should poison you instead. I gave him mild herbs for stiffness in his joints. Then he dined on oysters, and since the oysters he had eaten the week before were wholesome, the fault lay with me.”

“The fellow didn’t die, then.”

“They would not have freed me if he had.”

The soup burned going down. “But why Tombstone?”

“It was auspicious. At least, it should have been. That is why I summoned you.”

Jesse glanced up from his spoon. “Lung, don’t do that.”

“What am I doing?”

“I wouldn’t be here at all if some idiot hadn’t stolen Sam and made me tramp all the way here to get him back.”

“Sam
stolen
? Are you hurt?”

“Aren’t you going to claim you arranged the whole thing?”

“I have told you, one can only press the universe a little in the direction one wishes, and hope one’s goal may be achieved. You cannot believe I would wish for someone to steal your horse?”

“If I thought you had anything to do with it, I’d walk out right now. I shot the man, Lung.”

Lung was very still. “Is he dead?”

“Not the last time I saw him, but he may be by now.”

“Was it self-defense?”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“There is a balance—was your own blood shed?”

“Lung—”

“Tell me!”

Jesse looked at the door. But he wasn’t sure where Chu had taken Sam, or how to find Chu. And he was no longer plowing ahead on willpower and novelty. “A little.”

“If it is not enough, I will do what I can.”

“Like what, shoot me somewhere else? Lung, this isn’t a good time for … whatever you’re talking about.”

Lung studied him, eyes narrowed, and said something in Chinese that Jesse didn’t recognize. “So I see. Where are you hurt?”

“It’s nothing. I was up all night.”

“I apologize for the urgency with which I called you.”

Jesse shook his head. He was still hungry, but he hadn’t the energy to finish the soup. “I’m on my way to Mexico.”

Lung made a rude noise through his lips. “There is nothing in Mexico.”

“There’s a man who wants to give me a lot of money to train his horses.”

“What, have you lost all your money? O cruel goddess of fortune!” Lung smacked the back of his hand against his forehead. Jesse wondered if there were amateur theatricals in China.

“The more he pays, the better bargain he’ll think he’s got. And I like training horses.”

“A better reason than money. But it is not your—purpose?—to train horses.”

“Hell, say ‘destiny.’ It won’t change a thing. If I weren’t so damned tired, I’d be ten miles south by now.”

“Of course you would,” Lung said, the way Jesse would reassure a skittish yearling. “But since you are here, you may as well bathe and sleep. And I will look at your wound.”

For no clear reason, Jesse remembered the air on Allen Street, clinging, stifling. He shook his head again.

“Jesse.”

He looked up, startled. Lung wasn’t across the table anymore; he was at the stove, refilling the kettle.

“There is nothing but wilderness between Tombstone and the border,” Lung said.

“The good people of Bisbee camp”—Jesse yawned—”would love to hear you say so.”

“If you are going to fall asleep, it might as well be here.”

“All right. But after that, I’m going. No offense.”

“None at all,” Lung agreed.

Jesse managed to stay more or less awake after that, though things seemed to happen in bursts with blank spots between, like a book with missing pages. He nodded off once in the big tin bathtub, but when the back of his head banged against the rim, he woke up.

Lung showed him to a room at the back of the house, just big enough for a cot, a scarred trunk, and space to walk between them. There was a small, shuttered window, and the daylight came in as spangles of light on the wall.

The cot creaked as he lay back. He was aware of that, but nothing beyond it.