Wild Instinct

18

The Acjacheme Nation Tribal Hall is an adobe brick building on crowded Paseo Ramon in San Juan Capistrano, two blocks west of the mission.

Gale and Tribal Councilman Roger Winderling sit on a bench outside in the shade of a large pepper tree, where the lunchtime air smells of tortillas and grilled meat.

They’re class of ’01 Capistrano Valley High School, both tackles on the Cougars football team.

Cougars, thinks Gale, adding the name of his team to the coincidences that keep popping up in his investigation of the murder of Bennet Tarlow.

Small talk now, some predictable reminiscences, and an odd air of displacement between two men descended from an Indigenous tribe that dates back ten thousand years to this very place. The displacement of subjugation, Gale thinks. Of “conversion,” and the slow death of a culture unrecognized by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the other authors of history.

“What’s up, Lew?”

“I’m interested in the Tribal Mentor Program.”

“You mean donating to it?”

“No, I mean being a mentor.”

“Well, that’s just terrific, Lew. What brought this on?”

Gale has been wondering how to explain it. “It” having come to him gradually, then suddenly.

“I want to help a kid,” he says. “Be, like, a brother or a dad. Give them what I know and show them how to do the things I’ve learned. Basic stuff, like what you do and don’t do as a grown-up. Just a few hours a week, you know.”

“Do you want an Acjacheme?”

“Sure. Or mixed, like us.”

“We match up boys with men and girls with women, of course.”

“Yes, a boy.”

Winderling gives Gale a long, thoughtful look. “There’s no monetary compensation at all, not even for gas.”

“Fine. My truck gets okay mileage.”

“What kinds of activities do you propose for your... we call them Young Braves.”

“I can show him how to catch a fish at the beach. How to throw a football and a baseball, make bows and arrows the old way. Shoot a gun. I can bring him to work and have lunch in the cafeteria. Introduce him to deputies, just, you know, show him the place. There’s a crime lab and the jail, helicopters, patrol cars. Might be able to get him a ride-along. Maybe, you know, he might want to be a deputy someday. We’re always hiring.”

Winderling smiles. “Scare him straight!”

“There’s that, too.”

“Fantastic, Lew. This is great.”

“I’m glad you think so.”

“There’s an Acjacheme boy signed up with us,” says Winderling. “Rose Deming’s boy, Dylan. He’s ten. A big Indian. Easygoing. Handy with a football. Dad let the booze kill him.”

Gale thinks of his own relationship with alcohol and his weakness for it.

“I can talk to him about that,” he says.

“How long were you married, Lew?”

“Eight years.”

“Do you have children?”

“No. Neither of us wanted to. Then.”

“Now?”

“I’m not in that position.”

Winderling purses his lips. “Meaning...”

“I’m single, not attached. I’m forty-three now. Can’t just snap my fingers and have a child.”

“Would you like that?”

“Yes, I would. The days seem to be going by. I don’t want this murder job to be all I do.”

“Gotcha. There’s adoption.”

“I wanted one of my own.”

Winderling stands. “I understand. Remember how hard we used to hit those running backs?”

“Sure. But mostly I remember Marilyn.”

“How is she?”

“We haven’t talked in five years. She danced on Broadway. Her dream.”

“I remember that homecoming dance and her dress. Thought you were the luckiest dude on the planet.”

“I was!”

“Lew, let’s go to the office, get the Young Braves paperwork.”

Winderling’s Tribal Hall office is a neat white box with one wall festooned with Acjacheme baskets, several of which Gale recognizes as his mother’s creations. Two-hundred-year-old bows and arrows decorate another wall. Gale has always wondered how he hit anything with them. When he was ten, he tried out one of his grandmother’s old bows and it was pretty hard to get those arrows to go where you wanted. They cut through the air in tangents rather than flying true. When he started making his own bows and arrows in the Indigenous way, the hardest part was getting the willow arrow straight.

Now Gale wonders if he was just too young.

Behind Winderling’s desk hang old photographs of the mission and the Native huts outside its walls.

Roger takes a moment to browse a short stack of papers, then pushes them across his desk to Gale.

“Just read and sign them, bring them back when you’re ready.”

“Can I just sign them right now?”

Winderling smiles again. Gale thinks of him twenty-five years ago, number 78, grinning through the face cage and a bulbous black mouthpiece after crashing a hapless quarterback to the grass.

“Sure, Lew. No hurry, though. Or maybe there is?”

“Tell me about this boy.”

Gale, with a lifelong hostility to forms, applications, and details, signs swiftly without reading them, instead listening to Roger’s description of Dylan Deming, ten or eleven, great kid, quiet, big, doing okay in school, plays football and lacrosse. Two older sisters. Mom is Rose, works a day shift at the Cahuilla Casino way out in Aguanga, but they live right here in San Juan.

Hands over the forms.

“Well, that didn’t take long,” says Winderling, browsing through them. “Here, you didn’t date this one.”

Gale dates it and hands it back.

“Isn’t that surprising about Bennet Tarlow?” asks Winderling. “Your mother told me you were working it.”

“Good old Mom, always protecting my privacy.”

“She’s just proud of you. What I can’t figure is what Tarlow was doing out there in a wilderness park alone at night.”

“He wasn’t alone. He was with a man. We’re not sure who.”

“The guy killed him?”

“It looks that way.”

“Like a friend or something? Or did the guy maybe have the gun on him, like abducted him?”

“Can’t say. Did you know Tarlow?”

“Never met him. Weird though, I met his stepmom, be about ten years ago, long after she kind of dropped out of sight. I was working at the Capistrano Trading Post at the time and she bursts in with two young men in dark suits and sunglasses. I’m sure you remember her — the flamboyant dresses and that gigantic blond bouffant? Camile Stanton Tarlow. She wanted California Native crafts. The older the better, not current day knockoff things. I showed her what we had and she bought it all. The men loaded it into a big white SUV. I told her the Native Museum here had a few of the good old Acjacheme pieces. Not any left in the world. Anyway she asked me to take her there and introduce her to the owner. Which I did. Remember old Richard Bear? He told her that none of the Native arts and crafts were for sale. He was firm about it, but polite. Should have seen the look on her face. Talk about cold. That was that, then two weeks later I hear that she had bought the entire museum and everything in it. The building, land, and all.”

Camile Tarlow, thinks Gale.

There are secrets.