California Gold (29 page)

She ran down the hill to the phaeton, and Mack watched it speed away.
Stupid damn fool, turning down a woman that beautiful. A woman who doesn’t scorn a man’s ambition
…

He couldn’t do anything else—that was the problem. With a curse, he seized one of the oranges on the Joshua tree and yanked it so hard the cord broke.

Daybreak. December. Yellowish light was seeping into the gray over the eastern hills. Mack’s breath plumed as he checked the horse’s bit. The secondhand wool coat he’d bought in town was too light.

The depot door opened and Wyatt stumbled out barefoot, hugging himself. His two-day-old beard, black stubble, marred his good looks, and his purple satin robe, its elbows worn through, hung on his narrow frame. At least he didn’t seem truculent. It was too early.

“God, winter’s in the air.” He slapped his ribs and hugged himself again.

Mack climbed to the wagon seat. “I thought it never got this cold in Southern California. Never any danger of frost to kill the oranges and lemons—”

“You’ve been reading that book again. You should know better.” Wyatt grinned, sleep-bleary but cheerful. Mack thought the mood propitious for questions, but he didn’t ask the important one immediately.

“Wyatt, I’ve always wondered—how much did you pay for this land?”

“Sixteen dollars an acre.”

“Eighteen hundred acres—that’s close to thirty thousand dollars. Where’d you get that kind of money?”

Wyatt sniffled and wiped his nose with his sleeve. “Borrowed it from Carla’s father.”

“Otto Hellman? You never mentioned that.”

“For a reason. A lot of people despise Hellman. Having his name associated with San Solaro could hurt the project. Hellman’s a reasonable man, though. When I stated the situation, he understood, and we agreed to keep his interest quiet. If it ever does get out, I’ll just deny it.” Though still friendly, his tone sharpened. “That satisfy you, partner?”

“Sure,” Mack said, though he was still puzzling over it. The sweetly reasonable Hellman just described didn’t sound like the Swampy he knew. Was Wyatt really so persuasive?

“Get going or you’ll miss the train.” Wyatt slapped the snorting horse lightly. “Bring back some warm bodies.”

“If there are any to be had.”

Mack drove the canvas-topped wagon toward the arch. Light streaming across the eastern hills struck the wrought-iron sunburst, igniting a show of fiery color. His eye lingered on it.

That sun isn’t rising, it’s sinking. Fast.

In the deserted lobby of the Pico House, a Mexican boy on a ladder was hanging small tempera-painted
piñatas
from the beams. Christmas—Mack had forgotten.

He found Reilley in the steamy kitchen.

“Nobody,” Reilley said. “Not for three days now.”

“That’s bad.”

“You think I don’t know it?” the old waiter said, sadly polishing his spectacles.

“The waiter called it,” Mr. Swifty Southwood said, squaring a stack of pamphlets on the counter and blowing dust from another stack. “I can’t give these things away. The golden bubble’s burst—” A
pouf
with his fingers demonstrated.

“Thanks anyway, Swifty.” Mack put on his broad-brimmed hat and started out.

“Don’t bother coming around next week. I’m taking the wife and heading up to Vancouver. We’ll feed on my brother a while. I’m starving to death in this town.”

Mack tramped Main Street as the December sky lost its pale lemon hue and lowered like a slab of slate. How empty the street looked compared to that bright day in October. Most of the people abroad were residents. The clots of tourists outside the hotels and real estate offices were gone. He passed an agent’s storefront with its sign hanging crookedly, the chain broken at one end. It rattled to and fro in a rising wind. Whitewashed letters on the grime-coated window said for lease. At the SP depot he found the platform empty except for a baggage man. Cold rain began to fall, and Mack shivered, stepping along the platform to shelter, turning up the collar of his coat.

Monday of the following week—two weeks before Christmas—he again returned from Los Angeles with no prospects. The gray weather had been unrelenting, but today the wind increased the discomfort, blowing in from the east. It was a strangely warm wind, full of grit, and howled down the canyons and raked across the hills, a breath of the high desert. It roiled and spun the dust along San Solaro’s deserted streets, flapping the canvas of the striped tent and making the stays whine. It tormented the ear and rubbed on the nerves.

Mack sat on a wooden chair inside the yellow tent, wondering what to do. He’d come back at half past one and reported to Wyatt, who already had a bottle of wine open in his office. Wyatt wasn’t paying attention to his appearance anymore; he used his straight razor every four or five days at best. He’d said nothing in response to Mack’s terse report, only given him an accusing look and then started riffing through a ledger, muttering about expenses.

The four musicians were playing a silent game of whist. Mrs. Brill, the woman in charge of the food, sat like a statue behind the trestle tables. Yesterday the leg of mutton had a purple-green cast. Today he could smell it. The wind caught one of the cheesecloth domes and sailed it away. Mack looked at her. She looked at him. Nobody moved.

Suddenly Mrs. Brill’s eyes snapped wide, fixing on something outside. Mack turned to see Wyatt reel out of the dust clouds. His paper collar was attached only at one end, waving in the wind, and his shirttail hung out. He carried the expense ledger and some small envelopes.

Just inside the tent, he stopped. “I’m letting the band go. You too, Mrs. Brill. I have your wages in these envelopes. One day’s pay.”

Mack felt as though the earth had opened. Mrs. Brill burst into tears. The bandsmen dropped their cards and knocked over their instruments getting to their feet. The leader, the tuba player, a portly man with out-of-date burnside whiskers, ran over to Wyatt.

“You gotta do better than one day’s pay and one day’s notice.”

“No I don’t, Edelman, I can’t afford it.” He held out the envelopes. Edelman glared, refusing them, and Wyatt dropped four envelopes in the dirt. “Hell with you,” he muttered, and lurched on to Mrs. Brill, who took her envelope.

Wyatt rummaged under one of the tables and pulled out a bottle of wine. The bald cornet player counted his money and waved the envelope angrily.

“Listen here, Mr. Paul, us four had an agreement with you. Reg’lar work six days a week, till January first.”

“Where the hell’s the corkscrew?” Wyatt said to Mrs. Brill.

Still crying, she fumbled her hands over the table. “Here somewhere. Oh, I’m so upset—”

Impatient, Wyatt broke the neck of the wine bottle against the central tent pole.

“Mr. Paul, we had an agreement,” the cornetist repeated.

Wyatt drank sloppily from the shattered bottle. “A verbal agreement,” he said after a few swallows. “Show me something in writing.”

“I’ll show you something, you goddamn chiseler,” the cornetist yelled, bolting at him. Mack jumped in and wrestled him back.

“Leon, talk to him,” Mack shouted to the leader, while the cornetist tried to pummel his stomach. Mack pressed the man’s forehead to hold him away. The bandsman was no match; Mack was much stronger, and soon had a tight grip on the man’s wrists. He didn’t admire Wyatt’s tactics, but fighting solved nothing.

The cornetist stopped struggling and dropped his hands, deflated. Mack released him. Leon Edelman stumped back and forth, fretfully tugging his burnsides. Mack said, “Look, Leon, I always deal straight with you—”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I can’t find prospects in town. That means no sales—no money. Wyatt’s right. We can’t meet expenses. The boom’s over.”

The musicians were decent men, not brawlers; the cornetist swore and slumped back to his chair and Edelman settled his braided scarlet cap on his head. Wyatt was wandering around the tent with a glazed expression. Edelman glanced at him, then addressed Mack in a low voice.

“Awright, Mr. Chance, but I gotta say this to you. You seem like a smart young fella. Honest too. So I don’t know what you’re doin’ wastin’ time with a lyin’ shyster like him. I could have told you there’s never gonna be a town here. This land is trash. He’s trash.”

Mack stared at him, dismally thinking the bandsman was right. He’d known it almost since the first day, hadn’t he?

Muttering recriminations and lugging their cases, the musicians were gone within five minutes, Mrs. Brill with them, still sobbing. Mack stood in the center of the empty tent, while Wyatt, at the western side, stared out, emptying the bottle. He hadn’t looked at those leaving, hadn’t offered so much as a word of thanks or good-bye.

The tent poles creaked and the striped canvas gave off cracking pistol-shot sounds. Uprooted shrubs sailed by in clouds of dust. It seemed to Mack that the hot, dry wind was lifting away the soil of San Solaro before his eyes. He could believe the old bandsman. This was trash land…

A clink of glass brought him around. Wyatt was groping in the wine crate.

“Jesus, will you stop that?”

The shout snapped Wyatt’s head up. His eyes weren’t innocent now; they were the eyes of some baleful beast. His beard showed black, heavy, a dirty growth. He wrinkled his nose like a sniffing dog, then suddenly lined the buffet table with both hands and threw it over.

Cheesecloth domes sailed away and crocks and plates of stale food spilled and broke. “I’m not aware of any laws in California saying a man can’t drink whenever he goddamn pleases,” Wyatt screamed, swinging his fists from side to side like some demented preacher. “I’m not aware of any fucking laws like that.”

“If there was a law, you sure as hell wouldn’t obey it,” Mack shouted back. The wind howled. Wyatt crouched and plucked out another bottle.

“Look, this doesn’t help,” Mack said, struggling for calm, for patience. “This place is folding. The question is, what are we going to do to cut our losses?”

“
My
losses.
Mine
,” Wyatt cried, thumping his shirt bosom. “What we’re going to do is forget about it. Just forget about it for a while.”

He wandered from the tent and, blind to an overturned chair in his path, nearly fell over headfirst. Yelling obscenities, he picked up the chair in his free hand and hurled it high and far. The chair landed on a big cardboard sign skating along the ground, and the sign flapped noisily.

“Forget it,” Wyatt said with a wave of his bottle. He spoke to the wind. Mack didn’t exist. Wyatt went into the depot and slammed the door. Then came the loud whack of the bolt shooting home.

The next day Mack didn’t bother with the trip into town, instead riding Railroad to Newhall for supplies. At the post office he found a letter waiting from Nellie, a long one this time.

Mr. Hearst had raised her salary, at the same time instructing her to surrender herself to an alleged ring of white slavers operating in the City. She was to pass herself off as an innocent new arrival from the remote Mount Shasta district. Nellie was elated at the opportunity to write another sensational exposé, and Mack knew better than to warn her of possible dangers.

He didn’t see Wyatt that day. After dark, he lay in his tent, writing to Nellie. The wind still blew hard from the mountains, raiding the canvas and fluttering the flame of the lamp beside him.

All I do is break up his fights. What the devil am I doing for myself—except learning the wrong way to develop and sell a town—?

“Mack?”

The voice outside made him bolt up. Just as he identified the speaker, Carla lifted the flap and walked in.

She wrinkled her nose at the cramped interior and the few shabby furnishings. Mack had taken off his shirt but had kept his trousers on, thank God. He combed his hair with his fingers.

“I’m here because Wyatt and I arranged it last week. Where is he?”

“Inside the depot, I suppose.”

“Both doors are bolted. I called and called. I got no answer.”

“Then he’s still sleeping it off. We had a bad day yesterday. He drank way too much. Again.”

Disgusted, she sank down on a stool near the foot of the cot. She wore the white cambric riding outfit, but no gold scarf, her hair in disarray from the wind.

Mack straightened the blanket, all too conscious of their isolation, the night. “Wyatt’s in bad shape, Carla. He’s fine when he closes a sale, but he hasn’t closed one since the day we celebrated. San Solaro is all but out of business. Your father may have to take the land when the corporation defaults on the loan.”

“What loan?”

He frowned. “The loan your father made to Wyatt. So he could buy this property.”

“Papa’s never been near San Solaro.”

“But Wyatt told me—”

“Papa doesn’t know this place exists. Or Wyatt either. And I’m certainly not going to tell him.”

Mack didn’t know what to think. Hours of the whining wind had worn away his nerves. He swore and strode past her, his bare feet scuffing up puffs of dust. Yanking up the tent flap, he saw nothing but blowing dust.

“God, this wind could drive you crazy.”

“You’re not the first one to say that. It’s the wind from the desert. The
santan
.”

“The what?”

“
Santan.
It starts in the mountains, but the desert sucks and burns all the moisture from it. That’s why it’s so hot and dry. Usually it doesn’t come this late in the year, but now and then it does. The Indians call it the wind of evil spirits. When it blows, people do terrible things. Sometimes they kill each other.”

Mack looked into the Stygian dark, trying to plumb it with his eyes. He couldn’t see beyond the rolling dust. The wind sounds changed constantly, one moment a high keen, the next a moaning growl. Then he heard soft noises of movement behind him and suddenly felt Carla’s hands slip around him and press his bare belly.

“But mostly, when the
santan
blows, people go out of control in other ways.” Her right hand began slowly moving in a small circle. She ground her breasts into his back, and then her hips.

“All of us live with wild creatures inside. The
santan
lets them loose…”