The Fortunes Read Online Free PDF Page B

off demons or bring luck, as all the caps were supposed to, but because
elephant
sounded the same as
sign,
or
things to come,
even if he couldn’t guess what.
    It was just an expression, of course, but he couldn’t help picturing an actual elephant—he’d seen a daguerreotype of one in a newspaper—at the end of the trail, its soft leathery bulk rising before him like a cliff. It seemed at once more wondrous and more tangible than gold. And what would it feel like to ride one?
    He pictured the great beast approaching, kneeling heavily for him to mount, and carrying him, swaying, away, stepping over mountain ranges and even the ocean, which it drained with its trunk to wade while ships steamed around its knees, their funnels just clearing its drooping belly. It carried him home, of course, plucking him from its back with its trunk and depositing him gently on the ground, then daintily backing out of the light to reveal his old home and family—Big Uncle, even Aunty Bao, marveling at his triumphant return—from its vast shadow.
    â€œWhat are you smiling about?” Little Sister asked him, and when he told her she smirked lewdly, drew his queue forward over his shoulder, smoothed it down his front, batting it gently so it swung before him. “Oh, I’ve seen my share of elephants,” she breathed.
    â€œHave you no shame?” he snapped, and she told him coldly, “‘Gold is gold.’ You’d know if you ever made any.”
    I have money!
he wanted to call after her when she turned away.
    He knew what she cost—
two bit touchee, four bit fuckee,
she crooned into the night—less than a clean shirt. “Less than a clean pair of drawers,” as she put it herself. “Not that many of them
have
a clean pair of drawers” (or any drawers at all, as Ling knew, most considering their long shirttails sufficient underclothes).
    He traced the circles carved into the counter with his fingertip.
    Since his first payday, he had had coins of that size jangling in his pocket, and when he held them in his hand, growing warm from his flesh, they seemed filled with possibility.
    That evening he approached her door again, the glimmering window in it. But as he did so he felt a hand on his shoulder.
    â€œâ€™Cuse me, John. You comin’ or goin’?”
    Ling stared at the hand—a prospector’s, by the dark sickles of dirt under the nails. He didn’t dare speak, just stumbled back as the other brushed past him and pressed his face to the hatch.
    â€œEvenin’, missy. You dancin’?”
    Ling heard the bolt drag back, and the door swung wide, light opening like a fan into the alley. The fellow smoothed the tips of his mustache with thumb and forefinger, then stepped inside, and the fan folded shut. A moment later the shutter snapped closed and the alley was completely dark, but even in the blackness Ling could see the afterimage of the ghost’s face, pale above the brambles of his beard, glowing in the dusk.
    He stalked the streets past other cribs, some with girls beckoning listlessly from their windows, but he shied away, veering into the street out of their faint light.
    It was very late when he finally returned. Her lamp out, the stove cold, ash piled softly in the grate. Soon it would be time to scrape it out, run water through it to make lye. But first he slept . . . and dreamt of the elephant. In the streets, forced off the boardwalk, he was obliged to dodge not only piles of horseshit but the animals themselves, the clods of mud thrown up by their hooves and the flick of their reeking, flailing tails. Once one had farted in front of him so loudly that Ling reared back and lost his hat, which looked for all the world as if it had been blown off by the horse. But an elephant might trample such horses, and the whites, laughing or indifferent, who spurred them past him on the street. An elephant, he figured, might just shit