Golden Orange

by Joseph Wambaugh

  The sailboats and power yachts occupied most of the moorings, and shore boats taxied their passengers ashore for two bucks a head. The cruise ships and The Catalina Flyer were allowed to dock at the quay.

  After Winnie and Tess disembarked and were strolling along Crescent Avenue, the main promenade, Tess said, “No point rushing to the isthmus. We’ve got lots of time to kill.”

  Winnie looked at his watch and Tess eyed him knowingly.

  “I’m not looking to see if it’s late enough for a drink,” he said.

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  “I’m just seeing if it’s too early for lunch.”

  “We can eat any time you like,” she said.

  They chose a restaurant favored by many of the two thousand locals, off the main promenade. Tess ordered a salad, no dressing, and Winnie asked for a cheeseburger and fries. While they were waiting for their food, Tess said, “Greasy stuff takes care of the alcohol in your system. It’s the best thing when you’ve been drinking. I don’t think a beer’d hurt you.”

  “I’m not drinking today!” Winnie said.

  She reached over, and touched his cheek and said, “You don’t mind if I do?”

  “Why should I mind?”

  He was surprised when she didn’t order a beer. She didn’t even order a glass of white wine. She ordered a double Scotch at eleven o’clock in the morning! And she asked for a bucket glass.

  “I’m on holiday,” she said apologetically. “I’m going to have fun.”

  When the drink came, Tess got animated. She picked it up and clicked it against Winnie’s water tumbler.

  “Chin chin,” she said. “I’ll do the drinking for both of us.”

  She sipped, threw her head back like a bird, and said, “Mmmmmmm.” He watched her throat muscles work on the Scotch. He could almost see it gliding down that graceful throat. He loved bucket glasses. They seemed more nautical—a heavy solid honest bucket glass.

  He caught a glimpse of pink. Her tongue flicked along her chrome-red lipstick. She sucked the liquid like a she-wolf. Winnie waved to the waitress. He ordered a double vodka on the rocks. Tess said nothing.

  “Unfortunately,” he explained, “this is the only thing for a hangover. One a these and I’ll feel okay.”

  “You look okay now,” Tess said seductively. “You look good enough to eat. One more of these and I might decide to do it. Maybe we could try it on a glass-bottom boat? Give the divers and the fish a show.”

  The cheeseburger arrived and it was okay. So were the fries. The drink was a very honest one. Tess said he still looked a little shaky and should probably have another.

  Winnie ordered another double vodka. He had three before they left the restaurant at twelve-thirty. He and Tess were in a great mood. She kept repeating that he looked “extraordinarily sexy.”

  They walked down Crescent Avenue to the pavilion and watched some scuba divers sitting on the seawall, shucking clams.

  “Let’s come about, skipper,” Tess said.

  “Okay, where we going?”

  “I know a lovely little tavern in the town.”

  “There is no lovely little tavern. Too many tourists in them.”

  “This one’s different.”

  “Don’t you think we oughtta do something besides drink?”

  Tess looked around, and saw that the tourists were all watching the divers. She ran her hand down inside his belt tickling his lower belly with her long vermilion nails. Her gray eyes narrowed, vulpine and sly. “I will do something besides drink if I can get you in a dark corner of that lovely dark tavern!”

  “Let’s go find your tavern,” said Winnie.

  As he’d predicted, there was nothing lovely about it. It was just a bar where islanders did their drinking. It was dark, but there were no corners. The room was round.

  “Oh, well,” Tess said. “It used to look different when I was younger.”

  They ordered doubles. There were only three other customers. Winnie had to use the men’s room, and when he got back there were two more drinks in front of them.

  “Where’d these come from?” he asked.

  “I finished mine while you were gone,” she said boozily. “I wanted another so I ordered another for you.”

  “You finished yours just like that?”

  “Like that,” she said. “I’m on holiday!”

  “I had good intentions,” Winnie said weakly.

  Tess reached up and pulled Winnie down by the hair. She thrust that muscular tongue straight into his left ear, and said, “I want bad intentions, big boy. This is holiday time!”

  Winnie raised the bucket and said, “I’m catching up!”

  “That’s my boy!” Tess said, and Winnie drank guilt-free, proving yet again that the superego is alcohol soluble.

  They ordered yet another round, and Tess, whose voice seemed to be getting thick, said, “I gotta make a call, sailor. Gotta check on our B and B.”

  “Thought you already booked the room.”

  “Yeah, but I’ve got to make sure it’s ready. I hate getting turned away from inns, like Mary and Joseph.”

  While she was gone, Winnie noticed that his jaw was going numb. Greasy food or not, he’d had enough. He put the drink down, but then he saw that there was half a shot left in the glass. He drained it and put the glass down again.

  Lousy joint didn’t serve anything but crummy American vodka. He noticed that the fish in the aquarium on the wall seemed to be swimming. Then he looked closer and saw that it was a plastic fish in a three-dimensional wall hanging! He blinked hard and the fish stayed put.

  “Guess what?” Tess said when she returned.

  “What?”

  “Our room’s ready.”

  “So let’s go.”

  “We’ve got some time to kill. One more for the road?” Tess raised her hand and called for two more doubles.

  By the time they were back out on the street, Winnie was walking unsteadily. Tess led him to the taxi stand and the young driver helped Winnie up into the van.

  “That vodka,” Winnie said. “They oughtta can it and sell it to the cops. Tasted like Mace.”

  Buster filled the Bertram at the waterfront gas station next to the Balboa ferry. The kid pumping gas said, “Going after abalone?”

  “Anything I can get,” said Buster Wiles. “Sometimes you gotta take what life offers.”

  “Guess so,” the kid said, topping off the tank. “Hope you have good luck!”

  “Gotta make your luck sometimes,” Buster said.

  The day was heating up, and the sun crashed down on Buster Wiles up on the fly bridge. When he neared the end of the jetty, he thought the wind would cool him off, but it didn’t. He took off his sweatshirt and felt chilled with only a T-shirt underneath, but in a moment he was okay. In fact, his underarms were damp with sweat. He’d been sweating all morning.

  When he cleared the jetty, he gave her some throttle. He did not turn southeast toward Dana Point. The lazy sea lions on the bell buoy were indifferent to Buster Wiles, who steered a compass bearing of 240. Toward the isthmus of Santa Catalina Island.

  The west end of Catalina was by far Winnie’s favorite part of the island, and he was grateful for a respite from booze as the taxi wound along the road from Avalon over the mountains to the isthmus. During the hour-and-a-half drive, Winnie gazed at Mount Blackjack, the second highest elevation at two thousand feet, on an island without flat land. His father had taken him camping there when he was ten years old, and Winnie felt nostalgia welling up in his throat. It took a moment to subside. It was shocking to think that he was older now than his father had been when he took his son to the top of Mount Blackjack on a nature hike with his Cub Scout troop.

  When they approached Little Harbor on the offshore side of the island, Winnie was a bit more sober and said to Tess, “God, I forgot how beautiful it is! The white rock and black rock and the clear water!”

  The driver had to slow when a mother buffalo and
a calf, their hides caked with the chalky red dust of the island, crossed the road in front of the taxi, disdainfully trampling some prickly pear as though the yellow blossom cactus weren’t there. Finally the road snaked its way down into Two Harbors, Santa Catalina’s narrowest point, where Isthmus Cove on the north and Catalina Harbor on the south are separated by a narrow strip of land only half a mile wide.

  Here the cloud shadow on the hillsides gave the rugged landscape a look of moss and velvet before the summer burn. Cat Head juts out of Catalina Harbor on the south like a mini-Gibraltar, and the little harbor below Cat Head was dead calm with perhaps thirty boats moored and anchored: yachtsmen, fishermen and divers arriving early for the weekend.

  A three-masted Chinese junk, the Ning-Po, lies in shallow water there in Cat Harbor, a boat with a colorful history. First used by smugglers in China, later captured by Chinese Gordon himself—who later passed into legend at Khartoum—the junk became a prison ship and finally ended up as a restaurant, a movie prop, and now a sunken oddity.

  Sailing into Two Harbors through Isthmus Cove was the way Winnie loved best. So many times he’d come from the mainland for a weekend to fish the kelp beds with his dad. He’d always gotten that same feeling, his throat swelling up when he saw the chalk cliffs off to port, and Bird Rock off to starboard—home of gulls, pelicans and cormorants—a rock that guarded the harbor like an iceberg. And in fact many a careless skipper had been sunk by this “iceberg” when his bottom struck the protective reef to the south, so shallow it juts out of the water at low tide.

  Winnie and his father used to moor in Isthmus Cove and fish for halibut, yellowtail, albacore, mako shark, and his dad’s favorite, white sea bass. Winnie often thought that if his father were alive he wouldn’t have let himself deteriorate after he’d been forced out of police work. His dad would have saved him from himself. And then it occurred to him that he was still a lost little lad, longing for a father’s protection. Did that ever end?

  From the charcoal-gray, rock-strewn beach at Isthmus Cove the land rises up gently across the isthmus, with steep rugged hills ascending on both sides. Shaggy, wind-shaped eucalyptus and artfully placed palm trees provide a picturesque backdrop for the village at Isthmus Cove. Hollywood palm trees were uprooted when Sunset Boulevard was widened during the movie town’s Golden Age, and the trees were shipped to Two Harbors to give the village the look it needed for filming Rain, Hurricane and Mutiny on the Bounty. Many of the wood-frame buildings with tarpaper roofs, including the general store, were constructed as a backlot in the thirties, and now serve as homes for the 130 souls living at Two Harbors.

  Older yachtsmen still tell tales of the days when “Christian’s Hut,” built for the Clark Gable-Charles Laughton epic, became a favorite saloon for the legendary binges of Errol Flynn, Victor McLaglen, David Niven, Ward Bond, and of course, John Wayne, until it burned down and was never rebuilt.

  The dive-boat skippers claim there’s fifty-foot visibility in the water by the kelp beds and reef off Isthmus Cove, making it a diver’s paradise. Winnie remembered two trips he’d made here with Buster Wiles on the Bertram belonging to Woody the sailmaker to dive for abalone and lobster by the reef. On one of those trips they were outside the cove near Ship Rock, another small outcropping snowcapped with guano, when Buster had suddenly surfaced with a lobster in each hand.

  Buster’s violet eyes were dilated with fear! He’d been surprised by a large mako, which had come from nowhere and knocked the mask off his face. Still, Buster had clung to his lobsters, and later they cooked them on the beach by the pier and shared them with two young women from the Avalon Safari Tours, both of whom fell in love with Buster while he told them about the mako shark. He’d had good times there at Two Harbors, Winnie and his friend Buster Wiles.

  Instead of going straight to the lodge on the hilltop, Tess asked the driver to let them off by the general store down in the village. The taxi fare was ninety dollars, and Tess gave the kid a hundred and waved good-bye.

  “Need something from the store?” Winnie asked.

  “Need a drink,” she said. “That Catalina red dust, I’ve got it in my teeth.”

  There was one restaurant in Two Harbors, with a bar inside and another bar outside on a wooden deck. They chose the outside bar and sat on the stools rather than at a table.

  “It’s glorious,” Tess said. “We’re going to have a warm glorious weekend!”

  “Hot,” Winnie said. “Hot for Catalina at this time of year.” Then to the bartender, “Double vodka. Polish if you got it.”

  After the second one Winnie started to regain the buzz he’d lost during the taxi drive. After the next the buzz became a roar. After the fourth he knew he was getting drunk.

  “Think we better go find our room?” he said. “It’s almost four o’clock. What time’s the party start?”

  “Dexter said to be there at six. Sunset in paradise, that sort of thing.”

  “Which club is it?” Winnie asked. “There’s several little yacht clubs around here.”

  “I don’t know the name of it. The one near Cherry Cove. Walking distance, according to Dexter.”

  “I know that one,” Winnie said. “A long walk. Maybe we oughtta eat something now. I’m getting loaded.”

  “No, you’re not,” Tess said.

  “I’m drinking two for every one a yours!” said Winnie. “Or three.”

  “I’ll let you know when you’re drunk, old son,” she said. “I was married to three drinking men. I know the symptoms. You’re far from drunk. Anyway, we’ll get a ride to the party from our B and B landlady.”

  At 4:45 they left the bar and walked to the hilltop lodge, past the old Civil War barracks where the Union troops were supposed to protect the California gold from pirates during voyages from San Francisco to New York and Boston. The B and B lodge, once the home of the island’s first family, was a charming old building overlooking both harbors from a hilltop promontory. Their room was comfortable and cozy. Tess told Winnie to shower first while she lay in bed watching the five o’clock news.

  When it was her turn to shower, Winnie went down to the public room, whose fireplace had a century-old smell of eucalyptus and oak. He strolled outside and climbed the hill to enjoy the view of Cat Harbor. To ponder where life would take him now that he’d met Tess Binder.

  While standing there on the hilltop, full of nostalgia from early memories of this place, he couldn’t stop thinking of loss: his father, his career, his youth. He was full of alcohol and self-pity. He walked a little way up the road toward the Cat Harbor side where the path was littered with buffalo chips: Catalina frisbees. He saw a doe standing between a scrub oak and a dramatic, wind-sculpted cypress. The doe turned and pranced atop a rise and was gone. It was so ephemeral, that glimpse of something delicate and lovely. Winnie was almost drunk enough to run after the doe for one more glimpse, but he knew he’d never catch her. She was gone forever.

  He thought if he didn’t get a drink he was going to start crying and might not stop. At that moment, for the first time, Winnie Farlowe considered that possibly, just possibly, he might be a sick man. He might be what Sammy Vogel had mentioned: a dysfunctional alcoholic. He promised himself then that with or without Tess Binder’s help he was going to quit drinking. For six months. Maybe forever. Starting tomorrow.

  Then he looked down toward the lodge. She was standing outside with her back to him, looking toward Isthmus Cove, her hair blowing back from her neck, her white dress clinging, backlit. She had a gardenia in her hair and she wore black-and-white spectator pumps, the kind they wore in some of those black-and-white movies they used to film in places like this. He imagined how she looked from the front with that dress hugging her thighs, that white side-slit dress, her bare legs tanned and shimmering.

  The things that happened for the first time

  Seem to be happening again …

  In his drunken state the song seemed to be going at the wrong speed again. It was too slow. The ly
rics and the melody were grotesque.

  And so it seems that we have met before

  And laughed before …

  He put his hands over his ears. He felt like screaming. He was going crazy! He might have screamed except that Tess turned and saw him and waved. The song faded. Winnie returned her wave weakly and began descending the hill. He needed a drink.

  When he reached her, she put her arm around his waist and said, “Well, old son, shall we go to a party?”

  “You look absolutely beautiful,” he said.

  “Thank you, skipper.” She leaned her head against his shoulder.

  “I’m already pretty drunk,” Winnie said. “And I know I’ll get drunker tonight.”

  “I’ll watch over you. Go ahead and enjoy yourself.”

  They stood there for a moment looking down at Two Harbors, at the sun on its downward reach, leaving a trail of fire behind. “I guess before I get too drunk I just wanna say that … that I think I got a problem I got to control. I think I’m gonna stop drinking tomorrow and … and …”

  “Yeah?”

  “I wanted you to know that drunk or sober I woulda enjoyed this time you and me’ve had together just as much. And … well …”

  He studied her, that white linen dress, those black-and-white pumps and bare legs, the gardenia in her hair, its scent mixing with jasmine. A single strand of pearls and no other jewelry, the only vivid color coming from her lipstick red as blood. And he said: “No matter what happens, I wanna say you’re more beautiful than that sky out there. And I love you more than my memories of this place. You’re here and now and real. And that’s all I wanted to say before I get too drunk to say it.”

  For the first time Winnie Farlowe actually saw tears on the cheeks of Tess Binder. All the other times she’d bury her face and sob. Now she wasn’t sobbing. She was tearfully looking into his eyes. He removed her glasses and touched her cheeks. Then he licked the salt from his fingers.

  When their landlady dropped them off, they walked down the hill to the yacht club, hand in hand. Tess didn’t speak at all, not until they were looking at the outcropping of rock called Lion’s Head, the guardian of Cherry Cove.