California Gold (92 page)

“What’s an aviation meet?” she asked as they started up.

“A big exhibition with races, demonstrations, time trials, that sort of thing. The Hearst paper in Los Angeles is sponsoring it. Glenn Curtiss is bringing a replica of the
Golden Flyer
, the plane he flew to win the Gordon Bennett Cup at Rheims. Louis Paulhan’s coming from France. It’s shaping up to be quite an event.”

“I’ve read a lot about flying machines. I’d never want to ride in one but I’d love to see them. Could we go?”

“I suppose. We might as well. I’ve no family to entertain you while you’re here. Nor any close friends, for that matter.”

“Have you heard from H.B.?”

“Not since he left.”

Mack sped the Packard down the dirt highway. He caught up with a bicyclist and honked him out of the way. Margaret frowned and held on, and soon she was gasping again, clutching any available handhold while her cheeks paled and her heart raced. She exclaimed over the noise, “It’ll be a wonderful vacation if I live through it.”

The clerk at the Redondo Lodge showed them to adjoining suites without comment. Mack immediately noticed a connecting door.

They unpacked, changed from their dusty clothes, and walked down to the shore of Santa Monica Bay. An orange winter sky reflected in the silver water and high waves broke and roared toward the wet shingle. Two young men in tight striped bathing costumes balanced precariously on prow-shaped boards atop the rushing waves.

“What on earth are they doing?”

“It’s something called surf riding. Brand new. There’s always something new out here.”

They watched the spray-soaked surf riders on the crests of their waves, tilting from side to side with arms out for balance, laughing in their strength and their youth. Margaret slipped her arm through Mack’s, and he could feel the roundness of her breast touching him. He didn’t pull away.

They ate in the cozy wood-paneled dining room of the lodge. Mack was surprised to find Sonoma Creek cabernet listed among the offerings of the small cellar. They drank one bottle with their abalone steaks, and then a second, and both of them were weaving a little as they went up to bed. Margaret gave him a polite good-night kiss on the cheek and went to her door with her own key.

He’d drunk too much. He fell asleep facedown on the bed, still in his clothes. Sometime later he heard tapping on the connecting door. Opening it, he saw Margaret with the small bedside candle in its brass holder; the lodge was not electrified. Her nightgown was white as a bride’s, her nipples dark and large as dollar pieces beneath.

“Margaret—”

She put her palm on his mouth.

When she was sure she’d quieted him, she kissed him, and he could smell her hair and her skin. He flung off his clothes. She blew out the candle, and soon she was astride him.

They slept a while. When they woke he held her in his arms.

“Margaret.”

“Yes?”

“We mustn’t do that again. Ever.”

“No. But I had to do it once.”

She kissed him, her auburn hair tumbling down on his naked shoulders. “Thank you, my love.”

She left the warm tangled bed, and a moment later the connecting door closed. In the morning she was refreshed, humming as they walked down to breakfast.

“What a lovely dream I had, Mack. I dreamed you and I made love. We made a little bargain beforehand too. I’d sleep with you if you would take me to see the airplanes. Yesterday, you didn’t sound at all enthusiastic. I thought you loved new inventions.”

“I do,” he said with surprising vigor. He’d shaved clean and close, put on fresh linen. Despite the wine he had no hangover. For the first time in months, he felt better.

“Good, it’s settled.” To the Waiter she said, “A table in the sunshine, please.”

A
THREE-CAR PACIFIC
electric special arrived
at
Dominguez Junction every 120 seconds. From there it was a half-mile hike up a muddy road to the flat summit of Dominguez Hill. Promoters of the air meet had constructed a grandstand to hold twenty-six thousand, a three-mile wire fence to protect spectators from taxiing aircraft, and an area of large exhibition tents behind the stands. Special telephone lines linked the site to the city room of the
Los Angeles Examiner.
Concession booths lined both sides of the auto road leading to the hilltop. The promoters christened it Aviation Park.

From a modest twenty thousand or so on opening day, attendance jumped to forty thousand a day by the end of the first week. On Sunday, a boy and an older man squeezed in with many others aboard one of the P.E. specials from downtown. The boy’s left shoulder dipped noticeably each time he put his weight on his left foot. The man used a cane and moved stiffly because of arthritis. He was tall, and so was the eleven-year-old with the handsome face, blond hair, and dark-blue eyes. Both seemed to be crippled. People took them for relatives.

The boy went by the name Jim David, the first name that had come into his head when the older man asked what to call him. The man was called Jocker Sprue, though that wasn’t his real first name. “I was named for various thimble-riggers, money-grubbers, and whited sepulchers among my ancestors in the tidewater of Virginia. My full name, I regret to say, is Arlington Arvide Murtha Sprue,” he said once, when Jim asked the question. “Is that a mother’s triple sin against her offspring, or isn’t it?”

Jocker was the tall man who had created such an impression of terror in those vividly remembered moments just before the Valencia Street Hotel collapsed and a wall came down on them in the alley. Jocker had flung himself on top of Jim instinctively, and being more agile then, and powerfully strong from living a rough life in hobo jungles, he protected Jim in those moments when lath and plaster, siding and flooring and roofing and even a bed fell and buried them.

Jim had been knocked out for a while, waking to darkness, choking dust, and the weight of Jocker and the rubble on top of him.

“Shout, boy,” came Jocker’s hoarse voice in the dark. “Shout and pray to God somebody pays attention. It’s an earthquake, and a bad one.”

They yelled, “Help, under here, somebody help,” for what seemed like hours, meantime listening to a growing cacophony of sounds: fires crackling, injured or dying hotel guests moaning and pleading, people running and yelling in fear. Finally Jim felt he could yell no more and, in a gasp, said so. The unseen man whose weight was grinding down on him managed to grasp his shoulder and squeeze it—an excruciating pain.

“Don’t you say that, don’t you give up on me, you yell your throat raw, you yell till you pass out from yelling, or we won’t get out of here.”

Jim yelled.

Finally, ready to weep with exhaustion, he heard the tall man exclaim, “Somebody’s out there.” And then he heard a second, more distant voice:

“No, Harry, back here, under that bedstead in the alley. I distinctly heard a voice.”

Two dusty, sweaty San Francisco policemen dug them out with the help of another man. Jocker said his back was sprained, but he straightened up readily enough when the police asked his name. “Arthur Jones. We’re grateful to you, officers,” he said, dragging Jim away.

They emerged into the nightmare of Market Street with the great fire burning immediately to the south, and other fires over by the Bay. But they were alive, and Jim was too frightened and grateful to disobey the tall man with the long locks when he whispered, “You take my hand, boy. Jocker’s got you now, and he’ll look after you. Don’t you question me, or so much as look cross-eyed, because I’ve got to pick some pockets so we can get enough money for two ferry passages to Oakland. I hope to God the ferry’s running, because this side of the Bay looks like an inferno. Doomed.”

On Market Street, in the milling crowds, Jim thought he saw his father at one point. He almost called out, but the crowd shifted so fast that he couldn’t be sure it was Mack, and he wasn’t certain whether he wanted to be back with him now that he was alive, albeit bruised and gashed from his stay under the rubble. Besides, Jocker had one fingerless glove wrapped around his hand tight as a vise, to be sure they wouldn’t be separated in the confusion.

On Market Street that morning, Jim was introduced to one of the hobo’s unusual skills. Jocker successfully filched $5—from the purse of a sightseeing woman, no less—without detection, and they escaped to Oakland on a noon ferry.

It was on the ferry ride that Jocker asked his name, and he invented Jim David. He told Jocker that his folks were dead.

“If you say so,” Jocker replied with a snaggly smile; his teeth were white—later Jim learned he brushed them once a day, even if he had to use a twig and water—but he was missing a couple in front. “If you were a street boy, your face’d be weathered and your hands’d be callused. Which they aren’t. All right with me, though, if you ran away. We won’t go into it. I did the same thing when I was just a mite older than you. Oil and water don’t mix, and I determined at a pretty early age that Sprue and responsibility of any sort would never mix either.”

He leaned on the rail among the horrified crowds and watched the smoke and flame above the receding city.

“I’ve ridden the rods with a couple of boys, but neither was as quick and sturdy as you seem to be. So here’s the arrangement. You try to run off, I’ll catch you and whip you. You stick by me, I’ll take good care of you. I’ve never seriously hurt one of my boys, or harmed ’em in a nasty bodily way. Never touched one, in fact, unless it was to give a little discipline—or maybe a little necessary affection,” he added, slipping the arm of his queer patchwork coat around Jim’s shoulder. “Sort of like a father, don’t you know.” He said that so softly, Jim almost didn’t hear it above the slap of the waves and the churn of the engines.

“I think we’ll get along fine,” Jocker decided then. “You’ll have to fetch and carry for me—I’m not getting any younger, and this blasted arthritis is cruel—but you’ll eat more or less regularly, and you’ll sleep safe, out of the weather most of the time, and you’ll be safe from some of the less savory brethren we’ll bump into in the hobo jungles. Old Jocker, he’ll see to it, Jim David.”

He squeezed the boy again. His sleeve was coated with dust from the Valencia Street wreckage, and it left a white mark all across Jim’s shoulders, like a brand. But Jim didn’t see it, and he was not at all unhappy to have fallen into the company of the peculiar, untidy, but oddly likable old tramp.

They lived for two weeks in the vicinity of the Oakland rail yards, and for five nights actually had a splendid warm residence inside an empty boxcar that bore a painted legend on its sides.

TO THE CALIFORNIA SUFFERERS FROM THE PEOPLES OF IOWA

Finally, though, Jocker declared that they must move on. “Thought we’d find some nice pickings after the quake, but there’s too many soldier boys all over the place. Time we went where it’s warmer. My arthritis craves the sunshine.”

And so they began to move eastward. It was exciting to travel the way Jocker did, but it was dangerous too. The old tramp taught Jim how to swing aboard a freight when it was moving slowly—not as easy as it looked; the first time Jim tried it, it wrenched his arm sockets so badly, he almost fell beneath the wheels of the boxcar. Hanging in the door, Jocker pulled him up one-handed.

Jocker taught him how to ride the rods, down between the bottom of a locked car and the track speeding beneath, and do it without falling to your death. He taught Jim how to pluck a stolen chicken, cook hobo stew, and dodge the railroad bulls who always wanted to roust you, and sometimes beat you half to death, in the yards. Jim learned fast—it was that or perish—and he tried doubly hard to master the old tramp’s lessons because he fancied himself a drag on their progress; his crippled foot naturally made him slower and more awkward than Jocker. Jocker never complained, though, only encouraged and occasionally corrected him.

They went all the way down to the Gulf near the Mexican border, then east again through the Texas cattle ranges and cotton fields, and on across Louisiana and the rural South, into Florida. They roamed the pristine Atlantic beaches for a while, swimming and rollicking in the surf and catching and picking big Atlantic blue crabs for supper. Wherever they went, they lived off the land, stealing when they had to— “Man should only resort to stealing out of necessity, Jim, never for the sport of it”—and Jocker was good as his word, protecting Jim from the occasional advances of some unsavory love-starved hobo in the camps along the railway lines.

Jocker was an entertaining companion, Jim found, and a smart one too, despite his lack of formal education. He read any old newspaper he could find, every word—“the poor man’s university, don’t you forget it”—and he knew a little about every part of America, it seemed. At least he always had a comment when some hobo spun a story by a flickering fire about some town he’d visited. “Buffalo, you say? I was there with a couple of gents called Captain Silverheels and the Gray Spats Kid. Wouldn’t give you a plug nickel for Buffalo—too cold. They don’t like us knights of the road there either. That famous writer Jack London, he was in jail in Buffalo a whole month. He was a road boy like Jim here. He saw how bad the jail cons were treated in Buffalo and it turned on a light in his head, they say. Ever after, he championed poor folks.”

Finally they grew tired of road life, and decided between themselves that they should settle down again. They chose California, and specifically Los Angeles, because of the climate. By now Jim was growing taller, and there was very little of master and slave left in their relationship. They were friends, partners, surrogate father and son.

In Los Angeles, Jim found this or that job to help pay rent and buy food. He was industrious and smart, and he seldom lacked for work. Jocker worked when he could, but his arthritis was beginning to cripple him badly, so Jim worked that much harder. He was hugely fond of Jocker now; except for the fact that Jocker wasn’t his real father, Jim loved the old tramp almost as much as he’d loved Mack before Mack turned on him. Of his mother, Jim thought very little; he had seen newspaper photographs of her, he knew she was beautiful, a society lady, and was still living somewhere in California. But Mack had made clear that Jim’s mother had abandoned them for her own pursuits, and her own reasons, and to Jim, she was a remote, cold being, almost like a marble statue in a museum. That was mostly imagination, of course, because he’d never been inside a museum, only read of them; Jocker preferred pool parlors.