Eureka Page 4

  “I’ll pay for his food and take care of him,” Brodie pleaded. “You can take it out of my salary.”

  Old Gorman had smiled.

  “I think we can handle the food bill,” he said. And as he turned away, he looked back and said, “I admire you, Thomas. You have a big heart, which is a gift. But it isn’t much of a horse for three dollars.”

  Brodie had nursed Cyclone back to health and, in so doing, they had formed a bond. No one else could ride him, no one else could even climb into the saddle without being thrown head over heels. Horse and boy were devoted to each other.

  “You have a natural love for animals,” Gorman said, tapping the ash from his cigar. “I’ve watched you with the other horses and the dogs. I admire that.”

  He pointed to the end of the pasture, which was separated from the edge of the cliff by a high, white fence that surrounded the twenty-acre grazing land.

  “Let’s take a walk,” Eli said, nodding down the pasture. They strode side by side, with Cyclone clopping slowly behind Brodie.

  “Have you thought what you’re going to do when school ends?” Eli asked. “Ben will be going back East to Harvard in a couple of weeks. How about you? The state has a very good college down in Los Angeles. Then maybe take on law school.”

  “I ain’t . . . I’m not smart enough.”

  “You do yourself an injustice, Thomas.”

  “I make C’s, sometimes a B or an A but mostly C’s.”

  “There’s smart and there’s smart. Ben is smart about business. Someday he’ll run mine, he’ll be responsible for this valley. For what happens to it. But he needs somebody who is smart in other ways. Ben is naive about things. He trusts everybody. He needs someone—one person—he can trust without question, a partner who will take care of things Ben doesn’t see.”

  “You mean like somebody who can take care of a guy like Guilfoyle when he smarts off?”

  “I mean somebody who understands why people like Guilfoyle are the way they are. Someone who understands that and will handle that part of the business. The kind of smart Ben will never be.”

  Brodie twisted his apple into two pieces, and held one half behind him. The horse gently took it from his hand and ate it.

  “I . . .” Brodie started to say and then stopped.

  “You what?”

  “I don’t wanna be a roughneck all my life.”

  “I don’t imply you should. What I am saying is that it takes a man of unique talents to handle the roughnecks. My son doesn’t have that kind of talent.”

  “And I do because that’s where I came from. That it, sir?”

  “You grew up in that life. Now you’ve seen the other side of the coin. I’ll be glad to stand for your schooling.”

  “I don’t wanna go back to it, Mr. Eli. You spoilt me that way.”

  “Spoiled. I spoiled you that way.”

  “Spoiled.”

  “You’ve already risen above that, Thomas. But railroading is a harsh business. It not only requires shrewd business sense, it requires a man who can think ahead of trouble and handle it.”

  “And that’s me?”

  “I see that kind of strength in you, yes.”

  They reached the end of the meadow and walked to the corner of the high fence that marked the edge of the cliff. To the south, past two neighboring houses and O’Dell’s mansion, they could see the glow of Eureka.

  “I had a vision the first time I saw this valley,” Eli said softly, almost to himself. “And I still see it. I see a pretty village at the bottom of the valley. I see decent homes for workers. I see this valley, the way it is now, lasting forever. A place for good people to live and flourish. I see Ben and Isabel Hoffman marrying, they’ve been sweet on each other since they were children and she’s a nice Jewish girl. I see them raising a family here, surrounded by its beauty. And I see you watching his back, keeping the law. But it won’t happen as long as O’Dell owns half the valley, and Riker and his ilk run Eureka.”

  “Buck Tallman keeps the law, sir.”

  “Buck is an honorable man, but he’s in his fifties. He tolerates gambling and womanizing and hard drink and brawling. He keeps it controlled, but he was a town-tamer, Thomas. He is from another time. My vision of the valley will never become a reality as long as men like Buck let men like Riker have their way. And my vision won’t happen if O’Dell has his way. He will chop down the trees, turn all of this into power plants and paper mills and shanties for the workers. It will become a slum like Milltown.”

  Brodie was uncomfortable talking about the subject. It was not something Eli had ever shared with either of the boys. But his curiosity was rampant.

  “Couldn’t you just, uh, buy him out?”

  “Been tried, Thomas. This has been going on for two years. O’Dell owns the part of the valley that includes Eureka. He’s a rowdy himself and a spoiler. Our problems could never be worked out. The game was O’Dell’s idea—although I must admit it is the only solution.”

  Brodie hesitated for a moment and then said cautiously, “What if it doesn’t turn out the way, uh . . .”

  “It?” When Brodie hesitated again, unsure if he had overstepped his bounds, Eli said, “Ah. You’re referring to the game.”

  Brodie nodded. “Everybody knows about it, sir. The whole town’s talking.”

  “And what are they saying?”

  Brodie turned to Cyclone, held the other half of the apple in the flat of his hand, and the horse took it. “That O’Dell’s a gambler and you ain . . . aren’t.”

  “So they think O’Dell will win?”

  “Well, that’s what they’re saying. Riker’s giving five-to-one odds favoring Mr. O’Dell.”

  “You familiar with poker?”

  “When I lived down there, I used to play a little penny ante with the other kids.”

  Eli looked at the youth for a moment, then reached in his pocket, took out some bills, and handed Brodie ten dollars.

  “Bet this on me to win. You’ll win fifty dollars after you pay me back the ten.”

  Brodie took the bill and stared at it for a moment or two. Ten dollars was a lot of money to Brodie.

  “I never knew you to play poker,” he said, folding it carefully and putting it in his pocket.

  Eli puffed on his cigar and said, “You know who Andrew Carnegie is?”

  “I know he’s real rich.”

  “He’s a steel man, Thomas. Made his fortune manufacturing steel. When I was a young man back in Pittsburgh, he took a liking to me and he moved me up in the business. He and some of his rich friends had a poker club. Played once a week. A tough game. Fairly large stakes. One day he invited me to play and I told him I couldn’t afford it.”

  Brodie laughed. “What’d he say to that?” he asked.

  “He said, ‘You can afford it if you win.’ He sat me down and in one afternoon taught me some of the secrets of poker. Then he gave me two hundred dollars and told me to come to the game that night. I won seven hundred dollars. And became a member of the poker club.”

  “What were the secrets?” Brodie asked eagerly.

  Eli looked out at the shimmering reflection of the moon on the ocean.

  “The most important one,” he answered, “is the art of the bluff.”

  Brodie watched Eli walk back to the house, saw the back door open and close. He leaned on the paddock fence for a long time, thinking about everything Eli had said.

  Now, suddenly, he had to make some hard decisions.

  And then there was the other problem.

  He went in the barn and came back with another apple. He broke it in half, gave one to the horse and took a bite out of the other one to chase the dryness from his mouth. He got a bridle and a blanket, slid the blanket over Cyclone’s back, and put the bit in the horse’s mouth. Slinging the reins over the horse’s back, he jumped on and quietly rode out of the paddock and down through the woods to a pathway near the cliff’s edge. Brodie rode south, toward the lights of Eureka. The O
’Dell mansion was lit up like a church, its lamps flickering through the trees.

  He turned the horse back into the woods and stopped, slid quietly off his back, tethered him to a tree, and gave him the rest of the apple.

  “Be quiet, now,” he whispered, then ran his hand down along Cyclone’s mane and slid the blanket off his back before sneaking into the woods. He walked a hundred or so feet to a greenhouse and slipped inside. It was dark. He walked down the aisle of flowers and plants to the rear of the glass shed and stopped, looking back at the big house a hundred yards or so away. A light glowed in the corner room. A signal.

  “You’re late,” a soft voice said from the darkness.

  It startled him.

  “I . . . we, Mr. Eli and me . . . we had a talk,” he stammered, and before he could say anything else, she moved quietly from the darkness, gliding to him and putting her arms around his waist.

  “I was afraid you weren’t coming,” Isabel Hoffman whispered.

  She was so close he could feel her heart beating, a rapid tapping against his chest. He could smell her hair, feel her breath against his throat. In his young life he had never known such longing, never felt a connection with anyone that went so far beyond friendship.

  “We have to talk about something,” he said, but she lifted her face to his and kissed him. Her lips were wet and trembling with desire, and he was overwhelmed by her ardor, as he always was and had been for the two months they had been meeting secretly, two or three times a week, in her mother’s greenhouse. It was a tryst that had begun with a note he found in his geography book one morning. It had started innocently enough. They had met at the bakery on the Hill to study for a test. Ben was at his father’s bank, where he worked after school for two hours every day. She had been a little flirtatious at first, then their mutual attraction escalated quickly. She was like a lure, shimmering on the end of a line, and he was hooked.

  Now his emotions were in turmoil. He knew how Ben felt about Isabel, but his own longing for her had masked any sense of betrayal.

  He was so dizzy with longing he took her in his arms with passionate desperation.

  She took the blanket, pungent with the odor of the stallion, spread it on the soft earth in the darkness of the greenhouse, lay down and drew him gently to her, and, in a voice quivering with desire, she said, “I never knew it would be like this, Brodie. I never imagined it would be so wonderful . . .”

  The Social House, as the men on the Hill called it, commanded the northern crest of the valley and had once been a large, sturdy barn and stable, owned by a horse breeder from San Luis Obispo, thirty or so miles away. When the horse breeder died, Eli Gorman bought the property from his estate.

  The barn was refinished with teak and mahogany walls, Tiffany windows and lamps, and a slate bar imported from Paris. Fourteen bar chairs lined the bar, and fourteen tables and chairs occupied the sprawling, cathedral-ceilinged main room, each chair with a brass plaque identifying a member, nine of whom lived in sequestered mansions on the Hill. The other five had elaborate cottages and came from Los Angeles or San Francisco on weekends and holidays.

  There were two other rooms, one the office of the manager of the club, a fluttery little perfectionist named Weldon Pettigrew who had been the concierge of a Chicago hotel, the other occupied by the telephone switchboard, run by a widow named Emma Shields, who had been trained in New York. The barkeeper, Gary Hennessey, had been imported from a hotel in New Orleans and spoke with an accent that was part Irish, part New York, and part Cajun.

  Through the years, three apartments—for Pettigrew, Hennessey, and Mrs. Shields—had been built beside the clubhouse, and five small offices had been added to the clubhouse so its members could conduct business in private. Shields was the only woman allowed in the club except on rare occasions, when entertainers were brought in from San Francisco for the evening, and on New Year’s Eve, when all the family cooks prepared a feast and the new year was ushered in properly.

  At all other times, it was a place where the tycoons gathered to smoke cigars, sip brandy, talk business, play cards, and keep in touch with their businesses by special long-distance phone lines. There was no restaurant. If a member wanted to eat, food was cooked at home and delivered by servants.

  Tonight was a particularly special occasion at the Social House.

  Tonight was the poker game between Eli Gorman and Shamus O’Dell.

  The boys went to Brodie’s room on the pretense of studying, but quickly sneaked off through the woods to the Social House, Ben clutching his father’s opera glasses so they could see better. They cautiously entered through the back door and went up the stairs to the storage loft, crawling over cases of whiskey and sweeping away spiderwebs until they found a secluded place where they could watch the main floor without being seen.

  They stared down at the arena.

  All the tables but one had been moved to the side of the big room. A single table, with a felt cover and three chairs, held down the center of the room, spotlighted under the chandelier. Six bar chairs formed an arc five feet away from the empty spot at the table and six more were behind the chair opposite it. They were separated by an occasional brass spittoon. There were large Waterford ashtrays in front of each place at the table, with matching water glasses beside them and a Waterford pitcher to service them. The chandelier cast a sphere of light on the table. The twelve chairs were outside the orbit, in the dark. From the setup, Brodie figured there would be twelve spectators, six facing the empty seat at the table and six behind the dealer. Nobody would be seated behind the two players.

  The game was set for 8:00 p.m.

  Fifteen minutes before game time. The ritual began.

  Buck Tallman arrived first, carrying a saddlebag. He draped his jacket over the middle chair. He was wearing a bright red vest, a white shirt with a blue string tie, and tan leather pants. The boys had never seen him that elegant. He carefully rolled up both his shirtsleeves halfway to the elbow. He sat down and growled across the room to Hennessey.

  “A cup of black coffee if you please, Mr. Hennessey.”

  He planted the saddlebag close to his right, opened it, took out ten virgin decks of cards, and placed them side by side in front of him. Hennessey, who was wearing a tuxedo for the occasion, brought the cup of coffee and placed it on the felt next to Tallman’s elbow. He nodded his thanks.

  Spectators began to filter into the room and fill the gallery.

  Eli Gorman arrived two minutes before the hour. He was dressed in a dark blue suit. A gold watch chain draped between the vest pockets on either side of his chest. He was carrying a black leather doctor’s satchel. He shook hands with Tallman and placed the satchel on the table.

  His chair was below the boys. He sat with his back to them, but Brodie checked his position with the opera glasses. They would be able to see his hand over his right shoulder.

  Gorman took out a thick packet of land deeds tied with twine and laid them next to the decks of cards. Then he took out a packet of ten-, twenty-, and hundred-dollar bills, stacked them in individual stacks, and counted out ten thousand dollars.

  O’Dell was five minutes late, dressed in a garish light blue suit, an open-collared checked shirt, and a gray derby, which he hooked over the arm of his chair. His goods were in a small leather suitcase. He put his deeds on the opposite end of the line of cards from Gorman’s. He counted out ten thousand dollars in tens and hundreds.

  Hennessey poured each of them a glass of water. O’Dell ordered a glass of Irish whiskey. Gorman shook his head when Hennessey looked at him. The bartender vanished into the darkened room.

  Twenty thousand dollars lay on the table.

  Tallman said, “Gentlemen, the game is poker. I will deal for each of you. Five- and seven-card stud and three-card draw, no wild cards. In straights and flushes, high card wins. If it’s a push, the pot will carry over to the next game. The ante is ten dollars. The limit is table stakes, the minimum bet will be ten dollars. The first
player who can’t call a bet is out. Winner takes all, the deeds and twenty thousand dollars. Either player may ask for a new deck at any time. If so, the deal goes to the other player. I will flip a coin and the caller will select the first deck. Then you will draw a card for the first deal. We will take a fifteen-minute break whenever any of us requests it. Any questions?”

  There were none.

  Ben leaned close to Brodie’s ear. “What’s table stakes?” he whispered.

  “Means you can bet whatever’s in the pot.”

  Tallman said, “Then we’ll begin. Shake hands, gentlemen.”

  “Forget it,” said O’Dell.

  Gorman looked at Tallman and shrugged. He took his pince-nez from a vest pocket and set it near the end of his nose. Tallman took out a silver dollar and flipped it.

  “Heads,” O’Dell snapped. The coin landed on the table, spun around, and came up tails. Gorman selected a deck and Tallman broke open the seal, took out the jokers, dropped them in the saddlebag. He swept the cards around the table, mixing them up, and splayed the deck out between the two players. Gorman pulled an eight, O’Dell turned a jack.

  “Your game, Mr. O’Dell.”

  “Five stud,” O’Dell said, in a high-pitched tenor voice that was a sharp contrast to the voices of Tallman and Gorman.

  “Ante up,” said the dealer. O’Dell threw a ten-dollar bill in the center of the table and Gorman covered it.

  “The game is five-card stud,” Tallman said. He shuffled and arched the cards together several times. He lay the deck in front of O’Dell, who cut them.

  Tallman dealt the first card to Gorman. Both got one card down and one up. Eli lifted the corner of his hole card, let it snap back. A six of hearts.

  Gorman drew a four of clubs. O’Dell, a seven of diamonds.

  “Seven bets. The limit is twenty.”

  O’Dell bet twenty dollars. Gorman called.

  Sixty dollars in the pot.

  Second up card: O’Dell, a queen of diamonds, Gorman, a nine of hearts.