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Chapter 5 - Finding Work

A week had gone by but I still couldn't find a job. It wasn't that there was no work--other people were getting hired ahead of me. Work, it turns out, is all about who you know, and I honestly didn't know too many people who could help me get a job.

I was sitting in the park next to Lucas eating a churro when I told him about the problem. The young wolf looked over at me with one eye and a mouthful of sugary bread. "It's because no one knows you here," he commented.

"That much I gathered."

I sighed and took another small bite. I wasn't all that hungry but Lucas always was. I couldn't help but feed the kid when we were together. Lucas knew this too and always walked me by a cafe or a bakery or somewhere else that served food. I had to be careful or I would end up fat.

"I wish I could help you Simon but I don't know where a well traveled whore gets work besides at the Arc--Ow!" he yelped as I pinched one of his ears. I glared down at him.

"For the last time you smarmy pup, I am not a whore," I said calmly and let his ear go. Lucas made a show of it and rubbed the corner and finished his churro. He pouted a little bit and of course it tugged on my heart strings.

Lucas soon had what was left of my churro.

"But seriously," the wolf began as it kept trying to breathe in fried bread, "if I knew of a way to skip the line, I'd have done it for myself. Mama doesn't want me working anywhere dangerous like the rail lines, and the factories are full up. But it's okay, I get to spend my day bothering you!"

"Oh, goody." I grinned down at him and chuckled, leaning back and my elbows resting on the back of the bench. "I suppose, when you get right down to it, I'm also an immigrant. I haven't felt that way in a long time."

"You sound American, but you also said you work at it. Mama has me doing the same but it's hard... especially when I don't know a word I want to say in English."

"It'll come, you just need to keep working at it. Tristan is a good tutor, and I was watching you at the church. You take it seriously."

"I gotta," Lucas puffed his chest up. "If I'm not working, I need to make the best use of my free time. And St. Andrews is the best place for me. Plus the food is always so good!"

"I still don't know how those chopsticks work."

"Have you tried stabbing the food with the pointy ends?"

"Yes, and it got some laughter at my expense. A wonderfully sweet woman was showing me how to use it but it was touch and go there for a while."

"You said you were a sailor, yeah? You never went to the orient? China? Japan? Singapore?"

I thought about it for a moment. "Singapore a few times, but I only went to places where they spoke English. You're warned to not go too far away from the shops and inns and service the foreigners. Can be dangerous, get robbed. Not that I had much money on me, but I wasn't much older than you when I first got there and... ah, handsome boys are in demand there. Could have easily been kidnapped."

"Clearly you didn't. Or is that where you--"

"Say it. I dare you."

Lucas stared at me with his bright red eyes which slowly turned into a grin. More and more that wolfish smirk formed: "--where you learned all your secret whore techniques?"

I dove for the boy who was off the bench in a flash. He laughed and bounded just out of reach. I chased after him and watched him jump onto a fire escape, climbing up it toward the roof.

"Really?" I sighed and then crouched down, shooting up and grabbing the bar and hauling myself up. I knew where to put my feet and my hands, gliding up along the iron railing and was up on the roof before the boy. I was sitting on the ledge when he hauled himself up, huffing and puffing. I wasn't even winded.

When he looked at me he yelled. "AH!! How did you get up here?!"

"I told you, I used to work in the rigging on a ship. And before that, I was a chimney sweep. Climbing up and down things is second nature. I'm not scared of heights either. Weren't you paying attention?"

"Oh...right. Heh, I forgot, I guess."

I pretended to scowl and reached over, grabbing the boy by his neck and hauled him close in a headlock. "Now then, why don't we go down to the pier and try to find me a job."

"If I take you to someone who may be able to help, will you let me go?"

"Of course," I answered honestly and let him go.

"Good! There's this soda jerk on the way and I think--"

"Uuuuugh. Just get me there before sundown!"

Lucas took me back to Chinatown and then to St. Andrews in the most roundabout, twisted way imaginable. He just wanted to go to that soda jerk. I was angry at first, but it ended up being delicious. It was also just hard for me to be mad at him; I remember being hungry all the time and not having enough food -- though I was usually after loaves of bread, this scamp was getting fine sweets out of my generous heart.

Tri saw us as he opened the church gate to head outside, pulling on a trench coat. The wolf cub quickly explained the situation to the fox -- I recently learned that he was what people called a marble fox, a name which aptly described his unique gray and black accents on his primarily white fur -- who then smiled at me and said, "I think I can help you out."

Lucas winked up at me. "See? Tristan knows everyone in town practically. He can get you a job lickety-split."

I scoffed, "Why don't you pester him for a job yourself? So that you can be someone else's headache for a while." I then had my arm around his neck and pulled him in close. Lucas squirmed dramatically and yanked his head out from my grip.

"Finding jobs for children is much more difficult, I'm afraid," Tri said with a soft frown. "There are new labor laws being passed and better inventions being made. As a result, they aren't as in demand as they were even twenty years ago. Plus, you have to be very careful with finding careers for boys like Lucas."

"Huh? Why?" The wolf tilted his head in confusion.

I answered the question for Tri: "If a factory job here is anything like the factory jobs in London, kids can and do often get hurt in them very easily. Even if you pay attention completely, you can still lose an arm -- or even die."

"Gosh," Lucas frowned a little bit. "I didn't know that. That's why Papa said never go to the factories. Not that they're hiring boys like me anyway--"

"And just how do you know that, Lucas?" asked Tri with a knowing tone and a quirk of his brow.

"Oh! Uh...eheh, I mayhap had wandered by a few of 'em on my rounds around the city and...well...you know..."

I smirked. "Uh-huh. If I catch you near them, I'm telling your parents. They let you spend time with me because they think I'm a good person."

"Are you not a good person, Simon?" Tri asked. I couldn't tell if it was rhetorical or not.

"I do my best, and that includes keeping wolf boys alive." I glared down at Lucas who made a show of it by flattening his ears. "If you misbehave, they'll ground you, or worse, they'll let me put a leash on you."

"I promise to behave! You don't need to go telling my folks anything, Mr. Simon!"

I sighed. "Just do what you're told and we'll work from there, okay?"

"That's asking a lot of good old Lucas...but I think I can manage it. If we can go past that soda jerk again."

"Lucas," Tri said with a firmer voice, "I fear you're preying on Simon's good nature and generosity. I'm going to take Simon to the piers. I want you to stay here to help Father clean up the church. We're supposed to have some religious visitors, and I want you to help prepare for that."

"Yes, sir," the boy muttered with a defeated tone and headed inside the church.

Tri sighed and turned to look at me. "He needs some purpose in life. This idling will only lead to something dangerous. But his parents are working all the time, and his older sister just got married, so she can't watch him like she used to."

"Doesn't he have a little brother, too?"

"He does, but his mother is able to get an older woman to watch the cub. She doesn't want to burden Lucas. I think she may be worried he'll take the baby with him on one of his adventures."

"At the very least he is getting a chance to be a kid, which is something I think a lot of us missed out on."

Tri was silent for a moment and then turned. "Come, let's go for a walk to the pier. I need to stretch my legs."

Initially there was this air of cold silence pulsing off of the marble fox. I don't know if he noticed, but I could sense it. He didn't want me to see the anger boiling just under his controlled surface. But after a few minutes of walking, that churning anger seemed to ebb to nothing, and he was back to his usual self, with his soft and disarming smile.

"So what do you think of this little city called San Francisco?" he asked.

"That's... a hard question to answer. It's so different from London or New York City. The weather, the buildings, the people living here... It's more difficult for me to find something in common between San Francisco and where I previously lived."

"That's because this is what you would call the Wild West." Tri put his hands in his coat pockets as we walked. "This place used to be nothing but a stopping point for people looking to make it rich on gold. Even when California joined the Union, it was so far from Washington that it was on its own in practically every manner of speaking. It has gotten better with the advent of railways, telegraph, telephones, and all the benefits these modern wonders of technology brought upon us, but it still takes time."

I nodded. "I can feel how people here know that they're all they've got."

Tri's expression darkened. "Sadly, racism still persists even in a place with so many distinct people and cultures. Things have been building ever since the Bubonic plague outbreak in Chinatown a few years ago. When that happened, the authorities closed off access to the district for days. They didn't do anything, a lot of people were just sick."

"Do you mind if I ask what happened?"

The fox stared at the far mountains on the horizon. "The same thing that happens in every other area with a disease. It worked its way through the population and then petered out. But it was enough for the racists to start challenging the very idea of the Chinese being in this city. It was the annoying narrative of foreigners being disease-ridden and inferior to the Americans, who themselves are also foreigners to this land but merely happened to arrive a century or so earlier. What a joke."

I didn't answer. I just let Tri talk. I could tell he needed to get this off his chest, whatever it was.

"So now, America has laws limiting the number of immigrants who can come from Asia, the Orient. People who may be suffering and dying, or would be dead if they stayed in their home countries. But there are almost no restrictions on immigration from other countries like in western Europe. We used to get so many new people from China, but now it's a mere trickle. It's very sad."

I added softly, "It's not the same thing, but that's why I hide my accent." I pushed my own hands in my pockets as we neared the bay and I could smell the salty breeze brushing against my whiskers. "Being seen as someone who's different... it never helped me improve my situation."

"It's the sad reality of the world we live in." The marble fox looked at me and pointed a finger at himself. "I'm half-Japanese, but you wouldn't know it from how I talk or dress. I, like you, learned that it's better -- safer, even -- to blend in than to stand out. But it doesn't mean that I forsook my heritage or identity."

"Is that why you give so much of your time to the church and the community?"

Tri smiled and nodded. "These people were there for me when I really needed them, during my darkest days. I wouldn't be here without them. They're my family as far as I'm concerned."

"Everyone was really nice when I got to meet them."

The marble fox raised his eyebrows as he remembered something. "Oh! Speaking of that... You were very popular with everyone at the church, Simon. They were initially wary but you endeared yourself to a lot of them."

"I think you mean I amused them when I couldn't use the chopsticks," I laughed. Tri also laughed. It was a good memory.

"Well, that certainly helped. You demonstrated a desire to understand our ways and our culture. That's not very common. I had been waiting for you to ask for a fork. I even had one in my pocket."

"I'm glad I bucked expectations. They wouldn't mind me coming back for more lessons?"

"You are welcome to come even if they were hesitant. We don't turn people away at St. Andrews. But I will say that they want to meet you again. They also wanted me to tell you that you don't need to hide your accent around us. We would never judge you by the way you speak. You can be yourself."

That made me pause. In my life since leaving London, no one had really been put off by the fact that I was from England, but no one had told me that they wanted me to speak with my regular voice. I'm sure Fiz and Rut wouldn't have minded, and probably didn't even think that it was something to bring up, but to have it told to me was another matter entirely.

"I have to actively work at not speaking like an American then," I joked at the idea. But it also felt refreshing. "Thank you. I promise to speak like my royal self when I'm at St. Andrews."

"Just do whatever is most comfortable, Simon. That's all we want, and it's what everyone deserves, no?"

I was so deep in thought about the option--or rather, the invitation to talk without my fake American accent--that I didn't notice passing by the dockyards. It wasn't until I smelled the scent of fresh wood over the salty sea air that I knew we had gone all the way down the Embarcadero to the shipyards.

If you've never seen a shipyard, they're something to behold. It is a twister of wood, brick, water, steel, and everything else in between required to make a new ship. They had their own lumber mills and foundries, as well as a plethora of other shops and stalls making things to build ships. So much went into maintaining a vessel that, when I first started my life as a sailor, I was surprised how fragile these things actually were.

The shipyard was going through a kind of evolution, too. Steel was the new material of the twentieth century and there were ships also being made of the material. I was hesitant to ever board a metal ship -- could you even feel the ship move with the water? What would you do on a ship without rigging? The whole idea was baffling to me.

Oh Lord... Am I getting old?

I was staring up in awe of the ships in drydock, some on struts and others in dry pits near the water, ships and boats in various states of construction. To the far side of the pier were other ships moored and being worked on. I was grinning from ear to ear, and Tri must have noticed.

"You like ships?" he asked.

I nodded. "I spent years on one of them. They're practically as familiar to me as a rooftop. I was really good at my job, too. It's too bad that the crew wasn't the best company."

"Well, I'm hoping your skills on your ship aren't terribly rusty. Follow me."

Tri motioned for me to hurry with him through the docks, dodging people so smoothly without even turning his head or having to stop. He walked with a grace that felt somehow familiar.

We stopped in front of a slender-looking canine unlike any I had seen before. At a glance I had assumed he was a very thick fox, but his eyes were all wrong and the orange color of his fur didn't lay like your typical red fox.

The man was wearing a handsome three-piece suit and carrying with him a clipboard. When we stopped he looked at me and then at the marble fox and smiled. "Tri! What are you doing here?" They shook hands and then even hugged. The orange canine, a dhole as I would soon find out, was beaming. Tri seemed to have that effect on people.

"Hello John, I hope we're not intruding on your work?" The multi-colored fox was always so polite.

"Oh, no, you're always welcome here, Tri. Who's your friend?"

"This is Simon King. He's new to the city and I was hoping you could help him find some gainful employment. Simon, this is John Wong, assistant foreman for the pier and a good friend of mine. We were boyhood friends."

"It's a pleasure, Mr. Wong." I shook his hand politely. I then remembered to take my cap off and smiled.

The whole event seemed to amuse Mr. Wong who chuckled softly at my antics. The foreman looked at his clipboard and flipped through some of the pages on it before looking up at me.

"It's quite all right Mr. King! You don't have to worry about your cap with me, just take it off if you ever go inside the office. Now... you said you were looking for a job? What can you do?"

"Well, I spent five years on a sailing ship. Went down to the Caribbean more times than I can count. Also went to Singapore, Florida, the whole of the Eastern United States... I worked as a deckhand before I was assigned rigging."

"You look like a sailor. You keep looking up, making sure the ropes are where they're supposed to be, eh?"

I shrugged. "I suppose so. I spent a lot of time up there, and I know how crazy it can be even in calm weather."

"Not afraid of heights or anything like that?"

"No, sir, heights never bothered me."

"And how much work on ship repair and construction did you do?"

"Everything required when we were out at sea, sometimes helping when we were in port. I never did anything big like replacing the keel, but I did what I was told."

"Hm," the dhole rubbed his chin and looked between me and Tri. "Normally I would say no, we don't really need someone new coming about here, but if Tri took you here personally, you must be good people. I can give you a job starting tomorrow with helping build and repair these girls. Just don't be afraid to ask questions and do what you're told."

I beamed. "Yes, sir!"

"Great," Mr. Wong said with a wry grin. "Be here tomorrow morning at 7 AM sharp. Dress warmly, it can be very cold at daybreak. Tri, it was wonderful seeing you again. Mr. King, don't be late."

When the dhole walked off I turned to Tri and threw my arms around his shoulders, laughing. "Thank you, Tri! I didn't even consider working on ship repair and construction!"

The marble fox smiled and put his arms around me, laughing softly. "You just aren't thinking about all your skills, Simon. Always be aware of your surroundings and what you can apply your abilities toward. Don't let something surprise you, ever, if you can avoid it."

Again, that sounded familiar, somehow.

Tri took out his pocket watch to check the time. "We should get back to St. Andrews now before Lucas sets something on fire. Do you want to help us with dinner again, Simon?"

"I'd love to. Maybe I'll actually get the hang of those chopsticks."

I had once told myself I would never do any work on a ship again, that I was done being a sailor and that my time on the _Paramour_was done. But now, I had to admit, I was excited.

I think I was going to like this job.