California Gold (107 page)

That brought a wearied smile from Obregón. “I understand. It is radical to build this barracks with proper wood floors instead of dirt. Radical to provide decent privies instead of open trenches, or nothing. It is radical to house your people here, instead of crowding them in the usual tents and hovels. Radical indeed, sir.”

Mack and the old Mexican eyed one another, silently making peace.

Marquez groaned in his sleep. The red of sunset faded away outside the window. Mukerji reached up to the cord of the tin-shaded electric bulb and snapped it on.

Mack walked downstairs and into the yard, all dusky now. He wrinkled his nose at the odors of dirt and sweat left on him by the long journey. Things were still all wrong. He didn’t like harboring Wobblies, no matter who they were.

His body felt heavy as granite as he dragged to the water trough. He turned the spigot, stood away from the splash, and filled the dipper. The water was cool and sweet. He tilted the dipper and ran some over his chin, then spilled more over his forehead, licking it as it dripped from his nose.

When he opened his eyes, he saw the Indian on the stoop under an electric light. The man walked over quickly.

“Mr. Chance, sir. One moment please before you leave. I am Mr. Gopal Mukerji, sir. In my home village, Chandpur, in the Punjab, I learned to be a number-one first-rate farmer. I sailed by steerage to Canada, where I harvested wheat. Then I traveled down to California, where others from my region work also. I like it so much, despite the hatred I found in Fresno, I will be a Californian now.”

Tired and annoyed all over again, Mack didn’t know what to make of this foreigner. “I can’t talk now,” he said.

“Just please one more moment, sir. I am a very good, hard worker. An absolute top man with crops of all sorts, including muscat and muscatel raisin grapes, which I see you grow in quantity.”

“For God’s sake, Mukerji, this is no time—”

“Why not, sir? I am eager, industrious, honest. Give me a job, sir.”

Mack leaned on the pump. “Look. They don’t like your kind in the Valley. Didn’t Fresno teach you that? They also don’t like anyone who hires Indians. I said inside and I’ll repeat it—I don’t need more grief; I have plenty. You’ll have to go somewhere else.”

“But sir, I guarantee, you will find me a most capable number-one man. Working hard for you on this ranch, any long hours you ask, I could save enough to bring my prospective wife from Chandpur. I have great hope that we could prosper here in California.”

“You’ll have to go somewhere else. Now get inside, out of sight.”

“Sir…”

Mack clanged the dipper on the pump. “No job.”

The Indian stared at Mack as he hung up the dipper and turned toward the Packard. Then Mukerji plucked the dipper off the hook and twisted the spigot. Somehow that was too much. Mack spun around and knocked the dipper out of Mukerji’s hand. The tinned metal flashed as the dipper landed in dust.

“Goddamn it, I told you—get inside.”

“Sir. Not even a drink of water first?”

An enormous stillness seemed to descend on the yard. The two of them stood well away from the stoop, in the dark, barely touched by the electric light. A narrow luminous aura of yellow and white defined the peaks of the coast mountains.

Mack saw nothing of the surroundings, only a hopeful young wanderer at a meandering brown stream. He saw Swampy Hellman on horseback, denying the interloper a simple necessity and comfort…

“Sir?”

Mack rubbed his mouth, then walked over and picked up the fallen dipper. With an unconscious solemnity, he handed it to Gopal Mukerji.

The two men stared at one another.

Gopal Mukerji turned on the spigot.

What the hell have I become? How is it that I’ve forgotten so much? Is it age? Money? Frustration? Sorrow? Whatever it was, Mack was ashamed.

While water splashed in the trough, Jesse Tarbox galloped along a dirt track into the yard. Red and excited, he waved his riding crop over his head as he reined.

“Homer Keeter saw you drive in, Mr. Chance. There’s headlights on the main road. Whole damn bunch of cars.”

Mack sprinted to the Packard and jumped on the rear bumper, then the trunk. From that height he could see across the field to the Bowles-Raisin road. Sure enough, bobbing and flashing, headlights stabbed the roiling dust. Mack counted five, six, seven pairs of lights coming in a column from the east. From the Fresno pike.

Tarbox pranced his nervous mare toward the auto. “Whoa, Sal. Calm down, blast you.” The foreman slapped the mare savagely with his reins, drawing blood.

“Why are we suddenly entertaining visitors, Jesse?”

“Somebody must have talked in town.”

Gopal Mukerji ran to the Packard and, without invitation, stood on the bumper. He said to Mack, “I will not be moved, sir. Not until my friend and companion is well.” He yanked his shirt out of his pants and palmed a small pistol.

God almighty, everything is falling apart.

Tarbox sounded close to hysterical when he said, “Seven cars means a lot of men. They might burn us out. Kill people. Why don’t you hand over those two?”

Mack was tempted. He wished the burden would pass, but it wouldn’t.

“Why don’t you shut your mouth, Jesse? Ride to the office and get me the shotgun.”

He jumped back down off the car, throwing off his coat and pulling the Shopkeeper’s Colt off his hip. After opening the cylinder to check the loads, Mack jumped back up on the Packard’s front bumper. Now he heard as well as saw the caravan. Snarling and roaring, the autos turned one by one into the lane leading to the heart of his property.

Mack waited at the water trough. He’d sent Jesse Tarbox back to the office again, with orders to stand by the telephone. He tugged the holster around to his right hip, where he could reach it quickly. In the crook of his arm rested the ranch shotgun, an eight-gauge Ithaca with a modified choke on both barrels.

The single line of autos came on toward the yard, their headlights stabbing through boiling dust clouds. To Mack, in his tired state, they sounded like hungry, evil-tempered mountain cats.

The lights of the first car blinded him a moment. Four or five men were packed into the black Ford T-model. It veered left into the yard, then right again, its lights splashing the front of the barracks as it stopped.

One by one the other six cars pulled up alongside each other. Mack was staring at fourteen headlights. He locked his knees so his legs wouldn’t shake; he didn’t want them to see how frightened he was.

Doors on the cars sprang open and men in overalls and cheap suits piled out—stringy redneck Fresno County farmers and town merchants with derbies and high collars. Mack knew most of them, including Sergeant Phil Lummis from the police department—out of uniform—and the man who stepped out in front as if he were the leader, a bald and paunchy wheat rancher named Peter Sledgeman.

Sledgeman walked to the water trough with a wary eye on Mack, the others forming up behind him. Mack’s quick count came to twenty-three. Work-gnarled hands clutched ax handles and two-by-fours. He saw no guns.

Mack nodded to acknowledge the spokesman. “Pete.”

“Mack.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I expect you know. You’re harboring two men we want.”

Mack’s round eyeglasses flashed in the headlight glare, his hair shining white as new cotton. Sibilant Spanish was audible in the barracks. He’d ordered everyone inside, away from the open windows, and he hoped to heaven they’d obeyed.

“I said you’ve got two men we—”

“Calm down, Pete, I heard you. Is it them you want, or me?”

Sledgeman smiled coldly. “Well, yes—there’s that. You never have run with the crowd around here. Always made your neighbors look bad, out of step. Take this blasted barracks. Tents aren’t good enough for your stoop labor—”

“That’s right. Not good enough. What else, Pete?”

“Those two reds. Hand ’em over and we’ll have no trouble.”

“Hand them over? What for? Another water cure at the jail-house? Or is it a lynch rope this time?”

“Don’t stall us, Mack. We know they’re inside. One of Ramón Obregón’s cousins swallowed a lot of tequila in town and shot off his mouth.”

“I’m not denying they’re here. But you can’t take them. I gave them shelter and you boys are the reason why. I’ll thank you to remember this is my property, Pete. I want you to vacate it, right now. Go home. Cool off.”

Another farmer, Carl Cass, stepped in front of the lights of his Reo. Cass’s neck was genuinely red from working his melon fields. He chewed tobacco; stains showed all over his overall bib. Mack had once loaned Cass $500 for emergency medical bills for his little girl Clarice. There was no memory of that in Cass’s snake-mean stare, nor any when he shouted.

“You’re crazy, Chance. Why are you protectin’ a couple of damn reds who’d just as soon steal all your money and your land too?”

Some in the crowd muttered and said, “Yes,” or “Tell him, Cass.”

“Listen, Carl,” Mack said, “I like the Wobblies about as much as you do. Which is not very much. But speechmaking never hurt anybody. Something reminds me that American people are allowed to make speeches anywhere they please, on just about any subject. If that argument doesn’t move you, try this one. I know one of the two men from way back. He’s wasting away with fever and probably pneumonia, liable to die if I don’t get a doctor in here. A human life’s more important than money or land.”

A farmer leaning on a shiny green fender snickered. “Since when?”

“Might as well forget about calling a doctor or anybody else,” Sledgeman said. “We stopped half a mile up the road and Len Sudder shinnied up the phone pole and cut the line. We also sent one more car down the back road with its lights out. There’s a few good boys in the field behind this place, in case anybody gets a notion to run that way.”

A knife twisted in Mack’s middle and his mouth turned dry and juiceless.

Sledgeman ran his tongue over horsy yellow teeth, then settled his frayed old straw hat a little more firmly. “I think you just better let us have those two, Mack.” He walked around the trough, headed for the stoop.

Mack lined up the shotgun on Sledgeman’s gut. Sledgeman stopped, and so did the muttering from the others.

“Pete, I don’t want to fire this, but I will if you push. You want those men, you’ll have to take me first. I guarantee I’ll take some of you with me.”

Sledgeman chewed his lower lip and eyed Mack up and down, gauging his determination. Finally the farmer leaned over and expelled a big shiny blob of spit right into the dust in front of Mack’s shoes.

“You’re violating the law, Mack.”

“What the hell do you mean?”

Carl Cass shouted the answer. “Sheriff Chittenden deputized us. Every man-jack.”

“Except me—I already got a badge,” Sergeant Lummis said to general laughter.

Mack rubbed an index finger over his chin. He could hear the rasp of his beard, growing out dark as a twilight shadow; he hadn’t touched a razor since leaving the City.

“So you see, Mack—”

“Nothing, Pete. I see nothing.”

“If we want those two, we got the authority.”

“I’d like to see a warrant. Some legal paper.” Men shifted their feet and muttered again. “This deputy talk is bullshit, Pete, and we both know it. But I really don’t care one way or another. You’ll bleed just as much deputized as not.” He held the double-barrel Ithaca a little higher, the blued metal shining in the headlights.

Sledgeman finally answered him with a shrug. “We can wait you out. We can wait all night. We can wait a week. We’re gonna make an example of that greaser and the rag-head. Examples for the whole damn valley.”

“The whole state,” an Armenian farmer named Pazian yelled, drawing a lot of noisy approval from the others.

Sledgeman turned around and trudged back to the autos. Lummis and a few others huddled around him, whispering.

Mack walked backward to the dim pool of electric light on the stoop. “Anyone there?”

From the darkness of the hall came the reply. “I, sir. Mr. Mukerji.”

“Try the telephone on the wall. Let me know if it’s working.”

Mack waited.

“No, sir, I do not think so.”

Swearing, Mack sat down on the stoop and leaned back against the siding. “Turn out this light.”

Mukerji snapped it off. Mack watched the farmers and townsmen gesturing and arguing in front of the parked automobiles. He’d never been one to waste his money on gambling. But if this were poker, it was a pretty sure bet that he held the losing hand.

Ticking. A steady ticking…

His head jerked up. He’d dozed off.

A cock crowed somewhere. Clouds like white veils trailed across the stars. The ticking kept on. He remembered where he was and wished he hadn’t. Hours ago, he’d put on his suit coat for warmth, but he was freezing, his hands raw and cold. When he exhaled he could see his breath faintly.

The Ithaca rested on his knees. The ticking, he realized now, came from his twenty-four-karat-gold pocket watch. Bought and engraved before the earthquake, it bore the
JMC
crest on the lid.

The barracks raced north. To the east, light was breaking over the valley floor. Mack picked up the watch and tilted it to put some light on the dial. Half past five.

He yawned and wiggled his stiff legs. The auto lamps had been turned off long ago and the men had piled into the cars to doze, or had curled up on the ground. As the light brightened, Mack saw an arm stretched out here, heard a yawn there; they were rousing.

Behind the barracks, a sudden explosive hiss signaled the start of another irrigation cycle. Jesse Tarbox had thrown the switch in the office three quarters of a mile away. It might as well have been in China.

Slowly the men in the mob woke up and greeted each other. Someone’s muffled words were answered with a laugh. That commonplace sound made Mack feel even more alone.

He heard a rustling behind him, inside, me creak of a stool being moved. Mukerji had sat there all night, sharing the vigil like a servant attending his master. With his pistol, it was a total of two handguns and a shotgun against twenty-three.