California Bloodstock

by Terry McDonell

  What can I do for you?

  How about a miracle, Slant said, disgusted with women in general.

  Of the flesh or spirit?

  Whichever is the more difficult for you to manage, he told her.

  How would you like to meet an earth angel, she winked, one with the bloom of Eden and the grace of a swan on a silver lake?

  Interesting, Slant admitted, warming to the challenge. But what about the fluid moves of a racehorse and the radiance of midnight orchids.

  Of course, she replied. And don’t forget the elegance of a diamond needle and the purity of an albino’s tear.

  What fun it was: they leapfrogged in the above manner late into the night, and then nightly well into the months of Pippa’s pregnancy. Without a thought to the expectant mother, these two verbal libertines constructed new declensions of hyperbole in the name of an ideal that went far beyond breasts like twin roes hanging out on Mount Gilead. What to name their evolving perfection was a problem until Slant came across an obscure sixteenth-century tract about a western island in the zone of terrestrial paradise that the author, a visionary named Ordonez de Montalvo, had peopled with a race of Amazons ruled by a queen he called Calafia. The queen’s name was as tacky as Athena, but one of her huntresses, a canny woman-child who ran with the griffins, had a name that struck Slant’s fancy. As you can probably guess, the name was Taya.

  What could Pippa do? Her fool of a husband was out till all hours, returning, it seemed, only to moan for someone named Taya in his stupefied sleep. She had no choice but to employ a private agent to follow her husband, and ultimately pay off Josie Spoon to permanently eighty-six him. Josie was happy enough to oblige in this regard, saying that things were getting a bit kinky anyway. From that point until he left New York for keeps, Slant spent most of his time drinking alone on his roof, staring west, toward Newark and beyond.

  I must soon quit this scene, he told himself upon seeing his son T. D. Jr. born ugly and screaming like a troll.

  I am considering an affair, Pippa confided to the little Frenchman who owned the haberdashery where she bought white knit suits for the baby.

  It was just a matter of time.

  19

  For the Baby’s Sake II

  The wealth of furs that had changed hands at the Great Salt Lake had by this time reached the eastern markets, and numerous expeditions were being organized to cash in on the newly opened territory. To the courageously greedy and the morose, a trek west made infinitely more sense than waiting around to be hit by a pack of escapees from the Fifth Avenue Home for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquency or taking the train out to Hoboken to watch a shaggy old sack of bones get croaked in one of the lately popular buffalo hunts that drew thousands of New Yorkers. At least that’s how Slant saw things.

  Thus, he angled an opportunity to join up with a company of uncertain sponsorship led by Benjamin Louis Bonneville. Slant would serve as historian and record keeper with the rank of lieutenant. The hardest part, he sarcastically informed his colleagues at the paper, would be deciding what to wear.

  When he informed his wife that he would be stepping out for a couple of years for the baby’s sake, she replied caustically that if he had to run away to act like a man he might as well not come back. They never saw each other again.

  His departure on a muggy August morning, on the first of what turned out to be a number of expeditions, left her in a rather comfortable balance. She had T. D. Sr. to hate and she had T. D. Jr. to love.

  Although little is known about her romantic life after her husband ran off, it is probably safe to assume that she screwed around. There was a great deal of gossip about her, and she started drinking sherry again in the afternoon.

  20

  T. D. Jr.

  The privilege and protection afforded T. D. Slant Jr. as a child did not stop him from tumbling out of his adolescence with a certain, well, hunger. He entered Harvard College at seventeen and threw himself into a full flowering of collegiate decadence. He hung around with a club of rich southern boys and distinguished himself as a foul-mouthed rascal on club outings through Boston’s waterfront brothels and dives. In his sophomore year he smoked opium on a bet.

  Pippa Lippencot Slant naturally did all she could for her son, and old Backhouse in turn promised wondrous rewards if the lad would just settle down and study. But it was no use. T. D. Jr. found class-work the equal of floggings, and the suffocating orthodoxies of scholarly Cambridge, he claimed, made him at times want to puke his guts out.

  He had the temperament of an artist, Pippa decided. She encouraged him to study art, and as it turned out he was not without talent. He could sketch easily and well, often capturing the complexities of landscape with an economy of strokes. He dropped out of Harvard but remained in Boston, taking a large empty warehouse near the docks as a studio. His paintings were considered stark.

  He was disgusted with the romanticism of contemporary painting, all those rainbows and lapdogs with pink bows around their necks, the dripping sentiment and cute symbolism and sloppy draftsmanship. He rebelled. He became obsessed with realism. He tried to paint scenes exactly as he saw them but his talent failed him. He simply could not catch life in a mirror.

  But all was not lost. He had been following the development of daguerreotype and now began to see it as reality’s main chance. The process was clumsy, requiring a bulky camera box, long exposures during which there could be no movement, and the complicated and precise juggling of silver, sunlight, and various chemical vapors at specific temperatures; but the results were splendid. There were portrait studios employing the process, turning out likenesses so accurate that you could count a man’s whiskers.

  T. D. Jr. soon mastered the technique, but not to make portraits. He was determined to bring its realism to landscapes, to turn the lens on the world and show what it looked like, what it really looked like with no pussyfooting around. He was interested in perspective and the scale of things, images too grand for the normal eye to register without help, pictures so real yet of such sweeping scope that they became abstract, like the horizon or the future. He wanted to put man in his place.

  Massachusetts, indeed all of the East, let T. D. Jr. down. Nowhere could he find views of sufficient depth to test his principles.

  He was cursing the tininess of it all in a saloon near his studio on the occasion of his twenty-first birthday, when he met Richard Henry Dana. Dana, the eccentric and bumbling attorney who, as a Harvard undergraduate, had shipped before the mast to California and written a best seller about it. Poor Dana, now so pitifully under the thumb of a pious Calvinist wife that he was forced to cloak his visits to the joints on the waterfront in the guise of missionary work. T. D. Jr. had read the book and saw him coming.

  Young man, Dana demanded in a stern and fatherly voice, what business have you in this dive and what is that evil you are drinking?

  He snatched up T. D. Jr.’s drink and put it away in one neat swallow. T. D. Jr. ordered another drink for Dana to sample and, remembering that the best humor is based on cruelty, decided to have a little fun.

  So…it’s come to this, T. D. Jr. goaded.

  What’s come to what?

  Old men in dry months waiting for pain.

  What?

  Like you, T. D. Jr. said, waiting for pain. You know, out of it. Why don’t you quit playing the fool?

  Dana was incredulous. Veins bulged in his forehead. His eyes narrowed. He stared at his hands now gone parchment grey after years of association with little other then ledgers and holy scriptures. Then, slowly squeezing them into soft fists, he looked up at T. D. Jr. and blurted out what would catch on a century later as a truly all-American response: I could have had it all.

  Sure, T. D. Jr. said, rolling his eyes. But he did sense a certain change fibrillating in Dana. A temporary change to be sure, but at least notable in that Dana started buying his own drinks. And as he drank on, Dana’s imagination took giant steps backward, which in turn hoisted his
dignity like a flag, until he was swaggering at the bar like a buccaneer. Gesturing wildly with his walking stick, he raved about his adventures as a young man, depicting heroic scenes of himself in California, a land of such enormous presence as to dwarf God’s own soul…but not his.

  Not knowing any better, T. D. Jr. was intrigued, and they drank together through the night, an old man telling a young man about fortune and mistakes, lying.

  At dawn the sun popped up out of the Atlantic, splattering them straight in the face with what Dana translated to T. D. Jr. as the moral of what they had been talking about. With tears in his eyes, Dana said that a man’s only business was to make his life as exciting and interesting as possible.

  Go to California, he said, and don’t come back.

  Why not, T. D. Jr. figured, maybe the place had scale.

  21

  The Artist’s Progress

  T. D. Jr. returned to New York and told his mother that he was going west to make his life more interesting. He felt his boots quite solid on the marble floor of his mother’s library.

  California, he said.

  Pippa looked at her son standing there in his bottle-green cutaway and thought the scariest thought a mother can think: I have birthed a fool.

  Naturally she was bitter, figuring that her son’s plans had something to do with the rumor she had heard about her estranged husband having settled in California. But this was not the case; it had nothing to do with his father although, now that she mentioned it, looking old T. D. up once he got there sounded like a reasonable thing for T. D. Jr. to do.

  Dinner that evening with Backhouse Fish Lippencot went badly. Pippa soon exhausted reasonable argument and grew snide and bitchy. T. D. Jr. stared at the cherubs and stags molded into the ceiling, and nervously drummed his butter knife on the stemware. Old Backhouse looked alternately at his daughter and grandson and thought it was all too predictable for words. It figures, is all he would say.

  Finally, in desperation, Pippa gave T. D. Jr. a copy of his father’s book so that he could read for himself of the scoundrels Dad had taken up with. T. D. Jr. said he’d read it on the way, and after spending the money his grandfather had slipped him on the best daguerreotype equipment and chemicals available, he traveled west by rail and stage to St. Louis. There he boarded a paddle-wheel gambling boat and enjoyed the cruise down the Mississippi immensely, winning close to $1,000 at roulette with what the croupier, one Pierre Wallingsford, described as blind luck.

  Disembarking in New Orleans, however, he was approached by Wallingsford, who explained that he had ensured the young traveler’s luck by clever manipulation of a hidden foot pedal. Wallingsford claimed to have been fired as a result and now expected his share of the winnings. T. D. Jr. questioned Wallingsford’s honesty and in the ensuing argument the latter challenged the former to a duel. They were to meet in a meadow curtained with weeping willows and Spanish moss at dawn the following day, but T. D. Jr. made other arrangements.

  He cleared the harbor shortly after midnight aboard a dark-sailed bark of dubious reputation bound for Panama, leaving Wallingsford’s underhanded deal with the dueling referees to cause more trouble and embarrassment for the former croupier.

  T. D. Jr. was disgusted to find that his ship, the Rainbow, was a former outlaw vessel only recently gone straight as a slaver. When a storm splintered her mizzenmast eleven days out of New Orleans, forcing her into Vera Cruz for repairs, he sought other transportation as a protest against human bondage. The captain called him a naive lickspittle and refused to refund any portion of his fare. Undaunted, T. D. Jr. decided upon a land crossing of Mexico and reached Mazatlan two months later with a respectable command of Spanish, a bleached mustache, and a deep tan.

  Leaving Mazatlan he sailed for Monterey via the Sandwich Islands, a roundabout route only to those who don’t understand the ass-busting monotony of a long tack up the coast. During the layover in Honolulu he made several daguerreotypes of spectacular volcanic mountains and a portrait of one Samuel Brannan, the leader of a party of quarrelsome Mormons, also en route to California. Apparently something about Brannan fascinated him.

  Under sail again on the last leg of his journey, young T. D. watched dolphins racing the bow of the schooner Eagle and counted the days like a spoiled child waiting for his birthday.

  FIVE

  22

  Joaquin Peach

  Sexual currents and horses, fandangos in the plaza, and sweet kisses on the beach; but not for Taya.

  The Eagle was in from the Sandwich Islands and Taya watched naked Worm Eaters pile hides on the embarcadero. The Eagle was rumored to have two violins in its hold along with its stocks of coffee, chocolate, and gun powder, and there was much excitement. Any excuse for a baile. Taya had dressed carefully in her best deerskin boots, embroidered chemise, and full, gathered muslin skirt secured about her waist with a scarlet silk sash. Dressing up improved her mood but she had no plan for dancing. No, she had come to watch the way things happen to people.

  Two greaser dons in from San Juan Bautista for some shopping strutted toward her. They wore their britches part way open to show off full underdrawers of white linen. Separating in front of her like a river current sliding around a snag, they passed close on either side making obscene high-pitched sucking sounds. As they melded side-by-side again behind her, she turned to spit, but it was no use. They were laughing. She bit her lip and walked back across the plaza toward the custom house.

  Everywhere there was preparation for the baile, and everywhere also there was talk of revolution against Mexico and speculation about take-over by the gringos. Gringos, of course, were known as good dancers but Taya didn’t think about them that way anymore. She had been having her own revolution. She had begun to think of herself as a country, her own country, a free country, the United States of Herself. And such sovereignty not only saved her spirit; it was perfect for California back then. Indeed, the land was peppered with assorted free-state personas looking to increase their treasuries.

  Near the customhouse she was confronted by just such a person, one Joaquin Peach, formerly of Valpariso. He wore the billowy white pants of his native Chile and carried himself with the confidence of a conquistadore. He had come to California to soldier for Mexico but, seeing the possibilities, quickly struck out on his own with a number of other rotos. The rotos, of course, were a class apart, men with much tradition. Originally the lowborn gangsters who had driven Spain out of Chile, new generations of rotos had gone on to fight for various ambitious politicians in revolution after revolution throughout South America. Now they were showing up in California, gay and belligerent, starting knife fights and stealing chickens.

  Well, here comes the sunshine, Joaquin Peach announced loudly as Taya approached.

  I hate you all, Taya thought, and kept walking.

  Wait, Peach said, I saw you with those greaser dons. How about a present?

  As she passed, Peach smiled and reached out for her arm. Taya slapped his hand away. He smiled again. She went and leaned against a barrel in the shade of a fat oak on the edge of the plaza. Peach followed her.

  Please wait, he said. And watch. Fun for you, and a present too. Maybe.

  A quick bow and he was off, swaggering through the scattered crowd toward the two greaser dons who were now celebrating their purchase of twin tortoise-shell combs from the schooner’s mate. They were taking turns gulping from a bottle of brandy and flashing the combs at passing Californianas, with lecherous suggestions as to how the combs might be had. Obnoxious but altogether common behavior for gentlemen of their class.

  Taya watched Joaquin Peach step between them and in one quick flurry snatch the bottle and rap them both on the forehead. They went down like puppets with their strings cut and Peach picked up the combs. Speed and surprise were of the essence here, but Peach did not rush off. Instead, he stood proudly exhibiting the combs. A crowd gathered. The greaser dons worked at blinking their way out of the shock that always follows a sucker
punch. It took them about a minute to focus on Peach; and it was at this point that Peach told them they had the manners of goats and turned on his heel in the direction of his horse. The chase was on.

  Chase, however, is the wrong word. Follow-the-leader would be more like it. Around the plaza went Peach, picking up more mounted pursuers with each pass. And soon he was doing tricks, gallop bounces and saddle reverses, which all in his dust, including the greaser dons, found impossible to resist mimicking. Or improving on.

  This showboating merry-go-round went on for a good ten minutes, until Peach dropped the tortoise-shell combs in front of Taya, and hit the road north at a high lope with the greaser dons et al in whooping pursuit.

  How dashing.

  But so what. Taya picked up the combs and tossed them into a small huddle of Worm Eaters. She’d take a ride herself.

  Trotting south down the beach toward the point, she hardly noticed a young man with a pale mustache messing around with strange devices and holding forth at the Eagle’s captain about the significance of what he had just seen. Something about a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn’t attending to, and something more about his work catching things you don’t usually see.

  No, Taya hardly noticed.

  23

  Family Portrait

  T. D. Jr. had a picture of his father, a daguerreotype actually, that he had made from a family portrait he found in the attic of his mother’s townhouse. He had studied it until he was convinced that he could recognize his father anywhere, but standing at the patio gate that evening in California he was not so sure.