“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 us. 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 us. 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 us, 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 kept — the 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 us.
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.