California Gold

by John Jakes

  A farmer leaning on a shiny green fender snickered. “Since when?”

  “Might as well forget about calling a doctor or anybody else,” Sledgeman said. “We stopped half a mile up the road and Len Sudder shinnied up the phone pole and cut the line. We also sent one more car down the back road with its lights out. There’s a few good boys in the field behind this place, in case anybody gets a notion to run that way.”

  A knife twisted in Mack’s middle and his mouth turned dry and juiceless.

  Sledgeman ran his tongue over horsy yellow teeth, then settled his frayed old straw hat a little more firmly. “I think you just better let us have those two, Mack.” He walked around the trough, headed for the stoop.

  Mack lined up the shotgun on Sledgeman’s gut. Sledgeman stopped, and so did the muttering from the others.

  “Pete, I don’t want to fire this, but I will if you push. You want those men, you’ll have to take me first. I guarantee I’ll take some of you with me.”

  Sledgeman chewed his lower lip and eyed Mack up and down, gauging his determination. Finally the farmer leaned over and expelled a big shiny blob of spit right into the dust in front of Mack’s shoes.

  “You’re violating the law, Mack.”

  “What the hell do you mean?”

  Carl Cass shouted the answer. “Sheriff Chittenden deputized us. Every man-jack.”

  “Except me—I already got a badge,” Sergeant Lummis said to general laughter.

  Mack rubbed an index finger over his chin. He could hear the rasp of his beard, growing out dark as a twilight shadow; he hadn’t touched a razor since leaving the City.

  “So you see, Mack—”

  “Nothing, Pete. I see nothing.”

  “If we want those two, we got the authority.”

  “I’d like to see a warrant. Some legal paper.” Men shifted their feet and muttered again. “This deputy talk is bullshit, Pete, and we both know it. But I really don’t care one way or another. You’ll bleed just as much deputized as not.” He held the double-barrel Ithaca a little higher, the blued metal shining in the headlights.

  Sledgeman finally answered him with a shrug. “We can wait you out. We can wait all night. We can wait a week. We’re gonna make an example of that greaser and the rag-head. Examples for the whole damn valley.”

  “The whole state,” an Armenian farmer named Pazian yelled, drawing a lot of noisy approval from the others.

  Sledgeman turned around and trudged back to the autos. Lummis and a few others huddled around him, whispering.

  Mack walked backward to the dim pool of electric light on the stoop. “Anyone there?”

  From the darkness of the hall came the reply. “I, sir. Mr. Mukerji.”

  “Try the telephone on the wall. Let me know if it’s working.”

  Mack waited.

  “No, sir, I do not think so.”

  Swearing, Mack sat down on the stoop and leaned back against the siding. “Turn out this light.”

  Mukerji snapped it off. Mack watched the farmers and townsmen gesturing and arguing in front of the parked automobiles. He’d never been one to waste his money on gambling. But if this were poker, it was a pretty sure bet that he held the losing hand.

  Ticking. A steady ticking…

  His head jerked up. He’d dozed off.

  A cock crowed somewhere. Clouds like white veils trailed across the stars. The ticking kept on. He remembered where he was and wished he hadn’t. Hours ago, he’d put on his suit coat for warmth, but he was freezing, his hands raw and cold. When he exhaled he could see his breath faintly.

  The Ithaca rested on his knees. The ticking, he realized now, came from his twenty-four-karat-gold pocket watch. Bought and engraved before the earthquake, it bore the JMC crest on the lid.

  The barracks raced north. To the east, light was breaking over the valley floor. Mack picked up the watch and tilted it to put some light on the dial. Half past five.

  He yawned and wiggled his stiff legs. The auto lamps had been turned off long ago and the men had piled into the cars to doze, or had curled up on the ground. As the light brightened, Mack saw an arm stretched out here, heard a yawn there; they were rousing.

  Behind the barracks, a sudden explosive hiss signaled the start of another irrigation cycle. Jesse Tarbox had thrown the switch in the office three quarters of a mile away. It might as well have been in China.

  Slowly the men in the mob woke up and greeted each other. Someone’s muffled words were answered with a laugh. That commonplace sound made Mack feel even more alone.

  He heard a rustling behind him, inside, me creak of a stool being moved. Mukerji had sat there all night, sharing the vigil like a servant attending his master. With his pistol, it was a total of two handguns and a shotgun against twenty-three.

  Not good enough.

  Lummis gathered Cass and Sledgeman and five others and once again made a show of conferring. They stood in front of the Model T, where Mack could see them clearly—which was their intent. All night, he’d cudgeled his mind for a way out of this, a way to forestall violence. He considered Tarbox worthless in this kind of emergency, and Homer Keeter too. Mukerji had volunteered to try a dash through the fields for help, but Mack had vetoed it. To whom could they appeal? Maybe the Fresno city and county authorities hadn’t encouraged this marauding, but they’d surely look the other way, whatever happened. No other help was available.

  Sledgeman seemed to be talking loudest in the group by the Model T. He smacked a fist in his palm. “No, right now.” Lummis shrugged, and after some more argument, Sledgeman put on his straw hat and stumped out to the water trough.

  “Chance?”

  “Yes.”

  “You listen. We played your game all night, but the boys are hungry and cold and they want to get this over with. You aren’t going to be reasonable; we aren’t either. We brung some spare tins of gas with us. If you won’t deliver those two, we’ll punish them right here. Fry their hides inside me barracks. Cook ’em alive, and your Mex help in the bargain.”

  “Pete, there are women in the barracks.”

  “I know that.”

  “Youngsters—”

  “Mack, it’s your choice. If they die, the guilt’s on your head.”

  “You’ll have to get up close to start a fire.”

  “We will. You can put some shot in some of us, but not all of us.”

  A vein in Mack’s forehead stood out like blue string. He didn’t want to contemplate how bad, how truly bad this could be if they carried out the threat.

  “Mukerji?” he said over his shoulder.

  “Sir?”

  “Are they still watching the back too?”

  “Yes, sir, I looked not ten minutes ago.”

  Mack stood up, shivering, but not from the chill. With his knee joints cracking and popping, he walked rapidly to the corner of the barracks and looked down the wall to the arbors. There he discerned three men, widely spaced, about fifty yards beyond the barracks. One carried a piece of bar iron.

  Mack heard the slosh of liquid. Across the yard, Cass was lugging a five-gallon gas can out in front of the parked autos; a second man behind him had another. Mack ran back to the stoop, his palms slippery on the shotgun.

  Sergeant Phil Lummis found an ax handle. Someone else produced a rag. Lummis tied the rag around one end of the handle and Cass poured gas over it.

  Lummis stepped well away from the gas containers, holding the ax handle at arm’s length and averting his face. A man struck a match and threw it, and the rag ignited with a whoosh and gush of flame.

  After the flame settled, Lummis hoisted the improvised torch and started on a path to the water trough. Inside the barracks, a woman pleaded in Spanish for her children to gather close and hold on to her.

  Mack cocked the shotgun. “Far enough, Phil.”

  “No, sir, I got police authority. You pull a trigger on me, you’ll hang.”

  Lummis kept walking.

  “Phil,” Mack
said in a raw voice.

  Cass shouted, “Don’t worry, Phil, he ain’t got the balls to kill you cold.”

  Bastards. Bastards. They knew him.

  They started to edge forward, all of them, all across the row of parked autos. The sun was coming up. It promised to be a mild, sweet California day.

  “One last time, Phil. Stay back. This is senseless. A lot of people will be hurt for nothing.”

  Sledgeman yelled, “I don’t think keeping the radical unions out of California is nothing, you cocksucker.”

  There were shouts: “Right, by God”; “Kill him”; “And ever last one of his greasers—”

  Mack wanted to weep with rage. He never imagined it would degenerate to this. But Lummis kept walking, straight on past the water trough.

  Mack rammed the shotgun against his shoulder, taking aim. Lummis stared him in the eye from fifteen paces away. Mack fancied he could feel the heat of the burning rag.

  Then only ten paces…

  Do it. Shoot him.

  And seven…

  And five…SHOOT HIM.

  Lummis broke into a wide grin. “You’re a stinking yella coward, Chance.”

  Lummis wound up to throw the flaming ax handle through a window. Mack hardened his heart and touched the trigger.

  Another sound ruptured the silence, a sound louder than the sprayers in the arbors.

  “Reinforcements!” somebody yelled.

  “Shit, no—we rounded up everybody who wanted to come,” Sledgeman said.

  Mack’s crooked finger caressed the trigger. Then, squinting, he saw something unbelievable. Lummis turned around and saw it too. It was as if a little Essanay film of the previous night was playing on a screen. Five autos in a line roared down the Bowles-Raisin road and turned left into the property with headlights blazing.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Lummis shouted. The fiery ax handle burned too close to his hand and he threw it in the trough. There was a fierce hiss, and a squiggle of smoke in the air, and then nothing but the snarl and growl of the autos coming on through the dust clouds.

  A gilt star decorated the side of the first auto, along with the word SHERIFF. Looks of panic spread on the faces of the farmers and townsmen as the big black Stoddard-Dayton slewed around the parked cars and braked in front of them. The four other vehicles pulled up behind, blocking the road. Men jumped out, talking, yelling questions—city men, from the cut of their clothes.

  The sheriff heaved himself out of his car, tugging up his pistol belt against his sizable belly. He was bowlegged and walked as though his boots pinched. Gray hair showed beneath a creamy Montana peak hat. He spoke with the aggrieved air of a schoolmaster in a room of rowdies.

  “Everybody put down those clubs. Chance, put away that shotgun. Lummis, what the devil is an officer of the law doing mixed up in this?”

  “They said you deputized them, Chittenden,” Mack said.

  Sheriff Chittenden looked even more aggravated. “They’re damn liars. They’d say anything to get their licks at you, I expect.”

  The men fingered their ax handles and two-by-fours. Sledgeman narrowed his eyes as Mukerji peered cautiously from the doorway, his pistol in hand.

  Sheriff Chittenden dragged out his revolver, a homely old .44-40 Colt Frontier model, and fired a shot over his head. The echo rolled away above the sunlit arbors. “I said, put everything down. That’s an order. Barney, Al—if they won’t, arrest them.”

  “You heard him, gents,” said a voice. The speaker was the first of a pair of deputies, younger men with boyish faces, who had slipped between the parked autos. One carried an old Winchester Express, the other a later-model .30-30. After the deputies grabbed a couple of baseball bats and tossed them, the rest of the men pitched their weapons down voluntarily. Pazian and a few others looked relieved in a guilty sort of way.

  The city men moved nearer the farmers and townsmen. Mack saw checkered suits, spats, fancy watch chains. Sledgeman swatted his leg with his straw hat. “Chittenden, who the hell are these dudes?” From the pads and pencils in evidence, Mack knew.

  “San Francisco reporters, Pete,” Sheriff Chittenden said. Sledgeman failed to understand the warning. “Came in on a special train at half past four this morning.”

  “How the hell did they find out about it?” an angry farmer demanded.

  A reporter with a waxed mustache and a radish of a nose marched right up to him. “Well, I’ll explain that, ruben—”

  “Listen here,” the farmer sputtered.

  “One of your loquacious country cousins must have mouthed it around town, because somebody sent a telegram from the depot, maybe somebody who thinks this sort of sport is pretty barbaric. The message flashed from Sacramento to San Francisco, and my city editor dragged me out of Shay’s Market Street Saloon and said there was likely to be a shootout or a lynching here in the sticks. The Examiner hired a special train within the hour. That’s it in a nutshell, ruben.”

  The farmer glared. “You goddamn city wiseacre, my name ain’t Ruben.”

  “Well—whatever,” the reporter said with a shrug. “Sounds like it’s a crackerjack story you’ve got here. Wobblies besieged! King Mob and Prime Minister Arson reign in Fresno County! Yes, sir—could be bigger than Mussel Slough.”

  Sledgeman stumped over to Mack and leaned close. “Hadn’t of been for you, we’d have those two. Nobody’ll forget this.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  Sheriff Chittenden brandished his Colt. “Now I’m going to say this just once and everybody better listen. All you boys from around here, you climb in your cars and vamoose. Some of the rest of you, move those cars in the lane so they can leave. Collect the bunch out back, too. This party’s over.”

  “Sheriff, we came a devil of a long way. We’ve got to talk to these people,” a reporter said.

  Chittenden considered that. “All right. Five minutes. That’s all.”

  The new arrivals went shooting among the locals like pool balls ricocheting after a break. One farmer took a swing at a reporter; a couple of others couldn’t wait to start telling their side.

  “These are newspaper journalists?” Gopal Mukerji asked Mack.

  “That’s right. From San Francisco.”

  The Indian thrust his pistol into his pants, grinned, and dashed for the nearest of them.

  Tension drained out of Mack’s hands and shoulders, leaving him spent and fighting a yawn. He laid the Ithaca shotgun beside the trough and leaned forward to dip his face in the water, which rippled with highlights from the morning sun.

  After immersing his face, he straightened up and shook like a puppy coming out of a creek. Then, opening his eyes, he saw a reporter in a skirt and shirtwaist stepping around the hood of the parked Model T.

  “Nellie.”

  He was so astonished, he couldn’t move, just stood there with water dripping from his cheeks and chin. Her face was pale and puffy from lack of sleep and her hair showed more gray than he remembered. She watched him with a strange, tremulous, almost tearful expression.

  Gopal Mukerji plunged among the reporters, aggressively shaking hands. “How do you do, sirs? I am Mr. Gopal Mukerji, a very good number-one agriculturist and Californian. I wish to say that were it not for that gentleman, Mr. Chance, we would certainly all be dead—or worse. He is a very brave gentleman for whom I hope to work for many years to come.”

  “You work for him now, is that it?”

  Gopal Mukerji swiftly looked at Mack.

  Mack called, “Yes.”

  Mukerji’s grin shone like the sun. Mack ran to Nellie and flung his arms around her.

  “Mack—good Lord.” She gasped and struggled; he had a strong grip on her waist. Her slim body felt wonderful under his hands, wonderful and right. “I have a dispatch to write and file.”

  He paid no attention, forcing her to the side of the Model T and kissing her. Though the kiss lasted only seconds, by the end of it she relaxed in his arms.

  “What a
re you doing here?” He felt giddy as a schoolboy, miraculously reprieved from exhaustion.

  “You heard what kipper Harkness said a minute ago. This story got on the wire from Fresno. I was in the City last night, ready to sit down to dinner with old friends from the Examiner. They got a telephone call from the city room and you were mentioned. Within twenty minutes the paper decided to hire a train. I had to come along.”

  She studied the barracks. Workers and their wives and children crowded the stoop and upstairs windows. “You’re defending Indian labor now? That’s a whole new side of you.”

  “I don’t think so. You know I’ve always had a passion for underdogs. That young man Mukerji is one. He was treated brutally in Fresno. Marquez too. Mukerji brought Marquez here.”

  “Diego Marquez?”

  “That’s right. He’s inside.” Mack leaned against the Ford’s fender. “Before you go to work, I want to tell you something. I’m worn out from dealing with all this by myself. All these people and their problems.” He rubbed at his damp face and decided to take the risk. He tried to couch it lightly, though he suspected she could see how tense he was. She could probably hear his heart beating.

  “I wouldn’t mind laying back for a while, Nellie. I mean a good, long while. I wouldn’t mind having a wife who could support me with her writing.”

  “A—?” Nellie formed the w with her lips. Then astonishment silenced her.

  “Wife, Nellie. Wife.”

  “Damn you.” Her eyes filled with tears. She caressed his cheek, not caring who saw. “Damn you, Mack Chance. How am I supposed to write a coherent sentence when you come at me with a statement like that?”

  “I don’t know. I just had to say it. I’m tired of living without you. I was proud for too long, ambitious for too long, and thick-headed and a lot of other things. I’ve never loved any woman but you and you know it. I’ll take the blame for keeping us apart.”

  “My.” She rocked back. “You have changed.”