Blood and Oranges by James Goldsborough (latest books to read txt) 📗

Hollywood had begun with the water and became a billion-dollar industry in the twenties. The city reeled in 1928 with the collapse of the St. Francis Dam, the largest of the dams built to hold Owens River water. The disaster took five hundred lives and destroyed William Mulholland, the man who’d built the aqueduct, provoking many in the Owens Valley to claim it was God’s revenge, but life in the city went on. With the Depression deepening, more people were heading west than ever, escaping eastern unemployment, misery, and ruin. When so many people with the same idea head for the same place, unemployment, misery, and ruin inevitably accompany them, but that was still a few years away.

Bel Air hurt a little. Some overleveraged residents along Roscomare and Stone Canyon and Beverly Glen suffered foreclosures just like ordinary people. Even Eddie Mull felt a pinch, for fewer people bought his homes, lots, and gasoline. He still made money, just made it slower. It cost him briefly when Prohibition was repealed and the Bootleg Highway to Tecate dried up, but he took his profits and sank them into a gambling ship to operate in Santa Monica Bay, just beyond the three-mile state limit. His bank account took a hit while the ship was being refurbished and refitted and brought through the Panama Canal, but not so much that he had to ask Nelly to stop shopping or even slow it down.

When Maggie turned fourteen Eddie bought her a snazzy red Ford coupé for the weekly runs to the Playa del Rey stables where the girls still kept their horses. Nelly thought her daughter too young to be driving, but by then Cal had finished at USC, was working at the temple for his father and could no longer play chauffeur. Nelly had no intention of returning to the stables herself, and so Maggie got her car. Nelly took her for her first driver’s test and learner’s permit, which required someone over sixteen to be in the car at the same time.

With Nelly and Cal unavailable, Maggie swallowed her pride and decided to ask Billy Todd, an old enemy, to accompany her to the stables. Billy was sixteen and had a license. He lived just up Roscomare, and during long years in grade school and University High School had come to hate Maggie with a passion. He regarded her as a bully, a boy-hater and probably a lesbian. At school bus stops, they stood as far from each other as they could. At sixteen, Billy got his own car, a beat-up old Ford Model A that could barely make it up the hill. Going down was easier, and Billy sometimes stopped to give friends at the bus stop—not Maggie—rides down the hill. She remembered.

Lately when Billy rattled down Roscomare, he saw the sweet red coupé parked in the driveway. He began cruising by slowly, once almost stopping when he saw Maggie outside dusting the car. He saw she was filling out her sweater in a way he’d never noticed, and it aroused him. She wasn’t old enough to drive; why would she be dusting the car? One day Maggie saw him cruising, and the next time he passed she waved him into the driveway.

“That yours?”

“Like it?”

“You bet.”

“Want a ride?”

He knew her better than that. “What’s the deal?” he said, suspiciously.

The deal was that she’d pay him five dollars each Thursday to accompany her to the stables.

Younger, Maggie beat the boys in everything. She didn’t even bother with girls. Cousin Cal had never beat her in anything and Cal was six years older, though Cal, she knew, didn’t really try. At fourteen, with the changes in bodies, she couldn’t beat all the boys all the time anymore but never refused a challenge. At the stables, on Dynamite, she was the best rider they had. Eddie said it came from Grandma Eva, who was a state riding champion, but Maggie figured she could do anything she set her mind to—like the day in Venice when she’d scaled the derrick and stood looking down on the men, daring them to come after her.

The deal started the following Thursday after school, and didn’t go as intended. Billy hadn’t understood that Maggie didn’t need a driver, just a presence, and a silent one at that. After the third trip, he called it off. “Don’t need the money that badly,” he grumped.

It hadn’t escaped her that Billy, like other males, had begun looking at her differently, turning around to watch her walk and not looking in her eyes but focused lower. She dressed as she always had for riding lessons, in Levi’s and a checkered shirt, but the shirt didn’t hang straight down anymore. She wore the same shirts she’d been wearing for years, which was part of the problem for they were tight on her now. It was a little uncomfortable under the arms, but she saw the effect on boys and so she stayed with the old shirts.

She needed Billy, so she negotiated, telling him he could drive, but not all the time for the whole purpose of the deal was for her to learn how to drive. The following Thursday, after riding, they headed up into the Playa del Rey hills so she could practice starting and stopping. She drove south on Rindge Avenue to where it dead-ended in the sand dunes at Kilgore, about a mile beyond the last houses. They’d built streets for the houses, but the houses hadn’t come yet. Kilgore had a steep twenty-five-degree slope down to the cliffs, as much as any car could handle.

“Whoa,” shouted Billy as she turned down the hill, “are you crazy?”

Halfway down, she made a sharp U-turn and stopped in the middle, pointing up, cutting the engine. She left the gears engaged and pulled on the hand brake so the car wouldn’t slip back. Billy turned around to peer straight down the hill. “Nuts to this,” he said, opening the door. Death was not part