The Man Game (22 page)

That dog ever
not
follow you? asked the po-lice.

What dog? said Clough. I'm the poundkeeper, too, you know. If there's a stray, that's my business. I can catch stray dogs, stray men, and stray muggers.

Yeah, right, eh. How you ever expect to catch that mugger when you're always on the anti-fogmatic?

Clough waved his finger in the air. Call me a sap, but I swear I'll catch that mugger. Why, did I ever tell you how I chased a man across five islands?

Yeah, you did.

Five
islands, eh.

They paused at Westminster Street and watched a horse and buggy roll by, nearly tip over a dodgy hillock, and continue wobbling down the mudpacked road. The new clapboard buildings on the south side of Dupont Street were all part of Chinatown's most recent expansion. They were raised on stilts over the mudflats of False Creek, and at high tide the water would rise to the height of the sidewalk, lapping at your pantcuffs, spitting up along the boardwalks, sloshing in the gutter. Each building had its own plank bridge that connected it to land. If a man were to come stumbling out drunk and worried he couldn't walk a straight line over that gangplank, he might prefer the tide be in so that he'd splash into water instead of falling ten feet onto mud.

If the po-lice met any Chinaman coming out of an establishment and choosing to walk to the mainland, they
asked questions. Where you been? Where you going? What's your name? What's
your
name? Where do you live? What're you doing, eh? Speak English?

A snakehead down in San Francisco had hired them, bringing them over from Sze-Yap and other rural provinces whose farmers were exposed to the worst natural elements. He'd sold ten thousand of them to the Canadian government, which in turn sent them to mountain passes up in the Rockies where they hammered CPR spikes day in day out. After they were laid off and denied the return ticket to China promised in their contract, they came to Vancouver and took any job offered. Since they were only allowed to live in one part of town, that part of town had become rather overcrowded. They lived for pennies saved and in the meantime they endured. The situation on Pender was neither safe nor sanitary, not for those who lived on the street or for anyone else in nearby bordellos.

He'll stay, warned the constable. He'll
stay
and he'll
breed
and soon enough we'll all be Chinamen.

Me, I'm not unwilling to accept a bit a pessimism. But I'm not so easily polished neither, Clough said. You read aboot the Yellow Peril in the
Daily Advertiser
every day and just flat-out believe it, eh? Myself, I'm not so sure. You can't trust all you read in the papers, eh. Once they get paid for space to sell hair cream and tonics and rolling pins, well. In fact I read one a them Yellow Peril stories the other day, it was written by the tailor, has a shop way over on Beatty and Robson, see? And everyone still goes to Wah On Tailors, eh, down in Chinatown, because he's the better tailor.

Don't need papers, said the constable. See it for myself with my own eyes, every day.

They stopped in front of a two-storey fan tan making too much noise for the po-lice's taste.

Might as well be Shanghai not Vancouver, eh? said Constable Miller.

I'm out here doing my part so that don't happen, said the po-lice.

We need to do
more
, boys, more, said Miller.

What can you do? said Clough.

One a these times when we bust a fan tan you should come along.

I'd like that, said Clough. I never seen inside one.

Turn the beetle over and see all his crawly legs, eh, said Miller.

They circled back, this time paying attention to the north side of the street and the whorehouses; busiest among them Wood's, hosted by Madam Peggy. Her house was set back from the street with a simple boardwalk to the front door where a kerosene lantern in the shape of a pomegranate swung in the evening breeze. In Peggy's yard the po-lice saw that a couple young Sitka girls were daintily soliciting a Whiteman. Lots of laughter, ugly laughter, conspicuous tongue-wagging. They told old John to get lost.

It's not yet nine in the morning, said the po-lice to the whores.

It's a living, cried a skinny half-breed, half-laughing, half-weeping.

Innocent virgins, said Constable Miller in a low monastic voice, alas, ye perish hither Wood's.

What? Oh, forget it, said one of the girls, sticking out her arms for the ropeknot. Just get it over with.

Tying her slender wrists, Miller said: Children grow up so much faster to-day and it so seldom does them any good.

Pay the fine or it's off to jail with you all, said the po-lice.

Put your finger in my cunny and call it even, eh.

Don't give me that language, girlie, said Miller. We'll have no flouncing on our front porches, you hear? Schoolchildren will one day have to pass by your seething hell a immorality, you ever think a that?

The first clue Clough learned about the man game was there in the prison mews; having slept off his hangover, he woke up in the afternoon to hear it as gossip from the lips of a young prostitute in the pen next to his. His left ear was flat against a wood bench that smelled of another man's hair grease. His right ear was listening to the prettiest squaw voice.

Peggy say they fight tomorrow.

Wha'? Who fight? Who're you talking aboot, squaw? said Clough.

Litz and Pisk.

Litz and Pisk? Well, don't clam up now, girlie. Spit.

Show fight, alls I know.

Show fight, said Clough. What the hell's a show fight?

Litz and Pisk, said the young Whoi-Whoi.

Fighting each other.

Behind Calabi & Yau.

Back a the bakeshoppe, eh? Litz and Pisk, eh? Hmm, said Clough.

After sobering up and paying his fine, and the fines of the Indian girls who'd given him the clue, Clough was back on the street. The stars were out. An old raggedy spotted Lab was right there on the road outside the station waiting for him. Together they walked through the neighbourhood, looking for more gossip, more news, more clues. The dog's nose sniffled down the walls looking for chicken bones and eggshells. His muzzle was shaggy and sticky. Don't waste your time with that crap in the alleys, for God's sake, boy, Clough said and reached into his pocket, retrieved another sausage treat. The dog's eyes lit up. Yeah, buddy? Yeah? When the sausage left his fingers and not a moment too soon the dog's jaws were on it. Before the dog had time to slam Clough against the wall and demand more, Clough was completely dominating the creature, blinding him with one hand as he put a knee on his ribs and said: Good, buddy, you're just lucky I was here, eh? A treat like that? Now, hey, no biting, or
I'll—that's right, good, buddy, good, calm down. The two of them sat for a half an hour or so like that, Clough razzing the dog and dominating him until the dog grew tired and they sat down, Clough on a wood step and the dog beside him. I'm either catching guys like you, Clough said to the dog, or I'm watching over you, or I'm one a you. Look at me, fresh out a jail and I catch my first stray. How do you like that, eh? The dog finally curled up for a short, fitful rest. Clough adjusted his cap to the breeze, a light westerly hush against his cheek tiring him with its softness and grating his nerves with its unceasing breath. Booze, booze was all he needed. When he couldn't afford the bodega, local moonshine hit all the spots. Every single spot got hit. Each swig of the potato killed him awake a little more. He quickly spotted an old haunt, an unhinged door in Chinatown between two tofu huts. Here you could knock three times and a Chinaman with no front teeth top or bottom would give you a bottle of hair tonic for two bits.

The hair tonic was close to one hundred percent alcohol. The hair tonic obviously worked best on a man's self-confidence if taken orally. Root-based ingredients, essentially. The amber bottle showed the face of a Klondike man whose beard had overtaken his entire body—and the rest of bottle. This particular potato crop was like a bootlegger's dream, a gorgeous, totally hidden, undulating acreage of ravenous topsoil. Underneath the taters, so the rumour went, was a thousand-year-old midden. Generations' worth of human cremains, a massive Squamish burial ground of sorts. The debate was whether it was Indian burial cremains or an ancient Indian garbage dump. Why, Clough knew where it was, and he was sure it was cremains. It was just a few days north of the city, in one of many cold isolated forests along the coastline. A bountiful midden of spongy black earth growing miracle-cure potatoes. Upon his first swig Clough had a distinct flash of remembrance: he'd once stumbled upon this Squamish midden
where the bootlegger harvested. It was the second and third skull that convinced him all the other little bones were human, too, and that this was a burial mound, zitted by big purple potatoes. That's a good type a earth to grow potatoes in, he said to the lip of his bottle.

The dog awoke and snouted for more treats from Clough, who explained the rules: No more treats until you come back to the yard. The dog stood awhile longer, scratched his ear, bit his tail, then ever so slowly scented his way out of Clough's reach, and clicking his nails on the leaves, vanished into fugitive smog.

Three dollars a week was good extra money for Clough to round up strays, feed them and treat them properly, and still a little left over for a drink at the end of it. With that in mind, he found a spot of relative comfort in the alley behind the Calabi & Yau Bakeshoppe to wait for the
show fight
, and slipped into a deep, ulcerous sleep.

And sure enough, at the first blue shadows across the peaked roofs the next morning, the alley started to fill with shifty bachelors, rubbing their snotty nosepieces, feeling the cantankerous excitement of being awake for the sake of mystery.

From his hiding spot, Litz snickered to his partner: Doesn't look like Clough expected to see a crowd.

I didn't expect so either, said Pisk.

Next, Litz pointed out Moe Dee over there picking his teeth, and Bud Hoss in a corner against a black wall, hard to miss, he was a big guy. As Hoss walked towards Clough the two men muttered some morning greetings. Hoss asked something Litz didn't hear, though he could easily guess, and Clough croaked back: What's it
look
like I'm here for, I was getting some sleep, what are
you
here for? Clough got up and
walked away, eyeing Hoss suspiciously for a while until he set himself up a spot beside a crumbling fence, looking wary of everyone, and waited.

Litz watched Bud Hoss go over to shake Campbell's hand next. It might look like a friendship, but Litz knew better. He knew as well as anyone how Hoss had been fired from Furry & Daggett's logging camp where Campbell still worked. Hoss's insubordination, the strap-whipping and all. Everyone knew the story. So what did it mean that Campbell was here this night? Litz and Pisk were on guard for signs of Campbell's owners, Furry & Daggett.

Just because Campbell's here doesn't mean we can't do this, Pisk said. Money's money. I'd rather take
his
chickamin than anyone's. If he's going to place a bet on you or me, all the better.

Don't like it, said Litz.

Clough came over and asked Hoss: What're you writing in that small notepad?

Taking bets, said Hoss in a whisper.

Taking bets, is that so? On this show fight?

Hoss nodded.

Since when?

First time.

Clough looked at the crowd, some dozen Chinamen and six or seven Whitemen, and there in the corner the Erwagens' ward, the Snauq Indian exile Toronto. Why was he here? Then again, maybe no one looked certain why he was here. Clough put his hand on Hoss's shoulder and said: What's to say this here doesn't get shut down by the po-lice?

Po-lice don't know
, said Hoss firmly.

How many a these have I missed so far?

Listen, you going to bet or shove over?

Clough turned to face a queue of Chinamen standing one behind the other like a pack of cards. They wore pigtails and tanned cotton smocks. Jesus, he cried, where you coolies all get enough chickamin to go gamble with?