The Fortunes, page 4
With a splash she stood up, dripping so that he fell back. She let him look for a moment, her skin flushed and untouchable, then she wrapped herself tightly in a towel. “It’s only work, after all. Everyone works. I make sheets dirty, you wash them.” She was hardened, he decided—such an odd contrast to her smooth, soft flesh. “At least I don’t do laundry now. All I wash is myself.”
Perhaps he was thinking of her jibes, or maybe her ghost lovers—the irony was that because of her cleanliness, she had more custom than the typical tart, who might bathe but once a week—but that afternoon, when he was harassed by the local urchins, he lost his composure, lashed out. They’d been waiting for him earlier than usual, and when they’d pulled his hair he’d stumbled, gone down on one knee in a runnel of horse piss, still warm. He’d been even more enraged at the thought that the clean laundry might have been dragged through the mud, and when they’d come after him again, he’d swung his pole sharply. He’d only meant to bowl one of them over with the soft weight of a laundry sack, perhaps spill a cap into the dirt, but he misjudged and cracked a rawboned boy about the ear. The amusement of his fellows had faded quickly when the lad took his hand away to show them the blood. He wiped it off on his shirt, and Ling had wanted to tell him Don’t! They’d set on him in earnest then, the lot of them piling on so that Ling was knocked down, his face clawed and cut, his queue yanked and stamped into the mud, his packages strewn about. They looped his queue around his neck twice, like a noose, and pulled him to his feet, led him like a dog up and down the street. When he broke away they tripped him again, set about him with their boots this time, until he could only curl up, clutching the dirt as if to burrow into it. They drew a pair of drawers over his head like a bag, sat on him, stuffed the foul thing into his mouth—“Lick it clean!”—until he gagged. Finally, pulling him to his feet, they drew his queue up between his legs to hobble him, proclaiming to the laughter of the gathering crowd their intent to “send him home with his tail atween his legs.” They only lost their nerve at the edge of Chinatown, releasing him but flinging his pole and laundry after for good measure.
He’d been spitting with rage, had run into the laundry for the cleaver when Little Sister put a hand on his arm. He made to pull away, inhaled a wince. “Ribs,” she pronounced, stilling him with a touch. He held his ragged breath while her fingers traced his sides. “Just cracked, I think.” She pulled him over to a stool and filled a basin and cleaned his face as best she could while he turned it from her (and yet followed her shivering reflection in the basin water). Only when she’d sewn up the gash over his eyebrow did he steal a direct look at her: the purse of her lips as she tugged the thread through his flesh the same as when she repaired any other ripped item, except this time when she bit the thread, she leaned in close to his brow and he felt the brush of her lips, or perhaps her teeth, before the thread snapped.
She told him about the time that ghost women had burst into the laundry, complaining about the prices, that they were too low (“Too high?” Ling had corrected her automatically. “No, too low for them to compete!”), and put Ng’s queue in the mangle. “Made him kowtow! To women!” She shook her head, smiling. “He’d be there still, thinking about gnawing it off, if I hadn’t freed him. He’s lucky they didn’t throw him in the slough to drown. Those boys are the sons of those women, some of them.”
She handled his queue gently as she told him the story, rinsing it with warm water—“A wash always helps,” she crooned—then unplaiting it so that the hair slipped through her fingers and covered her hands, and then replaiting it until it felt as strong and heavy as rope. And by then he was still.
He turned slowly, feeling his queue run through her hands. She was still close, her head bent low, and he leaned in slowly to kiss her. But she drew back.
He stared at her, and then very deliberately tipped over the basin, so that she cried out.
He watched the water seep into the boards.
“I have money,” he said, and he stumbled to his pallet, rummaged for the change knotted in a rag, thrust the coins under her nose. “See!”
She pushed his hand away, and when he shoved it back in her face, she knocked it aside so roughly that the coins scattered, one of them rolling across the floor until it tumbled through a crack in the floorboards to fall into the slough.
They both stilled as if listening for the splash.
Ling knew that some Chinese refused to sleep with whores who slept with ghosts. “I’m not like those others,” he told her softly, and would have told her of his parentage, except she shook him off.
“You think they won’t have me? I won’t have them, any of you.” Her eyes flashed.
He pressed a hand to his side, suddenly winded. “But why?”
“It’s like they say. Chinamen”—she snarled the word learned from her customers—“only brought their womenfolk here so someone could be lower than them. So they’d have someone to look down on. You left us the only job you couldn’t do for the ghosts.”
“But how can you hate your own people?” How can you hate me? he meant. And yet, he calculated, would she sleep with him if she knew he was half white? Would half be enough?
“How? I tell you how! You know who sold me to Ng?” She paused to catch her breath. “My father! You know why? So he could send a brother to Gold Mountain to make the family fortune.” She nodded heavily. “That’s right. Chinamen love gold more than girls. The same brother who knocked on my door once. Yes! He didn’t recognize me until he was in the room.” She laughed sourly. “Probably wasn’t looking at my face! And you know what he does now? He’s a laundryman, just like you. So my father, you see, sells me as a whore for my brother to come to Gold Mountain to do women’s work.” She spat, a frothing gob of spittle that seemed to sizzle on the floorboard between Ling’s feet. “So no, I don’t sleep with laundry boys. You stink of other men’s sweat. Your fingers are wrinkled like old women’s hands. I won’t have you touching me. At least you don’t see them selling their women to you. But that’s Chinamen for you! You all want wives, lovers, but none of you want daughters. Daughters are bad luck, daughters are shameful, dirty, to be drowned like wash in a tub.” She was sobbing now. “Well, this is what you deserve, the lot of you. You send all your girls away, one day you find there’s no women for you. Just men, men, men, as far as the eye can see.”
He thought of her teaching him once to starch collars, how to make the creases sharp. “This one,” she had said, holding up a band with the triangular wings standing stiff and proud, “this is my favorite. They call it ‘patricide.’ The story goes a son came home one time wearing this kind of collar and when his father embraced him the wings cut the old man’s throat!” She had grinned wickedly. It was just a story, Ling knew, but she told it with such relish he couldn’t help imagine blood on the pointed tips of the collar.
“I’ll show you,” Ling tried now. “I’ll be rich.”
“Not if you spend your savings on me!”
For a moment the only sound between them was the drip of laundry.
“I will be,” he muttered, fingering his stitches warily.
“And what will you do?” She sniffed, humoring him. “When you’re rich?”
“Come back for you!”
“Ha!” But he could see she was touched, as if he’d stroked some bruise of hers.
“What else?”
“Why, go home. Of course.”
“Of course!” She laughed rancorously. “You think I can ever go home? Chinamen are sojourners here. Even if you die, someone from your clan or company will send your bones home. I live here now, and I’ll die here, and no one will bother with my bones. I’m a Melican now. Why shouldn’t I fuck them?” She bared her teeth in a smile. “Don’t look so sad. I’ll get rich too! See if I don’t. You know where gold comes from, yes?”
He began to explain, but she shook her head and thrust a hand into her pants. “Here’s my mine, my rich seam. What do the Melicans call it? The mother lode? Women are like dirt in China, but not here. Here we’re rare as gold. And men are dirt.”
He took a step toward her, but she pulled away, held up a finger before him. “Not for you, laundryman! Go back to your washee-washee, your women’s work!”
5.
Crocker’s place was on his delivery route, but he’d never seen him, only his huge shirts billowing like sails from the line outside Ng’s (the best linen hung on the line, the lesser Ling spread on the roof, weighed down with stones), leaping and snapping as if they’d haul the whole shack out onto Sutter Lake. Once Ling had pulled one of those shirts over his head—it hung down to his calves, the cuffs flapping like wings beyond his fingertips—to make Little Sister laugh. “I’ll take it for a tent when I go prospecting!” She shook her head, but he could see she was amused, and as he stared at her she took the challenge, shimmying into a petticoat and shirtwaist. They stood side by side, looking at each other in the cheap mirror Uncle Ng had bought and carefully positioned for good feng shui. “We look like proper Americans,” he laughed, but she shook her head, abruptly deflated. “We look like mourners.” She was right. Ling imagined himself for an instant at his mother’s funeral—not that he’d attended it—the too-big shirt evoking the mourning clothes of a child. Little Sister shrugged her borrowed clothes off quickly, and he pulled Crocker’s shirt over his head with a shudder.
And then a few days after his beating, still bruised, he was delivering a bundle of fresh laundry and the big man himself met him on the back porch in his undershirt—“About time!”—yanking the top shirt from the brown paper parcel and shaking it out with a crack and a puff of starch. Ling had imagined a fearsome giant from those prodigious garments, a man who could pull up trees with his bare hands and flatten mountains with a stamp, but here was Crocker struggling into his shirt, circling like a dog after its own tail, suspenders flapping around his knees, until Ling caught the sleeve and held it for the big man to punch his arm through.
“Obliged,” Crocker grunted, shrugging his suspenders on as if he were shouldering a pack and hunting in his pockets for a tip. He rummaged for loose change like a man scratching his balls, but all he could come up with was a single gold dollar. The big man considered the coin, not much larger than the nail on his thumb, then he snorted and flipped it to Ling, who caught it with a clap of his hands. He’d bowed low to the ground, unable to believe his luck, figuring to run before Crocker bethought himself, when he heard an exasperated sigh. Crocker was fumbling with the collar, trying to pinch it together at his throat, but the small stud kept squirting from his thick fingers. “You there!” He’d said no more, just raised his chin and let his arms fall to his side. Crocker’s cheeks and upper lip were clean-shaven, but he wore a thick beard, fanned below his jaw like a cravat. Ling would remember the rasp of it on the back of his hands as he worked, and the way the man’s Adam’s apple had throbbed beneath the tight linen. When he was done, Crocker rolled his vast head around on his neck, collar creaking, and nodded. Silently he proffered his wrists for Ling to attach cuffs and stuck out his chest for his shirtfront, stiff and gleaming as armor. “Obliged,” he said again at last, and perhaps because he’d already tipped Ling once, or perhaps because Charles Crocker was not a man who liked to be obliged to a Chinaman, he offered him a job there on the spot as live-in laundryman and manservant. “At least I’ll get my consarned shirts washed faster.”
It was a gruff, almost begrudging offer, but to Ling it was as if he’d struck gold.
Uncle Ng was ironing when Ling told him of Crocker’s proposal. “Bird matters,” the old head opined, waving them away. But he paused for a long moment, the smell of hot cotton, with its sweet trace of burnt sweat, rising around them, until Ling thought the shirt must be scorched.
“I have been meaning to speak to you,” Ng said at last, as if to the shirt he was smoothing again. “You know I have no son. I would adopt you.”
“I have a father,” Ling began.
“The man who sold you to me?” Ng sipped, spat. “Or the one who sold you to him? Who sells a son? A daughter maybe, not a son.”
“I don’t believe you,” Ling cried. Big Uncle had favored him, he was sure.
Ng shook his head without lifting his eyes from his work.
“The girl came of age to work. You cost less than another girl. Also, you spoke Melican.”
“It’s not true!” But he knew it was; he could already feel the tears rearing in his eyes, clamped his jaw to stanch them.
“If you were my son,” Ng went on, working the iron in circles now as if polishing the cloth, “you would inherit the business when I die.”
And tend to your spirit, Ling thought dismally.
Ng was folding the shirt now into a neat square of cloth with just his fingertips, the movements suddenly nimble after the clenched effort of the ironing. He pulled another shirt from the pile and set to it with a fresh iron. Over his bowed head, among the rough beams, Ling saw the metal hook gleaming dully.
“But . . . I mean to be rich.”
The old man bent once more to his ironing, the board groaning under the pressure.
“The girl,” Ng added presently. “You would own her too, of course.”
Ling was wrapping his few clothes tightly into his bedroll. Now he paused.
“Did she know about me?”
Ng shrugged. “She’s a whore, not a fool.”
Both of them sold, Ling thought. But her as a prostitute, him as a son. He secured the roll with twine, slung it on his back.
“I don’t want,” he managed at last, “to own her.”
“Love, is it?” Ng spat on the shirt before him, as if the issue were no more than a particularly obstinate crease.
“You don’t believe in it.”
“Of course I do. Men love gold, don’t they? But gold can’t love them back. Only a damned asshole thinks that.”
They stared at each other then, the old man’s knuckles whitening around the handle of his iron.
“Don’t try to stop me,” Ling warned. “I’ll drown you in your own dirty water.”
“I never told you,” Ng said at last, setting the iron down and lighting his pipe from the stove with a spill of paper. “That Frenchman, the Frog, the one with the shirt? He was my friend before. His claim was next to mine. Neither of us had any luck. Not in the creek, not in town. The Melicans called him foreigner too, made fun of his English. Same as me. Once when I caught two fish I gave one to him. Another time we shared a rabbit he trapped. We both enjoyed frogs’ legs. No gold, maybe, but plenty frogs in that creek.” He took a long draw on his pipe, exhaled smoke. “I called him friend. He called me brother. Fraternité, he taught me this. And he was the one said they should let me in the saloon, join the game. Egalité, that was another of his words. But after, when he beat me, made a fool of me, strutting around in his clean white shirt, calling me Madame, washerwoman, he was one of them. You understand?” Ng looked up at last, all three of his eyes narrowing. “I might as well have washed him, I made him so white.”
“So?”
“So.” Ng unclamped his teeth from his pipe, blew the fine hair from his mole aside. “You’ll be back.”
Ling had flung out the door. He stood panting in the street for a long moment, then turned on his heel, marched to her lean-to, and knocked heavily.
“Crocker?” she asked when he told her breathlessly about the new job. She stretched her arms wide. He nodded. “Seen your elephant, I reckon.”
In answer, he put the gold piece Crocker had given him in her hand.
For a moment they both stared at it on her palm—a woman in profile, as if looking away—and then Little Sister’s hand closed over it like something naked to be covered. With her other, she pulled him into her crib. He heard the shutter snap closed behind him.
She smelled of lye and lemon, so clean he hesitated to touch her. When he did reach for her, he couldn’t help but examine her for marks, as if he might have smudged her. He started with her blemishes, the puckered spots on her arm where she had burnt herself with the iron. He kissed them. He had those scars; she touched him back. Her hands were soft, except for the pad of her index finger, swollen purple from the pinpricks of mending. She winced slightly when she closed her hand around him. I’ll buy you a thimble, he vowed, and she lowered her head, her hair lapping across his thighs.
Afterward they were silent, lying side by side, staring at the dark ceiling. When he tried to pull her close, she seemed limp and heavy in his arms, as if waterlogged. He thought of his coin again, where it had been—in whose hands, whose pockets and purses, before it came into his, and into whose it would now pass. It made him feel flimsy, insubstantial, this small gold piece. It made him want more, so many that no one coin could ever be so important to him again. And he wondered if he’d spent it wisely (certainly he’d spent it quickly, he reflected with chagrin). He had thought he’d been courting her, but perhaps it was really the coin he’d courted.
Courted? A nice word for it.
He pictured the coins of his home, the holes at their center so that they could be threaded on a braid for safekeeping. American coins had no such hole and they seemed always to be slipping away.
He wished she’d give it back, and when she didn’t, when she rose and rinsed and dressed and still didn’t give it back, he hated her a little. He could ask for it, but he was afraid of being refused. She wasn’t worth it, he thought abruptly, though even now he knew he’d give her another coin when he earned one, and another after that, though he’d never save them long enough to buy her outright.
And she knew it too, he could tell. Suddenly he could feel the anger emanating from her, shimmering like heat from an iron. It was there in the stiffness of her movements as she brushed the tangles from her hair, the determination with which she avoided looking at him or talking to him, except to say, “Time’s up.” She wound her hair into a tight knot, jabbed a chopstick through it. He’d roused himself then, leapt from the bed really, and pulled on his clothes so roughly that he’d torn the stitches under the arm of his shirt. They’d both stopped at that sound of tearing, for just a moment. He might have asked her to mend it, she might have said yes, but then it was too late.
