IN THE HALL Stiv recognized John Coltrane’s theme “A Love Supreme” pealing from a room downstairs. Hot with a fever, his lungs hurt. The metal taste in his mouth was back, and he was having difficulty breathing. “This ain’t good,” he sniveled. Steadying himself, he put a hand against the wall. The floor was undulating and weaving; the corridor was going round and round.
The phantom of José Reyna entered the passageway. The dead outlaw’s shirt had been torn to ribbons. His chaps were covered with burrs. His holster was empty. His boots deposited a spoor of blood and dust on the floor. José was hauling a twenty-gallon glass jar with his head in it.
After driving a herd of stolen horses from Mount Diablo through the Central Valley into Southern California to San Diego County, José Reyna returned north. The police ambushed him and his band of renegades in the marshes at Diablo Creek. The temperature was 115 degrees in the shade that day. Insects weren’t chittering. Birds weren’t singing. The year was 1837.
José and his followers reined their horses over a precarious deer path to the creek’s bottom and passed through a grove of stunted black oaks. Their pinto mounts were shaky. José was limp in his saddle, mummified from the heat.
The cops lined him up in the sights of their Sharps rifles and opened fire, raking the trees with several volleys. The sound of gunshots traveled for miles across the flat valley floor. The first to fall, José was riddled with nine bullets in his chest. Two-Fingered Tom was the next to bite the dust.
Immediately their corpses began to decompose in the sun. The stink upset the cops to no end. Debating who among them was going to cut off José Reyna’s head to prove they had killed the right man, they were drinking heavily to celebrate their victory. The only officer in the posse who’d been acquainted with José—the sheriff’s deputy Wallace Haynes from Texas—was called upon to execute the deed.
José’s body, along with the corpse of Two-Fingered Tom, was covered with leaves. José’s youthful visage was peaceful, as if he were taking a snooze until the hoopla was over. Two-Fingered’s countenance in death was no different than it had been when he was alive. His lips were stiff with ridicule and his obsidian eyes blazed accusingly at the drunken killers. His squirrel gun lay in the yellow sand at his feet. His straw sombrero was scored with bullet holes. Flies swarmed around the blood drying on his legs.
Four policemen with hunting knives severed Tom’s hand, the one with the two fingers. The task consumed the better part of a few minutes. Then they went to work on his neck, cutting through the bone and gristle. Wallace Haynes decapitated José, hacking off the outlaw’s head with a Bowie knife. When he completed the chore, he went to puke in the bushes. José Reyna’s head was then dunked in a large jar filled with alcohol to preserve it. His sightless eyes stared blankly through the glass at the cops.
In later years law enforcement authorities said the head in the jar didn’t belong to José Reyna. It was the head of another member of his gang. Wallace Haynes ended his life in a mental asylum in Bakersfield. Hospitalized for dipsomania forty years after the battle at Diablo Creek, the former deputy told his doctors the bandit’s ghost was chasing him into the grave. Haynes passed away in the nut house, yowling that José Reyna was following him into perdition.
A year after the shootout at Diablo Creek, there was an exhibition at the Academy of Science in San Francisco. On the first day of the show, tickets were sold at a brisk clip. Since it was a weekend afternoon young parents had brought their children. Elderly pensioners were in groups of twos and threes. Out-of-town tourists fleshed out the crowd. A mustached man in bifocals and a wide-brimmed hat got in line and bought the last ticket. “It’ll be a while,” the usher told him. “The doors open at two.”
The stranger wore a maroon corduroy suit and walked with an exaggerated stoop. His black hair was longish over his ears. He eyed the stuffed animals in the nearby corridor; lynx, tule fox, and a saber tooth tiger. When the exhibit opened at the appointed hour the ticket holders solemnly filed into the hall. “One at a time, folks, one at a time,” the usher sang. “Give the person in front of you a chance to behold a premiere.”
The gory spectacle confirmed what the daily tabloids in the city had been saying—it wasn’t for the weakhearted. A pretty woman came away from it in tears. A child screamed for his mother. The man in the bifocals waited patiently for his turn. It wasn’t every day that he spent five dollars on a ticket to a museum. Museums were dormitories for the dead; he stayed away from them as a rule. Finally the usher said to him, “Here you go, sir. You’re the final person of the day. Take your time and enjoy yourself.”
In the center of the room, which was painted a robin’s egg white, a human head inside a glass vessel reposed on a mahogany table. The specimen’s features were angular; his hair was raven black and coarse. His skin was cocoa-brown with smallpox scars. His blurry eyes had an amber luster in them. The jaded calm on his face indicated that he’d been though this before.
The usher said, referring to the jar, “Pretty cool, huh?”
Removing his glasses, the man laughed tiredly, cussing, “It’s a motherfucker, all right. Thanks for letting me have a look.”
The next morning the local newspaper received a letter to the editor. It said: “I went to see the exposition at the Academy of Science and I was very disappointed. The price of the ticket wasn’t worth it. Despite what the newspapers are saying, that I’ve been captured and killed, it isn’t true. That head in the jar? It wasn’t mine. I still have my cabeza and it’s attached to my shoulders. You gringos messed up. Yours truly, José Reyna.”
Historians write that José fled California and returned to Mexico where he lived to a ripe old age. The headless caballero strode across the dingy carpet in the Allen Hotel to the emergency exit window that faced Market Street. Holding the jar that contained his skull, the outlaw lifted the windowpane and climbed onto the fire escape, leaving behind the fragrances of alcohol, horse sweat, and summer’s pollen to die in the corridor.