Wild Instinct

29

That evening Gale takes the barstool next to Geronima Mills in the Swallows Inn bar in downtown San Juan Capistrano.

She’s got thick black hair, dark eyes, a pronounced Acjacheme brow, and a seashell necklace against a red, snap-button blouse.

He recognizes her from the YouTube Wildcoast protest, one of Franklin’s comrades-in-arms.

To Gale, a handsome young woman.

“I didn’t think you’d call,” she says.

“Why?”

“Just my doubtful nature.”

She waves the barwoman over, orders a shot of bourbon and a beer.

Gale does likewise. Reminds himself to go slow.

“How goes the case?”

“Plodding forward,” says Gale, worried about his arrest, if the DA will choose to charge and arraign.

“A suspect?”

Gale nods, watching the barkeep set down the drinks. “Vern Jeffs. We took him in this morning.”

“What’s he do?”

“Tends bar. I can’t tell you any more, Ms. Mills. Open investigation, all that.”

“Salud.”

They touch beer glass rims. Geronima Mills’s thick black hair is held back in a comb that looks fashioned from bone. Her eyes are alert and prying. Gale notes the intimacy implied when Acjacheme women wear decorative bone, checks his vanity.

“How old are you, Lew?”

“Forty-three.”

“I’m twenty-seven. Why do you live with your mother?”

Oh boy, he thinks. What he often thinks when asked a question he doesn’t want to answer. “It’s temporary.”

“How long has it been?”

“Couple of years. Why?”

“I just think it’s interesting,” says Mills. “I love her baskets. Frank brought some to Native Studies one day and some of the old ones, too. Made way back when by our ancestors. I started making baskets last year, but they’re atrocious.”

“Mom told me she started at twelve and didn’t get one she liked until she was sixteen.”

“A four-year degree in basket making,” Mills says with a humored smile. “Ever try it?”

Gale feels his candor slipping. “No. I made bows and arrows when I was a boy. I still do some of that. Helps me relax, get to sleep.”

She lifts her shot glass. “To baskets, bows, and arrows.”

Gale tastes the bourbon going down, feels its promise.

“I got a weakness for this stuff,” she says. “You, too?”

Gale nods.

“Are you sad to let go of me as a person of interest in the murder of Bennet Tarlow?”

“Burn him at the stake and eat his face?” asks Gale. “Killer dot-com? Kill Wildcoast? You’re still a very interesting person, Ms. Mills.”

“That’s just the way young people get things done now, Detective. It’s called branding. The power of drama. Becoming a virus. Killing Wildcoast isn’t killing Bennet Tarlow! It’s just self-promoting theater.”

“I understand that. So you’re old enough to know better.”

To Gale’s surprise, Geronima Mills laughs.

“Lew, I asked you to buy me a drink so I could ask you to come on my Kill Wildcoast podcast. I want you to introduce you as the detective who considered me a person of interest in the murder of Bennet Tarlow III.”

Gale flashes on his disastrous Times interview. “That’s a firm no.”

“I took it as honor, being a person of interest in the killing of a powerful man in a historically evil family. It made me a part of what happened, even though I had nothing to do with his death.”

“No offense, Ms. Mills,” says Gale. “Your violence-prone videos and online chatter are asinine and inflammatory. Violence-prone people listen to you. You feed the flames. You accelerate them.”

“No, Detective. My followers see my words for what they are: exaggeration and self-promotion.”

“Tell the Proud Boys that.”

“Oh, Jesus. That’s not who I’m talking to.”

“But they’re listening,” says Gale. “Maybe not answering, but listening. You may not be capable of shooting Bennet Tarlow dead, but some of your followers might be.”

Mills takes a sip of beer, gives Gale another prying, dark-eyed look.

“Actually, Lew, I’ve thought about that,” she says. “I vet my audience and my followers by what they post and say. But... there are the silent ones. Out there. You are right.”

“Well, maybe one of them pulled that trigger.”

“You said Vernon Jeffs.”

“He could testify as a silent follower.”

“Which would make me an accessory to murder? An accomplice or even a coconspirator?”

“I’m not sure what a jury would decide.”

“What have you decided?”

“I think you should tone down the violence, Ms. Mills. I don’t want blood on your hands. You have beautiful, innocent hands.”

She gives him a surprised look.

“I meant nothing flirtatious or suggestive by that.”

“Oh, okay.”

With a small smile, she sips bourbon and chases it with the beer.

“I still want you on my podcast,” she says. “But the other reason I wanted to meet you was something Frank’s wife, Cathy, said to me one night over drinks. She said Lew Gale is the gentlest person on earth, and she thought we would like each other. Opposites, you know. She told me to find the Los Angeles Times feature on you. It was a great piece. And your face in the picture broke my heart. An Acjacheme brave. Beautiful and innocent, like how you see my hands.”

One of which she sets on one of Gale’s, pats it twice, and takes it off.

“So, why did you call me today?” she asks.

“I want to talk to King Bear of the Grizzly Braves. He posts calls to violence.”

Geronima gives Gale a long look, some disappointment undisguised within.

“Why bother, if you’ve arrested Jeffs?”

“He claims he was hired.”

“By King Bear?”

“That’s why I need to talk to him.”

Mills studies Gale again, long and cautiously.

“King Bear is Tony Rueda,” she says. “He plays puffed up and violent, but he’s really just a petulant child. A braided pony tail and cool bolo ties, but he’s a pretendian. He has one hundred percent no native blood that he can prove. So far as murder for hire, Tony doesn’t have two nickels to rub together. None of us do. You’re much more afraid of us than we deserve.”

“What does he do when he’s not posting or in class?”

“He works weekends at an indoor shooting range in Oceanside. Iron Sights.”

“Good with a handgun, then,” he says.

“He’s good. I’ve shot with him.”

“Twenty-twos?”

“Yes. He sold me one not long ago. An aluminum twenty-two, semiautomatic. Light as a feather, purse-sized and rose-finished. I wanted it for self-defense. Eight shots. He said it was inaccurate outside of six feet. But a good carry for a chick. Sold me a gun purse made especially for it, too, in matching rose leather with white rose petals embossed. It opens easy, and the gun grip is right there and you can draw it fast. Separate compartment from your lip gloss and credit cards.”

Gale smiles at Geronima Mills’s humor.

“I liked his post a couple of days back,” she says. “On the website killwildcoast.org. The one about Wildcoast being a white fascist utopia and the mountain lion that tore apart Bennet Tarlow getting a golden statue at the mission.”

Gale shrugs. “Okay, King Bear is a poser. But what about the Brunette Bombshell?”

“That’s Tammy Tarango,” says Geronima. “She runs a gator park outside Orlando. Has some Seminole, but she’s far, far away from hiring Vernon Jeffs.”

“Hatchet Man?”

“Bill Custer, doomsday prepper in Missouri.”

“Hmmm.”

Gale sips his bourbon and beer. Feels that little shiver, that hint of luck, of power coming on. Things he’s felt before with bourbon and beer and Marilyn before the war.

“And, to be honest,” says Geronima, “I called you because Frank told me you were a genuine warrior, and that we would like each other.”

Her eyes light a little. “Old-fashioned tribal matchmakers,” says Geronima. “So Frank and Cathy.”

“Mom said that about you, too,” says Gale.

Geronima looks out a window and Gale notes the long evening sunlight waning on her face in profile, the orange rays illuminating one eye, her catlike smile.

A smile that vanishes when she turns to Gale.

“I saw some strange things out at the Wildcoast site two nights ago,” she says. “Big excavators and dozers, heavy-duty augurs, high-power water hose engines like the fire departments have. Nine total monster machines, not counting the generators. Gigantic floodlights beaming down — those white-hot towers of lights they use for freeway work at night.”

“What time?”

“Four in the morning.”

“What were you doing way out there?”

“I go out to the streams and the hills sometimes. For first light. Where the three o’clock ghosts can’t follow. You get those?”

“They’re pretty punctual.”

Gale thinks of the Empire Excavators vehicles, of Kate Hicks, the supervisor who recognized him, the shovel laborer hand-digging a percolation test pit, joking about gold and big valuable crystals.

“Were there company logos on the equipment?”

“Too dark to say. Before dawn they killed the lights. Streamed away in their pickups and vans. Like vampires running for home. The night shift, I assume. Left all the flatbeds and the heavy machinery in place. Lights and all. I hunkered down in a stand of cottonwoods down by the creek. Wrapped in my coat. Dozed off and woke up two hours later to a bright, sunny morning. Looked out at the destruction and all the equipment. All shut down. Resting. No men. Odd.”

Gale checks his watch.

“I need to see it,” he says. “Come with me if you’d like.”

Geronima finishes the bourbon and beer and gets off her stool. “I’ll get the tip.”

Gale lays some bills on the bar top, and they step from the dark bar into the evening.

Gale beholds the broad grassy swale where the alleged percolation test was being conducted.

Approaching in the golden light, he sees big mounds of loose dirt and a wall of unearthed boulders strewn in a wide circle. Looks like some prehistoric ruin, or maybe a fallen temple, he thinks.

Cranes and booms rise against the darkening sky, anchored by their tonnage. Two white pickup trucks, with PacWest Mining emblems: snowcapped mountains and a blue lake. The unlit floodlight towers lean and glimmer dully.

Gales notes that the surrounding earth has been leveled by bulldozers, flayed and flattened by their steel treads.

Climbing and pulling their ways up the pile of rock, Gale and Mills reach the lip of a deep pit. Gale feels that light-headed vertigo as he looks down.

What had been a six-by-four-foot pit dug by one man is now roughly fifty feet in diameter and thirty feet deep. He sees the shine of water down there, just before the last sunlight is snuffed out.

“What do you make of this?” asks Mills.

“Maybe it really is a perc test,” says Gale. “They hit the groundwater. Now the hydrologists have to decide if there’s enough room to drain an entire city or build sewers.”

Gale remembers the miniature model of Wildcoast in Bennet Tarlow’s home office in Laguna. One of the hundreds of many pins indexed to the notebook was stuck in the middle of Lake Wildcoast. Something about filling the lake with natural groundwater, if necessary.

“Tarlow anticipated this,” says Gale. “He was going to make a lake with it.”

“I still hate Wildcoast, lake or not,” says Geronima Mills. “You know the ancient Acjacheme believed there was an ocean under the ground here? It was created by the god Chinigchinich as a resting place for spirits on their way to the afterlife. Isn’t that a beautiful? Grandma told me. Gale, have you read Pablo Tac?”

“Some,” says Gale.

“He was Luiseño, but they spoke a dialect of our Acjacheme language,” says Mills. “You should read all of Tac. He’s us, you know. Our racial ancestor. Father Peyri took him away from Mission San Luis Rey when he was eleven. Eleven! Peyri knew Tac had something special. They sailed all the way to Rome. Pablo became a scholar at the College of the Propaganda, a Catholic outfit there. Studied Latin and Spanish and wrote a Luiseño dictionary and translated it into Spanish. Wrote about hunting and fishing and living off acorns and rabbits and fish. Drank the rabbit blood fresh. Ate the rest raw. Deer, too. Didn’t cook anything until the Spanish made them. Played lacrosse against us Juaneños. War, too, against other Indians, like us! Unbelievable stuff. His is the only book about native life in California before the Europeans, written by a native. He loved Father Peyri, you know. So I guess that little Franciscan devil must have had some good in him.”

“I remember about the hunting and the wars.”

“You talked about it in the Times article,” says Mills. “Becoming a warrior. Your grandma’s stories. You making bows and arrows the old way. Baskets, too.”

Gale senses Mills looking at him.

“Sorry,” she says. “I lecture people just to prove I’m still alive. Pablo Tac died in Rome, age nineteen.”

Gale looks down into the cavernous pit again. Sees just a flicker of light on the water.

“Tell me more about the underground ocean,” he says.

“The ancients believed it was put under the earth by Chinigchinich before the great ocean was formed. Our Pacific, I would assume. It was very deep and its crystals grew up from the ocean floor, very large ones, and they contained a magic substance that was heavy and produced light. I’m sure they had a word for it but it’s not in Tac’s dictionary.”

“Heavy? Gold, silver?”

“I don’t know. Technically, no one does.”

“Did the ancient Acjacheme consider the crystals valuable?” Gale asks. “Something to be dug out and traded, maybe. Or worshipped?”

“They believed the crystals formed gigantic caverns,” says Mills. “And these were where the spirits waited. There were fish with lamps growing on their heads so they could see in the underground dark. This is according to Father Boscana and the three aged Acjacheme wise men, who Boscana believed were sent by God to help him write a scientific account of the Acjacheme. Boscana believed that we natives were savages in need of conversion. He wrote of sanctioned whippings and forced labor. Breaking up families. Taking our names away, outlawing our dances and our language and our gods.”

Gale’s great-grandmother Anna had bitterly recounted to Gale the mission days of her grandmother Gabriella. Gabriella had been a good basket maker and storyteller, and her accounts had fired Gale’s imagination. At first, she had welcomed the Spanish God into her life, just as her elders had welcomed the Friars and soldiers onto their land. But when her father was whipped in front of her family — for dancing — she was no longer able to believe in their Jesus and his miracles and his love. She told Gale that she had become fierce as the white mountain lion that prowled the creeks hunting deer.

“The guy digging the hole with the shovel that day,” says Gale, “talked about looking for gold and crystals. I figured he was just being funny.”

“Maybe he was just being Acjacheme.”

In the darkness overhead a jetliner descends toward John Wayne Airport.

Gale and Geronima Mills climb down from their rock lookout and walk in silence amid the cranes, excavators, earthmovers, and drilling rigs. The racks of floodlights. The generators.

“Why work at night but not in daylight?” asks Mills.

Gale had been wondering the same. “Maybe they’ve found what they’re looking for.”

“All I saw in that pit was groundwater.”

“A simple perc test,” says Gale.

“I don’t believe that. Too early. Not necessary.”

“I don’t either. Whatever they’re looking for, maybe they’ll have to go deeper.”

“What do you think Bennet Tarlow was doing out here the night he was murdered?” asks Mills.

“I ask myself that question a hundred times a day. I need to answer it.”

They walk the dirt road toward Gale’s truck.

The moon is full and low, and the truck is pale in its light.

He watches as Geronima Mills steps toward the passenger-side door but she stops, turns, and considers him.

“They almost killed our dances, but not quite,” she says. “Pablo Tac made some wonderful drawings. We didn’t dance to music. We danced to rattles and drums.”

With this, she raises her arms and sways her hips, writhing and stomping in rhythm to her clapping hands.

Gale recognizes her motion from one of Tac’s sketches, a movement he and Frank tried to re-create as boys.

He steps closer and claps the rhythm and tries to get his shrapnel-shot legs and graceless feet to keep the beat. But they won’t or can’t, so Gale backs away watching Tac’s dancer whirling in the moonlight.

Later that night Gale stays up with his mom, restringing one of his willow bows with fresh nettle-fiber, a beauty he’d made just weeks ago.

Sally is working on a medium-sized basket, which Gale recognizes as a vessel for transporting and storing water from the creeks long before the age of pumps and plumbing. The coils of deer grass wound tightly enough to be waterproof. He sees that she’s about halfway done with it, the coils climbing ever so slowly upon the rush frame in the traditional clockwise fashion.

Sally is pensive tonight and Gale utterly distracted by Geronima Mills and the feelings she set loose in him.

He pours a second bourbon and gets a look from his mother.

“Your father came by today,” says Sally. “Wanted some family pictures. He’s making some kind of history of his families.”

All three of them, thinks Gale. As always, mention of Edward Gallego stirs his sense of diminished value.

“I told him you’d love to see him.”

“I’m reading Luis Verdad again,” he says.

She gives him a smile. “The boy who gave me your name.”

“I’m still trying to figure out what he made up and what really happened,” he says.

“Blood & Heart is all true,” she says. “Magdalena and El Diablo and Bernardo and Water Dog. Chinigchinich. The dancing and the battles. The marriage of Luis. All true. All corroborated by your great-grandmother, and her mother, and hers.”

The stubborn detective Gale still doubts that all of Verdad’s story is true.

“I wonder why the fathers and grandfathers don’t tell the stories,” Gale says.

“Oh, they do. We’re just better at it.”

“Night, Mom.”

“Night, son. Say hello to Luis from me.”