Orange County Noir (Akashic Noir) (5 page)

I figured I'd get far enough into Bee Canyon so no one
would hear me shoot at beer cans set up on a rock.

I found tall Coors cans in the shade under a little pepper
tree, like I knew I would. In high school, lots of people came
up here to drink beer. Always Coors and Marlboros and weed.
The cans were old and faded. Perfect to shoot.

I stuck four fingers into the four sharp tab holes and kept
walking. A car was parked in the dirt at the mouth of the canyon. But maybe the people had gone back toward the river. I
listened. No laughter from the canyon. It was dim up there
now.

I kept going, and then I heard a huffing-huh, huh, huh.
Breath like a hammer. Huh, huh, huh.

Then I heard, "What the fuck! What the fuck you lookin
at? What's a nigger doin up here in Orange County!"

I dropped the cans in the sand. I was off-duty. I didn't go
on for two hours.

I kept walking, up past a flat section of sand near the deep
scour where the rainwater poured down, and then around another boulder.

A white guy with long brown hair hanging down his bare
back was straddling a girl. He looked up the canyon. He hadn't
seen me. But he stood up.

She looked dead. Dried blood dark under her nose.
Denim skirt hiked up around her waist, her legs open, black
hair there, her feet black on the bottom. He hunched over
and zipped up, the muscles in his back jerking like snakes, and
then turned and saw me.

"What the hell?"

My CHP voice came out before I could think. "Sir, I need
you to tell me what's going on here."

"You speak English?"

My face burned. "Sir, is this-"

"You're not dark enough to be that nigger's brother. He
was right up there. Watching. Freak."

"What's wrong with the young lady?" I hadn't moved. Felt
like my feet were sinking into the dirt.

"Young lady? Why you talkin like you're on TV?"

"I'm law enforcement, sir."

"No you're not. You're just nosy."

"Is she okay?"

He laughed. "She was supposed to do a slow ride. Take
it easy. But the stupid chick OD'd. Couldn't handle the trip.
Couldn't handle the ride, man. Like it's your fuckin business.
Wetback." He pushed his hair behind his ears and started
walking toward me. He must have been about thirty-five,
forty. His skin was lined around his eyes like birds had clawed
him deep.

Was he another phantom? Shit. Was he the vet who'd
built the bridge?

The girl hadn't moved. What if she was dead? I made my
voice louder. "I need you to turn around and walk over to that
rock and put your hands on the rock." I didn't have handcuffs.
I might have baling wire in my pocket.

"You need to go back to Mexico."

"Sir."

I didn't move. There was no sound except his feet on the
sand. Soft like ground corn.

"Sir." He was close enough that I could see his eyes were
green.

People said the real phantom was a guy who still wanted
to live in the jungle. Maybe if I brought up the war he'd know
I respected him.

"Are you a veteran, sir?"

"Fuck Nam. I don't need to be a Vietnam vet to kill
somebody."

He was about ten feet from me now. Kill her? Kill me?

Then the girl made a noise. She coughed. Her throat
rasped like it was full of sand. He grinned at me and said,
"Hey, kid, you just get here from Tijuana? You swum all the
way up that river and this is where you made it?"

I looked past him. The girl raised up on one elbow and
tried to stand. She scrabbled against the boulder and he
turned back fast and covered the ground. He said, "I'm not
done with you."

He drew back his arm and punched her in the face. Like
she was a man. The sound of her nose breaking. A popping.
Then an animal moan-like a coyote, full in the throat-but
not her. From above its. The phantom. He moaned again, like
he couldn't stand it when the girl fell.

I pulled my service revolver from the shoulder holster under my vest. It was silent now above its. The girl lay still, but
her breath was in her throat like a saw blade in wood.

He wouldn't shut up. He just kept talking when he came
back toward me. "What the fuck are you gonna do with that?
You steal that from a cowboy, Frito? From an American? Ay
yi yi yi-you think you're the Frito Bandito?" He was three
feet away and reached out his hand. A turquoise ring on his
finger. "You better give that to somebody who knows how to
use it, chico."

My mother called me chavalito. When I came in at night
smelling of the river.

I shot him in the chest like he was the silhouette at the
range. But he didn't move sideways. He fell straight back.

No sound from above. The girl pushed up again, on all
fours, like a dog. She crouched and swayed and stared at my face, squinting, the blood crusting like dried ketchup under
her nose and mouth. Like a movie. I went over to the guy and
stared at the hole in his chest. The blood running down his
ribs. Different blood.

I looked up to say, "Miss, I'm gonna call-" She ran sideways past me, bumping past the rock.

Then the car started up at the bottom of the canyon and
the tires popped over the gravel like firecrackers and I jumped.

I must have stood there for a while, because five flies
landed on his chest, green as fake emeralds moving slowly
over his blood. I would lose my job over this asshole. I would
go to prison.

His shoulder was sweaty and hot. I grasped it to see if the
bullet had gone through. It was gone. Went into the soft sand
that smelled of animal waste and creosote roots. I'd never
find it.

I put the shoulder back down. I didn't look at the open
mouth. I didn't have time to go back to the ranch for a shovel.
I found a stick and started trying to dig in the damp sand
where the water had pooled long ago. Deep enough to keep
him from coyotes, was all I thought.

A scraping above me, and granite pebbles falling.

A pick slid down the steep hillside and landed a few feet
away. Homemade. Metal wired to a piece of crudely sanded
wood. Like someone had thrown an anchor overboard.

Once it was all the way night, I thought that if he came my
way, down this trail that led to the east, to the golf course, I
would grab him, take the knife, cuff him, and keep my face
down. It was dark. He wouldn't see me.

But he never came. He knew exactly where we were and
what we were doing.

I'd slept, off and on, hearing small rustlings of rabbits and
birds in the darkness. Twice I heard metal scrape against rock.
One of the other men.

The phantom hadn't gone toward the river, or the freeway, or the golf course. He was probably watching its, even
now at daybreak, when the sun rose over the Chino Hills and
the brush glittered with dew like glass shards.

Kearney and George and the others came down the trail
and I fell in. We drank some water and ate some stuff they'd
packed, and then we fanned out to look for fresh signs. Footprints in the moisture, broken stems, all the things Kearney
had used for years to track Mexicans on the border. Mexicans
trying to swim up the rivers and walk over the desert. Beaners.
Wetbacks.

I was out of breath. Hungry. Bending down so far my back
hurt, remembering the short-handled hoe my father keptthe one he'd brought from Red Camp and propped in the corner of the porch so he wouldn't forget it. He was awake, a few
miles away, brewing his coffee in the dented aluminum pot,
making sure the veladora was lit, looking out the window at
the pomegranate tree. He didn't know I was here-so close
to him.

"Hey!" one of the deputies called softly.

Fresh tracks.

We followed for two miles, but we ended up at the mouth
of Brush Canyon. Kearney said he knew it all along. He and
two guys started up from the bottom, and George circled up
and worked his way down. I was behind him, and then one
guy hollered out, "There he is!"

We looked down the steep canyon slope. A head popped
out of a heap of brush. Black curly hair covered with dust. He
was moving.

Everybody drew their guns. I had mine aimed at his back.
His shirt was so tattered and patched it was like a weird quilt.
He had a knife. He had the pick. I'd left it there when I was
done. I'd wiped off my prints with my flannel shirt. His shirt
was even worse in front when he turned to see the rest of its.

Don't look at me, I was thinking. Don't do it. Don't look
in my eyes and then start yelling about what happened.

He was hunched over. I saw his face. He wasn't some little
mocoso. He was a grown man. But the sound he'd made, up in
Bee Canyon, when he heard the punch. The bones breaking.
He'd been beaten. I'm not through with you. That sound.

But he had a knife. I couldn't move toward him, but if he
saw me and shouted, "No! I didn't kill him! He did it!" I'd
have to shoot him. Justifiable.

My gun was pointed at his face.

"I quit! I quit!" he screamed, his eyes on the ground. He
wouldn't look up.

Kearney holstered his gun. "Come on out, James. We
aren't gonna hurt you."

The phantom. He was about five-seven, slight, but it was
his face. A little kid. He bowed his head. "I quit," he said.

I holstered my gun and turned around. It felt like someone
sitting on my chest, hammering at the bone running down
the middle of me. Like I always felt when I'd done something
wrong. I looked out over the canyon. Down there were bones,
and skeletons, everywhere under the dirt. The babies. The
guy. My mother's bones, in the churchyard. The Indians who
lived here first. The cows and coyotes and rabbits. The skulls
rolling down the arroyos if it ever rained for forty days and
forty nights.

They questioned him for a long time.

He was James Horton Jr. He'd been born in Keithville,
Louisiana. He was forty-two. He'd been riding the rails since
he was twelve.

I pictured the arm throwing the rock at my Nova.

"When I was little, I never had no time to play. I never
had a chance to get into mischief, like Dennis the Menace.
That's what I was doin with the rocks."

But why throw them at cars?

"The cars were going so fast. They made me mad, because
they were going so fast."

Why did he live in the canyons?

He didn't want to be around people.

He ate black walnuts in fall, lemons and oranges, the goat
he found dead, and food from the trash.

"You coulda killed someone," one of the deputies said,
and I felt the hammering again, lighter, but still there.

"I quit, I quit," he said again softly.

They tested him for insanity, and he pleaded, and I never
heard anything about him again.

My father had a heart attack in 1979, and we buried
him next to my mother. Our house was empty for a year and
then it burned down. They said transients were living there,
but Bryant Ranch was already sold by the grandson of the
woman who'd built the place and planted all the pomegranate trees.

Last week I saw an ad in the newspaper. Executives Prefer
Bryant Ranch, it said, with pictures of huge houses. Close to
Brush Canyon Park, Box Canyon Park, and Golf.

I left my apartment in Santa Ana and drove up there in
my old Nova. I'm in the Old Farts Car Club and we restore
classics.

I drove along La Palma. The river was much calmer now
because of flood control. I used to imagine the phantom in
some locked room in a mental ward. No river in his sight.
Back then, I kept thinking Louisiana-he must have grown
up beside the Mississippi. Huck Finn and shit like thatDennis the Menace. But I looked up Keithville, and it was
near the Red River.

He must have spent years looking out a window somewhere, waiting until he wasn't insane. No rocks. No water. No
hiding except under a bed, when people came and scared you
and said, "I'm not done with you yet."

I drove up to Bee Canyon, but it was just a scar in the
hills. There were bones in every canyon of the world.

The big gray and beige and rust stuccoed houses, the
roads and sidewalks and the same plants over and over. Purple agapanthus, society garlic that stunk up the median, and
fountain grass, which my father always thought was a weed.
The only people walking were two women in workout clothes
with iPods.

It was late morning, and I still worked the evening shift, so
I drove as close as I could to the Santa Ana River, off and on
the freeways. The water was wild and free in the canyon, and
then corralled with cement banks, tamed by the time it got to
Newport and emptied into the ocean.

I drove around Fashion Island, and the South Coast Plaza.
No island. No coast. Just rooms. Big rooms. Asphalt like black
carpet around them.

On the way back, I drove up into Santiago Canyon,
Modjeska Canyon, and I ended up in Santa Ana. The canyon
turned into flatlands covered with rooms. My three rooms.
The same number my father had.

I didn't want people around me either.

I liked working at night.

I partnered with Carl McGaugh for the last three years.
He was only twenty-five. Didn't say much. His dad was Irish.

I drove. Driving the freeways was like swimming in the
river, the currents and the way you had to move. But the freeways were choked with traffic all the time now. The phantom wouldn't have any trouble getting onto the median. He
could walk through the stopped cars easy. But if he stood up
with a rock, somebody would shoot him. In a heartbeat. Because what people cared most about was their vehicles. Their
Beemers and Hummers and Acuras. Their property. No room
for mischief when someone would pull out a semiautomatic
weapon from the passenger seat for any reason at all.