The Siren's Tale Read Online Free PDF

by the cojones before he coughs up a secret about a loaded White-Eye grandmother.
    “ When you track down…your grandmother…in San Francisco, you tell her…I stuck to my part of the bargain. Don't be afeared to ask her…for more dough.”
    “ I will handle her all right,” mutters Dakota. He adds darkly: “Ten to one, more cash is hid under Granny's mattress than you made in your whole life.”
    Any money coming Pa's way, including a mysterious check that appeared annually, was squandered on gambling and booze. Father and son lived poorer than the poorest Oglala Lakota on the Pine Ridge reservation, though it needn't have been that way.
    Caesar was born in 1902, the bastard of an unmarried, unnamed woman, but his adoptive parents were childless, doting, and well-off. The Lawless couple gave their son every advantage, but he was forever running away from their San Antonio ranch.
    As a teenager, Caesar overheard his parents discussing his birth mother. He gathered she was an actress living in San Francisco who had made a name for herself in the film industry. When Caesar cut out one final time, he headed for California in the beckoning light of her distant star. But the only job he could hold down for more than a month at a time was raising tents and shoveling shit-stained hay for a carnival traveling the length of the state.
    By 1947, Caesar was flat broke and out of options. Not even the bearded lady in the circus would take him in. One cloudy day, he hitched a ride on a turnip truck and rode from Sacramento to San Francisco. He traveled on the strength of a strong intuition, which in turn hinged on a feature story in the movie industry papers he followed.
    A famous actress/film writer, Nevada Carson, was retiring from her stage career in San Francisco. A sidebar article featured her daughter, a renowned psychologist who had chosen to live in Alta, Wyoming, a tiny hamlet in the nation's least populous state.  Having perfect recall, Caesar made a serendipitous connection with the town's name. On his birth certificate, which was hidden in a wood box at the back of Mrs. Lawless's bedroom closet, the place of birth and death for his natural father (name, “Deceased”) was recorded as Alta, Wyoming.
    Chances were good that the psychologist had family roots in Alta. If his hunch proved correct, the two famous women, Nevada Carson and Dr. Chloe Vye, were, respectively, his birth mother and half-sister, and hallelujah! his long dry spell was over. In San Francisco, a ticket seller Caesar picked up when the Rialto Theatre went dark told him Miss Carson lived in a Victorian townhouse on Nob Hill, a block down from the Fairmont Hotel.
    His knock at an imposing front door was answered by a mannish-looking Asian woman, who rudely looked Caesar up and down. Her attitude changed when he said he was Miss Carson's son. He waited in the foyer, and then Miss Carson herself appeared.
    She was beyond gorgeous and almost inhumanly luminous. She looked thirty years younger than her age. An old stringed instrument dangling from the crook of one arm struck him as peculiar.
    He tried flashing his dazzling smile, but his mouth was too dry.
    “ Come in, Caesar,” she said in a sultry voice. “I've been expecting you.”
    He was shown into a formal parlor decorated with Italian marble statuary, crystal chandeliers, Victorian engravings, and Native American tapestries. There was a curious, primitive aura of magic in the air. Miss Carson lounged in a one-armed divan and listened to his rambling life story without once taking her topaz eyes from his face.
    “ In my dreams, I saw you as a redheaded, good-looking man, and so you are.”
    “ I heard you give me my name. I figured it was high time we seen each other in person, maybe git better acquainted.”
    He was stunned when, in a tone admitting no argument, his mother said they were never to meet again, and he was never to divulge their family connection to anyone.
    “ You must do as I