California Gold

by John Jakes

  “Johnson. Fella from town said yesterday Jace was sending you out. Know anything about worrying down an oil well?” There was a thick slice of the South in the man’s speech.

  “I’ve worked in parts of the business almost two years,” Mack said.

  “That’s no damn answer. I need an experienced tool dresser.”

  Mack didn’t care for his bluntness. “I don’t have experience but I can learn. You tell me once, it’ll be done.”

  Johnson snorted. “Cocky cuss, ain’t you? Well, why not? I don’t see any other candidates lined up around here.” He calculated silently. “Three-fifty a day and your keep.”

  “Four dollars. Regular tool dresser’s wage.”

  “You got no experience. You said so.”

  “I’ll work that much harder to make up for it. Give you double effort on every tour.” He rhymed it with hour. He could tell Johnson caught that.

  “Let’s discuss it up at my palatial ranch house yonder.” He indicated a shanty a short way up the slope from the well site. The company’s financial condition was clear from its sign: just an amateurish keystone and a large 14 painted in whitewash.

  “I got a few swigs of popskull in a bottle,” Johnson added. “Mighty hot out here, and these boys can get along for a while. Follow me.”

  Mack followed.

  Johnson put wooden chairs against the front of the shanty. From there he could watch the rig builders setting spikes into braces between the first pair of derrick legs. These spikes would be hammered the rest of the way when the legs were raised in position.

  Johnson brought out his brown bottle but Mack passed on it. The driller set it under his own chair, tilted back, and began to worry invisible specks off the barrel of his Peacemaker with a clean rag.

  The gun was a beautiful weapon, its silvered metal elaborately engraved, each of its mother-of-pearl handgrips embossed with a large lone star. The front half of the trigger guard was cut away, for faster shooting. The Colt did not look like an amateur’s piece.

  “Fine gun,” Johnson said when he noticed Mack’s interest. “A hundred dollars, new, in Fort Worth.”

  “That’s where you’re from?”

  “There and elsewhere. First name’s Hugh, H-U-G-H. Hell of a name for a Texas boy, ain’t it? My mama hoped I’d grow up to be a gentleman. I sure-God disappointed the dear woman.”

  “When did you come to California?”

  Johnson’s expression grew guarded. “Oh, some years back. I used to be a cowboy. Then the big ranch combines from New York started buying up all the spreads I worked for, one after another, and cutting wages, and soon I couldn’t earn a dime. So I drifted over the mountains and learned a new trade.” He gestured to the derrick site.

  “So now you’re an oilman—”

  “Till something better shows up. I never stick long at any one thing. Somehow or other I was born with an urge to drift. I reckon I can’t drift until I punch this hole for Jace Danvers. Lord, that man travels with a cloud of pain and woe thicker’n a blue norther.”

  “I noticed.”

  “Jace is a decent sort, I’ll give him that. Loves his family. Wants to provide. It flogs him something awful.” Johnson idly scraped at a nostril with his thumbnail. “It’s a reason I never married. Among many.”

  “I’m single too.”

  “What are you doing in this part of the world?”

  Mack gave him a level look, the two of them seated there with chairs tilted back in the scant shade. A foot-long chuck-walla lizard with a broad fat head wandered by in the shale below. Apparently unafraid of daylight or human beings, it stuck out its tongue at the men. Johnson stuck out his tongue at the lizard, and it ran.

  “What I’m trying to do is get rich,” Mack said.

  “How?”

  “Any way I can. I’m from Pennsylvania, like Danvers. I already own some land over in Los Angeles County.”

  “And I’m ’sposed to learn you what I know about oil, huh?”

  “I guess you’d better.” Mack swung a hand to encompass the steep narrow canyon and the derrick site. “I don’t see any other candidates lined up here.”

  “By God you’re a pert cuss, Mr. Chance. Pertness says to me that a man’s got sand. I like that. I dunno, though. I’m out here to work, not run a school.”

  A long silence told Mack he was in trouble. Impulsively, he said, “I’ll take care of the grub too. Bear steak, fancy omelets, hangtown fry—I’m a damn good cook.”

  “You’re hired.”

  25

  MACK HAD SEEN OPERATING wells and knew something about their components, but he’d never had his hands on a standard tool rig or helped spud in a new hole. This equipment was modern, a far cry from Mulroy’s spring poles.

  The basic tool string consisted of a chisel-like bit hooked to the stem, an iron bar connected to a long two-and-a-quarter-inch Manila line. A coal-fired boiler generated steam for the little twenty-horsepower engine. The engine spun the band wheel, and the band wheel and its pitman rod tipped a walking beam up and down over the hole. Pulling the tool string up and dropping it by means of the walking-beam action dug the well.

  Johnson was a brusque, impatient teacher, but a good one. There was no job on the rig Mack didn’t learn. He sharpened tools at the coal forge, and clambered to the top of the derrick to free a drill line fouled on the crown block pulley. He and Johnson sweated to make casing out of columns of steel pipe, one wedged inside the other; to Mack fell the task of pounding the casing with a sledge to indent it, thus creating a strong bond without rivets. The casing, heavier than the tools, had its own special block-and-tackle support system, running off the calf wheel.

  Mack learned the nine-strand splice and soon repaired broken line so well that the original break was invisible. He ran the bailer to pull up drill cuttings. He cleaned scale from the inside of the boiler. He did the cooking.

  Johnson kept the logbook: how many feet drilled per day; how many feet cased. And he knew tricks. “If you have a good day, go short on what you report in the log. That way, when you get a bad day, and you will, you got leeway. Some extra feet to make up for your mistakes.”

  The Texan handled another important job around the well. Mack discovered this one afternoon when the little steam engine quit. Johnson peeled off his shirt, revealing a long hook-shaped knife scar, deep once but healed now, running down the left side of his back. Then he attacked the engine with wrench, pliers, and a crowbar and sweated and swore over it for half an hour, at the end of which time it sputtered once and died.

  “Damn modern machines,” Johnson said heavily, then started working again.

  Looking on, Mack said, “I’m glad you’re mechanical, because I’m not.”

  Johnson spat a stream of his plug tobacco. “I ain’t mechanical, just available. On the range I always got stuck repairin’ the chuck wagon because nobody else would…” After another adjustment he started the engine. In ten seconds it started to die again. Disgusted, he whacked it with the crowbar. The engine went whump-thump and then settled down, running smoothly.

  They broke one tool in the crazy tilted strata of Salt Marsh Canyon. Then they punched through a layer of hard rock into sand, and the new tool went too fast and stuck. It took three days to free the fish and recover it.

  At 605 feet, sulfur water gushed up. They hooked up a pump and ran it for a week, pumping water but no oil. Jace Danvers rode out and gloomily inspected the well and then the log, and authorized another 100 feet. They hit more slate. The drill line broke, the sides of the well caved in, and fishing couldn’t recover the tool. Jace Danvers returned, grimmer than ever.

  “I’m pressed on every side, men. Pressed and stretched thin. The railroad rates are killing me. Keystone Nine’s producing marginally—forty to fifty barrels a day—but I can’t afford to ship the crude to a coastal port. I’m closing down this well. We’ll start Keystone Fifteen farther up the canyon.”

  Mack and Johnson exchanged looks; Danvers wore the
expression of a man dying a lingering death.

  Johnson liked Mack’s cooking, and he approved of his uncomplaining hard work. A friendship began to grow, though it had its limitations. One Sunday night, eating supper, Mack said, “Tell me some more about your cowboy days, Hugh.”

  “Don’t use that name. I hate it.”

  “Then you should get a nickname.”

  “Got to have a reason for a nickname. I got no reason.”

  “Nothing from your time in Texas?”

  Johnson’s green eyes had a defensive, hooded look. “Nothin’ to talk about. Just a lot of long hours and saddle-sore butts. Quit palavering. Let’s eat.”

  Every other Saturday night the two men rode into Santa Paula. Both wore their side arms, as did most of the other drinkers, diners, and card players in the Ventura Bar & Grill, which became their refuge of choice. Upstairs, a little Mexican girl named Angel took Mack’s mind off Nellie and Carla for half an hour. Johnson preferred heavy women; his regular weighed 270.

  Shortly after midnight one Saturday in March, Mack and Johnson were leaning on the Ventura’s scarred mahogany bar, a half-consumed plate of oysters on the wet wood between them, along with several glasses that had contained whiskey or hot clam juice. They were jawing away about the dim prospects of Jace Danvers when loud whacking sounds upstairs were followed by a scream. Then a door banged open.

  “Get out, don’t you touch me! He whipped me, Gert,” a hysterical whore cried.

  A huge man stormed down the stairs. Mack’s hazel eyes opened wide at the sight of his face and the red-stippled belt with the studded buckle dangling from his fist.

  Poker games suspended abruptly, and the fiddler too. The man with the belt lurched toward the swinging doors, looking straight ahead, the sobs and screamed accusations continuing from upstairs.

  As he went by, Mack yanked the belt out of his hand.

  “Strap Vigory, you son of a bitch—you killed my mule back in Asphalto.”

  Vigory swung around with a snort, and as he grabbed for his belt Mack flung it behind the bar. He’d been a fool to confront Vigory impulsively, but it was too late to change things. He reached behind for his Shopkeeper’s Colt.

  “I’ll kill you too, you fucker,” Vigory said then, crashing a knee into Mack’s groin.

  Pain flashed up Mack’s trunk and down his legs. It loosened his grip, and Vigory snatched the Colt and leaped back. The round unblinking eye of the muzzle looked at Mack at chest level. Lord, I’ve done it now.

  Vigory snickered and the knuckle of his trigger finger whitened.

  Hugh Johnson swept his silvered Peacemaker off his left hip so gracefully that hardly a patron saw it. The first bullet drilled Vigory’s breastbone and knocked him down. Vigory shot from a convulsing hand; the bullet plowed into the ceiling. Behind him, poker players yelped and ducked under their tables as Johnson put a bullet in Vigory’s left shoulder, another in his right, one in each of his knees, and the last through the center of his forehead. The back of Vigory’s head exploded against the floor.

  The crashing thunder of Johnson’s .45 rolled away to silence. Vigory’s convulsing body came to rest. A sticky red pool spread all around his head. Mack snagged his piece off the blood-spattered floor, unable to avoid the sight of Vigory’s corpse. Vomit rose up into his throat.

  A card player eyed Johnson fearfully. “You put six slugs in him. Five after he went down.”

  “He was out to kill my friend. You heard him say so. Someone like that, you take him at his word—you don’t ask him if he’s serious or allow him time to show you. It was self-defense. Nobody disagrees, do they?”

  Johnson’s clear, cold eyes, leaf-green, generated a chorus of nos. Vigory’s body had relaxed and his bowels let go. The stench was too much. Mack reeled for the door and puked in the street.

  Inside he heard Johnson say, “Somebody fetch the law. I can’t stay in this town all night.”

  They rode homeward at daybreak, released without charges.

  The world felt sweet and fresh, the owls hooting their last and the small birds waking—kingbirds, linnets, orioles, and canaries in the alders and willows along the road to Salt Marsh Canyon. As the mauve sky changed to flaming orange, red cattle tinkled their bells on a hillside and a sleepy farmer waved from among the outdoor hives on his bee ranch. Swallows began to fly, and a hawk plummeted to catch a meal in a dewy field, the mountains rising up in blue haze behind. Mack was thrilled with the beauty of California once again, beauty that made the dirty death of Vigory almost unreal.

  He was plagued by curiosity too. Finally, as they jogged through a cathedral arch of shaggy eucalyptus with blue-white spring leaves, he couldn’t contain it.

  “Just a cowhand, that’s all? Stop fooling. Your story may explain why you’re a good rider, but it doesn’t explain how you placed six shots so perfectly. You’ve had experience.”

  “Well, some,” Johnson said, and then was silent. Mack’s eyes prodded him. “Listen, if it’s all the same, I’m damn tired, I’d rather not—”

  “Hugh, come on. You saved my life. That’s a special thing. No more secrets.”

  Their horses plodded along. The hawk soared into the orange sky with something in its beak. Johnson appraised his partner with those green eyes, then the chill left them and he slumped. His beard was showing, stubbly gray.

  “Ah, shit. I ’spose we’re too far from Texas for it to matter much.” He sniffed and eyed the blue hills with a queer cramped expression, as though ashamed of what he was going to say.

  “When the jobs ran out, I joined up with three of my friends—every one of us dead busted. We robbed a little piss-ant bank at a wide spot in the road. Driscoll, Nueces County.”

  Mack couldn’t help looking surprised. Johnson squinted at him, hunting for signs of accusation as well. He saw none, but nevertheless went on emphatically.

  “Didn’t hurt a living soul, and you better by God believe that.” He snorted, all the laugh he could manage. “Do you know how much we split between us? Ninety-seven dollars and twenty-four cents. Should of picked a bigger bank. I rode over the border four hours ahead of a posse. Hid out in the state of Coahuila the best part of a year. It was too much change, too fast. ’Bout broke me…”

  He reared up and inhaled the sweet air, as if trying to restore his soul with a few cool breaths. “This ain’t the same United States I knew as a boy, Mack. Not the same country at all. Those big cattle corporations just swallowed all the family spreads back home. They pushed fellas like me into peculiar new trades. Wildcatting. Banditry …”

  “Build a railroad like the SP, you can steal millions and get away with it.”

  “Guess that’s the truth. Just too much crazy change goin’ on to suit me.”

  He scanned the tranquil blue hills. “Right here, I could almost believe it hasn’t touched California. But you go in those oil towns, full of hard cases and starry-eyed greenhorns hoping for a strike—or you ride around Los Angeles and bump into hop-headed hustlers selling every crazy thing from dope to a new-design windmill, and you know that California’s where the change cuts deeper and faster than anyplace. This here’s the knife edge, and sometimes I don’t like it. But I dunno where else to run ’less it’s into the Pacific.”

  “Don’t run anyplace. Your secret’s safe.”

  “Better be. I got lots more ammunition.”

  Hugh Johnson’s smile said they were finally friends.

  A week later, Mack said, “You know, Hugh, there’s brea showing all over the land I own in the next county. Maybe we should stop working for Danvers and put our own rig together. As partners.”

  “A string of tools costs money.”

  “How much?”

  “Maybe forty thousand dollars for a complete one, good quality. That’s secondhand, mind.”

  “Interested?”

  Johnson worried the cleaning rag along the engraved barrel of his Peacemaker. “Not right now. I’m getting the urge to drift. Won’t be long ’
fore I can. My nose tells me Keystone Fifteen is another dry hole.”

  So it was, and so was Keystone 16. By the summer of 1891, Jason Preston Danvers faced a crisis.

  “Your charges to ship me the coal are more than the coal itself,” Danvers shouted into the trumpet-shaped mouthpiece of the wall phone. Mack sat tensely in a side chair and Johnson leaned against the wall, his dusty hat crushed under his arm. Bars of light swarming with dust motes lit up the Santa Paula office.

  Fascinated, Mack listened to the tinny voice issuing from the box on the wall; he’d seen the instruments but never talked on one. Danvers reddened and pounded the wall. “No, no, I don’t believe you. This is just one more case of the SP strangling small business. If I were a big-volume shipper, you’d come around fast enough. You’d give me the same rebates you slip under the counter to your—”

  A protesting squawk and a loud rattle interrupted him. “Wait, wait!” Danvers shouted. The rattle continued. He hung up the earpiece, beaten.

  “Four of my crew quit yesterday,” he said.

  “Then I’m sorry we picked today to ride in with the bad news on Sixteen,” Johnson said. “You want us to keep on there?”

  Danvers fell into his chair and held his head with both hands. “No, no. Abandon it. Tear down the derrick. Salvage all the timber you can.”

  The oilman had lost weight. His eyes were haggard and his speech slow. On the sweaty sleeve of his shirt he wore a black velvet armband. His son Bernard, second from the youngest, had died of diphtheria the preceding Wednesday.

  “The bank won’t carry my equipment loan any longer. I have to make a payment. That means I have to defer wages.”

  “Is that why the other men quit?” Mack asked.

  Danvers replied with a ponderous nod. He held his head again.

  “It’s OK with me,” Mack said, “so long as we get the money eventually.”

  “Sure,” Johnson said, shrugging.