California Gold

by John Jakes

“Fifty dollars?” Mack said.

  “One hundred,” said Paulhan. He was a cheerful young man of twenty-five or so with lively dark eyes and a perfect Gallic mustache waxed to points. His buxom wife, Celeste, and his mechanics, Didier and Edouard, hovered behind him.

  “Done.” Mack began to count out bills.

  “Are you sure this is safe?” Margaret said.

  “Why, I took Monsieur Hearst aloft yesterday; he is still alive,” Paulhan said. “Strap yourself in place, Monsieur Chance.”

  Everything happened too hurriedly for Mack to be frightened. He left his cap with Margaret but kept his goggles. The mechanics spun the propeller, the Gnome motor made his eardrums throb, and he gripped the struts of the fragile wing as the ground raced by underneath. Cold wind beat his face. Paulhan lifted the Farman skyward and Mack’s stomach dipped and churned.

  He watched the grandstand swoop away and diminish and fields shrink to patterned squares. Paulhan turned west toward the ocean. Mack held tight with both hands, the fear waning. What an incredible feeling. Angels must feel this way.

  They passed over farmhouses, arbors, the interurban line, racing toward the glittering ocean at incredible speed. Mack saw the land and sea from a perspective altogether new, but there was so much moment-by-moment excitement—the motor’s roar, the battering wind, the constant dips and bumps of the biplane—he had no time to consciously examine sensations, only experience them.

  “Two thousand feet,” Paulhan shouted over the wind. The struts cut into Mack’s white-knuckled hands. As the Farman shot away from the shoreline like a slingshot stone, he looked down with a new, dizzying feeling. Water—nothing but the herringbone wave pattern of dark-blue water beneath…

  Paulhan banked south and pointed at a small fishing smack plowing to sea, then he sank the Farman, and Mack’s belly with it. They flew fifty feet above the fishing boat, the fishermen waved, and Paulhan wagged his wings. Then the aircraft banked again, and Mack confronted the panorama of the California coast: surf, shore, green land, toy buildings, the distant mountains. It reminded him of the moment he came down from the Sierras. It was a magnificent, exalting sight.

  Paulhan took note of his passenger’s rapt expression and concentrated on flying.

  “It’s the most incredible experience I’ve ever had, Margaret.” Mack was walking through the crowd with his arm around her. Utterly chilled after the flight, he’d dragged her off to search for a coffee booth.

  “Didn’t you think you’d fall off or crash?”

  “Of course. Every minute. But I didn’t care—”

  Suddenly, in the aisle between concession tents, Mack dropped his arm from her waist. He was staring down the lane.

  “What is it?”

  “Someone who looks familiar.” He bolted forward. “Wait right there.”

  He worked his way through the crowd, shoving, turning sideways, his eye fixed on the tall boy studying a display of souvenir pennants. Sunshine lit the boy’s face like a medallion. The boy was fair, handsome, and browner than Carla had ever been. But her features were unmistakable.

  “Jim?” Mack shouted, his heart pounding.

  The boy turned and saw him. There was a rush of emotions Mack couldn’t quite read—surprise, confusion, fear, perhaps.

  “Jim— Damn it, out of my way.” Mack manhandled a portly gentlemen eating cotton candy, and the man stumbled against him, smearing him with the sticky stuff and delaying him for ten seconds. Finally Mack got around him and ran up to the pennant display.

  “Where’d that boy go? The one who was standing here?” The concessionaire pointed down the lane between his booth and the next. The lane was empty.

  Panting, Jim limped along as fast as he could beneath the grandstand. He kept flinging looks over his shoulder, his deep-blue eyes full of panic. “Look out—one side—let me through.”

  He wasn’t sure; he wasn’t sure at all. He’d seen the face only as the briefest of blurs. Then the white-haired man called him by name. Of course there were a lot of Jims in the world. But he wasn’t going to stand around and wait for the man to catch him. If it was his father, he wanted nothing to do with him.

  Out of breath, he burst into the sunshine and raced up the grandstand steps. He grabbed the old tramp’s hand, twisted as some root freshly dug from the ground.

  “Jocker, let’s go.”

  “What? What are you saying?”

  “Come on, Jocker, right now. I’m sick to my stomach. I’ve got this fearful bellyache. So bad I’m like to die. Let’s catch a train. I want to go back to Pasadena.”

  Jocker didn’t object. They escaped on an empty P.E. red car without seeing the white-haired man again.

  The fair was spoiled for Mack. Once Margaret understood what had happened, she readily consented to leave. “I’ll drop you at a hotel for an hour,” Mack said. “I’m going to the authorities before we drive back to Riverside. I know it was my son.” He pounded the steering wheel and never thought twice about his choice of words. He’d accepted that quite probably Fairbanks was Jim’s real father. But Jim remained his son.

  The drowsy sheriff’s deputy he spoke with late in the afternoon woke up when he heard Mack’s name. The man was much less hostile than the San Francisco police crowd, but he wasn’t encouraging:

  “Yes, I grant you, a limp is a noticeable trait. But we can’t send people house to house, Mr. Chance. So if the boy doesn’t want to be found—if he’s law-abiding, and doesn’t attract attention—he may not be. We’ll do our best, but please don’t expect any miracles.”

  Refusing to be discouraged so easily, he called Pinkerton’s and left a message for Flyshack with the man on duty. Then he telegraphed Alex Muller and ordered an updated reprinting of ten thousand copies of the old reward flyer.

  72

  A HAMMERED BRASS SUNBURST with radiant arms crowned the arch of the padlocked iron gate, and sunlight slanting into Pasadena Canyon lit the device to shimmering brilliance.

  Outside the gate, Mack and Margaret were tucked under a lap robe in Mack’s smart Studebaker trap, the four shiny bay horses blowing out their breath in pale plumes. The long iron fence and meandering dirt road were in shadow. Even as they watched, the sun’s angle changed and the sunburst darkened.

  “The Tabernacle of the Sun Universal.” Mack didn’t hide his distaste. He touched the padlock with his long buggy whip. “Evidently not everyone is welcome.”

  “That’s odd for a church.”

  “It isn’t a real church. They do conduct weekly services, I understand. Up there, in that octagonal building.” Still in the sunlight, the building shone on a terrace cut from the hill. The trim was white, the siding a soft butter yellow—sunny outdoor colors.

  The tabernacle was reached by a dirt road that curved up the grassy slope from the gate. Windows ran around the building on both floors, flashing back the sun like signal mirrors. Two women in white robes, tiny as miniature dolls, emerged from the house and took a path to a cluster of cottages even more remote. The property was heavily treed and well tended. Six gardeners were visible pruning stands of white azalea and weeding flower beds.

  “But they sell merchandise too,” Mack went on. “Nostrums. Health gadgets. Quack stuff. They collect thousands of dollars from newcomers bedazzled by the sunshine and the rhetoric of my former partner. He runs the whole thing. Calls himself Brother Paul. He stole that sunburst from our San Solaro tract.”

  “Obviously you don’t think he’s sincere about what he does.”

  “Oh, yes. If there’s one thing Wyatt is sincere about, it’s making money.”

  “What I meant was, you don’t believe there’s anything to this cult.”

  “Sunshine does make people feel better. Sometimes it actually promotes recovery from illness. Should you have to pay someone to tell you that—as though it’s some new gospel? I don’t think so. Wyatt’s a con artist, a crook.” He picked up the reins. “Seen enough?”

  “Yes, certainly.”

  Mac
k whistled to the four bays and the trap went briskly down the road, scattering gravel and tan dust behind it.

  On the hillside near the octagonal house, the young gardener heard the noise of the trap and horses. He was kneeling on a walk of blue slate, weeding a bed where gardenias would bloom in warm weather.

  Jim raised his head and studied the departing sightseers. A man and woman, that was all he could tell. Nothing unusual; they got plenty of rubberneckers up here. People showing Pasadena to visitors always included a drive past the tabernacle.

  He watched the trap disappear on its way down to the main canyon road. Then he spent ten minutes finishing his chore. After the narrow escape from Dominguez Hill, things had settled down again. Jim had a calm, sequestered existence, and he liked it. He worked at educating himself by reading books from the public library, and he seldom saw people outside the tabernacle. He and Jocker went into Pasadena once every three or four weeks, and that was enough. Life at the tabernacle was a soothing respite from the storms he remembered from his father’s house.

  The sun set behind the canyon, shooting rays of light upward behind it, and the hillside shade had a wintry tang suddenly. He shivered as he stuffed his cotton work gloves in his jeans pocket and walked up the path to the cottages.

  There were fourteen cottages scattered through a large eucalyptus grove. Beyond them lay the stable, storage buildings, and a small dining hall. Workers lived in the cottages and ate in the hall. The cook fixed real food. That was noteworthy in light of a pamphlet authored by the founder of the tabernacle and foisted on its members. In A California Sunshine Diet, Brother Paul’s recommendation for a proper breakfast was a bowl of cornmeal mush and chilled spring or well water. For dinner and supper, Valley fruits and vegetables, more water, and as a special treat, an orange or grapefruit. Jim liked oranges, all right. But the mere thought of the rest of the diet almost made him puke. In the dining hall—behind the scenes, so to speak—he got more solid fare: panfried steak and breaded cutlets, eggs cooked hard as leather, and biscuits as heavy as a handful of fishing sinkers. Normal, healthy food.

  The tabernacle’s founder occupied the entire top floor of the octagonal house. Often at night, the whole floor glowed with electric lights. Once, unable to sleep, Jim had seen the lights burning at half past four in the morning. He’d walked up near the house and listened. Behind the closed drapes, he heard the squeals of women and the rowdy laughter of men.

  He was pretty sure of what was going on; he’d learned a lot, very early, traveling with Jocker. He wondered if that sort of behavior was not a little improper for a church. But if it didn’t bother all the red-faced worshipers who drove out to the tabernacle once a week, why should it bother him?

  Jim’s familiarity with the octagonal house was limited to the first floor; he had never been upstairs. Nor did he care to go. Brother Paul was a moody, bad-tempered man. Jocker had several times spoken of the founder’s humidor of Canton opium. “Smokes it in his pipe. Don’t you ever take a puff if he offers. Kill you quicker’n the syph, that stuff.” So long as Brother Paul paid decent wages, Jim figured the founder could do anything he wanted.

  A meeting hall took up half of the first floor of the house, offices of Brother Paul and his part-time lay staff filling the rest. One of those offices belonged to Elihu Flintman, a queer old bird who lived near Covina, came to the tabernacle because his wife insisted, and kept the books on a volunteer basis. Flintman was on the board of elders that ran the tabernacle. He complained that the board had no power.

  Flintman’s wife raised roses. Jim had done a little part-time work in her garden. He’d gotten acquainted with Flintman— more accurately, had been watched by him; Flintman wanted blood for every dollar—and thus the bookkeeper had learned that Jim had a passion for ciphering. When Flintman was especially busy at the tabernacle, he’d bring Jim into his office for a few hours to run sums and double-check ledger figures. Jim enjoyed it, though he found Flintman fussy and inclined to be difficult.

  Moving up the path, he saw Jocker picking up small branches around one of the cottages. Jocker wasn’t a very efficient gardener; he moved too slowly and couldn’t bend over easily. Jim ended up doing a lot of his work, but he didn’t mind.

  Jocker straightened up with a melodramatic groan, then leaned his rake against a eucalyptus tree. “Tired.”

  “Let’s wash up and get ready for supper. Here, lean on me.” Jim put Jocker’s arm over his shoulder and helped him up the path toward the cottages.

  The following Saturday, Jim and Jocker hitched up the horses and drove into Pasadena to buy sacks of fertilizer. Jim took the occasion to dash to the public library. Waiting for him while the wagon was being loaded, Jocker happened to stroll past a flyer tacked to a telegraph pole, the word reward leaping out at him. He paused to read it.

  Ashen, he looked one way, then the other, along the dusty street. A dairy wagon creaked past. As soon as it vanished around a corner, Jocker tore the flyer down.

  On the way back to the tabernacle, Jim drove the wagon. There were books on the floor: by Mark Twain, Dickens, James Fenimore Cooper. Jocker hummed to himself, then cleared his throat several times before he finally said, “Look here. I found something on a telegraph pole you ought to see.” He pulled out the flyer.

  “I don’t know why they put in that birthmark,” he said while Jim read the flyer. “Otherwise it’s you, to perfection. Isn’t it?”

  Jim crushed the paper into a ball, threw it away, and concentrated on the road ahead, both hands gripping the reins so tightly, his fingers turned white.

  Jocker observed him for a moment or so, then said, “You haven’t told me everything, have you? Somebody’s after you. Somebody you don’t want to see.”

  Jim didn’t answer.

  Suddenly Jocker’s eyes opened wider. “Say. I’ll bet you saw that somebody at the air show. I’ll bet you didn’t have a bellyache after all.”

  “Jocker,” Jim exclaimed in a warning tone.

  “Who is it, Jim, folks?” the old man persisted. “Is that it, you really do have folks somewhere—just like I always suspected?”

  “Don’t ask,” Jim whispered, staring straight ahead. “If you’re my friend, Jocker, just don’t ask.”

  Jocker reflected, wiggling his tongue in one of the gaps where teeth were missing. “I am, so I won’t. I had a funny idea you might say something like this.” He pulled a wad of paper from another pocket—two more flyers. “That’s why I tore down all the others I could find before you got back from the library.”

  On the depot platform, Margaret gave Mack a big hug. “I’ve had a glorious vacation. Thank you.” The back of her glove rested on his cheek. “Especially for the first night.”

  He looked away.

  Saddened, she said, “You were so cheerful for a day or two. Then—”

  “Then I saw my son. I saw him, and I lost him, and even though the Pinkertons have redoubled their efforts, still nobody can find him…”

  “Get aboard, miss, if you please,” said the conductor on the steps of the car.

  “Yes, in a moment. Mack—won’t you come north for a visit sometime soon?”

  “I told Older I would when Ruef went to San Quentin.”

  “Wait for that and you may wait years. Don’t you need to see Mr. Anderson out at Niles?”

  “I suppose,” he said with another of those vague shrugs. He gave her a brotherly kiss on the cheek. “I’ll think about it.”

  She searched his face. Lifeless again. Then she squeezed his arm. “I really don’t care what reason you come up with—I just think seeing the City might be a good change. You can’t spend your whole life dwelling on mistakes.”

  “You can if they’re big enough.”

  The conductor harrumphed and insisted she board. Margaret flung an arm around his neck, and hugged him again, tears glistening on the lashes of her closed eyes. She held him, and shared his pain, then let him go.

  As the Daylight Limited pulled out, sh
e gazed at him from the window of her seat in the parlor car. Mack stood motionless in the steam, right hand raised. Slowly he disappeared. But the image of his haunted face remained with her.

  73

  THE GIRL IN JEANS and red gingham shirt booted her stallion harder, ducking at the sound of cracking gunshots from her pursuers. She flung a look of terror over her shoulder. There they came, eight hard-riding outlaws. The leader was a lanky desperado in a cowboy hat with a Montana peak, its wide brim hiding the upper part of his face, a leaf-green bandanna concealing the lower part. He rode at the head of his band of scruffy hard cases, each of whom had a brace of pistols.

  The outlaws chased the girl down a country road at the base of steep tree-clad hills. The leader held the reins in his teeth, controlling his black mare with his knees, and fired shot after shot from a pair of silver-plated Smith & Wesson American .44’s. The other outlaws shot too, white smoke puffing from their gun muzzles.

  Miraculously, though, the fusillade didn’t harm the girl on horseback. Eyes round with fright, she urged her horse to go faster, but now the outlaw in the Montana peak hat galloped to within twenty feet of her, firing relentlessly, apparently never exhausting his ammunition.

  Suddenly, on the crest of the hill to the right, the girl spied a lone rider in sheepskin batwing chaps, tall hat, cowboy vest, flowing bandanna. Sizing up the situation, he snatched out his Colt Peacemaker.

  The girl waved and wailed, “Oh, Billy—help me, help me.”

  The lone rider gritted his teeth and spurred his horse down the brushy embankment. With his reins in his teeth like the outlaw chief, he snatched a second Peacemaker from a holster, firing while his horse slid down the hillside. He knocked his hat back with a pistol barrel and the sun battled his face. His jutting jaw said he was fighting mad.

  The endangered damsel, her pursuers, and her savior all raced toward a grove of arching trees at a bend in the road. The lone rider picked off one outlaw, then a second, each malefactor falling with an elaborate toss of his weapon, a great clutch of his shirt bosom, a piercing cry. The outlaw leader flashed furious looks at his weakling assistants lying shot at me roadside. One of them sat up, dusted himself off, and grinned.