Bentley Little - The Burning

Until he'd landed here.

The strange and unbelievably realistic dreams he'd been having ever since leaving home had intensified as soon as he'd started heading north, and for a while he'd been afraid to fall asleep at night. If he hadn't been even more afraid of drugs, he would have bought some No-Doz or other over-the-counter medication to ward off sleep, but instead he simply toughed it out. Certain cities seemed to be flash points, where the nightmares came hard and heavy. In Kearney, Nebraska, he'd been tormented by visions of bloody skeletons working hard on some unseen project, swinging hammers in the bright morning sun while he lay gut-shot behind them on the sand, trying to hold in his spilling intestines with his fingers. In Brubeck, Wyoming, he dreamed he was floating paralyzed down a river while on the shore cowboys with long knives cut up piles of stacked bodies, saving noses and ears for souvenirs, stringing them on long leather cords that hung from their belts. He wondered if he got out a map of the United States, put marks on all of the places where he'd had these terrible dreams and then connected the dots, whether some type of recognizable shape or pattern would be formed.

In all of the dreams, behind the events, not causing them but watching them, was that giant spirit, the one he'd seen in back of the smoke at the end of the road, beckoning him. He spotted it in the sky, above the trees, above the mountains. Sometimes its head was triangular, sometimes oval, sometimes square. Sometimes it was made of fur, sometimes rock, sometimes bark. But it was always there, and Dennis had the feeling that it was trying to communicate with him, trying to tell him something, though he had no idea what.

He probably could have stayed in Milner for the week without unduly straining his wallet, but there wasn't much to do here and he'd gotten in the habit of working. Since he'd be hanging around town anyway, Dennis thought he might as well see if he could make some extra cash. He found a temp job delivering newspapers for the local daily, the Milner Sentinel, an old-fashioned publication that was delivered in the late afternoon rather than the early morning. The regular guy was on vacation for a week, so it was his job to pick up the bundled papers from the printer and then drop them off at the homes of the individual paperboys, who then delivered them to subscribers. He had to be at the printer's by two thirty each afternoon, and he generally finished dropping off the last bundle around four.

For his efforts, he got fifteen bucks a day-which just about covered his meals in Milner, if not the motel. Although the city was too small to have a real Chinatown, there was a Chinese restaurant and an adjacent Chinese-owned gas station, and Dennis ended up spending a lot of his spare time hanging around there, chatting with the owners and the workers. He got to know them only because most of the other people in town-the white people-had been so universally unfriendly. He hated to think it was a racial thing, not in this day and age, but after that incident with the kid in front of the motel in Selby-

Chink!

-and after visiting The Keep, he could not help wondering if this entire section of the country was hostile to minorities, particularly to people of Asian descent.

This was what it must have felt like to be a black man in the South in the early 1960s, he thought.

Last night, he'd gone to eat at the restaurant and Carl Fong, the twenty-something son of the gas station's owner, had invited him over to his table. The crowd had grown to five by the end of the meal, and when Carl said they were going to cruise around for a while and asked Dennis if he wanted to join them, he said yes.

These were not the kind of people with whom he would ordinarily hang-were what his sister mockingly called "yellow trash"-but still, it was fun to find himself crammed in the backseat of an old Jeep Cherokee, speeding up and down the quiet streets of the town, racing a flat-topped farm boy down Main Street, yelling come-ons to a gaggle of drunken middle-aged women stumbling out of a bar without their husbands. It was an eye-opener, in a way, because growing up in a large metropolitan area, he'd always had friends from a wide variety of backgrounds. Aside from his family, he had never hung out exclusively with people who were Chinese. But here in Milner he had no choice, and it was kind of weird to have everything filtered through that lens.

Like himself, Carl and his friends seemed caught between worlds, neither fully Chinese nor fully American, neither Buddhist nor Christian, but having grown up in a closed community where they were social as well as cultural outcasts, they had a harder edge to their outlook, a more cynical and aggressive attitude than he was used to.

After buying a twelve-pack at a liquor store near the edge of town, they drove out by the river and parked.

"You ever think that serial killers are, like, doing God's work?" Carl asked, taking a swig of Bud.

The others laughed.

"No, I'm serious. All these religious guys always want one thing: to get to heaven. It's the focus of their fucking lives. Everything they do is so they can get there. Maybe God sent these killers to do his bidding and help them out, send them on their way."

The laughter was a little more tentative. It was hard to tell sometimes whether Carl was joking with his outrageous statements or whether deep down he really believed some of the crap he spewed. As the outsider Dennis didn't feel qualified to comment at all. He figured it was his job just to listen.

Jack Chu tossed his empty beer can toward the water, clearing his throat. "I had a dream about that last night. Kind of."

A dream? Dennis focused his attention on the younger boy.

"It wasn't here-it was someplace else. And it wasn't now. It was a long time ago. I was this foreman guy. We were supposed to be building something, but my job was to kill the men who didn't work. There was this one dude taking a break, drinking out of this canteen? I smacked his head with a hammer. This other guy was taking a piss and I shot him. Two other guys were talking, and I shot them, too."

Carl Fong laughed. "Sounds like a good dream."

Uneasy chuckles.

Dennis was hoping some of the others had had weird dreams as well, and he wanted to open up and relate the stories of his own nightmares, but the conversation was already moving on to sex and he lost his chance. Later, in his motel room, he was still wired and not sleepy, so he turned on Letterman and picked up the copy of the afternoon's newspaper that he'd saved for himself. The top story was about a graveyard that had been unearthed by construction workers while excavating an undeveloped plot of land for The Store. A tractor and backhoe had simultaneously shattered two rotted pine coffins and brought to light the decomposing remains of the interred men. Judging by the shreds of decayed clothing, jewelry and symbolic money that had been buried with the bodies, it appeared to have been a Chinese cemetery, a disused and previously unknown burial ground from a forgotten past.

Dennis thought of the hidden graveyard he had discovered back in Selby, remembered the man he had seen perform some sort of ritual at the grave site, the words he had spoken that sounded like "bo sau."

Revenge.

Coincidence?

There were no coincidences.

He had a tough time sleeping after that, and he brought the paper with him to the gas station the next morning. It was news to Carl Fong and his friends that there'd been a previous Chinese community in Milner, one large enough to require its own cemetery, and they immediately asked their parents and some of the older residents whether they knew anything about it. Everyone expressed surprise and admitted that they'd never heard of such a community before. Of course, the history of the Chinese in America was spotty at best. Records had not been kept on members of society who lived on the margins, who were ostracized by the mainstream, and out of shame, families had not passed down information on failure and rejection, instead emphasizing only positive success stories-of which there were very few in the early days. Listening to Carl's parents and some of the other old-timers talk, Dennis understood why his mom had been so fearful about his making this trip. For years, throughout the United States, Chinese immigrants had been illicitly sold as slaves, beaten and robbed by thugs, their murders never investigated by an uncaring justice system. Word of the harshness of life in America had spread to China, and before coming here, most emigres had known what to expect, had been duly warned that with new opportunities came great risk. Even in California, where the Chinese community in San Francisco had grown fast and early, spreading throughout the northern half of the state to provide an entire support system for the miners of the gold rush, it had been illegal for anyone of Chinese ancestry to own property. Up through the twentieth century! In fact, it was because of the Chinese community's growing economic clout and burgeoning population that such laws were passed-white America had been afraid of being taken over by the yellow peril.