“Municipal Court meets tomorrow, 9 A.M.,” Ohweiler said to me. “Your client can be arraigned then.”
It was a pretty speedy arraignment for a suspect who wasn’t being held, but it meant I wouldn’t have to make a special trip back to Soledad for a routine procedure so I said okay.
Ohweiler wrote out a desk appearance ticket and handed it to me. He pulled his bulk up out of the chair, put on his Ray-Bans and his cowboy hat and went out the door.
“Not securing a vicious animal?” Juan asked me. “What the hell kind of a crime is that?”
“A misdemeanor,” I said. “The maximum penalty is a year in jail or a $1,000 fine. If you plead guilty and say you’re sorry, the judge will probably fine you $100 and that will be the end of it.”
“Sorry for what?” said Juan. “Siri isn’t a vicious animal to begin with and he wasn’t insecurely kept either. Why should I have to pay a fine?”
“You want to go to trial?” I asked.
“Can I?”
“If you want one, you have the right to a trial.” But who would do that when they could just pay a $100 fine? Juan Sololobo.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go for it.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Jayne asked. “You know how they can fuck you over in a courtroom.”
“A trial is going to cost a lot of time and money and there’s no guarantee you’ll win,” I said.
“But I’m right,” Juan said. “Any jury’s gonna see that Siri’s not vicious and that the last thing I would ever do is be careless with him.” Juan had more confidence in his ability to sway a jury than Jayne or I did. She threw up her hands and went to the shower. Maybe the reality of being in a courtroom tomorrow would change his mind. I hoped so. In the meantime we had some things to discuss.
“The subject of your past record is going to come up at the arraignment,” I warned him. “It’s all on computer. Maybe we should go over it once more just to be sure I’ve got the whole story.”
“When I was Bill Wiley I went AWOL from the marines, but, hell, they were probably glad to get rid of me. Then we got into antiwar activities, robbed some banks. All the money went into the movement. We didn’t keep a penny of it for ourselves. I was convicted in federal court of driving the getaway car for a bank robbery, was sentenced to seven and did five long years.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah, that’s it,” he said.
******
The municipal courthouse was a medium-sized, user-friendly stone building, not imposing enough to dissuade Juan from wanting a jury trial. When we got there a bunch of Upward Bound kids were hanging around outside waiting for him. They’d been tipped off by someone. “Kids,” Juan shook his head. “They’re the best secret weapon in the world.” But these kids weren’t exactly secretive. They followed us inside, howled, cheered, booed and made such pests of themselves that the judge threatened to clear the courtroom. Juan was arraigned under Section 77-l-10A, it being unlawful for any person to keep an animal known to be vicious and liable to attack or injure human beings unless such animal is securely kept to prevent injury to any person. “Not guilty,” Juan said loud and clear.
I saw some faces I recognized in the courtroom—the girls who had commented on Juan’s cordy muscles, the boys who had made fun of the sheriff—and some faces I didn’t. The two boys in the Anthrax-and-jeans uniforms who had bitched at Jayne were not in attendance, I noticed. Bob Bartel was.
After Juan had been arraigned I scheduled a date for a full hearing with the clerk. Juan hung around outside the courthouse and told wolf stories to the kids, an irresistible audience for him. I caught up to Bob Bartel as he descended the courthouse steps two at a time. “Have you got a minute?” I asked him.
“Sure thing,” he said, although he kept right on walking. Unlike those of most Soledad residents his boots had cleats, not cowboy heels. This man walked for a living.
“What brought you to Juan’s arraignment?” I asked him.
He smiled with his canine brown eyes. “I like going to court. In fact, I always kind of thought I’d enjoy practicing law for a living.” We reached the bottom of the steps and he started striding down the street.
“Really? I always thought I’d enjoy practicing walking for a living.” He laughed. “Is there any place we could sit down?” I asked.
“You bet.” He turned a corner and led me behind the courthouse to where a couple of picnic tables sat under an ancient cottonwood, the kind of place lawyers come to eat their lunch. But not to clean up after themselves, judging from the trash that had been left behind. Bartel brushed the benches off and we sat down. “I’m the research biologist for the FWS in charge of wolf recovery,” he said. “I need to keep an eye on public opinion and your client has sure been stirring it up. He’s made friends with the kids in Soledad, I see. That’ll help.”
“Ohweiler said you examined the dead calf.”
“Yup.”
“Well, what do you think?” I asked him. “Did Sirius kill it? When my client goes on trial the dead calf could be presented as proof of Siri’s viciousness.”
Apparently Bartel was one of those rare people who stopped and thought before he spoke. And then he thought some more. He was, after all, an employee of the federal government whose words could be used against him. “Whew, that was a long pause, a short dog with long paws.” He smiled. “Sorry. The truth is it can be very hard to tell what killed an animal unless someone actually witnesses the kill. We’ve got mountain lions, coyotes and feral dogs in Soledad County and they’re all capable of killing cattle. Even domestic dogs will pack up and kill livestock. You can’t always tell by examining the corpse, either. This kill was fresh and I could see bite marks. They were smaller than I would have expected from such a large wolf, more the size of a coyote or a medium-sized dog, I’d say. But I don’t have the wolf available for comparison either and there was a witness.”
“Who?”
“Perla Phillips. She was out riding and she saw ‘a big furry thing’ running away from the kill site.”
“‘A big furry thing’?”
“That’s what she said.”
“Couldn’t that be a coyote or a dog?”
“Could,” he said. “But Perla claims it turned its head and looked back the way a wolf would but a coyote or a dog wouldn’t.”
“And how does she know what a wolf would or wouldn’t do? Has she ever seen one?”
“You’d have to ask her, I guess. She has seen a lot of dogs and coyotes, I can tell you that. I wouldn’t underestimate Perla. She had four brothers and she grew up learning to ride and shoot as well as any man. If she’d stuck to riding instead of raising kids, she’d be getting her name in the Cowgirl Hall of Fame by now.”
I reached down to scratch my leg. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Bartel said, looking at a tarantula crawling up my pants so carefully that I hadn’t consciously known it was there. It was big and covered with thick black and brown fur. I watched it raise a hairy leg and inch upward.
“It’s a beauty, isn’t it?” asked Bartel.
It had an ugliness so strange and fierce that I supposed you could call it beauty. I had no idea where tarantulas ranked on the list of desert creatures that sting, bite, strike and poison, but I felt more curiosity than fear as I watched it crawl. My fear impulse, however, isn’t as reliable as it ought to be. Bob Bartel stood up, took a handkerchief from his pocket, placed it over the spider, picked it up—very gently—and placed it several feet away on the ground. The tarantula was furious and swung at him. Bartel chuckled. “They can bite pretty good, but you’d survive. It could make you dance, though,” he smiled. “Tarantulas are called wolf spiders in Europe and there’s a folk belief that a bite from one will make you dance like crazy. We have wasps in the Southwest who capture these guys and feed them to their young. They’re called tarantula hawks and they’re big as hummingbirds. Nature works in strange ways.” He shook his head and hitched up his polyester pan
ts.
“So do humans.”
“They’re nature, too,” he said, “even though sometimes they’d like to forget it.” He put his foot on the picnic bench, rested his elbow on his knee. “Look at that spider. Now why would anybody want to kill something as beautiful as that? But they’ll kill every one they can around here. Run ’em down on the road in their cars, stomp on them with their boots. They go up and down the arroyos shooting turtles, snakes, anything they can fix in the sight of their hunting rifles. They learn to shoot by practicing on live animals and it’s legal as long as they’re nongame animals and they’re not on anybody’s protected list.” He shook his head. “Those are the boys I grew up with and I can tell you they’re not happy to see me coming out on the side of the wolf.”
“Why are you doing it?” I asked.
“Because it’s my job?” His mouth smiled at the query, but his eyes did not. “I’m a biologist. That means you go to school, school and more school and after you graduate you go to work for the federal government. I’m the one who gets out in the field and does the studies, but the guys who make the decisions are the politicians in suits and ties.”
Not being the kind of person to let anyone else make my decisions for me, especially someone in a suit and tie, I asked, “Suppose you don’t like the decision?”
“Well, if you’re like me and your goal is to make it into the middle class and take care of your wife and kids, then you do what they say, go home and forget about it. Every now and then we get lucky. Government biologists were responsible for bringing the red wolf back to North Carolina, you know. Not all environmentalists wear big beards and flannel shirts and make provocative statements. Some of us are raging, raving moderates. The American public should be very proud of what’s happened in North Carolina. We started there because wolves had been gone so long the hard-core opposition had died off. We’ve gotten good cooperation from local citizens, including hunters, and the wolves are reproducing well. I was there when they were released from their cages and it was something to see. The wolves hesitated when they got to the door. Even animals get used to their cages and it was a strange and hostile world they were looking at. The wolves looked all around, thought it over and kept right on going. Curiosity is a big motivator for animal behavior. You might even say it is a form of intelligence.”
He stopped for a minute, embarrassed to find that he’d been making a speech. It took him a while to get started, but once he’d gotten warmed up he was a verbal marathoner. “I’m sorry. You had a question back there, didn’t you? Oh yeah, why am I coming out on the side of the wolf? Because it’s right,” he said. “Because the wild is where they belong, because wolf recovery would complete the link that was there before man came along, because it was wolf predation that made the ungulate herd so fast and sleek, because a wolf is at the top of the food chain and the health of the wolf is an indication of the health of the whole ecosystem, because the habitat at White Sands can support them. Because one thing I’d like to hear before I die is the howl of a wolf in the Sierra Oscura.”
The black box he was carrying beeped and he pulled out the antenna and spoke to it. “Bartel,” he answered; the radio squawked back. It sounded like static to me, but made sense to him. “Be right there,” he said.
“Don Phillips found another calf kill on the ranch,” he told me. “I’ve got to go on out there and take a look. It’s been nice talkin’ to you.” He had that subtly flirtatious manner of men in the rural West. There’s always an undercurrent with guys like that that they’re a man and you’re a woman and that’s something that ought to be celebrated.
“My pleasure,” I said.
6
WHEN I GOT back to the courthouse Juan Sololobo was still standing on the steps doing what he loved best—talking to the world’s greatest secret weapon. I had nothing to do that afternoon and I didn’t have to be back in Albuquerque till morning, so I decided to go out to the Phillips ranch myself. If anybody wants to call curiosity a form of intelligence, it’s all right with me. But mine isn’t a lawyer’s interest in closed-door negotiation and settlement. I have the curiosity of an investigator who wants to get out there and see who’s lying, who isn’t. Some lawyers pay investigators to go out and do this kind of work for them. Not me—although I was willing to leave the examination of dead cattle to Bob Bartel. It was cowgirl Perla Phillips that I was curious about, a less than objective observer when it came to wolves. She had God on her side and when He steps in common sense can take a hike. If my client was going to be tried for not securing a vicious animal, the dead calf could well be introduced as evidence of Siri’s viciousness. I needed to know whether Sirius had really killed it. Perla had also left Jayne’s living room the night the chain was cut and Siri set free. Maybe she’d freed him looking for the opportunity to kill him. Since trouble had a way of following Juan Sololobo, I left him talking on the courthouse steps and went the way I prefer to go—alone.
It was miles of bumpy road to the Phillips ranch. I looked at the desert and wondered if there was any locoweed out there driving the Phillips cattle berserk. Cattle liked it, I knew, because it was the first plant to turn green in the spring, but by this time of year it was probably as brown and dried out as everything else and the cattle that had started eating it then would be long dead. When it comes to addictive substances cattle are as dumb as humans. Once they start on locoweed they don’t give up until they get depressed and uncoordinated and their organs stop functioning. The plant can be sprayed with chemicals, but it costs $10 to $15 an acre and when you have 20,000 acres it adds up. It’s a hard life being a rancher, but what life isn’t? And ranchers have a lot going for them: they don’t have to face an office and a partner five days a week; they have the big sky, the wide open spaces, no neighbors and a greater sense than most of us of being in control of their destiny.
The Phillips ranch road led eventually to a bunch of end-of-the-road buildings. They were on the frontier; there was nothing beyond here but sky, desert and Mexico, where the wolves and the drug dealers roamed. The buildings were nestled under trees like they were at Jayne’s place, only there were more buildings here. It was, after all, a working ranch and there were a couple of small houses and trailers for the help. The ranch house had a portal in front and a horse was saddled up and waiting outside. Perla sat on the porch with two plump, fair-haired toddlers pushing trucks around her feet. She watched me curiously as I parked the Nissan and walked over.
“I’m Neil Hamel,” I said. “Juan Sololobo’s lawyer. We met at Jayne’s the other night.”
“Juan Sololobo,” Perla shook her head, “now where did he get a name like that?”
“Gave it to himself, I guess.”
“What kind of a name is Neil Hamel? “
Was I going to have to explain once again that I was named after my uncle who was in the Tenth Mountain Division? “American,” I said.
“Is that right?” The toddlers pushed a truck back and forth between her boots. “I’m getting ready to go riding,” Perla nodded toward the waiting horse. “Chili’s been getting lazy. He needs a workout. Esperanza, one of the ranch hands’ wives, is coming over to put the kids down for their nap. You ride?”
“No. I’ve never been that crazy about horses myself.” And only a few minutes ago I was claiming to be American.
“Is that right?” Perla said again. “Me, I try to get out every day. My family lost our ranch to the White Sands Missile Range and I grew up in town. It’s a real pleasure to be able to ride when I want to.”
“It must be lonely out here, if you’re used to town.” I said. The words filled a conversational void, and they sounded like it.
“I’m too busy to get lonely.”
A small Hispanic woman with a long black braid came around the corner of the house, a recent arrival from Mexico, I figured, by the way she wrapped herself tight in her rebozo, stayed near the side of the house and kept her eyes on the dusty ground.
“Hola, Es
peranza,” Perla said.
“Hola,” Esperanza replied.
“Buenos días,” I said.
“Buenos días.” Esperanza’s feet were bare, but it didn’t much matter, because the skin on the bottom of them looked as tough as the tires people sole huaraches with where she came from. She walked over to the toddlers, picked the youngest one up and snuggled his blond head under her chin. Mexican arms are empty unless they have a kid to hold. Perla was ready to ride, Esperanza was ready to cuddle; it was time for me to state my purpose.
“Juan Sololobo was arraigned this morning on charges of not securing a vicious animal,” I said.
“He never should have brought that thing into Soledad County.” Perla shook her head. “Never. Wolves are nothing but trouble.” The child who was in Esperanza’s arms dropped his truck and the other one made a quick grab across the ground to take it. “Waah,” the truckless one cried. “See,” Perla asked, “how kids move quick and make noises like that? They look like baby animals on the ground and a wolf thinks they’re dinner.”
“A wolf wouldn’t come near your house,” I said.
“Who knows what those things will do? I’ve seen a coyote take a calf and I’ve seen the cow’s bags all torn and bloody, I’ve seen her cryin’. It’s not the kind of thing you’d want to see again.”
“Wolves are much shyer than coyotes. They’re known to stay as far away from people as possible and there’s never been a documented case of an unprovoked wolf attack on a human being in North America, either.” Juan would have been proud of his lawyer.
“I’d sure hate to have my kids be the first, wouldn’t you?”
I didn’t have any kids, but I didn’t tell Perla Phillips that since childless women were probably as un-American in this world as wolves. “I was wondering if you might have seen or heard anything unusual that night at Jayne’s when somebody set the wolf free.”
The Wolf Path Page 6