1TAHOE TO TOOELE
Standing on the dusty shoulder, Mĕi squints down the length of the I-80 to track the gumball yellow cab of an eighteen-wheeler till it disappears around the highway’s bend. Sugar pines tower above, massive trunks ruler-straight as though drawn by a steady hand. Nearby, she knows, the crumbling stone foundations of buildings are drawn, too: leftover traces in dirt of Sierra Nevada camps that once housed Chinese railroad workers.
In Chinese, the base component of the character for “road” is “foot,” and Mĕi’s caught wind of high school friends, now in their mid-twenties, finding the railroad camps on foot; spraying graffiti inside old train tunnels; scaling portions of the China Wall, a long stone embankment of excavated rock. Her own grandfather, eighty-six and active only online (where he posts rhetorical questions like “If raccoon is trash panda, is rat subway squirrel?” and “Why we don’t say salmon like almond?” late at night) once told her stories of how two ancestors spilt sweat and blood here, laying transcontinental track, then returned to China with their earnings. “Two in fifteen, twenty thousand other Chinese worker,” he added, leaving Mĕi unsure of whether that made it more or less significant. “Decades before I come here.”
Closing her eyes in the towering trees’ shade, she recalls the old man greeting her after school in his threadbare pink robe and ornate slippers, bending to her eye level. “That your textbook?” Lǎoyé pulled the heavy edition from her hands, a self-proclaimed history buff. “Got more boogers in here than facts.”
Another eighteen-wheeler blows by, shaking her sternum. She opens her eyes but still sees her grandfather’s face. She was six when her grandmother died and he retired from his part-time mechanic’s job, relocating from the back bedroom of her childhood home in Oakland to the family’s drafty, converted garage. There, he played video games and smoked weed with the ardor of a teenager, declining to go outside.
“Neighbors crazy,” he’d cackle, dropping her textbooks on the rug as they settled into his ratty brown couch, grabbing game controllers in whatever sunlight made it through the murky window. “I got Grand Larceny IV: Chinatown Wars. What I gonna go out for? I need good conversation, I talk to myself”—smoke rings rising, spreading up over the bowed shelves of his leaning bookcase to pool between bare ceiling joists—“or you. Got no need for white folks.”
“But I’m white.”
“No, you just talk white. You a oriental cracker mix, like they sell at Trader Joe’s. Baked in America, half Chinese ingredients.” A crinkly grin. “You lucky you here at all.” Coughing, he set his stinky joint in an ashtray. “I got interested in America from family stories. But your ancestors barely make it over to the Golden State, because Governor Leland Stanford call railroad men like them the ‘degraded dregs of Asia.’ Look it up online!”
“But he hired them anyway?”
“Not enough white guys show up for the job. He change his mind real quick.” Lǎoyé snapped his fingers. “Poof! They upstanding citizens.”
Lǎoyé, with his smack talk, is her favorite person. Her best childhood memories are of hiding out in his garage, which might as well have been a kids’ fort with a Keep Out sign that her parents grudgingly respected. Even after moving into her own spot across the bay, she’d visited him regularly till the family fractured.
“Miss Brown?” The client’s glinting Bulgari watch stretches from the rear passenger window of the idling, air-conditioned sedan as two bald eagles slice the sky.
She lingers another moment, reluctant to leave the densely clustered needles that shade her from a pitiless sun—cooling herself with the thought of shivering men trudging through shafts dug deep in the mountain snow, from tunnel rock faces to blizzard-battered living quarters. Men who’d journeyed to Mĕi Guó, the “beautiful country” for which she was named, only to live without daylight for months at a time.
But the sun is stronger than her imagining. The sun screams down at her to get back on the road; reminds her that this leg of the trip runs six hours, wheels turning.
Kicking debris over the vomit-soaked paper towels, burying them like roadkill where the woods meet the highway’s shoulder, she strolls toward the car. “It still stinks back here,” the client says as she nears. “The baking soda isn’t working. Can’t you spray an air freshener?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Lee,” she says through his open window before sliding into the driver’s seat. “I only have citrus. The acid would exacerbate the odor.” She gets in, slamming the door and adjusting the rearview mirror away from his eyes. Does not open the clear plastic partition that divides them.
Of course she has other air fresheners. Any driver who’s handled a limo in prom season does. But this is no limo service, and the client’s weak stomach is wasting her gas. Let him bake in the stink, she thinks. The blasting air conditioner keeps the front cool and fresh.
She readjusts the mirror after pulling back onto the interstate. Examines him surreptitiously. His GQ face is miserable as he loosens his tie, rolls the back windows up, and pops earbuds in, distracting himself with his phone. She softens. Cracks the divider open. “Leave the windows down if it’s not too windy. It’ll help with the smell.”
He removes the earbuds. “Pardon?”
“Leave your windows down.”
“No.” A pained smile. “Don’t want the car to get too hot for you.”
“I’m fine up here,” she says. “Trust me.” But his earbuds are in again, shutting her out. She closes the partition.
Even as the Sierras flatten, hillside shrubs replacing colossal pines as they coast toward the flatlands of Reno, the client’s windows remain closed. Normally, she’d make small talk: note the moment the I-80 becomes a viaduct, passing over the main floor of the Nugget Casino Resort. But she doesn’t want to interrupt whatever he’s watching on his phone. Nor does she want the intense puke smell in the front of the sedan.
She examines him again, this immaculate twentysomething, his tall form folded into the back seat with the large suitcase he’s kept beside him, opting to fill the trunk with smaller things: his tablet and laptop, backpack, duffel, cooler bag. Miserable yet sincere. No way he snuck a flask by her. It would’ve marred the lines of his suit, the innocence of his smooth brow. Motion sickness, she decides. Or anxiety. He vibrates with barely controlled unease.
Watching his full lips curl as he forces himself to inhale, she softens. At the next stop, she’ll spray the back with Big Sur Breeze.
* * *
Elko, Nevada, is home to the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. And to Jarbidge Canyon, its name a clumsy anglicization of the Shoshone word describing a legendary, man-eating giant who carried locals off in a basket till native warriors managed to trap him in a cave. Tsawhawbitts. Exiting the car, Mĕi hands her client the Elko fact sheet she’s printed for him: a personal touch, a new sheet for each planned stop along their way, designed to help clients remember the interesting trips they’ve taken. It was in Jarbidge Canyon, the printout explains, that America’s final, murderous stagecoach robbery took place.
The client pauses a moment to glance the page over, looking confused, before hefting his enormous suitcase from the back seat. Despite his expensive clothes, Henry Lee’s booked a dump: leaks have stained the inn’s ceiling tiles, put ripples in the carpet, and the whole place reeks of mold. She chews a mealy apple from a bowl in the lobby as he checks them in.
“Gross,” she murmurs as they walk to their first-floor rooms.
“The ceiling?”
She shakes her head. “The apple.”
He grunts, rebalancing his suitcase on its wheels. Staring at the ugly, overpacked thing, she thinks perhaps she was wrong about him: perhaps he’s not above carrying a flask. “You’re still eating it,” he says.
“That’s my cheap Chinese side.” She flashes a tight smile. “You know we can’t pass up free food.”
“I can,” he says, “if it’s bad.” He watches her take another retching bite. “You could say something to the manager.”
“Nah. I’ll just keep complaining to you.” She grins. “And that’s my watered-down Texan side: all hat, no cattle.” What she doesn’t say is that, while her father had a two-semester teaching assignment in San Antonio the year she was born, they soon moved to temperate Oakland, where she grew up skateboarding around Lake Merritt in the yellow California sun; where cafés outnumber cowpokes and white-collar fields outnumber hayfields.
They pass a glass-walled swimming pool, tidy enough and empty aside from the elegant, brown-skinned woman who glances their way, startled, as though suddenly plucked from some luxury spa and deposited here in Elko by the hand of a pernicious god.
His room adjoins hers. He disappears through its dark doorway and she calls out to his broad back, “If you need me before breakfast, just pound on the wall.”
“Or text, like a normal human being?” His door clicks softly shut.
She fumbles a bit with the key card, turning it every which way, before her own door opens. Inside, it stinks like an ashtray. She unlaces her high-tops; kicks them off. Closes the map on her phone and drops it with her overnight pack on the bed. Unlike the client, she’s left her bulkier bag in the car: they will only be here till breakfast, after all—then back on the road. What could he possibly need so badly that he opted to lug his giant suitcase over the warped and sodden carpet? Or perhaps his belongings are simply too valuable to trust to an unattended parking lot. Peeling the covers back, slipping between cool, crisp sheets, she envisions him lifting the lid of the suitcase to examine neatly stacked gold bars packed in T-shirts and boxer shorts.
It’s quiet in her smoke-saturated room, except for the thundering air conditioner. Nicotine, she thinks, smells like resentment and lingers just as long. She runs her tongue over unbrushed teeth. Forces herself out of bed, grabbing her toothbrush and flipping on the blazing bathroom lights. Squints, examining her tired face in the mirror. If the client were to guess her age right now, he might not say twenty-four. She bites her lower lip, bringing the blood back to pinken it. Tousles her lank black hair. And at last, in this bright, tiled room, she acknowledges the fact of her client’s attractiveness. Prissy, yes. Pukey, sure. But the way he averts his eyes betrays his confidence: he’s accustomed to politely dismissing women’s stares.
Is he hapa, like her? American dad, Chinese American mom? He stands nearly as tall as her father—who was six foot two and had a comic book hero’s jaw—his skin a warm, indeterminate gold. She spits toothpaste into the sink. Swishes water, spits again, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. His last name is either Lee, like Confederate general Robert E. Lee, or Lee, the Chinese equivalent of Smith. And considering his quiet, clamped-down endurance of the pungent back seat, his parents were either uptight WASPs or zero-gen Chinese Americans who raised him to “swallow your bitterness,” an idea Mao Zedong ingrained in his people, condemning psychology as a bourgeois pseudoscience.
Whatever. She shakes her head in the mirror. Strips to panties and bra, dropping her clothes on the cold tile floor. Turns side to side, examining her own slight form. “Welcome to the gun show.” She flexes. Tiptoes gingerly back out to the empty, waiting bed.
* * *
In the morning, she stands in line for continental breakfast, watching drips fall into a bucket on the floor. Where does the water come from? Pipes? This is drought season, for Chrissake.
It’s not just the Chinese, she observes, who can’t pass up a free meal. Her own plate loaded up at last, she moves as far as she can from the line, the bucket—sits in a corner at the smallest table she’s ever seen, wondering if its dimensions are meant to discourage lawless gluttony, and spreads concord grape jelly on four slices of toast. There is something festive about single-serving jellies, she thinks: the colorful array, the expectant unwrapping. When she’s done, she gets more toast and begins again.
The client rounds the corner around eleven, as the inn’s staff clears the breakfast bar. Dragging his luggage over buckling carpet, he looks rumpled today, as though camouflaged to match his surroundings. He’s ditched the suit for jeans with a short-sleeved button-down, though his crocodile loafers still scream luxury, and yawns as he scans the room.
She stands, waving him over. “Got you this before they took it away,” she says, handing him a banana.
“Thanks, but what I need is that.” He points at the coffee dispenser, sticks the fruit in his back pocket, and goes to pour a cup, the female workers’ eyes tracking his broad shoulders and tapered waist, his staunch forearm steering the ridiculous suitcase.
Sweet bananas are a mutant. This is a factoid she’s learned from Lǎoyé, pulled, no doubt, from one of the quirky American history volumes in his leaning bookcase. She remembers how he offered her a piece of fruit; yanked it away before she could accept it. “You know where this come from?”
“Grocery Outlet.”
“Before that?” She pouted. “Spanish missionary bring the plantain to America. You know: red and green cooking banana. But one day, Jamaican farmer find a yellow banana tree on his land, bright like the sun.” Lǎoyé made a sun circle with his arms, like the normal Asian grandparents who stretched together in the park, near Fairyland. “He pull one down. Peel it, curious, and stick his tongue to the side. Whoa! Delicious, can be eaten raw. Xiāngtián kěkǒu.” Bending forward, he waved the banana in front of her. “Late 1870s, white folks eat yellow banana with knife and fork, all proper, on a plate. Sell for ten cents each. You know how much ten 1870s pennies worth now?”
She shook her head slowly.
“Two hundred fifty buckaroos! That skateboard you asking for cost way less.” And he relinquished the fruit to her waiting hands.
This, she thinks, has always been her grandfather’s secret, superhero power: the ability to educate painlessly. Organically. Sneakily. To turn a kid’s attention from the sweet treat in her hands to the American dollar’s inflation rate. Presto! She glances at the banana in Henry Lee’s back pocket—a treasure he doesn’t even recognize.
When he returns, his wattage has increased. He smiles, and she smiles back. Of course, she will not ask what kept him up late.
She pulls the car keys from her bag. “Ready to hit the road?”
* * *
She has loved driving since she hit four feet tall and was permitted to race go-karts at the outdoor track where Lǎoyé worked. At first, he won every race. But eventually his arthritis ended their competition, and he gave up his secret strategy: “Very simple,” he said. “Push gas pedal all the way down and keep you foot there. No matta what. And stick to inside lane.” She nodded, eyeing the waiting kart. “Go on,” he urged, giving her a little shove, a joint clamped between his teeth.
A pimply attendant buckled her in, shaking his head at Lǎoyé. The mechanics weren’t permitted to smoke weed or anything else, but the old man was like the Olympic flame. He’d stay lit till the end. The sweet, earthy scent of weed drifted across the karts he repaired and through the chain-link fence that enclosed the twisting black track.
More than a decade later, after Mĕi withdrew from the Ivy League institution that had awarded her a generous scholarship—returning to the Bay Area to rent a room in the Lower Haight, where the neon blue cross of First Baptist Church blazed through her curtains every night—it was Lǎoyé who convinced her to quit her gig with Live Large Limo. It was Lǎoyé who bought her a nearly new sedan with the savings from his life as a mechanic, nostalgic, perhaps, for their racing days. And it was Lǎoyé who procured her first client: a mousy, pale woman named Ling Ling who called for rides at all hours.
Whether she was intensely private or had embarrassingly poor English was unclear, but beyond stating the destination, Ling Ling never spoke, and Mĕi grew accustomed to scooping her up near Grand Avenue and steering silently past the slower cars: West across the Bay Bridge. East into the Dirty Thirties. South to San Jose.
“Guess I’ll apply to be a rideshare driver,” she’d mused, blinking through the smoke that filled the converted garage, after a week of driving Ling Ling around. “Make it official. Score more than one client.”
Lǎoyé scowled, revealing spotted gums. “What for? You like give half your money away?” He leaned closer on the couch and his hand grazed her forehead, sinewy and callused as if he handled railroad ties, like their ancestors, instead of Chocolate Thai. Pushing black strands behind her ear, he cleared his throat. “You need client, I get you client. Even Ling Ling get you client. She just waiting to see how it goes before she recommend you.” He coughed. “Listen, you heard of karura?”
“Is it a new strain of weed?”
“Nah.” He lifted his joint, examined it, and set it on a gold-gilded saucer that appeared to be from Mama’s wedding set. “Going karura mean ride service off the books. Drivers in Nairobi do it. I hear about it on TV. And I tell you, smart driver everywhere do it.” He released a smoke ring. “Customer call for ride, then cancel trip on they phone. Pay driver directly. No taxes neither.”
Copyright © 2024 by Soma Mei Sheng Frazier.
