I ask the long-haired boy at the counter if he knows a Bolinas resident named Bee Watson. Never heard of her, he says. I'm about to leave when he calls me back.
"There's an old woman called Bee. Don't think she's got a last name."
Excited, I ask where I can find her. He stares at me, confused. Then he steps out from behind his counter, leads me down an aisle to the honey section, scans the shelf, extracts a jar, hands it to me, then returns to his post.
I examine the jar. The label, beautifully hand-lettered, reads: "Bee's All-Natural Honey." At the bottom is the bee signature that appeared on the Bee Watson letters and the gun.
Exhilarated, I carry the jar back to the counter, purchase it, ask the boy where Bee the beekeeper lives.
He shrugs. "Maybe up on Overlook," he says. "Anyhow, you can try."
We drive up to Overlook, find an irregular row of small odd-looking craftsman houses, some with strangely angled roofs, others with turrets, still others shaped like silos.
"I wish you could see the hues," Sasha says. "Some are done up in rainbow colors."
A boy about eight years old is practicing with a pogo stick beside the road. We stop. I ask him if he knows where we can find a woman who keeps bees. He stares at us, terrified, then rushes toward the house behind, a geodesic dome.
"Mommy! Mommy!" he cries.
A huge obese woman with prematurely gray hair waddles onto the porch. She eyes us suspiciously while admonishing the boy. "Goddamnit, Wave—I told you not to talk to strangers."
"They want to know where the bee lady lives," Wave says.
He steps behind her, hides, starts playing peekaboo with us from behind her hulk. She waddles closer.
"We're looking for Bee Watson," I tell her.
"Who's looking? Sherlock Holmes?"
Sasha's laughter makes her grin. Wave grins too, then crouches down between her legs.
I hold up my jar of honey. "We're looking for the woman who makes this."
"That'll be Bee. Never knew her last name." She gives us directions. We're to take a dirt road right, then make a left at the fork. "You'll know it when you get there," she tells us. "Buzz-buzz-buzz."
"Buzz-buzz-buzz," echoes Wave.
We follow her directions. Soon enough, we come upon a sign bearing the bee signature followed by an arrow. As we approach, the road becomes deeply rutted. We pass a rusted-out pickup, then spot an old Volvo parked beside a tarpapered shack, with a trailer set up on cinder blocks behind. Though I don't hear any buzzing, I smell sweetness in the air, then make out a short plump woman on the other side of a field of wildflowers. She's wearing a beekeeper's helmet with fine mesh veil and appears to be puttering amidst a set of hives.
Evidently she hears us, for she turns and waves. A few minutes later, she walks over. When she lifts her veil I see a lovely, sweet-natured English face crowned by silver bangs. I recognize her at once as the unknown mourner who wept so copiously at Maddy's funeral.
She seems to recognize me as well, for she nods at me and smiles.
"I know who you are. You're Kay," she says. "Dear Maddy used to talk about you all the time." Her smile is warm, her accent British.
"Lovely day, isn't it? A good day to sit down and talk. There's a nice spot of shade behind the house. Would you and your young man like to join me for some tea and honey?" She grins. "Best honey in the world. You have my word on that!"
Bee is small, with fine hands, a woman of exuberant gestures She's also bouncy. As she speaks, she sometimes stands up out of her seat.
"Oh, she was a gunslinger!" Bee says. "'Deadeye,' they called her. 'Sharpshooter'! 'Miss Sure-Shot'! All the words like that. And her eyes! Well, you remember her eyes, Kay. To see them once was never to forget them. Blazing eyes! Eyes that'd melt you down like wax. She could shoot wicks off burning candles, suit marks off playing cards tossed in the air. She did that wonderful old Annie Oakley trick too, shooting backwards using a mirror. She'd shoot the cigarette out of your mouth. Once, when a fella challenged her, said he could shoot the pants off her, she literally shot the pants off him, actually shot off his waist button and his trousers fell to his ankles. He hobbled away and fell in the mud—kaboom! They called it 'trick shooting,' but it wasn't. It was honest shooting. As honest as the girl. And never in my life did I meet anyone more honest than Mandy Vail."
We're sitting in a little patio set up between her trailer and the tarpaper shack, shaded by branches of a big Monterey pine arching overhead. The sand floor's been raked. There's a freshly painted round metal table and three white metal cushioned chairs, three slightly chipped Chinese teacups, three fancy old silver spoons and a pot of fresh unpasteurized honey in the middle, honey so good, buttery, pungent with wild herbs, that the only descriptive phrase that comes to mind is "nectar of the gods."
I feel like I've just been hurled down by a stupendous aikido throw. It's like I'm on the mat now, all the breath knocked out of me, and I need a good jolt of something to bring me back. So I dig my spoon deep into the pot of honey, bring it to my mouth and suck the marvelous substance off. There! That's better! I'm revived, though still amazed. And yet it all makes sense, is so utterly logical I don't know why I didn't think of it before.
Maddy Yamada, she of the intense gaze, the laser-sharp eyes, the perfect eye-hand coordination, she who could perfectly nail a moving subject with her Leica at two hundred feet, one of the greatest war and action photojournalists of her generation—why couldn't she also have been an expert markswoman in her youth? It's all of a piece, gunslinging and photography. I learned that from Dakota. But still, to think that my Maddy, who hated violence and detested guns, had once been Mandy Vail, Wild West Show Sharpshooter—the concept boggles.
"She was a great cowgirl. Great horsewoman. Her entrances were terrific. She'd come in like a gust of wind."
Bee Watson glows as she speaks of it. Sasha, sensing my excitement, takes my hand.
"She'd gallop into the ring," Bee tells us, "white-brim cowgirl hat hanging from her neck, fringe flying behind her buckskin jacket, Winchester pump rifle slung over her back, twirling her pearl-handled six-guns, one in each hand, and, even while she held the reins of her steed, firing at floating helium balloons. Such carriage! Presence! She was irresistible. Everyone loved her. And oh yes—it was love that put an end to it too, that turned it all to bitter ash."
I start asking questions. I struggle to obtain the facts: How did Maddy learn to shoot? How to explain her prowess with guns? How did she land in a Wild West show? How did Bee come to know her? What was she like before the transition to photography? I want to hear the saga of her early life, and Bee is eager to recount it. I have the feeling this is a story she's been waiting to tell. Now that someone finally wants to hear it, it bubbles out of her like champagne.
Maddy Yamada was born Amanda Vail in Medicine Bow, Wyoming, in 1931, only child of Jim and Dilly Vail, hunting guide and hunting-camp cook. It was her dad who taught her how to shoot.
Jim Vail, regarded as one of the best professional tracker-hunters in the state, made good money accompanying rich, powerful men out to bag elk, cougar and bear—oil men, industrialists, generals and politicians, even, one time, a former President of the United States. The Vails ran a class operation, supplying burros, tents, camping gear, trophy carriers, everything a serious hunter might need. And the food rustled up by Dilly, wild game prepared over open fires was considered some of the best hunting-camp food in the West.
Amanda—or Mandy, as they called her—inherited, they said, the deadeye aim of her Wind River Shoshone grandfather on her mother's side, a famous hunter in his time. Even from her infancy people would comment on her eyes, how bright they were, how they burned like little fires in her face. She was an active, highly intelligent, tomboy-type girl, with a feisty nature, a winsome smile and almost frightening powers of concentration.
By the time she was five she was plinking rabbits. At twelve she was winning shooting competitions. At fourteen she was junior state champion. Wild W
est shows, long in decline, had pretty much died out during the Great Depression. But after World War II there was a revival. Mandy was sixteen when she saw her first show. She was bowled over by it.
In 1948, just seventeen, she moved on her own to Laramie to study mathematics at the University of Wyoming. She loved math, excelled at it, took pleasure in its logic, certainty, proofs. While attending college, she decided to take up "fancy shooting." Asking around, she found a coach, an old-time showman shooter named Tom Sewitt, who had actually known Annie Oakley when he'd worked as a stable boy in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West before World War I.
From Tom, Mandy learned some of the immortal Annie's favorite moves: behind-the-back shooting, mirror-shooting, shooting backwards using only the blade of a bowie knife as her mirror. Under his coaching she learned to fire six shots with her revolver in one second, to fire at six clay targets all thrown into the air at once, breaking each before it reached the ground. She could split aspirin tablets, puncture brass bus tokens, shoot chunks out of golf balls in flight, cut a rope while Tom spun it as a lariat, reduce clay targets to powder, explode lemons thrown in the air, "pulp" tomatoes, "scramble" eggs, reduce apples to applesauce. She could also create cartoon pictures with bullet holes by firing at a backlit screen. She'd fire six dead accurate bullets in a row. Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-BOOM! Above all, she learned the great trick of trick shooting: there is no "trick" to it, just practice, practice, practice.
The first year with Tom she shot thirty thousand rounds. The second year forty thousand. In 1950, at the age of nineteen, without a word to her parents, she took the train to Denver to audition as a fancy shooter for the Great Western Circus. The proprietors watched in awe as the bold girl with the flaming red hair performed. After her exhibition, they hired her on the spot.
In the circus they announced her, just before her entrance, as "Mandy Vail, Deadeye Shooter."
The crowds nourished her. She reveled in their wonder and applause, loved the greasepaint, the costumes, the drum rolls, the smell of the sawdust, the way the spotlight followed her around the ring. Hunting in the woods was fun, higher mathematics presented a challenge, but performing in public was best of all—it made her feel alive.
Bee Watson, five years older, was traveling with the Great Western Circus too, not as a performer but as company armorer, in charge of maintenance and safekeeping of the edged weapons and small arms used in the show. A rebel herself, she had fled her father's engraving shop in London the year before to seek adventure in the American West. She came over on a contract to engrave Colt revolvers, soon tired of it, then hooked up with the circus.
Though she loved engraving, she hated the thought of spending her life breathing the bad air of an engraver's shop. The circus was fun, gave her a chance to travel and engage with life. Shortly after Mandy joined, she and Bee became fast friends, going out dancing, flirting with men, sharing hotel rooms and confidences.
"I don't think Maddy—I'll call her that from now on, but remember, she called herself Mandy back then—I don't think she had much romantic interest in boys before we met," Bee says. "They were more like brothers to her, hunting pals, shooting-competition rivals she could easily defeat. But being always on the road, moving from town to town as we did—that put the pressure on. The circus was a sexual hothouse. Everyone was sleeping with everybody else."
Bee had come to America in search of adventure; now she found it in men's arms. She'd take a circus-crew member as a lover for a month, then throw him over for someone else. Or else meet a man at one of the dance halls she and Maddy frequented, spend a week of bliss with him, then wave goodbye when the circus train pulled out of town.
With Bee's guidance and encouragement, Maddy too joined the fun, flirting, kissing, indulging in petting, all the while retaining her virtue. She was seeking true love, and that, at least around the circus, was in short supply.
And, too, she scared men off. Bee thought it was her eyes.
"They seemed to consume you, gobble you up. A lot of men couldn't take it. There she was, young, beautiful, immensely talented and admired, and yet there was this forbidding thing about her too. Yes, her eyes, and perhaps also her purity, by which I don't mean virginity. More like the purity of her intent. There was no nonsense about her. No claptrap. Not only did she shoot straight, she was a straight shooter in every sense. Charlatans, fakes, frauds and poseurs, silver-tongued pretty boys with well-practiced seduction patter—the circus was full of them—were wary of her because they knew she could see straight through them. Better to stick with their own kind, or court a playful girl like me who was just out for fun."
But there were others who felt challenged by Maddy's discrimination, who vowed they'd be the first to bed her. One in particular, a stagehand and roustabout named Ram Carson, was determined to woo her with his charm.
"Wait!" I lean forward, head reeling. "You're talking about Ramsey Carson, the real estate tycoon in San Francisco, the one who collects erotic guns?"
Bee nods. "I see you've done your homework, Kay. Yes, that's the one."
"So that's the connection!"
"You know the story?"
"No," I tell her. "I don't know anything. Just that Maddy was spying on an apartment owned by Carson in the Mission, where Carson and his gun club pals did, you know . . . whatever."
Bee laughs. "'Whatever'—I like that. Because, God knows, they were certainly doing something up there. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Unless you want the story backwards."
No, I tell her, I want it straight, the way Maddy would have told it, in sequence, as it happened.
Bee nods. "'Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.' Emily Dickinson wrote that. Of all your Yank poets, she's my favorite. I'll try to tell it to you straight, Kay, but since I know only my own version and the events took place long ago, please forgive me if it comes out a little crooked sometimes."
Carson was an immensely handsome young man, several years younger than Maddy. He was muscular and headstrong, with a poetic veneer that hid the coarseness beneath. At first Maddy was taken with him. Perhaps, she confided to Bee, Ram, so much like a character out of a Jack London novel, was worth her time. Bee, who'd had a fling with him herself, did not encourage her friend.
Very soon Maddy became disillusioned. Ram was a marvelous dancer, a terrific kisser, had drop-dead good looks. But there was a mean streak in him which Maddy soon perceived: the way he bullied the horses, became belligerent when he drank, picked fights with smaller, weaker men while playing up to those above him. There came a point where she refused to go out with him, refused even to dance with him or speak with him in private.
This, unfortunately, did not dampen Ram's ardor. Perhaps because no girl had ever rejected him, he refused to take his dismissal seriously. On the contrary, like many egotistical men, he took it as a ploy. She must be trying to excite him, he told his friends, make herself more desirable by playing hard to get. Impossible she could resist him if he set his mind to her seduction. He decided then to change tactics, court her the old-fashioned way, sending notes, flowers and intermediaries to plead on his behalf.
He even attempted to recruit Bee for this purpose: "We had a good few weeks together, you and I," he told her, "but Mandy's the girl for me. Help me win her, Bee. Please."
When Bee laughed he was taken aback.
"She doesn't like you, Ram. Accept it and leave her alone."
But he wouldn't. And when Maddy finally did meet someone she liked, he became coldly furious.
The other boy was named Tommy Dunphy. He was the same age as Maddy, also a performer, a recent recruit to the Great Western Circus, hired to play several heroic roles—Wyatt Earp in the O.K. Corral sketch, and Colonel George Custer in the big spectacle piece, "Custer's Last Stand."
Tommy was an actor, not a shooter, though he fired off blank cartridges in his scenes. Ram, who was a shooter, hated him from the start, first because, being an actor, Tommy was far higher in the circus pecking order, and more im
portant, because Maddy was attracted to him.
At first their relationship struck Bee as brother-sister stuff. Tommy was pretty rather than handsome, had beautiful almond-shaped eyes, sensual lips, shag-cut golden hair that curled over his ears. He wasn't a good dancer or a particularly good kisser; in no sense was he a ladies' man. But there was a boyish sincerity about him that appealed to Maddy, a naïveté equal to her own. Even more attractive was his natural sweetness. Tommy was friendly, modest, self-effacing, generous and, perhaps most in his favor in Maddy's eyes, totally without guile.
They became secret lovers. Those first weeks even Bee didn't know. They'd meet after evening performances, go off together on long walks about the fairgrounds, then disappear to quiet corners of the encampment or to empty compartments in the circus railway cars. Bee began to notice changes in Maddy, a new quietude, the way she glowed and sometimes sighed aloud. It was only when she saw them practice shooting together that she understood what was going on.
It was a classic triangle: the beautiful girl, the pretty blond boy she'd chosen as her lover, and the dark handsome boy who wanted her was spurned and now smoldered in silent fury.
Everyone in the troupe knew how Ram felt. He continued to tell his friends, with an insistence that belied conviction, that the reason Mandy Vail flirted with Dunphy was to make him jealous. He would win her, he promised; they would see. Why else did she evade his glances unless she was afraid she'd yield to him if she did not?
Yes, everybody knew . . . except Maddy and Tommy, too wrapped up in one another to notice. Bee doubted that Tommy, as a featured player, was even aware of Ram's existence. As for Maddy, in her bliss she even forgot he was around.
One day Ram left a lengthy love letter for her, the silly, preposterous letter of a lovesick boy. It was filled with weakly expressed affection coupled with pompous pronouncements. It was all about him, not her, his distress, his needs, without any regard for feelings she might harbor or had ever professed. He accused her of playing him for a fool, taking up with another to make him jealous. But, he wrote, he was ready to forgive her now that the time had come to end the charade and admit to how she truly felt. "I'm the only man for you," he wrote. "We were meant for each other. There can be no other in your life." It was an obsessed, grandiose, lunatic letter, a little scary too.
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