Son of Fortune (8 page)

o work, sorry.”

“Got nothing. Go on.”

“Who sent you?”

After an entire week spent looking for a steady job, Aiden was starting to get worried. He had figured that in a city this big, there would be plenty of work, but every place he went there were lines of men and always the same answer.
Not today. Go away. Nothing here.
In the East, the machines of war had shut down. There were foundry workers laid off from the cannon works, tinsmiths no longer needed for pails and canteens, engineers with no barricades to build. Men were fleeing west: soldiers and bankers, blacksmiths and drovers, shopkeepers and organ-grinders, paperhangers and butchers. There were embalmers, with their satchels full of potions. The profession had barely even existed before the war, but there was not enough ice in the world to carry all the bodies home, so men had learned to plump the dead with arsenic instead. Embalming was now becoming cautiously fashionable in the cities. One undertaker on Montgomery Street proudly displayed a real body in his front window.

The world had changed and no one really understood how, but they all needed to make a living. The East was scorched and tired and so they came west. California had always been the promised land, but the promise was stretched thin here as well. The gold rush was long over. The transcontinental railroad was more than halfway finished, and lots of skilled men were being laid off. There were still places for architects and engineers, for bankers, of course, and for the interior decorators they needed for their sumptuous mansions. But the plain labor that most men had counted on—the digging and hammering and hauling, the factory work that could build a simple but secure life for a family—was getting more difficult to find.

“It's the damn Chinese!” a man muttered to Aiden after they had both been turned away from yet another laborer's job. “Chinese take all the Irish work here, you know! There's not a hole been dug by a white man in ten years! Women's work too! My wife used to get fifty cents a dozen for buttonholes in the shirt factory. Chinese do it for seven. Seven cents! No one can sew more than twenty buttonholes an hour—and that's only if the thread is good! My children used to shuck oysters—Chinese took over that too! One dollar a day for a good white child—Chinese do it for fifty cents!” He slammed the beer glass down on the bar. “And the children had decent hours!”

“What's good hours for shucking?” Aiden asked.

“Ten to noon for the lunchtime, then three to eight for the suppers, right? For the older ones, that is. The little ones, five or six, can't shuck more than three or four hours a day—their little hands, you know? But they still could get ten cents for shoveling away the shells. And always Sundays off. So that's all right, I say—let the Chinese work Sundays, but don't take work from my children!”

Aiden said nothing. Seven hours was an easy day for a child, and three hours off between shifts was extraordinary. Shucking oysters would probably be hard on their hands, but they had clean air, which was far more than mill children and coal children had.

As for himself, not working was very strange. For all his life before this, not working had meant starving. But now he had only himself to worry about. And not working in San Francisco was vastly different from not working in Kansas or the coal mine. A beggar eating out of garbage bins in this city would still fare better than he and Maddy had their last month on the burned-out homestead, when they ate nothing but clay and grasshoppers. Just a mile outside the city were farms and lush orchards where the gleanings—the bruised and discarded produce left behind after the harvest—could feed a hundred families.

But Aiden quickly learned that he did not have to forage in bins or fields. There were saloons throughout the city that offered free lunches. Food was spread out on a long table called a buffet. There was bread and butter, ham, roasted onions, plates of gorgeous oily sardines and pots of creamy oyster stew. There were whole apples! It was the craziest thing Aiden had ever seen, and every day he still could not believe it was true, but he soon saw the strategy behind it. Most men paid three times the cost of the food to buy liquor to go with the free meals. The usual price was twenty-five cents for a glass of wine or spirits, but some places charged as little as ten cents for a glass of beer. He could make his few remaining dollars go a long way.

He was fortunate to have a place to stay at Mrs. Neils's boardinghouse. Forever, no cost, Mrs. Neils had tearfully promised once she heard, as Fish knew she would, about how Aiden had rescued her youngest son.

On his third day of searching, he got a half day's work unloading a coal barge. Then one of the wagon drivers from that job, impressed by how hard Aiden had worked, hired him for a big furniture-moving job the next day. It was heavy work, but it was interesting to see all the things that rich people owned. It took four strong men to carry one cabinet, and one entire cart just for the carpets. There was one man who did nothing but wrap the paintings. He shouted at the movers if they came anywhere near his wrapping table. Aiden didn't see what the fuss was, since the pictures were all dull, dark portraits of grim old-fashioned people—or dogs. Why would anyone want a picture of a dog? Everyone knew what dogs looked like. If he could have pictures on a wall, if he ever had a wall of his own, they would be of beautiful things, flowers or the ocean or the pyramids of Egypt or any exotic land, really. He liked dogs well enough, but he could go outside and see one whenever he wanted—why have a painting of one? He wiped the sweat from his forehead and kept on lifting things. The moving job was good, but Aiden knew there were already enough relatives to handle the usual daily work.

As soon as he got paid from the furniture job, he gave Mrs. Neils money for rent and board, despite her protestations.

“I'm taking up a paying bed,” he said. “If you want me for free, I'll have to sleep on the kitchen floor, and that won't do since I'm used to luxury now.”

The thin mattress in the sailors' bunk room and the suppers of pickled fish and boiled potatoes were hardly luxurious, but he was grateful to have the security of a home, no matter how simple. Mrs. Neils had mended his pants and given him the very good jacket of a very old distant cousin who, she had assured him, had died peacefully in his sleep. It was a bit too small all around, but was a soft wool and had nice deep pockets. Even after he paid the rent, he still had enough money to buy two pairs of new socks, two shirts and a pair of sturdy blue pants called denims, which almost all the laborers wore here. The fabric was thick and stiff, but the shopkeeper said it would soften up with wear.

Though he was unnerved in one way to not have a job, in another way it was nice. Aiden enjoyed walking the streets of the city, looking at people and buildings and shopwindows. At first everything was so foreign it felt like he had landed on the moon. But by the end of the week, he was beginning to make sense of the rhythms and patterns of city life. The best and most amazing part of it all was having so much to read. Magazines and newspapers came infrequently to Kansas. News a month old was considered fresh. But now, with the telegraph running all the way across the country, news from Washington or New York could be in the San Francisco papers the next day. Soon, it was reported, there would be a permanent underwater cable across the whole Atlantic Ocean, linking America to Europe.

Books were even more scarce and expensive on the prairie. His family had often gone an extra year patching over patches to buy a book. A trader with a copy of
A
Tale
of
Two
Cities
once rode off with six live chickens, half their flock. But Aiden still remembered those wonderful sixteen days of winter when, for one hour each night, the whole family was transported to another world and lost in the story—except for interruptions of stomach gurgles and farts, since they were eating nothing but corn mush and beans.

Aiden had also put aside a few coins for Blind Sally. Though his daily exploration of the city had brought him back to the Barbary Coast, he hadn't found the old woman in the daytime, and he wasn't about to go back alone at night. But two weeks later, when Fish returned from the logging run eager for a night of adventure, Aiden was willing. Fish washed, changed clothes and bolted down his supper, and they were out the door before Magnus could begin his usual warnings.

“You would think he's sixty-one instead of thirty-one,” Fish ranted as they walked. “Sometimes I'm ready to push him overboard! Push them all overboard! The same men, the same stories, the same route, the same everything day after day after day. My sextant might as well be a toy.”

“Couldn't you just get a place on another ship? Aren't they always wanting sailors?”

“Sailors, sure. But I don't want to be a sailor. I want to be a navigator, though I'd be happy to start as boatswain and work my way up. But I've only sailed the coast, no blue water. They want experience.”

“Well, experience is nothing more than living through your mistakes.”

“So I need to make more mistakes?” Fish said with a laugh.

“Exactly.” Aiden slapped him on the back. “I can probably help you with that!”

The streets of the Barbary Coast felt different now that Aiden was a two-week veteran of the city, walking with a friend and here on purpose, not just lost. The bouncers in their bright waistcoats seemed far less sinister, more like bored men at a tiresome job. Gaslights flickered at this later hour, and there were lots more people walking about. There was still a desperate taint in the air, an overwhelming stink of piss and the weight of danger everywhere, but it didn't feel like murder was standing square in front of you either. Still, Aiden knew, it was true about there being a body a night. One of the newspapers had a column called “Despicable Crimes of the Barbary Coast” that filled several inches a day.

“It's great, isn't it!” Fish almost outpaced Aiden with his exuberant stride. “Didn't I tell you?”