California Gold (69 page)

They appraised each other. Wyatt’s tan was darker than ever, yet he didn’t look well. He was still dangerously thin, and white streaks like bird’s wings swept back through the pomaded black hair above his ears. Curiously, his lips seemed fuller, red and womanly. It gave him a disturbing androgynous quality.

The two young women, both buxom, peered at Wyatt like children awaiting instructions, their high-collared dresses so tight, Mack could see the lines of stays beneath. Corsets cinched in their waists to the smallest possible measurement, which in turn put more emphasis on their breasts. Dust clung to chiffon veils tying down their huge velvet Gainsborough hats trimmed with ostrich plumes. Despite this altogether proper attire, they managed to look like whores.

“Ladies, this is my esteemed partner from San Solaro, James Macklin Chance. This is Deacon Martha. This is Deacon Mary. I remarked to the ladies that you lived near here.”

“Arlington Heights,” Mack nodded, vaguely uneasy; Wyatt kept track of him. “I presume the bank’s getting your royalties to you regularly?”

“Indeed. My bookkeepers at the tabernacle post them and hand me a monthly report.”

Mack swept off his Stetson and wiped his forehead. “Did you say
tabernacle
?”

“I did. The Tabernacle of the Sun Universal. We’ve just moved into our new sanctuary in the foothills near Pasadena. Ten acres, and a remarkable building. It’s an octagon—many windows and very few walls. A man named Fowler built some octagonal houses around fifty years ago. He said there was something mystical and healing about the design. Of course it didn’t catch on. He was ahead of his time, and dealing with the general public—and we know what
that
consists of,” Wyatt said with a little smirk. “Dupes, village idiots, hymn singers—and worse. At any rate, an octagonal building is perfect for us. It fosters openness—the kind of freedom from conventionality that we endorse and encourage.”

“So you’re a preacher now?”

“I prefer ‘teacher,’ or ‘spiritual leader.’ ” And Mack heard the old smooth gears mesh, the machinery of charm beginning to grind.

Wyatt brushed away the hands of his companions and let his own flutter and swoop as he spoke. “I founded what you might call a secular faith. We worship and study the natural forces symbolized by the sun.”

“Health—healing—wholeness,” Deacon Martha chirped with a vapid smile. Or was it Deacon Mary?

“We recognize the rightful supremacy of man’s physical side,” Wyatt said. “We cultivate its well-being. We maintain that robust health and completely free expression of biologic drives are the highest form of morality.”

“That should make your church very popular.”

The cynicism brought a scowl from Wyatt, but the other deacon chirped, “Oh, yes. We have more than nine hundred communicants already.”

Mack slowly got over his surprise. Why should he be surprised at all? Wyatt had always been ambitious, amoral, and enormously persuasive. California was a seedbed for strange cults that appeared and vanished as regularly as the green hills of spring.

“Ladies, wait for me in the carriage,” Wyatt said.

“But June—” one said.

“Do as you’re told, sweet.” He smiled and grasped her arm. Her knees buckled and Mack realized he’d hurt her. The other girl supported her as they hurried away, their fine dust ruffles dragging through dirt.

Still uneasy, Mack said, “If you’re interested in autos, you must be prospering. I’m delighted.”

“Are you. How generous. As a matter of fact, we’re attracting a lot of rich communicants from Iowa and other states in the Midwest. They find the climate and our doctrine liberating.”

Suddenly he stepped in close. The sun behind him put a halo around his head. “Is Carla with you?”

“No. We’re divorced.”

He stepped back. “You took her away from me, used her—then you disposed of her, is that it?”

“Come on, Wyatt. That happened years ago.”

“Bad memories linger, my friend.”

“We aren’t friends, so stop pretending we are. Carla made her choice; I didn’t force her. As for disposing of her later—she left me. Eagerly, I might say. That should make you feel good. I think we’ve said all we have to say.”

He tipped his Stetson and walked off.

“Barney! Barney!”
admirers were chanting back along the road as Oldfield posed for a cameraman who ducked under a black drape.
“Oldfield, hurrah!”

The breeze snapped Wyatt’s creased white trousers, soiled now with country dust. Naked hate disfigured his handsome face.

In the double bed at the hotel, Deacon Mary snored lightly with her cheek on his left arm. Deacon Martha worked diligently at his crotch. “Junie, don’t you like this? Mmm, Junie. June?”

Indifferent, far away, he fondled her hair. Damn Mack for spoiling the day. Wyatt couldn’t forgive him for stealing Carla.

Mack’s success enraged him with jealousy. No—not so much Mack’s success as his public personage. James Macklin Chance was a name often seen in the California dailies. J. M. Chance was not only a millionaire, he was a personality.

Well, goddamn it, Wyatt Junius Paul was on his way to that same pinnacle. He was mining gold from the fools who flocked to the tabernacle. He was riding a cresting wave of his own ingenious devising. He was out in the sun again, after a long dark obscurity that he preferred to forget.
Couldn’t…

When he’d left San Solaro, he started to dip into his oil royalties. He could survive on them, but survival wasn’t enough. He wanted spectacular wealth. Even more than that, he wanted to be known all over California.

Admired.

Loved…How, though? For a long time, he couldn’t find the answer. In San Diego, he met and married a tubercular widow. He was tipsy when he proposed, dead drunk when they stood before a justice of the peace. Wyatt helped the woman open a cheap sanitarium-hotel, one of hundreds in the state catering to the one-lung crowd. Her bad health, and the hotel, began to suggest a solution to his dilemma.

The woman died quickly, as he’d hoped, and he liquidated the hotel, using the capital to bottle the first thousand pints of Sunshine Health Syrup. Cripples and hypochondriacs who bought the slop claimed they were energized, pepped up. They fucking well should have been, considering the raw alcohol and cayenne in his recipe.

From this medicinal triumph he advanced to a more elaborate one. Living in a shore-side cottage in Santa Barbara, he built the first of his Alpine Inhalation Cabinets. Price: $1,000. He manufactured and sold eleven of them, making money, but he was still anonymous. He wanted the kind of notoriety and prestige J. M. Chance enjoyed.

One night, frozen from a long swim in the surf and running a fever, he fell asleep and dreamed of his mother in Osage, Kansas, her insane religious faith, her equally insane ideas about health. God, how he wanted to puke from all the oat gruel and graham crackers she forced into his mouth.

He woke before dawn, listening to the Pacific. His fever inflamed him. But so did a sudden idea, clean and simple and perfect for its purpose as a razor’s sharp edge. Excited, he opened a hoarded brandy bottle. He was drunk by sunrise, drunk and ecstatic. He would combine his mother’s two insane predilections into a single scheme superbly suited to the place, the time, the climate—and all the idiots who came over the mountains wheezing and spitting out bloody gobs from their lungs.

A church—not of the next world, but this. Headed not by some wild Jew claiming divinity but a man of superior intelligence. A church offering not some wispy chromo dream of an afterlife but the vibrant physical reality of longer lustier life in this one. A
church
of
health.,

Goddamn Mack Chance for demeaning that vision today with his little looks and remarks. Goddamn him for turning his back, walking away, so respectable and superior in his fine suit and white landlord’s hat.

And goddamn him most for stealing Carla.

“Bad memories linger. Oh yes they do.”

“What did you say, Junie?”

“I said I love you, Deacon Martha.”

“Junie,” she giggled, “sometimes I think you’re just crazy.”

He yanked her hair.

“You pig-brained bitch. Put your head down and do your work.”

I
N THE SPRING OF 1903
, Mack fell into conversation with Fremont Older at the Olympic Club. Older was managing editor of the San Francisco
Bulletin.
Ink for blood, they said of him. He’d risen through the ranks as a tramp printer and reporter, an admirer of Hearst and Hearst’s sensational style. He was a huge man with a grenadier mustache and a passion for fine clothes and cigars, with eyes like searchlights and a lumpy bald pate. Wags around town said the lumps came from banging his head against the wall behind his desk. He banged his head over a weak headline or a grammatical gaffe. He banged his head over municipal corruption, which he abhorred. Sometimes he banged his head over things in general.

“I like your editorials about Schmitz,” Mack said after he introduced himself.

“Thank you. Glad to hear it. Have a drink. Have a cigar.” Mack took one and thanked him. Older then said, “So you agree this administration’s rotten—”

“Ever since the Perkins election, you can hardly escape the stench.” To return its tame dog George Perkins to the U.S. Senate, the SP Political Bureau had been forced to deal with Abe Ruef, who controlled four key votes in Sacramento necessary for Perkins’s reappointment.

“That’s only one symptom of the malady, one small symptom. There’s an evil sickness spreading through this town, Mr. Chance. I love San Francisco. I won’t see it poisoned and left to die.”

“Really that bad, Mr. Older?”

“I’ll tell you how bad. Abe Ruef’s turned City Hall into a mart in which everything’s for sale: permits, votes, favors. Schmitz is a puppet, a nobody. Ruef runs things—from his law office, the Pup, his hip pocket. He throws the unions a bone now and then. Otherwise he ignores them. The corporations kiss his fundament and slip him a thousand or two every month to make sure they win franchises and municipal contracts. Now he’s moving into the underworld.”

“That I didn’t know.”

“The saloon owners put their advertising where he tells them to put it. They don’t run it in the
Bulletin
, I assure you. He’s making inroads in prostitution. It’s all covert, hardly visible to the ordinary citizen, but it’s poisonous.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“More of what I’m doing already—editorials, exposés. The facts are hard to dig out. Ruef chums around with important men, and I’ve been threatened. Our publisher Mr. Crothers has been threatened.”

“Well, keep at it. I like what you’re doing.”

“Write us a letter and say so. Men of conscience are going to have to clean up this town. It’s either that or let the barbarians reign.”

The huge ornate fixture cast a circle of light on the green-covered table in the mansion’s card room. On opposite sides, with cigars and mugs of steam beer, Mack and Hellman played two-handed euchre, ten points a game. The light isolated them in the midst of a great darkness.

Hellman had been staying with his son-in-law for the past week. He no longer seemed enthusiastic about his real estate and ranch holdings, which others managed for him. His hair was nearly gone, his eyes watered a lot, he was flatulent, and he climbed stairs with difficulty. It was melancholy to contemplate. It reminded Mack that he too was growing old.

Mack took the last trick with the ten of trumps, scoring a march. He’d euchred his opponent in hand after hand. “That’s game, Swampy. Shuffle them.”

The old man did so, but listlessly. “I got a new story. A visitor goes into the auto owners’ ward at the nuthouse. He don’t see nobody. ‘What’s the matter?’ he says to the doc. ‘Where are the patients?’ ‘Oh,’ says the doc, ‘they’re all underneath the beds. Fixing the gears.’ ”

Mack finished his beer. It tasted stale.

“You didn’t laugh,” Hellman said. “You hear that one before?”

“Practically the first time I saw an auto.”

Hellman shuffled the twenty-four-card deck, then suddenly put it down. “We been doing this four nights now. It gets boring.”

Mack reached across to take the cards and shuffle. “You sound like your daughter.”

“Did you know she’s back from New York?”

“No.”

“Well, I guess she wouldn’t rush to tell you. She’s running with that arty crowd down in Carmel. Painters, writers, socialists, free-love types. Rotten bunch.”

The cards snapped and flowed together between Mack’s hands. “Not all of them.” He held out the deck. Hellman cut. “How is her—” He searched for a polite word. “Health?”

“You mean is she boozing herself to death? That’s what I hear.” He picked up his cigar and ash fell to the carpet. Ignoring it, he regarded his son-in-law gloomily. “You were the only good man Carla ever hooked up with.”

“Oh, I don’t know. There was her father.”

They looked at one another. Shared affection relieved the boredom and their miserable loneliness. Johnson had left for South America a month before.

Mack dealt three cards for each of them, then two more, then the turn-up card. “Spades are trump.”

The door opened, laying a rectangle of light on the rug, and Little Jim stood in the center, barefoot in his long nightshirt. His fair hair shone like a cap of gold.

“Come in, son.”

“I came to say good-night, Pa.”

Mack cupped the boy’s chin. His hand was hard and brown, a contrast to the child’s cheek. “Look at you. White as milk. You’re still staying indoors too much.”

Little Jim would be five in the fall. He was shooting up, slim and sturdy. “I like it indoors, Pa. I like sitting with a book or doing sums.”

“Say, don’t I know it,” Hellman said, patting him. “Jim put on a real show for me this afternoon. With that Chinee thingamajig, my grandson can add numbers faster than I can say Kaiser Bill.”

Frown lines cut in above Mack’s nose. “I want you out of the house two or three hours every day, Jim. Tell you what— tomorrow we’ll drive down to Stanford. The football team is starting spring practice. We’ll watch them scrimmage. Football’s a hell—a devil of an exciting game. You’ll like it.”