South California Purples

by Baron R. Birtcher

  “Put those cans on your ears,” Blackwood said as he slipped a pair of headphones over the crown of his ball cap. He pulled down a small L-shaped arm from one of the earpieces and positioned a small microphone in front of his lips.

  “Speak into the mic there on the side,” he added. “It can get pretty noisy in here.”

  The pilot spun up the rotors and we rose from the ground and peeled off at a sickening angle. I looked down through the plexiglass window and watched as we passed over the fence line that had so recently been ploughed over and repaired at least twice that I knew of. A few minutes later I recognized the blackened circle of ash where I had stumbled upon the remains of one my strays when riding out here with Peter and Sly.

  The pilot swung a wide half-circle over the sheer canyon walls and dipped down low over the alluvial rock fan that I had previously only seen from ground level. He slowed as we turned toward the narrow mouth of the crevasse and hovered momentarily before we moved into the shadows.

  “Do you know this place?” Blackwood asked. His voice sounded tinny and distant inside my headphones.

  “I’ve only been here once before.”

  “What did you see?”

  “I can’t really say for sure,” I said. “It looked like a building. A fairly large metal building.”

  Blackwood nodded and gestured up into the gorge. The pilot swung sideways so I could get a better view out my window.

  “What do you see now?”

  I placed a hand across my brow as a shield from the glare and squinted into the deep shade.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

  “Take a look down below us,” Blackwood said.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “Not even one scrap of rubbish or animal sign. No tire tracks. No sign of habitation at all. For a place where you claim a building once stood, that’s kind of strange, wouldn’t you say?”

  The pilot gained altitude and swung southward, in the direction of my house and my ranch. He moved swiftly and high enough so the noise of the engine would be minimized at ground level. The pilot traced a circle over the Corcoran place and we followed the fence that marked off the border between the BLM land and the Diamond D. We flew more slowly as we headed in a generally northern direction and Blackwood swiveled to face me again.

  “I want you to look down and make a mental note as to where you found the remains of your cattle,” he said. “Tell me if you notice a pattern.”

  About ten minutes later, we returned to the North Camp where the pilot set the chopper down in the grass. Blackwood made a circling gesture with his index finger, removed his headphones, opened his door, and got out. I did the same on my side, ducked low under the rotors, and we both jogged back to the tree line.

  “Every one of the carcasses was within twenty or so feet of my fence.”

  Blackwood nodded.

  “I would suspect that if you marked their positions on a map,” he said. “You’d find that they run in a line, straight up the same longitude.”

  I wasn’t grasping his point, but the message was clear. This was obviously neither a rustling nor a random occurrence.

  “I don’t take your meaning,” I admitted.

  “I need to tell you a story,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “WHO’S GOING TO answer for the death of Dub Naylor?” I asked after Blackwood had finished.

  “Nobody. You’ll never identify the one who did it.”

  “That’s unacceptable.”

  “That’s the way that it is,” Blackwood said. “Think of Dub Naylor as the first casualty in a war that won’t be declared and will never be given a name.”

  According to Blackwood, the building I had seen buried deep in the shadows of that narrow box canyon was a temporary facility built by a private military contractor for the purpose of testing what he called Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Dub Naylor had apparently passed through the rotted section of fence that the cattle had pushed over, in his attempt to round up my strays. In the process, he had followed the cows all the way to the cliff’s edge, much like I had done with Peter and Sly, but had been killed by sharpshooters tasked with the responsibility of securing the facility’s secret. Fearing that if one of my men simply went missing, it would draw far more prolonged law enforcement attention than one who had been murdered in a manner they knew would go unsolved. They relocated his body back to my ranch, where Dub would eventually be found, and the investigation would proceed under the supervision of Lloyd Skadden; the contractor had long had the sheriff in its employ.

  “I knew a guy in the navy,” Blackwood said. “He died of ptomaine poisoning while on leave in Saipan. The thing about that kind of death is that the incubation period is so long that you never associate the actual cause of the illness with the item consumed. You understand what I’m telling you?”

  The original intent of the development of the UAVs had sprung from a practical need: the collection of reconnaissance photos for use by intelligence and military agencies. They could fly at high altitude with an insignificant noise profile, and do so without placing the lives of actual pilots at risk. Then the corporation got creative. If the craft could collect photographs, why could it not be adapted to deploy munitions with equal success? The limits of its potential for use on the battlefield, not to mention pinpointed political assassinations, were unimaginable. Of course, if word of the technology leaked, the strategic advantage would be lost. The development of this weapon, as with any secret weapon, had to remain strictly covert. It couldn’t be tested out in the open, so even remote military installations were out of the question for that purpose. This had been created by the private sector, after all. As a result, once the vehicle was ready for real-world experimentation they constructed a temporary facility in the middle of the last place anybody would think to look. Meriwether County was perfect. There was only one road in and out of the valley and the livestock population outnumbered humans fifty-to-one.

  “The canyon is narrow, and runs north to south,” Blackwood said. “Given the trajectory of the sun, the entire structure would lay hidden in shadow for all but fifteen minutes a day, with ample space for a runway that was essentially an extinct river fan.”

  “They shot my cows with the thing?”

  “At some point, they had to test its efficiency on something that was actually alive.”

  “Why bring me into it at all? I’m just a rancher.”

  His eyes fell on the pack of cigarettes tucked into my shirt pocket.

  “Mind if I bum one of those things?” Blackwood asked.

  I shook one out of the pack for him and passed him my lighter. He crouched down on his haunches and angled his back to the wind. I lit one myself and waited while he gathered his thoughts.

  “Who better than you?” he said as he exhaled. “From the contractor’s point of view, it was a twofer: You’d be distracted from pursuing your cattle-killing problem, while at the same time creating the illusion that law enforcement was on top of the growing unrest at Teresa Pineu’s.”

  My eyes wandered over the newly repaired stretch of barbed-wire fence and wondered how much of this might have been avoided but for a handful of dry-rotted posts.

  “The contractor was facing a serious problem,” Blackwood continued. “They had to bug out, and get it done quickly and quietly. Your cattle mysteriously exploding had not been good for business. When your friend the wild-horse advocate started raising a ruckus at the opposite end of the valley they saw their opportunity and took it.”

  “A head fake.”

  “If they could keep the eyes and ears of the public trained on the south end of the county, they could exfiltrate out of the north end without attracting any notice. They didn’t need more than a few days to pack up and disappear, and they had the sheriff bought and paid for to orchestrate a distraction.”

  “Skadden called in the Charlatans himself.”

  Blackwood nodded and picked a loose piece of to
bacco off his tongue.

  “He had to be sure things came completely undone. It was working fairly well until the bikers started working off-script.”

  “Christ,” I said. “Emily Meeghan.”

  Blackwood nodded again.

  “And Peter and Sly.”

  “The two kids shooting the movie,” Blackwood said. “That hit was intentional. Those boys had the facility on the footage they shot when they went riding out here with you.”

  A wave of nausea passed through me. I had been the one who placed the call and informed Skadden that they had been up here shooting film.

  He read my expression and said, “Don’t blame yourself. Skadden already knew about it.”

  “If you knew this shit, why didn’t you stop it?”

  He tilted his head sideways and looked directly into my eyes.

  “I didn’t arrive here with the knowledge I am sharing with you now. I put it all together, same as you.”

  “Not all of it.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. “But to be clear, the only information I had that you didn’t was the existence of the test facility—that and the fact that some rancher’s cows were exploding for no reason. It’s why they sent me out here in the first place.”

  “You could have said something.”

  “It’s not my mandate. The organization I work for has a strict noninterventionist policy. Are you familiar with the Observer Effect?” Blackwood pushed his hands deep into the pockets of his field jacket and gazed into the valley. “There are physicists where I work who are convinced that even someone’s thoughts can alter the outcome of an event. The men I work for concern themselves far more with ‘what’ and ‘who’ rather than ‘why.’ It’s the way they make their money.”

  “Your terminology can be a little vexing,” I said. “Blood doesn’t just rinse off.”

  My tone was bitter, but Blackwood ignored it.

  “You and your family are good people, and I don’t like seeing good people placed in the crosshairs for no reason. We’re going to stop talking about me now.”

  My stomach churned and the back of my throat felt like I had swallowed battery acid.

  “Why tell me any of this?”

  “‘In for a penny in for a pound’ and all that,” he said while he stubbed and fieldstripped his cigarette butt. “As we’ve both come to understand, you were set up to fail from the beginning, Mr. Dawson. The demonstrations at the Pineu place were supposed to devolve into a full-scale goatfuck just like Wounded Knee or Kent State and they could lay the blame on you. But the bikers went off the reservation, and if you hadn’t stopped them and calmed the protest, the south end of your valley would have gone up in flames. That is not hyperbole. I had your back as best as I could.”

  “Within limits.”

  He studied my face for a long moment before he replied.

  “Limits that I exceeded,” he said finally. “You couldn’t be everywhere at once, Mr. Dawson, so I helped you the only way I could.”

  “What happens now?”

  “I disappear.”

  “And all of the other bullshit? The unmanned spy planes?”

  “UAVs.”

  “Whatever.”

  “The genie is out of the bottle,” he said. “The idiots in DC believe they have the power and the means to alter the nature of war, that in the future it can be waged via remote control. They believe in some imaginary misguided honor inherent in rules of engagement against enemy combatants who don’t recognize rules. They believe they can send our soldiers to fight wars inside countries without collateral damage or pissing off the local establishment. They believe they can engage in polite little wars.”

  “I can’t accept that explanation,” I said.

  “You’d better accept this: Every last politician in Washington has nothing but pig shit inside his skull. These flying toys here? They’ll end up using them for things you truly do not want to contemplate. Sure, at first they’ll deploy them to kill a few bad guys, but eventually they’ll also use them to do shit like trying to control the weather, or surveil you while you live your daily life, or keep track of the purchases you make at the liquor store or pharmacy. They will tell you that their mission and motivation is to keep the public safe, but that is a lie and could not be further from the truth. This is only the beginning. You and I won’t even recognize this world thirty years from now.”

  He stood up and offered his hand to me. I shook it and saw something else form up behind his eyes, but he caught himself short and moved to turn away.

  “Say it, Blackwood,” I said.

  He dipped into his pocket, unwrapped the cellophane from another mint candy, and popped it into his mouth.

  “Do you believe a man must sometimes do bad things in order to do good?” he asked. “That is not a rhetorical question.”

  “I don’t know how to answer that.”

  He smiled, took off his ball cap, and slapped the dust off the knees of his pants with the crown.

  “Good luck,” I said.

  “You too,” he said and walked slowly back to the chopper. He made the circling gesture with his finger again, and the pilot spun up the rotors.

  “Take care of yourself, Mr. Dawson.”

  I WALKED out into the meadow and whistled for Drambuie, watched as he raised his head and pricked his ears forward and ambled through the tall grass toward me. I stroked his neck and spoke softly while he stood patiently waiting for the saddle.

  The silence closed in on me in the wake of Blackwood’s departure, and an entirely new set of depressing thoughts crowded my head. The massive tectonic shifts that created this valley took place over a period of tens of thousands of years, a shifting of subsurface plates initiated by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that raised mountains and redirected the courses of rivers, globe-altering events that can be expressed only in terms of geological time. But modern man, in the profligate expression of his vanity, had come to expect that the fruits of his fantasies must be realized inside the course of his own lifetime.

  Those in positions of power and authority used to concern themselves with violations of the public trust. But once that trust no longer exists, what is left to violate?

  In an expression of my own petty vanity, I believed I had chosen a path for my life that might somehow be less malevolent in its nature. The methods and manner of ranching had remained largely unchanged for the last hundred years, as did the appeal of its agrarian nature for me. Apart from the advent of railroads and eighteen-wheeled trucks supplanting months-long cattle drives, this business was as it had been in my grandfather’s time, and change for its own sake was viewed to be as pointless and fickle as fashion. I had held fast onto notions of character and honor that I once thought to be timeless, and believed I could be the final holdout if need be.

  I was mistaken.

  NEW YEAR’S

  1974

  SAMUEL GRIFFIN SPENT several weeks of recovery in the guest room at our house. Jesse or I would drive him daily up to Lewiston for physical therapy, and I never once heard him complain. At his insistence, he moved down to the bunkhouse when he no longer used a cane, and though he still walked with a slight limp, his physician assured us all that it would pass with time.

  I was asked to stay on as acting sheriff of Meriwether County until a proper election could be arranged. Jordan Powell and Sam Griffin volunteered to remain with me as deputies, even though both would have preferred to be setting a horse or even bucking hay.

  Jesse and I were enjoying a night out on the town at the newly remodeled Cotton Blossom bar when I learned from Lankard Downing that I had won the election as an unwarned and unsuspecting write-in candidate. For the third time that year I’d been conscripted to serve in a position I had neither sought nor wanted, and Lankard stood a round of drinks for the house in my honor. As I mentioned before, he loved nothing more than to disseminate unpleasant news.

  ONE DAY in late summer, Jesse and I rode our horses all the way out to a
disused line camp called Amantes at the westernmost edge of the ranch. Because of its distance from headquarters, a water well had been sunk and a small cabin constructed to accommodate the cowhands during Spring Works and autumn roundups. By late morning we had ridden several miles down through the creases of low hills and cut creeks and the air smelled of dust and sun-heated rocks, and the chaff from the cottonwoods fell down and swirled on the wind.

  I swung out of the saddle and handed the reins to Jesse while I unhooked a wire and held open the gate. Jesse and her horse moved into the pasture, trailing Drambuie behind.

  We ate a picnic lunch in the shade beside a pond strung with cattails and long grass. Dragonflies circled and dipped on the still surface where a large boulder had rolled down and lodged in the mud. We spoke about Cricket, and the interest she had taken in her job that summer, working for Jesse as a location scout for a Hollywood western being shot on a studio back lot somewhere in Southern California. A new sense of determination and gravity had replaced the pious and whimsical idealism that had defined her just a few months earlier, a remnant of spring ’73 that would always remain a part of her makeup, like a broken frame that had been put back together and replaced on the wall.

  A couple hours later Jesse and I passed through a clearing and came to the thick copse of trees beyond which stood the lodgepole archway and hinge gate that marked the entrance to Amantes camp. The shadows had grown long in the afternoon sun and my attention had drifted to the sky overhead and the cries of a red-tailed hawk being mobbed by a trio of grackles.

  I was nearly thrown from my saddle when Drambuie spooked sideways, pitched his head wildly, and lifted his head to the wind. His ears angled forward, his nostrils flared as I regained control and saw that Jesse’s horse had begun to crowhop and she turned him away from the fence.

  We walked the horses back toward the trees, where we gave them time to calm themselves. Jesse climbed down and led her mount a short distance away. I dismounted too and asked Jesse to keep hold of the horses while I went on foot to investigate the source of their unease.