California Gold

by John Jakes

  “Christ,” Phelan said. He stood up and gripped the stern rail. “Never had that sort of rot when I was mayor. I knew of small bribes, certainly. Ten dollars here and there under the table. But not this kind of cancer.”

  Older said, “I remind you, gentlemen: If you want to remove a cancer, you must handle sharp knives.”

  There was silence. The steam yacht slipped on through the water, trailing a thin plume from her big stack. The stewards refilled glasses, as soundless in their slippers as the gull shadows on the awning.

  Mack leaned forward, hands spread. He’d let his beard grow again, though he kept it trimmed close. It was as white as his hair, which to his dismay was now starting to thin. “We’ve talked and talked about a reform movement. Talk must get it started, but we’re long past that stage.”

  “At what stage are we, men?” Rudolph asked.

  “We need a committed reform organization.”

  “We have the core of that here,” Older said.

  “Yes,” Mack said. “So we have to address this question. Suppose we want to start gathering evidence on a serious and methodical basis. How do we do it? I’m not a professional detective and neither are any of you. We need one or two investigators who know what they’re doing, and can’t be bought. We need enough money to hire men like that.”

  He leaned back and sipped from his glass of steam beer. “We need a war chest.”

  Rudolph Spreckels studied Mack a moment, then languidly beckoned a steward to refill his glass. “I’ll personally pledge two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

  Jim Phelan almost dropped an oyster over the side while Older clapped Rudolph on the back boisterously.

  Then Mack spoke. “I’ll go in for the same amount.”

  They were excited for just about a minute. Then Older finished his cigar and threw it in the ocean with a scowl. “All right, we’ve got money. With it we can probably hire investigators who can’t be bribed. But we also need honest prosecutors, and judges. You won’t get those in San Francisco unless you bring in the federal government.”

  “Then that’s what we have to do,” Mack said.

  In the evening, California Chance bore east again toward the blue chalk smudge of the coast. The gentlemen had donned yacht caps provided by their host. All of them had drunk their share of champagne and wine, beer, or whiskey, but they were still relatively coherent about their purpose.

  “I know one man we might enlist,” Older said as they stood together companionably in the dusk. Even Rudolph’s cloak of arrogant charm seemed happily misplaced. “Fran Heney. Francis Joseph. Born right south of the Slot. Hastings law degree. He’s in Washington as assistant attorney general and special federal prosecutor. He’s only about this tall, and he parts his hair in the middle. He looks dull and harmless, but he bites in and hangs on and he gets convictions.”

  “I know him well,” Jim Phelan said. “An incorruptible man.”

  “Then he must have left town long ago,” Rudolph said.

  “Is he really tough?” Mack asked Older.

  “Heney practiced law down in Arizona for a while. A man involved in one of his cases took a dislike to him and came after him with a weapon.” Older’s eyes turned to little ice chips. He cupped big hard hands around a match for a new cigar. “Fran shot the man in self-defense. They say he killed him without mussing his own cravat or disturbing a hair on his head. Is that tough enough for you, Mack?”

  55

  MACK BURST ONTO THE third-floor landing. “Nellie? I’ve got an important phone call. Two more minutes.”

  “The meeting starts in ten.”

  But he’d already disappeared.

  Nellie paced the foyer. The young Japanese garage man ran in from Sacramento Street. The Cadillac had been at the curb for half an hour, he said. Did Mr. Chance still want it?

  Nellie cradled her book against her bosom, her inscribed copy of John Muir’s Our National Parks. “One never knows, Yosh. I trust the great man will enlighten us soon.”

  Yosh laughed and ran out.

  Nellie walked around and around under the skylight. She’d lately celebrated her fortieth birthday, which sat on her much less easily than her fame. She looked smart and fresh, as always, with her hair worn longer and rolled over a rat into a pompadour. To complement her pleated plaid skirt and shirtwaist she’d put on a man’s long-sleeved navy sweater. Her stockings were a misty pale blue and they nicely showed off her ankles above a pair of low-cut pumps with ribbon bows. Some considered the new shoe style too informal, even a mark of bad character.

  Johnson strolled in with a billiard cue over his shoulder. “Mornin’, Nellie. Beautiful cool day.”

  “Invigorating. I walked over from my flat.” She’d taken a place on Russian Hill, though she still had the Carmel cottage.

  Johnson’s hair showed plenty of white now, almost as much as Mack’s. The new century was rushing along, turning pages of the calendar faster than Nellie liked. The Norris sequel remained at a standstill, and her mirror revealed new lines in her tan face almost daily. She loved her independence but she hated sleeping alone. Trouble was, there was still only one man she wanted beside her at night. All in all, being forty depressed her.

  Mack burst into sight again, jamming his arms into his jacket. He ran down to the second landing, plucked Jim from the protective arms of Señora Olivar, hugged him, and took his hand to bring him downstairs. Mack clearly wanted to rush, but Jim negotiated each riser slowly, cautiously, his body tilting, his hand jumping from baluster to baluster for support.

  “The call was from Jesse Tarbox, one of my foremen,” Mack explained. He snatched his hat from the stand. “Two of my laborers got the hell beat out of them in Fresno last night.”

  “Who did it?” Nellie asked.

  “Some fine young white boys who don’t think Mexicans deserve jobs.”

  “You know,” she said with a sad air, “Henry Thoreau once observed that the experience of Americans coming to California meant nothing but getting three thousand miles closer to hell. Sometimes I do believe it.”

  He winced; it couldn’t be called a smile. Then he took her arm. “Come on, let’s see whether your friends can hold their tempers if I air my views.”

  “The question is can you hold yours?”

  Jim limped over to stand by Johnson. The Texan put his arm around the boy.

  “While you two palaver with the nature crowd, me and Jim thought we’d rent a couple of saddle horses and canter through Golden Gate Park.”

  “Make sure he gets a gentle horse. Go slowly. I don’t want any falls. That foot can’t take it.”

  “Yes it can, Pa. I’m strong. I want a horse with spunk.”

  “You let me decide that, young man.”

  “Just like you decide everything,” Jim blurted.

  Mack grabbed his son.

  “Now, now,” Johnson said. He laid his hand between them, pressing the edge of it against Mack’s sleeve, and Mack backed off. Jim stepped closer to the big Texan. How defiant he is, Nellie thought. When will Mack wake up and devote as much of himself to Jim as he devotes to his deals? A month ago, in Carmel, she’d tried to say that to Mack. She’d never seen him so angry.

  Drawn by voices, Professor Love bustled from the library. He flourished a mathematics text. “No skylarking with Mr. Johnson until we finish the morning lesson. The procrastinating man is ever struggling with ruin. Hesiod said that.”

  Johnson made a pistol of his hand and snapped down the hammer of his thumb. “Finish up quick, Jim.”

  “Yes, sir, H.B., right away.” Jim went off with Love.

  Johnson leaned his cue against the wall and walked out with Mack and Nellie. “The boy’s right, Mack.”

  “Right to defy me? No.”

  “I keep tellin’ you—you oughtn’t coddle him so much.”

  Mack started to retort, but Johnson’s green eyes caught the sunshine of the summer morning and held, unblinking. After a moment Mack looked away.


  “Have a good meetin’,” Johnson said with a chilly smile.

  Shifting gears going downhill on Powell Street, Mack said, “Do you know what I read this morning? The army studied some automobiles and decided they have no use for them. Rich man’s toys, they said. Horses and mules—that’s all they need. Stupid bastards.”

  Mack sped around a dripping ice wagon, recklessly steering and braking and honking. Nellie held tight to the side rails of the seat.

  “Why are you so angry again?”

  “I can’t get along with Jim. I try and I try but I always fail.”

  “Sounds like me and my novel.”

  “I’m in no mood to joke about it.” He honked at an old Chinese gentleman with a laundry bundle crossing the street. The Chinese stumbled back and dropped the bundle in the water flowing in the gutter.

  Nellie frowned. Mack was so irascible and dogmatic these days, she sometimes wondered why she continued to see him. Of course there was an answer, but she tried to keep it buried most of the time. At the moment, though, she was not only tired of his ideas, she was tired of him.

  The Sierra Club met at eleven. The club had rooms on the third floor of the Mills Building. If Mack found any irony in the “nature crowd” meeting below the local offices of Chance-Johnson and Union Oil, he never commented.

  About sixty people sat in rows of hard chairs in the plain, drab room. Mack and Nellie were indeed late, and they drew stares as they took seats in the last row. The stares aimed at Mack were clearly hostile.

  Under the club’s banner on the platform, old John Muir held forth. He looked as wild and rustic as ever, with his long brambly hair and his beard flowing over a worn brown coat tightly belted above knickerbockers and high-top hiking boots. Nellie whispered that Muir had just come up from a ranch near Wilcox, Arizona, where he’d taken his beloved wife, Louie, desperately ill with pneumonia. What was his age now? Mack wondered. Almost seventy, surely.

  What a wonderful face he had, though. Old as mountains; old as glaciers. Those sky-blue eyes had gazed on most of the world’s natural wonders: the Himalayas, the Siberian steppe, the cataracts of the Nile…

  The world knew him now, not just a few Californians, his articles appearing regularly in The Atlantic and other periodicals. He thundered in print, and he thundered in person. Camping with Teddy Roosevelt in Yosemite, he’d chastised the President for hunting and killing living creatures.

  He was thundering this morning.

  “…the threat to Hetch Hetchy is still with us. Certain foolish men in that political quagmire known as our federal government continue to give consideration to the project. We must stand together, and never yield, because a Hetch Hetchy dam would be utter desecration of that pristine and lovely valley. It is not a civic need or a civic good, as some pretend. It is a scheme by developers and monopolists to exploit the wilderness for private gain.”

  Near the front, a man stood. “Mr. Muir, may I interrupt?”

  “If you must, Mr. Phelan.”

  Mack whispered, “I didn’t see Jim before.”

  “I feel compelled, Mr. Muir, because I don’t agree with you at all. I admire your courage and idealism. I admire the zeal of the Sierra Club in protecting the forests and rivers of California. But in this case, with all due respect, you misstate the facts.”

  A displeased mutter ran through the audience.

  “The proposal for Hetch Hetchy is not for anyone’s private gain, but for the gain of all. Connected by an adequate pipeline, a reservoir in the Sierras will assure San Franciscans of clean, pure drinking water for years. The alternate proposal favored by the Schmitz administration—another franchise, to the Bay Cities company—is the monopolistic, exploitative proposal. The mayor and his supervisors stand with you against Hetch Hetchy because Bay Cities has bribed them to do so.”

  Exclamations of “No” and “Sit down, Phelan” greeted that. Mack found his temper shorter than ever. He wanted to stand and argue.

  “I don’t accept those assertions,” Muir retorted. “Once despoiled, a wilderness is gone. Whatever the rationale, you may keep your damnable dam scheme to yourself.”

  Applause. Nellie joined in, sitting with her face straight to the front.

  Mack jumped up. “John—ladies and gentlemen—Jim Phelan happens to be right.”

  Flushed but pleased, Phelan yielded the floor and sat. Mack turned his hat brim in his hands. He fed all his nervousness into that movement, keeping his voice clear and loud. “San Francisco urgently needs a new and adequate water supply—”

  “The supply is adequate now, laddie.”

  “No, John, you’re wrong. Before I offer some evidence, I want to say unequivocally that I love Yosemite and the high country as much as anyone in this hall—”

  “How can you, sir? How can you when you talk like the worst sort of developer? We need none of your shoddy progress. We need no more sick starving immigrants crowding into the state—”

  “I was under the impression that most Californians were sick or starving immigrants once, John.”

  “—we need none of those, I say, if they put crushing demands upon our resources. We need no more savaging of God’s natural wonders in the name of a few more hotel rooms, restaurants, souvenir shops that offer meretricious gewgaws to the shuffling hordes of tourists.”

  “Growth isn’t the issue, John. There I disagree with my friend Mayor Phelan.”

  “Enough—sit down!” people yelled.

  Mack’s cheeks turned a dark choleric color. “I’ll have my say.”

  Old Muir held up a hand. “Yes, allow him that. Misguided as he is.”

  “I am not misguided,” Mack said. “The water situation in San Francisco is desperate. Over the weekend I read a copy of a report from the National Board of Fire Underwriters. It says that the thirty-six million gallons pumped every day isn’t enough for a city this size. We need more water, new hydrants—a completely new system. What if we faced an emergency? One of those great raging fires that burned San Francisco six times in the fifties? Or a killer earthquake?”

  “Persiflage,” jeered a young woman with thick glasses. “We’ve not had a quake for decades.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not since ’68.”

  “Shut him up.”

  “Listen to me,” Mack said above the chorus. “Chief Sullivan runs the best fire department in the West. But what good is it without water? For years the chief’s tried to build an emergency saltwater system or rebuild the old cisterns under the streets, but he can’t get money for either. We’re courting disaster here, and it scares me. I care about this city—”

  “You care about your real estate.”

  “Who said that? I care about the lives of my son and my friends. I care about the truth. You people don’t.”

  Someone shouted, “Liar!” A woman booed him. Mack felt he was laboring uphill foolishly. But there were great seas of anger churning in him, and they swept away all restraint and common sense.

  “I’ve studied the philosophic base of this dispute and others like it. You claim to have all the right on your side. You don’t. There’s a well-regarded water doctrine called conservation for public use. A Hetch Hetchy dam fits comfortably within that policy.”

  Muir thumped the lectern. “That doctrine is not my doctrine, Chance. It is not our doctrine. So why are you here? Whose side are you on?”

  “The side of reason, I hope. The side of compromise—”

  “There will be no compromise. None.”

  Mack jammed his hat on his head. “Then I don’t belong here.”

  Impulsively, he stepped into the aisle. In the heat of the argument, amid the shouts and finger-pointing, he expected Nellie to rise and follow. When she didn’t, he reacted.

  “We’re leaving.”

  “Are you insane? Don’t order me around.”

  Muir cried, “I say this to Mr. Chance, and his friends, and his dam. I say no. Eternally no. I say dam
n-dam-damnation!”

  Wild applause. Club members jumped up. Nellie jumped up. Phelan slumped glumly.

  Over the bedlam, Mack shouted, “You people don’t have any answers. You have a single issue—and blinders—and no answers.”

  “That’s it—that’s the end,” Nellie said.

  He whirled on her, out of control. “It’s true. You’ve got nothing but one narrow agenda and a talent for squealing like stuck pigs.”

  “You Republican capitalist bastard. Get out of here.” She gestured to the door like an actress in a melodrama.

  A man cheered, “Hurrah for Miss Ross,” and led more applause.

  “Get out.” She was nearly incoherent. “Get out, get out of here, Mack. You’re despicable—I don’t want to see you. Get out.”

  “By God I will.”

  Jim Phelan shouldered through the crowded aisle. “So will I. Goddamned wildfowl sentimentalists…”

  It was only a few steps to the anteroom, where Mack shut the double doors to mute the threats and catcalls. He leaned against the door, shaking.

  “John Muir’s right most of the time. But he isn’t right all of the time.”

  “Totally unreasonable,” Phelan agreed. “They’d rather see Frisco burn than damage a single tree.”

  Slowly Mack’s brow cooled as the trembling worked itself out. He regretted the tone of his remarks, but not the content. Though he respected the Sierra Club, he did believe the members were wrong about the dam. He also realized he’d behaved abominably in Nellie’s eyes. Phelan started to the stairs.

  “Just a minute, Jim.”

  Mack opened the right-hand door. The meeting room had calmed down, and Muir was speaking quietly and patiently again, using a red Wax crayon to mark a map of the Sierra range.

  “Nellie?” Mack said in a stage whisper.

  Still seated in the last row, she kept her eyes straight ahead. She was rigid.

  He spoke her name again. When she finally turned and looked, her eyes said everything.

  He shut the door and followed Phelan down the stairs.

  During the afternoon and evening he telephoned her apartment on Russian Hill. The first time, she answered. He said hello and she hung up. The next ten times he listened to ringing. When the exchange closed, he went into the dark summer streets and walked for hours. He ended the night asleep in an armchair at Margaret’s redecorated flat.