South California Purples

by Baron R. Birtcher

  “Listen, Ty. I didn’t want to have to bring this up, but have you ever heard of a thing called Posse Comitatus? I’ll save you the trouble of looking it up. It’s a statute that says I can press you into service whether you like it or not. Don’t dig your heels and make me do that.”

  “I don’t respond well to threats,” I said.

  “That wasn’t a threat. That was a recitation of the law. If I want to conscript you, I can. I would prefer it, though, if you perceived it as your civic obligation—like jury duty—and you’re the man to get it done.”

  “Keep blowing sunshine up my ass, I’m liable to combust.”

  “It ain’t sunshine, Ty,” he said, his tone mirroring sincerity. “If I thought there was a better man for the job, I’d be talking to him, not you.”

  DUSK WAS falling by the time I pulled the truck to a stop in the pea-gravel lot beside the house.

  The sky had turned gunmetal gray, but the clouds glowed pink and the air smelled of applewood and the chimney smoke that rose up from the bunkhouse. Yellow light spilled from the window over the kitchen sink, and should have looked warm and domestic and inviting. Instead, I steeled myself for the conversation I was about to have with Jesse.

  It did not go exactly as I had planned it during my long drive home.

  “Are you out of your goddamned mind?” I believe were the first words she said once I had finished.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I WAS PUSHING bacon around the skillet on the stove, barely tasting my coffee when the telephone rang. I moved the pan off the fire and stepped over to answer it.

  “Hi, Daddy,” my daughter said, and my pulse rate jumped a little, the way it always did when I heard my girl’s voice.

  “Hello, Cricket.” I smiled into the phone. “Pretty early in the morning, isn’t it?”

  Her given name was Laura, after my mother, but she’d been Cricket to me ever since she had taken her first baby steps. She had a way of crawl-hopping when she started to figure out how to walk, and the nickname stuck. She was nineteen now, and nearing the end of her sophomore year of college in Colorado. She was Jesse’s and my only child and the love of my life; she’s smart, and she’s pretty and I worry about her every day of my life.

  “I was raised on a ranch, remember?” she said.

  There was noise on her end of the line that sounded like highway traffic.

  “What’s all that racket?” I asked. “Where are you?”

  “I’m calling from a pay phone. Where’s Mom? Is she around?”

  My heart fell, though I told myself it shouldn’t. Ever since my daughter had gone off to school, her relationship with me had changed, dissolving into a pattern of faltering conversations punctuated by fits and false-starts and missteps. It seemed that nearly every time we spoke anymore, we’d end up mired in talk of politics, injustice, or the sins of the Establishment, my choices of words usually the wrong ones.

  “She’s still in bed,” I said.

  Cricket was silent for a moment too long, and the hiss of air brakes from an eighteen-wheeler spun down the line at me. I heard her sigh.

  I felt like that kid in the comic strip who tries to kick a football that gets pulled away from him at the last moment. He falls for it every time.

  “You still there?” I asked.

  “I’m still here. Listen, Dad, I was hoping I could come home for spring break. You think that would be okay?”

  “Of course it’s okay. I’ll send you a plane ticket. Just tell me what day you want to come.”

  She covered the mouthpiece and spoke to someone in words I couldn’t hear.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I’ll drive out instead.”

  “That sounds—”

  “I’ve gotta go, Dad. Tell Mom I love her, and I’ll call back a little later to fill in the details.”

  “I love you, Cricket.”

  “You too,” she said, and the line went dead.

  I HAD lost any interest in breakfast, so I drained the bacon grease from the frying pan, refilled my coffee mug, and walked down to the office instead.

  Sunrise was still half an hour away, but the waxwings and thrush were already stirring in the trees and the air was laced with moss and sloughed pine needles. A smattering of stars still flickered in the predawn and a breeze blew down from the eastern slopes that frosted my breath into vaporous silver clouds as I picked my way down the path between the conifers toward the dim halo of yellow light from a fixture mounted outside the office door.

  I lit a fire in the woodstove, warmed my outstretched palms as the flames took hold, and watched threads of gray smoke float by outside the window. I glanced at the feedstore calendar tacked to the wall and hung my hat on the coatrack. I took a seat in a rolling chair behind one of the two matching Steelcase desks that occupied the center of the narrow room and stared out the window while I finished my coffee, my boots propped on the writing surface.

  False dawn had given way to the real thing, and the leaves and blossoms on the dogwoods outside were shimmering, reflecting daybreak, when Caleb Wheeler pushed into the office.

  “Didn’t expect to find you here,” he said. He strode to the woodstove to warm his backside. “You brew any coffee?”

  I showed him my empty mug and shook my head.

  “Brought this from the house.”

  “I’ll do it.” He kept his heavy coat on while he spooned coffee grounds from a can into the percolator. “You know, for a smart man, you can sure be a dumb sonofabitch.”

  “You heard?”

  “Of course I heard.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Lankard Downing.”

  “Where else does news come from in this town?”

  Wheeler shrugged out of his coat, hung it on the hook beside my hat, and sat down at the desk that faced mine. He shot a glance at the coffee pot and turned his stare back at me.

  Lankard Downing owned a bar in Meridian called the Cottonwood Blossom that was favored by ranch hands and the occasional tourist in search of a glimpse of authentic Western life along the back roads of cow country. Downing was a consumptive-looking septuagenarian with hollow cheeks and face like the chipped edge of a hatchet who took pleasure in sharing stories that usually involved the misfortunes of others. He did not disseminate news as a community service, it was a character flaw. If bad news traveled fast in this part of the county, it was largely because of him.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you anyway?” Wheeler asked.

  “Lloyd Skadden convinced me it’s a thing that needs doing. Mostly convinced me.”

  “And what is ‘mostly’ supposed to mean?”

  “I came down here for some peace and quiet, Caleb.”

  “You came to the wrong damned place for that,” he sighed. His knees popped as he hauled himself out of his chair to get his coffee. “At least we got some good hands this season. I guess we won’t miss you for a week or two.”

  “You have any problems, let Jesse know.”

  “I intend to. At least she ain’t as stubborn as you, and probably twice as smart.”

  I smiled to myself, thought my foreman must be mellowing. He’d usually rather pass a kidney stone than pay someone a compliment.

  “Probably,” I said.

  The sun broke through the trees and came streaming in between the jalousies, painting rectangular patterns on the floor.

  I MADE a left off the county two-lane onto a narrow dirt road whose entrance was virtually obscured from view by a cluster of white oak and cascara. A young couple ate sliced watermelon at a table fashioned from reclaimed planks balanced between twin stacks of apple crates that had been placed in front of an open air fruit stand. They smiled as I passed and flashed me a peace sign.

  I eased my pickup around loose stones and deep potholes that were still brimming with mud-colored runoff, following a road that opened on one side to acres of unbounded agricultural land that bore the appearance of decades of abandonment and neglect. The other was bo
rdered by low hills that arose from the flats and a fence made from strands of steel wire that had been stretched between posts fringed with overgrown tufts of brown grass. No Trespassing signs were streaked with rust where they had been fastened to the fencing with crimped iron hooks, and creaked as they swayed in the gusts that moved down the arroyos.

  I crested a long sloping rise in the road and had my first look at the homestead that belonged to Teresa Pineu. I pulled to a stop, grabbed a pair of field glasses from my glove compartment, and stood beside the open door of my truck.

  Her home had been crafted from the carcass of a double-wide that had been mounted on a foundation of concrete block and surrounded by an apron of garden lattice that had once been painted white. A short set of stairs led to a porch landing where the front door was tied open with a knotted rope and a length of curtain fabric fell out through a side window and was fluttering in the wind.

  A goat, tied to a metal post with what appeared to be a length of clothesline, was chewing a piece of rotted fruit and pissing a hole in the dirt while a pair of naked toddlers roamed around nearby in search of something in the weeds.

  I saw no sign of Teresa Pineu, but her place was now surrounded by a makeshift encampment of lean-tos, tents, and pop-up campers and populated by no fewer than one hundred people. An American flag flew upside down from a pole fixed to a multicolored school bus where a cluster of people had gathered themselves into a circle and danced to the rhythm of drums made from upturned plastic feed buckets and rusted metal cans.

  I dropped the binoculars from my eyes, returned them to the glove box, and drove slowly down the hill. I parked between Teresa’s place and a drainage ditch overgrown with disfigured shrubs and dead brush that ran behind a tar-paper building with a door made of corrugated metal. When I stepped down from the truck the only sounds I could hear were the incessant banging of that metal door and the yapping of a dog from the encampment. The drums had gone silent and I felt the convergence of 200 eyeballs focused on the back of my neck.

  I used to have dreams about the war, the savage battle at Chipyong-ni and the evacuation of Seoul. I hold no illusions that my dreams were any worse than those suffered by untold numbers of veterans returning from the field of battle. When I awoke from those nightmares, though, no matter the hour or the state of the weather, I would dress and walk down to the barn and curry the horses, or study the work that had stacked up on my desk. The frequency of the nightmares has subsided over the years, but the images remain deeply embedded in some neglected place together with the visceral recall of that thing some call muscle memory.

  It had been my intention to make this a low-key visit, but present circumstances appeared to have scotched that plan. I strode toward the front door of Teresa Pineu’s trailer, and hand-checked the pistol strapped into the holster concealed beneath the three-quarter duster I wore. I wasn’t expecting violence, but experience had taught me that’s when it most often occurred.

  I made it nearly halfway to the foot of the stairs when I caught the approach of two men coming up on my flank in my peripheral vision. They were dressed nearly identically in faded denim jeans, lace-up steel-toed boots, and the familiar leather vests with sewn-on patches favored by outlaw motorcycle gangs. The man taking the lead was the taller of the two, with dark brown hair that hung beyond his shoulders, and a narrow, leporine face that was oily with perspiration, and a mustache whose ends grew all the way to his jawline. The other one was shorter, but broader across the chest, and wore a full Garibaldi beard that gave him the appearance of a lumberjack. This one’s cheeks were scarred and pitted where they showed above his facial hair, and his bovine eyes looked like pools of stagnant water. They made an odd pair, but then I looked at the crowd around me and thought, compared to what?

  They took up a position between me and Teresa Pineu’s trailer, stood shoulder to shoulder, and waited for me.

  “Help you with something?” the Rabbit said.

  His clothes smelled of asphalt and tar and his own alimentary odors.

  “I doubt it,” I said. “I’m here to see Ms. Pineu.”

  “Not today, cowboy,” he said. “Turn it around and go home.”

  They possessed the eyes of predators and men who took their pleasure from defiling and abusing the weakest of the herd while masquerading as their protectors.

  I eyed each one in turn, then swiveled my head to gauge the mood of the mob behind me. I saw that we had been joined by a second pair of young men by then, one with a movie camera balanced on his shoulder, who stood off to one side, maintaining a safe distance.

  I looked in the direction of the newcomers and said, “I’m not making any comments for the news.”

  “We’re not the news,” the one without the camera said, and tried to charm me with a smile. “We’re filming a documentary.” Then he hooked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating a commercial van whose sides were painted with a local network logo that I hadn’t noticed before. “Those guys are the news.”

  “Thanks for the clarification,” I said. “My earlier statement applies to all of you.”

  I stepped in close to the bikers and spoke softly.

  “I’ve long believed that the decisions that end up having the deepest impact on our lives nearly always seem of little consequence at the time. Know what I mean?”

  The Bovine pressed an elbow into the Rabbit’s arm and showed me a feral smile. “You believe this guy?”

  Rabbit cast his eyes to the ground that separated us, and widened his stance. The inside of my head suddenly felt like the scorched floor of a desert landscape strewn with thorn-bushes. It was an old but familiar sensation that accompanied dark and violent behavior.

  “You do not want to act on the thoughts you’ve got in your head right now,” I said.

  “And you don’t speak to me that way, cowboy. You think I’m some kind of bitch?”

  “Maybe,” I shrugged. “I don’t know you yet.”

  I knew what he was about to do, and he didn’t disappoint me. He made a move for the hunting knife that hung from a scabbard on his belt, but I was quicker, and had my pistol aimed squarely at his eye socket, hammer cocked and ready, before his hand reached the hilt of his blade.

  “You ever try to pig-stick me, you greasy fuck, you’d better do it quicker than that. Step out of my way now, both of you, or they’ll be peeling you off the wall with a paint scraper.”

  His pupils spun down to pinpricks, and he looked like a mental patient trying to comprehend his own illness.

  Teresa Pineu stepped out onto the elevated porch of her trailer, crossed her arms, and studied us.

  “That’s enough,” she said finally. “Come on up, Mr. Dawson.”

  I stepped around the bikers as I holstered my weapon and ascended the stairs.

  Teresa made a dismissive gesture in the general direction of the crowd and called out, “Go on back to whatever you were doing. Everything’s fine.”

  We stood together on the porch and watched the throng begin to disperse. The bikers tried to mad dog me with their eyes.

  “Keep the shiny side up, fellas,” I said, and touched my fingers to my hat brim.

  TERESA PINEU was a woman who kept mostly to herself and about whom I knew very little, apart from the nodding acquaintance we’d developed over the years in the fulfillment of our daily activities. Meridian is a very small town.

  She was unusually attractive, nearly six feet tall and fit. I guessed her to be somewhere approaching her late forties, but she still possessed a youthful olive complexion, and the mahogany hair and fawn-colored eyes that spoke of a Mediterranean heritage. Teresa had earned a reputation as one of the finest horse trainers in the state, and a passionate advocate for indigenous wildlife. She had built a living, as had I, out of the responsibility for the care of other lives—a dedication and fidelity that is alien to those who do not work or live with animals.

  We stood in the sunshine on her porch, looking out over the odd conglomeration of people wh
o had responded to Teresa’s public outcry regarding the roundup of wild mustangs on the BLM property that shared a border with her own. My gaze landed on a girl with wild curls of blond hair and an armband made of colored beads, dipping a wand into a jar and blowing soap bubbles into the wind.

  “So, did Sheriff Skadden send you all the way down here to shut me up?” she asked me.

  “No, ma’am. As far as I’m concerned, this is still America, and this is your property, and you’ve got the right to say whatever you want.”

  She studied my face for a long moment, looking for some sign of duplicity, and finding none.

  “Are you familiar with the verses of the Bible that pertain to man’s dominion over animals?”

  “I’m pretty sure I am,” I said.

  “Are you familiar with Ecclesiastes?”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  She leaned her elbows on the railing and gazed into the rolling pastureland beyond the wire fence.

  “ ‘For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity.’ ”

  She turned to face me before she continued.

  “Do you know that verse?” she asked.

  “It has a ring to it.”

  “I believe that the dimensions of that statement are simple, and need to be taken seriously.”

  “I don’t disagree with that outlook, Ms. Pineu,” I said. “But it’s these people who are becoming a cause of concern for the sheriff.”

  She pursed her lips and a flush of color came into her cheeks.

  “Mr. Dawson,” she said. “My life has taught me that any statement that precedes the word ‘but’ doesn’t count.”

  “Let me put it bluntly: the presence of those bikers should cause you some alarm. Because those two idiots are only the beginning. I’ve been led to believe that many more just like them are on their way. These are volatile, violent, and dangerous men.”

  “They perceived you as a threat to me,” she said.