California Bloodstock

by Terry McDonell

  Excuse me.

  The old man was obviously drunk. He located the sound easily enough but seemed to have difficulty shifting his eyes to fix the young intruder in his liquid vision.

  I am looking for Mr. T. D. Slant.

  What’s it to you?

  T. D. Jr. tried to measure the deterioration of the old man. He moved closer in the twilight, close enough to catch a whiff of whisky breath vaporizing with the essence of rose water and the smell of beard wax and damp tobacco. And something else. The scent of bile, perhaps, sweating through the old man’s pores. It was vaguely familiar. He had sniffed it as an infant in a white knit suit crawling through dirty laundry. Suddenly he was sure.

  Father!

  The old man’s eyes twitched frantically, out of control, flooding. Could this really be his son, the son he had walked away from like a bad debt? No. More likely just another rude joke meant to humiliate him further. And yet, if it were true, if the young man standing before him truly was his son, what better time for him to arrive? A son in need is a son indeed, he reasoned. Still, he’d be damned if he’d let this kid, son or not, make a fool of him.

  Prove it!

  T. D. Jr. pulled the daguerreotype from his coat pocket and handed it to the old man. Sure enough. Captured in the silver emulsion, a woman sat with a slight curl to her mouth. An infant in a knit suit of obvious French styling balanced on her lap. Standing behind them was a man in a beaver hat. Old T. D. Slant squinted and found himself locking eyes with one of the men he used to be.

  A moment later, he passed out.

  24

  Taya

  Taya rode the beach late into the night, watching the tide pull the sand clean then wash back and mess it up again. It occurred to her that she was no longer living her life. That it was the other way around. That her life was living her.

  25

  Youth Wants to Know

  When Taya found father and son together on the patio in the morning, much explaining was in order all the way around. T. D. Jr. agreed. He had liked her right off, when he had seen her in the plaza. And he liked her more now. Taya made breakfast and then sat next to T. D. Jr. across from the old man. Together they waited.

  You know how it is when someone doesn’t want to tell quite the whole truth? Well, that was old T. D., his mind strobing back over the years, looking for easy answers. He felt a babbling fit coming on, and there was no dignity in that. Taya kept staring at him as if he were someone else, and his son, he noticed, wasn’t blinking much either. He lost his wits totally for a long silent moment and when they returned he was desperate.

  What do you want from me?

  T. D. Jr. was a bit unnerved by the outcry but Taya wasn’t even startled. Her words came out flat and sharp.

  Who is he?

  Who?

  My father.

  It was not as if she were deliberately hardening on old T. D. Or was she? He had expected her to ask, eventually, when they were both recovered, but not now. When he saw something very sharp crystallizing in her eyes he went to pieces and told her everything he knew. Almost.

  And strange, very strange was the following week. Almost no conversation among the three of them, but they were very polite to each other, like new in-laws. Finally, off they went, leaving Monterey in a wet predawn fog. First Taya and T. D. Jr. riding out front on horseback. Then came old Slant, creaking along in a small cart loaded with the books he was saving for his old friend Vallejo, a few personal effects, and his son’s daguerreotype paraphernalia.

  Over the years, old T. D. had developed a theory about the four points of the compass. You go west for adventure, east for civilization, south for hospitality, and north for obscurity. He sucked in the damp air and exhaled a low gushing whistle. Whew, he was traveling north. What he saw as the new inevitabilities of his life eased through his mind, and he relaxed at the prospect of fading quietly into insignificance. He was kidding himself.

  And he was still at it when they reached the scattered fruit orchards of the Santa Clara Valley. They stopped beside a shiny little creek and he suggested they rest for an hour or so, take a little nap. Without waiting for an answer, he arranged himself in the warm grass and stared up at a blank, indifferent sky. But before he could close his eyes, Taya sent the twin horses of guilt and anxiety racing through his mind once again by announcing that she was not going on to Yerba Buena.

  She said she was going to find her father and then take care of Sewey and the Burgetts. She had decided, and that was that. He and T. D. Jr. here could do as they pleased. She had crows to pluck.

  Old T. D. rattled to his feet, arguing like an auctioneer, spitting a combination of perils and insecurities at her like darts. He called her an hysterical adolescent. He spit in the creek for emphasis. It was the worst of times and dangerous folly to go traipsing around in this obviously darkening climate looking for a father who was, likely as not, dead anyway.

  When he ran out of argument he threatened her with force. Goddamnit, he’d make her stay with him, for her own good. But when she calmly shook her head, he found himself nodding hopelessly in uneasy agreement.

  T. D. Jr., who had remained silent through his father’s harangue, was now about to offer up similar advice when she turned to him, a cautious smile unfolding on her face like a challenge, and he could not stop himself from returning it. After all, it was a man’s business to make her life as exciting and interesting…etc. He liked her better than his father anyway: youth against age, and all that. Maybe even a bit more.

  That evening in San Jose, old T. D. told Taya about Counsel, the only man he thought might know what had passed over the last fifteen years with Buckdown. And later that night he took his son aside. They walked out into the warm darkness of the town’s deserted square, mind to mind, father and son perhaps for the first time. Perhaps for the only time. They kept their voices low, specific, and sentimental.

  The next morning old T. D. Slant climbed into his cart and headed for Yerba Buena alone, wondering if Buckdown was alive and asking himself if courage had to hang between a man’s legs.

  SIX

  26

  Buckdown

  Buckdown had cut the moorings of his life as simply as he cut loose the martin and beaver he found still alive in his traps. He put none out of misery, even as he found them gnawing through their own shanks toward freedom. He simply set them free and watched numbly as they limped away, dragging maimed paws and forelegs in shock. He ate the dead ones out of habit but left their pelts where they fell like so many bloody rags to stiffen in the weather.

  When he wanted to talk he would go find Counsel’s place, wherever it happened to be at the time, on the Great Salt Lake one year, back up on the Yellowstone the next. He would take months searching it out, wanting to talk out the string of his pathetic life. But then he would get there and have nothing to say. Counsel had a Shoshone wife. That was part of it. And Counsel guarded her jealously.

  The last time Buckdown visited Counsel it was winter, snowing at Counsel’s new place on the Snake. He found the trader deep in conversation with Hippolyte Weed. They were talking about California, where Weed was heading.

  Milk and honey and furs and fun,

  California, here I come.

  Weed kept repeating his rhyme, while Counsel insisted that he couldn’t care less.

  Once again Buckdown could find nothing to say and left at once without even a peek at Counsel’s wife. Tears froze on his cheeks and he was glad the falling snow was covering his tracks. He would be gone from the world of men. Yes. And women?

  His wife was past him, he knew that, but her death pulled at him with each dropping moon. He couldn’t think. He made up simple equations in his mind, but none of them balanced. He loved her, still loved her, and that was the terrible weight of his unbalanced reckoning. He had led her and that bastard Slant on an expedition that scouted too deep into the wilds of happiness. It was all his fault. He hated himself. The seasons rolled by around him. He lost years.


  27

  His Own Ghost

  Buckdown became a wandering recluse, traveling aimlessly, talking only to animals. He was a strange man and strange things happened. One day, staring over some nameless cliff….

  Brother!

  Buckdown jerked around to face a grinning collage of bones, feathers, and vegetation. It was His Own Ghost, the albino son of a minor subchief of the tricky Western Utes. As a child his unique opaqueness had marked him for a life of spiritual pursuits with no questions asked. He was considered gifted, a prodigy. At twelve he was recognized as a full-rank shaman, by fourteen he was experimenting with medicinal plants, and at fifteen he had hit the trail less traveled by. Now in his fortieth spring, as he put it, he was widely known as a keeper of the spiritual buckskins. He traveled from tribe to tribe, from the Colorado to the Klamath, spreading visionary insights and potent little peyote buttons that he gathered and processed in his own secret desert near Agua de Las Vegas.

  In Buckdown he recognized a man obviously ajar with himself, but a man with a certain potential for mythic content just the same. He had been following the mountainman for several weeks, noting his peculiar behavior and intense sorrow.

  I am His Own Ghost and I was born magic, he told Buckdown. Sit down and relax. I will put you straight.

  Buckdown blinked. There he was, eye to eye with a pink-eyed Indian being offered salvation as if it were a piece of dog meat. His jaw dropped and His Own Ghost thrust a carved bone pipe into the gaping mouth. Why not? Buckdown figured, and puffed. His Own Ghost smiled and fired up a pipe for himself. The wind rose. They sat down smoking, studying each other.

  Buckdown wondered about His Own Ghost’s outfit. His footwear had been fashioned from two large desert reptiles, lizards slit down the back and hollowed out to accommodate feet. The dragonlike heads and heavily scaled tails had been left intact. They wiggled at heel and toe of the shaman’s feet as if about to take off in directions of their own choice. His loins were packed with some kind of elemental muck, wet and pliable, yet concrete enough to support an assortment of flowering twigs and branches that had been poked, or perhaps planted, into it. Over his shoulders he wore a cape of white feathers, ribbed with the delicate skeletons of tiny rodents and snakes. It gave off a hollow tinkling sound whenever His Own Ghost moved his arms. Hanging from his neck were a number of brightly colored pouches.

  Good smoke, Buckdown said.

  Tolache, His Own Ghost corrected. Some people call it jimsonweed and ignore the white flowers that blow everywhere. Stupid and sad people, the Great Emptiness for them.

  Buckdown didn’t know what to think. He himself felt stupid and sad. Then he began to feel little feathers growing out of his head and he wanted to fly with the birds. His Own Ghost kept him on the ground.

  I have seen you be kind to the animals, the shaman said, and that is okay as far as it goes. But you are not one of the Animal People so don’t kid yourself. Live like a man. Have some fun. Otherwise your path will sneak up on you from behind.

  Buckdown wasn’t sure. He wanted to tell His Own Ghost a tall and outrageous lie. Say what a big shot he could be if he felt like it. Instead he held out the pipe for more tolache.

  You feel like lying, His Own Ghost said, refilling both pipes. That’s a sign. Tolache is clever. She will cure you for a while, but she can kill you just as easy, so this is all you get.

  When his second pipe was finished Buckdown was nervous and sad. And mad. His Own Ghost grinned at him.

  Now you’re getting it. Men should be mad not sorry. Now go live with your own kind someplace and pay attention. Look for a sign. If you get shaky take one of these.

  His Own Ghost removed one of the pouches from his neck and tossed it down to Buckdown.

  What’s this? Buckdown fumbled it open and squinted inside at a dozen hard little orbs.

  Each one has a spirit. If the spirit likes you she will help you. Otherwise, watch out. Good luck, and look me up if you run out.

  With that His Own Ghost took off, the lizards bobbing with his hurried steps, tiny vertebrae rattling in his cape.

  Buckdown sank into a clear sleep, wondering why the afternoon sun was taking on a blue haze and what had happened to his feathers. Everything else seemed obvious. How long he slept remains a mystery.

  When he woke he felt like someone had left his bones out in the rain. His joints ached. His muscles felt like saturated sponges. And there was something else, a tingle, a not unpleasant shiver in his tired old body. He stretched and decided to head west, as far west as he could go.

  California, here he comes….

  28

  Fort Ross

  It was 1835. Buckdown came careening into what he thought was Monterey. Wrong. Instead of gentle padres and coy señoritas he found a handful of foul-breathed Russians lording over perhaps a hundred wild Aleutians and a pack of expert pelt hunters from Kodiak Island. The czar had dispatched them to California to raise crops for his starving colony in Sitka and to satiate, if they could, the boundless hunger for soft otter fur that was gnawing at his economy from St. Petersburg to the Ukraine. They were also supposed to keep an eye on the Spanish, the French, the British, the Americans, and anybody else found pirating around on his Pacific Rim.

  Before Buckdown realized his mistake, he found himself surrounded. The Russians put him through a round of suspicious pleasantries and insisted that he stay for a while.

  Followed closely by several pellet-eyed Aleutians who grinned at him with wooden teeth whenever he turned around, Buckdown spent the afternoon sniffing in the fishy wind, checking things out. Bales of otter pelts were stacked about in great quantity as they overflowed from a rough log tannery, but the crops on the small cleared plain behind the fort were withered and failing.

  Buckdown walked north along the cliff. Kayaks needled in and out of the surf on the beach below, dropping off furry, wet bundles of dead weight. The tide churned like a reaper, sucking delicate and disturbingly childlike carcasses off what Buckdown figured to be the skinning beach. The next thing he knew it was dinner time. Somewhere someone was ringing a bell.

  The Aleutians hustled Buckdown into a stuffy room, steeped with the smell of fish oil. He was eyeing the first course, salmon eggs and acorns, when one of the Russians mumbled something to the Aleutian at the door and another guest was led into the dining room. Buckdown had never seen anyone like him. The man’s face was as flat as the moon, with razor slits for eyes, and no whiskers. His body seemed to have been somehow compacted, foreshortened from the top down by enormous pressure. Yet there was something almost elegant about him, and a jumping intelligence in his pie face.

  And he was clean, exotically clean and turned out in such neatness as to appear to have no business whatsoever among his reechy dinner companions. While they were draped in ill-fitting skins and coarse wool, he wore silk. Heavy and somewhat faded silk, but silk nonetheless. Buckdown was so unfamiliar with such finery that he failed to realize that the man was, in fact, wearing a uniform.

  To Buckdown’s surprise the Russians seemed far more interested in himself than in their other guest. They asked question after question, ignoring the strange little man except to grunt at him from time to time. He sat silently working his way through the food with an economy of movement and a total absence of emotion while Buckdown answered questions.

  After dinner, the Russians drank themselves pragmatically toward stupefication. Buckdown excused himself and walked down to the beach. He watched the tide go out. Moonbeams glanced metallically off slick pink otter flesh tumbling skinless in the white-water. Time passed. He might have drifted into a daze. The next thing he knew, the Russians’ other guest was standing next to him on the sand.

  Help me escape from all this, said the strange little man.

  Help me, Buckdown said, without turning.

  29

  Dead Animals

  Buckdown cleared the fort just before dawn. He rode north, through groves of redwood throwing century-leng
th shadows toward the dunes. He did not stop until it was time to stare west, into the fifteen hundred and first sunset since his wife died.

  Curious, no wind on the cliff. Just the forest ticking behind him as he watched the sun fall behind the ocean’s flat horizon. The spookiness of the trees came over him with a scent of wet bark and a flash of vertigo that sat him down abruptly on the ground.

  He pulled the small pouch from around his neck and emptied it. The small grey buds spilled out. They reminded him of teeth. He ate one: bitter, but a trace of menthol, like a green pinecone. He ate another and mounted up. Hi-Ho Buckdown, riding a delicate passage north along the darkening coast.

  At night, the eyes of furry little animals, now dead, are the blackest holes in the universe; but then what is the difference between Buckdown and the stars? This is what Buckdown wonders. And do the stars talk to each other? Only when he is not listening. Then what do the trees eat? The secrets the stars drop. Are the secrets pretty? Some look like rain. How does Buckdown know all this? He drinks some of the secrets when the stars aren’t looking.

  The balance of his mind is disturbed. Suddenly he wants to piss in the ocean. He has a definite need. It is very important to the stars.

  He jumps to the ground and runs off over the dunes. The moon moves behind a cloud. Buckdown stumbles. Now he crawls, wiggling sinewy legs from his musky leggings. Up again, naked now to the waist, he prances into the surf. Foam swirls around his hips. The surge washes his stomach. He squirts his yellow stream beneath the surface. Invigorating. He throws his face toward the sky and whoops, but he might be sorry. Something tells him he is not alone. Dropping low in the dark salty water, Buckdown scans the surf.

  The moon slides out again, like a beacon, and he sees some kind of beast, awash to the withers, ambling toward him out of the sea. Buckdown blows a long anxious breath from his lungs and sniffs back the onshore wind. He smells it, that sweet mush of chlorophyll crystallizing to tartar on grazing molars, and green grasses rotting in a fat cud. Buffalo!