Сьюзен Стрейт: Orange County Noir

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.

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 us 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 mocoso, 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 us 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.