Blood and Oranges

by James O. Goldsborough

“Well, not exactly.”

  She turned away, but quickly back again. “Oh my God, I thought I recognized your voice.” Realizing what she’d said, she quickly added: “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  Willie dug into his sundae. Sometimes he didn’t mind being recognized. “Don’t worry about it, my dear.”

  “I’ve been to the temple,” she said. “I am a Soldier. It’s just that I never saw you up close before. I’m up in the rafters.”

  Willie put down his spoon. His smile lit up the ice cream parlor. “Hallelujah! Put your sins behind you.”

  “Whosoever abideth in Him sinneth not.”

  “My goodness. John 3:6. The Lord be praised. You know your scripture. Tell me, Angie, what brought you to our glorious city?”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Eddie’s advice to come to Los Angeles was the best his brother ever received. So he firmly believed. Without Eddie, he would still be with the bums on Turk Street. They arrived with the water that irrigated the land that brought the people who bought Eddie’s homes and oil and hooch and filled Willie’s temple. Willie wasn’t the only evangelist in Los Angeles, but he was ordained and a former missionary and in a profession of charlatans—some of whom he knew weren’t even Christians—Willie’s skills stood out. Rabble-rousers like the Rev. Bob Shoemaker preyed on God’s little people—the poor, the unfortunate, the colored—and Willie denounced them regularly. “There is no darkness nor shadow of death where the workers of iniquity may hide themselves,” he preached.

  Encouraged by Shoemaker and others jealous of Willie’s success, the workers of iniquity had begun digging into his past, combing through what was known of his career but finding nothing to attack him with. His personal life was spotless (how could they have known of Chun hua?) and his professional life exemplary, but that hardly slowed down the inquiry of those whose self-appointed task was to find corruption and charlatanry where none existed. Newspapers assigned star reporters to the temple in an attempt to expose him as one more fraud in a city full of them. One by one they came back shaking their heads.

  Finally, the Times had to admit it:

  Did the Rev. Mull’s prayers, his shouts of “heal, heal, heal” and his laying on of hands, produce what he said it would? The answer must be an emphatic yes. Our reporter approached the healed over a series of weeks, and their testimony left no doubt. Call it what you will, hypnotic power, positive thinking, subliminal suggestion or faith in Jesus Christ, it worked for these people, and that is enough for us.

  He courted Angie warily.

  If the Bible is full of admonitions against fornication, so is it full of fornication. With reporters stalking him and the Rev. Bob Shoemaker and other apostates hounding him, one bitter woman was all it would take. He could not preach against the temptations of a godless society if he did not lead a spotless life. Like Augustine, he was tormented, one whose spirit was ready to renounce but whose body was not. He prayed to find the right woman, the new Millie, the woman to return him to the safety and sanctity of marriage, end the torture of a divided self. He read from Corinthians: “To avoid fornication let every man have his own wife and every woman her own husband.” Exactly so, he thought. I am looking for a loving wife—and yes, a new mother for Calvin.

  And then came Angie, who was hardly what he expected. She was young and (so he thought) single. There was something of Chun hua in her—small but brave, less exotic but more alluring. He could not get Angie’s bounteous figure from his mind. He wanted to renounce, but could not. He fought, fought as Augustine had fought, but was not ready. The spirit was strong, but the flesh was stronger. A gentle man, like Augustine, he was in the grip of something violent. “And up to the very moment in which I was to become another man, the nearer the moment approached, the greater horror did it strike in me.”

  On his knees in the bungalow, his mind seeking Augustine but finding only Angie, he nodded and repeated the words: “I all but did it, lord, but not quite.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  With the success of the temple, Willie moved to the top floor of the new Sunset Tower, the tallest and most luxurious apartment building in Los Angeles, a city whose earthquake building codes did not like tall buildings. He rode the trolleys down Sunset to the temple during the week, saving his Chevy roadster for Sundays. Sunset also was more convenient for Cal, who was at USC and worked part-time at the temple, sometimes staying overnight with his father.

  Willie began dropping into Tony’s regularly, sometimes driving, sometimes taking the Big Red cars. She’d see him coming and already start making the strawberry sundae he always ordered. The shop was not always empty. Sometimes Tony was there and once he found two teenage boys at the counter eating sundaes and flirting. It was harmless prattle about where she lived and what time she got off and did she like the pictures, but he found himself annoyed. He was about to say something when she shut them off with a—“I don’t think my boyfriend Tony would like you talking to me like this.”

  When the boys left, she smiled for him. “Tony isn’t really my boyfriend.” He knew she said it for him.

  Angie was anything but naïve. She knew the Rev. Willie’s interest was not just in her soul and her sundaes, but she liked the idea of being courted by a famous evangelist. Her father was a preacher; her family was steeped in Texas Baptism and she’d been churchgoing until Gil came along. As a girl, she’d mounted the chancel with her father to recite scripture. One local newspaper named her “Sister Angie Smallwood, Beaumont’s child preacher.” Angie knew her Bible and she had her standards. She’d been seduced by Gil but had no regrets because she’d got him to the altar and he’d brought her to Los Angeles. Abandoned, she’d grown to miss her church but not her man, and had gone to the Temple of the Angels to be born again.

  When Willie learned she’d done some preaching and knew scripture he invited her to temple rehearsals and soon cast her in minor roles in the Sunday shows—as an angel, as a member of the chorus, twice with minor speaking roles in shows based on the Beatitudes. Clad in long robes, she looked little different from the other girls, but Willie always knew where she was. For the first time since Millie he felt his heart engaged again. He’d not expected it, not from a girl he’d been drawn to, he confessed, by lust alone. On his knees in the temple chapel he prayed, and the Lord replied, “Love her, love her,” and he did love her. It is what made everything possible. He knew there were risks: To love is to be vulnerable, to face loss, to face pain worse than anything physical. The heartsickness he’d felt after Millie’s death crept back at the edges of his mind, the shudders of pain. He could not go through that again.

  As for Angie, she loved it. Raised by a Bible-thumping father and a born-again mother, she missed all the church hooptedoodle. Saturday night in Beaumont had potluck and bingo, and Sunday the children dressed up and off to church for a morning of hallelujahs followed by cake and coffee and fruit juice and the families socializing while the children went outside to play with fruitless warnings not to get their Sunday best dirty. When she was seven she’d mounted the chancel for the first time and her father helped her onto a chair so she could recite the 23rd Psalm and the 91st, and the 103rd, and when she was nine she read from scripture, John 4 and 1 Corinthians and the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew, and when she was eleven she didn’t have to read anymore because she knew it all by heart.

  She still knew it. Maybe she’d forgotten it with Gil when she’d lost her way, but she still had it and sometimes lay in bed before work at the ice cream shop and sought it in her memory, and if there was a lapse she went back to her Bible, the same worn leather Bible given to her by her daddy. It was never far away. It was all coming back.

  Chapter 9

  The Depression slowed Los Angeles down but not by much. The city lacked the heavy industry of the East and big farms of the Midwest that doomed those regions. The main industry in Southern California was sun and entertainment, precisely what people
needed to lift sunken spirits in hard times. Hollywood had begun with the water and became a billion-dollar industry in the twenties. The city reeled in 1928 with the collapse of the St. Francis Dam, the largest of the dams built to hold Owens River water. The disaster took five hundred lives and destroyed William Mulholland, the man who’d built the aqueduct, provoking many in the Owens Valley to claim it was God’s revenge, but life in the city went on. With the Depression deepening, more people were heading west than ever, escaping eastern unemployment, misery, and ruin. When so many people with the same idea head for the same place, unemployment, misery, and ruin inevitably accompany them, but that was still a few years away.

  Bel Air hurt a little. Some overleveraged residents along Roscomare and Stone Canyon and Beverly Glen suffered foreclosures just like ordinary people. Even Eddie Mull felt a pinch, for fewer people bought his homes, lots, and gasoline. He still made money, just made it slower. It cost him briefly when Prohibition was repealed and the Bootleg Highway to Tecate dried up, but he took his profits and sank them into a gambling ship to operate in Santa Monica Bay, just beyond the three-mile state limit. His bank account took a hit while the ship was being refurbished and refitted and brought through the Panama Canal, but not so much that he had to ask Nelly to stop shopping or even slow it down.

  When Maggie turned fourteen Eddie bought her a snazzy red Ford coupé for the weekly runs to the Playa del Rey stables where the girls still kept their horses. Nelly thought her daughter too young to be driving, but by then Cal had finished at USC, was working at the temple for his father and could no longer play chauffeur. Nelly had no intention of returning to the stables herself, and so Maggie got her car. Nelly took her for her first driver’s test and learner’s permit, which required someone over sixteen to be in the car at the same time.

  With Nelly and Cal unavailable, Maggie swallowed her pride and decided to ask Billy Todd, an old enemy, to accompany her to the stables. Billy was sixteen and had a license. He lived just up Roscomare, and during long years in grade school and University High School had come to hate Maggie with a passion. He regarded her as a bully, a boy-hater and probably a lesbian. At school bus stops, they stood as far from each other as they could. At sixteen, Billy got his own car, a beat-up old Ford Model A that could barely make it up the hill. Going down was easier, and Billy sometimes stopped to give friends at the bus stop—not Maggie—rides down the hill. She remembered.

  Lately when Billy rattled down Roscomare, he saw the sweet red coupé parked in the driveway. He began cruising by slowly, once almost stopping when he saw Maggie outside dusting the car. He saw she was filling out her sweater in a way he’d never noticed, and it aroused him. She wasn’t old enough to drive; why would she be dusting the car? One day Maggie saw him cruising, and the next time he passed she waved him into the driveway.

  “That yours?”

  “Like it?”

  “You bet.”

  “Want a ride?”

  He knew her better than that. “What’s the deal?” he said, suspiciously.

  The deal was that she’d pay him five dollars each Thursday to accompany her to the stables.

  Younger, Maggie beat the boys in everything. She didn’t even bother with girls. Cousin Cal had never beat her in anything and Cal was six years older, though Cal, she knew, didn’t really try. At fourteen, with the changes in bodies, she couldn’t beat all the boys all the time anymore but never refused a challenge. At the stables, on Dynamite, she was the best rider they had. Eddie said it came from Grandma Eva, who was a state riding champion, but Maggie figured she could do anything she set her mind to—like the day in Venice when she’d scaled the derrick and stood looking down on the men, daring them to come after her.

  The deal started the following Thursday after school, and didn’t go as intended. Billy hadn’t understood that Maggie didn’t need a driver, just a presence, and a silent one at that. After the third trip, he called it off. “Don’t need the money that badly,” he grumped.

  It hadn’t escaped her that Billy, like other males, had begun looking at her differently, turning around to watch her walk and not looking in her eyes but focused lower. She dressed as she always had for riding lessons, in Levi’s and a checkered shirt, but the shirt didn’t hang straight down anymore. She wore the same shirts she’d been wearing for years, which was part of the problem for they were tight on her now. It was a little uncomfortable under the arms, but she saw the effect on boys and so she stayed with the old shirts.

  She needed Billy, so she negotiated, telling him he could drive, but not all the time for the whole purpose of the deal was for her to learn how to drive. The following Thursday, after riding, they headed up into the Playa del Rey hills so she could practice starting and stopping. She drove south on Rindge Avenue to where it dead-ended in the sand dunes at Kilgore, about a mile beyond the last houses. They’d built streets for the houses, but the houses hadn’t come yet. Kilgore had a steep twenty-five-degree slope down to the cliffs, as much as any car could handle.

  “Whoa,” shouted Billy as she turned down the hill, “are you crazy?”

  Halfway down, she made a sharp U-turn and stopped in the middle, pointing up, cutting the engine. She left the gears engaged and pulled on the hand brake so the car wouldn’t slip back. Billy turned around to peer straight down the hill. “Nuts to this,” he said, opening the door. Death was not part of the deal. “You miss and we go over the cliffs.”

  “So get out and walk if you’re scared.”

  “I am not scared. I am responsible. Get me out of here! No, move over. Let me do it.”

  He closed the door, she pushed him away and started the motor. It was tricky, jumping your foot from the brake to the gas pedal and coordinating with the clutch and the hand brake so the car didn’t slip back or stall, but if she could do it on Kilgore she could do it anywhere. She missed her timing, losing control as they started rolling backward down the hill with Billy screaming. After a few yards she was fortunately able to stop.

  He grabbed for the hand brake. “You’ll kill us!”

  She slapped his hand away. He was a twerp. His father was a Beverly Hills dentist, and she figured Billy for the same.

  On the second try, she aced it, coordinating perfectly between clutch, accelerator and hand brake and jolting quickly up the hill. She parked, angled the front wheels into the curb as you’re supposed to do and cut the motor.

  She smiled. “Not bad, huh?”

  He was breathing fast, hyperventilating. “Last time. Give me my five bucks.”

  “Don’t you want to drive home?”

  “Pay me!”

  He was mad—mad and humiliated, a bad male combination. She needed tact.

  “Come on, Billy, I need you.”

  “Like hell you do.”

  “I do need you.” She patted his knee.

  He grabbed her hand, holding it on his knee. “So why don’t you ever show it?”

  She stared at him, trying to catch the meaning.

  “Okay, you can take over. Let’s switch places.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “What?”

  “Can I touch them?”

  “What . . .?”

  It happened a few Thursdays after that. Lizzie didn’t come again (Lizzie never did like horses), and they’d gone back on the hill after the stables. By now, Maggie knew what it took to keep Billy happy and wore a tight blouse with the top buttons already undone. She took Rindge to the sand dunes at Kilgore, turned down and cut the motor. She turned to him.

  Suddenly he did something so unexpected that she slapped his face. He slapped her back and they would have gone at it right there except that she threw the car in gear, started up the hill to Rindge with a jerk, raced back to Culver heading east as fast as she’d ever driven with Billy screaming bloody murder. She forgot about the ESS turn over Ballona, somehow ma
de it around but coming out on the far side near the train tracks by the shed where they picked up the produce from the lettuce fields south of Ballona lost control and rolled. The passenger door sprang and Billy came out head first, landing on his head in a field of lettuce.

  Dazed, she crawled out but had no idea where she was or what had happened. She went to Billy and looked down, but nothing registered and so she sat down and didn’t remember anything until she was strapped down and heard someone say that the good news was that the boy was dead because his neck was broken.

  When she awoke, the doctor—gray hair, white coat, horn rims, stethoscope, nametag, everything a doctor should be—was smiling down on her. He introduced himself as Dr. Lambert and told her she was in Santa Monica Hospital. She’d had a concussion, and they’d had to sedate her to make some stitches, including on her face, but everything would heal just fine. Nothing was broken. He asked if she could answer a few simple questions. She nodded. He asked her name and age, what year it was, who was president? She answered. He asked if she remembered the accident? Again, she nodded. People were waiting to see her, he said. She might still feel some effects from sedation, but did she feel up to seeing them?

  “What people?”

  “Your family, mostly.”

  She sat up quickly, too quickly for she felt suddenly faint. “I want to get up.”

  “Why not stay as you are until everyone is gone? Easier that way. Your parents are here, your sister, parents of the dead boy and—oh yes, the police want to see you first.”

  The dead boy . . . the police?

  He saw her stunned look. “It’s routine in something like this, Maggie, but only if you’re up to it. You do remember everything, don’t you?” Something inside her had stopped working, not her heart for she felt it thump, but something was off. She nodded.

  “I ought to warn you.” He frowned. “Some questions might be awkward.”

  Billy, oh, God!

  He walked to the door, and Maggie saw that two people already were in the room, two men in dark suits and hats, unmistakably police, partially hidden behind a screen. One had a notebook and was writing. The door to outside was open and she heard voices.