The Fortunes (2 page)

Young Ling had no hope, even as he searched the faces of the white ghosts who frequented the brothel, of finding his own father. The man had given him up, after all. But he still wanted
a
father, needed one. To be fatherless in China, he understood, was to be poorer than the hungriest peasant.

He had made himself useful about the boat, running errands for the girls, waiting on their customers. His specialty was preparing opium for the men: pinching and rolling the doughy pills between his small fingers, holding them over the lamp on the needle until they began to smoke and bubble, then deftly depositing them in the bowl of the waiting pipe. Over time, squatting at their feet, he began to pick up shreds of their language—English mostly, but also phrases of Portuguese and French, Italian and Spanish—to go along with his Cantonese. It got to be a performance, men calling him “little parrot” and tipping him in coin (from which Aunty Bao took her customary cut). Once he saw Big Uncle watching him, and a few days later the man gave him a gift, a pet cricket folded up in a tiny cage made from a carved bamboo cylinder. He cherished it, peering in at it though the narrow bars, falling asleep to its ringing song, like a prayer or a promise. He wept when it fell silent, hiding for days, thinking he'd be beaten for letting it die (though Big Uncle never asked about it again).

Aunty Bao must have seen his hopes in his face. When he grew taller, she insisted he leave—“He'll fall in love with one of the girls, lah! Bad for business!”—and so Big Uncle sent him on his way, though not to Peru or Cuba but to “Big City,” San Francisco. He already sold girls from his nursery to supply the brothels on Gold Mountain. The boy with his pocketful of English might do well there too, he reasoned.

“Off to your own kind,” Aunty Bao crowed, but Ling, despite his misgivings, went willingly enough, eager to prove himself a dutiful son. “Your passage is paid,” Big Uncle told him, “a position arranged.” Ling had bowed, promised to send money, and the old gangster nodded complacently. That was when he'd told him gold was in his blood. Ling was fourteen years old. He knew nothing of America, nothing of mining—pictured himself drawing gold from the dirt like the apothecary straining over that old grandfather, yanking the gold from its roots, brandishing a nugget in a pair of pliers, wet and a little bloody—but he vowed to strike it rich and return in triumph. (His ideas of gold were to be even more confused when, on the voyage out, the captain had lowered the dory to recover an odd floating rock, as it seemed, the color of pale tea.
Ambergris!
the crew exulted.
Floating gold!
Though later Ling was to learn it was whale puke.)

Outside the carriage window, the trees—sharp firs poking through their layered foliage like the spike impaling receipts on Crocker's desk—fell away as the train ascended a ridge and the view opened before him. The distant peaks shone in the morning light, not gold, of course, but brilliant white, and as they climbed he watched the flakes tumbling past the window, mixed with sparks and smut from the smokestack.

Snow, and it was June.

The flurry whipped and twisted like a swarm, so blithely nimble, even as he felt the train grow taut, girding against gravity. And then an updraft swooped in and sent it spiraling back into the sky.

Beneath the thunderous thrill of it all—Ling was used to accompanying Crocker about town, but never before into the field—lay a thrum of unease. He contemplated the idle men waiting at the end of the line, the striking Chinese, and wondered why Mister Charley had brought him along.

3.

He'd been with Crocker for a little over two years by then, since 1865. His first job off the paddle steamer in Yee Fow—Second City, as the Chinese knew Sacramento—had been at a laundry on I Street, one of the shanties backing onto China Slough, hauling boiling kettles from the stove to the great half-barrel tubs where his boss, Uncle Ng, a wiry Cantonese, sat smoking and working the soaking linens between his red callused feet, every so often tapping the ash from his pipe—“soo-
dah!
” as he pronounced it—into the suds like so much seasoning.

Ng wore a wispy beard and a sleepy mien, heavy-lidded, his head seemingly propped on the long-stemmed pipe clamped between his teeth, but he had a dark mole the size of a pea above the bridge of his nose, a third eye that seemed to squint whenever he furrowed his brow. His queue he coiled around his head to keep out of the laundry water (at first glance, vision bleary from lye, Ling had been scandalized to think Ng had cut his hair, imperial law requiring the queue as a mark of fealty), but he let a single strand sprouting from his mole grow long and silky, believing after the Chinese tradition, if against all experience, that it brought him luck.

Ng was an inveterate gambler, tucking his coins into his ears for safekeeping and absenting himself each evening and part of most days to play the lottery or dominoes or “precious dice,” whatever he could find. He'd bet on which starling would rise off a roof first, back one cockroach over another in a race, so long as there was someone to wager against. He would return invariably with tales of perspicacious wins and unforeseeable reverses, but it seemed to Ling as if they mostly evened out, which might have been the extent of Ng's luck.

Not surprisingly, he was an indulgent boss, often leaving Ling unsupervised as if he were a partner, not an employee. Even when he was present during the day he was often stretched out, snoring, on an ironing platform, catching up on sleep from the night before. Ling took him for a fool—easy to see why he'd never amounted to more than a laundryman—but the old man's neglect was mostly benign. Early on, with a sly show of solemnity, he confided his “mystery”—a few crumbs of blue from an ink block added to the rinse water to make the “white whiter”—but otherwise he offered little direction beyond a couple of quick stabs with his pipe stem, once at the wall of tightly wrapped parcels stacked like bricks, then at the heap of plump, sagging bundles tied up in sheets, their knotted corners twitching in the breeze like ears. “These clean, those dirty. You . . .” The pipe stem swung from one to the other. But when he found Ling a few days after he started with his hands blistered from washing, he clucked over them, dressed the wounds himself. “Why. You. Think. I. Use. My. Feet?” he asked, punctuating each word with a tacky dab of salve.

The other member of their household was a surly young woman who told him to call her Little Sister, though she seemed two or three years his senior. “Or I could call you Little Brother,” she offered pertly, seeing his hesitation. He blushed at the slang for penis. “Pleased to meet you,” he said, and she smiled thinly. Her hair was parted in the middle, swooping down over her ears in two glossy black wings after the Tanka fashion, but when he asked,
Haam-sui-mui?
she grimaced.

“They call us ‘soiled doves' here.” Not Tanka then, by her accent, which was the same as Ng's, but at least her profession was familiar.

“Half the laundries are brothels,” Ng explained cheerily. “Good business! There's a dozen fellows to every woman in the state.” Ling thought of the ship he'd arrived on, packed so tightly with men they shared their bunks—three tiers, eighteen inches between—in shifts. He'd heard one sailor joke,
Add some oil and they'd be sardines.
And yet his abiding memory of his passage was of loneliness, despite (or perhaps because of) the cramped quarters, shunned as he was by many of the other sojourners for being Tanka. In San Francisco, though, surrounded by ghosts, he'd felt the disembarking crowd of Chinese draw tight together, himself among them, Han and Tanka, Cantonese, Hakka and Hoklo all as one.

Little Sister slept past noon, but when she emerged on Ling's first day, Ng set her to teaching him the “
eight-pound living”
—ironing—which she consented to, grumpily.

“You?” Ling asked, surprised.

“Who you think had your job first?” she snapped, winding her hair into a tight bun and securing it with a chopstick.

“Then why not just get another girl?”

“Girls are expensive. You're cheap!” The mannish jaw that clenched gave her face a sullen cast, unhinged into a wide, wanton grin when she laughed.

“Very funny.”

Her face closed, and she went back to lining up the flatirons on the stove, hefting them one at a time to spit on their shiny surfaces until the saliva skittered on the hot metal and she was ready to apply it to the shirt stretched out across the board before her.

“You see?”

He nodded.

She pressed the iron back and forth firmly, shoving the wrinkles along like waves until they fell off the edge of the board.

“See, lah?”

He nodded again.

She took a dainty sip from the bamboo beaker at her side and blew a fine spray of water onto the cloth before her, the iron sweeping over it with a little sigh of steam.

“I thought we were supposed to clean them,” Ling joked, but she ignored him, directed another jet of water at a stubborn crease. He caught a pink flicker of tongue between her teeth.

She moved forcefully but gracefully in her loose clothes, with a slight swinging rhythm that carried from her wrist to her hips and down to her dainty feet. She had rolled back her wide sleeve and he could see the sinews in her forearm—as taut as a man's—rolling under the skin. When he looked up she was staring at him, and the next time she spat with greater vehemence. She made the work look easy, handling the hot irons so nimbly that they seemed to glide over the clothes, her body behind them swaying and fluid.

He would never have imagined that someone could iron lewdly, and yet he couldn't help as he watched her thinking how else she used those hips, those forearm muscles, that mouth.

“Your turn,” she said, clanking her iron back on the stove.

The irons were heavier and hotter than he'd thought watching her—he cried out when he grazed his knuckles on a plate, stuffed them in his mouth to suck; she held out a rag for him to bind around his hand—and within minutes he was sweating, the drops dripping down his nose onto the linen, where he erased them with the hot iron, embarrassed to seem weaker than her. She had taken up a needle and thread.

“Too slow!” she scolded, without seeming to look up from her stitching. “Keep moving or the shirt will scorch.”

He felt his cheeks burning, heated with the work and the shame of it. Women's work; but surely that should make it beneath him, not beyond him. When he paused to take a gulp of water, she shook her head. “You're supposed to spit.” But when he tried the water just dribbled down his chin, or erupted from his mouth, not as a spray but as if he'd thrown up.

Wiping his chin, he thought he caught a smile on her face, but a moment later it was gone, like a wrinkle pressed away, her face smoothly indifferent.

“Here!”

She bit off the thread she was sewing, took the iron from him, and set to work again, drawing in a mouthful of water and expelling it with a little puff.

“How do you
do
that?”

“What? This?” And this time she hit him squarely between the eyes.

“Ai-ya!” He wiped his face on his sleeve. When he was done he found her standing on tiptoes before him, mouth open for him to study her tongue, her lips. He examined how she pursed them, the lithe curl of her tongue between them, and rehearsed the same motion tentatively inside his own mouth, all the time aware of her warm breath on his face, moist and honeyed like steam off tea.

“Now you.” She dropped back onto her heels with a little thud.

He worked on until his arm and back ached, but with concentration, by the time the pile was done he was able to direct a spurt of water in the approximate direction he intended. He looked over at her, but she was lying back among the dry clothes, eyes shut, asleep he thought, though when he flopped down beside her she leapt up at once.

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

“I'm finished.”

“Finished?” She pointed to the clothes all around them. “There's no finished.”

He unwound the strip of cloth from his hand, clawed from gripping the iron, and massaged his fingers. “But I'm tired.” His palm smelled sourly of metal.

In answer she pointed to the ceiling, where among the rough beams he saw a metal hook gleaming dully.

“That's for when you're tired.” It took him a moment to understand; he'd been studying the faint spray of freckles across her cheeks. He'd heard of scholars tying their queues to such hooks, so that if they fell asleep over their books they'd be jerked awake. Uncle Ng must have heard the same story.

“Aren't you going to help?” he asked.

“You need the practice. Besides,” she said, closing her eyes again, “I earn my keep.”

He had thought they were becoming friends, but when Ng returned and asked about his progress she gave a scathing report of him—lazy and weak, a shirker. He felt betrayed, leapt to his own defense. “See,” the old man cried. “He's a good boy.” And then he struck her across the face. “You teach him better.” Ling took a step back, but the girl stood fast, one cheek white, the freckles stark as a constellation, the other flushed red, freckles vanished as if struck off by the blow, until Ng dismissed her. “Go do
your
work.”

She entertained each evening in a narrow lean-to adjoining the laundry, a door with a shutter in it—closed if she was engaged, open for viewing if she was available—leading to the alley alongside. Ling slipped out back late that night after Ng had headed off to his regular appointment at a gambling den and approached it, his mouth dry. He meant to apologize for getting her in trouble. The wicket was open, a smoldering square of lamplight in the gloom. After a glance up and down the alley he crept forward and peered in. She was sitting on the side of her bed in a white shift—silk, from the ivory glow of it, and so finely embroidered he knew she must have “borrowed” it from a customer. The walls around her had been papered at some point with old newspapers for insulation, the indecipherable headlines surrounding her. She was still sewing, making alterations and repairs to cleaned clothes during the lull between customers, hunching low over the work—her hair untied, swinging forward like a dark curtain around her face to meet the swoop of her needle—as if to make it out in the greasy light. He could see the ridges of her backbone through the thin cover of the gown, and then she cried out softly and put her finger to her mouth. In doing so she glanced over at the shutter, her face accusatory as if he'd made her do it, and he fled.