Free The Man Game by Lee W. Henderson Page B

himself off the wood beam where he’d been leaning and swung a hand to grab the handle of his axe, lifted it off the ground in a cutting pendulous upswing, let it fly, and caught it in his fist right below the axeblade. He put an arm around the Chinaman and said: Why don’t we go somewhere more private if we’re gonna talk business? All right with you?
    Daggett made a motion with his hand near his mouth, and the Chinaman seemed to understand that they were taking him where they’d talk privately over a drink. What they did instead was take him down past the shacks to a spot just up from the ocean and tie him upright to a tree.
    The Chinaman didn’t understand what was happening until the rope started to come out, and by then Daggett had him in his grip. He shook his head no, begging like that.
    Me and Daggett, said Furry, swinging the axe, we’re on another level. No one’s coming around here. Me and Daggett, we’re on a level old-timers show respect. Old-timers ask permission to talk to us. Follow me? We walk the streets, Chinaman, people don’t look us in the eyes. Who sent you? San Francisco?
    The Chinaman nodded yes, slobbered his words.
    Even when you don’t see me smile, Furry said, in fact I am smiling. He took out a handkerchief from his shirt pocket and wiped the tearstreams and mucus off the Chinaman’s face, then stuffed the kerchief deep into the man’s mouth.
    And believe me, eh, said Furry, I took some bohunks off the shelf. God forgive me, I got a graveyard under my belt. You don’t know what I been through to get to where I’m at.
    Furry axed off the leg and the Chinaman tried to scream through the handkerchief when he saw his leg and boot fall to the ground, tip over. The blood immediately started to gush from the wound just above the knee. Then he fainted. They untied him and he fell to the ground beside his boot, and just laid there shaking, bleeding like a motherfucker.
    Furry tugged the kerchief out of the snakehead’s mouth and used it to wipe the blood from his axeblade.
    The newsmen wrote: CHINAMAN MURDER! MYSTERY BOOT FOUND; FOOT, LEG INSIDE; CULPRITS UNKNOWN; CHINATOWN UNDER CLOSER SURVEILLANCE SAYS CONST. MILLER.
    The police took charge of the damning evidence, a Shanghai boot found in broad daylight on a rocky north-facing beach with a leg still inside it, bleeding from the perfectly clean cut below the kneecap. Constable Miller hung the boot by its buckles to the branch of a maple tree outside the mews, having first rid it of the amputated limb (incinerated). They knew who killed the Chinaman. Everyone did. Even Ed Shermang who laid the type and inked the rollers and distributed the news knew the real story. This wasn’t a message to a murderer on the loose. That boot hanging there was a message to all snakeheads.

    A murder never stopped the bars from opening at ten A.M. , when there’d be men waiting on the step already. By around eleven, the bar at the Sunnyside Hotel had fifteen or twenty men lined up at the counter and every round came with a song and a dance and everyone had facial hair. They’d drink all day, pacing out their chickamin to last until bed, perhaps ordering a pot pie if the stomach started to act up, but otherwise just drinking. By mid-afternoon the Sunnyside was packed and would stay packed until closing time. One thing the bartender liked to say was that the Sunnyside never left a man wanting more. More booze, more fights, more women, more hash, more opium. There were plenty of bootleggers to compete with. Plenty of bootleggers and some of the ripest soil for potatoes. The potato moonshine that was going around these days, it was liable to burn the backs off your eyes, right in that place where the cords connected to the sphere. There was no other place like Vancouver anywhere in the world. It was slop, and here a man was swine. Times when you found a pile of them, three or four bohunks passed out in an