Peter Davies - The Fortunes

“No work? No food!” Crocker thundered, slipping into pidgin himself at the sheer impertinence. “You tell ’em that,” he snapped at Ling, who passed it along with an air of wretched redundancy, the strikers having already turned to each other to confer.

“Try to fuck me,” Crocker was growling, “I’ll fuck ’em right back.” But fortunately he didn’t seem to expect Ling to translate this odd threat. Ling had heard it before, of course. Men so starved of women, he could only suppose, had somehow mistaken sex for fighting.

Strobridge, smacking the ax handle into his palm as if applauding, leaned in to Crocker. “Shall we persuade them otherwise?” There was a general uncrossing of arms among the Irish.

Crocker surveyed the mass of Chinese, his thumbs thrust so firmly into his vest pockets Ling feared the stitches would give, and shook his jowls slightly at Strobridge. “Tell ’em if they go back tomorrow morning I’ll pay ’em for the time lost. If not, I’ll dock every man jack for each day wasted. And any man obstructing another from returning will answer to Mr. Strobridge here. I’ll not stand for intimidation, you tell ’em.” And after a long moment Ling did, clenching his teeth to stop his voice cracking with hypocrisy.

Another man stepped forward, an older fellow the others seemed to defer to. He gave a long sniff — Ling feared he was going to hawk — and shrugged. “We strike,” he reiterated before adding, as if this clinched something, “We strike it rich! ”

“I’ll give him a strike, by God,” Strobridge snarled as the men dispersed. “That’ll bring ’em to heel, mark you.”

“It better,” Crocker muttered. “At this rate we’ll need to hire niggers, and after them, who knows? Mexicans.” He shook his massive head at the calamity of it. “We must stop the rot here. I’m the author of this road, goddamnit! You and your men are armed?”

“A score of us bossing thousands of them? Always.”

“Very well. The posse from Cisco should be along after sunup.”

Strobridge spat one last time in the mud, followed by half his men, as if loosing their first volley.

Ling looked away across the valley as if to feign indifference. The scattered trees on the distant hillsides looked like a crowd of tall, thin men, another army, stilled and silent, watching them.

10.

Ling had dutifully climbed back aboard the train behind Crocker and helped him to the cold supper Cook had packed that morning. Crocker was silent, aside from the tearing of his chicken. Afterward he paddled his fingers in the bowl Ling held for him, dabbed a napkin to his greasy lips. “Fetch me down the locked case.” There was a pair of pistols inside, nestled in burgundy velvet like a heavy necklace. Their arrangement — barrel to handle, the curved trigger guards innermost — reminded Ling of something, but only when he lifted one out and proffered it to Crocker did he see what the layout resembled, a single shining gun mirrored by the shadowy absence of the other: the taijitu, the yin-yang symbol.

A gun belt was coiled in Crocker’s carpetbag; Ling helped him buckle it, kneeling to cinch the tie around his leg. Above him, Crocker’s paunch, girded by leather, bulged firm as a muscle. The big man slid the pistol into and out of the holster a few times until he was satisfied. Ling cast another glance at the second revolver, still snug in its case, weighing whether it was for him, but Crocker dismissed him with a curt wave when he asked if he needed anything further. Ling had seen him in such spleen before, though never at the Chinese; he knew to make himself scarce.

All he could think about was what the strikers had demanded: not just more money — he’d expected that — but equal pay with white workers. It wasn’t a vast disparity; the main difference, as Ling understood it, was that the white workers had their board included in their salary, the Chinese had to pay for their food out of theirs. But for Ling it changed everything. His pride was founded on proving Chinese men equal to, if not better than, whites. Now it turned out they were just cheaper. The same as Chinese food, Chinese laundry, Chinese whores, Chinese lives. Of course, he thought dully.

He stepped back out onto the rear platform and watched the dusk come down on the mountains like the lid of a pot. Behind him the mouth of the unfinished tunnel yawned open, jagged and dark. Even the engine, cool and silent, seemed to cower before it. Ling tried to imagine walking in there — bad enough in daylight, but he knew the men worked in shifts around the clock. Though perhaps it would be easier to pass from darkness to darkness, he reflected. As it was, it seemed as if the night emanated from the tunnel, blackness pouring forth from it as from a pipe. Beneath him he could just make out men perched on upturned buckets and barrels clustered around fires and candles outside their tents, smoking and drinking tea. He might have imagined it, but there seemed a holiday atmosphere. Men stretching their legs before the fire, arching bent backs. Ling could hear them chattering, the Cantonese carried on the wind to him along with the scents of tobacco and tea, and a floral note of… yes, opium.

He had felt ashamed to come before them in his Western garb and haircut, but something else too: a freak. He’d seen it in the faces of the crowd, marveling at him, not as a traitor or a toady — or not only, he realized — but also as a wonder, a phenomenon.

It made him think of Chang and Eng, the famous Siamese twins of the traveling show. He’d met them once, accompanying Crocker to the opera house. He’d stood in the shadows of the box watching them play table tennis and juggle, conversing all the while in perfect English he could only envy. Crocker was fascinated. He’d seen other such shows, he said: years earlier, back East, a Chinese lady with tiny feet eating with chopsticks and using an abacus; more recently in Woodward Gardens, the Giant Woo, so tall he could light his cigar from a gas lamp. But these twins were extraordinary. Crocker was especially struck by their strength, as they lifted weights and then members of the audience overhead. “Are there many more like them at home?” he asked Ling. “Can you imagine? One could spike, the other swing the maul!”

After the show Crocker had insisted on going backstage and drawn Ling along. The twins were in their dressing room, each with a glass in his hand, one — the one on the left; Ling couldn’t recall which was Chang, which Eng — of water, the other of wine. Crocker shook hands with each, his fleshy clasp engulfing first one and then another hand: “Pleased to meet you, pleased to meet you.” They had twitted him gently over the delays in completing the railroad—“The passage via the isthmus is so wearisome!”—and as if suddenly reminded, Crocker had added, “Allow me to present my manservant, Ling. Ling, my manservant. Quite a prodigy in his own right.”

Ling had been stunned. He’d never been introduced before, not once, let alone twice, though something about the repetition seemed ludicrous. All he could do now was bow, once and again, in greeting. The twins were dressed in evening wear, their hair cut short in the Western fashion. Ling couldn’t stop staring between them at the point their chests met, wondering at the flesh that united them but also at the linen of their shirts, which met so ingeniously.

“Oh, really,” one of the twins said — the face on the left — while the other looked away impatiently. Their bodies seemed to lean away from each other, perhaps for balance, yet giving the impression that they’d rather go in different directions. Their brows were filmy with sweat from the heat of the footlights. “And what is so remarkable about Mr. Ling?” Left asked, blotting his temple with a lace handkerchief.