San Francisco, California, 1874
Olive recuperated hidden away in a small apartment in the Marina District belonging to the Greek fishing boat captain, his mother, his wife, and their six children. The scent of charcoal, citrus, and bay leaf floated on the air, filling the space with a sense of sharp newness as she rested. There was distinct relief from the unrelenting winds of the islands as she lay in the still, warm air that floated from room to room. While the constant flow of screaming children and bickering was not the most ideal place to rest, Olive didn’t mind. The babies were a welcome distraction after months on the Farallones without any contact with the young or old of the human variety. Olive’s rabbit hopped around the apartment and delighted the children. The grandmother fed Olive magical lemon soup with rice, fried squid, and a hard sharp cheese called feta, layered with strong grassy oil. Olive had never tasted such glorious flavors and the tang revived her body, starting with her taste buds. The grandmother laughed when they told her the new guest’s name.
“Olive,” she scoffed. “Like zee oil.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“We name our children after gods, emperors, or muses,” she clucked, “not food.”
“Can you imagine?” her daughter roared, “My little baby Myzithra?” She mimed kissing a baby loaf of cheese.
Olive knew they were poking fun at her, but she was floating in a happy fog of big-bosomed women bringing her plates of delicious, fortifying food and shots of ouzo to numb the pain of the wound. She was, though still in pain, a happy clam.
Warren spent the week in San Francisco making deals with various black market vendors. He unloaded the shipment of eggs bit by bit, so as not to arouse suspicion on the street. The fishermen had told him that the next ship wasn’t scheduled to go out to the Farallones until the following week for deliveries, so he had to work fast before word could travel back from the island about the pirate egger and the lighthouse assistant boy who’d helped him pull the job.
He stopped at the door to a Chinese restaurant and regarded the naked plucked fowl hanging in the front window. Flies buzzed around and feasted on the goose-fleshed naked skin. Below, a tank with two live fish filled up the small space with their fatted bodies, watching and waiting for the flies to make the deadly mistake of landing on the surface of the water. Warren’s mind began drawing circles and arrows from being to being, as though to illustrate the cycle of life. He took out his notebook but put it back in his pocket without documenting his thoughts, as he was late for his scheduled meeting with the restaurant owner.
He had an appointment to sell three crates of eggs but was surprised to find the place empty and dark. The tables were set apart by thin wooden screens elaborately carved with serpents, birds, and the gnarled limbs of a foreign species of tree. He started to think he had arrived at the wrong time and turned to go when an old man emerged from the back holding an armload of oranges and a large knife.
“What?” the proprietor said, as if quite ready to use the knife.
“Warren, here.” He placed a hand delicately to his chest. “With fresh eggs. As per our appointment.”
“Aaaaah.” The man looked relieved as he let the armful of oranges fall into a crate. “Lots of men coming in here lately talking Chinese corruption. Prostitution. Many threats made on our lives. They make raids on some others, I hear.”
“Yes,” Warren nodded. “Men are distrustful of what they don’t understand. The celestial culture is foreign, therefore threatening. It’s their own ignorance at play.”
“It is.” The old man stood taller but still eyed Warren distrustfully as he twirled the end of his mustache. “You brought samples for me?”
Warren took out a murre egg hidden away in his inside breast pocket and handed it over to the proprietor. The old man held the egg up to the light and inspected the beautiful shape and brown-speckled bluish surface.
“They are fresh,” Warren said. “But you must not tell anyone where you got them.”
The man brought out a glass of water from behind the bar and let the egg drop into the water. It stayed on its side on the bottom, the sharp end just raised up enough to look like some pointer toward the divine.
“Good. How many crates can you give?”
“How about six?”
“Okay. Our secret,” the old man said. “We can have egg flower soup again. All the neighbors have been missing it. Bring them tonight to the back door.”
The men settled on a price agreeable to each and Warren left with half the agreed-upon sum, a stack of bills tucked away in his breast pocket where the egg had been. Outside in the sun, he watched the fish again, feeling the promise of a new life outstretched before him. The fish tried to move in a circle but was too large for the container and doubled back, folded in on itself. He was feeling the urge to free the fish, so that it might swim away as he was about to, when a man walked past on the street and hissed traitor in his ear as he passed. Warren watched the man as he retreated in the distance but did not turn his head to look back. He felt suddenly unsafe, unsure, and revealed on the city streets. The man was probably a run-of-the-mill bigot like the owner had mentioned, one of the increasing number of hooligans who had been storming Chinese businesses and looting, even killing, owners and patrons. He had been warned that the recession was causing outbursts of anger and desperation across the city. Citizen groups were forming on both sides. There were whispers of laws being drawn up to curb Chinese rights as contract workers and owners of land. Their rights to housing and employment had already been minimized five years prior. The vise of the white economy was clamping down, and hard. The man’s hissed traitor was probably nothing more than a commonplace assertion of judgment on Warren after he saw him leave the restaurant.
But Warren couldn’t be sure that the man wasn’t referring to his heist. What if he was someone from the Pacific Egg Company? What if somehow word had traveled back? What if the Greeks had betrayed him? There would be a mob of angry eggers who would surely hunt him down and dismantle him limb from limb. His traitor body would be thrown into the sea to be taken by the sharks. He hurried along the sidewalk, his feet kicking up dust as he hustled back to the Greeks’ apartment. He would hide out there for the rest of the day until it was time to deliver the eggs unseen. At least back at the Greeks’, he could be by the side of the one human he trusted as she convalesced.
Under the cover of night, he sold the rest of the eggs over the next two days—to a baker, another Chinese restaurant at the opposite end of Chinatown, and the last crate he gifted to an orphanage at Olive’s behest. After the fishermen’s cut of the profits, there was enough money left for two passages north and for a small parcel of land, possibly even a cabin. Warren had heard that they were practically giving away land in the copper belt in southern Oregon and northern California. But they would have to leave town soon, before the Egg Company learned of their whereabouts and sent the police, or worse, to their door.
Olive was still weak, but able to stand, so she and Warren made plans to take passage at night on a freight train. They needed to leave no trace of their path and so finagled a deal with a rancher Warren knew who was planning to move some sheep north. On the evening of their departure, he ushered her out into the cool, foggy San Francisco night and through the streets as the ladies of the evening replaced the daytime throngs on the planked sidewalks of downtown. Olive held tight to the wicker basket containing the Russian Blue. Every corner held a potential threat, so they made as though a newlywed couple, kissing and engaging with one another in conversation. The ruse did not require great acting skills from the two. As they passed a tall braided prostitute who smelled strongly of roses and smoke, Olive grabbed his arm and asked to stop.
“There’s no time to stop,” Warren urged.
“Just a few seconds,” Olive said.
Hazel looked confused by Olive’s short cropped hair, but held a glimmer of recognition in her opium-laden gaze.
“Can I help you, dear?” she asked with lidded eyes as Olive approached.
“It’s me. Ducky,” Olive said.
Warren watched from a few feet away as the two embraced and Olive put something in the woman’s hand, holding it tight with both of hers. The woman gave her a warm smile and whispered something in her ear before Olive walked slowly back to Warren.
“Who was that?” Warren asked.
“A lesson I learned early,” Olive said, “was that hardships befall us all, and that all people deserve kindness. That woman helped me learn that.” Warren smoothed her short hair back out of her eyes and decided not to inquire further. They just had to reach the train platform, find the right freight car, and they would be free. They hurried along the street, Olive clinging to Warren’s side, and past a group of rowdy drunks arguing about a gamble gone wrong. One pushed the other just as Olive and Warren tried to pass close by and the man’s shoulder hit Olive hard in the side. She winced and doubled over in pain. Warren’s brain flashed to the fish in the tank and her limp body laid among the crates of eggs, then it flooded red. A fire burned in his brain and he was suddenly on the man, pinning him to the wooden ground, spit flying from his mouth like foam as he growled in an ur-language. He slammed the man’s head into the sidewalk hard, grunting as he twisted the man’s arm in a position the arm is not meant to ever go. A trickle of blood grew to a stream, headwaters behind the drunk’s ear. The men pulled Warren off and skulked back into a doorway with their unconscious, bloodied, drunk friend like a pack of cur. They retreated en masse, nary a soul choosing to face off with Warren and his raging eyes, beard mottled with spittle, hair wild and unruly. His black eyes were open wide and invited anyone to dare step up. The men retreated down the street carrying their friend and he trapped their one small piece of luggage under his arm and picked Olive up carefully in his arms, sailing her the rest of the few blocks to the train station where he carefully set her down on a bench.
“Stay here,” he said, as though nothing horrifying had just happened. “I’m to find the switchman.” And with that he ran off across the empty tracks and disappeared behind a brick building. Olive sat with her hand on her abdomen, considering what had just occurred. This was her last chance to disappear. The drunk could potentially die from those wounds. Warren’s outburst had scared into her the feeling that she was lumbering off with a wild bear as his wounded prey, being led into a dark, tunneled forest. She could be stuck on a train for days with him, lying with a murderer. Or she could take the money she had from their exchange, as Warren had thought it best to split the money into both of their coat linings in case they should be mugged or separated along the journey. She could continue to live as Oliver, she thought. There was a certain amount of freedom she had truly enjoyed as a male that she wasn’t entirely ready to give up. There were conspiratorial whispers from other men. Richardson had called her a “brick” and one time even “boss.” It felt good to be part of the secret fraternity and she saw the portal to that world closing. She could go back to the island and tell Richardson she’d been kidnapped or drugged. Or she could go back to find Hazel and live a new life. She could save her. The taste of salt rose on her tongue, the lemon of possibility. She considered her options, but remembered the kind soul she’d found in the cave and the feeling he’d unlocked in her chest like bubbles rising in the sea toward the surface to join with the beloved air of the sky. She would stay and allow herself to slip back into Olive’s skin, she decided. She would stay and inhabit her old flesh, but on her own terms.
Warren arrived back and picked her up once again, completely ignorant to her struggle, and took her down the platform toward a still freight train in the distance. They paused before an open cargo car and he checked the number in his notebook before helping her up onto the hay-covered floor.
“Warren,” she said. “If I’m to go with you and this is to be our life together, I will not tolerate fighting and bloodshed. Promise me that.”
“I see,” Warren said, looking confounded and for the first time remorseful of his actions toward the drunk. “I can promise that.” He helped her up into the boxcar and followed awkwardly, his shoulders hunched like a sad giant or a dog that had just been shackled to a tree.
Once safely boarded, they inspected their surroundings. They shared the train car with an enclosure of goats and sheep, animals that despite their similarity in size and shape didn’t seem to get along swimmingly. The animals’ heads butted one another and pushed each other up against the walls of the train car. Olive inspected the profile of this burly man as he watched them without emotion, this man who seemed not to notice Olive’s concern at his earlier brutish outburst. He blinked the innocent lashes of a babe as he inspected the car and set down the rabbit gingerly in the corner.
The racket of the sheep and goats’ braying made getting sleep almost impossible. Warren arranged a comfortable corner for Olive with hay, blankets, and a very small down pillow he had purchased at a specialty store in downtown San Francisco and produced from his breast pocket. She thanked him, but still she tossed and turned. He adjusted her hair on the pillow and petted her forehead with his warm hand as she dozed in and out of sleep, minutely adjusting her position with each waking to minimize the pain. The wheels clicked and the car swayed back and forth like an impatient mother rocking a child to sleep. The little blue rabbit hopped around in a brand new basket twice the size of his last one, munching happily on his first-ever apple.
Warren held in his pocket a secret thing that he hoped to find just the right moment to reveal to Olive. She moaned a little and shifted in new sleep. She had become an annul of a woman, never able to reproduce. As the train rounded a bend she winced. The clacking marked the slow passage of time. She just wished to make it through each moment, hoping the next might hurt less than the last.
The early morning sun-streaked rays through the slats of the train car, a bright finger of light landing on Olive’s face. She sat up with some difficulty, the pain of waking a harsh reality of countenance first thing in the morning. Warren lay curled around her like a baby but snored like a hog. The sheep and goats seemed to have worked out some basic truce and lay snoozing in segregated piles on opposite ends of the pen. Olive sat up against the wall and stretched her short legs out in the hay. It was these quiet moments when she wanted nothing more than to be waking to the sounds of china and cutlery clinking in her mother’s tiny kitchen as she started the day. She longed to hear her say just once more, “Good morning, my fawn,” as though they were simply two little forest creatures waking into the wildness. Instead she found herself clacking and chattering in a train car smelling of animal dung, with a man capable of great kindness and great brutality curled around her. She wondered if perhaps life was predicated on this kind of paradox—the tenderness all wound up in a knot with the threatening.
After two full days of travel, the train came to a stop and stayed that way for over an hour. She had been asleep as the train pulled up to the station but she woke at the sound of the boxcar door opening. Warren slipped out and talked with someone on the platform. The scent of sagebrush drifted in through the slats in the car. Olive put her nose up to one of the cracks and breathed deep. It reminded her of back in the Rockies, when her mother was well and they would leave the city for a few days to stay in a little cabin in the sagelands. The smell had always seemed to her the freshest scent on the planet. It came in through the nostrils and wove a path through the body like some careful, cleansing ghost. Sitting there in the hay, the smell revived her to boldness. The pain had just that morning subsided to the point of being tolerable enough to rise on her own, so she carefully stood and peeked out through the slats at the forms of the men talking on the platform.
Warren had his hands folded and his hat pulled down over his face as if to hide his identity from passers by. He spoke to a cattleman who gestured back at the train car where Olive sat watching. She couldn’t quite tell if they were arguing or greeting one another, but arms began to fly in the air, gestures of some form of excitement or another. She scanned the faces of everyone passing by on the station to see if she recognized danger lurking in their eyes, but recognized no one. Finally, the crowd dispersed in wagons or on horseback, off to their destinations. When the two men were alone on the platform, Warren took out some bills from his pocket and handed them over to the cattleman who walked toward Olive and the bleating, increasingly impatient animals.
Once all the animals had been deboarded, Olive and Warren shuffled their belongings off the car. A pang of paranoia grabbed at them both once the sunlight hit their skin for the first time in days. Warren looked around nervously to see if he recognized any egg men who might have trailed them on their journey north. A painted wooden sign hung over the bench reading “Y R E K A.” Olive stood with her hand shading her eyes, looking at the sign for a long time before breaking out into laughter.
“What’s so funny?” Warren asked.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Olive put her hand over her mouth and whispered, “Eureka, I think we’ve found it.” She put her hand in Warren’s warm hand. “It seems we may have found our home.”