Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [234]
After Johnny left school, quite a few lovelorn girls wrote to him, Yin Ling among them. As time went by, however, they found new boys to focus their attentions on and memories of Johnny faded. Only Yin Ling kept writing. Johnny answered sporadically.
He stayed only three months in Montreal because people there spoke French and no one listened to English songs. The band followed the St. Lawrence River west, stopping for gigs in small towns. In Thunder Bay, Johnny fell out with the others and struck out for the Prairies. In the last letter, he said he had left the Prairies and had come back West. He was in the Rocky Mountains, in a town called Red Deer in Alberta, where he was singing in a tavern.
Johnny could be Yin Ling’s bolthole, her means of escape. That way she need never set eyes on her mother, father, grandfather, Mrs. Sullivan or the bean sprouts again.
To wander from one town to another, to find yourself in a new place before the streets you were in had grown familiar, to sleep under a different roof every night, to wake up to a different sky every day—that was what Johnny referred to as “skating through life.” Yin Ling wanted to skate through life, too.
She made up her mind, and the fleas stopped jumping. The snide comments were silenced, and Yin Ling calmed down.
Red Deer was near Calgary. You could get an early train from Vancouver and be there by the afternoon. Her luggage was very simple, a couple of changes of clothes and a watertight pair of shoes and an umbrella. Luckily it was not winter or she would have had to take the family’s suitcase, which would have attracted attention.
Money. That was what she needed.
Yin Ling took the piggybank from the table and emptied the coins from its mouth. It was all small change and took her an age to count. It came to eight dollars and ninety-seven cents. This was what her grandfather had saved up for her. He told her it was his tobacco money, but he had not given up smoking, so although he had kept this piggy for years, it had not grown fat. Still, it was enough for her train fare and anything left over could buy her a meal or two.
She would wait until next week, until her mother got paid, and take two or three more dollars from her purse. Then she would go. She knew exactly where her mother kept her money. She had thought of leaving many times, but this time she was really going to do it.
And when the money was used up, what then? Well, she would just have to cross that bridge when she came to it.
Her mother and father were still asleep when she got up the next day. She knew her grandfather was already up because she could see the flickering red dot of his cigarette down the dark passageway. She walked past him and, in the doorway, put on her shoes.
“Yin Ling, have some soy milk, it’s fresh,” she heard him call after her.
“No, thanks,” she called back. But when she got out of the door, she stopped and turned back. Her grandfather handed her the cup and she drank the milk down.
“Thanks, Granddad,” she said and felt a lump in her throat.
Red Deer was to the north and a long way from the ocean. By the time the summer sun got that far, it had almost run out of warmth.
When Yin Ling jumped down from the train with her bulky school bag, it was almost dark. Along the chilly street, the lighting was patchy and the dark gaps looked like the mouth of a toothless old woman. The wind frisked at her sleeves, making her shiver. Vancouver wind was a plump, fine-skinned hand which dipped