ONCE YOU GOT OUT of the Tenderloin and into the Castro district, Market Street became a different palette of colors. Few homeless people were seen. No crack dealers hawked their wares. No fire engines raced to tenement hotels. No hookers were at the curb. In their stead were renovated Victorians, upscale flower shops, jewelry stores, pricey restaurants, hair salons, and wine bars.
The annual Castro Street festival was taking place during the upcoming weekend, and a hundred thousand people would congregate outside to party. The disco king Sylvester used to sing at the event and had regaled the masses with his opus “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).”
The song was an anthem for gay men in San Francisco and was played a hundred times a day in neighborhood bars. Sylvester was the reigning diva of the international dance music scene in the 1980s. Recording for a regional label, his pioneering vocals made their presence felt in nightclubs from New York to Berlin. He died of AIDS, as did thousands in the city.
At four o’clock the doors to the post office were open, in the hopes of attracting a breeze. Sunlight had penetrated the station’s blue-tinted plate-glass walls; ponds of light coruscated on the brick tile floor. An airmail package with foreign stickers sat next to a computerized cash register on the service counter. A muzak version of the Lee Morgan composition “Sidewinder” percolated from a radio.
The lone clerk at the counter, a middle-aged Filipino man, heard a person come in the door. He levered his head to see who it was. The afternoon had been slow and he was a mite bored. It was a male customer, one he hadn’t seen before. Postal work was like that—people came and went, never to be seen again. There were too many faces to remember, too many voices to sort out. Some brought good cheer along with their mail. Most didn’t.
As the man’s footsteps came closer, the clerk’s short black hair stood up on end. His lips curled, showing uneven teeth. His skin whitened from brown to gray. His eyes widened in tortured recognition when he saw what was in the fellow’s hand.
A clean-shaven Stiv Wilkins pointed a Colt revolver with a three-inch barrel at the postal worker’s pudgy face. With his hair combed, Stiv looked positively juvenile, no more than eighteen. He pulled back the gun’s hammer, cleared his throat of phlegm and stated the purpose of his visit. “Can you help me, please?”
“To do-do-do-do what?” the clerk stuttered.
“Open the register drawer.”
“Why?”
Stiv was direct. “I want the money.”
“I can’t give it to you.”
Stiv was perplexed and signified with the Colt. “Why not?”
“Because you have to make a purchase. You have to put in money. It won’t open otherwise.”
“Fuck that.” Stiv goaded him in the chin with the revolver.
The clerk had coronary thrombosis written over his face. His orbs were egg yolks swimming in blood vessels. His skin was greasier than bacon. The sweat stains in his blue postal uniform were moons. He made a suggestion. “How about buying some stamps?”
Stiv let his arm drop, the gun at his side. His tongue was metallic, a warning that an attack was coming on. Not a full-blown hallucination, but near enough. The walls shifted a few inches. The post office’s bulletin board, spangled with the FBI’s Most Wanted posters, was moving up and down. It let him know he was on the brink.
Closing his eyes, Stiv forgot where he was. He daydreamed about taking the cable car at Powell and Market over Nob Hill and down into Chinatown. The ride took forever and you could see Angel Island and Mount Tamalpais. He reopened his eyes and found the postal worker was on all fours under the stamp machine. A handful of coins, dimes, pennies, and nickels were on the floor next to a stack of boxes. Stiv asked sleepily, not quite sure what was going on, “Where’s the money?”
“I’m trying,” the man gasped, “to get change for stamps.”
Having no more patience for the situation, Stiv scrambled on the countertop by the weight scale and sighted the clerk with the Colt. He counted backwards from ten and when he reached zero, he asked himself a question. Where had the summer gone? June had been cold and foggy. July had been a month without heat at the Allen Hotel. In August you had to hide out from the tourists on Market Street. Now it was a melancholy September day in his heart. Stiv fired the gun, once, twice, three, four times.
When a man is shot in the neck, his head explodes in a dance of bone fragments. Pieces of his skull take flight. How far the body parts fly depends on how close the shooter is to the victim. The brain splatters like jelly. The eyes pop out. The face is ruined in a surge of skin and blood. The lower cavities vacate urine and feces. By the time the gunshot’s amplitude dies away, the body is already turning cold.
The postal guy was kissing the ground, praying in Spanish. “Madre de Dios, por favor …”
All Stiv heard was a click—the pistol’s safety button was on. He undid the safety, and came up with a better idea. If he couldn’t send the postman to glory, at least he could kill himself. He flipped the pistol around and put the muzzle in his mouth. Wedding his lips to the barrel, Stiv rimmed the bore with his tongue, and hit the trigger.
Shooting yourself in the face is the pièce de résistance of suicide. It’s a hostile act that guarantees a drastic mess for someone to clean up. Believing he was dead, Stiv was puzzled. In the afterlife there was supposed to be no jazz on the radio, but nonetheless he was hearing it in the background. And the clerk was futzing with the stamp machine. Nothing had changed, meaning he was alive. Stiv had a gander at the Colt: it had been unloaded.
Hopping off the counter, he backpedaled out of the post office and cut up Eighteenth Street, just as the sun dipped over the sparsely grassed fields of the Eureka Valley Playground. He bustled past Cliff’s Variety hardware store and the Castro Theater and made a break for Market Street. Tongue lolling from his mouth, Stiv Wilkins spurted across the road and passed under an elm tree, trying to outrun the hallucination that was overtaking him.
Fog was coming down over the forested hills onto the beach as the skiff neared the cove. Harbor seals swam alongside the boat, their sleek heads visible in the moonlight. Mallard ducks were quacking in the water. José Reyna watched the two Ohlone oarsmen as they paddled the craft. Their unbraided black hair was wet with sweat and they were barefoot in wool trousers. Their thick leather belts held butcher knives and muzzle-loading pistols. The buoyant skiff, woven from marsh reeds, nosed into a wave. Two-Fingered Tom cleaned his guns and said to José, “Chale, this is a bitch, ain’t it?”
The last time Two-Fingered Tom had been in San Francisco, he’d escaped from jail. Since there was a bounty for his capture, he didn’t look forward to returning to the village and stared at the piney hillsides with suspicion. The two outlaws sat in the boat’s prow, attempting to keep their weapons and gunpowder dry. The rest of José’s men, mestizos and runaway Mission Indian slaves, were in Oakland guarding their horses.
The first Ohlone oarsman was using his paddle as a tiller, urging the vessel toward the coastline. Three yards from the shore, the other Ohlone jumped into the surf and guided the boat onto the sand. José and Two-Fingered Tom grabbed their serapes, rifles, and quirts and put on their sombreros.
“What’s the name of this beach?” José asked.
“Warm Water Cove,” Two-Fingered said.
The skiff was hidden onshore behind a crop of scrub brush and camouflaged with tree branches. José watched the Indians as they searched the ground for the path that led through the pine forest and into San Francisco. The older Ohlone was muscular; his back was cicatrized with scars from the whippings he’d received at Mission Dolores. The younger Indian, slim and quick on his feet, said something to him in pidgin Spanish and then gave the high sign. He said, “Aquí, hombres.”
Two-Fingered muttered, “That pinche indio better know where he’s taking us.”
With the moon in the west to navigate by, the four men followed the trail into the trees. The Ohlone took the lead. Two-Fingered Tom, paranoid out of his mind, brought up the rear with a six-barreled squirrel rifle. It was a model favored by the gringos. Birds were tweeting in a lilac bush. Two deer, a doe and a fawn, ran away when they heard the men. A small bear crashed through chokeberry bush brambles and a coyote barked in the hills.
An hour went by before the outlaws broke out of the forest and into a clearing. The ground had been fenced off for pasture; Spanish cattle raised their horned heads at the interlopers. Two-Fingered signed with his hands at the Ohlone. The Indian with the scars on his back pointed to a creek that ran north. Two-Fingered said to José, “We follow the agua and then in a couple of miles we get to the Mission.”
Resuming their march, the bandits proceeded to walk alongside the creek. They encountered more cows, a herd of sheep, and a gang of wild dogs. Two-Fingered Tom was taking swigs from a flask of absinthe and singing a corrido. He couldn’t wait to find the Chinamen in the village—they sold the best opium he’d ever smoked.
The march was uneventful until they saw the white walls and church tower of Mission Dolores. The settlement dated back to the 1770s and was one of the oldest in the state of California. It was ringed with corrals and outbuildings that housed the overseers and other church employees. Further off were the shanties of the Mission Indians. Small plots of corn, squash, and beans bordered the creek. Horses were grazing on burdock. A half-breed boy, naked from the waist down, spied the strangers and ran past the corrals into the cornfields.
The young Ohlone held up his hand and made the travelers get behind a ridge of serpentine—several lawmen on horseback were riding out of the compound. The horses kicked up dirt and José Reyna was hard pressed to keep from sneezing. When the horsemen had ridden down the road and into the woods, the guides led him and Two-Fingered Tom to a side gate. In front of them was a cemetery. Rose bushes climbed the adobe walls; stone grave markers were corroding in the loamy soil. The two Ohlone stopped and talked to each other in their native tongue. The older man drew a circle in the dirt with his finger and then crossed it out.
Two-Fingered Tom said to José, “He’s saying there are too many ghosts around here. Ohlone slaves are buried in that graveyard. Their spirits want out of the ground.”
Retreating into a corral, the pistoleros hid behind a bale of hay and prepared their weapons. José had an 1836 Colt Navy repeating revolver. The Ohlone carried old-fashioned flintlock pistols. Two-Fingered Tom’s adolescent face was stern under his sombrero as he said, “Orale, this has been long overdue.”
The mission’s stout wood gate opened and a man in cowboy clothes with a Sharps rifle stepped out. He was bearded and wore a cream-colored ten-gallon Stetson hat. He looked at the cemetery and at the cows by the creek. He stared at the cornfields and at the corral where the outlaws were hidden. José was sure they’d been seen. But the guard didn’t detect them and shouldered his rifle and went back inside the walls. A few minutes later a priest came out.
“That’s him,” Two-Fingered Tom exclaimed.
The brown-robe started walking down the dirt road toward the Mission lagoon. He was fat and bald with a face that was red from drink; his nose was bulbous and his mouth was thin. His leather sandals raised sprites of dust. The hem of his garment was muddy. In his right hand he clutched a staff carved from hemlock wood. Around his waist was a rope belt. From it hung a deerskin pouch.
Two-Fingered Tom said, “This is it, vatos. Watch my back.”
The outlaw, skinnier than a scarecrow, two-stepped out from behind the hay. He brushed off his leather chaps and jacket and greeted the cleric as if they were old friends. “Oye, padre, ¿qué pasa?” Extracting the flask from his jacket, Two-Fingered had a lusty pull from it and offered it to the priest. “You want some, viejo? The shit’s good for you, eh? Puts hair on your cojones.”
The brown-robe said, “Who are you, hijo?”
“I ain’t a friend, that’s all you got to know.”
A pinto pony nickered in the corral. A cow mooed in the fields. A rooster began to cock-a-doodle-doo. Two-Fingered Tom put the flask in his belt and tapped the priest on the chest with his squirrel gun. “Gimme the chingadera, that pouch you got, tu pinche gusano.”
The two Indians jumped up and pinioned the brown-robe. The younger Ohlone removed the pouch and handed it to Two-Fingered Tom. The teenaged desperado untied it and poured the contents into his palm. It was three ounces of gold dust from the mines near Mokelumne Hill.
The scarred Indian withdrew a knife from his belt and ran it over the priest’s face, testing the blade’s sharpness against the man’s white skin. José Reyna went to stop him, but his cousin held him back, saying, “No, vato. Let him do what he’s got to do.”
The Ohlone drove the blade in the brown-robe’s chest; the man’s legs kicked once, a hiss of breath escaped from his mouth, and that was it. The mockingbirds in the cedar grove next to the cemetery began to protest. Two-Fingered Tom sifted the gold dust back into the pouch and tucked it in his shirt. Disregarding the dead priest, he said to José, “Let’s go, hombre. We’ve got a lot of shit to accomplish.”