The next day Milton popped into the mercantile to see if Fiona Littleleaf’s produce supplier could add a monkey to his regular delivery. “He brings bananas,” he reasoned. “I figure that where there’s bananas, there’s likely to be monkeys.” Fiona had little patience for such nonsense and shooed him out. Milton next went to the library where he was surprised but quite happy to see Ma behind the big desk.
“What monkeys make good pets?” he asked her.
Ma spent a little time going through the card catalogues before leading Milton to a back section of the library where they found a monograph on Capuchin “organ-grinder’s” monkeys. On the cover was a picture of a tiny, dark-furred creature with a halo of blonde hair wreathing its baby face. Milton was delighted.
“This is perfect,” he told Ma. “I’ll walk around town with one of these little bastards on my shoulder and people will say, ‘There goes Milton Garwood and his trained monkey.’ And I will train him, too. I’ll teach him how to retrieve my newspaper and open beer bottles and play the harmonica. It’ll be better than having a Zenith Stratosphere.”
He grinned at Ma.
“So, where can I get one?”
“I don’t know,” Ma answered. “A pet store?”
There were no pet stores in Tesoro and Milton couldn’t buy a new car to drive to San Francisco as his now-bitter enemy, Skitch Peterson, was the only dealer in town and Milton didn’t know how to drive, anyway, still relying on the horse-drawn wagon he’d inherited from his father. However, James Throckmorton went into the city for the afternoon every week or two to see the minor-league San Francisco Seals play baseball, and he agreed to let Milton hitch a ride on his next trip. Not long thereafter, Milton had his monkey, a creature he named Mr. Sprinkles.
A buying frenzy had gripped Tesoro. Remember that the carrot on Dinkle’s stick was dangled during the Great Depression, a terrible time at least partly to blame for my father running out on us, given his already inconsistent acquaintance with a regular paycheck. I didn’t know Seamus O’Halloran well. He left when I was four. I’ve seen pictures and know he was handsome; his hair dark and thick and curly, the end of his nose round like a little ball. The only other memory I have is of someone who was very tall.
Angus MacCallum once described him for me as, “a fella unwillin’ to do the work that connect a long reach wit’ a short grasp.” That probably explains why he tried on so many jobs but never found one that fit. At various times Dad was a salesman, a journalist, a novelist, an actor, a prospector, a bookkeeper, a beekeeper, and a barkeeper. He wasn’t much of a father, although I remain amazed that he didn’t catch the scent of treasure in the air when I discovered the ambergris on the beach, returning to lay claim to his old chair at the head of a much more solvent table than the one he deserted after Alex was born.
As far as that goes, people in Tesoro had not only caught the scent of treasure; indeed, Dinkle’s lines of credit now threatened to asphyxiate them in a cloud of cupidity. They wrote checks for clothes and jewelry and appliances. They bought sofas and mattresses and china and knick-knacks and knick-knack shelves. One woman ordered a chandelier with globes shaped like the heads of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, another an entire Craftsman house kit from Sears, Roebuck and Company. James Throckmorton’s father, Axel, had been widowed for more than a decade, and although he’d sworn never to consort with another woman after his beloved Lillian died, years of going to sleep in an otherwise empty bed joined to a line of credit from Cyrus Dinkle was simply too much enticement.
“I’m gettin’ me a mail-order bride,” he announced to his son, owner of the Last Resort Bar & Grill. “I’m tired of being alone. I ain’t got that many years left and I’d like to have someone warm my feet under the covers.”
After Coach Wally Buford’s wife, Judy, packed their house full of so much furniture they had to squeeze through it all sideways, she sent off for a porcelain commode with a jeweled seat cover. “You can’t get one of these from Sears or Montgomery Ward,” she told her friends. “It’s a special order, custom-made item. Definitely not pedestrian.” Judy had received a Word-of-the-Day calendar from Coach Wally on her last birthday and “pedestrian” happened to land on the same date she ordered her commode. Of course, hardly anyone in Tesoro understood Judy’s use of the word in that context, but the more perplexing question attached to her purchase was the lack of a sewer system in our town.
A few of the wealthier folks—Cyrus Dinkle, Miss Lizzie, Roger Johns the Banker, and C. Herbert Judson the Lawyer—had septic tanks and indoor sewer plumbing, but the rest of us, including the Bufords, trudged to an outhouse each morning after arising and just before retiring at night. Judy was undeterred, figuring a septic tank was in the Buford future once their ambergris ship came in, and she filled out the order form for the commode, wrote a check from the line of credit Dinkle had set up for them, and then spent several days making certain that everyone in Tesoro knew what was coming and how much it cost.
The plumbing fixture arrived in Oakland on a Thursday and Coach Wally drove over to pick it up. A sizable crowd was on his front walk when he returned, anxious to ooh and aah when the thing was uncrated. Judy and Coach Wally happily accommodated the looky-loo’s and before long the toilet sat white and gleaming atop its palette like a king about to be crowned. Wally attached the wooden oval seat and then unveiled the coronet: a cover encrusted in fake rubies, emeralds, and sapphires. He held it up for the crowd to behold, like a boxer displaying his championship belt, and then fastened it in place, afterward puffing out his chest and squeezing Judy’s hand as they basked in the chorus of “Well, I nevers” and “Don’t that beat alls” that poured out of the assembled onlookers. After the hubbub settled down, Coach Wally had a couple of his high school football players haul the commode inside where he and Judy contemplated the dilemma of where to put it in a house without indoor sewer plumbing.
“Eventually, we’ll have a real, big-city lavatory,” Judy asserted, “so we should put it where we think a proper bathroom might go.” The Buford residence was a nice little house but had only enough space for a couple of bedrooms, a living room, dining room, and kitchen, so they put the commode under the stairs while Judy worked on design plans. She took over the kitchen table with a pad of paper and a newly sharpened pencil. A day or so later the pencil and its eraser were nubs and the kitchen floor was littered with crumpled balls of rejected lavatory drawings. “There’s no place to put a bathroom,” she complained to her husband. “We’ll have to add on.”
Coach Wally was a creature of habit and ordinarily blew a gasket if even a scent of change in his routine was in the air. However, he kept his cool when Judy apprised him of her conclusion because he never listened to his wife, and with his tacit consent, she set about planning the renovation. In the meantime, however, Judy felt the commode deserved a more prominent position in the Buford furniture hierarchy.
She first made Coach Wally haul it into the living room where she tested out several locations before ordering him to place it next to the sofa. A day or so later she had him move it to the head of the dining table, and then to the kitchen where the coach put his foot down. “That’s it,” he told Judy. “This damned thing weighs a ton. I ain’t movin’ it again. I didn’t want it to begin with.” Still, once the commode had settled into Coach Wally’s favorite room, he managed to look past his initial disdain. Indeed, he eventually took a real shine to the thing, perching on it when he had his morning coffee and read the paper, anticipating its special purpose by doing so with the jeweled lid up and his underwear down to his ankles, a bathrobe tastefully shielding Judy from unnecessary glimpses of his manhood.
Now, I can promise you that when a fellow adopts such a position for an extended period of time his physiology will begin to advance some pretty insistent mandates, and it wasn’t long before Coach Wally was reading the sports section or cheating on his crossword puzz
le while filling the air around him with gas that made the disgusting, black coating of the ambergris I’d discovered on the beach smell like lavender. Eventually, Judy ordered her husband to take his coffee on the porch, but Coach Wally had fallen deeply in love with the jeweled commode by then and refused to budge unless the toilet went with him. That’s how it ended up on their front porch with Coach Wally atop the thing each morning, his coffee and a cigarette always in hand, a bathrobe making certain that passers-by would be titillated by nothing more provocative than a set of hairless and veiny ankles.
It had been one month since I discovered the ambergris on the beach and Tesoro had changed from a sleepy little seaside village to a bastion of consumerism, home to a commode with a jeweled seat cover and an organ-grinder’s monkey named Mr. Sprinkles. It would soon change again.
Chapter Eleven:
Mr. and Mrs. C. Herbert Judson
Our ambergris came to reside in C. Herbert Judson’s boathouse after Angus MacCallum suggested that exposure to salt water might transform more of the foul, black-gray crust and its brown, waxy undercoat to sweet, lucrative ambergris. The boathouse—a floating, wood-frame garage with a tin roof—had once been painted red, but weather and the sea had beaten the siding into the dull pink-gray of the Tesoro sky at dawn. Inside were narrow walkways and a spider’s web of ropes and pulleys used to lift Mr. Judson’s boat out of the water should the hull need to be scraped or repainted. There was a single door on the landward side of the structure with double doors on the seaward side, allowing the C. Breeze to be put out or docked without leaving the water. Before the ambergris was relocated, the place smelled of salt water and barnacles with a hint of rot, the lower edges of the wood siding dark and ragged from years of exposure to the sea. Afterward, it smelled like the worst outhouse one can imagine.
Guards from a list of volunteers had been posted around the clock in twelve-hour shifts since moving the ambergris from the beach to the boathouse. It was tedious duty, particularly at night, and most of the assigned guards were dozing when I rode my bicycle past the place around 6:00 a.m. every day. I delivered papers for the San Francisco Chronicle, the newspaper that would eventually employ me as a writer. I had a large route, a significant number of folks in Tesoro relying on a big city paper to keep them abreast of which politician in Sacramento or Washington D Almighty C deserved to be shot as well as the latest goings-on with Dick Tracy and the Katzenjammer Kids. I also carried for our own Tesoro Town Crier, a weekly publication devoted to local issues and happenings.
It was mid-July, the summer half over, and Ma was back at the library full-time, her moods so smoothed by Miss Lizzie’s nauseating potion that she seemed tantalizingly normal. Unfortunately, as Ma became more clear-headed, the rest of Tesoro went crazier. Once people wearied of buying things they began to consider how money might help them settle family squabbles or disputes with neighbors. There were a couple of petitions for separation and so many lawsuits that C. Herbert Judson was no longer able to shutter his office and go sailing whenever he pleased.
Mr. Judson was a subscriber to the Chronicle and my first delivery each day. Before the ambergris turned up on the beach, his windows were dark each morning and I quietly slipped his paper under the mat rather than toss it against the front door. However, with the promiscuous proliferation of lawsuits, more often than not I now found him sitting on his porch swing, reading a document, contemplating the sunrise, or just staring at the immaculately painted floorboards. “Top of the morning, Connor,” he always said.
Sometimes his wife, Mrs. C. Herbert Judson, sat with him, a hand stroking the back of his neck, her legs curled up beneath a fuzzy bathrobe so oversized it must surely have been her husband’s. She was a handsome woman although I thought her ancient, a callous and immature appraisal that now amuses me. In 1934, Mrs. C. Herbert Judson was probably in her early fifties—far from ancient—and second only to Fiona Littleleaf as the most beautiful woman in Tesoro. She and her husband were very much in love and had given the tongue-waggers a workout when they arrived from San Francisco, walking about town hand-in-hand and occasionally kissing each other full on the mouth right out in the open where anyone could see them.
C. Herbert Judson had been a big deal lawyer in the city, a founding partner in his firm and a man with photos on his office wall that showed him hobnobbing with some impressively famous people of the early twentieth century: Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Edison, Stanford White. A vigorous man with hair more the color of ash than charcoal, he was not young and yet I remember him as youthful. Mrs. C. Herbert Judson had been a prominent socialite in the city, chairperson of organizations populated by photogenic women with rich husbands. She was as charming as she was beautiful and had been a favorite at the various theater, symphony, and ballet openings, always in the latest fashion from New York or Paris.
That the Judsons appeared at all in Tesoro was a surprise. Mr. Judson, an avid sailor, claimed to have heeded a call from the sea. Mrs. C. Herbert Judson was less enthusiastic about sailing—prone to seasickness and fearful of underwater creatures. She loved her husband but generally spurned the pitch and sway of his twenty-eight-foot sloop, the C. Breeze, in favor of tea with Fiona and Miss Lizzie or an excursion to San Francisco.
There were no Judson children for reasons I suspect to have been biological, as both Mr. and Mrs. Judson liked children a great deal—dressing in costumes for Halloween, leading caroling parties at Christmas, and opening their spacious lawn for Easter egg hunts. They cheered for the Tesoro High Seagulls, attended school plays and concerts that featured other people’s kids, and organized beach weenie roasts in the fall. It might seem Mr. Judson’s sailing left his wife too much on her own inside their huge Victorian at the landward edge of town, but they were blessed with a decent number of nieces and nephews as well as a good many friends from San Francisco and elsewhere, their four stylishly appointed guestrooms rarely unoccupied.
Upon moving to Tesoro, C. Herbert Judson’s pedigree had been immediately joined to the fact that anyone from San Francisco whose name began with an initial was automatically enveloped in a cachet of respect and dignity. This installed him as a town leader, a trust he subsequently justified, offering sound advice in a calm manner. Unlike Coach Wally Buford, who seemed determined to engage in a pissing contest with the rest of the town leaders, Mr. Judson was never overbearing, unfailingly polite, and would have been just as likeable as Roger Johns the Banker had we not all been a little daunted by his unpretentious use of words like “estop” and “subrogate.”
A week after the Fourth of July, I was up earlier than usual, unable to sleep on a night that lacked its typical cooling breeze from the sea. I picked up my papers at the Sinclair station—the drop-off used by the fellow from the Chronicle who serviced most of the coastal villages and towns north of the bay—then pedaled off, reaching C. Herbert Judson’s house by 5:30 a.m. Mr. Judson sat on the porch swing, reading from a sheaf of papers in the pale light of early morning, a cup of coffee in one hand, a stack of files on the wooden porch floor. Unlike many men who reach their fifties with a bald pate and substantial belly, he had remained fit, with all his hair and a complexion healthily bronzed by sun and saltwater spray.
“Top of the morning, Connor,” he called out.
“Hi, Mister Judson,” I answered. I hopped off my bike, climbed the steps, and took a seat next to him on the swing. From there I could easily read the print at the top of his document:
Axel Throckmorton v. Harvey Fu Chang
I wasn’t surprised. Given the epidemic of litiginitis that had infected Tesoro, it was predictable that old Axel would end up suing the fellow who had sold him his mail-order bride.
The notion of buying a wife likely seems old-fashioned and quite odd in today’s world with its steady diet of unmarried folks carrying on with one another on cable television. But I can assure you that it was already old-fashioned and odd in my day, too, gi
ven that such transactions were already in the sunset of their time in 1934. Keep in mind, however, that old Axel was in the sunset of his own time, too, figuring he lacked both the stamina and the timeline for an extended courtship. Thus, a few days after signing his line of credit agreement with the Boop who looked like Garbo and spoke with a Russian accent, Axel had caught a ride with his son to San Francisco where James cheered on the baseball Seals, giving the old man plenty of time to canvass restaurants and shops in Chinatown. After being thrown out of several establishments, the evictions accompanied by a good deal of mixed Chinese-English profanity, Axel came across Harvey Fu Chang, a fellow who traded in imports, exports, opium, and mail-order brides. Harvey and Axel struck a deal, and a week or so later, a fiancée named Mei Ling was scheduled for delivery.
On the night the transaction was to be completed, James accompanied his father. He was opposed to old Axel’s engagement but was even more opposed to the idea of a contract finalized at midnight in the shadows of a dimly lit Chinatown alley. So he fired up his recently acquired 1927 Olds, and the two men made it into the city shortly before the appointed time. They found the designated alley just off Grant and Clay with about five minutes to spare and eased up to the rear of the importer’s store. Axel had donned a suit and tie for the occasion and carried a bouquet of roses for his new fiancée. However, the flowers threatened to wilt as visibly as the old man’s expression when sixteen-year-old Mei Ling stepped out of the shadows and into the pale halo of light provided by a single, forlorn bulb on the rear face of the fellow’s establishment.
Treasure of the Blue Whale Page 7
