The Fortunes (12 page)

“Tell him we don't work to make him fatter!” another man, face shadowed under the brim of his hat, yelled in Chinese, to flickering laughter.

“I can't tell him that,” Ling hissed.

The man pushed his conical bamboo hat back off his forehead, his face opening wide like an eye beneath a lid. Ignoring Ling, he pressed on in accented but dogged English.

“We no work for make you fat! We work for make we rich. We use mine gold, now we mine nothing. That's what is tunnel: no-thing! We mine air only.
You
must give gold. No gold. No work.”

“No work? No food!” Crocker thundered, slipping into pidgin himself at the sheer impertinence. “You tell 'em that,” he snapped at Ling, who passed it along with an air of wretched redundancy, the strikers having already turned to each other to confer.

“Try to fuck me,” Crocker was growling, “I'll fuck 'em right back.” But fortunately he didn't seem to expect Ling to translate this odd threat. Ling had heard it before, of course. Men so starved of women, he could only suppose, had somehow mistaken sex for fighting.

Strobridge, smacking the ax handle into his palm as if applauding, leaned in to Crocker. “Shall we persuade them otherwise?” There was a general uncrossing of arms among the Irish.

Crocker surveyed the mass of Chinese, his thumbs thrust so firmly into his vest pockets Ling feared the stitches would give, and shook his jowls slightly at Strobridge. “Tell 'em if they go back tomorrow morning I'll pay 'em for the time lost. If not, I'll dock every man jack for each day wasted. And any man obstructing another from returning will answer to Mr. Strobridge here. I'll not stand for intimidation, you tell 'em.” And after a long moment Ling did, clenching his teeth to stop his voice cracking with hypocrisy.

Another man stepped forward, an older fellow the others seemed to defer to. He gave a long sniff—Ling feared he was going to hawk—and shrugged. “We strike,” he reiterated before adding, as if this clinched something, “We strike it
rich!
”

“I'll give him a strike, by God,” Strobridge snarled as the men dispersed. “That'll bring 'em to heel, mark you.”

“It better,” Crocker muttered. “At this rate we'll need to hire niggers, and after them, who knows? Mexicans.” He shook his massive head at the calamity of it. “We must stop the rot here. I'm the author of this road, goddamnit! You and your men are armed?”

“A score of us bossing thousands of them? Always.”

“Very well. The posse from Cisco should be along after sunup.”

Strobridge spat one last time in the mud, followed by half his men, as if loosing their first volley.

Ling looked away across the valley as if to feign indifference. The scattered trees on the distant hillsides looked like a crowd of tall, thin men, another army, stilled and silent, watching them.

10.

Ling had dutifully climbed back aboard the train behind Crocker and helped him to the cold supper Cook had packed that morning. Crocker was silent, aside from the tearing of his chicken. Afterward he paddled his fingers in the bowl Ling held for him, dabbed a napkin to his greasy lips. “Fetch me down the locked case.” There was a pair of pistols inside, nestled in burgundy velvet like a heavy necklace. Their arrangement—barrel to handle, the curved trigger guards innermost—reminded Ling of something, but only when he lifted one out and proffered it to Crocker did he see what the layout resembled, a single shining gun mirrored by the shadowy absence of the other: the
taijitu,
the yin-yang symbol.

A gun belt was coiled in Crocker's carpetbag; Ling helped him buckle it, kneeling to cinch the tie around his leg. Above him, Crocker's paunch, girded by leather, bulged firm as a muscle. The big man slid the pistol into and out of the holster a few times until he was satisfied. Ling cast another glance at the second revolver, still snug in its case, weighing whether it was for him, but Crocker dismissed him with a curt wave when he asked if he needed anything further. Ling had seen him in such spleen before, though never at the Chinese; he knew to make himself scarce.

All he could think about was what the strikers had demanded: not just more money—he'd expected that—but
equal
pay with white workers. It wasn't a vast disparity; the main difference, as Ling understood it, was that the white workers had their board included in their salary, the Chinese had to pay for their food out of theirs. But for Ling it changed everything. His pride was founded on proving Chinese men equal to, if not better than, whites. Now it turned out they were just cheaper. The same as Chinese food, Chinese laundry, Chinese whores, Chinese lives.
Of course,
he thought dully.

He stepped back out onto the rear platform and watched the dusk come down on the mountains like the lid of a pot. Behind him the mouth of the unfinished tunnel yawned open, jagged and dark. Even the engine, cool and silent, seemed to cower before it. Ling tried to imagine walking in there—bad enough in daylight, but he knew the men worked in shifts around the clock. Though perhaps it would be easier to pass from darkness to darkness, he reflected. As it was, it seemed as if the night emanated from the tunnel, blackness pouring forth from it as from a pipe. Beneath him he could just make out men perched on upturned buckets and barrels clustered around fires and candles outside their tents, smoking and drinking tea. He might have imagined it, but there seemed a holiday atmosphere. Men stretching their legs before the fire, arching bent backs. Ling could hear them chattering, the Cantonese carried on the wind to him along with the scents of tobacco and tea, and a floral note of . . . yes, opium.

He had felt ashamed to come before them in his Western garb and haircut, but something else too: a freak. He'd seen it in the faces of the crowd, marveling at him, not as a traitor or a toady—or not only, he realized—but also as a wonder, a phenomenon.

It made him think of Chang and Eng, the famous Siamese twins of the traveling show. He'd met them once, accompanying Crocker to the opera house. He'd stood in the shadows of the box watching them play table tennis and juggle, conversing all the while in perfect English he could only envy. Crocker was fascinated. He'd seen other such shows, he said: years earlier, back East, a Chinese lady with tiny feet eating with chopsticks and using an abacus; more recently in Woodward Gardens, the Giant Woo, so tall he could light his cigar from a gas lamp. But these twins were extraordinary. Crocker was especially struck by their strength, as they lifted weights and then members of the audience overhead. “Are there many more like them at home?” he asked Ling. “Can you imagine? One could spike, the other swing the maul!”

After the show Crocker had insisted on going backstage and drawn Ling along. The twins were in their dressing room, each with a glass in his hand, one—the one on the left; Ling couldn't recall which was Chang, which Eng—of water, the other of wine. Crocker shook hands with each, his fleshy clasp engulfing first one and then another hand: “Pleased to meet you, pleased to meet you.” They had twitted him gently over the delays in completing the railroad—“The passage via the isthmus is
so
wearisome!”—and as if suddenly reminded, Crocker had added, “Allow me to present my manservant, Ling. Ling, my manservant. Quite a prodigy in his own right.”

Ling had been stunned. He'd never been introduced before, not once, let alone twice, though something about the repetition seemed ludicrous. All he could do now was bow, once and again, in greeting. The twins were dressed in evening wear, their hair cut short in the Western fashion. Ling couldn't stop staring between them at the point their chests met, wondering at the flesh that united them but also at the linen of their shirts, which met so ingeniously.

“Oh, really,” one of the twins said—the face on the left—while the other looked away impatiently. Their bodies seemed to lean away from each other, perhaps for balance, yet giving the impression that they'd rather go in different directions. Their brows were filmy with sweat from the heat of the footlights. “And what is so remarkable about Mr. Ling?” Left asked, blotting his temple with a lace handkerchief.

“Why, he's a model of industry. I go further, a
muse
of industry, of capital and labor. Were it not for his shining example, we of the Central Pacific should never have thought to hire so many thousands of your countrymen.”

“We've heard of your Chinese army,” Left replied, using the plural pronoun even though Right looked utterly indifferent. “Storming the Sierra, is it?”

“Indeed, sirs, and this is the very man. The first among ten thousand!” And Crocker raised Ling's arm as if he were a prize fighter and pinched the muscles there.

“Quite the sensation,” Left noted, looking Ling up and down. “An honor.” He held out a hand, and Ling took it gingerly.

“First of your kind, eh?” Right asked, thrusting his own hand forward and drawing Ling close enough to whisper. “The real trick is to be one of a kind.” And how peculiar, Ling thought, for this twin to be talking about uniqueness. To Crocker, Right added, “You might be chary of first impressions, though. When we were originally exhibited, you know, quite a few of your countrymen thought all Chinese came in pairs. We're not all alike, you know. Even if we look it.”

Crocker chuckled amiably, as if this were all part of the show.

“Perhaps you should talk to Mr. Barnum,” Left went on smoothly, “have Mr. Ling exhibited. Send him about the country . . . by train, of course. If you can spare him, that is?” Both were staring at him now, and Ling felt caught between their gazes as if between two chopsticks.

They were mocking him, these odd urbane monsters—one directly, the other more subtly—and mocking Crocker too, though his boss was immune to it, unable to conceive of a Chinese ragging him, let alone two grotesques. But Ling had heard that the twins had toured Europe, met royalty and presidents. “Baron” Crocker must seem nearer to Barnum, that bloated showman, than to all the dignitaries they'd met.

Ling wanted to tell them how he'd once been mocked in their name. How would they feel about that? Irked or abashed? And how did he feel toward them—resentful that they'd made Chineseness part and parcel of freakery?

It seemed to him that Left might at least feign regret but Right would likely deny it gruffly. Strange, he thought, to be yoked together so, each other's brother and burden, and yet be so different, even after a life of shared experience. Had they always been different, he mulled, or grown apart in temperament, like figures in a mirror—the one raising his left hand, the other his right? Was it an innate contrariness or some fundamental lust to be different, distinct from the other who was so close in every physical sense—an insistence on individuality?

Someone coughed behind them.

“You'll excuse us, sirs,” Left lamented. “The gentlemen of the local medical establishment are here to examine us.”

“You're not in poor health, I hope?” Crocker asked.

They shook their heads in unison, to giddying effect.

“Not since debarking from the steamer, thank god. The doctors visit only to ensure no fraud, to examine us—”

“To poke and prod us—”

“To ensure no chicanery.”

“That we are what we say we are.”

“Siamese, he means.” The one on the right winked at Ling.

“Well, good luck to you, joining the nation,” Left called over his shoulder. “Or should I say conjoining?”

“What a pair,” Crocker muttered afterward, in perplexity.

Ling himself had felt a nagging disappointment, though at the time he attributed it more to the letdown of discovering that the circus had not included, as widely rumored, an elephant among its wonders.

It was almost full night now, yet on the platform Ling felt as if he were perched on a stage. It was all for show, after all. The grand palace car, his own servile presence. Crocker typically traveled more modestly, had never brought Ling to the front before. A show of strength, then, but not only a show. He laid his hand on the chill metal of the railing and thought of Crocker's gun, the polished weight of it as he had lifted it from the velvet-lined rosewood box and handed it across, the slight pause as Crocker held out his hand for it and it seemed to hang in the air between them, along with the sickly scent of oiled metal.

Did the strike leaders know what they were doing? Did they truly represent these men?

Far below across the plain he thought he made out distant fireworks, soundless from this distance. Some celebration, but of what and by whom? And then he realized it was lightning, flashing in the low clouds.

He ducked back into the carriage, to the closet that was his berth, and changed into the work clothes wrapped in his bedroll, kneeling to tie his trousers at the ankles before stepping off the train. “How's Crocker reckon all Chinese are like you when you don't even look Chinese no more?” he recalled Little Sister asking him once.

The men, when he moved among them, were gambling—dice here, fan-tan there—heads bowed close to their fires. Many, he saw, had their queues coiled tightly around their foreheads, in some cases around their hats, to keep them out of the way while they labored. In the firelight the dark braids looked like chains. When he stopped to watch a game of dominoes, someone offered him tea and he accepted, feeling the warmth of the liquid through the china cup, amazed to find such a delicate thing here, so far from home. Then the players invited him to sit in for a game. It was such a tonic to hear Chinese spoken again that only when they had emptied his pockets of loose change did he catch on that they knew who he was. Belatedly he recognized a couple of the strike leaders among the firelit faces. “You're a credit to your race,” someone joked, and he knew they must have conspired against him somehow, and yet he only smiled. He owed them this, he figured, and the losing came as a kind of relief, the money sliding from his fingertips.