Wild Instinct

14

As a member of the Acjacheme tribal council, Lew Gale’s mother, Sally, runs the monthly Juaneño Nation Market, which falls on this sunny October afternoon on the Capistrano Mission grounds.

He spots her at her usual table, a handsome woman, black-with-gray hair worn long, jeans, and a long-sleeved blouse, red, with a shell-and-glass bead necklace that ends in a white clam half shell.

She rises from her basket-piled table to give her son a hug. She’s tall and lithe, sixty.

“You were out early this morning,” she says. “Any breaking news on Mr. Tarlow?”

“None, Mom.”

“Well, your brother is here and he’ll want an update.”

“Wish I had one.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Have a couple hours off.”

Gale follows her gaze to his younger brother, striding across the courtyard in jeans, a tucked-in white shirt, a bead-and-clam necklace like his mom’s, and cowboy boots.

They shake hands, crunching hard for a power squeeze — always in competition. Franklin takes his brother by the arm and leads him into the shade of a big pepper tree.

“Do you have a suspect yet?”

“No, Frank.”

“Tarlow was desecrating sacred ground with his goddamned Wildcoast,” says Frank.

“Someone shot him in the head, brother.”

Frank shrugs.

“The Tarlow Company has owned that land for over a hundred years,” says Gale.

“You don’t own the land,” says Frank. “The land owns you. It was ours for thousands of years before Tarlow got here. And that’s not all they’re doing to us.”

Gale says nothing, just waits for his brother to lob another angry but true platitude his way.

“Tesla is courting the Orange County supervisors for a factory! On Acjacheme burial ground east of Wildcoast! Not that you care much about the sacred.”

Gale nods, looks into his brother’s clear, black eyes. “Hearing anything from the Grizzly Braves?” he asks.

Frank’s Grizzly Braves are a band of young Acjacheme men and women — and Indian sympathizers — who hang out at the Outpost bar when they’re not picketing the Tarlow Company, bailing each other out of jail, writing letters of hot grievance to newspapers, blogging aggressively online, and attending Frank’s Native Studies classes at UC Irvine.

“About who might have put the bullet in him?” asks Frank. “Unfortunately, no. They’re learning what I teach them to understand. Tarlow Company as nature killer, Indian hater. Stole our land to exploit it and make money off it. Don’t get me going on all that.”

“You’re always going on that, Frank. It’s what you do.”

“Was the bullet still in him?”

“I can’t be talking about that with you. Why does it matter?”

“Caliber. What caliber?”

Gale lets his vision drift past his younger brother. Frank has been fascinated with evidence and forensics ever since they were boys, watching crime shows on TV. When they were little, Frank was always the attacker. The Indian brave with the bow and arrow. The sheriff with the six-gun. The platoon sergeant in the jungle. Gale has long wondered if Frank’s day job might be a little dull.

“How’s UCI treating you?”

“Same old. Tenure and sabbaticals. Native Studies never had it so good.”

“Cathy?”

“Perfect, as always. Up in LA a lot. The band is off on tour tomorrow, for two months. She’s my alibi for the night Tarlow ate it.”

Gale says nothing. Four-plus decades of shock talk from his bookish, tightly wound little brother.

“What do you need with an alibi?”

“I’m not one bit sad for him,” says Frank. “Whatever the reason, he got what he had coming. The Spanish owe us for approximately a hundred and sixty-five years of genocide, rape, the obliteration of Acjacheme culture, religion, and language. The Tarlow Company is just finishing what the Spanish started. The world is a better place without him. Speaking of worthless Spaniards, have you seen Dad lately?”

Gale shakes his head. “Been a while. Never know when he’ll show up.”

“I’ll never understand why Mom lets him back under her roof.”

“She still loves him, bro.”

“Never understand that, either.”

Gale sits in the shade at his mother’s basket table, making occasional small talk with the mission tourists. They’re interested in where Sally gets the reeds and branches used to make them.

“We still have some sources back in the valleys,” she tells them. “We lost access to a good spring when they built the high school. So sometimes we have to buy supplies.”

“They’re beautiful,” says a pretty mom holding hands with a small boy and girl. “Do you weave, too?” she asks Gale.

“Nothing like she does!”

“Your faces have so much character. May I have a picture?”

Gale has been asked this before by tourists, here in this very place. Takes something out of him.

He agrees and endures, for the sake of... what, exactly?

She brings the children up closer to the table and gets out her phone. Lew and his mother join them in front of the baskets, and they all lean in and the woman shoots selfies. Buys a big wheat-colored basket with a splendid geometric web running through it. Gale puts it into a handled burlap bag, sorry to see this beautiful thing fly away, but okay with his mom getting some money. He’s never made a basket that good in his life. Nor bows, nor arrows.

The woman and her kids walk off.

“When I see little children, I think of you and Frank,” she says. “And your father. He was a good man but not a good husband.”

“I know you do, Mom. I thought he was a good dad, until he ditched us.”

For Carol, then Isabelle, thinks Gale. A Luiseño and a Cahuilla. “The conquistador,” he says.

Gale hasn’t gotten over his sense of abandonment by Edward Gallego, the proud Spanish-German American who at eighteen married his mother, seventeen-year-old Sally Jones, a full-blooded Acjacheme Native, right here in this mission. Good Catholics both. Begrudged permission from Sally’s parents.

When Edward Gallego left, it felt more like full betrayal. Not just of him, but of his mom and little brother, too. Lew was eighteen. When he heard his mom crying in her room, he wanted to find Dad and pound him. Not likely. Edward was a former Marine boxer, and by the time he left his first family, he was a Capistrano High School history teacher and a wrestling coach.

Later, Sally leads a tour of the cemetery, located on a hill above the mission, housing the bodies of the converts since 1776.

Lew and Frank traipse up the road in the brewing heat, along with a handful of tourists and fourth graders from Guin Foss Elementary in nearby Tustin, who, like all California public school fourth graders, are studying the missions in history class. The girls look animated and happy, the boys mostly bored. Gale remembers studying this mission in fourth grade and the odd feeling of walking the grounds and taking tests about where you had spent your entire life in a small home just a few hundred feet away, and where your ancestors had been renamed, converted to Christianity, taught to farm, and lost their language and most of their culture. Over half had lost their lives just a few short years after the founding of the mission.

Spanish diseases and forced labor.

Confinement, lashings, and poor diet.

Their names changed, their language forbidden, their culture banished, their religion replaced by a man nailed to a cross.

Their bodies exhausted and their spirits broken.

Mother Nature herself, too: the Capistrano Earthquake of 1812, killing forty Acjacheme parishioners at Mass in the mission church their forebearers had built by hand.

Lew thinks about Daniela’s son at Tustin High, the “great kid,” inward and high strung, with a manipulative girlfriend, a job at the bowling alley, and a deceased father.

The boy, living with his single mom deputy, who puts in some long hours for $70,000 a year, working for a county where the average cost of a home is $1.09 million.

Age thirty-eight, widowed.

Gale and his brother find shade under a big sycamore tree. Gale listens to his mother’s voice, watches the tourists and schoolkids. Wonders again what it would have been like to have a son or daughter of his own.

Most of the graves here at the mission cemetery are unmarked. The few headstones are crumbling and cracked. Some fallen, others propped up by rocks. Weeds and gopher mounds, the iron fence pickets rusted and askew.

“They took our lives and left us with this,” says Frank.

Sally gives a short history of the cemetery, then asks for questions. None.

She makes the rounds of the visitors, holding out a beautiful basket.

Gale hears the tinkle of coins and the sound of cash.

Sally thanks them, and a dollar bill flutters out of the basket in the breeze.

They start back toward the mission, and Frank pulls him aside again. “One of my students posted some pretty harsh things about Tarlow. Said she’d like to burn him at the stake and eat his face. Interesting, considering what actually happened to him. Her name is Geronima Mills. You can find her on most of the socials.”

“Interesting,” says Gale. “Burn Tarlow at the stake and eat his face.”

“She was not at my Thursday night class when Tarlow was killed. And she hasn’t been back since. I texted her, no reply. I’ve sent you her number.”

Before leaving the mission, Gale sits in the back of the chapel, then kneels and lets his thoughts out. He hasn’t really believed in all this since he was eighteen. Left the home, left the faith. But Sally and Edward had staunchly brought him and his brother up in the Church. The brothers baptized by Father Ordonez right here in the mission baptistry. Never missing a Mass or a Confession.

Sangin shattered the last of his faith and blew away his future, but the voices inside him still murmur to be heard, and Lew Gale brings them here to let them speak.

From his Explorer, parked in the sun with the air conditioner on, Gale calls Geronima Mills, leaves a message about meeting her to talk about Wildcoast developer Bennet Tarlow.

Half an hour later, Gale is back in Laguna, a heavy plastic grocery bag in one hand, opening the gate to Bennet Tarlow’s backyard bird sanctuary and walking in.

No food means no birds.

He takes the pet store hummingbird nectar from the bag and fills the empty feeders with red sugar water.

In the small garage Gale finds the wild birdseed inside a galvanized aluminum trash can, fills the pet store bag, and takes it back to the yard.

When he’s done with the hanging seed feeders, he tops off the bright yellow birdbath with the hose, then sits in one of two aqua blue Adirondack chairs in the shade of the patio overhang.

And waits, picturing Tarlow doing all this every morning, because he had built up such an avian following here in his sanctuary.

You have to open the bird café or you’ll lose your customers.

He pictures those impatient hummingbirds dive-bombing Tarlow like they used to dive-bomb his mom when she opened her bird sanctuary in the morning, trying to get her back inside so they could drink.

And he sees in his mind’s eye Tarlow photographing the out-of-habitat great gray owl raising her brood in the sycamore tree near Wildcoast.

Hears the pistol pops.

Flinches in the blue chair.

Pictures Tarlow collapsing.

Tarlow’s backyard birds return rapidly.

Half a dozen hummers, their red throats flashing in the sun.

Doves landing clumsily on the seed feeders.

A sleek little phoebe splashing in the bath.

Gale sits an hour, reading his case file, then goes next door, where the friendly neighbor who had entertained Tarlow and possibly Norris something or other at a Fourth of July party is watering his roses.

“Detective,” he says, cutting off the hose water. “Have you made an arrest?”

“We’re working it hard,” says Gale.

“What’s in the bags?”

“Birdseed and hummingbird nectar. Can you fill up Bennet’s feeders once a day? The side gate is unlocked. There’s more seed in the trash can in the garage; keep the lid on tight for the mice. Refrigerate this nectar.”

The man gives Gale a yes-sir look and nods.

“You got it.”

“Thank you from Tarlow and his birds.”