California Gold (10 page)

“There—see?” Bao bobbed his head at a dark rectangle above the reeking beds. Mack read the sign with difficulty.

FITZMORGAN OYSTER CO.

PRIVATE PROPERTY

ALL TRESPASSERS WILL BE

SHOT

Bao was breathing in that wheezy way again. It was a symptom of excitement, maybe, or a problem caused by his weight. He tossed the leather sacks out and passed Mack a pair of greasy stiff gauntlets.

“Do I need these?”

“Yes. Cut your fingers to meat, otherwise.” Bao sounded both serious and urgent now; all the good-humored tolerance of the previous night was gone. He jabbed Mack’s ribs. “Be quick, be quick. There are sometimes other men here besides the watchman.”

Mack’s neck prickled. He clambered from the boat and nearly fell. Maneuvering on a bed of oysters was another new experience. It was like walking on cleavers cocked at every conceivable angle.

“What men?”

Bao’s round cheeks worked upward but his smile was cold; in the starlight he resembled an ivory Buddha. “Oyster pirates. Like me. They do not like to share their pickings. No more talk now. Work.”

He wheezed his way up the shoal, almost to the low summit, then bent over with a grunt and began snatching oysters and flinging them into a sack. Mack felt an increasing sense of danger, though there wasn’t another human being anywhere, only the lights on the Bay’s eastern shore, and a faint silvery gleam of mud exposed all around the shoal by low tide. Farther south, some big slow vessel, maybe a barge, worked northward. He was angry at Bao for not being more explicit about the risk.

He started picking oysters. They were sharp and slippery and his left glove had rips in the fingers. In a matter of minutes he was cursing under his breath and bleeding from two cuts.

When his sack was nearly full, he picked it up to move it and gasped at its weight. Bao’s thick silhouette bobbed up and down, up and down, his movements rhythmically punctuated by his grunts and wheezes. Mack was stunned to see that the Chinese man had already filled one sack, which stood by itself, and was working on a second.

As Mack bent to start picking again, a firefly light winked in the corner of his eye. He straightened, and saw it wink again, perhaps half a mile down the shoal. His hands froze in the gauntlets.

“Bao,” he whispered harshly. “There’s a lantern. Good God, there’s a boat too…” He’d been working so strenuously, he’d paid no attention. It had evidently anchored quietly on the opposite side of the shoal. It was different from Bao’s little launch—larger, square-sterned, sloop-rigged. It had an ominously professional look.

“I saw it five minutes ago,” Bao whispered back.

“But…if we can see them, they can see us.”

“No talk.” Bao spat the words between his teeth. “Bring the sacks.”

Easy enough to say, but when Mack tried to heave the nearly full one to his shoulder, the unexpected weight and treacherous footing threw him off balance and the sack slipped from his hands. He hadn’t quite secured the drawstring, and oysters spilled out,
clacka-clack-clack.

Bao cursed him. The noise was ungodly, Mack admitted. He started scooping up the lost oysters, but Bao kicked his arm aside. “Leave them!” Bao squatted, one sack on his shoulder, grasping Mack’s sack with a free hand. “Bring my other sack.”

“Who the fuck’s down there?” someone shouted, and then the firefly light expanded and a beam shot forth from the lantern’s full-open shutter. There were men running, three or four, one with the lantern.

“It’s that dog-shit Chink,” another man yelled.

“Into the boat,” Bao cried, pushing Mack. He ran past, and with enormous strength heaved the full sack from his shoulder into the launch. Mack pulled Bao’s other sack toward the water as Bao flung the second sack in too. Bao rushed back to help him. As Bao grappled for a hold on the third sack, Mack whipped around to look at the running men and saw a flash of lantern light on bright metal.

Without warning or ceremony, he hit Bao from behind. The Chinese man cursed in surprise, gashing his cheek open on the rocks when he fell. Mack heard the shotgun discharge both barrels and the pellets buzzed by, scattering over the oysters well beyond them,
tick-tack, tick-tack.

“Hurry,” Bao said, struggling up and wiping his bloody cheek. There was no longer any anger in his voice.

“You better run for it, Chinaman,” the first man shouted. “We catch you, we’ll stuff your queue and your balls up your yellow ass.”

“I know him,” Bao wheezed, running with Mack, the partial sack abandoned. “Called Redbeard. Bad man.”

“This bay’s for white men, you fucking dog on two legs,” the same voice boomed. Giving a wild look over his shoulder, Mack thought he indeed detected a beard on one of the oyster pirates chasing them.

Another of the pursuers flung a knife, but it fell short. Mack and Bao jumped in the launch from opposite sides, the Chinese man again exhibiting remarkable agility. Mack hauled up the anchor while Bao rummaged in his gear. He startled Mack by producing an antique Colt revolver, which he aimed across his left elbow, firing three rounds.

The explosions rolled and echoed over the Bay, and the white men immediately fell to the ground. Bao uttered a curt laugh and started the engine. It died.

Mack’s throat filled with a strange hard lump. “God, come on, get going,” he muttered.

On the shoal, the oyster pirates cautiously raised themselves. Hearing no more shots, they proceeded toward the launch, all of them hunched over except Redbeard. Mack realized he was a huge man, six and a half feet or more.

Bao chattered over the controls in Chinese. Mack gripped the gunwale, sweating. Pa had taught him never to run from peril, but Pa also said that men without fear were either fools or crazy, and that if courage had a definition, it meant standing up to peril despite all that fear pumping and churning in you. Maybe he was being courageous now, but it sure as hell wasn’t a romp or a pleasure.

Redbeard seemed to be wrestling with his shotgun. Reloading? Suddenly the engine of
Heavenly Dragon
kicked to life. “Aieee!” Bao screeched, shaking his hands at the sky as if in gratitude. He and Mack grabbed the oars and pushed off and the launch shot into the deeper channel between shoals. The pirates peppered them with further curses and warnings, and Redbeard fired both barrels again, some of the shot splattering water against Mack’s cheek.

Bao gave a long shuddery sigh and sank down with a hand on the tiller. His face no longer resembled pale ivory, but melting white wax. Mack smelled the Celestial’s sweat, and his own.

Bao nudged a leather sack with his foot. “A poor haul.” After a silence: “I did not mean to expose you to so much danger.”

Mack licked blood from his gashed fingers. “You warned me, but you didn’t say we might get killed. I thought it was just dangerous because we were stealing.”

Bao remained silent; perhaps that was his way to admit guilt.

For a while neither spoke, the launch racing down the Bay on its zigzag course. The night air cooled Mack’s face and settled his nerves somewhat. They passed an iron freighter high as a house, and while they tossed in its bow wake, he watched its lonely lights float by, and its great white name, Liverpool lady. His anger at Bao faded, but he certainly had a better measure of the man. When he shifted his glance to the passing lights on shore, he thought of T. Fowler Haines. “They sure as hell don’t like outsiders around here,” he said finally.

“That is true—even though every Californ’ was an outsider once.”

“The ones who’ve been around a while, and settled in—they seem like the worst.”

Bao nodded. “When I take you over to the City, it would be well to remember that. Assume an attitude of deference and respect. That way, you will survive.”

“Hell with that, Mr. Bao Kee. I’m interested in a lot more than surviving. I have as much right to be here as anybody.”

Bao Kee the fisherman smoothed his glossy hair with his palm and examined his passenger ruefully, as if thinking that Mack Chance was a naïve, rash, foolish young man.

T
HE VIOLENCE AT THE
oyster beds kept Mack awake a good part of the night. Over and over, he experienced the frantic, fearful dash to the launch, heard Redbeard’s shotgun and the dark threats. The memory disturbed him, but it couldn’t deter him.
Never be poor again. Never be cold again…
California was everything.

The day dawned bright and clear. After Mack trimmed his beard to chin length with a pair of Bao Kee’s scissors and they ate a breakfast of rice, crackers, and hot tea, they hurried down to the slip.

Bao raised the sail and
Heavenly Dragon
swept over the swells with great speed. White gulls sailed and swooped past. Jauntily-colored ribbons on the masthead tailed out behind in the sparkling air. The city rose up ahead, and Mack began to see particulars: people scurrying, tiny doll-figures; drays and buggies and horse-drawn street trams clogging the steeply inclined streets. The breathtaking Pacific light painted some walls brightly, left others in shade, the patterns of rectangular shapes, of reflecting windows, reminding him of a painting, with verticals and horizontals creating an enormous grid.

Noting his passenger’s expression, Bao said, “You came far to find this place. I am pleased to be the one who carried you on the last mile of your journey.”

At the bow, Mack turned to look at him. The wind ruffled and tossed Mack’s hair, and he could taste its salt-sweet pungency. Suddenly, instead of Bao and the choppy blue water, he saw the image that had been haunting him since he’d arrived in this state: a closed door. He fished the guidebook from his pocket and held it up. “I dreamed of this moment all the years I read this book. It says a lot about the wonders of California, the opportunity, but it doesn’t say a word about people closing doors in your face.”

And I didn’t come this far to be turned away by the likes of Hellman or that Fairbanks. Or by damned thugs who’d beat up an old Indian, or railroad tycoons, or foul-mouthed harbor rats.

“I’ll tell you this,” Mack continued aloud, shaking the book at Bao. “If they shut the door on me, I’ll find the key. Or knock it down. But I’m going through.”

The Chinese fisherman looked at the young man brandishing his treasured guidebook. Despite Mack’s innocence and the dangers that lay ahead for one so ambitious, Bao could not help recognizing the tenacity in his hazel eyes, the courage suggested by the pugnacious lift and thrust of his chin. Hope surely burned like a fire within him, for no human being walked across a whole continent without hope as a companion.

Bao gestured beyond his passenger. Quietly he said, “Look. We are close now. There is the City.”

San Francisco. The commercial, financial, and cultural center of California, she was known as the Athens of the West. So established and so assured, a select group of her residents insisted that she be referred to as the City, capital C.

Before the Gold Rush, Yerba Buena was a tiny, shabby, insignificant port on a splendid bay. But the discovery at Sutter’s sawmill changed everything, including her name. Soon thousands of strangers flooded her shores. Not all of them stayed after the gold ran out. One large group that did remain to form the base of San Francisco society was composed of Southerners, some of whom had come for gold, others simply to flee the poverty and political turmoil of Dixie. They fought for control of the local Democratic party, and fought duels over secession and slavery. Harshly conservative, they formed and led the Committees of Vigilance of 1851 and 1856—the infamous San Francisco vigilantes
—
hanging malefactors indiscriminately to curb crime.

The Nevada silver strike of ’59 fueled a second great growth period, for the City was the port of entry for the fabulous Comstock Lode. She soon had quite a cosmopolitan population. Criminal riffraff from Australia had arrived, and penniless Irish. There was a large laboring population, both whites and their formidable competitors, ambitious and energetic Chinese brought in to lay the Central Pacific through the mountains— “Cholly Crocker’s Pets,” they were called. By the 1880s, San Francisco was home to 290,000 people, prosperous banks, fishing and shipping interests, flourishing theaters, a prolific literary community, and cable cars that had been clanging up and down Nob Hill for over a decade. She boasted many rich and notable families
—
leaders of a young society who yearned to match the elegance and prestige of Mr. Ward McAllister’s New York “Four Hundred.”

By this time San Francisco had a distinct and unconcealed arrogance. All those living across the Bay in Oakland, those so unfortunate as to hail from the Central Valley, those residing in the wretched adobes and cow towns south of the Tehachapis—those people simply didn’t exist, or if they did, they were scarcely better than savages. This so inflamed the Southern Californians in particular that they tried unsuccessfully to secede on several occasions.

Of course, as a practical matter, the elite of the City could do little about the continuing flood of arriving sailors, “Chinks,” Irish, Valley parvenus, and the like. Little, that is, but snub them, build invisible walls, and keep the outsiders in their place
—
on occasion, by force.

L
ONG AFTERWARD, MACK SPECULATED
about the direction his life might have taken—how different it might have been—if, on that afternoon, he hadn’t followed his nature and acted as he so often did: impulsively.

There was no hint that an impulsive act would be called for as
Heavenly Dragon
chugged up to a ramshackle finger wharf where a number of empty hay scows were moored. Mack jumped to the pier, which was deserted save for a crewman repairing a line on a scow down at water level, and a fisherman, a sickly-looking old man seated on a stool. Neither paid attention to Mack, and the massif of the City, lumber and brick, granite and glass, seemed equally indifferent. Damned if San Francisco would be indifferent to him very long.