Wild Instinct

10

An hour later, Gale steps into his San Juan Capistrano adobe home. It’s on an alley off Los Rios Street, in the historic district, not far from the mission.

The Amtrak Surfliner roars northbound, a few hundred feet from his front door.

The adobe was built not long after President Lincoln had claimed Mission San Juan Capistrano from Mexico and returned it to the grateful Spanish friars. It was they who had recruited the local Indians to build and worship in it. His mother’s family had lived in this place for five generations, descending from the Acjacheme who originally built it under the Spanish. Her Native blood is Gale’s half.

While the train thunders past, windows rattle, dishes clink in the cabinets, and the roof timbers creak.

His mother sits on one end of the couch in the lamplight, a basket in progress on her lap.

“So late, Lew.”

“Tarlow.”

“It’s awful. But good you didn’t have to shoot that lion.”

“I never really wanted to.”

“No. We take so many orders. Still.”

He pours three fingers of bourbon and takes the glass to his room, where he hangs his paddle holster and gun on the door. Heads to the kitchen and opens the refrigerator. Microwaves a big bowl of chicken tortilla soup and eats it standing up at the counter. The counter tiles are Mexican and well made, over a hundred years old, cobalt blue with red filigree near the edges and one small yellow quail in each middle.

“How do you like Daniela after one day?”

“She’s good, Mom. She’ll be a good homicide detective.”

“Single, you said?”

“You know I did, Mom. A divorced single mom, like you.”

“Your papa called today. The principal offered him a raise so he wouldn’t retire.”

“Well, the school district gets its money’s worth out of him.”

“He doesn’t want to retire anyway. He just doesn’t want them to forget that he can.”

That’s Dad, thinks Gale: getting his way by threatening to leave. Then leaving anyway.

He rinses his dishes, fetches his own in-progress basket from the spare bedroom and sits at the opposite end of the blue couch. Sets his bourbon on the lampstand, turns on the light, and sets the basket on his lap.

His basket is a classic Acjacheme made up of black geometric designs — oddly Grecian — staggered within a circle of thick, tightly wound straw, mostly undyed. Many days from now he’ll finish it with a circle of rust red, bordered by interlocking rectangles of thin black. His mother taught him the pattern when he was ten and showed some interest.

It was much harder than making the bows and arrows his grandfather taught him to build. It took him ten years and twelve baskets to get one balanced and symmetrical. Quit for the war but picked it up when he came home. What he liked about weaving was how you could go slow and get it right, and let your mind wander while you worked. You could listen to music and hum along. You could think about sports and, later, girls. Even early on, he’d enjoyed the doing just as much as the ending. This will be his forty-third, one for each year of his life.

Now he takes a sip of bourbon and looks down at his project.

I’m a basket case.

A former bow-and-arrow maker, now a basket maker.

A former man.

Jesus help me.

Chinigchinich — god of the Acjacheme — help me.

He wonders how a mega-builder like Bennet Tarlow III spent his evenings. Wonders why he and his companion took two vehicles to Caspers that night. Wonders what the old, beat-up, rusty Econoline said about its driver. And about Tarlow, too.

Also wonders if Mendez made it home okay, and how she spends her evenings. A day like today — face-to-face with murder — can take it out of you. Especially if you’ve got a hard-assed attitude to keep up.

He takes the leather notebook from his hip pocket and reviews his notes on this first day in his revised investigation into the death of Tarlow. Notes that Daniela Mendez is smart and has a hard but handsome face. The general drift he’s gotten from the department deputies is that she’s not a woman who takes things lightly.

Later in bed he takes up a time-aged manuscript given to him by his great-grandmother.

Blood & Heart was written in Spanish by a mission-educated twenty-one-year-old Acjacheme named Luis Verdad in 1815, passed down and nearly forgotten through the decades, and this English version was translated by Gale’s great-grandmother.

Luis Verdad is the name given to him by Father Serra, erasing his Native name, which Verdad states in his introduction was “Oso Nada” or “Bear Swims.”

The manuscript is 135 pages, translated from Verdad’s original handwritten Spanish. It’s the oldest piece of Juaneño Mission Indian writing extant. There’s a carbon copy behind glass in the Mission San Juan Capistrano museum store, and $15.99 paperbacks for sale, with a colorful cover of a boy with a primitive bow walking along a beach.

Lew Gale has read these pages countless times, a lifelong companion on his way into his dreams.

He likes the aged pages better than the slick museum paperback because they feel as if Luis Verdad has touched them himself.

Blood & Heart is the story about Luis at age twenty, a respected hunter and warrior, tracking a mountain lion that has carried away his young sister, Magdalena. The huge cat snatched her from the garden outside the Verdad family’s newly built adobe house near the mission grounds, and Luis fears she is dead but he wants to find her “remnants” so they can cremate her and send her to heaven in the Acjacheme way.

And he wants to kill the lion. The lion has done this three times before, dragged people off — right there in the village not far from the mission’s walls — and Verdad promises his mother and father that he will end this evil.

Luis Verdad sets out with his friend and fellow hunter Bernardo Rio. They each have their best bows, twenty good arrows with fire-hardened foreshafts and obsidian tips, and stone arrow straighteners. Also, for his tracking skills and optimistic attitude, they have Luis’s hunting companion, Water Dog.

Verdad says in the introduction of Blood & Heart that the older men are afraid of this lion because of its size and lack of fear and its taste for human blood. He’s now taken four Acjacheme, and there are rumors of Cahuilla and Luiseño victims as well. Lions can travel miles in a single day. Some say this cat has killed and eaten dozens, and others say scores. Some elders and medicine men believe that the lion lives in “a cavern of light in an underground sea,” which is a resting place for spirits on their way to the afterlife. And, if Luis doesn’t find Magdalena’s body, that means she’s been taken to the cavern. According to Verdad, the elders openly admit to being more terrified by this lion than by the much larger and much more numerous grizzly bears that routinely kill Natives, traders, and pirates, though often avoid people and the mission grounds.

Even after his many readings over nearly four decades, Gale isn’t sure whether this account is fact or fable, or how much of which. He keeps changing his mind. In his introduction, Verdad says his tale is factual, just as his given name means “true.” His grandmother and mother have both told him that it is true, but the detective hears mythmaking here. Which he enjoys almost as much as the stories’ glimpses of Acjacheme life in the days of the Spanish padres, and is part of the reason he’s read it so many times.

As he reads, Gale hears Luis’s voice, a young man speaking Juaneño-accented Spanish:

Gale drifts off, again wondering about his centuries-old relation to Luis Verdad and his sister, Magdalena. And if the lion that carried her away was a long-ago ancestor of the cat that buried Bennet Tarlow under the leaves not at all far from Mission San Juan Capistrano.

Connections, coincidence, conspiracy, Gale thinks.

Fragments, and fragments of fragments.

Killer Cat, lions, Marilyn, Sangin, the old man and the blast and after.

Luis Verdad and Bennet Tarlow III.

His dreams.