Railroad

by Graham Masterton

  Collis didn’t answer, but sat in silence for almost a minute, his elbow resting on the table.

  ‘Have you ever told Charles any of this?’ asked Collis.

  Wang-Pu shook his head.

  ‘I don’t understand why you haven’t,’ said Collis. ‘And most of all, I don’t understand why you’re telling me.’

  ‘Your fortune is tied up with Charles, but your fortune is greater than Charles,’ said Wang-Pu.

  ‘What does that mean?’ asked Collis.

  ‘You are driven by something greater than yourself,’ Wang-Pu told him. ‘You also have sensitivities inside of yourself that are deep, although they are unresolved, and it is to those deep sensitivities that I have been addressing myself. You are a man who can understand the fears of others, as well as your own fears, and that is what will make you great.’

  ‘What are you – some kind of a clairvoyant?’ asked Collis.

  Wang-Pu raised his hand in a quiet gesture of acknowledgment. ‘Everybody in California is a clairvoyant. This is the territory from which there is no going back. Only forward. We have learned, over the years, to look only in that direction.’

  ‘I still don’t understand why you’re talking to me this way. You don’t talk to Andy Hunt this way, do you?’

  ‘I tried. But he is not a responsive man, in that respect. In the end, I had to make a joke of what I had told him, and pretend that I had been quoting Confucius. What I have to tell you, though, is something different.’

  Collis said nothing, but leaned back in his chair, waiting for Wang-Pu to speak. Wang-Pu poured the remaining four or five fingers of whisky into the glasses in front of them. ‘If you really want to build a railroad, Mr Edmonds, then consider the Chinese for your labourers.’

  Collis rubbed his chin with his hand. There was an odd pause, then he sat up a little, lacing his fingers together. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you don’t mind my saying so, and this is speaking theoretically, it seems to me that the Chinese aren’t exactly heavyweights, as a race. I always thought the best railroad labourers were Irish, or Polish. Big muscular fellows.’

  ‘Maybe it seems that way.’ Wang-Pu smiled. ‘But you must think of the numerous advantages of the Chinese character. The Chinese are industrious in a way which makes the hardest-working Occidental appear positively sluggardly. Their attitude to work is historical. They have a thousand-year heritage of cultivating rice fields of untold acreage, and of coping almost yearly with tragic and disastrous floods, on the Yangtze and the Hwang Ho. We may not be physical giants. But we have a persistence against which not even the Sierra Nevada can stand.’

  ‘You seem pretty sure that I’m going to build this railroad,’ said Collis. ‘In fact, you seem a damned sight surer than I am.’

  ‘You forget that I’ve already met Theodore Jones. I think I know what effect his technical expertise and your aura of destiny will have upon each other. Theodore Jones has the mechanical vision. You, from what I have observed, have the historical vision. Together, you will have both the competence and the inspiration to plan this railroad, and it is my humble suggestion that when that time comes, the Chinese people might be the ideal instrument for constructing it.’

  ‘What’s your interest?’ asked Collis, a little too sharply.

  Wang-Pu smiled again, as if to say that Collis was being predictably Western. ‘My interest,’ he said, ‘is also in business. If you wish to summon Chinese labourers to this task, when it reaches fruitfulness, then I shall recruit them for you, and manage them for you. I am well known on Tong Yan Gai, which is what we call Sacramento Street. I will do it in exchange for reasonable moneys, and in exchange for being part of your destiny.’

  Collis felt curiously disturbed. ‘I’m not magic, you know,’ he told Wang-Pu.

  Wang-Pu sipped his drink. ‘I know, Mr Edmonds. But you are one of those we call “fabled.” One of those people who are selected by fate to fulfil a certain role in the history of the world. You are a hinge, if you understand me, upon which the future of this nation will hang.’

  ‘I think you’re flattering me. I’m broke. I’m an apprentice merchant, that’s all.’

  ‘Nevertheless, you are the perfect candidate.’

  ‘You have an unnerving command of English, for a Chinese.’

  ‘You have a very dull sense of your own importance, for an aristocrat.’

  Collis abruptly laughed, and Wang-Pu laughed too, a high-pitched giggle that set Collis laughing even harder. It took them all of three or four minutes to recover, and then they sat there wiping their eyes with their handkerchiefs, and still letting out occasional chuckles.

  ‘I never knew the Chinese had a sense of humour,’ said Collis. ‘You always struck me as dour.’

  ‘It isn’t a Western sense of humour,’ Wang-Pu told him. ‘But we take great pleasure in laughing.’ He wiped his eyes again, and tucked away his handkerchief. Then he took out his gold pocket watch and examined it.

  ‘Time for my medication,’ he said. ‘You’ll excuse me a moment, won’t you?’

  ‘You’re not suffering from anything serious, I hope?’ asked Collis.

  ‘An ulcer. I have to treat it three times a day.’

  ‘You take kaolin?’

  Wang-Pu smiled. ‘I am Chinese, Mr Edmonds. I take the traditional Chinese cure.’

  Wang-Pu opened a worn brown leather case that was lying propped against the legs of his chair. He bent over and reached inside, and produced a dark-red lacquered box, with gold paintings of Chinese trees on it. The box appeared to be ventilated with leaf-shaped air holes, and when Wang-Pu set it on the saloon table and opened the lid, Collis could see why.

  Inside, the box was divided into compartments. In one compartment, there was a flat saucer of thin porcelain. In the second was a glass-stoppered bottle of dark liquid. And in the third, nestling in white cotton, were three baby mice, pink and hairless, but wriggling with life.

  Collis looked at Wang-Pu uneasily. But Wang-Pu simply continued to smile, and set out the saucer on the table. He poured a little of the dark liquid into it, and then took up one of the baby mice by the tail, and dipped it into the liquid as if he were coating a quenelle with egg yolk.

  ‘This is soya sauce,’ explained Wang-Pu. ‘It isn’t medicinally necessary, but it gives the mouse some flavour.’

  ‘Flavour?’ asked Collis in disbelief; but before he could say anything else, Wang-Pu had tipped back his head, raised the squirming mouse to his open mouth, and dropped it down his throat. The Chinaman gave a hefty swallow, and the little creature was evidently gone.

  Collis, alarmed said, ‘I don’t really see what benefit that’s supposed to afford you.’

  Wang-Pu shrugged. ‘The mouse bursts inside the stomach, and its warm blood bathes the ulcer. That is the theory, in any event.’

  Collis waited for the Chinaman to say something else, but he didn’t. Wang-Pu simple took anoher sip of whisky, put away his medicine case, and sat back to watch the shores of Solana pass them by, a dry-baked, desolate land, where birds turned and drifted like leaves on a still summer pond.

  Collis was dozing in his chair as the steamer docked at Sacramento. It was early evening. He opened his eyes to see a tree-lined riverbank, and beyond, through a hallucinatory ripple of heat, a small town of flat-fronted houses and stores and saloons, neatly laid out in squares. The wood and adobe walls of the buildings were lit by sinking sunlight under a sky that was still stunningly blue. In the far distance, beyond the squarish outlines of the state capitol building and the cluttered rooftops downtown, across a wide purplish wilderness of trees and empty land, Collis could see the far, entrancing peaks of the Sierra Nevada. He straightened his hat, brushed his sleeves, and then stood up and went to the steamer’s rail.

  There were several steamers and small cutters docked along the river’s edge, and the water was clustered with lighters taking goods and passengers ashore from the ships anchored out in midstream. Their oars dipped into the sun-gilded riv
er and made criss-cross patterns of dazzling light.

  Charles came up from astern, his face redder than usual, and hooked his thumbs into his vest. ‘Well, Collis,’ he said, ‘I’ve brought you home, then.’

  Collis nodded. There was a smell of dust and chaparral on the breeze. By the river’s edge, a congregation of carts and Conestoga wagons had collected, and a group of men in plaid shirts and blue work pants were smoking pipes and watching the steamer tie up. On the foredeck, a man with a high, hoarse voice was playing the accordion, and singing, ‘Oh, I remember well, the lies they used to tell, of gold so bright it hurt the sight, and made the miners yell.’

  To the north, around a small promontory, and under a wide wooden bridge, lay the flooded land called Sutter’s Slough. To the south, about a mile away, behind a stretch of trees, there was a plume of black smoke rising, slow and thick, and leaning slightly to the east.

  ‘That’s where the Sacramento Valley Railroad comes in from Folsom,’ remarked Charles. ‘I’ll take you down to see Colonel Wilson in a day or so, unless he calls by the store beforehand.’

  Collis eyed the distance between the plume of smoke and the faraway foothills. He had always known that the West was open, and almost endless, but to arrive here in Sacramento on a hot afternoon and see miles and miles of flat valley floor was almost enough to make him doubt his ability to build a branch line from one side of the city to the other, let alone a transcontinental railroad.

  ‘I never guessed,’ he said quietly.

  ‘You never guessed what?’ asked Charles, pleased to be back.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Collis. ‘The distance, I suppose.’

  ‘The distance?’ said Charles, almost as if he had invented the whole idea of distance. ‘Well, that’s what California’s all about. Valleys, and mountains, and wide-open spaces. It’s a place you can breathe in.’

  From the riverbank they heard a baritone voice come out with a loud ‘Halloo,’ and there on the roadway stood a tall, whiskery man in a buttoned-up morning coat; a man with a dark, Scottish-looking countenance, as if every angle of his face had been chipped out with a broken flint, and a chest that filled his coat as deeply as an oil barrel. He was standing by a small varnished surrey, in which two chestnut horses were harnessed, but it looked as if he were as capable of carrying them, the surrey and the horses, as they were of carrying him.

  ‘That’s my partner, Leland McCormick,’ said Charles, and waved to the riverbank with both arms. McCormick waved back, and raised his hat.

  ‘I got the barbed wire!’ shouted Charles. ‘Enough to fence off the whole of Northern California!’

  ‘Did you get the stoveblack?’ McCormick called back.

  ‘Enough for everyone in the whole damned city to make up in blackface!’ Charles told him.

  McCormick guffawed. A few feet away, on deck, Billy the coachman gave a sour grin. But then the gangplank was let down to the riverbank with a hollow bang and a cloud of dry dust, and it was time to disembark.

  They shook hands with Leland McCormick as they stepped on to the warm, hard-baked shore, and Collis was introduced.

  ‘How’s Andrew?’ asked Leland. ‘Still doing well with his food wholesale business?’

  ‘Short on storage space, mostly,’ replied Charles, as they climbed aboard the surrey. ‘But he’s lent me one of his rented warehouses for three hundred tons of Australian coal, provided I wash it out afterwards, and he’s even found a corner for young Collis’s first business venture.’

  McCormick turned to make sure that all their trunks were aboard. Billy and Wang-Pu were making their own arrangements to ride to Charles’s store on a hired wagon. There was probably enough room for them in the surrey, but Collis had the strong impression that neither Charles nor Leland was the kind of man, in Sacramento at least, to have servants riding along with him. Leland in particular. He seemed ponderous, and humourless, and permanently conscious of his dignity.

  ‘Your first business venture?’ he asked Collis, with a trace of a Scots accent. There was something his voice which made Collis feel that he was being patronised. Something, too, in the way Leland’s dark, deep-set eyes never quite looked at Collis straight, but always appeared to be fixed on something more interesting, like his horses’ ears, or a passing Chinaman in a coolie hat. They passed Wildmore & Glazier’s store, and Stanton’s Chop House, and then they rattled over the rutted thoroughfare to the end of K Street and turned east.

  Collis took out a cheroot, bracing his feet against the floor of the surrey as he cupped his hands around the tip and lit it. He glanced as he did so at Leland’s hands on the reins, with heavy, masculine gold rings on three fingers. Leland smelled of somebody’s French cologne, but not offensively. Just enough to make anyone who had been travelling all day feel that he might smell of sweat.

  ‘I had a tip that a cargo of blankets was due into San Francisco on the Aria,’ Collis said, at length. ‘I rowed out before she anchored and bought the lot.’

  ‘Blankets?’ queried Leland.

  ‘I’ll sell them readily enough when the winter begins to bite,’ said Collis.

  Charles laughed. ‘It was all Arthur Teach’s idea, originally,’ he told Leland, with enormous good humour. ‘But poor Teach made the mistake of telling Collis, and boasting about it, and before we knew it Collis had rowed out into the Bay and bought them right under Teach’s nose. I would have given a five-dollar piece to have seen Teach’s face when the Aria’s lighters came ashore and told him the blankets were all bought. I saw him later, at Barry & Patten’s saloon, and he was ready to have Collis strung up from the Vigilance Committee’s upstairs rooms like Casey and Cora.’

  ‘Not seriously, I trust?’ asked Leland.

  ‘Not seriously,’ said Collis.

  Leland sniffed. ‘I never know with San Francisco. The only way you can tell San Franciscans from savages is by their fancy clothes and their bread-crumbed oysters.’

  Collis looked around K Street as they drove along. He could have remarked that it appeared, on first sight, to be a great deal more primitive than San Francisco, with the admitted exception of Sydney Town, between Kearny and Sansome north of Broadway, that fearsome collection of sheds and tents and rough saloons that greeted all those who disembarked for the first time in San Francisco. But San Francisco had its brick banks and its iron boardinghouses and its fireproof theatres, as well as its occasional marble frontage and its decorative offices and civic institutions; Sacramento appeared to be constructed very largely out of wood and brown mud.

  The largest and most prosperous-looking row of buildings in sight were those along the north side of K Street. In particular, there was a hardware store, No. 54, with a front veranda, and handsome upstairs windows. It was only when they began to draw close, and Leland McCormick slowed the horses, that Collis could see the signs that were hung on the front of the store, in lavish serif script: ‘Tucker & McCormick, Hardware,’ and beneath that, ‘Rubber Hose, Belting, Powder, Fuse, Rope, Blocks, Pitch, Tar & C.’

  ‘Well,’ said Collis, remaining in his seat in the surrey as Leland climbed down and tied the horses to one of the veranda posts, ‘it seems that you have done great things for yourselves.’

  Leland almost raised his eyes, but not quite far enough to look Collis straight in the face. ‘We’ve built this up through good practice, prayer, and years of personal industry,’ he said. Then he turned to Charles. ‘You must come upstairs. Jane has been preparing a special dinner for you. She knows how much you like poultry.’

  Collis felt as if he had been firmly put in his place. He paused for a moment, feeling the muscles in his cheeks tighten, but then he tossed his half-burned cheroot aside and stepped down to the street. If he wanted to make his fortune in California, then he was going to have to enlist the sympathies of men like Charles and Leland, and their friendship, no matter how they treated him. He followed them past barrels of tar and coils of rope into the shadows of the veranda, and then through the store itself,
to the stairs at the back.

  The store was gloomy and smelled of grease, hemp, and kerosene. There were stacks of rope, hairy and pungent, that reached almost to the cream-painted ceiling, and rolls of woven wire fencing, ten cents a rod. There were double-cap steel roofing, chain pump tubing, wagon scales, and force pumps. To Collis, who had never been into a hardware store before, the emporium of Tucker & McCormick seemed to be crowded with the most extraordinary and eccentric devices, mostly constructed of drop-forged iron or dull-polished steel, with hooks and springs and valves and odd attachments whose arcane purposes could only be guessed at. He began to wonder if he would be able to understand the hardware business at all, especially when Leland remarked to Charles as they filed their way past a stack of boxes, ‘I’m running short on Hancock inspirators.’

  They reached the door to the stairs, and Leland ushered them up. It was carpeted here, and there was an aroma of roasting chicken. They emerged in the hallway of a set of apartments, quite comfortably furnished with plain mahogany bureaus and upright chairs, and well equipped with jardinières and planters, from which ferns and aspidistras sprouted with all the clamourous health of a family of young children. They went through into a living-room, whose windows gave out on to a wide balcony and the dusty street below; and it was here, on a tapestry-covered davenport, that a small, big-nosed woman sat, in a gown of black watered silk with a white lace collar. Her hair was brushed flat and black on to her head, and two huge garnet earrings hung from her fleshy earlobes. Her eyes were bulbous and sorrowful. She stroked, or rather rubbed, as if it were a persistent stain on her skirts, a diminutive dachshund which sat in her lap.