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

“Give it a half mile,” said Callender, catching the drift.

“Easy for you to say,” said Eddie, “You don’t pay the crews.”

“Have to go a half mile—you don’t, someone else will.”

Why not? At two thousand, they were almost there.

When Venice #1 blew, oil shot ten stories into the sky, higher they said than Doheny’s spout at La Brea, covering one square mile of Kinney’s canals with gooey spray. It was the same with #2 and #3 and the subsequent wells. Venice wasn’t Signal Hill and wasn’t Santa Fe Springs, but there was oil a-plenty down there and before long they had fifty derricks pumping and had paid off all the homeowners who wanted to sue but knew that no judge was going to penalize someone for bringing in oil or water—not in Los Angeles. Having slept in a tent on the sand for three weeks, Eddie went home nearly as black as the oil. Up to the day of the blow, he’d been a successful real estate man, rising maybe faster than some others who’d arrived with the water, but not as fast as he wanted.

Oil changed everything for him. It took time to get rich on water: You had to find the land, borrow the money, develop the property and hope you sold enough houses to get back enough to pay the bank and start over again. Oil, on the other hand, was ready cash. It came up as fast as it went out. In the tarry sands of Venice Beach, with a little more help from the good fairy he’d found at Security Trust on Fifth Street, Eddie had what he wanted.

The problem was that Henry Callender wanted it, too.

Chapter 5

The Mull girls were born independent. Was it because Mother, who didn’t nurse, was so uninspiring and Dad couldn’t be bothered, or was it something innate, like the X factor, the genetic alleles that make us unique? Margaret, called Maggie, came first, followed by Elizabeth, called Lizzie, a year later. With two girls to look after, Nelly moved the family from Mull Gardens, which in her opinion was too common, to snappy Bel Air, an elegant new community in the hills above Westwood, built by a rancher, who, like Eddie, had struck oil—his in Santa Fe Springs. Willie moved into a rented bungalow in West Hollywood to be near his church, and Cal joined his aunt, uncle and little cousins in Bel Air rather than share another house with his father, who was rarely home.

Cal was the brother the girls didn’t have and wouldn’t have, for after Lizzie the doctor said there’d be no more babies. It was a shock, for Nelly thought of herself as the perfect physical specimen, which is why she hadn’t nursed. Cal became the son she didn’t have and Nelly the mother he didn’t have. He was a pleasant and helpful boy, as if something in his unconscious had been touched by the misery he’d seen from his mother’s backpack in the dingy alleyways of Shanghai. Willie said that Cal’s good nature came from Chun hua, who nursed him (and Willie, too), teaching them something of Chinese endurance and stoicism. Cal was born “in the Tao,” Chun hua used to say, an obscure Oriental idea Willie never fully understood.

For a while, Nelly tried to raise her daughters like other little rich girls in Bel Air, dressing them in cute pastel dresses for school and bows and pinafores for dance lessons at the Wilshire Ebell. The girls wouldn’t have it. They were aided by Cal, their chief babysitter and confederate. He was in the eighth grade his first year in Bel Air, Maggie and Lizzie starting kindergarten and nursery school. Sometimes he caught the school bus down the hill, but often Nelly drove the three of them down together.

On her own, Lizzie, the younger, might have bent to her mother’s schemes, but Maggie pulled her along in her draft. She was a gritty, outdoorsy kind of girl who preferred boys to girls and loved competition. When she was seven they got her a horse, named Dynamite, which they boarded at stables at Playa del Rey. A year later Lizzie got her horse, too. Nelly hated everything about horses—the dust, the smells, the flies, the shit—and soon was employing Cal to chaperone the girls on the trolleys that stopped in Playa del Rey on their way down the coast to Redondo beach. At fifteen, Cal got a driver’s permit and new responsibilities as the girls’ chauffeur. Nelly was more than happy to turn her car over to him. Riding days conflicted with her bridge days.

For Cal, a nature boy, Playa del Rey was love at first sight. A beachy village at the foot of a long sandy hill overlooking a vast area of marshes and dunes, it was home to every species of waterfowl known to Southern California. He’d take his bicycle along, and while the girls rode horses peddled the twisty hill streets with their view from Point Dume to Catalina Island. On foot he prowled the marshes of Ballona Creek. If he lifted his sights over the wetlands toward Venice, he could see the dozens of derricks Uncle Eddie had sunk into the marshy lands that once were part of Abbot Kinney’s dream. He hated the sight and so didn’t look.

For his sixteenth birthday, Eddie bought him a red Ford roadster. Twice a week he’d load his bike in the back, the girls in the front and head down Roscomare Road across Sunset to Wilshire and Sepulveda and on west to the stables, on the road soon to be named Culver. He graduated from high school that June and would start at USC in the fall but had two months to explore the city in his new car. It was a summer the cousins would never forget, the summer they spent every day together, free of adults, who were just as happy to be free of them.

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