The Fortunes (10 page)

Even the sun seemed to shiver here through the spruce branches, throwing lacy shadows on the snow, as if the mountains were draped with the same antimacassars adorning the furniture at the Crocker home.

The dappled sunlight grew stronger as they rose above the feathery treetops, onto the Secrettown trestle, the panting engine drowned out by the percussive clatter of the wooden bridge. Ling had overheard Crocker telling his Associates at a recent meeting that the rickety trestle, all eleven hundred feet of it, would eventually be buried beneath tons of earth—a precaution against fire—to make a permanent embankment.
As if it were a secret itself,
Ling thought, the spidery lattice of stilts and crossbeams too frightening for passengers to behold, though he recalled Ng telling him the place was originally named, satirically, for a gold strike that local miners tried unsuccessfully to hush up.

For a moment there was nothing but blue on either side, and then the rails met earth again in the form of a sharp ridge curving off to the left. Below and beside the track Ling made out small cairns of rock dotted among the trees, and as the land rose like a slow wave to enclose the train again he saw them come closer until they stood within a few yards of the track. Mile markers? But they were too irregularly spaced. Something to do with the construction? Spare ballast for the grading? And then the isolated ones gave way to a little cluster, laid out together side by side in a clearing, and he realized they were graves.

Crocker had told him that around a dozen men had been buried in an avalanche near Alta the previous winter and their bodies only found in the spring, still upright, still gripping their tools, frozen as if by Wu Kong's magic. Crocker had reported it as a marvel—“cigarettes still in their dang mouths”—and yet Ling had noticed that he couldn't recall the exact number of Chinese—“ten or fifteen, supposedly”—and this from a man who could tell you the price of a shovel in 1854 (fifty dollars—admittedly a memorably fabulous sum). Where had Ling been during such disasters? he asked himself. In Sacramento watching the trains pull into the depot with a load of snow for the local boys to have powdery snowball fights.

The dead, he'd heard, were buried with a bottle alongside them, a scrap of paper or cloth with their name and home village inside it. Some of these graves contained the remains of men blown to bits in the blasting, “and not all of them found,” as the papers related. Ling shuddered at the thought of their not being buried whole. Someone from their clan or district association, whichever of the Six Companies they paid into, would eventually come to claim their bones and send them home, perhaps on the same ships that had brought them.

Once, as he'd filled buckets at the laundry, a drowned body had floated past him along the slough, a man's, judging by the queue that trailed it like a water snake, though the flesh was so pale and puffed that Ling had taken it at first to be a clump of laundry. It had drifted silently into the early-morning mist before he could think to snag it, but he'd seen the face later that day in his own tub just beneath the soap scum, a wound like a dark stain on the brow, and thrust it back down with his paddle, thumping and splashing to cover his sobs.

Before that, on the voyage out, Ling had found his own bunkmate—a fellow so seasick that Ling had thanked the flower boat for his own sea legs—cold and stiff one dawn. Not wanting to fail the man's spirit and blight his own enterprise before it began, he'd gone to the captain and pleaded with him not to bury the body at sea.

“What d'you suggest? That we pickle it? Salt-cure 'im?”

And so the body had been sewn into a sack, weighted with a length of rusty chain, and tipped over the side into water the color of long-worn jade. Ling had watched it go, his queue hanging down toward the spray like a fishing line. And moments later the sailor's cry of
Floating gold!
went up, the ambergris spied bobbing beneath a mob of gulls, their wings flecking the sky like breakers. A wondrous occurrence, Ling would realize later, which at the time seemed no stranger than burying a man in water. That night he had had a berth to himself, but he slept poorly, tossing and turning as he dreamt of the dead man's bones gnawed by fish, swirling and bouncing across the sandy ocean floor. He imagined the spirit out there in the waves, slapping the wooden hull, trying to get in, trying to tell Ling it was his turn to lie down.

Outside, the earth rose up once more on either side of the tracks, another deep cut, sharp as an arrowhead, and the train was plunged into gloom again.

They had paused again at Cisco, the great engine huffing as if to catch its breath, the town so new it still stank sweetly of cut lumber. Crocker sat up, rolled his head on his neck with a crack, and pushed himself to his feet. He set his shoulders so that Ling knew to drop his topcoat about them, but when Ling moved to follow him out, the big man raised a hand. “Won't be needing you here.”

Ling watched him lower himself heavily from the platform and talk to a couple of men who had stepped out of the sharp shadows of the depot. Their words were drowned by the pecking echo of hammers, but each shook Crocker's hand and bobbed his head emphatically at something the big man said, their nodding exaggerated by their collarless throats. Crocker turned and clambered back aboard, but one of the men had spotted Ling at the window, and as he watched the fellow pulled a face and gave a little caper. “Ching Chong, Chinaman, sitting on a rail,” he crooned. “Along comes a white man to chop off his tail!” A childish ditty, but this was a grown man. Beside him, his companion's teeth were gritted, yellow as nuggets in his dark beard, and this more than the other's prancing doggerel made Ling uneasy.

Crocker barreled in, and when Ling looked again the pair had vanished, though whether back into the shade or elsewhere he couldn't have said. The train was already shrugging to life again, the depot scarcely fallen behind before Crocker was snoring lustily once more. A smut from the smokestack had settled on his shirt front, Ling noted sorrowfully. He licked his finger, bent close to dab it away, vacillated. The train was trembling so much he'd only smear it. He made himself lean back, look away, let his eye follow the telegraph lines, swooping like swallows alongside the track.

Past Cisco the ascent slowed. Brilliant flecks of snow flung against the windows like rice. Along the track Ling could see the muffled forms of men, bundled in quilted coats over their baggy homespun, sacks and scarves wrapped around their faces and hands. Some were trudging along the line, picks and shovels on their backs, bent against the wind as much as the weight of the tools; others sat on logs before oilcloth tents, hunched over smoky fires. One bent to scoop a handful of snow to his mouth, the crystals shining in his thin beard. Another knelt beside a stream of runoff tumbling alongside the roadbed, washing his hands, the water in the sunlight rippling and sparkling like a cascade of coins.

As the train passed, the men's heads rose for a second, so that when Ling looked back, their faces were like a wave, rising and then falling. And each face he saw was Chinese. He lost count of how many, and then he stopped counting, and then he stopped looking at all, sat back from the window in the shadows of the carriage, almost as dizzy as when he'd looked over Cape Horn. It was a long time since he'd been in the company of so many Chinese—he used to have his forehead shaved each week by a Chinatown barber, but since he'd lost his queue he'd let his hair grow in—and he found himself suddenly shy. And something else: ashamed to come before these men dressed like a dude, bathed, and well fed while they trudged through the smutty snow or bent over cooking pots, though what they might be eating he couldn't guess. Crocker had had their supplies—the rice, dried cuttlefish, and smoked sausage shipped from China—stopped in Sacramento. “Even the opium and women,” he bragged to Ling, drawing a line across his throat.

It made Ling think of Little Sister. Of course he'd had girls since, though never the same one twice, always wondering if he might find her again, always wounded not to. He'd heard by then “going to see the elephant” used as a euphemism for a visit to a brothel, an echo of something Little Sister had once told him. He even knew of a bawdyhouse called the Elephantine, the El for short, or sometimes simply Hell. Once in a humor half daring, half despairing—his escape from the anti-Chinese rally had endowed him with a reckless, magical faith in his new appearance—he'd even tried a ghost whore by the irresistible name of Miss Ellie. He got as far as her room in his Western clothes, with his hat low over his eyes, but when he took it off she balked. “I have the money,” he said, holding it out like a talisman, but she spat back, “Not for all the tea in China, nor the opium neither!” and he'd found himself, despite himself, admiring her scruples. He'd beaten a hasty retreat, but her harangue had followed him even after he gained the street. “The nerve on ye! To turf me out of my own 'onest work and then buy me with the proceeds like some 'eathen 'ore!” He'd slunk into the shadows even as she stood framed against the light, her arms clutching her bare breasts to her chest like a pair of bulging laundry sacks. Only later, his heart slowing, did he wonder if under the caked and greasy makeup, the talc-y bosom, and despite her name, he hadn't recognized the woman. Wasn't it Bridey herself? She hadn't seemed to know him at first, with his hair cut and wearing a suit. Or perhaps she just couldn't tell him apart from other Chinese, as he'd heard whites complain.

Then again, he reflected much later, perhaps it hadn't been her at all and it was he who struggled to tell one Irish girl from the next.

Crocker had taken him along to a brothel once. He had started taking Ling about on business in the last year or so, even teaching him how to drive a surrey, liking the idea of traveling with a manservant. Not that Crocker was any kind of fop or dandy; being a valet to Charles Crocker, it was to be understood, was manly labor. Perhaps in this spirit, Crocker arranged for Ling to attend him one evening at a bawdyhouse. They were in San Francisco, the first time Ling had been back since his debarkation.

“I can trust your discretion, I know,” Crocker breathed. “Not as a servant but as another man, yes?”

Ling nodded, puffed by the confidence, by the thought of Crocker and himself as equals.

“Mrs. Crocker just can't take it,” the big man disclosed, his hands drawing a curve before himself to indicate another pregnancy, though for a moment Ling thought he meant his own swollen girth, as if the poor woman couldn't withstand his bulk.

The brothel was a renowned one, as plush and brocaded, swagged and damasked in Ling's memory as the palace car. In Chinatown the cribs Ling frequented brought back his home—the thick, ripe scent of naked flesh, a warm stink of crowding and confinement, as if the girls were livestock in a pen. So vivid was the recall that he half felt the sluggish sway of the old flower boat beneath his feet. But this was different, not the memory of a brothel but a dream of one.

The madam was the famous Ah Toy, once famous for her beauty—“Men would ride two days just to behold her,” Crocker had told him in the cab over—now for her business acumen. “Risen from whore to madam,” according to Crocker. “And rich as Croesus,” he added approvingly. As if money had purified her, as if he would welcome her as an investor. Ling remembered Little Sister speaking of her in almost the same tone of admiration. It was reckoned she'd slept with ten thousand men.

“Prolific cunny,” Crocker marveled. “Yet still snug as a virgin, if what your sages say about foot-binding is to be believed, eh?” The swaying gait resulting from bound feet was rumored to strengthen the muscles of the
hai.
“Tight,” Ling agreed hurriedly, “as . . . ah . . . a fist.” He blushed furiously.

The madam had greeted them in the parlor, a sinuous silk presence, rustling and fragrant, daintily leaning forward on her porcelain shoes to kiss Crocker on each cheek—no easy task, given the capaciousness of his beard—and calling him, purringly, “Charles.” He had clasped her gloved hand in his and actually bowed. Ling had found himself beaming, heart brimful, at such a display of warmth. He held his breath in anticipation of their withdrawal, but Ah Toy had clapped lightly and waved her girls (all of them Chinese) forward and Crocker, after lingering consideration, had taken one of them by the hand and led her away—Ling had glanced at Ah Toy, as if there'd been some mistake, but she was smiling lustrously—leaving Ling in the perfumed parlor to wait, leaving him moreover with a curt “Stay here” uttered before the assembled whores and their madam.

He had stood by the wall, brow furrowed, until one of the girls offered him tea. He sat with them then, and they had been friendly, even playful, one of them drawing a hank of hair across her upper lip like a mustache to make the rest laugh, another slipping off the flowerpot shoes she wore to simulate the tottering walk of bound feet (he had finally smirked at that subterfuge), until one after another—
Zhen!
Jia!
—they had been summoned by the madam for her customers. After forty minutes it was just him and Ah Toy.

“You like my girls?” she asked him now in Chinese, but he put on a show of disdain.

“They're nice enough for whores.”

“Nice enough to you, because they know you don't have the money to buy them. You're safe to them, like a brother.” She smiled demurely. “Or a eunuch in the Forbidden City.”

He flushed. “I have money.”

“Maybe.” She smiled sweetly again. “But not the balls to spend it.”

He searched her painted face for some sign of the coarseness of what she'd just said, as if for some blemish in the perfection.

“How much?” he demanded hotly.

“They're all gone.” She shrugged, her silks rustling. “You missed your chance.”

“How much for you?”