The Man Game (10 page)

The Chinaman broke pace, remonstrated a pearl button on his jacket, and otherwise unfazed by the provocation (he didn't know English, just a little Chinook), continued towards them with a smile, almost a laughing smile, open enough to see down his throat to its pasty back wall. His mouth was a tunnel railroaded with silver fillings.

They started to conversate. Daggett rose to his true height, six foot and nine. Furry, shoulders outstretched, was six foot and two. The Chinaman was five and a bit. In a laxatived voice, smooth and unexpectedly fast, the Chinaman spoke a long list of ill-memorized syllables. He expected them to understand Chinook. They did understand Chinook. The problem was he hardly knew what he was saying and didn't know a word to hear it.

'The hell are you on aboot? said Daggett.

Velly tenas chickamin, said the Chinaman smiling as gingerly as his teeth allowed. One dallah, he said, then pointed to the Chinamen across the street, klone mans. Ikt chickamin, klone mans.

We ain't interested, Daggett said.

Ikt chickamin? Velly good deal. Klone mans, ikt chickamin. I said, no. Daggett felt the little snakehead was not taking his anger seriously enough, and this got him even madder. When he said: Not interested, this meant nothing to the Chinaman, who stood his ground and implored them with hook-fingered motions to look over his employables across the street.

Klone mans …

What? said Daggett.

Ikt chickamin.

Yeah, yeah, he said. I heard you the first time you—.

Furry raised himself off the wood beam where he'd been leaning and swung a hand to grab the handle of his axe, lifted it off the ground in a cutting pendulous upswing, let it fly, and caught it in his fist right below the axeblade. He put an arm around the Chinaman and said: Why don't we go somewhere more private if we're gonna talk business? All right with you?

Daggett made a motion with his hand near his mouth, and the Chinaman seemed to understand that they were taking him where they'd talk privately over a drink. What they did instead was take him down past the shacks to a spot just up from the ocean and tie him upright to a tree.

The Chinaman didn't understand what was happening until the rope started to come out, and by then Daggett had him in his grip. He shook his head no, begging like that.

Me and Daggett, said Furry, swinging the axe, we're on another level. No one's coming around here. Me and Daggett, we're on a level old-timers show respect. Old-timers ask permission to talk to us. Follow me? We walk the streets, Chinaman, people don't look us in the eyes. Who sent you? San Francisco?

The Chinaman nodded yes, slobbered his words.

Even when you don't see me smile, Furry said, in fact I am smiling. He took out a handkerchief from his shirt pocket and wiped the tearstreams and mucus off the Chinaman's face, then stuffed the kerchief deep into the man's mouth.

And believe me, eh, said Furry, I took some bohunks off the shelf. God forgive me, I got a graveyard under my belt. You don't know what I been through to get to where I'm at.

Furry axed off the leg and the Chinaman tried to scream through the handkerchief when he saw his leg and boot fall to the ground, tip over. The blood immediately started to gush from the wound just above the knee. Then he fainted. They untied him and he fell to the ground beside his boot, and just laid there shaking, bleeding like a motherfucker.

Furry tugged the kerchief out of the snakehead's mouth and used it to wipe the blood from his axeblade.

The newsmen wrote: CHINAMAN MURDER! MYSTERY BOOT FOUND; FOOT, LEG INSIDE; CULPRITS UNKNOWN; CHINATOWN UNDER CLOSER SURVEILLANCE SAYS CONST. MILLER.

The police took charge of the damning evidence, a Shanghai boot found in broad daylight on a rocky north-facing beach with a leg still inside it, bleeding from the perfectly clean cut below the kneecap. Constable Miller hung the boot by its buckles to the branch of a maple tree outside the mews, having first rid it of the amputated limb (incinerated). They knew who killed the Chinaman. Everyone did. Even Ed Shermang who laid the type and inked the rollers and distributed the news knew the real story. This wasn't a message to a murderer on the loose. That boot hanging there was a message to all snakeheads.

A murder never stopped the bars from opening at ten
A.M.
, when there'd be men waiting on the step already. By around eleven, the bar at the Sunnyside Hotel had fifteen or twenty men lined up at the counter and every round came with a song and a dance and everyone had facial hair. They'd drink all day, pacing out their chickamin to last until bed, perhaps ordering a pot pie if the stomach started to act up, but otherwise just drinking. By mid-afternoon the Sunnyside was packed and would stay packed until closing time. One thing the bartender liked to say was that the Sunnyside never left a man wanting more. More booze, more fights, more women, more hash, more opium. There were plenty of bootleggers to compete with. Plenty of bootleggers and some of the ripest soil for potatoes. The potato moonshine that was going around these days, it was liable to burn the backs off your eyes, right in that place where the cords connected to the sphere. There was no other place like Vancouver anywhere in the world. It was slop, and here a man was swine. Times when you found a pile of them, three or four bohunks passed out in an alley, so drunk on bootleg they looked stone dead.

In between the rains, Vancouver cherished a sunny day among the quickly tapering afternoons. A murder did not stop the trout from idling in the creek. The creek wended its way unperturbed by man's violent soul, meandering through the handsomely primitive garden behind the Erwagen house. When the Erwagens had moved in they didn't touch a thing on the property, just put in some fenceposts and looked at its wildness with great, frightened admiration. Sammy was terribly fond of wildness. The creek jagged through their yard, flowing around the cedar shake fenceposts, solid beams shaved to a point at the top and covered in a soft algae at the bottom, where the fish pushed one another through this gateway to the sweet untouched pond beneath the boughs of a pine where insects hatched year-round. He liked it, like the writhing chaos of it.

Hidden in the reflection of the small hemlocks and fruit trees that marked the way to and from the pond, the trout gathered to eat, safely out of reach from bear claws, wolf jaws, and pollution from sawmills, fish canneries, smelting operations that dumped into nearby streams like this one or from the thousands of smokestacks and woodstoves that gave the air over Vancouver a sometimes greasy aftertaste like a burnt egg stuck in the back of your throat.

The Erwagens' verandah was partially covered against the western sun, sturdily built by local men shortly after their arrival in June on the day of the Fire. A simple, splitlevel A-frame is all the Erwagens asked for. On two floors were three main bedrooms including the master, one for their ward Toronto, another for guests or, perhaps, under other circumstances, a child. A den, study, and living room, as well as kitchen and servants' quarters—smaller rooms to the east, facing the garden—and that was all. Clapboard walls covered in shiplap and papered over in a subdued blue with a gold filigreed pattern of blushing crystalloids. They hung a landscape painting on one wall.

What are you reading? she asked her husband with a sigh.

A dictionary a Chinook Jargon, said Sammy, turning his eyes from the pamphlet propped in front of his face on a
music stand. And, like music sheets, Sammy's ward Toronto assisted his reading by turning the pages at his cue.

Chinooky, it's our language, Molly exclaimed. Tell me more aboot Chinook. How does one say
come hither
?

Hm, well,
mamook chahko
.

Mamook chahko.

Don't tease, Chinooky. But I might also, in keeping with the tone a the conversation, compliment your gorgeous
totoosh
.

What, my … she raised her hips.

No, my dear, I'm afraid the closest I can find for that is
ee-na
. I want ee-na. Ha ha. I shall have to write the author a thank you for his fine work in compiling this educational pamphlet. It seems he's also using it to publicize his business as an importer and repairer a firearms. Clever man indeed. Shall I purchase a firearm, dear?

Oh, Sammy, she said, turning onto her back and kicking her legs in the air above her head. I'm more bored than ever. Let's go tip our hats for no decent reason at all. Decency be damned. Let's drink.

He considered the idea and said: I could wet my lips.

Would you? said Molly, sitting up and beaming at him.

Yes, it's been months now. Aboot time, he said and shrugged with his mouth, his eyes, nothing else.

You're ready to go out?

I might as well admit I'm alive. I expected to be dead by now.

We'll go then. I'm sure we'll have a splendid time.

How could we not on such a splendid autumn day?

I do feel impatient today, she said and flapped her hands, I don't know why. Let's go right now.

She pulled at the lap of her dress and made static. Otherwise the house was silent. The sun shone straight in the window and captured the smallest motes of dust as they followed the current of air. A half hour later they were ready. She opened the door and with Toronto's help wheeled her husband out into the solitude of the day. Even on good days, Sammy was willing to admit at least to himself that he felt imprisoned in the worst way imaginable.

THREE

There is nothing like a feud to make life seem full and interesting.

–
ERIC HOFFER

Count the faces. Impossible for Sammy to tell apart the faces on all these bachelors, all these transient dirtbags, homeless peons, and outcast poltroons. Anyone who was anyone in logging was in the bar that day.

Along the far wall of the saloon, two filthy sconces burned their wicks' end while another sconce was blackened and unlit. The funnel shapes of soot on the wall marked a thousand cheap paraffin candles burned in their scalloped glass. The Sunnyside had survived the Great Fire with that one wall intact. Instead of tearing it down, it stood as a gross, charred memento for the disrepair the place was in before that fateful day in June. In rebuilding the Sunnyside attention had been paid to such modern details as finely crafted mouldings, a varnished mahogany bartop, exotic floral ribbons on the banister knobs, even a player piano. The place had an air of quality and propriety far and above the general countenance of its daily visitors, who were halfwits, in no better shape than the old wall.

No one in the room had ever seen a paraplegic before 1886. A cripple was a mythic creature, an ember in the fire of God's eye sent to Earth to inspire religious worry. Raving cripple, Jesus was not far from the raving cripple. A man with an unclean spirit who had his dwelling among the tombs, as St. Mark would have it. Gives a healthy man shivers down his back. Sammy was evidence that
He'd
discovered his wayward men, His West Coast flock, whispering: Beware the eye a the Almighty, eh.

Making things worse, also among the Sunnyside's clientele were two other worrisome men, Furry and Daggett, wearing the same clothes as on the day they killed the Chinaman, and every day since.

Serving drinks was the big Negro Joe Fortes. He tapped two drafts for Molly. She paid him with two bits and sought a table for herself and her husband where they could drink and stare at each other without talking or needing to talk.

Deal, said a man with his hands flat on a table to a man shuffling and reshuffling a deck of cards.

Tell you what, said one, a young drunk cowboy bachelor with a dirty wool mitt for a face, a cowboy straight from Alberta with the name RD Pitt. I'm sick a seeing them Celestials on my streets. Don't even need no explanation. Look aroond. They're ever-where like fleas, you know, sucking, sucking the blood out a me. Asiatic spectacle. If I see pigtails today …

His buddy laughed and nodded, looking into his beer for the words he'd lost.

I'll take those pigtails and twist them around.