“You didn’t see that coming?”
“It was always a possibility, but the only warning we got was from Sonny Lau, and it came too late.”
Speaking about what came next was difficult, even in broad daylight. Watching Elizabeth’s face would only make it harder. Jesse turned to the window and fixed his eyes on the sun-shot haze that divided heaven from earth.
“I was down in Chinatown when it happened. It was a Thursday night, hot, with a spit of rain coming down, just enough to wet the streets and slick your collar. Most nights, I worked at Madame Chao’s alongside my father. I was as big as him, about as strong, and quicker, though maybe not as intimidating. But the night started slow, and Madame Chao sent me out to deliver a payment to the See Yup man who supplied us with opium.”
“So, not just a bordello but also an opium den?”
“The white men who came to Madame Chao’s believed a proper Chinese whorehouse ought to serve opium on the side. But no, we weren’t a ‘den,’ strictly speaking. We were a cooch house that let the customers buy a bowl if they insisted on it. Most of the girls liked a smoke now and then themselves—it made their work easier—and Madame Chao wasn’t above smoking a pill after the last guests left.”
“But not you?”
“I had an idea that sobriety was a weapon. I thought it would give me an advantage over my enemies. I wasn’t sober for moral reasons—I was sober for the same reason a man carries a concealed pistol.”
“Okay,” Elizabeth said.
“So I’m headed back to Madame Chao’s when Sonny Lau pops out of an alley and pulls me in after him. His clothes are gaudy with blood. Some of it is his own—his face is cut in a couple of places, the sleeves of his shirt are open on a couple of bad gashes—but most of it’s someone else’s. He’s so worked up he can hardly talk. He’s begging me not to go back to Madame Chao’s. Sonny speaks English as well as the next man, but he’s mixing in Chinese words. Eyes rolling in his head like a mad dog. ‘Roscoe’s men,’ he says, and ‘there was too many of them!’ There’s more, but he can’t bring himself to say it, so I have to ask. What about my father, what about Phoebe? ‘I stood with your father,’ he says. ‘We killed some men. But there were too many! He’s still inside! Phoebe, too.’”
Jesse felt a pressure on his shoulder, which was Elizabeth’s hand, and he appreciated the attempt to comfort him. But if he submitted to her compassion he wouldn’t be able to speak.
High above the passing valley, a turkey buzzard circled and circled like a feral thought.
“I leave him and run to the house. There’s a mob of Candy’s men milling around in front of it. These are white men who followed him from the mining camps for the most part, but they’re armed like highbinders, kitchen cleavers in their hands and pistols on their hips. I can see smoke coming from one of the upper windows of the house, one of the girls’ rooms, and I can smell it, a cindery stink. There’s no chance I can get past Candy’s men, but there are other ways inside. Down an alley, up a drainpipe, across the roof of a mercantile shop to an attic window. Inside, the first room I come to is Madame Chao’s. She’s dead, her throat cut. More blood than I’ve ever seen in one place, and I’m no stranger to blood. It’s a revenge killing pure and simple—revenge on all of us, for the sin of having put an obstacle in Candy’s way.
“I have a Bowie knife up my own sleeve, because that’s how Sonny taught me to carry it; I’m nobody’s boo how doy, but I know better than to go out unarmed. I have a short blade, too, a little knife I keep in a leather sheath in my hip pocket, but that’s all, and it’s not enough to go up against even one of Candy’s mob. But it seems like the hatchetmen are all downstairs at the moment, and anyway I’m not in my right mind any longer, so I head for the attic room where Phoebe sleeps, the same room where my father keeps his possessions, such as they are, a few books and mementos, including his Gibbon and his Pilgrim’s Progress. Some of the rooms I pass on the way to the stairs, the doors are open. Some of them, I can see the girls inside. And they’re all dead, in ugly ways. I look because I can’t stop myself, but there’s nothing I can do for them.
“The door to my father’s room is standing open, but I hear movement inside. So I slow down and come up on it quietly, or trying to be quiet, though I’m breathing like there’s not enough air in the world to fill my lungs. I put my head around to take look. But all that stealth was futile. Candy’s in there, and he has my father in a wrestler’s grip, and his flensing knife is at my father’s throat, and they’re both looking right at me.
“It seems like the world goes silent and motionless. Then I see my father’s eyes darting left. I know him well enough to know he’s frightened, but he was never a man to panic in a tight place. He’s trying to tell me something.
“Candy says, ‘You might as well step in, boy. You got nowhere else to go.’
“So I step into the room. Candy’s wearing the kind of ridiculous clothing he favors, a vest as green as a beetle’s wing, a schoolboy cap, a clawhammer jacket half a size too small for him. All drenched in blood, and blood on his face like scarlet freckles. He knows me as my father’s son. He smiles.
“I realize my father is gesturing with his eyes at the wardrobe in the corner of the room. I know better than to stare at it. The wardrobe, hardly bigger than a steamer trunk standing on end, is where Phoebe hides out whenever there’s trouble in the house. She must be in there now. In the dark, trying not to cry out.
“‘Best put down that knife,’ Candy says to me.
“The Bowie knife is in my right hand. I was foolishly about to take it in my left. I’m left-handed, but Candy doesn’t know that. There’s nothing useful I can do with the knife now that Candy’s seen it. So I put it on the floor. With my right hand.
“‘Now step away from it,’ Candy says.
“I take two sidelong steps away from the knife toward the only other real furniture in the room: a writing desk. The desk has a drawer. I know my father keeps a loaded pistol in the drawer. It might still be there.
“The fire at the other end of the house is spreading, and a haze of smoke rolls along the ceiling. I hear myself telling Candy to let my father go. Candy says, ‘Well, why would I do that? I’m here to kill him! Watch.’ So he slides his flensing knife through my father’s throat. My father is still looking at me as it happens, as the knowledge of his own death comes into his eyes. While the blood’s still gushing Candy makes another long slice, belly to rib cage, right through my father’s shirt. Three bone buttons drop to the floor and rattle like dice. My father’s insides also fall to the floor—as much of them as he can’t catch in his hands. Then he follows them down.
“What I do next I do without thinking. I take my small knife from my pocket. With my right hand. And I hold it in front of me, point toward Roscoe Candy. Who’s delighted to see it. He can’t take his eyes off it. Like it’s the jolliest thing he’s ever seen. He wipes his bloody flensing blade on the tail of his blood-soaked vest and grins. ‘Come on, boy!’ he says. ‘Come on, then! Take me! Take me, while your old man’s lights are still warm—take me!’”
Jesse realized he was shouting. But the passenger car was empty except for him and Elizabeth, and Elizabeth had only flinched.
The train cornered a bend. Sunlight tracked along the rows of seats like a moving finger.
“I wave that little knife as if I’m looking for the best way to cut him—and maybe I am—but my better hand is behind my back, and my better hand has ideas of its own. By the time Candy gets tired of waiting and rushes me, my left hand has opened the desk drawer and found the pistol there.