The Fortunes (15 page)

And now he might go aboard one of those ships as a passenger himself. He had enough saved to buy a ticket home, and he had certainly come to envy the peace of the men in his care, their silence, their stillness, their eventual homecoming. He was old, even Gold Mountain was old; Australia was the new Gum Shan. And yet . . . there was still the matter of the elephant.

A part of him, younger and more innocent, still hoped the phrase might refer to a real elephant; circuses were all the rage then, after all. He'd heard of Jumbo, the star attraction, made famous in part by the railroads, which allowed him to be shipped from city to city, traveling as the papers said in a palace car of his very own. It made Ling smile to picture it—the elephant reposing like Mister Charley, the man's voluminous beard grown into a flowing trunk—and he yearned to see the beast, but the nearest he'd come was being passed once, somewhere in Nevada, by a circus train, a giraffe's great neck stretching above the treetops, its tiny ears pinned back in the wind.
They'd better have it lie down before the Sierra tunnels,
he thought. He could hear the roaring of lions, the chatter of monkeys, and, he fancied, the bellow of an elephant over the engine. He found himself waving at the train like any child.

But lately he'd read that the famous pachyderm had been killed, struck and crushed by a train, of all things. All that was left was its skeleton, on display in a museum in Washington, and he'd seen enough bones. In another paper he'd learned of the death of the Bunker twins, Chang and Eng, their bones buried in North Carolina but their shared liver pickled and on show in a museum back East.

Now on the docks what came to mind at last was the old Chinese fable of the blind men and the elephant. How one flapped its ear and said it was like a fan, and another grasped its tail and said it was like a snake, a third rubbed its trunk and proclaimed it like bamboo. And so on and so forth. It's how he felt about his life, about Gold Mountain, like one of those blind men finding an elephant but not knowing what he held.

And yet, looking out across the roadstead to the famous gap of the Golden Gate, Ling resisted being driven out. If what distinguished the Chinese from the rest was that they didn't mean to stay, well then, some of them
must
stay, and why shouldn't he be one? Him and all the whores, he thought, summoning up Little Sister for the first time in years.
They
couldn't go home for shame, but if he did, he'd still be Tanka or Eurasian, the stains he'd hoped to wash away with wealth. On Gold Mountain, at least, they were all simply Chinese.

It reminded him of a dirty version of the old story told to him by a whore—maybe Little Sister herself, though after so much time and so many whores he couldn't be sure. He'd met her again, years later, alive and well, if more ample than before, madam of her own establishment, albeit one in a dusty backwater he passed through on one of his bone-gathering trips.

He hadn't known her at first. She was in a Western dress, dark watered silk and flounced crinoline—very seemly, if a little dated. He recalled Mrs. Crocker in similar styles, and when the woman called him by name he'd had the odd thought at first that it was her, his former mistress. And then he'd recognized Little Sister's wanton grin.

“Well, if I ain't seen the elephant!” she'd exclaimed. He'd been tempted to turn on his heel, look behind him. She meant him, of course, and yet he wanted to deny it, as if it were an accusation. She held him at arm's length to study him—he could feel the dirt under his nails, in the seams of his clothes and flesh—and then embraced him, and even though he knew she pitied him, it felt as if she'd lifted a yoke from his shoulders.

She was calling herself Madame Celeste these days and partnered with a robust old highbinder who went by the name of Sam Gum—a play on Gum Shan—though whether he had chosen the name or had it bestowed upon him, Ling never knew. He reveled in it, though, styling himself Missa Gold in expansive moods, though he was certainly called other names by those he beat at the poker table in the corner of the brothel. He reveled in those too, though as if they were so many laurels, going so far in latter days, after the fame of Bret Harte's poem “The Heathen Chinee,” about a couple of whites gulled by a Chinese gambler, as to call his place the Heathen Café. The poem's fame, despite the dim light in which it showed his kind, brought him customers by the bushel, though he was sure to sit down to the table in only a vest, his arms bare to the shoulders, so no man could accuse him of cheating like the Chink in the poem, the cards secreted in the folds of his voluminous sleeves.

And through it all he kept winning—not always, but often and steadily. Ling had stayed for a few days, scouting the tracks in and out of town for bodies, so he had a chance to observe him most evenings and overhear the gossip about him. Many were the theories as to how Ah Sam managed it. Cheating was ascribed to him—strategically placed mirrors on the walls, the collusion of waiters and the hurdy-gurdy dancers twirling across the floor—but he was always willing to change his seat, to sit with his back to the dance floor or bar. Some suggested that such was his Oriental inscrutability that he had a natural advantage in bluffing. Still others ascribed his success to sobriety, it being said that the bottle he swigged from at his elbow was filled with cold tea and not whiskey—a trick he may have learned from the hurdy girls, or learned them himself—which gave him another edge over most of his rivals. If appealed to directly, he would only say, “No trickee, no cheatee! Luckee!”

“He speaks perfectly good Melican,” Little Sister assured Ling, hawking into a spittoon. (She'd taken up chewing tobacco in the intervening years, as if to keep her aim in, though when he asked, she grimaced: “Takes away the taste of cum.”) “He just likes to Chink it up,” she noted. She wanted Ling to think well of him, he thought, and he was touched.

“At least he's luckier than poor Ng,” he told her, and she rolled her eyes.

In truth, Ling had already guessed it wasn't luck but the very opposite that served Sam so well. “Don't believe in fortune,” the gambler opined contemptuously after the suckers had cleared out. The two of them were having a drink together, Little Sister hovering sleepily. Sam seemed to need to explain himself, but Ling found he already liked the man, was happy for Little Sister. “Didn't I put in my years scratching around the mother lode?” Sam asked. He'd not struck it rich there, and he knew moreover from bitter experience what a Chinaman's chance meant—none at all. He'd been run off claims, he'd seen his fellow Celestials gunned down for sport. (The story sounded so much like Ng's that Ling wondered if he'd cribbed it from Little Sister, or if the similarity had drawn her to him.)

“You know we can't testify against devils in law?” Ling nodded. “Best thing that ever happened,” Sam grunted.

“How d'you figure?”

“Chinese can't testify, devil reckons he can do anything bad—whoring, dope, drink, gamble—around Chinese. He feels easy here! Good for business.”

“I guess so.”

“And, no, I don't believe in luck,” Sam declared, banging his glass onto the table. And that was his edge when playing men—white men—who to a soul cherished, like a hand cupped around a flickering candle, a belief in it. Hadn't they come out West on the basis of it? These men were quintessential Americans, believers in the main chance, certain they deserved better than their lot, that the world, the earth, owed them its treasures. (Ling thought those men believed in something else too—their superiority to a Chinaman—but he nodded along.) Such men, on aggregate, Sam was saying, stayed in a hand past their time, hoping, hoping, always hoping for the right card, or at least the wrong one for their opponent. “But I don't believe in such stuff,” he asserted with a belligerent little puff of his chest. He bet on the cards he had, not the ones he wished for. That's what the West had taught
him.
“My candle went out long ago, but I can see all the better in the dark for want of it.”

“He doesn't believe in love either.” Little Sister smiled ruefully when the gambler had scraped his winnings into his hat and taken himself off to bed. “No more than I. It's why we get along so tolerably well. A gambler who doesn't believe in luck and a whore who doesn't believe in love. It's the secret of our success!” She looked at him shrewdly. “And what about you, bone scraper, do you believe in the afterlife?”

He shook his head slowly. “I've no ancestors, no descendants. I've no use for an afterlife.”

“Well, good for you!” She raised her glass. “All those credulous fools dreaming of going home even when they're dead, paying good money for the privilege. Money that could get them fucked in this life if they spent it wisely. Oh, I know, they think women have no souls. What a lonely afterlife for them! I have no soul, so I make the most of my life here and now. Besides, who's to say the soul resides in bones? Why not in the flesh? Any whore might tell you that.”

“But what
do
you believe in?” he asked her.

“Gold!” She grinned crookedly. “Still gold. I'm faithful! And you?”

“I believe,” he sighed, “you were pregnant. I didn't want to at first.”

He stared at her steadily until she met his eyes.

“Were you?”

“But you never came looking for me!”

“I heard you were dead. Besides, I never knew your name.”

“Sure you did.”

“Your real name.”

“Mei Mei, Little Sister. That's the name he gave me, even though I was the eldest.”

Ling stared at her.

“I guess he wanted to honor her.”

He nodded slowly.

“You didn't answer my question, though.”

“Oh, who can remember? Who wants to? All the pregnancies and miscarriages, stillbirths, and worse.”

“I'm sorry.”

She shrugged. “Some live.” She gestured toward a girl sleeping on the bar. “My eldest. Goldie, they call her, though I named her Jin, on account her cradle was an old prospector's rocker. Her sister is around here someplace too.” She smiled wanly. “How do you think I started my own business?”

He took a drink, shuddered only a little as he swallowed.

“They're half?” he asked while she poured him another, and she nodded.

“But
their
children will be more white than not. They'll be something. Storekeepers. Teachers!”

They were silent for a long time. He laid his hand on hers, and after a moment she turned it over, squeezed his back. She rose and pulled him up from the table.

“No charge,” she whispered.

“Now
I've
seen the elephant.”

She set her hands on her hips. “What are you suggesting?”

“I meant the money,” he said hastily, but she winked.

“I know what you mean. Just don't go telling everyone. Bad for business, lah. Besides, Ah Sam wouldn't like it.”

“He's jealous.”

“Not so long as there's gold involved.”

“I won't tell a soul,” he promised, and she grinned.

“They'd never believe you anyway.”

He had been joking, but as he watched her disrobe, he wondered if he hadn't really seen the elephant, seen it years ago, that first morning at Ng's as she knelt in the tub to bathe.

When she was naked she stretched out a hand to caress his cheek and reach for his neck, not to pull him close for a kiss, as he thought, but to slowly draw his queue forth from his collar and smooth it over his shoulder.

Afterward, in bed, as he licked the taste of her tobacco off his lips, she told him her version of the elephant story.

The beast, in her variant, is approached not by blind men but by blind women. “One grabs his tail,” Little Sister said, making a gesture with her fist, “another his trunk. Ah, an elephant is like a penis, the first cries. And the second says, I'm keeping this elephant!” And they cupped their hands to each other's mouth to catch their laughter as if it were spit.

 

II

The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then.

Life is dull without it.

—
Pearl S. Buck

RIVETING

In 1926, after the first spadeful of earth was turned with a golden shovel, she had the honor of driving the first rivet for Grauman's Chinese Theatre. She'd starred alongside one of the theater's backers, Douglas Fairbanks, in
The Thief of Bagdad
two years earlier. In yellowing press clippings she can be seen posing for photographers with a ball-peen hammer perched jauntily on her shoulder as if it were a golf club or parasol (though after she struck the first symbolic blows—“Chink, chink,” some card joked—a worker with a pneumatic hammer moved in to finish the job). The next day the caption in
Variety
called her a “riveting beauty.” She was twenty-one years old.

 

FIFTY MILLION FRENCHMEN

In Yokohama the newspapers catch up with their ship, with a juicy bit of Hollywood gossip. It's 1935. Clark Gable's
Parnell
is a bust, except in China of all places, and Carole Lombard has had some fun dropping fliers from a biplane over the MGM lot saying, “Fifty Million Chinese Can't Be Wrong!” a reference to the Broadway smash of ten years earlier,
Fifty Million Frenchmen,
and its hit song.

It's a coup. “Typical Carole,” she observes over the rim of her highball when people ask, though she envies Lombard her wit, and Gable a lover to make light of humiliation. If only she'd had someone. If only she'd thought to fly a plane over the studio. And what would she have dropped? A bomb, probably.