Spider’s Cage (2 page)
And then a tarantula glided over the threshold of the shack's front door, and over the cupped boards of the porch to the open ground beyond. In the moonlight between the shack and the first atroplex of the encroaching desert, a matter of some forty or fifty feet, the spider appeared as an animate shadow against the blue dust. Halfway across the yard the owl hit it with a thump. The dust swirled as the wings moved down to contain their prey. But the talons, expecting the firmer resistance of meat and tiny ribs, completely crushed the minimal substance of the invertebrate. The tarantula became a shapeless pulp, with a few bent legs twisting up out of the dust, still trying to walk, the wings closing down on them.
Turning the owl's distraction to its own advantage, the true meal appeared from under the pump fence and hopped across the ten open yards between the pump and the Cadillac, stopping for an atroplex seed along the way. The kangaroo rat stood in the shadows under the Cadillac eating the seed, and watching with big eyes as the beak stripped the talons of their evaporated prey.
T
HE HAND TOOLED, HAND STITCHED AND SOFT, RUBBED
labial soft, four hundred fifty dollar, El Paso commemorative, kangaroo hide cowboy boots, with engraved silver caps protecting the not too pointed, but pointed, points, the cream yellow-white stitching on the outer flank of each ruby boot portraying a gushing oil well, stepped carefully up the worn wooden treads of the creaking staircase in the front stairwell of the Scarf Building. Each step was taken so that the 2-1/2” heel of the boot landed just in front of the nose of the stair tread but not touching it, because the sole of the boot completely used up the ten inches of tread available to the purpose, the silver tips not allowed to bruise against the next riser.
As they ascended the staircase, the boots were accompanied by a country-western melody, sung in the undertones and out of tune,
basso profundo
.
Let's go to Luckenback, Texas
Willie an' Waylon an' the boysâ¦
At the second floor landing a rat, thinking that, as usual, it had the building to itself on Sunday morning, found itself cornered. It stood up on its hind legs and hissed at the intruder.
Without breaking stride, one of the silver tips caught the rat in the abdomen and kicked it into the wall at the rear of the landing, breaking its back.
This successful life we're livin'
Got us feudin' like the Hatfields and McCoysâ¦
A quarter of the way down the front hall on the second floor the melody ceased to be audible, though its phrases continued fitfully under the singer's breath. Halfway down the hall, the boots paused before a peeling wooden door with a frosted glass panel in its top half, upon which a sign painter had lettered
Windrow
PRIVATE
The stranger turned the knob and pushed the door open, but did not enter.
Martin Windrow saw the dude dressed up like a dry cleaning ad for western wear immediately, because, although it was eight o'clock on a Sunday morning, he was awake and walking across his office in front of the desk toward the convertible sofa. He noticed the silver tipped boots only after he'd registered an unusually large bulge under the cowperson's jacket in the area of the left armpit, which, though the other two were more modest, gave the cowperson three bulges and made it likely that the cowperson was a cowwoman: about five foot six, one hundred seventy-five pounds, wearing an off-white western leisure suit, a red bandana knotted at the throat, a short brim stetson, red boots, and carrying a large gun in a shoulder holster.
What the cowwoman saw was a naked man with an
erection, very pale amidst brown office furniture, holding in his right hand a small jar of Vaseline. She assessed and appreciated the naked man as being fully alert to her presence, perhaps even alert to the location of her pistol. The cut of her leisure suit, the cut of her hair, her weight and the way she carried it, could fool a lot of people, she knew: but not this guy, with his careful eyes and his Vaseline.
Still, the cowperson seemed to have the advantage, and smiled accordingly, thinly. The woman on the fold out couch, however, had not had time to arrange her expression. Nude and belly down, a twisted sheet wrapped around one of her legs, her cheek resting on one arm and facing the door, her half-opened eyes and wet, slightly parted lips betrayed a lingering allegiance to a different set of circumstances. Her expression had yet to begin to slip toward confusion, recognition, and disappointment.
For a moment, the intruder said nothing. The office was silent enough to discern the hum of the refrigerator behind the door. When she stepped into the room, Windrow, expecting no trouble, nevertheless, found himself contemplating the employment of Vaseline as a weapon for self-defense.
The woman on the foldout bed turned her face to the wall, making no effort to cover herself. “Go away Sal,” she said.
“Get into some clothes, honey,” the cowwoman said evenly.
“I just took them off Sal.”
“I said get dressed.”
Windrow, following this exchange with his eyes, thought he might say something.
“Stay out of this Windrow,” the cowwoman suggested, “or I'll grab you by that little pecker of yours and bat you around it like a pinwheel in March.”
Windrow thought about that, and the phone rang behind
him on the desk. He looked at the cowwoman called Sal. The phone rang again. Sal shrugged. Windrow answered it.
“Help,” he said into it.
“Whâ,” the other voice at the other end said. “Ahem. Good morning brother Windrow, and God Bless. This is Elder Osmond speaking, and I'd like to ask what you know about the Mormon Church?”
Windrow held the phone out toward Sal. “For you,” he said.
Sal didn't move, but stared coldly at Windrow. Her eyes narrowed. They were grey. Windrow recognized an undisguised hatred for himself in this woman's eyes, though he'd never seen her before.
“Nobody here knows anything about it,” Windrow said into the phone, and hung it up without taking his eyes of Sal.
“How'd you find me Sal?” said the girl on the bed, still facing the wall.
“We never lost track of you honey. We just thought to leave you alone until the time came.”
There was a silence. It seemed to Windrow that something was leaving. The woman on the bed waited a while longer, then spoke carefully. “Boojum⦔
Sal said nothing.
Windrow blinked.
Boojum?
The woman sat up. Facing away from Windrow and Sal she lowered her head. The blonde curls that descended to her shoulders parted evenly around the nape of her neck.
“Boojum's dead,” she whispered, not quite giving her words the inflection that would distinguish them as a declaration or a question.
“Hardpan found him last night,” Sal said, her voice gentler now, “just sitting in his chair.” She cleared her throat. “He died about a week, maybe ten days ago.”
The girl held her breath a long time, then exhaled loudly. Her head lowered further, the shoulders slumped. She began to pick fitfully at a corner of the sheet.
“He was reading that book,” Sal continued softly, “the one you'd given him about the music businessâ¦?”
The girl was silent, then she gave a big sniff and looked up at the corner over her head, where the wall met the ceiling. “
Gnashmill
,” she said, her voice catching in her throat. “The fucking story of the fucking country fucking music business.”
After a short silence, Sal nodded. “He was about halfway through it. Readin' by lamplight, like always.”
After a longer silence, the woman turned to look at Windrow. He realized that he hadn't seen her face since just after Sal had appeared. It looked different than he remembered it. She looked from him to Sal and to the floor. “I'll get into some clothes,” she said, and stood up. She moved naturally, without embarrassment.
Windrow thought her most beautiful. As she poked around the guitar for her jewelry and clothes, looking under the bed, discovering a stocking under a lemon, her beauty displayed itself most advantageously, and in spite of the contraindicative circumstances, he managed to continue being aroused.
Sal apparently sensitive to these things, looked at him and snorted. “Looks like the bull got left in the chute,” she observed.
“Here's that record,” the girl said softly, placing a record sleeve on the desk. She kissed him on his mouth, and brushed her now clothed hips against his naked ones.
“Don't forget me. I'll come back for the six-string,” she said, indicating the guitar with a sweep of her arm. She smiled sadly and kissed him again. There were tears in her eyes.
“Jodie, what's going on?” Genuinely puzzled, his eyes searched hers.
“Goodbye,” she said, and hurried out the door and down the hallway. He could hear her heels on the first step of the staircase before he moved to follow her. “Hey,” he said, “wait.” But Sal was still there, her hand on the doorknob. Windrow was just confused enough by the way life had thought to treat him this morning that he'd not noticed Sal retrieve the wrapped roll of quarters from her jacket pocket. He walked right into it. Making a fist around them, she buried ten dollars in change in Windrow's stomach. All the air went out of him with a whoosh. The little jar of Vaseline hit the wall on the opposite side of the hall, but before it made the floor, Sal had delivered the roundhouse with the weighted fist to the side of Windrow's head. He didn't hear Jodie yell, he was unconscious at the time. But he pirouetted on tiptoe, backwards, to his desk as if to answer the phone again. Then, as if the phone had stopped ringing before he got it, he twisted around, as if the conversation with Sal might continue past the interruption. But then the detective suddenly relinquished the pantomimeâor, vice versa, the pantomime flung him from its grasp and he flew incongruously backwards over the desk, sweeping it clean; and crashed into the slatted blinds covering the window behind. He pulled them down on top of himself, to the floor in a heap. Scotch bubbled out of a bottle onto the floor.
Sal opened her hand. Forty quarters cascaded out of their split wrapper onto the floor boards. Then Sal pushed an astonished Jodie back into the hall, smiled mildly, and closed the door behind them.
Several quarters twirled slowly flat, and a couple of others rolled lazily to the far corners of the room.
T
HREE DAYS PASSED BEFORE ANY MENTION OF THE
death of Jodie Ryan's grandfatherâ“Boojum”âshowed up in the newspapers. Windrow read seven California newspapers a day until the item turned up in the Tuesday
L.A. Times
, page 2.
Vegas Cremation
The remains of Edward “Sweet Jesus” O'Ryan, rancher, cowboy, rodeo star, philanthropist and pioneer oilman, were discovered Saturday in his desert retreat at the edge of the Temblor Range, west of Bakersfield, Ca.
Details of Mr. O'Ryan's death were scanty. A family spokeswoman would say only that it was several days before his badly decomposed remains were discovered by a family employee. The body was cremated in a private ceremony, attended only by members of the O'Ryan household, on Monday in Las Vegas. The press were informed of his death Monday night.
O'Ryan began his career as a cowboy in Texas, and by the time he was 25 ran his own cattle on a 2,000 acre ranch. He lost the ranch to the depression, declared
bankruptcy, and joined a travelling rodeo as a stock handler. At this time his first wife, Jodie Dweem of Philadelphia, “packed up and went home to Momma,” according to O'Ryan in an interview granted the
Times
in 1970.
By the time the rodeo got to Bakersfield, Ca., two years later, in 1934, O'Ryan was an accomplished bronco buster and rodeo clown. When a talent scout spotted him and offered him a job doing stunt riding for Western movies, O'Ryan quit the rodeo and headed for Hollywood. But before he left Kern County, O'Ryan made a $50 down payment on a quarter-section of “god-forsaken desert” just north of Taft, California. Nearly forty years later, asked about the purchase, O'Ryan said, “Sweet Jesus, I thought it was the prettiest land I'd ever seen. It reminded me of Texas, but you just can't find any place in Texas with that much creosote bush on it. It was downright green. I thought that little piece of real estate was just about the most
lush
country I'd ever laid eyes on. Figured if Hollywood didn't work out, I could always herd tarantulas.”
O'Ryan went on to spend twelve years in Hollywood, working in over 25 western and adventure films. “The only lines I ever got paid to speak was
Eeyah
and
Argh
,” he told the
Times
in 1970.
By 1947, O'Ryan had remarried, his Hollywood career had stagnated, and he felt he was “too old to be falling off horses for a living.” He and his wife packed up and headed for the desert. Driving through Taft, they noticed a new structure on a hillside just east of town, and stopped to inquire about it. “Was a wood oil
derrick,” he recalled for the
Times
. “Greasy feller called Hardpan was standing next to it. We got to talkin'.”
According to Hughes Tool Co. records, in 1960 O'Ryan Petroleum had 29 wells producing on the original quarter section, and owned or operated 75 wells under a variety of other arrangements, including leases in Texas, Oklahoma, the Gulf of Mexico, and California coastal sites.
In 1970, O'Ryan established Petrofoundlings, a philanthropic organization widely known for its Old Well-driller's Home “for fellers too pooped to poke” and the Old Stuntmen's Home “for fellers too brittle to fall,” both located in the Los Angeles area, as well as worldwide charitable endeavors.
To the end of his life, O'Ryan preferred the simple existence afforded by his two-room shack located in the foothills on his original oil property. Though electricity runs to every pump and well in the valley, he never had electricity installed in his home there. He preferred to read Greek philosophers and Latin poets by lamplight, and to live without “godforsaken modern gadgetry,” except for his Cadillac. “You ever see a cowboy didn't want a Cadillac? Any butt ever sat a mean horse don't want to do without one, or maybe two of 'em, one for each bun.”
Why was O'Ryan known as Sweet Jesus? Long time friend and employee Hardpan, who would not give his last name (“I got one, but I can't pronounce it.”), told the
Times
, “Ever time a well'd come in, whether he was standin' on top of it, like the early days, gettin covered with sâ, or in the penthouse office, in downtown
L.A., knee deep in likewise, I reckon, he'd throw his hat or a monkey wrench or a secretary just as far as he could, and holler, âSweet Jesus.' No, I never knowed him to go to church, âless he was gettin' married.”
Edward O'Ryan is survived by a daughter by his second marriage, Mrs. Kitty Larkin, of Malibu, Ca., and his granddaughter, country-western singer Jodie Ryan, of San Francisco. His third wife, Pamela Neil, divorced from Mr. O'Ryan in 1975, also lives in the Bay Area.