Within seconds, Solomon Gill had talked himself out of any more expeditions into the hills. He would take the next available transport back to Monterey. If he didn’t arrive too late, he could catch the night coach to San Jose and be home in time for breakfast. The idea became more attractive every moment, so he cheerfully began preparations for a timely departure.
The professor’s fortunes were on the rise. As chance would have it, the motor stage north was due to stop by around nine o’clock. There would be plenty of time to enjoy a ranch breakfast of venison and eggs at his leisure.
The bill for Professor Gill’s stay at the lodge came to a grand total of six dollars and forty cents. He left the change to buy Doughboy a treat. Sixty cents worth of apples or carrots he thought a fitting gratuity for a mule. He left another dollar as a housekeeping tip. Then he took his bag and went outside to the veranda to await the stage in the morning sunshine. Little Anne from the kitchen brought him a second cup of sweet coffee to enjoy while he waited.
At 9:05 the motor stage rattled to a stop in front of the lodge with a grinning Corbett Grimes at the wheel. Next to him sat a young girl he introduced as his daughter, Mary, called “Toots.” He said he was taking Toots to a friend’s birthday party up on the Palo Colorado. Grimes was in a garrulous frame of mind and full of good-natured quips. Toots laughed at everything.
Being the mail-stage driver made Mr. Grimes the first herald of all local tidings. His catalog of idle gossip seemed endless. Grimes loaded the professor’s bag in the boot of the stage with the mail, smoked wild boar hams for Frida Sharpe up at the Bixby Inn, and a roll of uncured deer hides for the little tannery in Monterey.
Solomon thought he would be the only passenger until the cowboy who had delivered the string of ponies earlier came out of the lodge, greeted Grimes with a chuckle, and climbed into the front passenger seat next to Toots.
The cowboy was dressed in the Spanish mode. He wore a black bandanna on his head in seaman’s fashion and a flat-brimmed black hat. He sported black leather leggings that buttoned up the sides and took the place of chaps, a style Mexican vaqueros had long since made popular. The cowboy carried a beaded quirt with which he saluted when introduced to Professor Gill by Mr. Grimes.
The vaquero said, “A pleasure to meet you, Professor. My name is Castro, Roche Castro. Have you enjoyed your stay in our wild country?” He spoke well, but maintained a lissome accent that sparked with Latin embellishments.
During the ride north Mr. Grimes and Roche Castro exchanged tall stories like trading cards. Occasionally Roche would turn to share exceptionally colorful details of some story with the professor, but for the most part Solomon Gill kept to himself.
He wasn’t impolite, just reserved, and Roche went out of his way to make the shy professor feel included. He asked Gill where he taught, but not what. When he heard that Solomon was a professor at San Jose State, Roche said that he had a second cousin going to school there, but never asked if the professor was acquainted with her. He was just being polite.
Roche preferred trading hot shots with Corbett Grimes. He was not one to chat up strangers except when boosting them at poker. Toots just sat there in the middle soaking it all in and laughing at the old jokes as her father spun them out.
God only knew how many times she had heard these tales in her young life, but she enjoyed them all the same. Grimes liked regaling strangers with his stories about Robinson Jeffers, the famous poet. One of the first locals to meet him, Grimes had driven Jeffers up and down the coast when he first came to visit the Big Sur.
Professor Gill didn’t care much for poetry, but he listened politely while Grimes spun out yarns about the old days. Grimes had known George Sterling and crazy Jimmy Hopper too, but these names meant nothing to Solomon, so he let his mind wander out over the vast green ocean flecked with white. The sunlight was clear and sharp and defined the stark coastline in superb detail. The professor drifted in his reverie until Roche Castro said something about “the dark watchers.” Instantly the professor surfaced with a belated, “What? What about the dark watchers? What were you saying?”
Roche turned around and said that Corbett had been talking about this story he heard about a tool-drummer from Santa Cruz who got lost up the Little Sur River. When they found him he was jabbering on about being haunted all night by dark figures that watched his every move, but would not come out of hiding. They had been seen for centuries, Castro said. All the local Indian legends related similar stories about the dark watchers.
Grimes cut in, shouting over his shoulder to make himself heard over the loud rattle of a particularly bumpy turn. “That’s the truth, Professor. Seen ’em myself once or twice of a moonlit night. Ain’t that right, Toots? You can ask Olive Steinbeck over in Salinas. She used to teach school in the Sur. A well thought-of woman, and you won’t find anybody as hard-nosed and stone-bound practical-Irish as Olive Steinbeck. There’s no malarkey tolerated with that woman, but she’s seen them, plenty of times. Told me so herself a few years back. She said she had spotted them when she was riding the high trails in the evening. Told me she made a habit of leaving small baskets of apples at special locations. The apples were always gone when she returned, but the baskets were never touched or taken. The dark watchers have never harmed a soul as far as anyone can recall, but Olive said that several greedy old prospectors had disappeared mysteriously while looking for Indian gold in the high canyons; fat chance of anyone finding Indian gold up there. Have you ever seen them, Professor? The dark watchers, I mean.”
The professor didn’t answer at first. He couldn’t. He was about to say “No” when the stage made a wide turn around the base of a hill. On the bluff above the road overlooking the Pacific, mounted on his black horse, stood Professor Gill’s private Indian nightmare.
Solomon felt cold perspiration bead on his temples. He wanted to say something, but his throat constricted and the words wouldn’t come. Solomon desperately needed to know whether the other passengers could see what he saw, but he found it impossible to make himself understood. When Roche Castro turned to better hear the professor’s answer to the previous question, he was confronted by a disquieting sight. Professor Gill was almost blue, sputtering and pointing a shaking hand to indicate the mounted figure high on the bluff ahead.
Professor Gill was not remotely prepared for what transpired next. Suddenly Corbett Grimes, Roche Castro, and Toots all caught sight of the figure on the hill. They began to wave and hoot wildly. Grimes blew the rusty Klaxon horn and waved his hat out the window while Toots crawled across Roche’s lap, propped herself out the passenger window, and waved both arms with delighted enthusiasm. Gill was then double stunned to see the half-naked Indian dismount, smile broadly, and wave back. In a few moments the motor stage had banged and popped its way down through the next turn and the apparition was gone. Solomon heard Roche Castro’s voice as through a fog. “Are you all right, Professor? Professor? Are you feeling well?”
Professor Gill at last found his voice. “Yes. Yes, thank you. It was all something of a jolt, well, a surprise at any rate. I’ve seen that man before and, obviously, you are all well acquainted with him. Who is that Indian, sir? I’m confident we have crossed paths before.”
Roche Castro turned with an amused knit to his brows. “I shouldn’t be surprised, Professor. But he’s no Indian, though he knows the local Indians better than any man in California. That was Dr. Jaime De Angulo. He bought a ranch from me a few years back. He’s a famous anthropologist, studies Indian languages for one thing. I’ve heard said Dr. De Angulo knows twenty-five dialects, maybe more. He’s an expert on the Pit River tribes. I’m surprised you never heard of him, being a professor and all.”
Professor Gill sat back with the expression of a poleaxed calf. His jaw dropped, his eyes rolled to heaven, and his head nodded like a Chinese doll. After a few moments Solomon Gill reached into his pocket to retrieve his handkerchief and wipe his perspiring brow. When he withdrew it, his little notebook eme
rged in the folds. He looked at the cheap marbleized-paper cover for a second and then tossed the fluttering pages out the window into a ditch.
In late August Dr. Hedgepoole sent a letter to Professor Gill. The message communicated the doctor’s disappointment at not hearing from his friend since his trip into the Big Sur. The letter also related the news that a local anthropologist and noted Indian linguist by the name of Dr. J. De Angulo had discovered a remarkable network of Native American hunting encampments in the Big Sur.
Dr. Hedgepoole had been told the discovery took place in approximately the same area Professor Gill had supposedly investigated. Dr. Hedgepoole went on to state that he had never met the man personally, but was apprised that Dr. De Angulo was understood to be quite the character and that the Big Sur locals all seemed to know the man well. Dr. Hedgepoole asked if Solomon had met Dr. De Angulo while staying at Pfeiffer’s Lodge. He closed his letter by asking for news of his friend as soon as it was convenient.
It was almost four months before Dr. Hedgepoole heard from Professor Gill again. One day he was surprised to receive a letter postmarked from Chicago. The professor apologized for the long delay in replying to the doctor’s previous message. He went on to explain that he had decided to accept a more lucrative teaching post at a prestigious women’s college in Illinois. Unfortunately, his move had required considerable dispatch and thus afforded little time to catch up on his parting correspondence.
Professor Gill’s letter went on to relate various trivial details about his decision to move east, but one aside did manage to catch Dr. Hedgepoole’s attention. In the vast fertile plains of anthropological study, Professor Gill had finally decided to focus on an unusually obscure and unpopulated field of study. Dr. Hedgepoole didn’t quite understand it all, but the gist had something to do with early grain cultivation, arthritis, and dental ware in prehistoric European populations: obviously a field of study offering little competition. Professor Gill’s letter noticeably avoided any mention whatsoever of his journey into the Big Sur, or his singularly bizarre encounter with fellow anthropologist Dr. Jaime De Angulo. Sic transit gloria mundi.
BLIGHTED CARGO
Even by the slimmest of accounts, young Simon Gutierez O’Brian was said to be fractious, deceitful, ill bred, and dangerous. Born a cold, selfish, and resentful scion of an indifferent bloodline harboring similar tastes, he was thought well suited to bear the malformed, sapless branches of his malignant family tree.
The O’Brian clan of San Jose, such as it was, had long dedicated its meager endeavors toward diverse forms of petty and not-so-petty villainy. At any given time, half the O’Brian tribe was abroad taking the cure at some state-run correctional facility.
At fifteen, young O’Brian had already grown gaunt and leaden with sin, but his greatest criminal talent always manifested itself in cultivating some witless blockhead to shoulder the blame for his own calculated misdeeds. On those lucky occasions when he could get away with bearing false witness, O’Brian took his deliverance as a sure sign that his skillful duplicity was beyond the mastery of the local authority, and for the most part, he was right.
At sixteen, O’Brian ran away to sea to avoid prosecution for serious crimes he could not blame on others. This gave the San Jose constabulary much-needed breathing room, but it did little to modify the boy’s basic inclinations. Even aboard ship, O’Brian found ample opportunity to employ his dark gifts and in no time at all was up to his eyeballs in petty crime.
Unfortunately a particular instance came about when his cunning miscarried badly. As a rigger’s mate aboard the coastal schooner Queensland, bound for Seattle, O’Brian had been caught stealing medicinal brandy from the spirits locker, which in turn he was selling to his mates at rudely inflated prices. He might have escaped with a fine and demotion if he had not been so impetuous as to attempt to lay off the true guilt on the bosun.
The inculpable bosun, wide-eyed casualty of O’Brian’s black accusations, turned out to be a first cousin to the captain, who knew only too well that his kin had taken “the pledge” the previous year at the behest of his dying wife. After summary justice before a captain’s mast, O’Brian was ignominiously put off the ship without pay or rations and left to fend for himself on a lonely stretch of beach south of Coos Bay, Oregon. O’Brian swore never to be caught short of a credible patsy again.
By pretending to be an officer of a passing ship bound for the sealing grounds and cruelly washed overboard in the dead of night, O’Brian cozened the sympathies of two aging Catholic priests, soliciting their aid to finance his journey north to Portland.
The castaway spuriously represented himself as part owner of the lost vessel the Saints and warranted the captain, his brother-in-law, would make for Portland when they discovered he was missing. As a ship’s officer, O’Brian avowed he would be pleased to sign a promissory note for all funds advanced, with modest interest of course, the funds forthcoming as soon as he returned to his ship.
The two priests were gulled into believing that the castaway was a good Catholic and a gentleman of his word. O’Brian played upon their sympathies until they happily offered to subsidize his journey north with two hundred dollars in Mexican gold.
O’Brian repaid their credulous generosity by pocketing the cash, stealing valuable church silver, and skulking out of town hidden in the back of a northbound goods wagon. In all, he thought himself far better off than if he had stayed aboard ship.
In a Portland dockside gin mill, O’Brian elaborated upon his sly story to a sinister audience in the person of a scar-faced Portuguese schooner captain late out of Macau and the China trade. Though obviously an accomplished officer, the captain (in O’Brian’s estimation) had all the charm of hard-boiled leather. He correctly accounted the “Portugee” a dangerous man from all quarters, but also lucky enough to have survived and prospered in his chosen field of roguery.
Like most old hands, the Portuguese captain was highly suspicious of every sailor’s self-appraisal. Nonetheless, the captain hinted that he might be in need of a rated hand, but specifically a mate having special knowledge of the more remote landfalls south of Santa Cruz, California. O’Brian at once claimed such knowledge and more besides.
There was little doubt in the captain’s mind that O’Brian might possibly hand, reef, and steer if pressed to it, but the balance of the braggart’s professed credentials he dismissed out of hand as so much oakum and smoke. However, it was not the Portuguese’s actual intention to take on deck crew, but rather to snare a blackleg, a soul-skinner and Judas goat with a morbid dependence upon lawless enterprises. The applicant should also constitute a fitting dog’s body to take the axe when the cards turned sour, as they sometimes did. But the Portuguese sea wolf hardly thought it prudent to apprise O’Brian of that particular eventuality.
As a ship’s master who had survived ten years on the China station, the captain had, by necessity, developed a keen sense of character, or lack thereof. Aptly discerning that O’Brian had little or no real integrity to contend with, the captain offered up a post with the stipulation that O’Brian learn to master his mouth. The excruciating alternative to the captain’s code of silence was beyond contemplation. He hinted that his lascars knew more about pain and death than any scoundrels in the world. He also indicated his willingness to demonstrate those subtle arts the first moment O’Brian stepped over the line or opened his mouth to so much as a bedbug.
With a raised glass and a warped smile, the Portuguese declared that on his ship, even the vermin had ears and they all reported to the captain’s mast.
O’Brian gulped down his brandy like one about to cheerfully face the noose, then signed articles with a handshake. To solemnize the contract, O’Brian poured his new captain three fingers of Mexican brandy, a treacherous distillation that corroded the blood in mere seconds. The Portuguese shrewdly noted that O’Brian had a prodigious thirst for strong spirits. To the captain’s way of thinking most sailors were sworn to perpetual inebriation, but
happily it made them remarkably pliable when moral fiber required acute flexibility.
It was thus that Simon Gutierez O’Brian began a new career as a blackleg smuggler. Not just a common contrabandist of uncustomed rotgut, but a bootlegger of souls. He had come under the sway of a captain who made his trade smuggling Chinese “illegals” into the numerous mining enclaves of California and the Baja coast.
It would be O’Brian’s task to search out prospective customers for the Portuguese and, once landed at some clandestine location, lead the hapless Chinese off to the mine contractors. Five or six times a year O’Brian would meet the captain off a prearranged point and guide the Portuguese’s ship to a secluded landing where the contraband might be transferred ashore out of sight of the authorities.
When not engaged with the captain’s business, O’Brian would occupy his time with nefarious schemes of his own devising. He judiciously never showed his face in Monterey or King City, where awkward questions might be asked if he were picked up on charges.
O’Brian’s favorite haunt was a notorious perch on the Monterey coast called Notley’s Landing. This curious enclave was comprised of a humorless cluster of bleached wood structures haphazardly braced against the ocean winds on a rugged span of coast south of Carmel Highlands, at the mouth of the Palo Colorado canyon. It was there, in the arms of frontier depravity, that O’Brian squandered his spare time, his money, and his health.
When not engrossed in planning or executing minor felonies, he could be found with the ladies at the bar of Notley’s infamous dance hall, the most uproarious establishment of its kind on the Monterey coast. Other occasions might find him laid up for a few days at the Chinaman’s, where he indulged in numerous pipes of opium to medicate the ills acquired asserting a dissolute lifestyle.
Down to a Soundless Sea Page 16
