Santa Cruz Noir

by Susie Bright

  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 ou
tfit 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.