South California Purples

by Baron R. Birtcher

  I hadn’t checked the phone lines downstairs, so I lifted the receiver of the one up here, a heavy Bakelite rotary with a cable sleeved in woven cloth that had been gnawed on by rodents. To my surprise, there was a dial tone.

  I shut off the lights behind me as I left, with a malignant combination of depression and anger at having been manipulated overtaking me by the time I stepped back onto the street and locked the door. I tugged at the sleeves of my coat and wondered if it was possible for a human soul to be sucked out through the pores of exposed skin.

  The streetlights had come on while I had been inside, though it would be at least another hour before the sun had fully set. I slid the keys back into my pocket, walked slowly up the street and through a rectangle of light that spilled across the sidewalk from the glass doors of the Alpha Beta market, whose mere existence in that moment seemed to help revive the sensation of my own waning sentience.

  THE COTTONWOOD Blossom had been a fixture in Meridian since the very first ranches had been established. The date carved into the capstone above the door read 1891. Its name alluded to a slang term used by old-time cowboys, and referred to a recipient of frontier justice who had later been discovered dangling at the end of a knotted rope, most frequently a cattle thief.

  The room was fairly large by the standards of Meriwether County, but the Friday crowd had only begun to wander in. It was still the dinner hour and the atmosphere inside remained relatively subdued.

  The paneled walls were festooned with the expected jetsam and detritus of a cow-town roadhouse: ancient poster advertisements from rodeos and fairs, rusted highway signs riddled with holes shot from the windows of passing vehicles, and the mounted heads of horned animals. On the joists that supported the tin-stamped ceiling over the duckboards, someone had tacked several pairs of women’s panties and a collection of brassieres.

  I took a stool at a C-shaped bar that had been crafted from rough-hewn planks of black oak, propped a boot heel on the brass rail, and watched the last of the muted daylight disappear behind the frosted pane of glass embedded in the front door. Neon beer signs buzzed beside the liquor bottles lined up along the shelves, and the owner, Lankard Downing, was jawboning with a customer as he counted change from the antique cash register at the far end of the bar, so I watched the beer tap leak foam onto the drip pan while I waited. Downing looked as pinched and sour-faced as always, but he nodded in my direction when he finally saw me there, then promptly disappeared into the stockroom without coming over to take my order.

  I drummed my fingers on the scarred bar top and scanned the room while a Wurlitzer jukebox spun 45 rpm records by Donna Fargo and George Jones. My attention landed on a trio of old-timers wearing snap-button shirts and pressed blue jeans passing a dice cup at a four-top pressed up against the wall. They were sipping bottled beer they chased with red whisky in a manner that suggested a weekly ritual.

  When I finally turned my head away, I found Lankard Downing’s vulpine face staring at me like he’d been waiting for some time.

  “What can I do you for, Dawson?” he asked.

  It was an expression I had always detested, but in his case described an accurate declaration of his intentions.

  “Olympia.”

  “Draft or bottle?”

  “Draft,” I said, and turned toward the room again while he set off for the tap.

  The young man he had been speaking with earlier sat alone at the opposite end of the bar, hunched over an Old Fashioned glass filled with cracked ice and amber liquid. He poked at the contents with a plastic swizzle stick and stared into it like he was memorizing scripture. His head was angled in such a way that I couldn’t see his face, but his reddish hair was long and dangled past his chin. He was dressed in faded denim jeans and matching jacket whose sleeves had been razored off at the shoulders, and wore a beard that he kept trimmed close to the skin. He must have sensed the weight of my gaze resting on him, because when he lifted his head he looked directly into my eyes. I nodded briefly, in the way you do when you’ve been caught gawking, and casually swiveled my stool in the opposite direction.

  Lankard Downing slid my pint across the counter and I took the glass and moved to a table near the back that gave me a view of the entire room. An open archway in the far wall opened onto a room that had long ago been annexed from a space that had once been a bakery, but now contained coin-operated billiard tables, a couple dart boards, and a pinball machine with a lightning bolt of fractured glass across the scoreboard.

  Two men wearing faded and sun-damaged motorcycle leathers were shooting pool and drinking beer out of a pitcher, and bore a striking resemblance to the pair of goons who’d tried to brace me at Teresa Pineu’s place. Their vests were stitched with patches ornamented with artwork that identified them as members of the Charlatans MC.

  “You got a minute, Ty?”

  I looked up and into the face of Chandle Meeghan. He was a man I’d known for years as the owner of the feed and hardware store in town, but only in passing, and from his periodic presence at the church Jesse and I attended. He was a fifty-some-odd-year-old widower with the lined and worried affect of a man who carried a great and perpetual burden.

  “Sure,” I said. “Take a seat.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you, but I think I’ve got a problem.”

  I shot a glance in the direction of the bar and saw Lankard Downing working a damp rag along the bar, keeping one eye on our conversation.

  “I called Lloyd Skadden’s office about this a couple days ago,” he said. “But I never heard back from him. Then Lankard phoned me and said that you were here. He told me you’re the undersheriff now, and figured you’d be the man to talk to. So I came right over.”

  I removed my hat, hung it on the backrest of an empty chair beside me and smoothed my hair with my fingers. I did it as a stall for time while I took a deep breath and calmed myself from a surge of annoyance that made me want to stride across the room and drop Lankard Downing to the floor.

  “What’s the problem?” I asked, and took a draught from my glass.

  “Emily’s gone missing again.”

  “How long has she been gone?”

  “Three, four days, I guess.” He kept his eyes locked on the tabletop and would not look at me directly.

  Chandle Meeghan was locally famous for the thick mane of hair that had gone from brown to stark white in the space of just a few weeks. That had been about the time his only daughter, Emily, turned fifteen. She was twenty or so now, I supposed, and widely known to possess a free spirit, a lazy mind, and the absence of any semblance of a moral compass or personal character. She was a wild child who had been gifted with considerable beauty, but had logged a long and checkered pattern of extremely poor choices.

  “No idea where she might have gone off to? Friends or relatives, maybe?” I asked.

  “You know how she is,” he shrugged and still could not manage to look me in the eyes, and I felt sorry for him all over again.

  “Have you got a picture of her, Chandle? Something I can show to people when I ask around.”

  He slid a photo from a clear celluloid frame sewn into his wallet and passed it to me. I planned to show it to Teresa Pineu. It seemed a likely place to start, but I mentioned nothing about that to him.

  “I have to be straight with you, Chandle,” I said. “She’s over eighteen. A legal adult. She’s got the right to go wherever she pleases. I assume you understand that.”

  He nodded and finally looked at me. His eyes were watery, the whites shot through with tiny pink veins.

  “I can’t make her come back home,” I said.

  “I just need to know she’s all right.”

  He stood and started to walk away, then came back to shake my hand.

  “Thank you, Ty,” he said. “I mean it.”

  “I have a daughter too.”

  I leaned the chairback to the wall, balanced on two legs, and finished my beer in two long gulps as I watched Chandle Meeghan stop to
whisper something to Downing, then push the door open to leave.

  I looked at my watch and saw I still had fifteen minutes before Caleb Wheeler was due to join me, and questioned my own decision-making process at allowing him to persuade me to come here in the first place. I watched a man feed a handful of quarters into the jukebox while I lit a cigarette and signaled to Lankard Downing for another beer.

  I was joined, without preamble, by the reddish-haired man from the bar. He dropped into the chair Chandle Meeghan had just vacated and pushed a fresh pint and a shot of tequila across the table at me.

  “Looks like you could use this,” he said.

  He was younger and much larger than he had originally appeared from a distance, a man built for decisive action, but his eyes were lit up with something resembling amusement.

  “I’ll pass on the tequila,” I said. “It has a tendency to lull me into a false sense of calm right before it rips the hinges off of doors I try to keep shut.”

  “It won’t go to waste,” he said and tossed back the shot himself.

  “But thanks for the beer.”

  “You know, Mr. Dawson, I usually don’t like to be stared at when I’m surreptitiously staring at others.”

  “I assume the bartender gave you my name.”

  “Your man Lankard is a fountain of local information.”

  “He’s not my man.”

  “I wouldn’t think so,” he said and it was his turn to smile. “Name’s Rex Blackwood.”

  He offered a firm grip and I noticed the tattoo on his forearm.

  “Navy?”

  “SEAL Teams,” he said. “But that seems like a long time ago.”

  “Couldn’t have been that long.”

  On the dance floor in the corner, a couple of overweight tourists swayed beneath an electric oscillating fan that had been screwed into the wall overhead and pushed silver clouds of cigarette smoke around the room. The woman had squeezed herself into a tight pair of jeans that wrapped her thighs like sausage skin, but they gazed at one another with expressions of inebriated joy, so kept my unkind judgments to myself.

  “What is that song?” Blackwood asked.

  “No idea.”

  “Whatever it is, those two should not be dancing to it,” he said. “Like a pair of cows skidding on a patch of ice.”

  My eyes cut sideways, toward the billiard room. The two bikers had replenished their pitcher and taken up stools at a high table. They were making no effort to disguise their interest in Blackwood and me.

  “Friends of yours?” I asked.

  “Because of the way I’m dressed?”

  “It delivers that impression.”

  Blackwood studied his drink in the same way he had before. “Those guys are bad news,” he said finally. “There were three of them earlier. I ran into them over at the Richfield station when I was topping off my tank. They were filling jerry cans with gas. What would three bikers be doing with jerry cans?”

  I waited him out and took a pull at my beer.

  “One of them accosted me with a firearm,” Blackwood said. “So I hosed him down with the pump I had in my hand.” “Why are you telling me this?”

  “You seem like a man who appreciates facts,” he said. “I’m not affiliated with those assholes. I’d rather you didn’t think of me as a biker. I’m more of a motorcycle enthusiast.”

  “You have an oblique way of speaking with people.”

  “You live in an interesting town.”

  “We’ve got trouble enough,” I told him. This conversation had taken on unsettling overtones. “You plan on staying long?”

  Blackwood shrugged.

  “I could use a bed and shower for the night. Got any suggestions?”

  “There’s a motel about twenty minutes south of here.”

  “Saw it,” he said. “Not exactly my speed. It seems a little . . . rustic. My interests lie farther north, anyway.”

  “It’s a good two hours or more to Lewiston. But I’m sure you’ll find more agreeable choices up that way.”

  Blackwood’s eyes shifted to a point somewhere over my shoulder. I turned to see the two Charlatans swaggering toward our table.

  “Something I can help you with?” I said.

  “We thought that was you,” the rabbit with the mustache said. “I couldn’t be sure, since last time I saw you the barrel of your pistol was drilled into my eyeball.”

  His companion’s face split into a lopsided grin, and made him seem more bovine than before. He had the flat and oblivious aspect of a baking pan, and his eyes bulged out from their sockets like Fritz Lang’s.

  “Didn’t he call you a greasy fuck last time we met?”

  “I do believe he did.”

  “As amusing as your Mutt and Jeff routine is,” I said. “I think you need to pack your Samsonites and head on down the road.”

  Blackwood stretched and broke into an exaggerated yawn.

  “Are we boring you?” the one with the rabbit face asked.

  “More than you could possibly know,” Blackwood said, and his face took on a curious, detached expression, like a man watching a rat in a wire cage through the window of a pet shop. “I’d rather mow the lawn than listen to you two fucktards. By the way, how’s your buddy doing? He seemed a little miffed with me the last time I saw him.”

  Rabbit crossed his arms and glared at Blackwood. His eyes seemed to vibrate inside their sockets, the pupils spun down to pinpricks, and his sweat gave off an electric, medicinal odor.

  “Nice seeing you again, cowboy,” he said to me, and made the shape of a pistol with his thumb and forefinger. He trained his focus on Blackwood. “And I’m sure we’ll be seeing you later.”

  “Not unless I want you to, you won’t,” Blackwood smiled.

  I took a draw off my cigarette and crushed the butt into the ashtray as I watched them push through the door without a backward glance. These were men for whom I had no frame of reference, men without apparent purpose or destination in their lives, unfamiliar with human experience apart from the sting of loose highway gravel on their skin, the hum of pharmaceuticals in their bloodstreams, and the mechanical vibration of raw horsepower in their loins.

  “Five minutes with you guys, and all I want to do is scrub the inside of my skull with a wire brush,” I said to Blackwood.

  The front door flew open again without warning, and the first thing that I noticed was the weapon. The biker with the mustache stood alone, a momentary silhouette against the pink light of the streetlamps, with a sawed-off shotgun dangling from one hand at waist level. The stock had been planed and sanded to the size and shape of a pistol grip and the barrel chopped off just beyond the magazine and forend. What happened in the next few moments seemed to unfold in kaleidoscopic fashion.

  The eruption from the barrel of the sawed-off looked like a channeled blast from a smelting furnace and blew the bar mirror and the shelves of bottled liquor into tiny diamonds of sparkling glass. A woman’s scream from behind me was drowned out by the crash of chairs and upturned tables as patrons scrambled to find shelter.

  I tipped our four-top on its side and drew my revolver. Blackwood hunkered down beside me with a semiautomatic pistol that had somehow appeared inside his fist. I peered over the table’s edge in time to see the gunman swing the barrels in my direction. His next blast slammed into the tabletop, rocked us backward, and I heard the whistle of stray pellets crease the air beside my ear. He jacked the spent shell casing and it rolled across the floor, then loosed another round that ripped the stuffing from the booth three feet to my left.

  The room was choked in a haze of smoke and bits of foam padding that shimmered in a fleeting wedge of light as the biker backed his way outside.

  I thumbed the hammer and loosed a shot that went wide and bored into the doorframe. My second went low and I heard it whang off the floor with the sound like the broken string of a guitar, but the ricochet caught the shooter in the ankle and swept him off his feet halfway out onto the sidew
alk. His partner dragged him out before I could squeeze off a third shot and the room went deathly still.

  I made a move to follow the bikers, but Blackwood took hold of my elbow.

  “That model holds five shells,” he said. “He’ll take your head clean off your shoulders if you step outside that door.”

  “See if anybody’s been hurt,” I said, and made for the back exit instead.

  I circled the rear of the building and moved up a narrow alley that smelled of standing water and spoiled food, my Colt held tight in a two-fisted grip. I paused when I reached the corner where the alley let onto the sidewalk and heard the hammering roar of Harley engines accelerating up the street toward the state road and stepped out in the open. I sighted down the barrel as the two bikes passed beneath a streetlight and disappeared into the dark.

  The night went unnaturally quiet. The birds inside the maples had all gone still and even the shouts and emergent chaos inside the Blossom were frangible and muted. Beside me, at the edge of the curb, a tin sign advertising Green Stamps swung soundlessly from rusted hooks inside a metal frame and I noticed my ears had begun to ring.

  There were no wailing sirens, no noticeable response of any kind until a couple of volunteers jogged over from the firehouse down the block. If I had previously harbored any illusions regarding professional support of any kind from Lloyd Skadden, it was time to let them go. The rhythm of my own breath reverberated through the blunted wall of my impaired hearing and I felt a rage grow in my chest until it burst like a line of surgical stitches popping one by one.

  I knelt outside the front door of the Blossom and examined the trail of blood drops that led to the lip of the gutter and disappeared. When I stood, Caleb Wheeler was jogging toward me from wherever he had parked. He followed me inside the Blossom and took in the damage.

  “Looks like things got a little Western in here,” was all he said.

  IT WAS approaching midnight by the time I returned to the ranch.

  My hearing had recovered in the hours since the shooting, and the music from the wind chime Cricket and Jesse had strung inside the branches of our willow resonated sweetly on the breeze as I stepped inside the house.