Orange County Noir (Akashic Noir) (3 page)

ee, right now, if the phantom was roaming around like
he did back in 1977, haunting the freeway and busting
up people's cars, stealing food-damn, he even stabbed
a deputy in the neck!-somebody would shoot him. No hesitation. Blow him away. A cop. Hell, a driver. Everybody's got
guns in their cars. The freeway's a battlezone. People follow
each other off the ramps and pull out automatic weapons.
People lean out the window and shoot a nine like Grand Theft
Auto. People die every day just for cutting each other off or
throwing up a finger.

I almost shot the phantom thirty years ago, when he came
out of that hole. His hair all dusty and his shirt in rags. I had
my gun out. I thought I would have to kill him, but I waited to
see if he remembered. If he'd look at my face and shout it out,
what he'd seen me do. If he said it out loud, my life was over.

I saw him just before the rock hit my windshield. It was twilight. Strange word. My father always called it ocaso. In school
they told us twilight, dusk, evening. Before night.

That's the only time the phantom ever appeared. A shadow
lifted up and twisted for a second, in the center divider of the
freeway. I was heading west, toward Santa Ana, and on my
left this movement-like when you have a nightmare as a kid
and you can't see the guy's face, the guy chasing you.

He was small. Compact throw. The rock flew into the glass
and the windshield exploded like music. A crazy instrument.
Most people panicked and that's why they crashed. I felt the
splinters on the side of my face and neck like wasps stinging
me but I kept driving until I could get out of the fast lane and
off to the side.

The blood dripped into my right eye. Thick. It stung. The
salt. I had an extra T-shirt in the backseat and I held it to my
temple. I pulled down the visor. One sliver of glass was stuck
in my neck like Frankenstein's screw. Not by my jugularhigher up, just under my jaw. I pulled it out and not as much
blood came out as from my temple. I held the T-shirt to both
for a long time before I headed to the call box.

It was darker now, red-smog sunset hanging west, where I
was headed to work. But even though I was California Highway Patrol, I had to call this in, stay here, just like all the other
people he'd thrown rocks at. People driving out of Riverside
and the desert, heading to Orange County.

I'd gone to Riverside to visit my friend Manny, who used
to live at Bryant Ranch with me. He and his father gave up
picking oranges and went to work in the packing house near
Casa Blanca. I'd passed the Prado Dam in Corona, where the
big flag they painted for the 1976 bicentennial was getting
dusty after a year.

"Where are you?" the dispatcher said.

I'd gone about a mile and a half trying to get over, off the
freeway. It was a Sunday. He threw rocks at twilight, and usually near Featherly Park.

I squinted at the hills on the north rim of the Santa Ana
Canyon. I knew them better than anyone but him-the phantom. "Bee Canyon," I said.

"What?" she said. "Bee Canyon?"

Nobody would know that name. I told her the mile marker.
Then I hung up. Bee Canyon was already black in the fading
light. Like someone had poured tar down the side of the hills.
We'd called in a fire there last year.

But I'd been up there just before the fire, when I watched
what happened to that girl.

I stood on the side of the freeway, where I'd stood a hundred times before taking reports or writing tickets or hearing
about flat tires, and looked back at the center divider. But the
headlights went straight into my eyes. Between that blinding
and the blood, I couldn't see anything.

I don't remember why they called it Bee Canyon. All those
little canyons along the Santa Ana Canyon, and the Riverside
Freeway winding along the edge. At City College, when I was
taking general ed before law enforcement, I had a professor
who showed its how all the world was just a big irrigation system. The water fell, the water moved, the water shaped the
earth. Bryant Ranch took up a lot of the hills and the canyon
because it had water. The perfect place for citrus and cattle. I
grew up walking all the arroyos and canyons, since I was born
on the ranch. After that college class, I realized it was the
everyday water that wore down the dirt.

My dad was born in Red Camp, and my mom in La Jolla
Camp. They met at a dance in Sycamore Flats, near Bryant
Ranch, and they got married and had me in 1954. All I ever
knew growing up was the ranch, the river, the railroad tracks
along the foothills, and the canyons.

People think Southern California is a desert, that it never
rains here, cause of that stupid song, but in winter rainfall
pours down all those gullies and makes them canyons too.
When I was a kid, I wondered how they picked names: Gyp sum Canyon, Coal Canyon, Brush Canyon, Bee Canyon.

Somebody must have kept bees up there once. Had I seen
the white boxes, the ones that always looked like random
dumping until you heard the hum swell up like the air was
infected all around you?

Bee Canyon was where he was buried. The guy. I thought
of his long brown hair. Gone now. He was a skeleton. The girl
woke up and tried to stumble away, and he punched her in
the face, and he kept coming toward me. Taunting me. "You a
wetback? You just come up outta that river, Frito Bandito? You
swum all the way here from Tijuana?"

The phantom had seen it all. I heard the noise he made.
He'd been living in the canyons for a long time by then. He
knocked down some loose granite while I was digging. But
then I waited for a long time, when I was done, and it seemed
like he couldn't help himself. He looked out of his shelter, a
wall of creosote and rabbitbrush, and I saw his face.

He was darker than me. Small. His hair was wavy and
black, but covered with dust, and one eucalyptus leaf dangled
like a feather near his ear.

I was off-duty. I knew CHP and Orange County Sheriff's
Department and Riverside County had been searching him
out for a long time. The freeway phantom. But I couldn't tell
anyone I'd seen him, because then they'd see the grave in Bee
Canyon.

"He got you, huh?" the Riverside CHP said. Fredow. They
pulled over about ten minutes after I called. "Goddamn.
That's thirty or forty this year. He's gonna kill somebody."

"That one guy he hit lost his eye," his partner said. Anderson.

"And you're CHP? That's what the radio said."

"Yeah," I replied. I pulled the shirt away from my facemy white Hanes looked like one of those tests they make you
stare at. The blots. I'd say flowers if they asked what it looked
like. Flowers that came out of my skin. My mother's favorite
hibiscus, before she died. How did the blood thicken up so
fast? "Heading in for night shift."

"November 6, 1977. Jerry Frias? F-r-i-a-s? How long you
been with O.C.?" Anderson asked.

"Two years."

"Just past rookie," he said. Then, "You born here?" and I
knew what he meant.

"Right there on Bryant Ranch." I pointed to the hills. Not
Mexico.

"Is that right? I was born in Indianapolis."

"Wow-the Indy 500." I tried to be polite. I felt the crusting over on my neck.

"What did he look like? This fucking phantom?" Fredow
asked, writing the report.

"I wouldn't call him that. Makes him sound like a comic
book, and this ain't funny," Anderson said. "I call him a goddamn idiot. I don't care if he's a Vietnam vet. I did a tour in
Nam and I ain't throwin rocks at people in cars. If he chucks
one at me, I'll shoot him."

Fredow frowned at him. He said to me, "No description?"

I shrugged. "It's so damn fast," I answered, and it was true.
"You're doing sixty and he's just there like a shadow. You know.
You turn your head and then you're past him."

Twilight. The Twilight Zone-me and Manny's favorite
show when we were kids. This phantom was like something
Rod Serling would talk about-He glides through a river of
speeding cars as if not afraid, and in his hands, he holds the possibility of death.

"You didn't want to pull over on the divider?"

"Remember what happened in May? The off-duty saw him
in the divider and pulled over, chased him around, and then
the guy stabbed him in the neck with the homemade knife?"

"Damn." Anderson looked at the freeway beside its.

"The deputy he stabbed said he's a short black guy. Named
James," I said.

"But we got other descriptions too."

I knew it was him. And I'd seen the reports over the last
year-six-two, five-nine, white, Chicano, long-haired, shorthaired, huge, thin.

I shrugged again. "A guy with a rock." I bent over and got
it out of the passenger seat. The windshield glass was piled up
like some broken mirror in a fairy tale. "A rock the size of an
orange."

Then their radio crackled, and Anderson leaned in to
take it. "He just got somebody else. A lady."

When I got to work in Santa Ana, someone had already told
Chuck George about it. He'd been special assigned to the
phantom for months.

In the locker room, I felt the bandages over my neck and
temple. I had a cut on my right hand that I hadn't noticed
until the tow truck came for my Nova.

Somebody in the locker room said, "Who the hell runs
through traffic on the Riverside Freeway?"

"How does he do it over and over and not get plastered,
man?"

"Hey, he hit somebody else after he got Frias. Broke five
bones in her face and she's got deep cuts. He's gonna kill
somebody tomorrow."

"George has the tracker," I said, over the lockers. "The one from Oklahoma. He wants to talk to me. He says they're
going out Thursday night."

But all night, driving my route, winding along the 91 and
the 55 and the 22 and the 57, back up the 91, the way the
engine chugged under me when I went after an idiot speeding
near Imperial Highway, the way the exhaust smelled when I
was writing the ticket-the tumbleweeds were green and big
by November, like explosions all along the frontage road right
there, and the guy's arm dangling in his white cuffed shirt, the
burgundy Buick Regal and how he was so pissed-I thought
about how long the phantom had already been living in the
Santa Ana Canyon, how smart he was, how he slid down the
pick he had to have made himself.

"Hijo, what happened to your face?"

I went to see my father almost every day before work. I
got my own apartment a year ago, but all I had in there was a
TV, a couch, two chairs, and one of those coffee tables made
from a burl of wood. The apartment was in Corona, because
it was cheap, so I would leave a couple hours early and stop at
the ranch to see if he needed me to carry anything for him. He
was only fifty-seven, but his shoulders were wrecked, full of
loose cartilage. One day he said, "Stand here," and he moved
his shoulders, and the popping was loud. "Sounds like that
cereal you always wanted."

Rice Krispies. We'd had tortillas for breakfast, lunch, and
dinner. Same as my mother and father had grown up eating.