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 jugular — higher 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 us 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: Gypsum 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 face — my 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 us.
“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, short-haired, 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.