South California Purples

by Baron R. Birtcher

  “It isn’t her fight,” was all I could think of to say.

  “Look who’s talking.”

  Sometimes when the wind blew just right, I could hear snippets of sound from the bunkhouse where the hired hands slept: a few bars of a song, or shared laughter at someone’s expense. Those sounds bore no distinction from those made by the cowboys and fence-riders employed by my forebears, and I felt insulated by the passage of time. The focus and function of the ranch and the care of its livestock took precedence here, in a form little different from the activities on ranches that predated the Civil War. We were isolated and safe, removed from the mechanized tick of the clock.

  From below, near the office, I heard the muted patter of conversation among Cricket and Peter and Sly. Not many years ago it was rope swings, Shetland ponies, and pet squirrels. It seemed outside the natural order of things that nineteen years of accumulated joy could disappear in the span of a few short months.

  “I swear to Christ,” I said. My eyes burned in their sockets and I was grateful for the dark. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do in order to be a good father to that girl anymore.”

  THAT NIGHT I was visited by dreams of incoming rounds and Chinese soldiers in quilted jackets breaching the wire and of feathers falling out of the sky. They had not been cast off by the wings of the Seraphim, but a swirling black murder of crows. I dreamt of a circle of fire, a pit lined in rocks, and of Indians whose fingers had been dipped in ochre, painting their faces in accord with ancient ritual, preparing for battle. Preparing to die.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I SKIMMED THE bodies of dead insects and leaves from the trough in the horse pen enclosure, and ran a cool stream of fresh water inside it. A cloud of starlings passed overhead several times and finally lighted on the loose, hoof-pocked soil. They pecked at the ground for only a few moments and took flight again.

  Drambuie separated himself from the herd and walked slowly in my direction, poked his head between the fence rails, and nuzzled me with an expectant look in his eyes. He was still young, not much more than a colt, and was frequently playful with me in the mornings before settling in for real work. I reached into my pocket, snapped off the end of a carrot, and palmed it into his mouth.

  Cricket came up beside me, leaned her elbows on the crossbeam, and watched the horse eat from my hand.

  “You want to feed him?”

  “Sure,” she said, and I handed her the remains of the carrot. “Can I ride him today?”

  “I think he’d like that.”

  “I’ve missed him.”

  “I’m sure he’s missed you too.”

  She patted his neck and he pushed at her until she capitulated and scratched him between his ears the way she always did.

  “You drink coffee?” I asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  “I was going to go up and get some. Want to come with me?”

  She looked away from Drambuie and into my face, and in those few seconds she seemed like my daughter again.

  “In a little while maybe,” she said. “I was going to take a walk.”

  “Stop by the office and say hi to Caleb. I know he’d be happy to see you.”

  Jesse was at the sink doing dishes when I came inside, the sleeves of her plaid flannel shirt rolled up past her elbows. Her hair was tied back with an elastic band and she turned when she heard me come in.

  “We just finished breakfast,” she said as I kissed her on the neck. “Want something?”

  “I’ll pour myself some coffee.”

  “Did Cricket find you?”

  “Was she looking for me?”

  From the corner of my eye, I saw Jesse studying me.

  “I really don’t know,” she said, and returned her attention to the dishes.

  I USED the phone in the kitchen to call Sheriff Skadden at his office.

  “He’s not in,” she told me.

  The receptionist’s reply was curt and her tone transmitted the pinched expression she’d worn when I met her, like she was sucking all of life’s bitterness up through a soda straw. I let go of any residual guilt I may have carried for my earlier unkind assessment of her personality.

  “When will he be back?”

  “No idea.”

  “Can you give him a message for me?”

  I could hear the rattle of a flagpole chain and the popping of windblown canvas spinning down at me from her end of the line.

  She sighed audibly. “Go ahead.”

  “Please thank him for sending the young filmmakers to see me. We had an enlightening conversation.”

  “Is that it?”

  “No,” I said. “One more thing: Please pass along my gratitude for seeing to it that my busted fence got mended so quickly, though it may need a little more attention. Seems somebody might have snipped the wires again.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Have we got a faulty connection?” I asked.

  “The connection is fine.”

  “The name is Dawson.”

  “I got it the first time.”

  “D-A-W-S-O-N.”

  Jesse was staring at me as I broke the connection and placed the receiver back on its hook.

  “What is the matter with you?” she asked.

  “I don’t know what you’re referring to.”

  “I’ve seen that look before, Ty, back when we worked in Hollywood. It’s like the slide that precedes an ugly fall. I’ve never seen it on you.”

  “Just taking care of some things,” I said. “There’s getting to be too many piglets for the teats.”

  CRICKET WAS running Drambuie around a barrel course she’d set up in the arena when I brought my coffee out to the gallery. I never tired of watching a good horse and rider at work, the mutual trust that they shared, and Boo had always had the lungs and legs to run the outside circle. She leaned forward and lay low along the pommel while he opened up his gait for the return run, and I lost her inside a cloud of dust when Boo hunched his hindquarters, dug in his hooves, and skidded to a stop. I heard the cowboys whistle and applaud.

  Wyatt scurried up from the arena, took the stairs two at a time, and lay on the floorboards beside my boots, his pink tongue hanging out from his snout. I knelt and rubbed his head before I went back indoors to top off my mug.

  I was pulling the plug on the percolator when Wyatt began to bark in the way that he does only when he’s distressed, and it captured my immediate attention. When I returned to the porch, I saw what had him so agitated.

  Eli Corcoran straddled a dapple-gray stock horse and had walked him straight up to the porch rail. Both horse and rider looked parched and hard-used.

  Jesse came out from the back of the house where she had been hoeing fresh rows in the vegetable garden.

  “What’s got that dog so riled up?” she said, the last of her words trailing off as she also caught sight of the old man.

  I shushed Wyatt and told him to sit on the stoop and I went to speak with our neighbor. I placed a hand on the horse’s withers and looked up into Corcoran’s lined face.

  “I come by for a word with your grandpap,” Eli said, crossing his arms over the horn of his saddle and leaning down toward me. “Can you fetch him for me, son?”

  I glanced sidelong at Jesse and she read my expression.

  “I’ll go take a look inside,” she told him. Her lips flattened into a narrow line and she moved hastily into the house to phone Snoose.

  “You look a little thin at the equator,” I said. “Why don’t you climb off and let us scare up a bite for you.”

  He searched my face for a long moment and seemed to be translating my words. He patted a saddlebag that was strapped on behind him, and I noticed he’d tied on a bedroll as well. Wherever he thought he was going, he had planned for an overnight trip.

  “Thanks just the same,” he said. “But Miss Marie packed me a kit before I rode out this morning.”

  “Your horse could use some water, too, I expect,” I persisted. I sm
iled and took gentle hold on the reins where they hung loose from the snaffle.

  “You got a point there.”

  “I’ll water your horse while you take a seat on the porch. Jesse’ll bring you a glass of iced tea.”

  Eli Corcoran swung a bony leg over the saddle and dismounted. I could feel the slight tremor of his hand when he gripped my shoulder to thank me, his expression bemused and his eyes like blue milk. He looked past me and into a distance and seemed to recede for an instant, into a place where round bales rested in fresh-mowed green fields and barn roofs caved in on themselves from nothing more than the passage of time.

  I kept my eyes tight to the ground.

  A train whistle blew from some other part of the valley and he came back into himself.

  “I’d prefer you don’t tell my son about this, but I’ve been seeing spirits with some regularity lately. I don’t like to think on it too hard,” he said and ambled slowly toward the house.

  I led the horse to the trough and watched Jesse carry a pitcher and tray of glasses out to Eli. I let the horse drink his fill and hitched him to a post in the shade of a red maple.

  Jesse was seated on a wicker chair beside the old man and nodding her head as he spoke. He turned to me when he noticed I’d come back.

  “You s’pose you could spare one of them store-bought smokes you carry?”

  I shook one out of the pack and lit it for him.

  “Like I was saying,” he said, resuming whatever he’d been speaking about with Jesse. I took a seat on the glider. “We trailed some beeves down to Old Mexico and when we was done I wired Miss Marie and she and her sister and her sister’s husband—can’t remember his name—all came down and joined me there for a vacation trip. We had a fine time.”

  “Sounds beautiful,” Jesse said.

  “The sister was a water witch. Did I ever tell you that?”

  “I don’t think you ever did.”

  “We held hands and walked down this little back street that was paved with nothing but round stones that looked like baked bread rolls. Kinda hard to walk on with boots, I remember. It was hot and so quiet that day, but somebody was playing a piano. The music was coming out of a house somewhere on that street, and we followed the sound ’til we found it. Sure enough, it was coming down from a third-story window of a building that looked like it was made from nothing but plastered-over mud bricks, all painted white. The windows had iron bars over them. Even so, somebody inside there had a piano, and they was playing something so pretty and sweet.”

  As I listened to him it came to me again that this man had been born in an era of transition, perhaps the last generation to know a nation that was more agrestic than industrial, where the insulated wires and poles that stretched across miles of rangeland carried messages tapped out on a telegraph key. But the voices that now drew his attention were those that no one else heard, and whose disclosures belonged solely to him.

  “We sure had a fine time,” he said.

  Snoose Corcoran pulled up in his five-window flatbed and got out with the engine still running. He acknowledged both Jesse and me with a nod of his head, but his eyes remained fixed on his father.

  “Hello, son,” Eli said. “Come on and join us.”

  “We’d better get home, I think.”

  Eli reached over and scratched Wyatt on the flat of his head, and his knuckles went white when he latched onto the arms of his chair and hoisted himself to his feet.

  “Thank you for the hospitality,” he said. “I enjoyed the visit.”

  “Anytime,” Jesse said and gave him a gentle kiss on the cheek. “You know that.”

  Snoose tried to take hold of his father’s elbow as he started down the porch stairs, but the old man shook him off.

  “I may be old, but I can still walk by myself, damn it. And I can still throw a string better ’n you can.”

  I walked Snoose to his truck and we both waited as Eli folded himself into the passenger seat. Snoose leaned in close and whispered an apology.

  “There’s nothing to be sorry for, except maybe he’s not twenty years younger,” I said. “And don’t worry about the horse. I’ll get him back to you.”

  “I’m not kidding, Ty, the old man’s starting to spook me. He was talking to Mama when I walked into the kitchen this morning.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything, honored Eli Corcoran’s wishes and kept the man’s earlier confidence to myself.

  Jesse stepped up beside me and wrapped an arm around my waist. We waved as Snoose threw the truck into gear and began to pull away.

  Eli leaned out the window, cupped a hand to the side of his mouth.

  “You tell your grandpap I’m sorry I missed him,” he hollered.

  If there is a sadder sight than a once-vital man brought to fear and confusion, I have not seen it.

  SHADOWS HAD begun to fall across the paper targets I had tacked to the straw bales in the meadow a good half mile from the ranch. I did not want to spook either the horses or the help with the shooting I was doing in an effort to clear my head. I slid the last six cartridges of Sellier & Bellot .357 ammunition out of the box and into the cylinder, clicked it into place, took up my stance, and sighted down the barrel of the Colt.

  I had been at it for nearly an hour, emptying no fewer than 150 rounds in the process, but I’d planted every one of my last thirty shots inside the eight-ring from twenty-five yards. The final six had been no exception.

  I plucked the cotton from my ears and ejected the spent shells into my hand. They were still hot to the touch and the air smelled of sulfur and ammonia and left the roof of my mouth tasting like I had sucked on a fistful of pennies. It was an altogether satisfying sensation.

  “Blowing off a little steam?” Caleb Wheeler asked as he came up behind me. “Been that kind of day?”

  “It’s been that kind of week.”

  He followed as I strode across the swale to retrieve the tattered remnants of my targets. A tangle of wild primrose and salmonberry had begun to bloom around the base of the hay bales.

  “I spoke to the medical examiner on the phone this afternoon,” I said.

  “What’d he say?”

  “Nothing I didn’t already know,” I said, studying the holes I’d made in the paper and wadding the spent paper targets into balls. “All he would tell me was that Dub had been shot from an upward angle. He said that Lloyd Skadden directed that any further information go through him and not me.”

  Caleb buried his hands inside the pockets of his jacket and gouged a hole in the soft soil with the pointed toe of his roughout boots.

  “Has Dub got any family around here?” I asked. “Anybody we can call?”

  “I’ll look into it. Jordan Powell might know. Those two were pretty close.”

  “Goddammit,” I said. “A young man gets shot out of the saddle for no reason at all. What the hell is that?”

  Caleb looked off into the pines and said nothing for a long moment.

  “Cricket came by the office this morning,” he said in an attempt to lighten my mood. “She’s growing into a fine young lady.”

  “She has her moments.”

  He attempted to camouflage a smile as he smoothed his mustache with his fingers.

  “I heard.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

  “The office ain’t that far from the barn, Ty. Voices carry.”

  In the distance, I could see rain sheeting the sky at high altitude, but down here on the ground it was cool and dry and brittle with thorny sunlight.

  “Seems to me you could use a break,” he said. “Meet me at the Blossom later on?”

  “What the hell,” I said, and saw a flash of lightning inside that far-off bank of clouds.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I PARKED THE Bronco in the lot beside the post office, got out, and glanced up the length of Meridian’s main street. The red leaves of the plum trees that had been planted along the sidewalk shimmered in
the fading light, alive with the roosting clatter of grackles and junco. The small shops, bank, and feedstore had already closed for business, but Leo’s Liquor and the Rexall still had their doors propped open, and the blue rings of neon tubing that circled the apron of the Richfield station glowed like a beacon on the corner.

  The ball of keys that Sheriff Skadden had given me weighed heavy in the pocket of my Carhartt, and I used the hour I had to kill by making a visit to the small substation the sheriff’s office maintained in town. The place was a dark vacuum of stillness when I stepped inside, the air stale, heavy with moisture and the sickly sweet odor of wood beetles. A fine layer of dust dulled the surfaces of two misshapen desks in the main room and the wire-glass partition that screened the rank of metal file cabinets in the back was littered with postings and memoranda that were curled up at the edges and fastened with cellophane tape that had gone brittle and yellow with age. I flicked a wall switch and the overhead lights stuttered to life and reflected off dust motes suspended in the atmosphere with a dull violaceous light.

  I crossed to the rear of the room and passed through a door at the base of a narrow stairway that led up to the holding cells. My boots echoed loudly on the linoleum treads as I climbed the stairs, swallowed by the dark. I touched the handle of the Colt revolver tucked into the holster at my waist, and immediately felt like a fool. I ran my hand along the wall to find another light switch and blinked my eyes against the unaccustomed brightness when they finally flickered on.

  This room seemed every bit as doleful and disused as the one below, only somehow more malevolent for its purpose. A single desk and wooden chair were positioned at an angle facing inward, between two grime-encrusted windows where the walls met in the far corner. Three holding cells constructed from vertical iron bars and steel mesh occupied the remainder of the space, their doors left ajar on hinges whose bolts and strike plates were crusted with layers of cracked and peeling paint and the mummified silken nests of insects long since dead.

  If Sheriff Skadden or his deputies had ever spent much time at this end of the valley, or Meridian in particular, they’d left little evidence of it here.