Peter Davies: The Fortunes

“If I were you I wouldn’t be in such a hurry,” the old man counseled, setting his iron down on the stovetop so hard that sparks flew, to which Ling wanted to cry, Don’t you know they call it a Gold Rush? Already he felt himself falling behind the ghosts.

He contented himself with pointing out sulkily, “You found gold.”

“Gold found him, more like,” Little Sister chimed in. She was folding the ironed clothes with deft little flicks while Ling parceled and bound them with twine, the bundles still warm from the iron, like packets of sticky rice.

Ng raised his hand halfheartedly. “Shut it, fox spirit!”

“How?” Ling pressed.

In ’54 or ’55, Ng explained, licking his fingertip and smoothing the lone hair from his mole across his brow, he’d been playing out a hand of poker with a stocky little Frenchman — a Keskadee, in the parlance of the camps. The two of them were down to their last few cents when the Frenchman, named Philippe but known universally around town as the Celebrated Frog, had ceremoniously shrugged the shirt from his back and thrown it on the table. “Made en Paree,” he’d declared, slipping his suspenders back over his union suit with a prideful snap. The shirt was filthy and sour-smelling, ruffles yellow as wilted lettuce, but it was worth more than Uncle Ng had left to his name, and he looked at his hand — two pair, kings over threes — and had an inspiration. “Call,” he said, and when the Frog sneered, “ Avec quoi? ” Ng told him, “You bet shirt. I bet I wash it if I lose. Deal?” And the Frog, who was celebrated for, among other things, sending his shirts to San Francisco in flush times, from where they were shipped to Hawaii or even Hong Kong to be laundered, at a price of ten dollars apiece, hoisted up his shoulders in assent.

“Ten dollars?” Ling cried in disbelief.

“Yes! Back then there weren’t even enough women in the state to take in washing.”

“Or anything else,” Little Sister scoffed.

“Hong Kong,” Ng sighed, laying his iron down more gently this time, seemingly transfixed by the oily curls of hot air swimming over the stove. “How I used to envy that laundry in my homesickness.”

“But what about the game?”

“Oh.” Ng blinked. “Lost.”

Afterward he understood that the Frog had only accepted the bet because he was sure he would win, as he duly did with a full house, yet the loss had been the making of Ng. It had cleaned him out, but Philippe had so enjoyed strutting around camp in his pressed and gleaming shirt and telling the story of the bet that Uncle Ng’s services were soon in high demand. He’d set up shop using a couple of long toms, or sluice boxes: “And that’s how I got my start.”

“But you never found gold again!”

“I did so! All those miners, see here, they’d not washed for months — years, some of them. What did they care with no women for fifty miles? The stink on them.” He wrinkled his nose. “But when I drained that dirty water, why, there was flake caught in the riffles of the sluice like carp in a paddy field, gold dust from out the cuffs and pockets and seams of all those reeking clothes! How do you think I bought my own business? I gathered up all those pinches and drifts of color until those boys were picked clean !” He delivered the pun in English with a toothy grimace, and sat back teasing the hair from his mole as if to confirm his luck. But he must have seen the disappointment in Ling’s face.

“Gold is gold, however you make it,” he said, holding up a coin and clenching it between his teeth as if it were a clinker he’d just plucked from a pan. “Man swills it out of the mud, he gets dirty, gives you some to wash his clothes.”

“And then you gamble it on ‘white pigeon ticket,’” Little Sister added tartly.

“But he makes so much more money if he finds gold,” Ling insisted, eyes on the coin. He had caught his first glimpse of gold by then, flashing from the corner of a sailor’s grin on the voyage out like a hook in a fish’s lip. So that was gold, he’d thought as the ship plowed through the waves: a sharp tug in the flesh, hauling you toward land. But this was the first gold coin he’d seen, and he felt a pang of lust. Ng was turning it in his puckered fingers, balancing the glint between his thumb and forefinger. They called it a yellow eagle in Chinese, and Ling could see the wings of the embossed bird beating gently as the light slid back and forth.

Then Ng’s hand dropped, his long sleeve covering it. “One in ten finds gold, all ten get dirty.”

Ling nodded, but he felt cheated somehow.

And yet he liked that phrase See the elephant. Felt an affinity for the beast.

His mother had left him nothing excepting a child’s cap. He’d seen children, children rich with parents, wearing them at New Year’s, caps sewn with eyes and ears, teeth and tongues, to look like tigers or lions, dragons, or pigs or rabbits.

“You had one of those,” Aunty Bao had told him once. “Only thing you came with. Shape of an elephant.”

“What happened to it?” he asked.

“What?” She’d already forgotten him. “Pah! Who knows?”

He might have felt robbed of his birthright, but in fact he felt buoyed up. It didn’t matter that it was gone, that he’d never seen it. He already knew he had nothing. But that his mother had given him something once, imagined him wearing it, felt like a gift (it never occurred to him that it might have come from his father). He didn’t know if she’d bought it or received it as an offering, but either way, he resolved, the elephant must have meant something to her, not merely to ward off demons or bring luck, as all the caps were supposed to, but because elephant sounded the same as sign, or things to come, even if he couldn’t guess what.

It was just an expression, of course, but he couldn’t help picturing an actual elephant — he’d seen a daguerreotype of one in a newspaper — at the end of the trail, its soft leathery bulk rising before him like a cliff. It seemed at once more wondrous and more tangible than gold. And what would it feel like to ride one?

He pictured the great beast approaching, kneeling heavily for him to mount, and carrying him, swaying, away, stepping over mountain ranges and even the ocean, which it drained with its trunk to wade while ships steamed around its knees, their funnels just clearing its drooping belly. It carried him home, of course, plucking him from its back with its trunk and depositing him gently on the ground, then daintily backing out of the light to reveal his old home and family — Big Uncle, even Aunty Bao, marveling at his triumphant return — from its vast shadow.

“What are you smiling about?” Little Sister asked him, and when he told her she smirked lewdly, drew his queue forward over his shoulder, smoothed it down his front, batting it gently so it swung before him. “Oh, I’ve seen my share of elephants,” she breathed.

“Have you no shame?” he snapped, and she told him coldly, “‘Gold is gold.’ You’d know if you ever made any.”

I have money! he wanted to call after her when she turned away.

He knew what she cost— two bit touchee, four bit fuckee, she crooned into the night — less than a clean shirt. “Less than a clean pair of drawers,” as she put it herself. “Not that many of them have a clean pair of drawers” (or any drawers at all, as Ling knew, most considering their long shirttails sufficient underclothes).

He traced the circles carved into the counter with his fingertip.

Since his first payday, he had had coins of that size jangling in his pocket, and when he held them in his hand, growing warm from his flesh, they seemed filled with possibility.