The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies

who had stepped out of the sharp shadows of the depot. Their words were drowned by the pecking echo of hammers, but each shook Crocker’s hand and bobbed his head emphatically at something the big man said, their nodding exaggerated by their collarless throats. Crocker turned and clambered back aboard, but one of the men had spotted Ling at the window, and as he watched the fellow pulled a face and gave a little caper. “Ching Chong, Chinaman, sitting on a rail,” he crooned. “Along comes a white man to chop off his tail!” A childish ditty, but this was a grown man. Beside him, his companion’s teeth were gritted, yellow as nuggets in his dark beard, and this more than the other’s prancing doggerel made Ling uneasy.
    Crocker barreled in, and when Ling looked again the pair had vanished, though whether back into the shade or elsewhere he couldn’t have said. The train was already shrugging to life again, the depot scarcely fallen behind before Crocker was snoring lustily once more. A smut from the smokestack had settled on his shirt front, Ling noted sorrowfully. He licked his finger, bent close to dab it away, vacillated. The train was trembling so much he’d only smear it. He made himself lean back, look away, let his eye follow the telegraph lines, swooping like swallows alongside the track.
    Past Cisco the ascent slowed. Brilliant flecks of snow flung against the windows like rice. Along the track Ling could see the muffled forms of men, bundled in quilted coats over their baggy homespun, sacks and scarves wrapped around their faces and hands. Some were trudging along the line, picks and shovels on their backs, bent against the wind as much as the weight of the tools; others sat on logs before oilcloth tents, hunched over smoky fires. One bent to scoop a handful of snow to his mouth, the crystals shining in his thin beard. Another knelt beside a stream of runoff tumbling alongside the roadbed, washing his hands, the water in the sunlight rippling and sparkling like a cascade of coins.
    As the train passed, the men’s heads rose for a second, so that when Ling looked back, their faces were like a wave, rising and then falling. And each face he saw was Chinese. He lost count of how many, and then he stopped counting, and then he stopped looking at all, sat back from the window in the shadows of the carriage, almost as dizzy as when he’d looked over Cape Horn. It was a long time since he’d been in the company of so many Chinese—he used to have his forehead shaved each week by a Chinatown barber, but since he’d lost his queue he’d let his hair grow in—and he found himself suddenly shy. And something else: ashamed to come before these men dressed like a dude, bathed, and well fed while they trudged through the smutty snow or bent over cooking pots, though what they might be eating he couldn’t guess. Crocker had had their supplies—the rice, dried cuttlefish, and smoked sausage shipped from China—stopped in Sacramento. “Even the opium and women,” he bragged to Ling, drawing a line across his throat.
    It made Ling think of Little Sister. Of course he’d had girls since, though never the same one twice, always wondering if he might find her again, always wounded not to. He’d heard by then “going to see the elephant” used as a euphemism for a visit to a brothel, an echo of something Little Sister had once told him. He even knew of a bawdyhouse called the Elephantine, the El for short, or sometimes simply Hell. Once in a humor half daring, half despairing—his escape from the anti-Chinese rally had endowed him with a reckless, magical faith in his new appearance—he’d even tried a ghost whore by the irresistible name of Miss Ellie. He got as far as her room in his Western clothes, with his hat low over his eyes, but when he took it off she balked. “I have the money,” he said, holding it out like a