California Gold

by John Jakes

  Mack’s stomach was snarling. He took a piece of biscuit from a saddlebag he’d improvised from a burlap sack. While he wolfed it he examined the flyblown window. Various pieces of paper had been pasted up helter-skelter, until not one inch of clear glass remained. Suddenly, from all the gaudy clutter, one advertisement leaped out.

  A handbill, black type on orange stock. The headline promised A FREE RIDE AND A FREE LUNCH!TRIPS DAILY BY EXPRESS RAIL AND COMFORTABLE COACH! ABSOLUTELY NO OBLIGATION!

  What arrested him was the illustration, an engraving of an impressive gateway arch, crowned by a huge sun with flaring arms. Between the scrolled top and bottom of the arch, cutout letters proclaimed the name.

  SAN SOLARO

  “THE CITY OF HEALTH”

  He’d found the man he rescued in the mountains.

  He dashed inside, rousing the real estate agent from contemplation of a peeling wall. The agent rocketed to the counter, shooting his hand over.

  “How do you do, Southwood’s my name, Newton Southwood, Swifty to my friends. See Swifty for the fastest deals in— Oh.”

  He saw Mack more clearly—the length of his hair, the poverty of his wardrobe, his youth. The agent smoothed the part in his oiled hair. He was a sleek Escrow brave, with canny darting eyes.

  “I’m interested in a real estate development,” Mack said.

  “We got sixty-five, seventy of those platted around here. On the ocean, down south, up in the hills—you can take your pick. If you got any money,” he added with a suspicious eye.

  Mack pointed to the San Solaro handbill. “That’s the one—The City of Health.”

  “Out in the Santa Clarita Valley. The excursion only leaves in the morning. You take the SP local to Newhall, then a wagon. The developer picks up the thirty-five-cent round-trip rail fare.”

  “In the window it says you go by express train and a comfortable coach.”

  Southwood handed Mack a pamphlet with the arch on the front. “Developers say a lot of things. Where you from?”

  “Not here.” Mack disliked Mr. Swifty Southwood.

  “In Los Angeles you can say that about damn near everybody but the Injuns and the greasers up in the Sonora barrio. Me, I came out from Cleveland two years ago. I’m not making the money I expected to make.” He gestured to the array of posters and literature. Mack saw more boxes of material piled all the way to the rear of the shotgun office.

  “Pie’s cut too thin. Too many offerings. It’s the same all up and down the coast, here to San Diego. The railroads cut fares too far. They hired too many hacks to write books. We get the lookers but not the buyers.” Mack obviously belonged to the former class. “You got to excuse me.”

  He trudged back to his desk to resume whatever Escrow Indians did when they had no victims to waylay.

  “Are there any cheap restaurants here?” Mack asked a gentleman in a white sombrero and string tie.

  “How should I know? I’m from Wisconsin.” He asked several other people and was finally directed to a noxious little slum near the plaza, bluntly referred to as Nigger Alley. There he saw mostly villainous-looking white derelicts, cowboys, and a few ragged mestizos.

  He had a dollar left. At a cantina he bought a plate of beans and a glass of clear, hot tequila, a drink he’d sampled before and liked. He sat in a corner reading Wyatt Paul’s pamphlet. It promised marvelous amenities in San Solaro, a new town founded on the benefits of Southern California’s healthful climate.

  Persons suffering from almost any medical malady will find San Solaro a useful aid in restoring them to health. The overworked and overworried soon regain their lost energy and equilibrium. Consumptives declared past all help have come here and in a few weeks have shaken off that eastern ice-born curse. Our valley is safe for anyone whose heart condition might be threatened at higher altitude. In short, we may assert that death here is a remarkable event. Any physician depending on his practice will soon starve to death!

  On succeeding pages, one engraving depicted a street flanked by buildings taller and more substantial than most in Los Angeles, and others showed model cottages, orange groves, a steam packet docked at a pier in a broad stream. Mack was amazed.

  Twenty cents bought him a place in a stable loft, and a stall and a feedbag for Railroad. In the morning he purchased a ticket on the 8 A.M. SP local bound north to Santa Barbara and intermediate points. He could hardly wait to see the new town of San Solaro.

  17

  “I DON’T BELIEVE THIS,” Mack whispered. He re-called Swifty Southwood’s remark: “Developers say a lot of things.”

  He stood beneath the gateway arch, which was black wrought iron, huge, and splendid. The great sunburst dominated, powerful and faintly menacing, like some primitive icon. The arch was exactly as the pamphlet showed it.

  Nothing else was. The arch opened on a large tract of dry, treeless land at the head of a small valley. Flanking the valley were steep hillsides with the characteristic parched golden hue of the dry season. A rutted wagon road ran through the property, and beyond the arch, cardboard nailed to a stick identified the road: GRANDE BOULEVARD DE SAN SOLARO.

  Sweat ran down Mack’s neck. The temperature was ninety or better. Hot gritty wind rattled the boulevard sign. He walked through the arch and noted similar signs all over the tract, which appeared to run to the far end of the valley, where the golden hills converged. The signs within reading distance made profligate use of words such as Royal, Imperial, Elysian, Paradise. Flagged stakes marked out the building lots. Other large signs on certain parcels identified the SAN SOLARO OPERA HOUSE; W. J. PAUL COMMERCIAL BLOCK; SANITARIUM AND HEALTH SPA; PROPOSED SITE OF 1OO-ROOM LUXURY HOTEL. There were no cottages, no buildings save one, farther down the main road, a single-story structure of unpainted wood with trusses framed in above and a partially finished roof.

  The hot wind blew in gusts, snapping the brave yellow, red, and blue marker flags. Along Grande Boulevard Mack saw five lots tagged as sold. He turned down a cross street, following an arrow pointing to SAN SOLARO CANAL. This proved to be a wide and shallow creek bed. The mud in the bottom was hard from days of baking in the sun.

  Mack walked along the bank until he reached the site of the FUTURE BOAT DOCK. Not a little depressed, he gazed down the parched watercourse, following it as it twisted and disappeared in the folds of the hills. He was seized by a strong urge to leave. Only his desperate need for work held him.

  He cut back to the boulevard and the raw wooden building. A painted board on the end proclaimed RAILWAY DEPOT. No rails could be seen. Near the door hung a sign identifying it as the temporary sales office. He stepped up on the depot platform and raised his hand to knock.

  Music startled him—low belches of a tuba, a cornetist practicing a run. He stepped past the end of the building and saw, about fifty feet distant, an open-sided circus tent of heavily soiled yellow-and-white striped canvas, FREE LUNCH HERE!!

  Inside, a stooped woman with gray hair pottered behind trestle tables, where cheesecloth covers protected the food. Mack saw wooden beer kegs, galvanized tubs for ice, and a row of glass pitchers waiting to be filled. Four men in garish scarlet uniforms heavy with gold braid sat on rickety, wooden chairs, one reading a magazine, one smoking a cigar, and two tuning up.

  The bald cornetist noticed Mack and returned his stare. Despite all, the audacity of this outlay—the pretense that something existed when it didn’t—brought a grudging smile. He knocked on the depot door and said, “Wyatt Paul?”

  From the desk against the wall of the waiting room, Wyatt stared at his visitor with annoyance and no recognition. He wore white duck pants and a white shirt, sleeves rolled up, the pale color dramatizing his dark skin. His bright-blue eyes struggled with memories and at last found the right one.

  “Chance. Mack Chance. My benefactor from the Sierras.” He jumped up. “How the devil did you get here?”

  “Took the local to Newhall and walked.”

  “That’s four miles. Oh, but I forgot—you
walked from Pennsylvania. But what about San Francisco? Didn’t you get there?”

  “Things didn’t work out. Too many closed doors.”

  “I warned you.”

  “You did. You also said that if I got to Los Angeles, I should look you up.”

  “Sure, certainly—I don’t know what to say—I’m still astonished. But glad to see you. Yes indeed. Here, take a chair.”

  He threw a stack of pamphlets into a nearby crate and brushed off the dusty seat. Then he sat down again, and Mack took his chair a little nervously. Wyatt Paul was handsome as ever, yet there was a rasp to his breathing. Maybe he needed the healthful climate more than any of his prospects did.

  “You managed to find your land—”

  “Eighteen hundred acres. All the way up the valley. It was a distress sale. I got a bargain.” Even so, Mack wondered how a penniless traveler stealing rides on freight trains had come up with the necessary funds.

  “It’s impressive.” He could think of nothing more positive.

  “Not yet, but you wait,” Wyatt said with enthusiasm. The cornet player ran up the scale, shrill bright sounds. A profusion of site plans, conceptual cottage sketches, and sales documents were tacked up all over the walls. Directly behind Wyatt hung an artist’s drawing of fruit-laden trees crowding a hillside, FUTURE CITRUS GROVES—TOWN OF SAN SOLARO.

  Wyatt leaned back and ran both hands over the temples of his black hair. “Are you in this part of the world permanently now?”

  “I’m here for a while. I’m going back to San Francisco after I make some money. You said I should come around if I ever needed work…”

  The last word raised a wall in Wyatt’s eyes. He picked up a pen and studied the nib blackened with dried ink. “So I did. Trouble is, right now I have all the people I need.”

  Mack grasped the arms of his chair, prepared to rise. “Then I’d better—”

  “No, sit right there—let me think. We’ll work out something. I’m making money here.” He swept his hand in a curve that embraced all the visionary plans and drawings on the unfinished pine walls. “Big money.”

  That sounded the first genuinely wrong note. Through the depot’s open ticket window, Mack could see a large adjoining room with a small iron stove, and a skillet full of souring grease. An unmade bed was in the corner, a block of wood propping one leg.

  Wyatt saw him staring and instantly jumped up and yanked down the milky glass ticket window. A trick of the light put that strange opal blaze in his eyes for a moment.

  Mack wondered if he really wanted to stay. Then he thought of probable alternatives in Los Angeles: unloading produce, sweeping someone’s sidewalk. Here there was nothing but parched earth and treeless lots—for the moment. There might be money to be made in the future. He’d stay if he could.

  Wyatt clapped Mack’s shoulder now, having recovered his good humor. “I’ve sold thirty-nine lots so far. Today’s load of prospects is due around noon. I have a greaser kid who collects them from the hotels and agencies in town, rides with them on the nine-thirty local, and drives them from Newhall in our wagon. Come on, I’ll show you around till they get here.”

  Mack nodded, then noticed one of the pamphlets in the crate. It wasn’t the same piece of literature he’d picked up in town. “May I have one?”

  “Absolutely, old friend,” Wyatt said with high enthusiasm. “I’m beginning to have a very good feeling about this reunion.”

  Outside the sales office Mack examined the pamphlet.

  MIRACLES OF THE CALIFORNIA CLIMATE

  AMAZING BENEFITS AND CURES

  IN “THE CITY OF HEALTH”

  On the cover, the artist-engraver had repeated the gateway arch, but in this version, a radiant sun peeped over the hill behind. A healthy family of four stood beneath the arch, admiring the vista.

  They began walking toward the head of the valley. Mack scanned the inside of the pamphlet. His mouth fell open and then he laughed aloud.

  “Catch your fancy, does it?” Wyatt asked.

  “Well, it—Wyatt, you’re promising that the climate in your town will cure everything from nerves and dyspepsia to the fantods and marital disorders.”

  “Right. I decided to leave out cancer.”

  “What about these photographs? Where did you get this one? You look like you’re ready for the grave.”

  Mack pointed to a matching pair of stiff portraits. In the right-hand one, “After,” Wyatt looked normal, but the “Before” shot depicted him with deep, dark eye sockets and wasted cheeks above a beard longer than a Civil War general’s.

  “An artist in town doctored that one for me. I told him to make me look as bad as possible.”

  “It says California completely cured your consumption. I didn’t know you had consumption.”

  Wyatt laughed as they cut past the end of the tent. Neither the woman nor the four bandsmen gave their employer friendly looks or a greeting. In fact they were all sullen.

  They walked along Grande Boulevard. “I noticed you’re going to build a sanitarium.”

  “Absolutely. Have to have one to attract the one-lung crowd. That’s why I faked the picture.”

  Ahead, on the hillside to their left, Mack saw a cluster of half a dozen twenty-foot trees with globular orange fruit. They looked decidedly peculiar, their leaves high above the ground and clustered at the ends of thick branches.

  Wyatt spoke in a reflective way. “Mack, I owe you a considerable debt. So I’d like to find a place for you. But if I do, you’ll have to understand how things work. Easterners come out here with their noses dripping snot, their lungs sloshing with blood, their bowels stopped up with glue, their cocks dead since last Fourth of July, their cunts full of cobwebs and fairly quivering for a second coming. One drink from the California grail, they think—one drink. Bang! A fucking miracle.”

  Mack’s smile hardened in place and his skin crawled.

  Wyatt gestured in that grand way of his. “They step off the train. The sun dazzles them. The balmy air. They’re in a beautiful daze. They see what they want to see—a warm, bright place, free from sickness, away from the cold—where anything’s possible—even the redemption of their corrupt white flesh…”

  His gaze fixed on thunderheads in a sky whiting out with heat haze. Mack saw the opal flash of his eyes.

  “I hated my parents, but I learned something useful from them, stupid as they were. My mother taught me there are always fools panting after miraculous cures. And you remember my talking about my old man?”

  “That he tried real estate, and failed—yes.”

  “Two things whipped him: a conscience, and too many laws hemming him in. I don’t think I was ever bothered with a conscience, and out here I don’t have to bother with laws. That’s the beauty of California: the freedom. That’s the lure. That’s why we’re all here.”

  “Wyatt, there are plenty of laws in California.”

  “I’m not talking about the petty stuff. A legal hack in Newhall handles that for me. I’m talking about forgetting higher laws. Thou shalt not deceive thy prospects. Thou shalt not cheat, thereby remaining poor. Higher laws,” he repeated, with such charming good cheer that Mack was almost persuaded that what he said was perfectly all right.

  Almost.

  “Anyway, my prospects deceive themselves. They’ve read Charley Nordhoff’s book or the SP advertising in their railway depot back home. They know that they’re going to live better—feel better—in California. I just say to them, ‘Certainly, help yourself to the miracles.’ Even if they are manufactured.”

  With a merry expression, he crooked a finger, summoning Mack to a path leading up the nearby hill. He lifted a rope hung with keep out signs. They ducked under and scrambled up the slope.

  “Still carry a clasp knife?”

  Mack handed it to him. Wyatt reached to a high branch of the nearest tree and cut through twine. An orange dropped from the twisted tree limb. Every orange was hung that way, on all the trees.

 
; “The pride of the South,” Wyatt said, balancing it aloft on his fingertips. “The California navel.” He tossed it to Mack. “These are Joshua trees from the Mojave. The trick isn’t original with me; I picked it up from a developer down in Riverside, where you find the real groves. I keep that rope up, and I keep the prospects down on the boulevard, and it works.” He clapped his hands and flung them over his head. “Miracles. Goddamn miracles!”

  Mack was alternately fascinated and repelled. He didn’t know what to say. Music saved him, a snare drum and the horns, striking up a march. Wyatt shielded his eyes.

  Dust boiled around the gateway arch. From the tan haze a large wagon emerged, rigged with a canvas top on poles. Someone with a dark face under a straw hat drove the wagon. “That’s the crowd from the nine-thirty local.” He counted aloud. Two men, three women, plus a couple of youngsters seated on the wagon floor. “Shit. I should get rid of that kid who rounds ’em up. Too young. No push. Besides, he’s a greaser. Porters and waiters in the good hotels won’t give him the time of—Wait a minute.” He snapped his fingers and pointed at Mack like a prosecutor. “You know how to drive a wagon, don’t you?”

  Wyatt conducted the prospects on a walking tour and Mack trailed along behind, admiring the performance. Wyatt had a fine command of words and the persuasive, emotion-charged delivery of a preacher. The group was cross from the heat and dust of the trip, but Wyatt’s jokes and line of chatter soon charmed them out of that—all except one.

  Soder and Edna Erickson hailed from Minnesota. The two young girls, one shy and silent, the other maddeningly forward and noisy, belonged to them. Soder Erickson said he raised corn. He was overweight, red-faced, and perspiring, but he refused to remove his heavy coat of black alpaca, and he greeted Wyatt’s every claim with a suspicious mutter or a sideways sneer at Edna. Mack felt uneasy.

  There were also a Mr. and Mrs. Cato Purvis, Danville, Illinois, colorless people traveling with the wife’s equally drab sister.

  The baking white sky seemed to generate hellish heat, and Wyatt’s face glistened as though washed in oil. The children complained, the ladies fanned themselves with hankies, but nothing diminished Wyatt’s energy. He only stopped his sales talk when someone asked a question.