South California Purples

by Baron R. Birtcher

  “I share your feeling on that, sir,” I said.

  “It ain’t a feeling, it’s a code, goddamn it.”

  He came back to himself then, took a last draw from his hand-roll and crushed it beneath the sole of his boot.

  “I tell you what,” he said. The lines at the edges of his eyes grew deeper as he gazed at me. “In my day, we didn’t waste a lot of time between the rustling and the hanging.”

  “I don’t plan on lingering.”

  “I know you don’t. It’s Lloyd Skadden I’m worrying on. You know, Dawson, I knew that boy’s granddaddy. He was a good man, like yours was. Your daddy, too. But Lloyd? I never knew what was in that boy’s head.”

  “I can’t say I know him very well, myself.”

  “Me, neither, but what I do know is that he ain’t hobbled by being too modest, or by too much hard work, either.”

  “WE CAN eat here on the porch,” Snoose said as he brought the stove-warmed food out from the kitchen. “It’s a pleasant evening out.”

  A plank picnic table covered in red-and-white checked oilcloth had been set in the far corner where the living room window spilled light out into the night.

  I took a hold of Eli’s elbow, and he let me help him up out of his chair. The old man may have shaved, but he hadn’t bathed that day, and a smell like spoiled milk floated up out of the wrinkles in his shirt.

  Jesse served supper onto a set of chipped and mismatched plates with a metal serving spoon. A pitcher of iced lemonade stood at the center of the table, dripping condensation in a pool that ran off the edge and onto the uneven boards of the floor.

  Eli said grace for all of us, and we talked and ate and listened to his stories of drovers and transient cowhands on the Goodnight-Loving trail, and the sounds of crickets in the long grass and the dry croak of frogs beside the well. It was companionable and familiar, and vaguely sad for reasons I could not put my finger on, reminiscent of some other time altogether.

  I wondered then if we might quite possibly be the very last of our kind.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I TELEPHONED the sheriff while I drank my morning’s first cup of coffee on the gallery. I lit a cigarette and listened to the cattle begin to stir in the confines of the paddock down below, while I paced the short distance allowed me by the tether of the coiled cord that stretched all the way through the gap in the screen door.

  The morning had arrived in shades of turquoise, cold and clear, and the morning star continued to shine long after the sun had topped the ridgeline. A thin layer of cloud cover lay off to the west, and I felt the portent of afternoon rain.

  “Who was that?” Jesse asked as she came into the kitchen. She was dressed in blue jeans and T-shirt, and wrapped in a thick woolen Indian-print sweater.

  “I’m meeting with Lloyd Skadden this afternoon.”

  She stirred cream into her coffee and leaned a hip against the kitchen counter.

  “Here?”

  “No,” I said. “At his office.”

  “All the way up there? He knows the Works have started, right?”

  “He is aware of that. But he said he had some things to talk to me about.”

  “Besides our rustled cattle?”

  “Apparently.”

  Jesse placed her spoon in the sink and blew at the steam that rose from her cup. “About what, then?”

  “No idea,” I said. “But he did not want to talk about it on the phone.”

  “He’d better not be trying to hustle you for a campaign contribution.”

  “He’s a political animal. I don’t think he even knows when he’s doing it.”

  I kissed her on the cheek, stepped over to the percolator, and poured myself another cup.

  “Don’t worry about me,” I smiled. “I did not just fall here from space.”

  THE DRIVE to Lewiston took nearly two hours in good weather, along a winding two-lane that had been cut into the floor of a narrow valley that ran the entire length of the county. Steep ridges rose up on either side, where the last vestiges of snow lay melting among the scree and deadfall in the shadows of glaciated stone.

  Lloyd Skadden was only the third full-time sheriff in the history of Meriwether County. Fifteen years ago, the whole region could be effectively policed by a shopkeeper cop whose main activity centered around breaking up fistfights at the Bristo when the hired hands turned loose the last of their paychecks on rye whisky, glasses of beer, and a spin around the dance floor with local girls who lacked either the means or motivation to leave town and seek more promising prospects. The completion of the interstate several miles to the west of us had pretty much left our lives untouched, with the exception of the improvements it precipitated in the way we transported our stock. And even though some municipalities along its route had experienced noticeable growth, our entire county still consisted of just two towns: Lewiston, the county seat to the north; and Meridian in the south, nearest my ranch. We remained an unincorporated area isolated both by geography and the unreliable road system that served our more rural backcountry, with a livestock population that far exceeded that of humans, and we tended to like it that way.

  A light sprinkle of rain began to fall on my windshield as I finally reached the stoplight that marked my arrival in Lewiston. A serpentine wall made of mortar and stone was decorated with the various insignia of service clubs and fraternal organizations, and the name of the town in large block letters that had gone to green with the patina of age and weather.

  I parked in the lot next to the municipal building, got out, and pulled down the brim of my hat against the mounting rainfall. A hand-painted sign on the glass doors directed me down a hallway that was lit by the flutter of fluorescent tubing and smelled of mildew and trapped heat, and dead-ended at the door to the office of the county sheriff.

  The receptionist inside was brusque, officious, and at least forty-five pounds overweight. Her pinched features and facial expression suggested she was a person whose life had been defined by a long series of disappointments and personal humiliation, and was happy for every opportunity to return them in kind.

  Lloyd Skadden intercepted me before I had the chance to announce myself.

  “Sorry to make you drive all the way up here, Ty,” he said, and led the way into his office.

  His hair was oiled and brushed straight back from a deeply lined forehead, his complexion ruddy with permanent white circles that raccooned his eyes where sunglasses had protected them from the elements.

  He gestured me toward a guest chair while he took up his position behind a desk of dark walnut that had been elaborately adorned with the hand-carved images of elk, deer, and caribou. Behind him, the gold-fringed flags of the United States of America and the County of Meriwether hung limp on their stands at either side of a matching credenza, and bookended a framed collection of shoulder patches that had been gifted to him by other law enforcement agencies.

  “Sal, bring Mr. Dawson some coffee, will you, sweetheart?” he called through the doorway, then turned his attention to me. “So, tell me about your cattle problem.”

  Lloyd Skadden was not a large man in conventional terms, but his carriage and personal boldness created an impression of authority and influence that was at odds with both his physical stature and the man I knew him to be. Like mine, his family had helped settle this valley and had earned itself a certain amount of respect in prior generations. But the intricacies of land ownership and ranching had not come naturally to Lloyd’s father, and that deficiency had taken its toll on the architecture and direction of Lloyd Skadden’s life. In his eyes, I imagined I could still see the young man he had once been: swilling beer in the backseats of jacked-up automobiles and tossing the empties on the unpaved shoulders of dark rural roads, shooting holes in the signs that marked blind curves and deer crossings, or making vulgar and demeaning remarks to adolescent girls as they stood in shy clusters outside the minimart. Still, I did not actually know him well enough to dislike him outright, had in fact con
tributed small amounts to his campaigns for office over the years, and I prayed that I was judging him too harshly.

  “I’ve lost a bull and three breeding cows in the past few weeks,” I said. “And three more, from what I understand, over on the Corcoran lease.”

  “Don’t let that old coot wind you up, Dawson. He’s old as the hills. I’m pretty sure he was around when the Columbia was just a trickle.”

  “I buried most of them myself, Sheriff—”

  “Call me ‘Lloyd’,” he said.

  A sudden gust of wind drove a torrent of rain against the window that sounded like bird shot ticking on the glass.

  “These animals were not simply butchered for meat. Half of them were nothing more than a pink stain on a crater by the time I found them.”

  He looked at me quizzically.

  “You saying somebody blew them up?”

  “I only know what I’ve seen. It’s why I called you. I need your help to track the sonofabitch who’s doing harm to my animals.”

  Skadden leaned back in his leather chair and stared out into the storm, while he pulled together the filaments of thought inside his head. He puffed his cheeks and heaved a long sigh as he turned to face me again.

  “There’s a reason I asked you here today, Ty. Fact is, I don’t have the resources to be your stock detective. I don’t have the resources to do that for anybody at the moment.”

  The receptionist stalked into the room with a pot of freshly brewed coffee, cream and sugar, and a pair of ceramic mugs. She wordlessly sat one mug in front of me and poured without making eye contact with either of us, then placed the tray on the credenza.

  “Thank you, Sal,” he said to her retreating back. “And please close the door behind you.”

  I cupped the coffee between my palms, absorbing the heat while I waited for the door strike to snap shut.

  “Sheriff—”

  “I need you to listen to me for a minute, Ty,” he interrupted. “I mentioned that I had a reason for asking you to come all the way up here, and here it is: We’ve got a problem. Possibly a big problem. You’ve been following what’s going on over at Pine Ridge?”

  Anyone with a television set or a car radio had been hearing about little else, apart from the daily reports out of the Senate Watergate Committee describing unimaginable behavior coming from the White House. The toothpaste was coming out of the tube, and wasn’t going to slide back in. Even so, I had no idea what the siege at Wounded Knee had to do with me, or with the president’s growing troubles, and I set my coffee mug on his desk, preparing to direct our conversation back to my cattle problem.

  He preempted any comment by showing me the palm of his hand.

  “Just give me a minute here,” he said. “About six weeks ago, 200 Sioux agitators showed up out of nowhere and took that whole town hostage. A whole damn town.”

  “I am aware of that—”

  “Yesterday, some fella with an airplane went and dropped a ton of food down out of the sky for those Indians. The feds, dumb asses that they are, opened fire when the natives came out to pick that crap up off the ground, and managed to shoot an Indian in the head. TV news cameras got the whole damn thing on film.”

  He stopped and waited for me to absorb the weight of his words, interlacing the fingers of hands that were dusted with freckles and a pattern of white scars left behind by something other than manual labor.

  “Thing is, it’s turning into a war zone over there, Ty, and there’s nothing that says it can’t happen here. The wheels are coming off this whole damn country.”

  I did not follow his leap in logic, and it showed on my face.

  He drew a deep breath and refocused.

  “I received a call yesterday. Some woman down south of you is stirring up all kinds of dust about the BLM rounding up wild mustangs for slaughter. Now, I’ve put a call in, but haven’t heard back whether there’s any truth to that or not. But I can say this: when the media gets a hold of a story like that, the circus comes to town. I’m not talking about a little sideshow here—I’m talking about a Woodstock-sized hippie fest that we are in no position to handle.”

  “I think you might be getting ahead of yourself,” I said.

  “Listen, I’m smart enough not to borrow trouble. I learned that a long time ago. But that’s not all of it. You’ve heard of the Charlatans?”

  “The motorcycle club.”

  “It’s not a club, it’s a gang. They make a pile of money running dope and shaking down small businesses. Three weeks ago, they skinned a man alive with a carrot peeler. That happened down in Fresno.”

  “Okay.”

  “In Sacramento, they gang raped a mentally retarded girl. She uses a wheelchair now.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I get it. What about them?”

  “They’re coming this way.”

  “Because of some wild mustangs? I’m sorry, but that sounds a bit hard to believe.”

  He waved a hand in the air and looked at me as though I were a slow child.

  “Easter’s less than a week away, Dawson,” he said. “These jokers have planned some kind of rally that’s going to bring a whole mess of ’em straight up the interstate and right through our county on their way somewhere up north. And that little bit of intel comes straight from the feds.”

  He pointed a stubby finger at me for emphasis.

  “You mix that bunch in with a gathering of horse-huggers, hippies, and news cameras, you have got yourself a perfect storm. And I will not have our towns held hostage like those folks in South Dakota.”

  I took a sip of coffee and scanned the room as I processed what he was telling me. For all the things that Lloyd Skadden was and was not, I had not ever known him to be a reactionary, and he appeared to me to be genuinely worked up. My eyes landed on a framed photo of the sheriff swapping smiles with John Dean and Richard Nixon, which apparently had been snapped at a campaign event during happier times for all of them.

  “Sheriff, I understand your concerns. But I don’t know why you’re telling me all of this,” I said. “Or what it has to do with my dead cattle.”

  His face flushed and accentuated the tangle of broken capillaries on his cheeks.

  “I am asking for your help, Dawson,” he said.

  He had a vaguely garbled manner of speech that put me in mind of a man who spoke while chewing food.

  “I don’t understand that statement,” I said.

  “You are a stiff-necked sonofabitch, aren’t you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  He stood and began pacing behind his ornamented desk. His eyes were glued to the carpet as he spoke.

  “I have a geography problem here. I can’t look after both ends of this county at the same time. Those bikers and all the other riff-raff can set one town on fire while they rape and ransack the other: a bait-and-switch. I got close to 4,000 souls here in Lewiston who are counting on me to keep them safe.”

  “You’ve got another couple thousand in Meridian, Sheriff. I suspect they’d like to be safe too.”

  He smiled and turned on his heel.

  “It appears that you are hearing me now.”

  At first I was incredulous. Then I got angry.

  “You want me to act on your behalf in Meridian?” I said. “There’s not a chance in hell I’d do that.”

  “I intend to appoint you as my undersheriff for the south end of the county, with my full authority, to act as a law enforcement officer. And to deputize additional help if you need it.”

  “I’m sorry, Lloyd, but that’s not going to happen. I’m not the man for the job.”

  “Don’t try to hooraw me, Ty Dawson. You are exactly the man for the job. I am aware of your service with the military police.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “Time don’t matter, this’ll be like riding a bike. And age don’t matter either. I must have a good ten years on you—I’m coming up on fifty-some and it don’t keep me from kicking ass when the situation calls for it.
”

  “I’m a rancher, Lloyd.”

  His face went red again, and I knew the conversation was getting away from me.

  “You are a man, goddammit, and Meriwether County needs you.”

  He slid his hands into the pockets of his trousers and resumed pacing, which appeared to calm him down.

  “I’m not asking you to kiss me on the lips here, Ty. We ain’t getting married. I need you to watch this county’s back door while I mind the front. Just ’til this situation blows by. After that, you can go back to the ranch, and we can all get back to your rustling problem.”

  I had always considered myself to be a reasonable and responsible man, and I had to admit that he was making a practical point. If he was wrong about all of it, no real harm will have been done, other than taking me away from the ranch for a few days.

  “What are we talking about here, time-wise?” I said. “I just got my Spring Works underway.”

  “You got men for that.”

  I felt my face get hot again.

  “With respect, Lloyd,” I said evenly. “You’ve got men for what you’re asking of me. And I don’t appreciate people telling me how to operate my business.”

  He surprised me when he laughed out loud.

  “Ty, what I got is me plus two other deputies. Three, if you count Myron, which nobody usually does ’cause he’s a dipshit.”

  “Myron’s your son.”

  “Myron is my second ex-wife’s son, and he don’t have the sense to smoke a cigarette from the end that ain’t on fire. That aside, four men are not enough to cover a county this size twenty-four hours a day. That’s a fact, and you know it.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  He pursed his lips and looked out the window again. The downpour had slowed to a drizzle again, and a chain of sun breaks was dappling the face of the mountain.

  “A week. Two weeks tops. If this thing turns out to be a snipe hunt, we’re done. And if it really turns to shit, then we got a problem that’ll probably require the National Guard.”

  “I’m going to have to think on it,” I said.