Air and Fire (20 page)

Namu was hacking two mackerel into pieces on the bench beside
him, chopping the fish as fine as if they were parsley. When he had reduced them to a bloody pulp he moved down the boat, examining the pale stones that were wedged between its ribs. She had thought these stones might be decorations, or represent some kind of superstition, but she now saw that they had a specific, practical purpose. Namu selected a stone with a good flat surface and laid the crushed fish across it, then he took his hook, already threaded with a whole mackerel, and wound it round and round the stone. He threw the whole grisly parcel into the water and paid his line out fast. He looked up, saw that she had been watching. He grinned, and uttered a few quick words.

‘What did he say?' she asked Wilson.

‘Wounded fish. They smell the wounded fish.'

And sure enough, before too long, Namu was up on his feet, the line taut in his fist, the muscles standing out on his stringy arms.

‘He's got something,' Wilson told her.

Namu would haul on the line and then pause, his head tipped sideways, as if he were listening to the fish below. Then he would haul on the line again. One final tug, a shudder of silver in the air, and the fish landed on the boards at Namu's feet. The length of an arm, and heavy too, if the blows it gave the bottom of the boat were anything to go by. She could feel the power of its convulsions in the soles of her feet. As Namu chopped another pair of mackerel, he began to talk to the dying fish. Wilson translated for her. ‘He's telling it to quieten down. He's saying that everything's going to be all right.'

Namu spoke to the fish as you might speak to a child with a fever, his voice calm and comforting, soothing as a cool hand on your brow. It struck her that he cared for the creature he had killed. There was respect in the look he gave it, a kind of compassion too, perhaps even a little affectionate teasing at the continuing strength of its protestations, even though the battle was lost. She touched it after it had ceased to move; it felt as hard as muscle. There were many colours in its skin, pink and blue and yellow, the colours of dawn, but only when the light caught the scales at a certain angle. She thought of the doctor's waistcoats and mentioned the similarity to Wilson, who looked up from yet another empty hook and smiled.

At the end of an hour Namu had two more fish, almost identical to the first. It was close to midday by then, and time to set sail for the land.

‘I don't think I'm very good at fishing,' she said, as she handed her reel back to Wilson.

‘I didn't catch anything either,' he reminded her.

Namu spoke to Wilson. He pointed at the sky, then at the fish, and shrugged.

‘He says we arrived too late,' Wilson told her. ‘He says the small fish mostly pass this way just after sunrise. If we'd been here earlier, we would have caught forty or fifty.'

‘Three, though,' she said. ‘It's enough for lunch, surely?'

Wilson laughed. ‘More than enough.'

Wilson chose a beach that was just south of San Bruno. It had a platform of flat rocks to moor against, and sea-grape clustered thickly at the water's edge, providing anchorage for the boat and some degree of shade.

‘But this is beautiful,' Suzanne exclaimed.

He let his eyes travel beyond her, along the curve of blinding sand. The burnt-orange hinterland bristled with cardon and ocotillo. Out to sea, there were small islands, as rough and pink as grazed skin, and the sky above was that uncanny blue, so bright and hard that if you stared into its depths, it threatened to turn black.

While Namu gathered brushwood for the fire, Wilson put up the parasol that he had borrowed from the company store. Suzanne had brought a straw hamper and a Mexican rug with her. She spread the rug out on the rocks and began to unpack: plates, glasses, bottles of water and fruit cordial, knives and forks, two loaves of fresh bread, some green tomatoes and a few ripe figs.

She glanced up, caught him. watching her. ‘It's only a few simple things,' she said. ‘It's nothing special.' Her eyes had captured so much light that it was hard to look at her.

He piled stones around the base of the parasol, then sat down close to her. They were silent, taking in the view. Dark-purple shells the size of dishes lay scattered along the shoreline, rolling and scuttling as the waves pushed up the beach, pulled back, pushed up again. Three pelicans flew north, their bellies no more than a finger's width above the surface of the water. Soon a crackling began. Namu was turning the fish on a wooden spit, and all its fats and juices were spilling down into the fire.

In twenty minutes it was cooked. The meat, pinkish-grey and succulent, fell into easy slices on their plates. It tasted so good, they could not pause to speak. They ate with their fingers, to be closer to the food; the knives and forks lay near by, still glittering and clean, parts of their lives that had been abandoned, disdained. Afterwards they crouched by the sea and washed
their hands, returning to the shade of the parasol to lean against rocks or rest their heads on cushions.

With the brim of his hat pulled low over his eyes and his vision narrowed to a strip of blue water, Wilson began to talk about his feelings for gold. He wanted to try and explain how it was. He had been born in a wagon at the edge of a road in Iowa. Come to think of it, he was not so sure about the road. It could have been a track or a riverbed or just plain grassland, featureless and wide. Still, it was probably fair to say that he had been born in transit, on the way to somewhere. Born with movement in his blood. Later, his father would tell him of the many strange sights that they had witnessed on their journey west. A wardrobe standing by a river, its mirrored door ajar; snakes coiled among the rows of ballgowns that still hung inside. A four-poster bed beneath a tree (they spent the night in it). And, once, abandoned on the prairie, quite alone, a grand piano. Its stout legs bound with weeds. Wind whipping through the strings. A sound so mournful, they heard it for weeks after. Like everyone else they were forced to offload most of what they owned, fetching up in San Francisco with a few pans and a blanket. He had never had much, never wanted much. He could not imagine being rich. No, it was the idea of gold. The feel, the colour – the
idea
of it. It was out there someplace and you never quite knew where; it was the looking for it. It ran beneath your days like time itself. It measured just about everything you did. It was the joy you felt for no reason. The thought of gold pushed everything else to the sides of your head, like a room cleared for dancing.

He looked across at Suzanne, saw that she had understood.

‘But tell me, Wilson. How did it begin?'

‘Let me show you something.'

He sat up, took off his jacket and, borrowing Namu's knife, began to unpick the stitching on the lining. After opening the seam along one edge, he reached his hand inside. And slowly drew a piece of parchment out into the air.

‘It's a map?'

He nodded. ‘It's my father's map.' He spread the parchment on the ground and put stones on the corners to keep it flat. ‘We travelled together many times looking for gold. We never did have much success. Then, one fall, the fall of ‘82 I think it was, we headed down to Reno. Reno, Nevada.'

His father sensed that his luck had changed. He said a man just knew sometimes. He claimed there was gold waiting for them at a gaming-table,
a whole heap of it. He claimed it had the name Pharaoh written all over it. His father was not given to mystical episodes or premonitions of any kind – in fact, he had always poured mockery on fortune-tellers, calling them a pack of charlatans. His announcement was so unlikely, such a departure from the rule, that Wilson thought there must be something in it.

In those days the town of Reno had a reputation for lawlessness. Assaults were commonplace, even in broad daylight. Greed had men reaching for their guns; greed pulled the trigger. The time to arrive was just after dawn. Cold-streak gamblers would already be asleep. The rest would be locked deep into their games, with eyes for nothing else. There was less chance of trouble at dawn; they might even live long enough to sit down at a table and win themselves some money.

They walked in with the first fingers of light, one morning late in September. The desert floor creaked as the chill lifted. Wilson could see the low brown buildings of the town, and the mountains behind, violet and grey and mauve. The way it had been set with such deliberation in the middle of nowhere, it had the look of a place that could settle your destiny, if you were prepared to hand that power over. He took the keen air into his lungs and whistled under his breath. His thoughts were falling into line with his father's thoughts. The ground stood firm beneath his feet. Out here there would only be fine days.

On the edge of town, they passed a shack. A man was saddling up outside. His father hailed the man. Said they'd been walking through the night and could the man spare a drop of water for their thirst.

The man studied them across the horse's neck. ‘Ain't got no water, but I could sell you a couple beers.'

His father said that beers would do just fine. The man named a high price, and his father paid. They sat in the shade behind a wall and drank from the cool brown bottles. When Wilson remarked on the man's avarice, his father shook his head.

‘This here's a town of transactions. People came out here with money and threw it around, and the town sprang up like money was the seeds for it. The price of beer's steep because people can afford it. If the beer was cheap, then we'd be in the wrong place for what I got in mind. It's no more than I was hoping for. It's a good sign.'

During the next five days his father let it be known that he was a road agent, a gambler and a horse-thief. All the bad things he had ever done, he owned – and he invented some more, just to be on the safe side. The only shame in a town like Reno, or so he claimed, was a life lived according
to the law. He boasted of robberies he had never committed, men he had never killed. His crimes swirled around him like some voluminous, embroidered cloak. They had arrived in town on Monday. By Saturday they were being shown into a private room at the back of the Lame Mule Saloon.

He had never seen his father play cards before. Imagining disaster, he could not watch. Instead he let the room absorb him. It was some place. Tall gold pillars, scarlet drapes. Walls that were said to be bullet-proofed with sheets of corrugated iron. Paintings of women, naked beneath transparent scarves. One had hair like Saffron's, and he stared until the face came too; even after fifteen years, he had not forgotten it. Then, towards midnight, the doors burst open and a burning girl walked in. Her face serene, but all her clothes on fire. Three men put her out with French champagne. Afterwards, she stood beneath the chandelier, her arms raised, the fingers on each hand spread out to form a crown. She seemed unharmed. A man in a white derby turned to him. The man had to shout to make himself heard above the whistling and the applause. ‘Most nights she shows up,' he said. ‘We call her Flaming Lil.' When Wilson looked round again, the girl had gone. The air filled with string music, and the watery slap and lick of cards. From time to time someone would kill someone else with a revolver and smoke would drift upwards from the barrel, mingling with the fumes of a gambler's cigar. One man, wounded or dead, would be removed, and the music would start up again and the game would continue. It got so he could tell the difference between the smoke from a gun and the smoke from a cigar: the gunsmoke had more blue in it. His father was smoking too, he noticed, when he could bear to look, the smudged black letters of the horse-thief's brand showing casually on his thumb as he brought his cigar up to his mouth.

Then came the decisive moment, at five o'clock that morning, when he snapped awake to see his father raise the stakes so high that all the players had dropped out but one, and that one player paused and then reached down, not for a gun, as might have been expected, but for a roll of parchment that had been sealed with wax and tied with black ribbon.

‘I'm using this to match your stake,' the man said.

His father frowned. ‘What in hell is it?'

‘It's a map.' The man smiled. ‘It could be worth more than all the money on the table. All the money in this room, for that matter. It's up to you.' The man leaned back, put two fingers to his jaw and waited, the same
curious smile on his face, a bystander's smile, as if he were outside the game, as if it amused him to know what the outcome might be.

Smoke rose from seven motionless cigars.

The man did not look like a gambler. He wore no long-tailed coat, no white shirt with ruffles. There was no pearl-handled Colt revolver lying on the floor beside his chair. All the same he had an air about him.

It was as if the man knew his father, Wilson thought, shifting on his gilt chair in the corner. As if he were some kind of doctor and had diagnosed the fever that had brought them to the town. He was offering a piece of parchment instead of money, and he knew that Arthur Pharaoh would accept it. Maybe it was the inevitability of it all that amused him.

But his father was smiling too, a smile of recognition. He fanned his cards out on the table. Three queens. The stranger had nothing but a pair of tens. His father had won the hand.

Though there was more than eight hundred dollars in the pot, it was the map that his father reached for first. He turned to Wilson with the scroll clutched in his fist.

‘This,' he said, ‘is why we came.'

His father had astonished himself that night. He had become something that he had never dared to dream he might become, something that he had been known, in his fear, to scorn: a man who could cut the cloth of his existence and turn it into a suit of clothes that he might wear.

It was morning by the time they climbed the stairs to their room. Outside, the street stank of hogs and vomit but the map, it seemed, could sweeten any air. They spread it out on the table, weighed down with mining tools. It followed the outline of Lower California, from the Mexican border to the tip of the peninsula. Three women stood in the sea, below the Colorado river. They had brown skin and pointed breasts, and they wore skirts that were made of black stones hung on bits of string. Halfway down the east coast, just to the right of a grove of palm trees, the land was covered with a flurry of markings that looked like the transcript of someone's excitement. His father read anything that was legible out loud. The names of islands, towns and bays dropped into the still air of the room and sent out ripples.