Peter Davies - The Fortunes

They had paused again at Cisco, the great engine huffing as if to catch its breath, the town so new it still stank sweetly of cut lumber. Crocker sat up, rolled his head on his neck with a crack, and pushed himself to his feet. He set his shoulders so that Ling knew to drop his topcoat about them, but when Ling moved to follow him out, the big man raised a hand. “Won’t be needing you here.”

Ling watched him lower himself heavily from the platform and talk to a couple of men who had stepped out of the sharp shadows of the depot. Their words were drowned by the pecking echo of hammers, but each shook Crocker’s hand and bobbed his head emphatically at something the big man said, their nodding exaggerated by their collarless throats. Crocker turned and clambered back aboard, but one of the men had spotted Ling at the window, and as he watched the fellow pulled a face and gave a little caper. “Ching Chong, Chinaman, sitting on a rail,” he crooned. “Along comes a white man to chop off his tail!” A childish ditty, but this was a grown man. Beside him, his companion’s teeth were gritted, yellow as nuggets in his dark beard, and this more than the other’s prancing doggerel made Ling uneasy.

Crocker barreled in, and when Ling looked again the pair had vanished, though whether back into the shade or elsewhere he couldn’t have said. The train was already shrugging to life again, the depot scarcely fallen behind before Crocker was snoring lustily once more. A smut from the smokestack had settled on his shirt front, Ling noted sorrowfully. He licked his finger, bent close to dab it away, vacillated. The train was trembling so much he’d only smear it. He made himself lean back, look away, let his eye follow the telegraph lines, swooping like swallows alongside the track.

Past Cisco the ascent slowed. Brilliant flecks of snow flung against the windows like rice. Along the track Ling could see the muffled forms of men, bundled in quilted coats over their baggy homespun, sacks and scarves wrapped around their faces and hands. Some were trudging along the line, picks and shovels on their backs, bent against the wind as much as the weight of the tools; others sat on logs before oilcloth tents, hunched over smoky fires. One bent to scoop a handful of snow to his mouth, the crystals shining in his thin beard. Another knelt beside a stream of runoff tumbling alongside the roadbed, washing his hands, the water in the sunlight rippling and sparkling like a cascade of coins.

As the train passed, the men’s heads rose for a second, so that when Ling looked back, their faces were like a wave, rising and then falling. And each face he saw was Chinese. He lost count of how many, and then he stopped counting, and then he stopped looking at all, sat back from the window in the shadows of the carriage, almost as dizzy as when he’d looked over Cape Horn. It was a long time since he’d been in the company of so many Chinese — he used to have his forehead shaved each week by a Chinatown barber, but since he’d lost his queue he’d let his hair grow in — and he found himself suddenly shy. And something else: ashamed to come before these men dressed like a dude, bathed, and well fed while they trudged through the smutty snow or bent over cooking pots, though what they might be eating he couldn’t guess. Crocker had had their supplies — the rice, dried cuttlefish, and smoked sausage shipped from China — stopped in Sacramento. “Even the opium and women,” he bragged to Ling, drawing a line across his throat.

It made Ling think of Little Sister. Of course he’d had girls since, though never the same one twice, always wondering if he might find her again, always wounded not to. He’d heard by then “going to see the elephant” used as a euphemism for a visit to a brothel, an echo of something Little Sister had once told him. He even knew of a bawdyhouse called the Elephantine, the El for short, or sometimes simply Hell. Once in a humor half daring, half despairing — his escape from the anti-Chinese rally had endowed him with a reckless, magical faith in his new appearance — he’d even tried a ghost whore by the irresistible name of Miss Ellie. He got as far as her room in his Western clothes, with his hat low over his eyes, but when he took it off she balked. “I have the money,” he said, holding it out like a talisman, but she spat back, “Not for all the tea in China, nor the opium neither!” and he’d found himself, despite himself, admiring her scruples. He’d beaten a hasty retreat, but her harangue had followed him even after he gained the street. “The nerve on ye! To turf me out of my own ’onest work and then buy me with the proceeds like some ’eathen ’ore!” He’d slunk into the shadows even as she stood framed against the light, her arms clutching her bare breasts to her chest like a pair of bulging laundry sacks. Only later, his heart slowing, did he wonder if under the caked and greasy makeup, the talc-y bosom, and despite her name, he hadn’t recognized the woman. Wasn’t it Bridey herself? She hadn’t seemed to know him at first, with his hair cut and wearing a suit. Or perhaps she just couldn’t tell him apart from other Chinese, as he’d heard whites complain.

Then again, he reflected much later, perhaps it hadn’t been her at all and it was he who struggled to tell one Irish girl from the next.

Crocker had taken him along to a brothel once. He had started taking Ling about on business in the last year or so, even teaching him how to drive a surrey, liking the idea of traveling with a manservant. Not that Crocker was any kind of fop or dandy; being a valet to Charles Crocker, it was to be understood, was manly labor. Perhaps in this spirit, Crocker arranged for Ling to attend him one evening at a bawdyhouse. They were in San Francisco, the first time Ling had been back since his debarkation.

“I can trust your discretion, I know,” Crocker breathed. “Not as a servant but as another man, yes?”

Ling nodded, puffed by the confidence, by the thought of Crocker and himself as equals.

“Mrs. Crocker just can’t take it,” the big man disclosed, his hands drawing a curve before himself to indicate another pregnancy, though for a moment Ling thought he meant his own swollen girth, as if the poor woman couldn’t withstand his bulk.

The brothel was a renowned one, as plush and brocaded, swagged and damasked in Ling’s memory as the palace car. In Chinatown the cribs Ling frequented brought back his home — the thick, ripe scent of naked flesh, a warm stink of crowding and confinement, as if the girls were livestock in a pen. So vivid was the recall that he half felt the sluggish sway of the old flower boat beneath his feet. But this was different, not the memory of a brothel but a dream of one.

The madam was the famous Ah Toy, once famous for her beauty—“Men would ride two days just to behold her,” Crocker had told him in the cab over — now for her business acumen. “Risen from whore to madam,” according to Crocker. “And rich as Croesus,” he added approvingly. As if money had purified her, as if he would welcome her as an investor. Ling remembered Little Sister speaking of her in almost the same tone of admiration. It was reckoned she’d slept with ten thousand men.

“Prolific cunny,” Crocker marveled. “Yet still snug as a virgin, if what your sages say about foot-binding is to be believed, eh?” The swaying gait resulting from bound feet was rumored to strengthen the muscles of the hai. “Tight,” Ling agreed hurriedly, “as… ah… a fist.” He blushed furiously.

The madam had greeted them in the parlor, a sinuous silk presence, rustling and fragrant, daintily leaning forward on her porcelain shoes to kiss Crocker on each cheek — no easy task, given the capaciousness of his beard — and calling him, purringly, “Charles.” He had clasped her gloved hand in his and actually bowed. Ling had found himself beaming, heart brimful, at such a display of warmth. He held his breath in anticipation of their withdrawal, but Ah Toy had clapped lightly and waved her girls (all of them Chinese) forward and Crocker, after lingering consideration, had taken one of them by the hand and led her away — Ling had glanced at Ah Toy, as if there’d been some mistake, but she was smiling lustrously — leaving Ling in the perfumed parlor to wait, leaving him moreover with a curt “Stay here” uttered before the assembled whores and their madam.