Pecked to death by ducks (30 page)

She tended to stutter, to lose her train of thought, to repeat herself. When she spoke of the things that had happened to her— about how they took her baby from her—the temptation was very great to hold her. Men, she said, would give young girls KJ and encourage them to smoke great amounts until their senses shattered and their brains burst, and then the men would have them, one after the other, all night long, and the next day that girl would wake up, and the long bad night would come back to her only in vague shadows, like the dimly recalled meat of last year's nightmare.

Another client, Mike, said he supported his habit with a little low-level dealing to friends. A gram of KJ goes for about $140.

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Out of that you can make eight heavy joints at $30 a pop for a profit of $100, or twenty-four street joints at $20 for $340.

Guys deal on this level from their houses or apartments. They deal on the street and at the parks and at the parking lot at Story and King. I know of one woman who turns her welfare check into grams and deals out of her house. That's why it's so hard to quit, Mike said. There's someone dealing on most every block.

Eve Torres, a senior counselor at Project DARE, told me that they separate the heroin therapeutic group from the PCP group because the addicts think the KJ freaks are "punks."

Eve said that since the PCP treatment program started in July of '77, a number of distinct groups had come through, and that, currently, she was seeing chronically unemployed young people with serious emotional problems.

And that was where it lay these days in Tropicana, or so it seemed to me after six weeks of poking around. The epidemic was at its periphery, and about to collapse on itself. In the beginning Project DARE's PCP section couldn't even get a group together. Now, people were volunteering for the program.

In the barrio, this most mannered of all American communities, things that fall from style fall fast. And when even the junkies finger you for a punk, it becomes very apparent that you ain't got no style at all.

We are hunched in this sweat lodge, which is about three feet high and six in diameter, cramped quarters, dark as the womb of the earth itself, and in a pit at the center of the lodge are a dozen or so rocks, hot from the fire outside, and they are glowing malevolently. In a few seconds the medicine man, who is a Chicano named Sal Candelaria, will pour water on the rocks, and a scalding steam will rise, burning our chests and faces, which are already rolling with sweat. To cope with the pain of this strong ceremony, we will chant an old Indian song that sounds to me like "hi how are ya, hi how are ya," and it will feel good to chant in this manner, much better than screaming in pain, which is in very bad taste because this is, after all, a religious ceremony, and

we are singing the old song in prayer. The prayer is for all the Chicano brothers and sisters in the parking lot at Story and King. We are praying for these young brothers and sisters because some of them have burned their brains on PCP. We are sweating in prayer for these burned-out brothers and sisters.

Sal pours the water. Steam fills the lodge. Candelaria has been a community organizer for over half of his thirty-four years, first with the Black Berets, then in the mid-seventies with the Monitors, a street-level group funded by the Campaign for Human Development and formed for the express purpose of preventing trouble in the parks and parking lots.

Early on, Sal and the Monitors discovered that a lot of the problems at the local parks—fights, rapes, serious beatings—had to do with the use and sale of KJ. The Monitors launched an anti-KJ campaign complete with bumper stickers, posters, rap sessions in the parks and schools, and a sophisticated "boycott the pusher" campaign.

It was tough to get people to listen in those days. The pushers responded by circulating rumors in the barrio: The Monitors were raiding houses, flushing the KJ, and ripping the dealers for their cash. The Monitors were in league with the police and accepting kickbacks from certain dealers.

On August 31, 1974, a shotgun blast shattered a window, and Sal caught seven buckshot pellets in the head. Then came the anonymous death threats: rasping voices on the telephone. Sal was arrested for possession of stolen guns, and later for inciting a riot during a march protesting the death of a Chicano shot by the police under suspicious circumstances.

It seemed to Sal, in those days, that he was caught between the dealers and the police. "I didn't know who to trust," he says now, and felt as if ... as if he were going crazy. He fled "up north," where he lived with "some Indians" which is how the Sundance religion came to heal his mind. Sal thought I might find similar solace in Sundance.

The rocks in the pit are glowing like meteors, and in a minute Sal will pour more water on them, and the steam will rise, scalding us for the fourth time. This has been going on for two hours.

When I close my eyes, I see little dancing colored lights. Sal says they are spirits.

Having already prayed for the people at Story and King, Sal says, we may pray for anything we like. He pours the water, and the steam comes hissing up off the rocks. I pray for Huero and Babe in the lowrider's dream. I pray that I don't have a heart attack. I pray that I am right about KJ's imminent fall from grace in Tropicana. I pray that my teeth won't melt. I pray that Bernardo knows I kept my promise.

It occurs to me, in the middle of this last, strong sweat, that I am really praying—actually praying—for the first time since being "raised Catholic." I am not praying to our Grandfather, which is Sal's vision. Or, at least, I don't think I am. My mind doesn't work that way. I imagine I am praying to something in the spirit of all the people I've talked to in the last six weeks.

And I'm thankful. I'm thankful I wasn't devoured by zombies, and that Bernardo was right, and that I can walk into the goon show any time and spot ten cars I know and see the owners' personalities in them. I'm thankful for my big moment in the club called Disco East when the disk jockey introduced me and the people cheered.

I feel clean, sanctified, goofy as a god. I am not used to this sort of thing, and so I close my eyes to see how the spirits are taking it all. They are still dancing, madly.

dragged him a couple of miles. When we finally got to him, he looked like he'd been scrubbed with a wire brush. Funniest damn thing I ever saw." You see some of the same attitude in a few of Charlie Russell's turn-of-the-century western paintings: the humor of mishaps on horseback.

We rode through foot-deep snow, down toward the banks of the Sweetgrass River, where the cows were. They were all black Angus, a hardy breed, and Edd spotted one off by herself, half hidden in the willows along the banks of the river. It was, he said, "suspicious." We rode across the river, dismounted, tethered our horses, and walked through the thick willows. There was some blood on the snow, some frozen water, and a small trail where something wet, about the size of a full-grown bird dog, had been rolled over and over. The cow was still licking her newborn calf when she saw us.

Leo Cremer moved in close, checking the mother's udders. Sometimes the bag is so tight and the teats are swollen so large that the calf can't suck. "She looks okay," Leo called back to us. The mother shied and waddled off a few feet into the willows. Her calf chose that moment to rise on its spindly legs. It swayed, stumbled, kept its feet. Its front legs bent in toward one another in a knock-kneed fashion, and it looked about with a kind of deep bovine wonder.

The calf hadn't had a lot of time to figure things out, and it stumbled toward Leo, taking him for Mother. Leo felt the calf's muzzle. It was warm, a good sign. A "cold calf"—one that is likely to freeze to death—generally has a cold muzzle. If the calf had been cold, Leo would have taken it back to the forty-year-old trailer where he was living and warmed it up by the wood stove.

The mother was watching through the willows about ten feet away. Leo spoke for the calf. "Bok," he said. It was a pathetic little bleat. The mother responded in the manner of full-grown cows. "Bok," Leo bleated again, moving away from the calf as the mother edged toward it.

We walked to the horses and mounted—more Comedy Horsemanship on my part—and rode to the top of a low ridge nearby.

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A z6o

Leo and Edd wanted to make sure the mother came back. "They're like birds," Leo said. "You disturb the nest too much and the mother won't come back." Below, in the willows, the mother nuzzled her calf, which stumbled a bit, said "bok," and eventually found a teat. "Once they're up and sucking," Leo said, "you almost never lose a calf."

We walked the horses farther up the ridge, watching the cows below. The ranch belongs to Leo's parents, George and Helen Cremer. It is a good-sized spread—about 156 square miles—and the Cremers run two thousand head of cattle on it. Cremer cows calve in April. The timing, of course, is a simple matter of when you let the bulls in with the cows. Most of the smaller operations hereabouts calve in February, hoping for the fabled thaw. If it doesn't come, a fellow who is only running a hundred or two hundred head can get his calves into a barn or shed. The advantage of early calving is that when the buyers come around in November, the calves will be heavier.

But with two thousand head spread out over 156 square miles, the Cremers calve in spring. That's the way the big ranchers did it in 1890, and the methods of a century past are still the most efficient. We might have herded the cows on snowmobiles—later, mud bikes would be in order—but it is impossible to rope a sick calf from either of those vehicles and equally impossible to catch even a week-old calf on foot. Horseback is the only way to go.

Leo and Edd live in a trailer, twenty miles from the main ranch house—one of three cow camps on the ranch—and they have managed to get the six hundred cows they are responsible for into about two square miles. They rise at first light, and one of them goes out to catch the horses and saddle them up. The other makes the coffee. (A recipe for cowboy coffee a la Edd and Leo: Fill pot with one quart of water from river, add an equal amount of coffee, boil fifteen to twenty minutes.)

The bridles are brought in and set beside the wood stove while Edd and Leo wince down their coffee. The bridles are warmed so the bits don't stick to the horses' tongues. In Montana blizzard conditions are not unusual in April.

The first morning I rode with Leo and Edd, a foot and a half of

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snow fell in the three hours it took us to check the cows. Leo held an incredible amount of information in his head: There was a "suspicious" cow—one he thought was ready to calve—hanging out too near the high bank of the river. He didn't want her accidentally rolling a newborn calf into the frigid waters below. There was another cow off by herself on top of the ridge, but her bag wasn't tight with milk—a sign that she would be about ready to calve—and he wanted to check her out. There was a mother and calf in the trees by an abandoned homestead, and Leo thought the mother's teats might be too big. If they were, he'd get the calf mothered up with an old cow who had lost her calf. Leo marked down the new calves in a notebook he had back at the trailer, but I believe he knew, without thinking about it, where each individual was and how many there were.

That knowledge is important, because just as it was in the 1890s, rustling can be a problem. The calves aren't branded yet, and a fellow could drive down the poorly maintained county road, hop the fence into Cremer's land, and steal a calf. A strange vehicle will make its way down the road about once a week, and Leo will mark it in his mind. If a calf is missing, there is a two-way radio in the trailer. A fellow with a calf lying beside him in the cab of his pickup might find a few vehicles waiting for him at the end of the road.

After making the rounds, Leo and Edd came back to the trailer for breakfast. Later they moved cows from one pasture to another and mended fence. Late in the afternoon they made another round, checking the cows. I calculate they spent an average of ten hours a day on horseback. They slept in their long underwear and went to the main ranch for a shower about once a week.

One afternoon I went out to check on the cows with Leo. I lurched onto Dick's back, and we rode out to a desolate stretch of windblown prairie where an old cow had dropped a stillborn calf. She had stayed with it more than a week, licking it mournfully during the day, sleeping with it at night. "Usually," Leo said, "they give up after a couple of days." The mother had finally left her calf. Now there were coyote tracks near the body, which had been ripped open.

We came up over a ridge, and a huge golden eagle rose sound-

lessly no more than ten feet from us. It had left behind a bit of blood and one hind leg from a jackrabbit. I thought, This is the way it was for the people who worked this land a hundred years ago.

Goofy Dick, as if in agreement, jumped three feet straight into the air, for no discernible reason. Funniest damn thing you ever saw.

hacking 'itn J>om

I would have preferred a lost child, but instead we drew a homicide.

Jim Grasky, a Border Patrol agent and man-tracking expert who might have been the Marlboro Man in another life, laid out the hypothetical problem. The body had been found out by the old gravel pit. It was discovered last night, he explained, at a low point in the southeast corner of the pit, along the fence. A bullet had passed through the heart, on a downward angle.

The twelve of us, all in our first tracking class, began looking high, along the dusty ridges that ringed the pit to the north and west. It was late afternoon, and the sun was low in the west, a fine time to track. We found a muddle of bootprints near the highest promontory. They were hard to miss: The ground was covered with a thin layer of black grainy dust made for tracking. We positioned the prints between the sun and ourselves. The shine—the reflection of light off a flattened area, in this case made by a pair of boots and the weight of a man—showed a definite line of travel. You could see it from twenty yards away.