California Gold

by John Jakes

  A yellow-and-red sign on the booth said fare 15¢. Mack saw the agent in the booth eyeing him, and he turned around and walked the other way, fighting to curb his rising impatience. For an hour he drifted through a commercial section along Railroad Avenue, the western extension of Seventh Street. Then he returned to the mole. Another ferry was departing with hoots of its whistle and chugging of engines. A different man was on duty in the booth, a weak-sighted man with thick silver spectacles.

  Mack waited, making an effort to be inconspicuous. The next incoming ferry, Contra Costa, docked ten minutes later. She unloaded passengers and prepared to depart again. He waited until the last boarding call, and then darted past the booth while the man inside was squinting to count his receipts.

  Brawny sunburned young men secured ropes across the open end of the ferry while others on the wharf uncleated the lines and tossed them aboard. With a fanfare of whistles, Contra Costa chugged out of the slip. Mack brushed by a stout woman who looked at him as if she feared rape, and climbed to the upper deck, where he sank down on a bench at the bow. The wind was fierce up here, but still sweet with the sea scent. The light falling on San Francisco’s hills and buildings had a mellow, burnished quality unlike anything he had ever seen. Soon he noticed the ticket collector working his way through the crowd of passengers on the upper deck. Mack held fast to his bundled possessions, screwing up his nerve.

  “Ticket,” said the little rabbit of a man, his brushy mustache fairly trembling with authority.

  “Look here, I don’t have one. No money. But I have to get across, because—”

  The ticket man turned away with a bored air. “Mix! Portugee!” he called down a companionway. “Another free rider up here.”

  Mack clutched the rail. Below, the Bay folded back on both sides of the bow, foamy white, eminently dangerous. In Pennsylvania, he’d tried to learn to swim in an old quarry, but never really mastered it.

  Mix and Portugee were two of the sailors who manned the ferry. One, dark-haired and cheerily sinister, wore a gold ring in his right ear.

  “Damn you, let go,” Mack said, trying to shake them off as they hustled him downstairs. He didn’t resist too violently, because he didn’t want to reach the City beaten and bloody. The ferry was in midchannel. Prolong this a bit and he’d be across. “I tell you I can explain why—”

  “The Southern Pacific can’t put your stories in the bank, kid,” said the seaman with the earring. “No money for a ticket, you swim. It’s the rule.”

  The other one shot a bolt back and opened a gate in the port rail. Passengers watched the little scene with a mixture of curiosity and amusement.

  Mack yanked backward, alarmed. “You can’t do this. I’ll drown, I don’t know how to swi—”

  A boot against his backside turned the rest of it to a yell. He flew forward into space, the water rushing up at him. He struck, remembering at the last moment to dive his hand into his pocket and seize the guidebook and hold it over his head.

  Choking, kicking, he went down, his entire head underwater. He flailed his legs, and that took him back to the surface. Wake from the ferry crashed over him, spuming in his eyes, washing him with brackish water. He held the book high in the sunshine while something slimy brushed against his cheek. The silver eye of a dead fish regarded him. “Shit,” he groaned.

  On the ferry’s stern, behind the rope where the passengers boarded, a father traveling with two children gestured and argued with the ticket taker, protesting their treatment of Mack. It made no difference, though; the ferry Contra Costa plowed on toward the wedding-cake city, its whistle blast a mocking good-bye.

  He began to kick, treading water simply by instinct. Already he felt tired, heavy. He started to sink again and kicked harder. He’d gambled that they never threw stowaways overboard, but it was a bad wager. He was going to drown.

  He didn’t see the launch until it was practically upon him. He heard the stutter of its little steam engine, and that caused him to twist around, and there it was, squat in the water, its drab hull showing oozes of black caulk, its single mast minus a sail. At the wheel, frantically signaling to him, was a plump fellow in a quilted green coat from which the sleeves had been cut. The man was Chinese. He wore a black skullcap and a queue wound around his ears and pinned. He looked about thirty, uncommonly fat.

  “Hang on, mister, I will pick you up,” the Chinese man shouted in clear English. He throttled back almost to a standstill and brought the launch around. Mack saw Oriental characters on the transom, and the name Heavenly Dragon. The launch rolled and pitched in the chop, and the man lurched to the port rail. Above the engine’s noisy idle and the lap of the Bay, Mack heard him wheezing as he knelt and put down his fat hand.

  “Grab hold—throw your leg in.”

  Instead, Mack flung the guidebook in the boat. The man recoiled. “You crazy?”

  “Take care of that,” Mack yelled. He hooked his leg on the gunwale and seized the man’s hand. He found himself astonishingly weak, but somehow he made it, falling into the launch and landing on a fisherman’s net. He banged his head on a bucket full of oysters. The Chinese lurched back to the wheel; another SP ferry was passing on the way to Oakland.

  The wake rocked the launch, but the man kept his balance with surprising grace. He had a ready smile that pushed his plump cheeks up, lending him a genial air. Whipping the wheel around, he throttled the engine higher. “I saw them throw you off. I am Bao Kee. I fish these waters.”

  “My name’s Mack. I’d have drowned if you hadn’t come along…”

  The heaving of his middle told him he’d swallowed a lot more of the Bay than he thought. It looked prettier than it tasted. Wet and miserable, he dragged himself over the gunwale and puked. Bao Kee grinned and sent the launch bounding toward Oakland in a series of zigzags, much like a sailboat tacking.

  Bao lived in a hovel in a grim Chinese section just above the Inner Harbor near Webster and Eighth streets. The air in the crowded, crooked lanes smelled of cooking oil and something sickly sweet. Mack stripped to his drawers and hung up his soggy clothes while Bao lit a coal fire in an ancient James cookstove with a tin smoke pipe that was wired to a hole in the slat roof. Bao spread mats for them, unrolled a piece of oily paper, and picked up some small fish he proceeded to broil.

  “Sand dabs. Local fish. Very delicious.” He took off his cap and smoothed his glossy hair. At first Mack had thought him a cheerful but rather witless fellow. Now, noting the way Bao’s eyes missed nothing, he changed his mind.

  “You know your way around the Bay, I guess…”

  “Long time Californ’, as the old men say. I was born in this state.” Bao explained that the waters of the Bay sustained him in many ways. They yielded fish sold to the restaurants in the City, but he also netted shrimp that a middleman salted and packed for shipment to China, where it was considered a delicacy. Mack had never seen or eaten shellfish. Bao said many Americans considered shellfish to be the fare of barbarians.

  Mack told Bao where he’d come from and where he was going. Bao nodded agreeably. “I will take you over to the City when you want to go. No charge.”

  A cry in the lane drew them outside. An old Chinese man, matchwood-frail, pointed at a cart with one wheel sunk in a deep rut. The cart carried scavengers’ goods: rags, Oakland newspapers, chunks of rough paving block. A fat woman, evidently the old man’s wife, screeched protests in Chinese. She pantomimed trying to drag the cart from the rut, and was close to weeping.

  “She says it’s too heavy for him,” Bao called to Mack. He smiled, patted the elderly woman, and with a one-handed tog and a grunt, he freed the cart, which he then pushed down the lane to a nearby shanty, leaving the approving babble of men, women, children, and a few dogs in his wake. Mack once again changed his appraisal of the fisherman. He was obese but far from a weakling.

  In the hovel, Bao placed the broiled sand dabs on two tin plates, along with white rice cooked with bits of something black, and filled their
small ceramic cups with a strong, fruity wine. While he bustled around, Mack had a chance to study his home. Three irregular pieces of mirror hung on different walls. In a cigar box under the bunk were a collection of dice, playing cards, and hand-carved wooden dominoes with the spots burned in. A lacquered tray on a shelf held a ceramic dish, needles, a small oil lamp, and a long pipe with a ceramic bowl and ornamental ivory bands around the bamboo stem. Mack noticed a black glossy residue coating the lip of the bowl and the ivory mouthpiece.

  Bao, aware of Mack’s curiosity, took several large polished beads from the cigar box and scattered them on the mat in front of him. “Chu,” he said, pointing. “Counters. I like gambling. It’s a Chinese passion. It’s a gamble making a living on that Bay, too. Most white men hate us.” He shook his fist, imitating them. “ ‘Run run Chinamun!’ ”

  He invited Mack to seat himself on the mat, then, sitting down as well, he picked up a sand dab and bit it in half.

  “Have you always been a fisherman?”

  Bao shook his head. “I have had many jobs since I was a boy. I was number-one cook on a ranch near Modesto. I carried granite to build a winery in Napa. Scrubbed floors—polished boots—many things. Know what’s hardest job?” He dipped the wine cup at his visitor for emphasis. “Staying alive.”

  “They don’t want Chinese here at all, is that it?”

  “They want them for certain things. Certain things only.” He stated it flatly, but Mack saw the bitterness in his dark eyes. “California’s my home. I want no other. But Mr. Kearney over in Frisco, the friend of the laborer, he says, ‘The Chinese must go!’ So they are always passing laws. I can’t become a citizen. I can’t own property. I can’t even get a business license. If they put me in jail”—he struck his palm against his pinned-up queue—“the Pigtail Law says they can cut this off.” His mouth twisted. “Thus it is in Kum Saan.” He toasted Mack with the wine, and drank.

  “What’s that, Kum Saan?”

  “Gold Mountain. The men of Canton gave that name to California when they came over the seas in ’49. My father came then.”

  “Your pa was a prospector?”

  “Yes.”

  “So was mine.”

  “There was no gold waiting for my father, only hard times, and white men who feared we Celestials would work harder, and better. But my father was a man of determination. Religious—that too is Chinese. He drew strength from the invisible forces of life that flow through the universe. When he came down from the gold country empty-handed, he would not quit. He found work over in the City, making cigars. Many Chinese made cigars there. My father earned enough to bring a picture bride from home. I was born in this very town, Oakland. My mother did not like California. The hardship, the hatred …she lived but two years more.”

  He cast a long look at the pipe and other paraphernalia and then turned away with what seemed a visible regret. He picked up a last gob of gluey rice in his fingers and swallowed it, wiping his hands on his old black pants.

  “My father took me to the mountains, where he built the railroad for Cholly Crocker. I was small, fit only for menial work. But my father, nimble as a monkey, he was one of those who scaled the rock cliffs to plant the blasting charges. Many coolies fell in the gorges, or were blown to heaven by the nitro. My father missed death many times. It was not until 18 and 69, after the gold spike was driven and all of Crocker’s pets were scattering to the winds, that my father died. We were returning from the mountains to San Francisco. We tried to buy a supper in a little town along the San Joaquin, and some white men, very drunk, fell on my father and beat him. He lay nineteen days holding his belly, wasting away, bleeding inside, and then he died. I have made my way since,” Bao finished, without self-pity.

  “Seems there are a lot of ‘keep out’ signs posted in this state,” Mack said. “Those bastards on the ferry didn’t have to throw me overboard. Hell, I’d have paid back their stinking fifteen cents after I got a job.”

  “That is not the railroad’s way. They have what people call”—he had to struggle for the word—“monopoly. I have studied this octopus.” He held out both arms and wriggled his fingers.

  “Octopus?” Mack eyed the black bits in the last of his rice. “My God, did we eat…?”

  Bao laughed loudly. “No, no. Squid. Octopus—that’s the name for the railroad. I see it in the papers, I hear it from men on the docks. The railroad runs everything. They have the only trains, so they can charge whatever they wish for goods or passage. They own the coastal ships too, and the Bay ferry—even most of the dock space in Oakland.”

  He leaned forward. “I listen to what others say. Ordinary people with jobs in the City, they don’t like the high price of the ferry. A clever man could turn that fact to advantage. I have been pondering ways.”

  “Well, I wish you luck. From what I’ve seen so far, I don’t like that damn Southern Pacific line either.” Mack rose, stretched, and went over to feel his shirt on Bao’s corner clothesline. Almost dry. Out in the lane, someone plucked a stringed instrument that had a strange minor sound.

  Bao scraped their tin plates in a bucket, then applied the scraper to the iron sheet on which he’d grilled the fish. Mack noticed the scraper was a large oyster shell.

  “You eat those?”

  “I harvest them. When it is dark.”

  “What’s the matter with daylight?”

  A thin smile. “The oyster beds in the Bay are privately owned.”

  “Good God. Even under the water.” He picked up the guidebook, which had escaped damage except for a few water spots.

  “You come with me tomorrow night, I show you an oyster bed,” Bao said.

  “Would that be a trip for pleasure, or could you use some help?”

  “Yes, I could,” Bao nodded. “It would be wrong, though, if I did not tell you there might be danger.”

  Soberly, Mack regarded the fat Chinese, whom he decided he liked. “Fair warning, and thanks. I’ll still go.”

  “You could be a Celestial,” Bao said with a beaming grin. “You like gambling too.”

  The next night Bao Kee’s launch ran south in the Bay against an ebbing tide. The villages along both shores gleamed with fairy-tale lights. Mack relished the sweet open calm of the water, the panorama of stars and dimly seen hills. Bao followed a zigzag course through the Bay, which struck Mack as a waste of time. “No,” Bao said when asked about it, “the sha—the wicked spirits and evil influences that disrupt the flow of the life force—they travel always in straight lines. Straight lines are no good.”

  Mack smiled to himself. He’d never met someone like Kee—that was his first name, the fisherman had explained with great patience. In China the name of the family always preceded the given name. Whatever name he went by, he was a first-class mixture of practical business sense and religious tenets Mack would never understand. He truly liked the Celestial. He liked that term too.

  Bao throttled down; he was operating with a furled sail again tonight. Mack caught the strong odor of the oyster shoals and then he saw them, long and rough-surfaced, like miniature islands flanking what must be a fairly deep channel. Bao shut off the engine, then stood up, studying the shoals while the launch drifted.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Watchman. He drinks a lot. Sleeps a lot. Very lazy. Good men can’t be hired to work out here. I don’t see his light—the flow is with us tonight. Now take this.” He handed an oar to Mack. “Close in, the water’s very shallow.” Mack thrust the oar down into the muddy bottom and they slowly poled the launch ashore. Mack dragged the bow up while Bao dropped a small mushroom anchor. Then the Chinese man pulled some heavy leather sacks out of the bilges.

  “There—see?” Bao bobbed his head at a dark rectangle above the reeking beds. Mack read the sign with difficulty.

  FITZMORGAN OYSTER CO.

  PRIVATE PROPERTY

  ALL TRESPASSERS WILL BE

  SHOT

  Bao was breathing in that wheezy way
again. It was a symptom of excitement, maybe, or a problem caused by his weight. He tossed the leather sacks out and passed Mack a pair of greasy stiff gauntlets.

  “Do I need these?”

  “Yes. Cut your fingers to meat, otherwise.” Bao sounded both serious and urgent now; all the good-humored tolerance of the previous night was gone. He jabbed Mack’s ribs. “Be quick, be quick. There are sometimes other men here besides the watchman.”

  Mack’s neck prickled. He clambered from the boat and nearly fell. Maneuvering on a bed of oysters was another new experience. It was like walking on cleavers cocked at every conceivable angle.

  “What men?”

  Bao’s round cheeks worked upward but his smile was cold; in the starlight he resembled an ivory Buddha. “Oyster pirates. Like me. They do not like to share their pickings. No more talk now. Work.”

  He wheezed his way up the shoal, almost to the low summit, then bent over with a grunt and began snatching oysters and flinging them into a sack. Mack felt an increasing sense of danger, though there wasn’t another human being anywhere, only the lights on the Bay’s eastern shore, and a faint silvery gleam of mud exposed all around the shoal by low tide. Farther south, some big slow vessel, maybe a barge, worked northward. He was angry at Bao for not being more explicit about the risk.

  He started picking oysters. They were sharp and slippery and his left glove had rips in the fingers. In a matter of minutes he was cursing under his breath and bleeding from two cuts.

  When his sack was nearly full, he picked it up to move it and gasped at its weight. Bao’s thick silhouette bobbed up and down, up and down, his movements rhythmically punctuated by his grunts and wheezes. Mack was stunned to see that the Chinese man had already filled one sack, which stood by itself, and was working on a second.

  As Mack bent to start picking again, a firefly light winked in the corner of his eye. He straightened, and saw it wink again, perhaps half a mile down the shoal. His hands froze in the gauntlets.