Salomon – Part One

  David Xavier

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  When Salomon Pico was still running barefoot among the hide traders in the dusty streets of Monterey, his cousin, Pío Pico, had already served as a city councilman in Pueblo de Los Angeles, and was now serving in the desputación, the senate of Alta California. Pío was a man of growing political stature, but he was also an insightful businessman, and it was Pío who taught Salomon his first lesson in money.

  Salomon remembered Pío, twenty years his senior but still a young man himself, as a slim man with a bulging face, massive in a way he did not see on other men, and thick, dark skin that did not lighten near his hairline. Pío lived in a humble adobe hacienda with a palm-thatch roof on a rancho near San Diego then, and he did not carry a gold pocketwatch with a chain dangling across his chest, but he did dine with the political influences who signed over enormous land grants to their friends and family. Under this influence, he dressed like them.

  Kneeling next to Salomon among the drifting movement of Monterey, Pío held a gold coin between his finger and thumb, one of only a few the boy had seen in his lifetime. Pío’s voice came from some deep chamber within, and rattled ironlike from the back of his throat so it seemed his voice did not belong to him. That it was not he who possessed his voice, but rather it was his voice that possessed him.

  “Do you want this coin, Sal?”

  “Yes, I do. Want that coin.”

  “Then convince me to give it to you.”

  Salomon stood before him and after a silent moment, he lifted his ankle and swatted at something live and legged that crawled upon it.

  “How?”

  “Tell me what I may receive in return.”

  The boy looked around. “I will clean and shine your boots.”

  “I had them cleaned yesterday.”

  He pointed to Pío’s horse at the rail. “I will polish your saddle.”

  “There is already a boy who does that for me.”

  Salomon squatted with his hands on his cheeks, then stood again. “Let me see the coin.”

  Pío held it closer, still pinched the way a diamond cutter holds his product to the sunlight to look for impurities. Salomon mimed an inspection.

  “It isn’t real gold.”

  “But it is, Sal. It is.”

  The sunlight caught the coin for a brief moment, and Salomon swiped at it. Pío pulled it back, the coin disappearing into his fist as he laughed, a hollow echo of itself. He waved the coin and rubbed his hands together and held them out, fingers splayed to show the coin had vanished. He reached for Salomon’s hand and yanked it forth, and with monstrous expression, he pressed his thumb to his young cousin’s palm. Salomon looked and found the coin had reappeared there. Pío held the boy by the shoulders, squeezing him as he spoke.

  “Now,” he said. “Hold it out for me.”

  Salomon did as he was told, holding his palm face-up with the coin shivering in the center. Pío reached for it, and Salomon pulled it away. Pío tried again, and the same thing happened. The coin now sat perfectly still, and Salomon held a grin.

  “Good,” Pío said. “Don’t let anyone take what is yours.”

  Pío leaned close and looked left and right before he spoke. “Sal. If you let me have that coin, that coin that you hold in your hand right now, then in one month I will repay you with three coins just like it.”

  Salomon shook his head.

  “Sal. If you let me have that coin, in two months I will repay you with five coins of its equal.”

  Salomon looked at the coin. Again he shook his head.

  Pío inched his face closer, his large, inconsistent features, and looked into his cousin’s eyes, unflinching. The boy’s grin disappeared. Pío stared, his forehead dotted in sweat, until the salt forced him to blink. He lifted one hand to the air and kept it rising above his shoulder, taking his time and allowing it to quiver, as if it was attached to a man who could no longer control its tremors. He began to whistle, his round, dark lips coming together and his breath coming so lightly you could hardly tell if it was a whistle or some mystical whisper. While the boy’s eyes were still on the trembling hand, his mouth slightly parted, Pío was sly with his other hand.

  Salomon closed his mouth and swallowed. His eyes were wet. He needed to blink.

  “And now you have no coin at all.”

  Salomon looked down and the coin was gone.

  “Be smart with your money, Sal. For if you are not careful, someone will take it from you without your knowing.”

  Pío stood and mounted his horse, swinging the reins to turn the animal about and kick up dust.

  “Wait,” Salomon said. “What about my coin?”

  “It was my coin to begin with,” he said. He spoke once more from the saddle before he kicked his horse and rode away in a flurry of dust and shouts. “If you want something in this lifetime, you must find a way to get it. You find a way, and you take it.”

  Salomon’s father worked for the Rancho del Rey, supplying horses and cattle, hides and tallow, and many other supplies to the Mexican Army at the Presidio of Monterey. As a retired commander, José Dolores Pico knew many of the officers and their needs before they knew them themselves. It was here that Salomon learned to work hard, standing elbow to elbow with his brothers, unloading horse blankets, leather, uniforms, boots, buckles, and rifles. He watched a fat military commander negotiate prices with his father. He watched his father receive less and less in pay.

  It was a habit for Salomon and his older brothers to run in the streets and get lost when they visited Monterey. Small as it was, there were people in the city. In the city, there was talk. There were politicians, there were soldiers, there were pretty women in dresses, and men in fine suits. Other children ran the same streets, and he chased them around corners, not knowing their names but knowing the game. It was there at the Presidio of Monterey that Salomon saw his first dead man.

  Juan Carmen Flores was the leader of an outlaw gang. He had robbed the bank in Pueblo de Los Angeles a week after it had opened, pistol-whipping the bank manager to a point where he would have died a day later had Juan Carmen Flores not shot him on the bank floor. The manager’s arms and legs lurched and held stiff off the ground, slowly lowering to the floor. Witnesses had to point to his headless body and identify him to authorities. Flores had held up a wagon train of migrating mexicans as it crossed the San Joaquin River. He held the pointman in the river and watched through the clear water flow, like looking through thick glass, as the man called out in silent screams. He held him there until his thrashing subsided. Then he let him go for his people to watch float among the rocks. He once cut a man’s horse open and watched it collapse and struggle in the street, entrails bubbling forth, until the dust rushed black beneath it. The horse owner ran, cutting back and forth to make for a difficult target. The outlaw allowed him a sporting distance before he mounted his own horse and clubbed the man down.

  From behind a barrel, Salomon watched the outlaw spit insults and grin at the officers who read aloud his sentence of hanging. He heard him shouting into the black hood, above the small crowd, and continue murmuring even with the rope taut and jerking until he swung motionless moments later. Salomon’s father found the boy staring, alone in front of the hangman’s platform as people walked by with turned heads, a small child stock-still among the movement.

  When he finally did speak it was in the dim light of the study that night, where his father had collapsed from the day’s exhaustion in the chair by the window. Other men would have used this time of day to drink, however, he never did. He was content to drink water. Salomon approached and held out a coin he had taken from his father’s pouch, the one marked with the emblem of the Mexican Army. His father’s face was cranial without light, eyeless in the shadow.

  “Where did you get that coin?”

  “I took it.”

  “Took it from where? Who does it belong to?”

  “It was yours.”

  “You mean it is mine.”

  Salomon stepped closer. “Convince me it belongs to you.”

  His father leaned forward, his legs wide at the knees, his arms lifeless and hanging between his thighs. Salomon held firm.

  “It is mine because a ranking official, a man more important than you or I, gave it to me as payment. I worked hard for that coin.”

  “I worked too.”

  “You did. Yes. You moved supplies from one place to another. But where did those supplies come from? How did they get there? Did you know the people who bought them? Where did they come from? Answer me.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I did that. When you can do all that, I’ll give you a payment. Until then, I’ll give you your supper and a place to sleep.”

  His father sat back with a sigh, disappearing back into the shadows. He rubbed his face. “What you saw today. That man. How do you feel about it?”

  “I am not scared. They had him wear a hood.”

  “You are not frightened by it?”

  “No.”

  “You must understand he was not a good man. He was a murderer of his own people. He was an abuser of women and animals. He took money that did not belong to him. Now, tell me. Did he deserve to die?”

  “Yes. I believe so. Don’t you?”

  “It is not up to me. It is not up to man. If a man behaves like an animal, it is up to God whether or not he wants to punish him like an animal.”

  His father did not move. He sat deep in shadow, his elbows on the rests, his fingers touching in front of him. Salomon looked down, and, after a brief pause, stepped forward with the coin held out. His father leaned forward and put his hand on the child’s head.

  “Keep it, my son. It is yours,” he said, and he fell into a racking cough.

  His father died that same year, sitting among his nothings at the Rancho del Rey in the ragged chair by the window. A lifetime of service in the military, and decades spent building coastal missions in Alta California, and he died with little possessions. Salomon’s mother, Maria Ysabel, moved to Monterey, the capital, the city they visited so often, and took Salomon with her. His brothers were older, and stayed to work at the ranch. While they were sweating among the cowhides and butchered meat, the cold bladders and intestines stuffed with tallow, waving their arms at the cattle in the fields, Salomon sat among other students or read aloud from his textbooks at the front of a classroom.

  When class let out, he and Arturo Leyva ran across town to sit with their legs and arms dangling through the presidio fence slats, and watch the army drills. They watched the field taken in a bitter smelling roll of smoke at the crack of a dozen rifle shots, and the targets rip apart downrange. They watched the lancers ride in formation, wheeling about in the field, one after another, in a precise display of horsemanship.

  “I’d be a swordsman,” Arturo said. “If I was in the army.”

  Salomon’s eyes blinked once as he turned back to the field. “I’d be a marksman.”

  The boys fell from the fence as one and wrestled in the dirt. Halfway through town they split their separate ways. Salomon entered his home through the secret door he had cut in the floor of the raised storage room. He crawled under the house stilts, slithering at one point with his arms at his sides, and came up beneath the storage room to find his panel had been replaced. He pressed on it but it had been secured from inside. He stepped across the porch on his toes and eased the screen door open.

  “Salomon.”

  He swallowed and went into the next room where his mother’s voice had come from. She was standing over a basin, washing clothes. He stepped in, playing with his hands.

  “Yes?”

  “Our house has a front door on it,” she said softly, her eyes never leaving her work. “Built specifically for people going in and out.” She looked up and touched her sleeve to her lips. “Just use the door, son.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  He stood there, unmoving. The clock on the mantle clicked away. His mother said, “Wash up.”

  As a widow, Maria Ysabel had gained new wrinkles. What was once an ageless face had become tired in a year. Her black hair now divided with strands of gray that shown white. She draped her head in a shawl, tied beneath her chin. She spoke in whispers. Yet men pursued her. They came to her door on Sundays wearing uncomfortable suits and bearing flowers, which she accepted with a smile to avoid being rude. Salomon observed one day a man with dark moustaches swept to the side of his face, wearing boots with medallions on the toes, sweep his hat off his head and bow so low his head dipped below his waist, his arm lifted to the side in gentle dramatics.

  “Your father was the kindest, gentlest man on earth,” she told Salomon with her back against the door. “He had no need for romantic fusses. And I didn’t either.”

  “Then how does a man get the attention of a woman?”

  She looked at him. “Just be who you are. She will see the passion in your eyes. A woman can see through any disguise anyway.”

  With this new advice, Salomon went to school the next day and sat beside the girl he liked. She always wore her hair pulled behind her neck or tied up on hot days, never in a braid over her shoulder as the indian children did. On this day, she wore her hair twisted in a bun at the back of her head. Salomon did not understand how the twist worked, where it began and where it ended, and he had spent much time looking at it from the other side of the room with his head cocked. Now, sitting next to her, he did not look at her or even ask a simple question of her. He was himself. When this did not work, he fixed his eyes on her and did not blink so she could see into them. She raised her hand and told the teacher that his stares made her uncomfortable. The next day he wore an old hat of his fathers, and brought one of the many gifts of flowers that Maria Ysabel had placed in a pile on the corner desk. He tried to duplicate the flourish he had seen the man with the moustaches perform. This time Juana Vasquez laughed. He looked up, and she was smiling.

  While her mother thought she was playing with her friends, Juana followed Salomon to the presidio to see the military drills and the horses. He looked on with wide eyes, but Juana yawned. And when the soldiers knelt in the field and fired their rifles, she blinked and covered her ears. He led her by the hand to the pond he had found behind the schoolyard, where he and Arturo waded in up to their waists and scooped at tadpoles. Juana sat in the grass, and when Salomon finally turned, smiling, with his fist raised and dripping, she had her head back and had been looking at the clouds.

  “She will never marry you,” Arturo told him later in the field. They marched together in the tall grass, chopping down thistles with carefully chosen sticks.

  “Why? Does she not like me?”

  “Because she has older brothers.”

  “So do I.”

  “But yours will not choose your wife for you when you are older. That is what my brothers did for my sister. They did not like the first man who asked my father if he could marry her. My father did not like him either, and told him so. But the man continued to ask. He came to the house late and talked to my sister through the window. My other sisters share a room with her and they told. My father was afraid the man would run off with my sister, and my sister continued to beg him to bless the marriage, so he finally told her yes. But the next day my brothers chased the man away with clubs. The man came back, and my brothers broke his arms. He came back again months later, and they cut his face. He did not come back again, and my sister married another man who owns land and cattle. She does not like him, but my father does.”

  Arturo looked back. Salomon had stopped.

  “Do her brothers like you?”

  Salomon looked up. “I don’t know.”

  Ismael Vasquez was a soldier at the presidio. He would know how to fight, he may carry a knife, and he would not be afraid of the sound a gun made when you pulled the trigger. Salomon had seen Ismael at church many times. The Vasquez family took up an entire pew and stood from tallest to shortest, Juana on one end and Ismael on the other. He never smiled, not even when greeting those around him. His face was always serious, as if angry.

  But he was not as ugly as Raul Vasquez, the second from the end on the tall side, who worked as a hog butcher on the Ranchito del Playa Negro, a ranch that spread all the way to the coast. It was said the sands ran black with the blood of the pigs. These were pigs that Raul Vasquez tore open with a hooked knife and an unflinching face, a mouth that pulled his face down so the lines from his nose to the corners of his frown were so deep they were shadowed even on bright days.

  It did not matter because Salomon did not sit next to Juana any longer. Manuel Santiago had taken his seat. When Salomon stood in front of her that first day, hoping she would have the answer for how they would sit together again, Manuel stood and looked down at him until he left.

  The next day Salomon left his house while the streets were still moonlit, and sat hidden around the corner, shivering against the school wall, until he heard the teacher arrive and unlock the door. He walked in before the teacher could even set her things down, and took his seat next to Juana’s. He sat with a smile as the sun rose in the window and the other students trickled in. Manuel Santiago stared from the door but Salomon sat, head held high. Manuel told him to get out of the chair but he did not. Manuel stood over him and told him he had better get out of that chair before Juana arrives or he would beat him so badly he would never want to show his face in front of her again. Salomon did not move or speak, and the bigger boy eventually moved away but kept his eyes on him. When the teacher left the room, Manuel stood and hit Salomon across the face with the hard edge of his book, and broke a ruler against his forehead. When Juana arrived, Manuel was in the seat next to hers, and Salomon sat in the back of the room with his head buried in his arms.

 

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