Suicide Blonde by Brian Thornton

Author:Brian Thornton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Down & Out Books

XI

It was a good hour before sunrise when I met Chin Gee Hee at the Columbia Street Depot. To call it a “station” would have been charitable. Like nearly everything in Seattle, it was smaller and meaner than its like found elsewhere, especially in the teeming cities of the east.

The station was about a hundred feet by sixty feet, with two floors, which made it the equal of most buildings in Seattle. The second floor was devoted exclusively to the living quarters of the station master, and the first nearly exclusively to freight.

Customers intent upon taking passage out of the city aboard the Seattle & Interlake railroad could await their train on the platform outside of the station. The sole concession to their comfort was a long row of benches built into the side of the building where it abutted the platform.

The walk from my Eighth Street rooming house down the steep grade of First Hill had gone smoothly enough. The predawn fog conspired with the earliness of the hour to render the heart of Seattle as still as the countryside after a snowstorm, and I spent the walk in quiet contemplation. I had purposely set out early for our rendezvous, intent upon beating Chin there. As if being first on the platform to await the train taking us to Gilman’s Crossing would afford me some sort of advantage.

Did I need an advantage? Thus far, Chin Gee Hee had conducted himself in an honorable manner. And I had no patience for bigoted notions of scheming Celestials, or for the fools determined to spread them. That Chin Gee Hee was some deviant, bent on the general destruction of all white Americans for some inscrutable, unknowable Oriental reason, just seemed absurd.

But Blake’s words of the previous afternoon ate at me. What if his suspicions were correct? Even if Chin Gee Hee was as crooked as Blake’s encounters with Ah Sin had led him to suspect, it did not necessarily follow that all Chinese were crooks bent on our collective destruction and eventual replacement. That sort of xenophobia is what caused mere sparks of discord to fan into full flame.

I shook my head to clear it as I stepped off the last block before the depot. The shaking did nothing to dispel the doubts bouncing around inside. Was it possible I was every bit a bigot as those I looked down upon for their beliefs, for their fears?

In the light of day, I was an educated man, the product of good upbringing, a believer in the universal brotherhood of all mankind. Was it the same now? In the wee hours, as my Irish grandmother would call them, when shadows were at their lengthiest, and doubt crept unbidden and barely hindered into any thinking man’s mind?

I shook my head again and reached for a cigar as I stepped across Railroad Avenue and onto the depot platform. All was stillness, no activity on the tracks, no train at the station. Only a single gaslight burning above the depot’s southern-facing doorway illuminated the platform.

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