Peter Davies - The Fortunes

“Why, he’s a model of industry. I go further, a muse of industry, of capital and labor. Were it not for his shining example, we of the Central Pacific should never have thought to hire so many thousands of your countrymen.”

“We’ve heard of your Chinese army,” Left replied, using the plural pronoun even though Right looked utterly indifferent. “Storming the Sierra, is it?”

“Indeed, sirs, and this is the very man. The first among ten thousand!” And Crocker raised Ling’s arm as if he were a prize fighter and pinched the muscles there.

“Quite the sensation,” Left noted, looking Ling up and down. “An honor.” He held out a hand, and Ling took it gingerly.

“First of your kind, eh?” Right asked, thrusting his own hand forward and drawing Ling close enough to whisper. “The real trick is to be one of a kind.” And how peculiar, Ling thought, for this twin to be talking about uniqueness. To Crocker, Right added, “You might be chary of first impressions, though. When we were originally exhibited, you know, quite a few of your countrymen thought all Chinese came in pairs. We’re not all alike, you know. Even if we look it.”

Crocker chuckled amiably, as if this were all part of the show.

“Perhaps you should talk to Mr. Barnum,” Left went on smoothly, “have Mr. Ling exhibited. Send him about the country… by train, of course. If you can spare him, that is?” Both were staring at him now, and Ling felt caught between their gazes as if between two chopsticks.

They were mocking him, these odd urbane monsters — one directly, the other more subtly — and mocking Crocker too, though his boss was immune to it, unable to conceive of a Chinese ragging him, let alone two grotesques. But Ling had heard that the twins had toured Europe, met royalty and presidents. “Baron” Crocker must seem nearer to Barnum, that bloated showman, than to all the dignitaries they’d met.

Ling wanted to tell them how he’d once been mocked in their name. How would they feel about that? Irked or abashed? And how did he feel toward them — resentful that they’d made Chineseness part and parcel of freakery?

It seemed to him that Left might at least feign regret but Right would likely deny it gruffly. Strange, he thought, to be yoked together so, each other’s brother and burden, and yet be so different, even after a life of shared experience. Had they always been different, he mulled, or grown apart in temperament, like figures in a mirror — the one raising his left hand, the other his right? Was it an innate contrariness or some fundamental lust to be different, distinct from the other who was so close in every physical sense — an insistence on individuality?

Someone coughed behind them.

“You’ll excuse us, sirs,” Left lamented. “The gentlemen of the local medical establishment are here to examine us.”

“You’re not in poor health, I hope?” Crocker asked.

They shook their heads in unison, to giddying effect.

“Not since debarking from the steamer, thank god. The doctors visit only to ensure no fraud, to examine us—”

“To poke and prod us—”

“To ensure no chicanery.”

“That we are what we say we are.”

“Siamese, he means.” The one on the right winked at Ling.

“Well, good luck to you, joining the nation,” Left called over his shoulder. “Or should I say conjoining?”

“What a pair,” Crocker muttered afterward, in perplexity.

Ling himself had felt a nagging disappointment, though at the time he attributed it more to the letdown of discovering that the circus had not included, as widely rumored, an elephant among its wonders.

It was almost full night now, yet on the platform Ling felt as if he were perched on a stage. It was all for show, after all. The grand palace car, his own servile presence. Crocker typically traveled more modestly, had never brought Ling to the front before. A show of strength, then, but not only a show. He laid his hand on the chill metal of the railing and thought of Crocker’s gun, the polished weight of it as he had lifted it from the velvet-lined rosewood box and handed it across, the slight pause as Crocker held out his hand for it and it seemed to hang in the air between them, along with the sickly scent of oiled metal.

Did the strike leaders know what they were doing? Did they truly represent these men?

Far below across the plain he thought he made out distant fireworks, soundless from this distance. Some celebration, but of what and by whom? And then he realized it was lightning, flashing in the low clouds.

He ducked back into the carriage, to the closet that was his berth, and changed into the work clothes wrapped in his bedroll, kneeling to tie his trousers at the ankles before stepping off the train. “How’s Crocker reckon all Chinese are like you when you don’t even look Chinese no more?” he recalled Little Sister asking him once.

The men, when he moved among them, were gambling — dice here, fan-tan there — heads bowed close to their fires. Many, he saw, had their queues coiled tightly around their foreheads, in some cases around their hats, to keep them out of the way while they labored. In the firelight the dark braids looked like chains. When he stopped to watch a game of dominoes, someone offered him tea and he accepted, feeling the warmth of the liquid through the china cup, amazed to find such a delicate thing here, so far from home. Then the players invited him to sit in for a game. It was such a tonic to hear Chinese spoken again that only when they had emptied his pockets of loose change did he catch on that they knew who he was. Belatedly he recognized a couple of the strike leaders among the firelit faces. “You’re a credit to your race,” someone joked, and he knew they must have conspired against him somehow, and yet he only smiled. He owed them this, he figured, and the losing came as a kind of relief, the money sliding from his fingertips.

Afterward he asked the men about their lives, where they were from, the work they did.

“Digging,” offered an older man. His queue was down, and he was puffing on a stubby cigar. He’d been the last of the strike leaders to speak. The man’s face was a web of lines except over his cheekbones, where the skin was pulled tight and smooth, shiny as polished wooden knobs. “Digging, digging, digging. All day, all night, you can hear the picks and awls ringing from underground. The only difference is if you dig east or west.”

“East or west?”

“We dig from both sides of the mountain to go faster,” the old man explained. He nodded to one of the younger faces flickering in the firelight. “Ah Ho has a brother on the other crew. The bosses call him Eastward Ho, his brother Westward Ho.”

“I tell him we go up the mountain’s cunt, him up her ass,” the young man added, wagging a railroad spike between his legs. “He says we go up the ass.”

“Who can tell in the dark?” someone asked morosely. “Who even remembers the difference?”

“Either way she’s a tight bitch!”

There wasn’t a woman for fifty miles in any direction, Ling thought. Just men, men, men, as Little Sister had prophesied.

Others were superstitious about the work. It was terrible feng shui to build a straight line through the mountains, they told him, hands held out to the fire as if in prayer. Everyone knew demons liked to travel in straight lines; evil liked to come quickly. At funerals scraps of paper, each with a tiny hole in it, were scattered along the route to the cemetery; any demons would have to pass through each hole before pursuing the living or the dead. But now the men were making a way for the straight line of track, doing the demons’ work for them. That, they told Ling, was why so many had died.