California Gold

by John Jakes

  Mack tramped Main Street as the December sky lost its pale lemon hue and lowered like a slab of slate. How empty the street looked compared to that bright day in October. Most of the people abroad were residents. The clots of tourists outside the hotels and real estate offices were gone. He passed an agent’s storefront with its sign hanging crookedly, the chain broken at one end. It rattled to and fro in a rising wind. Whitewashed letters on the grime-coated window said for lease. At the SP depot he found the platform empty except for a baggage man. Cold rain began to fall, and Mack shivered, stepping along the platform to shelter, turning up the collar of his coat.

  Monday of the following week—two weeks before Christmas—he again returned from Los Angeles with no prospects. The gray weather had been unrelenting, but today the wind increased the discomfort, blowing in from the east. It was a strangely warm wind, full of grit, and howled down the canyons and raked across the hills, a breath of the high desert. It roiled and spun the dust along San Solaro’s deserted streets, flapping the canvas of the striped tent and making the stays whine. It tormented the ear and rubbed on the nerves.

  Mack sat on a wooden chair inside the yellow tent, wondering what to do. He’d come back at half past one and reported to Wyatt, who already had a bottle of wine open in his office. Wyatt wasn’t paying attention to his appearance anymore; he used his straight razor every four or five days at best. He’d said nothing in response to Mack’s terse report, only given him an accusing look and then started riffing through a ledger, muttering about expenses.

  The four musicians were playing a silent game of whist. Mrs. Brill, the woman in charge of the food, sat like a statue behind the trestle tables. Yesterday the leg of mutton had a purple-green cast. Today he could smell it. The wind caught one of the cheesecloth domes and sailed it away. Mack looked at her. She looked at him. Nobody moved.

  Suddenly Mrs. Brill’s eyes snapped wide, fixing on something outside. Mack turned to see Wyatt reel out of the dust clouds. His paper collar was attached only at one end, waving in the wind, and his shirttail hung out. He carried the expense ledger and some small envelopes.

  Just inside the tent, he stopped. “I’m letting the band go. You too, Mrs. Brill. I have your wages in these envelopes. One day’s pay.”

  Mack felt as though the earth had opened. Mrs. Brill burst into tears. The bandsmen dropped their cards and knocked over their instruments getting to their feet. The leader, the tuba player, a portly man with out-of-date burnside whiskers, ran over to Wyatt.

  “You gotta do better than one day’s pay and one day’s notice.”

  “No I don’t, Edelman, I can’t afford it.” He held out the envelopes. Edelman glared, refusing them, and Wyatt dropped four envelopes in the dirt. “Hell with you,” he muttered, and lurched on to Mrs. Brill, who took her envelope.

  Wyatt rummaged under one of the tables and pulled out a bottle of wine. The bald cornet player counted his money and waved the envelope angrily.

  “Listen here, Mr. Paul, us four had an agreement with you. Reg’lar work six days a week, till January first.”

  “Where the hell’s the corkscrew?” Wyatt said to Mrs. Brill.

  Still crying, she fumbled her hands over the table. “Here somewhere. Oh, I’m so upset—”

  Impatient, Wyatt broke the neck of the wine bottle against the central tent pole.

  “Mr. Paul, we had an agreement,” the cornetist repeated.

  Wyatt drank sloppily from the shattered bottle. “A verbal agreement,” he said after a few swallows. “Show me something in writing.”

  “I’ll show you something, you goddamn chiseler,” the cornetist yelled, bolting at him. Mack jumped in and wrestled him back.

  “Leon, talk to him,” Mack shouted to the leader, while the cornetist tried to pummel his stomach. Mack pressed the man’s forehead to hold him away. The bandsman was no match; Mack was much stronger, and soon had a tight grip on the man’s wrists. He didn’t admire Wyatt’s tactics, but fighting solved nothing.

  The cornetist stopped struggling and dropped his hands, deflated. Mack released him. Leon Edelman stumped back and forth, fretfully tugging his burnsides. Mack said, “Look, Leon, I always deal straight with you—”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “I can’t find prospects in town. That means no sales—no money. Wyatt’s right. We can’t meet expenses. The boom’s over.”

  The musicians were decent men, not brawlers; the cornetist swore and slumped back to his chair and Edelman settled his braided scarlet cap on his head. Wyatt was wandering around the tent with a glazed expression. Edelman glanced at him, then addressed Mack in a low voice.

  “Awright, Mr. Chance, but I gotta say this to you. You seem like a smart young fella. Honest too. So I don’t know what you’re doin’ wastin’ time with a lyin’ shyster like him. I could have told you there’s never gonna be a town here. This land is trash. He’s trash.”

  Mack stared at him, dismally thinking the bandsman was right. He’d known it almost since the first day, hadn’t he?

  Muttering recriminations and lugging their cases, the musicians were gone within five minutes, Mrs. Brill with them, still sobbing. Mack stood in the center of the empty tent, while Wyatt, at the western side, stared out, emptying the bottle. He hadn’t looked at those leaving, hadn’t offered so much as a word of thanks or good-bye.

  The tent poles creaked and the striped canvas gave off cracking pistol-shot sounds. Uprooted shrubs sailed by in clouds of dust. It seemed to Mack that the hot, dry wind was lifting away the soil of San Solaro before his eyes. He could believe the old bandsman. This was trash land…

  A clink of glass brought him around. Wyatt was groping in the wine crate.

  “Jesus, will you stop that?”

  The shout snapped Wyatt’s head up. His eyes weren’t innocent now; they were the eyes of some baleful beast. His beard showed black, heavy, a dirty growth. He wrinkled his nose like a sniffing dog, then suddenly lined the buffet table with both hands and threw it over.

  Cheesecloth domes sailed away and crocks and plates of stale food spilled and broke. “I’m not aware of any laws in California saying a man can’t drink whenever he goddamn pleases,” Wyatt screamed, swinging his fists from side to side like some demented preacher. “I’m not aware of any fucking laws like that.”

  “If there was a law, you sure as hell wouldn’t obey it,” Mack shouted back. The wind howled. Wyatt crouched and plucked out another bottle.

  “Look, this doesn’t help,” Mack said, struggling for calm, for patience. “This place is folding. The question is, what are we going to do to cut our losses?”

  “My losses. Mine,” Wyatt cried, thumping his shirt bosom. “What we’re going to do is forget about it. Just forget about it for a while.”

  He wandered from the tent and, blind to an overturned chair in his path, nearly fell over headfirst. Yelling obscenities, he picked up the chair in his free hand and hurled it high and far. The chair landed on a big cardboard sign skating along the ground, and the sign flapped noisily.

  “Forget it,” Wyatt said with a wave of his bottle. He spoke to the wind. Mack didn’t exist. Wyatt went into the depot and slammed the door. Then came the loud whack of the bolt shooting home.

  The next day Mack didn’t bother with the trip into town, instead riding Railroad to Newhall for supplies. At the post office he found a letter waiting from Nellie, a long one this time.

  Mr. Hearst had raised her salary, at the same time instructing her to surrender herself to an alleged ring of white slavers operating in the City. She was to pass herself off as an innocent new arrival from the remote Mount Shasta district. Nellie was elated at the opportunity to write another sensational exposé, and Mack knew better than to warn her of possible dangers.

  He didn’t see Wyatt that day. After dark, he lay in his tent, writing to Nellie. The wind still blew hard from the mountains, raiding the canvas and fluttering the flame of the lamp beside him.

  All I do is
break up his fights. What the devil am I doing for myself—except learning the wrong way to develop and sell a town—?

  “Mack?”

  The voice outside made him bolt up. Just as he identified the speaker, Carla lifted the flap and walked in.

  She wrinkled her nose at the cramped interior and the few shabby furnishings. Mack had taken off his shirt but had kept his trousers on, thank God. He combed his hair with his fingers.

  “I’m here because Wyatt and I arranged it last week. Where is he?”

  “Inside the depot, I suppose.”

  “Both doors are bolted. I called and called. I got no answer.”

  “Then he’s still sleeping it off. We had a bad day yesterday. He drank way too much. Again.”

  Disgusted, she sank down on a stool near the foot of the cot. She wore the white cambric riding outfit, but no gold scarf, her hair in disarray from the wind.

  Mack straightened the blanket, all too conscious of their isolation, the night. “Wyatt’s in bad shape, Carla. He’s fine when he closes a sale, but he hasn’t closed one since the day we celebrated. San Solaro is all but out of business. Your father may have to take the land when the corporation defaults on the loan.”

  “What loan?”

  He frowned. “The loan your father made to Wyatt. So he could buy this property.”

  “Papa’s never been near San Solaro.”

  “But Wyatt told me—”

  “Papa doesn’t know this place exists. Or Wyatt either. And I’m certainly not going to tell him.”

  Mack didn’t know what to think. Hours of the whining wind had worn away his nerves. He swore and strode past her, his bare feet scuffing up puffs of dust. Yanking up the tent flap, he saw nothing but blowing dust.

  “God, this wind could drive you crazy.”

  “You’re not the first one to say that. It’s the wind from the desert. The santan.”

  “The what?”

  “Santan. It starts in the mountains, but the desert sucks and burns all the moisture from it. That’s why it’s so hot and dry. Usually it doesn’t come this late in the year, but now and then it does. The Indians call it the wind of evil spirits. When it blows, people do terrible things. Sometimes they kill each other.”

  Mack looked into the Stygian dark, trying to plumb it with his eyes. He couldn’t see beyond the rolling dust. The wind sounds changed constantly, one moment a high keen, the next a moaning growl. Then he heard soft noises of movement behind him and suddenly felt Carla’s hands slip around him and press his bare belly.

  “But mostly, when the santan blows, people go out of control in other ways.” Her right hand began slowly moving in a small circle. She ground her breasts into his back, and then her hips.

  “All of us live with wild creatures inside. The santan lets them loose…”

  Her mouth pressed his shoulder blade, her tongue licking his flesh. He wanted to turn and take her, on the cot, on the floor, it didn’t matter so long as he had her. He hurt from wanting that. But he fought the need for the same reason he’d fought it before, and lifted her hands away when they dropped beneath his waistband.

  She stepped back.

  “San Solaro’s still Wyatt’s property,” he said. “So are you.”

  “When are you going to stop this stupid, priggish—”

  “Go home, Carla. Just go home.”

  He patted her shoulder but she wrenched away. He sighed and walked to the cot, missing the reaction on her face—anger, and then a steel determination.

  She started to say something sharp, but before she could, her eye fell on the crate he used as a bedside table. She snatched up T. Fowler Haines and pulled out the gold scarf.

  “This is mine. You saved it.”

  “What of it?”

  She crushed the silky material in her hand. “It means that your protests are just talk. It means you really want the same thing I want, and one day you’ll stop all your idiot prattle about respecting Wyatt’s rights. He hasn’t any rights. That’s simple enough. So is this: I want you and you want me. Here’s the proof.”

  She lifted the scarf and kissed it seductively. Her deep-blue eyes held his while her tongue tasted the fabric a moment. Then she laughed, a little laugh of victory, flinging the scarf on the mussed cot. He stood staring at it after the tent flap fell in place behind her. The santan howled like some wild beast baying in a cave.

  21

  THE SANTAN FLUNG DUST clouds through the streets of Los Angeles and Mack held tightly to his hat outside Southwood’s So-Cal agency. Boards nailed over the door said Swifty Southwood’s vacation in Vancouver was permanent.

  He trudged up toward the plaza. Christmas bunting and greens decorated the hotels and the windows of stores. In a season of hope, he searched for hope within himself and couldn’t find any. That had never happened before.

  He wasn’t a religious person. Not formally, anyway. He knew nothing of Catholicism. Still, almost unconsciously, he was led to the studded doors of the church on the plaza, Nuestra Señora la Reina. He sank down in a back row, rested his folded hands on the pew ahead, and gazed at the glittering altar, the candles in tiny red glasses, the melancholy Christ gazing down from the cross. He sat there more than an hour, a drab figure, noticed but not bothered by the elderly priests who walked through occasionally. He searched deep in himself for the hope that had always been there to lift and renew him in bad times.

  Presently the noise of the wind fell off outside, and the solitude and reassuring strength of this holy place restored him. Christmas without a home made a man feel a crushing loneliness, but he’d survive that, and he’d survive San Solaro, and move on. Moving on was imperative. There was no longer any doubt.

  Muted voices interrupted then, and a door squeaked open at the head of the left aisle. A priest in a white surplice shook hands with a man wearing a dark sheepman’s coat. The priest vanished through the door and the other man walked up the aisle toward the plaza entrance, carrying an old leather valise. Mack recognized the broad nose, heavy features, bull-like body, and scrambled from the pew.

  “Father Marquez.”

  “Mr. Chance. Que placer encontrarlo. Totally unexpected.” They stepped outside. The wind had calmed, and westward over the Pacific, evening light was breaking through rents in the clouds. The stocky priest had a fatigued look; he lacked the energy Mack remembered.

  “How long have you been in Los Angeles?” Mack asked.

  “One hour.”

  “Are you transferring here?”

  The priest shook his head. “There has been a bitter dispute between the owners of the three morning newspapers and their union typographers and printers. Because times are growing hard again, the owners want to cut wages ten or twenty percent. I understand there have been lockouts, and negotiated settlements on the Tribune and the Herald. But the Times men are still out. A strike may be a worthy and necessary endeavor, but it can’t fill the empty bellies of a family. The men will need encouragement.”

  “And you came for that?”

  “Yes.” Gravely, he added, “Without sanction by my superiors. Indeed, they expressed disapproval.”

  “Father…” Mack approached the subject hesitantly. “All three of the morning papers are still being published. I read the Times today.”

  “How can that be? The telegraph message I received said the printers were still out. I must go to headquarters—”

  “I have my wagon at a stable close by. Come along, I’ll drive you.”

  The wagon bumped south along Spring Street. Gaslights in stores and cottages made the dusk even more lonely. They passed an adobe with a candle-decked holiday tree in the window and heard a family lustily singing “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”

  “It has been a long while since we met in the jail in San Francisco.”

  “And a lot’s happened,” Mack replied.

  “Change rolls on like the sea. But some things—injustice, the greed of those who control property—they do not change.”
Marquez chuckled. “You perhaps understand why my reputation grows steadily worse within the Church, and my position more untenable.”

  “But you came here anyway.”

  “There is a call. One answers,” the priest said with a solemn shrug. “Actually, this is both duty and a holiday of sorts. When my family lost most of its grant lands, they managed to save the main building, the original heart of the rancho. I am its temporary custodian. When my only nephew, Gonsalvo, is grown, I am hoping he will marry and take the place over. Until then, it stands empty. It’s a beautiful spot, down the coast, overlooking the sea. I was going to hire a horse and have a look. Would you like to go along? I’d welcome the company.”

  Mack started to say no, then asked himself why. Wyatt spent all his time drinking. He’d been asleep when Mack left that morning to dutifully check the station and the hotels for prospects he knew he wouldn’t find. In the lonesome December dark, the priest’s invitation cheered him.

  “Yes, Father, I’d like to go. I have the time, and I’ve never seen one of the original ranchos.”

  “Please—not ‘Father’ any longer. Diego.”

  Mack grinned and shook hands on it.

  The small frame building on South Spring housed the Los Angeles local of the International Typographers’ Union. Half a dozen men were gathered in the office amid a litter of literature, handbills, and copies of the Times. There was a dispirited air about the printers, though they welcomed Marquez warmly.

  The priest shucked off his sheepman’s coat; underneath he wore a white shirt with his clerical collar. He pointed to a stained bandage on the head of one of the typesetters. “Is that a result of the trouble?”

  “Aye. Otis brung in some plug-uglies from San Diego and Sacramento. They’re scabbing for him. I got this from one of ’em. The scabs are the reason the Times is still being printed. ’Course, the colonel, he lauds ’em to heaven…”

  He gave Marquez a handbill. After scanning it, he passed it to Mack. The florid prose referred to the strikebreakers as “Liberty-loving immigrants. Pioneers of sound, selected stock, who vow to defeat the cancerous foreign-inspired plague of trade unionism.”