“Hey, Lemonade Girl,” he teases, as I chug a fourth cup. “Slow down. You’ll burst.”
When I’m done drinking, Ernie takes me to Dr. Richmond before going back to his own work. Dr. Richmond wastes no time in handing me a trowel, a bag of fertilizer, and giving me directions. “Work a little bit into the soil around each plant,” she says, showing me how much each plant needs.
As I coax the fertilizer into the soil, the back of my neck moist with sweat, something about the chiles occurs to me. “So if red or green’s the state question where are all the red chiles?”
“Color’s just a matter of time,” Dr. Richmond, who’s on her knees a row away, answers. “They’re all red if you let them mature.”
We fertilize control Field A with the non-GMO chiles, then Field B, with her GMOs. When we finish the job, she shows me where Esha’s extra-hot chiles grow, also in the guarded zone, and where her control chiles grow, in the non-guarded zone. The chiles in each field look exactly the same, no weird tentacles or strange appendages or glowing ooze that the Frankenfood reference might imply.
When the afternoon’s work is finished, we say good-bye to Ernie, climb into the truck, and head back to town. The heat and sun have left me zapped. As we drive to Santa Fe, the lull of the road tugs at my consciousness and I nod off. My last thought before drifting away is that I’m no closer to finding Rudy.
***
I’m sleepy through the last hour of the day at the lab and head out a few minutes before five to catch the bus back to the dorm, fantasizing about a pre-dinner nap. When I step outside into the bright late-day sun, at first I think I’m seeing things because why else would Amelia be parked in front of the building? But then, no, she honks, and I realize my half sister is no mirage.
“What are you doing here?” I ask through the open truck window.
“What do you think I’m doing here?” she says sarcastically, and then, with a huffy eye-roll, says, “I’m here to pick you up.”
“And to what do I owe this chauffeuring occasion?” I say, just as huffy.
“I’m not a chauffer. It’s not an occasion. I need your help.” The request for help isn’t asked. It’s demanded.
I stick my hands on my hips, though I can’t say I’m not intrigued. “Why on Earth do you need my help?”
“Because I asked around and got some information on the guy Rudy was selling chiles to at the Farmers’ Market. His name is Cruz Sampson, and he was one of the last people to see Rudy. I got his address. I thought we could go and talk to him. See if he knows anything about where my asshole boyfriend’s disappeared to.”
“And I’m still waiting to hear why you need me?” I say, though secretly I’m pleased she does.
“Because he lives in Santa Cruz.”
“California?”
“No, Guera. Santa Cruz, New Mexico. The heroin capital of the state. Also known for cocaine, crystal meth, and prescription painkiller abuse. And I’m not going up there by myself.”
“So you’re bringing me because I’m what, expendable? If some nasty drug dealer gets his panties in a bunch he can take it out on me?”
“No, I’m bringing you because you’re…”
I get that she doesn’t want to finish the thought, but I don’t let her off the hook. “I’m what?”
She gives an exasperated sigh. “You’re brave.”
Though the compliment nearly gives me heart failure, I don’t let on. Cool as ice itself, I shrug and say, “Okay, whatever,” and climb into the truck.
We clank to the north end of town where the houses get bigger and the lots more spacious. She pulls into the parking lot of a burger place and cuts the engine. “I’m hungry,” she says. “We’ll eat, then go.”
We’re halfway across the lot when a group of rainbow-haired hipsters bubble out of a ruggedly fashionable vehicle in a fit of giggles. Amelia turns toward the laughter and freezes. I tug her arm, but when I notice her terrified expression, I let go.
“Let’s get out of here,” she whispers.
Before we can take a step, one of the hipsters, a girl with neon red hair who I recognize from the party the other night, steps out of formation. “Hey, Amelia,” she calls in a snide voice, loud enough for all her minions to hear. “You know what the difference is between a smart Mexican and a unicorn?” She waits a beat, looking to her friends for approval, then answers her own dumb question with an even dumber answer. “Nothing. They’re both fictional!”
The group bursts into a Greek chorus of hysterics as if cheap, racist jokes are the wittiest thing they’ve ever heard.
“WTF?” I mouth to Amelia with a nudge to her ribcage. I wait for her to sock Red in the nose and give her a face to match her hair, but she just stares at her feet without moving.
“I’m just glad your beaner father’s six feet under where he belongs,” Red goes on.
“Okay, you know what?” I say, unable to keep my mouth shut another second. I step in front of Amelia and square off with Red. “I have no idea who you are or what your problem is, but I don’t care. You’ve made your loser point and we’re out of here. Come on, Amelia.” I grab her arm and give her a hard tug. The tug breaks her trance, and she takes a step to follow me.
“‘Come on, Amelia,’” one of the toadies from the back of the crowd calls out in a high-pitched mocking voice. “Let your little half-breed bodyguard stand up for you.”
It’s not half-breed that gets me. I’ve been called worse. It’s that the ass-hat who said it is cowering in the back behind some bigger kid, too scared to face me herself.
“You want to say that to my face?” I say, slowly turning back to the crowd.
Of course not.
Red, however, bolstered by numbers, resumes her crusade. “Your little friend Amelia’s a Mexi-ho daughter of a job-stealing wetback.” She spits, and a gob of saliva lands on the ground in front of Amelia’s shoe.
“Hey, Red,” I say, getting up in her pasty vampire face. “Your nose is bleeding.”
She crosses her eyes, trying to get a look at the protuberance in the center of her face, and swipes a hand under her nostrils. “No, it’s not.”
I hit her with a right cross, the punch that starts with the rear foot, accelerates with a twist of the torso and launches from the shoulder. I slow it down at the last moment to avoid breaking bones, but the blow connects solidly, and I feel her nose spread out under my knuckles.
“It is now,” I say, and grab Amelia’s hand and make a run for it.
“What the hell was that about?” I blurt as we reach the truck and Amelia peels out of the parking lot, leaving the posse behind huddled in disbelief. “What’s Red’s problem?”
Amelia pulls off to the side of the road and stops the truck. “Nothing,” she says, but I notice her hands are shaking.
“Nothing? Are you kidding me? I just stood off a gang of anti-Mexican, racist pigs and you’re telling me it was nothing?”
I wait for the swearing and the lecture about how she didn’t ask for my help—exactly what I myself would’ve said just months ago—but she surprises me. “That girl you called Red is Missy Erickson,” she says, her hands shifting on the wheel and gripping harder. “Her dad was a foreman at the construction company where Dad worked, but he lost his job when he fell off a roof because he was so freaking drunk. Dad got promoted to his job. I guess her dad’s been out of work ever since. And from what I’ve heard he’s a total drunk.” Amelia stares past me, her eyes distant. “Of course Missy doesn’t say that. She says Mexicans are to blame for the lack of jobs because they’ll work cheaper and Dad’s to blame for her father losing his job because he’s a Mexican.”
“And she takes that out on you?”
Amelia gives a shrug that tries to say she doesn’t care, but it’s obvious she doesn’t mean it. “She never liked me before, anyway. She was always going on abo
ut how Mexicans are illegals and that all we know how to do is sell drugs and mow lawns. Then when her dad lost his job, she and her posse got mean.” She jerks open the glove box and grabs a tissue. She blows her nose hard and loud. “Missy and me and some of her gang were in a cooking class at school together in the spring,” she goes on, tossing the tissue to the floor. “It was more than a class. It was an internship. We got to work with chefs from some of the big restaurants around town. Missy knew the class meant a lot to me. We had this big project. I made mole. I make the best freaking mole. Everyone knows that.” I think back to the mole reference in the car the night of the party, Mari’s comment that Amelia’s mole is famous after what happened. “I know just how much cocoa powder and how many chiles to use, too much of either and you ruin the whole thing. But someone dumped like a whole bottle of extra-hot chile sauce into mine. The kind that comes with a skull and crossbones on the label. I had no idea what they’d done until Chef Anthony ate it and…” She’s too upset to finish the thought. “That’s why I can’t be on that show. Everyone thinks I’m a screw-up. That my cooking’s a joke. And if I by some miracle I did actually win, they’ll just hate me even more.”
“Or maybe everyone knows you were scammed. Maybe being on the show is a way of standing up to them,” I say, handing her another tissue. “Dreams aren’t all shit, you know. Sometimes they’re the only things that keep you going.”
Amelia chews her lip and twists an eyebrow ring. Our eyes meet, and for the first time the eye contact isn’t poison. We sit silently after that. Amelia glances out the window, lost in thought, while I zone out and listen to a world of invisible insects whining in the early evening air. Somewhere I heard that cockroaches would be the only things to survive after a nuclear bomb. No idea why, but as I sit in the car with Amelia, I start thinking of giant cockroaches as world leaders and CEOs and teachers and artists and chefs, and I can’t help it: I laugh.
“Something funny?” The words come with a glare.
“You ever think that humans won’t be around forever?”
“That’s what’s funny?”
“Never mind,” I say, embarrassed. “That was random.”
“No,” she says. “Well, I mean yeah, Guera, that was totally random, but I do think about stuff like that, I just thought I was the only one who had those weird thoughts.” We hold each other’s eyes for a second and then she says, “Sometimes when I’m so pissed off I can’t stand it, I think about how all of our problems and issues seem so big, but really we’re just a blip, and our problems, if you think about it, are an even smaller blip. Like a micro blip.”
“A millimeter blip.”
“A…” She stops.
“An Angstrom blip.”
“A what?”
“Angstrom,” I repeat. “It’s ten million times smaller than a millimeter.”
“Okay, you’re not a guera,” she says, rolling her eyes. “You’re a nerd.”
I ignore the friendly (I think?) dig, and go on. “And there’s this one tree somewhere in California that’s like five thousand years old. And then on the other end of the scale some insects only live a few minutes as adults. I guess time is a matter of perspective.”
“Do you believe in God?”
“Wow,” I say and laugh. “There’s a question for you.”
“Well? Do you?”
I pick at a loose thread on my shirt and stare out the windshield. “I don’t know. Not really. I mean when my mom died I was like if there is a god, he-she-it sucks. And all the suffering in the world? Forget it. How do you reconcile that with God? What about you?”
“Totally,” she says, shocking me with her spiritual certainty. “I figure if we don’t know for sure, it feels better believing there is something out there, some power with a plan or whatever. Some reason for all this.” She swipes her hand in a gesture meant as a substitute for what words can’t express. “Anyway, it’s getting late. We should go.” She pulls down the visor and checks her reflection in the mirror. Then she closes the visor and turns to me with a hint of a smile and says, “That bloody nose looked really good on Red.”
Twenty-two
“Are we almost there?” I ask a half hour into the drive.
“How would I know? I’ve never been there,” she snaps. “Calm your panties.”
I tightly cross my legs. “My panties aren’t the problem. I’ve gotta pee.”
“Seriously? Can’t you just squeeze or something?”
“I’m trying. It’s not doing the trick. Pull over.”
Amelia doesn’t so much pull over as stop in the middle of the road, which I guess doesn’t matter since the middle of the road is the middle of nowhere. I’m out the door and squatting before she’s even come to a complete stop.
“Watch out for…” she starts.
“Ouch!”
“…cactus,” she finishes.
The Faith Flores Guide Book for Desert Living, Rule One: Look before you squat. I waddle a few feet, pull out the spine, reposition myself, and this time manage to gush without piercing my other butt cheek and making symmetry of my ass.
Then I encounter the toilet paper problem.
“What’s going on out there?” Amelia calls when I finish my business and don’t come back to the car.
“Nothing. Just, uh…”
A wad of tissue flies out the door in my direction.
I wipe, climb back in the car, and balance on the seat on a lone butt cheek.
A few more minutes of teeth-chattering dirt road and we pass a mailbox at the top of a long, dirt driveway numbered 8005. “This is it,” Amelia says. “Maybe we should park here and walk. I’m not sure driving into a stranger’s place in the middle of nowhere right as it’s getting dark is the best idea.” She pulls to the side of the road and plucks the key from the ignition. “Be careful,” she adds as we get out of the truck. “People around here like to keep pit bulls. And not as cuddly pets.”
Rattlesnakes and pit bulls and cactus, oh my, I sing in my head as I try to see what’s at the end of the driveway. Under a moonless sky, not a streetlight in forever, there’s just one thing I can make out: No Trespassing posted in big, bright, orange letters.
“Couldn’t we call first or something? Let him know we’re coming?” I ask, as we approach the sign.
“I would’ve done that if I had a phone number for him, Guera,” she says with a glare. The glare quickly reconfigures into something less angry and more nervous. “Do you think we should turn back?”
“Probably,” I say, and start down the driveway.
Amelia’s arm brushes mine as we walk. I feel her unease in the graze of flesh, just as I feel mine, an unease both of us are either too proud or too stupid to admit.
We’re about thirty feet down the driveway when I catch the metallic glint of a doublewide trailer and stop. The vibe of the place matches with what Amelia told me about this area being the heroin capital of New Mexico and it gives me the creeps. I doubt we’ll be too welcome if we just go knock on the door, offering a cheery smile and a plate of cookies.
“Maybe you should wait here,” I say to Amelia. “I’ll go investigate.”
Even in the dark I can feel the look she gives me. “Just because I said you’re brave don’t let it go to your head.”
“I’m not being brave,” I snap. “I just think we need to be cautious.”
“Obviously,” she says. Then, as if I’d asked to be put in charge, she adds, “What now?”
I think again about Amelia’s declaration about the heroin and cocaine and crystal meth in this area, and then, of course, I think about Mom. The Philly drug dealers she got her junk from weren’t exactly a friendly bunch. I have no idea who this Bulldog guy is. Maybe he’s an organic farmer and loves puppies, but I don’t want to chance it.
“Let’s just check it out before we go knocking on the
door,” I say. We slip forward until we reach the trailer. I flatten myself against the metal siding and point to a window to the right of the front door. We crouch down and sidle along the edge of the trailer until we’re under the dirty glass. A beam of fluorescence lights a single room.
I put my finger to my lips and motion her to stay low while I rise and peer inside into a small kitchen with blistered Formica counters and peeling yellow wallpaper. It’s a kitchen shipwreck. Bulldog stands in the center of the flotsam and jetsam, deeply involved in some kitchen-related process.
“What’s happening?” Amelia whispers and pops up next to me. I gesture for her to get down, but the girl and I are clearly related—she has a mind of her own and ignores me.
It’s hard to see exactly what’s going on through the cobwebs and dirt, but I see that Bulldog’s wearing plastic gloves, the kind we wear in the SCPG lab when we’re working with DNA samples and other sensitive materials. He works quickly, grinding something in a blender and then pouring the sludge into a pot. He pours steaming water from a kettle into the pot, then adds cooking oil and turns up the heat.
“What’s he doing?” Amelia says in a not-so-quiet whisper.
Bulldog turns to the window, and we drop. My heart punches my chest as I wait to see if he heard us, if he’s coming out to check on the sound. The desert isn’t exactly filled with good places to hide. I glare at Amelia and this time slam my fingers to my lips. When Bulldog doesn’t come out I decide it’s safe to take another peek. Amelia stands up next to me.
Bulldog’s still working. He starts sucking up the liquid with a turkey baster and straining the liquid through a coffee filter into a jar. Then he steps to the side, and I get a glimpse of what he’s been working with: Chiles.
I don’t get to see what comes next.
At that moment Amelia’s phone rings. A full volume, mérengue ringtone.
“Are you kidding?” I hiss. “You didn’t think to turn that thing off when we went creeping away from the car in the dark?”
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