She crossed Columbus Avenue, stopped outside the Museum Cafe and looked up Seventy-seventh Street. Already the street was blocked with snow, and both sidewalks were deserted. Jennifer had lived on the Upper West Side when she was going to Columbia Law School, and she prided herself on knowing how to be careful in the city. She had even taken self-defense classes at the YWCA to boost her confidence, but once she left school and moved to Brooklyn Heights, she had become increasingly paranoid about being alone on the West Side.It was foolish, she realized, especially now that the neighborhood was so fashionable. Still, she couldn’t keep herself from being wary.
She stood a moment longer on Columbus and looked for an available yellow taxi, but the few cabs moving slowly downtown were either filled of on call.
“Damn!” she said, feeling sorry for herself. Everything, it seemed, was going wrong in her life. Defiantly she pushed forward up the deserted side street, thinking guiltily that she should have asked Tom to walk with her as far as Broadway. That was the trouble with her. She fought so hard to be independent, but whenever she felt afraid, she wanted a man around. That realization made her furious. She looked up and purposely exposed her face to the cold, as if trying to freeze the pain she felt in her heart.
Then she felt the hand on her shoulder and was stopped in her tracks.
Tom must have come after her. She twisted away and turned to him. But it wasn’t Tom.
This man was taller, bigger. He seemed to block the entire street. She could barely see his face, hidden in the dark cave of a jacket hood, but she knew he was dangerous.
“Get away!” she shouted. She tried to step back and run, but her boots didn’t grip in the slippery snow and she stumbled just as the man swung at her.
“You bitch,” he swore, then lunging at her, knocked them both into the gutter between parked cars.
He was on top of her, pushing through her coat and grabbing at her body. His hands were on her breasts, his thick lips on her face. He kept swearing, calling her filthy names, and then he jabbed his blunt, wet tongue into her mouth.
It was when he ripped away the front of her white silk blouse that she went for him. Reaching up with both hands, she raked her nails down his cheeks. She wanted to hurt him, and hearing him cry out gave her courage. She hadn’t hit anyone since she was a little girl in the playground, and the pleasure it gave her to strike back was gratifying.
With the ferocity of a cornered dog, she grabbed his throat and curled her fingernails into his neck. She felt the skin pop as her nails broke his flesh and his warm blood ran down her fingers.
He swung at her blindly, and she ducked the blow. Then, moving like an animal, she attacked, catching him in the groin with her knee. He stumbled forward, groping for his testicles, and fell face-forward into the deep snow.
She did not run to the corner, where the snowbound traffic honked along Columbus Avenue. Instead, she licked the corners of her bleeding mouth and tasted the blood with pleasure. He grabbed the front bumper of the parked car and pulled himself up. She hit him hard in the back of the neck with the heel of her right hand, swinging at him as if she were chopping a block of wood. His big body slumped forward, skidding off the car’s metal grill, and dropped into the gutter.
She couldn’t let him go. She wouldn’t. She grabbed him by his hair and, with her foot jammed against the shoulder blades, jerked back his head until she heard his neck snap.
Jennifer stayed on her knees beside the body for a moment, gasping for air. She cupped a handful of snow into her palm and, using it like soap, wiped her face clean of blood. Calmer, she moved close and saw that the predator was dead. She had killed him. She smiled.
Her name was Shih Hsui-mei. She was Chinese, the wife of Cheng-k’uan, and he was a young man then, living in the town of Silver Hill. It was during the boom years of mining, and he had come west with his father from St. Louis to settle claims for the government.
He delivered goods to Cheng-k’uan from his uncle’s store and would see Shih Hsui-mei sitting on the porch facing the Yellowjacket Mountains, combing her hair. She was his age—sixteen, perhaps seventeen—and had come from China to be old Cheng-k’uan’s bride.
She had long black hair, very long, very black, and she would comb it slowly, time after time, until it fanned across one side of her perfect round face like a blackbird’s wing.
She would then take a paste made of rhubarb and comb it through the hair until it lay straight and still, like a fan, and then she would tie it out of sight.
She never wore Western clothing but dressed always in silk trousers and tight, beautifully embroidered jackets and small silver slippers. She had such tiny feet. When she walked across the boards of Cheng-k’uan’s mountain shack, she never made a sound. He would see her one moment, then she would be gone, like a tropical bird.
He could never see enough of her. He went again and again to Chinatown just to catch a glimpse of the young Shih Hsui-mei, for she never came across the creek to the white side of town.
In the opium dives, he saw her tend to the men, bring them fresh pipes of opium. The men stayed for days, lost to the world, hidden away in their private hells.
The boy’s hell was Shih Hsui-mei. He wanted her. Her old husband used to laugh at him as he sat watching her comb her hair in the bright morning sun. The old man made fun of the boy and spoke rapidly in Chinese to Shih Hsui-mei, asking her if she wanted to feel the white man’s prick.
The boy went to the opium dives and paid to smoke in the cells. He went because she would come to him then and give him a pipe full of the sweet-smelling drug. She would look at him with her wet black eyes and her round, perfect face, and he would stare wordlessly at her.
Then she would pass away into the den, and he would smoke the sweet opium and cough into the filthy blankets. In time he would forget her, forget his pain, and in the dimness of his consciousness, she would appear again, and he would not know if she were alive or simply in his dreams.
He had her then as he always wanted her—in a place where they could be alone together, away from the world. Even if it was only a dream, she was with him, and he would smile and see her smiling, beckoning him farther and farther into the world of opium and dreams.
When he woke, into the fierce pain of daylight and consciousness, he did not want to live. He wanted only more opium, more dreams of her passing him in the den, hearing her silk trousers, seeing her lovely small body. But he would have to leave the den, stumbling down the snowy path, crossing the cold river on the narrow log bridge. Sometimes he’d be sick there, falling off the bridge, tumbling into the rocky creek, puking the night’s anguish of opium onto the slippery river rocks.
His father threw him out of his shack. He was no good to him, no good at work. The opium had destroyed his mind. He could not write down a simple claim in a government ledger or help his uncle. He wanted only Shih Hsui-mei. And now he had no money to buy opium, to
spend the night watching her slip through the dense fog in her silk trousers, tending to the worthless lot of Chinese miners, or himself, a hopeless pale-faced white boy.
He stole his father’s long-barreled pistol, the one he had been issued in the war, and went to get Shih Hsui-mei. He had a plan. A crazy plan. He would take her away from old Cheng-k’uan. The old man had no rights. He was a miserable Chink. The Chinese were killed by the dozens in the mines of Idaho. He would steal a horse and take Shih Hsui-mei with him across the Salmon River and into Oregon, where he had family, cousins of his mother.
When he went to Cheng-k’uan and told him what he intended, the old man laughed and spit in his face.
He shot the Chinaman in the head. The bullet made a small, neat black hole in the yellow man’s forehead and splashed blood and bone and brain on the whitewashed wall. The old man turned in a tight circle, dancing on his thin legs like a chicken when it’s axed.