Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [238]
But Yin Ling did not.
She just said: “Thirty dollars it is, but if I bring a friend back, that’s not your business.”
The woman looked startled, and hesitated.
Yin Ling pulled some notes from her pocket and slammed them down on the counter. “I’ll give you thirty-five. Half up front, half next week. You won’t get anyone else in the world to take the room at that price.”
The woman said nothing. She went into the back room and Yin Ling heard a muttered conversation, perhaps with her husband. After a while, she came out again and picked up the money Yin Ling had put on the counter.
“And don’t complain we don’t turn the heating up enough in the winter.”
As Yin Ling turned to go out, she heard the woman say in a low voice: “I couldn’t rent it to you if I had a daughter at home.”
It was a few moments before Yin Ling understood. “If I had a daughter, I wouldn’t want her to learn bad habits from you” was what the woman was really saying.
As Yin Ling walked away, she felt the woman’s eyes boring into her back of her neck. The woman thought she was a prostitute.
She was not the first person to mistake Yin Ling for a prostitute, and she would not be the last. Yin Ling was well aware that wherever she went with Johnny, apart from working at the tavern, people thought she was a whore. But she did not care. Her pressing need now was for a roof over her head—a roof to shelter them both.
She could not care less that she had a reputation as a whore. In a few short weeks, she had grown the hide of a rhinoceros.
She and Johnny moved into the attic room above the Wen Ah Tsun Store. This time, however, their situation was reversed. Now it was Johnny who had to steal in, and creep out. They hardly dared breathe, in fact, because this time they were living on the floor above the landlady, not on the floor beneath.
Autumn did not last long in Red Deer. Winter and summer performed a perfunctory handover ceremony over a few rainy days. At the end of September, with the first snowfall, Yin Ling realized what the landlady had meant when she said: “Don’t complain we don’t turn the heating up enough.” The steam heater was only turned on for two short periods every day—before bedtime and after waking. Of course, Johnny and Yin Ling were on a completely different schedule than their landlady, and they always seemed to miss out on the heat.
When Johnny and Yin Ling came home at dawn, it was to a freezing room. Without bothering to wash their faces, they would dive straight under the covers and lie, shivering, between the icy layers of quilt and mattress. Johnny would throw back the covers and sit up, then thrust frantically into Yin Ling. This was his new way of keeping warm. Yin Ling did not resist, but would try to shush him: “Remember they’re downstairs!” But Johnny’s cries grew louder with every thrust.
“This’ll teach those Chinks to try and make a dollar out of ten cents!”
Yin Ling gave a short laugh. “Don’t forget that those Chinks are the only people in the whole of Red Deer who were willing to give us a room.”
Johnny suddenly went soft, and flopped onto the bed beside Yin Ling. She tried all the tricks she knew, but could not get him hard again. She pulled the covers over both of them and slid her leg over Johnny, clamping him tight to her.
“Why don’t we leave, and go and try another town?”
Johnny said nothing. Yin Ling could see his eyes gleaming dully in the dawn half-light. After a long time, the light went out and she thought he had gone to sleep. But then she felt him shift against her.
“It doesn’t matter where we go, we can’t get away from people,” he said.
December was a grim month.
The war intensified and radio broadcasts were anything but reassuring. The American fleet was almost annihilated at Pearl Harbor. Kiev was taken. Leningrad was under siege, Hong Kong had fallen. Bad news was followed by worse. Groups of men from Red Deer went off to the front, their work taken up by the women who stayed behind. If the front line was hardpressed, the rear was equally so. Food and water were