The Last Annual Slugfest

by Susan Dunlap

  “So you were friends then?”

  “No. I was too much younger. I wasn’t her friend. I just knew who she was.”

  Leila lived across the street from Hooper now. But I didn’t know if they were friends now. “Did she ever mention an old lover to you?”

  His face closed into that blankness.

  “It’s important. I’m not just asking for gossip. Leila told me she had a lover in high school whom Edwina disapproved of, and there was a big family hubbub about it. Did she tell you?”

  “No.” His voice was very soft. It sounded like an old man’s voice. I didn’t believe him.

  “Edwina’s dead. Secrets don’t count any more.”

  Without moving, his fingers tightened.

  “The treaty is going to be suspect till her death is cleared up.”

  “Do you think I’d sell a friend for this scrap of land? This isn’t big enough to build a house on, much less share it with every born-again Pomo in California. Lay off.”

  I didn’t need to be told twice, not by a man that tightly controlled. I pushed myself up and started toward the road. At the edge of the copse, I stopped. “Hooper, one more thing: Who else, besides you, knows about the treaty?”

  “Before now? No one.”

  “Edwina told you. She could have told—”

  “She didn’t. She swore me to secrecy. She told me she didn’t yank the Slugfest out of Guerneville, get Bert Lucci to clean up Steelhead Lodge, and commit herself to eat slugs, just to have word of her announcement leak out before. And in case you’re thinking I spilled the beans, believe me, I didn’t. If the news had gotten out, Edwina would have known whom to blame.”

  I made my way back across the undergrowth to the road. Getting into my pickup, I headed back to town. Maybe Rosa would recall something about Edwina’s mysterious niece, Meg. If not, she could find someone who did. In the meantime, Hooper had left me with more questions than he’d answered. Who was Leila’s lover? Was it just loyalty that kept Hooper from telling me? For that matter, who was Hooper? I had been assuming that he was a longtime Hendersonian. But as a transient, what did anyone know about him? It could be that he wasn’t even a Pomo. Hooper could be his stepfather’s name, or even a made-up name.

  And the poison, was it added to Chris’s pizza during the Grand Promenade? Was it a poison that easy to deal with? What was the poison? There were a lot of questions I needed answers to, and Rosa was the person to start with. I stepped harder on the gas.

  The redwoods and laurel trees formed a canopy over this part of the road, and it wasn’t till I got into town that I realized it was raining. It was a gentle rain, but the dark clouds hung low in the sky, as if preparing to pounce. The wind was blowing the rain eastward, in from the ocean, against my windshield, and in my side window. I rolled up the window, and almost immediately the windshield fogged. Choosing the lesser of evils, I lowered the window.

  The rain had thinned the traffic downtown, and it was only a couple of minutes till I pulled up in front of the Fortimiglios’ house.

  I wasn’t out of the truck before the kitchen door opened. Rosa, whom I had almost always seen wearing an apron over old pants and a sweater, was dressed in a wool skirt, white blouse, and low stacked heels. She looked like she was going to church. But her face wasn’t made up. She had neither eyeliner or lipstick, not even a spot of powder. Indeed, she looked paler than she had last night.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked as I hurried up the steps.

  But Rosa didn’t invite me in. She stood in the doorway, and unlike last night, this time she did meet my eyes. She stared at me in anger. “It’s Chris. The sheriff arrested Chris. Because of the treaty you found.”

  CHAPTER l4

  ROSA PUSHED PAST ME down the stairs to her truck.

  I ran after. “Rosa, why should Chris be arrested because of the Pomo treaty?”

  She climbed in and started the engine.

  At the closed window, I yelled, “Finding that treaty should have taken the sheriff’s attention off Chris.”

  Behind the window, she shook her head.

  “Once Bert and I found it, I couldn’t keep it from the sheriff, even if I had suspected it would cause Chris problems, which I didn’t.”

  The idle shifted down; the truck was ready to go. Rosa reached for the gearstick, hesitated, then rolled the window halfway down. “Vejay,” she said, “I know you didn’t mean Chris any harm. But it seems like you’re just bad luck for us.” She didn’t look angry any more, just resigned. She rolled up the window, shifted into first, and drove to the end of the drive at North Bank Road. I stood in the rain, watching, as she turned left onto the road. I watched the truck slow, then pull harder as she shifted to second. Then she rounded the curve and was gone.

  I walked back to my truck, climbed in, and turned the key in the ignition. I could go home. I should go home, shower, and wash my hair. In the warmth of the cab my scalp felt gummy and the wet wool cap was beginning to reek. It wasn’t yet four o’clock. I had just enough time to get ready for Harry Bramwell and our early dinner date.

  But even as I drove along the commercial block of North Bank Road, I knew that I was kidding myself. I couldn’t let go of Edwina’s death, not with Chris Fortimiglio in jail and Rosa accusing me of producing the evidence that put him there. But the treaty? The creation of the Pomo rancheria? I couldn’t see any connection between either of them and Chris Fortimiglio.

  I glanced at the Women’s Space Bookstore. It was closed. Odd, at this hour. Leila had assured me that she would be there till six. I wanted to stop, to check for a note on the door that said she’d be back in five minutes. But I had to catch up with Rosa.

  I came to my house, stopped, scribbled a note to Harry Bramwell and stuck it on the door. I’d meet him at his room at seven. He seemed to be an easygoing man; I guessed I’d find out how easygoing.

  I jumped back in my truck and hurried toward Guerneville, passing first a station wagon, then a line of cars. Rosa had insisted I come to her house after midnight last night.

  I had spent all day trying, however vainly, to give her the help I had promised. At the least, Rosa owed me an explanation. I pulled around a camper, barely making it back into my lane before a car whizzed by in the other.

  Rosa drove slowly in her old Ford truck, I knew that. But it wasn’t till I pulled into the parking lot of the glass-and-metal sheriff’s department building that I spotted her, already headed in the door. I ran across the lot, splashing water from the potholed surface onto my legs.

  Inside, Rosa was standing by the ersatz wood counter that ran the width of the building. Behind it, the desk man spoke into the phone. I recognized him—Joey Gummo, a distant cousin of Rosa’s. As I hurried toward them, he glared.

  Ignoring that, I said to Rosa, “I don’t understand.”

  I couldn’t tell whether her surprise was at my statement or my presence.

  “How can that treaty incriminate Chris?” I asked.

  “Vejay,” she said, as if talking to a particularly backward grandchild, “Chris is a fisherman.”

  “So?”

  “He’s ready to see you now, Rosa,” Joey said. He opened the half door in the counter, and held it for her to pass through.

  “Rosa,” I said, “you asked me to help. Don’t leave me hanging.”

  She started through the opening, stopped, stood unmoving but for her neck muscles pulling tighter. Turning abruptly to me, she said, “Let Chris tell you.”

  I followed her through the half door, again ignoring Joey Gummo’s scowl, and into a long, narrow room. It was bisected by glass and had a counter and chairs on either side. There was a round mesh hole in front of each chair. The room was painted muddy blue. There could have been twenty people seated on either side, along the dividing glass, if the river area had ever had twenty prisoners at any one time sober enough to talk to their friends or families.

  Rosa swallowed hard and sat down. I took the chair next to her. We both looke
d at the empty space on the other side of the glass.

  The door opened at the opposite end of the room from where we had entered.

  Rosa gasped.

  In here, the jeans and workshirt that Chris wore most warm days looked like prison clothes.

  “Chris,” she said, leaning so close to the mesh that her breath fogged the glass around it. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, Mama. It’s not so bad in here. Joey’s going to bring me dinner in a while. Then I’m going to watch television. It’ll be just like sitting around the living room at home, except for Stan Kelly’s snoring. He’s in for drunk and disorderly again. I was hoping Stan’s wife would come and bail him out, but I guess she doesn’t want to listen to him any more than I do.”

  “Are you sure she knows he’s here, Chris?”

  “They call, Mama.”

  “Maybe she wasn’t home.”

  “Maybe, but when Stan doesn’t come home, this’ll be the first place she thinks of. You know, Joey told me that Stan’s been in here thirty-seven times. He said that’s nearly a record. You remember Buddy Griggs?”

  Rosa nodded.

  “He had the record. Fifty-two times, Joey said.”

  They were talking just as they might sitting around the kitchen table while the spaghetti sauce simmered. I bit my lip and felt my face flush as I watched them try to weave their own familial security around Chris’s situation.

  But the small talk died. There was only so much Chris could offer of his experience here that didn’t lead back to the reason for his being on that side of the glass. In the silence, my unwanted presence seemed even more intrusive.

  I started to say I was sorry if I had caused him to be here, but before the words were out, I realized how pointless that was. Taking a breath, I said, “Chris, I thought finding the treaty would send the sheriff’s investigation in a different direction, after someone else. What is it about this treaty that you and your mother and the sheriff think implicates you?”

  Chris stared at me, as if he found it difficult to believe I wasn’t joking. He slid into the chair across from me and leaned toward the mesh, even though it hadn’t been hard to hear him before. “I know you didn’t mean to make things worse, Vejay. You were trying your best to help me.”

  “But what is it about the treaty?”

  “Haven’t you heard of the Boldt Decision?”

  “No.”

  “Really?” His eyes widened. “Well, every fisherman knows it: the Boldt Decision was handed down in Washington State in the seventies. There, the Indian tribes had rivers running through their reservations, and they claimed that they should be able to fish in those rivers the way their ancestors did, because it was part of their religion, or something. Anyway, what they said was that their ancestors had gillnetted the fish on the rivers. You know what gillnetting on the rivers does, don’t you?”

  “Catches all the fish.”

  “Pretty much. Some fish get through. But when you string a net all the way across the river, you catch a lot.”

  “But, Chris, you fish in the ocean. So what if the Pomos net every steelhead and the few salmon there are in the Russian River? You’ve still got the whole ocean. Why would you kill because of that? Bert Lucci would be hurt a lot more than you would.”

  “That’s not the end of the story, Vejay. When that happened in Washington, the sports fishermen and the commercial men went to court, and the state decided—the Boldt Decision—to divide the fish between the Indians and the non-Indians, fifty-fifty.”

  “Still, that’s not so bad. It’s better than having them gillnet all the fish in the rivers.”

  Chris leaned closer to the mesh. His face was getting red under his tan. “That’s still not the end.”

  I waited.

  “Then they decided that that fifty percent included the fish in the ocean, because they had been spawned in the rivers.”

  “You mean the Indian tribes got half of all the fish?”

  “Right.” His face was redder. I had never seen easygoing Chris this angry.

  “But surely that couldn’t happen from one little two-acre rancheria here,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter how big it is if it crosses the river.”

  “But, that was Washington State. This is California. Maybe the laws aren’t the same here.”

  “They’re not,” Chris said grudgingly. “But that’s because the tribes don’t have the same power here. It hasn’t gotten to a court case. It probably won’t, not for a while anyway, but that’s not the point.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Geez, Vejay. The point is that once the government gets a hand in deciding who can have what fish, they can do whatever they want. They can decide there aren’t enough fish to go around and that the Indians have first right to them, for religious reasons. They can decide we don’t get any fish at all.”

  “But, Chris, the government already sets the salmon season.”

  He glared at me.

  Even I recalled how angry the fishermen had been when, the year after a freak warming of the ocean—El Niño—had ruined the salmon season, the Pacific Fisheries Management Council voted to close the coho salmon season two months early. And when that second season had turned out to be a boom one, the ban remained enforced. The bountiful salmon swam out in the Pacific, mocking the fishermen. With two catastrophic seasons in a row, many of the men had lost their boats. As Chris had pointed out to me then, the bank expects payments whether the boat is out in the ocean or sitting at dock.

  “But, Chris,” Rosa said, “you didn’t know Edwina had the treaty, did you?”

  “No.”

  “So then it doesn’t matter what the treaty said. You didn’t know, so you wouldn’t have had any reason to want to kill her. The sheriff will understand that.”

  I sat silent, hoping I wouldn’t be the one who had to disillusion her. But Chris didn’t say anything, and finally, I said, “Rosa, the sheriff won’t believe Chris didn’t know about the treaty. Edwina might have told anyone. Hooper might have said something.”

  “Hooper knew?” Chris asked. “He didn’t tell me that.”

  “Why would he tell you?” I asked, with a sinking feeling.

  “He was helping me fix the manifold on the boat last Sunday. He was there all day.”

  I wanted to say, “Don’t mention that to the sheriff,” but this was hardly the place for that type of comment. It was just as well I didn’t say anything at all. Rosa was right: everything I found, everything I even asked about, made things look worse for Chris.

  Joey motioned to Chris from the door.

  “I’ve got to go, Mama,” Chris said.

  Rosa swallowed hard.

  “I’ll be okay,” he added. “It’s only Joey, Stan, and me. Don’t worry.”

  Rosa swallowed again.

  “Mama, nothing’s going to happen to me. The sheriff will find the person who killed Edwina.”

  Joey walked up beside Chris. Bending so that his mouth was near the wire mesh in front of the next seat, he said, “Rosa, the sheriff wants you in his office.”

  Rosa’s neck muscles tightened. She looked as if she would have swallowed yet again, but there was nothing left to swallow. “Now?”

  He nodded uncomfortably. “It’s official—his request.”

  “Oh, Chris.”

  “It’ll be okay, Mama.”

  I could tell from their faces that neither of them believed that.

  To Joey, Chris said, “She can have a lawyer or a representative with her, can’t she?”

  Joey nodded.

  “Mama, you’ll feel better not seeing the sheriff alone, right? You take Vejay with you.”

  Facing the sheriff in this kind of interview, on this case, was not something I wanted to do. Being connected to me wasn’t likely to raise the Fortimiglios in the sheriff’s estimation. I wasn’t even sure that Rosa found my company better than going it alone. But taking me with her was Chris’s parting request, and she di
dn’t argue. She turned and walked to the door, stood staring out, her back to me, until Joey came to open it and led us through the rows of plexiglass cubicles to Wescott’s office. It was on the inside of the aisle. Once Wescott had told me that it didn’t do for the sheriff to have his back to the windows.

  The office was as I remembered it from a year ago when Wescott had had me in here for an interrogation. Then, as now, papers were stacked on the muddy blue desk, on the blue bookcase, and mixed in with heavy binders atop the blue file case. From some place in the center of the building came the plastic clack of a typewriter, its electronic pips marking the end of each line. Overhead, the air grate buzzed softly.

  Sheriff Wescott was standing behind the desk. His blue eyes were pale, his rough skin drawn. I wondered how late he had been at Steelhead Lodge last night. When he looked at Rosa, it was with sadness. “Mrs. Fortimiglio.” He started to indicate the chair but stopped halfway, as he spotted me. He eyed me with annoyance. “Mrs. Fortimiglio, is it your wish to have Miss Haskell with you?” he demanded.

  Perhaps it was the sheriff’s tone that got to Rosa, or his implication that she was too timid to say no. “Yes,” she snapped, “it is my wish.”

  I moved the box of files from the other chair to the floor and sat. When we had left Chris, I wouldn’t have thought it was possible for me to make things any worse for him and Rosa, but already I had.

  The sheriff sat, pulled out a notepad, and said, “You cooked those pizzas, didn’t you, Mrs. Fortimiglio?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Rosa had looked nervous before. Now her eyes widened. She had the same expression of amazed disbelief Chris had had when I told him I knew nothing about the Boldt Decision. “We wanted to win the fifty dollars.”

  The sheriff pressed his lips together. It was clear from his expression that he figured she had misunderstood the point of his question. “Let me approach it from the other end. Why didn’t you take those pizzas to the Slugfest? Why did Chris?”

  Rosa leaned forward, resting her fingers on the edge of the desk. “Oh, well, you see, Edwina was still piqued at me. My grandson, Donny, bought some tobacco from her last fall. He was only sixteen then. He has bad asthma. I’m not excusing Donny, Sheriff; he had no business there. But Edwina should have known better than to sell it to him. I know you don’t speak ill of the dead, but truth is truth. We had to take Donny to the emergency room. His face was all red, he was trying so hard to get the breath in. He was scared to death. It was a good lesson for him. He’ll never go near tobacco again. But, I’ll tell you, we were all scared.”