California Gold

by John Jakes

  “On my desk in Riverside.”

  “Haines—that was the author. I still intend to look him up someday.”

  “You’re changing the subject. I want to discuss—”

  “No, it’s settled. I’m glad you came to visit, very glad. But that’s all it’s going to be. A visit.”

  “Damn your fine high principles, Nellie—” She stiffened and seemed to withdraw into herself as she hurried to the kitchen. “Will you be staying in New York a few more days?” she asked, returning with the bowl of oranges.

  “Earlier this afternoon I thought so.” He paused, his eyes bleak. “But I find there’s nothing left to do. I’ll catch a train tomorrow.”

  “Then you’ll be traveling on New Year’s Eve.”

  “Yes, I’ll probably celebrate by watching the snowdrifts go by in some godforsaken place like Iowa or Nebraska. What does it matter?” He was furious with her; he’d never loved anyone so much.

  Nellie held out the bowl. “Would you care for an orange?”

  “No thanks. I get all that I need back home.”

  Two hours after Mack left, the storm became a blizzard. Nellie heard the building creaking and stumbled from her hard narrow bed to peer out the window. She could barely see the bridge, or anything else, for the wind-driven whiteness.

  She hadn’t been sleeping. She felt wound tight inside and her feet were stiff with cold. She’d piled all the fur pallets onto the bed, but they didn’t help. How she wished he were here for—

  No, she mustn’t think that. She had been so close to giving in tonight—too close. He was a married man now. But he was still a potent force in her life, she’d been stunned to discover when she first saw him with Mr. Hearst at the office. She hurried back to bed in the frigid darkness and shivered under the furs, remembering how he looked, how he touched her, all the small things he said to interest and secretly delight her—

  Damn your fine high principles, Nellie. He said that, too.

  “Oh God, yes, I wish I could. I wish I could,” she murmured as she turned her tear-streaked face into the pillow.

  On the last day of 1897, Carla went out to Pasadena on the Santa Fe. The train was packed with tourists, and she resented their noise and good cheer. She could only think of Mack and how he’d abandoned her a week before Christmas to travel to New York.

  I’m the one who does the abandoning, my friend. You’ll see.

  “The Tournament of Roses” is a name well chosen to convey to the blizzard-bound sons and daughters of the East one of the sources of enjoyment of which we boast here in the Land of Perennial Sunshine.

  So said the official parade program lying open on her lap. It was a splendid morning in the San Gabriel Valley, January 1, 1898. Carla was expensively, even extravagantly dressed. So were all the ladies crowding the veranda of this fine house on Orange Grove Avenue. It belonged to a vice president of the Bank of Pasadena, a dull little man who did business with Carla’s father.

  Since its inception on New Year’s Day, 1890, the Tournament had become an important event on the Southern California calendar. A local traveler and promoter had persuaded the Valley Hunt Club to sponsor a parade of vehicles, followed by an afternoon of games and concerts. The promoter remembered colorful flower festivals he’d seen while traveling in the Mediterranean, and he suggested that parade entries carry floral decoration. The event was supposed to be an antidote to the low spirits that followed the bursting of the land bubble in ’88. A corporation of private citizens ran the event now, and it attracted more tourists every year.

  Precisely at ten-thirty the guests on the veranda heard music from Colorado Avenue, and they put aside their punch and champagne, their plates of fresh watermelon and strawberries in cream, and crowded to the rail to await the first units turning south on Orange Grove. Utterly bored, Carla nevertheless joined them, feigning enthusiasm.

  Following the color guard came the City Band, blaring Sousa’s “Thunderer March,” then the gentlemen of the Valley Hunt Club, red boutonnieres in their lapels, red rosettes brightening the bridles of their thoroughbreds. There were marching units and bicycle units. A ten-man glee club rolled by on tandems, singing “My Old Kentucky Home.” But the loudest applause was reserved for the vehicles artfully smothered with roses and geraniums, carnations and marigolds, sunflowers and chrysanthemums in blankets and garlands and sprays. Every wheel bore flowers, and every harness and headstall. Green chains of twining smilax complemented the flowers. Carla soon grew glassy-eyed at so much color.

  Entries ranged from modest to magnificent, and were sorted into categories, starting with single Shetland-pony carts, tandem goat carts, and burro carts. Hotels and businesses entered huge gleaming four-in-hand and six-in-hand road coaches driven by professional whips. On top of these splendid equipages were giggling, waving girls, the prettiest to be found. Pennants of blue, yellow, and cardinal decorated the first-, second-, and third-prize entries in each category.

  Professor Thaddeus Lowe, who had operated the Union balloon corps in the Civil War, was represented by six vehicles. Lowe and his family rode in the first one, a George IV phaeton. Something of a local celebrity, the professor operated a narrow-gauge scenic railway running to the summit of a peak named, predictably, Mount Lowe.

  Carla’s host and hostess sought her out.

  “Enjoying yourself, my dear?” the banker’s wife asked.

  “Oh yes, it’s beautiful.” She hated it.

  “After lunch we’ll drive to the park,” the banker said. “There are bicycle races, ring tournaments, burro races—it’s thrilling.”

  Anyone thrilled by a burro race is an idiot, Carla thought. She smiled. “I certainly hope to go with you. But I seem to have developed a ferocious pain just here.” She pressed a spot between her eyebrows. “I have it at certain times. It lasts for hours, sometimes a whole day.”

  They understood the feminine code, and withdrew graciously. At the conclusion of the parade, she pleaded indisposition and returned to her suite at the Green Park Hotel. She ordered a light lunch, ate it, bathed, and settled down to wait for him.

  It was half past ten. They lay naked in the darkness beneath the crinkly sheet. “I’m glad you telegraphed me, Mrs. Chance.”

  “And I’m so happy you could arrange to come down for the Tournament, Mr. Fairbanks.”

  “You’re certain your husband is still in New York?”

  “Yes. You’ll be able to conduct all of your urgent business without interruption.” He laughed and seized her billowy breast. He was hasty, even a bit rough, but his muscles and his masculine smell aroused her. Her arm flew around his neck and, like a devouring animal, she opened her mouth. Soon he was jerking up and down deep inside her. She hung on his neck, imagining Mack’s face if he could see this. Then, overcome, she flung her head back and cried out.

  Fairbanks took her three times in as many hours. After they slept, at her insistence, he came into her again. At half past four in the morning he crept out, shut the door, adjusted the do not disturb tag, and returned to his own hotel.

  42

  ON FEBRUARY 15 THE battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor. Of her crew of 350, 260 died.

  Everyone suspected a Spanish mine, and war fever spread like an epidemic. A balky President McKinley backed step by step toward armed intervention, flogged by his Republican colleagues and the yellow press. Hearst and Pulitzer trumpeted their vindication and demanded military action: REMEMBER THE MAINE!

  Villa Mediterranean seemed a long way from all that. A copy of A Daughter of California arrived, its flyleaf inscribed Affectionately—N. Mack decided not to show it to Carla.

  Carla had been surprisingly pleasant, even ardent, when he came home. One evening early in April, they went driving down on the flats in their black trap with the elegant thin gold stripe on the side, taking a dirt road through the groves of ripening Valencias. The dark-green leaves rustled in a warm breeze and the perfume of the trees was thick and heady.

  Carla
asked him to stop the trap. Noticeably pale, she rubbed her arms. “I’m so glad spring’s here.”

  “Are you feeling well? You seem to have lost color lately.”

  “Just a little faint now and then.” She fixed her eyes on the multicolored clouds of evening, and it was hard to say whether she was disturbed or merely intent. “There’s a reason for it, Mack,” she said finally, resting her hand on his.

  Mack snatched the receiver off the hook and racked the crank around twice. God, when would they get the new express phones that didn’t require cranking?

  “Central exchange.”

  “Harriet, this is Chance. Ring Doc Mellinger, please.”

  “Mr. Chance, it’s five past eight. I was just about to close up and go home.”

  “Damn it, Harriet, this is an emergency. Ring him.” Dr. Gustav Mellinger answered in his perpetually grumpy Teutonic voice, and Mack barked, “Doc? Mack Chance. Will you come up here first thing in the morning? You need to see Carla. She’s expecting again.”

  Later that night, they lay in each other’s arms.

  “It’s wonderful news,” he said. “But I’m not sure I know when we—”

  “One of those nights right after you came home. The baby’s due early in October, I think.”

  “Does it please you, Carla?”

  She was silent a while. “I’ll be honest. I never intended for it to happen again. Papa told you I’m not the domestic type. But I refuse to risk my life by going to one of those filthy midwives in some back alley in Los Angeles. I’ll make the best of it.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said, chafing her hand to warm it. “Things will be better from now on.”

  With a bitter little laugh, she patted his cheek. “You’re always so optimistic.”

  “No, I feel it. I’m sure of it.”

  He wanted to be enthusiastic. Why was it so hard?

  On April 19, Congress passed a resolution declaring that Cuba should be free of foreign domination. It empowered the President to so inform the Spanish government and intervene with appropriate force to bring it about. McKinley put his signature to the resolution next day.

  At the end of the following week, Mack and Johnson took a Friday-night walk through the packing house down on the flats. Both of Mack’s packing houses were showplaces because of the general cleanliness and electric lights.

  The place was busy, and the spring crop looked exceptional. For this seasonal work, Mack employed mostly older men, married women, and young girls, at least a third of them Mexican. They worked in large interconnected rooms; the finishing lines ran straight through archways. Windows without glass admitted plenty of fresh air.

  Mack and Johnson started their walk at the sorting conveyer. Oranges put onto the conveyer by hand had already been brushed, then washed. Farther down, men and women on either side of the conveyer plucked up the rolling oranges and sent them into three spillways, one for each grade. They worked quickly, their white cotton gloves darting and swooping like so many hungry birds.

  Mack leaned over the shoulder of a stout woman and plucked an orange out of a channel. “That’s a standard, not a fancy, Margarita.” He gave her shoulder a forgiving squeeze, she returned an apologetic smile, and he and Johnson walked on.

  Mack broke the skin of the orange with his thumbnails, then sucked the juice and some of the pulp. Johnson stared at the light fixtures. He had a distracted air this evening, and kept tugging at his sky-blue bandanna.

  Something occurred to Mack. “I’m going to put stools in here. Convince the Exchange to do it everywhere.”

  “Why should the growers spend the money?”

  “Why should these people stand up for nine hours and break their backs?”

  As they passed into the next large room, Johnson’s green eyes drifted back to the ceiling, or somewhere beyond. Mack said, “Where’s your head tonight? It isn’t here.”

  “Down in Texas, I reckon. That’s where I’m goin’.”

  “Back home? Fort Worth?”

  “Camp Wood, San Antonio. Leonard Wood and Roosevelt, that blue-blooded pup from the Navy Department, they’re puttin’ together the First Volunteer Cavalry Regiment. I read all about it. They want men who can handle a horse. Cowboys, polo players—I fit on both counts.”

  “Is the regiment supposed to fight?”

  “Damn right. Chase those damn Spics out of Cuba.”

  “Hugh, forty-six is too old for that.”

  “I’m only forty-five. I’ll shoe-black the gray in my hair and lie like hell. I seen a lot of sights and wonders, but never a war. I bought my train ticket this afternoon.”

  Depressed suddenly, Mack walked on. In this room the wide conveyer with its spillways branched into three separate packing lines. On each, women wrapped the fruit in pieces of bright-orange tissue. Farther down the line, other women—Mack’s best, carefully chosen—speedily packed the fruit into two-compartment crates. A Calgold label with the old prospector covered one end of boxes containing the fancy-grade oranges. Less attractive labels, with different trade names, identified the lesser grades.

  The packers chatted and laughed as they worked. Many had the tanned, coarse look of farm wives. This room was even noisier than the sorting room. As soon as a box was full, a packer yelled, “Box!” and a rustler ran up. Rustlers were always strong young boys, because it was the hardest work. A filled box weighed seventy pounds.

  Mack noticed a boy’s thumb bleeding as he raced by with his load. The box’s coarse shook often ripped palms and fingers. Mack took a pencil and scrap of paper from his shirt pocket. “Got to tell Biggerstaff they need gloves in here.” He put the paper against a pillar and scribbled.

  “Listen, you got any objection to me traipsin’ off?”

  “No, I told you before—you can always leave whenever you want.”

  “If I go, I won’t be around when your kid’s born. I mean—in case you need help.”

  They walked out a side door into the warm breezy dark. “Isn’t a hell of a lot you could do for me if you stayed.”

  “I’d cheer you up, if I could. You ain’t exactly been clickin’ your heels over the prospect of a youngster.”

  Electric light from the shed fell across Mack’s bleak face. “I feel guilty about it. I don’t know why this mood’s on me. Maybe…” He shoved his hands in the back pockets of his jeans and gazed at the rustling trees. “Maybe it’s because the whole marriage doesn’t amount to much.”

  Johnson spilled pouch tobacco into a cigarette paper and rolled it. “Well, you was pretty impulsive about gettin’ hitched. But then, bein’ impulsive’s one of your good traits too. Not like that stiff-collar lawyer Fairbanks, or some others I’ve met.”

  “I’m not sure Carla wants the baby.”

  “I don’t ’spect she does, very much. She’s a handsome woman, but she ain’t cut out for home and hearth. Puts a double burden on you, ’f you want my opinion.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Johnson struck a match on his pants. “Too bad—you get it anyway.”

  He lit the cigarette dangling from his lip. “You clean forget about your wife sometimes. You’re busy eighteen, twenty hours a day—you was in New York a mighty long time just for some business calls. That newspaper girl’s in New York, ain’t she? The one who wrote the book?”

  “Forget about her. She has nothing to do with this.”

  Johnson didn’t believe it, but he didn’t argue. “All right. I’m just sayin’ once again—don’t nail Carla too hard if she gets the fidgets. You ain’t exactly payin’ court to her every minute of the day. Still, none of that matters a tad when it comes to this here youngster. You’re the papa, so you got to do your part and maybe some of Carla’s too, you want to raise the kid right.”

  “Do you think I’d want to do anything else? That baby will be cared for regardless of how Carla feels.”

  “Why, sure,” Johnson said softly. “I was just remindin’ you.”

  America fought her splendid l
ittle war on two fronts, and it lasted 105 days. In the Caribbean, General Shafter’s expeditionary force whipped the imperialists on the island of Cuba, and General Miles whipped them on Puerto Rico. In the Philippines, Commodore Dewey, General Wesley Merritt, and Philippine rebels besieged the Manila garrison. On July 30, McKinley demanded Spain’s surrender and dictated the terms. Spain capitulated during the second week of August, agreeing to cede Puerto Rico and Guam to the United States, and allow her to occupy Cuba and the Philippines. The victors counted about five thousand lives lost, 90 percent of them to yellow fever and dysentery.

  In late August, Sergeant Hellburner Johnson came home from the war. About two dozen people gathered at the Riverside depot to meet his train an hour before dawn. Mack drove the black trap through a heavy wet mist that enfolded the town. The headlight of the local stabbed the fog and the train chugged in. As the conductor helped Johnson down the steps, the well-wishers clapped. Johnson shook his head, amazed. He picked up his portmanteau in his left hand, supporting his right side with a forearm crutch. His right foot, the one they’d replaced with cork, dragged over the wooden platform.

  A Spanish sniper had hit him on July 1, during the advance on the hilltop village of El Caney. “Ain’t nothin’ like them Mauser bullets. You heard ’em comin’ through the palmettos: zzzzz. If you heard ’em go chug, you knew they got somebody. I heard one go chug and looked down and it was me.”

  He’d recuperated in a Tampa hospital for a month. Considering his permanent injury, he was in good spirits. “Teach me to go sashayin’ off to a war like it was a party. Well, I never was much for dancin’ with the ladies. Rather get ’em into bed right off.”

  He was full of stories about his regiment: “Newspaper boys couldn’t decide what to call it. Teddy’s Terrors was one handle. Teddy’s Gilded Gang—that was another. Finally a name stuck: Rough Riders.”

  Stories about the second-in-command: “Teddy really ran the outfit. He’s an all-right sort for a dude who wears little spectacles the size of dimes.”