TEN

A man bows down before another man

And sucks his lust

– HAROLD PINTER

Back in the day when you were out logging for months on end, the lumberjacks got used to sleeping eight in a bed. And those guys who lived in boarding houses in the city, it was the same thing. The Chinese slept in shelves. Shelves like the kind in a dresser. To stuff in more men per room. A Whiteman could expect to make a dollar a day. A snakehead hired out his Chinamen for thirty, thirty-five cents a day.

You’re interested in history, I said.

Sort a, said Silas. We’re interested in the man game. Back then it was a popular event. Me and Ken and Cedric want to bring that back.

It’s chilly in here, Minna squeaked, hugging herself.

We’re trying to cut expenses, said Ken.

Cedric stuck his neck out, said: What? What does that mean, cut expenses?

No heat.

Who needs heat? said Cedric. You need body heat is what you’re telling me.

What aboot blankets? said Ken. What aboot sweaters and socks and toques?

It’s a way to improve our game, said Silas.

It’s a way to connect with the past, said Ken.

It’s a way to connect your—, said Cedric.

It is very cold in here, I said.

The whole lifestyle, said Ken, reseating himself on the plush armrest of the davenport. We want to know how they did it, he said. You know, how they got by, how they dealt. Those guys back in early Vancouver, Litz and Pisk and so on, they lived off their share a winnings from man games. It was all they did to get by. Times were tough.

Because I didn’t know yet, I said: Who what? What’s a Lizzanpicks?

But Ken, you live off your inheritance, said Cedric. You’re just being insane. What aboot indoor plumbing, get rid a that, too, and eat bear meat?

It isn’t much inheritance if I keep the house. I can’t afford to repair it …

So what, how do you plan to make money? I asked.

The man game.

Couple hundred from the bets, said Cedric. Twenty bucks off the beer maybe.

Like I said, we need to cut expenses.

Cedric grunted dismissively and scratched the back of his neck, rolled his eyes, and smiled dumbly at Minna, as if looking for confirmation. But I could detect something else in his critique, as if he felt, like me, that he wasn’t being included in some important part of the world, the society of the man game.

Cedric dug into his pants pocket and dropped a few mushy old twenties on the coffee table. Noticing the bulky mahogany thing for the first real time, I absently opened one of its doors and saw a shelf stacked with the bamboo-yellow spines of vintage National Geographics. I was tempted to check out the more creased and worn-out issues, but I didn’t want to be caught looking at the breasts of exotic village women in situ; still, the issue I ended up choosing seemed to have page after page of them. It was the wrong time to be confronted with faraway beauty when here I was so close to losing the woman right beside me on the shag carpet.

What aboot girlfriends? Minna asked. Do they—?A second question seemed to linger on her tongue, a more explicit question she was too coy to ask.

Girls don’t seem to care, said Ken. Some like it.

Silas said: Do you want to see, we have a picture of Furry and Daggett and their crew in bed. It’s a really wild picture. They’ve all got their nightshirts on and their faces are filthy. I don’t know why, but they used to take pictures a logging camps. Do you want to see? Silas stood up to his full bulk.

Where is it? I said.

Oh, it’s in the basement. You should come down, I’ll show you. It’s really wild. We have so much stuff down there related to the man game. We’ve hardly scratched the surface.

Ken said in a mumble: Why can’t you respect the decisions we make?

Who, me? said Cedric.

Yeah.

Cedric said: Oh, come on. I’m busting your balls. You know that’s why I was put on earth. We all have a special purpose, and mine is to bust balls. I promise. And if you guys want to sleep in the same bed in the cold and eat bear meat like it’s 1886, it’s your lives. Hey, you know what I always say.

No one did. Silas and I scaled our way down the kitchen and waited for the rest to meet up with us at the tiny stairs. I remembered when I first came in—when was that? half an hour ago? seemed like forever ago—standing on that scary tipped-over entryway between here and the steps to the basement, worried that I’d let go of the banister and slip and fall down that dark, serrated tunnel. Here I was volunteering to see the basement, actually wanting, despite my reservations, to see the basement, for the sake of a picture of men together in bed, and a strange curiosity for a sport I was increasingly unsettled by, largely because of its effect on Minna.

We got a whole shelf a my forefather Samuel Erwagen’s journals, said Ken, and all these handwritten receipts from the Calabi & Yau Bakeshoppe with Toronto’s name on them. Things like that.

Things a that nature, said Cedric.

Who? said Minna.

Conversation was a little stalled by us all having to gingerly navigate the weird angle of the staircase. I had to keep in contact with the lower wall as I held on to both banisters, taking a step and then redistributing my weight, taking another step, and so on. The passage to the basement reminded me of pictures I’d just seen in National Geographic, not the tribeswomen, but the pictures of people hoisted into spelunking chasms.

I waited in a foolish position on the seventh stair as one by one the other guys let go of the banister and landed on a nerfy chair, there for the purpose. Minna was in front of me and she didn’t hesitate. Her landing was not graceful. Her nose almost slammed against the armrest. She didn’t need quite as much assistance getting to her feet as the guys seemed to believe. I was last to jump, and owing to a lifelong love for the freefall, my land was faultless. I have, for whatever private irrelevant reason, always loved the suicidal grace of a good freefall.

Once I stood back up and objectively checked out the area, I was the first to comment. What we had was a fire hazard. It wasn’t a basement anymore because of the steep angle of the house, it was more of a wood-panelled well that led into a septic tank for paperwork.

Nothing basic down here, said Ken as he slid between two handmade bookshelves and patted a row of slim, wrinkly spines. He said: This is like three-four generations a my Erwagen people not throwing anything away. This is the Erwagen legacy. All this you see. My grandfather’s grandfather, Samuel. He kept a lot. And my grandfather’s father, he kept everything and stowed away as much old stuff aboot his dad as he could. And my grandfather was out a his mind. He kept train tickets. Slowly getting more and more, over the years, disorganized. These are …, Ken looked at the small type, ledgers from Hastings Mill intermixed with … looks to be old magazines aboot cowboy life.

In most ways the basement wasn’t all that different from the crammed-full used bookstore downtown that I sometimes visited when I felt lonely and needed to be around things that were older and more ignored than me. The difference of course was that this wasn’t a priced inventory but rather a pack-rat’s intense problem. Whoever was responsible for this basement was the same kind of intellectual as my favourite used bookseller. The back or lowest wall was stacked floor to ceiling all the way across with yellowing newspapers crisp as wasps’ nests. That was a little more unsettling than you’d expect.

Ken flinched when he saw me gawking at it. He said: It’s two rows deep.

Oh god, I said. Fire hazard. Why not recycle?

Ken wrung his hands, said: I know, I know.

I can’t find that picture. Silas searched in dresser drawers filled with leather photo albums of black construction paper, those corner tabs for every picture of one’s unsmiling loved ones. Silas said rhetorically: I wonder where I put it then? He searched more with his fingers.

One day I’ll do something with all this, said Ken. He seemed honest enough but I doubted him.

What blocked my path was a weedy green brass chandelier from the Cold War. After I uprooted the chandelier, I crept below a door and scaled a stockpile of Hudson’s Bay catalogues. The basement was a library of digressions. A wooden file cabinet to my right was labelled CALABI & YAU BAKESHOPPE ~ RECEIPTS 1884–1941. I didn’t touch it. Fear of dust. The bookshelf at my left was used for a long-held subscription to a monthly magazine on experimental bookkeeping from the nineteenth century, and when I opened one dusty volume to the masthead, Cedric told me that Ken’s grandfather’s grandfather was a member of the editorial board. Samuel Erwagen. The dust on things had plantlike texture. So daunting, where to start looking, where to hide. The sheer amount of paper sapped my curiosity. I wondered: Why me. It was a choice between asthmatic claustrophobia or going home.

Ken revealed to Minna his special cache of musty letters that required going down on their hands and knees and crouching close together. I found myself reading the same sentence over and over, about how a legendary coyote urinated on milkweed and turned it into hemp, for what that was worth. I returned the manual where I’d found this true tale to its wrongful place among the wrack, and lo and behold, spotted the picture we’d come to see.

The picture was smaller than I’d expected. It was on top of a cardboard box on the shelf in front of me, at waist height. I looked at the picture discreetly to see its value. Indeed, it showed six men in a bed in a weather-beaten shack. One was very small, another two were very huge with only three eyebrows between them, an average man of average looks stuck in the middle, and all of them bookended by two savage creatures, mannish beyond belief, snarling. Coming from every known region of an impoverished planet to share a bed, suffering a life of no privacy to escape a life of no hope. I turned the picture over. The cardstock was heavier than today’s memories. The elegant handwriting’s faded pencil lines listed the names Furry through to Daggett. I turned it over again. I looked at their condition. They were so foreign, yet I shared their streets. Furry’s beard was something to behold. It spanned his cheeks right to the eyebags. With the dark rings around his eyes and the downcast mouth, he was looking tired or rabid, not in the mood for daguerreotypes. Campbell held his chin up; that is, he held Furry’s chin up, while they took the picture. Perhaps, despite the serious faces, this was a joke. The other possibilities were that Furry was too drunk to hold his own head up, or that he was dead. Boyd lay there beside a dwarfed Campbell, mid-puff of a cigarette, cocking his monobrow. Half of Daggett’s mouth smiled, the other half was showing off a long wolfish incisor tooth. Smith looked ready to go to work even though he was in woollies and a sleeping cap. No matter that there’s a huge hairy surly Meier to share the bed with, it looked to me like they all expected to get some rest. The sheets and blankets were arranged. Toes still needed to be covered. Stiff pants hung on bent nails on the slat walls around them. I tipped the photograph behind a shelf. I didn’t want to start more conversations today. I wanted to leave. I was sleepy. The picture only reminded me how Minna and I still had to pick me up a bed before I could go to sleep tonight.

You have to see this, said Minna, waving for me. From my vantage point all I could see was her slim tanned arm waving above a rubbish wall. I was glad to have hidden the picture.

I switchbacked my way through piles of unsought-after history to Minna’s position between the two formerly naked men. What is it? I said. I couldn’t even muster up an inflection.

It’s a map a the secret tunnels under the city.

She handed me a notebook open to a scribbled-upon page. At first blush all I saw were paired sets of numbers, 358 ~ 224, and so on. Ken explained they were city addresses with tunnels below linking one to the other. Usually the tunnel’s entrance was concealed in the backroom a some reputable establishment, Ken said. One tunnel started at the address for the Stag & Pheasant, a respectable parlour. For a man of RH Alexander’s good taste (as an example), manager of the most successful lumber mill in town, who loved to entertain, an evening at the Stag & Pheasant on Water Street was just the thing for his wife’s spies to see him doing. It was a pleasure to sneak away from normalcy, kiss the cloakroom girl, and unlock the secret door behind the rows of topcoats to the staircase down to the tunnel that led directly to a private room in a reprehensible men’s lounge named Wood’s on Dupont Street, where he scheduled his time with lush Peggy, a bottle of bodega and a pinch of hashish, a late game of stud-horse poker against Mayor McLean and George Black and the capitalist Oppenheimer while Siwash princesses and Chinagirls massaged their shoulders.

Do you think the tunnels still exist?

Ken said no, he didn’t think they did. They were like the workers’ tunnels for the early sewers, he explained. They had the Chinese labourers and the prison chain gang make the whole thing.

Did you know, he said to Minna, that your mouth is shaped like an infinity symbol when you smile?

Who, me? said Minna, wrinkling her nose. Her percipient mind still enjoyed shallow compliments. I knew the bowl of her vanity was deep enough to hold many more gushes than that clever little sputtering compliment. My only chance was to get her away.

Moving upstream, I started to say: Actually, I just remembered how I got that bed—

Ken cut me off: Check this out, I found this a little while ago.

We peered into an old tin can. Inside it was something made out of clay or the like.

What is it? Minna asked.

The mummified body of a canary. It’s wrapped in old newspapers, he said.

That’s so bizarre.

I found it all in a small pink purse—from around the 1880s, Ken guessed, by looking at the can. The newspaper had long since faded and crumbled into illegibility. When I poked my head in and took a second look I realized that it was indeed a small bird. Its eyes were shut. Even more delicate in death than in life, with just the slightest shade of yellow left on its dried body—I was visibly moved.

What a you think it is? I asked.

Ken explained that he believed it was the pet of a girl at the Wood’s brothel. And he knew this because of something to do with one of the tunnels, but I wasn’t listening carefully enough to understand how the path that led from the Stag & Pheasant to a VIP gambling room in the coach house behind Wood’s whorehouse had anything to do with a mummified canary.

The day after the man game RH celebrated the snakehead’s departure with a day of opium and hashish in a slumhouse, and then, after stumbling across the street, celebrated further with a poker game in the coach house behind Wood’s.

He heard the canary in the distance, peeping from a window on the second floor. The Whore Without A Face’s canary. It whistled a brief melancholy scale once a minute. No man had ever set eyes on the bird, nor on its owner.

RH played poker with Mayor McLean, the successful Jewish capitalist Oppenheimer, and George Black, the local butcher. Weak competitors, weaker men still. His mind was stretched like a cat’s cradle between their hands. It was chilly along the floor and too warm around head level. The cigarsmoke was a mask. He had to think fast. At the moment he had a pair of Queens in his pocket and the ante was high.

Quite a riot your city’s lumbermen held not long ago, yes? said RH, looking to his own chipstack. Right under our noses. Fools and their pranks. Disturbs the semblance we once had a order and discipline around here. And all these men stomping around on precious real estate. Almost wondered if these activities are being condoned.

The mayor, seated at RH’s right, knew the comment was intended for his ears. He said: What’s that supposed to mean, eh? Now, listen, RH, I just heard aboot this myself only a few hours ago. Asking around, by all accounts what you’re talking aboot was just some whisky party with a bit more dancing than usual. Ha ha. Your riot. You make it sound like we’re all going to get our throats slit because a couple guys started lobbing fists.

The mayor was a rough man underneath his thin skin of political pretense, and Alexander enjoyed flushing out his true self, a salesman.

Perhaps you’re right, and what would I know aboot the mind a these woodsmen? I’ve so little experience. But these gatherings seem to be more and more frequent, if I’m not mistaken. If memory serves, said Alexander, the paper reported six hundred citizens out to cheer the departure a those twenty coolies last month.

I read the same. Old news, grunted the mayor.

The round of betting done, everyone paid to see the flop.

Quite a fearsome group, I dare say, said RH. Why, I dare say there wasn’t six hundred teeth among two hundred ruffians that day.

Ha ha, said George Black, that’s a laugh.

I remember more support, though I hardly worry, said the mayor.

Twenty Chinamen received more public support than the vote.

What?

The total, what was it again? Five hundred, give or take the men you convinced to vote twice.

More old news. RH, please, play cards. Why bring this up again, after all? Do I come here to talk aboot the election, no. Your theories don’t hold water with me, never have. Let a sleeping dog …

Ah, yes. What was it? We’re all North American Chinamen.

You said it, not me, said the mayor. Well, alas, popular opinion wasn’t on your side. What can I say?

Oppenheimer slid four more red chips in after his first three and leaned back fraudulently.

George Black squinted at the flop, the cards remained wrong. RH’s mouth was dry and he broke a sweat. He was about to trap them all, in cards, in life, all of it in his pocket. Even his enemies would do as they were told. Lying to the mayor, he said: I never said it myself, but it has a certain eloquence. It’s true, isn’t it? I can at least appreciate … and—, well, regardless a the words exactly … one can twist any words to smear a man with magnanimous intentions for his people.

The mayor squeezed his forehead. Time stands still for you, does it, RH? The vote is over. Try again next time. At least a hundred men heard you say those words, and were—

Again your numbers. Twenty-five men at a union meeting.

And they hear—

They misrepresent a comment I made, foolishly attempted to reason with your klans—. Does this mean you’re going to hold a parade every time you run another dozen Chinamen out town?

I believe it’s worth the effort, said the mayor, scratching his unnecessary cummerbund. I’m sorry we disagree on the issue, my friend. May we continue—

A handful a Chinamen? Hardly worth the blink a your brown eye.

An inferior race overrunning our country? Never happen on my clock.

I’m a capitalist, not a Cassandra, said Alexander. I only know they have inferior bargaining power, which my accounts department approves of.

You’re completely backwards. This must be why Hastings Mill is plagued with strikes. It’s your own damn blood you’ve given inferior bargaining power. And I shouldn’t need to remind everyone how your accounts department is a disembodied head.

Oppenheimer choked on his hair tonic.

All this effort to rid us a our best economic asset against Ontario, said RH. It’s interesting, and yet you ignore the threat posed by dissidents within our White population.

Men, said George Black. How’s aboot some poker? Alexander, it’s your—

Yes, I’m tired a prattle, said the mayor. If I wanted prattle I’d be home with my wife.

Yes, ahem, said RH, feigning a last look at the top corners of his cards, seeing Oppenheimer’s raise, and doubling it. If he read his mates, they weren’t expecting him to go large. He had the cards. His nerves hit full gallop as half a minute elapsed in no time. Not giving the mayor a chance to think, RH said: So am I to assume you know aboot this lurid game the men in this town are at, very indecent and anarchistic, I should add.

Yes, I had the unfortunate occasion a seeing it one time a while back. Heard it’s pretty popular with skid road types. The mayor spoke while he fondled his chips. All this talk, RH. What barn are you circling? This game you keep talking aboot, I’ve wanted to mention the same to you—. Say, what are you up to?

I should ask you the same.

Aren’t the crowds mostly men from your mill? Including Chinamen in the gambling, too, I hear. And Litz and Pisk, the players, aren’t these bohunks your employees?

Former, said RH.

George Black sloughed his cards across the table after a torturous decision no one noticed. I fold, he said.

Ah, my responsibility? Alexander was irked by the moisture around his collar that made him twist his head. Does my jurisdiction suddenly extend beyond the—the—

The mayor was stacking and restacking his chips, said: I see now what you’re after. You want me to take care a this mess for you? He shook his head with fatherly disdain. Why not say so?

Pardon?

Don’t come walking in all proud to me when you’re pussyfooting around for a favour.

I beg your pardon?

You want me to clean up your mess, right? That’s what you’re asking?

I’m not in charge a the law, said Alexander, stiffly. If you’re content to see mobs a men gambling openly in the streets, and the indecency. This is crime, not a mess. My employees are your citizens. What they do—

Ah, said Oppenheimer, to see a strong man broken by a criminal habit, that’s a sadness, that’s a pity. He shook his head. The easy way to money never pays. Nothing saves like hard work.

RH agreed vigorously: Indeed, indeed.

The mayor muttered and punched himself in the head. You deal with Chinamen, you deal with snakeheads … I don’t know, RH … He measured his chips in smacking stacks of five. He saw Oppenheimer’s raise and Alexander’s raise, pushing a few paltry chip towers into the middle of the table. The mayor looked Alexander in the eyes and said: All in.

All in? said Oppenheimer. His head fell back. All in, ay-ay-ay, I’m all in. One thing I hate is all in. Yeah, you heard me, I’m all in, too, you bastard.

George Black said: Glad I got out when I did.

Oppenheimer said: I want these steamers to battle it out. This kind of poker isn’t what I came for anyway.

Ha ha ha, said George Black. That’s right. Let’s see some blood. Come on, Alexander, call. Put your money where your mouth is.

RH made a quick estimate. If the mayor won, he was out. Was it worth the risk? He’d liked his hand a lot until the mayor went all in. On the flop, Oppenheimer started the betting after they all saw a Queen of spades, as well as a ten and an eight of spades. Alexander knew from memory that his pocket cards were Ace, King of spades—beautiful black royalty. A flush on the flop, he felt quite confident to bet high and see who got scared, see who was still chasing. It seemed to Alexander that the mayor was using the off-chance he had the straight flush to make him fold a strong hand.

RH said: All in.

The mayor nodded cosmically, and said: Good, let’s see their faces. He turned his cards over, Jack and nine of spades—straight flush.

All told, RH lost two dollars. It was getting late he had to go, klahowya. It was on to Peggy for yet another chance to spread open his wallet and get fucked out of his money.

While the mayor expanded his empire of chipstacks, Alexander’s knees cracked as he stood to leave. The mayor said: Pleasure to see you as always, RH. And I will consider what can be done aboot your problem.

They shook hands.

I’d recommend the man game be outlawed, RH said from the doorway as he casually beheaded a fresh cigar.

You would, eh?

Yes. First, it is indecent, and second, it promotes gambling. Promotes gambling, the mayor said with a chuckle, twisting his own cigar in his mouth. Promotes assimilation more like … well, I’ll look into it.

As he left the coach house, RH took a moment to breathe the night air. It was a night of daunting shades. The barebones trees pleaded for leaves. They wore raggedy crinolines of fog. Weather was a greater force than any other on earth. This morning he’d predicted to his wife a cold evening. Instead it was relatively warm and foggy. He walked up to the porch and opened the back door to Wood’s, stood in the cloak room, and held his breath. Going from the pure clean air of British Columbia to the smog of human lust, even for a regular, took some acclimatizing. As the eyes required adjustment to the darkness, so did the nose.

In the smoking parlour at the other end of a house decorated in King George’s castoffs, RH Alexander heard the rowdy talk of axemen.

Swinging crouching dancing kick. It was a swinging kick. Like the beam a your schooner swinging by on deck, knocking out legs.

It was point after point for Litz and Pisk. I don’t know aboot Campbell. He’s too small. He can’t move, he’s thick. His eyes, he might be blind the way he squints all the time.

I think it’s he’s angry.

That squint’s anger? If that’s anger, he’s in trouble. Never bet on him. Never. His one move. That Faint. No. Pisk could do five Cherry Tree Clutches in a row to get him a win against that naive bohunk Campbell, shit {see fig. 10.1}.

Damned near invincible. Brute strength though. Not finesse, character? Muscle. The man game is aboot more than muscle. It’s aboot strategy and, you know, not just aboot muscle.

Who coaches?

A gust a wind. So far’s we know they make it up themselves.

Listening to the men talk, it seemed as if no matter where he went RH Alexander couldn’t shake yesterday. Men might conversate for a few days, but the issue of the man game’s longterm future was, he believed, resolved, so long as his discussion with the mayor bent to his influence. He checked his reflection in a convex mirror. The narrow staircase coiled up to the women’s bedrooms. As he inspected his face, he thought about his plans. Along the intricate carpet of his thoughts he hit a lump where something unswept remained in his strategies with the mayor. If nothing else RH was meticulous. What was kinking up his strategy? Enough thinking like that, he told himself. He would put an end to it, that’s all there was to say.

FIGURE 10.1
Cherry Tree Clutch, alternative sketch

He mounted the staircase. The hall on the second floor was papered with a design of red roses. The hall smelled of years of perfumes, skin, and today’s exhaustion. The candlelight was borne in flowery sconces, and the unsteady light was accompanied by all the muffled and murderous noises of coitus. Six doors, three on either side led into private rooms where it happened. On the other end of the upstairs hall was a sacred room. Behind its door lived The Whore Without A Face. Her only companion was that singing canary. She was feared and desired in equal bouts. The Indians said she was cursed. Her allure for Whitemans was her invisibility. In her studied drawl, Peggy always said: If I let you all go inside her walls I’d be out a business. One fuck you’re done. She’s a manslaughterer.

I’d like to slaughter her, Alexander thought toughly. After years of coming to Wood’s—since before there was an upstairs—, that sacred door to her room still made Alexander’s heart quaver. The Whore Without A Face. Rumour was she was Snauq.

Six more doors, each assigned to a woman, each presenting her origin of the world, as it were, and he’d visited them all. Except her. He was not a man who fell for whores, but Peggy was a delicacy, a truffle among yams. She lived behind the door marked P in gold filigree at the end of the hall, right beside the sacred room. He expected her to be in bed waiting for him to arrive. He took off his hat and pressed his ear to her door—not Peggy’s, but the one adjacent. The Whore Without A Face. Quiet, not even the bird. Strange. He backed away. He took one last look at the door, and saw it shudder and start to open.

At that he froze. From the shadows of the room he saw a man’s profile emerge, and in an anxious hurry RH turned the brass knob and swung open Peggy’s door to hide. He shut the door and heard the other door shut just as fast. Now both men were hiding. What folly. But as he caught his breath, he realized he’d just seen the face of his crippled accountant, Samuel Erwagen. An impossibility. The man was a total cripple. Impossible. This golem, standing and walking, some flight of the imagination, thought RH. Bah, he thought. A trick of the mind. I thought of Sammy only a moment ago, that’s what caused me to see him just now, yes.

What are you doing? The voice startled him. He’d forgotten where he was. He was safely inside Peggy’s room. He looked over at the door that connected hers to the sacred room. Locked in there with her was an able-bodied double and in bed with—. His eyes bulged. He was seeing spooks. He feared the door would open.

Honey, said Peggy. You’re scaring me.

What? Peggy. I—nothing, I—it’s nothing. Indeed, he saw that the door was locked.

What if I was with a customer? Then what?

Yes, I’m sorr—

Come here, you, she said.

Yes, but—I saw, I think I saw—

You saw nothing. Peggy squeezed his cheeks in her hands. My crazy opium addict, she teased. What did you think you saw?

Nothing, nothing.

Did you take care a your little problem? she said.

I insisted the mayor outlaw the man game.

Outlaw?

Yes, why do you say it like that, like you disagree?

Nothing, I just wonder if—. Nothing.

What is it?

No, I see why outlawing it is the only way.

A course it is, dearie. It can’t continue.

How much did you lose?

Two dollars, he said, knowing he’d have to tell his wife it was six to include the forthcoming cost of Peggy’s routine.

Two dollars? She shook her head. Wasting your money. You’re the worst gambler in the world. Why do you do it?

To relax.

Actually, I must admit, what I meant when I asked if you’d taken care a your little problem was if you saw the snakehead.

Ah.

You did, I trust?

I did. Yesterday. A fine afternoon, a terrible evening. I had him in my pocket. Then we stumbled upon the man game.

You resolved …

I resolved nothing. Please, I don’t visit you to talk business.

Baby, sweet thing, who, then, if not me, is your confidante? Do you talk to your bookkeeper aboot strategy? Certainly you don’t speak with a cripple. You consult with no one. You think you can take it all on alone. You know I’m not just a mink. I’m a businesswoman. My profits exceed yours.

Doubtful. Now shush, come here and put your hot breasts on my face.

Shush yourself. Your costs are higher. My margins are better.

I love your margins.

You buy me, but I could buy you.

How dare you speak to me this way, Peggy.

It’s just that I’m so terrified for you, sweet RHA. That snakehead … if he ever visits again, I believe your life, our lives are on the line. We won’t survive without his help.

I’m fine, we’re safe. I took care a things as quickly as—. Now don’t move a muscle, unless it’s to undress. I need to use the head.

Go then. Quietly.

For the second time, Dunbar Erwagen was a shoe into the hallway at Wood’s when he startled again at the sound of the next door opening. Instinct told him to shut his door, and the other man—RH Alexander’s instincts told him the same. What a shameful sound: two doors slamming in a whorehouse, both wanting the same thing, to micturate. Why should I be shy, thought Dunbar, when no one in Vancouver knows who I am? I have no one to hide from here. He was about to step back into the hallway with his anonymity but remembered his brother, Sammy, and their disgraceful similarity. This put him in a spot. Meanwhile, he heard the other door creak open again and a man’s footsteps walk down the hallway and open the door to the very facility Dunbar so badly needed to use.

He turned around to find his lover had disappeared. The Whore Without A Face: where was she? A moment ago she’d been on the bed clutching the serpent of blankets twisted between her pale candlestick legs. Her sweetly tapered legs wrapped around this veined rope of linens. His own manhood had never touched such bliss as this. They’d spent hours enjoying the crests and surges of euphoria that marked their style of love. He’d kissed her on the collarbone and neck. She seemed to like it. If not her face then he wanted to kiss the hood. If not the sight, he wanted to feel. He’d grown to adore her black silk hood. But on his first attempt to kiss above the neck she’d pushed him away with a strict hand.

One of the other girls had brought her a dozen Calabi&Yaus, which were sitting on the dressertop with her other perfumes. Before going to the door, he’d brought the box to the bed and suggested she eat a few while he went for his break, but to save him the one with chocolate and goat’s cheese. She undid the knot and clapped gaily when she saw the pastries. They looked imaginary and they smelled amazing. Knowing how delicious they were, he craved them even more now than when he’d first had one with Toronto. She poked off a baked scallop stuck to the sugar on a sweet one.

What variety do you have there, my sweet?

You want taste? she asked.

She wore a slip that suited her figure from every angle. The hood itself was brutally sexy. He loved to watch her breath push and pull the silk around her mouth.

When I return from my lordly duties, he’d said to her. He’d turned to the door, opened it, shut it in embarrassment, turned around, and she was gone.

Da-arling? he said now.

Wa, she said from behind the wardrobe. Scared me. I think you left—

No, not yet. What are you doing? He tried to see her between the slats of the wardrobe.

Eating, she said. Please, no look at me.

A-a course, he said, and nosed in for a snoop. It was impossible not to be curious. He could smell the pastries and hear her eat them. Through the slats he saw a little of her head where the skin was a paler complexion than her body. Perhaps that was all he could really say for sure. It wasn’t even possible to see her chew. How serious was the deformity? Actually, he didn’t really want to learn the reason she hid all day in a room in a whorehouse and wore a black silk hood locked around her neck with a leather collar. Some horrors were best left unseen. So he turned around and walked out the door, crept down the hall to the piss-pot.

Indoor plumbing, he said to himself. Not bad. He shook off and stared into the empty porcelain, unsure if he was actually finished. There was a framed crocheting of a King James verse hanging on the wall. In a bright floral arrangement, it read: Jesus saith unto them, Verily I say unto you, That the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you. For John came unto you in the way of righteousness, and ye believed him not: but the publicans and the harlots believed him: and ye, when ye had seen it, repented not afterward, that ye might believe him. ~ Matthew 21:31, 32.

Dunbar didn’t know that this toilet was a local secret among a cadre of sinners. Wood’s was the first house in Vancouver with indoor plumbing. No doubt Dunbar appreciated it this minute going on two. No such luxury on the farm in Wyoming with the heavyset wife. Every day he looked at her, she looked more like his mother. Invalid. Skin like encaustic. Sand in her hair. He never wanted to go back there. The outhouse was twenty-five steps in the frigid silent cold. He heard the wolves howl. His wife howled. His stomach howled. Wyoming was the worst place on God’s crumbling earth. His family home in Toronto had had indoor plumbing all along. That’s comfort.

He chalked up the sudden upspike in his sexual activity as the reason why the piss was not flowing proper. Months and months of nothing and then all this fucking, a little stammer of the bladder was to be expected. Squeezing out jot after jot of urine, Dunbar thought a little about The Whore Without A Face. Peggy had been a true visionary to recommend this mystery to him. When he first arrived at Wood’s, Dunbar had been all eyes for a couple of the squaws in the smoking parlour.

I know she’s a girl for you, Peggy had said. Peggy’s fingernails were always fixing up the pins in her mungo hairstyle. When I see a man come into Wood’s I know what girl is just for you, she said. Some men get this or that because anything will satisfy them tastes. Not you, I can tell aboot you. She changes your whole life, honey. I see a brave man, ain’t I right? she said. Dunbar nodded. It was true, he’d helped capture a dangerous criminal only moments ago. Honey, she said, not just any man gets to visit my Whore Without A Face. I protect her and I protect her and I keep her safe from all them out there, right? She’s my flower. My little broken wildflower. They’re all my little flowers, but I love her too much. More than my own daughters. Oh, I keep her safe. I can only trust certain men with her, right? Men who deserve what she got. Men who need to appreciate her and what she got. A spiritual man. I think you’re a man like that, don’t you? She unlocked the door to the sacred room and guided Dunbar through.

Dearest Huldah (his wife), wrote Dunbar the next morning, I hope you remembered to slaughter the chickens before the cold. The news said it hit Wyoming in the night. I’m concerned that the meat will go to waste if they die of exposure, placing me in the unfortunate position of once again crediting that against your monthly allowance. We did agree the chickens were your responsibility. Take care. I must return to Toronto again to tell Father and Mother how far Samuel has fallen since he left the nest. I mustn’t go into the details of his predicament now for fear that it might provoke another of your debilitating phantasies. Your husband in eternity, Mister D. Erwagen.

The following morning Dunbar escaped from Vancouver. The moist savage cage that had imprisoned him for three days in January, 1887, finally set him free. It was not without mixed feelings. Tears, his own; and The Whore Without A Face, she too, if he heard correctly, had wept. A kissless farewell and he was gone. The Whore Without A Face remained in her cloister at Wood’s and he boarded a train in New Westminster heading east. He didn’t bid his brother any kind of farewell. He didn’t even call on Toronto. He rode in the back of an applecart, shivering, while the farmer complained the whole way there about the Chinamen.

On the train, his sleeping car was compact but royally accessorized. Yet still he felt like a real peasant: letting his emotions overtake him. He already missed her. There was a girl, and he had met her, who knew love when she felt it rubbing against her heart. She was a glorious hydra with no true face, and their time together was so short-lived, so punishingly short-lived. He didn’t know how he would survive not having her. Was he in despair or just incredulous? Life to Dunbar was a series of worsening associations. It was so private between them. No one would ever know that he was ever in love with her because his love lived in a sacred room, a dark room. He realized he might find some satisfaction in cherishing a deep regret and harbouring it to the grave, his secret love, all the while living in Wyoming among cows, a wife like a chicken coop on fire, and who knows how many children he’d eventually have to feed. The image of his brother Sammy, the man who was only a head, floating around in his wheeled chair with an Indian at his side—it all came back to Dunbar in a rush of queasy vertigo. He decided right then and there that from this day on, he would grind like a mortar and pestle, and his labours would provide for his life, and he would ask for no more than what he reaped with his own hands.

Please, Ma, Father, I mean no harm, for it is I, your loving son. I have returned with foul news aboot Sammy …

As Dunbar prepared his words, he became aware that many of the passengers and crew aboard the train were watching him. Until he found out why, he wouldn’t let on. This was how he always lifted his hand to his chin. Why was that woman leaning back in her chair every minute or so to search for something in her handbag? And why did her eyes always dart up to look at him with the most unflatteringly serious face? Her face was quite similar to the train conductor’s, who came again to check for tickets. Another suspicious goon. His brother is living with a woman who controls his every move, quite literally, while she seduces what appears to be every drifter in town, right under his nose. To make it worse, they live with an unstable, or perhaps he should say fiendish Indian, since his parents will never visit. And two Chinamen act as houseboys, creeping soundlessly over wood floors that scream when any other foot touches them—the floors that is. The real culprit of Sammy’s predicament was still definitely Molly, a conniving woman after the Erwagen fortune sure enough. Sammy was virtually incapable of rational thought with her around; her every gesture left him senseless with ardour. Sammy was so thoroughly seduced by Molly’s hypnotically green eyes, soulful and yet so proud, that he himself defended her innocence while she plundered the good name of the Erwagen family in plain public view.

The fur traders on board carried weapons under their skins. Dunbar saw a big man straight off the trapline flash the black double barrel at him and laugh. If he changed from one car to the next, the fur traders always followed him. When the train conductor asked him for his ticket again, he was afraid to show it. How you feeling, sir? he asked, a shockingly inappropriate question coming from an utter stranger, a mere ticket-taker. All these questions were getting under his skin. He didn’t answer any of them. Instead he shut himself in his private, seven-by-three sleeping cabin, and washed his face with the new bar of Ivory soap, shaved with the complimentary Kampfe Brothers safety razor, quite an invention, and rolled up under the Hudson’s Bay blankets for what he hoped was long enough.

He slept for two days. Three more days into the voyage, and Dunbar was howling and thrashing and not unlocking the door, though he could reach it from any place in his room. When they liberated him, he was clammy beyond belief. According to a doctor he’d succumbed to a kind of fevered paranoia brought upon by infection, and if kept under watch, his health should improve within the week. For safe measure, he was opiated heavily and quarantined. Influenza was no laughing matter. They fed him milk to relax him and he did indeed say some queer things about lumberjacks while under the fevered spell. With good-hearted intentions or pity, the doctor prescribed for him chicken soup and lots of rest.

An intense bladder infection quickly turned into gushing venereal sores overnight, all over his genitals and mouth. The slightest movement Dunbar made cracked open a sore. In the hours before the train reached Fort William, the crew recommended they stop for real medical attention, Dunbar insisted that the only doctor he trusted was Klinx in Toronto. Klinx, he’s the only man in the world I trust, he said. But as his temperature dropped, he kept saying the same thing. Klinx. Take me to Klinx. These were his final lucid hours. The Erwagen family doctor’s name was Billings.

His parents, Mr. and Mrs. Erwagen, took him straight from the train station to the hospital. The first thing he said upon seeing their faces was that they were milky devils.

Dunbar had developed a full-blown case of catatonic mania brought on by a breed of super-syphilis, according to Dr. Billings. He sees nothing but devils, the doctor surmised. Herpes sores ravaged his genitals with craggy and volcanic scabs. The gonorrhea doubled him over with bee-sting pain that throbbed across his entire pelvis. He was unable to stretch out his legs to full height. Rank mucus streamed in green rivers from his eyes. The colour of his urine alternated between dark red, oxidated copper, and muddy grey, and dribbled all day. The last stage of his journey through life came when the syphilis gained complete control of his nervous system and started to mutilate his features. In an hour, he went bald. Once the hair was gone, his entire head deformed until, in about a week, it resembled cauliflower. His nose and mouth sank between the gutters of ruddy white vegetable flesh. His veins poked themselves to the surface, almost on top of his skin.

Before anything could be done, the Toronto medical establishment stepped in and requested that Dunbar be allowed to live under a prolonged spell of morphine for the opportunity to study him as a rare and valuable scientific specimen of rampant venereal mutation. The mind was lost, but his body was a boon, said the men of medicine.

A monthly stipend was offered to the Erwagens as compensation for their loss. His mother was bedridden again. The idea of her son living out his years as a morphined freak, cut up and inspected by avid surgeons, attacked her overnight like scarlet fever. Father Erwagen looked at the cheque and started to guiltily daydream. The cheque’s amount was good, it bespoke the gravity of the matter at hand and was, after a time of calculating deliberation, accepted. An Erwagen is taught never to argue with numbers, he told the doctors, who seemed to find the credo disagreeable. They wrote a letter to Dunbar’s wife in Wyoming but she was already dead, frozen to death in the latest storm. What happened to Dunbar next is a story for medicine. Photographs were taken and discreetly reproduced for private collections, including at least one in Vancouver.

Instead of telling their son Sammy the whole horrid story of Dunbar’s illness, and whose own health his parents knew nothing about, they wrote him a telegram to let him know that his brother Dunbar was dead.

On the same day Dunbar left town, two days after the man game, Vancouver’s general practitioner Dr. Langis received a panicked-sounding note:

Please, doctor, we must meet. Be at the post office 5 P.M. Man needs help urgently … etc. etc. …, he read through it quickly, searching for any sign … bring your instruments ~ Mrs. Samuel Erwagen.

He read the note again. It was written as though by the hand of someone new to English.

Man needs help urgently—as if dictated.

He said aloud: A man?

What man? he thought to himself. She must mean her husband, not me, he thought, putting aside his own feelings and studying the note further.

He checked to make sure his pince-nez were in the breast pocket of his vest—they were—and was on his way.

In Vancouver there was steady work for the Whitemen’s doctor. Why, just the other day, a young man up in the branches of a red cedar had axed his hand in two, fainted and dropped a hundred feet to the ground, landed on a bed of chanterelle mushrooms, dislocated a shoulder, woke up, used his mouth to prepare a tourniquet for the cleaved hand, walked ten miles into town and dingled the office of Dr. Langis, let himself in, sat down at the doctor’s side and showed him the bleeding wound and the wonked arm. All a problem like that required was gauze and a drop of laudanum. Now and then stitches were needed. Dr. Langis was an even-tempered man, that temper being serious and impatient. Never looked you in the eye. Wouldn’t remember your name. He heard only what ailed you. Among these salmonbellies he was an eel, quick-witted, never sympathetic.

The note from Molly left him curious … hopeful, if he allowed himself such luxury. Which he did not. As he walked down Cordova, he walked into the pall. There was snow in patches and the fog bleakened everything. He could see into it as much as a block ahead. According to Dr. Langis’s pocket fob, it was twelve past the hour. Late as usual. Fine then, he thought. He knocked steadily three times.

Molly hurriedly let him in, studied the street with her green eyes (moted with brown), slammed shut the door. The post office’s clapboard facade trembled as if struck by the back of a hand. Inside, he allowed her to remove his topcoat and scarf and find them a place on the rack. Her lips were the colour of a sweet plum, her tongue hiding between them, strange fruit, peeled.

And how have you been, Dr. Langis? she said politely, leading him past the counter to the back room. She wore a modest frock with a seasonal lily appended to an open buttonhole, but this didn’t smell like romance. Dr. Langis felt the blood to his fingertips ease back. She walked too quickly for this to be a secret rendezvous.

I-I’m w-well, said the doctor, pressing around his face for his pince-nez.

He followed her through the door to the back room. There before him sat a bearded gentleman, charmless and hulking across a sofa that leaked sawdust. His bare, ravaged feet were up on a table. Doubtless, the feet were the matter.

Why had Molly sent this urgent message for him to meet her here when it was only to amputate the feet off this unrepentant bohunk? Surely her husband must be in the room and he was just too blind to see him. Well, the other person in the room turned out to be a second young man who stood dumbfounded next to a tube of brown newsprint. With a moustache for a face and ball bearings for eyes, his expression was of calculated sheepishness, the manners of a pugilist or lummox.

The doctor fished pockets in search of his pince-nez, wondering if he’d left them in his topcoat, but no, here they were, where they always were, in the right breast pocket of his vest, wrapped in a handful of blue silk.

Molly gestured.

The doctor focused.

Pisk’s feet were laid out in the light coming through the south-facing window. There was a candle-powered frosted lamp as well. These feet, they sat on the table like two gruesomely overdue loaves of raisin bread waiting to be thrown out with the rest of him.

Worst frostbite I’ve seen in I don’t know how long, said the doctor to Pisk’s feet, which were black, flaked, and glassy. He gingerly lifted one and turned it to the side. Pisk didn’t acknowledge, no sign of pain or awareness. When the light touched it, the black showed through to a layer of green, scaly, and metallic skin like exposed mica. The heels, ankles, and patches on top were hot pink. The knuckles were a molten shade of red surrounded by the blackened silicated crust. They’ll both have to go, he said.

What? No. Do something, said Pisk in a hoarse, fevered voice. I can’t lose my feet. I can’t lose them.

I’ve no other choice, young man, I’m sorry.

Don’t be sorry, fucking don’t amputate.

Nothing else I can do.

You don’t get it, doc. I need my feet. Look, Molly said you’d be a better fucking doctor than this. I’m not going to let you amputate. If I leave this room without my feet, you will, too, doc. You will, too. So. What else can you do?

The doctor sighed, rubbed the irritated bridge of his nose, the pink indents where his pince-nez sat. He looked to Molly for support, for another voice of the rational. To prevail against this man’s fervour with the aid of a woman’s logic. Instead he saw someone who expected miracles.

Bloody hell, said the doctor, flushed. He checked his watch again, by reflex. Sixteen minutes past five.

He said: What did your boss have you doing to get your feet in such a state?

Said Pisk: I don’t got a boss. I got frost-bit in my spare time.

Spare time? said the doctor. No boss? he said. The doctor dabbed his forehead with a kerchief. He unrolled the leather purse that held his chisels and tools. They glinted. Pisk clenched his teeth. The doctor took the sharpest chisel, gave it to Litz, and ordered him to assist in the preparations. From a pouch the doctor unslipped a stainless steel flask, twisted off the cap and took a swig, passed it to Pisk, who took three swigs, then another swig, then passed it to Molly, who took a swig. She passed the flask to Litz, who declined when he felt the weight. Save the rest for Pisk, he said, leaned to give it back to the doctor, and saw engraved on its side the words Adveho valetudo vel altus unda.

What?

I shouldn’t have any, Litz said. Spare it for Pisk.

There’s more than one raspberry on the bush, son, said the doctor, take a pull if you want.

Litz nodded boyishly and took two swigs of the warm brandy.

I better have some more then, too, said Pisk, grabbing and slugging down.

We get this over with fast, said the doctor.

Faster the better.

Molly took Pisk’s hand in hers and patted his rocky knuckles. He let her go and said: You better not hold my hand, I might crush it.

Dr. Langis said: Where do you want me to start?

Pisk looked at his feet. He took another drink. He said: With the big toes and work your way down. Fuck.

Might not be enough, the doctor warned. These feet …

Cut the feet off, I kill you with the stumps.

Yes, yes, said the doctor, enough out a you. Have another drink.

The doctor lopped off the big toe in a swift two-fisted jab with the large chisel, and said: Bring it.

Litz opened the door to the stove and pulled out the wood-handled iron pick, well-reddened like a cigarette, and applied it gingerly to the wound. A noxious cooking smell arose from the hissing flesh and blood. Hold still, said Litz. It really fucking hurts now, said Pisk. All right, said the doctor, and waved Litz off. The wound cauterized shut and Dr. Langis slathered the nub with aloe lotion. Holy shit, said Pisk. His face was pale and wet. Keep going, he said. Keep going.

The doctor walked Molly home, for it was quite late by the time it was all done. Past midnight. The fog lifted into the trees. The ceiling of the world wasn’t much higher than the rooftops they walked past, silently, fatigue keeping them silent despite all the things a man would normally inquire of a lady in such a scene. Like who the hell were those guys back there? And why does she keep company with them and not himself, if she’s grown weary of the paralyzed company of her husband?

When they reached her verandah, he paused on the walk while she ascended two stairs. Then she turned and looked him in the eyes at last. They were indeed brown moted with green, so said his heart.

M-Molly, he said.

Yes, Dr. Langis?

Not certain what to do with his hands, Dr. Langis touched his chest for his pince-nez. He said: Worst of all is knowing that you mustn’t love me.

Oh, she said. Her cheeks were flushed and plump. The swirl of her mouth was imploring him to recant his words. She was tracing circles around his desire. But I do love you, Dr. Langis, she said. I do. Look what you have done for me today. How could I not love you?

That’s not love, my young thing, he said, with misted eyes under his pince-nez, that’s gratitude you feel. I was only doing my duty.

What you did for Pisk, that was not for me, said Molly. I’m aware of that. What I mean is, you have respected my dignity. Dr. Langis, she said, you know that I love you. You know how shy I am around you because of it. Your intelligence brought you there, to help another man, another good man in need of help. You’ve shown me your strength. My husband, Dr. Langis—, well … Klahowya, dear doctor, she said and turned and ran up the final stairs with an irrational titter to her step.

Yes, but—

Klahowya, she said, and eased in the door and out of sight.

But how was I supposed to know that you loved me? he thought to himself with growing, ascending, impending nausea. One denies the face of love as often as the skull of death … Ah, Langis exclaimed, curse my intelligence.

Inside night’s jewelled mouth, under a forest of bacilli on the tip of North America’s tongue, saved from the jaws of gloom by the flames and sparks and embers of the campfire, Daggett hacked a message into a tree that would remain there until the construction boom of 1952. In giant wedged-out axe script, the message read: KILL PISK.

His men watched him carve out the message and laughed and, as Daggett seated himself back by the campfire, fell into silence. The cook came over. Furry & Daggett hosted their logging team to a late dinner of beans, flatbread and butter, coffee.

When dinner was over, Daggett took a deep breath as he prepared to begin the evening’s soliloquy with a bold declaration: Vancouver’s going to learn our crew’s the better. Woodsmen and man game. Bohunks are going to want a coach, and that’s us. Open up a Furry & Daggett’s Coaching Association.

Furry, who usually never said a word, lifted his beastly face from staring at the firepit and said: Don’t forget, Campbell is our first. Campbell’s the man on the street.

That’s right, said Daggett. Campbell is the first in line. No one starts a game except Campbell. Don’t let bohunks and peons and poltroons get your goat. Don’t get set up and let your pride get you a fight. That’s for Campbell. You hear? I tell you straight, this here a lesson for me. Alls I know is a good fight. But shit. We got to push this game. Every day practise.

What do I do? said Campbell, chewing his lip.

You wait. You wait and listen to see who wants to compete against you. If it’s Litz, so be it. If Pisk is still alive, you stomp his toes, that stupid bastard. I don’t care aboot how they play. I can tell how much they practise. We got to practise twice as much.

Tired a waiting. I want to call out a man game.

If you can stir up some others, I don’t know who, then do it. Daggett smoked his hash cheroot and paused for thought. No one interrupted, no one dared derail his train of thought. At last he said: If Moe Dee is looking to compete, fine. I suspect he is. But everybody can’t be on the street looking to start something. Campbell’s our representative for now. If someone wants to battle Furry & Daggett, they got to go through Campbell first.

And then it’s Boyd, said Furry.

And then it’s Boyd, agreed Daggett.

Why Boyd? Why not me second? said Meier. I want a shot.

You’re still too clumsy, Meier. Don’t argue here. We know what we’re doing. So don’t start something just to start something. It’s Campbell then Boyd, and that’s how it’s got to be.

And no way me or Furry go up against nobody but them, said Daggett. No way I’m a showing a single one a these nuts before I use them on Litz and Pisk. If Pisk dies, I’m gonna curse God till the day I die for not giving me opportunity for revenge. I’ll curse that motherfucker God he gets a spur up the ass so deep he gags. I’m one thing, said Daggett, and that’s vengeful …

He paused.

He smoked.

He continued: That’s why I don’t take a wife. I got a vengeful soul. I’d strike a woman as quick as I would a tree. Women and whores fear me, ladies scared a me the same as a grizzly, and, you know what? I don’t care. Anything aboot who I am strike you as caring what a woman thinks? You think a lady gets a load a these tattoos and this beard and expects me to support her? You think the girls at Wood’s look forward to my visits? I’m the unluckiest number in the room, always.

He paused again, his chest heaving with phlegm.

While the men enjoyed the silence, their Chinaman cook rinsed the dishes in the rushing creek nearby, spying intently on their conversation and trying to understand their words— he regularly attended man games—, and they all smoked copious amounts of purple-haired weed inside cheroot leaves.

On the subject a women, Campbell said: I want to get married, marry me a plum girl like Molly Erwagen and make some childs with her.

If I were your teacher, Daggett said, raising his elbows off his knees and swinging a fist through the air, I’d whip you for saying that. Campbell, my friend, don’t get involved with a lady.

But that Molly …, said Campbell.

You see any other ladies around here like Molly? None that I see. And do any a the wenches calling themselves ladies around here, do any a them say word one to a fuck like yourself? You ever conversated with Molly Erwagen? I’m asking you a question, Campbell.

… No, said Campbell.

You’re so full a shit, Campbell. A lady like that shows a man like us no interest, I can promise you that. Marriage, Daggett scoffed, marriage is for one a them pencils who needs an eraser, them men who keeps making mistakes and rubbing them off. We’re not pencils, we’re not even fountain pens, men, we’re goddamn axes.

Wa, cried all the men, raising their drinks for clinks, inspired as much by Daggett’s words as their fear of displeasing him.

Daggett pointed a finger at Meier, who braved a harsh woolpack of firesmoke to meet his boss eye to eye. For instance? Daggett asked himself (implicating Meier, perhaps), name me one married man who wouldn’t dream to trade lifes with you. This taking care a the kids business? Do I look like I’m rearing me no kids? These women get it put up in their heads by their mothers. Think if they can marry you then they can control you. Make you do all this backbreaking work, take all your chickamin, spend it on rearing. Know what I’d rather spend my chickamin on? Hash, whores, horses, and hooch. That’s what blankets are for, spending at the saloon, the billiards hall, the cat house. What use do we got for families and childs-raising? What good’s all that? No, she got babies because that’s her sex.

As Daggett paused to catch his breath, Campbell said: I do, I want to find me a smart lady, good with money, marry her, have some childs. That’s why I’m here. Raise money for a family.

Daggett stared at him. He received the weed, inhaled, gave it to Smith next to him, and exhaled.

Furry got the pipe next. He took two long pulls one right after the other, as if his lungs could take the entire plug at once. Their boys sat on the overturned logs around the fire, getting hazier, all ears at their age, young and impressionable and afraid of a belt whipping.

If I could marry a lady such as Molly Erwagen, said Campbell, I’d never want another thing in life.

Oh hell, said Daggett, calming a bit, I wasn’t talking aboot Molly Erwagen. You find yourself a Molly Erwagen, Daggett said, and I don’t say nothing to you. Go right ahead. But that girl’s aboot as common as a blue cherry. You’ll see one in your life if you’re lucky. I’d say any one a us might be crippled to some degree by her loveliness.

Aye, said all the men. A faint silence came upon them, and Smith, in a good mood, donated the cherried joint to Campbell at his left.

Presently, a strange puppet-like grimace overtook Daggett’s face. With eyes unblinking and glassed, his mouth thinned and spread from ear to ear. He said: Fucking if wives didn’t want some childs I might change my mind. But she wants a family. I’m telling you you don’t want a family. Fucking you know what a family is? You want some freedom to—Jesus Christ, do a damn job wherever, whenever, with whoever you damn well please. What’s the point a wives?

Daggett threw a pinecone into the fire and watched it crackle and explode, and said: I’ll tell you. None.

Campbell shook his head and spat into a flame to hear it hiss. You’re a godawful sonofabitch, you know that, don’t you?

I might be, Daggett said, straightening his back, but you’re the one who likes taking orders from everybody all his life.

There’s no comparing us, said Campbell.

No one moved. Daggett was slow to respond. How you know that? he asked.

What, in the span of fortunes, was the difference between the two? Added up, Campbell was dozy and incomplete. His boss Daggett was fierce and patient. The two of them were equals in every way. They may have stared at each other like a world of difference had landed them together in this forest, but that was mere pride. Life had subjected them to the same worsening. The shades of their personalities were no more constant than the play of light on the leaves of the trees or the fire in the pit.

I believed wrongly that to the alien eye there’d be no comparing Cedric and me. When it came to Minna, his warring tactics were no match for my funny conversations, but she seemed to like him just as much. Every so often Cedric looped one of those hands of his around her waist, or her shoulder. She giggled and squirmed away … Oh, it wasn’t so much that I hated him per se. In school we were taught to respect all creatures on earth, even the lower primates. His fingers without any nails truly sickened me, I confess, but so did the expression on the face of a baboon.

So you two aren’t …? Cedric asked me in semi-private, … bunkmates?

No, I said.

Then, turning to face Minna, Are you …?, he said with impolite ellipsis, implications galore.

Minna slouched on her heels. Cedric, she said and slapped his bare, reddish pimplish shoulder, I told you, I’m not and we’re not.

Cedric open-mouthed a smirk and said to us all in a quiet, spiritual voice: So this is what it sounds like when doves cry.

Ha ha, well who do you go out with? Minna asked Cedric. I can’t even imagine who’d think so little a themselves.

Me? Cedric asked. I can make a flower bloom in winter, you hear?

I’m feeling allergic, Minna said.

Don’t get me wrong, Cedric said. I’m still interested in hooking up for some casual.

Haw-haw, Minna said.

They began to talk about the man game again, and I, exhausted by jealousy, tuned out.

You know I’m just fucking with you, right? Cedric nudged me.

Yeah, yeah, I said, being nudged. I know that.

Everything in this basement has something to do with the man game, said Ken, on his knees in front of a stack of ledger books. I just don’t know what yet. When I started looking I didn’t know what I would find. I found some pretty weird shit down here, too. Ken turned to Silas and said: After we found the book with all the drawings of the moves, that’s when we sort of realized what was going on.

Silas turned to Cedric and said: Ken wanted to figure out why his grandparents had all this stuff before we threw it away. To keep the important stuff. Turns out—

Cedric turned to Minna and said: It was an intergenerational search for nothing in particular.

Kat, Silas said to me, you should really see this book a drawings upstairs. We use these drawings all the time, hundreds a moves drawn by a pastry chef using a brush pen. We use these drawings in this book to learn new moves. There’s so many. Some we can’t figure out yet. There are like hundreds a drawings a man game moves, all glued into this yellow leather scrapbook.

Sounds great, I said, instantly regretting it. I’d love to see it, I said.

Where’s the book? said Minna, yawning. My heart danced at her boredom. She covered her seductive mouth with her hand. A tear glazed along her eye. We’ll go home soon, I thought to myself.

Silas said: It’s upstairs. It’s definitely a great book for inspiration. We look at it every day. I think after we looked through it the first time we realized right away that we wanted to revive it, didn’t we? All these pictures on this old paper.

I wasn’t so concerned aboot getting naked as you were, said Ken.

No …

But I was afraid a getting hurt.

Yeah, me too, said Silas. Ha ha ha, I was not comfortable with the—. And I didn’t want to get hurt, either.

Why aren’t you in the man game? Minna asked Cedric.

Silas said: It’s not aboot showing my … It wasn’t aboot showing at first. I think if just I was, had to, and you guys didn’t have to, I would have been comfortable. But it was, ha ha, you have to make the comparison.

You have to make the comparison, agreed Ken. So be it.

Right, but.

Even though like …

Yeah, I mean, said Silas, a course I don’t care care. What the fuck do I care what you look like? But it was not going to be easy, I knew that when we saw the moves …

Ken patted his fist into his palm, said: We weren’t ready to touch.

Uh, no.

Cedric said: I was ready to touch right away.

You were.

Seriously, Cedric said, these guys were so lame aboot it.

We were.

Afraid to be buck, afraid to be hurt. I had to slap it out a them.

You’re way bigger than either of us, said Silas. It was intimidating.

Yeah, said Cedric in an unfamiliar voice, now you beat me almost every game.

Only recently, said Silas.

Only recently does not bode well for King Cedric.

We’ll see.

So you do play the man game? Minna said, getting even more excited.

As a way to excuse myself from a conversation I was already not a part of, I began to rub away the ink from an old newspaper’s headline. Mummified yellow paper from February 14, 1887’s edition of the Sunday Advertiser: PREPARE FOR 1500 CHINESE TO LAND ON VANCOUVER THIS MONTH.