by Manuel Munoz
“Start the car — don’t turn on the lights,” he told me, running back inside. When he came back with another armload of clothes and got in the car, I was panicked, listening for the sirens, but there were none. “Drive,” he said. “You’re keeping all this stuff at your house.” Beneath the second pile of clothes, he unzipped a black banker’s bag and counted out the cash.
I should have known then that he was after an easy answer, but that was my problem back then. I never thought about consequences. I never thought about what can happen down the road. I never believed that one thing really does lead to another. I couldn’t see things coming.
THOUGH IT WAS JUNE and over a hundred degrees, I helped Treviño in the early evening, after my shift at the mill. I would come over after six when his backyard was in shadow, late enough for Treviño to think that I had worked a long day but still had energy and time for him, that the extra money was important for somebody like me, somebody trying to change and get ahead. Treviño, though, was turning out to be cheap and guarded, expecting a lot from the transformation of the yard. I would lug pipes — iron, plastic, and ceramic — out to the front lawn. Treviño followed me out there, then sent me back alone while he went off to a neighbor’s. If things were going to sell, he didn’t want to let me in on how much he was actually getting.
On days when I had cleared a good patch and Treviño had hobbled out to the front yard, I spent the time with a trowel on my hands and knees and broke up the hard dirt, watering it down. At first, it was all a mess — the loose soil gathered muddy and quick, and the dirt drank the water far, far down, but I just let the hose trickle out for a little while. Before long, everything started to give way: the weeds, broken beer bottles wedged deep and jagged, beetles scurrying for cover. It was on those days that Treviño lightened up into a warmer kind of man, staring at the rich dark of the earth, and I knew he was remembering as he smoked his cigarettes and coughed.
I had done a particularly long stretch of the yard, from one end of the fence to the other, taking my time all through the evening, and I knew that the sun was edging as close to the horizon as it could before it went dark. Treviño had sold an old toilet, not a crack in the porcelain, that I had muscled over to the front lawn, along with some tire rims that used to be on his Cadillac. He had started up the car and taken off without telling me when he was returning, so I had continued with the work, even watering over the patches I had excavated days earlier, the yard slowly giving itself over to me.
Later the Cadillac chugged into the little driveway on the side of the house; the engine idled a bit, as if Treviño were listening to the car as he would a heartbeat, and then there was silence. Kids in the street were still shouting, but they were being called home because darkness was falling. I walked out to the little driveway, where I found Treviño slowly easing himself out of the car with such care I thought he was in pain. “Oye,” he called out to me before I got there to help him. “Take the keys and open the trunk.”
Back there was a case of beer, a big bag of charcoal, and paper grocery bags cool to the touch. I peeked inside and saw the packages of beef, the onions, the tomatoes still wet from the produce section. “Bring them out back,” I heard Treviño say, and I brought the charcoal over my shoulder first.
His house: the back porch had a wooden door with a screen so rusted I could smell a faint powdery puff come from its wire lacing when I closed it behind me. Treviño reached for a tiny grill he had near the door and wheeled it out to the lawn. “Eat with me,” he said. “Chop up that meat in the kitchen.” And so it was that I finally stepped into his house and saw how cramped it actually was. The linoleum worn down to black patches near the sink and the stove; the refrigerator so tiny it only reached my chest; the heavy gas stove crouching in the corner; the electric wiring looping cheap and dangerous, as in all the houses of the neighborhood; the sink and the baseboards tilting a little where the house must have been giving way on its foundation; on the table, a half loaf of bread with its wrapper tucked under, and plums still coated with the gray film of the field; a smell in the air like the creak of the boards, like mildew, like dust settled deep in the cracks, like kitchen grease. I could hear the whirr of the swamp cooler in the living room, and a waft of air came from its dark space, but the kitchen held everything in a thick heat.
Treviño didn’t turn on the kitchen light, but enough illumination came through the window for me to see what I was doing. It reminded me of my mother, back when I was younger, how dark she kept the house when the sun went down, trying to save every dime she could. I chopped the meat and the tomatoes and the avocados and the onions and brought them out in separate bowls to find Treviño with the coals already glowing in the little grill, and a beer in his hand for me.
“So how did you get a place over there?” Treviño asked me when the first pieces of meat came off the grill and he could take a bite while waiting for an answer.
“Las Palmas?”
“You live with somebody there?”
“No,” I said, taking my own bite and hoping that would be enough.
Treviño spoke right through his food. “So how did you get the place by yourself? You have a primo working for you in the county?” He lit a cigarette from the grill, then took a last drink from his beer. “Always helps to have a cousin doing favors, right?” When he put the can down, I could hear the aluminum hit empty against the dirt. The yard had gone quiet, as had the houses on the entire street. I felt he was testing me. He reached for another beer in the ice chest.
I chewed loudly, as if that were slowing my answer; it was dark enough by then that I didn’t worry too much about Treviño studying my face, but I felt trapped by his question. I knew I had to come clean. “I spent some time in Avenal. I wrote some bad checks. They lock you up for anything these days.”
“Is that right?” Treviño asked me, sipping his beer. In the dark, I couldn’t see his eyes, how he looked at me, but the way he responded, the deliberate, drawn-out question, worried me. “Is that right?” he asked again.
“Couple months,” I lied, taking another bite, watching the grill. “Yeah.” I had been hungry from all the work I had done that evening, but now I couldn’t enjoy the food.
Treviño flipped some of the meat and then remained bent down as if he could study it by the meager light of the coals. “You know, I told my daughters about you. About you coming to help out. They told me you killed somebody.”
I let out a half laugh, a snort of disbelief, and shook my head. “No, nothing like that. Where did they hear that?”
“You know women,” Treviño said, handing me another taco, then tapping the ice chest, encouraging me. “Mentiras. They love to tell lies. Bunch of metiches.”
The longer I stayed quiet, the more I played into how smart the old man really was. He was waiting for me to offer up some kind of story about the forgery, something he could match against what his daughters had told him, a counterpoint. Patient, Treviño kept chewing, and I weighed my options: a lie or a bigger lie.
“I used to hang out with a kid,” I said, knowing it was wrong to admit it. “I bet I know who they’re talking about.”
“The white boy in the neighborhood,” Treviño said gruffly. “His mama still lives on the street, you know.”
“I heard he shot somebody. A robbery. That kid was always trouble.”
“He’s long gone. Probably in Mexico,” Treviño said, and then he laughed, but I couldn’t tell if he was joking. Even if it was a joke, just the mere mention of Kyle brought back the possibility that someone would uncover the truth, that the door to my apartment would open slowly one morning like the one at the motel over in Las Vegas, and the police would be there, saying they had caught Kyle, or that they had found the car and my fingerprints all over it, or some such evidence that would put me behind bars for a long time. But that had been four years ago, and Kyle was gone and the car was gone and nobody had ever come forward with an accusation, except in my sleep, and then I’d ope
n my eyes and realize I was still safe.
Treviño was having another beer, and he fished out another one for me. I wasn’t finished with the one I had, but I took it. The food sat heavy in my stomach and I wanted to go back to my apartment, but Treviño was in the mood to talk, to sit in the yard watching the dark settle in for the short summer night, just like my mother used to, except my mother would just sit out there quiet.
“I don’t know how my daughter knows about you. The youngest one, I mean. The one who keeps asking about you. She’s almost thirty years old, so she couldn’t have gone to school with you.”
“People talk, I guess. Even if they get it wrong.”
“So she got it wrong.”
I could hear his voice settle at the end — that it wasn’t a question, but an invitation to tell about the forgery. So I drank more beer, wanting my head to wrap around the buzz and loosen me. “That kid — Kyle — he had stolen this computer that had this program on it that made documents. So we made up some checks that looked like the paychecks he got from this store he used to work at. Went around to Parlier and Fowler, where the Mexicans cash their checks and, you know . . .”
“That doesn’t sound easy.”
I searched the darkness for an answer. “I had fake ID cards. And the checks were two hundred dollars here, two hundred there. You know, like I worked for a week at the store. I just wasn’t thinking, you know? It wasn’t like I could do it again and again or anything, so I paid more in the end for a really dumb mistake.”
“Avenal? You spent just a few months there, you said? Doesn’t sound so bad.”
“I got a record now,” I answered, and now it felt like the truth. “It’s hard to find work as it is, especially when people think you’re a thief.”
“Once a thief, always a thief, no?” Treviño huffed. He shifted the coals in the grill, which looked to have died down, and they glowed bright orange again, sparking some and jumping out of the grill’s base. “Señor Equis. You don’t even know who you are.” There was more meat in the bowl, and Treviño laid it on the grill.
“People change,” I said. “I changed. I wouldn’t steal from you.”
“Good,” Treviño said. “Because I don’t have any money.” He laughed and opened another beer.
WHERE WE GREW UP, Kyle and me, you travel along Avenue 416 for fifteen miles over to Selma, straight west, to get to Highway 99, and just before you get to the on-ramp there’s a gas station with a towering lighted sign. I’ve driven there a million times, all those years I’ve lived here in the Valley, and it’s hard to forget the station light’s fluorescent gleam, the hard edge it gives to the grape vineyards all around. Months and months after he robbed the men’s clothing store, we didn’t hang out; the news about the robbery was all over the front page of the paper, but nothing ever happening to Kyle. All the stuff was at my house, but no one ever came knocking. When the news got old, we started drinking out in the orchards again, and that night, I thought the plan was to go out over to Caruthers and maybe smoke some pot. At the gas station, I sat in the car waiting while Kyle went in there, his baseball cap lowered. I didn’t know if he was going to steal the beer or just pay for it, but then I saw him walk up to the counter with a case of beer and pull that gun on the clerk, a Mexican kid, so young, his hands straight up and confused. When had Kyle hidden the gun? How had it happened, this kid lowering one hand to open the register, Kyle in his mad frenzy to yank out as much money as he could? My heart raced, hearing the slow rumble of an approaching diesel truck, just off a long haul on 99. I could see the diesel truck approaching with its barrel of a trailer like a shiny silver bullet — it was easy to think that, hearing what I heard, my head jerking back to the station in horror, in disbelief, and Kyle racing back to the car, yelling, “Go, go, go!” He lugged the beer like a treasure chest, the plastic bag of money in his other hand. I did not see the Mexican kid go down, but I heard what had collapsed him. And I knew even then that all of Kyle’s want for change and escape and excitement was impossible to reach. I knew even before Kyle counted the money that there wasn’t enough in the bag.
We were eighteen and we were sloppy. “Don’t go on the highway,” he told me, and so we headed back to town. My hands were shaking and so were my knees: I felt I was tapping on the gas pedal because I was shaking so much. “Don’t speed,” he told me. My eyes were on the rearview mirror. We drove back to his house and I waited for him to go inside. The front door was open to let in the night air, and I could see the shape of his mother sitting in her armchair, watching television, but Kyle only came and went, his mother never making a move. A paper sack of clothes and the plastic bag of money on the floorboard and the gun tucked under the seat. Why Las Vegas seemed like a good idea, I don’t remember, but we pulled down Gold Street and out of our neighborhood very slowly. I looked at my house as if I’d never see it again. We took the back roads heading south, through Visalia, Tulare, then the scattering of little towns before Bakersfield, and it was remarkably easy. There was never a cop car; strangely, my panic began to ease. We headed east up into the Tehachapi Mountains on Highway 58 and the darkness, leaving the Valley behind, and even in the night I knew my life had changed without my wanting it to. The fruit trees were gone, the vineyards. In the dark was the dry rustle of the mountains at the burst of fire season. In the dark was the edge of the desert and its frightening jaws, the long road leading to Las Vegas, the headlights, the ominous signs pointing to Edwards Air Force Base, both of us quiet the whole way. The hours were going by, and at home, I knew my mother would never notice. We pretended our silence was caused by the stark awe of the land stretching on all sides, how it wanted to swallow us in Kyle’s beat-up Mercury. But that wasn’t it. He had done something beyond terrible, and we knew it.
Kyle wanted to stop at a hotel with a hallway, a door that didn’t open to the parking lot, but that would have been too expensive, and I knew there was not enough money in the bag. We would have to stop before Las Vegas, on the edge of the city, where the highway still laced through the desert, and the gas stations appeared almost holy in their glow, that’s how dark it was.
We found a room at a motel just off the road, maybe ten miles from Las Vegas, but we could tell it was near, a hazy amber glow stretching across the horizon. The woman at the counter gave us a room on the second floor as Kyle had asked, and then, without Kyle asking, she told us the nearest casino was only a mile farther down the road.
I was tired but unable to sleep. Across the road was a diner, and we walked over. Both of us ate huge, cheap plates of omelettes and hash browns, the food making us drowsy. Kyle said this was how it was in Las Vegas, the cheap buffets, and how easy it would be to live there, but I wasn’t convinced. It wasn’t going to work, and I knew it; still, Kyle flooded me with promises.
“We could wait tables in the casinos, man,” he said, his eyes sunken in the sharp lighting of the diner. They looked almost bruised underneath. “Construction. They’re building all kinds of stuff in Vegas now. It’ll be easy. We’ll find work like that.” He snapped his fingers. The waitress had given us decaf, and I sipped at it, staring out the big plate windows at the glow that was Las Vegas. The city appeared to send out heat rising over the dark desert, and I pictured the Strip, all the people there, rowdy, drinks in hand, counting chips, wishing hard, the city never quiet. I tried to picture someplace where Las Vegas would be quiet, where the lights turned out and buildings went dark.
“I needed to get out of there,” Kyle said, looking out the window with me. Then, after I didn’t respond, he said, “Don’t bail on me, man. I’ll rat on you.” He spoke quietly, the way he had that night in the orchard when everyone laughed at him. I couldn’t turn to look him in the eye.
We paid the bill and left the waitress a big tip. Cars slowed to pull off the road and into the diner’s parking lot, though it was very late by then. We waited to cross the road, and the wind whipped around. It had been like that since Barstow, when we had pulled into a gas s
tation and I had found myself unable to go into the little store to get sodas. I had just stood there, afraid, with my hands in my pockets and the desert wind racing. Kyle had gone in and bought them instead, paying for the gas in cash, and I stood watching him, the wind so constant that I wondered why sand wasn’t picked up and scattered. When Kyle left, he smiled at the clerk.
“Get to sleep,” Kyle said when we got back to the room. “You’re driving first in the morning,” he said, in defeat, because he knew that there was no easy solution. I had been standing at the window, my hands on the curtains, looking out at the glow of Las Vegas and wondering how I had gotten myself into such a mess. When I turned around, Kyle was getting into one of the beds. He had stripped down to his underwear, and I caught a glimpse of him before he went under — he was the skinniest, whitest person I’d ever seen in my life, his chest caved hollow, and I found it incredible to think how somebody like that could have fired a gun.
“Shut the curtains,” Kyle said, and I did, but I left them open a crack so I could see outside. I took off my clothes and slipped into the second bed, my eyes still focused on the lights of the horizon, how they kept shining as the hours passed. From the other bed, I could hear Kyle tossing around, but then he finally settled, started snoring.
I stared out to the glint of the horizon and drifted into sleep, refusing to dream of the Mexican kid falling, falling, falling in the gas station way back there. I closed my eyes to him and shut him out, made myself dream of driving into Las Vegas, except it would be nighttime and not morning. It would be the flash of neon bulbs and electric arrows and tourist traffic and people sticking their heads out of car windows to snap pictures of the shimmer. I was dreaming of being like that waitress across the road in the diner. I was dreaming of the motel room being my home for a little while, opening the windows to let in the morning light, then walking across the road for work. I was heavy into dream when I felt the edge of my bed sink some, the covers shifting, and there was Kyle, not saying anything, just getting into the bed. I could feel the warmth of his skin even though he wasn’t touching me, and I was awake again, wondering if I should speak or not. He didn’t move for a while, and since I was silent, he must have thought I had gone on dreaming undisturbed. But I had my eyes open the whole time, watching the lights of Las Vegas, and I felt Kyle push himself over, felt him hard against the small of my back. In the same gesture, he wrapped one of his arms over my stomach and started spreading his fingers downward, but I grabbed his hand.