California Gold (50 page)

“Nothing’s wrong. She’s going to the dance alone.”

“Listen, it ain’t gonna warm up just ’cause you hang around. Climb into your fancy suit and go with her.”

“I can’t do it. Not tonight.”

He clattered down the hardwood stair. Johnson followed, an even deeper frown carving the deep lines of his face.

The north wind blew relentlessly and constellations sparkled, the veils of cirrus gone. As they tethered their horses Johnson took notice.

“Not a cloud. Not a blasted one.” A cloud blanket would have moderated the effect of this wind that felt frigid as the North Pole.

In the hilltop grove, groups of Chinese huddled near the burners. Mack could smell the strong crude oil as he and Johnson walked under the trees. He checked every burner and adjusted the drafts of some.

To supplement the burners the men had lit torches, sooty smudge pots, and more soft coal and kindling in the wire baskets. Smoke drifted and stung the eyes.

“Wind’s too strong,” Mack said. “It’ll dissipate the heat.”

“Not much we can do about that,” Johnson said.

Mack jammed his hands in the pockets of his sheepskin coat and eyed the winter sky.

By eleven, he was stretched out beneath a tree, Johnson dozing next to him. All across the horizon in the foothill belt you could see the glow of burners and coal baskets—the watch fires of the gentleman orchardists…

Mack wondered if Carla was having a good time. In another hour a new year would begin. Would their relationship be better? Not unless he did something about it. Something other than pleading for understanding; she was incapable of that.

Johnson woke, checked a tin pail by his side, then held it out.
“Cerveza?”

Mack drank some. “Hell, the beer’s the only thing warm tonight. What’s the temperature?”

Johnson consulted a thermometer tied to a branch. “Twenty-six.”

“Wind’s down, though.” It was true. The smudge-pot and coal-basket smoke no longer dispersed immediately. The burner could be felt.

“It’ll go hardest with the lemons down yonder,” Johnson said, squatting again. “Up here, maybe we’ll make it. You should of gone to that shindig.”

Mack didn’t respond. They heard some workers arguing softly and then the click of gambling tiles. Mack thought of Bao Kee. It made him feel worse.

Johnson finished the beer. “Tell me somethin’. You been married most of a year and a half now. You happy or not?”

Mack’s hazel eyes caught the blue-white flicker of the flame in a burner. “I should tell you it’s none of your damn business.”

“Just askin’ as your friend.”

Mack blew on his hands. “If being happy is making money, then I’m happy.”

“Not exactly what I meant.”

“Anything else I’m too busy to notice.”

The pale-green eyes fixed on him. “I can understand you frettin’ about the oranges. Still, women do take some noticin’ now and then. I ain’t ever been tied up in matrimony, but I learned that much.”

“Sure, I know, but…”

Suddenly he was tired of dissembling. He needed to confide in a friend. He sat up straight.

“It’s more than a fight over a dance. Carla’s slipping back into her old ways. She was fine for a few months. Now when I try making up to her with little gestures, suggestions—a horseback ride in the country, a picnic—she isn’t interested. She’s bored. She wants something else—a party, a trip, always something else. Swampy warned me.”

“Seems pretty clear all she wanted tonight was what both of you’d planned on.”

“And I was the one who balked?”

“Uh-huh. You got reasons for what you did. Pretty good ones. But you still stayed home. Don’t put all the burden on Carla.”

“Thanks for the lecture.”

Johnson sighed. “You can be a mean bastard when you’re riled. That’s good in a fight, but it don’t do much for marriage.” He paused a while. “Listen here. We get through this night, I got somethin’ to say to you.”

“Something else? Say it now.”

Johnson ignored the sarcasm. “In the mornin’. If we ain’t wiped out. ’Scuse me.”

He sank down on his haunches, his back to the tree, snapped his hat low over his eyes, and went to sleep.

Mack watched patterns in the coiling smoke. He stood and held his hands near the burner. It warmed his flesh but not his soul. He didn’t know how to handle a rich, spoiled woman like Carla. His intentions were good, but his temper, and her whims, canceled that out.

At midnight someone in a distant grove fired a volley to welcome 1897. That was the extent of the celebration. He expected Ah Sing would bring Carla home in an hour or two.

The cold lonely night chastened him. Johnson was right: Carla’s bad behavior didn’t excuse his own; he bore half the responsibility. In the morning, he’d try to make it up to her.

Mack woke. The ground was frigid under his legs, the tree trunk hard on his spine. He didn’t remember falling asleep.

The rasp of Johnson’s snoring penetrated his sleepiness. Johnson hadn’t budged from the tree, though his hat had fallen off. In the east, the morning light was breaking.

Mack’s breath plumed when he exhaled, mingling with the burner smoke rising in scores of straight columns, as though the grove hid a whole subdivision of row houses with fuming chimneys. One of Mack’s best men, a young Chinese named Kim Loo, opened the door of a burner to check the oil supply.

“Almos’ gone, Mist Chance.”

“Better refill them. Feels like another cold day.”

Kim Loo nodded and hurried away. Mack stood up, stretching and flexing out the stiffness in his knee joints. He checked the thermometer. Twenty-four degrees. He plucked down an orange, wiped it, pierced me skin with his thumbnail, and sucked the juice.

He nudged Johnson with his boot. “I think we made it.”

Johnson yawned and complained. After a few minutes, Mack decided his foreman was sufficiently awake.

“Now, what was it you wanted to tell me this morning?”

“Gettin’ restless, that’s all.”

“You mean you want to traipse off again?”

“Think so. In the spring, maybe.”

“The polo club won’t be happy. We need you. I’ll never play as well as you. You’re our strongest rider.” They were still making up teams exclusively from their membership. Mack looked forward to playing another club someday.

Johnson chuckled. “Yeah, and I got to admit I like the applause from the ladies on the sidelines. Like gettin’ paid, too. Just never figured a dirt-poor Texas boy would take to a fancy-pants game like that. Still, I do get these hankerings—”

“You know I depend on you,” Mack said. “But it’s always been conditional. You’ve always been free to go. Still are.”

“What about all this?”

“I’ll promote Billy Biggerstaff till you get back.”

“Will you get along all right if I go off a while?”

“Sure—absolutely,” Mack said with a quick nod. Could his friend tell that he was lying?

Half an hour later Mack trudged up the hill to Villa Mediterranean. The great house was still and chilly. He felt grubby and exhausted as he climbed the stairs to the master suite. He took care to open the carved door quietly.

The huge room was dark, all the shutters closed. He listened.

Silence.

Anxiously, he walked toward the bed. The pegged flooring gave off small creaks.

“Carla?” he whispered. “Happy New Year—”

No breathing. Nothing.

At her side of the bed, he ran his hand over the spread. The bed was perfectly made. Empty.

He went downstairs for a cup of coffee. In the kitchen, the household majordomo, an old haughty Mexican named Rodolfo Armendariz, showed him a bottle of Mumm’s standing in a silver bucket. Water filled the bucket to a depth of six inches.

“Here is the champagne, Señor. I set it out at midnight, as you requested.”

Mack had completely forgotten. He’d spoken to Rodolfo before going to the groves—preparing for a little celebration when Carla came back.

“The ice is melted, Señor.”

“I see. Someone else can drink it. Anyone. There won’t be a celebration this morning.”

Mack slept for three hours, then ate breakfast. It was another clear, cloudless day. But the wind had died and the cold felt less severe.

He checked his pocket watch. Quarter past ten. Walking down to the lower limit of his property, he inspected the new barracks. Two stories, closed in and roofed but not yet painted, the building was tucked out of sight behind a windbreak. He’d built it to provide clean, comfortable quarters for some of his workers, the young bachelors like Kim Loo who could not yet afford a bride from one of the Chinatowns or the home country.

He walked the groves a while, talking with the tired men refilling the burners. There was some defoliation from yesterday’s wind, but no sign of the split bark caused by sap freezing in the cambium layer.

He leaned against a tree. It felt like the end of the afternoon. He pulled out his watch again. Half past twelve.

Looking down the winding road, he saw only two of his Chinese on foot.

He wandered aimlessly for more than an hour. Finally, up on the summit, he walked into the dirt yard in front of the carriage house. A Chinese boy with greasy hands was using a wrench to tighten the front hub of Mack’s new safety bicycle. He saw the owner and smiled.

“Got her all fixed, Mr. Mack. Wheel run good now.”

“Thanks. The cycling club’s going on a twenty-mile ride on Sunday, and—” The rattle of a coach on the hill interrupted him. “Thanks,” he shouted, enthusiastically this time, and ran.

Ah Sing halted the team, avoiding Mack’s eyes. When Mack opened the coach door with the gold-leaf
JMC
cartouche blazoned on it, Carla regarded him with puffy eyes. She was still in her New Year’s Eve finery.

“Long party. It’s after two o’clock.”

“I got a little drunk. Some friends put me up.”

“What friends?”

“Oh, I’m now accountable to you, am I?”

Her clothing looked mussed and all her lipstick was worn away. He fought a jealous anger. “No, Carla, and you never have been.”

She jerked the door shut and thumped the front of the compartment. “Ah Sing, goddamn you, go on.” Ah Sing shook the reins. The sudden forward lurch of the coach flung her against the cushion with a pained cry. She pressed her palms to her temples, eyes squeezed shut.

The coach passed and left him standing in dust.

After dark the temperature dropped below thirty-two again, but the night was windless: Mack stayed in the grove until midnight, then made a bed on the couch in his office. In the morning he saddled up and rode down to the flats. Damage was spotty, and most of his oranges were unharmed.

Clive Henley’s lemon grove was different. It had the blasted, wasted look of a war zone. Work crews wielded axes and saws, cutting off defoliated limbs, in some cases all the way back to the trunk. Teams of dray horses with chains pulled other trees right out of the ground.

Mack hated to see it. He hated for living things to die. Besides, the grove struck him as a suitable picture of his marriage.

H
E SLEPT IN THE
office again that night. Next day Carla offered a half-hearted apology and asked him to come back to their bed. He did, but she refused his good-night embrace, and he slept on his side, turned away from her. At the end of the following week she packed and left to visit her father for several days.

Meanwhile, Mack took the Santa Fe into Los Angeles. In his suite at the Pico House, he talked business with Potter. Then, on the second afternoon, he walked briskly to the Phillips Block at Spring and Franklin, where the Southern California Fruit Exchange kept offices in rooms 77 and 78.

On the way he saw sign painters putting up new shingles for three doctors. He’d read an editorial in the
Citrograph
proudly proclaiming that California already had more doctors in proportion to its population than any other state—quite a contrast to Wyatt’s claim that doctors were few because no one sickened or died. Doctors wanted to practice here because they had so many patients; Otis and his cronies at the chamber of commerce brought them in by hawking the climate like a patent medicine. To potential new residents the chamber advertised Los Angeles as “the world’s greatest sanitarium for years to come.”

In the rooms of the Exchange, about two dozen growers from the region gathered for a meeting. The only one Mack knew well was Clive Henley, who’d taken an early-morning train. The hottest topic of the afternoon was the cost of a citrus crate. The price had risen from 11 cents to 12 in the past year. Total production price of a crate of oranges from most groves, including Mack’s, was about 50 cents. If crate costs went higher, so would that figure, and no grower could afford it.

“It’s the cost of box shook,” one grower said. “We’re helpless. We have to pay what the market demands.”

“We wouldn’t if we had our own timber,” Mack said.

“You mean the Exchange should go into lumbering?”

“Exactly. We should own everything that’s necessary to produce a finished product.” There were mutters and scornful exclamations, almost universal disapproval of the radical idea. Mack shrugged. “Well, you gentlemen think whatever you want. This morning I authorized my attorney to buy ten thousand acres of prime timber up in Lassen County. I’ll have my own shook supply in a year.”

After the meeting, they crowded around him, wanting to know how the Exchange could make an arrangement.

Mack and Clive Henley rode the early-evening local back to Riverside, discussing the new president-elect, McKinley. Mack and Clive were Republicans, and had voted for McKinley over Bryan; Clive and most other Riverside Republicans thought Mack far too liberal, however.

Mack speculated about the coming title fight between Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons, a serious contender; it was scheduled for March, at Carson City, Nevada. They talked also about Cuba and the nationalist revolt against Spain; both Hearst and his New York rival, Joe Pulitzer, were ardent supporters of the rebels. Many critics flayed Hearst for war-mongering for the sake of circulation.

And inevitably, being Californians, they discussed the railroad. Only a few days earlier, Congress had settled the debt issue, actually handing Huntington a huge defeat by refusing cancellation or remission of the debt. Governor Jim Budd, a Democrat, had declared a state holiday in celebration.