Peter Davies - The Fortunes

The demons struck at them in many ways. In falls from cliff sides, in avalanches, in blasts that took a man’s head from his shoulders. Track layers tried to pin the demons down, driving spikes into them, but the demons always wiggled free, slipping like sunlight over the polished rails. There were two demons, some men said, left demon and right demon — the devil of violence and the devil of greed — in a race with each other across the continent. The right demon wanted to get ahead, so he killed men working on the left; the left demon retaliated by maiming the men on the right. This was the race the men cared about, not the one between them and the ghosts from the east. Some thought that the demons were twins; others said they were male and female, lovers who yearned for each other. By day they squabbled to the ringing of hammer and spike. But at night they lay together, side by side, silently. And sometimes an errant blast or a landslide would twist them together into an inextricable knot of steel. When the lines were finally joined, one man warned, demons would be able to fly from one side of the country to the other in clouds of sparks and smoke, bellowing, shrieking, fiery-eyed and fiery-bellied.

To protect them the men had invented new gods to pray to. The god of the hammer, the god of the spike, the squeaking god of the wheelbarrow, and, the greatest of all, the black powder god, whose blasts scared off any demon, just like firecrackers at New Year.

The senior man ignored this talk serenely, leaning back on his stool, the tip of his dangling queue tracing illegible characters in the sandy dust behind him as he rocked back and forth. “Sometimes,” he said finally, screwing the cigar into the corner of his mouth, his fingers as stubby as the cheroot, “I think I’m going to grow old in there, die and be buried in there, and then it’ll turn out I was digging my own grave all along.” He produced a little bag from the collar of his tunic, secured by a leather thong around his neck. It rattled when he shook it—“Finger joints.” He grinned. “I mean to be buried whole”—and Ling saw that he was missing the tips of two digits, to frostbite or accident.

“Other days,” the man continued, “I let myself dream maybe the tunnel will go all the way home to China. The last tunnel we finished, when we met in the middle, it was like that. Like we’d dug up Chinese. I was there when a hand thrust through the hole, out of the darkness.” He held out his seamed, stunted hand, and Ling almost grasped it.

“So here we sit at the top of the world,” someone murmured. “Next to the deepest hole in it.”

“But aren’t you proud at all?” Ling pressed them. “Of what you’ve achieved? What about Cape Horn?” he reminded them. “The whites couldn’t have built that except for Chinese skill.” He had heard that the men had woven their own baskets, after an old Chinese practice, to be lowered in down the sheer rockface. But they just looked at him with bemused impatience. Baskets? They didn’t know anything of baskets. Men on ropes? Who would be so foolhardy as to dangle over a cliff? “They’re not paying us enough for that!” Such modesty, Ling thought at first. He remonstrated with them. The feat was famous; they were celebrated for it as far afield as San Francisco! It had been in the newspapers!

“Lies.” The old man shrugged. “I was there. That’s just a story made up by the bosses.”

“But why?”

“To justify hiring us over their own, probably.”

It made Ling consider queasily if even his own role hadn’t been a fiction, another story made up by Mister Charley. The possibility yawned vertiginously: his whole life an invention of others.

In turn the men asked him eagerly about Crocker, what he was like.

“I just do his laundry.” Ling blew across his tea to cool it. “Wait at his table. Set out his clothes.” I’m his servant, he thought, his head bowed. These men were workers. He and Crocker had mistaken one for the other.

“They treat us like dogs,” someone — the man who’d called Crocker fat — said, spitting into the embers, “and say we’re his pets.” Ling nodded slowly. He’d heard it too, him the loyalest of dogs.

He felt his old pride rise up in him for a moment, like a knot in his throat. Had he truly been proud to show Crocker and his cronies what the Chinese could do? Or was he just proud to prove he was better than other Chinese? The exception, not the rule.

He swallowed it down now, this pride like vomit.

“They’ll shoot you like dogs too,” he said hoarsely.

“We’re willing to die,” the other said.

“And you speak for everyone?”

There was a pause while they looked around the fire at the glowing faces.

“Well, why not?” the man asked at length.

Ling just stared at the older fellow. “But don’t you see?” he finally managed, his voice thick with despair. “That’s how it starts.”

After he left them, he stood for a long while before the tunnel. Up close it wasn’t much more than a rough-hewn cave fanged with rock, like a shark’s mouth he had seen once, rows and rows of teeth angled every which way. Meltwater ran down the walls, glazing the rock, and dripped from overhead like a slow pulse. This close, the darkness was so dense the starlight seemed to fall in shafts from the night sky behind him, the stars like bullet holes in a blanket. The tunnel’s blackness, by contrast, was so palpable he felt he might reach out and caress it. One more step and I’ll be gone. He felt his body summon itself, lean in, and then a chill tear tapped him heavily on the neck and he pulled up short. “It rains in there,” one of the men had told him, but to Ling, breath held tight between his teeth, the pattering sounded like nothing so much as laundry dripping.

Or blood, he thought, turning away with a shiver. A powder man, they’d told him, had been blown to bits just the week before, nothing left of him but his boot heels.

When he climbed back into the palace car he found Crocker sitting up in the dark. He was in his shirtsleeves, collar and cuffs undone, a crystal tumbler in hand, peering out into the night, a revolver at his elbow. For a moment Ling imagined the gun was smoking, and then he saw the stub of cigar in the ashtray beside it.

“Do you need me, sir?” he asked, holding up a taper.

“Oh, is it you?” The big man took a long swallow, the whiskey the color of gold in the candlelight. “No, that’s all right,” he murmured. “I was just thinking. I crossed these mountains myself, not far from here — twenty year ago, nigh on.” He shook his head slightly, as if it hurt to remember. “What we’d have given then for a railroad. Three cussed months it took us.”

Ling’s own passage from China had lasted but five weeks; strange to think his home, measured thus, was closer than Crocker’s own.

“And we were the lucky ones, not like those Donner wretches and all the rest of them, starved or froze or scalped along the way.”

Ling gave a shudder at the memory of Uncle Ng’s story, but Crocker paid no heed.

“This road will save lives one day, my boy. You mark my words. This is history we’re riding, civilization. Excursionists will be picnicking at Donner Lake within two years.”

Ling tried to picture the dark landscape sliding past, as if the train were already under way. How he wished they could go back. But all he could see in the window was Crocker’s waxen face perfectly reflected, as if he were peering in on them from another carriage alongside. His great beard was coming in white, Ling noticed, as if he were snorting forth twin plumes of steam. Ling could just make out his own form dimly mirrored behind Crocker’s, alongside the scroll-top desk, but his face was obscured, too dark to be reflected. Crocker took another sip, and Ling remembered Uncle Ng warning him off whiskey: “Looks like gold, tastes like gold — bitter.”