Sarah Canary Page 27

  The tiger began to reel him in. Its face came very close. Chin could smell dreams of blood on its breath. He saw the rings of its eyes, the lines of its narrow pupils. Somewhere inside those dark lines a tiny Chin stared out in horror.

  But it was all right, everything was all right, because Miss Dixon was there, on the outside of the bars, stabbing into the cage with her knife. She circled the paw, slid the blade into Chin’s sleeve, and cut the cloth loose. Chin pulled his arm back, sitting and cradling it.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked Miss Dixon, just as she was saying the very same words to him. Some people in the crowd behind them clapped their hands. ‘Are you all right?’ a man asked Miss Dixon. ‘Are you all right?’ a woman said, and then she said it to Chin, too. ‘Are you all right?’ She laughed as she said it, because everyone was all right and everyone knew it, even the tiger, even the tiger’s keeper, who had arrived at last with slabs of ripe meat and was latching the cage, demanding explanations, tossing in bits of dead animal as a special treat through the bars.

  ‘There, there, love,’ he said. ‘Here’s a lovely steak for you.’ He whirled about to confront Miss Dixon. ‘Don’t get into a cage with a Bengal tiger,’ he told her angrily. ‘Such a stunt. I know you. You’re one of those suffragists.’ But Miss Dixon hardly noticed him. She was staring at Chin, her eyes so huge and bright he couldn’t look back at them.

  ‘Where is Sarah Canary?’ Miss Dixon asked.

  Chin felt his stomach twist as suddenly as if he’d been punched. He scanned the crowd, but of course he didn’t recognize a single face. No Sarah Canary. No Harold, No B.J. ‘He must be taking her out of the gardens,’ Chin said.

  ‘I’m not through talking to you,’ the keeper told Miss Dixon. ‘Don’t you try to leave now.’ But she was already running with Chin back along the cages, back through the tunnel, turning to the right now, back along the opposite side of Fourteenth Street, past the polytechnic hall and the aquarium, past the whale pond, where the sea lions called out anxiously, past the glass walls of the conservatory. The gate was empty. Chin looked outside, down Mission Street in both directions. He could not see Harold.

  A row of carriages lined the street at the entrance. Miss Dixon asked the nearest driver if he had seen a short man and a woman dressed in black leaving the gardens. ‘Just in the last ten minutes or so,’ she said. ‘They would have only just left.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Would you have seen them?’ she asked.

  ‘Coming out the gate? Oh, yes. No one’s come through the gate, madam, but you.’

  Miss Dixon and Chin returned to the gardens. They walked slowly back along the path. Behind the conservatory, they peered through the glass into the tropical animal house. Copper pheasants from China ran about the ground, first this way, then that, pecking at nothing. In the shaded corners, blood-sucking vampire bats hung by their hooked toes, their wings wrapped about their bodies. Parrots called from the trees. There was no public door into the tropical animal house. This was a sealed world. There was no sign of Sarah Canary here.

  They crossed a bridge over the brook behind the rotary boat. Couples with children and couples with skates draped over their shoulders walked by them. A little girl called for her mother to come quick and see the emu. ‘He’s being so funny,’ she said.

  B.J. shouted for Chin.

  He stood at the end of the path just about where Chin had last seen him, in front of the columns of oaks. ‘Chin! Chin!’ Chin and Miss Dixon ran past the fountain and the frightened statue of Pandora with her arms over her head. B.J. was gesturing wildly, pointing into the opening of the artificial cave. Nothing he said was intelligible.

  The entrance was perfectly rounded, not the door to a real cave, but the door to someone’s dream of a cave. Chin saw something dark moving about inside. He entered. Miss Dixon came with him and she still had her knife. The cave was just deep enough to be dim. Chin could see to the back where Harold knelt on the cave floor. Beneath him lay a still, black form. Blood danced from Chin’s head to his feet and back again. He was dizzy and his eyes went even dimmer. The air became thin.

  Harold had a knife, too. Chin could see its dull metallic glow in the gloom, an ugly, underground sunless shining. ‘What have you done?’ he asked Harold from some other part of himself, some part that could still think and talk. He walked slowly over the distance between them, dropped to his knees beside Harold. Sarah Canary’s dress lay on the ground, split open from collar to hem. It was empty.

  ‘She metamorphosed,’ Harold said in an airless whisper that was almost nothing more than breathing. The marked madness of Seabeck was back upon his face. ‘This was just her larval stage. She shed her cocoon.’

  ‘Where is she?’ Chin asked.

  ‘Gone,’ said Harold. ‘She overpowered me with her inhuman strength. She threatened me with her chopstick. This is all that’s left.’ He lifted the dress with the tip of his knife. ‘First, a mermaid. Half woman, half fish. Then, a wild woman. Half woman, half beast. Is there a pattern here, Chinaman? What comes next? Half woman, half—’ He stopped suddenly, cunningly. ‘Now, that would be telling,’ he said. ‘I will find her again. I will never stop looking. It is my destiny. I am not afraid.’

  ‘You’re crazy,’ Chin said. ‘I will find her, too. I will find her first.’

  Harold laughed, a sound like air leaving a bellows. ‘You don’t even know what she looks like. You wouldn’t know her if you saw her now.’

  ‘B.J. was here,’ said Chin.

  ‘Her dress came off,’ B.J. reminded him, ‘in the struggle. I tried to help, but I certainly didn’t look.’

  ‘You helped,’ Harold agreed. ‘You helped, all right.’ Harold folded the dress over one arm. He held his knife in the other. ‘Have you ever seen a butterfly that someone has helped out of the chrysalis?’ He edged toward the light of the cave entrance, growing brighter as he went. ‘One good wing,’ he said. ‘To show what was supposed to be. And one wing that is twisted and folded and useless. I’m stronger than she is now. And do you know why? It’s because you helped.’ He feinted once at Miss Dixon, laughing again as she ducked. ‘You remember that,’ he said. ‘The next time you’re tempted to help someone.’

  He ran away between the lines of live oaks and vanished into the skating rink.

  Chin went to the cave opening. He could hear people on the rink shouting at Harold. ‘Get out of the way!’ ‘No one allowed without skates, sir.’ ‘Are you crazy?’ ‘Get out!’ ‘Look out!’ ‘Now look what you’ve done.’ The shouts faded to nothing beneath the hushing sounds of the fountain.

  Miss Dixon came to stand beside Chin. ‘Madness and moonshine,’ she said. ‘You go and look through the gardens for Sarah Canary again. I will go to the museum and demand the police. We’ll meet back there.’

  Chin started his search on the other side of Fourteenth Street. B.J. was with him but disappeared somewhere among the Large Animals. Chin refused to go back and look for him, as well. He saw no evidence of Sarah Canary. He returned to the museum to report his failure to Miss Dixon. His new boots, purchased in Tacoma and therefore a gift from someone, he did not like to ask himself who, clicked across the stone floor of the museum. Glass cases of stuffed animals lined the walls of the entry room. Like all museums, it had the feel of trapped ghosts.

  The policeman arrived about the same time as Chin. He wrote down the details of Miss Dixon’s report in a floppy brown notebook. Miss Dixon began with her own kidnapping this afternoon on the docks. Then she mentioned the second missing woman.

  ‘Yes?’ The policeman was alert. ‘Description?’

  ‘Short. Dark eyes. Dark hair. Big teeth. Prominent nose. About thirty-five years old,’ Miss Dixon said.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know.’

  ‘Dressed how?’

  ‘Undressed.’ Her voice dropped.

  ‘I see.’ The policeman snapped his notebook shut. ‘We’re certainly going to give this
our full attention,’ he said. ‘You’re one of those suffragists, aren’t you?’ He pulled on the brim of his hat, ducking his head politely as he left.

  ‘We’ll never hear from him again,’ Miss Dixon told Chin, glaring after the policeman. A second man, weasel-thin, waited to see her, loitering by the case containing the Diurnal Birds of Prey, pretending to examine the stuffed King Vulture. ‘Yes?’ she asked him sharply.

  ‘Reporter,’ he said. ‘From the El Camino Real. I’m interested in your adventure with the tiger. Which seems to be only one of many adventures you’ve had today. Forgive me. I only heard the bits I couldn’t help overhearing. Would you mind going through it all again, Miss Dixon? For the record? For our readers? The El Camino Real reader loves a good adventure and is interested in social issues. Forward-thinking people.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Miss Dixon. She was obviously pleased. ‘Well.’ She brushed at her hair with one hand, tidying herself, using the glass of Case 1 as a mirror. She stared straight into the artificial eyes of a wedge-tailed eagle as she primped. Then she turned to the reporter. ‘We arrived in San Francisco early this afternoon,’ she said. ‘On the steamer from Tacoma. Apparently our assailant followed us all the way here from Washington. We were unaware of that. There’d been no glimpse of him since we left the Lotta White in dock at Tacoma, and we assumed we’d left him there or someplace even farther north. His motives remain a mystery. I can only say that he is relentless and cunning.’

  ‘All the way here,’ the reporter repeated, writing it down. ‘No glimpse of. Lotta White. Cunning.’

  Miss Dixon recounted the incidents at the docks, her kidnapping, Harold’s use of the whip upon her in the carriage. ‘A case of mistaken identity,’ she said. ‘The woman Harold really wanted is still missing. In fact, she was the whole reason for our trip. We hoped to find a haven here in San Francisco for her. She’s just that bit dim, that bit helpless. We had hoped eventually to find her family. Perhaps your readers could assist us.’ Miss Dixon described Sarah Canary as gallantly as she could for the forward-looking EI Camino Real readership. She made no reference to clothing at all. The reporter took it all down.

  ‘How was she dressed?’ he asked.

  Miss Dixon paused. ‘I’m afraid I can’t be too specific as to her dress.’

  ‘We were told that she changed,’ B.J. said helpfully. He had only just arrived in the museum, coming to stand beside Chin.

  ‘Changed into what?’

  ‘We weren’t told. And we didn’t look.’

  ‘I see,’ said the reporter, who clearly didn’t.

  ‘No,’ said B.J. ‘No gentleman would.’

  Miss Dixon moved resolutely on to the Bengal tiger. She gave Chin full credit for her escape from the tiger’s cage. She was smiling. Had Chin ever seen her smile before? It dazzled. ‘A crowd of stricken witnesses was too horrfied to move,’ she told the reporter, ‘but Mr Chin seized the tiger by the tail and would not let go, dragging it from one side of the cage to the other, even as its claws raked through the sleeve of his coat, leaving bloody marks on the skin of his arm.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Chin, happy and uncomfortable.

  ‘Show him your arm,’ Miss Dixon ordered.

  Chin held it out, folding back the jagged edge of fabric. Well. Now he had made himself very visible indeed. Appearing in Caucasian newspapers couldn’t be a good idea, no matter how flattering the portrait. And yet Miss Dixon’s gratitude pleased him very much. He couldn’t refuse it. Perhaps he had not been so heroic, but he had been useful, no doubt about it. The reporter took his full name, checking the spelling of Ah Kin twice, although without Chinese characters it only approximated his real name, so who cared how you spelled it? How could you say one spelling was correct but not another if the whole ideographic system was flawed? Chin had a sudden, uncalled for stab of loneliness. China. Home. People who knew his real name. What if he died here, where nobody knew his real name? What would it be like to be Tom, dying in your own home, with the wrong name?

  ‘I rode in the rotary boat,’ B.J. told him, and it took Chin a moment to remove the sudden omen of the words and remember it was just B.J. What kind of a name was B.J.? ‘No Sarah Canary there. I went round and round.’

  B.J. had spent another quarter hour looking for her at the five-legged buffalo’s cage. ‘The fifth leg is just as big as the first four,’ B.J. told Chin, ‘but it hangs down from the buffalo’s shoulder. The buffalo is a hermaphrodite. It said so outside the pen. What does that mean? Does it just mean five-legged?’

  ‘I don’t know this word,’ Chin said. He turned to Miss Dixon, but she was studying Case 3 as if she had never seen a Goshawk before. The El Camino Real reporter shuffled from foot to foot. ‘I better get back with the story,’ he said. ‘If I hurry, you can look for it tomorrow. Thank you, Miss Dixon.’

  B.J. wandered back through the museum, leaving Chin trapped with the ghosts, and returning in a great rush to tell them that Case 105 held a Union flag made entirely from the feathers of California birds. In their natural colors. He recommended that they see it at once.

  Chin and Miss Dixon moved irresolutely in that direction, searching the museum again and then the hothouses and then the skating rink. A naked woman should not have been able to leave the grounds unobserved, but apparently Sarah Canary had managed it. Finally, late in the evening, the gardens closed. Miss Dixon took B.J. with her to the Occidental Hotel. Chin went to Tangrenbu.

  The smells and sounds – roast duck and wind chimes, ginger, garlic, and loud, loud Cantonese – intensified his homesickness. The slave girls called to him from their cribs, high voices like breath through wooden flutes, promising him a half-dollar’s worth of ecstasies, telling him he could do anything he wanted for a dollar, making him think uncomfortably of Miss Dixon, so that he noticed what he might not otherwise have noticed, that the cribs were not so large as the animal cages he had just left at Woodward’s Gardens. Chin remembered B.J.’s complaint about Miss Dixon, that she was always making you see something ugly. She didn’t create it or imagine it or misperceive it. It was there, all right. But you might not have seen it for yourself if she hadn’t made you.

  ‘Chin Ah Kin! We thought you were dead!’ Wong Woon ran from one of the street kitchens and threw his arms about Chin. ‘Your uncle is here. Have you seen him? We must go. We must eat. We must drink!’ Chin found himself dragged joyously through the streets. There was no time to resist.

  But Chin’s uncle rejoiced at his reappearance. He asked fewer awkward questions than Chin had anticipated. He had too many things of his own he wished to tell Chin. His mole quivered as he talked. He bought Chin dinner and they shared a bottle of tiger whiskey. The Washington Territory had become unsafe for the Chinese, Chin’s uncle told him, his face beginning to flush from the heat of the liquor. Chin was right to get out of it. Steilacoom did not get the railroad terminus, after all. It went to Tacoma. Hadn’t Chin’s uncle said that it would?

  ‘San Francisco has become unsafe for the Chinese, too,’ Wong Woon said, setting down his rice bowl, picking up a square of boned fish with his chopsticks. ‘You cannot leave Tangrenbu at night. You must stay away from the parks even in the daytime. Small boys will throw stones at you. Or worse.’

  Chin’s uncle thumped the bottle of whiskey on the table. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘This is true. You have lived among the white demons and you have come back from the dead. Do not tempt fate twice. Now you must stay within the gates of Tangrenbu.’

  How good it felt to be safe, to speak freely, to speak loudly. How wonderful rice tasted. Chin could not eat enough. He shouted at Tom’s moon, floating above him, fat and ghostly. ‘I see you!’ Chin called. ‘There you are. Hello from someone.’ The sky above Tangrenbu was full of stars. If Chin squinted, he could imagine the stars were falling toward him, bright and soft and no larger than snow-flakes. How many dangers had Chin faced? He began to count them. His life since the sudden appearance of Sarah Canary receded from him, became unlikely, became
dreamlike. As white men counted their sheep to fall asleep, Chin counted dangers to wake up. Boats and Indians. Hangings and Hank Webber, Harold and Seabeck. Tigers and Miss Dixon. Chin was a man waking up from an enchantment.

  Chin was a man waking up from a great deal of drink. The next day was wrapped in fog. There was an odd, unfamiliar pulse drumming behind his eyelids. His mouth had been wiped dry. It was noon before he was able to see a copy of the El Camino Real. ‘San Francisco’s Own Tiger Lady,’ the headline read. Chin needn’t have worried. He was not mentioned at all.

  18

  The Story of T’ung Hsien Nu

  Now I knew I lost her—

  Not that she was gone—

  But Remoteness travelled

  On her Face and Tongue.

  Alien, though adjoining

  As a Foreign Race—

  Traversed she though pausing

  Latitudeless Place.

  Emily Dickinson, 1872

  Miss Dixon had hired a Pinkerton detective to search for Sarah Canary. Chin was surprised, hurt, and then resigned to this. It was, Chin was forced to concede, a good idea. Certainly the detective was more efficient, more clever than Chin could ever be. Certainly the readers of the El Camino Real, who continued to see vague, lost women wherever they went, would be more comfortable sharing their sightings with a Caucasian detective. For four weeks now, Chin had looked and found nothing. ‘I only wish you’d called me in earlier,’ the detective said, sitting with them in the little room at the Occidental Hotel. ‘While the trail was still fresh.’

  Miss Dixon had given him every letter she had received from the El Camino Real readership. He spread them in his lap like a fan. He aligned them like a deck of cards. He selected the most promising. ‘You’ve given me so little to go on. And’ – the detective glanced briefly at Chin with his round blue eyes – ‘muddling amateurs may have destroyed whatever leads existed initially. I will have to undo the damage before I can even begin the search.’