Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [176]
Ching Chong Chinaman sitting on a wall,
He thinks one cent’s worth twenty-four.
He heard the sharp cries as the children pinched their noses and assumed ladylike tones. Then there was a pattering of laughter behind him and he knew they were coming after him.
Chink Chink Chinaman sitting on a fence
Trying to make a dollar out of ten cents
The shrill cries were swelling into a confused clamour. They were on his heels. He clutched the bottle to his chest and sped on.
But his body suddenly flagged. Something hit him on the back. Pain flared up until his back and shoulders were on fire. They were throwing stones. The children were the same size as he was, and so they had no fear of him. He may have been seventeen but he had not grown much and still looked like a child.
A fierce pain jabbed him in his gut, as if a rope was tightening around his intestines. Tighter and tighter it pulled until his guts felt like they were trussed up. He pressed the bottle against his belly, exhaled sharply and the tension suddenly eased off. But his belly took that as an invitation to let go completely and something hot filled the crotch of his trousers. He smelled the stink.
Faster, faster, his head told his legs, but by now his head was not in charge. He heard a ping on his forehead, like the sound of a watermelon left to rot and burst open in the field, and something hot and sticky trickled down into his eyes, gluing them together. His eyes were no use any more. He had only his legs, driven on by blind instinct. They knew which way to take him without his eyes telling them.
Gradually the rabble receded into the distance.
When Mrs. Henderson came to open the door of the house, Kam Ho was standing there with blood pouring down his face. He pulled up his jacket and extracted the bottle. Pushing it into her hands, he said: “My hat … gone,” and slumped to the ground.
He was woken up by something icy cold on his chest. He was lying in a bed. Beside him stood Mrs. Henderson and a man in a black hat and glasses. The man looked familiar somehow. It was Dr. Walsh, Mrs. Henderson’s doctor.
Dr. Walsh moved the cold thing around Kam Ho’s chest a few times and said: “His heart rate is fine but his temperature is one hundred and five degrees. Apart from infection in the external injuries, there’s still some gastric infection. How many times has he opened his bowels today?”
“I’ve lost count. My poor bed,” said Mrs. Henderson.
“Did he eat anything unusual yesterday?”
Mrs. Henderson shook her head. “Those Mongols are like horses. They eat anything. But he eats the same as us now, and Rick and I haven’t had any problems.”
“Apart from medicine to settle his stomach, you need to get the fever down. Do you have any ice in the house?”
Kam Ho felt as if he were lying on a thick layer of billowing cloud. The voices of Mrs. Henderson and the doctor floated in and out. He did not understand but he knew they were talking about him.
“Henry, I’ve just had a thought!” he heard Mrs. Henderson exclaim. “This morning, I saw the stupid boy break off an icicle and eat it.”
Kam Ho did not hear what the doctor said in reply because just at that moment, he sank into a trough in the cloud.
He just hoped it was not Mrs. Henderson who had taken off his trousers and cleaned him up.
That was the last clear thought he had before falling into a deep sleep.
It was evening when he woke up, the evening of the third day, as he discovered later. He guessed the time of day from the light coming through the curtain. The room was gloomy. The light was off, but one candle burned on the windowsill. The candle threw a flickering shadow over blue expanse; the blue assumed a shape that was sometimes angular, sometimes round.
As Kam Ho stared at the form, it gradually turned into a woman’s back, topped by two bony shoulder blades draped in a blue nightgown.