Читать книгу Coyote Fork - James Wilson - Страница 7

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THE HUMAN PSYCHE IS INFINITELY adaptable. Confront it with two contradictory ideas, and it will respond by what psychiatrists call splitting: that is, by locking each one in its own separate domain, and preventing it from ever coming into contact with the other. That—after a twenty-minute meltdown when I feared I might genuinely be going mad—was the way I coped now. In cell number one, a message from Anne from beyond the grave. In cell number two, a perfectly rational explanation, which—when you took into account all the coincidences involved—appeared equally incredible. In my confusion, I didn’t feel ready to choose between them. But on one point they agreed: Anne had always had an unerring nose for a story.

I googled Carter Ramirez. Instantly I was bombarded by a barrage of emotive words: fraud, martyr, crook, predator, low-life, hero or villain? I ignored them as best I could while I excavated the bare facts: Carter Ramirez had been a self-styled Native American activist, who claimed to be of Ohlone Indian descent, whatever that was. When the Global Village headquarters was being built, construction workers uncovered two ancient American Indian skeletons, which Ramirez said belonged to his ancestors. He started a campaign to persuade Global Village to give his people money, so that they could buy another piece of land nearby. Global Village investigated Ramirez’s background, and revealed that he was a petty thief who had links with organized crime. The only reason he wanted the land, they said, was so his mobster friends could build a lucrative casino on it. Publicly discredited, and hounded by online trolls, Ramirez started drinking heavily. Nine months later his body was found at the bottom of a cliff. It wasn’t clear if he’d fallen or jumped.

After his death, everyone and his dog seemed to have got in on the act: White supremacists; an organization called End White Supremacy Now; a conspiracy theorist claiming that the bones found at Global Village were the remains not of Native Americans, but of aliens; a conservative columnist saying the whole sorry story was a morality tale for our time. It would take me the whole day to wade through all those bees in bonnets, and at the end I’d be none the wiser. Best just to interview the daughter and make up my own mind about what she had to tell me.

It took three calls to reach her. When I finally did, her voice sounded flat and harassed. Yes, she remembered me. When I told her I was interested in doing a piece on her father, she thought about it for a moment, then said, OK, she guessed that we could meet. She was at work right now but would be free later. Did I know the Presidio park in San Francisco? She’d be there, at the Inspiration Point Overlook, at three.

OK, I said.

What do you wear to meet a Native American activist? It’s not a question I’d ever had to deal with before. Since I was travelling, the choice was fairly limited, and I quickly settled on my light jacket and a dove-grey shirt. But that left the tie issue. The case against: it might seem snooty. The case for: it showed respect. In the end, I came down for selecting a sober beauty with a rich dragonfly-wing sheen that she’d have to be dead not to appreciate.

I thought I still had plenty of time to get there, but the traffic was agonizingly slow, and I got lost in the vertiginous three-dimensional maze of Pacific Heights. When I eventually reached the Presidio, it turned out to be bigger than I’d expected—a huge expanse of grass and trees, crisscrossed by sandy trails. I broke into a half-run, my bag jigging against my back. Every minute or so I stopped to check the directions on my phone. At last, after struggling up a steep, treacherous woodland path, I emerged huffing and sweating at the Overlook. There, in the distance, beyond a crescent-shaped stone parapet and a dense carpet of treetops, lay Alcatraz, the waters encircling it dotted with white sails.

I looked around. Corinne Ramirez hadn’t arrived yet. In fact, there was no one else there at all. I sat on the wall, wiping my forehead on my sleeve, trying to catch my breath. Almost immediately, I saw a young man stepping noiselessly out of the trees, as if he were stalking a wild animal. He was squat and heavy-set, with an explosion of black hair that made his head seem too big. When he realized I’d seen him, he stopped, and pretended to be looking at the view, his loose blue shirt fluttering in the breeze.

“Hi,” I called.

He nodded but said nothing and didn’t turn his head. After a few seconds Corinne Ramirez appeared from the trees behind him, carrying a scuffed leather satchel. She half-raised a hand when she saw me, then plodded towards me, ignoring the man in the blue shirt.

“You Bob?”

“Only very occasionally.”

She frowned.

“Sorry. People normally call me Robert.”

She shrugged. “It was too dark to see you real good last night. Did you find that person you were looking for?”

“No. Well, sort of. It was more that she found me. Up to a point.”

Not a good way of putting it. It hung in the air between us, like an unresolved chord. I hurried on, before the oddness of what I’d said sank in.

“And that’s why I’m here. She was a journalist too. And she thought I should find out more about your father’s story.”

“Was a journalist? Did something happen to her?”

“She lost her job.” Better: I was thinking on my feet now. “When Evan Bone bought the paper she was working on.”

“What’s her name?”

“Anne Grainger.”

She shook her head: Means nothing to me. “That man,” she said. “He’s screwed up a lot of people’s lives.”

“Yes. Including mine.”

I waited for her to ask how, exactly. She said nothing. Eventually I went on, “So you needn’t worry that I’m just going to write a piece of Evan Bone propaganda.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Propaganda. That’s what it’s been, pretty much all of it. The stuff people have written about us. We want to tell your side of the story, they say. So we talk to them. And then when it comes out, they say we’re liars. Just trying to get a hold of a whole load of money. So’s we can live in a penthouse suite and drive around in one of them big German cars.”

“I brought some examples of my work, if you’d like to see it.” I opened my bag and started rummaging inside. “I haven’t got any of Anne’s, that’s my friend, but I could email you something.”

She shook her head. “I don’t need to see anything.”

“You sure? I’d want to, if it was me.”

“That’s OK.”

I looked at her, puzzled. Her face had the mass, the stillness, the weathered endurance of a Mayan statue. And I saw, suddenly, that she was right. What could reading a piece on Robert Adam’s last Scottish masterpiece or Gaudi’s Barcelona possibly tell her about whether I could be trusted with her father’s story?

“All right,” I said, closing the bag again. “Is there somewhere we can sit down?”

She walked over to the parapet and lowered herself gingerly on to it, like a crane depositing its load. I went and sat next to her.

“Why did you want to meet up here?” I said.

“No spies.”

I hoisted my eyebrows at the man in the blue shirt.

“He’s my brother,” she said.

I expected her to introduce me, or at least tell me what he was doing there. But she seemed to feel she’d explained enough.

“So,” she said, turning back to me, “you read about our dad?”

“A bit. I didn’t really know what to make of it.”

She sighed. She couldn’t have been more than thirty, but life had already taken a toll on her. Her dark heavy face was scored with lines. Her thick hair was pulled into a tight black pigtail, as if to prevent it distracting her from the business of getting through the day. One of those women, you imagined, who’d been forced to take on adult responsibilities when she was still a child and had been shouldering them ever since.

“Tell me,” she said.

I gave her a quick précis of what I’d learned.

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s about it. What they say about him.”

“It isn’t true?”

She shook her head. “Well, some of it’s true. He had a tough time growing up. Kids picking on him at school. You know”—flapping a hand against her mouth to make a Hollywood-western war whoop. “If he stood up for himself, got in a fight, his dad would give him a belting. So after a bit he’d say he wasn’t Indian, he was Mexican. And them Global Village lawyers, they picked on that to make it seem like he was a liar, he made it all up. But he wasn’t a liar. He just said it to keep out of trouble. He always knew we were Ohlone.”

“Do you mind if I record this?” I said, taking my phone out.

She eyed it for a moment. “OK.”

I switched on the voice recorder and laid it on the wall between us. For a few seconds she looked silently out at the bay. Then she said,

“You know the history of this place?”

“Not really. Not well.”

“When the Spanish arrived, seventeen whenever it was, don’t remember the exact date, they took all of us Indians round here, the Ohlones, and forced us into missions. Reducing us, that’s what they called it. My people, they put us in the San Vincenzo Mission, made us work for the missionaries, killed us or beat us if we tried to run away. Then the Mexicans kicked the Spanish out, turned the missions into Rancherias. They’re still reducing us, though. They take our religion, our culture, our language. But all the time, we never forget who we are. Each generation passes it on to the next one. You are the people of this place. This is your land. You are Ohlone.”

She scanned my face, to see if I believed her. I nodded.

“And then Uncle Sam showed up and kicked the Mexicans out,” she said. “And Uncle Sam decided we been reduced so much there aren’t real Ohlone left. Other groups, they get recognized as tribes, given a reservation, all that stuff. But not us. We’re just told we’re not Indians anymore, and we have to get off our butts and root for ourselves. But we know who we are. You need the government to tell you who you are?”

It was such an alien idea that I had to think about it for a moment. I shook my head.

“My grandmother, my dad’s mom,” she said. “She made a list of everyone, all the families, who they were descended from. Here, I’ll show you.” She unbuckled the satchel, took out a notebook, opened it. “This is our family. See? Carter Ramirez. His mom was Millie Ignacio. Her mom”—tracing the progression with her finger—”was Teresa Guttiérez. Her dad was Joe Guttiérez, when I was a kid, people would talk about Joe all the time, he was a famous cowboy, worked on ranches all over the state. His dad was Alfonso. And”—turning the pages—“you can go the whole way back to this guy, Ignacio, see? He was the first one they brought into the mission and baptized.”

“May I look?”

She handed me the book and watched while I leafed through it. It didn’t feel like a fake. The material had obviously been added at different times using different pens, some of it in ink that had begun to discolor. There was a lot of crossing out, with emended dates and comments crammed into odd spaces. And there were small details—ladies’ man; lost an eye and two fingers in a fight; Indian doctor—that seemed too particular to have been invented.

“Yes,” I said, giving it back. “That’s impressive.”

The tension in her face eased.

“When we were little,” she said, “long time before any of this stuff with Global Village, long time before there was a Global Village, Dad would bring us up here, and he’d tell us, ‘This is our land. The Creator put us here, so we could take care of it. And see the mess these people made of it. Poisoning the rivers. Killing the fish. Building dams. That’s why there’s so many fires nowadays. They took all the water and locked it up. So the trees now, they ain’t little better than firewood. And all it takes is one spark, and whoosh.’”

She shook her head. “He’d say, ‘Can you feel them? Our ancestors? They’re still here. They’re all around us.’”

She glanced at me. A nod seemed to be expected. I nodded.

“And he’d tell us about that place,” she said.

She pointed to Alcatraz. With its ugly crust of abandoned buildings, it looked like one of those mysterious misshapen sea-creatures that fishermen occasionally drag up from the deep and no one can identify.

“He’d say how, when he was a kid back in the seventies, Indian people came from all over and occupied it, to protest the way they been treated. And he said, ‘They were warriors, those guys. Warriors for their people. And I want to be like them. One day, I’m going to quit everything, and I’m going to fight the government, get them to recognize us as a tribe. And then we can get a bit of land, that’ll be ours forever. And then’—and he’d open his arms, like this—‘And then we can start to take care of all this again.’”

Her voice was phlegmy with emotion. If it was a performance, it was a tour-de-force. After a moment she went on,

“But yeah, sure, he made mistakes. When he was drinking, he’d hit us, hit my mom.” She pulled back her sleeve and showed me a white welt on her brown arm. “He did this to me. When I was ten. With a bottle. That’s how mean he could be.” She pulled the sleeve down again, covering up the evidence. “And yeah, I guess when he was younger his friends stole cars and stuff, so he did the same.”

“Wasn’t it a bit more than that? That he was supposed to have had links to organized crime?”

She shook her head. “He didn’t have no links to organized crime.”

“Someone just made that up?”

“He did something stupid, OK? And didn’t realize it till it was too late, and he was way in over his head.” She took a deep breath. This was something she’d had to explain before, and she was getting tired of it. “What it was,” she said, “was that when Dad started the campaign for federal recognition, this guy in Florida called Ronnie Ronaldo wrote him, said he was in real estate, he’d made big bucks developing new resorts, now he wanted to give something back. So he offered to help with the legal expenses. Make sure Dad had the best firm of lawyers around.”

“And your father accepted?”

She grimaced. “Yeah, I know. You must think he was pretty dumb. But what he said was, you can’t go through life thinking everyone’s just out for themselves. There have to be some good people in the world, don’t there? And this guy’s one of them. See? Finally we got lucky. The ancestors are looking out for us.” She paused. Her face was stiff with pain. “Only later we figured out the real reason he was helping us. And Evan Bone said Dad must have known about it all along. But he didn’t. He was just naïve, I guess.”

I nodded.

“You know about Indian casinos?” she said. “You know why there are so many of them? Because if you’re a recognized tribe, you can build a casino on your reservation and the government can’t tax you. So that’s what a lot of tribes done.”

“Ah. And Ronnie Ronaldo thought that if your tribe succeeded—”

“Yeah. He was just sitting there”—tapping the keys on an invisible calculator—“working out how much he could make. But you know what? Dad may have been dumb, but he wasn’t that dumb. By the time he figured what Ronaldo was doing, he was into him for millions of dollars, I don’t know how many, a lot. He couldn’t get out, but, you know, he was careful. They never talked about this stuff on the phone, just in emails. So the Global Village guys, the only way they could have found out about it was by breaking into his Gmail account.”

The echo of Anne’s experience must have registered in my expression.

“Don’t you believe me?”

“No, I’ve every reason to believe you.”

“And I still don’t get why they did that,” she said. “Why they wanted to hurt him so bad. You know how much money Evan Bone has? If he’d given Dad what he asked for, he wouldn’t even have noticed it going out of his bank account. Plus, it would have made him look good, wouldn’t it? Helping the little guy. But he fought dirty instead. Like it was a grudge match. Like he really hates Indian people.”

“Maybe he thought it would set a precedent. If he helped your father, then every other good cause in the country would expect him to help them, too.”

“So why didn’t he just say that?” She shook her head. “I’m telling you, he was out to get us. And anyone stood up for us.”

Perhaps, I thought suddenly, that’s why Anne had pointed me in Carter Ramirez’s direction: because Evan Bone’s attitude towards him seemed anomalous. A modish progressive—as she had put it—like Bone should surely be sympathetic to Native Americans? So why, in this case, hadn’t he been?

“You know about Hazel Voss?” said Corinne.

“Who’s Hazel Voss?”

“Was. She was another one.”

“Another Native American?”

“No, she was a white kid. A student. Kind of up here, you know.” She scribbled a cloud in the air above her head. “But she wanted to help us. Posted stuff online. Wrote Evan Bone. And they got her, too.”

“Got her?”

“I never heard the details. You’d have to ask her mom. All I know is, Bone’s goons went after her. Just like they did my dad. Trolling, calling her names, I don’t know what all. Till finally she couldn’t take it anymore, and she killed herself.” She paused. “You look into it, I bet you’ll find that’s why it was. Because she stood up for the Indians.”

I gazed out at San Francisco Bay, watching the brilliant pinpoints of sun dancing on the waves until they made my eyes hurt. Anne Grainger hadn’t stood up for the Indians. But she had been driven to suicide by Evan Bone. And so, probably, had Carter Ramirez. And so had Hazel Voss. And that was striking. Anne’s instinct, even in her final days, hadn’t deserted her. This wasn’t just her parting shot, a final eruption of professional sour grapes. She’d caught a whiff of something more. Something—it wasn’t even an idea yet, but just a tingle in my belly—that might turn out to be Evan Bone’s Achilles’s heel.

“So you going to write about it?” said Ms. Ramirez.

I shrugged. “How would I reach her? Hazel Voss’s mother?”

She shook her head. “She lives up in Riddick. I know that.”

“Where’s Riddick?”

“Couple hours.”

“OK,” I said. “I’ll try to speak to her.”

“That it?”

“I’ll let you know how I get on.”

We both stood up. As she slung the satchel over her shoulder, her eye caught the play of light on my tie. She leaned forward and touched it.

“That’s pretty. Looks like a dragonfly wing.”