California Gold (110 page)

The canvas of the tent snapped again, and wind blowing over the mountain summit streamed into the fire, causing them to hitch back away from it. Scattering sparks fell among the tall weeds to one side of the clearing. Mack scanned the sky.

“Wind’s changed direction.
Santan
coming. Guess we’d better think about going home in the morning. I’ve things to do in Riverside.”

Drowsily, lovingly, Nellie caressed the curve of his chin. “All right. But we still have the night.” She gave him a lingering kiss. “Oh, my, I do wonder why it took me so long to come to my senses.”

“Both of us, Nellie. I had some pretty wrong-headed ideas about women.”

“I had some pretty wrong-headed ideas of my own. Long ago, I should have gotten over being scornful of the way you set your sights for the top of a mountain, and then got there. I really do admire you for all you’ve accomplished—and especially the way you’ve put all your success to so many good uses.”

He kissed her chin, smiling again. “Are you trying to soften me up so I’ll take you on a better honeymoon someday?”

“This has been the best honeymoon I’ve ever had. And the only one I want.”

She kissed him.

The
santan
blew.

Higher up, in deep weeds so dry they snapped at the touch, Wyatt watched the embracing couple in the penumbra of light. The climb up the hills, well away from the foot trail, had been long and arduous, but worth it; he’d cornered them. And the shift of the wind gave him an extra benefit he hadn’t anticipated.

He rummaged in his pocket for his last scrap of bread, then stuffed it into his mouth. He probed the pocket again. The matchbox was safe, but he should hold off until they were sleeping soundly in the tent before he set the fire. So he hunkered down to wait. In ten minutes he was perspiring, in thirty his palms crawled and silent screams filled his head. If he didn’t get back to Los Angeles soon, didn’t get a pipe of opium or a syringe of morphine, he’d die. He couldn’t wait hours and hours.

He pulled out the box of matches and sat there cross-legged in the parched weeds, tossing the matches up and down, up and down, listening to them rattle.

The wind ripped down over the Santa Monicas, blowing harder.

Mack leaned on his elbows, musing.

“I’ve made so much money in California—more than I ever dreamed of making—and I built such a wall of property, and propriety, around myself, I didn’t understand what it had done to me till the moment that Hindustani fellow stood there with the dipper and I told him to put it down. I had a dream that told me I was doing exactly what Swampy and Fairbanks did to me. I almost shut the door on Steinweis too. ‘I’ve got mine, you stay out, so I can keep more for myself…’ ”

“There’s a lot of that in California,” Nellie said.

“There’s a lot of it in human nature.”

With an enormous whoosh, the wind blew a cloud of sparks off the fire. They momentarily swirled in the air, then settled. Not three yards from where Mack and Nellie stretched out on a blanket, the knee-high grass smoked and caught fire. Mack ran over and stamped it out.

“That farmer was right. These hills are tinder.”

Creeping down on them, Wyatt heard. And smiled.

And struck a sulfur match on his boot heel and touched it to the brush.

Nellie saw the sudden blaze above them and scrambled to her feet. “Mack, I saw someone on the hill up there.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I saw a man. Someone started that fire.”

Chuckling to himself, Wyatt ran stealthily through the brush. He slipped and stumbled across the ridge and struck another match and tossed it, then ran the other way, starting a third blaze. All three leaped high and quickly began to spread. Wyatt bobbed up and down on his toes, tapping his palms together like a gleeful child.

“I saw him too,” Mack yelled over the roar of wind and the crackle of fire. It leaped down the dry slope, devouring brush, growing hotter and higher every moment.

“Come on, Nellie, we’re going down.”

“What about the tent? Our things—”

“The hell with
things.
Hurry.”

He caught her hand, the hand with the plain circlet of gold on the fourth finger. They started for the winding foot trail to the glade where they’d left the surrey. Above them, the fire raised a red wall with flags of smoke blowing on top. After running twenty yards down the trail, they looked back. A long finger of fire poked their tent and then the canvas smoked, blackened, and burst into flame.

Mack shielded her with his arm, the wind snapping his shirtsleeves and tossing her cap of graying hair. Stumbling, sliding, they ran on with the whole ridge starting to burn behind them.

Through rents in the wall of flame, Wyatt watched. A sudden enraged confusion swept over him. He’d made a mistake by not waiting; they were escaping.

No
, he said to himself. And aloud, “No.”

He skidded down a slope, around the left edge of the fire. It was traveling down the ridge with incredible speed, having already consumed the tent and engulfed the campsite.

The
santan
gusted suddenly and fire billowed at Wyatt from the right. His sleeve caught.

He shrieked in a high girlish voice, pounding his arm against his thigh until he beat the fire out. Then, careless of his footing, he stumbled and fell, bouncing, rolling, turning over and over, dry brush whipping his cheeks, small stones raking and drawing blood. He rolled into a shallow gully that braked his descent abruptly.

His left leg was bent beneath him. As he started to roll over and straighten it, he knew something was wrong.
Christ—the pain…

He screamed, and then he felt intense heat. Twisting onto the other shoulder, he saw the fire directly above, racing down.

He screamed words this time. “Mack! Mack, help me!”

On the foot trail, running and jumping and at the same time steadying Nellie, Mack heard the cry. He dug in his heels, and Nellie exclaimed and crashed into him, rattling his teeth. He bit his tongue and tasted blood.

He stroked her hair while he stared upward at the rampart of fire, not believing what he’d heard, yet almost certain he wasn’t mistaken.

“Mack!”

“That man’s hurt.”

“The one who set the fire?”

“God help me, Nellie—I know who it is,” he said, pulling away.

“You can’t go back up there.”

He ran up the trail.

Mack climbed the ridge through the raging wind, choking smoke, furious heat.

Wyatt lay on his side in the shallow gully, in excruciating pain. On the back of his unwashed neck he felt the fire coming closer. His confused thoughts sorted themselves with a speed and clarity unknown to him since well before the tabernacle failed. He stretched a hand downward.

“Hurry, Mack.”

“Wyatt? Is it you?”

In his dementia, Wyatt started to weep. “I didn’t want to kill you,” he sobbed. “But Fairbanks promised me a lot of money…”

Running, climbing, pain beginning to bore into his chest from the exertion, Mack shouted the name he thought he’d heard. “Fairbanks?”

“Fairbanks,” Wyatt cried, so clearly there was no possibility of misunderstanding. Mack was fifty feet below Wyatt, but the fire was scarcely twenty above the fallen man. The heat began to parch Mack’s exposed skin, and he flung up a forearm. The hillside was bright as noon, the
santan
and the fire singing an evil duet, soprano and bass. “Mack, hurry, I’m hurt, I can’t move—”

“Hold on,” Mack shouted, now within twenty feet of him. A blast of fire leaped over the gully, almost into Mack’s face. The smoke blinded him and set him coughing.

Go on.

He ran at the fire with every intention of doing so, but stopped when the flames shot over his head. Through a rent in the smoke he had a glimpse of Wyatt’s trousers burning, and then his hair. A hand with spread fingers groped for the sky. Flame ran up Wyatt’s sleeve…The fire wall battered Mack backward, and the gap closed.

Mack held Nellie in his arms a half-mile down the trail. Above, the fire was jumping to a second ridge, and very faintly, on the dark flatlands below, alarm bells pealed.

“I couldn’t get him,” Mack said, his eyes full of angry tears. “Not without dying myself, and I wasn’t willing. God, that’s shameful.”

“How can you say that? He came up here to kill you.”

“He must have gone crazy. Poor Wyatt. Poor Wyatt.”

Wyatt the failed dreamer.

California had given Mack everything. For Wyatt, everything was too much. The freedom was too much. And it had killed him.

T
HE OPERA WAS
TROVATORE.
At the first interval, Mr. and Mrs. James Macklin Chance and their guests, the Essanay star Margaret Leslie and the character player H. B. Johnson, left the Chance box for the lobby.

It was autumn, the season’s gala opening, and everyone was in finery. The circle foyer was packed, and so was the magnificent marble stair leading down. Some crushed their way up; some crushed their way in the opposite direction. The foursome were among the latter, and Margaret excited comment and drew stares because her face was widely known. Johnson beamed; the old cowboy looked almost respectable in white tie and tails.

“Do you like it?” Margaret asked as they squeezed and pushed on the stair.

“Not much. I don’t know Eyetalian and I don’t know what they’re carryin’ on about,” Johnson complained.

Margaret patted him soothingly. “You’ll understand in the next act.”

“But I won’t like it.”

She patted again. Under the great crystal chandelier, a diamond bracelet worn outside her white glove winked with starry light. Anderson had given her the bracelet when he decided the public loved her.

A few steps below, Nellie and Mack came upon a familiar couple.

“Governor. Mrs. Johnson,” Mack said. He shook hands with Hiram Johnson while Nellie exchanged greetings with the first lady.

Hiram Johnson drew Mack to the balustrade and whispered a word or two in his ear.

“Consider it done, sir.”

The governor and his wife then pressed on upward. Near the bottom of the stairs, Mack paled suddenly. Nellie said, “Darling, what—?” and then saw a couple breaking away from a group.

Walter Fairbanks III. And his wife.

Mack’s head whirled in a red fury. He’d not seen Fairbanks since Wyatt died in the Hollywood foothills, his body consumed and never found. Mack thought Wyatt had probably been responsible for the bullet fired into his car in Riverside too. Nellie wondered how her husband would react, given the name Wyatt had shouted just before the end. She watched Mack with a grave air, knowing that in the old days, the old California, a man like Mack, meeting a man like Fairbanks, would have drawn a pistol and shot him.

Now, looking trim and altogether proper in his tails, Mack simply stood by the balustrade, defying the lawyer to come up.

Fairbanks didn’t avoid his eye—Mack had to give him that much. He held Carla’s elbow to steady her on the steps. Mack tried to imagine what Fairbanks would say, and how he should answer.

It was an unnecessary effort; Fairbanks cut him, walking right by and waving at an acquaintance at the head of the stairs. Over her shoulder, Carla gave Mack a blurred smile of apology.

Then, a step above Mack and a step behind her husband, she stumbled. Mack shot his hand out to prevent a fall, and her face came into focus. There was still something youthful and cornflower-pretty about her blue eyes, but the rest was wasted, ruined by drink, age, and weight. Carla Hellman Chance Fairbanks wore Parisian clothes, an amber satin gown with a dolman wrap of black-and-gold brocade, a white fox fur edging the wrap; some creature was always dying for Carla, he thought cynically. She was opulent, but fat, every pound an unhappiness. He felt sorry for her.

“Thank you, Mack. Thank you so much.” She pressed his hand with her glove and gave him an intense look. He thought he detected a certain confusion or doubt in her eyes, but then it dissolved.

A glance up the stairs showed her husband occupied with his acquaintance. “Please telephone me Monday,” she whispered. “Walter will be in Sacramento arguing an appeal. There’s something I want to tell you before I go away. It’s important. Please call.”

Fairbanks was glaring down at her, and now she signaled that she was coming. Under her perfume Mack smelled whiskey. She tottered up the stairs.

With Nellie’s permission, he telephoned Carla as requested.

She arranged to meet him at two o’clock at virtually the same place he’d confronted Abe Ruef. Today the weather was different. Marin’s gentle hills were sharply defined in the crystalline sunlight, and the sparkling Golden Gate teemed with inbound and outbound marine traffic.

Mack paced up and down, consulting his watch. Carla was late. For a moment he wondered if Fairbanks had found out about the meeting. Possible, but not likely, he decided. Carla’s husband was busy with many other things these days, domestic matters the least of them. Only a week ago, over highballs at the Olympic Club, Rhett Haverstick had told him a story about the lawyer.

“I have a colleague who’s wild for Charles Dickens. He came up with this wonderful Dickensian name for Walter, and every other attorney in the City—at least the ones who despise Walter, and that’s a majority—is using the name behind his back. They call him Mr. Oldefood.”

“Mr. what?”

Haverstick repeated and spelled it.

“I don’t understand.”

“Simple enough,” Haverstick said. “Walter has a practice, all right: real estate contracts, society divorces. Hardly sufficient to keep him in his customary style, but of course that doesn’t matter with the income from all his Fairbanks Trust stock. However, there is a man’s money, and then there is his self-respect. The only legal work that enables Fairbanks to call himself a real attorney—keep a staff of clerks and typewriters—is the work from the people who cast him off, like the SP legal department. They throw him crusts and bones. Hence Mr. Oldefood. Esquire.” Haverstick chuckled. “If he ever heard the name it would kill him.”

So Mack had won a victory of sorts. But it gave him no satisfaction.