Santa Cruz Noir

The Strawberry Tattoo by Maceo Montoya

Aptos

When David started barking, Marcela knew something awful was about to happen. His first bark, a sudden low growl, could’ve been mistaken for a man clearing his throat. But by the second and third, it was clear that David was doing his best impersonation of a bulldog ready to attack. When she followed his eyes, past all their colleagues at the hotel bar, she saw that he was staring at her boyfriend, Vicente.

“Shit,” she said.

Someone else added, “What the hell is going on?”

Marcela and David used to sleep together. They were both English instructors in Avanza, a community college program geared toward disadvantaged students, most of them Latino. Marcela and David taught at different colleges now, Marcela in the Bay Area, David near Sacramento — but they ran into each other periodically at these team-building workshops. This semester, they’d gathered at the Seascape Beach Resort in Aptos.

Marcela was married when they first met, and so was David, but their attraction was so strong, at least on her end, that she refused to drink at the conference mixers in case she found her defenses weakened. At the next conference, after her marriage collapsed, she downed two tequila shots, found David, and practically dragged him to her room. He was stocky, muscular, with tattoos all over his body: on his back an Aztec warrior carrying a half-naked princess; on his chest the Virgen de Guadalupe, the rays of her halo crawling up his neck; and on his rib cage a giant bulldog in full color. She knew he’d gone to Fresno State.

“Damn, you got some serious school pride,” she said when she first saw it.

“Something like that,” he said.

David reminded her of the boys she grew up with. He may’ve been a college-level English professor, with an MA in comparative lit, schooling poorly prepared students in basic grammar and critical thinking, but he hadn’t shed his upbringing. With his shaved head and carefully manicured goatee, he looked like a cholo, often talked like one. One unfortunate night, he acted like one too. At a conference in Sacramento, Marcela and David went for a beer run for the after-party. While David went inside the liquor store, she stayed out front to smoke a cigarette. A guy passed by and asked her if she had a light. She fumbled in her purse for her lighter and the guy asked, “Whatchu up to tonight, girl?”

She was about to say something friendly and dismissive, when she heard the door jingle behind her.

“Better back the fuck off, motherfucker,” David’s voice was right at her back.

The guy looked up. “Who the fuck you think you talking to, son?”

She tried to intervene. “David, stop—”

She didn’t even see the punch, just a flurry, and suddenly the guy was knocked out cold.

Marcela screamed. “What the hell, David?” She grabbed his arm, but he jerked it away and she tumbled backward, almost falling. Marcela stumbled in her heels across the parking lot. She made it to the corner when she turned around, hoping David would be right behind, but there he was, holding a case of Tecate in one hand, standing over the guy and barking like a mad dog.

They never talked about the incident. They slept together a few more times, but then she heard he was still married and just had a kid. She avoided him from then on.

Everyone’s attention was on David’s barking act now: their academic colleagues, the bartender, and several recently arrived hotel guests. Marcela stared at Vicente. He was smiling as he mouthed something in David’s direction.

Vicente was the most beautiful man, straight or otherwise, Marcela had ever met, down to the unblemished smoothness of his skin and his thick, shiny hair with never a strand out of place. She wished she had his eyelashes, his eyebrows, his nose and shapely lips, even his permanently minty breath. She was envious of his arms, and his thin, muscular legs. It was unfair so much beauty had been bestowed on a man.

There were drawbacks to his perfection. He heightened her insecurities, even though Vicente soothed her with compliments. But he could also act like the model on a magazine cover — unattainable, enigmatic, as perfect as he was blank. They’d been together almost six months and it drove her crazy.

This current moment was a good example of his inscrutability. What was Vicente mouthing in David’s direction? Why the hell was he smiling?

David was the opposite. He was a man who wore his heart on his sleeve, and right now he was reacting, pure and simple.

“Come on, David, stop it,” a male colleague said.

David’s barking grew more aggressive. He set his glass of whiskey on the bar counter and now both arms were free to emphasize his canine-about-to-pounce stance.

The bartender tried to intervene: “Sir, excuse me, you’re going to have quiet down or else I’ll have to call security.”

Without taking his eyes off Vicente, David stopped barking and said, “I’ll quiet down when this piece of shit wipes the smile off his face.”

Only at that moment did the others finally turn toward Vicente, who stood with his arms crossed, his smile unwavering.

God, he’s so handsome, Marcela thought despite herself and the circumstances. But how could she ignore his perfect white teeth, his dimples, that confidence?

Vicente looked around and shrugged.

Satisfied, everyone now turned back to David, except for Marcela, who kept staring at Vicente, waiting for him to look at her. But he was fixed on David. There was a certain twinkle in his eye, and again he mouthed something, less perceptible than before, but Marcela was ready for it.

Bow-wow, she thought. That’s what he’s mouthing. Bow-wow, like a little dog. Bow-wow, like the poet Francisco Alarcón’s dog. Earlier that day, a colleague in session had described her appreciation for the Chicano poet’s verse about his bilingual dog. How when he came home, the dog greeted him, Bow-wow — and in case he didn’t understand, the dog then barked, “Güau-güau.”

Vicente had made a strange comment. He interrupted to ask what kind of dog it was.

“What?” the speaker didn’t get it.

“I haven’t read the poem. So I’m curious, does it say what kind of dog it is?”

“It’s a bilingual dog.”

“No, I mean, is it a bulldog or something, or is it nothing but a mutt?”

People were quiet for a moment, but then Vicente smiled and everyone realized it was a joke and a few people chuckled to be polite.

Marcela shook her head and tried to alleviate the tension. “Ay, you tell the worst jokes, Vicente.” He laughed good-naturedly and leaned back in his chair. Not a minute later, David abruptly rose from his seat and walked out of the conference room. No one gave it a second thought, and not until now did Marcela think that the two were connected: Vicente’s stupid joke and David’s exit.

Vicente did it again. Speaking softly now: “Bow-wow.”

David barked in response and lunged toward Vicente. Two other men tried to restrain him but their efforts were pointless. David pushed them aside like the featherweight academics they were.

A glass fell off a table, hitting the floor with a dull thud; someone cried, “Oh my God!” In three bounds, David was on top of Vicente. Vicente didn’t attempt to move. He didn’t even flinch. David tackled him to the floor, where he straddled him and began punching Vicente’s face in a left-right combo.

Marcela kept thinking it would stop, that David had to stop, but he’d lost all control. No one dared step forward. Vicente’s head was limp and soft, like a rag doll.

Hotel security pushed through the crowd and grabbed David from behind, cutting short one last punch. They dragged him backward. He gave little resistance, and his wide-eyed expression made him seem as shocked as everyone else. Vicente lay prostrate on the ground, blood streaming from his nose and mouth, his face already swollen. One of the security guards said into his walkie-talkie, “Call the police. Get an ambulance too!”

The Avanza conference attendees, so accustomed to doling out advice to desperate young people, were at a loss. They stared at Vicente’s limp body, fearing the worst. Marcela overcame her shock and rushed to his side, collapsing. “Vicente!”

As if beckoned from the dead, he turned his head to her. The last thing she expected was for Vicente to smile and reveal a mouthful of bloody teeth.

“An ambulance is coming!”

“No, I’m fine.” He coughed. “Tell them I don’t need one.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Really, I’m fine,” he said. “Just give me a sec.” Vicente rose onto his elbows, turned, and pushed himself to his knees. He grabbed a table and with a little hop, hoisted himself up onto his feet. He looked around at everyone. “I’m all good,” he said. “Don’t worry about me.”

Frederico, a counselor at Davis, said, “Vicente, bro, you should go to the hospital, man, it doesn’t look good.”

Vicente waved him off. “I’ll just ice up, get some rest.” He turned to Marcela. “Help me to the room, will you?”

Marcela held his arm and together they walked slowly toward the elevator. She turned back to look at their colleagues, wanting someone to stop them. But no one said a thing.

They stepped onto the elevator and a few seconds later the doors slid closed. After a long silence, she realized she’d forgotten to press the floor number. She pressed 3 and stood back, staring at the tile floor, trembling. Mirrors surrounded them. She didn’t want to look up. She couldn’t bear to look at Vicente’s face.

“Baby,” Vicente said.

“Yeah?”

“Look at me.”

She slowly looked at Vicente’s reflection in the mirror. One eye had shut completely. He stared at her through the slit of his other. He started to laugh, revealing his blood-smeared teeth.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she said. She felt tears streaming down her cheeks.

He let out a long satisfied sigh. “I needed that,” he said.

“You — what?”

The elevator dinged and the doors slid open. An elderly white couple was waiting outside. They were dressed for dinner, bubbling with excitement. When they saw Vicente their eyes bulged in unison. The woman gasped, “Oh my God! What happened?”

Marcela was too upset to respond.

Vicente had no problem finding words: “You know, just a little scrap with a bitch-ass nigga.”

Vicente slept for an hour with ice-wrapped towels covering his face. Marcela watched over him from a rolling desk chair. Her heart steadied. She knew David was capable of violence. She’d seen it firsthand. She knew what the barking was all about too. After the liquor store incident, she’d confided to a friend from her writing group. Like David, he had grown up in Fresno. “He must be a Bulldog,” the friend said.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“It’s a Fresno gang. That’s what they do. They bark to show how crazy they are. I swear, look it up on YouTube.”

“It’s psycho, that’s what it is,” Marcela said. “A grown man barking. And what the hell, wasn’t he supposed to have left that life behind?”

“Vatos locos forever,” the friend said, doing his best Miklo impression from Blood In Blood Out before bursting into giggles.

But as enigmatic as Vicente could be, violence hardly seemed in his nature. In addition to his physical beauty, he was polite, almost debonair, as if he’d been raised at an English boarding school, at least how Marcela imagined one. He rarely cussed. He never raised his voice. He didn’t even fumble when he spoke, rarely letting slip an “uh” or an “um.” He used words that were odd coming out of a first-generation Mexican kid, such as “preferably” and “perhaps.” Vicente adhered to the rules of chivalry as though he’d come across a guidebook, holding doors open for others regardless of gender, the first to give up his seat, always insisting on clearing the table and washing the dishes.

His colleagues loved him, his students worshipped him. And yet to date him, Marcela had learned, was like eating in a dream. The feast might be all hers but she still couldn’t taste a goddamn thing.

What did she know about him? He’d grown up nearby in Watsonville. At her insistence, he once brought her there. She had taken him to meet her parents in Woodland, and he remarked that the place reminded him of where he grew up, a small California city surrounded by fields and full of Mexicans. She wanted him to return the favor, show her “his” Watsonville.

She pestered him until one Sunday morning they drove out to the coast, stopping at the first market they passed to buy pan dulce and hot chocolate. The clouds hadn’t burned off and it started to drizzle, so they stayed in the car and just drove around. He said he was going to take her down “memory lane.” He pointed out where he went to school, where he used to play soccer, the playground where he got his first kiss, yet these were all the things she had shown him in Woodland, as if he were simply repeating her memories and pointing.

But then he would throw in stuff such as, “That’s the alley where we jumped my cousin Rafa,” and laugh. “In high school, I used to deal from that apartment right there.”

“Stop playing,” she said.

Then he drove to the outskirts of the city and his tone become more somber: “We used to live in a trailer out here on the farm where my parents worked, and my dad, he would walk home from the bar every night. And one night he didn’t come home, so my mom went looking for him. She found him dead on the side of the road. A hit-and-run. Can you believe that?”

“I’m so sorry!” she said. “I didn’t know.”

But then Vicente began laughing and she thought he was teasing her again.

“Don’t do that!” And she slapped him on the arm. “That’s not even remotely funny.”

She assumed that after driving around they were going to end up at his house and she was going to meet his family. But after circling around a picturesque central plaza with a kiosk, he took the main road out of town and got back on the 101 heading north.

“Aren’t we going to visit your family?”

“My family?” He chuckled. “You don’t want to do that.”

“Do what? Meet them? Of course I do. If it’s your family.” Then she stopped herself. They had only been dating a few months. Maybe he wasn’t ready for that step. “All right,” she finally said. “No pressure.”

Before getting too far, they pulled over at a roadside fruit stand and she picked up a basket of strawberries. “I know these are your favorite,” she said. She took a strawberry out of the basket and went to put it in his mouth.

“What makes you say that?” he asked, backing away.

“Uh, if it’s not your favorite fruit, why do you have a tattoo of one on your back?”

The first time they had hooked up, she noticed a tattoo of a strawberry near the base of his neck. It was so delicate that she almost laughed. It was sweet, and so like him too, like a stamp on his taut skin.

He chuckled. “Oh, yeah, that’s right. I forgot.”

She laughed too, and attempted again to place the strawberry in his mouth. “Open up,” she said.

“Perhaps it’d be wise to wash those first,” he said.

She had already eaten half the basket. “Whatever, live a little.”

A few weeks later, out with her girlfriends, they got on the topic of things they found odd or gross about their lovers. When it was Marcela’s turn, her friends joked that they should just skip her because Vicente was clearly a gift from God. She wanted to share something so she told them about his strawberry tattoo. “Isn’t that weird?” she said.

Her friends laughed politely and said it was “adorable,” but one of them asked, “Isn’t he from Watsonville?”

“Yeah, why?”

“I mean, I think that’s a gang thing. In Watsonville it’s the strawberry, in Salinas it’s a freaking lettuce head. Somewhere else it’s an artichoke. My students, I swear, they teach me the randomest shit.”

Marcela tried to laugh it off. The idea that Vicente’s tattoo was gang-affiliated seemed so ridiculous that she didn’t intend to give it any further thought. But later that same night, she went home, poured herself another drink, and googled variations of “beautiful thugs” and “hot gangsters.” She found the results entertaining if nothing else.

It was her own romantic history that caused her worry. It was lined with two kinds of men: machistas who infuriated her, and one harmless white guy whom she eventually grew bored of. She had married the latter, but had suffered the torture of plenty of the former. Vicente, she thought, was a departure for her. Finally she had learned from her mistakes. She wasn’t doomed to repeat herself. Didn’t she deserve someone beautiful and kind with an air of mystery?

Marcela heard a loud pounding at the hotel door followed by, “Police department, open up!” She looked over at Vicente, who hadn’t stirred in an hour. The towels of ice remained covering his face. The pounding on the door resumed and she rushed to answer. Two officers filled the doorway.

“We’re looking for Vicente Cuellar.”

“Yes, he’s here,” she said. “But he’s sleeping.”

“I’m Officer Fernandez. This is Officer Halston. If you don’t mind, we’d like to ask him a few questions about the incident in the downstairs bar. If we can just wake him up, we won’t be long.”

Marcela hesitated in the doorway. The officers couldn’t see the bed from where they were standing. Were they really asking her permission?

“Let them in. I’m up,” Vicente called from inside the room.

Marcela stood aside and the officers walked in. As soon as they saw Vicente’s face, they looked at each other, then pulled out their pocket notepads and began writing.

“Well, he sure got you good,” Officer Fernandez said.

“You should’ve seen the other guy,” Vicente quipped.

The officer looked up from his notepad. “Uh, we did. He’s in handcuffs right now. And he’s fine.”

Vicente chuckled. “It was a joke. Look, officers, let the guy go. It was just a misunderstanding. We were drinking. Tempers flared. I said some things I shouldn’t have—”

“And what did you say, exactly?” Officer Fernandez cut in. “The other guy just said, ‘Stuff.’”

“It doesn’t really matter. All I can say is that I’m over it. We got it out of our systems. I’m sober, he’s sober. No need to make it a bigger deal than it is.”

“Well, you see, we’re staring at your face and it looks like a pretty big deal. If a man is capable of doing what he did to you, then he might be capable of doing that to someone else. It makes us feel like we’re not doing our jobs.”

“I appreciate what you’re saying, sir, but see, the issue is—” Vicente stopped. “I thought I recognized you, Fernandez.”

The officer looked up from his notepad. “What was that?”

“It’s me, Cuellar. You used to be a guard in juvie, right?”

The officer looked closer. His face brightened. “Holy shit. It’s you! I thought that name sounded familiar! What the hell, man! It’s been years.”

“I know, I know,” Vicente said. “You gave up on the little homies or what? After the real bad guys now?”

“That was just my first job. Jesus, I was barely a kid in there myself.”

Fernandez’s demeanor had relaxed completely. He shook his head in amazement and turned to his partner. “This kid ruled the hall. You would’ve thought he was Tony Montana.” He turned back to Vicente. “So you teach college now? That’s what they were saying downstairs in the lobby. I couldn’t believe the other guy was a teacher. Looked like a thug to me. And now you, I can’t believe it — they letting every banger go to college now? But that’s good, Cuellar. I’m proud of you.”

Vicente nodded his head. “Look, that guy downstairs. Me and him are cool. We both got pasts, and today they caught up with us. We both spent too many years working to get where we are right now. I wouldn’t want to mess that up for him over a little skirmish.”

Officer Fernandez smiled. “Skirmish. Listen to you. Same old Cuellar. You could always talk your way out of everything. Nothing stuck to you.” He looked over at Marcela. “Ain’t this guy about the smoothest talker you ever heard?”

Marcela was too stunned to answer. She had leaned against the wall and was digging her fingernails into the textured ridges of the wallpaper, afraid she was going to lose her grip.

The officers left. After a long silence, Vicente turned to Marcela. “You okay?” he asked.

She still hadn’t moved from the wall.

“Come here,” he said. “Let’s sleep this off.”

She couldn’t even look at him. “I don’t know who you are,” she said. “We’ve been together six months and I feel like I don’t know you any better than when we first met. That cop called you Tony Montana. All this time, I think you’re a sensitive, thoughtful teacher and now suddenly you’re Scarface?”

Vicente sighed. “What do you want to know?” His voice was tender, apologetic.

“Why’d you do that down there?”

“I don’t know. I just wanted to fight.”

“But that’s the thing. I saw you. You didn’t fight at all. You didn’t even try to defend yourself.”

Vicente shrugged his shoulders. “Sometimes it feels good to get hit.”

“That’s not an answer that makes any sense. You know that, right?”

“Marcela, I’ve been through some shit.”

“You need serious help.”

He leaned his head back down on the pillow. “Perhaps,” he said.

Next morning Vicente woke her up, gently shaking her shoulder. There was a coffee maker in the bathroom and he had made a pot. He served her some in a Styrofoam cup and placed it on her nightstand. The coffee was weak, but it helped her headache. She pulled aside the curtain and saw it was dawn.

“Why’d you wake me up so early?”

“I wanted to walk with you on the beach. I don’t want to scare anyone with my face like this. It’ll be empty for a little while. Let’s go.”

They bundled up and strolled along the wet sand in silence. Neither made any attempt to talk and it was soothing just to listen to the crashing of the waves.

“In all my life living in Watsonville, I’d never been to Santa Cruz except when I was in juvie up the road. I didn’t realize it was like twenty miles away. The first time I came over here was when I started going to Cabrillo after I got my GED in County.”

“County jail?”

“Yeah,” he said. “First juvie. Then I got transferred to County.”

“For what?”

“A whole bunch of things. Liked it better inside than I did out.”

“Is that why you didn’t want me to meet your family?”

He grunted. “What family?”

They passed a man in a baseball cap walking his golden retriever. The man nodded to them, doing a double take when he noticed Vicente’s face.

“How bad is it?” he asked.

“You didn’t look in the mirror?”

“I was afraid to.”

“I’m surprised you’re alive, let alone walking on the beach.”

“I always could take a punch.”

Marcela wanted to bring the conversation back. “What do you mean what family?”

“After my dad died, my mom, she struggled. I was in and out of foster homes.”

“Is that why you joined a gang?” she asked.

He scrunched up his face. “What do you mean?”

“You know: didn’t have a family so you found one.”

“I wasn’t in a gang,” he said.

She looked up at him. Through his swollen face, she couldn’t tell if he was being serious or not.

“Then what about your strawberry tattoo? Don’t tell me that’s just Watsonville pride.”

“Naw, that’s my favorite fruit.”

She burst out laughing. “You think you’re funny, Vicente.” She felt his arm around her waist. He turned her toward him.

“Look at me,” he said.

She was cold and she pushed herself closer to his warmth, though she couldn’t look up. She didn’t want to.

“Look at me,” he said again.

She allowed herself to stare at his disfigured face. The ice had helped. His eyes were no longer as swollen, yet his face was still covered in welts, cuts, and bruises. She reached up and gently touched his busted bottom lip, then the cuts on his nose. She moved a little higher and ran her fingers over the veins of his swollen eyelids. His eyes were closed. She could hear his breathing and feel his breath on her forehead. He was shivering slightly. She touched his swollen, bruised cheek. He winced, but she kept her hand there anyway.

With the tips of her fingers she dug into his skin and expected him to back away, but he didn’t. She pressed harder and harder until she realized that he was resisting, pushing back hard against her fingers — and then he grabbed her wrists. “Hit me.”

“No,” she whimpered as she tried to wrest her hands away. “Let me go, you’re scaring me.”

“Hit me,” he said again.

“Hit your fucking self.”

“I can’t!” he screamed — and then softer, “I can’t hit anyone.”

She stopped struggling. “I’m not going to hit you, Vicente.”

He let go of her wrists and her arms fell to her side. She turned and walked quickly back toward the beachfront. She didn’t want to look back, but she couldn’t help herself. Vicente was still where she’d left him, staring after her through swollen eyes.

Crab Dinners by Lou Mathews

Seacliff

I was in my apartment, above The Mediterranean, Seacliff’s favorite dive bar, on Center. If you don’t drink and you don’t dive, you’ll still know the joint, or at least the location, because it’s next door to Manuel’s, the best Mexican restaurant in Santa Cruz County. My apartment is spitting distance from my office, a realtor’s shack on blocks on unused state park land. Estelle Richardson, the realtor who rents me a desk, figures we’ll be here for life.

I poked my head out the window to scan the weather and see what the day would bring. There was a girl sitting on the steps of the office, a redhead, reading a book with a finger in her curls. It was nine, an hour at least before Estelle would show, and I didn’t think the kid was looking for real estate.

I have access to the Mediterranean’s espresso machine, a reliable Gaggia that fires up and delivers in three minutes. In five, I was walking up to my office, coffee in one hand, key in the other to indicate my intent. Red looked up, showing an unspoiled face, freckled, quizzical. I looked at her book. It was Carter Wilson’s classic, Crazy February. She closed it on her finger and stood up.

“Are you looking for an apartment?” I said.

“I’m looking for a detective,” she replied. “I’m looking for Ms. Sukenick.”

“It’s Sukie,” I said, and put the key in the lock. “Come on in.”

She sat down across from me. I studied her face. I couldn’t figure out where she was from. I mean, from her speech I knew she was a California kid. She had that accent that Californians don’t think they have, compressed words, raised inflection, like they’re asking a question. But I couldn’t place her face. The freckles and coppery curls could have been County Cork, but there was something different in the eyes, which were a shifting green-gray. Then the cheekbones. If I had to make a guess, I would have said some Irish missionary once made a convert in Beijing.

“So, ” I said, “what does an anthropology major from UC Berkeley want with me?”

She gave a little gasp. “Wow, you really are a detective. How did you know that?”

She probably thought she hadn’t given me any clues, but the blue-and-gold knit cap stuffed in her backpack was definitely Cal and the essential clue was her reading material. Crazy February is a classic in Mesoamerican anthropology, about a murder in the Maya highlands of Chiapas, and I knew Lars Guthrie, the Berkeley professor who assigned the book to his upper-division anthro students every quarter.

What I said was, “If you hang around long enough, you learn some things. What can I do for you?”

She gathered herself. “My name is Kelly Wong. I’m looking for my father, Leonard Wong. Do you know him?”

I didn’t know the man personally, but I’d eaten in his restaurants and any reader of Good Times in the seventies and eighties knew him from his chatty weekly advertisements. “Chef Wong,” in his towering toque, had introduced Szechuan peppers and triple-X chile oil to Santa Cruz County.

Something didn’t scan. I had to ask. “Were you adopted, Kelly?”

She laughed. “I get that a lot. No, Leonard was my father as far as I know. I know the Mayan dicho about you only really know who your mother is, but she said Leonard was her one and only. My mom was Uyghur from Xinjiang. There’s a lot of red-haired kids there.”

“Okay,” I said, and took up my pad and pen. “So when did you last communicate with your dad?”

“That’s the thing,” Kelly said. “Usually, we would talk on the phone every week. He’d call from the restaurant. Sometimes I could tell he’d been drinking, but he always called. Two weeks ago, he didn’t. I wasn’t too worried because I knew there was a big cockfighting tournament in Watsonville. He usually stayed up all night for those.”

She’d mentioned the drinking and I’d seen that at Wong’s restaurant. “XO sauce” was a craze developed in Hong Kong and Chef Wong was determined to improve on the recipe. The “XO” symbolized rarity, like XO cognacs, but there wasn’t actually cognac in the Hong Kong recipe, just Shaoxing wine and pricey dried seafood.

In Wong’s version, there was cognac. When he flambéed scallops, table-side, he would pour a glug of Rémy Martin onto the shellfish, swallow a glug himself, then tip the wok toward the burner. Blue flames would erupt, then applause. Every other table would order the dish. By the second or third order, a lot more of the cognac sauced Chef Wong than the scallops.

“Then,” Kelly said, “this came yesterday, registered mail.” She handed me a nine-by-twelve envelope. The return address was an impressive San Francisco law firm. The sheaf of papers inside explained that a trust had been established in the name of Kelly Wong. On the last page was the full dollar amount, a little over a quarter-mil.

Kelly had teared up. I pushed the tissues across. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “I’d been calling him since Sunday and he wasn’t home and he wasn’t at the restaurant. Nobody knew where he was.”

“Your mom?” I ventured.

She teared up again. “I lost my mom two years ago. There were too many problems for her.” I let that one slide. “My dad has a lot of enemies,” she continued, “because of the restaurants, the investors. He likes to gamble. So, I’m worried. Can you please look for him?”

I was still mulling. “How did you hear about me?”

“That was kind of weird. I have finals starting Monday, so I went to my advisor to see if I could do a makeup. I told her the whole story. I didn’t want to go to the cops in case it turned out to be a ransom situation. She thought I needed legal advice and called a friend at the law school. He recommended you.”

“What’s his name?”

“Brad Turner. You know him?”

“We have some history. Do you have someplace to stay here? I don’t want you staying at your dad’s.”

“I can stay with my dad’s cooks. They won’t say anything.”

“Do that.” I told her what I’d need to get started. She didn’t blink. The only thing she asked was if she could pay the thousand-dollar retainer in two checks. Sure. She wrote two checks for $499 each and handed me two dollar bills. She explained that it was a condition of the trust. Any checks above $500 had to be approved by the trustee. “My dad told the lawyers he didn’t want me paying off his debts.”

“Go get some rest,” I said. “Call me here tomorrow morning and I’ll give you an update.”

“Don’t you want my phone number, or the address where I’m staying?”

“I don’t want to be able to answer that question until I figure out what’s going on. As you said, your dad has enemies. You want me to call you a cab?”

“No,” Kelly said, “I want to walk down the railroad tracks. I can catch the bus on Park. My dad’s first restaurant was in Capitola. It was just my mom and dad cooking and working the front. I helped out from the time I was five or six. A lot of customers couldn’t figure out who I was. I was my dad’s favorite joke. He’d say, ‘This is my daughter Kelly. She’s living proof that two Wongs can make a white!’”

“He’s got a lot to answer for.”

“Yeah, not many customers laughed, even back then.” She put on her pack and jammed the stocking cap over her curls. I watched her walk up Center.

At Manuel’s, Leobardo, the head waiter, was lounging on the bench in front, reading the Santa Cruz Sentinel. Leobardo didn’t even look up as Kelly passed, which surprised me. Usually he checked out anything with a bounce and a pulse.

Kelly crossed to State Park Drive, walked up to Moulton’s Union ’76, and headed north on the railroad tracks.

So Kelly Wong had said Brad Turner recommended me. A blast from the past. I knew Brad for the same reason I knew Lars Guthrie and Carter Wilson: my shady academic past. I was a failed professor. I did my four-year stretch in Rubber City. When I was denied tenure at UCSC, I did what my role model Annie Steinhardt did when she was denied. I went over the hill and started dancing at Jolly’s, a topless bar in the pits of San Jose. Annie wrote a book about it, Thunder La Boom. There wasn’t a novel in my future, I wrote poetry — but I liked the idea and the money was good and immediate.

About my third month at Jolly’s, I encountered a former student, Brad Turner. Or, should I say, Brad Turner looked me up, and looked me down. It’s a little hard, peering over your own bouncing breasts, to acknowledge a former student, but I nodded and we met in the parking lot.

“Dr. Sukenick,” Brad said.

I had to smile. “Call me Sukie.” It was my stage name, but it fit. “Did you graduate?”

“Yeah,” Brad said with a grin, “my stepdad just about stroked out.” Brad was one of my salvage jobs.

“I’m here to return the favor,” he said. “I’m working for the public defender’s office. They want smart people and I thought you might fit.” Brad came from a family of lawyers and he’d avoided that fate as long as he could, but the PD’s office had sniffed him out, and hired him as an investigator. He was off to Boalt and he thought I might be the ideal replacement.

It worked out. More than worked out. Turned out that intuitive instinct I thought would lead to chapbooks and tenure was ideally suited to listening to liars. I spent six years learning the trade and, more valuably, getting to know every judge, prosecutor, public defender, and most of the cops in Santa Cruz County. My three-month stint, topless, had more cachet with them than my four years at the university.

I made the obligatory calls on Chef Wong. Leonard didn’t turn up much on the criminal front: two DUIs and an arrest without charge in a mass bust in Prunedale — one of a crowd of two hundred — plus at an alleged cockfight.

Civil was a different matter. Leonard Wong had been, and was currently being, sued by investors, landlords, suppliers, contractors, and even a live seafood supplier from Korea who he’d stiffed. The investors came in clumps. It appeared that he had sold the restaurants at least four times to five groups of overseas investors. He hadn’t done the bankruptcy out, which was interesting. That meant he hoped for new investors. I checked with my sources in the DA’s office and learned there were more lawsuits pending. Then I checked my darker sources and learned that in addition to his drinking and money problems, Leonard also had a cocaine problem, and that was overtaking the rest. The profile was shaping.

Estelle blew in around eleven thirty a.m., looking, as she was wont to say, rid hard and put away wet.

“If you look in the dictionary under blowsy...” I said.

“Stuff it.” Estelle reached for the Visine, tilted back, and shuddered as the drops hit her tender eyeballs. “Made the sale. At least I damn well better have made that sale. His wife would not like to see what my security camera saw.”

“Leonard Wong?”

Estelle sat up. “Interesting story, but I only know the parameters. He used to own the land his restaurants sit on. Three refi’s in three years. New case?”

“Time for lunch.”

“Gotcha.” Estelle turned on her desk lamp, put on her dark glasses, and spun her Rolodex.

I walked over to Manny’s. It was pleasantly dark, as always, and quieter than usual. You could actually hear Manny’s favorite soundtrack, delicate jarocho harp music from Veracruz. Manuel Santana was an interesting man, successful restaurateur, and failed artist, according to him — and Chicano Centrál if you were involved in Democratic Party politics. He kept the lights low and stocked chardonnay, which kept the gringas of a certain age coming back.

The head waiter’s wife, Socorro, was behind the cash register, comparing the tale of the tape to the handwritten bills, then stapling them together. I touched her on the shoulder as I went by. She lifted her head and smiled at me. Leobardo approached; he nodded and it was almost a genuflection — then, full smile. He leaned in attentively with his pad and we went through our ritual.

“Para mi, poquito ensalada de Manuel,” I said. “Chile relleño combinacion, menos frijoles, solo arroz.”

Leobardo didn’t write it down until I finished my recitation, and then he began his own: “One small Manny’s salad, one stuffed chile, no beans, only rice. And to drink?”

“Una Bohemia, por favor.”

Leobardo winked. “It’s December. We just got our shipment of Noche Buena. ”

The Christmas beer, a joy, a dark beer with some sweetness but more body and a great aftertaste. The German braumeisters who came to Monterrey in the nineteenth century lived on in this great beer, available once a year. “Noche Buena,” I agreed.

Leobardo bowed and smiled again. At the cash register, Socorro cackled. As always, Leobardo ignored his wife and maintained his chivalrous flirtation. “Esta bién, señorita. Your accent is really improving.”

As he set down the beer, I said, “Leobardo. A question, and this is professional.”

“For your work?”

“Yes. Do you know anyone who knows about cockfighting in South County?”

He sat down across from me. “You need this?”

“Yeah, it matters.”

“Then you should talk to my uncle Mike. Miguel to me, but he’ll want you to call him Mike. Did you know about my family?”

“No. Just a shot. Cockfighting’s been big in Watsonville since the sixties and I know your family has been here longer than that.”

“My family is from Michoacán, and that’s the center of cockfighting in Mexico. We’ve bred champion roosters for more than a century.”

At the cash register, Socorro spiked a sheaf of bills, rolled the tape around the spike, and punched the empty cash drawer closed. She stood with the bank bag and peered at us with some humor. “If I had a peso for every macho from Michoacán who claimed he raised the best cock in the country, I’d be a happier woman than I am today.”

Leobardo rolled his eyes and blew a kiss in Socorro’s direction, “Besos y pesos, mi amor.” He tore off a page from his order pad, wrote furiously, and then handed it to me like a check. “That’s the address and phone number. I’ll go make the call.”

The address was in Corralitos. Back at the office, Estelle looked up the parcel. It was a good-sized ranch for the area, 180 acres off Eureka Canyon Road. Miguel Sandoval was the owner.

Estelle spotted something interesting, the parcel opposite Miguel’s, which fronted on Amesti Road. It was owned by another Sandoval, Benjamin. Corralitos Creek separated the properties.

Estelle pointed out the window, “There’s your flag boy.”

I looked out. Leobardo had stepped out the front door of Manny’s and was waving a red napkin. When he saw he had my attention, he jabbed a forefinger south. It was time to go.

The day was too nice for the freeway. I took my Karmann Ghia through the apple orchards and Victorian farmhouses, then rolled down my window as I passed the Corralitos meat market to enjoy the scent of burning applewood and smoking linguiça.

I found the address, an impressive stone gate with a bronze sign affixed, Rancho Sandoval. Uncle Mike was behind the gate, an older, sturdier version of Leobardo, on horseback, a beautiful roan that must have stood seventeen hands high. I waved, and he walked the gate open and then walked it closed behind me, a nice bit of horsemanship.

I leaned out and looked up at him, “Don Miguel, cómo estás?”

He laughed, “Yeah, Leobardo said you would try out your Spanish. He said not to encourage you. It’s Mike. Follow me.”

He set out at a canter and then got up to speed, cutting through short grass and vetch that fronted the rows of apple trees. I followed on the concrete, which became well-graded dirt out of sight of the frontage road. It was almost three minutes to the house and outbuildings, clustered on a wide meadow, backed onto Corralitos Creek. It was as close to a hacienda as anything I’d seen on this side of the border.

Off to one side was what looked like a full-sized rodeo arena, with metal stands. In back, a parking lot. Mike went inside and came out bearing two sweating bottles of Noche Buena. He handed one over. “Let’s walk and talk. Leobardo told me two things. He said you wanted to know about cockfighting and he said you were to be trusted.”

I pointed to the arena. “Is that where they’re held? The cockfights?”

He laughed. “No, we actually do hold rodeos here, once a month at least, both vaquero and American.”

He took my elbow and guided me around an oak to a smaller path, which led to a pristine metal building with tiers of canted rows of windows, tilted to let in sunlight, but at an angle that made it impossible to see in from outside.

Inside, I understood I was in the Taj Mahal of henhouses — climate-controlled with filtered air, sunlit apartments filled with happy chickens, if the slow contented clucking was any indicator. Chickens of all colors walked and scratched and sat asleep on fresh straw, in tiers stretching to the roof.

“These are the hens,” Mike explained. “We sell some eggs at our roadside stand. About half of them are breeders, from long lines of fierce ancestors. Rockefeller couldn’t afford these eggs for breakfast.” Beyond the hens was a metal wall that had a metal door with a coded entry lock. Mike punched some numbers.

Beyond was Fort Rooster. The walls resounded with roosters in full cry, roosters pacing back and forth on their sawdust runways, roosters pecking at whole corncobs and their reflections in small mirrors. Combs engorged, metallic feathers flashing, mindless bright eyes reflecting us. These birds, with their herky-jerky movements, seemed more reptilian than avian.

I noticed metal bowls in a lot of the cages that seemed to have what looked like steak tartar, diced cubes of dark flesh. I pointed. “You feed them meat?”

“Horse meat,” Mike said, “low fat, lots of protein.”

“Chickens eat meat?”

“In the wild,” Mike said, “chickens eat anything: bugs, lizards, snakes, rats, other chickens — people too, if they find a body.”

At the end of the room was a deep pit; two young men were standing in it, holding what looked like younger roosters, one black, one red. They were thrusting the birds forward to excite them. They dropped the birds and there was a flurry of kicks, squawks, slashing beaks, kicking heels, and loose feathers flying. Until one bird, the red, turned away.

The men stepped in and gathered the frantic birds up, turned in different directions, and calmed them, stroking and soothing.

I looked at the confined space. “Is this where it all happens?”

“No, no, no,” Mike said. “This is the practice palenque. Come on, I’ll show you the real deal.” As we went through the back door, he turned back and spoke to the men. One nodded, and wrung the neck of the red bird.

We walked to a section of Corralitos Creek that was different from the small stream I knew. Here it was wider and deeper, twenty feet across at least. Mike pointed downstream and up: “Two check dams. We close the gates when we want to stop waders. Now, come round the corner.” There was a tall, dense eugenia hedge; on the other side was what looked like a boat landing. “I’m not actually going to show you the real palenque. It’s a quarter-mile walk on the other side.”

“On your brother’s land?”

Mike’s eyes gleamed with amusement. “I am going to show you how we get there.” He lifted the top of one of the pilings. Inside was a panel with four buttons. He pushed the top one. From beneath the deck, a metal rectangle emerged and kept emerging, like the ladder on a fire truck extending up the side of a building. The smoothness suggested hydraulics. The metal span crossed twenty feet of creek and locked into a slot on the other side. Mike pressed a second button, railings unfolded from the bed and swayed upright to lock into place. I was looking at a perfect bridge. The whole process had taken about a minute. Mike pressed the third button, the rails collapsed, and then the fourth. The return trip was less than thirty seconds.

The big ranch had parking, public events, all legal and family friendly. Across the creek at the secluded arena, there was no traffic, no cars, and enough security precautions that if anyone came snooping, the high rollers would fade back across an uncrossable creek to join innocent crowds at the rodeo.

“Ridiculous, no?” Mike tugged on his mustache. “A rope bridge would have worked as well and cost nothing. This bridge is designed to impress. I showed it to you to give you an idea how much money is involved in these events.”

“I’m guessing a lot.”

“This ain’t Prunedale. Cops bust some flaky Filipinos and they think they’ve wrapped it up. Santa Cruz County has been the center of cockfighting in the US since the 1950s. The prize for our last tournament was fifty grand. More than a million dollars changes hands on side bets... So, now that I’ve told you this, do you want to ask me about Leonard Wong?”

“How did you know?”

“Leobardo saw Kelly on your stoop this morning. He’s known her since she was a little girl. She used to come to the cockfights with her dad. If you hadn’t asked, he would have told you to come see me.”

“Do you know where Leonard is?”

“I think I know who’s behind this, but I want you to finish your investigation. I have some prejudices, I don’t like the family. I want to have an independent eye on this.”

“What’s your interest?”

“Leonard Wong was my friend — and he taught me — me, un hombre de Michoacán — most of what I know about chickens. People forget, cockfighting started in China, before Jesús. We Mexicans have only been doing this a couple hundred years.

“Leonard was a genius with birds. He used to say, ‘I know how to cook them and I know how to pick ’em,’ and he was right. He never lost money betting on cockfighting. Just last week he made three hundred large, and he made me a lot of money. He helped me build my line of birds to where they are today, champions, just using his eye to pick mates. He taught me how to train, correct their faults.”

“So why is he in money trouble?”

“He was as bad at poker as he was good at cockfighting. He thought he could read gabachos the same way he read chickens.”

Mike closed the cover on the bridge button and went businessman on me: “I gotta go, I have a meeting. Do your digging. If you find out what happened, there’s a bonus in it for you. I don’t want to make a serious move without being sure. You have my number.”

I drove back to the office, a little dazed. There was one little red flag that flew up during that drive. Mike had said that Leobardo had seen Kelly Wong on my stoop. That he had known her since she was a little girl.

I’d watched Kelly walk down Center, past Manuel’s where Leobardo was sitting on the bench in front. He didn’t look at her, not even to study her schoolgirl ass. I thought at the time it was odd, but then I thought, well, maybe Socorro was over his shoulder, watching.

But how do you explain childhood friends not even looking at each other? That was a red flag that might stay up.

It took about three calls for me to connect the dots. What I said was, “Big-time, big-money poker games. Cross-category: cocaine access. Santa Cruz County.” The answer was the same each time: Joe Morielli.

It was a name I knew but a profile so low he’d never showed up on my screen. Joe Morielli was a black sheep, and perhaps the most successful member of the Watsonville apple cider vinegar clan.

I’d first heard about him at the public defender’s office, but even then he was a rumor. Joe, unlike the rest of the Moriellis, hated apples. He’d gone to work at local nightclubs, first as a busboy, then tending bar, then tending bar as a hobby while dealing cocaine. It was a fairly common progression. But Joe was smart and made a smart move. He started giving discounts to local law enforcement and from there moved up the food chain to the legal community: DAs, prosecutors, eventually judges. By then, he was midlevel and no longer had any contact with the buyers, but he knew who they were. They knew he knew.

Joe had never been busted, not even when some competitors disappeared and he took over the longest-running poker game in town. Then the man seemed to vanish. No one I knew could put me in touch with Joe. He was a ghost. No presence. More than that, he was an absence, which spoke to his layers of legal protection. The best intel I could manage was that his regular players were only informed the day of the card game where the game would be held.

I called it a night and trudged home — Campbell’s chicken noodle, sprawled on the couch, soothed by Perry Mason and the gentle happy din from downstairs.

Friday, I hired a temp to cover for me with Kelly and anyone else. The temp loved the script I gave her: “I get to say that? You’re tracking leads? That is so cool!”

I’d decided the only way to smoke Joe out was to tap into the ground from which he was raised. I hit every bar, lounge, and tavern in Santa Cruz County. I was depending on the loose confederacy of bartenders and cocktail waitresses to pass the word along. I pressed my card and the promise of cash.

By late afternoon I’d covered the county. The temp said no one except Kelly had called. I paid her to stay and monitor the phones, in case of a tipster. At seven I gave up, sent the temp home, and went downstairs to join the cheerful roar.

The Friday-night Mediterranean was packed and in full fling. I found an empty two-top in the back corner and waited for a waitress to find me.

Sacha Howells found me first, and he bore my signature drink, a Red Bomb: Carpano Antica, twist of lemon, rocks.

Sacha spun a napkin onto my table and set the drink down. I was surprised to see him. Sacha is on the day shift. He leaned in. “I was told to give you this.” He handed over another Mediterranean napkin. I could see the ink bleeding through from the middle.

I heard you’re looking for me.

Why don’t you join me on a voyage.

Aboard the SS Palo Alto.

I’m there now.

Joe

A little frost descended my spine. I swallowed my vermouth and headed for the door. I went upstairs for my peacoat. It was going to be cold out there on the boat. The SS Palo Alto was one of two cement ships built in 1919 at the US Navy shipyards in Oakland. The war ended before the ship went into service, so they mothballed her for a decade until the Seacliff Amusement Corporation bought her and towed her to Seacliff Beach, where they tethered her to a pier, built a dance hall, a swimming pool, and a café on board — and sank her. Probably a great entertainment idea, but not in 1929. They closed in ’31, stripped her, and left her as a fishing pier, the focal point of the new state park.

I spent a lot of time there fishing and watching the bay. The boat had split apart in ’58 and become a paradise for fishermen, an ideal reef, full of fish, mussels, crabs, and the birds that fed on them.

I was looking down on the pier and the ship from the cliffs. I put my watch cap on and started down the endless Seacliff stairs. With the wind chill, it was close to freezing.

I walked out onto the pier. It was a long way out. It was a clear, beautiful night, with a moon over the bay beating a silvery path toward me. There was a constant crash of waves on the broken bow of the ship, then the sough and sigh of the tide working back from the beach.

On the ship there was a solitary fisherman looking down into the dark water. A big bucket beside him. He grabbed a braided yellow nylon rope that was tied to the railing. As soon as I saw him start hauling on the rope, I knew exactly what he was doing: fishing for the rock crabs that congregated around the cement ship.

My first husband, my only husband, Elron, taught me how to fish for crabs. He grew up in Brooklyn and haunted the piers of Jamaica Bay. The only Jew-boy there, he said, and he learned from old Italians. Later, he would learn from the young heiresses he taught at Vassar another way to catch crabs, but I fucking digress.

The guy was really hauling on the line now, end over end, slack rope looping behind him. When you pull the trap up, a small hoop drops down, trapping the crabs, but you have to haul fast before the crabs scramble to the rim and drop back in the water.

As the trap came up into the moonlight, I could see that it was swarming with crabs, seven or eight in there, more than I ever caught in one pull. The guy yanked the hoop net over the rail and let it slap down on the deck. He moved fast, plucking them out of the netting and tossing them into his bucket. A few got out and scuttled toward the water. I ran and grabbed one, put my sneaker on the other, and then picked him up too. I dropped them in the bucket and glanced up to see the man peering at me.

He was decent-looking guy, wavy black hair, olive complexion, but there was something wrong in the eyes. There was nothing there — like looking into that rooster’s eyes.

“Sukenick,” he said.

“Yeah, Morielli?”

“Allegedly.”

“I have to ask,” I said. “What the hell are you using for bait?” There must’ve been thirty crabs in the bucket.

“Tonight? Liver.” He pulled a flashlight from his jacket and shined it on the hoop net. I was looking at liver, but not calf’s liver. What I saw, wired to the netting, looked like a slice of bad Spam hit with a blowtorch. The unmistakable cirrhotic liver of a drinking man.

He switched the light off. “I hear you’re looking for Leonard Wong.” I didn’t want to know how he knew that. “Well, you found him.”

Morielli tossed the hoop net over the side. I flinched at the splash.

“Yeah, Leonard’s paying his debt off in installments. Well, he’s just paying the vig. These crab dinners have been a big feature at my poker nights. And there’s kind of a neat side effect since I started serving the crab. A whole bunch of slow payers have sped up.”

I started to back away.

“When you talk to Kelly tomorrow, tell her I’ll be in touch. You could really help this whole process along for me.”

I threw up my hands, “Come on, man. That’s not on her.”

He seemed to swell, like his hackles had raised up. He said, very quietly, “People die. Debts don’t die.”

I walked away. About the time I cleared the ship, he called after me, “You tell Kelly, checks are just fine, and $499 a week sounds about right. We’ll be in touch.”

I picked up my pace. I figured I’d check into a no-tell motel for a few days. I would stop at home first, time for one phone call, to Corralitos. Mike Sandoval wanted to know the deal, and if I knew my man, he’d be ready and he would move fast.

The red flag was flapping. Now I understood why Kelly and Leobardo had ignored each other. Kelly knew who killed her father. She knew the scumbag would come after her inheritance, and she knew the only man, Don Miguel, who could stop him.

Kelly had played me, but she’d played it right. I would absolutely confirm to Mike Sandoval what he wanted to be true.

Joe Morielli might have time for a few more crab parties. But I expected Joe would be attending a lot more chicken dinners in his future.

Pinballs by Beth Lisick

Corralitos

Living by the ocean had always been my plan — a third-act strategy. What a cool way to get old and wrinkled: go for long swims, walk in the sand, eat tacos every day, drink beer. When Dave freaked out on me again, I figured there was no time like the present. I ditched the mountains for lower ground. Under the cover of night, like you see in the movies.

Sure, I washed up on the beach a little earlier than I thought I would — only halfway old and halfway wrinkled — but what a relief to be on to my next chapter.

Now I’d be pedaling toward the white light at the end of the tunnel on one of those sparkly beach cruisers with the fat seats: sunburned and pleasantly buzzed. It was going to be a good few years.

The rent wasn’t cheap, even back then — especially if you wanted to live solo, like I did. But you know what worked? Driving south on Highway 1 and parking underneath a eucalyptus grove.

You get off the freeway on Riverside Drive, right where you see that abandoned Queen Anne. Go past the strawberry fields, the artichokes and brussels sprouts, and that’s where my spot was. You’re not going the wrong way, even when you start seeing signs for the condo development. Keep curving around. You can practically smell your way there, there’s so much eucalyptus. Chances are, the lot will be empty. It’s in between two private beaches, so it seems like you don’t belong there, but there’s no trick. Pull up, hike over the little path, and thar she blows: a mile of beach almost all to yourself.

In one day, my life went from flat zero to watching pelicans dive-bomb for their breakfast. Walking along the beach for hours. After what I’d been through, being all alone in my sleeping bag in the back of the square-back was a pleasure: a promising turnaround.

Marta knew all about beaches because her family had been in Watsonville before all those condos were a gleam in the developer’s eye.

The morning I met her, she showed up in her station wagon with a whole brood. I peeked out of the checked curtains I had sewn for some privacy, and there were all these kids, piling out, clown-car style. I knew they couldn’t be hers because there were at least ten of them. Little ones. They were bouncing around like pinballs! This was before they passed the seat belt laws, so it’s not like she was doing anything wrong. It was just how you did it back then. She wanted to take ten kids to the beach, so she squeezed them all together in the Olds.

It was cold out, and early, so the kids had their colorful little jackets and hats on, and they were yelling and goofing off. A couple were crying. Marta was the only one wrangling them and they all started heading up over the dunes. I wanted to see how this was going to pan out, so I followed. One little guy, he started lagging behind, and pretty soon he was running off the path.

There used to be real tall grass in the dunes; it was like a maze in there. You could easily lose a kid that way.

They were small. None of them over five. So I chased after the little guy and scooped him up and got him back on track. I brought him over to the group and Marta smiled at me, but she didn’t seem worried at all. She hadn’t even noticed he was missing. She had the kids all plopped in the sand and playing with their toys and I sat down. She spoke plenty of English and I spoke Spanish pretty well from my abuela, so we chitchatted the way you do: a mishmash. I didn’t tell her my whole situation, but I got the feeling she knew. She could tell I’d been places and seen some things. She told me my eyes reminded her of a turtle, which might not sound like the nicest thing to say, but I could tell she meant something good by it. She said it in Spanish, tortuga. I think she was telling me I was smart, or serious, or something.

I stayed and played with the kids all morning. We dug holes and got sand in everything and she offered me some food from her big paper grocery sack. She had these corn tortillas, wrapped in a cloth and still warm, that she’d roll around hunks of white cheese. A big jug of pineapple juice with Dixie cups. I never wanted kids of my own, but I loved the way these guys were climbing all over me from the get-go. It made me feel purposeful, like I was an animal assisting other animals.

When I helped her pile everyone back into the car, she asked me what I was doing the next morning — if I wanted to help her again, maybe at her house. She showed me on my map and I wrote down her address in the margin and all of a sudden I had a job! Just for the mornings, but it was a start. I didn’t need to have a degree, or a resume, or fill out any paperwork. I could go ahead and call myself a teacher if I wanted.

It’s funny because working at a day care turned out to be a lot closer to sex work than you’d think. You have to be present in your body and not overthink things. You have to trust that your body is being used for good. Also, it helped that my immune system was bulletproof from all those years dancing. I had developed a lot of patience too.

By the end of the week, Marta and I already had this mother/daughter thing going on. Nothing like what I had with my own mom, thank god. The house was warm and comfy, and with all the kids and cousins around, it felt like family real quick. I thought it was a blessing to find her so soon after moving, to be welcomed in like that. It was special. I tried not to talk about my past or that I was still sleeping in my car, but she worried. She packed me meals to bring back and gave me a whistle. When I made a crack about who would hear a whistle all the way out there — she opened her purse and tried to give me her knife.

One day, we were back at the beach with the kids and she said that Ricky might have a lead on a place for me. I think she called Ricky her brother or brother-in-law; but maybe Ricky was another cousin?

Hoo-boy, Ricky was hot. I’m going to be blunt about it because one thing that makes me nuts is when people can’t just call it for what it is. Ricky was a stone fox and no sane person would refute it. He wore these tight black jeans and boots all caked with mud, Western shirts with snaps. Mustache. You get the picture. He fixed stuff around Marta’s house, like the garbage disposal and the toilet, and he had a formality about him that turned me on. He passed me a tub of margarine one time at dinner and my hand touched his, and I thought I was gonna die.

Now this whole time I was assuming Ricky made his money as a fix-it guy and a fisherman. He had poles in his truck, and he was always unloading coolers into the backyard, hosing them out, filling them with fresh ice. There were a lot of fishermen around, selling cod or rockfish out of their coolers by the gas station or near St. Patrick’s.

If you pressed me, I guess I’d say it was illegal. Maybe you had to have a license? People sold a lot of stuff around Watsonville. Tortillas, tamales, churros, blankets, flags. And I’m sure there were drugs, like all places, but I didn’t see them. I was around a different crowd back then, mostly older Catholic people who worked hard and had one eye on la Migra.

Ricky came twice a week — sometimes with kids, sometimes not. He had an “office” that was a converted bathroom where he took the little ones. Marta said he was checking for lice, signs of chicken pox. The kids’ parents were too scared to take them to the public clinic. God, I remember hating my nits getting picked too; I would cry my head off, just like they did.

One morning I got to work — I usually showed up around six thirty and we’d eat and get everything set for the kids to arrive — and Marta hugged me so tight. She told me Ricky had a place I could live for cheap. A place just for me. It was out in Corralitos, where there wasn’t much except for a meat market and a lot of apple orchards. But it was sitting there empty. There had been a huge flood the winter before, the famous one that triggered all the landslides, thousands of them, and the cabin had gotten pretty well dumped on and waterlogged. It was going to be moldy, but it wasn’t anything we couldn’t fix. Spring was coming, and we could open everything up and let it dry out.

We laid out the snacks for the kids and then Ricky showed up. He arrived with two little ones I hadn’t seen before, though I don’t think they were his. The number of kids fluctuated daily, I think, because most of the parents worked in the fields, and not all the moms worked every day.

Marta never turned away anyone, even when kids were swinging from the curtain rods and diapers were running low. It was chaos, but it worked somehow. Some of them practically lived there. One set of twins, a boy and girl (named Albino and Blanca — White and White, if you can believe it), had been staying overnight every weekday for months. Their mom was deported after being pulled over for some traffic nonsense and it was impossible for their dad to take care of them and work at the same time. Marta was keeping them until they could fly down to Mexico with another relative to be reunited with their mom.

I thought those kids were lucky. In rich neighborhoods, you couldn’t have a group of more than three children in a home without the California Department of Social Services breathing down your neck, and here were all these babies getting loving care practically for free.

I should’ve taken my own car to see the cabin instead of riding with Ricky. I knew that the minute I started talking to him, my mouth would be leaking honey. I hated that about myself — used to be if there was an attractive man around, my whole everything changed. My voice got softer, I held my body differently, I said the stupidest shit. I had just learned to get ahold of myself and I didn’t want to ruin things.

Then Ricky opened the car door for me and Marta put a jade plant on my lap and I started to fall apart, ever so slightly.

The cab of his Chevy was tidy. I remember the carpet on the floor was freshly vacuumed in those long professional-detailer strokes, first one direction and then the next. He had a cup holder attached to a sandbag laid across the hump below the stick shift and an air freshener with la Virgen on it. He kept his eyes on the road, even when I couldn’t stop thanking him. I was so grateful to be given this fresh start, yet I was probably giving off a vibe of wild desperation.

We wound back onto the country roads, past orchards, getting farther and farther from the ocean. It was only about twenty minutes away, but it was rural, and I didn’t have a sense where I was at first. He pulled off the road and we dropped down into a driveway. The cabin was a bitty thing, surrounded by brush and fallen branches, but it had two windows in the front with window boxes underneath them. I imagined I would fill them with flowers, maybe herbs — buy a bright yellow watering can and even learn to cook. I didn’t have any furniture, but I did have a welcome mat. For some reason I’ll never know, I had grabbed it from me and my old man’s place when I stormed out the door. I think it was my way of saying, Now you gotta wipe your feet somewhere else, asshole. Dave probably hadn’t even noticed it was gone.

Ricky walked around to the back and I followed him. He climbed up on a pile of wood, hoisted open a small window, and went through it, headfirst. I’ll never forget the look on his face when he popped up from the other side of the window, like, Ta-da! It was the first genuine smile I’d seen from him, and I laughed.

I started to climb in myself and he was saying, “No, no,” and motioning toward the front door, but I dove in right after him. He helped pull me all the way through by my armpits and the minute my feet hit the floor, it was on. We were going at it. We were kissing and pawing each other, we wrestled ourselves into the main room, and then we were peeling our pants off and rolling around on that filthy, disgusting floor. God, it felt good.

It wasn’t until after that I could see what a real mess the place was, and boy did it smell bad too. Garbage and animal turds and big holes in the walls. It looked like whomever had been squatting had vacated awhile ago.

I tried to make a joke and said, “I’ll take it!” and grabbed at his crotch, but Ricky didn’t seem to like that.

He put his arm around my shoulder when we walked back out to the truck, though he had turned quiet again. I took a swig out of the bottle he offered from under his seat. We stole looks at each other. Or maybe he was checking to see if I was still staring at him? Honestly, I tried to be cool, yet it wasn’t my nature.

When he said he had to make a quick stop, I knew I should get back to Marta, but I didn’t say anything.

“It’s fine,” he said, “I’m fast.” And it was. We drove to this residential neighborhood in Freedom, boring but nice, and left one of his coolers on the doorstep and brought what I assumed to be an empty one back. And that was it. I didn’t think anything of it.

He dropped me back off at work and Marta was really weird to me right away. I apologized for taking so long, but it was like she could tell I’d just bagged Ricky in the landslide cabin.

I slept one more night in my car out at the beach, and then Saturday I bought some cleaning supplies and went up there to see what I could do. Ricky came by just before nightfall and we screwed again. At least this time I had made a bed of sorts out of my sleeping bag and some blankets. The candlelight softened the dankness. I tried to make some small talk with him afterward, but he wasn’t having it.

Instead of seeming hot and mysterious, it just seemed rude. Do I feel used? I asked myself. And then a few minutes after he left, I remembered that I had wanted and enjoyed the sex, and I now had my own place to live for the first time in my life. Be that way, I thought. I’d be fine.

When I came to work on Monday, Marta was standing on the porch waiting for me. She said that she didn’t need me anymore. “Go,” she said. “You’re finished.” I hated how cold she was. I tried to talk to her, but she walked in her house and shut the door and I knew that was it. The kids would start showing up any minute and I couldn’t make a scene. There’d been enough of that in my life anyway. Marta had so much dignity that it made me want to leave with some of my own. But what was it? Had she been in love with Ricky? Weren’t they related?

Marta wasn’t returning my calls. Ricky wasn’t stopping by. I needed a new job quick if I was going to stay at the cabin for another month. I started working at a “private entertainment” company, promising myself it would be temporary. Twice while I was driving around I thought I saw Ricky’s truck, once taking the on ramp toward Monterey, and once in the bakery parking lot.

That second time, I circled around and parked on the opposite end. I got out with no plan. As I drew closer, I saw the old coolers in the back. My hands were shaking when I reached for them. I could hear Ricky yelling from the bakery. I lifted the Styrofoam lid and pushed back the bag of ice, and there were shiny vials full of dark liquid. The fuck were these things? Ricky was walking right at me. “You whore!” he shouted. “Get away from my life, you whore!”

I turned and ran back to my car while he stood there, arms folded across his chest, watching me. I should have let it go, but I rolled past him on the way out, slow enough to look him in the face. I kept my voice calm, the way I did when I was working. “I wish I had a dollar for every man who’s called me a whore,” I said.

I drove off and grabbed everything I needed from the cabin in three minutes flat. I found a new spot at a new beach. That look in Ricky’s eyes? I never wanted to see him again.

Almost a year later, the story came out. I was working in a real day care by then, a licensed place, living in a nice house near Struve Slough with one of my coworkers and her girlfriend.

It was in all the papers. Marta and Ricky had been arrested for trafficking.

They’d been extracting the kids’ plasma and blood and urine, and selling it to a research start-up. Some tech crew over the hill had formed their own biotech company and needed raw materials. How they found Ricky and Marta, I’ll never know.

The case didn’t end up going to trial. The children didn’t matter. That company is listed on the NYSE today.

I had to quit my job after that, stop working with kids. Marta had been the only contact on my resume and my employers couldn’t risk it. Oh well, there’s always “private entertainment.” I don’t live by the ocean anymore — but I always go to sleep where I can hear it.

The Shooter by Lee Quarnstrom

Watsonville

I’d picked out the shooter’s car by the time I hopped out of my Plymouth and crossed the dusty parking lot toward the front of the two-story building. It was the rust-speckled Studebaker, backed in against the head lettuce field dotted with thousands, maybe millions, of tiny, shiny green shoots sprouting from the chunky black soil of the fertile fields just outside Watsonville.

Out here, row crops planted since the war had pushed the valley’s once-ubiquitous apple orchards back to rolling acres and narrow barrancas where the steep slopes of the redwood foothills began to flatten into furrowed farmland, better-suited for irrigation ditches that watered endless rows where leafy greens were bringing in more bucks per acre than Bellflowers and Newton Pippins and Granny Smiths ever would!

For one thing, the Studebaker was clean, if a bit rusty around the chrome, with no telltale smears of the region’s rich topsoil spattered across its fenders. For another, like all gunmen, this shooter had parked facing out; he could make a speedy getaway from here or from anywhere else he’d ever parked his automobile. If he had business to attend to here at the bar below Hildegard’s whorehouse, or in one of the rooms upstairs, it wouldn’t take him half a minute to run to his car and hit the road.

He’d missed the weekend carloads of soldier boys getting trained how to shoot North Koreans — they’d all headed back toward Fort Ord: loud youngsters, always drunk, pimply, stopping for a quickie if they’d failed to find any gash. They’d all leave Watsonville to weave down the dark and narrow Coast Highway toward the army base built on massive dunes just northeast of the Monterey Peninsula.

I spotted the shooter as soon as I walked into the joint, even before I took a seat at the end of the bar near the front door. He was a Mexican, of course, like almost everyone else in the room, but he was wearing neither the dungarees nor the overhauls of the campesino, nor the dusty white outfit sewn from flour sacks sported by los viejos, old men, single old-timers too bent and broken to chop lettuce anymore or work at any of the other stoop labor that the growers depended on.

Much of the campesinos’ meager haul, of course, eventually crossed this polished slab in front of me where the stocky gal pouring drinks — Hildegard herself — slapped down a shot of Four Roses and a glass of whatever was on tap before she grabbed a few quarters from those I’d dug out of my pocket before I’d parked my butt on the stool.

Take it easy, Nelson, she mouthed at me.

I wouldn’t say the guy I’d tagged as the shooter was dressed like a pachuco — for one thing, he wasn’t flashy; he wore a suit that didn’t make him look any sharper than the fieldworkers standing or sitting along the bar. But the tan gabardine outfit with draped trousers pegged at his ankles did cover a smooth leather holster. I could tell it sat against his white shirt where the fabric was bunching beneath the lapel of his jacket.

Also, his two-tone Western boots, shiny brown-and-white leather, were luxuries none of the farmworkers in the place would have wasted money on. Cash like that could buy some necessary relaxation down here in the barroom or some relief upstairs with the chamacas whom Hildegard’s customers kept busy from sundown to almost midnight — and even later on weekends.

The main reason I picked the shooter out was that he, at least the guy I’d made as the shooter, didn’t look at me even for an instant when I came in through the front door. All the other drinkers had at least given me a side-eyed peek as I walked in; some glances had been bored, some had been hostile in a macho sort of way. The pistolero, however, didn’t turn his head, didn’t glance at me in the mirror, or didn’t, in any other way that I could discern, check me out.

I knew immediately that he’d instantly sensed everything he needed to know about me — and about every other man doling out quarters to Hildegard as she patrolled her beat behind the stick. He focused on no one. Hildie pocketed some cash from pitiful little stashes on the bar and nodded the other customers toward a beaded curtain that led to the toilet and to the rickety stairway to the rooms upstairs.

As I was on my second Four Roses, Blue Ribbon back, Hildegard came up to me for a good hard stare. Like every barkeep, she was polishing a smudged glass — one of those squat cocktail glasses that you can’t tip over because they’re wide and weighted at the bottom even when they’re empty — with a rag so soiled that no customer in his right mind would have noticed on purpose unless he was eyeing it to use as a fly swatter.

“Hey, amigo,” Hildegard whispered loudly enough that the guy to my right had to act like he couldn’t hear, “Maruca’s workin’ tonight!”

“Why you telling me?”

“’Cause you and Maruca could be making some sweet music upstairs instead of you and the gunsel down the bar making a lot of racket down here.”

I nodded; I understood.

A minute or two later, a beefy fieldworker, still tucking a short-sleeved cowboy shirt into his Roebuck jeans, six-inch cuffs rolled tightly up over the tops of his work boots, came out through the beaded curtain and headed for the front door. Maruca followed him, sidling into the barroom, where she saw me and smiled. She then strode to the jukebox and slipped in a couple of nickels. She played “Bell Bottom Trousers,” the Moe Jaffe version, but no one made a move. Then, with her second nickel, she played Lalo Guerrero and his band harmonizing on “Los Chucos Suaves.” Maruca was a Filipina close to my age who thought she still looked like a teenage señorita. She sashayed — and that’s the right word; that’s exactly what she did, shaking her skinny hips like a hoochie-coochie girl — right up to where I was sitting.

“Hey, mister,” Maruca said. She knew my name all too well. “Hey, mister,” as she waited for me to light her Lucky Strike, “you wanna screw?”

I put my Zippo flame to her Lucky. I did want to screw, but not right now. I wanted to keep an eye on the shooter sitting a few feet down the bar. Killing this vato was what I needed to do as well as wanted to do. Maruca could wait for another time.

“Maybe later,” I said loud enough that Hildegard flashed her tired-looking eyes at me, then at the gunman.

“Maybe now!” Hildie demanded.

Maruca grabbed my arm and started to pull toward the string of beads hanging beneath the hand-painted sign that read Baños. “He still be here when we come back, bud,” Maruca said.

Hildegard nodded in agreement. “Más tarde!”

Maruca, having figured out the whole scene, gritted her teeth, nodded, and walked away, not sashaying the slightest bit. She walked along the bar until she reached the pistolero who was so obviously paying no attention at all to me or her or Hildegard. She whispered in the guy’s ear and he whispered something back and slowly, slowly he stood and followed the woman across the room and through the strands of beads. I could hear their footsteps starting up the stairs. Goddamn him all to hell.

After the Lalo Guerrero tune ended, I crossed to the Seaburg jukebox and popped in a coin of my own. Following a quick look at the selections, I pushed a couple of buttons and put on another Lalo special, “Marihuana Boogie.” I went back to my drinks, made sure my shoulder holster was sitting comfortably beneath my armpit, and sipped my beer.

I waited.

A few minutes later I heard Maruca’s footsteps coming back down the stairs. She passed through the doorway, looked at me, and nodded at someone behind her on the steps. Then she walked to the other end of the bar. Ordered three fingers of aguardiente. Our drink.

Hildegard gave her a glance, then gave me the evil eye. “I told you, Nelson. Take it easy.”

The shooter walked back into the room. No one had taken his place at the bar so he returned to his stool and nodded at Hildegard for another cerveza. As the bartender turned to grab a cleaner glass, the shooter looked at me for the first and only time.

In an instant he stood, reached under his jacket, jerked his automatic from its holster, and fired two quick shots in my general direction. But I’d known it was coming and I had my Smith & Wesson in my hand before the shooter even got to his feet.

He pumped one long spurt of blood right through the hole I’d shot in his forehead, then slumped to the barroom floor.

“Ah, Jesus, Nelson,” Hildegard spat at me. “Jesus Christ, why’d you have to do that?”

“You saw him,” I shouted, “you saw him grab his gun! What the fuck was I supposed to do?”

I watched as Maruca ran back through the beads, no doubt to vanish upstairs so she could tell the coppers that she’d missed the whole thing.

In a few seconds the bar was empty. I could hear car engines turning over and tires screeching as a half-dozen drunks and their passengers tried to back out of the dusty parking area without turning on their headlights before heading back into town, or out toward the shacks where they rented beds by the week. Hildegard was on the phone and two or three minutes later I could hear sirens coming from the direction of town.

I sat back on my barstool and finished my drink. I slapped down a few bills to cover the costs and then stood and headed toward the door.

The sirens got closer.

“Buenas noches, Hildegard,” I called out. “Say goodnight for me to Maruca.”

The dead man’s Studebaker was still parked in the dusty lot. I thought about shooting out a couple of the tires for practice, but on second thought left it.

I got in the Plymouth, turned the key, and stomped on the gas till the motor caught. As I headed down Riverside, I looked in the rearview mirror. A squad car, siren loud and red lights flashing, turned into the parking lot. I lit a Chesterfield and tuned the radio to a Mex station out of Salinas. Some Trio Los Panchos tune was playing.

It Follows Until It Leads by Dillon Kaiser

San Juan Road

My papa died when I was a baby, shot in the crossfire between the cartel and the police.

This, I only heard from my mama, later. What a way to die, I always thought — innocent and found by a bullet not meant for you.

Mama worked the streets, but she had tried to raise me better, tried to keep me in school. It did not work. The wary respect I was given, with a gun in my hand, was intoxicating.

The police found Mama blindfolded in the trunk of a car, tied up, her throat cut. I was seventeen, and hadn’t seen her in years when this happened. By then, I had already risen from a charoliar, a wannabe, to a halcón, a lookout runner. I was twenty when I became a narco soldado, a soldier of the cartel de Arellano Felix and the right hand of pez gordo, a big boss. Arellano Felix was all I knew, all any of us knew in Tijuana. If you were ruthless, if you were smart, if you were loyal — Arellano provided.

I was ruthless, and I was smart. The loyalty? Love changes a man.

The gun on the kitchen table is not mine. Yet there it lies, insisting upon its own fealdad, its ugliness. Infecting my home. Sunlight streams through the window above the sink where Martha has set a vase of flowers and glints upon the gun. It breeds disease. And there, on the table next to my daughter Lupe’s doll, the disease spreads.

The gun is not mine. Worse, it is my son’s.

Se sigue.

“Get it away from the doll, eso infecta,” I say. Martha raises her eyebrow. Perhaps I have said a crazy thing, but I cannot think with the gun so close to Lupe’s doll. “Por favor.”

I look away. Out the window, green berry fields stretch to the hills beyond. The cultivated rows are identical to the ones I hunched over sweating and picking just hours ago. My hands still ache, the fingers throbbing and slow to uncurl unless I will them. Martha purses her lips. She lays the gun on a dishtowel, checks the safety, wraps it, and carefully sets it on the chair beside her. She glances at me, her mouth so small I fear it will not open again.

“Luis,” Martha says.

I gaze into her eyes, wide and watering. A kitchen chair creaks in protest, resisting my heavy body. I heave myself into it. This life — I’m soft now, no longer the jefe’s right hand. I’m simply Papa, and I am happy. Was happy, until this moment. I wonder how my son caught the sickness.

“Luis,” Martha says again, and sits herself beside me. My hands tremble, and I thrust them beneath the table. She sees, but I pretend she does not.

“Where did you find it?” My voice coarse and hushed.

“Out back. In the shed. I knocked over a box on the shelf. It was in the box, Luis. Loaded. I checked. You said you’d never have one again, ever.”

“I know.” I tell myself to look down. To be ashamed. Bien. Maybe I can fool her after all. Just to buy time. All I need is time to think.

“Talk to me,” she says. “Just tell me. Why?”

The sunlight washes over me, and dust floats in the empty space, at peace. In the stillness, the refrigerator rattles to life. Beneath letter-shaped magnets our pictures cover the outside: Juan on his first day of school. Me and Martha after she got her license. (The test, all in English, was a mountain we climbed together.) Juan holding Lupita after she was born (so tiny she was, and Juan, so proud to hold her).

“After that day. We needed protection, just in case.”

She shakes her head. “But loaded, Luis? It’s not like you.”

I bang my hand on the table. “So I made a mistake! I cannot make mistakes? I was a tarado, I left it loaded!”

Her eyes widen again. They have seen something terrible. They have seen the truth. My theatrics pushed too far. A gasp escapes her, and her hand flies to cover her mouth. She presses her hand tight over her lips, as if the knowledge is airborne, and if only she does not breathe she will not know. She pushes herself backward, chair scraping the floor, and she is on her feet. Not saying a word, her eyes pleading, No, no. Tears spill down her cheeks.

“Talk to him. Now,” she says.

I stand and turn from her, my boots heavy on the floor, softer on the carpet down the hall toward Juan’s room. The music from one of his video games thumps through the wall. He told us he bought the speakers, the TV, the clothes, all from the money he made stocking shelves at the grocery store after school. I wonder when he became a better liar than me.

In front of his room my hand floats above the doorknob. If I open it, I do not know what will follow me inside. But too late for that. Time now to speak to my son of death.

Se sigue.

A policeman shot Arellano at a traffic stop, of all things. Arellano drew on the officer first, and in seconds both men lay dead on the road. The cartel fell into chaos after that, the narcos like chickens running around with their heads lopped off, or roosters fighting to dominate. Allegiances formed. Killing. Choosing a side was important. And I did not choose.

When Martha told me she was pregnant with Juan, I told her to pack her things. She looked at me in shock, in doubt. We had never thought the idea possible. But her face soon hardened into stone. She would go. For us, for her family.

We went north to Watsonville, a town with a community and work for Mexicanos. Hard work, picking the fields or cleaning. But we found friends. Lived with them, worked with them. I had some money left from my old life. Not much, but enough to help us create a new life.

Juan was five when they found me. That day, I drove home after work, my rusted Toyota pickup grinding through the field roads at the bottom of the Royal Oaks Hills. When I pulled into our driveway and saw the shiny black SUV, I knew. The wicked thing had come breathing hot on my back.

I stopped the truck, my sweatshirt damp and roasting in the cab’s stale heat. My throat suddenly dry. I squinted at the SUV, the tinted windows. No movement. Only sunlight glinting on the black paint. Please let Martha and Juan be okay, oh God, please let them—

No. Worry would not help me. I was not a hero. I was a man who had done bad things, and my family was in danger.

I got out of the truck and bit the inside of my cheek, to keep me sharp. Blood welled up, copper pain like an angry spark. I crouched down, crawled to the back of the SUV. Raised my fist and rapped on the back window. Waited. Pressed my ear to the car. Silence. I hunched over, back aching, and ran to the driver’s-side door. Tried the handle. The door opened and I squatted by the tire. Nothing from the SUV. I opened the door wider, pressed up on the leather driver’s seat, and peered inside.

No one in the car. They were inside the house.

I swayed through the front door, already open. Waiting for me. Laughter, loud and familiar, drifted from the kitchen. I followed.

“Señor Cruz! Good of you to join us! Good to see you, mi amigo!”

I had not heard that voice in many years, save perhaps in nightmares, but I could never forget it. My eyes flicked quickly, seeing without looking. Registering. Preparing.

Martha sat hunched at the table, eye swollen shut, puffed black, blood running down her chin. Still breathing, thank God. At the sight of her, I wanted to scream. But screaming would not save her. And where was Juan?

A man leaned back over the counter. Thin, corded with muscle, a mustache drooping down his face like a frown. Hair slicked back with grease. A gold plated AK-47 dangled in his hands. Too much for me, mano a mano, even if I somehow wrestled the rifle from him.

The other man, the one who had spoken, sat next to my wife — grinning at me through misshapen teeth stained the color of old urine. Clean shaven. Sharp eyes. Eyes that see beyond, we used to say in Mexico, cursed eyes. Wearing crocodile cowboy boots and a bolo tie. His rolled-up shirt sleeves, tattoos of skulls and M-16s creeping out like a rash on his skin. Waving around a diamond-encrusted Browning 9 millimeter, with a custom grip. A good gun. The type of gun I used once.

I nodded. “Hola, Rojelio.”

“He remembers!” Rojelio said. “How good to be remembered. Especially by the great Señor Cruz, and after so much time. Your wife, she has not been hospitable; she did not offer us coffee. You know how I enjoy my coffee, Luis.” He tapped his piss-colored teeth with the barrel of his gun and laughed.

Perhaps they did not know I had a son. If they had killed him, Rojelio would tell me soon enough. Just to see my face. M’ijo, if you are hiding, stay hidden.

“I’ve missed you,” Rojelio said, still smiling, always smiling. We used to say he would smile even when la bala lo encuentra, the bullet finds him. “Sit down, sit down!” He pointed to a seat by Martha.

“I cannot say the same.”

He laughed again. A strange, wet sound. No humor. Only amusement. Martha’s head rolled on her shoulders toward me, and she blinked her good eye. I tried not to see her swelling, bruised face. A lump rose to my throat. Heat rushed through me, prickled my skin, and balled in my aching hands. Anger. Good. I had tried to forget that feeling, that candencia. Time I remembered.

Martha blinked at me again. A movement so subtle as to mean nothing. But her clenched jaw, her gaze locked onto mine, showed me different. She had every reason to be scared, but she was not.

“Not many remembered you left, Luis.” Rojelio studied me as if I was a simple curiosity. “But I did. I remembered. You know too much. I had business, you know, after Arellano was killed.” He crossed himself — in earnest or mockery I could not tell. “But Luis. I remembered to come for you. Aye. Arellano thought much of you. But this place? Your work?” He waved the Browning into space, his head nodding to accommodate the gesture. “This is beneath you. Truthfully, it disgusts me. You disgust me. Do you see it? Smell it on your body, when you come home after working for them, doing something so low they would never sink to it?” He wiped his mouth. Flicked his tongue across his dry lips. A lizard in the clothes of a man.

“You would not understand,” I told him. His compañero, unhappy with my words, shifted his frame from the kitchen sink. He lifted the rifle. Rojelio glanced back, cocked his head, and the compañero faded into the kitchen once more.

“Luis.” Rojelio stared at me, beady eyes narrowed, as if in disappointment. Then he laughed again. “What makes you think I want to understand?” He sighed, shrugged his shoulders. “This life. Our life. You cannot leave it behind. It follows. It follows, until it leads you where you’ve been going all along, kicking and screaming con espuma en la boca!”

Se sigue.

Martha blinked, moved her lips, and moved her lips again. I finally understood the words Martha mouthed to me: Ven aquí. Come closer.

“No! Please!” I begged, and leaned forward. Under the table, Martha slid the cold steel of a kitchen knife into my sweating palm. I clenched it tight. Blinked at her. I had to be faster, not only than Rojelio, but his compañero. I did not know if I was so fast, not anymore.

“Do you wish me to shoot her?” Rojelio said. Holding the gun to Martha’s head. She whimpered.

I ground my teeth. Patience. Wait for the moment.

Rojelio slid his free hand onto the table. There. Now. Or my family died.

I arced the knife from beneath, sliced the air, and it landed with a soft thunk! In the back of Rojelio’s palm, pinning it to the surface. He screamed and dropped the Browning. I dove for it, smacking the floor hard enough the air left my lungs. The compañero had already raised his AK-47, eyes burning. I pointed the gun at him and squeezed the trigger.

His knee exploded in red-and-white pulp, like the splatter of a rotten apple. Warm, wet, red, and hard flecks of white sprayed my face. I fired again. This time I found my mark, and the compañero clawed at his chest, as if to dig the hole deeper.

Screaming overcame the fading thunder. Rojelio. I whipped the gun back, saw the color drained from his cheeks, yet he clutched at the knife handle, nearly had it free. I put a bullet in his head. He did not smile when it found him.

Martha fell into my arms, shaking, sobbing into my shoulder. I held her as tight as I could. Tasted wet salt on my lips. I let the gun drop, jerked my hand. As if it had bitten me.

“Papa?” A voice so soft. A voice so scared.

I looked down the hall, and there stood Juan. My eyes closed tight, tighter. But no matter how much I shut out the nauseating light, I could not undo what my son had seen.

Juan stands next to me in our backyard, and I hold his gun in my hand, still wrapped in the dishtowel. Sunlight burns orange across the fields and streaks the clouds with red as it lays itself to rest beyond the horizon. There is Lupe’s playhouse, bought at Kmart last Christmas. Juan’s old soccer ball still sits on the grass, untouched by anyone except time. My son has gained weight, like his father. Wears a goatee. It does not make him look more of a man, only like a boy playing pretend. I think to tell him this — this and how ridiculous he looks in his sagging jeans and shirt so large it hangs nearly to his knees.

“What is it, Pops? What’s up?” he says. “You and Mama need help with English on the bills again? It’s cool; I got time.”

I shake my head no. “Juan.”

“Come on, Pops. Call me Johnny, remember? Johnny Cruz!” He laughs.

“I’ll call you the name you were given.”

The laugh stops. He kicks his feet. Useless to start this fight with him. We watch the sun sink lower beyond the valley, setting the sky on fire.

“I found this,” I say, unwrapping the dishtowel.

Juan stares at the gun. His mouth opens, he stiffens. Then he relaxes, cool all over. “Whose is it?”

This game. I am so tired. “Juan.”

“Qué? You mean? Oh shit. Ha. You mean you think it’s mine?”

I will not hit him. I never have and I never will. I have seen men hit their sons, their wives, their daughters. It is only part of the sickness, not a cure.

A different strategy, then. I put my hand on his back. His body rigid beneath my touch, brittle. I have caught him. He knows I have caught him. “Juan. Listen. You are a good boy. I know this, in my heart. Por favor, tell me. Why?”

His shoulders slump. He crumbles beneath my hand. My soft, aching hand. “Pops...”

“Your mama found it. Not me. Think, Juan, if it had been Lupe.”

“Lupe would never go in the shed!” His voice cracks.

I sigh, and sit myself on the porch step, knees buckling, back sore.

“Juan! Juan! Play with me!” my daughter yells, her tiny footsteps rushing through the house, to us. I wrap the gun and cradle it in my lap before she bursts from the back door.

“Lupe, hey, hermanita. Go back inside, yeah? I’ll play with you in a little bit,” Juan says.

“But I heard you and Papa talking! Are you in trouble?”

“Lupe, escucha a tu hermano. He will play later,” I tell her, and offer a smile, the best one I can manage.

“Lupe! Lupe! Come in the house!” Martha shouts after her.

“I’m coming!” Lupe responds. She looks up at her brother. “Promise to play with me! You gotta promise.”

“I promise,” Juan says, and chuckles.

Lupe nods, and runs inside, banging the door behind her. It slams in the frame, BLAM, BLAM, until it rests.

Juan whistles, a dry, nervous sound, and rubs his eyes.

“You see?” I tell him.

“Yes,” he says, and sits beside me.

“Now. Answer my question.”

He cocks his head, eyebrows raised. “I thought you’d know, Pops. If anyone did, I thought you’d know.”

My turn to raise an eyebrow.

“Because of that,” he nods at the gun in my lap, “you get respect. I get it, with that. It’s like power, you know? You have one, your name rings out. Like your name used to.”

I shake my head, grit my teeth. “No. Respect from fear, Juan, is not the same. Your sister respects you. And not from fear. Your mama respects you, because you care for your sister, and you help us, and go to school. I respect you, because you are smart, and you have a good heart. The gun? It disappoints me. It is low. It is not for you, m’ijo. Your name should mean more.”

He cries, and looks away from me. It is okay for him to cry. If he cries, and knows he does not need the gun, he can cry.

“You will stop? For this family? For the ones that love you?”

“Yes, Pops, yeah.”

I smile at him. “Me and your mama, we left Mexico because of bad men. Because I did not want to be a bad man. I do not want my son to be a bad man. You can be better, Juan. Here, in this town. If you go to school. If you work hard. You can be better than me.”

I embrace him. He stiffens again, then becomes limp, and slowly he wraps his arms around me.

“Swear to me,” I say.

“I swear, Pops.”

Tonight, I will bury the gun at the edge of the yard after I dismantle it piece by piece. I will bury it next to the bodies of two dead men who once came to my home. I think perhaps Rojelio was wrong, perhaps the sickness won’t follow this time.

Me and Martha are cleaning the house on my day off. Her telenovela plays on TV, something to laugh at while we mop and sweep. Lupe is in her room playing dolls. Juan is still at school. Because he’s been good this week, I let him take the Toyota.

The phone rings from the kitchen, and I go to answer. When Juan’s voice crackles high and frantic into my ear, part of me wishes I had let it ring. I remember, then. He is a better liar than me.

“Pops!” he says. “Pops, I did something. It’s bad, and they won’t stop now, so I’m coming, I’m coming—”

“Juan. Slowly. Where are you?”

“Fuck fuck fuck. Aw man. Aw maaan.”

“Juan.” I keep my voice low, but Martha hears anyway. She hurries into the kitchen, her face creased in worry.

“Is it him?” she says. I nod. “He’s in trouble?” I squeeze my eyes shut, nod again.

“Where are you?” I say to him.

“Driving, Pops. They’re following me. They keep following me!”

Sirens sing, far away through the phone. A song for Juan. If he listens, if he stops — yes, prison maybe, but he will have a life still.

“Stop for them, Juan. Do it.” The kitchen darkens, and I lean against the refrigerator. Martha grasps my arm, steadies me.

“They’re following me! They won’t stop! I’m coming home. Okay? I don’t know where to go. I’m coming home.”

“Be calm, m’ijo. What did you do?” My ear burns against the plastic of the phone.

“A cop pulled me over and... Fuck. I had weed, okay? A lot. And I just drove away. All I did was drive! But now there’s more cops, and I’m scared, I’m scared, I’m—”

The sirens scream. Loud in the phone, too loud. They are not only coming from the phone. My eyes meet Martha’s. I see my terror mirrored in them. She shakes her head, mouths one word: No.

“What’s that noise?” My daughter runs into the sitting room. Her hair held back by a plastic tiara, her face scrunched in wonder, cradling her doll.

“Stay with her. Stay inside,” I tell Martha. Nausea wrestles with me. I push it down. Bury it deep. My wobbling legs carry me to the front door. I open it, and peer down the road into the late afternoon.

The screech of tires, the roar of an engine. There. My truck. A blur down the pavement, but filling my sight faster than I can believe. It slides across the road, leaving black marks like streaks of blood in front of the driveway. The smell of burning rubber, and I cough. Smoke fills the air. Juan stumbles from the car drenched in thick sweat, his eyes rolling wildly, panting. The police follow.

“Listen to them! Juan, whatever they say! LISTEN!” I scream at him, descending the front steps to our walk, running past the old oak and the swing I built for him long ago.

He stares beyond, at something I cannot see. Police cars screech to a stop, fencing him in. A young officer, crazed with adrenaline, yells into a bullhorn: “Put your hands in the air! Drop to your knees and put your hands in the air!”

“Do it, Juan! Do what they say!” I scream. Can he hear me over the damn noise? He jerks his head again. Okay, okay. He will stop.

Instead, he runs toward our home.

“Stop! Stop or we will fire!” the officer shrieks. His hand crawling toward his gun belt.

No.

The sirens scream into my ears.

“Stop! Juan, por favor, stop!” My voice straining over the noise.

“Pops?” he says. For a wonder, he listens, and stops near our fence. He sees me for the first time.

“Turn around slowly, with your hands on your head!” the cop commands.

“Juan. Turn around. Show them you do not have a gun,” I say.

He opens his mouth, as if to tell me something.

“Listen to them m’ijo. Do it!”

He breathes out a short laugh, and turns.

I catch the glint of metal tucked into his jeans.

“I’m taking it out now, it’s okay, I’m taking it out,” says my son, as his hand dips down.

They shoot him. His body whirls in mad circles, while the police fire again and again. A bullet whines by my side, almost finds me. The guns roar until smoke chokes the air. Juan rests, finally, in a twisted heap by our fence, one hand curled around a post. He almost made it home.

I cannot swallow. Cannot breathe. The stench burns my nose. I slump forward until my knees settle on the ground.

“Back away, sir! Back away!” the police yell.

I hold up my hands and crawl to my boy on my knees. They let me do this until I am close.

An officer walks toward me, the calm one. He kicks Juan’s gun away. “That’s close enough.”

Still I cannot swallow. “But he’s my son.”

“Papa! Papa!”

Shivers nearly knock me over. My teeth rattling in my skull, I twist my neck around. My daughter. Why is she covered in red? Blood? Not her blood, please God.

“Papa! Mama won’t get up!”

I frown. My eyes wander to the front of our home. I see Martha crumpled in the doorframe, dark red blooming across her blouse, spilling down the step. Her body still, as if she is sleeping. In that moment, I understand.

I understand everything.

Se sigue hasta que se conduce.