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Category:
Historical Fiction
Publisher: Solstice Publishin
Pages: 408
Copyright: 2013
ISBN-13: 97814590470764
Price: $2.99 (eBook)
It's 1908. After his brother is stabbed to death outside a San Francisco bar, Andy Maxwell discovers he is on his own to stop the vendetta meant to wipe out his family and their Sierra Nevada Ranch.
“Die you Maxwell son of a bitch.”
Those are the words Michael Yellow Squirrel spews as he stabs Andy Maxwell’s younger brother to death outside a San Francisco bar on a foggy night in 1908. That curse and other evidence leads Andy to believe that the killing is part of a vendetta against his family. He vows to find the conspirators and thwart their plot, but he can convince no one—not the police, not the U.S. Army, not even his own mother—that the killing is anything more than the sad result of a brawl between a pair of drunks. So if he’s going to prevent the destruction of his family and their Sierra Nevada ranch, the powerful realm it’s taken generations to build, he’s on his own
Andy’s quest for mysteries and motives behind the scheme carries him from California to Wyoming and deep into his family’s pioneer past. He unearths disturbing secrets, including the little matter of his own racial heritage. He finds himself plunged into a romantic dilemma involving himself, a blonde debutante, and an Arapaho princess. What began as an attempt to foil a conspiracy leads to disturbing questions about his own values, about those of the frontier that spawned them.
1908 is more than a hundred years gone, but nothing’s more modern than the racism, political corruption and sexual exploitation which abound throughout The Maxwell Vendetta. All that, and a touching story of mother and son struggling toward reconciliation even as they remain at odds over all that’s precious to both of them.
Excerpt
JULY 3 1908
CHAPTER ONE
Sure, Julian was drunk. It was Friday night, after all, a San Francisco longshoreman’s night to howl. And Independence weekend besides. Since when does downing a few too many merit a death sentence? Let alone for a nineteen year old? Nineteen. That’s all my younger brother was when he was murdered.
* * * *
We’d agreed on a 9:00 P.M. rendezvous at the Fandango Club, an ersatz Mexican dive on Jackson Street famed for Consuela and her Mexican hat dance. Tantalus never yearned for his legendary grapes more than Julian and I lusted after Consuela. Her long legs, angelic ululations, flowing tresses, high-heeled boots clicking like castanets. She’d stroke her bare body with a pair of glittery sombreros that revealed little, but promised the universe.
I was on time, as usual. Julian was not, as usual. He missed these meetings about as often as he kept them, but tonight was special. I’d graduated from the University of California that very afternoon, was ready to celebrate, but by 11:00 P.M., neither Julian nor Consuela had appeared. The night looked like a bust.
A lackluster Mariachi band played a mournful “Oh, Susannah.” From time to time someone would yell for Consuela, but she never appeared. The Fandango smelled like most San Francisco waterfront bars—a miasma of liquor and sweat hovering over a rotting marine odor emanating from floors and walls likely salvaged from some shipwrecked hull. I was almost always in a frolicsome humor at the Fandango, so the reek before never bothered me. Tonight it darkened my mood.
I sat on a stool, back to the bar, and took the first swig of my fourth mescal, watched a sultry lass in a black Merry Widow festooned with scarlet ribbons settle briefly on the lap of a deck hand sporting a watch cap and pea coat, then inveigle him into a stroll behind a red curtain near the bandstand. Another lovely headed my way, her third approach, and I’d just about decided to make her my Friday night consolation companion when I heard a “toot, toooot” from the front door. Julian had arrived.
Suddenly the gloom evaporated. When Julian stepped into a room, everyone sought to bask in the sun of his company. Eyes turned toward his sandy hair and beaming smile as naturally as daisies to the sun. Handsome he was, but I always thought his joie de vivre drew people more than his looks. He worked his way through a gauntlet of handshakes like a politician while I ordered fresh drinks. He finally reached me and seized his glass.
“Mud in your eye, Big Brother,” he said. We tossed our shots down in a gulp. Julian closed his eyes, shook his head, and blubbered his lips like a horse.
“Again, Dan,” he called to the barkeep. “How’s tricks?”
“Can’t complain, Julian,” the bartender said as he poured. “You paying or is Big Brother, here, picking up the tab?”
“Hey, on the cuff.”
“No can do, Julian. Cash only till you clear up what’s overdue.”
“Hear that, Andy? The whole Maxwell empire at my fingertips, and they won’t even advance me a jigger of cheap booze.”
I flipped the bartender two silver dollars. “That ought to keep our glasses full for a while longer, eh, Dan?”
“Keep the cash coming, Big Brother, and I’ll keep pouring.”
I turned to Julian. “Glad you made it. Another five minutes, I’d have been in the back with Siren Jenny over there.” My prospective date had deserted me for a gent in a threadbare frock coat.
“Oooh,” he said, “You’re liable pick up some crawly critters from the girls in here.”
“I’d name them after you because you kept me waiting so long I turned desperate.”
“There’s many a slip twixt one bar and the next in these parts,” Julian said. “Especially on a Friday night.”
“And what slipped you up this time?”
“Andy,” he said, “not half an hour ago I had enough cash sitting in front of me to take us both around the world and back again. Just needed an easy-way six. What do I get? An easy way seven. All those pictures in my head of brown women and round coconuts? Poof. Dan, hit us again. We got to use up Andy’s money.”
My glass barely needed topping off, but Julian’s was empty.
“Julian, are you open to a suggestion?” I knew it was a stupid question the second I asked it, but when he got this far into his cups, I somehow couldn’t help acting like a parent. A year earlier, Julian had stormed off our Sierra ranch after an argument with Mother and declared his intention to adventure his way over the seven seas. So far, he’d gotten no closer to sailing out the Golden Gate than the wharves, dives, and fleshpots of the Barbary Coast.
“Andy, I know you’re gonna tell me I should work my way to Tahiti, but why? Trip of a lifetime and I’ll miss the benefits if I’m scrubbing decks.” He surveyed the teeming space before us and gestured toward a nearby poker game, one of several scattered among the tables.
“Do you have any idea how much money’s in play out there right now, Brother? Thousands. And this isn’t even a proper gambling hall. I need only one little jackpot. It’ll come. And soon. I can feel it.”
“Perhaps if you went back to the Circle M…” Still the parent. Still the fool.
“Those bar girls will be wearing nuns’ habits before I go crawling back there, Andy. You know that.”
I started to object, swallowed my words. “Forgive me for sounding like Mother?” I lifted my glass.
“And me for playing the naughty child?” We emptied our glasses and turned to Dan for a refill. A grizzled man in a checked shirt and red suspenders sidled between us.
“Evening, Julian,” he said.
“Howdy, Mitchell.” Julian focused his gaze on the row of bottles behind the bar.
“Time’s up, Julian,” he said.
“Bad manners, Mitchell,” I said. “You want to apologize now?” Julian waved, shook his head.
“I have until Monday,” he said. He was smiling.
“I don’t trust I’ll find you Monday.”
“Have a drink on me, Mitchell, and I’ll see you Monday noon, Pier Twenty-Three. Set him up, Dan.”
“Come on, Little Brother,” I said. “Let’s go. The Bella Vista or some place that smells better.”
“Great idea.” Julian shoved away from the bar, yelled “toot, toooot,” and plunged back into the crowd like a seal into the waves. I followed in his wake, glanced over my shoulder to find Mitchell hurling a poisonous glare across his free whisky as we ducked through the door, up the stairs, and into the cold murk of July’s fog.
“How much do you owe that Mitchell?” I said. Julian teetered a little on the last step up to the boardwalk. I extended a steadying hand.
“The man’s only trying to persuade himself he’s a hardcase.” He regained his balance and stepped to the curbside gaslight.
“I’m sorry to admit it, Julian, but the Bella Vista’s beyond my purse. I heard there’s a new can-can girl at The Cave down on Kearny—”
I never finished my thought because a huge shadow loomed from the fog and lurched into Julian with such force that he had to grab the light pole to keep his feet.
“Watch who you’re pushing around,” Julian said. The cone of thin light revealed a man who was big and—judging from the dusky skin and lank, shoulder-length hair—Indian.
“I’ll walk where I want to walk,” he said.
“Seems to me you haven’t learned how to walk at all,” Julian said.
Julian was more of an athlete and fighter than I ever was. But he was smaller-boned and shorter, full of drink and in no shape to beat down an opponent several inches taller and thirty or forty pounds heavier. Still, a terrier will attack a mastiff, and Julian shoved the bigger man, who moved not an inch but simply lifted Julian and threw him toward me. I grabbed my brother’s shoulders, put him behind me, and stepped between the combatants.
“Hold it. There’s no need—” A kick to my privates stopped me mid-sentence, mid-stride, and felled me like a rotten tree. We get tested. Sometimes we pass, sometimes we don’t. I failed that night, watched—hurting, helpless, gasping—as the man I would soon know as Michael Yellow Squirrel pulled a knife, rammed it low and hard into Julian’s belly, then sliced upwards, the way a man guts a trout. Julian groaned, raised to his tiptoes, and seemed to float for a moment on the point of the blade, a hovering angel.
“Die, you Maxwell son of a bitch,” Yellow Squirrel snarled. Then he pulled the knife free and watched Julian crumple silently to the boardwalk. I lifted myself to a knee as the Indian turned my way. Certain I was next, I readied myself to launch toward his knees, though what I would do if I managed to bring him down I still can’t say. Luckily, I didn’t have to find out. Whistles sounded and two policemen brandishing pistols and nightsticks bounded from the gloom.
“Drop it, redskin. No scalps tonight.” The Indian hesitated, then flicked his wrist and sent the knife thunking into the boardwalk, where it quivered beside Julian’s trembling foot. Then he raised his hands in surrender.
I scrambled toward my brother. His shirt and flesh were ripped and soaked red, his eyes blank as unminted coins. I looked up and saw Yellow Squirrel smile as the policemen put him in handcuffs.
“You’re too damned late,” I yelled to the cops as I tried to push together the edges of the bloody crevice in Julian’s belly. It was like trying to close the very gates of hell.
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