The Shasta Gate

by Dick Croy

  Stoically ignoring them, Eugene continued to push his disabled motorcycle along the highway. The Leader nodded in his direction to the mechanic, who moved up beside Eugene. “Whatever’s wrong with it, man, I prob’ly got the tools here t’ fix it. Be glad t’ give you a hand.”

  The offer was apparently sincere. The Harley beside him was as sweet-sounding as any he’d ever heard, and immaculate. “Thanks. You don’t happen to have a spare hose clamp though do you?”

  “I speck so,” said the mechanic.

  “No kidding? That’s great! I tore the carburetor and manifold off, but it was a clean break. They went back on okay.”

  The mechanic swung down and opened up the most impressive set of tools Eugene had ever seen on a bike. And there was a clamp, along with a lot of other small spare parts most bikers wouldn’t consider hauling around.

  “Nice set a tools.”

  “Yeah, I can take care a ‘bout anything goes wrong on the road,” the other replied with the same deliberate understatement.

  Had he gotten these people all wrong? It wouldn’t be the first time he’d judged prematurely and too harshly. They were all up milling around now, stretching out, bantering among themselves.

  “That was some good ridin’ back down the road a ways,” said the Fool.

  “Oh man, I ain’t never seen anyone roll a bike like that!” exclaimed the street-wise kid beside him. “Where’d you learn how t’ do that?”

  Eugene smiled at him. “Right there.”

  “You mean you never done it before?”

  “Never had to.”

  “Oh wow!” said the boy.

  “C’mon, man—you’re a pro, ain’cha. You do stunt ridin’.” This was the foxy lady. She looked just as good standing still as she did at 100 miles an hour. “Don’t shit me, man—nobody pulls somethin’ like that outa the hat.”

  Eugene shrugged. “She’s just naturally suspicious of anyone that shows her up,” said the Fool good-naturedly.

  “I’m not the only one he showed up, sweetie. And I ain’t too dumb to know a good hustle when I see it either. I’m sure I could learn to do shit like that too, if I got paid for it.”

  “We all know what you’d do if you were good enough t’ get paid for it,” said the one with the braid. He talked with a cold venomous smile, a snake charming the flute player before the strike.

  Becky’s eyes became a mirror image of Fu’s: frozen fire, a coldness of the soul to keep her hatred from consuming her. The Chinaman was pushing his luck as usual; what Becky started and couldn’t finish, the Leader probably would. But to Fu the more rickety the hanging bridge, the more compelled he was to cross the gorge. If there weren’t enough floorboards missing or the suspension ropes weren’t frayed enough, he’d find some way to make things interesting.

  Like a hundred others before it, however, the blowup never came. Whistles and commotion among the other bikers interceded this time. “Jee-zus!” said Pretty Boy as if he were in pain and enjoying it.

  “That ain’t him, man!” replied the Fool.

  No, it certainly wasn’t, Eugene agreed. However He returned the second time, it didn’t seem likely He’d come back as the girl on the Arabian. But she was back, looking down on them from her hilltop with a contempt he could feel from here. Then she lifted her head with that haughtiness that seemed to be her most distinguishing feature and started down the hill to the ranch.

  Pretty Boy, sprawled on the seat of his bike with his feet on the handlebars, swung down and kicked his bike awake. “Hold on there, honey! Let’s play cowboys and cowgirls.”

  Eugene felt himself stiffen. He didn’t want this clown going after her, whoever she was. “Take it easy, man!”

  Pretty Boy turned to him with a sneer. “You talkin’ t’ me?”

  “You don’t wanta tangle with her,” Eugene answered with sudden insight and a smile. “That’s how I got my bike messed up.”

  “What’s wrong, she too tough for ya?”

  “She can take care of herself. But I don’t think she’d be much of a match for all of you. Doesn’t seem like much of a challenge t’ me.”

  “What’re you tryin’ to do—psych-out that asshole?” shrieked Becky in delight. “Man, the only psychology he understands is a kick in the balls!” She looked at Eugene as if she’d just discovered his secret: underneath that cool exterior was one naive dude.

  “I don’t think it’ll come to that,” Eugene answered, still affecting his smile and good-natured banter. In the meantime, he’d moved in front of Pretty Boy’s bike.

  “You lookin’ t’ get tire-tracked, man?”

  When a guy starts talking about what he’s going to do, he’s already sliding down off his horse. Eugene knew without turning around that the girl would be across the road by now. And he certainly wasn’t concerned about this punk. What about the rest of them? He glanced over at his bike. It was finished; the mechanic was putting his tools away. There was an uneasy silence.

  “You got it fixed? Man, I really wanta thank you!” He strode over to the mechanic. “How much do I owe you?”

  “You don’t owe me nothin’,” the man mumbled into his tool kit. “Clamp wasn’t new.”

  “Well listen—I really appreciate it.” Eugene put his left hand on the man’s shoulder and thrust his right with such aggressive and genuine appreciation in front of him that the mechanic had little recourse but to grip it, awkwardly. He always felt a little undone after his work was finished.

  But his timing couldn’t have been better; the circle of tension had been broken. The Leader, who’d managed to stay unnoticed throughout all of this, swung off his bike and leaned back against the seat. His arms weren’t heavily muscled but they were as lean and taut as steel cables. “We seem t’ be ridin’ in the same direction,” he said silkily. “Be pleased t’ have you join up with us, if you’d care to.”

  Yeah, this was the one he remembered most. Funny how he could remain so unobtrusive and suddenly be so much in command. Eugene felt the man could dominate this group—all of them obviously power freaks themselves—with his little finger. He measured him with a long steady look, sensing the underlying maze of motives behind the invitation.

  “…Thanks for the offer,” he said finally. “I’m not much of a joiner though.”

  The other didn’t seem surprised. The faintest of smiles flickered across his face beneath the dark glasses. “Glad we could help out,” he said. “Maybe we’ll run into you again.”

  * * *

  Ram was in the tack room mending a saddle when Catherine rode in. No one could burn his patient ears like that girl! He heard her stream of invective almost as soon as the drum of the stallion’s hooves. Her vocabulary, a lexicon of scatological and sexual phraseology that far exceeded his experience—and he hoped hers as well—made him wince. As she led Jebel past the tack room to his stall, he saw with amusement that even the stallion found the torrent of profanity impossible to ignore. His twitching ears made a perfect caricature of the Indian’s fatherly wince.

  He could hear her stripping the tack from the stallion, and then his restless movement told Ram she was brushing him not so much for his comfort as an outlet for her anger. He decided it was best to intervene.

  “What troubles you, girl?”

  “Oh some fool biker spooked Jebel. And I just get him under control and ridden out, and a whole gang of them shows up. A motorcycle gang—up here!”

  If she could have seen Ram right now, Catherine might have stopped ranting long enough to ask some questions herself. There was an alertness on his face that hadn’t been there a moment earlier.

  “This jerk turns off the road,” she continued, “and rides right up into the meadow on his goddamn motorcycle! Naturally he scared the hell out of Jebel. It scared me. I thought he must be crazy!” She laughed vindictively. “He got what was coming to him though. He ran into the fence! We jumped it and he ran right into it. I guess it’s a little hard to jump a bike—unless you line up a bunc
h of cars and put up a goddamn ramp or something.

  “I thought he might be hurt, you know? At first I was glad, but I decided I’d better go see if he needed help. Then I find out he has a whole gang with him, Ram! That’s the kind of thing I’m trying to get away from. People like that are mutations. Like the places they come from!”

  Ram had been listening to her harangue with intense interest, but his eyebrow lifted in amusement at this last remark. “I hear your father speaking, Catherine. If he had his way, there would be nothing on the ranch with wheels but a buckboard—and his Mercedes of course.”

  Miffed at the comparison with her father, she smiled in spite of herself at the reference to his car. She stopped brushing the horse and peered around the stall at the Indian. He surprised her. The amusement she’d heard in his voice was gone. He was standing next to the saddle and seeing neither it nor her. But he was seeing something. Some inner vision held his attention in a way she had rarely seen before. Then she surprised herself. Involuntarily, she shuddered.

  Chapter 15

  Next morning the Gang stopped in to see Mom ‘n Pop, who had a little general store just outside of Weed. Although Weed and Mt. Shasta City are located just 11 miles apart along Shasta’s western base, their close proximity to the mountain is the only quality they share.

  Mt. Shasta City, a resort town without the glitter, basks in the reflected radiance of the snow-capped peak of which it is the namesake. Weed huddles beneath a massive cinder cone which appears either to be nature’s little practical joke on the town’s inhabitants or some pathetic attempt by a vanished civilization to erect a likeness to the “jewel of Siskiyou County”. In either case, Black Butte is astonishingly ugly. And poor little Weed, appropriately named, presents a smudged and afflicted face to the traveler high on Shasta’s beauty.

  Mom ‘n Pop’s was typically Weed: undistinguished, to be charitable—the kind of store where, after you’d gone up one aisle and down another, you were no longer surprised to find package labels 20 years out of date on non-perishable items, or an eclectic arrangement of merchandise which placed cobwebbed cans of soup next to cute little signs to hang on outdoor toilets or wherever else it was appropriate or humorous to call attention to the other end of the food chain.

  The exterior looked like this too, and it attracted the Gang’s attention the way an outhouse draws flies. Most were aficionados of kitsch whether they knew the word or not. They piled into the store like prize-winners in one of those all-the-stuff-you-can-carry-out-in-ten-minutes contests.

  “Listen! Here now—I want all a you to pay for your things and get out of here before I call the sheriff!” Mom, a short, plump woman in her mid-60’s with hair somewhere the other side of pink but safely this side of lavender, ran out from the back where she lived with her invalid husband, her finger still holding her place in the National Enquirer she was reading. Pop’s frail grey head peered, myopic and vague, around the back of a rocking chair in their living quarters.

  Meanwhile, the Gang was rapidly falling into a feeding frenzy. Pilfering had deteriorated into pillage. Beer and junk food were the first items to be snapped up, followed by soft drinks and more nutritious fare like white bread and Skippy’s. But soon even the inflatable toilet seat covers and the liquor bottle pour-tops that looked like little boys peeing were disappearing into jackets, pants pockets, and bags. Finally Helen, Pretty Boy’s woman, set some of the things she had scavenged down on the counter and pulled out a book of food stamps. Most of her stash her son Jerry had already sneaked out to the bike.

  “Whattaya think you’re doin’—what are them things?” Mom demanded.

  “What are them things? Why, ma’am, them’s food stamps,” Helen drawled. “Hain’chu never seen food stamps?”

  “Food stamps?! You can’t buy nothin’ with them things here. This ain’t no city slum. …Whattaya mean anyway, bringin’ a child along with a bunch like this?”

  Jerry had just walked past with another load.

  “What’s wrong, Mildred?” Pop’s pathetically weak voice quavered in from the back room and was immediately met by a chorus of falsetto echoes.

  “What’s wrong, Mildred?” “What’s the matter, Mildred?” “What’s happening, Mordred?” (this last from the intellectual, who later explained in excruciatingly convoluted detail that his allusion was to the legendary bastard and incestuous son of King Arthur and his half-sister Morgause).

  “Never you mind, Pa,” his wife answered, trying to reassure not only him but herself as well. Her voice quivered now too but strictly from anger. “These hooligans will pay for every last thing they’ve picked up. You hear me? You’ll pay for it with money now, or you’ll pay for it later!”

  “Hey, that’s great, Granny!” mocked the Fool. He “presented” her, like an emcee, to the intellectual. “D’ja hear that, Stein? ‘ Pay for it,’ with money…and pay for it—like the ‘long arm a the law,’ right?”

  “Law is right, you young punk! We still respect it up here!”

  There were catcalls and mock cries of outrage as the gang heard themselves called punks by a little old lady. They had already grabbed everything they could carry and were streaming past her to the door. Realizing that all her threats weren’t going to get any of the goods paid for, Mom began to get a little hysterical. Her voice broke as she turned in confusion from one thief to another. “Here now! Where do you think you’re…You! Come back here!”

  “Mildred, what’s happening?” Pop had tottered to the door and stood there looking on at the carnage in bewilderment.

  “You won’t get away with this! I’ll have the sheriff…”

  “Put this on the bill, Granny,” said the vet, sticking a six-pack in her face as he walked past the counter. Interestingly enough, the Leader took nothing more than some local maps and tour guides.

  “You sonsabitches! You…welfare creeps! Pa, they robbed us blind!” she sobbed. “I told you the politicians’ve sold us out. Food stamps! They might as well used a gun!”

  The Gang made for their bikes, doubled up with laugher at Mom’s spluttering fury and dropping some of their loot. She followed them outside, shaking with rage.

  “You won’t get away with this! The Lord punishes them that tramples on the rights of decent folk!”

  They started their bikes. The noise was deafening.

  “You city scum are all alike!” she raved. “I don’t care whether you’re riding your filthy machines—or runnin’ the gov’ment!”

  Revving up their engines, they poured out of the parking lot in a noxious flood, showering the frantic woman with dust, gravel, and obscenities as she screamed her final epithet: “You got no sense a proppity!”

  * * *

  There had been no sign of the bikers this morning. Catherine, lingering over Lucille’s good coffee and pound cake on the porch swing, hoped to hell they’d moved on. She was still trying to digest—“process” as, with dismay, she suddenly encountered Bill in her mental conversation—the events of yesterday. Some things Ram had said, her odd experience with the wind chimes and discovery of a giftedness she’d never dreamed of in Douglas, even some of the perceptive things he’d said, all cluttered her mind. She longed for the serenity of her secret pool.

  Half an hour later, Jebel Druze was picking his way up the narrow ledge when a loud splash took both of them by surprise. The stallion nearly lost his footing. Catherine urged him forward cautiously. That was no small animal. Could it be a bear? No, Jebel would be reacting violently if a bear’s scent were in the air. Which way was the wind blowing? She hunched down close to the horse’s neck and eased him quietly into the clearing, straining to see through the trees to the pool.

  Another splash, and the stallion snorted, shifting his weight nervously. But he still didn’t seem spooked enough for real alarm. Suddenly a flash of movement caught her eye, a fan of water in the sunlight. A man’s lean bronzed body broke the surface.

  Now her heart was beating rapidly. She inched Jebel into
a slow circle around the perimeter of the clearing to get a better look at him. No! It couldn’t be! Everything went red. She dug her heels into the stallion’s flanks with reflexive adrenaline fury. The horse’s whinny ripped through the lush stillness like wood splintering as he lunged forward.

  “What are you doing here?” Her own voice was as savage as the stallion’s. “This is private property—you’re trespassing! Get out!”

  Such an entrance would have startled anyone. Naked in the middle of the pool, Eugene bent his knees to get himself as low in the water as possible and whirled to face this banshee on a charging horse. Catherine pulled the stallion up at the very brink. The skittish horse pranced and pivoted about so that she was facing the defenseless intruder over first one shoulder, then the other.

  “What do you mean coming here? You don’t belong here! And after that, that stupid stunt you pulled yesterday, you’re absolutely unwelcome! Do you understand?”

  Eugene was flabbergasted. He’d never experienced anything quite like this. Her horse seemed as crazy as she was—rolling its eyes, nostrils flaring, ears flattened fiercely against its narrow head. The girl fought to hold him even as her erupting emotion fueled his wildness.

  “Listen,” she said, with a supreme attempt to control both the horse and her voice, threatening to fly into upper registers that neither her throat nor her ability to verbalize would tolerate: “you’d better be off this ranch in a goddamned hurry. And the rest of your gang with you. Don’t think you can run roughshod over the people around here! We can take care of ourselves. I’m going to get help—you’d better be gone when we get back!”

  She wheeled the horse around with a vehement patrician flourish. When they were out of sight, Eugene stood up in the icy water. His legs were numb. He took a deep breath, whipped his long hair out of his eyes, threw back his arms, and landed with a resounding splash fully extended on his back. As he let himself sink completely beneath the surface, the glacial water took his breath. Then he pushed from the bottom with all his strength and let out a mighty war whoop. What a spitfire!