The Fortunes (5 page)

“Thank you,” she said simply when he was done. She had been sitting up, her knees drawn to her chest and her arms encircling them. Now she lay back slowly, her neck on the edge of the tub, her eyes closed. He watched the soap scum drift across the water like clouds until the surface was still and clear. Her breasts seemed to float just beneath, the water lapping her throat gently with each breath.

“I don't mind it so much, if I can have a bath every day.” She opened an eye, pinched her arm, her cheek. “See, good as new.”

Still, she must have sensed his pity. He was thinking of the frayed shirts, the torn and mended pieces he washed and ironed.

With a splash she stood up, dripping so that he fell back. She let him look for a moment, her skin flushed and untouchable, then she wrapped herself tightly in a towel. “It's only work, after all. Everyone works. I make sheets dirty, you wash them.” She was hardened, he decided—such an odd contrast to her smooth, soft flesh. “At least I don't do laundry now. All I wash is myself.”

Perhaps he was thinking of her jibes, or maybe her ghost lovers—the irony was that because of her cleanliness, she had more custom than the typical tart, who might bathe but once a week—but that afternoon, when he was harassed by the local urchins, he lost his composure, lashed out. They'd been waiting for him earlier than usual, and when they'd pulled his hair he'd stumbled, gone down on one knee in a runnel of horse piss, still warm. He'd been even more enraged at the thought that the clean laundry might have been dragged through the mud, and when they'd come after him again, he'd swung his pole sharply. He'd only meant to bowl one of them over with the soft weight of a laundry sack, perhaps spill a cap into the dirt, but he misjudged and cracked a rawboned boy about the ear. The amusement of his fellows had faded quickly when the lad took his hand away to show them the blood. He wiped it off on his shirt, and Ling had wanted to tell him
Don't!
They'd set on him in earnest then, the lot of them piling on so that Ling was knocked down, his face clawed and cut, his queue yanked and stamped into the mud, his packages strewn about. They looped his queue around his neck twice, like a noose, and pulled him to his feet, led him like a dog up and down the street. When he broke away they tripped him again, set about him with their boots this time, until he could only curl up, clutching the dirt as if to burrow into it. They drew a pair of drawers over his head like a bag, sat on him, stuffed the foul thing into his mouth—“Lick it clean!”—until he gagged. Finally, pulling him to his feet, they drew his queue up between his legs to hobble him, proclaiming to the laughter of the gathering crowd their intent to “send him home with his tail atween his legs.” They only lost their nerve at the edge of Chinatown, releasing him but flinging his pole and laundry after for good measure.

He'd been spitting with rage, had run into the laundry for the cleaver when Little Sister put a hand on his arm. He made to pull away, inhaled a wince. “Ribs,” she pronounced, stilling him with a touch. He held his ragged breath while her fingers traced his sides. “Just cracked, I think.” She pulled him over to a stool and filled a basin and cleaned his face as best she could while he turned it from her (and yet followed her shivering reflection in the basin water). Only when she'd sewn up the gash over his eyebrow did he steal a direct look at her: the purse of her lips as she tugged the thread through his flesh the same as when she repaired any other ripped item, except this time when she bit the thread, she leaned in close to his brow and he felt the brush of her lips, or perhaps her teeth, before the thread snapped.

She told him about the time that ghost women had burst into the laundry, complaining about the prices, that they were too low (“Too high?” Ling had corrected her automatically. “No, too low for them to compete!”), and put Ng's queue in the mangle. “Made him kowtow! To women!” She shook her head, smiling. “He'd be there still, thinking about gnawing it off, if I hadn't freed him. He's lucky they didn't throw him in the slough to drown. Those boys are the sons of those women, some of them.”

She handled his queue gently as she told him the story, rinsing it with warm water—“A wash always helps,” she crooned—then unplaiting it so that the hair slipped through her fingers and covered her hands, and then replaiting it until it felt as strong and heavy as rope. And by then he was still.

He turned slowly, feeling his queue run through her hands. She was still close, her head bent low, and he leaned in slowly to kiss her. But she drew back.

He stared at her, and then very deliberately tipped over the basin, so that she cried out.

He watched the water seep into the boards.

“I have money,” he said, and he stumbled to his pallet, rummaged for the change knotted in a rag, thrust the coins under her nose. “See!”

She pushed his hand away, and when he shoved it back in her face, she knocked it aside so roughly that the coins scattered, one of them rolling across the floor until it tumbled through a crack in the floorboards to fall into the slough.

They both stilled as if listening for the splash.

Ling knew that some Chinese refused to sleep with whores who slept with ghosts. “I'm not like those others,” he told her softly, and would have told her of his parentage, except she shook him off.

“You think they won't have
me?
I won't have
them,
any of you.” Her eyes flashed.

He pressed a hand to his side, suddenly winded. “But why?”

“It's like they say.
Chinamen
”—she snarled the word learned from her customers—“only brought their womenfolk here so someone could be lower than them. So they'd have someone to look down on. You left us the only job you couldn't do for the ghosts.”

“But how can you hate your own people?”
How can you hate me?
he meant. And yet, he calculated, would she sleep with him if she knew he was half white? Would half be enough?

“How? I tell you how! You know who sold me to Ng?” She paused to catch her breath. “My father! You know why? So he could send a brother to Gold Mountain to make the family fortune.” She nodded heavily. “That's right. Chinamen love gold more than girls. The same brother who knocked on my door once. Yes! He didn't recognize me until he was in the room.” She laughed sourly. “Probably wasn't looking at my face! And you know what he does now? He's a laundryman, just like you. So my father, you see, sells me as a whore for my brother to come to Gold Mountain to do women's work.” She spat, a frothing gob of spittle that seemed to sizzle on the floorboard between Ling's feet. “So no, I don't sleep with laundry boys. You stink of other men's sweat. Your fingers are wrinkled like old women's hands. I won't have you touching me. At least you don't see
them
selling their women to
you.
But that's Chinamen for you! You all want wives, lovers, but none of you want daughters. Daughters are bad luck, daughters are shameful, dirty, to be drowned like wash in a tub.” She was sobbing now. “Well, this is what you deserve, the lot of you. You send all your girls away, one day you find there's no women for you. Just men, men, men, as far as the eye can see.”

He thought of her teaching him once to starch collars, how to make the creases sharp. “This one,” she had said, holding up a band with the triangular wings standing stiff and proud, “this is my favorite. They call it ‘patricide.' The story goes a son came home one time wearing this kind of collar and when his father embraced him the wings cut the old man's throat!” She had grinned wickedly. It was just a story, Ling knew, but she told it with such relish he couldn't help imagine blood on the pointed tips of the collar.

“I'll show you,” Ling tried now. “I'll be rich.”

“Not if you spend your savings on me!”

For a moment the only sound between them was the drip of laundry.

“I will be,” he muttered, fingering his stitches warily.

“And what will you do?” She sniffed, humoring him. “When you're rich?”

“Come back for you!”

“Ha!” But he could see she was touched, as if he'd stroked some bruise of hers.

“What else?”

“Why, go home. Of course.”

“Of course!” She laughed rancorously. “You think
I
can ever go home? Chinamen are sojourners here. Even if you die, someone from your clan or company will send your bones home. I
live
here now, and I'll die here, and no one will bother with my bones. I'm a Melican now. Why shouldn't I fuck them?” She bared her teeth in a smile. “Don't look so sad. I'll get rich too! See if I don't. You know where gold comes from, yes?”

He began to explain, but she shook her head and thrust a hand into her pants. “Here's my mine, my rich seam. What do the Melicans call it? The
mother
lode? Women are like dirt in China, but not here. Here we're rare as gold. And men are dirt.”

He took a step toward her, but she pulled away, held up a finger before him. “Not for you, laundryman! Go back to your washee-washee, your women's work!”

5.

Crocker's place was on his delivery route, but he'd never seen him, only his huge shirts billowing like sails from the line outside Ng's (the best linen hung on the line, the lesser Ling spread on the roof, weighed down with stones), leaping and snapping as if they'd haul the whole shack out onto Sutter Lake. Once Ling had pulled one of those shirts over his head—it hung down to his calves, the cuffs flapping like wings beyond his fingertips—to make Little Sister laugh. “I'll take it for a tent when I go prospecting!” She shook her head, but he could see she was amused, and as he stared at her she took the challenge, shimmying into a petticoat and shirtwaist. They stood side by side, looking at each other in the cheap mirror Uncle Ng had bought and carefully positioned for good feng shui. “We look like proper Americans,” he laughed, but she shook her head, abruptly deflated. “We look like mourners.” She was right. Ling imagined himself for an instant at his mother's funeral—not that he'd attended it—the too-big shirt evoking the mourning clothes of a child. Little Sister shrugged her borrowed clothes off quickly, and he pulled Crocker's shirt over his head with a shudder.

And then a few days after his beating, still bruised, he was delivering a bundle of fresh laundry and the big man himself met him on the back porch in his undershirt—“About time!”—yanking the top shirt from the brown paper parcel and shaking it out with a crack and a puff of starch. Ling had imagined a fearsome giant from those prodigious garments, a man who could pull up trees with his bare hands and flatten mountains with a stamp, but here was Crocker struggling into his shirt, circling like a dog after its own tail, suspenders flapping around his knees, until Ling caught the sleeve and held it for the big man to punch his arm through.

“Obliged,” Crocker grunted, shrugging his suspenders on as if he were shouldering a pack and hunting in his pockets for a tip. He rummaged for loose change like a man scratching his balls, but all he could come up with was a single gold dollar. The big man considered the coin, not much larger than the nail on his thumb, then he snorted and flipped it to Ling, who caught it with a clap of his hands. He'd bowed low to the ground, unable to believe his luck, figuring to run before Crocker bethought himself, when he heard an exasperated sigh. Crocker was fumbling with the collar, trying to pinch it together at his throat, but the small stud kept squirting from his thick fingers. “You there!” He'd said no more, just raised his chin and let his arms fall to his side. Crocker's cheeks and upper lip were clean-shaven, but he wore a thick beard, fanned below his jaw like a cravat. Ling would remember the rasp of it on the back of his hands as he worked, and the way the man's Adam's apple had throbbed beneath the tight linen. When he was done, Crocker rolled his vast head around on his neck, collar creaking, and nodded. Silently he proffered his wrists for Ling to attach cuffs and stuck out his chest for his shirtfront, stiff and gleaming as armor. “Obliged,” he said again at last, and perhaps because he'd already tipped Ling once, or perhaps because Charles Crocker was not a man who liked to be obliged to a Chinaman, he offered him a job there on the spot as live-in laundryman and manservant. “At least I'll get my consarned shirts washed faster.”

It was a gruff, almost begrudging offer, but to Ling it was as if he'd struck gold.

Uncle Ng was ironing when Ling told him of Crocker's proposal. “Bird matters,” the old head opined, waving them away. But he paused for a long moment, the smell of hot cotton, with its sweet trace of burnt sweat, rising around them, until Ling thought the shirt must be scorched.

“I have been meaning to speak to you,” Ng said at last, as if to the shirt he was smoothing again. “You know I have no son. I would adopt you.”

“I have a father,” Ling began.

“The man who sold you to me?” Ng sipped, spat. “Or the one who sold you to him? Who sells a son? A daughter maybe, not a son.”

“I don't believe you,” Ling cried. Big Uncle had favored him, he was sure.

Ng shook his head without lifting his eyes from his work.

“The girl came of age to work. You cost less than another girl. Also, you spoke Melican.”

“It's not true!” But he knew it was; he could already feel the tears rearing in his eyes, clamped his jaw to stanch them.

“If you were
my
son,” Ng went on, working the iron in circles now as if polishing the cloth, “you would inherit the business when I die.”

And tend to your spirit,
Ling thought dismally.

Ng was folding the shirt now into a neat square of cloth with just his fingertips, the movements suddenly nimble after the clenched effort of the ironing. He pulled another shirt from the pile and set to it with a fresh iron. Over his bowed head, among the rough beams, Ling saw the metal hook gleaming dully.