Mendoza in Hollywood (13 page)

The dust got everywhere. It covered every surface in the inn, and you shook it out of your blankets at night, and it greeted you in a fine sediment at the bottom of your morning coffee. The low-hanging branches of the oak trees, heavy with leaves, were thick with it, and dewy morning cobwebs in the grass looked like little brown rags by nightfall, they’d collected so much dust. And what had happened to all those burbling rills and freshets that had been so picturesque a couple of months earlier? Dry and dead; and in their places bone-dry trackways of sand and gravel, or deep piles of dead sycamore leaves. The cicadas started up a drone about 0700 hours in the morning, when the day would begin to heat up, and they rang in your ears like fever until sundown, when the crickets started up
their
song in the cool of the shadows.

No way you could have mistaken the place for England now, not a sight or sound or smell that was anything but Californian. You might think my specter would leave me alone now, and in truth I had no more gasping visitations that made Porfirio stare at me suspiciously the next morning; but the darkness was still there, beating like a sullen heart when I was alone in my room. I woke up one morning and realized I’d give anything for a breath of sea air.

“So, what’s it like at San Pedro?” I said to Porfirio at breakfast.

“San Pedro?” He frowned. “Muddy. Used to be dangerous in the old days. It’s not so bad now that Banning’s running the place.”

“It’s the local seaport, right? Any chance Einar could take me down there for a visit, if he’s going that way? I haven’t seen a good-sized body of water in months.”

Porfirio shrugged. “We’ve got some cargo due to come in. I’ve been meaning to send him down to the warehouses to see if it’s arrived yet. You want to go with him? Nothing growing down there that I know of, though.”

Einar, when approached on the subject, thought a day at the beach sounded like a great idea, so he busied himself hitching up the horses while I packed my collecting gear. In the midst of our preparations, Juan Bautista came out of the lean-to he shared with Erich von Stroheim, rubbing his eyes.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“Field trip to San Pedro,” Einar said, giving me a hand up to the seat.

“The
beach
?” His eyes widened. “Can I come too? I haven’t been swimming anywhere since I’ve been here!”

“San Pedro isn’t exactly surf city, man,” Einar said. “But if you want to come, sure. What will you do with Erich, though?”

“Oh,” Juan Bautista said, turning guilty eyes to the condor, who had come staggering out after him. He wasn’t a mature bird yet, according to Juan, but he was enormous. “I don’t guess he should come. The seagulls might scare him. But I’ve never left him alone before. . . . Would you mind watching him for me?” He looked hopefully at
Porfirio, who was just sitting down with his six-shooter, preparing to clean it.

Porfirio looked about as enthusiastic as one might expect. “Look, I’ve got work to do,” he told the kid. “Put him in a cage for the day. I’ll see to it he gets food and water.”

Juan Bautista ran off to shoo the bird back to his room. Einar and I waited, listening to the croaks of protest as Erich von Stroheim was coerced into the aviary Juan had built for him. A moment later, Juan came running out with his towel and a short broad plank, planed smooth and rounded off at the corners. Behind him we heard a plaintive scream.

“Okay!” he said breathlessly, vaulting up into the back of the wagon. There was another scream, louder than the first.

“Is he gonna be all right?” asked Einar, releasing the brake and starting us down the canyon.

“Yes. He’s just never been alone for very long,” Juan said, turning around to get comfortable. Another scream rang out on the still morning air, echoing off the canyon walls. We could still hear the condor when we turned onto the road, and in fact the sound of his outrage carried for a good mile out into the plain.

“I hope he doesn’t do that the whole time we’re gone,” I said, looking over my shoulder as the foothills receded into the distance behind us.

“Nah. He’ll settle down and sleep. He likes to take a nap every morning,” said Juan Bautista with confidence. I looked at Einar, who shrugged. We rolled on.

The sea was a lot farther than it had looked from the ridge above the Hollywood Bowl site. It took us five hours, rumbling along in the wagon, though Einar informed me that Banning could do it in two and a half in one of his Concords.

“Bully for him,” I snarled, retreating even farther into the shade of my hat. Juan Bautista had set his piece of plank on his head and made a little tent for himself by draping his towel over it. He sat in the relative cool, humming a little tune.

“Yeah, that’s the way to go, if you don’t have freight to pick up. Banning’s got regular stagecoach service from L.A. to the coast. Another few years, and there’ll even be a railroad,” Einar said. “Not that that does us much good now, of course.”

Ahead of us, the sun on the summer sea lit up the sky, and Catalina Island hovered out there like a lovely cool mirage, blue and eternally remote. Just when I thought I couldn’t take another mile of this wasteland (I’d thought Porfirio was kidding when he said nothing grew down here), we rolled up a little hill and over the top, and there it was: San Pedro Harbor.

Except it wasn’t a harbor, yet, of course. It was a vast expanse of tidal mudflat, stretching away to shallow water and a distant line of white breakers. Hell, there wasn’t even any sand.

But there was sea air, at least, if a bit swampy, and there was a little stream flowing through willows, blessedly green after all those parched miles.

“Surf’s up, dudes!” crooned Einar. “Check it out!”

Juan Bautista obediently scrambled about and sat up to stare. He gave a cry of disappointment. “Where’s the
water
?”

“Hey, this is Los Angeles! No water in the rivers, no water in the sea. No, seriously, access your Richard Henry Dana. This is the worst harbor on the coast right now. Tide flats are so shallow, cargo ships have to anchor way the hell out there and send in longboats to unload. Amazingly inconvenient. But see that big house being built over there?” Einar pointed to a vast edifice being framed about a mile inland. “That’s the place Phineas Banning’s building for himself. See those wharves? They’re the latest step in his big plan to make this the next world port for shipping. Way off there”—he swung his arm around—”is the old San Pedro landing. Nobody lives there now but some fishermen. And see that island? That’s Dead Man’s Island. First recorded murder mystery of L.A., or so I’m told. Dead guy buried there is supposed to have been a British ship’s captain, poisoned by somebody when he put in here to pick up a cargo of hides. Who slipped him the fatal glass of sherry? Nobody knows.”

“Where’s Malibu?” asked Juan Bautista, craning his neck, as if that would make yellow sands and clean surf appear.

“North of here. Nothing much there now either, kid. Nobody even goes there, except when a cow slips down a ledge and has to be retrieved from the rocks. Honest, it’s just a little trail between the cliffs and the sand, and when we get earthquakes, it isn’t even that.”

“Sight-seeing is the art of disappointment,” I quoted.

“I want to go surfing,” said Juan Bautista sadly.

So we drove down the hill and took him as far out across the mud flats as we could without getting the wagon bogged down, and left him to walk out to the waves while we went over to the shipping warehouses.

I got down and walked to stretch my legs while Einar negotiated with the warehouse foreman, one of our paid mortals, a fisherman named Souza. It turned out that we did actually have goods to pick up: a box of printed materials for Porfirio and two crates for Oscar from the Acme Manufacturing Company of Boston, Massachusetts.

When everything had been signed for and Señor Souza had helped us load it all into the wagon, we drove out again, edging along the tidal flats as far as we dared before proceeding the rest of the way on foot. The mud was heavy clay, hard to walk through.

“That
is
the sea out there, yes?” I said, shading my eyes with my hand, peering ahead. “Not a special effect?”

“Just a little farther now,” said Einar, swatting at midges. And sure enough, after we’d clambered over some slimy rocks and past a wrecked whaleboat, there were bright combers and surf breaking on rocks and even clean brown sand. Juan Bautista seemed to have got some surfing in, to judge by his piled clothing and his wet hair. But he was sitting in his drawers on the sand as we approached, cradling something in his bare arms. A big unsightly something. As we neared, it struggled and flapped.

“Easy, come on, take it easy,” said Juan; and at his voice the bird calmed and turned its big rocket-shaped head to watch us.

“What do you have there?” Einar asked, crouching down to stare at it.

“
Pelecanus occidental
,” Juan said. “Brown pelican. Old female. She’s hurt. Look, I think that’s fishing net cutting into her leg—I think her leg’s broken—can you see? Can you get her leg free?”

“Sssh, ssh, let’s see.” Einar stretched out a careful hand. “You won’t stab me, old lady, will you? No, you won’t. Okay, that’s fishing net, all right. I can try and cut it loose, but you’ll have to hold her bill so she doesn’t take a whack at me with it, okay, J. B.?”

“Okay,” said Juan, his voice trembling.

I turned and walked away. I couldn’t watch. It seemed to me the poor bird would have to be killed. I was profoundly grateful I was a botanist and free from the attachments people in other disciplines formed with the creatures they studied. Not that I didn’t love plants. I walked up and down, looking out at the horizon where a couple of ships lay at anchor. I looked east, where Dead Man’s Island raised its cone of mud. I looked at the ramshackle adobes and fishing boats beached at the old landing. I looked at the squared spaces where the new Union Army headquarters was being built, to save us all from joining a Confederacy in a distant and unreal world.

When I dared to look back, Einar was putting his knife away and talking in a soothing tone. “See how easy that was? Didn’t hardly hurt the old lady at all. It’s not a bad break, but it is broken, J. B. You need to make a decision now.”

“We can’t kill her!” the boy said in panic. “She’s a brown pelican. They’ll become endangered.”

“I know. Okay, look. I can splint her leg now, and you can put it in a cast when you get her home, but what will happen then? How are you going to feed her? She eats fish, you know.”

“There’s trout in the stream,” said Juan. “And I can give her food supplements, like I do with Erich. Please, Einar.”

Einar was shaking his head, but he got a piece of driftwood and fashioned a splint for the bird’s leg, cutting strands from the net to bind the leg securely.

I ventured close. “You have to remember, Juanito, she’s an old bird,” I felt obliged to say. “Even if this doesn’t work, you’ve made
what little time she has left more comfortable. So you mustn’t feel bad if she doesn’t make it. This happens to mortal things. Nature will make more of them.”

“Not that many of
these,”
he said, and I couldn’t argue with that, so I kept my other helpful remarks to myself.

We took her with us, across the sloughs to the wagon, and Juan Bautista climbed into the back with her and wrapped her in his towel so she’d feel more secure during the long rattling drive home. By the time we reached La Nopalera that evening, she was still alive, and he’d named her Marie Dressier.

At about the point where we passed the future Hollywood Bowl, we began to hear something, and it wasn’t Symphonies under the Stars. “What is that?” I asked.

Juan Bautista, dozing in the back with his arms around Marie, sat up guiltily.

“That’s Erich,” he said.

“Uh-oh,” said Einar, and uh-oh was right. When we finally came creaking up our canyon trail to the inn, the screams were sounding out once every two seconds and Porfirio was sitting out by the cook-fire, his hands over his ears.

Einar set the hand brake and jumped down. “Bird’s upset, I guess.”

“When did he start?” asked Juan Bautista, clambering out awkwardly, his arms full of Marie.

“Start? He never stopped,” replied Porfirio through his teeth. “Not for ten seconds since you’ve been gone, muchacho. Please go in there
right now
and shut him up, okay?”

“Okay,” said Juan Bautista, and ran for his room. As soon as he had gone inside and lit his lamp, the screams were replaced by happy little croodling sounds and a couple of dinosaur noises.

Porfirio’s head sank to his knees. “Finally,” he groaned. “Finally.” Then he sat bolt upright. “Did he have
another
damn bird with him?”

“Another endangered rarity, chief,” Einar said, getting the horses out of harness. “Just doing his job. California brown pelican with a busted leg. No big deal.”

“We picked up some freight, too.” I hastened to bring the box of periodicals. “Looks like you got your latest issue of
Punch
.”

“How nice for me.” Porfirio took the box with trembling hands. “Well, I think I’ll go to bed now. I think I’ll lie in bed and just read for a while. There’s plenty to eat—Imarte and Oscar decided to dine out this evening. Help yourselves. Bye.”

He got up and walked away, stiff-legged with controlled violence. I stared after him in frank admiration. I’d have wrung the bird’s neck after the first hour.