Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [146]
What was he wearing? Who had taken his trousers off him? Was it the woman? Or the girl?
The thought made Kam Shan flush so hotly he could have boiled a river of water. He heard giggling. He saw several pairs of eyes peering out at him from one corner, shining a wolfish green in the lamplight. When his eyes got used to the gloom, he saw three small children sitting on a wooden bed at the end of the room, barefoot and sharing a cover between them.
“Sundance!” commanded the older woman, and the girl ran over and started to dress the children.
Sundance. The Redskin girl’s name was Sundance. Pretty name, Kam Shan thought to himself.
“Where do you live? How did you end up in the river?” The man had been silent, but now he suddenly broke in. He squatted on the ground, took a burning stick from the hearth and lit a cigarette. It must be some sort of local tobacco, thought Kam Shan. The cigarette was as thick as the Redskin’s thumb and the tobacco smoke burned his throat. Kam Shan remembered the man pulling him into his canoe and asking the same question.
“Not far from Vancouver,” Kam Shan answered vaguely.
He did not know how to answer the second question; his English was just not up to telling such a long and complicated story. About a pigtail.
But the man was not going to let him off the hook. “And how did you end up in the river?” he persisted. “You floated a long way down.”
Kam Shan’s lack of English effectively smothered his flustered hesitation. There was a long silence. Finally Kam Shan said: “Fight … someone pushed me … into river.”
“Why?” The man looked interested.
“Woman,” Kam Shan muttered.
He startled himself with this lie. As far as women were concerned, he was a blank sheet of paper. He glanced towards the shadows but could not see Sundance’s face, only her hands, busy shaking out the quilt her young siblings had been wrapped in.
The man burst out laughing and clapped Kam Shan on the shoulder. “Not much of a swimmer, are you?” he said. “I thought it was a dead seal draped over that bit of wood. Good thing your girl didn’t see you looking so hangdog!”
The man threw the remains of his cigarette into the fire and flicked ash from his finger. “Sundance can find him an animal-hide coat to wear and make sure he’s had enough to eat. In a couple of days, when I go back to town, I’ll take him along with me and give him back to his girlfriend.”
Kam Shan was horrified.
It was only many years later, when he thought back to his time with the Redskin tribe, that he realized how the casual telling of one little lie had required a whole string of lies to cover it up. It was like when his mother wrote with her brush on rice paper and accidentally spattered it with ink. To erase that almost invisible blob, you had to dilute it with so much water that it eventually covered a huge area.
At the time, Kam Shan was only sixteen, too young to think that far ahead. He was cornered and his only thought was to fight his way out as quickly as he could.
And since he could not go back on the first lie, he had to go along with it.
No way could he go home to his father, at least not now. How could he explain his bad luck? What would he say? That dark abyss, which made father and son strangers to each other, remained between them. The only thing that could help him across this abyss was a pigtail. He could only go home when that pigtail grew back.
“Thing is … I really don’t want … see that girl again,” Kam Shan said now.
“Thing is … I got no home, I just been wandering … place to place.”
The woman was feeding