Dulce had been dead for a decade, almost to the day. Delgado had planned his return to Los Angeles to coincide with that anniversary, according to the terms of the deal he’d been forced to make in order to avenge her murder… although he didn’t want to contemplate that just now. The pain of her loss had been dulled by time, but he could still feel it as keenly as a new wound whenever he made the mistake of letting memory catch up with him.
The town at the end of the tracks had still been called ‘Toluca’ when he departed from this same station a full ten years before. He was a native Californio, Tomas Delgado was, born on a nearby rancho in the year 1845, and he remembered back to a time when this particular place had enjoyed no proper name at all.
But then the times were changing, weren’t they? Everything was changing, change was absolutely derigueur these days. In the fullness of time, Delgado reflected, this little boondock situated to the north of Hollywood would probably come to be called something else again.
He eased himself down from the private car el Rey’s man had chartered for him and stepped onto the wooden platform, leaning heavily on his cane.
His hip seemed to ache even when the weather was warm, these days.
At sixty-five, Tom felt far older in his bones than he did in his mind. On some days that discrepancy didn’t bother him a bit, but on others, it did.
He paused on the platform while his fellow travelers milled around him, greeting families or fussing with trunks, tickets and porters, then shielded his eyes to look south.
The Santa Monica Mountains jutted up from the earth a few miles away, divided by the natural cleft once known to the old people as Kawengna. It was the ‘Cahuenga’ Pass these days, the old native name approximated by a new Spanish spelling.
Not far beyond the pass, Tom knew, was a lonely field in which stood an ancient and gnarled encino, or oak tree, whose limbs had always pointed up at a Hole in the Sky. A Hole where someone was currently waiting for him to climb up and crawl through, as he’d long ago promised he would… one day.
And now that day had come.
Tom sighed. He could hardly complain. He’d had a decade to roam the earth and money enough to do it in style. He’d bedded the most beautiful of women during that time; dined at the finest of tables; drunk himself stupid on the rarest liqueurs. He’d seen the cities and palaces of Europe, traveled the colorful trade routes of Egypt and India, sipped at tea or opium while conversing with silken courtesans in the lacquered pavilions of the Orient. Through the grace of his patron Mictlantecuhtli, the ancient Aztec ReydeLosMuertos, the old sorcerer had done and seen and had just about everything he could remotely imagine doing or seeing or having, but now…
Now that he’d traveled so far to the west that he was a mere ocean away from the mysterious East again (and, more importantly, now that the bill for the whole affair was about to come due), he couldn’t help but feel a touch of what the world’s professional pitchmen were said to have labeled ‘buyer’s remorse.’
Caveat Emptor indeed, Tom thought.
Watt, the skinny Englishman whose given name was Wendell or Wilson or Webster or something like that, if Tom remembered correctly, was already waiting for him across the street. Leaning against the Japan-black fender of a brand new Model T, right out in front of the Lankershim Post Office, where they couldn’t fail to miss each other.
Watt raised a hand in greeting and Tom waved back, muttering “Hijo de puta…” through a phony rictus of a smile.
He’d expected at least one night to himself. A chance to eat a last meal in a proper restaurant and sleep in a soft hotel bed. Not the King’s one-man welcome wagon over there. But he knew it was in his best interests to keep a pleasant face on things.
And besides, he ought to be at least a little bit grateful. The Pacific Electric Railway had plans (again, according to the papers) to open a Big Red Streetcar line up from Hollywood to the recently-rechristened Lankershim sometime in the next year, but until then the only way over to the field containing the Tree That Grew Below the Hole in the Sky was via the rutted, winding dirt track that snaked through the mountain pass.
The route was known by now simply as Pass Road, though Tomas could remember a day when it had been part of el Camino Real, the Royal Road connecting all the Spanish Missions up and down the coast. He also knew, beyond what he could personally recall, that it’d served the old people as something that might be better described as the Carretera del Rey, the King’s Highway (or simply the Road that Runs Past the Hole in the Sky), for some millennia before that.
Riding in Woolgar or Wilshire or Wilbur Watt’s fancy new auto-mobile would certainly be easier on Tom’s old bones than the joint-jarring trudge in a hired horsecart that was his only other option.
El Rey never skimped on hospitality. Not even when it overwhelmed his guests.
Wallace or Walter or Watson crouched down to crank-start the Tin Lizzie while Tom hefted his bag over his shoulder and hobbled across the street on his walking stick. He’d heard those engines had a tendency to kick back if the spark wasn’t properly retarded, and he wondered if he wasn’t about to witness Willie or Wally or Whatever his name was breaking a thumb.
But no, the engine sputtered safely to life, and Watt stood to shake Tom’s hand. “Welcome home, Tom,” the Englishman said, in his characteristically clipped and formal tones. He lowered his voice to add: “Mictlantecuhtli would see you.”
Tom knew. That’s why he was here.
He nodded, climbed up into the fancyass car, and held onto his hat as Winston (yes, that was it, Winston) Watt piloted the noisy contraption out into traffic and away down the street, frightening any number of horses.
By the time they reached the far side of the pass Tom learned to be glad that the racket kicked up by Mr. Watt’s ‘auto-mobile’ more or less precluded casual conversation. He also learned, after they stopped for a gulp of water at the Eight Mile House (a small way station and hostel situated in the middle of the pass), that the infernal thing could hammer along at a pace of almost twenty-five miles per hour on a straightaway. Watt felt compelled to demonstrate that property, for some unfathomable reason, as they barreled down the southern side of the mountains.
It felt suicidally fast to Tom. He remembered the headline furor surrounding the death-by-motorcart of a man named Henry Hale Bliss way back in 1899. The accident had still been the talk of the town when he first disembarked in New York City, after leaving Los Angeles. He further remembered naively regretting that the internal combustion fad hadn’t snuffed itself out before such a tragedy had to occur. Tom had been certain, back then, that the threat of violent, crushing death would finally be enough to dampen the public’s rabid enthusiasm for this absurd new sport of ‘motoring.’
He, apparently, could not have been more wrong about that.
Twice he and Watt met with vehicles like their own as they traversed the Carretera del Rey-noisy bouncing carriages piloted by grinning idiots swaddled in dusters and goggles, and each time such an encounter occurred one car or the other was forced to back some number of yards down the narrow dirt track until it widened out enough for someone to pull off into the weeds and let the other motorist pass by.