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 chain-sawed 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.
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.”