California Bloodstock (3 page)

Galon coughed into the stillness. Then again and again, unleashing a jangling chain of spasms from deep in his chest. His noisy fit sent a family of swallows winging from their nest in the cypress. They fluttered in alarmed circles over the patio.

It must be the air, Sewey laughed, too much grease in the air. Galon bent from the waist and rode himself out with a series of convulsive spits at the ground.

The swallows settled back on their branches, but not for long. Millard, who had been carving his initials in the base of the cypress, felt so bad about his brother's cough that he started chucking pieces of bark at the nervous birds.

Slant was inside talking to Taya, telling her to stay out of sight. Naturally, she wanted to know why. Because, Slant explained with an unsteady intensity, the three men on the patio were rather upset with
her father and himself. Something about the literature of history. And they were also looking for a free lunch.

Father? Taya was totally unprepared. Not that she wasn't interested. She would often stare into mirrors, dissecting her reflection, noting that yes, she might be the daughter of an Indian princess like old T. D. said, with his talk of how he had traded for her because she was such a beautiful baby. But she never got the story the same twice and besides, who ever heard of a Worm Eater with freckles.

Yet she had these feelings, and knew moments, languishing in the half sleep of rainy mornings, when she saw herself on a brave and sensual journey, scouring all manner of terrain, searching out the gene pools and nostalgic tumors of closeted family secrets that would account for her smoky intuitions. She wanted to know if history repeated itself beyond shanks of bone and hanks of hair, but she had never had a clue. Until now.

Old T. D. left her to join the three old farts on the patio. She leaned against the wall in the darkening pantry, sensing the past and the future at the same time. It was traumatic, intoxicating. Father? She hadn't even read the book.

The swallows were still circling when Slant returned to the patio and went to work tossing steaks around on a grilled fire pit. Millard and Sewey were pleased,
but Galon kept coughing and spitting into the fire. He ignored the food except to pick now and then at a plate of tiny figs intended as dessert while Millard and Sewey gnawed at the meat like wolverines and gulped handfuls of fried clams rolled in tortillas. Once they had stuffed themselves, it was on to more brandy and the literary business at hand, with Taya listening from the pantry.

The conversation was difficult to follow, but about this Buckdown…this transgressing double-dealing viper turd…this venal captain of falsehoods…this polluted forger of truth…this dirty rat…this liar. He should be made to grovel in the pornographic bile of his own sucking counterfeits. Cysts, sties, carbuncles, cavities, slivers, and ingrown horns should come to him as only a partial reward for his salacious frauds. He should be lashed, rib-roasted, larruped, pummeled, stomped, drawn and quartered, and creamed. Something to that effect.

Galon seemed to be feeling better. He led Millard and Sewey into a righteous frenzy about how they were going to serve that son-of-a-buck Buckdown right. Slant nodded and made cosmetic notes while the tremors of drunkenness rattling up from the patio chased off the swallows for good. Suddenly, Galon lurched to his feet.

The big spit, he announced, and staggered off.

Slant grabbed the pause in the conversation and excused himself to the pantry for another bottle and his small silver-plated belly gun just in case.

Inside he found Taya loading the gun. Her eyes flashed wet and cold at him, like bullets in a shot
glass. He asked her for the gun. She shook her head.

You're drunk, she said.

Indeed he was, drunk enough to forget himself and blunder through an explanation of how he was just faking it with the Burgetts and Sewey, and how he had no intention of writing down any of their swill.

Don't you see, he said, gesturing for the gun, I'm just putting them on.

A big mistake and too bad. Framed in the small open window behind them was Galon Burgett, his mouth smeared with vomit, a whip cracking in his bloodshot eyes.

The rape of Melting-Snow-of-Winter-That-Chases-Despair and the castration of Theodosius D'Artagnon Slant took the boys about ten minutes. They accomplished it in what Sewey referred to as southern style. Semi-southern style is closer to the truth, however, since both victims were not conscious throughout, and the idea was always to make each watch what happened to the other. Just ask any Oakie.

While Galon held Taya, Millard and Sewey gagged old T. D. and hung him by his wrists from the main redwood ceiling beam. He kicked frantically for a moment, running hopelessly in the still air, getting nowhere. Sewey spun him like a field-dressed animal, and he went limp at the end of the twisting rope
as they bent Taya back like a sapling over the desk. Then an almost isometric quiet, broken only by the sound of fabric being torn from her breasts and crotch. Finally, her one and only scream.

As Sewey and the Burgetts took their turns, Taya strained as if against drowning, counting their thrusts as days, then months. Old T. D. clenched his eyes against the sight of her finely grained skin glistening under their sweat until he sensed that she had passed out, and he looked with hopeless resignation to see them turning their attention to him.

Sewey said he'd handle it, and he did. Drop his pants for him, he told Millard, and when that was done Sewey grabbed old T. D. by the balls and made a quick swipe with his knife. The scrotum sack and its vein-laced contents came away in his fist.

When she came to, Taya was alone with old T. D., whom the boys had left dangling in shock and bleeding to death over a puddle of blood. She cut him down quickly and, without thinking, began to treat him like a gelded colt. First she tied off the spermatic artery then cleaned him out and packed him with pledgets of tow that she dipped in a bottle of tincture of muriate of iron. Either he would heal by adhesion or he wouldn't. As she rubbed him dry she wasn't so sure about herself.

When she could walk again, Taya made her way to one of the deep pools above the crumbling Mission San Carlos Borromeo on the Carmel River. Easing in and out of the still water, she carefully examined herself. Over and over, her delicate hands stroked down her body, coming together ultimately like two streams at the mouth of her own mysterious ocean.

She knew what had happened. When she was twelve, she had seen Mexican soldiers take the wife and daughter of a renegade Worm Eater behind the horse barn next to the customhouse. And she knew what happened next. The word would go around and she would be expected to put out for every horned freebooter who staggered through with a hard-on.

Thus a dense garden of vengeful plants began to grow in her mind, and when it reached the proportions
of a forest, she walked to the beach, using the timber to build herself a fort, a storeroom really, for the twisting and urgent tortures she began designing for Sewey and the Burgetts. As the sun faded behind the ocean she stepped back from what she had built and heard wind rushing through the beams.

The rent was due.

It warmed every rattlesnake heart in California that nobody ever stayed in cahoots with anybody else for very long. Maybe it had something to do with the land itself. What with opportunities crystallizing every morning like dew hardening into candy on the bright petals of lilies, fireweed, and pussy-paws. Who knew what tempting chances would show up like specials on the daily menu, along with the glazed oranges carmelized in wheat porridge and the sweet and sour calf hearts soaking in
chilimato salsa.
Even three old pals like Sewey and the Burgetts didn't stay together long once they digested the possibilities.

They had ridden out of Monterey in the dark. At dawn they were passing out of the Carmel Valley, headed for the Salinas River. By noon, the sun was blasting at the dry brush and they heard insects clicking like bones in the sandy dust. Galon's lungs felt like sacks of hot dirt and he coughed over and over in the brittle air. Suddenly, he pulled up and dry-puked from the saddle.

Millard wondered if Galon was feeling bad. He was always concerned about his brother. Sewey thought it was funny.

Yeah, Galon, he goaded, you feeling okay? You been doing that with some regularity lately, I've noticed.

Fuck you, Galon shouted, gagging again with the effort. Fuck both of you! Who needs you!

When Galon composed himself, they rode on in anxious silence, all three brooding over what Galon had said.

They stopped for supper at the Mission San Juan Bautista and demanded to eat inside. Galon had some broth and closed his eyes. Millard and Sewey gobbled up a rabbit fricassee and some lime chicken while a fat old padre bemoaned the shortage of Worm Eaters to tend to the work of the mother-shepherd church. Out the window, Sewey counted more than thirty scabby Worm Eaters scratching in the dark with crude hoes. A fat untended ox dragged a splintering wooden cart with a broken axle aimlessly among them. Sewey found the scene inspiring.

The next morning he rode off alone with only a loose agreement to meet up with the Burgetts at some later date. He seemed in a great hurry.

See you around, is all he said.

Or in hell, Galon shouted after him and told Millard they would ride west, toward Santa Cruz.

They found it growing up around a defunct mission and took up immediately with a fraternity of grubby southerners who hung around a distillery run by Kentucky-born Isaac Grahm. Grahm was highly respected. He had been plotting and scheming
in California for a number of years and had done well, if you forget the various efforts by numerous Californios to have him deported as a dangerous foreigner. He and the Burgetts hit it off at once and they were his guests for more than a week, drinking raw whisky and bullshitting.

Galon was quick-minded as a drop latch but having only just arrived in California his understanding of its politics was, as he put it, as fuzzy as a mad cat's back. He wondered if there was any law around.

Naw, Grahm assured him, anybody with any balls just makes up his own.

Galon was relieved. It wasn't that he was especially concerned about their fun with the girl, but he had been feeling vaguely anxious whenever he thought about what Sewey had done to Slant.

Well, fuck him if he can't take a joke, Grahm roared when Galon told him the story. Ha, ha, ha.

So when the Burgetts rode on, Galon was chuckling to himself at how easily such things could be made into jokes. Which goes to show how right he sometimes was for all the wrong reasons.

Slant lost most of his illusions along with his balls. He knew without thinking that it would be useless to report the incident to the greaser authorities. He didn't have any confidence in American justice
either, but he did file a formal complaint with Thomas Larkin, the American consul, probably just to test the density of his new status. What would Larkin say?

Larkin was a big-eared, plodding, dry-goods-oriented transplant from Massachusetts who dealt primarily in skins, soap, and manifest destiny. He wore black linen suits and was known from Mazatlan to Mystic as a man who definitely knew how to fry more than one fish at a time. He had bartered his way into Californio society, and since about 1840 had been carrying on like some kind of one-man chamber of commerce and tourist bureau, writing letters full of hard-sell descriptions of California as paradise to the New York papers. Larkin called for pioneers the way that most men ask their wives to pass the salt, and quietly supplied any warships, whalers, or trading vessels touching his coast without regard for their affiliations.

He propped his black boots up on his shiny mahogany desk and leaned back grinning at Slant. So they cut your balls off.

Just what Slant was afraid of, snide ridicule. Larkin rocked in his chair and chuckled that if Slant could round up the culprits he would be glad to officiate at a trial.

Big deal, Slant shouted, limping toward the door.

You never know, Larkin called after him. Hang in there.

Very funny. Slant's paranoia conjured hideous jokes being circulated at his expense. He imagined former friends and business associates yucking it up
over his condition as they sat around drinking and gambling at the Cantina del Futuro Proximo. Sticks and stones…indeed. He dropped from sight.

Days, he convalesced in bed, cursing out of control at the vacancy between his legs. Nights, he brooded on the patio. And the deeper he brooded, the icier the winds he felt blowing up his thighs. He felt his manly juices deserting him, dripping away. He decided to get out of town, to flee. If he couldn't have a miracle in his sad old life, he could at least be left alone. But where?

Finally, after considering a return east, he determined to point his future north, toward Yerba Buena, a small settlement at the head of San Francisco Bay noted for keeping secrets and not giving a shit who showed up. A good place to forget about everything.

Ironically, it was on the very night he made his decision that his past fell in on him like a crumbling library. The keystone had moved.

T. D. Slant wooed Miss Pippa Lippencot on the muddy sidewalks of New York in the spring of 1825. An interesting year, 1825, and not just for Slant.

Buckdown helped organize a trappers' rendezvous which drew a large and rowdy congress of Indians, mountain men, and eastern fur dealers to the baking flats of the Great Salt Lake. The affair turned into a six-week drinking and gambling toot during which more than $100,000 worth of furs changed hands.

And further west in California, the first duly appointed Mexican governor proposed importing six hundred apes from Guatemala, dressing them as soldiers, and turning them loose to confound the American mountain men his spies told him would soon be heading his way from the Great Salt Lake with their
heads full of avarice and their souls full of animal murder. All of them on the make, just like Slant.

Slant was forty-five years old at the time, and a lettered liar. After a cruise through the
Citizens Advertising and Social Directory
and several afternoons studying the
Commissioners' Folio of Real Estate Maps
, Slant set his cap at Pippa Lippencot and went to work. Pippa was tall and pale, thick-haired but rather stark-looking in the manner of women who never expect to have any fun. She was also the vainest thirty-year-old spinster on Fifth Avenue, and took pleasure in what she felt as a rather eclectic superiority. They were made for each other like pearls and swine.

You ride like an Indian princess, he would tell her as they rode up the thicket-lined avenues of a social order she understood to be fixed forever. An Indian princess, yes. She would stiffen in her awkward sidesaddle and admit that, yes, she knew she did.

She had what was known in horse circles as a bad seat. Slant knew this, of course, but he also knew a good deal more. Her father, Backhouse Fish Lippencot, was right up there with Astor, Vanderbilt, and the Brevoorts when it came to money and land—that matched team pulling the shit wagon of power out of the previous century. Old man Lippencot was only a little more conservative than those who went on to be richer than God by the time the Animal People were on the run.

Privately, Pippa was a bit wild. That she drank sherry at the solitary little teas she threw for herself was her little secret. Ditto for the fact that she had lost her virginity to a French expansionist on the
continental tour that was all but mandatory for young ladies of her class. But people talk, and when she expressed interest in the new science of phrenology, it was said that she was one of those modern girls. You know, the kind that like to experiment. So she had a reputation. One of Slant's newfound New York cronies told him that when she left for Europe she smelled so sweet that one of them frogs she ran into over there probably popped her cherry with his nose.

Well now. Slant, new in town, broke, and horny for privilege, just in from Florida where he had failed to get rich with a newspaper of expansion, planned to use his noggin to get rich and laid at the same time.

Perhaps because he had dabbled unsuccessfully in a number of careers from acting to land speculating, he found it to his advantage to court her as an adventurer with a mysterious past. He went so far as to claim inside information pertaining to the mysterious suicide of the famous explorer Meriwether Lewis, but would not reveal it. He was dashing in a blunt sort of way that Pippa found amusing. He recounted gruesome events, in such exotic locales as Key West and Kentucky, in such an understated manner that she felt brave just listening to him.

In his dealings with Backhouse Fish Lippencot, Slant hinted at pirate treasure and claimed that common sense, not education, had gotten him where he was today. College, he said to Backhouse's great disdain, was nothing more than a hideout for the indecisive and he was happy to have had none of it. All of which was showboat on his part as records show
that Slant was the third son of an elegant Virginia tobacco buyer and extremely well schooled for his time.

The courtship came to a head, so to speak, at a picnic on the beach at Rockaway. After chivalrously not crowding Pippa under the shade of her parasol, Slant feigned a sun-induced headache and got her to rub his brow. Being a curious woman, her slender fingers were soon embarked on phrenological explorations above his hairline. Science is so interesting. Almost immediately she discovered that he had the lumps of a genius.

Round and round in that old gravitation of love and money went Pippa and Slant, while New York society fluttered with catty speculation as to his motives and her sanity. Old Backhouse paid little attention until he was informed that both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had died on the same day, July 4, 1826, which just happened to be the same day that his only offspring had married. And looking back over that week he recalled fizzling fireworks on the nation's rainy birthday and thought dark hopeless thoughts about middle-age marriages. They were better than no marriages to be sure, but they were about as American as being broke.

Anticipating the worst, he nonetheless gave his daughter and her husband a red brick house, with
stables, just off the Washington Military Parade Ground, and hoped for the best. The best being a grandson.

No problem if you know how to go about it, and the newlyweds seemed to. Not that she had the sweet flesh of cherries under her tongue, but Pippa was sweet enough and Slant got right to it. They drank a lot of sherry and screwed in the afternoons. Evenings they went on the town in rounds of boisterous dinner bouts with whoever could keep up. Pippa had the money and Slant definitely had the time.

They would return home after such evenings and take brandy to bed, where Pippa would insist that they make love in French. Slant would go along on the condition that in the morning, when he inevitably woke up hung over and horny, they make love like animals. Lions one morning, whales the next, and so on. Pippa preferred unicorns.

Then it happened, as it often does between men and women who think of their life together as theatre: she became pregnant and everything changed, soured. She quit drinking and he took up the slack.

What's the deal? Slant wanted to know.

Our life is no life for a child, she said. Your life is no life for a father. Don't spill on the carpet, I'm tired of things spilling on carpets. My carpets.

Slant whipped out his thing and pissed his initials on the carpet.

Let me tell you about a dream I had, Pippa said. There was this graveyard on what looked like a beach and there were many new graves and they were all unmarked except one. Yours.

What's that supposed to mean?

Needless to say, they began arguing like gypsies. Make that existential gypsies. Worse, she began prefacing everything she said to him with
for the baby's sake
, and was quite blunt with her opinion that it was no big deal to father a son (she had a feeling about that). The true test of manhood was making something of yourself that a son (that feeling again) could look up to.

For the baby's sake, at least get a job.

He'd show her. He took a position as social columnist with the New York
Sun
and was soon thrashing friends of the family in print. The
ooh la la
and animal noises disappeared forever from their bed and Slant began frequenting a neighborhood cathouse kept at demanding standards by one Madame Josie Spoon. There, surrounded by feathers, music, coquettish conversation, and good champagne, he found love. Not good, sticky, carnal love, although he did do his duty, as Josie called it, with all of her jaunty girls at least once. Slurping and sliding had nothing to do with it, this new love of Slant's. It grew, rather, from imagination—his and Josie's. And it began as a parlor game they invented together the first time he walked in.

What can I do for you?

How about a miracle, Slant said, disgusted with women in general.

Of the flesh or spirit?

Whichever is the more difficult for you to manage, he told her.

How would you like to meet an earth angel, she
winked, one with the bloom of Eden and the grace of a swan on a silver lake?

Interesting, Slant admitted, warming to the challenge. But what about the fluid moves of a racehorse and the radiance of midnight orchids.

Of course, she replied. And don't forget the elegance of a diamond needle and the purity of an albino's tear.

What fun it was: they leapfrogged in the above manner late into the night, and then nightly well into the months of Pippa's pregnancy. Without a thought to the expectant mother, these two verbal libertines constructed new declensions of hyperbole in the name of an ideal that went far beyond breasts like twin roes hanging out on Mount Gilead. What to name their evolving perfection was a problem until Slant came across an obscure sixteenth-century tract about a western island in the zone of terrestrial paradise that the author, a visionary named Ordonez de Montalvo, had peopled with a race of Amazons ruled by a queen he called Calafia. The queen's name was as tacky as Athena, but one of her huntresses, a canny woman-child who ran with the griffins, had a name that struck Slant's fancy. As you can probably guess, the name was Taya.

What could Pippa do? Her fool of a husband was out till all hours, returning, it seemed, only to moan for someone named Taya in his stupefied sleep. She had no choice but to employ a private agent to follow her husband, and ultimately pay off Josie Spoon to permanently eighty-six him. Josie was happy enough to oblige in this regard, saying that things
were getting a bit kinky anyway. From that point until he left New York for keeps, Slant spent most of his time drinking alone on his roof, staring west, toward Newark and beyond.

I must soon quit this scene, he told himself upon seeing his son T. D. Jr. born ugly and screaming like a troll.

I am considering an affair, Pippa confided to the little Frenchman who owned the haberdashery where she bought white knit suits for the baby.

It was just a matter of time.

The wealth of furs that had changed hands at the Great Salt Lake had by this time reached the eastern markets, and numerous expeditions were being organized to cash in on the newly opened territory. To the courageously greedy and the morose, a trek west made infinitely more sense than waiting around to be hit by a pack of escapees from the Fifth Avenue Home for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquency or taking the train out to Hoboken to watch a shaggy old sack of bones get croaked in one of the lately popular buffalo hunts that drew thousands of New Yorkers. At least that's how Slant saw things.

Thus, he angled an opportunity to join up with a company of uncertain sponsorship led by Benjamin Louis Bonneville. Slant would serve as historian and record keeper with the rank of lieutenant. The hardest
part, he sarcastically informed his colleagues at the paper, would be deciding what to wear.

When he informed his wife that he would be stepping out for a couple of years
for the baby's sake
, she replied caustically that if he had to run away to act like a man he might as well not come back. They never saw each other again.

His departure on a muggy August morning, on the first of what turned out to be a number of expeditions, left her in a rather comfortable balance. She had T. D. Sr. to hate and she had T. D. Jr. to love.

Although little is known about her romantic life after her husband ran off, it is probably safe to assume that she screwed around. There was a great deal of gossip about her, and she started drinking sherry again in the afternoon.

The privilege and protection afforded T. D. Slant Jr. as a child did not stop him from tumbling out of his adolescence with a certain, well, hunger. He entered Harvard College at seventeen and threw himself into a full flowering of collegiate decadence. He hung around with a club of rich southern boys and distinguished himself as a foul-mouthed rascal on club outings through Boston's waterfront brothels and dives. In his sophomore year he smoked opium on a bet.

Pippa Lippencot Slant naturally did all she could for her son, and old Backhouse in turn promised
wondrous rewards if the lad would just settle down and study. But it was no use. T. D. Jr. found class-work the equal of floggings, and the suffocating orthodoxies of scholarly Cambridge, he claimed, made him at times want to puke his guts out.

He had the temperament of an artist, Pippa decided. She encouraged him to study art, and as it turned out he was not without talent. He could sketch easily and well, often capturing the complexities of landscape with an economy of strokes. He dropped out of Harvard but remained in Boston, taking a large empty warehouse near the docks as a studio. His paintings were considered stark.

He was disgusted with the romanticism of contemporary painting, all those rainbows and lapdogs with pink bows around their necks, the dripping sentiment and cute symbolism and sloppy draftsmanship. He rebelled. He became obsessed with realism. He tried to paint scenes exactly as he saw them but his talent failed him. He simply could not catch life in a mirror.

But all was not lost. He had been following the development of daguerreotype and now began to see it as reality's main chance. The process was clumsy, requiring a bulky camera box, long exposures during which there could be no movement, and the complicated and precise juggling of silver, sunlight, and various chemical vapors at specific temperatures; but the results were splendid. There were portrait studios employing the process, turning out likenesses so accurate that you could count a man's whiskers.

T. D. Jr. soon mastered the technique, but not to make portraits. He was determined to bring its realism
to landscapes, to turn the lens on the world and show what it looked like, what it really looked like with no pussyfooting around. He was interested in perspective and the scale of things, images too grand for the normal eye to register without help, pictures so real yet of such sweeping scope that they became abstract, like the horizon or the future. He wanted to put man in his place.