California Gold (34 page)

“Then they will have to come out here again, or at least engage California attorneys, to institute proceedings against you as owner. Considering the relatively small sums involved that may never come to pass. But if it should, I can maneuver and gain you some time.”

“All right, do it. I’ll pay those people back, every one. With interest. But there’s still the eleven hundred and seventy-three dollars locally—”

“No, those six creditors are paid. There are no immediate encumbrances on San Solaro.”

Mack assumed he’d misheard. “No—?”

“Debt. For the moment, the property is yours to do with as you wish.”

“Potter, what the hell’s going on?”

The lawyer slid a drawer out. “A young woman called on me late on New Year’s Eve. A very attractive young woman, from Ventura County. She said she was your partner. She gave me eleven hundred and seventy-three dollars in cash. I didn’t mention the twenty-five cents.”

Mack missed the gentle joke, blurting, “I don’t have any partner besides Wyatt.”

“So I thought. However, she was quite insistent about helping you. To protect you, I wrote a short agreement. It merely states that a loan was made to you at no interest, with no due date, and no other contingencies. In other words, you may pay her back tomorrow, or never. I didn’t expect her to be willing to sign such an agreement.”

He drew it from the desk, rolled up and tied with the gold scarf.

Mack snatched the paper and tore the scarf away. Carla’s large signature was slashed at the bottom of a short paragraph.

“Otto Hellman’s daughter,” Potter said. “Very impressive.”

“Damn it, she can’t do this.”

“I’m sorry—I thought you’d be pleased. I’ve already paid the creditors. I can hardly go back to them and say you’d like to renege and assume your debt again. I think they’ll prefer to keep the cash. Frankly, I don’t understand this reaction.”

“Personal. Never mind.” Mack stood up so quickly his chair almost turned over. “Please have someone keep watch on San Solaro. I’m going away for a while to get money to return the down payments and then develop the property. I’ll pay you for all your trouble.”

“No trouble. Consider it another investment in the future. How will we communicate?”

“I’ll be in touch as soon as possible.”

“Very good, Mr. Chance.”

“If you’re my lawyer, it’s Mack.”

Potter was pleased. “May I ask where you intend to go?”

“To follow your suggestion about oil.”

“Be careful. The oil towns are some of the roughest in the West. Carrying a side arm might be advisable—”

His client was already out the door.

Mack hammered up hasps on the two depot doors, ran a chain through each, and then secured them with padlocks. He stood back and surveyed the building, clean-washed by January sunshine falling through broken clouds. Patterns of light and shade lay on the steep hillsides and the air had a refreshing sharpness.

He patted Railroad as he tied a small carpetbag to his saddle. “Come on, old son. We’re going prospecting again.”

The mule flicked its ears forward and back. Mack climbed up and jogged toward the arch, looking behind him once. A shaft of sun illuminated the sham orange grove.

He’d gotten over some of his anger, but he despised Wyatt for involving him in a project financed by murder. There was no concrete evidence that Wyatt had killed and robbed the San Diego businessman. But why else would he preserve the news cutting with his other personal treasures, except as a reminder of his prowess?

Of course Wyatt hadn’t exactly begged Mack to join in; he had knocked at the door. Well, nothing to be done now. San Solaro existed above and apart from the circumstances of its purchase. And he owned it. He didn’t like Carla’s intervention, but he couldn’t change that either. Not for a while.

His spirits were lifting again. The canal was dry, but he’d seen it flowing with water that could transform this arid valley. He owned the canal, and eighteen hundred acres besides. And despite the debt to all those Wyatt had robbed, he was encouraged. He was a man of property.

He was on his way.

He passed by a sunken pool of
brea—
a good omen. Recalling what Potter had said about carrying a pistol in the oil towns, he decided he’d buy one first chance he got. He rode out beneath the iron arch and turned west.

The crooked sign on the crooked post said
HELLMAN
.

The malevolent black sky threatened rain and raw wind blew from the Pacific. Mack tugged his hat lower against the dust, wondering if he had the right place. A dirt track left the main road at this point, meandering out of sight over a hill where cattle grazed. They looked well fed, and that persuaded him to try the road.

From the hill’s summit he saw the ranch beside the Santa Clara River. The house was substantial but not opulent; it spread in several wings and was constructed of tawny stucco, with red half-round roof tiles. A few
vaqueros
worked around the barns and outbuildings.

A broad-shouldered woman with black braids answered the fall of the enormous ring knocker. Mack worked out the words in his head before he addressed her.

“Hablo con Señorita Hellman, por favor.”

“¿Señorita Hellman?”

He nodded.

“Pero ella no está aquí.”
The Indian woman took pity on his Spanish and repeated in English, “Not here.”

“Will she be back soon?”

“No, she packed everything. She has gone to Paris.”

“Paris, France?”

“Is there another?”

He felt a stab of disappointment. For days he’d thought of Carla. Every night, too. She was a craving, like a drug. He’d repeatedly been tempted to ride over here to Ventura County, but had kept from it by telling himself what he already knew: She was beautiful, but she was willful and dangerous.

Instead, he’d decided on this kind of visit—to cut it off with a polite good-bye, tell her he’d repay the loan and that would be it between them. She’d stolen a march. He turned the brim of his hat in his hands. The Indian woman started to shut the great carved door.

“Wait. I came to say good-bye to Señorita Hellman. Please write my name down—Macklin Chance.”

Indifference gave way to politeness. “Ah, Chance. Señor Chance. For you she left a message.”

“What is it?”

“She said to tell you it was necessary for her to leave for a while—”

“Necessary? Why?”

The woman ignored his question. “She said she would see you again, you are to be assured of it.”

She bid him good-day and closed the door. As he mounted the mule, he saw the dark-gray clouds boiling from the west, full of storm. He turned the mule’s head out into the bitter wind, mightily confused about Carla’s sudden departure, and his own reaction to it.

Two days later, waiting in a barbershop in Newhall, he picked up a Los Angeles paper from the week before.

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE IN SAN DIEGO!

Police Summoned to

Beavis Mansion!

Tycoon Hospitalized with

Stab Wounds!

Wife Piles Alienation of Affection Suit; Heiress Named

A rotten scandal, Hellman said. Now Mack understood. He also knew Carla’s disposition. She might flee the trouble, but not forever…

You are to be assured of it.

He was overjoyed, and at the same time he dreaded the moment of reunion. He was angry about his confusion and helpless to get rid of it. The one certainty was that she’d be back.

They called it
la brea
, the tarry stuff in Southern California that congealed in pools, hinting at huge deposits of petroleum lying below.

For a long time, hardly anyone cared. To the early coastal Indians,
brea was
a common brown-black substance useful for waterproofing canoes and baskets, cementing bundles of yucca fibers to make brushes, or setting ornamental inlays of shells. Now and then an enterprising member of the Chumash or Yokut tribe hauled some of the stuff inland and bartered it to other tribes for spearheads and furs. It was not considered particularly remarkable—not by the tribes, and not by the early settlers. Coming down from the mountains into California, newcomers saw oil seeps hellishly aflame on the plain, and glimpsed similar fires far up in narrow canyons. Later, a few of their brighter counterparts collected buckets of this pitch, as they called it, using it to grease the hubs of their wagons and the moving parts of their farm machinery.

It wasn’t until the 1850s, however, that Californians made a serious attempt to dig out the tarry material for commercial purposes. Even then, those wanting to sell or lease land to prospective wildcatters found that they needed promotional help, and hired the inevitable consultants. One such was the famous and distinguished chemist Professor Benjamin Silliman of Yale. Silliman wrote enthusiastic endorsements of the riches lurking under the ground in California, including several tracts he never visited. He analyzed and lauded the quality of certain samples of California oil, but when some rival academicians, perhaps jealous of the professor’s high consulting fees, proved that the samples were enhanced with Devoe’s Kerosene, an eastern product widely available in California stores, Silliman’s reputation was ruined.

Still, even honest promotion couldn’t make California oil better than it was. Back in 1859, Colonel E. L. Drake had sunk his famous well at Oil Creek, Pennsylvania, and touched off an oil boom there. Pennsylvania crude was high-grade stuff; it could be refined into superior lubricating and illuminating oils. It yielded grease of a fine, thick consistency and lamp oil that burned clean, bright, and hot, virtually without smoke. No
s
uch claims could be made for the lubricants and oils haphazardly produced in California a few years later. The state’s pioneer oil industry was a pygmy, and a weak pygmy at that. Nevertheless, California oil attracted men from Pennsylvania and elsewhere who migrated west late in the century, eager for the wealth that had eluded them back home. When they arrived, the familiar pattern repeated once again: It was the outsider, the newcomer with more greed than geology, who would suck California’s black gold out of the earth and make it pay.

I
N THE SPRING OF 1889
, in Ventura County, Mack Chance worked for a driller named Mulroy. Mulroy had a lean purse; he hunted for oil the two-thousand-year-old Chinese way, using a drilling tool attached to a spring pole. Hour after hour, Mack pulled the pole down on its fulcrum, then released it to slam the tool into the ground. Mindless, grueling work, it paid only $1.50 a day. Mulroy’s shallow holes were all sunk on the south side of the Santa Clara River, and every one was a duster. After Mulroy abandoned the sixth, Mack decided he could learn nothing more, and quit.

Up north of the river, in the foothills of the San Rafaels, oil sands promised a profit, but the slopes were too steep for conventional derricks. Hardison & Stewart Oil, out of Santa Paula, designed horizontal tunnels for the hillsides. When complete, and infused with water, the tunnels allowed seeping oil to float out on top of the water and then, by gravity, trickle through a system of wooden ditches down to large open collection tanks.

Mack worked the rest of 1889 on the crew digging the tunnels into Sulphur Mountain. Some were sixteen hundred feet, longer than most deep wells. To provide the diggers with light, mirrors were set up and properly angled at the tunnel entrance, reflecting sunshine into the shaft. It was an ingenious system. Someone told Mack that Africans had invented it long ago.

Mack earned $3 a day for the tunnel work and sent most of the money to Potter in Los Angeles for the taxes on San Solaro; the lawyer had promised to advance him any shortfall sum for the year, and wrote to say that, thus far, there had been only one threat of legal action by a purchaser. Deep in the tunnel, awash in his own briny sweat, Mack struck all the harder with his pick whenever he thought of Enrique Potter. If the lawyer had such faith in him, he had to justify it.

After hours, he asked questions of the older men, the supervisors, about the nature of the underground oil formations (unpredictable), and the characteristics of California crude (in one word, poor).

In December an explosion in a tunnel killed four men. As Mack watched the pine coffins being loaded on a wagon, he decided he’d learned all he could from the Sulphur Mountain operation.

He rode Railroad to San Solaro. The gateway arch was rusting and weeds and scrub vegetation stood knee-high, but the padlocks on the depot remained secure. In Los Angeles he paid a call on Potter, who was now fending off three purchasers with legalistic letters containing vague promises of repayment.

Then Mack left the city and rode over the mountains to the flatlands of Kern County, where he discovered work was scarce. In a month, he found nothing in the oil business and was soon down to eating one meal a day. Finally, he took the first job that came along, a bad one, in a godforsaken spot called Asphalto.

Lying in the western part of Kern County, Asphalto produced what its name suggested: asphalt for roofing and street paving. Huge kettles boiled the raw asphalt for twelve hours, putting a permanent stench in the air, then the hot asphalt was poured from the sediment into forms of sand, for shaping, hardening, and eventual shipment.

To get the asphalt, miners worked in large open pits. Because the stuff quickly destroyed clothes, they worked naked. At the end of a twelve-hour tour—in the oil fields, this word was pronounced to rhyme with
hour
, for no reason ever satisfactorily explained to Mack—a corps of boys with wooden horse-scrapers swarmed over the miners, scraping off the tarry stuff and a lot of skin too. Mack and the others then washed down in stinging petroleum distillate. They sat naked in the mess tent, their chests and flanks still shining from the distillate, as if lacquered. Mack discovered you never got totally clean. The management insisted on covering the mess benches with newspaper, and at the end of his very first meal, he stood up and found big sheets of paper stuck to his ass.