California Gold (18 page)

“All right, I spoke too sharply last night. It’s a bad habit.”

“Holding grudges is one of mine.” He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry.”

“Thank you. It’s been a beautiful trip, but we’ve only this day and tomorrow, and then we must go back. Let’s spend the time pleasantly.” She held out her hand. “Truce?” Taking her hand he broke into a smile. “Truce.” She didn’t pull her hand back. Instead she squeezed his fingers, giving him a deep, searching look, as if she knew what was inevitable now. He knew too, and he was scared.

They hiked and climbed steep trails and ate a picnic by Mirror Lake in early afternoon. Before they finished, clouds began to come in, thick, gray, and wet, hiding the rock summits. The waterfalls appeared to pour from the beclouded sky. That night he went to sleep wearing the heavy wool coat he’d brought along.

He awoke hours later, freezing and frightened. He knew he wasn’t dreaming, yet this was the nightmare. Whiteness everywhere…His tongue slid over his lip and tasted ice. Ice melted in his hair. He was blanketed in thick falling snow.

He scooted out of the soaked bedroll and flung off the blanket, shaking down little avalanche clouds of the snow. It slanted in hard, driven by a loud moaning wind, and his teeth clicked as he groped for the log pile. Stirring the dead embers, he shivered all the harder, groaning in the cold.

“Mack?”

He turned toward the tent, but was unable to see it. Somehow he knew the way her face looked, though. Her voice was low, husky with emotion.

“You can’t stay out there. Come in. Come in and get warm.”

Next day in midafternoon, they went to the base of Yosemite Falls. Crashing and cascading from above, water splashed on great granite boulders and spun off into swirling pools between the rocks. In one of these, well sheltered, and in the lee of tall sunlit mist clouds among the pines and sequoias, they bathed naked and began to make love for the second time.

He kissed her breasts. They were round and firm as fine apples. She broke away, laughing, and crouched to scoop up water and lave her shoulders. He stood over her, so huge and eager he hurt. She touched him.

“What if someone comes, Mack? A stage full of tourists down there on the road…?”

“I don’t care. Do you?”

She slid her arms around him, kissing him, and he drew her sideways, directly into the waterfall. He lifted her out of the water and then lowered her again, slid into her wet sable hair, and then into the different wetness beyond. She clasped her legs around him, shuddering. He was part of her, she was part of him, and the beauty of the wilderness was part of them both, arousing them to something like frenzy.

The falls roared. She held fast to his neck as they swayed to and fro under the beating water. At the end, she screamed softly and sank her teeth into him. He held her cold wet shuddering body joined to his, letting the falls pour down on them the raging torrents of the springtime.

The wagon bore them out of the Sierras again. In the foothills, with the golden poppies blowing wild all around, the shattering passion of that encounter with the valley, and each other, kept them silent. Nellie rode with her head leaning against his shoulder, her hand entwined with his. Words weren’t necessary; adequate ones couldn’t be found.

She had been so different up there. Young, wanting, eager, yielding—not at all the cool, tart, modern girl who’d first intrigued him. She was different people in one person.

Well, wasn’t he? He was in love with her. But he hadn’t come to California to fall in love; he meant to follow and fulfill the promises of his pa, and the guidebook. How could he reconcile that with this new emotion?

A raucous sound startled the horses, and Nellie sat up, rubbing her eyes. Out of a choking, rolling dust cloud that blanketed the foothills for half a mile in either direction, a honking, shuffling tide of sheep overwhelmed them: rams, ewes, lambs, heading for the high country. The dust and the smell of droppings and the bleats and the suspicious looks of a half a dozen Basque herders kicked Mack headfirst back to reality.

“There must be five thousand sheep,” she said, coughing and waving at the dust. Suddenly, clutching his arm, she hid her eyes against his sleeve. “What are we going to do?”

“About the sheep?”

A fist struck lightly at his leg. “Us. About us. I love you. I’ve never loved anyone before. There was one other before, but he—never mind, he didn’t matter. This matters. I have my career with Mr. Hearst, you have your own ambitions—and what happened just—just changes everything.”

“How?”

“Complicates it. Unbelievably. I was on a straight, sure course. Now—”

“I was thinking the same.” It was scary to utter the words for the first time: “But I love you, Nellie.”

“God, what are we going to do? What are we going to do?”

He hugged her to shelter her from the dust. A herder with a crook gave them a stare and trudged on. The world crushed in upon them, full of questions and uncertainties; it was overpowering. He struggled to say what his heart told him. “What does a waterfall do? It goes where it has to go, that’s all.”

“That’s no answer.”

“I don’t know any other.”

Nor did they find one, all the way to the City.

M
ACK AND JIM CORBETT
walked out of the Olympic Club together. Mack’s left eye was starting to puff and his muscles ached. Since the return from Yosemite, he’d seen Nellie several times. She was affectionate, but there’d been no repetition of what happened in the valley—as if there were some unspoken pact between them.

It was a Saturday in June, cool, with fog creeping in from the western hills. Before leaving the club the young boxer had carefully fastened the horn buttons of his tan broadcloth overcoat and spent a minute adjusting his striped four-in-hand and the tips of his wing collar. His black silk hat sat jauntily, and his tan spats perfectly matched his overcoat; he looked good.

“You’re coming right along,” he said as they turned east on Post. “If you keep practicing, you’ll soon be a pugilist, not just a fighter.”

There was something odd about the remark, Mack thought. “I intend to keep practicing, Jim.”

“Good. I regret I won’t be here to see it. I’ve left the bank. I’m getting married.”

Mack was stunned. “I didn’t even know you were engaged.”

“Spur-of-the-moment thing, the marriage,” Corbett said with a curious look, as if he weren’t certain of the step. “She’s a nice girl. We’re going to live in Utah.”

“I wish you the very best. You’re not going to give up fighting…?”

“Not if I can help it. Not many contenders in Utah, though.”

This disappointing turn of circumstances kept Mack silent for another block or so. Shadows lengthened as they strolled south through the crowds on Powell Street. At Union Square, Mack recognized a stocky man in clerical black standing on a wooden crate surrounded by an audience of seven or eight other men, mostly shabby. After a cable car passed, some of the speaker’s words carried to Mack and Corbett.

“…it is your right to organize stronger trade unions in every sector of commerce. Let no one gainsay you that right. The capitalist masters of this city will try, but I tell you again, you must stand fast. You must not allow…”

“I know that man,” Mack said to Corbett.

“All of San Francisco knows Father Marquez. His family goes back to the early Spanish explorations of California. Where did you meet him?”

“In the Valley.”

“He went out there regularly for a while. Now he’s the curate at St. Mary’s Cathedral on Van Ness. I don’t approve of that radical rot he preaches.”

Neither did some other bystanders. One found a stone and flung it. “Enough of your damn communist cant, you filthy papist.”

Marquez turned a calm gaze on the rock thrower. “It’s my right under the Constitution, and my duty under God, to say whatever my conscience dictates. Today the voices of my conscience and my church are one. Pope Leo has written that the Church insists on the application of Christian charity and justice to relations between owner and worker.”

The objector spat and walked away. Mack noticed a uniformed city policeman nearby, tapping his hickory baton lightly in his palm and watching the priest. One of Marquez’s listeners saw him and hastily walked away, and within minutes the priest had no audience except the policeman.

The policeman smiled, touched his forehead with his baton, and left.

“Just a minute while I say hello,” Mack said to Corbett. Before he’d reached the other side of the street, though, Marquez had picked up his box and strode away along one of the gravel paths in the square.

In Oakland, Mack found Bao Kee in an excited state.

“Come see something, while there is still light.”

He led Mack down to a section of mud flats by the Inner Harbor, and there onto a canted pier with whole sections of rotted planking gone. Tied up near the end of the pier, chains across her gangway and padlocks on her pilothouse, a sixty-foot steam launch bobbed in the swells. The name on the transom was
Grace Barton.
Bao scurried up and down on the pier, admiring her.

“Gambling boat,” Bao said. “Two men refitted her for excursions on the Bay. The mahogany bar inside cost two thousand dollars. She made three trips. Then the first partner shot the second partner over money and ran away. She is for sale. Fifteen thousand dollars.”

“Looks like she’s in good shape,” Mack said, noting her paint and brightwork. “But why would you trade
Heavenly Dragon
for this?”

“To have a ferry boat,” Bao said. “Take all the customers away from the railroad boats. I have figured a long time on the abacus. With you, me, and one pilot, we can make money charging less than the railroad. Five cents, here to there,” he said, gesturing over to the City.

The idea delighted Mack. But not for long. “You don’t have pier space.”

“We can use the public piers. Here, and over in Frisco.”

“The SP has the harbor commission in its pocket…”

“They can’t keep us out,” Bao argued. “We will make money if we buy this boat.”

A sharp wind ruffled the water and the sunset etched the hills of the City. “I think I heard you say
we
.”

“I need you,” Bao said with a sober nod. “Banks won’t loan a penny to a heathen Chinee. I am not a person. If I walk in a bank today, and go back tomorrow, they don’t know me.” The bitterness was deep, and justified. Mack had heard white men at the ranch say Chinese should be registered because you couldn’t tell those who’d come in before Exclusion from those smuggled in afterward; all Chinamen looked alike.

“If you help me buy this boat, Mack, I will give you half ownership of my share. Forty percent. The pilot gets the other twenty instead of wages.”

Mack felt a surge of hope again, overlooking all the obstacles, delighting in the audacity of it. “I’d love to hold the railroad’s feet to the fire. I’ll do it. Should we sign some kind of agreement?”

“No, my friend. This is enough.”

He held out his hand.

“Ask Mr. Hearst about a loan,” Nellie advised when Mack described the scheme.

“Fifteen thousand’s a devil of a lot of money.”

“One of the fundamental lessons you’ve got to learn about money is this. If those who have it don’t want you to have it, the loan of a dollar will be too much. But if you find someone who wants you to have a loan because he’ll make money, you can just as easily get five million as five cents. That’s the way money works.”

The steam yacht
Aquila
bobbed in her sunny anchorage in the lee of the hills of Marin County. Mack had rowed out from Sausalito harbor and discovered Ambrose Bierce, elegant in a white suit and matching spats, lounging under the awning on the afterdeck. Onshore, Sunday-morning church bells chimed.

“I came out to discuss some story ideas,” Bierce said. “But the chief and Tessie are still, ah, resting.” He reached for a bottle in a silver stand. “Care for champagne? Excellent stuff. Madrone Vineyard—Senator Hearst’s own.”

Mack shook his head. Nervous, he sat down in a canvas chair and picked up a copy of the previous day’s
Examiner
, which had been discarded on the teak deck.

SPECTACULAR BRAWL ON WATERFRONT!

Draymen vs. Police!

Blood and Injury

Everywhere!

Twenty Arrested!

Catholic Priest

Behind Bars!

Mack scanned the story. Sure enough, it was Marquez. “I know him,” he said to Bierce.

“Don’t worry—officials in the Church already got him out. The riot happened on Friday. Marquez was down on the waterfront at an outdoor rally of draymen. He’s urging them to form a union. Some of the warehouse owners got the coppers to break up the party with their clubs.”

“Is it a crime for workingmen to organize a union?”

“Not in San Francisco. This has always been a strong labor town. There are plenty of gentlemen here and throughout California who’d like to change that, however.” Bierce regarded him over the bubbles in his goblet. “Marquez is a radical. How does it happen that you know him?”

Mack explained. Bierce took it in, then said, “His militance is understandable. The Marquez family owned one of the biggest land-grant
ranchos
south of the Tehachapi. Then the Anglos came in. The family got caught in the flood of land-claim cases and lost all of their holdings except the original adobe. Marquez’s father went crazy. Took to the countryside, robbing and murdering Anglos for six or seven years. The duly deputized gentlemen of the posse comitatus finally tracked him and caught up with him back at the adobe outside Los Angeles. They shot him down like a mad dog. Fifty or sixty bullets in his body, as I recall. Splendid tribute to Anglo justice and mercy, don’t you think?…Chief—good morning.”

Willie Hearst blinked and yawned as he came on deck barefoot. The publisher looked especially pale and scrawny in his blue velour robe. Behind him in the doorway, a voluptuous young woman smiled drowsily at the guests. Mack knew her name was Tessie Powers. Hearst had found her waiting on tables in a Cambridge restaurant in his student days.