California Gold (36 page)

Mack learned the nine-strand splice and soon repaired broken line so well that the original break was invisible. He ran the bailer to pull up drill cuttings. He cleaned scale from the inside of the boiler. He did the cooking.

Johnson kept the logbook: how many feet drilled per day; how many feet cased. And he knew tricks. “If you have a good day, go short on what you report in the log. That way, when you get a bad day, and you will, you got leeway. Some extra feet to make up for your mistakes.”

The Texan handled another important job around the well. Mack discovered this one afternoon when the little steam engine quit. Johnson peeled off his shirt, revealing a long hook-shaped knife scar, deep once but healed now, running down the left side of his back. Then he attacked the engine with wrench, pliers, and a crowbar and sweated and swore over it for half an hour, at the end of which time it sputtered once and died.

“Damn modern machines,” Johnson said heavily, then started working again.

Looking on, Mack said, “I’m glad you’re mechanical, because I’m not.”

Johnson spat a stream of his plug tobacco. “I ain’t mechanical, just available. On the range I always got stuck repairin’ the chuck wagon because nobody else would…” After another adjustment he started the engine. In ten seconds it started to die again. Disgusted, he whacked it with the crowbar. The engine went
whump-thump
and then settled down, running smoothly.

They broke one tool in the crazy tilted strata of Salt Marsh Canyon. Then they punched through a layer of hard rock into sand, and the new tool went too fast and stuck. It took three days to free the fish and recover it.

At 605 feet, sulfur water gushed up. They hooked up a pump and ran it for a week, pumping water but no oil. Jace Danvers rode out and gloomily inspected the well and then the log, and authorized another 100 feet. They hit more slate. The drill line broke, the sides of the well caved in, and fishing couldn’t recover the tool. Jace Danvers returned, grimmer than ever.

“I’m pressed on every side, men. Pressed and stretched thin. The railroad rates are killing me. Keystone Nine’s producing marginally—forty to fifty barrels a day—but I can’t afford to ship the crude to a coastal port. I’m closing down this well. We’ll start Keystone Fifteen farther up the canyon.”

Mack and Johnson exchanged looks; Danvers wore the expression of a man dying a lingering death.

Johnson liked Mack’s cooking, and he approved of his uncomplaining hard work. A friendship began to grow, though it had its limitations. One Sunday night, eating supper, Mack said, “Tell me some more about your cowboy days, Hugh.”

“Don’t use that name. I hate it.”

“Then you should get a nickname.”

“Got to have a reason for a nickname. I got no reason.”

“Nothing from your time in Texas?”

Johnson’s green eyes had a defensive, hooded look. “Nothin’ to talk about. Just a lot of long hours and saddle-sore butts. Quit palavering. Let’s eat.”

Every other Saturday night the two men rode into Santa Paula. Both wore their side arms, as did most of the other drinkers, diners, and card players in the Ventura Bar & Grill, which became their refuge of choice. Upstairs, a little Mexican girl named Angel took Mack’s mind off Nellie and Carla for half an hour. Johnson preferred heavy women; his regular weighed 270.

Shortly after midnight one Saturday in March, Mack and Johnson were leaning on the Ventura’s scarred mahogany bar, a half-consumed plate of oysters on the wet wood between them, along with several glasses that had contained whiskey or hot clam juice. They were jawing away about the dim prospects of Jace Danvers when loud whacking sounds upstairs were followed by a scream. Then a door banged open.

“Get out, don’t you touch me! He whipped me, Gert,” a hysterical whore cried.

A huge man stormed down the stairs. Mack’s hazel eyes opened wide at the sight of his face and the red-stippled belt with the studded buckle dangling from his fist.

Poker games suspended abruptly, and the fiddler too. The man with the belt lurched toward the swinging doors, looking straight ahead, the sobs and screamed accusations continuing from upstairs.

As he went by, Mack yanked the belt out of his hand.

“Strap Vigory, you son of a bitch—you killed my mule back in Asphalto.”

Vigory swung around with a snort, and as he grabbed for his belt Mack flung it behind the bar. He’d been a fool to confront Vigory impulsively, but it was too late to change things. He reached behind for his Shopkeeper’s Colt.

“I’ll kill you too, you fucker,” Vigory said then, crashing a knee into Mack’s groin.

Pain flashed up Mack’s trunk and down his legs. It loosened his grip, and Vigory snatched the Colt and leaped back. The round unblinking eye of the muzzle looked at Mack at chest level.
Lord, I’ve done it now.

Vigory snickered and the knuckle of his trigger finger whitened.

Hugh Johnson swept his silvered Peacemaker off his left hip so gracefully that hardly a patron saw it. The first bullet drilled Vigory’s breastbone and knocked him down. Vigory shot from a convulsing hand; the bullet plowed into the ceiling. Behind him, poker players yelped and ducked under their tables as Johnson put a bullet in Vigory’s left shoulder, another in his right, one in each of his knees, and the last through the center of his forehead. The back of Vigory’s head exploded against the floor.

The crashing thunder of Johnson’s .45 rolled away to silence. Vigory’s convulsing body came to rest. A sticky red pool spread all around his head. Mack snagged his piece off the blood-spattered floor, unable to avoid the sight of Vigory’s corpse. Vomit rose up into his throat.

A card player eyed Johnson fearfully. “You put six slugs in him. Five after he went down.”

“He was out to kill my friend. You heard him say so. Someone like that, you take him at his word—you don’t ask him if he’s serious or allow him time to show you. It was self-defense. Nobody disagrees, do they?”

Johnson’s clear, cold eyes, leaf-green, generated a chorus of nos. Vigory’s body had relaxed and his bowels let go. The stench was too much. Mack reeled for the door and puked in the street.

Inside he heard Johnson say, “Somebody fetch the law. I can’t stay in this town all night.”

They rode homeward at daybreak, released without charges.

The world felt sweet and fresh, the owls hooting their last and the small birds waking—kingbirds, linnets, orioles, and canaries in the alders and willows along the road to Salt Marsh Canyon. As the mauve sky changed to flaming orange, red cattle tinkled their bells on a hillside and a sleepy farmer waved from among the outdoor hives on his bee ranch. Swallows began to fly, and a hawk plummeted to catch a meal in a dewy field, the mountains rising up in blue haze behind. Mack was thrilled with the beauty of California once again, beauty that made the dirty death of Vigory almost unreal.

He was plagued by curiosity too. Finally, as they jogged through a cathedral arch of shaggy eucalyptus with blue-white spring leaves, he couldn’t contain it.

“Just a cowhand, that’s all? Stop fooling. Your story may explain why you’re a good rider, but it doesn’t explain how you placed six shots so perfectly. You’ve had experience.”

“Well, some,” Johnson said, and then was silent. Mack’s eyes prodded him. “Listen, if it’s all the same, I’m damn tired, I’d rather not—”

“Hugh, come on. You saved my life. That’s a special thing. No more secrets.”

Their horses plodded along. The hawk soared into the orange sky with something in its beak. Johnson appraised his partner with those green eyes, then the chill left them and he slumped. His beard was showing, stubbly gray.

“Ah, shit. I ’spose we’re too far from Texas for it to matter much.” He sniffed and eyed the blue hills with a queer cramped expression, as though ashamed of what he was going to say.

“When the jobs ran out, I joined up with three of my friends—every one of us dead busted. We robbed a little piss-ant bank at a wide spot in the road. Driscoll, Nueces County.”

Mack couldn’t help looking surprised. Johnson squinted at him, hunting for signs of accusation as well. He saw none, but nevertheless went on emphatically.

“Didn’t hurt a living soul, and you better by God believe that.” He snorted, all the laugh he could manage. “Do you know how much we split between us? Ninety-seven dollars and twenty-four cents. Should of picked a bigger bank. I rode over the border four hours ahead of a posse. Hid out in the state of Coahuila the best part of a year. It was too much change, too fast. ’Bout broke me…”

He reared up and inhaled the sweet air, as if trying to restore his soul with a few cool breaths. “This ain’t the same United States I knew as a boy, Mack. Not the same country at all. Those big cattle corporations just swallowed all the family spreads back home. They pushed fellas like me into peculiar new trades. Wildcatting. Banditry …”

“Build a railroad like the SP, you can steal millions and get away with it.”

“Guess that’s the truth. Just too much crazy change goin’ on to suit me.”

He scanned the tranquil blue hills. “Right here, I could almost believe it hasn’t touched California. But you go in those oil towns, full of hard cases and starry-eyed greenhorns hoping for a strike—or you ride around Los Angeles and bump into hop-headed hustlers selling every crazy thing from dope to a new-design windmill, and you know that California’s where the change cuts deeper and faster than anyplace. This here’s the knife edge, and sometimes I don’t like it. But I dunno where else to run ’less it’s into the Pacific.”

“Don’t run anyplace. Your secret’s safe.”

“Better be. I got lots more ammunition.”

Hugh Johnson’s smile said they were finally friends.

A week later, Mack said, “You know, Hugh, there’s
brea
showing all over the land I own in the next county. Maybe we should stop working for Danvers and put our own rig together. As partners.”

“A string of tools costs money.”

“How much?”

“Maybe forty thousand dollars for a complete one, good quality. That’s secondhand, mind.”

“Interested?”

Johnson worried the cleaning rag along the engraved barrel of his Peacemaker. “Not right now. I’m getting the urge to drift. Won’t be long ’fore I can. My nose tells me Keystone Fifteen is another dry hole.”

So it was, and so was Keystone 16. By the summer of 1891, Jason Preston Danvers faced a crisis.

“Your charges to ship me the coal are more than the coal itself,” Danvers shouted into the trumpet-shaped mouthpiece of the wall phone. Mack sat tensely in a side chair and Johnson leaned against the wall, his dusty hat crushed under his arm. Bars of light swarming with dust motes lit up the Santa Paula office.

Fascinated, Mack listened to the tinny voice issuing from the box on the wall; he’d seen the instruments but never talked on one. Danvers reddened and pounded the wall. “No, no, I don’t believe you. This is just one more case of the SP strangling small business. If I were a big-volume shipper, you’d come around fast enough. You’d give me the same rebates you slip under the counter to your—”

A protesting squawk and a loud rattle interrupted him. “Wait, wait!” Danvers shouted. The rattle continued. He hung up the earpiece, beaten.

“Four of my crew quit yesterday,” he said.

“Then I’m sorry we picked today to ride in with the bad news on Sixteen,” Johnson said. “You want us to keep on there?”

Danvers fell into his chair and held his head with both hands. “No, no. Abandon it. Tear down the derrick. Salvage all the timber you can.”

The oilman had lost weight. His eyes were haggard and his speech slow. On the sweaty sleeve of his shirt he wore a black velvet armband. His son Bernard, second from the youngest, had died of diphtheria the preceding Wednesday.

“The bank won’t carry my equipment loan any longer. I have to make a payment. That means I have to defer wages.”

“Is that why the other men quit?” Mack asked.

Danvers replied with a ponderous nod. He held his head again.

“It’s OK with me,” Mack said, “so long as we get the money eventually.”

“Sure,” Johnson said, shrugging.

“You’re good men, both of you.”

“One problem,” Johnson said. “I don’t do so good when I defer eatin’.”

“Mrs. Danvers will fix food twice a week. She’ll bring it out to Salt Marsh Canyon in the wagon.”

“That’s a lonesome trip for a woman,” Mack said. “Not too safe, either.”

“There’s no other way,” Danvers said. “I’m up against the wall.”

Danvers’s troubles compounded. Keystone 19, which another crew punched in, began producing crude in the autumn, but Danvers couldn’t afford to ship it. He was deeply in debt to the rig builder, who threatened liens, and available money went to pay that obligation.

Danvers owned no tank cars and no one would lease him cars on credit. Though Hardison & Stewart’s pipeline from Newhall to Ventura, a four-inch metal snake suspended on cables, had capacity available, again, it was only for cash up front. Danvers appealed to every bank in the county, and two in Los Angeles; they all rebuffed him—no more loans.

On a hot gray afternoon in November, Danvers summoned all his roughnecks to a meeting in his office. Mack and Johnson had discussed in advance the certain outcome of the meeting and they weren’t wrong.

“I’m folding,” Danvers announced. “Everything’s being attached. I’ll meet payroll this coming Friday, but not afterward.”

“You talkin’ about back pay too?” said a bald man with a beard. “As of last Friday, you owed me for seven weeks.”

“Eight here,” another said. Nineteen men jammed into the office were all in approximately the same fix. Mack noticed a rectangle on the wall, lighter than the surrounding area, where the telephone had been connected.

Danvers had lost at least thirty pounds. His pompadour, once shiny-dark, was a crest of gray. From deep-sunk eyes, he surveyed the unhappy men. “I can’t pay anything but the current week.”

“Jesus,” Hugh Johnson said. His slitted eyes looked dark as emeralds.

Mack stepped out from the others. “We trusted you, Mr. Danvers. Carried you and trusted you to pay up.”