South California Purples

by Baron R. Birtcher

  OTHER BOOKS BY BARON R. BIRTCHER

  Hard Latitudes

  Rain Dogs

  Angels Fall

  Ruby Tuesday

  Roadhouse Blues

  SOUTH

  CALIFORNIA

  PURPLES

  BARON R. BIRTCHER

  Copyright © 2017 by Wink & Snick, LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

  For information, address:

  The Permanent Press

  4170 Noyac Road

  Sag Harbor, NY 11963

  www.thepermanentpress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Birtcher, Baron R., author.

  South California purples / Baron R. Birtcher.

  Sag Harbor, NY : The Permanent Press, [2017]

  ISBN 978-1-57962-500-9 (hardcover)

  eISBN 978-1-57962-531-3

  1. City and town life—Oregon—Fiction. 2. Ranchers—Oregon—Fiction. 3. Nineteen seventies—Fiction.

  PS3552.I7573 S67 2017

  813'.54—dc23

  2016053021

  Printed in the United States of America

  This one’s for my Dad

  “I thought I met a man

  Who said he knew a man

  Who knew what was going on

  I was mistaken . . .”

  —DAVID CROSBY, “Laughing”

  “You will know them by their fruits . . .”

  —MATTHEW 7:16

  New American Standard Bible

  NEW YEAR’S

  1973

  IT IS SAID that history is defined by the things we never saw coming. I have found that to be true.

  There was a peculiar feeling in the air that year, and it seemed to be seeping into every corner of our lives. Newspapers reported events using language that reeked of malaise, sapped of any revenant of the joy that had once accompanied the birth pangs of the Age of Aquarius.

  The last of America’s soldiers were finally on their way home—Vietnamization—though they were coming home alone rather than together with their units, victorious brigades returning to home shores, as had been done at the conclusion of prior wars. These soldiers had been spat upon by protestors who gathered at airports and shouted insults and epithets and labeled the young, dazed soldiers as “baby killers” all while the stench of smoke and white phosphorous still permeated the fabric of the uniforms they wore; some not even forty-eight hours from the scene of their final firefight, nor more than twenty years of age. But lately it was as though even the hippies and freaks had lost their fervor for the end of this conflict, and no longer wished to celebrate the accomplishment by spitting on their victims.

  To me, it marked the incipient mortality of the values that I had taken for granted as a younger man, when I had returned from my generation’s war. I feared what would come to fill the vacuum left behind.

  I felt too young to be harboring judgments such as these; they belonged inside the minds of much older men, to the graybeards who gathered themselves in lodges that bore the names of animals, and who played checkers while complaining of physical maladies and retold stories of misremembered histories and tales of conquests that never happened at all. Like those men, I will always carry my war with me, but the marks that had been blazed upon the trunks of old-growth forests, the ones that branded the narrow line between passion and disaster, were beginning to fade away.

  The shape and nature of war had changed.

  As had the nature of peace.

  MY WIFE and I watched the ball drop in New York City where the murder rate had just reached an all-time high, heroin was the drug of choice, and teenaged prostitutes worked openly on every corner of Times Square. We watched it from the safe distance afforded by the television console in the living room at the ranch, while the fire in the hearth cracked and funneled fragrant plumes of smoke out into the snow-blanketed Oregon night. I popped a bottle of iced champagne and kissed her as the band played “Auld Lang Syne” and ’72 went into the books.

  The old year was gone.

  Nixon had gone to China, and Jane Fonda straddled a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun for the enjoyment of the press corps; in June, five Nixon campaign operatives had been arrested after breaking into the Watergate Complex, and by August, the last United States ground troops were promised to begin returning home from ’Nam; Bobby Fischer defeated Boris Spassky in a chess match viewed by millions all over the world, and American eighteen-year-olds won the right to vote and celebrated that newfound gift by delivering Richard Nixon a landslide second-term presidency that recorded the lowest voter turnout in nearly three decades.

  Baby New Year had arrived, but we had no way of knowing at the moment that the restless little bastard had been delivered into this world with the myopic inclinations of a narcissist, and in possession of the heart of a cynic.

  I CANNOT lay claim, with any specificity, to know what evil is. I had seen it in Korea and encountered its image and affect in the random acts of scared and desperate men. Sometimes they invaded my sleep and revealed themselves inside the rippling waves that rose from the flames of a human form torched in effigy. Other times, even on a bright spring day, with the sun burning warm and yellow behind a patch of cumulus as it floated above the valley, I could feel its foul breath against the skin on the back of my neck. These were the intrusions I had come to fear the most.

  PART ONE:

  SPRING WORKS

  CHAPTER ONE

  A NARROW STRIP of orange appeared along the ridgeline as the glow of the rising sun refracted off the clouds that lay inside the folds of the Cascades. I pulled at the wool collar of my jacket and turned my horse away from the brittle oncoming wind that still carried the reminder of winter.

  We had been riding since well before sunrise in the hopes that we’d make the upper pasture before the first full flush of dawn stirred the cattle and made the job of gathering the herd all the more difficult. I looked off behind me and watched my best roper, Jordan Powell, work his way through a heavy growth of brush toward the cluster of cows that had taken shelter with their calves in the lee of a rock cove. His roan gelding was blowing puffs of white fog from its nostrils and the vapor of Powell’s own breath hovered around his head and reflected the pale sunlight.

  The winter had been a long one, and we were getting a late start on spring. It was already the first week of April, and we should have cleared at least half of my outlying pastures of grazing stock by now, and brought them back to the pens for health checks, sorting, and counting.

  I whistled softly to my dog, Wyatt, a blue heeler who lived for the chance to work the herd. He came to attention and waited for my command, his eyes locked on me.

  “Away to me,” I said, and he immediately sprang to his feet and started a wide circle around the small group of heifers I was working.

  I untied my loop from the saddle and moved in a flanking arc that would cut off their only route of escape. I momentarily lost sight of both Powell and his separate portion of the herd as I passed behind the rise of the rock outcropping, but I heard him clearly enough.

  “Sonofabitch,” he said.

  I spurred my horse into the gap and got my first look at the mutilated, nearly unrecognizable corpse of one of my cattle. “Goddammit, Captain,” Powell said.

  “Cussing my dead cow isn’t gonna bring her back.”

  “I’m not cussing your dead cow. I’m cussing whatever killed her. That’s what, four in the last two weeks?”

  “And three others over near the Corcoran piece.”

  I strung the
reata over my saddle horn and dismounted, handing the reins to Powell as I moved closer to the corpse, or what was left of it. Our horses were balky with the smell of blood and Powell eased them back as I circled around on foot to get a better look. A couple of guys with a Winchester rifle, a pickup, and a chainsaw can butcher a cow and disappear in minutes. But like the others, this didn’t have that appearance, plus it was miles over muddy, rough, and rocky terrain in order to get to my access road, let alone back to the highway.

  “They didn’t take away any meat,” I said.

  “Don’t know how they coulda got any. Looks to me like the damn thing blew apart.”

  “The head’s gone,” I said. “I don’t see it anywhere. You?”

  Powell made a slow pass in the dew-covered grass, my horse still trailing behind him, and we separately searched all the way to the fence line. Wyatt remained focused on his job, paying no attention to either Powell or me, loose-herding his group and moving them in the direction of the ranch.

  “I don’t see it, either,” he said. “Can’t imagine anybody came out all this way for a skull and a set of horns.”

  “Well,” I said. “I tell you what: it’s not coyotes. No animal could have done this kind of damage.”

  I dipped into my pocket and came out with a cigarette, turned my back to the wind, and lit it, watched the gray smoke tear away in the breeze. I pocketed my Zippo and took a folding shovel from my saddlebag.

  The morning sun illuminated the planes and creases of Powell’s face as he eyed the trenching tool.

  “What are you gonna do with that?”

  “You come on down here with me, and I’ll show you,” I said.

  “You hired me for a cowhand, Captain. I reckon if I can’t do it ahorseback, it can’t need doing all that bad.”

  “If you don’t get down off that animal and help me dig a hole for this cow, I guarantee that you’ll have plenty of time to do your reckoning while you walk your ass back to the ranch,” I said.

  “Somebody’s got to keep hold of these horses.”

  “I suspect you could tie them to one of those trees down there, and they’ll be patient enough for a while.”

  Powell chewed his bottom lip as he looked down the slope toward the poplars that grew along the river, and shook his head. After a moment, he clucked his roan and headed off toward a stand of sugar pines. I finished my smoke, field-stripped it, and tucked the dead filter back into the pocket of my jeans.

  “Better jangle those spurs, Jordan,” I said. “This hole isn’t going to dig itself.”

  THE SUN was well up and had burned the chill from the air by the time we gathered the herd and hazed them through the trees, and up over the crest of the rise that looked down on the main body of my ranch. I had been raised on this land, watched the whole county grow up from between the ears of a horse.

  Family legend had it that my grandfather acquired his first quarter section in exchange for fifty dollars and a shotgun from an Ohio man who decided he didn’t want the piece he’d claimed. That was 1895. Granddad constructed a small house and spent every dollar he made adding to his holdings in both land and livestock, earning a reputation as tough but hard-hewn, and a fixture of stability in Meriwether County. He was there selling rough stock the day that Bonnie McCarroll was beaten to death by a bronc at the Pendleton roundup in 1929, the same day my father got married to my mother. I was born three years later.

  I worked the ranch every day until I went to college on an ROTC scholarship and did my bit in Korea as the captain of an MP unit, which consisted of every manner of drunk, troublemaker, and knucklehead who had managed to get himself washed out of his original platoon and have his sorry ass sent over to me. Not a day went by that I did not think about returning to this place.

  By the time I did make it back, my father was dead from an aneurism, but not before he had aggregated over 63,000 deeded acres, plus another 14,000 he leased from the Bureau of Land Management. I moved into the main house and took over the operation of the ranch, and kept an eye on my grieving mom for what turned out to be the final two years of her life.

  “It’s so quiet up here, I swear I can hear the ground squirrels blink their eyes,” Powell said, startling me out of my thoughts.

  I nodded and lit another cigarette as his horse shook its head and rattled his curb chain.

  “Enjoy it while you can,” I said. “I believe Dub Naylor’s coming back for the Spring Works.”

  “Aw, damn, Captain.”

  “Well, ain’t you a daisy,” I said.

  “I swear that old fool could talk the bark off a tree.”

  “Then I suggest you move your war bag and bedroll to the far side of the bunkhouse. It’s fixing to get a little noisier in there.”

  “Caleb’s been hiring?”

  “All day long,” I said. “Ought to have a decent crew filled out by tomorrow.”

  “Well, hell.”

  “Take a look around you, Jordan. It’s springtime, son. What do you think we’ve been doing out here anyway?”

  The calves were rooting aimlessly in the clump grass while I took a last look out toward the grove of white oaks that marked the family plot where my entire bloodline lay buried. I whistled to the dog, then reined my horse, and swung a wide circle around the herd and started them moving down the hill.

  CALEB WHEELER was seated at a spool table in the shade of an atlas cedar, his sweat-stained Stetson pulled low on his brow and obscuring his face in shadow.

  “You get yourself some experience and proper headgear, you can come try me again next year,” I heard Wheeler say to one of the applicants.

  I nodded to the young cowboy as he passed me by, dejected. He couldn’t have been old enough to own a razor. I watched him climb into the cab of a faded green pickup and toss his cap on the seat and pull out of the driveway inside a cloud of dust.

  My foreman licked the tip of his pencil and scrawled something on a yellow legal pad as I approached the table.

  “You want to tell me why this gets harder every year?” Caleb said to me. He leaned back in his folding chair, crossed his arms, and squinted at me through the dappled sunlight. “Pull up a pew, you’ll see what I mean.”

  “What was wrong with that kid?”

  “He was wearing a ball cap, for Chrissakes. Are we branding beeves or playing baseball out here?” he said. He looked past me and waved the next applicant over. “Besides, the kid still had California all over his boots.”

  I took a chair at the spool table and watched a tall, loose-limbed man swing down from his perch on the porch rail of the office and crunch across the gravel toward us. He removed his hat and placed it on the table, crown down. His grip was firm and dry when he offered me his hand.

  “Samuel Thomas Griffin,” he said. “You must be Mr. Dawson.”

  “That’s right. Tyler Dawson,” I offered. “And this over here is Caleb Wheeler, my foreman. Have a seat.”

  Wheeler pushed the brim of his hat off his brow with a knuckle and eyed the new man. “You get more than your share of lip from the boys, I expect.”

  “Because I’m black?”

  “It is one of your more distinguishing qualities,” Wheeler said. “Answer the question.”

  “Once per man, typically,” Griffin smiled. “That usually puts the finish to it.”

  “He’s not kidding, amigo. We don’t have time for nonsense,” I said. “We got eight weeks to get this herd sorted, horned, and branded.”

  “It don’t ever start with me.”

  “Good,” Wheeler said, loud enough for everybody to hear. “Because if we have one lick of trouble from any of you cowprods, I will run you off this place so fast it’ll take your shadow a week to catch up to you.”

  A cloud of dust from the paddock curled across the open space on a breeze that carried the odor of singed hide and the bawl of a startled calf.

  “How much of this kind of work you done before, Griffin?” I asked him.

  “I’ve done a
bit. I can set a horse and throw a loop.”

  I saw the skin at the corner of Wheeler’s eyes go tight as he searched the black man’s face. “My daughter can do that.”

  “Then you ought to hire her.”

  Wheeler tapped his pencil on the legal pad and looked up at a pair of scrub jays scrapping inside the branches of the cedar.

  “What do you know about cattle?” I asked.

  “Well, sir, it’s been awhile, but if I recall correctly, the grass goes in the eyeball end and comes out the other.”

  Wheeler dropped the pencil and leaned in on his elbows, toward Griffin. “Are you sassing us?”

  Griffin smiled, and he looked from me to Wheeler.

  “No, sir, just having a little fun. Truth is, I s’pose I can toss a loop as well as any man you got here. First-string linebacker at Cal State Chico don’t exactly put you in contention for the NFL. But I did learn my share about animal husbandry.”

  My foreman stood, placed two fingers in his mouth, and issued a shrill whistle. “Taj! Powell! Get your asses over here!”

  Two of my permanent cowboys ran over from the separating pen and skidded to a stop at the edge of the table.

  “Get this man a skin string so he can show us what he’s got.”

  We both climbed up and took a seat on the paddock fence, and watched. Within ten minutes, Griffin had roped, dragged, and branded three of the new North Camp calves all by himself. His movements were as confident and fluid as I had ever seen.

  Wheeler smoothed his mustache with a thumb and forefinger and pursed his lips as Griffin dusted off his chaps and ambled back toward us.

  “You’ve worked Purples before?” Wheeler asked him.

  “Yes, sir,” Griffin grinned. “Down in Cali, outside of Paso Robles.”

  “That’s the line these come from,” I said. “Long time ago.”

  “Is the interview over then?”

  Wheeler nodded.