South California Purples

by Baron R. Birtcher

  Jordan Powell and Samuel Griffin knelt in the loose dirt on the other side of the rail fence, turning their faces away from the ball of dust kicked up by the calf they had just branded and released. He bawled and kicked the air before he found his footing and ran through the chute into the paddock with the others.

  “I’d wager Naylor’s afoot,” Powell shouted. “’Cause his horse committed suicide.”

  “I’ll go,” I said to Wheeler. “I could use some fresh air anyway.”

  Griffin dusted off his chaps, hopped the top rail and wandered in our direction.

  “If it’s all the same to you, Mr. Wheeler,” Griffin said. “I’ll go along with Mr. Dawson just in case he needs a hand.”

  Caleb looked from Griffin’s face to mine. Whatever he was thinking, he was keeping it to himself.

  “It might be wise to have another man along if you can spare him,” I told Wheeler.

  He glanced at his wristwatch and craned his neck to have a look at whatever progress was being made by the rest of the crew.

  “I can set with that,” he said and stepped out of the saddle. “You better sparkle up quick, though. You only got another three or four hours of daylight.”

  THE FIRST hour went by in a silence defined at first by small talk punctuated by long, companionable silences. I spoke of the ranch’s long history, and Griffin told me about his football career and his pursuit of a college degree in husbandry.

  “I heard one of the men call you ‘Captain,’ ” he said as we topped a rise that looked out over the rolling hills to the north.

  “Only Powell calls me that,” I said. “Don’t you start doing it.”

  He nodded and took off the sunglasses he had been wearing and slipped them into the breast pocket of the denim jacket he wore.

  “You mind if I ask why he does that?”

  I scanned his face for a moment and recognized no motive or artifice, so I answered him.

  “Force of habit,” I said. “I was in the army once. So was Powell.”

  We had shared the experience fighting wars where nobody won but the losers numbered beyond counting.

  “I was in the Crotch myself.” His eyes skimmed the folds of the landscape where rock-strewn ravines were falling into shadow and appeared to lose himself for a moment. “Sorry, sir, I mean the marine corps.”

  “No need to apologize. Some marines can be fine men too.”

  He smiled at my tired jest and seemed to come back into himself.

  “Vietnam?” I asked him.

  “I volunteered. One tour was enough for me.”

  “One tour of any war is more than enough for anybody.”

  THE WINDMILL at the edge of the wide pasture we referred to as the North Camp was laboring slowly in a halting late afternoon breeze and the trees cast long shadows in the grass. I came down off my horse and pulled the lever on the pipe and released some fresh water into the trough to water our mounts.

  There was no immediate sign of Dub Naylor, nor had we seen any on the way up the trail, and our companionable silence had given way to anxiety. We split up, and I rode the fence line while Griffin disappeared into the trees. A flight of geese flew high overhead and their shapes disappeared behind a distant stand of old growth timber.

  I found Dub Naylor about half an hour later.

  I was kneeling beside his prone body, half hidden by the bunchgrass that grew near a spring-fed pond at the far edge of the pasture, when I whistled for Griffin to join me. I checked for the pulse that I knew would not be there and studied the neat hole that had been punched through the center of Naylor’s throat. His eyes were open, wide with surprise, and I drew down the lids with the tips of my fingers.

  “He’s cold,” I said. “This happened hours ago.”

  “Looks like a high-velocity round,” Griffin said as he knelt down beside me. “Check out the size of that exit wound.”

  I scanned the landscape in every direction, knowing full well that the shooter had long since disappeared.

  “He was dragged here, but no telling from where.”

  I watched Griffin use his thumb to trace the sign of the cross on Dub Naylor’s forehead, as I had seen it done by chaplains in the battlefield.

  “I ain’t a priest,” he said softly. “But we all deserve something at the end.”

  We stood and led the horses some distance away, careful to walk in a line to minimize any damage we’d make to the long grass, but we both knew it was futile. Any trail left behind by the shooter was long gone by the time we had arrived, but we hobbled the horses anyway and set out on foot in a perimeter pattern, in search of neither of us knew what.

  “You see that?” I asked.

  “Fence is busted down.”

  Three heavy posts still attached to the strands of barbed wire that separated my ranch from the BLM range had been laid over in the brush. The bases felt spongy to the touch, decimated by wet rot.

  “Looks like the cows pushed ’em over. They’re leaning that direction.”

  “Let’s grab our horses and see if Dub had tried to track them over the other side.”

  Fifteen minutes later we spotted his blue roan grazing the bottom of a dry creek bed, the reins of the bridle hanging limp and strung across the horn. It nickered when it caught the scent of our horses, and crow-hopped nervously as I approached on foot. I calmed him, caught hold of the reins and trailed him behind me while Sam Griffin and I rode in overlapping circles across the area. We maneuvered through thickets of timber and undergrowths of live oak runners, finding no sign of a struggle or anything else in the dry grass that had grown tall enough to brush the bottoms of our stirrups.

  We worked our way back to my side of the fence, careful to avoid snags on the tangle of fallen wire and wood. The surface of the pond was still in the failing light, strung with bunchgrass along the edges and clotted with blooms of algae and moss. Swirling gray clouds of lacewings and gnats, and the sweet green odor of stagnating water floated in the air as we lifted Dub’s body and placed it gently across the saddle of his horse. I unfurled my rain slicker and covered him with it, and secured him with his own reata.

  It was a different kind of silence that accompanied us down the hill, mournful and angry and not at all unlike the sensation I had long associated with the loss of a companion in battle. But this was murder, without purpose or explanation, and I carried the weight of Dub Naylor’s death where it rested: squarely on my shoulders.

  We picked our way down the trail in full dark. Insects buzzed in the tree line and would go suddenly still as we passed.

  “This isn’t on you, Mr. Dawson,” Griffin offered.

  His voice had the muted quality of a man speaking more to himself than another. It seemed we hadn’t uttered a single word in quite some time.

  “The hell it isn’t,” I said.

  We topped the last hill of open pasture, and I climbed down to unhook the gate. I held it in place as Griffin rode past me, trailing the blue roan that carried Dub. He pulled up to a stop and waited for me while I looped the gate chain back into place.

  I expected Griffin to move on ahead once I had remounted but he turned in his saddle instead.

  “Do you mind if I ask you a question?” he asked.

  “Go ahead.”

  “What is it like to own all of this?”

  His question was one I had not been expecting. The ranch was one of the largest in this part of the state, in terms of deeded acreage, but I never truly thought of it as my own. It is not characterized by extravagant structures; the house Jesse and I lived in had not changed much in three generations. The barns and outbuildings had been constructed for service, not luxury, and it was the ranch and the cattle that always came first. I had been taught early and often that you sacrificed whatever you had to for the land, because God wasn’t making any more of it. You never used debt, so you owned what you owned, and legacy was something your great-great-grandchildren might talk about.

  I looked into the night sky and foun
d the thumbnail scratch of a waning crescent hovering low on the horizon, and shook my head.

  “I truly have no idea,” I said.

  He nodded, and I believe he understood what I meant.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  MY HEADLIGHTS CUT a swath along the white line of the two-lane that was still deserted at this early hour of the morning. The hum of the highway and the whistle of wind blowing through my open window had grown monotonous, and I crushed my cigarette into the ashtray. I knew the only radio station I’d be able to receive between the steep walls of the canyon was an all-news channel, but I switched it on anyway.

  “. . . day twenty-six of the standoff at Wounded Knee has brought the arrest of so-called mercy pilot Bill Zimmerman on charges of conspiracy. In other news, Washington sources have reported that White House Counsel John Dean has told prosecutors that the break-in at the offices of Daniel Ellsberg had, in fact, been ordered by the White House itself, and the repercussions could result in the resignations of senior White House staffers H.R. Haldeman, the president’s chief of staff, and domestic affairs advisor John Ehrlichman.

  “Washington officials also announced today that government attorneys have requested that all bomb-related charges associated with members of the radical group, the Weather Underground, be dropped due to allegations that tactics used by the FBI have been deemed illegal—”

  I switched it off again. The radio had been a mistake.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said to no one, and watched the last curl of smoke slide out the window.

  The acid in my stomach burned like a welding torch, and my head felt as if it were being methodically constricted inside of a band of razor wire.

  I MADE a right onto a paved rural road whose only identifying marker was a mailbox that had been welded to a steel pillar with a name stenciled on it with reflective paint.

  I drove only a short distance before I passed beneath a broad archway scrolled with decorative iron and climbing vines, beyond which the edges of the road had been planted with Italian cypress and decorative shrubs and terminated in a circular driveway that surrounded a stone fountain.

  I pulled to a stop, got out, and walked up the short staircase to the front door. I rang the bell several times then went back to my truck. I leaned against the truck bed and lit another cigarette. Stray water drops fell from the bowls of the dormant fountain and made a sound like that of a kitchen faucet in need of repair.

  The light fixtures that flanked the twin doors of the entry switched on and their brightness cut into my eyes as I stood waiting in the dark.

  “What in the hell are you doing at my home at this hour?” Sheriff Lloyd Skadden said as he stepped outside. He raised a hand to his brow as a shield against the glare of the house lights and squinted in my direction. He was dressed in plaid flannel pajamas and a heavy wool bathrobe that hung to his ankles, his feet clad in leather-soled slippers.

  “Step down here,” I said. “I need you to see this.”

  I lowered the tailgate and pulled the canvas cover away from the wood box that rested in the bed. He peered over the side and I watched his expression change.

  “You get that off my property,” he said.

  “You told me that the medical examiner would come pick him up last night. Nobody showed.”

  “You moved the body?”

  “Of course I moved his body. If I hadn’t he’d still be lying on the ground out there, wouldn’t he?”

  “Please put the tarp back down.”

  I ignored him and let him stare into Dub Naylor’s face.

  “I waited until one thirty this morning. I had to put him in a shipping crate filled with ice,” I said. “Does that sound right to you?”

  “I told you I’d get to the bottom of it. If the ME didn’t show, that’s on him.”

  “Like hell,” I said. I flicked the remains of my burning cigarette in his direction. It exploded at his feet in a shower of sparks. “You’ll call that sonofabitch yourself, right now, and have him come pick up my man.”

  Skadden balled his hands and shoved them into the deep pockets of his robe. His eyes darted between me and the box in my truck.

  “You need to calm down, Dawson. I can’t have an ME’s report saying they retrieved a dead man from the driveway of my personal residence.”

  I took a step toward him.

  “This man was murdered. On my land. Shot through the throat with a high-caliber weapon.”

  “You’re not the sheriff, for God’s sake, Dawson.”

  “You sure got me acting like one.” I recalled my father’s admonition never to trust a man who was unwilling to saddle his own horse.

  His gaze cut away from me, in the direction of his tree-lined entry, and he seemed to lose three inches in height. I had not been to this place in years, not since before I had left for Korea. For all the fountains and landscaping, it held the appearance of the dwelling of a man in exile from his own homeland. His family’s holdings had shrunk down to their last twenty acres, and Lloyd Skadden had fastened himself onto it like a life ring.

  “You’re nothing but a goddamned politician,” I said.

  “That’s exactly the kind of politician I am,” he said, and turned his face to me. “Don’t make me regret giving a badge to you.”

  “I already regret it. But now that it’s come this far I reckon you’ll have to drill a pistol barrel up my nose and pry it out of my hand.”

  “Are you making some sort of threat?”

  “People don’t always agree with me,” I told him. “But they rarely misunderstand what I say.”

  He combed a hand through his hair and tried to recover control of the situation.

  “I said I’d look into what happened to your man there,” he said and pointed a finger at me. “In the meantime I want that Pineu woman shut down like I told you before.”

  I shook my head.

  “That train already left the station,” I said.

  “Then you’d better call it the hell back. I will not have federal agents taking over my jurisdiction.”

  He walked back into his house, but left the door open. Lights from inside glowed briefly and went dark again, then he came back onto the landing.

  “You take these,” he said and tossed me a key ring strung through with a heavy set of keys. “I forgot to give them to you before.”

  I held his stare as I hefted their weight in my palm.

  “Don’t look so confused,” he said. “Those are keys to the lockup in Meridian. There’s five or six holding cells in there. The next time you call me, it’d better be because they got too crowded.”

  IT WAS nearly noon that same day by the time I returned to the ranch from the hospital where the medical examiner kept his office. My truck bed was empty and I had left the canvas tarp neatly folded on the seat, like the ceremonial flag from a military interment. I decided to leave it there as a reminder that in spite of appearances, some malevolent agent of transformation had begun to reveal itself, as though the people of this valley were being systematically poisoned. As a means to lift myself out of denial, anger would be as effective a tool for me as any.

  Pale pink flowers blossomed on the dogwoods in the yard and wisteria climbed the trellis beside the gallery. A spider’s web was strung between the uprights of the porch rail, and sunlight sparkled on the near-perfect circle still limned with dew. The creature that had constructed it was nowhere in sight.

  The house was empty as I went into the mudroom, stripped off my clothes, and threw everything into the washer. The sleeves of my coat, my shirt, and the cuffs of my jeans were crusted with patches of dried blood. I took a long, scalding shower, dressed myself, and took a pan of hot water onto the porch to scrub my boots with a rag and brush to remove the blood that had seeped onto the welt.

  The phone in the kitchen rang and I placed my boots in the sunshine to dry while I went inside to pick it up.

  “There’s two kids here in the office to see you,” Caleb said.

  “W
hat kids?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. Hippie kids. I figured they’re new friends of yours from the circus at Teresa Pineu’s.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  “You know,” he said. “I hope our little cattle business isn’t interfering too much with . . . whatever this is turning into.”

  I hung up, pulled on my boots, and threaded my way down the long path to the office. A piss-yellow Ford Econoline van sat in the shade of a tree near the front door to the office. The back doors of the van were flung open, revealing a clutter of black cables and steel suitcases and a shoulder-mounted rig for a film camera. An Indian blanket had been strung from a cord that separated the cargo area from the driver, the interior walls ornamented with dozens of stickers. A familiar young man wearing aviator sunglasses sat on the bumper strumming an unplugged electric guitar that made the dull sound of a stick being scraped on a chain-link fence. He wore a Fu-Manchu mustache that grew down to his chin and he nodded blithely as I passed him and stepped into the office.

  Caleb Wheeler looked up and grinned when I came in. He had been seated at his desk poring over an order form from a supply catalog while Samuel Griffin leaned against the wall, propped on one foot, and fashioning a hackamore from a length of rope. He was enjoying this too.

  If the kid sitting in the corner on a hard wooden chair—in the sole and silent company of a grizzled cowboy three times his age and a broad-shouldered black man with his hat pulled down to his eyebrows—was the least bit uncomfortable, he didn’t show it. In fact, he appeared rather pleased with himself.

  “My name’s Peter Davis,” the kid said, then stood and offered his hand. “We met at Teresa Pineu’s place down in—”

  He wore an open-collared shirt embroidered with Mexican stitching, crushed corduroy bell-bottomed jeans, and a simple silver chain ornamented with a tooth from some kind of animal circling his neck.

  “I remember you,” I said and shook his hand. His hands were as soft as a woman’s. “You’re making a movie.”

  “A documentary,” he corrected. “We’re covering the whole thing about wild horses, the BLM, the government stifling free speech and assembly—”