The Fortunes (11 page)

She eyed him placidly, ignoring the impudence. He stared back, trying to guess her age, but her makeup—rice-powdered cheeks, penciled eyebrows, rouged lips—was like an embroidered screen. Only the dry claws protruding from her fingerless lace gloves gave her away.

“Bolder than you look. And a flatterer!” Only she used the Chinese euphemism “horse fart spirit.” “But I'm not for sale. Not anymore. Unlike some.”

“Meaning me?”

“You work for him, he pays you. The girls he pays to fuck, and you he pays to . . . wait, yes?”

“For now.”

“Ah!” She pointed a long enameled fingernail at him. “Ambition! Very good. What will it get you?”

What indeed? he pondered.

“Will you build railroads of your own? Have servants of your own?
Chinese
servants?”

“I just want to be rich,” he said quietly. “Never mind how.”

“Rich, rich.” She clapped her hands, and her bracelets rang. “Everyone wants to be rich. The
only
question is how.”

“What about you? Did you always know you wanted to be a whore, a madam?”

“A whore, no. No woman wants to be a whore, or be called one. I prefer
haam-sui-mui,
myself.” He blinked. “But a madam? Well, every whore wants to be a madam. I was the first, you know, the very first Chinese whore in this town. Why do you think I became so famous? I created the market for these girls. They'd none of them be here without me.”

He stared at her. She was not so unlike Aunty Bao, for all her finery.

“You're proud of it.”

“It's business. I treat them well—well enough. Better than I ever was.”

“And how do they feel about you?”

She was staring at the teapot before them, and slowly, as if it were a great weight, he found himself lifting it, refilling her cup. She nodded.

“Oh, they hate me, naturally. Every last one. What do you think? They'd thank me? Only their fathers thank me.” She peered at him. “You think I should be a mother to them, love them, spare them. Do I look like a mother?” He caught his breath, but she didn't seem to expect an answer. “They've had enough of filial duty, wouldn't you say?”

But he was lost in a memory of his own mother, in a silk dress, a red cheongsam, not unlike Toy's, so smooth and slippery that when she sat him in her lap—he couldn't recall how old he was, but not much more than a babe in arms—he kept sliding from her grasp. He remembered her laughter, but to him the slipping was terrifying. He cried, and when once he slid all the way to the floor, landing in a heap at her feet, he screamed all the harder trying to climb back up her silken leg, so slick, almost wet to the touch, that he couldn't get any purchase on her, felt her warmth beneath the red but kept losing his grip and sliding to the floor. And all the time he wanted her to pick him up, just pick him up, but she wouldn't, just kept laughing. It was so vivid—he had to fight the desire to grasp a bunched fistful of Toy's dress—only it couldn't be a memory, he knew; she'd died bearing him.

“If not me,” Madame Toy added, dabbing her lips, “some man would own them.”

“They might marry.”

“Ownership under a different name. Work without pay. Slavery is what that is. They fought a war in this country to end it!”

“So they're better off as saltwater girls?”

“Shows what you know!” she retorted, finally provoked. “
Haam-sui-mui
doesn't mean that. It's not Chinese. It's from English—
hand-so-me,
what the ghosts called us. Means beautiful.”

She believed it, Ling could see, by the way she thrust her chin, and for his mother's sake he wanted to as well.

“But it's shameful.”

“Is not! These girls sacrifice their honor for their families. They should be proud, rather. It's only men who are ashamed for women. Ashamed for themselves more like, for not being able to save us.”

Ling colored.

“Ai-ya!” She sighed. “It's not the worst life. I tell the girls they could always be squeezing fish balls instead!”

He started at the reference. As a child he'd been mesmerized by old Tanka women at that work, squatting over a tub of fish paste, mashing it in their fists until the little white balls swelled like bubbles between thumb and first finger before dropping like milky pearls into a bucket of water.

Madame Toy poked a bony beringed finger in his chest.

“We're not so different, you and I. Oh, I know about you. Crocker's ‘pet'—the one he brags about—the first pet, first among thousands, but still a pet. And he's not bragging about you. He's boasting of himself, his vision.”

He caught her hand in his, and held fast when she made to pull away.

“A joke between friends,” she whispered. He caught a whiff of sweat beneath her perfume. “Let me find you a nice girl.”

She looked at him intently, painted eyes widening. “Ah, I see it now. You're a mixed seed. Of course.” He gripped harder, warning, but she continued serenely. “That explains it. Half-breeds are always trying to be twice other men.” She pursed her lips. “And you hate whores because your mother was one.”

He felt her fist relax and he loosened his own grip and they held hands almost tenderly for a moment.

“I don't hate them,” he muttered. Then: “Did you ever hear of a girl called Little Sister?”

“Sure.” He leaned forward. “They're all
someone's
little sister.” She shook her head ruefully. “But now I see what you want. Like other men, after all. The same thing, the one thing. Love. The only thing you can't have, poor Chinaman, not on Gold Mountain.”

“Can I ask?” he began. “What would you—you or one of your girls—what would you do with a child?”

She sat very still. “I wouldn't have one.”

“But if you did?”

“Even if I did, I wouldn't,” she told him flintily.

A couple of the girls had drifted back in, and behind them Crocker, slightly flushed but otherwise just as when he left, smoothing his hands down his ample vest front.

“Dressed himself, I see,” Ah Toy murmured to Ling, with a final squeeze of his hand. “Careful. You could be out of a job.” Together they watched Crocker down a glass of rye standing up, one foot propped on a silk hassock as if it were something he'd just shot.

Ling had felt a qualm for Mrs. Crocker afterward. Felt some obscure kinship—both of them shamed somehow. She was such a refined figure, dressed in long gowns, her pale skin glowing against the dark fabrics, all gliding serenity next to Crocker's bustling, bristling energy. But Ling must have betrayed something—bowed too deeply or too long, allowed some softness to steal into his voice—for she summoned him to her chamber a few days later. Crocker was at his office, the children at their lessons.

“I felt you should know,” she said brusquely, squaring her shoulders under her lace shawl, “that I'm well aware of my husband's occasional evenings.”

Ling started to say something, but she cut him off.

“Please don't.
He
can deny it. Between a husband and wife there may be necessary mendacities. But
you
are not to think you know what I do not. Understood?”

“Yes, ma'am,” he murmured. He recalled Crocker confiding in him once his intention to name a town along the railroad after his wife.

“Very well.” She seemed to Ling as stiff and unyielding as the tightly stuffed and buttoned horsehair chair she sat upon. “These are Chinese girls, I assume?”

Ling nodded wretchedly.

“Well, that's something. Your sort have a reputation for cleanliness, at least. And a Chinese girl displays a certain discretion. He could hardly fall in love with one, after all. And none would be so presumptuous as to try and make a claim on him.”

She looked at Ling and waited until he said quietly, “No, ma'am.”

He was jolted now by the train's braking, the long caw of steel on steel drowning out the thrum of the wheels. He felt a sliding sensation in the pit of his stomach, as if something were loose inside him, as if his body wanted to keep going rather than stop. But it was the end of the line. He feared Crocker might roll off the divan and was about to reach out a hand when the big man grunted and stirred, catching himself. He sat up at once—the speed with which he moved his massive frame often made Ling want to jump—planted his feet, and looked about him for his hat. Ling offered it to him, and Crocker ran a palm over his head to smooth his hair and pulled it on tightly.

“Right!” he declared, spirits revived. “This is it. The front. Summit Tunnel.”

9.

Crocker stepped out onto the platform at the rear of the carriage as if onto a balcony. The train had pulled up on a narrow shelf next to a rough-hewn shack—the foreman's office—resting akimbo on a railroad flatbed, the wheels sunk into stiff mud. Below, the land sloped away slowly and then more steeply to a narrow cut in the mountain through which the rails receded. The ground around the office was bare, churned by foot- and hoofprints and wagon ruts, dotted here and there by gnarled tree stumps, but downslope, fanning out from the rails that ran like a line of stitches through their midst, was a small city of tents like a miniature range of snowy mountains, smudges of smoke rising up between the peaks into the porcelain-blue sky. And between the train and the tents, filling every foot of ground with the exception of the track itself, were Chinese.

Ling had been ascending for so many hours now that looking downhill he felt as if he were toppling, had to put out a hand to steady himself for fear of pitching forward. He would have hung back in the doorway, but the big man wanted his buffalo fur—the snow had turned feathery and finally stopped and the sun come out, but in the shade it was still raw at this elevation—and Ling came forward to drape it over his shoulders, straining on tiptoes to lift it. On the hook beneath the robe he'd seen the rifle in its deerskin scabbard. “Will that be all?” he murmured, smoothing the collar over the pale roll of fat, splintery with stubble, at Crocker's nape. He was hoping to withdraw from both the cold and the cold inquiry of the faces lifted to them, but Crocker shook his head, drew him forward. “Take a look, my boy. Take it all in! None of this would have been possible without your fine example.”

The big man's basso seemed oddly muffled to Ling—it made him wonder if he'd been deafened by the engine—so instead of perusing the crowd he turned to Crocker, only to find his employer gazing back at him with a look of appraisal, his eyes as flat as in the old tintype portrait of him hanging at the mansion (the photographer had drawn them in because the exposure took too long for anyone not to blink). And then Ling's ears popped and sound, like cold air, flooded into his head once more.

Ling was almost relieved when the foreman, Strobridge with his eye patch, strode toward them. He was wearing a moleskin coat, a pick handle swinging jauntily in his hand as if it were a walking stick.

“I'd have thought they'd be back at it afore now, Stro.”

Strobridge pulled himself up the ladder with one hand, spitting with gusto from the new elevation. “Oh, they're feeling it, all right,” he noted grimly, his one good eye seemingly aimed at Ling.

He was accompanied by a chargeman called Kurtz, sporting a tightly curled imperial, and a dozen Irish crew chiefs, who ranged themselves around the rear of the palace car, all of them with picks or shovels on their shoulders as if ready to take up the work of the strikers. Just the kind of men the Chinese had displaced, now set over them. Ling overheard one of them, his beard streaked from one corner of his mouth with tobacco chaw, introduce himself to Crocker: “Name o' Bill, sir, but you can call me Bill-in-a-China-shop, if you catch me drift.” The lopsided brown stain exaggerated his smirk grotesquely.

“Well, bring them up.” Crocker sighed irascibly. “And you,” he told Ling, “you translate.”

So that's why he was here, Ling thought as he watched half a dozen Chinese approach the car at Strobridge's wave: “These claim to speak for the rest.”

“By what right?” Crocker asked, and the foreman shrugged. “They've got the thickest heads.” To Ling, the men, most bareheaded, their shaved brows pale above the tan lines where their hats normally rested, looked breakable as eggs, even with the mass of workers arrayed behind them. He adjusted his own derby nervously, first tugging it low over his eyes, then tilting it back to cover his bare neck.

It wasn't that the men didn't speak English (albeit a pidgin version), Ling found, but that Crocker wanted to be sure of what they meant, as if he thought they might not really know the meaning of the word
strike.
The Chinese were belligerent—Ling wondered if their hostility was magnified by his presence, or if it was even for his benefit—and he found himself speaking their demands softly to Crocker, as if by mumbling he might lessen them. But it only made Crocker bark at him “Speak up!” and Ling blushed to be chastised by a ghost in front of these others. Not that Crocker didn't yell at them too, inveigh against their duplicity. “We had a deal,” he blustered, the Irishmen chomping on their beards like horses at the bit around him. “You took the job at the wage we quoted. No one obliged you.”

Ling had barely translated these words—quietly, but forcefully, he hoped—when one of the men bawled back in English, “Ten hour a day good for white man, forty dollar a day good for white man, all the same good for
China
man.” The striker, a fellow with a nose so broad his nostrils seemed permanently flared in anger, glared at Ling until he turned to Crocker.

“They say . . .” he relayed haltingly, as someone else behind him added, “Same beatings as white workers, also!” “They say,” Ling continued, “that they wish equal . . . terms with other laborers on the line.”