The Man Game (38 page)

Waiting for the teatime hour to arrive, his wife gathered her energy. The house was prepared for the man's arrival. RH went around and checked that all the rooms were locked save the kitchen, the living room, and the library, in case RH wanted to take the snakehead in for a private viewing of some of his rare antiquities. RH claimed that his pornographic works, imported from Bombay and Constantinople at great cost, dated from the medieval era, although telltale signs on the page suggested they were no more than a hundred years old.

For her part, Mrs. Alexander was concerned with maintaining another sort of filth. Before the tea was made, the silverware was not polished. The carpets were not swept. The curtains were not beaten. The furniture was not oiled and buffed, but left dull and dry. Her single act of rebellion against this intruder was to not dust. The whole week she'd let a fine white layer settle over everything, commanding her servants to leave it all. Even the mirrors were stained with grime, fingerprints, and a ghostly fog. Nothing in her house would shine for the Chinaman.

As a gift, the snakehead brought the lovely tin free of charge, filled with a heavy dollop of legendary mud. The Alexanders thanked him, bowed their heads, begged him to enter their home. They led him into the living room where
everything was set out for his arrival. From the tips of his boots to the whiskers atop his lips, the snakehead presented himself behind his guns. He never took them off. In their greetings, RH apologized for the late invitation, claiming work at the mill had required his attention during a mechanical emergency. The snakehead agreed that RH had been very impolite this week and he was glad to see there was still a chance to reconcile their friendship. RH was flustered. He promised he meant to harm. His wife looked on with terror as she watched the snakehead treat RH the way RH treated Mayor McLean, as a nobleman treats a salesman, as definitively as a snake treats an egg.

Tea was served. They drank in silence. Mr. Alexander buttered the scones.

The snakehead watched Mrs. Alexander eat. He impulsively touched a bullet in the chamber, tickling it. To a woman approaching sixty, his lecherous gaze was unwanted and distasteful but also surprising in its effect: she was suddenly conscious of her every motion. RH was keenly aware of the man's strange power over his wife, much the way a hypnotist controls his subject before she knows it and long after she's assumed herself free again. Mrs. Alexander had not been courted more than once until this day—if that was even the word for the squamatic eye that watched her. As his wife shifted her weight from hip to hip, munching toasted crumpet, RH was having great trouble swallowing and kept needing to find excuses to stand.

In all my travelling, said the snakehead, I never taste salmon so delicious as ones spawning Vancouver's waters.

I'm delighted you enjoy it, Mrs. Alexander said with a bow of her head. The Alexanders never served Whitemen salmon, never would dare. For the snakehead they made an exception and ate the blasted fish to spite him.

I love salmon meat cut from living fish, he said. You try it?

Y-yes, she said, a lie out of timid politeness. Her husband shot her a frightening look. She looked at her lap where she discovered her hands made into fists.

At my home I have tank with Pacific salmon for the purpose, said the snakehead. See them swim with my bites in them, yes.

RH sucked bravely on the walrus brush hanging over his upper lip. He was vexed at himself and feared for the safety of his wife. She was brave, too, likely braver than he, but excitable. It was within her character to do something rash. She might leap from her seat and slap the snakehead across the cheek. She might be capable of murder. RH didn't know. He did not know his wife in anything but domestic situations. He did not know her when life might be threatened. He was not so brave as he thought. His wife's neck was flushed to the ears and, if he knew her body, all the way down to the navel. Looking at her, the sight of her fear, terrified him to the core. His heart, weakened by mud, palpitated.

The snakehead accepted a second cup of black tea. The minutes ticked by. He sipped without quite opening his fat lips. When the conversation fell into a morbid silence, the claustrophobia didn't seem to bother him the way it bothered the Alexanders. He put the teacup down with a squeak as porcelain touched porcelain, reached to his side for the shelf of the four-legged chess table, and opened it—the one drawer they forgot to lock. The ebony and ivory players rattled around. He picked through them and produced a deck of cards. He looked the deck over and finally, with a disgraceful show of ardour, sniffed it.

Shall we retire to my library and talk in private for a while? said RH, smiling.

The snakehead ignored him. He took pleasure inquiring about the provenance of her furnishings. When he caressed the leg of her teak tea table, she rubbed a calf against a shin under her unattractive blue dress. She gripped the shiny glans knob of her oak armrest. RH felt an intensely encroaching fear and began to talk aimlessly about the weather in stilted phrases, saying the word
rain
upwards of ten times in as many observations, pretending to
enjoy the sight of a slave trader with his wife, hoping not to faint as he watched a Chinaman-servant spread butter on a fresh crumpet.

Polite society be damned. We should be on our way if we're going to make it to the clearing before it's too dark, said RH.

RH was more than relieved to see the snakehead out and to kiss his wife goodbye as he shut the door. They walked to the gate, heard her lock it, which they hardly ever felt the need to do. He knew his wife's habits, and could've guessed what happened next. Her manservants prepared the pipe, cleaned the tar out with a coarse-haired little chimneysweep brush, and practically poured the sweet smoke into her.

Walking through the forest with this madman, this rabid sensualist, RH regretted bitterly the tea. Having such a creature in his home was as wise a move as inviting in a demon, an evil faun of the woods, a trickster spirit such as the Indians spoke of. Once the man was in his house, something of him would stay forever as a sticky, ectoplasmic residue. The wallpaper would bubble up now. Their mirrors would never again return a proper reflection. They would have to burn the chess table. RH shivered involuntarily at the thought.

The two men began the hike through town. They passed tradesmen who whipped pairs of ox from atop full carts being heaved along the road, loaded with shipyard tools and blacksmith junk and barrels of lard and everything else you could think of. The men at the corners eyed them with deep suspicion. Alexander avoided any conspicuous routes. He stayed far from the Calabi & Yau Bakeshoppe, Red & Rosy's General Store, the Oppenheimer factory, George Black's butcher shop, and most certainly City Hall. The last thing he wanted was for the mayor to see them. Alexander would show his guest the construction site of the Hudson's Bay six-storey department store and be done with it. He'd employed many Chinese to clear the land for excavation, and his responsibilities ended there. He
might even give up hiring Chinamen altogether after today. He'd already lost the mayoral election to his decision; he wasn't about to lose his wife. Sammy Erwagen was a good enough accountant. Together they'd find a method to make back the money from employing more Whitemen as workers. This was where the snakehead wanted to be taken. As they trekked down Hastings at dusk and then to the edge of town and up the stiffening incline into the awful dark wilderness, neither businessman enjoyed the company of the other.

Ah, said the snakehead, what beautiful mushrooms.

A pace or two in front of the snakehead, RH saw a patch of muscimolic mushrooms. Their bright red caps were flecked with white and ranged in shape from flat as a table to conelike rockets. RH didn't see the need to waste any more time on the matter. The snakehead looked at the mushroom patch without so much as lowering his head. He smiled but it didn't appear to be from joy.

Ah, the fine shaft on that one. Or there, that pie …

Fly Agaric, I believe they're called, said RH.

Indeed, said the snakehead.

RH turned to walk again, but the snakehead remained still. RH sighed and shifted his weight, combed his fingers through his beard, and waited.

When I see rare mushroom, said the snakehead in that cruel accent, part Oxford, part Shanghai slum, I never know if I want to eat them or kick them to pieces.

At least, thought RH as he crouched behind two rotting logs in the pitch black, he wasn't still at tea. Except that he'd inadvertently trekked the snakehead all the way to Georgia Street, just outside the light of the four torches wherein Litz was after his third point against Pisk.

I say, I say—, said RH, and in great haste broke certain codes of conduct and tugged the snakehead's coatsleeve, ignoring speculation about leprous pathogens, hoping to get him to turn back from the spectacle before he saw too much. Too late. The snakehead raised his arm away, saying:
Move move, and stepped onto the log for a better view. His cufflinks—silhouettes of concubines in their lustre—flashed back moonlight in RH's eyes.

I'm afraid we shouldn't have made the trek …

On contrary, said the snakehead, peeking between the logs, I did not realize so much to see at construction site. No, I'm very interested to see what Whiteman does when you not looking.

I think we should leave, for our own safety.

If I was afraid for safety right now, said the snakehead, you would be dead.

I hardly think—

The inky evening combined with the flickering torches made the crowd seem to RH and his guest one black seething mass. The snakehead shuddered from neck to tailbone. Through the red cedars that concealed them, RH and the snakehead saw only a few slavering faces lit from the torchlight. Smouldering orange faces. They saw raucous gaptoothed mouths opening to shout and scream and make maniacal sounds as caves will make in a terrible wind, surrounded by moss that was their beards, skulls as thick as stone. Neither man assumed the crowd was made of anything other than Whitemen. It didn't occur to them that Chinamen were present as well. If they saw any Asiatics in the throng, their minds denied what their eyes took in. Racial commingling at an event like this, and of all the places, did not seem feasible. RH saw two men, two exiles, Litz and Pisk, wrestling like rabid incarnations of the figures from Greek pottery. He was thoroughly disgusted. When pirated-wood shipments from the CPR-owned land had stopped coming in he'd assumed Litz and Pisk had left town and contented himself with the fact; didn't give the boys another thought. Instead they'd been playing this game right under his nose the whole time.

I abhor this kind a behaviour, said RH, dusting himself clean of specks of the man game that had drifted through the night air to land on his shoulders.

If you permit elements like this to continue, said the snakehead, if you permit devian
ce
. If it continue unabated, sir, Whiteman will turn on you sooner or later.

I think my Whitemen will turn out to be
your
problem before they turn on me.

This is your opinion?

Yes, that I foresee, said RH. Great ambition resides in the Anglo-Saxon spirit.

There was a troubling pause. In the snakehead's opiated stupor each of RH's words lay on his head like cold coins, drop-drop-drop, and it took a lot of thought to tot it up. He fitted his palms together at his chest, covering his pistols in a gesture like jaws shutting. He said slowly and gently: Don't misunderstand me, sir. Kumtuks. I protect my investments.

When RH made no reply, the snakehead continued: I trust you know how important it is for our mutual investments to be protected? It is only way to do business. Your Whitemen, they are not my concerns. They are not my investments. I retract my advice on matter your Whitemen with great apology, sir. I do not mean to look like it is
I
who undermine your authority.

Realizing his error, RH leaned ever so slightly forward in nausea. Yes, he said.

The fists popped at him one by one. He ducked the left and swooped to avoid the right. He wasn't losing much ground when Litz circled in boxer stance and popped a fist at him. Litz wasn't giving it his all. The fists popped at easily dodged intervals. One came high, he zigged left. One came low, he narrowly zagged right. Left popped then the right. They scuttled in harmony through the cold mud. Pisk was relaxed. He was in control. He was all dodge. Tried to block one but his balance made it impossible now that he was steadily backing up. Had to kind of bounce like a fish to avoid a slow gut punch. Litz skipped to the left and cornered Pisk in his own strange gliding momentum and in order to miss the punch he
had to contort in the opposite direction, again with a fish's determination. What was Litz up to? For a guy who wasn't as smart as him, Litz had a swift mind for strategy. What never failed to deke out Pisk was Litz's ability to whip a new move before Pisk even recognized that he was playing along. Litz got points off Pisk's own damned obliviousness. It was happening again—but how? He thought he was bobbing and weaving, zigging and zagging, ducking and jiving. He thought he was saving energy for a big comeback. Tie it up three-three. Whatever it was Pisk thought it was, it wasn't. Somehow the tides had turned on him. Pisk was used to winning. He was used to winning against Litz, and now he had no choice but to give away points. How was it possible that the only player he'd ever played, the one man who constituted the entirety of his opposition and whose moves and actions he knew as well as his own impulses, had somehow suddenly one-upped him? Litz was suddenly the better player. Pisk was, to be honest, furious. He was furious with himself. The moment finally came when he heard everyone snapping their fingers to the rhythm of Litz's fists popping and his own dance-like ducking. Those fingers were goddamn snapping. It was another point. Three-two for Litz. As the crowd cheered him, Litz bounced on the weightless power of his newfound glory
{see
fig. 9.1
}
.