The Fortunes (4 page)

It bothered him too that he must step down off the boardwalk and into the muddy street whenever he saw a ghost coming toward him. The same street that they spat tobacco in, that their horses and mules pissed and shat in. His “thousand-layer” shoes grew spongy and clotted. He dodged buggy drivers' whips, not knowing if their cries of “Go on!” were meant for him or their animals. He wanted to explain that he was carrying ghost laundry, he was trying to keep it clean for them. He wanted to say that his father was a ghost. But he held his tongue—at least until he got back to the laundry.

“More dirt mountain than gold mountain,” he grumbled one night as he sorted the rancid washing into piles. He knew he needed the job, at least until he had saved the price of a pick and a pan, but that might take months on his paltry wage, and his patience was wearing thin. The closest he'd come to the diggings so far was the occasional miner who paid for his laundry with a pinch of dust.

“What you think prospecting is?” Ng chuckled as he ironed. He didn't trust anyone else with the finest linens and lace. “Ankle-deep in a cold stream, bent over like a paddy farmer, washing more dirt. At least
we
use warm water!” He had won at “heaven-and-nine” the night before and was still in an expansive mood.

Ng had “seen the elephant,” as the old-timers liked to say, meaning he'd seen it all, everything the mother lode had to offer. He'd been an original forty-niner, made a small fortune at placer mining near Youbet and (appropriately enough) lost it at fan-tan, made another and learned his lesson only so far as to lose it at poker (the whites had barred his entry to the saloon at first, “But once I had some gold about me they became more sociable”). By then the easy pickings were played out and the Chinese were being driven out, pushed off claims at gunpoint or by ruinous foreign miner taxes, likewise often collected at gunpoint. Ng had seen one dead Chinaman shot in the back, “the end of his queue dipped in blood like a brush in ink.” He frowned at the recollection, his middle eye beady with rage. Others, Ling had heard, had been lynched with their own queues.

“If I were you I wouldn't be in such a hurry,” the old man counseled, setting his iron down on the stovetop so hard that sparks flew, to which Ling wanted to cry,
Don't you know they call it a Gold
Rush
?
Already he felt himself falling behind the ghosts.

He contented himself with pointing out sulkily, “You found gold.”

“Gold found him, more like,” Little Sister chimed in. She was folding the ironed clothes with deft little flicks while Ling parceled and bound them with twine, the bundles still warm from the iron, like packets of sticky rice.

Ng raised his hand halfheartedly. “Shut it, fox spirit!”

“How?” Ling pressed.

In '54 or '55, Ng explained, licking his fingertip and smoothing the lone hair from his mole across his brow, he'd been playing out a hand of poker with a stocky little Frenchman—a Keskadee, in the parlance of the camps. The two of them were down to their last few cents when the Frenchman, named Philippe but known universally around town as the Celebrated Frog, had ceremoniously shrugged the shirt from his back and thrown it on the table. “Made en Paree,” he'd declared, slipping his suspenders back over his union suit with a prideful snap. The shirt was filthy and sour-smelling, ruffles yellow as wilted lettuce, but it was worth more than Uncle Ng had left to his name, and he looked at his hand—two pair, kings over threes—and had an inspiration. “Call,” he said, and when the Frog sneered, “
Avec quoi?
” Ng told him, “You bet shirt. I bet I wash it if I lose. Deal?” And the Frog, who was celebrated for, among other things, sending his shirts to San Francisco in flush times, from where they were shipped to Hawaii or even Hong Kong to be laundered, at a price of ten dollars apiece, hoisted up his shoulders in assent.

“Ten dollars?” Ling cried in disbelief.

“Yes! Back then there weren't even enough women in the state to take in washing.”

“Or anything else,” Little Sister scoffed.

“Hong Kong,” Ng sighed, laying his iron down more gently this time, seemingly transfixed by the oily curls of hot air swimming over the stove. “How I used to envy that laundry in my homesickness.”

“But what about the game?”

“Oh.” Ng blinked. “Lost.”

Afterward he understood that the Frog had only accepted the bet because he was sure he would win, as he duly did with a full house, yet the loss had been the making of Ng. It had cleaned him out, but Philippe had so enjoyed strutting around camp in his pressed and gleaming shirt and telling the story of the bet that Uncle Ng's services were soon in high demand. He'd set up shop using a couple of long toms, or sluice boxes: “And that's how I got my start.”

“But you never found gold again!”

“I did so! All those miners, see here, they'd not washed for months—years, some of them. What did they care with no women for fifty miles? The stink on them.” He wrinkled his nose. “But when I drained that dirty water, why, there was flake caught in the riffles of the sluice like carp in a paddy field, gold dust from out the cuffs and pockets and seams of all those reeking clothes! How do you think I bought my own business? I gathered up all those pinches and drifts of color until those boys were
picked clean
!” He delivered the pun in English with a toothy grimace, and sat back teasing the hair from his mole as if to confirm his luck. But he must have seen the disappointment in Ling's face.

“Gold is gold, however you make it,” he said, holding up a coin and clenching it between his teeth as if it were a clinker he'd just plucked from a pan. “Man swills it out of the mud, he gets dirty, gives you some to wash his clothes.”

“And then you gamble it on ‘white pigeon ticket,'” Little Sister added tartly.

“But he makes so much
more
money if he finds gold,” Ling insisted, eyes on the coin. He had caught his first glimpse of gold by then, flashing from the corner of a sailor's grin on the voyage out like a hook in a fish's lip.
So that was gold,
he'd thought as the ship plowed through the waves: a sharp tug in the flesh, hauling you toward land. But this was the first gold coin he'd seen, and he felt a pang of lust. Ng was turning it in his puckered fingers, balancing the glint between his thumb and forefinger. They called it a yellow eagle in Chinese, and Ling could see the wings of the embossed bird beating gently as the light slid back and forth.

Then Ng's hand dropped, his long sleeve covering it. “One in ten finds gold, all ten get dirty.”

Ling nodded, but he felt cheated somehow.

And yet he liked that phrase
See the elephant.
Felt an affinity for the beast.

His mother had left him nothing excepting a child's cap. He'd seen children, children rich with parents, wearing them at New Year's, caps sewn with eyes and ears, teeth and tongues, to look like tigers or lions, dragons, or pigs or rabbits.

“You had one of those,” Aunty Bao had told him once. “Only thing you came with. Shape of an elephant.”

“What happened to it?” he asked.

“What?” She'd already forgotten him. “Pah! Who knows?”

He might have felt robbed of his birthright, but in fact he felt buoyed up. It didn't matter that it was gone, that he'd never seen it. He already knew he had nothing. But that his mother had given him something once, imagined him wearing it, felt like a gift (it never occurred to him that it might have come from his father). He didn't know if she'd bought it or received it as an offering, but either way, he resolved, the elephant must have meant something to her, not merely to ward off demons or bring luck, as all the caps were supposed to, but because
elephant
sounded the same as
sign,
or
things to come,
even if he couldn't guess what.

It was just an expression, of course, but he couldn't help picturing an actual elephant—he'd seen a daguerreotype of one in a newspaper—at the end of the trail, its soft leathery bulk rising before him like a cliff. It seemed at once more wondrous and more tangible than gold. And what would it feel like to ride one?

He pictured the great beast approaching, kneeling heavily for him to mount, and carrying him, swaying, away, stepping over mountain ranges and even the ocean, which it drained with its trunk to wade while ships steamed around its knees, their funnels just clearing its drooping belly. It carried him home, of course, plucking him from its back with its trunk and depositing him gently on the ground, then daintily backing out of the light to reveal his old home and family—Big Uncle, even Aunty Bao, marveling at his triumphant return—from its vast shadow.

“What are you smiling about?” Little Sister asked him, and when he told her she smirked lewdly, drew his queue forward over his shoulder, smoothed it down his front, batting it gently so it swung before him. “Oh, I've seen my share of elephants,” she breathed.

“Have you no shame?” he snapped, and she told him coldly, “‘Gold is gold.' You'd know if you ever made any.”

I have money!
he wanted to call after her when she turned away.

He knew what she cost—
two bit touchee, four bit fuckee,
she crooned into the night—less than a clean shirt. “Less than a clean pair of drawers,” as she put it herself. “Not that many of them
have
a clean pair of drawers” (or any drawers at all, as Ling knew, most considering their long shirttails sufficient underclothes).

He traced the circles carved into the counter with his fingertip.

Since his first payday, he had had coins of that size jangling in his pocket, and when he held them in his hand, growing warm from his flesh, they seemed filled with possibility.

That evening he approached her door again, the glimmering window in it. But as he did so he felt a hand on his shoulder.

“'Cuse me, John. You comin' or goin'?”

Ling stared at the hand—a prospector's, by the dark sickles of dirt under the nails. He didn't dare speak, just stumbled back as the other brushed past him and pressed his face to the hatch.

“Evenin', missy. You dancin'?”

Ling heard the bolt drag back, and the door swung wide, light opening like a fan into the alley. The fellow smoothed the tips of his mustache with thumb and forefinger, then stepped inside, and the fan folded shut. A moment later the shutter snapped closed and the alley was completely dark, but even in the blackness Ling could see the afterimage of the ghost's face, pale above the brambles of his beard, glowing in the dusk.

He stalked the streets past other cribs, some with girls beckoning listlessly from their windows, but he shied away, veering into the street out of their faint light.

It was very late when he finally returned. Her lamp out, the stove cold, ash piled softly in the grate. Soon it would be time to scrape it out, run water through it to make lye. But first he slept . . . and dreamt of the elephant. In the streets, forced off the boardwalk, he was obliged to dodge not only piles of horseshit but the animals themselves, the clods of mud thrown up by their hooves and the flick of their reeking, flailing tails. Once one had farted in front of him so loudly that Ling reared back and lost his hat, which looked for all the world as if it had been blown off by the horse. But an elephant might trample such horses, and the whites, laughing or indifferent, who spurred them past him on the street. An elephant, he figured, might just shit on
them,
or blast their hats from their heads with its trunk if they tried to jostle him aside.

It came to him now, sitting beside Crocker all these years later, that a locomotive was the nearest he'd come to an elephant. The first time he'd seen one it had spooked horses, thrown a man sprawling. He'd been making deliveries. Men were running and then he was running—
from them
for a panicked instant, then, as they drew level and passed him,
with them,
parcels jumping wildly at the end of his carry pole. He'd thought it was a fire at first; there was a pillar of smoke over the rooftops. He wasn't the only one; others were coming with buckets slopping. Then he heard the shrill of steam and he knew, even before he rounded the corner.

Ng had described an engine to him once—“a great hot iron come to smooth the earth”—but Ng had been doing laundry too long; an iron horse on an iron road wasn't iron
ing
(even if the engine with its pilot did resemble a flatiron). To Ling the engine seemed like a live thing, scaled with soot, snorting and shuddering and shivering the ground. When it lurched into motion, men fell back. The great brass bell yawned so wide he could see the tongue dangling in its throat, like a cry of “Gold!” Describing it later to Little Sister (“You're making it up.” “No, no!” he swore), he said it was like a New Year's parade—the crowds, the raucous clanging racket, and at the heart of it the train, bedecked in red-white-and-blue rosettes and crepe streamers, like a dragon, its fiery face and lantern eyes and long, trailing body. He'd actually glanced down to see if there were feet beneath it, arms supporting it.

And now I'm riding in one,
he thought, watching the trail of cindery smoke widening in their wake like a rent in the very sky. How he wished she could see him.

All those weeks he had assumed that she didn't know he was there behind the laundry line while she bathed, but the morning after he snapped at her she dropped her soap and, when she bent to look for it, their eyes met beneath the sodden edge of the drying clothes.

“Did I wake you?” she asked matter-of-factly.

He nodded dumbly.

“Don't look so worried.
No money lookee.
But since you're up, you might help.”

He parted the sheets between them, their wet corners licking at his calves, and ducked under the line, remaining stooped to disguise his erection. A fresh kettle boiled on the stove, filling the air with steam like incense in a temple. She was holding a cloth behind her back and he took it and began, gingerly, to wash her. “Harder,” she instructed, and when he hesitated, she begged him, giggling, “Harder, harder,” and he rubbed her firmly, angry at the mockery, until her flesh turned fiery beneath the cloth.