The Fortunes Read Online Free PDF Page A

spongy and clotted. He dodged buggy drivers’ whips, not knowing if their cries of “Go on!” were meant for him or their animals. He wanted to explain that he was carrying ghost laundry, he was trying to keep it clean for them. He wanted to say that his father was a ghost. But he held his tongue—at least until he got back to the laundry.
    â€œMore dirt mountain than gold mountain,” he grumbled one night as he sorted the rancid washing into piles. He knew he needed the job, at least until he had saved the price of a pick and a pan, but that might take months on his paltry wage, and his patience was wearing thin. The closest he’d come to the diggings so far was the occasional miner who paid for his laundry with a pinch of dust.
    â€œWhat you think prospecting is?” Ng chuckled as he ironed. He didn’t trust anyone else with the finest linens and lace. “Ankle-deep in a cold stream, bent over like a paddy farmer, washing more dirt. At least
we
use warm water!” He had won at “heaven-and-nine” the night before and was still in an expansive mood.
    Ng had “seen the elephant,” as the old-timers liked to say, meaning he’d seen it all, everything the mother lode had to offer. He’d been an original forty-niner, made a small fortune at placer mining near Youbet and (appropriately enough) lost it at fan-tan, made another and learned his lesson only so far as to lose it at poker (the whites had barred his entry to the saloon at first, “But once I had some gold about me they became more sociable”). By then the easy pickings were played out and the Chinese were being driven out, pushed off claims at gunpoint or by ruinous foreign miner taxes, likewise often collected at gunpoint. Ng had seen one dead Chinaman shot in the back, “the end of his queue dipped in blood like a brush in ink.” He frowned at the recollection, his middle eye beady with rage. Others, Ling had heard, had been lynched with their own queues.
    â€œIf 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.”
    â€œGold 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!”
    â€œHow?” 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.
    â€œTen dollars?” Ling cried in disbelief.
    â€œYes! Back then