“You should go,” he says. “The police come here almost every hour.”
I turn just as the door swings open and three surfer dudes spill in-flip-flops and sweatshirts and matted hair. They laugh until they see me coming their way, then they quiet down, bumping into each other as they come to a halt. Their eyes are slits and their Adam’s apples bob.
“Whoa.”
“Allison.”
“Gun.”
“Hey, can I like take a picture?”
“Sure, but be quick.”
The clerk comes around the counter. “Perhaps I can be in the picture, too?”
“Cool.”
“Get close,” says one of the surfers.
He steps back toward the door, a cell phone out. His buddies and the clerk join me but they’re too scared to get up close so I gather them in. The smell of weed is strong.
The surfers laugh their stoned laughs and I’m in a little bit of a hurry here so I yank one of them in by the hood of his sweatshirt and Cañonita goes off.
The roar is deafening.
The surfer dude screams and drops. The cameraman runs outside. The third surfer dives to the floor and scrambles down the aisle on hands and knees, flip-flops jumping off his feet. The clerk backs away from me with terror in his eyes.
I stride to my car, mask off, head up, plastic bag containing maybe a quart of beer or a box of cereal swinging in my left hand. But my right ear is ringing from the gunshot and my heart is racing and my nerves feel they’ve been stroked with a wire brush. Once again I’ve forgotten to hand out business cards. I wonder if it’s a run of bad luck or if I’m losing my nerve.
An HBPD patrol car swings into one of the 7-Eleven lot entrances as I exit another and goose it for the on-ramp.
Back at the Rendezvous Hotel I shower and change and go down to the bar in the ballroom. The Vietnamese dance to an orchestra. Everyone is Vietnamese, not a round-eye in the room except for me. Most of the people here are older and established. They had the means to flee the war and ended up here, where they built a place to remind them of home. They’re good dancers-cha-chas and fox-trots and waltzes. The men are in suits and the women in dresses and the air is thick with smoke. The walls are mirrored.
I’m tired all the way to my bones. I think about my boys and my mom and Hood and almost blowing the surfer’s brains out. Wait until that makes the news. I must have had a tighter grip on Cañonita than I thought. I must have been more nervous than I thought. I don’t know. But I do know that luck changes like everything else and I get the idea that Quang should have names and addresses to send that jewelry to in case I’m not able to deliver it personally.
Joaquin wrote in his journal about coming across an old man and his white dog walking the road to Nevada City one day. The man wore clothing that was little better than rags and his shoes were held together with baling wire. Joaquin slowed his gang of bandits and got off his horse and walked along with the old man and they spoke Spanish and the man told him that he had once been rich and now he was poor and rich was better. He said the worst thing about being poor wasn’t hunger or cold but being made to look ridiculous. Joaquin unloaded a bundle from one of the packhorses and in the grass he unrolled it. Inside was a new suit of clothes, a pure woolen suit in black, with a white cotton shirt and a black satin necktie. From another packhorse Joaquin got a new pair of leather boots, black and beautiful. Joaquin loved clothes. The bandits waited while Joaquin used a needle and thread to shorten the pant cuffs. The old man went into the trees and when he came out he was wearing the suit and boots and his chin was up and his eyes looked clear and he was smiling. Joaquin and his men then mounted up and pounded away in clouds of dust and continued on to Nevada City. They gambled and drank and bought women and things. Joaquin bought two new suits. Three days later on the road out of town they came across the old man, hung by his neck from a big sycamore tree, still dressed in his finery. The white dog lay beneath him, baying and growling. A note pinned to the coat lapel said: “This is what happens to friends of Murrieta.”
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.”