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.”
30
Gale sips and reads.