Luis Alberto Urrea - The Water Museum

His ringtone was Nine Inch Nails, thank you very much. Emo! Shit.

“I’m out, ‘homes.’”

He clicked off and pulled on his Pumas. Got his jog on along the beach. It was one of those rare sunny days, and everybody was out looking in their Lycra and spandex like a vast roving fruit salad. He tucked the celly in his shorts pocket. Who’s the bitch now, he wanted to know.

His nemesis caught him again as he was cooling off, jogging in place beside a picnic table, breathing through his nose, pouring good clean sweat down his back — he could feel it trickling down the backs of his legs. “You let me penetrate you,” his phone announced. “You let me desecrate you.”

“You again?” Junior said.

“It’s me! Damn! It’s Chango!”

Junior wiped his face with the little white towel he had wrapped around his neck.

“Yeah. Right? I should have known an’ all.”

“That’s what I’m sayin’.”

“Fucking Chango.”

“Right?”

Junior could hear Chango smoking — he still must like those cheap-ass Domino ciggies from TJ. They crackled like burning brush when Chango inhaled.

“Why you calling me, Chango?”

“What — a homeboy can’t check on his li’l peewee once in a while? I like to make sure my boyz is okay.”

“I haven’t talked to you in ten years,” Junior said. He sat on the tabletop and lay back and watched the undersides of gulls as they hung up there like kites.

“So?” said Chango. “You think you’re better than us now, college boy?”

Apparently the one thousand — mile buffer zone was not enough barrier between himself and the old homestead.

“Nice talking to you, Chango. Be sure to have someone send me an invitation to your funeral. So long. Have a nice day.”

“Hey, asshole,” Chango said. “I’m gonna live forever. Gonna be rich, too. I’m workin’ on a plan — cannot fail. You gon’ want some of this here.”

“A plan?” Junior said.

And when he said it, he felt the trap snap shut over him and he couldn’t quite figure out how or why he was caught.

* * *

It was a short flight. Lindbergh was clotted with GIs in desert camo and weepy gals waving little plastic American flags. Junior caught the rental-car bus and grabbed a Kia at Alamo. No, he wasn’t planning to take it across the border. Put it on the Visa, thanks. Oh, well — the homies were going to give him shit about the car. It would be badass if they rented ’67 Impalas with hydraulic lifters so he could enter the barrio with his right front tire raised in the air like some kind of saluting robot. He didn’t smile — he was already thinking like Chango! He poked at the radio till he found 91X and The Mighty Oz was cranking some Depeche Mode. At least there was that.

On his way south, he hopped off the freeway, onto Sports Arena, but Tower Records was gone. What? He pulled a U and tried again, as if he’d somehow missed the store. Gone? How could it be gone? Screw that — he sped to Washington and went up to Hillcrest and looked for Off the Record. He was in the mood for some import CDs. Keep his veneer of sanity. It was gone, too. Junior sat there in the parking lot where the Hillcrest Bowl used to be. He could not believe it — all culture had vanished from San Diego. His phone said, “You let me penetrate you.” Chango. Junior didn’t answer.

He’d only come to check it out. It was a crazy adventure, he told himself. Good for a laugh. Chango had picked up a magazine in a dentist’s office. New dentures: our tax dollars at work. He thought it was a Nat Geo, but he wasn’t sure. Some gabacho had written an article about abandoned homes along the I-15 corridor. Repos. Something like six out of ten, maybe seven out of fifteen or something like that. Point was, they were just sitting there, like haunted houses, like the whole highway was a long ghost town, and the writer had broken in to look around and found all kinds of stuff just laying around. Sure, sad shit like kids’ homework on the kitchen table. But it’s on a kitchen table, you catch my drift, Chango demanded. There’s whole houses full of furniture and mink coats and plasma TVs and freakin’ Bose stereos. La-Z-Boys! Hells yeah! Some have cars in the garages. And it’s all foreclosed and owned by some bank. But the kicker — the kicker, Yuniorr — is that the banks can’t afford to resell this stuff, so they send trucks to the houses to haul the stuff to the dump. Friggin’ illegals driving trucks just drag it all out and go toss it. A million bucks’ worth of primo swag. “You tell me, how many freakin’ apartments gots big-screen TVs that them boys just hauled home? You been to the swap meet?” And Chango had noted, in his profound research (he stole the magazine from the dentist’s), that the meltdown had banks backed up. Some of these houses wouldn’t be purged for a year or more.

“Ain’t even stealin’, peewee. Nobody wants it anyway. Worst case is breaking and entering. So I got this plan and I’m gonna make us a million dollars in a couple of months. But I need you to help.”

“Why me?”

“You know how to talk white. Shit! Why’d you think?”

* * *

Junior motored down I-5 and dropped out at National City. He was loving the tired face of America’s finest city — San Diego was a’ight, but National was still the bomb. The Bay Theater, where he used to see Elvis revivals and Mexican triple features. He’d kissed a few locas up there in the back rows. He smiled. He checked the old Mile of Cars — they used to call it The Mile of Scars, because sometimes Shelltown or Del Sol dudes would catch them out there at night and fists would fly between the car lots. That was before everybody got all gatted up and brought the 9s along. Junior shook his head; he would have never imagined that fistfights and fear would come to seem nostalgic.

He drove into the old ’hood, heading for W. 20th and Chango’s odd crib over the hump and hiding behind the barrio on the little slope to the old slaughterhouse estuaries. He wanted to see his old church, maybe light a candle. He never meant to go all “mi vida loca” in his life. He didn’t mean to go so far away and not come back, either. St. Anthony’s. America’s prettiest little Catholic church. He smiled. They’d sneak out of catechism and go down behind the elementary school and play baseball on the edge of the swamp. There was a flat old cat carcass they used for home plate.

He turned the corner and beheld an empty lot surrounded by a low chain-link fence. He slammed on the brakes. It was gone, like Tower Records. Things seemed to be vanishing as if all of San Diego County were being abducted by aliens.

He jumped out of his car and watched a man watering his lawn, surrounded by a platoon of pug dogs.

“Where’s the church?” he called.

“Burned down! Where you been?”

“What? When?”

“Long time, long time. Say, ain’t you that García boy?”

“Not me,” said Junior, getting back in the car.

He drove past his old house. Man, it sure looked tiny. Looked like all his old man’s gardens were dead. He didn’t want to look at it. It had a faded FOR SALE sign stuck in the black iron fence.

The barrio had a Burger King in it, and a Tijuana Trolley stop. Damn. All kinds of Mexican nationals sat around on the cement benches savoring their Quata Poundas among squiggles of graffiti. Junior shook his head.

He dropped into the ancient little underpass and popped out on the west side of I-5 and hung a left and went to the end of the earth and hung another left and dropped down the small slope toward the black water and there it was. Chango’s house. His dad’s old, forgotten Esso station. Out of business since 1964. Chango lived in the triangular office. He’d pasted butcher paper over the glass and had put an Obama poster on the front, with some Sharpie redesigns so that it now said: