Chapter Seven:
A week after I discovered the ambergris on the beach a notice was posted to the announcement board of the town hall, on the public kiosk in Fremont Park, and inside the front window of Fiona Littleleaf’s mercantile.
CITIZENS OF TESORO
A meeting will be held at the town hall on the evening of June 9 at 7:00 p.m. Please be on time.
Agenda
I. Election of moderator
II. Approval of minutes
III. An offer from Mr. Cyrus Dinkle
Item III provoked a torrent of gossip as Dinkle and “offer” had rigorously kept separate houses in the past.
“What do you suppose he’s up to?” I asked Fiona. I was at her mercantile where I often hung out, hoping she might stop stocking shelves or sorting mail or scribbling in her account book long enough give me a sign that we would one day become husband and wife. Fiona Littleleaf was the prettiest woman in Tesoro—the prettiest in California in my estimation—a wheat-haired beauty with coltish eyes. I thought her perfect—as clever as she was beautiful, unafraid to argue with the devil, and able to pound a nail straighter than a master carpenter. We shared a history of sorts, both of us fatherless, our mothers infirm. Fiona’s father had been killed in the Great War, her mother lost to the flu pandemic of 1918. After her parents died, the six-year-old little girl had been adopted by spinsters Rosie and Roxy Littleleaf, a pair she called aunts even though they were actually cousins.
Precociously capable, the little girl had a flair for business and was running the mercantile and postal exchange by the time she was fifteen, something her aunts welcomed. The general store was part of their inheritance from their father and they had already come close to sinking it several times before their niece took over. “I love them dearly, but they’re better at yarn selection than balance sheets,” Fiona once told me. Rosie and Roxy made Fiona a full partner shortly after the young woman graduated from high school and the new co-owner immediately added the Kittiwake Inn next door to their little empire. It, too, was profitable and Fiona Littleleaf and her adoptive aunts were well on their way to moving into the sparse, upper financial echelon of Tesoro’s families when the stock market crashed. Tourism dried up for a time, but Fiona had already set aside enough money to keep them afloat, and now after almost five years, the tourists were trickling back into town.
In 1934, Fiona Littleleaf was twelve years my senior and undoubtedly loved me in the same way an aunt loves a nephew. I had loftier intentions as I was merely ten and believed I would eventually get women figured out. I’m ninety-one now and still haven’t, although I’ve learned that baffling men is part of a woman’s charm. We baffle them, too, although I suspect they are more often annoyed than baffled.
Fiona was reorganizing bolts of fabric when I asked her to speculate on Dinkle’s intentions. Of course, I already knew her answer. An offer of any sort from Cyrus Dinkle was uncharacteristically magnanimous, given that he was a man legendarily indisposed to magnanimity.
“I don’t know what he has in mind, Connor,” Fiona said, “but there will be fine print on it, that much I’ll guarantee.” She moved a bolt of thin cotton material boasting a gaudy floral pattern from one open compartment to another. The first cubicle had seemed adequate to me, the entire transaction pointless. However, Fiona accomplished it with such grace, indeed, was so assured that I found myself utterly captivated. She had a way of moving that seemed at once purposeful and unpretentious—a woman who both knew the effect she had on men and yet seemed not to know it at all. Once I was far enough clear of adolescence to think straight, I learned to attribute such an affect to confidence. As a boy, however, it was simply hypnotic. She looked at me and fashioned a quizzical expression.
“That’s quite a face. Penny for your thoughts?” she asked.
About a year earlier I had seen a moving picture in San Rafael starring Frenchman Maurice Chevalier. It depicted a fellow in love who burst into song or spouted poetry whenever confronted by the woman he loved. Ma and Miss Lizzie took my brother and me to see it and thought Chevalier’s reaction not only entertaining but entirely plausible. Alex and I thought the whole premise silly. We giggled throughout the picture with Miss Lizzie occasionally aiming a narrow eye our way to shush us. However, in the mercantile that morning I was a year older. With Fiona waiting for an answer to her question—her perfect face offering an inquiring expression, a strand of honeyed hair falling over one eye—I felt suddenly and inexplicably musical. Unfortunately, I lacked Chevalier’s talent for verse or staying on key.
“Just thinking about the meeting tonight,” I answered, disappointed to provide nothing more than a one-note response with no rhyme. Nevertheless, this seemed to satisfy her as well it should have. Merely a week had passed since the first town meeting to discuss the ambergris. A second gathering so soon was unprecedented and lent the sort of stature to the get-together typically reserved for holidays like the Fourth of July. The twilight start time added to the excitement; indeed, a meeting convened in the evening was a festive affair, often preceded by a picnic in Fremont Park—the cuisine leaning toward fried sand dabs, potato salad, and corn on the cob. During an evening meeting, children were turned loose to chase fireflies or play tag in the park, while across the street, the adults filled every seat in the assembly room of the town hall for sessions sure to include entertaining arguments, more than a few fellows emboldened by a nip or two after dinner. Should they fail to deliver, there was always Milton Garwood’s thin skin and Angus MacCallum’s habit of rubbing it thinner whenever he could.
Such displays of temper might have gone from theater to back alley had C. Herbert Judson not routinely intervened. He had a talent for shifting moods to the matters at hand, typically offering a joke or a run of vocabulary words that had us later scouring a dictionary. His calm voice and Mr. Johns’s firm grasp of Robert’s Rules of Order always managed to get the meeting back on the rails. Indeed, folks were a little disappointed each time Mr. Johns gaveled the proceedings to a close, dawdling outside the town hall or on the walk home as if reluctant to let the curtain fall on the evening’s theatrics. If the meeting took place on a warm summer night, more than a few lounged on porch swings or in back yards until close to the scandalous hour of ten-thirty, drinking iced tea while discussing how Mr. Johns was a fine fellow and all, but you could be damned sure things would be run differently if they were in charge.
Activities started early for the second town meeting and Fremont Park was packed by five o’clock. I was there with Ma and Alex, sharing fried halibut, macaroni salad, and watermelon slices with Miss Lizzie and Fiona. My mother was more than a week into drinking Miss Lizzie’s latest concoction and was uncommonly steady, joining Miss Lizzie and Fiona in a monumentally boring discussion of how much they all admired First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. This left Alex and I no choice but to prowl about with our pals, playing tag or hanging out with Tuck Garwood and his junior high buddies, snickering as they told each other dirty jokes or lied about which base they’d gotten to with their girlfriends. We returned to retrieve Ma a little before seven o’clock.
“Stay in the park until I come back for you,” I instructed my brother. “And don’t go to the beach. I mean it.”
“I want to come to the meeting,” Alex said.
This was a surprise. I was fascinated by the little dramas that played out at a typical town meeting, but things like Milton Garwood’s griping or Coach Wally Buford’s bloviating had always seemed pointless to Alex.
“Why?” I asked. “It’s the same old stuff. You’ll hate it.”
“I want to go.”
I was about to give Alex a pinch when Ma butted in. “There’s no reason he can’t go, Connor,” she said.
I shot her the sort of look parents throw at each other when they disagree about what to do with their kid.
“There isn’t,” Ma reiterated, her voice soft.
I sometimes argued with my mother when she overruled me about Alex. I figured I should have a say in what he did since Ma could be pretty crazy at times and I was the one who would have to get him out of the trouble she allowed him to get into. Besides, like most men, I hated to back down, even though this time Ma’s eyes were clear, her voice was steady, and I was wrong.
“I just think—”
“There isn’t,” Ma interrupted.
“He’ll be bored, Ma.”
My little brother took one of Ma’s hands. “You don’t know what I’ll be,” he said.
I glared at him but offered no rebuttal, since there really was no reason he couldn’t go other than my damned stubbornness. Ma and Alex were right and we all knew it.
“Fine,” I muttered.
I took Ma’s other hand and we led her across the street to the town hall. Inside the assembly room the usual leadership group was already seated at the front: Roger Johns the Banker, C. Herbert Judson the Lawyer, Miss Lizzie Fryberg, Fiona Littleleaf, James Throckmorton, and Coach Wally Buford. Cyrus Dinkle sat at the end of their row of chairs with his man standing a few steps away, the tall, thin fellow’s expression a lugubrious blend of somnambulist and basset hound.
Ma, Alex, and I took seats in the back row and watched Coach Wally Buford make his regular pitch for the moderator’s gavel. He finished up by nominating himself, his name uncharacteristically making it to the ballot when Milton Garwood impulsively seconded the nomination because Angus MacCallum told him he couldn’t. Of course, Angus just wanted to stir things up and voted for Roger Johns like everyone else. Moderator Johns then asked if anyone proposed corrections to the minutes of the previous meeting. Milton Garwood, a staunch Catholic with six children and thirty-seven grandchildren, believed a request for corrections to the minutes was tantamount to a referendum on the ambergris distribution plan. He asked for another vote in favor of the per person allotment supported by his church.
“I’m just asking for approval of the minutes,” Mr. Johns pointed out. Milton then provided a lengthy rebuttal, confusing parts of the Bill of Rights with the Ten Commandments. He went on to declare his dissatisfaction, specifically, with President Roosevelt and, in general, with the crooks who made up Congress back in Washington D Almighty C. Eventually, someone in the back of the room advised Milton to “run for dad-burned office if you want to give a speech.” Mr. Johns followed up with a gentle suggestion that Milton save his proposal for new business following completion of the published agenda.
“You can’t tell me what to do, Roger,” Milton groused. “You’re the moderator, not the King of Persia or something.”
For once, Milton had a small group of backers, Catholic hackles still up over the previously agreed upon allotments. With Mr. Judson’s help, Mr. Johns successfully gaveled them down, then got his majority vote to approve the minutes. That’s when silence settled over the room, all eyes on Cyrus Dinkle. Mr. Johns introduced him and Dinkle rose from his chair. He moved across the stage, his footsteps softly echoing over the hushed assembly.
Now if Roger Johns was as inoffensive as a fellow can be, Cyrus Dinkle was the opposite—a mostly bald and thin-lipped reptilian tyrant who looked as if he had never in his life done any heavy lifting, because he hadn’t. He was soft—soft belly, soft manicured hands, and soft jowls that flowed seamlessly into his soft neck. You’ll recall that Dinkle’s appearance on the agenda had sent small whirlwinds of gossip whipping around Tesoro like rumor-laden dust-devils. Indeed, his appearance at a town meeting, even without the promise of an offer, would have waggled tongues anyway as Dinkle disdained civic goings-on, preferring the solitude of his estate overlooking the ocean, except on those occasions when his man fired up the Duesenberg for a trip to San Francisco. Heads turned when the Duesenberg rolled through town with Dinkle in the back seat, his eyes resolutely avoiding us in favor of his Wall Street Journal, his purplish lips curled into a censorious sneer. “He goes to San Francisco to meet up wit’ the rest of the divils runnin’ this damned country,” Angus MacCallum once told me. “They drink brandy and smoke cigars and try to figger oot ways they can stick it to the workin’ man.”
Angus’s assertion might have seemed like a mean-spirited harangue from a bitter old man except that he was entirely correct. As Miss Lizzie claimed, Dinkle actually owned land and various businesses in several states, and his trips to San Francisco were spent in the company of bankers, who helped him foreclose and evict; mining company executives, who helped him figure out ways to put a maze of shafts where bears might have hibernated; lawyers, who advised him on the best way to maintain his stranglehold on water rights; and accountants, determined to make sure he paid less taxes than an Okie fruit-picker. Unlike self-made tycoons like Henry Ford, George Pullman, or Andrew Carnegie, Dinkle had not made his fortune by building something; rather he had manipulated and enticed and intimidated, moving money from someone else’s ledger column to his. In that way he was a harbinger of the future, a man unable to construct a birdhouse but adept at luring the bird inside and then eating it.
Dinkle glided toward the podium, a surprisingly graceful man given his age and bulk and the stiff curl of his back. Once settled, with the full attention of the room at his command, he fashioned a smile. I had never seen him smile and expected the result to be a serpentine thing. Instead, his smile was genuine, even warm. It was a welcoming smile, an expression of approval from a man whose wealth made us believe he was somehow superior to us, the unexpectedly seductive result making Dinkle not so much likable as irresistible. He began to speak next, and his voice was not the gruff, impatient snarl he routinely flung at kids in Tesoro, but a polished, syrupy tenor that would have elicited envy from a Chautauqua preacher. I looked around the room and was astounded to discover the faces of my friends and neighbors to be as open and unguarded as lemmings approaching a cliff.
“Citizens of Tesoro, it is a privilege to be here tonight,” Dinkle cooed. “It has been far too long since I shared your company and for that I beg forgiveness. I am hopeful that when you hear what I have to offer, you will pardon my absence from your lives and find it in your hearts to once again call Cyrus Dinkle your friend.”
Dinkle went on, repeatedly referring to himself in the third person and invoking a lot of claptrap about God, good will, and charity, inferring that he, Cyrus Dinkle, possessed a non-stop elevator to Heaven. Of course, the opposite was true as Dinkle was Satan in saint’s clothing, the devil playing to a room filled with Fausts. I kept quiet, figuring folks would know this without hearing it from a ten-year-old boy like me, but it soon became apparent that they didn’t. Before long, heads began to nod approvingly, people in the audience laughing at his contrived, self-effacing asides. He was mesmerizing them with flattery and faux-amiability, a snake charmer playing his pungi, and I was reminded of Miss Lizzie Fryberg’s advice: “A man who refers to himself in the third person has a big enough head for two faces. Steer clear of him.”
I was contemplating her words when Dinkle unexpectedly called out my name.
“Come up here, young Connor,” he boomed. “There’s a good lad. Come up here and let your friends and neighbors see what a fine young man you are.”
I was stunned to hear my name called, even more surprised that he knew my name at all.
“Come on now, Mister O’Halloran. Come on up,” Dinkle exhorted.
“Go on, Connor,” Ma whispered.
I shook my head.
“Go on,” Ma repeated, giggling. “Everyone is waiting.”
I stumbled to the front of the room and climbed the steps to the stage. Dinkle then led me to the podium and stationed me at his side, a hand lightly cupping the back of my neck. His hand, like his smile, confounded my expectations. It was not warm and unctuously moist, as I had always surmised, but as dry and cool as snakeskin. He began to speak again, talking about good fortune and divine benevolence, at the same time squeezing my neck until I was dizzied.
“What a lesson you’ve taught us, young Connor,” Dinkle clucked, going on to employ a surprisingly competent repertoire of Bible verses, praising me as a combination of Jesus Christ and Tom Sawyer, and generally captivating the congregation like a magician about to levitate a volunteer from the audience. I was heartily embarrassed and wriggled out from under his hand, putting enough space between us to make certain the lightning bolt likely to crash through the roof at any moment would merely lift the hairs on the back of my neck while turning a liar like Dinkle into a spent matchstick. He issued a fatherly chuckle after I pulled away.
“That’s right, boy,” he said. “Steer clear of the limelight and the limelight is more likely to find you again.” It was an original aphorism among a host of pirated ones, but no one was surprised. Although Dinkle disdained community events, he was a regular at that panoply of aphorisms we knew as Methodist Sunday services. He never took communion, citing an allergy to grape juice and water crackers, a claim failing to dampen the suspicion that symbolic ingestion of the blood and body of Christ would cause him to burst into flames.
“But allow me get to the point, dear friends,” Dinkle went on. “You are all about to embark on a journey with which I am familiar. I, too, came from modest means, but through a combination of hard work and luck, was able to attain the measure of comfort that presently describes my station in life. You, too, have worked hard, but luck has not brightened your doors…until now. Until young Connor OHalloran parted the clouds and allowed the sun to shine through.”
Dinkle smiled at me, replacing the irresistibly smarmy expression he’d evinced at the beginning of his presentation with a rabid, facial scrawl. He clearly wanted me to bite the hook that had snagged a lip on nearly everyone else in the room. Instead, I suddenly felt like a seal already on its way down a shark’s throat.
“So now luck has smiled upon you,” Dinkle went on. “But I think we can all agree that luck is not a bank account. It is not a mortgage payment or a pair of new shoes or a trip to San Francisco for dinner and a moving picture show. Luck is not collateral until that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow resides in a safety deposit box at the Sonoma State Bank. Am I right?”
A hum of assents rose up, and with that, Dinkle had them. He went on to describe his offer: He would establish lines of credit for those who wished to pony up their ambergris shares as collateral. Limits would be set at $10,000, the money available upon signature to prospective borrowers as early as the next day, the interest rate, “A very reasonable 5.5 percent. Just like one of those new government FHA mortgages you’ve probably read about,” Dinkle revealed.
“These lines of credit will allow you to enjoy your good fortune now rather than suffering through the prolonged and cumbersome negotiation process with the perfume companies,” Dinkle went on. “Of course, once the ambergris is sold to a perfumer, those of you taking advantage of my offer will be free to maintain the line-of-credit or pay it off with the accrued interest and close the account. It will be entirely your choice.”
I glanced at the row of town leaders sharing the stage with Dinkle and me. C. Herbert Judson and Roger Johns revealed no emotions at all. Miss Lizzie and Fiona stared at the floor, arms crossed, tight lines where their mouths should be. James Throckmorton seemed pensively interested, but Coach Wally Buford was simply agog, sporting the same grin he’d displayed after his team’s last win eight years previous, an expression of glee identical to nearly everyone else in the room. Suddenly, he leapt to his feet.
“Let’s hear three cheers for Cyrus Dinkle,” he cried out. “Hip hip…”
“Hooray!”
“Hip hip…”
“Hooray!”
“Hip hip…”
“Hooray!”
And that was that. The ball was rolling down the hill. There would be no stopping it.