California Bloodstock

by Terry McDonell

  When she said yes, Peach shrugged and explained the normal procedure. Safe passage over the San Fernando Hills was usually best purchased from him and Zorro. Otherwise they couldn’t be responsible; and it would be a sad thing if such a fine young couple fell prey to the hazards of the trail and wound up completely broke or even dead, like some other travelers who passed this way just recently.

  Ah, come on, Taya said.

  Yeah, said T. D. Jr., who do you think you are? Pizarro or something?

  Pizarro, Zorro suddenly shouted. Who’s Pizarro? I’m Zorro.

  Yes, we know, Taya told him softly.

  There must have been something in the old hero’s desperate outburst or in Taya’s response that softened Peach’s attitude. Or maybe he just wanted to spend a little more time with people his own age. Or maybe it had all been a big joke anyway. Let’s just talk some more, he said.

  And they did: Peach trying to flirt with Taya; Taya trying to find out if Zorro had ever heard of Buckdown; Zorro trying to explain how things had gone from bad to worse; and T. D. Jr. trying to explain, as he set up his equipment, how he would use the moonlight.

  As it turned out, T. D. Jr. did make a daguerreotype, but it was not what he had expected. Zorro had refused to remain in the frame and had instead insisted on watching from a distance of at least ten yards behind T. D. Jr. Completely out of the picture. Yet when the plate was finished, streaks of moonlight angled to form a Z, erasing the features of Taya and Peach, even as their outlines came through clearly.

  You’d better watch it, Zorro told T. D. Jr. when all were examining the daguerreotype. Pretty soon everyone will be getting one of these portraits the same way the rich Spaniards used to have themselves painted. And, just like the Spaniards, everyone will look more and more alike.

  What he meant was that technology breeds doublecrosses.

  Good old Zorro.

  37

  Pueblo de Los Angeles

  Dust, fogged up from hooves of their tired horses, hung above the ground like clouds of brown mist. The faded buildings fronting on the plaza blocked whatever breeze there might have been. It was very hot. The air itself was flat, opaque.

  It was almost siesta time and the low-rent Californios lounging here and there in doorways had never heard of Buckdown or Sewey or the Burgetts. When Taya or T. D. Jr. asked about Counsel, the man old T. D. had said would know something, most closed their eyes and would say no more. Finally there was one man, a rather distinguished old Californio in faded blue pants with silver stitching up each leg, who was willing to talk.

  Counsel is a mean stupid gringo who can’t talk good, he said. We ran him out.

  The old Californio was sitting at a table in the shade watching a young Worm Eater coax a small donkey across the otherwise deserted plaza with a stick. The latticework that hung out from the cantina was covered with dry brown vines. It filtered the midday sun and freckled the old man’s face with tiny points of shadow. Like most southern Californios, he sensed coercion in any arrangement involving three or more foreigners and enjoyed it very much when they wound up killing each other. He was drinking mescal.

  If you want to kill this Counsel, he has a trading store near Tejon on the trail to the San Joaquin, he said. Good luck.

  When T. D. Jr. told him that they just wanted to talk to this man Counsel, the old Californio became very agitated. He cursed out at the sun and fumbled in his belt for a pistol which he dropped on the table with a thud. He began talking very fast.

  California is almost for dogs, he said, glaring at T. D. Jr. Mexico gives us monte players and cholos. France sends us prostitutes and little bullies. Chile, sneak thieves and rotos. Highway bandits come from Peru and some place called Ireland, probably a prison in England. Italy, pickpockets and bad musicians. Spain’s degenerate priests are still here, and you gringos are all politicians and plotters. It is all getting to be the shits.

  Taya told the old man that she understood. He paid her back by grabbing at her breasts and moving his hips obscenely below the table. T. D. Jr. snatched up the gun and leveled it at the old Californio’s head.

  Who do you think you are?

  I am the mayor of Pueblo de Los Angeles, the old man shouted. Get out of my town.

  38

  Peek-a-Boo

  Four hundred miles away, Joaquin Peach rode into Yerba Buena looking for bigger things. What kind of backwater trick was this? he wondered. Compared to Valpariso, this Yerba Buena was a dog village. Sweet erb, indeed.

  Christ, what a collection of bullshitters all living together in a disgusting summer fog. In Valpariso there was a lighthouse, and white mansions set like pearls among groves of almonds and citrus, and hillside gardens with rows and rows of heliotropes and geraniums. Here he saw only mud flats and weeds. The wind howled over the sharp hills behind him and a shiver chased up his spine like a fine and violent lace.

  He had left Zorro in a deserted Worm-Eater camp near the Mission San Antonio de Padua, which was now for sale. The old hero had insisted on keeping track of prospective buyers, hoping no doubt to run into some old ghosts. It was the ghosts that had started to trouble Peach. Zorro was always talking about them; and worse, talking to them. Was that where duende led? Duende, that mysterious and ineffable charm of the good outlaw that Zorro more than anyone else had once defined. You sure as hell couldn’t spend duende, couldn’t even buy an old broken-down mission with it. Poor Zorro, he should have planned ahead. Shit, Peach thought, and here I am in this shit hole. To improve his mood, he went looking to get laid.

  —

  Interesting, how all living things seem to suffer postcoital depression, a sadness that sneaks in even after the most brightly colored of screws. Old T. D. Slant made a note of it. He was poised on all fours in his suite at Cargo West, once again squinting through his favorite peephole.

  In the room below he could see Joaquin Peach stretched out across the bed like some deposed prince of love. Less than an hour earlier the roto had stomped into Cargo West like a conquistadore just returned from El Dorado with the loot. He had swaggered up to the bar and bellowed intentions to satisfy his various and wide-ranging carnal needs in every imaginable rut. It was then that old T. D. had bought him a drink of encouragement and hurried eagerly to his vantage points on the floor above. What a disappointment.

  After less than an hour of undistinguished diddling with a perfectly capable and enterprising young Worm Eater, Joaquin Peach was deep in a funk. He was down, way down, but not because he had performed poorly. For the satisfaction of the Worm Eater he cared zero. Let her go squat on an anthill. What bothered him was something, shall we say, more universal. He had not been doing well in California so far and this weighed heavily upon him now that his balls were empty. What would Pizarro have done? Joaquin Peach rose from the bed. He dressed slowly, covering his body and, he hoped, his doubts with the care of a matador about to enter the ring. Then he smiled sadly at the Worm Eater and, pants billowing, went back to the bar.

  Old T. D. Slant was about to call it a night himself when another man eased into the room. A tall man with a close-clipped beard and nervous hands poking out of stiff-boiled cuffs. Slant recognized him with hand-rubbing relish. It was Brannan.

  The Mormon captain examined the sad-eyed little Worm Eater on the bed with clinical thoroughness. He traced and probed his way over her body from top to bottom. He turned her over on her stomach and kneaded her smooth round ass. He turned her over on her back once again and, taking hold of her ankles, spread her legs.

  Old T. D. could no longer see Brannan’s face. The Mormon had dropped to his knees at the foot of the bed and was groaning between the Worm Eater’s thighs. Old T. D. was beside himself with the possibilities. His mind churned in syncopation with Brannan’s bobbing head. By chance his eyes wandered up to the Worm Eater’s face. It was a mistake. Her eyes grew wider and moved across the ceiling. She locked on Slant’s peephole like a timid animal frozen by a torch in the night.

  Slant was
pinned. He felt tied to all women like the tail of a falling kite.

  39

  Taya

  Dwarf shrubforms clustered here and there in tight packs on the grey underslope of the Tehachapi Mountains. In the moonlight their shadows seemed almost human, apelike, an army of monkeys or midgets standing guard in the night. Taya’s mind was a cold garden. She dreamed of growing things, shapes and textures pushing and sliding against each other, trying to break free. And all around her she felt the large movements of men and horses. When they began looking for her she woke up.

  She looked across the dying fire at T. D. Jr. He was wide awake, searching among the stars of some inner midnight, waiting for the night to fall away. He looked over at her. They heard a scraping beneath the folded mountains, teeth perhaps, tearing into the earth somewhere under the crust. Without speaking they gathered their gear and saddled the horses. And soon they were climbing again, higher into the mountains, riding out the night together in silence.

  NINE

  40

  Petaluma Adobe

  The frontal perspective on Galon Burgett’s health was confusing. Sometimes he looked pretty good and sometimes he didn’t. His energy seemed to depend on the weather. Heat bothered him and on days like this, with shimmering lines rising from the needle grass and greasewood, he was a ragged quiver of symptoms. He coughed a lot, his eyes turned yellow, and there were irregularities in his stool.

  He walked across the courtyard of the huge adobe that had served until recently as the working headquarters for the Rancho Petaluma, with its endless acres and its long-horned cattle by the thousands, its fine horses and its wheat and tallow and wine. It was almost deserted now, most of the Worm Eaters gone back to their scratch hills and Vallejo’s trusted foremen dead in their own workshops and corrals. Only a few half-breed vaqueros and their saggy-breasted whores still hung around. Fremont and the Bear Flaggers had driven off the livestock and stripped the place of anything they could carry. Who cares? thought Galon. He passed through the front gate and sat down against the thick adobe wall. His face was puffed and flushed bluish pink, like the belly of a dead fish. His own breathing made him dizzy. A short distance away he could see his brother and a gang of the half-breeds having a little fun. Beyond them the dry low hills pulled toward the Coast Range like the waves of nausea Galon felt rolling through his body. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep.

  Millard was sad that Galon hadn’t wanted to join in the new game he was learning. It was a good one. The vaqueros told him it was very old but still popular. It was called carrero del gallo.

  A chicken was buried up to its neck in the dirt. Then the participants took turns charging the squawking bird at a gallop. The idea was to swing low out of the saddle and pick off the bird’s head with one hand in passing. Millard was very good on a horse in spite of his age and came up with the head on his second pass. The half-breeds cheered and Millard felt very proud. He couldn’t wait to show Galon. He raced over to his sleeping brother cupping the bug-eyed chicken head in his bloody palm like an egg.

  Wake up, Galon, he shouted, shoving his prize in Galon’s sleeping face. Look what I won!

  Galon woke with a start, eye to eye with the mangled chicken head. Something snapped inside him. He slapped Millard’s hand away from his face and fought for breath. He sucked at the still air but it settled in his mouth like fine dust. He coughed and grabbed for the canteen lying next to him. The water was warm and stale. Millard’s smiling babble grated on him like a sandstorm.

  Look here, Galon, Millard persisted, shoving the chicken head back under Galon’s nose. I done good.

  That was it. Galon kicked out at his brother, catching him in the stomach and sending him buckling backward into dust. Galon slid his back slowly up the wall till he was standing and glared at Millard.

  Is that what you got for me, Millard, a shit old chicken head? Galon wheezed. I spend my life looking after you and that’s what I get when I ain’t feeling good. Well, you get the hell away from me. I’m through with it. You ain’t never done good. You’re on your own and I don’t give a fuck.

  Millard didn’t understand. He stared blankly at his brother and tried to think of what to say. But it was no good, and he was still sitting there in the dust when Galon got on his horse and rode off without him.

  Galon headed west, toward the coast. He wanted moisture. He wanted to stand naked in the rain. He wanted the cool relief of mist and fog on his face and in his lungs. For the first time in his life it occurred to him that he might be dying. But imagine how Millard felt.

  41

  Millard

  Poor Millard. Most of the time he was like an empty house: nobody home. His brain sailed back and forth in the space of his head like a phantom trapeze. Dumb habits dominated and he never felt much one way or another, with one obvious exception. He loved his brother.

  Millard would have led apes into hell for Galon, and now he was lost, orphaned, like a child told to sit in the corner without the faintest understanding of what he had done wrong. He watched Galon disappear into the brittle golden hills and it occurred to him that the best way to get him back would be to buy him. Galon had always wanted to be rich, so if Millard got a lot of money and could buy Galon whatever he wanted….It is not an unusual line of reasoning even today.

  Thus, Millard Burgett, at the age of fifty-nine, set out to make his fortune. He rode east, toward Sutter’s Fort and what turned out to be a golden future.

  TEN

  42

  Counsel

  Great dark birds sailed huge and aloof on the hot wind above the clusters of blue oak and digger pine that sheltered Counsel’s place on the dry, rocky approach to Tejon Pass. Taya and T. D. Jr. rode in, sweating and winded, late in the afternoon.

  Everyone around Counsel’s had a frontier mind. You could tell by the way each could carry on long and complicated conversations without the aid of another person. The shrewdest spoke of themselves only in the third person, which sounded pretty clever until you spoke to Counsel himself. He was special, a truly superior frontier mind.

  In his travels, his bouncing around on the frontier to establish one trading venture after another over twenty-five years, Counsel had come to believe that conversation, talk, was not simply cheap. It was also dangerous. Words were weapons that men used to trick and dominate each other, especially in the trading business. If he let another man impress him as to the worth of, say, a bundle of beaver pelts, it inevitably cost him more money. And if he made the worse mistake of talking about himself, sooner or later it came back to undermine him. Better misunderstood than to let on how your mind works, he had decided. Thus, he never told stories, and more important, he let nothing he heard impress him.

  I couldn’t care less he had found to be a most useful phrase and over the years he had refined it. First by shortening it to a sly I couldn’t care, and then, in what he considered a major breakthrough, he had honed it into verbal shorthand with care nothing. Eventually, when he reached California, he had hit on the ultimate: care.

  Yes, it gave him the perfect image. That one simple word used alone, Counsel found, communicated a disdain of disarming power. When Taya and T. D. Jr. showed up that afternoon asking about Buckdown his response was predictable.

  Care.

  What’s this care? Taya wanted to know. But it was no use. Try as she might, she could get nothing more from Counsel. Even T. D. Jr.’s elegant attempts to reason with the trader were met with the same monosyllabic response.

  The trappers who witnessed the exchange found it hilarious and volunteered nothing for fear of cutting short what was shaping up to be a real howl. If it had not been for Counsel’s wife, Taya and T. D. Jr. might have learned nothing. When she returned from her wood gathering and found Taya almost pleading with her husband, she put an end to the foolishness.

  Buckdown is in the North, she said, but he is probably crazy. There are jokes about him.

  With that, the trappers figured that the fun was
up to them, and proceeded to tell each other Buckdown jokes.

  Did you hear that Buckdown won’t eat tongue anymore?

  No, how come?

  He says it ain’t clean to eat anything that comes out of an animal’s mouth.

  Oh, yeah, well then what does he eat?

  Eggs.

  —

  Taya and T. D. Jr. rode north the next morning, but before they left T. D. Jr. made a daguerreotype, at Taya’s request, as a present to thank Counsel’s wife. He placed her and her husband in front of the trading post. She sat on a bale of fox pelts; Counsel stood behind her with his rifle. The trappers heckled from the side. Halfway through the exposure, Counsel suddenly wheeled and walked off into the woods. T. D. Jr. knew at once that the plate was ruined, and sure enough, when he developed it there was the woman, clear and sharp in every detail but totally unbalanced in the composition by Counsel’s blur fading out of the perspective behind her. T. D. Jr. wondered if Counsel knew Zorro.

  43

  San Joaquin

  Dawn. The sky was pink, pale blue, and shiny. It cupped over the San Joaquin like an inverted abalone shell, tropical and misleading. They were traveling north, straight up the middle of the huge arid valley, through a flatness that stretched in every direction like amnesia. Taya was sullen. Jumpy.

  Since leaving Counsel’s she had felt herself pushed closer and closer toward the edge of something, something physical, depleting. Yet she wanted to fly toward it, to get to it and see.

  She was already mounted, waiting for T. D. Jr. He was seeing to the packhorse, checking his equipment.

  Relax, he said. We’ll find him.

  Yes, she said quickly, if we get moving and don’t waste time talking about it.