Nameless Dame, page 4
I turned back to Deputy Mesker. “How’d you identify her?”
“Her tattoo.”
“I’ll show you,” the sheriff said. He folded the tarp down to reveal the body of a lovely young woman in her mid-thirties, clothed only in a pair of soiled panties. Small cantaloupe breasts, a flat belly, and beneath it a blue reptilian tail and some of the creature’s body, tattooed on her navel.
“I told them to look for a salamander heading straight into her pussy.”
In gloves now, the sheriff yanked the panties down toward the victim’s knees. Her pubic hair was shaved so there was only a narrow thatch left. The head of the salamander extended all the way down.
“She always kept it shaved,” Deputy Mesker offered.
“I’m not going to ask how you know that, Mesker,” said the sheriff. He pulled her panties back up and then turned to me. “You think you’ve seen it all,” he said, puffing on his cigarillo.
Back in the car, Coolican, wearing dark glasses now, was lighting some fresh faggots of sage. We sat in silence as he blew out the flame and the smoke rose in feathering drifts.
CHAPTER FIVE
For Some
I DIDN’T GET to sample the glories of the Sabbatinis’ rollaway bed that night. Back from seeing the body with Deputy Mesker and the sheriff, I agreed to a bit of community service and bunked with Deputy Coolican at his cabin on the edge of Guerneville. It didn’t really matter. I was limp with weariness and could have slept standing.
It turned out that Coolican’s cabin was nice and cozy. Bookcases lined the walls. And there were several striking paintings, with bold, gestural stripes painted in shades of salmon. Although the stripes weren’t black, the paintings were reminiscent of Franz Kline.
I also noticed a framed photograph of a large-eyed young woman with a creamy complexion atop a side table. Rose petals were scattered around the base of the frame. I walked up and studied the photograph. The woman looked fresh and hopeful. Or was I just imagining that? In any case, she was a far cry from a nameless dame.
“Yeah, that’s Ruthie,” Coolican said. “Taken when she was in her early twenties. I remember the day when she gave me the photo. I was walking downtown in Guerneville and ran into her coming out of the pharmacy. It was a few years after high school. I think I was done with college. Who knows when I’d last seen her? So, I’m standing beside her, chatting, and I notice my breath is fucked up—I can’t draw a deep breath. Can’t get to the bottom of it. I s’pose that’s what they mean by the phrase, ‘She took my breath away.’ Anyway, she reaches into this envelope and pulls out a folder of photos and hands me one. She said she was going to start doing some acting and needed head shots. I barely looked at the photo, but I took it. I figured she was trying to break my heart.”
Coolican nodded his head and bit his lower lip, presumably to keep from crying.
I walked away from the photo and a fat tabby came over to check me out.
“That’s Maverick,” Coolican said. The cat sniffed around at my feet. A moment later, done with me, he went back to his carpeted cat shelf, under a hanging coleus.
Coolican pointed toward the red futon and said, “That’s where you’ll sleep.” Then he heated some water and brewed a pot of chamomile tea. He asked if I minded if he lit some sage before we went to bed. I was new to this ritual of lighting sage, but whatever it took.
As we sipped tea, I asked Coolican about the paintings and he told me that he made them during college.
“They’re very good,” I said.
“You know art, Augie?” he asked, regarding me with amusement.
“Not really. I go to museums. I know what I like.”
The Indian nodded toward the paintings. “They’re derivative.”
“Everything is derivative.”
Coolican smiled. “Yes, some things derive from tradition; others, like these, are facile copies.”
“You’re pretty hard on yourself, Deputy.”
“Aren’t you the same?”
“No, I treat myself with kid gloves. That’s the secret to my success.”
Coolican smirked. “Maybe I’ll come study with you in Minnesota.”
“Trouble is, I don’t have any success.”
“You’re kind of modest for a white man, Brother Bear.”
I looked around the large room to see if I could spot any painting materials, but didn’t see any. “You still paint?”
“Not since college. I didn’t see a whole lot of future in an Indian painting Franz Klines.”
“But you still like to look at them.”
“If I could find something better, I’d stick it up there.”
I watched Coolican furrow his brows. “May I ask you how old you are?”
“I’m thirty-five,” he said, “if that’s any kind of measurement.”
He was the oldest thirty-five I’d ever seen. Maybe it was the crooked trail that grief left on his features. Maybe the deep pockmarks. Clearly there were things that had seasoned him in ways I couldn’t imagine.
“Personally,” I said, “I’ve discovered that angst is overrated. From my ancient perch of fifty-three, I can tell you that life gets easier.”
“For some,” he said.
“For some,” I echoed, sadly.
The smell of sage,
a thin trail of grief
unites us.
A Stinking Macramé
In the morning Coolican built a nice fire and we shared a pot of coffee. The deputy wore a pair of red, waffled long johns and I, feeling a little crusty, sat in the clothes I’d traveled in the day before.
At first we said very little to each other. Coolican jabbed at the fire with a poker. He took small sips from his mug of coffee and, facing the flames directly, apologized for getting emotional in the car and again at the Last Judgment Campground.
“You don’t have to apologize to me,” I said.
“No, it’s pathetic, man. I’m an Indian. I’m not some fucking crybaby Mormon politician.”
“Hey, emotion has become one of my best friends,” I said.
“With friends like that, a man can drown on dry land.”
“I’m all about treading water.”
“I don’t know how to swim, which is why I like living along a river that floods. Keeps me on my toes.”
Coolican excused himself to dress for work, but he had more to say and kept walking in and out of the main room. It was strange to watch an officer of the law assume his official look at the same time as he bared his soul. “I thought I was prepared for it,” he said in a soft voice. “But when I realized there was no bringing her back, man—it blew me away.”
“You can’t prepare for that.”
“They shot her in the head like she was an animal, a varmint. The bastards.”
I wondered if it meant anything that Coolican thought of Ruthie’s killer(s) in plural.
“And fuck me,” he said, swatting a pile of unopened mail from a side table. “If I’d been a better friend to her, her life might have been different. She might still be here.”
“You can’t second-guess yourself about stuff like that,” I said. “You can’t beat yourself up.”
“Bullshit,” Coolican said. “I can and I will.”
He walked over to the fire and spat into it a couple of times. Just when I thought he’d calmed himself down, he dashed across the room and scattered a pile of books from a plant stand. Cowering against the wall, I noticed Michel Foucault’s This Is Not a Pipe bounce open as if it wanted to be read.
“Sorry, sorry,” Coolican said.
A moment later, the deputy stood in front of the fire in full uniform, his brown eyes shooting huge out of his pocked visage. “There are times when my life seems like nothing but an assemblage of weak moments. A stinking macramé hanging on the wall, woven from my vacillations, my acts of cowardice, my hiding in the dark. Do you have any idea how much has been invested in me? Do you know how little I’ve delivered? A smart boy Indian without a tribe. Too smart for his own good. What kind of fool Indian studies literary theory at Berkeley? Who does he think he is? What’s he prove buying into that high-minded irrelevance? What more does he know about being a human being?”
When he finished his rant, Coolican added a log to the fire and sat down in the chair beside me. Through the room’s large window, I could see the fog lifting up the tops of the redwoods. The deputy kept his eyes closed as if he were meditating.
“Augie,” he said.
“Yes.” It was odd the way he said my name, as if we’d known each other for years, not just since the night before.
“I want to ask you a favor. I don’t ask many people favors.”
“So I should be honored?”
“Or you could be an asshole about it.”
“Shoot,” I said.
“I want to spare myself getting caught up in who killed Ruthie. . . .”
“I think that’s a good idea.”
“Good, because I want you to fill in for me. The sheriff’s department is going to do its thing, but somebody’s got to be looking at it another way. I’d have asked Poesy, but he’s distracted. He says you’re a decent detective.”
I started to protest, telling Coolican that I’d only be in California a couple of weeks and didn’t know my way around.
“Hush,” he said, “you’re blessed with dumb luck. Any fool can see that.”
Coolican let out a contented sigh.
By the time he stood up and put on his cap, he looked as if the demons had left him. I feared that I’d be the one who absorbed them.
Drifters and Dirty Underwear
From Coolican’s cabin, I walked fifteen minutes or so into downtown Guerneville. As I crossed the bridge, the river looked swollen. It had rained during the night and, from what I understood, for much of the last month. I found a restaurant on Main Street where I got a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal and drank some more coffee. I picked up a copy of the Chronicle, glad to see that you could get the city paper in this outpost. I scanned the paper, hoping to find an item on the Russian River murder, but it was too soon for that.
At ten, I wandered up the street to Ginsberg’s Galley and found Sabbatini inside the barely lit tavern. It was cave-like, and so dark that I couldn’t see much of anything.
“There he is,” Bobby shouted from behind the bar. “How’d you sleep, man?”
“Better than expected.”
“See. And how’s Coolican?”
“He’ll live.”
“You’re just the right tonic for him.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.” I pulled up a stool across from Sabbatini at the long bar.
“How about a Bloody Mary?”
“Little early for that, isn’t it?”
Sabbatini shook his head. “What’s with this newfound sobriety of yours, Augie?”
“Just trying to keep my nose clean, but I s’pose a single bloody won’t hurt me.”
In response to the breakup of my marriage, I’d become a prodigious pothead. Weaning myself from the herb had been difficult. I could see that my resolve would be tested, here in Weed Central.
Now I watched Sabbatini mix a couple of bloodies with a grand flourish. We clinked glasses and Sabbatini proposed a toast to Jesse Coolican. I found myself gulping at my drink, enjoying its spicy kick. I also liked the aura of darkness as the spirit of unreality became pervasive. Nothing like sitting in your dirty underwear on a dark morning in a rumpled river town. Add the bloody and the shadow of a nearby murder, and there was hardly any need for night.
Sabbatini looked across at me. “I don’t know if you’ve been around him long enough yet to realize what an amazing man Jesse Coolican is. He’s really quite brilliant. He tries to make like he’s a regular guy, but he’s not. The Monte Rio Rancheria, an unincorporated band of Indians, have tried for years to recruit him to be their chief, but he won’t have any of it. More recently, a Nevada gaming company that runs casinos tried to get Coolie to support a possible gaming facility in the town of Monte Rio. The Rancheria has sovereign rights to 2,500 acres right outside town, and the outfit offered Coolie some large sums to lobby for them. He wouldn’t have any part of it. The man has some genuine dignity.”
“To Coolie,” I said, and we clinked glasses again.
“The guy also has a feel for poetry that’s very special.”
“That’s what matters most,” I said, jesting.
“You laugh,” Sabbatini said, “but to hear Coolican recite Robinson Jeffers’ ‘In the Hill at New Grange,’ with all of Jeffers’ severity and crisp diction, is one of life’s great pleasures.”
“You sound like you’re doing a Mastercard commercial, Bobby.”
“There’s nothing commercial about it. But I’m worried about Coolican,” Sabbatini continued. “I don’t think he’s been so successful wrestling with his mental Satan. And the way he’s taking the murder. He really loved that girl. Everything that I’ve heard about her is that she was a real loser. Smart, good-looking, and fatally hooked on crack.”
“But that’s not what killed her,” I said.
Sabbatini shrugged. “Not directly.”
“You never met her?”
“Oh, I met her. One time I ran into her in downtown Guerneville. She was pretty whacked out. She tried to sell me her body.”
“Hmm. Coolican asked me to do some poking around about the murder, but I told him I was only visiting.”
“You’re not visiting anymore, Augie. The man needs you. The sheriff’s department detectives are going to spend a lot of time linking this to the two Christian kids killed in their sleeping bags a few years back. That one’s still eating them. Maybe the link pans out, but maybe not. People disappear easily out here. There are plenty of drifters around. It’s easy to blame it all on a phantom drifter.”
I threw up my arms in protest. “This kind of stuff’s not my forte, Bobby. I don’t even know the area. Nobody’s going to talk to me.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, my friend. Everybody knows Augie Boyer.”
“How’s that?”
“Everybody’s heard about your heroics in Minnesota. You’re Paul Bunyan with a paunch come to Rivertown.”
“That’s a crock of shit.”
“You know that and I know that, Augie, but the rest of the folks out here in the Occident are willing to give you carte blanche. It’s a very valuable currency. Don’t underestimate what you can do with it. And don’t forget, if Coolican has asked you for his help and you withhold it, you’re not only insulting a man, you’re insulting a nation.”
The Galley Illuminated
With that, Sabbatini burst into a laugh and came out from behind the bar. He flicked some light switches, and the cavernous pub came alive. I could see that Bobby had sunk a lot of dough into the joint. The middle of the room was wide open. To the left were several cozy booths. On the right was the bar at which I’d been sitting, a monstrous slab hewed from a giant redwood. An impressive inventory of bottles glowed majestically in the mirrored spotlights. A photo of a bearded Allen Ginsberg had a place of honor behind the bar. The visage of the poet, all eyes and beard, leapt like a powerful ancestor out of its knotted-rope frame.
The nautical theme was one of the pleasures of the place. Sabbatini led me on a silent tour of his church. He had us stand under a fishing net suspended from the high, pressed-tin ceiling. A couple of dozen abalone shells gave off their marbled enamel shine. Sabbatini had rounded up a collection of French sailors and pirates, boldly rendered on beer platters. They were roguish eighteenth-century creatures with great mustaches. Some had red pom-poms on their sailor caps.
Poster-sized photos of poets were everywhere I looked. As we strolled, I recognized a number of them enshrined in matching gilt frames. There was Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore and Robert Creeley. Gary Snyder looked especially puckish, while W. B. Yeats appeared like an effete priest in his wire-rimmed specs.
At the front of the room was a stage built to look like a captain’s bridge, with an old wooden helm and a brass compass.
I patted Sabbatini on the back. “This is quite an enterprise, Bobby. I had no idea you were taking it to this level.”
“Me neither. It just kept growing.”
“You look like you’re ready to go.”
“Pretty much. I’ve got staff hired. Have done my publicity. A couple of newspaper features are coming out on the place next week. The karaoke machine is ready to fly. I dropped a bundle on a software designer with a background in book design. We’ve got 3,000 poems loaded in and fifteen different broadside templates. Get this, some of the poems are set up as responsive readings. We take recordings of the poet reading, delete every other line, and the bar crowd collectively fills in the missing lines, highlighted in the projection.”
“The church of Sabbatini.”
“I guess so.”
“You got enough folks around to fill the congregation, Bobby?”
“Listen, I’ve been in West County a year and a half now, and I’ve really cultivated the population. I used to run a morning meeting on Wednesdays. People came in, brought coffee and sweet rolls, and recited poems. Now the demand has become so great, I’m doing it five days a week. The city of Guerneville lets me use the chapel of an empty mortuary up the street. People come from all over the county. I betcha I have more than two hundred folks memorizing poems.”
“Father Poesy.”
Sabbatini raised his hands in benediction. “Bless you, my child.” Then he went back behind the bar and pulled out an ashtray, fished in his shirt pocket for a joint, and fired it up. When he offered it to me, I declined.
He took another hit, shook his head, and said, “You’re not the Augie I know and love.”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
Sabbatini leaned across the bar, drawing leisurely on the joint. Master of his realm, he reminded me of Groucho Marx with a cigar. A moment later, he snuffed the fatty and flashed me a stoner’s smile.
A New Wife
