Chapter Sixteen:

James Throckmorton makes his play

Axel Throckmorton’s mail-order bride, Mei Ling, did not go back to China but remained with Miss Lizzie. Our long-time town medical officer could well afford to feed another mouth, but Axel felt obligated to provide a small measure of financial support and gave Mei Ling two dollars in nickels each week. “I gotta keep her happy. She’s evidence in my lawsuit against the sonuvabitch who sold her to me,” he told people. Axel was an honest man who never cheated at cards, watered down the whiskey bottles at the Last Resort, or concocted a whopper unrelated to the size of a fish. However, his two dollars per week were less a legal strategy than a way to ease the guilt he felt for spiriting Mei Ling across an ocean in anticipation of marriage only to be confronted by an intended older than one of the Pliocene-era moon snail fossils we occasionally found on our town beach.

“The girl come from China expecting a husband and connubial bliss, and I ain’t gonna be the one to see her go wanting on either count,” he told his son, James. “I was prepared to keep up my end of the bargain as far as warming the bed goes, but I just ain’t up to the connubial blissing somebody that young is looking for.” Axel reckoned it would take a while to get a court date for his lawsuit and determined to put the time to use finding Mei Ling a husband nearer her own age. Miss Lizzie put an end to the nonsense after discovering Axel, Milton Garwood, and Angus MacCallum compiling a list of groom candidates over beers at the Last Resort.

“Mei Ling is sixteen years old,” Miss Lizzie scolded. “She’s too young to marry anyone.”

Miss Lizzie further contended that, when the time came, the young Chinese girl would be more than capable of determining who tickled her fancy without help from three dried-up old coots whose fancy-tickling days were far behind them.

Meanwhile, Mei Ling was quickly adapting to life in America. She had been predictably suspicious at first, her mother cautioning that her daughter’s new American husband would likely connubially bliss her morning, noon, and night for a while. “You’ll have to put up with it until he tires out,” her mother advised. “Then you can start squeezing his balls.” However, a little time with Miss Lizzie had provoked a rather remarkable transformation and Mei Ling now seemed less interested in connubial bliss than learning English and spending Axel’s two dollars on movie magazines and bubble gum.

Mei Ling wasn’t the only addition to Tesoro. The village was now filled with treasure seekers, the story of my discovery on the beach eventually making it into the San Francisco Chronicle. This inspired a gold rush of sorts, an army of people with dollar signs in their eyes streaming into town and then setting up Hoovervilles on the beach below the lighthouse, and around the edges of the Dinkle estate. The reporter who incited the ambergris prospectors, a small fellow with a bow tie and virtually no chin, was particularly taken with my decision to share the treasure with the entire town. Ten-year-old Santa comes early to Tesoro, California the headline read when his story appeared on page five, sparking attention I enjoyed at first. Ma and Miss Lizzie and Fiona were proud of me and showed it. Girls looked at me in a different way, too, particularly a brown-haired cutie with an upturned nose who would eventually become my wife, Marjory.

However, after the treasure hunters began to pile into town, overrunning the village like cockroaches, the nature of the attention shifted. People don’t like change and strangers clearing the shelves at Fiona’s mercantile, or parking their heaps until the only road in and out of town was turned into a one-lane tractor path, or sneaking into someone’s outhouse to do their business was a good deal of unwanted change. Someone needed to be blamed for such nonsense and the kid who had stumbled upon a stinking, viscous mass on the beach was as good a target as any.

As the sons of a crazy woman and the bounder who abandoned her, Alex and I were accustomed to a bit of talk from behind someone’s hand. However, the Ambergris Rush, as I like to remember it, put a barb on tongues I’d always thought fairly blunt. Milton Garwood the Misanthrope was in the thick of it, the stinger on his tongue as poisonous as a scorpion’s tail. He and Angus MacCallum nearly came to blows when Milton suggested that Ma and Alex and I ought to pay a surtax to cover the cost of clearing up refuse the ambergris prospectors left piled up in Fremont Park and on the beaches, the debate fueled by a few beers and whiskey chasers over at the Last Resort.

“No one taxed ye extra when yer damned monkey ran aroond town crappin’ up a storm,” Angus growled. “I think mibbie ya oughta start savin’ up to pay the tax on dunderheeds. Yers is gonna be bloody steep.”

The two old men then carried on a discussion of the various flaws each possessed that might be taxable. Eventually, James Throckmorton broke it up by kicking them both out of the bar. Outside, Milton and Angus found the street deserted, and as is often the case, the absence of onlookers cooled off the combatants. Neither apologized, but they did share a conciliatory nip from Angus’s flask before stumbling off in opposite directions. Angus headed toward the lighthouse while Milton made for the cottage where Ma and Alex and I were about to turn in.

Ma was still drinking Miss Lizzie’s remedy every day and was calm when she answered the knock on the door. Milton was half-drunk and acting about one quarter crazy, which seemed to calm her even further.

“What do you want, Milton?” she demanded.

Her question, a straightforward request, was unintentionally philosophical from Milton’s point of view. It rendered him momentarily flummoxed.

“What do I want, what do I want?” he sputtered, adding after a moment’s pause, “I don’t know. What the hell do I want?”

His ambergris shares had provided at least one of many things Milton felt was lacking in his life: a lot of money. However, a fat bank account had failed to fulfill its end of the bargain with the Zenith Stratosphere Model 1000Z nowhere in evidence and Mr. Sprinkles now urinating and defecating at the exotic animal preserve in Petaluma. His wife had managed to exhaust most of their remaining line of credit with stuff he didn’t care about, filling their house with so much junk he couldn’t walk from the kitchen to the bedroom without climbing over a sofa, squeezing past an icebox, or tripping over one of several whale-replica doorstops. Worst of all, after agreeing to make his outhouse available to any of the ambergris prospectors who had both an urge and a nickel, he could no long enjoy his morning bowel movement in peace, instead waiting in line with a bunch of strangers who were rapidly using up his catalog pages.

“What do I want?” Milton said, echoing Ma’s question one last time. “I’ll tell you what I want, Mary Rose. I want things to go back to the way they were.”

The inconveniences imposed by the Ambergris Rush partly gave way to excitement over the impending visit from Everson Dexter, the analyst from the Allegheny Chemicals Corporation. Every new stranger in town was looked over from eyeball to toenail, making the ambergris prospectors justifiably nervous. A few of them turned tail and ran in the face of such scrutiny, but a good many stayed. “Too damned many,” Angus MacCallum growled as the driftwood he had once carved into mermaids and gnomes was scavenged by the prospectors for use as tent poles and firewood.

Some folks in Tesoro worried that Mr. Dexter might not find the town at all as someone was removing the road signs pointing motorists in our direction. In early August, James Throckmorton went to San Francisco to see the Seals play baseball and reported no shortage of billboards advertising Burma Shave or Coca Cola or Vicks cough drops. However, there was a complete absence of anything to help someone find Tesoro. The culprit who had pilfered the signs was a mystery and remains one even now—travelers wishing to visit Tesoro today still must do so sans the benefit of signs to guide them.

I had begun to see a good deal of James Throckmorton. As I previously revealed, he had been sweet on Ma for a long time; indeed, they’d known each other from kindergarten, at the same elementary school Alex and I attended, to graduation from Tesoro High School in 1918. “Them two was quite the lovebirds,” Angus MacCallum often told me. “No offense, but she shoulda married James instead of tha’ no-good bastard da of yers.” Ma had gone off to Cal, returning to Tesoro four years later with a degree in library science and a no-good bastard husband. James Throckmorton stayed in town and remained a bachelor.

I’ve been told James came around for a time after my father left us. I don’t remember it, but I guess Ma’s illness drove him off. She wanted no part of anyone when depressed and her up moods could test the bounds of a man’s ability to be a gentleman. Alex and I stayed with Miss Lizzie or Fiona during such times, with Angus MacCallum standing guard over Ma to make sure she didn’t run off to a roadhouse somewhere to offer up something she shouldn’t. James might have taken advantage of such moods but didn’t, and I remain grateful to him for being a good man when being a bad one would have been so easy.

James was as happy as Alex and me when Miss Lizzie’s latest treatment started to work, and once Ma returned to her job at the library, our town tavern-keeper unearthed a previously concealed affection for reading. Before long he began to turn over the Last Resort to his father, old Axel, in order to spend his afternoons thumbing through magazines or scanning western novels from a table conspicuously close to Ma’s desk. She didn’t seem to mind having him around, recruiting his help to re-shelve books while offering glances and little asides as she moved through the stacks, putting the musty, old place back in order after so many years away. James was partial to True Detective and Zane Grey novels although Ma convinced him to give Robinson Crusoe and The Count of Monte Cristo a try. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that she could have asked him to spout nursery rhymes in his underwear from atop the gazebo in Fremont Park and he would have done it. He was still crazy about her and Miss Lizzie’s concoction had opened a door he’d long thought closed. I soon learned that it had opened for Ma, too.

“James Throckmorton is coming for dinner,” she told my brother and me one afternoon. Alex had his nose in a book about airplanes and simply nodded. I wasn’t pleased. I knew James liked her and I thought he was okay, too, but the job of looking after Ma and Alex had been mine for a long time. I wasn’t ready to be replaced. Besides, Ma’s even temperament was too novel. I was enjoying it and wanted to keep her attention solely on Alex and me for as long as possible.

“Why is he coming over?” I griped. “He owns a bar. He can cook for himself.”

“Don’t be like that, Connor.”

“I’m not being like anything, I just don’t get it.”

“He’s not coming because he wants dinner. He’d just like to spend a little time with us.”

“Why?”

“He likes us, I guess. I don’t know. He wants to be our friend. Let that be reason enough, okay?”

“Why can’t he find his own friends?”

I confess this recollection to be one I find embarrassing. Despite her improvement in mood, Ma was still fragile, my peevishness causing her to become increasingly flustered, the skin on her neck suddenly splotchy and red, her hands anxiously patting down invisible wrinkles on her dress. Alex could see it, too.

“Stop,” he mouthed silently.

I wanted to smack him. Brothers are supposed to put a knot in each other’s ropes once in a while, but I’d always had the decency to do it in time-honored fashion: peeing in his bath water while he was still in it, or seasoning his peanut butter sandwich with snot. Alex didn’t fight fair. He pestered me with perfect reason and unassailable virtue, qualities I would come to admire and emulate, but absolutely infuriating when I was ten.

“Stop,” he repeated, this time aloud.

He might have said more. He might have reminded me that we’d known James Throckmorton all our lives, that James was a decent fellow and Ma obviously liked him even though he was nothing special to look at, his hair thinning, his belly fighting his belt. I went to Ma and gave her a hug.

“Sorry,” I said.

Ma sighed, unconvinced. I don’t blame her, my apology flavored with the same enthusiasm I displayed when she tried to persuade Alex and me that Methodist Sunday services were a better idea than playing baseball or lying around doing nothing.

“Please, Connor,” she said.

“It’s fine,” I pouted, my voice making clear that it was nowhere near fine.

“Connor—”

“I said I was sorry. I’m glad he’s coming.”

But I didn’t sound like it and I wasn’t.

That night Ma wore a dress borrowed from Fiona and had her hair nicely made up in a style I’d not seen before, her face worked over with some of Miss Lizzie’s face pastes and creams. She looked very pretty and James said so. Repeatedly. Over a dinner of fried salmon patties with peas and a milk salad, he paid a lot of attention to Alex and me, too, insisting that we call him “James” instead of “Mr. Throckmorton” and talking to us about baseball. He was a big fan of the San Francisco Seals and regaled us with stories about Vince and Joe DiMaggio. “You heard it here first, boys,” he told us. “Joe DiMaggio is going to be the greatest player who ever lived.” He promised to take us to a game. I wanted to hate him, but James had a pleasing manner. Tall and broad-shouldered with big hands and thick wrists, he was a bit like a tamed bear—strong and powerful but also gentle and protective.

After dinner James went outside with Alex and me to throw a ball around. I was a decent player, but Alex was an absolute marvel. At six years old, he leapt and dived for balls I could hardly reach, never failing to snag a throw anywhere near him. He had a good arm, too, putting some zip on the ball that made it pop when it hit my glove or James’s. “You’ve a little brother who’ll be a pitcher someday, Connor,” James said. “Let’s teach you to be a catcher.” And he did. He taught me all about framing a pitch to fool the umpire and firing a ball to second base from my knees and blocking the plate against a runner bearing in on home. Of course, most of that would come later. That night—the night of the first dinner—we just played catch. Eventually, James sent Alex inside to check on Ma, giving us a chance to talk in private.

“Have you told your mother about the boathouse?” he asked.

I scowled.

“Of course, I haven’t told anyone,” I snapped. “I’m not stupid.”

This sort of sass is commonplace these days. My great-grandkids mouth off to their parents as if they’re pals. In my time, kids were kids and grown-ups were grown-ups, the difference between us reinforced with an occasional swat on the backside. Fortunately for me, James was still on probation with Ma and not anxious to get on her bad side by paddling me. He laughed.

“Sorry, Connor,” he said.

“I can keep a secret.”

“I know.”

“Maybe you should worry about yourself. Have you told anyone?”

James frowned. “Ease up, young man,” he said.

He didn’t have to say it again. I had seen James tell men at the Last Resort to ease up, always after a few drinks had provoked a disagreement about what was ruining the damned country or who could strike out who blindfolded. Such disputes occasionally evolved into chest-thumping and wildly thrown haymakers, forcing James to break it up. In most cases, it took merely a warning and a grim expression as James was a great bear of a fellow, as I’ve already pointed out. Drunk or sober, fellows around town weren’t anxious to replace his customarily affable disposition with one that might get them tossed out of the Last Resort as easily as my brother Alex flung a baseball into my glove. I certainly wasn’t about to challenge him. Besides, despite the competition between us for Ma’s attention, I couldn’t help liking him and suddenly realized that I wanted him to like me back.

“I’m sorry, James,” I said.

This time I meant it.



That night Alex and I lay in the bed we shared. I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to tell my brother about the boathouse and Everson Dexter and the fictitious Allegheny Chemicals Corporation. But a secret was a secret.

“I like James,” Alex said.

“He’s okay,” I said.

I could see the shine of my brother’s eyes in the dark. He studied the ceiling as if the uneven plaster held secrets of its own.

“Will he marry Ma?”

“I don’t know.”

“If he does marry her, he’ll be our dad.”

“I guess.”

Alex was quiet for a long time, so long that I felt certain he’d fallen asleep. When he again spoke, I was both terrified and grateful.

“What’s going on in the boathouse?” he said.