The Fortunes (7 page)

Six months after he'd hired Ling, Crocker had fallen into a black mood, his railroad enterprise stalled, the tracks not much farther than the outskirts of town. Part of Crocker's disdain for the failed miners was that they made such lousy workers. He'd hire them on at the start of the month, and by the end half of them would have defected, riding the rails to the end of the line for free and then lighting out for the diggings again. “And those that don't spend their wage on new rigs spend it on drink, so that I'm left with the worser half!” he thundered. Now these fellows had had the temerity to demand a pay raise.

It had happened once before, three months earlier. Then Crocker had duped them—called their leaders to the office over his store and, once they were spotted coming down the street, ordered Ling to walk in the front door, hustle out back, down the alley, then hell-for-leather it round the front again. “Over and over, mind,” Crocker had instructed. “As many times as you can before those fellows arrive. And see here, take your hat on and off betimes,” he called after him.

Ling had managed a half-dozen breathless circuits before Crocker welcomed the delegation on the boardwalk.

“What's all the palaver?” he heard a mutton-chopped Irishman ask Crocker as they shook hands. “You running an opium den, is it now, Captain?”

“Hiring,” Crocker told him serenely, nodding curtly to Ling as he led the men upstairs to his office. “Plenty more where he came from too, so I hear.”

The men had been back to work within the day. “Credulous bog-trotters!” Crocker had guffawed, watching them go, his chain and fob jiggling with mirth. Ling had allowed himself to join the laughter, marveling that anyone could be so stupid as to mistake one man for a multitude, delighted by the thought of the men's ignorance, their inability to tell one Chinaman in his bamboo hat and baggy cotton suit from another, being turned against them. He thought he'd be able to smile now whenever a ghost called him John (though shortly he'd start to hear a new epithet in the streets:
scab
).

And then Crocker had added, clapping him heartily across the back, “As if you little Chinaboys could undertake such hard labor.” Ling had staggered a little under his meaty paw, making Crocker bark with laughter.

But now these same fellows were calling Crocker's bluff.

One morning a few days after the new year, Crocker had come prowling into the kitchen before sunup. Ling had been preoccupied, thinking of the long-ago cricket the old gangster had given him, the dry rattle of it in its bamboo cage after it died. Big Uncle was a spirit, Aunty Bao had written, “dead of a curse,” and then reminded him of the outstanding debt be owed for his passage. Ling had immediately dispatched a sum—asking for a paper servant to be burnt at Qingming so that the dead man might be well attended in the afterlife—and realized he'd never write home again (nor send another cent; his debt was to the dead man, he figured, and he knew himself to be untouchable under Crocker's roof). He was free, and yet he'd wept, so silently he'd hardly been sensible he was doing it, until he heard the household waking, and then he'd scuffed the tears away as if ashamed.

He roused himself when Crocker appeared. The big man, restless and irritable, had been looking for coffee, and Ling hurried to set the pot on the stove. But even after he'd set a cup before his employer, Crocker had merely sat and watched, the wooden chair creaking under him as he rocked, while Ling tended the laundry kettles, hauled in firewood, all the time terrified the chair would give way and Crocker crash to the floor, splashing coffee on his clean shirt. Ling was in a sweat worrying what the man wanted, but after slowly slurping his coffee, pursing his lips as if to draw the last of it from his beard, Crocker merely slapped his thighs and bustled out. Ling had sunk into the chair in silent relief.

The next morning, though, Crocker had come out onto the back porch, two of his business associates with him: Stanford, the former governor, a frequent dinner guest, as sleekly plump in his nankeen trousers and morning coat as one of his prized thoroughbreds, and another gentleman in a sack suit, leaner and with a leather eye patch, whom Ling didn't know. They talked among themselves, smoking—“The Metropolitan Railway already has four miles of tunnels under London, for Pete's sake!” “Underground ain't the same as under mountains, boss”—but Ling could feel their eyes on him, appraising, as he chopped wood. Once, on the stump, Stanford had called the Chinese “a degraded race” and “the dregs of Asia” (Uncle Ng had liked to quote the phrase whenever they emptied their laundry tubs), vowed to drive them out of California, declaiming an animosity that Crocker confided went back to the gold camps. “Leland took it as an affront that some of your brethren struck pay dirt when he didn't: American gold for American pockets is his view.” Ling always stood a little straighter around him, at once haughty and trying to impress the man, though as far as he knew Stanford had never noticed him before (at dinner the man's conversation was only of horses, once contending against all the rest that a galloping steed took veritable flight, all four hooves off the ground.
Imbecile,
Ling had concluded).

And then finally one of the three—the fellow with the eye patch—told him to come forth. The man—Strobridge, Crocker called him—planted himself before Ling, pummeled his shoulders, pinched his arms. It felt odd to Ling to look a one-eyed man in the face, especially as the fellow cocked his head to one side, as if listening rather than looking. Ling stared at the man's jaw instead, the wad of tobacco bulging and bobbing in his cheek, until he started to imagine it was the missing eye rolling around in there. He made himself focus on the sole good eye then, and it felt like gazing down a long tunnel. Strobridge finally thrust a bushel basket into his arms, piled it high with billets, then made Ling totter around the yard with it. But after a single staggering circuit Ling had lowered the burden and the other two men had looked at Crocker pityingly, the one-eyed man hawking in the dirt, his dusty ball of juice rolling between Ling's feet.

“Know what the men call 'em? Wongs. On account, two Wongs don't make a white.”

Stanford, beneath his top hat, chortled into his beard—“Don't look to me, Charles. My competence is horseflesh, though by that measure I'd say you're trying to sell us a nag”—and Ling wished he'd choke on it. He began to empty the basket to puzzlement, then outright laughter as he transferred a portion of logs to a second basket. “Who's he think's going to carry that 'un?” Strobridge snorted, pushing his straw skimmer off his brow. “I told ye they're not worth half a man. Beats me how they built that there Great Wall.” But Ling had pulled his old bamboo carry pole from beneath the porch and threaded the handles of first one and then the second basket onto it, crouched between them, and raised the balanced load across his shoulders. The baskets bounced lightly in time with his strides, giving a little spring to his step as he circled the yard. You'd have thought he'd produced the Monkey King's golden-clasped rod, such was the astonishment. Crocker nodded vigorously while Strobridge and even Stanford clustered around and tossed more wood into both baskets. “Stand fast,” Crocker told Ling, and so he had, even when pearls of sweat had sprung from his brow.

“Are all coolies strong as you, boy?” Stanford asked. The man had recently had a giant sequoia named for him, before that a mountain. Up close he smelled faintly of horse.

“Yessir,” Ling began. “
K'u-li
is Chinese for—”

“Coolie,” Stanford repeated slowly. “Coo-
lie.
”

He's correcting my pronunciation,
Ling realized.

“Yessir. Most Chinese strong as me.”

He had wanted to explain that
k'u-li
in Chinese meant “hard strength.”

Strobridge and Crocker exchanged a glance. The former rubbed his hands together and the latter, thumbs hooked in his vest pockets, cried, “Bravo! What did I say, Stro? They're
from
China, not made of it!” And Ling, muscles still braced under his load, had trembled with pride.

Crocker told him Strobridge, his foreman, had hired “fifty Celestials” the very next morning. “You're a credit to your race, my boy.” (And to Crocker, it seemed; he'd won a tidy wager with Stanford in the process, he confided cheerfully.) It felt like a vindication to Ling. Tanka were looked down on by the Han Chinese, Eurasians viewed with suspicion. Yet here he was proving himself the best of them. It was the Year of the Ox, of hard work. He went about his duties in the Crocker home, even his ironing, with greater gravity, as if every load of laundry lifted required stiff-backed dignity.

Ling had boasted to Little Sister about his new significance. They were lying together after coupling, her head on his chest so that he felt he was breathing for them both—a fleeting tenderness she might end at any moment, since it wasn't part of her price, and which he tried to draw out with talk.

“Credit to your race?” She twisted her neck to eye him. “How do you spend that?”

He tried to settle her, stroking her hair, but now it seemed as if he were pushing her away with each inhalation.

“Besides, what's he pay these new workers?”

Ling had to admit that it hadn't occurred to him to ask.

“No head for business, lah,” she berated him, sitting up.

“As if you have!” He'd been teasing, reaching for her, but her eyes sparked.

“What do you think? I have an ass for business, tits for business only?” Slapping at those parts, and not gently.

And she told him the story of Ah Toy, the first Chinese courtesan in California, so beautiful—
ho leng
—men paid just to look at her. “Her face, I mean!” Little Sister shook her head at the wonder of it. “And you know what she did with her money? Bought her own brothel!” she added approvingly. “Now that's what I'd do if I could.” She brightened suddenly. “That's what we could do if you get more than credit! Sure. You make enough money, buy a brothel, I'll run it for you.
Partners!
” She said the last in English and he'd laughed it off, but later, walking back to Crocker's through the quiet streets, he'd whispered the word to himself over and over, as if correcting her:
Pardners.

7.

He was improving his English, training his tongue to roll his
r
's so that
Crocker
didn't sound like
Clocker.
He lingered at the door when the little Crockers—Master Fred, Miss Harriet (his favorite: she was fascinated by his queue.
How long did it take to grow?
she asked once, wide-eyed), and little William—were at their lessons, and forced himself to practice his English when on errands, wincing to hear other Chinese with their accented
Engrish
and
Melican.
Several times he leaned in to “interpret” between a countryman and a white, easing the way, as he saw it, and setting a good example.

But one morning he came across a stooped Chinese in a standoff with a blowzy ghost woman. She was barring his way on the boardwalk, a knot of passersby tangling around them.

“Go on!” the woman was demanding, her face ruddy. “Cat got your tongue?”

“More like t'other way round,” someone hollered from the crowd.

It was the laughter that made Ling worm his way to the front.

“May I be of assistance?” he offered soberly, but the woman regarded him with frank repugnance—“'arken to 'im!”—fanning herself with her hand as if to shoo him away.

Up close, she reminded him of Bridey, albeit much reduced, hair wild beneath her bonnet, face chapped and wan. He almost called her by name, yet she didn't seem to know him, and he thought he must be mistook.

Instead he quietly asked the other fellow in Cantonese what was going on, but the wretch only shrugged. “The mistress turned her down for a job. Now she blames me!”

“W'as he say?” the woman demanded of Ling, lurching between them. “W'as 'is answer?”

“Let it be,” the other Chinese muttered, eyes down.

“Sing-song,” the woman jeered. “Bing-bong, ning-nong-nang!”

“What is it you wish to know?” Ling asked punctiliously.

“Just this! What's so blasted special about him, eh? About your lot, that they hire you afore me and mine?”

Ling stared at her blankly, as if it were a trick question, as if she couldn't see they were Chinese. He remembered how Uncle Ng dealt with untoward customers, giving no indication of understanding, smiling and chattering away in Chinese—insults mostly—until they threw up their hands. Ling regretted it was too late for him to take the same tack.

He tried to leave instead, turning away from her, and she yanked his queue, snapping his head back so hard he bobbled the package he was holding. But it was the laughter—even the other Chinese smirked—more than anything that set him off. He whirled on her, snatching his hair away, causing her to fall back.

“Unhand me, you trollop!”

There was an appalled hush, broken only by the woman's choked sob.

“Couldn't even get hired for
that,
damn you!” Too late he grasped how drunk she was. “Chinks even got that market cornered.”

The other Chinese made to bolt, there was a scuffle of boots on boards, and Ling felt hands laid on him. He struggled, but then he heard the cold snick of a blade being drawn, felt the bright line of it at his throat, and went limp.

“What do you want us to do with them, darling?” he heard someone drawl over his head, but the young woman was inconsolable, hurrying off in tears.

The tears were coming to Ling's eyes too. A hand was pulling his head back by the queue so that his neck was bared, the knife so hard against his Adam's apple he didn't think he could swallow. The pain from his scalp was excruciating. He felt a fumbling behind him and then he was released, the knife scraping his chin as it withdrew so that he touched the spot at once, as if feeling for a shaving cut, in case he bled into his collar. But when he started to move off he felt his hair pulled again. Twisting, he found himself face-to-face with the other Chinese, their queues knotted tight together.