The Garden of the World

4. Five Grand

< 32 = Gilbert Tourneau was released from the county penitentiary in the late spring of 1928, the time of the cherry harvest, a year and a day after he’d gone in for selling whiskey. The first month of time, Gill had been on the sawdust pile, shoveling sawdust and scrap wood out of boxcars and into bins, and then from the bins into the furnaces and boilers that provided heat and steam power for the jail. He was a fish, a first-timer, and all new prisoners were put on the sawdust pile at the beginning of their time. Later, he was put out on a gun gang to work in the corn and onion fields that surrounded the pen, spending all day in the fields with eleven other men under the eye of two guards with shotguns, and being locked up only at night. In the fall, he helped prune apricot trees after the harvest so they would bear evenly the following year, and he did the work well, though he knew he’d never see the trees come into fruit. His scarred face kept most at a distance, even those guards and prisoners who were also veterans of the war, and he grew close to no one. One old guard on his block, a man named Casey, looked after him some, even though Gill had never asked him to. Casey had thin white hair and a sagging face red as brick, and it was common knowledge among the cons that he slept and ate every night at the pen, never going outside the walls. It was thought that he had killed a prisoner once, and that there were people outside who would kill him on sight, or else that his wife had died young and beautiful, and that after her death he had never found reason to go out in the world again. Casey did some small favors for Gill, making sure that he was around when Gill came back from the prison store so he wouldn’t get f o u r # Five Grand < 33 = jumped for his cigarettes, or seeing to it that he wasn’t put on a gang with anyone who would abuse him. When Gill’s time was up, he went to the warden’s office to get mustered out. The warden always tried to strike a jovial, optimistic tone with those who were getting out, and he asked Gill what he planned to do now that he was a free man. “Don’t know,” Gill said. “Go back to where I came from and see if there are any pieces to be picked up.” “You’ve got a name in the Valley,” the warden said. “Your last name is well known.” “That’s got nothing to do with me,” Gill said. “Well, you’re young. You can walk out of here with a clean slate and make your own name.” Gill went to Casey to get dressed out and pick up his traveling money. Casey fitted him out as best he could with a suit of the cheap and hardfinished cloth that all prisoners were given at the end of their terms. He also gave him a new dark blue work shirt, the kind called a thousand-miler because it didn’t show dirt and wear, a short-billed cap, and stiff-soled shoes with hobnails that were painful to wear, and two pairs of socks. They walked together to the prison doors, and Casey advised him to hop a train to save money right off. “The cinder bulls expect it. They been seeing releases hop trains forever, and they won’t bother you as long as you ride on top of the boxcars and don’t try to ride inside.” “Good deal,” Gill said. Casey signaled to the guard in the tower over the main entrance, and a thick barred gate rolled slowly back. Then Casey himself went forward with a key and unlocked a second large door and opened it. “Did the warden tell you that you were starting with a clean slate?” he asked. “Yeah,” Gill said. “Says that to everyone. Full of shit as Christmas turkey.” “I didn’t believe him,” Gill said. “Good,” Casey said. “It’s not true. Now there’s the road. I don’t want to see you back this way.” “You won’t if I can help it,” Gill said. He struck out toward the train yard and looked back to see Casey, standing at the threshold and waving his hand to him slowly. < 34 = @ From the prison siding, the first stop for the local was in Morgan Hill. Gill climbed off the boxcar and hitched a ride on the back of a farm truck to the foot of the hills below Ojo de la Montaña. He walked the four miles to the spring, stopping to change his socks when they sweated through. He’d had a sergeant in France who told them all how important it was to keep changing socks on a march, and he tucked the wet pair into his belt to sun-dry. The grasses in the hills were the same height now that they had been the day he’d come down the hill with Big Boy, changing shade from green to straw as they had been then, and the smells of the grass in the sun were unchanged from that day. As he came to the rise overlooking the bowl where they had placed the still, he found himself hoping that he would find the tent still there. The tent flap would stir, and Lupita would come out, walk to the fire, add a couple sticks of wood. Then she would turn back to the tent, where she had something on the stove, and she would see him. See him and call his name, as though a year of his life had not been plucked from him. But the bowl was empty. The grasses were already growing over the cut in the earth where they’d placed the mash barrels, softening and reclaiming the tent site and the scorched earth beneath where the still had been. The tomb of William Kingman rested above the site, quiet and closed, but other signs of human residence were diminishing. Only the spring ran unchanged, the eye of the mountain, burbling as it had before they arrived, and during their tenure, and after. Gill walked up to the tomb and scraped open both doors. The simple oak coffin rested still and quiet within the shadows. He felt along the top of the box, searching for the envelope with the money. He scrabbled both hands along the sides, then grabbed the coffin and skidded it halfway out of the tomb. He crawled inside, coughing at the crumbling dirt and the spiders. There was nothing. He backed out, sat on the sill of the tomb, looked out at the hillside that had never really belonged to him, except in his own pretensions. He didn’t know why he’d expected anything different than what he’d found, didn’t know why he’d come at all, except that he was like a dog coming back to its own puke. After a time, he pushed the coffin back into the tomb and closed the doors on the dusty remains of William Kingman. < 35 = @ Gill reached the Coyote Feedlot in the late afternoon. In the daylight, he could see that the store looked neat and prosperous. The sign was freshly painted, and the porch was swept, and the drive was spread with new gravel. In one window, he noticed the signal lamp still sitting. Inside the store, the air was warm and close, smelling of wet spoiled grain and old manure. Yellowed window shades were rolled down against the west-facing windows, and two men in overalls were leaning against the long wooden counter. They both stopped talking to look Gill over, and he knew they were taking in his prison-issue clothing, and his scarred face. The storekeeper behind the counter wore a white shirt and bow tie, and blinked behind round owlish glasses. “Help you, mister?” he asked. “You know anything about the Ojo de la Montaña?” One of the men in overalls shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “What’s that?” The storekeeper answered. “It’s an old name for part of the Chabolla land grant. You got business over there, mister?” “Just wondered who owns it.” “Why do you need to know?” Gill looked at the storekeeper, his left eye gazing a little inside what the other focused on. Then he walked over to the lamp in the window and turned it on, then off, then on again. The two men straightened, watched him carefully, and the storekeeper took from below the counter an axe handle of polished hickory. He tapped it in the palm of his left hand. “Easy now,” he said. “We never did nothing to you.” Gill knew that all of these men had drunk whiskey he’d made. Drunk it and made money from it probably. He knew it and they knew it. And he was broken now, just sprung from the pen, and they were respectable men. “Bet you got a fifth of rye behind the counter,” Gill said. “Why don’t you pull it out? Toast my release.” The storekeeper hesitated. Then he put down the axe handle and placed a square unmarked bottle on the counter and poured a single shot into a shot glass. “After this, you’re on your way,” he said. Gill walked to the counter. He reached toward the glass, but instead snatched the bottle by its neck and smashed it against the counter. Whiskey sprayed from the cracked glass, soaked the storekeeper and one < 36 = of the men, and Gill leaped back with the jagged half bottle in his hand. He held it before him like a weapon. The man drenched with whiskey moved toward him, and Gill aimed the broken bottle high, at his eyes. “You like my face? You want one like it?” “Get the hell out of here,” said the storekeeper. “Who owns the Ojo?” Gill asked. “We’ll call the sheriff. Send you back.” “Who owns it?” “Beckwourth.” The man who hadn’t been soaked spoke up. “He sells Dodges in San Jose. But you didn’t hear it here.” “Beckwourth. Good.” Gill looked at the storekeeper, who had picked up the axe handle again. “Nice place you got here. Shame if it burned down some night.” He threw the half bottle to the floor and walked out. @ Beckwourth Motorcars lay several blocks west of downtown San Jose. Gill saw Dodge sedans coming and going from the lot, the same kind of car Big Boy had driven to the still, and he wondered how much of what he saw was bootlegging. How many of those new cars were carrying liquor in the trunk, making pickups and deliveries and payoffs behind the sleek and gleaming facade of chrome bumpers and waxed paint. Gill ignored a salesman who tried to talk to him and went down a hallway with a long plush runner rug until he found a door with a walnut plaque inscribed william beckwourth. A secretary behind a desk guarded the door and slowly inspected him. Gill looked back at her. She wore a white blouse open at the throat, and he could see her hair was dyed blond. “Could you please tell Mr. Beckwourth that I’d like to see him.” “He’s busy right now,” she said. “I’ll wait.” “He may be busy all day.” Gill sat down on a settee beside a floor lamp. He hoisted his left shoe over his right knee and settled back. “I don’t have any other appointments,” he said. The secretary sighed. “Name, please?” “Gilbert Tourneau.” < 37 = “Tourneau?” she repeated as though she knew the name, and she raised a black eyebrow. Gill waited through the afternoon, watching the secretary and the door. Men in fine linen suits came and were admitted and left again, and she answered calls and took messages or buzzed the call through. Once, she leaned in through the door and said his name—Tourneau, Gilbert Tourneau— and the light leaking from inside the office seemed green and watery. When she wasn’t busy, she touched up her makeup, ignoring Gill’s presence. She shaped her lips with red, painting them high and low in the center like a Kewpie doll, and rouged her cheeks from a silver compact. Later in the afternoon , she lined her eyes with black and applied mascara, so that her eyes seemed dark and hidden. She painted her nails, waved them back and forth above her desk to dry. Near five o’clock, she looked brittle and whorish. Then the door opened, and she stood up and leaned in, and there was some whispered interchange across the threshold, and she giggled. She turned to Gill and told him Mr. Beckwourth would see him now. The inside of Beckwourth’s office was cool and dark. Heavy plaques from the Lions Club, Rotarians, the Kiwanis Club crowded on the wood-paneled walls, and nickel-plated lamps illuminated the expansive oak desk. Beckwourth leaned back in a leather armchair behind the desk. His face was lean and sharp, with a trim mustache, and his crow-black hair was slicked down to fit the shape of his skull. He gestured toward a metal case of cigarettes sitting on the desk, and Gill took one and lit it and settled into a squarish leather chair. Before Gill could say anything, Beckwourth told him that he’d informed himself of the situation. He knew that Gill had been working at the Ojo still before he was arrested for distribution. They had to move the still in case he sang, but that turned out to be unnecessary, since Gill hadn’t said a word. “I like that in a man,” Beckwourth said. “Knowing how to keep your mouth shut.” Gill could have reduced his sentence two months if he’d disclosed the still’s location, but he hadn’t said anything because he wanted to protect Lupita. Now he leaned forward in his chair. “Do you know what happened to the people I worked with?” “You worried about that girl you had up there?” Beckwourth smiled. “Sure I am.” “She shacked up with Big Boy for about three weeks. Made him act simple , then took him for a big wad of cash. Headed south, I imagine.” < 38 = For a moment, Gill thought that he could hop a train for Southern California and somehow he would find Lupita, waiting for him. A train, and Lupita waiting with all the money he had earned and all the money she had taken from Big Boy. And she would look at his scarred face and prison thinness with love. Then he heard Beckwourth laugh, a quiet, worldly laugh. “Is that all you wanted from me, Mr. Tourneau? Someone to tell you what you already knew?” “I didn’t know.” “Then you should have.” “I have another question. Was I set up the night I was arrested?” “These things happen when you’re in the business,” Beckwourth said. “You didn’t think you were immune just because you had a girl up in the hills, did you?” “Was it Big Boy?” “It doesn’t matter. You’re free. You should be thinking about the future.” Beckwourth stood up and took glasses and a bottle from a liquor cabinet behind his desk. As he poured two shots, he asked whether Gill was related to Paul Tourneau, the vintner. “You must know I am,” Gill said. “Or you wouldn’t have asked.” “Good. I have a business proposition for you.” He offered one glass to Gill and sat behind his desk. Gill sipped the whiskey . It tasted like genuine Scotch. Beckwourth explained that whiskey was everywhere these days. It was so cheap that it was barely worth the smuggling. But champagne and fine aged wines were rare, and there were those who would pay top dollar. Two truckloads of Tourneau champagne, for instance, could bring as much as a hundred thousand dollars. Word had it that the vineyard was booby-trapped. Alarms, tear gas, shotgun traps. Nobody who wasn’t trusted by Tourneau got near the cellars. And Tourneau didn’t want to do business with anyone. “Just lead us in one night, when there’s enough of a moon to drive. Get us by the traps and to the good bottles of wine. Somebody else will drive the trucks and load the boxes. All you need to do is case it and get us in.” “That simple, is it?” “And a five percent finder’s fee would come to five thousand dollars. Think what you could do with that money. Maybe set yourself up on some land of your own. Maybe find a good woman, not like that girl you were shacked up with. Maybe go someplace brand-new, get a fresh start in life.” < 39 = “That’s a lot of money,” Gill said. “People will do a lot of things for that kind of money. Even betray their fathers.” “Mr. Tourneau, the world is a deceitful place.” Beckwourth reached forward for another cigarette and lit it with a matchstick. He waved the matchstick out and left a strand of phosphorous smoke in the air. “Think of what you’ve gained from what you’ve done. Has any of it matched what you’ve hoped for? Has any of it matched what you’ve deserved? Yet you still want to keep believing that you’ll be rewarded.” Beckwourth shook his head, shadowed eyes and lean hollow cheeks moving in the dim interior light. “I wouldn’t call it betrayal. I’d call it getting back something of your own. Something from that vineyard you have a claim to. I’d call it being loyal to yourself. Five grand is something you can hold in your hand. You can keep looking to the past, for something you’ll never have again. Or you can look to the future.” Gill stood up. “That’s why you had me in?” “I like you, Mr. Tourneau. You’ve had a raw deal in life. I’d like to help you square things up.” “I’ll think about it.” As he walked to the door, he heard Beckwourth’s voice hushed and insistent behind him. Five grand. Come back when you’re ready. I’ll be waiting for you right here. Five grand. Five grand. Five grand. ...