South California Purples

by Baron R. Birtcher

  I raised my hands in mock surrender.

  “Save it,” I said. “What are you doing on my ranch?”

  “Last time I saw you, you told me to talk to the sheriff, and I did. I met with him this morning. He said if things were getting out of control at Teresa Pineu’s, then I needed to see you about it. He said that you were the undersheriff in this part of the county, and that whatever went on down here was your responsibility.”

  His face seemed lit from within as he spoke, eyes misted, and carried himself with the inflated posture of a True Believer. It was the expression I associated with ideological fanatics driven by politics or religion that I’d been seeing so much of lately.

  “You have the sheriff’s statement on film?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “The sheriff also told me that you lost a man yesterday.”

  I felt my face flush with heat, a taste in my mouth like burned copper.

  “We didn’t lose a man. Someone shot him in the throat and nearly took his head off his neck with a high-powered rifle. They dumped his body in a pasture and left him to be picked apart by coyotes. Did he mention that to you?”

  “No, sir,” he said. A little of the light had gone out of his eyes.

  “This movie you’re—”

  “Documentary.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “This documentary you’re making, you intend to tell the truth? To show the truth?”

  “Sure, man, of course.”

  I looked at Caleb, who had stopped grinning, then turned my eyes on Peter Davis.

  “If you want the truth, you need to speak to the people who live here. You need to walk the streets of Meridian and see what is happening here, what all of this fuss is doing to them. This town is our lives. This place is my life. We all have the right to say what we want, but someone murdered one of my hands for no reason at all, and that kind of shit will not stand. Am I making myself clear?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “You want some film? You want to see some reality, you come with me now. You know how to ride a horse?”

  “We can’t drive where we’re going?”

  “Not a chance. Answer my question.”

  “I’ve ridden a little.”

  “And your friend out there? He’s your cameraman, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can he ride?”

  “I guess so.”

  I nodded at Caleb, and he and Griffin were out the door to fetch three horses. While we waited, the two young men sifted through the back of the van for the equipment they’d need. A few minutes later, we mounted up. I eased my horse forward and addressed them from over my shoulder.

  “There’s not that much to it,” I said. “Just keep your ass in the saddle and the pointy end headed in the same direction as me.”

  TWO HOURS later, we crested the last rise that opened onto the North Camp pasture. The boys had handled themselves reasonably well on horseback once the animals settled in, and had shot film for what they called “b-roll” in various spots along the trail. They were doing more of it now, a slow pan across the wide expanse of forage and a zoom toward the pond and the spot where I’d discovered the body of Dub Naylor.

  I twisted in my saddle and saw ribbons of smoke rising from the slash piles that burned in the bottomlands, and the stacks of felled timber awaiting the torch. A trio of carrion birds described slow circles against the sky and a breeze coming out of the south carried the smell of bruised grass and loam.

  Peter signaled me that they had finished their wide shots, and I moved off toward the pond where we dismounted and I hobbled our horses.

  “I want this on film,” I said. I squatted on my haunches and indicated the patch of silage where Dub’s body had been dumped. “We found him here. The bullet entered just below his Adam’s apple and exited at the base of his skull. The hole in the front was smaller than a dime; in back it was the size of a golf ball. Why his head stayed on his shoulders is a mystery to me.”

  Peter blanched, but I continued, “There was little blood near the body, so we know he had been moved, but out here there is no way to know which direction the bullet had come from.”

  I stood and waited as the lens swept over the scene and I began to walk in the direction of the section of fence that had been pushed over. I was surprised to discover that it had been repaired, but tried not to show it to the camera.

  “This section of fence had rotted out and been opened up by the herd. Cattle will often brush against the wire and posts, and if they break, the animals just keep on going.”

  Three sections of twisted barb had been replaced, together with the four-by-four upright supports. This would not have been easy work and would have required hours of digging and stringing, work which I had not ordered done by my crew.

  “Stop the camera,” I said.

  It had been nearly dark by the time Griffin and I had found Dub’s body, so we had not had the ability to conduct a proper search on the other side of the line. I intended to do it now. I gathered the horses and led them by the reins, returning to the spot where the movie boys waited. I reached into my saddlebag and retrieved a pair of wire cutters.

  “Hey, man, are you supposed to do that?” Peter Davis asked.

  “Old cowboy tradition,” I said, laying the cutters across my palm. “This device is known as a ‘Range Key,’ and technically, no. But if you want to see the scene the way that it was when I found my man’s body, this is how it gets done.”

  I led us in single-file through the narrow gap I had created and entered onto the untended rangeland that belonged to the government. The forage was tall enough to brush against our feet, and undulated in smooth waves where the wind channeled through.

  I found the first sign of cattle flop on the opposite side of a thick copse of cedar. The grass had been trampled flat, and gave the appearance of having been grazed by a dozen animals or more.

  “You can see here that my herd must have pushed through the old fence and drifted their way in this direction. Dub Naylor would have come this same way to round up the strays so he could haze them back through the hole in the wire. You following me?”

  The camera was running again.

  We continued in a wide arc through rough terrain strewn with moss-crusted boulders the size of a car, and dotted with the burrows of voles and gophers. I counted at least six more spots where my cattle had settled during their trespass, and figured it must have taken hours for Dub to locate them all.

  My eyes roamed the horizon, temporarily lost in thought, when my horse faunched and spooked, and threw his head wildly. It was then that I looked to the ground and saw that I had nearly run all three of us off the edge of a bluff that dropped nearly fifty feet straight down into a dry gulch.

  Peter and his cameraman, whose name I couldn’t remember, came to a halt and my heart pounded hard in my chest. I swung my leg over the cantle, dismounted, and stepped cautiously to the edge and looked over.

  The neck of the swale was relatively narrow where I stood, maybe fifty yards across and cloaked in deep shadow by the steep angle of the afternoon sun. It opened gradually, like a Chinese fan, and spread to a width of at least a quarter of a mile, the bottom gray and smooth with crushed stone.

  “I gotta get a shot of this, man,” Peter said.

  I helped them both down from their saddles and stood beside them on the rim of the gorge as they captured the sweep of the view.

  “What the hell is that?” Peter asked. He was pointing some distance up into the throat of the chasm.

  I shaded my eyes and squinted into the dark and finally saw it.

  “It’s fucking huge,” the cameraman said. It was the first time I had heard him utter a word. “What is it?”

  “Looks like a building,” I said.

  “No shit.”

  “I wanna get down there and check it out,” Peter said.

  “Not a chance,” I told him, and glanced at my watch. “I’
m not taking the horses down there. Too steep. It’ll take hours to get to level ground, and hours to get back. We don’t have that kind of time before the sun goes down.”

  “C’mon, dude.”

  “Besides, this is federal land.”

  The cameraman twisted his face into an expression that put me in mind of a spoiled child.

  “What’s your name again, anyway?” I asked.

  “Sly.”

  “Sylvester,” Peter corrected.

  “Fuck you, man,” Sly said, and returned his attention to the shadow below. “Seriously.”

  I led my horse away from the ledge and hoisted myself into the saddle.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “We’ve seen enough.”

  In order to save time, I took a more direct northwesterly route back to the place where we had breached the fence. The sun was dipping lower along the crenellated outline of the mountains and bathing us in its glare. I pulled my hat down low on my brow in an attempt to keep my eyes in shadow and heard an odd brittle snapping sound beneath my horse’s hooves. I pulled to a stop, looked down, and saw the skeletal remains of a heifer, the shards of its bones scattered over a broad patch of soil that looked as if the vegetation had been burned away by fire. It was exactly the same mutilation that Jordan Powell and I had come across only a few days before, only this one was much older.

  “Hold up,” I called out to Peter and Sly. “Get a shot of this.”

  They drew up on either side of me and turned their backs to the sun for a better view.

  “What are we looking at? Are those bones?”

  “It used to be one of my cows.”

  Sly hefted the camera to his shoulder and circled the blackened area on foot. When he was finished shooting, he tucked the heavy camera under his arm and looked into my face.

  “It looks like it fucking blew up, dude.”

  “It does,” I said. “And I’ve seen others just like it.”

  “Where?” Peter asked.

  “Different places, mostly along this fence line.”

  “What is it?”

  “Rustlers?” I said. “I don’t really know.”

  “Rustlers? Is that still a thing?”

  I pushed the brim of my Stetson back so that he could see my eyes when I answered him.

  “I told you before: If you intend to tell the truth about what is going on in this valley, you better get off your ass and talk to the people who make their living on this land. Yes, rustlers are still a thing. Roundups are still a thing. They don’t grow hamburger patties on a farm somewhere in Iowa. Teresa Pineu’s stand against the treatment of wild horses is a thing. It’s all a thing, goddammit.”

  Peter started to apologize, but I had had enough.

  “A bunch of kids in tie-dye showing up with picket signs and incense doesn’t mean a hill of shit if you don’t get a handle on the whole story. Whatever good you might do here, or whatever trouble you bring down? It all remains right here long after you’ve all gone back to wherever the hell you came from. Before you poke the beehive, you’d better know what’s going to come of it, and who’s going to have to foot the bill for the fallout.”

  I pulled my hat back into place and turned my horse toward the sun.

  “I don’t know what you’re standing there for,” I said. “You’d better fork that saddle. We got a long damn way to ride.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  JESSE WAS WAITING inside the barn when we returned that evening. She had prepared a tray of sandwiches and a pitcher of iced tea and was seated in a high-backed chair in the alcove where the saddles and tack were stored.

  The final remnants of a lavender sky set the silhouettes of conifers into sharp contrast against it and the first glimpses of Venus and Saturn and Vega floated in the dim glow of the rising sliver of moon. Winged insects circled the lights outside the barn and cast a fluttering pattern of shadows on the hard ground.

  We walked the horses inside and I tied each one in turn to hitch rails affixed to their stalls. Peter and Sly slid down from their mounts, stretched the kinks out of sore backs and legs, and moved off toward Jesse and the tray of food.

  “Where are you going?” I said. “Horses eat first.”

  “Say what?”

  “Those animals just carried 200 pounds of rider and gear over fifteen miles, and all you did was sit on your asses. We take care of them first.”

  Jesse filled glasses from the pitcher and brought them to us while we curried and combed sweat and trail dust from horsehide. The air was thick with the singular equine odors of sawdust and feed pellets, and the wet smacking sounds of grinding teeth; nostrils flared wide as they worked their jaws in anticipation.

  The boys made a beeline for the food while I turned the animals loose in their stalls. I could hear the unintelligible mutter of voices when Jesse introduced herself and passed plates.

  I unbuckled my chaps and hung them on a peg in the tack room, brushed myself off, and returned to kiss my wife’s upturned cheek. Smile lines radiated from the corners of her eyes, bright with the light that they held when she was happy.

  “I have a surprise for you,” Jesse said.

  She gestured toward the open door of the barn, and I watched as my daughter stepped in from the dark. She crossed the space in three steps and into my outstretched arms, and pressed her face into my chest. Her hair smelled of strawberries and sage.

  “Hi, Daddy,” she said.

  “Welcome home, Cricket.”

  I held her at arm’s length and looked into the clear blue eyes she had inherited from her mother, then drew her back in for another embrace. It had been barely three months since I’d seen her at Christmas, but I would have had a difficult time recognizing her in a crowd. She was dressed in a pair of form-fitted Bongo jeans, a white peasant blouse, and bare feet encircled by the narrow leather straps of Mexican sandals. Earrings fashioned from silver wire and pill-shaped beads of turquoise and coral dangled halfway to her shoulders.

  “You’ve changed your hair,” I said.

  She fluffed it with her fingers, shook her head in the manner of a fashion model, and smiled.

  “They call it a shag,” she said. “You like it?”

  I waited a beat too long, and it showed in her fallen expression.

  “I like it,” I said.

  “No, you don’t.”

  Jesse took our daughter’s hand in hers and led her into the alcove where the two boys stood mutely, making no attempt whatsoever to disguise their interest.

  “Put your tongues back in your mouths,” I said. “This is my daughter, for God’s sake.”

  Jesse shot me a look and introduced Cricket.

  “This is Peter,” she said. “And this is Sly.”

  They nodded a greeting, but made no attempt to shake hands or otherwise touch her, which I considered to be a good thing.

  “They’re making a film about the demonstration at Teresa Pineu’s.”

  “A documentary,” Peter said. This was an important distinction to him for reasons I had yet to comprehend. “They’re protesting the slaughter of mustangs on BLM land. It’s terrible, and the government is doing nothing about it.”

  “What do you expect?” I put in. “It’s a government program.”

  They all frowned at me, and my daughter’s cheeks flushed in either embarrassment or anger, or both.

  “That’s even worse,” Cricket said. “It’s Wounded Knee all over again.”

  “Yeah, exactly,” Peter agreed.

  “You’d better pray it isn’t,” I said. “They’re trading gunfire with federal agents every night. People have been killed over there.”

  Peter puffed up with the look of righteous indignation I had seen earlier that day and his eyes went all misty again.

  “If that’s what it takes,” he said.

  I felt my own skin prickle with heat.

  “Those are the words of a person who has never heard a shot fired in anger. There are other ways to get what you want.”

/>   “I just came from there,” Cricket said.

  “Came from where?” I asked.

  “Pine Ridge. Wounded Knee.”

  “What the hell—”

  Jesse’s eyes met mine, and she appeared to be as shocked as I was.

  “A bunch of us went there to support AIM,” Cricket persisted. “They’re being victimized.”

  “Far out,” Sly said.

  “Shut up, Sly,” I interrupted, and he took a step back, like my words had assaulted his person.

  “They’re defending their rights!” Cricket’s cheeks flushed pink. “Our own government’s been lying and stealing from them for years!”

  “That may be,” I said. “But 200 militant Indians are going to die, and get nothing in the bargain.”

  “And that’s okay with you?”

  “Of course it’s not,” I said. “But I don’t want my daughter to die with them.”

  At the back of the barn a horse nickered, and I heard the agitated pawing of hooves on the floorboards. I drew a deep breath and moved toward the cool air blowing in from the night.

  “I’m sorry,” I sighed. “I respect your passion. What I don’t understand is how you can protest a war in Southeast Asia, but condone the provocation of one right here at home. People will die. Good people.”

  “We didn’t start it.”

  “I know,” I said and turned to face Peter Davis. “I’ve told you once already: You have the power to shape your story any way you choose, it’s right there in your hands. Just be sure it’s the truth. I’ve seen killing firsthand, and I can promise you that you don’t want to see it yourself. Go ahead and fight your fight. It’s a respectable one. But I warn you to be mindful about it; you may not recognize the wreckage after it’s blown itself out.”

  The silence that followed was more than mere absence of sound, and the weight of it was both tangible and heartbreaking.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  The fact was, I was tired of hearing moral and political lectures from children, so I excused myself and went up to the house for a smoke.

  I was still standing on the gallery when Jesse came from the barn to join me a few minutes later.