California Bloodstock (7 page)

The Mormon captain examined the sad-eyed little Worm Eater on the bed with clinical thoroughness. He traced and probed his way over her body from top to bottom. He turned her over on her stomach and kneaded her smooth round ass. He turned her over on her back once again and, taking hold of her ankles, spread her legs.

Old T. D. could no longer see Brannan's face. The Mormon had dropped to his knees at the foot of the bed and was groaning between the Worm Eater's thighs. Old T. D. was beside himself with the possibilities. His mind churned in syncopation with Brannan's bobbing head. By chance his eyes wandered up to the Worm Eater's face. It was a mistake. Her eyes grew wider and moved across the ceiling. She locked on Slant's peephole like a timid animal frozen by a torch in the night.

Slant was pinned. He felt tied to all women like the tail of a falling kite.

Dwarf shrubforms clustered here and there in tight packs on the grey underslope of the Tehachapi Mountains. In the moonlight their shadows seemed almost human, apelike, an army of monkeys or midgets standing guard in the night. Taya's mind was a cold garden. She dreamed of growing things, shapes and textures pushing and sliding against each other, trying to break free. And all around her she felt the large movements of men and horses. When they began looking for her she woke up.

She looked across the dying fire at T. D. Jr. He was wide awake, searching among the stars of some inner midnight, waiting for the night to fall away. He looked over at her. They heard a scraping beneath the folded mountains, teeth perhaps, tearing into the earth somewhere under the crust. Without speaking they gathered their gear and saddled the horses. And soon they were climbing again, higher into the mountains, riding out the night together in silence.

The frontal perspective on Galon Burgett's health was confusing. Sometimes he looked pretty good and sometimes he didn't. His energy seemed to depend on the weather. Heat bothered him and on days like this, with shimmering lines rising from the needle grass and greasewood, he was a ragged quiver of symptoms. He coughed a lot, his eyes turned yellow, and there were irregularities in his stool.

He walked across the courtyard of the huge adobe that had served until recently as the working headquarters for the Rancho Petaluma, with its endless acres and its long-horned cattle by the thousands, its fine horses and its wheat and tallow and wine. It was almost deserted now, most of the Worm Eaters gone back to their scratch hills and Vallejo's trusted foremen
dead in their own workshops and corrals. Only a few half-breed vaqueros and their saggy-breasted whores still hung around. Fremont and the Bear Flaggers had driven off the livestock and stripped the place of anything they could carry. Who cares? thought Galon. He passed through the front gate and sat down against the thick adobe wall. His face was puffed and flushed bluish pink, like the belly of a dead fish. His own breathing made him dizzy. A short distance away he could see his brother and a gang of the half-breeds having a little fun. Beyond them the dry low hills pulled toward the Coast Range like the waves of nausea Galon felt rolling through his body. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep.

Millard was sad that Galon hadn't wanted to join in the new game he was learning. It was a good one. The vaqueros told him it was very old but still popular. It was called
carrero del gallo.

A chicken was buried up to its neck in the dirt. Then the participants took turns charging the squawking bird at a gallop. The idea was to swing low out of the saddle and pick off the bird's head with one hand in passing. Millard was very good on a horse in spite of his age and came up with the head on his second pass. The half-breeds cheered and Millard felt very proud. He couldn't wait to show Galon. He raced over to his sleeping brother cupping the bug-eyed chicken head in his bloody palm like an egg.

Wake up, Galon, he shouted, shoving his prize in Galon's sleeping face. Look what I won!

Galon woke with a start, eye to eye with the mangled chicken head. Something snapped inside him.
He slapped Millard's hand away from his face and fought for breath. He sucked at the still air but it settled in his mouth like fine dust. He coughed and grabbed for the canteen lying next to him. The water was warm and stale. Millard's smiling babble grated on him like a sandstorm.

Look here, Galon, Millard persisted, shoving the chicken head back under Galon's nose. I done good.

That was it. Galon kicked out at his brother, catching him in the stomach and sending him buckling backward into dust. Galon slid his back slowly up the wall till he was standing and glared at Millard.

Is that what you got for me, Millard, a shit old chicken head? Galon wheezed. I spend my life looking after you and that's what I get when I ain't feeling good. Well, you get the hell away from me. I'm through with it. You ain't never done good. You're on your own and I don't give a fuck.

Millard didn't understand. He stared blankly at his brother and tried to think of what to say. But it was no good, and he was still sitting there in the dust when Galon got on his horse and rode off without him.

Galon headed west, toward the coast. He wanted moisture. He wanted to stand naked in the rain. He wanted the cool relief of mist and fog on his face and in his lungs. For the first time in his life it occurred to him that he might be dying. But imagine how Millard felt.

Poor Millard. Most of the time he was like an empty house: nobody home. His brain sailed back and forth in the space of his head like a phantom trapeze. Dumb habits dominated and he never felt much one way or another, with one obvious exception. He loved his brother.

Millard would have led apes into hell for Galon, and now he was lost, orphaned, like a child told to sit in the corner without the faintest understanding of what he had done wrong. He watched Galon disappear into the brittle golden hills and it occurred to him that the best way to get him back would be to buy him. Galon had always wanted to be rich, so if Millard got a lot of money and could buy Galon whatever he wanted….It is not an unusual line of reasoning even today.

Thus, Millard Burgett, at the age of fifty-nine, set out to make his fortune. He rode east, toward Sutter's Fort and what turned out to be a golden future.

Great dark birds sailed huge and aloof on the hot wind above the clusters of blue oak and digger pine that sheltered Counsel's place on the dry, rocky approach to Tejon Pass. Taya and T. D. Jr. rode in, sweating and winded, late in the afternoon.

Everyone around Counsel's had a frontier mind. You could tell by the way each could carry on long and complicated conversations without the aid of another person. The shrewdest spoke of themselves only in the third person, which sounded pretty clever until you spoke to Counsel himself. He was special, a truly superior frontier mind.

In his travels, his bouncing around on the frontier to establish one trading venture after another over twenty-five years, Counsel had come to believe that conversation, talk, was not simply cheap. It was also
dangerous. Words were weapons that men used to trick and dominate each other, especially in the trading business. If he let another man impress him as to the worth of, say, a bundle of beaver pelts, it inevitably cost him more money. And if he made the worse mistake of talking about himself, sooner or later it came back to undermine him. Better misunderstood than to let on how your mind works, he had decided. Thus, he never told stories, and more important, he let nothing he heard impress him.

I couldn't care less
he had found to be a most useful phrase and over the years he had refined it. First by shortening it to a sly
I couldn't care
, and then, in what he considered a major breakthrough, he had honed it into verbal shorthand with
care nothing.
Eventually, when he reached California, he had hit on the ultimate:
care.

Yes, it gave him the perfect image. That one simple word used alone, Counsel found, communicated a disdain of disarming power. When Taya and T. D. Jr. showed up that afternoon asking about Buckdown his response was predictable.

Care.

What's this care? Taya wanted to know. But it was no use. Try as she might, she could get nothing more from Counsel. Even T. D. Jr.'s elegant attempts to reason with the trader were met with the same monosyllabic response.

The trappers who witnessed the exchange found it hilarious and volunteered nothing for fear of cutting short what was shaping up to be a real howl. If it had not been for Counsel's wife, Taya and T. D. Jr. might have learned nothing. When she returned from her
wood gathering and found Taya almost pleading with her husband, she put an end to the foolishness.

Buckdown is in the North, she said, but he is probably crazy. There are jokes about him.

With that, the trappers figured that the fun was up to them, and proceeded to tell each other Buckdown jokes.

Did you hear that Buckdown won't eat tongue anymore?

No, how come?

He says it ain't clean to eat anything that comes out of an animal's mouth.

Oh, yeah, well then what does he eat?

Eggs.

Taya and T. D. Jr. rode north the next morning, but before they left T. D. Jr. made a daguerreotype, at Taya's request, as a present to thank Counsel's wife. He placed her and her husband in front of the trading post. She sat on a bale of fox pelts; Counsel stood behind her with his rifle. The trappers heckled from the side. Halfway through the exposure, Counsel suddenly wheeled and walked off into the woods. T. D. Jr. knew at once that the plate was ruined, and sure enough, when he developed it there was the woman, clear and sharp in every detail but totally unbalanced in the composition by Counsel's blur fading out of the perspective behind her. T. D. Jr. wondered if Counsel knew Zorro.

Dawn. The sky was pink, pale blue, and shiny. It cupped over the San Joaquin like an inverted abalone shell, tropical and misleading. They were traveling north, straight up the middle of the huge arid valley, through a flatness that stretched in every direction like amnesia. Taya was sullen. Jumpy.

Since leaving Counsel's she had felt herself pushed closer and closer toward the edge of something, something physical, depleting. Yet she wanted to fly toward it, to get to it and see.

She was already mounted, waiting for T. D. Jr. He was seeing to the packhorse, checking his equipment.

Relax, he said. We'll find him.

Yes, she said quickly, if we get moving and don't waste time talking about it.

Her voice was sharp, too sharp for him that early in the morning.

Look, he said, I don't see why you have to be nasty about it. I'm still here, aren't I? And I'm not complaining, am I?

She didn't answer, just dropped her eyes away from him and waited. He walked his horse up beside her and climbed slowly into the saddle. He had hurt her feelings, he thought, and he didn't like to do that. But he was damned if he was going to be badgered into a pace that would exhaust them both and probably kill the horses.

I know how you feel, he told her and was about to explain about the horses when she cut him off.

No you don't.

She spurred her horse into a reckless lope and he didn't catch up with her that day, or that week. In fact, he almost didn't follow her to Sutter's Fort at all. He thought about turning west, straight for the coast and the hell with her. But he didn't, and not because of any promise he had made. No, it was far more complicated than that. In fact, he was never sure himself why he followed her to Sutter's Fort.

At dusk, Taya pulled up on a bluff and looked northwest. Ash trees quivered in the late breeze along a small river. Two miles farther north, it joined a much larger river, and there, in the crook of that junction, a tribe of Worm Eaters had made a fishing camp.

Purple light thrown off in a glow from the dropping sun lingered in the air, washing the water birds in a florescent pastel. When Taya looked due west, she noticed the rolling dust of a band of mounted men. They were headed toward the fishing camp. Taya had two choices: warn the Worm Eaters about the night riders headed for them, or forget it and ride on about her own business. She spurred her pony toward the river.

By this time there were about a hundred thousand Worm Eaters left in California, about half as many as that Majorcan-born soldier of God Junipero Serra
had found in the bushes when he had shown up to save them seventy or so years earlier. And the fact that there were, even in this year of our Lord 1846, only a few hundred Californios, Mexicans, Europeans, and gringos loose in the land made the Worm Eater weeding-out process seem all the more successful. Hell, it hadn't been easy, especially in light of the Worm Eater's timid manner. The young ones were sometimes tough to find.

Riding into the fishing camp Taya wasted no time. As the braver of the Worm Eaters snuck out from behind their tule huts to stare at her, Taya jumped from her pony and drew the sign for bad trouble in the dirt.

As she rode on, her shortening shadow only confirmed what she knew the moment she had seen the dust to the west. A bad moon was rising.

Only mitten-heads voiced occasional sympathy for the plight of the Worm Eaters. Aside from slavery, simple and direct homicide was the most popular method of dealing with them. And, indeed, as old T. D. Slant was often heard to say, it was difficult to spend a weekend drunk or sober without encountering at least one of their pathetic corpses.

But consider poor T. D. Jr., who encountered three hundred of them on the banks of the Fresno River where it flows into the San Joaquin. Strange, he thought, as he walked through the carnage in the
moonlight, so few of them are women. This was the wrong meat for his mind to chew on and he knew it, but nothing could be done. He wasn't about to admit to himself that he half expected to find Taya's lithe young body dead and cold among the corpses.

She had probably ridden right through. He hoped so.