California Gold

by John Jakes

  She struggled for her next words. “I know what I’m about to say will offend you. No, stronger—you’ll probably despise me. I’m truly sorry. I have to be honest. When you ask me to marry you, you’re asking me to be less than what I can be with Mr. Hearst.”

  “I’m offering you my life, damn it.”

  “Yes, but in exchange for taking mine.”

  “That’s a hell of a way to look at love.”

  “I think—” Her eyes flooded with tears of confusion, something else completely unlike her. “Oh, I think if you really understood me—if that was part of your love—you wouldn’t even ask.”

  “My God—no, I don’t understand your crazy ideas. Who put them in your head? Who?”

  The shout brought her to her feet, red-cheeked. “The world, Mack—the world. This is almost the twentieth century, not the Dark Ages.”

  He fought his temper. “Stop it. All that matters is this: I don’t love anyone else; I never will love anyone else.”

  “Nor I. But you love your own ideas too. They’re grotesquely old-fashioned. You love what’s in that wretched little book you worship. Look at you, running wildly up and down the state snatching up farms, orchards, spending as if you’re going to die tomorrow morning…”

  He sat up straight in bed. It hurt, but no more than his anger over the way this was degenerating. “What the hell’s wrong with ambition? I know people who admire it in a man.” Carla, for one.

  “Nothing’s wrong with it, Mack, unless it comes before everything else—unless it builds a wall.”

  “What about your ambition? What about New York?”

  Her rueful smile said he’d hit a fair target. “Two walls.” She gave a sad little shake of her head. “I don’t know, Mack. We’re right for each other—absolutely right—and at the same time, all wrong.”

  “Nellie, don’t do this.”

  She rushed to the bedside and bent to give him a kiss. The moment their mouths touched, he seized her shoulders. She fell sideways, her hip on the bed, bracing her leg and surrendering to the embrace. “Oh, you’ll hurt yourself…” As he kissed her more fiercely, she shuddered and closed her eyes.

  The deliriously emotional kiss went on, sweeping away all the arguments and objections.

  But not for long. As Nellie pulled back for air, Mack saw the lifted chin and determined eyes he remembered from that first day on the pier. He released her and let his hands fall.

  “I’m sorry, Mack. The city desk…” She rose. “They’re expecting telegraphed copy tonight. Ambrose and I have a meeting with the sketch artist. Come see me in New York.”

  Mack’s hazel eyes held hers, and the stoniness of his stare said it would never happen.

  “Mack, please…”

  Nothing. Nothing but that stare. She left the room quietly, and he heard her murmuring with Bierce, then the front door. Shortly the clip-clop and rattle of the buggy faded away beneath the familiar sound of the pumping derricks. He turned to the sunlit window, blind now to the sight of the wells. He’d never felt so unwanted, miserable, furious, defeated.

  32

  EARLY IN JULY, HELLBURNER Johnson returned from a month of roaming the Baja down in Mexico. He rode in through the arch and found his partner in the expanded office section of the depot. Amid the usual desk litter of ledgers, reports, contracts, and memoranda stood an open bottle of Kentucky whiskey. An inch of the liquor shimmered in a shot glass.

  Johnson slapped dust from his striped pants, staring from the whiskey to his partner. “This time of day?”

  “This or any other time of day, what about it?” Johnson clicked his tongue and left. In talking to a few men around the field, foremen and roughnecks, he found there was no secret about it. Ever since Mack had gotten out of bed, he’d been at the bottle. Heavily.

  Lieutenant Colonel Harrison Gray Otis paid a call.

  Mack received him in the office in the afternoon. Otis carried a malacca swagger stick, and in his lapel he wore a military rosette of some kind. Some years before he’d edited the G.A.R. journal, and he was still active in that organization of Civil War veterans.

  The colonel was disconcerted by Mack’s unshaven, unkempt appearance. To someone accustomed to alertness and discipline, such a foggy expression was displeasing.

  “Unexpected pleasure, Colonel.”

  “You are a long way from Los Angeles, sir. A difficult man to find. Have we perhaps met before? There’s a certain familiarity—”

  “It’s possible.” Mack wasn’t yet so drunk that he’d forgotten the altercation when he drove Marquez to the Times office. “Join me in a drink?”

  “No, sir. But you have one if you wish.”

  “Yes, I’ll have another.” He opened a drawer and uncorked the bottle. Otis tapped his knee with his swagger stick, a march cadence, and Mack regarded him blearily. “I don’t always drink in the daytime, you understand. Only when I feel like hell.”

  The heavy humor failed to move Otis to smile. “You were injured in the Tehachapi wreck. I hope you have recovered.”

  Mack raised a full glass. “Works wonders.”

  “Mr. Chance, if this is an inconvenient time…” Mack’s wave said no. Some of the whiskey spilled on papers on the desk. Otis’s disapproval grew more apparent. “I traveled out here, sir, because you have made an impression upon the Los Angeles business community. You are proving yourself one of the most astute entrepreneurs in the region. Further, from what I read in Mr. Hearst’s execrable San Francisco rag, you comported yourself heroically at Tehachapi, though you are no partisan of the railroad.”

  “Almost everywhere in California, the SP has a monopoly. I don’t like that kind of stranglehold.”

  “Precisely. The very reason I’m here. I want to enlist your support, personal and financial, for our continuing war against the railroad’s machinations to secure the harbor for Santa Monica. I invite you to join the ranks of the chamber of commerce. I ask you to lend your energy to the creation of a greater Los Angeles—a greater Southern California—free of the stinking infection of communist trade unionism.”

  Mack set his glass down. His eyes seemed to clear, and his speech too. “I’m not opposed to all trade unions. Owners and workers should support and encourage each other, not exploit each other. That way, everyone makes money.”

  Otis stiffened as though Mack had whipped his face with a glove, Prussian style. “I find those sentiments repugnant, sir. Look at the riot and rebellion last year during the Pullman strike. The minions of Gene Debs subjected Sacramento to mob rule. Governor Pardee had to send regiments of militia up the river on steamboats to prevent anarchy, arson, and mass murder.”

  “Come on, Colonel, it wasn’t that bad.” Bad enough, though, Mack had to admit; the strikers had weakened a railroad bridge and a train had plunged off, killing the engineer and four soldiers of the 5th Artillery.

  “Bad, sir? It was heinous. It was treason against the principles of free commerce. Any man who employs union labor-deals with union labor—or even sympathizes with union labor, as you apparently do, is an enemy of the decent citizens of Los Angeles.”

  Mack was just drunk enough to forget this man’s power. He leaned on the desk corner, squinting in what he hoped was a truculent way.

  “I have a friend, Colonel. Marquez is his name. Diego Marquez. Is he your enemy?”

  Otis acted as though Mack had invoked Satan. “Marquez the priest? Marquez is nothing but a mangy yellow dog of a socialist. He betrayed his sacred oaths—his church—the Almighty Himself. A few years ago, he attempted to infiltrate the citadel of the Times, but I repelled…” Otis sucked in a breath. “Wait. That’s where I saw you. That night with Marquez.”

  “Correct, Colonel.” With a smirk and another toast with the shot glass, Mack drank down the whiskey.

  Otis snapped to his feet. “Your reputation deceived the business community. I’ll set them straight.”

  “Before we leave the subject of Marquez—who burned down his rancho wh
en he supported the printers? Friends of yours?”

  Otis flung up the swagger stick.

  “I wouldn’t try that, Colonel.”

  The stick shook, as did the freckled, veined hand grasping it. Harrison Gray Otis fought the stick down to his side. “I withdraw my invitations, Mr. Chance.”

  “And I withdraw my tolerance of you. Get out of here.”

  “Happily. Happily!”

  Otis quick-marched to the door. A moment later his buggy rattled away. Well, Mack thought, now I have enemies in Los Angeles too. He slopped another full measure of booze into the glass.

  That afternoon the wind shifted, blowing from the east, hot and parched, and by evening the sky was red as the heart of a steel furnace. Mack sat on the cottage porch with a fresh bottle at his feet. He stared inward, at the certainty that Nellie was lost to him, at a growing awareness of what little was left.

  About half past seven, Johnson strode around the corner of the house. He gave Mack and his bottle a disgusted look as he stomped up the porch steps. A clump of uprooted weeds sailed by.

  “Santan,” Johnson said.

  Mack drained his glass. The wind reached inside him, rubbed and grated and bloodied his nerves. The santan was the wind of murder and madness. When it blew, people lost control. He was losing control.

  The Texan sniffed. “I don’t smell supper.”

  “Fix it yourself.” Mack threw the empty glass in the yard and started for the road. Johnson grabbed him.

  “Where you goin’?”

  He flung Johnson’s hand away.

  “Where I belong,”

  33

  MACK’S HORSE TORE ALONG the road with its mane standing out, lather streaming off its flanks and thighs.

  When Mack pulled the reins hard to the right, the horse balked and almost threw him. But after an impatient kick, it lunged up the dirt track past the crooked sign saying HELLMAN.

  Dust clouds blurred the outbuildings. A vaquero ran for shelter with both hands clutching his sombrero to his head. The wind tore a spinning weather vane from the roof of a barn, spiraling it upward into the heart of the cloud, where it vanished. In the same barn maddened horses neighed and kicked their stalls while vaqueros shrieked curses in Spanish.

  Under the portico Mack jumped down, the wind snapping his coattails and tossing his hair while little veils of sand trailed from his trouser cuffs. He didn’t bother to tie the horse; the stallion was too frightened to run off.

  He hammered the huge ring knocker down twice, then kicked the doors open.

  “Carla?”

  He slammed both doors. One failed to catch and crashed against the wall. Cyclonic wind rushed through the high, dim hall, causing an ornamental gourd to fly off its peg and break on the tiles, loud as a rifle shot.

  “Carla, where are you?”

  He climbed three stairs to an arch, which led to a huge living room. A jutting adobe fireplace dominated one wall, with colorful broadly striped blankets decorating the others. Dark polished chairs stood along the walls like straight-backed soldiers, and leather cushions and an enormous divan created a horseshoe near the fireplace.

  In a second archway opposite the entrance, the Indian woman hovered, wide-eyed, taking in Mack’s disheveled state. Whatever she meant to say died in her throat, and she fled.

  He overturned one of the chairs, a ferocious clattering.

  “Carla, answer me!”

  The wind roared through the open front door and he could feel it whipping and eddying in the room. Every shutter in the house was closed against the storm.

  Appearing in a third arched entrance, this one opening into the wall opposite the dark hearth, she took in his agitated state, and her smile tightened.

  “I hardly expected you, my dear,” she said.

  “So I surprised you. What have you got to drink?”

  “From the sound of it, you’ve had quite a lot already.”

  “Does that mean I’m not welcome?”

  She came down the short stair slowly and licked her lower lip. Although she wore no lipstick, it was red, as though bitten.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  He staggered to the divan and sprawled, arms spread to either side, head lolling. Carla watched from the foot of the stair. She wore a translucent wrapper of white silk and, beneath it, her corset, pink-brocaded and frilled with lace along the scooped bodice line. The corset fit over a chemise of linen with the hem trimmed in lace; the rolled tops of black stockings showed below. Her blond hair tumbled over her shoulders.

  She touched the silk. “I was undressing for my bath, hardly prepared for visitors.”

  “You look fine. Gorgeous as a fifty-cent whore.”

  “God, you’re stinking drunk.” She was amused, though. “I’ll not quibble. I’ve finally got you where I’ve wanted you. All to myself.”

  He waved toward the other arch. “I saw your Indian woman—”

  “I’ll take care of her.” She glided over the cool tan tiles in her stocking feet. “What would you like?”

  “Champagne.”

  “I have it. Dom Pérignon. I have a cellarful.” Carla smoothed her hands down the underside of her bosom. “I have enough to last all night.”

  Soon she returned with the champagne and two crystal flutes. “I sent Ynez to her quarters. She’s happy to lock herself in for the night. The wind’s frightful. You can scarcely see three feet outside.”

  She held out the bottle. “Will you open it?”

  Mack took it from her and struggled with the cork. He couldn’t loosen it. Pushing her back, he stepped to the jutting corner of the fireplace and smashed the neck against it. Champagne foamed over his hand and dripped to the floor.

  “That’s one way,” Carla said. She held out the flutes.

  He filled both, then, seizing his glass, he drained it before she finished a first sip. He was weaving on his feet, his hazel eyes crawling over the deep round cleavage her corset made.

  Carla licked the rim of her glass. “My. It isn’t difficult to tell what’s on your mind.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  She licked the goblet again slowly, tongue sliding to one side, then sliding back, leaving wet traces. “Did I say that?”

  Mack threw his flute in the hearth and pushed against her. One hand circled her waist, the other closed on the swell of her lace-covered breast. She dropped her glass and sagged in his arms and said, “Oh my God,” in a voice both excited and frightened. He kissed her. She opened her mouth and he tasted her frenzied darting tongue.

  Up above them, outside, the santan tore away red roof tiles. It sounded as if someone were shooting at the house. The wind spun the tiles away to smash on the baked earth. Barn siding ripped loose and sailed away. Trees surrounding the rancho creaked and bent and lashed their branches, limbs snapping and flying aloft like missiles from a crossbow. A sharp one gored a mare loose from the barn. She tumbled over, wailing and howling in the wind and darkness. No one heard her die.

  Carla undressed herself quickly and fell on her back in her enormous bed. Her boudoir was dark, every shutter rattling and leaking windblown dust. Mack groped for her, and she guided him. The santan screamed, a wind of craziness. They were both crazed with lust. She struggled and writhed in her haste to take him into her.

  Carla woke.

  Her eyes flickered open, drowsy and momentarily bewildered. A bedside candle fluttered on a small table. Next to it was a disorderly mountain of books, a peak in a littered sea of unread newspapers.

  With a start, she saw Mack’s hazel eyes. The weariness had cleared. He sprawled naked beside her, the bedclothes shoved together in mussed ridges and valleys. On his left shoulder she noticed the imprint of her teeth, and this made her smile.

  The wind was as loud as ever. Carla brushed a plump forearm across her eyes. Her body glistened, pink and moist from the lovemaking. “What time is it, love?”

  “Almost midnight.” He reached down beside the bed and produced anothe
r bottle of champagne, this one uncorked. “Still thirsty?”

  She made a little animal sound indicating she was.

  “Here,” he said. “Don’t take too long.” She looked down. He was erect again.

  She pushed a spill of blond curls off her forehead. Smiling, she clasped hands on the bottle and greedily sucked at it, then trickled the liquid on her nipples and into the golden nest of her sex.

  He took the bottle from her and upset it trying to stand it on the floor beside the bed. There was the sound of the wind, the sound of champagne running out, then the louder sound of the bed creaking and shaking.

  A match scraped in the dark. He relit the stubby candle a gust of wind had extinguished. Carla woke after a moment, muttering and making soft complaining sounds, her eyes still closed. He left the bed and returned with a fresh bottle of champagne. She drank, then he drank. She grasped the bottle’s neck again, caressing it.

  He laughed, drunk. Somewhere down inside, a little flame of sanity blew out, like the candle. He took this bottle away from her too. She felt him and uttered a sleepy erotic laugh. “You’re insatiable.”

  She slid beneath him.

  Out in the dark, a horse neighed and kicked a stall.

  The night smelled of the dead mare’s blood.

  And the wind went on…

  He woke, tasting a cotton layer inside his mouth, smelling champagne and sweat.

  Carla was sleeping. He touched her breast. Cool. He rolled over as quietly as he could. Slitted light patterned the floor.

  The bedroom was a mess. Broken glassware, flung bedding, overturned furniture—the disorder of a battleground. A fine old Spanish chair with a thick leather seat was pulled against the foot of the bed. He dimly recalled that one of the times they’d made love, it had been in that chair.

  He scratched his belly and carefully stood on the cool tiles. His legs wobbled, incredibly weak. There were empty green bottles all over the room. Finding one with a half-inch of stale champagne in it, he drank.

  He padded to the nearest shutter, careful to avoid broken glass, lifted the metal latch, and pulled the shutter inward. Ruddy light struck his eyes, driving him back with a groan. He slammed the shutter and latched it.