The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies Read Free Book Online

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!”
    Â 
    5.
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    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.
    â€œObliged,” 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