South California Purples

by Baron R. Birtcher

  “Remember when I told you I’d seen the slide,” she said. “But I’d never seen it on you?”

  “I remember.”

  “I had no right to say something like that to you.”

  She stepped into me and wrapped her arms around my waist. She laid her head against my chest and I could smell mulch from the garden and the sunlight on her skin.

  “I need to take a shower,” I said.

  “I’ll take one with you.”

  “I’m ashamed to occupy the same universe as men like that. It’ll take a belt sander to scrape the filth off me.”

  “You can’t scare me away,” she said, and kissed me gently on the mouth.

  “You are a bullheaded woman.”

  I PHONED the hospital after I’d finished dressing, knowing I would not be satisfied until I had spoken with Emily and Chandle Meeghan. After several transfers, I finally spoke with a woman in admissions who informed me that Emily had been released earlier that morning.

  I found an address for the Meeghans in the phone book, wrote it down on a sheet of notepaper, and tucked it into the pocket of my vest.

  A CONTINENTAL Trailways bus was pulling away from the diner as I drove into town, grinding slowly away from the curb and trailing a black cloud of diesel exhaust. Rowan Boyle was smoking a cigarette in the shade of his sidewalk awning, on a lawn chair made of aluminum tubes and plasticized webbing, wearing a T-shirt and stained apron, a paper overseas cap pushed back on his head. He waved a lazy greeting to me as I drove past, and took another deep drag off his smoke.

  I made a right turn into a small grid of residential streets that had been given the names of wildflowers. The whole town seemed uncommonly quiet; long afternoon shadows of alder and larch dappled the asphalt and a crosshatch of contrails slashed the sky. The address I’d been looking for was stenciled onto a concrete drainage swale where a moss-crusted brick walkway ran from the street to the front door of a two-story Craftsman. Dim lamplight shone like a damp cotton ball, through lace curtains drawn tight on the casements, the only sounds being those of my footfalls and the creak of a wicker porch swing in a riffle of wind.

  I rapped on the doorframe and waited, heard a brief muffled exchange from inside the house. Chandle Meeghan drew a narrow part in the curtains and saw it was me. He stepped to the door, opening it only wide enough to poke his head through.

  “I have nothing to say to you,” he said.

  His face was unshaven and gray, and he still wore the blood-spattered clothes he’d been wearing the night before. The stale, overheated odor of confinement drifted out through the breach and his expression was one of both foreboding and defeat.

  “I’m here because I want to help you,” I said.

  “You can’t help me.”

  “Did someone threaten you or Emily?”

  He glanced past my shoulder, up both sides of the street, as if he were expecting to find something there. The tick of the pendulum on the grandfather clock in his foyer echoed on the hardwood floor. He startled visibly when the spring clip suddenly snapped into place and the Westminster chimes sounded the quarter hour.

  “Please leave us alone, Dawson. I mean it.”

  He pushed the door shut as I started to speak, and I heard the deadbolt lock into place.

  I cruised the streets of the neighborhood, not knowing what I had expected to find. After nearly an hour, I drove home in silence, haunted by Meeghan’s disquiet, and the palpable sensation that I was about to have an arrow parked firmly between the blades of my shoulders.

  THE CHAIN gate was unhooked and lay limp in the loose dirt of my driveway. A surge of adrenaline spiked through my veins when I saw the Harley leaning on its stand at the foot of my front porch. The Super Glide was spotless, painted the color of black cherries and reflecting the light of the low-hanging sun. I looked toward the sorting corral, but saw no one. The ranch hands had not yet returned.

  I drew the Colt out of my holster and crept to the side door, hoping to get some sense of what was happening inside. I poked my head slowly up over the sill, and could only catch a glimpse of my wife, her posture attentive and erect and pressed deep into the cushions of our sofa. She appeared oddly composed, with one hand on the forestock and the other on the trigger of the shotgun that rested on her lap.

  I slipped inside as silently as I was able and inched toward the living room, my revolver locked and loaded. I bore my sights down on the bridge of the intruder’s nose before I had time to determine who it was.

  “Oh good, you’re here,” Rex Blackwood said.

  He was seated opposite Jesse, one leg crossed over the other, perched comfortably in the upholstered lounge chair I favored when watching TV. His attitude and expression were calm and relaxed, but the muscles beneath his eyes and the pulse that showed at his temple told me that he was wound up like a spring trap. It was not the chemical-driven, hair-trigger tension I associated with junkies and armed thieves; it was the full body awareness that was the manifestation of rigorous training.

  “Did this man threaten you?” I breathed.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “He told me that he knows you, but he doesn’t look like any friend of yours.”

  “You’ll notice she is the one with the Browning pointed at my throat,” Blackwood said to me. He had not once moved his eyes away from Jesse’s as he spoke. “For the record, I have no doubt whatsoever that she would pull the trigger if she felt the need to. Any chance you could stop aiming it at me?”

  “What in the hell is the matter with you, Blackwood, coming out here unannounced?” I said.

  He wore loose-fitting BDU fatigues and a blue-and-white striped shirt, a three-quarter length duster hanging open and unbuttoned over a faded denim vest. His wardrobe struck me as the stylistic opposite of the steel-stud crusted, leather-clad bike thug whose clothing squeaked and jangled from half a block away. Instead Blackwood was outfitted not only for the highway, but for stealth and physical engagement. The only leather he was wearing could be found on the soles of his paratrooper boots.

  “Are you heeled, Blackwood?” I asked.

  “I exercise my right to keep and bear,” he answered, careful that his hands never moved from their positions on the soft arms of my chair.

  “Don’t leave me guessing,” I said.

  “There’s a .44 pistol in a holster underneath my left arm; a .32-caliber Sauer on my right calf, and a Gerber fighting knife strapped to my left. Would you like me to unpack?”

  “No,” I said. “But I’d love to hear why you came into my house armed for an insurrection.”

  “I never face the threat of violence unarmed. And I’m not only referring to your wife.”

  I reseated the hammer of my Colt and sat down on the couch beside her.

  “You can stand down now, Jesse,” I said. “Meet Rex Blackwood. He was with me the other night at the Blossom.”

  She shifted the muzzle six inches to the left, but kept her index finger inside the trigger guard. “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

  Dusk had fallen, and I heard Wyatt barking in the distance. I knew that at least part of the crew was returning. I hoped it was not the group that had my daughter riding with them.

  “Any reason we couldn’t have had this discussion by phone?” I asked.

  “I don’t trust telephones. This is a face-to-face kind of thing.”

  The clock on the mantel ticked off several seconds, and the sound of horse hooves was growing nearer.

  “Can we cut to it, please?” I asked. “As it turns out, life is short.”

  Blackwood scratched at the stubble of his beard and shot a glance out the window.

  “You’ve been correct not to underestimate the Charlatans,” he said. “I assume you’re aware of their history.”

  I nodded and Blackwood shifted his gaze back indoors, looking first to Jesse, then to me.

  “In the late forties they were one of the gangs that overran Hollister, California. Four thousand bikers took over
a town and 4,500 of its citizens. Their police force at the time was seven men. They occupied the place for three full days. I don’t need to tell you how that went.

  “In ’69 they were with the Hells Angels at Altamont when the Angels killed Meredith Hunter. The bike clubs had been hired as ‘security’ for a Stones concert. The promoters paid them with cases of beer.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Let me finish,” he said. “A few months ago in a small town in the Black Hills, they lit the highway on fire with gasoline and took turns driving through the flames. But not before they shot holes in all the town’s fire trucks.

  “They make their money dealing weed, speed, and sunshine. Assault and murder are not crimes to them, but rites of fraternal passage. They are dangerous and unpredictable, and they hold no inhibitions about tracking their shit all over your world.”

  I looked across the couch at Jesse, and saw that her eyes had gone stone cold.

  “This is what you came here to tell me?” I asked.

  “I came here to ask you a question.”

  Fingers of light shone through branches of white oak and cedar as the floodlights switched on at the corral down below. The stock horses were being turned out for the night and their sounds floated up with the light.

  “Ask it,” I said.

  “Can you think of a good reason that a Charlatan with a bandaged-up hoof would be visiting with your sheriff at his house?”

  My mouth went dry and I felt like I’d swallowed a road flare.

  “I couldn’t think of one, either,” Blackwood said. “I thought you’d like to know. I’ll let myself out.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I RESTED MY forearms on the top rail of the fence and watched the stock horses take turns at the trough. A dun gelding rolled on his back in the dirt then kicked to his feet and strolled over to me for a treat, his coat powdered with dust. One by one, I offered him chunks of a carrot I broke off from the flat of my palm. He nuzzled my jacket pocket in search of more, but found none, so he swatted his tail along his flanks and slinked away.

  I lit a cigarette and watched the gnats and moths gather in the curtain of luminous heat generated by the floodlight. A colony of brown bats darted along the periphery and disappeared into the dark.

  I saw Caleb come out of the office and lock the door behind him. He removed his hat, combed fingers through his gray hair, and walked slowly over to me. His shirt was stained with crescents of dried sweat beneath his arms and trail grit traced the creases of his face.

  “We got all the animals put out like you wanted,” Caleb said. “And the boys set up a watch schedule for tonight.”

  “I appreciate that, Caleb,” I said. “Did you ever find any family for Dub Naylor?”

  “A sister in Big Pine, Montana.”

  “Can you write down her name and number for me? I’d like to give her a call.”

  “Already spoke to her. She’s driving down to claim the body and take him home.”

  “How’d she take it?”

  “’Bout like you’d expect.” Caleb shook his head and shoved his hands into the back pockets of his jeans. “A cowboy oughtta die of old age in a border town whorehouse. Ain’t supposed to get shot off his horse herding Purples.”

  I shook a cigarette out of the pack for him and handed over my lighter.

  “They’re coming, aren’t they?” Caleb asked.

  “They’re coming.”

  “When?”

  “Soon, I’d guess.”

  Caleb exhaled through his nose and pushed his hat brim off his forehead. The air was heavy with the smell of apple blossoms and damp earth.

  “Got a plan in mind?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Care to share it with me?”

  I got down on my haunches and drew a diagram of the ranch in the dirt between us. When we had finished talking, he took a long last drag, crushed out the butt, and squinted up into the stars.

  “Have I mentioned how much I hate your new job?” he said.

  WE ATE DINNER as a family at the kitchen table for the first time since Cricket had come home. Jesse served the Easter meal she’d prepared for us the day before, but we hadn’t had the opportunity to eat.

  Wyatt lay on the floor beneath the table, between Cricket and me, waiting for my daughter to feed him table scraps she snuck off of her plate. I caught her in the act and winked, saw an echo of the smile I used to see on her face when she was just a girl, riding her first pony or the time I taught her how to parallel park her car. Jesse had set the table with a pair of pillar candles and a vase she’d filled with anemone and poppies. The flicker of the light reflected in her eyes and I felt the piquant slip of time that was so disconcertingly common to men of my age. I had been harsh in my judgments of my daughter and her friends, and had the sudden realization that it was not that children grow too fast, but that perhaps I had grown too slowly.

  My train of thought was interrupted by the ringing of the phone. Jesse shot a glance at me, and the warm light in her dimmed. We had spoken earlier, after Blackwood left, and I laid the whole thing on the table. The facts were ugly and unpleasant, but when the conversation ended I was left with no doubt about her courage or her strength.

  I lifted the receiver from the wall phone, dragged the coiled cord behind me, and walked into the living room to talk.

  “I’m driving up to Salem in the morning to meet with the BLM,” Teresa Pineu told me. “I have you to thank for that.”

  “You stood your ground, Teresa, you and the kids. Best part is, you did it without anyone getting hurt.”

  “I don’t know if that last statement is true.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  She drew a breath and fell silent for so long I thought I’d lost her.

  “It’s the reason I called tonight,” she said. “There’s a state trooper standing in my house who wants to talk with you. He won’t give me any details except there’s been some kind of incident.”

  “What kind of incident? What’s he doing at your place?”

  “Something happened not too far from here, out on the state road. He thought it might involve someone who had been camping on my property.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know, there’s just too many of them,” she said. “I’m not sure he does either.”

  “Put him on,” I said.

  THE BURNED-UP vehicle had been discovered on a gravel turnout along a remote stretch of the state road about twelve miles from the ranch belonging to Teresa Pineu. It had settled on its wheel rims, the tires themselves having long since ruptured and nearly liquefied from the heat of the conflagration that consumed it.

  At its apogee the blaze had reached a temperature in excess of 1,700 degrees, enough to cause the roof to sag down like a hammock, melt glass, and crystallize the springs inside the seats. The paint had blistered and blackened over most of the exterior surface, but even so, I had no difficulty identifying it as the piss-yellow van that belonged to the filmmaker Peter Davis and his partner, Sly.

  The state trooper I had spoken with on the phone was standing near the rear doors of the van, hands on his hips and speaking with a short, thickset civilian wearing glasses who was busy marking notes on a sheaf of papers fixed to a clipboard. Their profiles cast long shadows on the pebbles, backlit by the headlights of the trooper’s patrol car, its Mars Lights coloring their faces with deep red oscillations.

  “You must be Dawson,” the trooper said. “My name’s Wilkens. We spoke on the phone.”

  He offered me his hand to shake and tucked his thumbs beside the buckle of his utility belt and rocked back on his boots in a way that was meant to maximize his height. His face was youthful and unlined, blond hair cropped close beneath the lemon-squeezer campaign hat tilted forward on his brow.

  “This is Dr. Hill, the medical examiner,” Wilkens said.

  The ME acknowledged me with a nod, without moving his eyes off of his notes.

 
A pump truck manned by volunteers from the Meridian station was parked on the opposite side of the two-lane, the men milling aimlessly beside it, waiting for some kind of direction from someone in authority.

  “Who was first on scene?” I asked.

  “I was,” Wilkens said. “I saw the glow in the sky from quite a ways away. The vehicle was fully involved by the time I pulled up here. I radioed dispatch and they sent the ME and the fire guys.”

  “And then you found the time to call me on the phone?”

  He squinted past me, toward the firefighters, nostrils flared.

  “There was nothing I could do here, Mr. Dawson, so when the ME and my backup arrived I went out to the Pineu ranch where all the hippies had been camped.”

  “Where’s your backup now?”

  “He continued his patrol after I returned.”

  Dr. Hill lowered his clipboard and stepped over between Wilkens and me.

  “The protocol is not to disturb a burning vehicle when any victims are obviously beyond medical attention. We don’t want to disturb any evidence if it proves to be a crime scene. It’s the reason those firefighters aren’t hosing down the vehicle.”

  The air smelled of superheated metal, melted rubber, and petroleum. I circled toward the rear doors and saw for the first time what Dr. Hill had been observing.

  “Someone chained all the doors shut.”

  “Christ,” I said. “Is there anyone inside?”

  “Take a look for yourself. The rear windows melted out.”

  I stepped up close and felt the heat radiating from the blackened openings. The interior looked like the inside of an oven that had been left on broil overnight, the sickening odor of scorched steel and electrical wiring and cauterized flesh was one I would always associate with the aftermath of the tank battle at Pyongtaek. On the floor inside lay two incinerated bodies, their limbs drawn up in a pugilistic manner, white patches of bone clearly visible where their scalps and faces had been charred and left their lips drawn back in the rictus of silent screams. Their limbs had grown entangled in the loops and runs of cables and sound booms. The victims’ clothing and their bedding and the detritus of their camera equipment had been completely soaked in gasoline; the mineral smell still permeated the night air. Scratch marks on the inside panels showed where Peter and Sly had, in their final futile moments, tried to claw their way out through the metal with their fingernails.