Daughter of Fortune (37 page)

At the end of the meal, Jacob Freemont invited his friends to see the sensation of the day: a Chinese girl whom one could watch but not touch. Her name was Ah Toy and she had sailed on a clipper with her husband, an elderly merchant who had the good taste to die at sea and leave her free. She lost no time in a widow's laments and to enliven the rest of the journey she became the lover of the captain, who turned out to be a generous man. When she debarked in San Francisco, showily gowned and with a heavy purse, she noticed the lustful gazes that followed her and was struck with the brilliant idea of charging for those looks. She rented two rooms, cut holes in the dividing wall, and then charged an ounce of gold for the privilege of looking at her. Jacob Freemont's friends followed him in good humor, and with the bribe of a few dollars they were able to jump the line and be among the first to enter. They were led into a narrow room thick with tobacco smoke where a dozen men stood elbow to elbow with noses pressed to the wall. They peered through the uncomfortable peepholes, feeling like ridiculous schoolboys, and saw in the next room a beautiful young woman dressed in a silk kimono slit on both sides from waist to toes. Underneath it, she was naked. The voyeurs groaned at each of the languid movements that revealed part of her delicate body. John Sommers and the Rodríguez de Santa Cruz brothers doubled over laughing, unable to believe that hunger for women could be so consuming. Afterward they went their separate ways, and the captain and the newspaperman left to have a last drink. After listening to the account of Jacob's voyages and adventures, the captain decided to confide in him.

“Do you remember Eliza, the girl who lived with my brother and sister in Valparaíso?”

“Perfectly.”

“She ran away from home nearly a year ago and I have good reason to believe that she is in California. I have tried to find her but no one knows anything about her or anyone of her description.”

“The only women who have come here alone are prostitutes.”

“I don't know how she came—if she did. The one fact we have is that she left in search of her lover, a young Chilean by the name of Joaquín Andieta.”

“Joaquín Andieta! I know him, he was my friend in Chile.”

“He is a fugitive from justice. Accused of theft.”

“I can't believe it. Andieta was an upstanding young man. In truth, he had such a strong sense of pride and honor that it made it difficult to get close to him. And you are telling me that he and Eliza are in love?”

“I know only that he embarked for California in December of 1848. Two months later, the girl disappeared. My sister believes she came here, following Andieta, although I can't imagine how she did that without leaving a trail. Since you move around through the camps and towns in the north, I thought you might find out something . . .”

“I will do what I can, Captain.”

“My brother and sister would be eternally grateful, Jacob.”

Eliza Sommers stayed with the caravan of Joe Bonecrusher, where she played the piano and shared her tips fifty-fifty with the madam. She bought books of songs in both English and Spanish to liven up the long nights of entertainment, and for idle hours, which were many. She taught the Indian lad to read, and helped with the daily chores and the cooking. Everyone in the carnival said that they had never eaten better. With the same eternal dried beef, beans, and bacon, she prepared savory dishes created in the inspiration of the moment; she bought Mexican condiments and added them to Mama Fresia's Chilean recipes, with delicious results: she had only lard, flour, and preserved fruits, but she made pies, and when she could get eggs and milk her creations rose to celestial gastronomic heights. Babalú the Bad was not a believer in men cooks, but he was the first to wolf down the young pianist's banquets and so had to stifle his sarcastic comments. In the habit of being on guard during the night, the giant slept like a log most of the day, but as soon as a whiff from the cook pots wafted to his dragon nostrils his eyes flew open and he sat down near the kitchen to wait. He had an insatiable appetite and there was no way to fill his gigantic belly. Before the arrival of Chile Boy, as they called the supposed Elías Andieta, his basic diet had been whatever game he caught, split down the middle, seasoned with a handful of salt, and laid on the coals till it was black. Following that method, he would eat a whole deer in a couple of days. Exposed to the cuisine of the pianist, he refined his palate, hunted every day, selected the most delicate prize, and delivered it skinned and dressed.

On the road, Eliza led the caravan on her sturdy nag, which despite its sorry appearance was as princely as the finest purebred, with her useless rifle strapped onto her saddle and the young Indian drummer riding on the horse's croup. She felt so comfortable in men's clothes that she wondered whether she would ever be able to dress like a woman again. Of one thing she was sure: she would never wear a corset, not even on the day of her marriage to Joaquín Andieta. If they came to a river the women seized the opportunity to collect water in barrels, wash clothes, and bathe. Those were Eliza's most difficult moments; she had to invent more and more contrived excuses for cleaning up out of sight of observers.

Joe Bonecrusher was a corpulent Pennsylvania Dutch woman who had found her destiny in the wide-open spaces of the West. She had a prestidigitator's skill with cards and dice, and she was passionate about cheating. She had earned a living betting, until she got the idea to organize a crew of girls and travel the mother lode “prospecting for gold,” which was what she called her method of mining. She was sure that the young pianist was homosexual and that was why she made room for him in her heart beside the young Indian. She did not allow her girls to tease him or Babalú to call him names: it wasn't the kid's fault that he was born without a beard and with that baby face, just as it wasn't hers that she had been born a man in a woman's body. These were just jokes God invented to screw things up. She had bought the Indian boy for thirty dollars from some vigilantes who had killed the rest of his tribe. He was four or five at the time, nothing but a skeleton with a worm-filled belly, but within a few months of forcibly feeding him and taming his rage so he didn't destroy everything within reach or beat his head against the wagon wheels, he had grown a hand's width and his true warrior's nature had emerged: he was stoic, hermetic, and patient. She named him Tom No-Tribe so he would never forget the debt of revenge. “The name is the person,” Indians said, and Joe believed it; that was why she had invented her own name.

The soiled doves of the caravan consisted of two sisters from Missouri who had made the long trip overland and lost the rest of their family on the way; Esther, a girl of eighteen who had run away from her father, a religious fanatic who beat her; and a beautiful Mexican, the daughter of a white father and an Indian mother, who passed for white and had learned four phrases in French to bamboozle men who had only one thing in mind, because according to popular myth French girls were the best. In that society of adventurers and ruffians, there was also a racial hierarchy: whites accepted cinnamon-skinned girls but scorned any mixture with black. All four women were grateful for having run across Joe Bonecrusher. Esther was the only one without previous experience; the others had practiced their trade in San Francisco and knew the bad life. They hadn't worked in the “best” houses; they knew about beatings, sickness, drugs, and the evil of pimps; they had had countless infections, suffered brutal remedies, and had had so many abortions that they were sterile, which they considered a blessing, not a tragedy. Joe had rescued them from that vile world and taken them out of the city. Then she had supported them during their long martyrdom of withdrawal to rid them of addiction to opium and alcohol. The women repaid her with the loyalty of daughters, and besides, she treated them fair and square. The intimidating presence of Babalú discouraged violent customers and hateful drunks; they ate well and the rambling wagons seemed a favorable atmosphere for good health and spirits. In those far-reaching spaces of hills and forests they felt free. There was nothing easy or romantic about their lives; they had saved a little money and could leave, if they wanted, yet they didn't because that small band of humans was the closest thing to a family they had.

Joe Bonecrusher's girls, too, were convinced that young Elías Andieta, with his effeminate manners and high voice, was homosexual. That gave them leave to undress, wash, and talk about any subject when he was around, as if he were one of them. They accepted him so naturally that Eliza tended to forget she was supposed to be male, although Babalú made it his job to remind her. He had taken on the task of making a man out of this lily-livered weakling, and he watched Elías closely, quick to correct him when he sat with his legs crossed or shook back his short mane with a very unmanly gesture. He taught him to clean and oil his weapons, but gave up trying to teach him to shoot because every time his student pressed the trigger, he closed his eyes. He was not impressed by Elías Andieta's Bible; on the contrary, he suspected he used it to justify his childish ways and complained that if the boy did not want to become a damned preacher, why the hell did he read all that foolishness, anyway?; he'd be better off reading dirty books to see if that gave him any ideas about acting like a man. Babalú was barely able to sign his name and read with great difficulty, but he would die before admitting it. He said that his sight was failing and he couldn't see the letters well, although he could shoot a terrified hare between the eyes at three hundred yards. He used to ask Chile Boy to read out-of-date newspapers and the Bonecrusher's erotic books aloud, not so much for the sexy parts as the romantic, which always brought him near to tears. The plot invariably had to do with burning love between a member of the European nobility and a common peasant girl, or sometimes the reverse, an aristocratic lady who lost her mind over a rustic but honest and proud man. In these tales the women were always beautiful and the gallants tireless in their ardor. The backdrop was a series of bacchanals, but unlike pornographic dime novels these had a plot. Eliza would read aloud, masking her shock, as if she had always been exposed to the worst vices, while Babalú and three of the doves listened, mesmerized. Esther did not participate in those sessions because to her it seemed a worse sin to describe the acts than to perform them. Eliza's ears burned but she could not help but recognize the unexpected elegance with which these lusty tales were written; some of the sentences even reminded her of the impeccable style of Miss Rose. Joe Bonecrusher, who was not the least interested in carnal passion of any sort and so was bored by the reading, personally saw that not a word wounded the innocent ears of Tom No-Tribe. “I am raising him to be an Indian chief, not a pimp for whores,” she said, and in her wish to make him strong she also refused to let the boy call her Grandmother.

“Hell's fire, I'm not anyone's grandmother. I'm the Bonecrusher, do you hear what I'm saying, you damn brat?”

“Yes, Grandma.”

Babalú the Bad, an ex-convict from Chicago, had crossed the continent on foot long before the gold rush. He spoke Indian tongues and had done a little of everything to earn a living, from strongman in a traveling circus, where he might lift a horse over his head or pull a wagonload of sand by his teeth, to stevedore on the docks of San Francisco. That was where he had been discovered by Joe Bonecrusher and had taken a job in the caravan. He could do the work of several men, and with him they needed no further protection. Together he and his employer could scare off any number of attackers, as they had demonstrated on more than one occasion.

“You have to be strong or they grind you down, Chile Boy,” Babalú counseled Eliza. “Don't think I've always been the way you see me. Once I was like you, weak and soft, but I began lifting weights and now look at my muscles. No one tries anything with me.”

“Babalú, you're more than six feet tall and weigh as much as a cow. I'll never be like you!”

“Size has nothing to do with it, man. It's balls that count. I may have been big but they laughed at me just the same.”

“Who laughed at you?”

“Everyone, even my mother, may she rest in peace. I'm going to tell you something nobody knows.”

“Yes?”

“You remember Babalú the Good? That was me before. But ever since I was twenty I've been Babalú the Bad, and things have gone much better for me.”

I
n December, overnight, winter descended upon the foothills and thousands of miners had to abandon their claims and move to town to wait for spring. A merciful blanket of snow covered that vast terrain tunneled by greedy ants, and what gold was left again lay quietly in nature's silence. Joe Bonecrusher directed her caravan to one of the new little towns in the mother lode, where she rented a dilapidated barn in which to hibernate. She sold the mules, bought a great wood trough for a bathtub, one cookstove and two for heat, and a few lengths of cheap cloth and boots for everyone because in the rain and the cold you couldn't do without them. She set them all to scrubbing out the barn and making curtains to mark off rooms; she installed the canopy beds, the golden mirrors, and the piano. Then she went off to pay a courtesy call to the taverns, the general store, and the blacksmith shop, the centers of social activity. In the way of a newspaper, the town had a one-sheet bulletin printed on an aged hand press that had been hauled across the continent, in which Joe placed a discreet announcement of her business. Besides the girls, she offered bottles of what she called “The Finest Cuban and Jamaican Rum”—although, in truth, it was a savage brew that would curl a man's soul—“torrid” books, and a couple of gambling tables. Customers showed up promptly. There was another brothel, but novelty was welcomed. The madam of the other establishment launched a campaign of slander against her rivals but refrained from openly confronting the formidable duo of Joe Bonecrusher and Babalú the Bad. In their new quarters there was frolicking behind the improvised curtains, dancing to the tune of the piano, and betting of considerable sums under the watchful eye of the boss lady, who did not permit any fighting or cheating under her roof—unless her own. Eliza watched men lose in a couple of nights what they'd won with months of titanic effort, then weep on the bosom of the girls who had helped clean them out.