Year of the Dog (8 page)

Sampan Sinking

Sai Go awoke on his sofa bed, still fully clothed except for his shoes, groggy and unsure how he’d gotten there. He had no idea what time it was, but in the somber light that crept in along the edges of the window blinds, he could make out the closet wall and the mirror above his dresser. Also, the two boxes of summer clothes he’d taken out in case he decided to go somewhere sunny and warm. It was early afternoon, but with a twilight sky outside his window. When he rolled out of the bed, he felt a twinge of pain in his shoulder and was reminded that he needed a haircut, which included a massage.

He pulled out a gray-metal lockbox from under the dresser, dialed the numbers until the combination was right, and opened it. There were the stacks of prepaid telephone calling cards, a few of which he used with his cell phones to take bets, a wireless transmission that couldn’t be traced. Most of the cards were for sale, on consignment from Big Chuck Chan, who was the leading Chinatown distributor of international calling cards. All the gamblers knew Sai Go sold the cards and bought from him because of the dollar discount he offered. Big Chuck was one of Sai Go’s regular bettors and the stack of phone cards served as collateral toward his credit line.

Underneath the stacks was a gun in a holster. He slipped the weapon out of the quick-draw belly-holster and caressed it. The Trident Vigilante was Italian-made, had a matte-nickel finish with black hard-rubber grips, and a six-shot cylinder that took the .32 caliber Smith & Wesson cartridge. The snub-nosed revolver was ultralight, only sixteen ounces, and the thirty-two cartridge produced less kick than the thirty-eight. It was a very practical belly gun, good for close combat but bad for distance accuracy. He had sawed and filed down the hammer so it wouldn’t snag on the draw.

Sai Go didn’t like automatic pistols because he worried they would jam up, and if he kept it on his belly with the safety off, he was afraid he would blow off his balls if he had to quick-draw and caught the trigger wrong. With the revolver, no such problems. Draw and shoot. No cocking action. Simple and quick. He’d seen enough gambler fights to know whoever got in the first hit was usually the winner. The first two shots, the muzzle explosions shocked the eardrums, causing a momentarily freeze. The man who didn’t freeze up was going to walk away. The other man, dead.

Sai Go put his money on the revolver.

At the bottom of the box were two small packs of money, and an envelope that contained a booklet and a certificate for the fifty-thousand-dollar life insurance policy he’d bought from Nationwide. He had kept up the modest payments, all these twenty years since his wife left, thinking that if he ever remarried, he’d have something more to offer a woman than an aging divorced man who couldn’t even claim a legitimate occupation.

The insurance was like a bonus prize, like a Ginsu knife.

He could remove his ex-wife’s name as beneficiary and could designate a new beneficiary at any time. He didn’t have children, had no one else in mind. Ha! The irony of it all, with him dying now, and no one else to benefit from it. The policy was paid up until next summer, a season he wasn’t expecting to see.

He tucked the envelope back into the side of the box, and removed the packs of money, crisp twenties and fifties, a couple of thousand, emergency cash, run money.
Well, it was an
emergency now,
he knew, and he with nowhere to run.

He imagined a village in the south of China, near Toishan, but far enough away from Guangjo city to still be considered farm country. The village of generations of his family, scattered now, the remaining few relatives there no longer on speaking terms with him, especially after the divorce.
Sure,
he thought,
go
home to the village where no one wants me, so they can watch me die?

He was calm, rested now after the long sleep. He had a vision of himself in Thailand somewhere, a sunny tropical vista with brown-skinned girls to ease his remaining days. Spend the nights drinking Singha beer and feasting on
satays, chow kueh
teow
noodles, and
tom yum
soup.

When he thought better of it, he felt he could just as easily go to Fat Lily’s or Angelina’s for brown-skinned girls, and to Penang or Jaya Village for Thai beer,
roti,
and
hainam
chicken. For the sunny vista he could take a bus south on the interstate, or take the train with the glass skylight roof down to Florida somewhere for a few weeks. Somewhere sunny and not too far. A cruise to one of the islands? What would he do with a shipload of
lo fan
strangers? He could just as well be alone in Manhattan, if he only turned off his cell phones and stayed out of the OTB and Chinatown.

He was taking it all very well, he thought, with some resignation, of course, but what else could he do really? Get hysterical? Get depressed? Beg the gods for forgiveness and salvation? Be hopeful even when the doctors offered no hope? He wasn’t the suicidal type, and even though he feared the pain to come, he didn’t see himself wasting half the time he had left being sick from the radiation. He wasn’t going to roll up in bed and wait to die.

He’d made it to fifty-nine,
Sai Go mused,
what the hell.
He’d led a decent life, generally speaking, and hadn’t committed any evil he couldn’t face up to.

There were no relatives to notify. He wasn’t leaving anything to anyone, and his plot in the old Chinese section of Peaceful Valley cemetery had been paid in full years ago. Now he needed to spend whatever he had left, and try to avoid a painful death, even though he’d quit the meds, and canceled the chemotherapy.

Three or four months?

If he were a family man, there would be many other considerations, but he was alone. So the question was did he really want to go on a vacation to die, or to hang around Chinatown until the end? He could stop taking bets and just enjoy the final days. Take a junket to Atlantic City or Connecticut and play some cards games with the Chinese high rollers. He’d get comped with a lot more bang for the buck, and it would be only a three-hour bus ride from Chinatown.

The thoughts went back and forth inside Sai Go’s head even as he slurped hot
jook
, and chewed the crisp fried crullers at Big Wang’s. He read his Chinese newspapers and couldn’t help but scan the racing sections.

At the U.S. Asia Bank, his Happy Valley payout had been wired, and now his account had grown to over thirty-eight thousand. Even minus the six thousand for the
dailo
, he still had over thirty thousand to spend during his last months. There was another two thousand on the street he had to collect, but he didn’t anticipate a problem. These bettors were his family: the waiters, cooks, kitchen help, the street vendors and deliverymen. Ten-dollar bettors and hundred-dollar players, he’d treated them all fairly, with a savvy blend of camaraderie and no-nonsense. He never let his credit get too far in front and had built a loyal following. None of which mattered anymore, Sai Go knew, the game was over.

He went east on Catharine Street toward Henry, those streets crowded even in the cold with sidewalk vendors of fruit, vegetables, and seafood stores stacked against meat and poultry markets and a string of bakeries. Trucks and vans idled at the curb, their exhaust pipes steaming, as they rushed their deliveries with one eye out for the
chow pai
ticket of the
brownie
traffic cops.

On Henry Street, the buildings were turn-of-the-century brick tenements, mostly Jewish back then, but now overwhelmingly Chinese. A section of the Manhattan Bridge rose up in the near distance.

The New Canton Hair Salon had a blue awning with a cartoon of a pair of scissors and a comb drawn across the front. It was a small storefront sandwiched between a noodle shop and a poultry market on a dilapidated block of Henry Street.

The salon was unlike the new and shiny hair, nail, and massage “emporiums” that dominated Pell and Doyers Streets. There was graffiti on the outside of the New Canton. Inside was a run-down room with six barber chairs and a small counter near the door. There were mirrors on the walls, and shelves full of shampoo, lotions, and towels. The helpers washed hair at two basin stations, side by side behind a plastic partition.

As he approached, Sai Go could see there were two barbers on duty and no customers in the shop. One cutter was a vampy-looking Chinese girl with reddish hair, who showed a lot of skin and a tattoo of a cat on her shoulder. The other was Sai Go’s regular, a woman he knew as Bo, which meant precious
.
She’d been trimming his hair once a week for almost two years now.

Ms. Chu Bo Jan.

Bo was not one of the full-time stylists, the pro hair designers
.
Instead, she rented one of the barber chairs three to four days a week for a sixty-forty split between her and the salon owner. The owner, KeeKee, was an occasional bettor with Sai Go, and she had explained Bo’s situation when he inquired, privately, why an older woman, still handsome, had come to be a part-time haircutter.

Precious

Bo was indebted to the snakeheads, one of many thousands who were paying off a thirty-thousand-dollar deal with Chinese human traffickers, for passage to America. The deal involved bogus passports, fraudulent paperwork, and sometimes the promise of jobs. The illegals placed relatives in China as human collateral against breaking the contract.

Bo Jan was twenty-eight, already considered an old lady, when she’d married a factory worker ten years older than herself. This was during the times of the One Child Policy. Bo had wanted a child, and her husband Kwok grudgingly agreed that a child would be okay if it were a boy. The option of an abortion was already in the back of his mind.

It was a girl.

The marriage quickly became strained. Kwok wanted to give up the baby girl to an orphanage, as many Chinese had done. He hoped they’d have another chance at a coveted boy child.

Bo could not bear the thought.

The orphanages were flooded with baby girls. Americans, who’d declined to adopt black American babies, were flocking to China to adopt yellow babies as fast as they became available. China was selling its unwanted excess population at ten thousand dollars an adoption. This new global baby trade was sanitized, and legal. The Asian women sex-slaves who arrived packed in the holds of cargo ships had no such protection.

Rather than allowing the clan bloodline to end, Kwok abandoned his wife and child before the baby girl was a year old. Bo took her daughter back to her family village near the Pearl River. There, a series of unsuccessful relationships with local village men caused her to lose hope of a future for her in China, where she would be doomed to wind up a spinster, with a mother and a young daughter to care for. She began to hope for a new start in America. After the girl’s third birthday Bo left, alone, smuggled by snakeheads to New York City by way of Canada.

Now, after two years of slaving in Chinatown, she was still struggling to pay off her passage, the specter of prostitution ever present.

At first the snakeheads tried to convince her to become a whore, to work for an escort service, saying it was a much faster way to repay the debt, adding that she was not such a young woman anymore.

She had politely declined their offers and never bowed to their intimidation. Bo explained to these heartless men with no souls that she was a devout Buddhist, and prostitution was a grave sin. The snakeheads ridiculed her, called her crazy,
chi
seen,
but by slogging through a succession of small jobs, she managed to pay her monthly installment to them without fail. She worked in a Chinatown bakery during the day, supplementing her salary with piecework,
cheun gee,
at home, where she strung beads into necklaces, or assembled gift baskets. The payments to the snakeheads continued, as did the funds she wired to her mother and daughter in Toishan.

After a year, the bakery job became a supermarket cashier post, which became a gift-shop clerkship, the jobs declining in desirability, requiring longer hours for less pay. So, in rapid succession, she snipped threads off piecework in a sweatshop, pushed a steamy dim sum cart in a restaurant, gutted tilapia in a fish market. On Canal Street, she hawked knock-off designer handbags. In between, she washed hair and swept up the shorn locks that piled up beneath the rotating chairs in the barber shops that lined Doyers Street. She taught herself how to cut men’s hair, and learned to include a free ten-minute neck and shoulder massage.

She waited until Sai Go was seated comfortably in the chair before she draped the plastic sheet over him.

He observed his haggard reflection in the mirror, noticed when she glanced at him. She held her small smile.

“I didn’t see you last Saturday, you weren’t here,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Of course not.” He smiled quietly. “How could you see me if I wasn’t here?”

“I thought you found a new cutter,” she teased. “At one of the
designer
shops, hah?”

Sai Go grinned. She was happy to see this as her comb and electric clipper danced, spraying bits of gray and white hair off his head, small clumps catching on the plastic sheet around him.

“One of those young girls made up like Hong Kong movie stars?” Bo continued, “A
siu jeer
girl to cut you a new style, hah? Give you a great massage, make you feel like young man again, hah?”

Sai Go chuckled, told her again and again that it was just some family business that had come up. He remembered she had given him the gold-plated Buddhist card, the talisman, many haircuts ago. He’d explained to her then that in his line of work he dealt with good people and bad people alike, explaining why he carried a box cutter in his back pocket.

Bo had detected sadness in him then, and still now, in this older man who she guessed was about twenty-five years her senior. She felt sorry for him, and tried to cheer him up with clever sayings, giving him five extra minutes of shoulder massage. The Buddhist talisman had been one of several that she carried to ward off the sex-slave snakeheads. She’d told him it would protect him in his travels.

Sai Go’s haircut hadn’t required much imagination. Years of ministrations by Chin Ho’s barber shop on Doyers Street had shaped his hair into a military-style crewcut, the sides trimmed very tight to the skull, the top about an inch long and angled back. Bo rubbed gel into the top so the sheen would disguise the gray there. He looked younger than a man in his fifties, she thought, although this day he looked tired, a bit distant, his mind drifting elsewhere.

When he looked in the mirror, Sai Go saw a beat-up, baggy-eyed fifty-nine-year-old mask of wrinkles, worry lines etched into his brow. Fifty-nine—the numbers five and nine, in Chinese sounded like
not enough. True
, he thought,
Not enough luck,
not enough time . . .”

“
It’s the massage,” he heard Bo say, still teasing. “Must be I give a better massage, hah?”

Sai Go smirked, closing his eyes as the roar of the blow-dry gun filled his ears.

Bo released the lever and the chair dropped so that she had a higher angle to work from.

It
was
the massage, he thought, the only time he’d ever felt tension leaving his body. He liked the way Bo dug her elbows into the tops of his shoulders. He shut his eyes as she pressed down harder into the deep part of the muscle, then dragged her elbows along his shoulder blades. Her fingers worked the joints, pressing nerve points that ran along the spine.

Bo had strong fingers and hands, and knew just how much force Sai Go could tolerate.

“Everything’s stiff,” she said innocently. “
Very hard.
What have you been doing? See? Miss a week and your back’s all screwed up.”

“You’re right,” he heard himself say. “I’ll try not to miss any more visits.”

She said, “You’re working too hard, that’s what it is. You need to drink hot soup. Wintermelon,
foo jook,
mushrooms.” She gave him a pat on the back. “It’s the wintertime. You know how to make soup, don’t you?”

She put her thumbs into the depressions at the base of his skull and worked the nerves, then followed with hands, firmly grabbing, kneading the musculature and cords inside the back of his neck.

He took a long and deep breath, held it a moment before releasing it, thinking,
He was fifty-nine, and she was thirty-something,
yet she was mothering him?

Bo’s pressing and digging, pushing and rubbing, forced his inner energy, his
chi,
to circulate. He felt his blood moving, the joints of his fingers crackling as he clenched and unclenched his fists underneath the plastic sheet. Finally, she balled her fists and pounded his back.
Playing the drum,
it was called.

When she was done, he gave her his usual ten-dollar tip, generous but not so overly generous that it suggested anything more than simple appreciation of services received. Knowing her story, Sai Go felt sorry for her, for her predicament, supporting two generations back in China, and having to fend off the snakeheads.

After Sai Go left the New Canton, Bo had begun to sweep up the hair on the floor around her station when she noticed the folded square of paper directly underneath the chair. It was a prescription card with notations she didn’t understand, from the Mon Tang Pharmacy on Mott Street. Folded along with the card was a piece of notepaper from Chinatown Imaging, and a scrap of crinkly cellophane that had the Chinese words
Ming
Sing,
or movie star, scrawled on it.

On the Chinatown Imaging note was the word chemotherapy with appointment dates during previous weeks. They all seemed to be Thursdays. Below the dates was a scribble of Chinese words, several of which she understood to mean
cancer
and
radiation.

A freezing wind suddenly swept into the salon, and Bo quickly glanced toward the door, but she knew that Sai Go was long gone. She stepped out into the cold street anyway, looking both ways to make sure he wasn’t still in sight.

Back inside the shop, Bo tucked the papers into her pocket, and reminded herself to return them on his next visit. She realized then why Sai Go had missed his last trim and although she hadn’t noticed any hair loss, he did appear fatigued, quieter than usual. The word
radiation
lingered in her mind, and she considered whether there was another talisman that could prevent the pain of cancer.