Joaquin said a prayer for the old man, called the dog and rode away.
When I first read that part of the journal I could feel Joaquin’s luck changing. He could feel it, too, and he said so. He said it was like a dark cloud he couldn’t see but he could feel the way it blocked the sun and made the world a cold place. Thirty days later they shot him down and cut off his head and you know the rest.
I wonder what I’ll do with Joaquin’s head. I don’t love it but it is rightfully mine and it is my personal history, love it or not. Is it a curse? Is it a blessing? Either way it will belong to my sons after I go. I wonder if it’s time to have the talk with Bradley.
The talk.
I’ll never forget the talk I got. My great-uncle Jack- Mom’s side-took a liking to me when I was very young. He paid special attention to me. I remember him holding me on his lap, listening to my early words, just sitting and watching me. He read to me. Later I noted that none of his other great-nieces or -nephews or even his own grand-children had anything nice to say about him. But he continued to give me special gifts for my birthday and Christmas. He taught me to dance.
He was a slender, quiet man, silver-haired and dark-eyed. He had been a farrier by trade, which is a person who shoes horses. He had a vertical scar on his forehead, curved as a hoof is curved. He had a mobile farrier service that was successful in the seventies and eighties. He drove all around Southern California shoeing horses. He told me later that he was also a bookie-a “front” as they call them in that business-which is the person who takes the bets. His mobile farrier business made it easy. He drove a junkyard crane part-time because the money was good and his brother owned the wrecking yard. When I was little he’d take me there, let me work the levers and push the buttons of the big crane, let me grab some junkers with that big magnet hoist and put them in the stack. Fun, but all the dead cars made me sad.
One day when I was fifteen and he was sixty-two he took me out for a “driving lesson” in my mother’s 1974 Alfa Romeo Spider. Jack loved cars. I had my learner’s permit, so I could drive with an adult in the car, and we raced all around Bakersfield in the little red roadster and I can’t explain what a joy it was to drive that thing. It was the last year the Spiders had the cool bumpers, and the last year before catalytic converters were required, so it put out 129 very adequate horses. And the four-speed had a short, sweet throw, with a lively clutch. That car stuck to the road like a tick. The air conditioner didn’t work. The door handles kept falling off. Radio? Forget it. Nothing on it really worked, but Jack just sat back and let me blast around, the top down and the wind blowing back his long silver hair. Of course I wasn’t exactly learning to drive because by then I’d been taking my mother’s and several other cars for joyrides for months. I was good. Thought I was.
When we came back I pulled the Alfa into the garage and shut off the engine.
Jack turned to me and put his hand on my knee.
“You are a special child,” he said.
“Thank you, Jack,” I said. “You always made me feel that way.”
He handed me a key with a tag attached. On the tag was an address and a number.
“This is yours,” he said. “My great-great-great-great-grandfather was Joaquin Murrieta. You will come to understand.”
“I wrote a report on him.”
“One night while you slept I told you his story. You were very young but I think you heard me.”
“I remember every part of it, Jack. The wind was blowing that night.”
“It seemed like the right time for an outlaw story.”
It took me a week to get out to that address, what with school and hapkido and my jobs at KFC and Taco Bell. Bradley’s father-to-be drove because he was three years older than me. I was two months pregnant with Bradley. Funny how that first walk across the floor in the morning would leave me queasy back then but the eighty-mile-an-hour Alfa jolt left me wanting more.
The address was a storage facility down in the south part of Bakersfield. I made Bradley’s cute fool of a father wait in the car. The key fit a well-oiled Schlage and got me into unit number 227.
There were two large cardboard boxes, big enough for a microwave or a small TV. They were taped shut. I picked the one on the left, slit the tape with my knife-a beautiful four-inch, walnut-handled Buck I’d shoplifted from Oshman’s Sporting Goods when they refused to hire me one summer. I still carry it in my satchel.
The first box was filled with papers, books, yellowed news clippings, flyers for exhibitions of the head of my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, the outlaw Joaquin Murrieta. There was a leather duster with bullet holes in it, worn boots folded over and stiff with age, a lariat, an Indian arrow. His journal was at the bottom.
In the other box was his head in a jar of yellow liquid. A bit of a shock, even to a knocked-up fifteen-year-old with no discernible sense. I looked at all that hair lilting around near the bottom and the face as dead as a face can get, and I felt that I was a part of this man and he was a part of me.
I didn’t go back there for thirteen years. I took over the rent payments when Jack died.
I moved it all out to Valley Center a year and a half ago. It’s not hard to hide two boxes. The property is big and truly, people don’t see what they don’t want to see.
The Vietnamese are dancing to “The Tennessee Waltz.” I turn and look at the nearest mirrored wall and I see a blonde looking back at me. She looks confident. I take the elevator up to my fourth-floor suite.
I keep thinking of the surfer dude I almost blew away. I can feel the dark cloud that Joaquin wrote about and I wonder if it’s going to pass by or stay right over me, freeze my bones with me still on them.
I call my boys and talk an hour with each, not counting Kenny of course. Ernest is quiet and gentle as always, willing to let me avoid all truth.
I call Hood and listen to him say hello then I hang up and turn off the phone.
33
In the darkness Hood waited for Lupercio to come into the motel parking lot. The Mariposa was on Aviation near LAX, and when the jets roared over, Hood heard the window glass buzz and the lamp stand rattle on the table.
Sitting back from the window in room 6, Hood could see each parking place and the side of the motel office. Fog had broken the heat wave and now the night was heavy and damp. The Mariposa’s security and courtesy lights were yellow, casting the property in false colors.
There were twenty-six rooms. The parking places were nearly all taken. Around the perimeter was a cinder-block wall that had been heavily tagged and sandblasted and tagged again. A low concrete planter lit by a yellow ground light stood in the middle to divide the incoming and outgoing traffic, and in it grew three sagging queen palms blanched by the foggy illumination.