Down to a Soundless Sea (22 page)

Even by the slimmest of accounts, young Simon Gutierez O’Brian was said to be fractious, deceitful, ill bred, and dangerous. Born a cold, selfish, and resentful scion of an indifferent bloodline harboring similar tastes, he was thought well suited to bear the malformed, sapless branches of his malignant family tree.

The O’Brian clan of San Jose, such as it was, had long dedicated its meager endeavors toward diverse forms of petty and not-so-petty villainy. At any given time, half the O’Brian tribe was abroad taking the cure at some state-run correctional facility.

At fifteen, young O’Brian had already grown gaunt and leaden with sin, but his greatest criminal talent always manifested itself in cultivating some witless blockhead to shoulder the blame for his own calculated misdeeds. On those lucky
occasions when he could get away with bearing false witness, O’Brian took his deliverance as a sure sign that his skillful duplicity was beyond the mastery of the local authority, and for the most part, he was right.

At sixteen, O’Brian ran away to sea to avoid prosecution for serious crimes he could not blame on others. This gave the San Jose constabulary much-needed breathing room, but it did little to modify the boy’s basic inclinations. Even aboard ship, O’Brian found ample opportunity to employ his dark gifts and in no time at all was up to his eyeballs in petty crime.

Unfortunately a particular instance came about when his cunning miscarried badly. As a rigger’s mate aboard the coastal schooner
Queensland
, bound for Seattle, O’Brian had been caught stealing medicinal brandy from the spirits locker, which in turn he was selling to his mates at rudely inflated prices. He might have escaped with a fine and demotion if he had not been so impetuous as to attempt to lay off the true guilt on the bosun.

The inculpable bosun, wide-eyed casualty of O’Brian’s black accusations, turned out to be a first cousin to the captain, who knew only too well that his kin had taken “the pledge” the previous year at the behest of his dying wife. After summary justice before a captain’s mast, O’Brian was ignominiously put off the ship without pay or rations and left to fend for himself on a lonely stretch of beach south of Coos Bay, Oregon. O’Brian swore never to be caught short of a credible patsy again.

By pretending to be an officer of a passing ship bound for the sealing grounds and cruelly washed overboard in the dead of night, O’Brian cozened the sympathies of two aging
Catholic priests, soliciting their aid to finance his journey north to Portland.

The castaway spuriously represented himself as part owner of the lost vessel the
Saints
and warranted the captain, his brother-in-law, would make for Portland when they discovered he was missing. As a ship’s officer, O’Brian avowed he would be pleased to sign a promissory note for all funds advanced, with modest interest of course, the funds forthcoming as soon as he returned to his ship.

The two priests were gulled into believing that the castaway was a good Catholic and a gentleman of his word. O’Brian played upon their sympathies until they happily offered to subsidize his journey north with two hundred dollars in Mexican gold.

O’Brian repaid their credulous generosity by pocketing the cash, stealing valuable church silver, and skulking out of town hidden in the back of a northbound goods wagon. In all, he thought himself far better off than if he had stayed aboard ship.

In a Portland dockside gin mill, O’Brian elaborated upon his sly story to a sinister audience in the person of a scar-faced Portuguese schooner captain late out of Macau and the China trade. Though obviously an accomplished officer, the captain (in O’Brian’s estimation) had all the charm of hard-boiled leather. He correctly accounted the “Portugee” a dangerous man from all quarters, but also lucky enough to have survived and prospered in his chosen field of roguery.

Like most old hands, the Portuguese captain was highly suspicious of every sailor’s self-appraisal. Nonetheless, the captain hinted that he might be in need of a rated hand, but specifically a mate having special knowledge of the more remote
landfalls south of Santa Cruz, California. O’Brian at once claimed such knowledge and more besides.

There was little doubt in the captain’s mind that O’Brian might possibly hand, reef, and steer if pressed to it, but the balance of the braggart’s professed credentials he dismissed out of hand as so much oakum and smoke. However, it was not the Portuguese’s actual intention to take on deck crew, but rather to snare a blackleg, a soul-skinner and Judas goat with a morbid dependence upon lawless enterprises. The applicant should also constitute a fitting dog’s body to take the axe when the cards turned sour, as they sometimes did. But the Portuguese sea wolf hardly thought it prudent to apprise O’Brian of that particular eventuality.

As a ship’s master who had survived ten years on the China station, the captain had, by necessity, developed a keen sense of character, or lack thereof. Aptly discerning that O’Brian had little or no real integrity to contend with, the captain offered up a post with the stipulation that O’Brian learn to master his mouth. The excruciating alternative to the captain’s code of silence was beyond contemplation. He hinted that his lascars knew more about pain and death than any scoundrels in the world. He also indicated his willingness to demonstrate those subtle arts the first moment O’Brian stepped over the line or opened his mouth to so much as a bedbug.

With a raised glass and a warped smile, the Portuguese declared that on
his
ship, even the vermin had ears and they all reported to the captain’s mast.

O’Brian gulped down his brandy like one about to cheerfully face the noose, then signed articles with a handshake. To solemnize the contract, O’Brian poured his new captain three fingers of Mexican brandy, a treacherous distillation
that corroded the blood in mere seconds. The Portuguese shrewdly noted that O’Brian had a prodigious thirst for strong spirits. To the captain’s way of thinking most sailors were sworn to perpetual inebriation, but happily it made them remarkably pliable when moral fiber required acute flexibility.

It was thus that Simon Gutierez O’Brian began a new career as a blackleg smuggler. Not just a common contrabandist of uncustomed rotgut, but a bootlegger of souls. He had come under the sway of a captain who made his trade smuggling Chinese “illegals” into the numerous mining enclaves of California and the Baja coast.

It would be O’Brian’s task to search out prospective customers for the Portuguese and, once landed at some clandestine location, lead the hapless Chinese off to the mine contractors. Five or six times a year O’Brian would meet the captain off a prearranged point and guide the Portuguese’s ship to a secluded landing where the contraband might be transferred ashore out of sight of the authorities.

When not engaged with the captain’s business, O’Brian would occupy his time with nefarious schemes of his own devising. He judiciously never showed his face in Monterey or King City, where awkward questions might be asked if he were picked up on charges.

O’Brian’s favorite haunt was a notorious perch on the Monterey coast called Notley’s Landing. This curious enclave was comprised of a humorless cluster of bleached wood structures haphazardly braced against the ocean winds on a rugged span of coast south of Carmel Highlands, at the mouth of the
Palo Colorado canyon. It was there, in the arms of frontier depravity, that O’Brian squandered his spare time, his money, and his health.

When not engrossed in planning or executing minor felonies, he could be found with the ladies at the bar of Notley’s infamous dance hall, the most uproarious establishment of its kind on the Monterey coast. Other occasions might find him laid up for a few days at the Chinaman’s, where he indulged in numerous pipes of opium to medicate the ills acquired asserting a dissolute lifestyle.

One day, as expected, a message came down that the Portuguese would await O’Brian off a lonely beak of coast on a certain moonless night in August. The captain wished to land a cargo ready for delivery to the Los Burros mines in Manchester.

The town of Manchester, if it could be called that, was a loose but lucrative community set high in the Santa Lucia Mountains. Like most mining enclaves, Manchester exhibited a robust appetite for bargain labor. The mine shafts, often haphazardly constructed and poorly maintained, took their customary toll in blood. The turnover in labor was high. Coastal Indians, Mexicans, Filipinos, and Chinese made up the bulk of the sacrificial feast, but there were also professional miners from Wales, Italy, Poland, Hungary, and Germany. Tin miners from Cornwall were especially regarded as thoroughgoing bastards and the best shaft bosses to be had, but even they quickly succumbed to the rigors of frontier mining at an amazing speed. The Italian and Portuguese miners happily murdered each other at a prodigious rate, so turnover was relatively high for them as well.

Manchester was a dangerous place to make friends and a worse place to make enemies, but O’Brian fit right in. The
town saw him only when he had contraband Chinese in tow, and this made him rather popular with the mine bosses.

By way of business, O’Brian made it a habit to go fishing by himself on evenings when the weather permitted. To disguise his real purpose with an innocent avocation, he would hire small fishing boats from the locals, who were always in need of a few coins. He made a point of becoming a familiar face to other fishermen as he worked a dory in and out of the shallows and inlets. O’Brian’s well-known pastime was intended to camouflage those particular occasions when his catch would be far more lucrative than fish.

On appointed evenings, O’Brian would row out with a hooded signal lantern to await the captain’s old schooner in the offing. Contact made, the wily Portuguese would personally barge the Chinese ashore and await O’Brian’s return with the money. To expedite matters, the mine owners were often encouraged to send their own men to a prearranged site near the landing. There they took possession of their cargo for the long march back into the mountains. On other occasions O’Brian made deliveries personally.

On the evening in question, O’Brian sat quietly, rocking and smoking in his hired dory. He nursed the kerosene flame in his lantern and warmed his hands periodically over the blackened stack. The coming night was well suited for phantom fishing, so he sent down several bottom rigs on hand lines in case he was being watched or was hailed by strangers. His general indifference to any possible catch proved irresistible to the fish and his slop box soon boasted sixty pounds of flounder and five robust sea bass. This too he would peddle to the miners to feed to their Chinese conscripts.

Like many sailors, O’Brian couldn’t swim an oar’s length.
Nonetheless, he always felt at ease afloat. The sea gave some small repose to his madness, but it did little to lessen his bodily discomforts. To that end he swallowed a small bead of opium against the chilled pain in his joints and followed that with a long, satisfied pull on his brandy flask. After a short belch he beamed like an anointed cat. He carefully checked the shore’s rocky points of reference every few minutes and deftly countered tide and drift with long strokes on the sweeps. He had acquired the simpler rudiments of coastal navigation from long exercise waiting for the Portuguese.

The ocean chop became docile as the onshore breezes died. The sound of shallow waves scuffing against the bows became quite soothing, and O’Brian allowed his head to sink almost to the point of sleep. But only a few seconds would elapse before he looked up again to check his bearings, his hand lines, or his pocket watch. At the appropriate time he began to flash his signal from the lantern. Standing in the dory, O’Brian flashed his number in a sixty-degree arc out to sea. He did this three times in a row, covered his light, and sat down to check his lines. He waited ten minutes before repeating the maneuver. On the fourth attempt he became worried, on the sixth sullen, and on the eighth angry.

It was just as he had decided to sweep back for shore that O’Brian noticed a dense, swift-moving fog bank overtaking his flanks from the northwest all the way to the lee shore. It came upon him at first like a wall against the horizon and stars. Then it consumed the constellation of Leo and boiled on to embrace every visual reference. O’Brian felt iced fingers of panic climb his spine and make his scalp twitch. Beads of perspiration erupted from every pore and chilled instantly to magnify the effect.

Forgetting his tackle, O’Brian rowed for the shelter of his hidden cove, but before he had pulled a score of desperate strokes his world was enveloped in an impenetrable vapor. It was a fog so dense and a sea so temperate that every sound traveled under protest.

O’Brian’s first instinct was to listen for the breakers on shore and then test for the set of the tide. Using a hand line and a cork float he set out a log and was relieved to find a slack tide on the verge of turning. O’Brian took advantage of the tidal shift to row farther out to sea. He wanted to keep a safe leeway under his stern in case he was unhappily obliged to make a night of it. Such things had happened before. If the fog cleared by late morning he would coast in on the next turning of the tide.