South California Purples

by Baron R. Birtcher

  The tall stalks of brown grass grew to my waist, and bent over on their stems in currents pushed by the hot breeze. It was not until I had nearly reached the swing gate that I saw a form stretched out prostrate on the ground. Even before I stooped to check the old man’s pulse, I knew that Eli Corcoran was dead.

  He was lying facedown, and I knelt in the dirt beside him, wavered a moment before I rolled him over. The blue of his eyes had faded and his skin had gone waxen and cool to the touch. The wind pulled at the loose collar of his shirt and I studied the peaceful expression on his unshaven face and wondered where his spirit might have gone. There was no sign of the haunted look he had worn when I had last seen him, and I prayed he was no longer a lonely old man, but instead a young maverick pushing a herd up to Abilene or torturing the truth beside a fire ringed with stones, and passing a bottle of mescal from hand to hand somewhere out along the Chisholm.

  The rusted chain that held the gate shut dangled in the dirt where he’d dropped it, and I spotted his horse in the distance, outlined against the bright sky, wandering aimlessly and dragging his reins through the weeds at the crest of the hill. I was sure Eli had set off from his place on some grand adventure, preparing to raise hell and high cotton with the wild-eyed boys of his youth that only still existed in his mind. He hadn’t died on my ranch, he had died with his friends somewhere out under the stars.

  Jesse came up behind me. She had left our horses tied to a tree limb downwind and well off in the distance. She knelt by my side, placed her open palm across the stillness of his heart and exhaled a ragged sigh. My eyes burned wetly when I lifted my head to look at her.

  “What happened to him, Ty?” she asked, and the wind blew a stray lock of hair across her cheek.

  “No violence came to him,” I said. “He just lived himself out.”

  TERESA PINEU’S notoriety faded just as rapidly as it had bloomed, which was fine as far as she was concerned, if you took the time to ask her. She resumed her work as a horse trainer, forgotten by the horde that had descended on her ranch only to disappear to some other destination to chant the slogans of some other cause.

  The events that followed in the wake of the Wounded Knee occupation, however, were far more tragic. On May 8, after a siege that lasted seventy-one days, the militants surrendered to the feds. During that time, 500,000 rounds of ammunition had been expended by both sides in exchanges of gunfire that claimed the lives of two Sioux men and wounded several federal agents. Eleven townspeople had been taken hostage, and 600 occupiers arrested. Of that 600, none was ever convicted of a crime, and the movement’s leader, Russell Means, was acquitted of all charges and set free after a federal judge determined that the government had unlawfully mishandled both evidence and witnesses.

  After all was said and done, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation suffered a legacy of violence that continued on for years. The community remained among the poorest in the nation, and the murder rate was nearly three times greater than that in Detroit, Michigan. Not one of the occupiers’ demands was ever meaningfully met.

  BY MID-OCTOBER, the trees had lost their leaves and Cricket had returned to school. I spent eleven days in a Salem courtroom, including two full days of testimony, at the conclusion of which three of the four bikers who had been awaiting trial in the state penitentiary received twenty-five-year sentences for arson, rape, unlawful sexual penetration, aggravated battery, and assault. Due to the incompetence of both the DA and the medical examiner, they could not bring a murder charge against any of them, despite the cruel and savage circumstances in the deaths of Peter Davis and Sylvester “Sly” McCarty. The fourth Charlatan, the racist waste of skin I referred to as Wallace, was extradited to Nevada where he will likely face the gas chamber after standing trial on three separate counts of murder, the details of which are each too pointless and gruesome to describe.

  As Rex Blackwood had predicted, no one ever was indicted for the killing of Dub Naylor, the responsibility for which I lay squarely at the feet of Denton Lowell, the spineless district attorney for Meriwether County, and the medical examiner, Dr. Gerald Hill.

  The ME kept his job, as there aren’t yet any laws on the books with respect to being a toady, turd, and dumbshit; but Denton Lowell resigned at the conclusion of the trial beneath a well-founded dark cloud of suspicion. He had been a close personal friend of Sheriff Lloyd Skadden’s, which at a minimum suggests he possessed the moral clarity and the intellect of an earthworm.

  Emily Meeghan spent nearly three months in a psychiatric clinic outside of Portland. She spends her time these days working at her father’s feedstore, and every now and then she will show me a vague smile of recognition when she sees me at their store, or at the counter drinking coffee at Rowan Boyle’s diner. I’ve had to lock up her dad once or twice for drunk and disorderly behavior, but we’ve kept it local, and I think he’s getting a handle on it now. The whole town of Meridian, myself included, tends to give him wide latitude on his outbursts, which have never featured violence directed at anyone other than himself.

  I continued working with the ODOJ and together we won an indictment against Oregon State Trooper Wilkens and two others who were also in the pocket of the military contractor which had been funneling protection money through Lloyd Skadden. All three were sent to prison. I have not yet been able to identify the firm by name, but the case will remain open on my desk until the damage they have caused in the lives of Dub Naylor and his family and so many others in my county has been rectified.

  In short, the elected officials we had previously entrusted with their positions had proven themselves unworthy not only of the public’s confidence, but had learned they couldn’t trust themselves or one another either. They had reminded ordinary citizens that solipsism was a prerequisite, or at the very least a consequence, of bureaucratic power. There is an Oriental proverb that states, The fall is not far for the one who flies low. While that sentiment may contain a certain truth, I have chosen to engage my obligations at a slightly higher level, and damn the consequences.

  GALILEO SAID that all truths are easy to understand once they are discerned; the point is to discern them. It has also been said that most conspiracies are conceived in hell, and rarely have angels as witnesses. I have come to learn that both statements are true.

  I will always recall 1973 as the year that everything I thought I knew had changed. I suspect many others in our country may well do the same. Some believe that our nation lost its innocence on a November day in Dallas back in 1963; if it is possible to lose such a thing twice, it happened a second time, nearly eleven years later, on August 9, with the resignation of a sitting president who faced impeachment for betraying the trust of the citizens he had sworn an oath to defend and to protect.

  I find myself unable to shake the imagery that the man named Blackwood had implanted in my brain: a world resembling Ouroboros bent on devouring itself alive. The rotation of the earth seemed to begin to spin more rapidly that year, and if we did not act with both immediacy and resolve we would discover far too late that we had given our lives over to a cabal of self-deifying oligarchs who had appointed themselves as saviors.

  CRICKET BROUGHT a friend home for the holidays, and they spent most of it riding horses, baking bread, or sitting with us in the living room next to the Christmas tree beside the fire. The season had been uncharacteristically dry, but very cold. Two days after Christmas, there was an ice storm in the night that cocooned the shrubs and tree limbs in a thin coating of frost that glowed like crystal in the sunshine and the cloudless light of the next morning.

  We drank pink champagne from narrow flutes and watched the ball drop on TV on New Year’s Eve. Though none of us had the temerity to say the words aloud, every one of us was more than happy to see the Old Year reach its end.

  After Cricket and her friend turned in for the night, Jesse sat beside me outside on the porch swing. We wrapped ourselves beneath a heavy blanket, snug in our winter coats. The air smelled dry and sweet wi
th fallen needles and the woodsmoke from the fire, and she leaned her head against my shoulder as we drank the last of the champagne.

  “Look,” Jesse said and tossed the blanket from her knees. She gripped the railing and leaned out beneath the eve, her eyes cast to the sky. I joined her there and watched the first snowflakes we’d seen all winter falling softly from the clouds.

  NEW YEAR’S morning I placed a saddle on Drambuie and took a long ride alone out to the Three Roses. A thin blanket of snow still covered the ground and clung to the bare branches of deciduous trees, and the sun looked like damp golden cotton in the frigid morning air. Gray puffs of Drambuie’s and my crystallized breath chained the trail at my back, and the sounds of his hooves perforating the crust on the snowfall sounded like whispers.

  I turned up the narrow path that ran through that part of the glade that almost always was concealed from the sun. I felt the temperature drop as we entered the swale that had been cut through the forest by the flow of the creek and tightened the collar of my fleece-lined coat. The water was clear, transparent as glass, as it flowed over a riffle where aspens and willow trees grew close to the bank and a skin of ice had formed along its edges. In spite of the cold, I could smell lichen and cedar and the water that rolled over the pebbled streambed. A lone turtle idled on a flat rock in a fragile taper of sunlight, and somewhere deep in the old growth a woodpecker tapped on a tree. I spoke to Drambuie as we followed the watercourse, and he cocked his ears rearward while I softly gave voice to my confessions.

  That horse had always been a good listener.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I OWE A sincere debt of gratitude to two fine gentlemen who provided me with some invaluable insight and background for this book: The first is Col. Ron Battersby (USAF, ret.) and Mr. Patrick Partridge, whose decades-long experience in law enforcement is simply too extensive to enumerate. Thank you both for your expertise, and your generosity with your valuable time.

  Once again, to my dad, Ron Birtcher, who taught me about horses and fishing, family and life, and gave me an early appreciation for travel and the inestimable value of reading—and writing.

  To Christina for her endless supply of patience and support as all these characters wander around inside my head (and our house) while the story finds its way to the page. Aloha pau ole.

  And to my two beautiful and talented daughters, Allegra and Britton, who provide me with so much enthusiasm, encouragement, and confidence, and always manage to demonstrate the meaning of unconditional love.

  Thank you, yet again, to a pair of true professionals (whom I have the distinct privilege of calling my friends), my publishers,

  Martin and Judith Shepard at The Permanent Press. And that goes for you, as well, Chris Knopf.

  I also get to reap the benefits of working with an incredibly patient and talented copy editor, Barbara Anderson, who once again made it all look good. And to cover artist and designer, Lon Kirschner—thanks, amigo! You two are the best.

  Until next time . . .