Windwhistle Bone

by Richard Trainor

  Back in the car, Ram stacked the material on the passenger seat, leaving the story on his granduncle Ram on top. He filled the car at a gas station, then headed north, taking the old route that Yick used to take when Ram was a kid, up 99 through Colusa, Yuba City, Biggs and Gridley, the towns now bypassed by contemporary California on I-5.

  …He remembered Yick coming down to fetch him from his house in South Sagrada sometime after the Fourth of July, dressed in a black suit, white shirt, and black tie, chewing a panatella and driving a black Buick luxury sedan. Yick wasn’t tall, but stocky and broad-shouldered and seemed formidable. At least he did until he spoke.

  While his initial greeting might be boisterous, his essentially gentle nature soon took over, his voice modulating accordingly. Ram remembered how happy his mother would be to see him, how warm their conversation over coffee would be, how deliberate Yick was with her, asking after her mother and father and brother and how she was adjusting to her new job and whether or not she had any new friends and how Ram and his brothers were doing in school and what kind of activities they were involved in. If Ram or his brothers were there, Yick would be openly demonstrative with the boys, hugging them or putting an arm around their shoulder, gathering them into the warmth of his orbit, including them in all he did or said and how different it was with Yick’s brother, Ram’s father, Fran Le Doir Jr., for whom affection or its expression was difficult or at best rare.

  …Ram remembered that first trip with Yick. It was fall rather than summer, just after Fran left the family. He remembered the smell inside the Buick, of cigar, Old Spice and leather, and remembered the stops they made as they headed north. Yick was working on the John F. Kennedy Presidential campaign then, serving as the Northern California chairman. They’d pull into postage-stamp-sized towns and park in front of barbershops, farm equipment outlets or city halls, where Yick talked with people, handing them stacks of printed material redolent with the chemical smell of mimeograph, giving them brown manila envelopes, receiving other envelopes back in return, all the while talking or listening, registering everything in a black notebook he carried in his breast pocket. Between towns, Yick would talk about the campaign, calling Kennedy “our candidate” and making it obvious to Ram that he too, a boy of ten, was part of this “our.”

  The valley towns’ distance from one another was marked by Burma shave signs, and they motored under a gray-to-black autumn sky between drifts of rain, the road lined by trees aflame with gold and orange leaves, gathered in clumps beneath them like campfires. When Yick’s political business was concluded, he would pull the Buick into roadside hamburger stands and buy food for the road, which they ate while they drove to the next town. When they were near Red Bluff, an old barn stood off in the distance behind a battered fence with white letters painted on it that read, “Snake pit—See Dangerous Poisonous Snakes!” Yick looked at Ram, smiling. “You don’t have to ask, Ace,” he said.

  They spent the afternoon walking up and down the dirt ramps of the enclosure, watching pit vipers, adders, rattlesnakes, corals, mambas, and hooded Cobras which were Ram’s favorites. Yick explaining each of the species to Ram and answering every question Ram posed that he could. When they reached Yick’s appointment in Red Bluff, late for it and angering whatever councilman or party official he was who displayed his anger, Yick shot him a steely look and said, “Listen, Charlie, my nephew wanted to stop at the Snake pit, and if he wants to see the Goddamn snakes then you just have to Goddamn wait until we’re done. Am I making myself clear?” Ram remembered the political guy became real quiet and, all of a sudden, lost his agitation, saying, “Sure, Jack, that’s fine.” Thinking about it now made Ram smile like he did when he was a boy…

  …At Biggs, the black rags at the edge of the clouds melded into whole cloth and the skies opened up with a downpour. It was mid-morning and Ram was hungry. He bought a local paper and entered a diner, sitting at the counter reading and waiting for the rain to stop. When it didn’t, he pulled out the stack of clippings he’d brought in with him and looked over the partial printed record of the Le Doir family.

  It was dribs and drabs, factual errata, a photograph or two, nothing close to the panorama that Ram’s dad’s tales always painted of the Le Doir legacy, the drumbeat of the falling rain marking the minutes with the café’s percolator supplying the punctuation. Ram drifted off into the time that was the first time he’d heard it.

  …They were in the De Soto driving east on a midsummer day, motoring along J-16, the two-lane county highway that ran east from Sagrada into the foothills. Ram watched the passing landscape of old houses, barns, and fences, behind which grazed horses and cattle, his father talking all the while. “We’re natives here, Ram, longtime Sagradans, and you’re a fifth-generation Sagradan in case you want to know. All this,” the old man said, waving his trembling hand with a cigarette smoking between his fingers at the landscape on either side of the car. “All this used to be ours. We owned it, a Mexican land grant, it was your great-great-grandfather on my mother’s side who was the one who got it, and the Le Doirs married into that family. So you’re a part of that family too, Ram, a part of that history. And now, you’re the last of the Le Doirs,” said Fran quietly. “Yes, indeed, the last of the Le Doirs.”

  That reality—of land riches and nobility, and riches of history and lineage of new west aristocracy—was Ram’s Dad’s reality, and Fran lived it daily and drank it nightly, almost from the moment the family set foot in California until those VFW boys, with their gin-blossomed faces, shoveled dirt over his grave in Westwood, a day more distant to Ram than that drive in the De Soto was.

  They were natives because his dad said so, native Sagradans as old as the dirt around Sutter’s Fort. No, older than that because Ram’s first California forbear, Joaquim Degnan, was the one who built the Fort.

  But then too, we’re not natives, Ram told himself as he drove. Not really. We aren’t Miwok or Maidu or Wintun, or Nisenan, the real natives of Sagrada. But we’re natives all the same. We’re natives because my dad said we were, and my dad was the authority of the moment when I was driving east with him on J-16 in the old De Soto, the moment that was yesterday now many years ago…

  …It is always the authority of the moment that commands history. It was one of the few things Ram learned at college that stuck with him.

  …In one of the largest lecture halls on the UC Deerville campus, a professor named Spiros Kolikotronis held a crowd of three hundred students spellbound for an hour and a half, twice a week for thirty weeks straight, except for quarterly breaks. His course was titled “The History of Civilization 101 A, B and C.”

  Kolikotronis was barely thirty—if that—and he was already a legend throughout the UC system, beloved by students and feared by faculty and the administration. He wore skinny sunglasses like Jim McQuinn of The Byrds; his black hair long and unruly and he wore it in spikes, looking like Bob Dylan, which his clothes further emphasized. He was partial to iridescent sharkskin suits, European-cut with narrow trousers and slit pockets, and wore Beatle boots which made him even taller than the six-four he already was. He’d take the stage of the huge room at 194 Chem and not so much lecture as assail, bobbing and weaving, pointing, gesticulating, and contorting himself until he was in a sort of ecstatic half-crouch, his neck twisted to one side and raised heavenwards, assailing the foundations of civilization, disdaining the delusions they created with the might of his wire-tight being, looking like the catechism picture of Adam caught in a shaft of God’s light, or a thinner more charismatic Quasimodo taking on those foolish enough to assault his place of sanctuary. The women would swoon, moan, or faint. The men sat utterly rapt, barely breathing, and Ram, when he thought of it later, saw Kolikotronis as an exotic hybrid cross of Moammar Khadafy, Rob Tyner of the MC5, and terrorist Carlos the Jackal. He was, bar none and quite easily, the hottest dude walking on campus at the University of California’s Deerville campus.

  Ram remembered it was Kolikotronis’s cont
ention that if you took enough facts and spaced them evenly like lamp posts over a period of time, then the lighted path they described was the history of that era. And whoever most forcefully—rather than who was first or most factually accurate—described that lighted path, would be that era’s great historian. That person was what Kolikotronis called “The Authority of the Moment.”

  But that path was only one described path of many and it was observed by only one of many possible or even actual observers. But over time, this particular account, whether it was Herodotus’s or Homer’s or Horace Greeley’s or Charles Foster Kane’s, would become the accepted account of what really happened and the reason that this was so, claimed Kolikotronis, was due to the force and persuasiveness of the one telling the tale. This person, this historian, this yarn-spinner, whoever he was, was the authority of the moment. Which moment? Take your pick, claimed Kolikotronis, the history of Western Civilization is a series of lighted paths all illuminated by a succession of authorities of the moment.

  Ram remembered the electricity of those lectures at 10 a.m. every Tuesday and Thursday in 194 Chem, and the effect they had on him, at first taking them with a grain of salt and appreciating them more for their charged effect. Then as his life unfolded and revealed its inner workings, Ram later concluded that what Kolikotronis said long ago and yet again just yesterday wasn’t so much theory as fact. At least it was for Ram…

  …Thinking about it as he ate his pigs-in-a-blanket, Ram began to see the irony, for that’s what he had now become—an authority of the moment, a describer of lighted paths in a wilderness. He thought of it, remembering the early part of what he could now call his career in Sagrada, the wild nights with Phil and Jill at Emile’s, after-hours with doors barred and lines of coke on the bar, and the weekends down the Delta at the mansion on Grand Island when the first flush of success landed on him, the late nights at Graeagle at Phil Le Gris’s folks’ home, the punk music nights at the China Wagon, and the LA nights at The China Club after Phil and Jill moved there in the early eighties. During those years, his career ascended to the point where it was now, where he sometimes didn’t know what city he was in, waking up in another hotel room that looked just the same as the hundreds of others he stayed in, searching to find something, a matchbook, a piece of stationery, a landmark outside the window that might tell him where he was. Then Ram remembered the Phil Le Gris of now and his Barry Bailey assignment and remembered that he still had to make arrangements.

  He went outside to a phone booth and called Phil first, missing him at home, but catching him on his mobile phone on the way to the office.

  “Le Doir, where are you?”

  “In Biggs.”

  “What in God’s name are you doing in Biggs?”

  “Stopping for breakfast, I’m on my way to Red Dog for St. Patrick’s Day.”

  “With the pig and all?”

  “You bet. But listen, I want to clear things with you on the story I’m coming to LA on, the Barry Bailey story. Is it okay if I stay with you and Jill?”

  Phil sighed. “How long?” he asked.

  “Two nights, maybe three.”

  “Two, okay. Don’t know about three. Let me call you later. Where are you staying?”

  “A motel called The Lassen. I don’t have the number.”

  “I’ll find it. How’s everything else?”

  “Good.”

  “How’s Vera?”

  “Good. At least she was the last I heard.”

  “I’ll get back to you this evening. Give me a time.”

  “How about 8:30?”

  “You got it. Are you gonna be okay up there? For St. Patrick’s Day I mean.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “You know what I’m talking about, Ram. Jill and I are concerned.”

  “No, I’m good.”

  “All right, man. Take care and kick ass. Write something to make Yick proud.”

  “I’ll do my best. Give my love to Jill.”

  “I’ll do that. Talk to you later.”

  Ram called Barry Bailey’s office and was patched through to his assistant, a young Jewish guy named Dan Feldman who liked to gossip about names in the news and was working Ram for a job as a research assistant. Feldman wanted to get into the news business and implied that he was willing to repay a favor granted with one he could perform himself, whatever that might be. Ram told Feldman he’d be arriving in LA on Tuesday and was calling to confirm Barry Bailey’s schedule.

  “You know Barry, Ram. He never has a schedule set until the day before. As far as I’m informed, you’re still set for an 11 a.m. Wednesday meeting here.”

  “And then lunch, right?”

  “I think so,” Feldman hesitated. “Like I said, we’re never sure.”

  “Come on, man. If it’s not lunch then, then I want to know that it’s lunch when.”

  “I’ll get back to you.”

  “Uh-huh,” Ram said, rolling his eyes, beginning to catalog the other LA calls he still had to make.

  “Did you have a chance to speak with your editor about the matter we discussed?”

  “What matter was that?” Ram humored.

  “About my becoming your research assistant,” Feldman said, chuckling lightly. “Remember? We discussed it the last time we talked. You said it might work out.”

  “As I recall, all that I said was that it was worth exploring.”

  “Well, did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “Did you explore it with your editor?”

  “Briefly,” Ram lied. “He said we should talk about it when I got to LA, and so we will, when I get there. I’ll let you know what he says. Now, what do you have for me? Did you get any of the stuff I asked for?”

  “Some,” Feldman said after a pause. “But I’m not comfortable talking about it on this phone. Let me give you another number, and call me later,” he said, calling out numbers which Ram took down and read back to confirm them.

  “What time?”

  “About 9:30.”

  “I’ll do that. What’s this number?”

  “It’s my home number, silly.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  Ram hung up and placed more calls, one to Vera’s agent, Molly Dobbs, asking her to convey the news to Vera of where he was staying. Vera was shooting in the studio that day, and Ram never called her when she was on the set. Then Ram called veteran director Richard Brooks and set up a block of time for their interview.

  “You want me to bring anything?”

  “Just your tape recorder. I got the rest of what we need—bottle of good Polish vodka and some Cuban cigars.”

  Ram laughed. “The cigars are good. But my vodka days are behind me.”

  “Oh,” Brooks said, taken aback. “You don’t mind if I indulge, do you?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Good.”

  “If we get hungry, dinner’s on me,” said Ram. “Well, on Lumière actually.”

  Lumière was a British magazine that had been started by film critics forty years ago, before Cahiers du Cinema had even been launched. Ram had been writing feature stories for Lumière for the past five years.

  “Deal—if I’m hungry. These days, I don’t feel hungry too much. Maybe it’s my age. I don’t eat as much as I used to.”

  Ram hung up and emerged from the booth in the moist air. The black sky was gray now and off to the northwest, it was lighter still, a sort of moonstone color. A puddle reflected Ram’s face. He hurried past it before the image could register.

  In the car, he lit a cigarette and restacked the clippings on the passenger seat so they were face up. The one about Charles Le Doir’s resignation was back on top again, the second time this occurred, and Ram took it for a sign, leaving the car in gear after he started it and reading the story published in the August 20, 1927 edition of The Stinger, alongside another story about Buster Keaton who was in town making Steamboat Bill.

  The story of Charles’s resignation as city
treasurer mentioned the fact there was money missing from the treasury and the matter was under investigation, with audits ordered by Charles himself and the district attorney. It was a systemic bookkeeping inaccuracy compounded by a new system instituted by his predecessor two years before, said Charles, who claimed he was being unfairly blamed for an action in which he had taken no part, had not and could not be blamed or held responsible for anything. Charles’s attorney, Simon Wexler, the son of the legendary Julius Wexler, the lawyer who fleeced John Sutter of his Sagrada holdings, claimed Charles was a victim of character assassination conducted by Republican District Attorney Jeremiah Blumenthal. All this was reported in The Stinger story, as was Blumenthal’s response to Wexler’s charges. “Pure hokum,” he said, “It’s a smokescreen to cover his tracks.” Blumenthal’s audits and investigation showed that Charles caused the city treasury to come up $200,000 short, and much of this money, Blumenthal hinted darkly, had found its way to unsavory business enterprises in West Sagrada and Nevada City, where Charles Le Doir was affiliated with a group of financiers called the Paladins, who, rumor had it, were involved in business ventures related to sin, gambling and prostitution chiefly.

  It was all there in The Stinger—it was if you stripped away the dross of the politesse that obfuscated what the story really contained when you read between the lines—if you knew how to read between the lines in a story such as this. You could know it that way, or you could know it if in some way you knew the story firsthand. Ram knew it both ways, having recently been accorded the former method through years of experience and training, and having been accorded the latter when he became his father’s research aide at age eight, the summer after they got to Sagrada.

  They were in the De Soto again, passing through the West End, where the city began in the Gold Rush and which had since become a slum. It was midsummer and hot as hell as they drove down Front Street and Ram rolled the window down to get some air. He nearly vomited as soon as he did, the stench was overpowering, acrid and alive, and sour sweet, a smell of piss and cheap wine and overripe vegetables just this side of rotten, of river rot and creosote and something dead or dying. The smell would hit you in the stomach and in the knees both at once and take the breath of this world away, supplanting it with a breath from that of the other.