Orange County Noir (Akashic Noir) (4 page)

My cuts were scabbing over, two days later, and they
itched like hell.

"The phantom," I said. "He busted my windshield."

"Yours?"

"He doesn't know who's driving." I leaned against the tractor. He had it set up to disc weeds. "The tracker's going
out tomorrow with a search party. Tell everybody we'll be up
in Brush Canyon. He thinks the guy is holed up there."

"We?"

"He told me to come along because I know the area. He
and George have been talking to people in the canyon."

People who lived on the ranches had caught glimpses for
more than a year. He'd thrown a rock at one of the workers
driving a tractor one day, and my father had called me. Someone had seen the phantom bathing in a stock tank up where
the cattle ran. Someone else had been out riding a horse and
saw him butchering a goat, but that was last year. "He's been
here a long time now," my father said, easing himself off the
fender. "He's living on food from the golf course."

The Green River Golf Club was just to the east. "How do
you know?" I asked. We started walking to the shed where he
kept the smudge pots.

"I met one of the cooks. He's seen the guy taking bags out
of the dumpster in the back."

"Oh yeah?" I said. My father stopped and sat on the
wooden bench near the picnic table where he repaired tractor
parts and pruning shears and whatever else needed fixing. In
the open door of the shed I saw the smudge pots lined up like
one-armed soldiers.

"Remember when he knocked over every single one a
those?" my father said, rubbing his shoulder. "Took its all night
to fill 'em back up with fuel and he did it again. I wanted to
kill him."

"Kill him?" I looked at my father's hand, the wrinkles filled
with black rime from the citrus rinds, the dark lines never
erased since I'd been a child no matter how hard he scrubbed
with cleanser.

"Not kill him," my father said wearily, glancing up at me.
I was a cop now. "I was just so damn tired. And the kerosene
was running down the irrigation lines. El fantom-like a mo-
coso, but they say he's a grown man."

Mocoso. A bad little kid. Why would he throw rocks all
the time? I said, "Maybe we'll find him tomorrow."

I took all the bagged fertilizer off the truck and into the
barn. When I walked back to my car, with the new windshield
thick and green in the afternoon light, I stopped at the house,
like I did every time. Three rooms. I looked inside the front
window at the altar for my mother.

I only remembered the cough. I was about five. She
coughed all winter. You could hear it in the front room, where
I slept, and from inside the trees when we picked the valencias in January. The crows used to wake its up with those
raspy caws, and I thought it was them, but it was my mother.
Pneumonia.

The altar had not changed since she died that year. Plastic
wisteria blossoms arranged all around her picture, and new
roses every day in a vase on the little table underneath, with
the veladora glowing faint. He left it lit all day, no matter how
many times I told him not to. The flame was little, though,
inside the glass. Maybe as big as a grain of rice.

He thought I didn't know about the two babies, but I did.

The long drive into the ranch was lined with pomegranate
trees. In spring the flowers were like pink umbrellas hanging
everywhere. But now, in November, the old pomegranates were
hanging on the branches like dead Christmas ornaments.

There were only about fourteen families left on the ranch.
People kept telling my father the owner was going to sell it
next year, and someone would build housing tracts all the way up to the hills. "Yorba Linda will be a big city," they said. "The
canyon will be full of people instead of cows."

I got on the freeway and the center divider was full of
trash and bottles.

"Keep on truckin, baby," the radio said. "You got to keep on
truckin. "

By the time I pulled into the station, it was "One toke over
the line, sweet Jesus, one toke over the line."

The words were still in my head when I got dressed. The
tracker was from Oklahoma, and his voice was country. They'd
hired him from El Cajon Border Patrol and he'd been here off
and on since May, when the deputy got stabbed. George and
some deputies had been out on a bunch of occasions, sometimes on motorcycles and horseback, and they hadn't seen
anything. So they got Kearney.

He didn't say much, but I heard him tell someone, "I plain
love putting together a puzzle like that." They'd been looking
at maps for weeks. I couldn't tell what he thought when he
glanced at me, so I hadn't said anything except that I used to
hunt with my father in the canyons.

"What you hunt?"

"Rabbits."

He had a mustache like a black staple turned upside
down. A brimmed hat. They called him a sign-cutter and a
man-tracker. Some of the other guys in the locker room joked
that he was like Disneyland-Daniel Boone or some shit.
He'd been working Border Patrol for seventeen years, tracking Mexicans trying to cross.

He looked at me. "Rabbits. Why?"

I looked back. "Dinner."

Then he nodded. "We ate a lot of rabbits in Oklahoma,"
he said. "Let's go."

We got there when the sun was in the eucalyptus windbreak,
not twilight yet, and hiked toward Brush Canyon. It was Kearney and four other Border Patrol sign-trackers, three deputies, George, and me. La Palma Road went along the canyon,
with the river and freeway west, and the train tracks and hills
east.

"He crosses the damn river every time he hits the freeway," someone said. "How the hell does he do it? He fords the
river, fords the traffic, all to throw a rock?"

The tracker had seen where he entered the river, and
where he left, and he thought the guy was living in Brush
Canyon.

We moved up toward the foothills. We were going to stake
out the mouth of the canyon and the trail he used lately to get
to the freeway or the golf course.

I scratched the cut on my neck, under the bandage. I
could smell the cooking fires from the ranch. How many times
had the phantom watched my father, or me?

Did he remember my face from when I dug the hole, when
I pushed the body into it after I checked for the bullet?

My service revolver was on my hip. I was fifth in line and
the foothills loomed up like they had all my life, in fall, the
rocks smelling cool, not like summer. The brittlebush and
creosote giving off their scent. The animals stirring in late
afternoon.

"First camp was Bee Canyon, right?" someone said. "That's
where he lit the fire last year."

"What was he doing?"

"Cooking. In a coffee can. Musta got out of control."

"He was camped in Coal Canyon after that. But that one's
been empty a long time."

Kearney frowned. No one talked after that.

Kearney was sure it was Brush Canyon. He said the
tracks kept leading us away from there-that's what any
animal does when it wants the hunter to stay away from the
nest or den.

We're just animals, my father said. Except our souls, the
priest said. The phantom was a man, but he'd been living like
an animal for years. We moved up past the railroad tracks and
the rocks smelled of sulfur along the embankment.

He had a knife.

If he saw my face, if he moved toward me, if he started
shouting, I would shoot him. He had a knife. He was armed.
Justifiable.

I knew the rules. I'd known them last year when the guy
kept walking toward me.

Kearney studied the ground every step of the way. He figured the phantom had to leave Brush Canyon on the trail he'd
been using for days, and we each had a place to hide. I kept
looking up, since Kearney was looking down. Brush Canyon
was a jagged arroyo, steep sides and then slopes studded with
granite boulders that turned pink now with the sun fading.
A few rogue pepper trees, like in every canyon, and no other
green because winter rain hadn't started yet.

Was he watching us, all this time? He was a crazy little
kid, my father said. Was he laughing? He wouldn't throw a
rock down here, because we'd find him then, but he'd stand in
the center divider of the 91 where hundreds of people could
see him for a few minutes, until he launched it like a Little
League pitcher.

The air was purple now, the railroad tracks ran red and
shiny as Kool-Aid. This was the time my father used to say I
had to head home. "When the silver tracks turn red, or the rocks turn pink, or the river turns black, you better be close to
here. Or La Llorona will get you."

We were fanned out on the possible trails, about a hundred yards from the canyon. I lay behind the boulder Kearney
had pointed to. The others kept going.

I listened to their footsteps move away.

They knew nothing about La Llorona. She was a beautiful
woman who had killed her children over a man, and now she
roamed the riverbank searching for them, or for some other
kids to replace them. That's what my mother had told me,
before she died. She was lying in her bed, and I was six, and
she didn't want me wandering.

She didn't know I'd watched in the night after the two babies came out of her, with the old woman from up the ranch to
help. My mother was very sick. The babies were born too small,
the size of small puppies. They were wrapped together in a white
cloth and then my father took the bundle outside to the rose
garden and pomegranate tree my mother loved.

They couldn't have been babies yet, with skeletons and
hearts, or they would have gone to the priest. But my mother
was crying and coughing, and the old woman said in Spanish
to my father, "No mas."

And my father said to her, "Don't tell anyone. No one.
Those Hernandez women keep saying she's got the evil eye."

By the time I was eight, my father didn't care if I wandered
off, as long as I did my work. We'd go up to Brush Canyon, the
ranch kids. We dug a deep mine, with hammers and picks and
shovels, looking for gold. We found piles of mica-fool's gold
we thought we could sell.

The darkness fell completely, and I waited for my eyes to
adjust. I heard nothing.

In Bee Canyon, I'd had nothing to dig with, to bury the guy.

I hadn't gone up there to shoot rabbits. I'd been CHP for
about a year then, and I'd come to my father's house on my
day off to help him take out two dead lemon trees. Gophers
were bad that year.

I was covered with sweat and dirt and crumbled roots
that flew up when we finally pulled out the stumps. We chainsawed the branches and trunk for firewood, and then I piled
the green wood on the south side of the house so it could dry
out for my father to burn in winter.

I told him I had trouble with the service revolver. It wasn't
like the rifle I'd been shooting since I was a kid. "The kick is
weird," I said. "And the way you have to look at the target.
They keep messing with me at the range. Their favorite word
is wetback. Go back to a hoe if you can't handle a gun." I felt the
rage rise up in my chest like hot coffee swallowed the wrong
way. "I want to tell them I'm not used to shooting something
that ain't alive. But I can't say shit. Hueros."

"You been shooting all your life," he said. "A gun's a gun.
Go up there in the hills and find something to aim at."

I put my T-shirt back on, even though my skin was sticky,
and then my shoulder holster. I grabbed a flannel shirt to cover
the holster. I was still sweating when I left the grove.

I walked a couple miles that day, along the river where
the wet sand smelled like aspirin from the willows, and then
I turned toward the hills. The cattle grazed up there, three
thousand acres or so. We had three hundred acres of citrus.

I remember I was already thinking about the phantom
when I crossed the tracks, because he'd thrown rocks a couple
of times by then and downed the smudge pots. I'd seen a bridge
made out of vines and cable over the arroyo under the train
tracks, but everyone said that was old, from a Vietnam vet.