Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [41]
A fierce argument broke out among the three foremen and although Ah-Fat could not understand, he hazarded a guess that the other two were pinning the blame for this new trouble on his foreman. After the shouting had continued for a bit, the three men went into the tent, rolled up the bed mats and slung them across the horses’ backs. They were about to mount, when Ah-Fat pulled a bottle from his pocket and blocked their way. “You dare make one move,” he said, “and I’ll smash this. I’ll take your three lives with my one life. Fair’s fair.”
The foremen could not understand a word Ah-Fat said, but they did not need to. Their eyes were drawn to the bottle in Ah-Fat’s hand and the yellow liquid that glinted in the early morning sunlight. They suddenly looked ashen, as if a receding tide had sucked all the blood from their faces, exposing a network of livid lines and wrinkles.
A dense black cloud started to roll up the mountainside. It was a black cloud of men, several hundred Chinese men, all from the dozen or so tents that made up the camp. They came brandishing shovels, hammers, pickaxes, rock drills, axes and sticks. They brought the brazier shovels and the ladles too. Anything that could be moved, they brought with them. The black cloud coalesced from scattered puffs of vapour, gathering speed and momentum as it surged up the slope and arrived at the foremen’s tent.
Ah-Lam was first on the scene. He was holding a knife which he had grabbed from the cook—one used for peeling potatoes and cutting up cabbage. He had torn his trousers running here and the tatters flapped in the wind like the wings of a sparrow hawk.
“You motherfucker,” he raged at the foreman. “We gave years of our lives for you, and now you think you can get rid of us just like that.” Ah-Lam grabbed hold of the foreman’s jacket and lunged at him with the knife. The foreman dodged and Ah-Lam deflected, missed his footing and tumbled down the slope, coming to rest against a sapling. The tears in Ah-Lam’s trousers caught on the branches and he had to make several attempts to stand upright. A trouser leg ripped off in the process, leaving him with one bare leg. His hair stood up like wire bristles and, his eyes blazing and almost starting from his head, he launched himself into a new attack.
Just as he was raising his knife to bring it down on the foreman’s head, he glimpsed, out of the corner of his eye, something which leapt, pantherlike, from the crowd of men. It seized his arm. Ah-Lam saw it was Ah-Fat, and his aim faltered—but too late to stop the knife on its ferocious plunge downwards.
Ah-Fat felt a smack on the face and shut his eyes involuntarily. When he opened them again, it was to see a bright red duck egg suspended over his head. After a few moments, he realized it was the sun. Gradually his vision cleared and he looked at the trees and the men standing around him. They seemed to be slowly spinning, each branch and leaf and face coloured in a single hue—the vermilion red of the print in his school books.
There were shouts of “Ah-Fat, Ah-Fat!” Some of the men rushed to pull Ah-Fat to his feet, others made to grab the foremen.
“Don’t move! Or I’ll blast you with this!” Ah-Fat leaned against a tree trunk, holding the bottle of Yellow Water in his hand. The men froze, and the shouts died in their throats, reduced to astonished gasps.
“It’s the Pacific Railroad Company who took this decision. What’s the point of killing these three? It’ll take us a month or more to walk back to the city, and if we don’t get supplies, we’ll all starve. We’ll keep two of them here and send the third down the mountain to cable for supplies. If no supplies turn up, then we’ll keep them pri—”
Ah-Fat crumpled to the ground before he finished talking.
Three days later, the supply team arrived in the camp heavily laden with sacks. There were eighty rice sheets for every navvy. Carrying the food sacks and tools over their shoulders, the motley crowd of men trailed like yellow ants down through the autumnal forests, at the start of the