“Hi,” I called.
He nodded but said nothing and didn’t turn his head. After a few seconds Corinne Ramirez appeared from the trees behind him, carrying a scuffed leather satchel. She half-raised a hand when she saw me, then plodded towards me, ignoring the man in the blue shirt.
“You Bob?”
“Only very occasionally.”
She frowned.
“Sorry. People normally call me Robert.”
She shrugged. “It was too dark to see you real good last night. Did you find that person you were looking for?”
“No. Well, sort of. It was more that she found me. Up to a point.”
Not a good way of putting it. It hung in the air between us, like an unresolved chord. I hurried on, before the oddness of what I’d said sank in.
“And that’s why I’m here. She was a journalist too. And she thought I should find out more about your father’s story.”
“Was a journalist? Did something happen to her?”
“She lost her job.” Better: I was thinking on my feet now. “When Evan Bone bought the paper she was working on.”
“What’s her name?”
“Anne Grainger.”
She shook her head: Means nothing to me. “That man,” she said. “He’s screwed up a lot of people’s lives.”
“Yes. Including mine.”
I waited for her to ask how, exactly. She said nothing. Eventually I went on, “So you needn’t worry that I’m just going to write a piece of Evan Bone propaganda.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Propaganda. That’s what it’s been, pretty much all of it. The stuff people have written about us. We want to tell your side of the story, they say. So we talk to them. And then when it comes out, they say we’re liars. Just trying to get a hold of a whole load of money. So’s we can live in a penthouse suite and drive around in one of them big German cars.”
“I brought some examples of my work, if you’d like to see it.” I opened my bag and started rummaging inside. “I haven’t got any of Anne’s, that’s my friend, but I could email you something.”
She shook her head. “I don’t need to see anything.”
“You sure? I’d want to, if it was me.”
“That’s OK.”
I looked at her, puzzled. Her face had the mass, the stillness, the weathered endurance of a Mayan statue. And I saw, suddenly, that she was right. What could reading a piece on Robert Adam’s last Scottish masterpiece or Gaudi’s Barcelona possibly tell her about whether I could be trusted with her father’s story?
“All right,” I said, closing the bag again. “Is there somewhere we can sit down?”
She walked over to the parapet and lowered herself gingerly on to it, like a crane depositing its load. I went and sat next to her.
“Why did you want to meet up here?” I said.
“No spies.”
I hoisted my eyebrows at the man in the blue shirt.
“He’s my brother,” she said.
I expected her to introduce me, or at least tell me what he was doing there. But she seemed to feel she’d explained enough.
“So,” she said, turning back to me, “you read about our dad?”
“A bit. I didn’t really know what to make of it.”
She sighed. She couldn’t have been more than thirty, but life had already taken a toll on her. Her dark heavy face was scored with lines. Her thick hair was pulled into a tight black pigtail, as if to prevent it distracting her from the business of getting through the day. One of those women, you imagined, who’d been forced to take on adult responsibilities when she was still a child and had been shouldering them ever since.
“Tell me,” she said.
I gave her a quick précis of what I’d learned.
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s about it. What they say about him.”
“It isn’t true?”
She shook her head. “Well, some of it’s true. He had a tough time growing up. Kids picking on him at school. You know”—flapping a hand against her mouth to make a Hollywood-western war whoop. “If he stood up for himself, got in a fight, his dad would give him a belting. So after a bit he’d say he wasn’t Indian, he was Mexican. And them Global Village lawyers, they picked on that to make it seem like he was a liar, he made it all up. But he wasn’t a liar. He just said it to keep out of trouble. He always knew we were Ohlone.”
“Do you mind if I record this?” I said, taking my phone out.
She eyed it for a moment. “OK.”
I switched on the voice recorder and laid it on the wall between us. For a few seconds she looked silently out at the bay. Then she said,
“You know the history of this place?”
“Not really. Not well.”
“When the Spanish arrived, seventeen whenever it was, don’t remember the exact date, they took all of us Indians round here, the Ohlones, and forced us into missions. Reducing us, that’s what they called it. My people, they put us in the San Vincenzo Mission, made us work for the missionaries, killed us or beat us if we tried to run away. Then the Mexicans kicked the Spanish out, turned the missions into Rancherias. They’re still reducing us, though. They take our religion, our culture, our language. But all the time, we never forget who we are. Each generation passes it on to the next one. You are the people of this place. This is your land. You are Ohlone.”
She scanned my face, to see if I believed her. I nodded.
“And then Uncle Sam showed up and kicked the Mexicans out,” she said. “And Uncle Sam decided we been reduced so much there aren’t real Ohlone left. Other groups, they get recognized as tribes, given a reservation, all that stuff. But not us. We’re just told we’re not Indians anymore, and we have to get off our butts and root for ourselves. But we know who we are. You need the government to tell you who you are?”
It was such an alien idea that I had to think about it for a moment. I shook my head.
“My grandmother, my dad’s mom,” she said. “She made a list of everyone, all the families, who they were descended from. Here, I’ll show you.” She unbuckled the satchel, took out a notebook, opened it. “This is our family. See? Carter Ramirez. His mom was Millie Ignacio. Her mom”—tracing the progression with her finger—”was Teresa Guttiérez. Her dad was Joe Guttiérez, when I was a kid, people would talk about Joe all the time, he was a famous cowboy, worked on ranches all over the state. His dad was Alfonso. And”—turning the pages—“you can go the whole way back to this guy, Ignacio, see? He was the first one they brought into the mission and baptized.”
“May I look?”
She handed me the book and watched while I leafed through it. It didn’t feel like a fake. The material had obviously been added at different times using different pens, some of it in ink that had begun to discolor. There was a lot of crossing out, with emended dates and comments crammed into odd spaces. And there were small details—ladies’ man; lost an eye and two fingers in a fight; Indian doctor—that seemed too particular to have been invented.
“Yes,”