Light Action in the Caribbean (2 page)

The colors are not the colors of flowers but of stones. The filtered light underneath the limbs, spilling onto a surface of earth as immaculate as a swept floor beneath the greens, and the winter tracery of blacks, under a long expanse of gray or milk or Tyrian sky, gave me, finally, an inkling of what I had seen but never marked at home.

I do not know where this unhurried reconciliation will lead. I recognize the error I made in trying to separate myself from my stepfather, but I am not in anguish over what I did. I do
not live with remorse. I feel the error only with a little tenderness now, in these months when I find myself staring at these orchards I imagine are identical to the orchards that held my stepfather—and this is the word. They held the work of his hands, his desire and aspiration, just above the surface of the earth, in the light embayed in their branches. It was an elevation of his effort, which followed on his courtesies toward them.

An image as yet unresolved for me—it uncoils slowly, as if no longer afraid—is how easily as boys we ran away from adults who chased us into orchards. They were too tall to follow us through that understory. If we stole rides bareback on a neighbor’s horses and then tried to run away across plowed fields, our short legs would founder in the furrows, and we were caught.

Beneath the first branching, in that grotto of light, was our sanctuary.

When my stepfather died he had been preparing to spray the filbert orchard. He would not, I think, have treated the trees in this manner on his own; but a type of nut-boring larvae had become epidemic in southern California that year, and my brother argued convincingly for the treatment. Together they made a gross mistake in mixing the chemicals. They wore no protective masks or clothing. In a single day they poisoned themselves fatally. My younger brother and a half brother died in convulsions in the hospital. My stepfather returned home and died three days later, contorted in his bed like a root mass.

My mother sued the manufacturer of the chemical and the supplier, but legal maneuvers prolonged the case and in the end my mother settled, degraded by the legal process and unwilling to sacrifice more years of her life to it. The money she received was sufficient to support her for the remainder of her life and to keep the farm intact and working.

We buried my brothers in a cemetery alongside my mother’s parents, who had come to California in 1923. My stepfather had not expressed his wishes about burial, and I left my mother to do as she wished, which was to work it through carefully in her mind until she felt she understood him in that moment. She buried him, wrapped in bright blue linen, a row into the filbert orchard, at a spot where he habitually entered the plot of trees. By his grave she put a stone upended with these lines of Jeffers:

It is not good to forget over what gulfs the spirit
Of the beauty of humanity, the petal of a lost flower

blown seaward by the night-wind, floats to its quietness.

I have asked permission of the owners of several orchards along the river to allow me to walk down the rows of these plots, which I do but rarely and harmlessly. I recall, as if recovering clothing from a backwater after a flood, how my stepfather walked in our orchards, how he pruned, raked, and mulched, how his hands ran the contours of his face as he harvested, the steadiness of his passion.

I have these memories now. I know when I set type, space line to follow line, that he sleeps in my hands.

What we did was wrong, of course, and then it got out of hand, as I suppose such things often do. I knew Ed Hemas from grade school, years ago, before all this. It was his idea. He made it work a few times, and then him and Brett Stallings and Andy Pinticton thought it would work again, and that’s how I got into it.

Actually, I don’t remember what I thought at the time, twelve years ago. Easy money, and I didn’t have any, I guess. I was drifting between high school and whatever when Ed asked and I said, Sure, I’m in.

He and Brett and Andy had done this twice already, stealing horses and hauling them across the high desert to Burns in the middle of the night, where some guy gave Ed four hundred bucks a head and loaded them on another truck. Thirty
head one time, thirty-eight another. Split three ways, cash of course. You can figure it out.

Andy brought the stock truck down from the Victor Ellen place north of Madras where he worked, tractor-trailer rig. Ed and Brett, they drove Ed’s pickup with a two-horse trailer. Ed scouted places around Sisters and down toward Bend where he thought he could get the horses bunched up quiet, away from the house, and then load them in the dark, where all he needed was a little plastic fencing set up, like wings on a chute into the truck. He and Brett wrangled, Andy pushed ’em up the ramp into the trailer.

It took no more than an hour, either time. They did it under a new moon, two in the morning, no one even around maybe on these 300-acre, new-money showplaces. By sunrise, they had the truck idling in a stockyard 150 miles away in Burns, and Andy had the rig back at the ranch by noon. I don’t know what he told his boss about where he’d been with the truck.

The job they asked me about was a place between Sisters and Redmond, sixty head of horses. I knew there were some registered quarters in there, I’d driven by and seen them. Andy wanted a hand with loading. Ed had gotten a deal for five hundred bucks each, so that would be $30,000 four ways. I should have said no, of course, but it looked good and I didn’t care at all about the people who owned the horses.

Here’s where my thoughts on this start to run deep. Ed was selling the horses to a guy who trucked them back to Michigan, back to Ohio. This guy, Ramirez or Sanchez, sold them to people who’d pay a premium for horses that came, as they say, from out west, people just getting into stock market
money or lottery money, lawyering or something. Inheritances. Ed thought this Ramirez guy was getting $2,000 a head. We were stealing them from the same kind of people in Oregon, people who just got them for show. I know it’s not right, but justice is a strange thing, looking at it from my end. My family ranched that central Oregon country for four generations. We took the land from the Indians to start with, but then these people, they took it from us. They came in from Seattle, California, wherever, waving big money around, desperate to get some horses in and look the part. We had to sell. None of us had ever seen money like that.

I know, there’s no excuse for theft, not stealing like this, just to get a little extra money and maybe smack some of these people in the face. But anger was a strong feeling, and we all had it. We wanted to fool and rile these people. They could just buy a place they knew nothing about, none of its history or even literally which way the wind blew. And they surely didn’t want to be caught around any of us, no more, I guess, than my great grandparents wanted to hang around with the Molala.

No one should have been killed—I didn’t even know Ed had a gun until he shot the guy. The other guy, he had no call to run Brett down, it wasn’t that sort of a deal. And Ed and Andy, they shouldn’t have driven off without me, but you never see these things coming. Maybe you don’t want to see it.

I had met Ed and Brett that night in a restaurant in Redmond about seven-thirty. We had a few beers and some barbecue and Ed told me about the place. North side of 126, six miles out of Sisters. The horses were in a big pasture along
the highway, but there was an access road farther north running parallel, the pasture between them. The only exposure for us, Ed said, was rounding horses up within sight of the highway, but at two in the morning there was no traffic and if there was, a guy could see it a long ways off and get off his horse so he wasn’t silhouetted. Ed had drawn us a map—where the road and fences ran, where the house was. It looked simple.

I left my pickup at the restaurant and got into Ed’s Ford with him and Brett, their horses saddled in the trailer behind us. Andy was driving in on his own and he was there when we pulled in along the back fence. Ed and Brett unloaded their horses, and after Andy and I cut through the fence wire, they rode off into the dark. Ed thought it would take him and Brett about thirty minutes to bring the first horses in. We set up the ramp. Andy said we’d load ’em loose. “If they got room enough to fall down,” he said, “they got room enough to get up.”

The only part of the night I recall without anger or sadness is loading the horses. Andy and I hardly had the fencing up before Brett came along with the first ten or twelve. We had no light, not even a flashlight out, so they weren’t easy to see, but I knew horses well enough to know what was there. Well-fed, spirited animals, good conformations. A couple of roans and an Appaloosa stood out in that first bunch in the starlight, and a bay with a roached mane. Then Ed brought up a second bunch, about fifteen, mostly dark but a palomino and two paints in there, I remember. Andy and I shooed them up the ramp, which clattered and thundered under their hooves. It was a cool night, still. I could feel the horses on my skin, their
body heat swirling around us. I could smell their shit and hear their nostrils fluttering. I felt hard muscle ripple under my hand when I clapped a hip to steer them around. I felt their tails slap my back, and caught a glint in their bared eyes. They jerked their heads and tried to lunge past us, as if they aimed to bolt through the plastic fence. Their feet drummed steady, coming toward us on firm ground, feet shot down and pulled up so deftly I heard only the rare click of two hooves. They came up like a big wind in fall cottonwoods.

We waited a good while for the third bunch. I was peering into the night, listening to the jostle and whinny behind me when I saw the headlights of a vehicle pop up, bucking across the uneven pasture.

Andy just said, “Shit!,” slammed the trailer doors shut and raised the ramp. I guess he meant to drive away, but Ed’s truck was in front of him and he couldn’t back that trailer through the turns behind him.

For a while I stood there not knowing what had to be done. I could see Ed and Brett, cutting wildly back and forth in front of the vehicle, then I saw the big Suburban hit Brett’s horse and him go down. The guy hit his brakes and dust just swallowed everything. Right then I heard a terrific crack—high-powered rifle—and then two quick, light pops from a handgun. Then it was just dust settling in the headlight beams. And silence. The next thing I saw was Ed galloping by. He yanked the horse around in the road, loaded him in the trailer, and him and Andy roared off. It took presence of mind to load that horse. I was just standing there, and they were gone, running for the highway with the lights off.

Dammit! is all I thought. Damn! Now what? The guy in the Suburban is shot, I guess. Brett’s hurt, or worse. I don’t want to get caught here. All I could think to do right then was turn the horses back out. I dropped the ramp, opened the doors, and flailed my arms to spook them back to the pasture. I looped a rope, quick, in the gap where we’d cut the fence wire, and was thinking I should get to Brett when I spotted a vehicle just screaming down the highway, and I ran. I snuck along through the ponderosa and sagebrush ’til dawn, all the way back to Redmond, where I got my truck.

The police put it together in no time, what with the Ellen truck being there. Andy and Ed had gone on to Burns anyway and got arrested there that night, somebody putting a few things together quickly. Brett had a broken leg, so he went nowhere after he was run over. And Ed, he did kill the guy.

As well as I can understand what happened afterward, Andy and Brett and Ed agreed to leave me out of it. My turning the horses back into the pasture made for a lighter sentence for Brett and Andy, what with the lawyers’ bargaining, and they had Ed for murder, anyway.

It never made the papers that I saw, but two years after they sent him up to Pendleton, Ed got killed. Andy and Brett did six years and have been out another six now. The murder, there’s no statute of limitations on that. One of them, I suppose, could still say something and they’d come after me. But I don’t expect it now.

My life got different very soon after that. I moved to Florida, got a job, one I was ashamed of, selling real estate. Got a degree in finance from the University of Miami, and
now I run a small business, industrial cleaning company. I have ten employees, meet a payroll, get to a few Dolphins games and am relatively happy, with two kids and all.

I’ve never understood the economy. I read in the Oregon papers where the guy Ed shot had made a lot of money running a vitamin-packaging business on his ranch. My wife works with Cuban refugees teaching English, $6 an hour. My father, a few years back, took what he got for a quarter-section of our family land along the Deschutes, bought a $185,000 motor home, then lost the rest of it in Las Vegas, Reno. He lives in an apartment in Salem now, on what he got for the motor home and some Social Security.

I haven’t been on a horse for twelve years, but I remember riding some fine ones. We loaded some that night, and when I see the paints and bays again in my mind I feel the pounding of their feet in my thighs, their body heat on my cheeks. I suppose they all got sold after that, then moved around again, and people made more money off them. Maybe somebody rode one of ’em once in a while. I recall those horses mostly, I believe, because they’re not involved in what I’m in. For them there was no place of drifting, trying to decide what would come next. I think about the four of us, young and dumb as fence posts, thinking we’d get ahead. Ahead of what? For three of us, it got very bad very fast. Ed, he paid the price, I’d say. Andy and Brett, after something like that, you’re almost always going to be behind, the rest of your life. And me, I know there’s that price out for me for what I did. I don’t know if I’m ahead or behind. I clean people’s offices now. I’m looking for no bill.

Thomas Lowdermilk had long hands the shape of garden trowels, as though he had been born to his work. He grew up on the Santa Rosa Reservation and then they all had moved after World War II, his parents, his sister, and two brothers, to Escondido, north of San Diego, where he married in 1957 and with his wife raised two daughters and a son. Rosamaria passed away early, at thirty-four—cancer of the lymph system. When his daughters married, they each moved to Texas, and his son followed. He had supported them all as a gardener, and he carried on this way, working at a variety of tasks with soil and trees and plants that gave him pleasure. He was a patient man, and thorough. His services, his ministrations, were sought by many people.