ON A DECEMBER MORNING in 1944, Mr. Andrew Jackson Blackwood--a young-faced, self-made man who had been in California twelve or fourteen years, depending on whom you asked--was making his way down El Camino Real. He was driving his yellow Imperial Victoria on his way to a real-estate convention in San Diego. At present he was somewhere between Dana Point and Oceanside, but many miles back his Automobile Club map had flown out the window, the wings of its paper-folds extending and flapping away. The fluttery movement--and the car''s sudden swerve as he lunged for the accordioned map--made him think of a large, ancient bird lifting itself into extinction. This was a more morose thought than Blackwood was used to, and it didn''t stay with him, flitting away like the map itself. But Blackwood had a sense of direction, he liked to tell himself, and he continued on his way. Yet by now he could no longer be certain that he was still traveling down El Camino Real; had he made a wrong turn somewhere back? The road cut through dormant pea fields and lettuce farms and a patch of shallots, passing an avocado orchard and a lemon grove protected by eucalyptus windbreak.
It climbed a scrub-oak terrain burned gold in autumn where at hillcrest a rattler stretched belly-up in the sun. Thin, shabby utility poles stood across the fields like a line outside a poorhouse, and upon the drooping wires sat a family of garbage-fed gulls. Every now and then the road turned sharply and the hammered pewter of the Pacific would appear in the distance and Blackwood would inhale, tasting the salt on the breeze. He was listening to the kid announcer on the KCRO radio news, and lately word from Europe was better than expected, the Americans marching swiftly up the wine-cold valleys of the Moselle. Blackwood thought of the boys weighted down by carbine and canteen, and it occurred to him just then, as he descended a hill and the ocean lay before him, that the war would end sooner than most dared to hope. The soldiers would return en masse and many would request passage to Long Beach or Coronado and each would need a bungalow and a patch of ryegrass for himself and his honey-haired girl. The world after the war would be different. There would be an unprecedented demand.
Someone would supply it. The idea came to Andrew Jackson Blackwood, complete and formed. And this was what distinguished Blackwood from the rest, he liked to tell himself--whether when meditating upon the passage of another day while falling asleep in his mint-green pajamas, or at the closing of yet another deal around the bank''s white-oak table. Blackwood looked only forward, never back: the cuffs of history never locked about his wrists and throat. In an open stretch of flatland close to the shore, he spotted a farm stand tended by a girl with dark, nostalgic eyes. A tulip tree shaded the stand, and Blackwood slowed the Imperial Victoria as he passed it. The girl looked sad, perhaps because of her skimpy display of onion and the day''s catch in a box of ice: three cigar-shaped flyingfish on their sides, their woven silver wings catching the sun. Behind the stand was a small farm, its turned onion field edging an arroyo dense with lemonade berry.
The farm extended to the ocean, a perfectly underutilized tract of land, and Blackwood--whose first speculation in California real estate all those years ago had hauled him north across the border from poor to rich--swerved and turned down the dirt road. He was a thin but strong man whose Broadway Brothers suits fit him well. In 1931 he had arrived in Pasadena unnoticed, an import from Maine who, with a small wad of money of questionable origin and a full, boyish smile, bought an abandoned whitewashed mansion on Orange Grove Avenue that had once belonged to a family whose money had been made and lost in ice. Blackwood converted it into a rooming house open to anyone who could push the nightly fee through the slot in the cashier''s cage. Because he was sympathetic to the outsider, from the beginning Blackwood accepted the money of any and all men--Negro, Mexican, Chinese, even a girl or two in dire straits--at a time when most other landlords turned away those with a hue in their flesh or a pickled breath. This and a general distrust of the police kept Blackwood''s rooming house full and brought him rapid success in the world of the down-and-outs. Eventually, other properties followed, dilapidated and distressed, picked up for pennies on the dollar. Early on, Blackwood became friendly with a professor of economics at Cal Tech, a man they called Stinky Sweeney, and together Blackwood and Sweeney pondered the many ways to expand their pies while most others watched theirs shrivel in the pan.
And oh how Blackwood''s pie had grown since he''d come to California! Spanish-tiled mansions divided into by-the-week apartments; long-closed dress and millinery shops on Colorado Street reconfigured as pawn emporiums and pool halls and even a lounge where girls danced in their rationed silk underwear; and the plots of sandy land bought for almost nothing from desperate, tax-hounded people who sometimes paid Blackwood to take the property off their hands! He padded his real-estate holdings with a position in steel stocks, in oil shares, and in a piece of a rubber-belt company that held a patent. But Blackwood knew that there was no asset in California like the parched terra firma that could crumble in the hand. The dirt road ended at three small cottages on a headland bluff. They overlooked the ocean, their foundations close to the eroding lip, where ropes of ice plant grew in rappel and belay. The cottages were on the verge of decrepitude, shredded tar paper and horizontal plank warped white with salt, and the arroyo-stone chimneys leaned precariously against the scabbed corrugated roofs. The wind was throwing dirt and sand in the bantam-pecked yard, and from the barn Blackwood heard a horse sneezing and the groan of an udder-sore cow. Blackwood, so skilled at this sort of evaluation, noted that there wasn''t a telephone pole in sight. What was it Blackwood had first taught himself when he arrived in California all those years ago? The true developer sees value where others turn away.
Blackwood got out of his car and called hello in a friendly way. What Blackwood didn''t know about himself was that pink-cheeked friendliness came naturally to him, and that others sensed it and trusted it, perhaps even when they should not. He was handsome in a safe, pale-featured way--handsome enough for success to have come to him just a little more easily than to most; but he was unaware of this slight advantage. In fact, Blackwood was certain that he had started off with no advantages at all. He was equally unaware of his natural powdery scent, much like a baby''s, not unpleasant but unusual for a man of forty-four. Oddly, however, on this December morning his typically cheerful "Hello! Anyone home?" emerged shrilly, as if he was nervous--like the call of a red-tail hawk. But Blackwood wasn''t the type of man who knew about birds and their calls. Since moving to California he had failed to grow curious about habitats and ranges and migration paths interrupted by the reach of man.
Like most Pasadenans--and certainly he thought of himself as one, although others, many others, did not--he delighted when a bald eagle alit in the Arroyo Seco. Why, the Star-News had run a picture of such an event this very morning!--but this was the extent of Blackwood''s ornithological interest. Had it been greater, he might have noted earlier the sign along the dirt road that read: CONDOR''S NEST STAY OUT "I''m afraid you''ve made a wrong turn," someone said. The voice came from behind one of the cottages, and Blackwood turned and removed his hat and said in that cheerful way of his, "Who''s there? How do you do? My name is Blackwood. Andrew Jackson Blackwood. Sorry to barge in." A man appeared on the porch, and Blackwood offered his free hand. "This is private property.
" "Yes, I''m aware of that. And I''m sorry to intrude, but in fact that''s why I turned down your drive. I thought we could have a chat." "You''ll have to leave." The man was taller than Blackwood, broad in shoulder but weary in whiskered cheek. His hair was as black as crude oil, his eyes too, and this made Blackwood think of his thousand shares that had doubled in value three years in a row. Only then did Blackwood realize that his hand was still extended. He wondered why the stranger hadn''t offered his own, but the paw of the man''s right hand, Blackwood now noted, was wrapped around the deer-foot handle of a hunting knife, and this caused Blackwood''s heart to sit up in his chest.
A waxy sweat broke out on his face as he noticed that the man''s shirt was sprayed with blood. On closer inspection, Blackwood could see that blood splattered the man''s pants as well. In the man''s hair, tiny rubies of blood sparkled, and there was a drop of blood on his lip, bright and round and trembling. Blackwood didn''t want to believe it, but the evidence suggested he had stumbled across a murder. Blackwood was silent, and his hand reached behind him for the Imperial Victoria''s door. He would try to leave. "Who sent you here?" "I . I .
" "Why did you come?" "I . I ." But Blackwood couldn''t. Suddenly there was a noise, like a log smacking the side of the cottage, and Blackwood''s knees, tender since his days kneeling in the flinty Maine soil, buckled, and he found himself huddled against the car, its door warm against his cheek. He heard the smacking noise again, and Blackwood, teary, looked to the man and was prepared to beg, to offer anything to be sent on his way without.