1991
Concerning the recipe for a perpetual fog
It’s on the hood of Jesus’s old beat up truck. A pink rock wound tightly in a piece of plastic. He untwists the plastic and holds the rock between his dirty fingers. With a razor, he cuts it in thin slices over a small mirror with the image of El Sagrado Corazón printed on it. It’s the kind of mirror you win your date at the carnival hoping it’s enough to get you laid, though usually it isn’t. When enough slices are splayed out, he chops the rock until it becomes a fine powder, then sculpts four long rat tails. He pulls a gutted ink pen from his coat, takes the pocketknife that dangles from his key chain and cuts it in half to make a short straw.
“Here,” he says, passing the straw. “Vuela.”
My mouth curls up in one corner and I stare at it clueless.
“Vuela, man!” he says again, jamming the straw into my hand.
I lift it to my nose and hesitate.
“What? You aint ever done Cuca before?” He snatches the straw from my grip. “Like this. Observe.”
He puts it to his nose, bends over, and sucks up two lines in one long drag. He yanks his head back and pinches his nostrils, making a loud snorting sound. Without a word he passes the straw back to me. I angle it in my left nostril then lean over the mirror. Between the two thin lines I catch a glimpse of my reflection. My gaze is hollow. Staring into the glare of both eyes, I shut them, then lean in close and inhale.
“Fuck!” I say, pawing at my nostrils to stop the burn.
Jesus laughs.
“Lean your head back and pinch your nose.”
I try and end up sneezing. My eyes water. I wipe them and run both hands over my face. I lift my nose at him to make sure there aren’t any flakes dangling from it.
“Am I good, man?”
“Yeah, cherry.”
* * *
It’s a shit-kickers party on the outskirts of Woodlake. The town is pure Hicksville. Nothing but pick-up trucks and heaps of manure. On every front lawn, a glowing Santa or nativity scene. On our way here, we passed a house with a flashing baby Jesus, his little hand waving at passersby. “Órale, there I am,” Jesus says, flipping himself the bird.
In the early twenties, Woodlake was a retreat for Catholic missionaries. This is what’s left. The only reason we’re here is because Jesus is trying to score with some cowgirl. He tells me she has friends, fine ass chicks with horse-riding thighs. But even after a couple of hours have passed I’m still not able to settle into the scene like him.
The night is cold and wet. I see a ghostly blanket rolling in from the nearby almond fields and think of my grandfather, who used to claim that the fog was the wandering spirit of Tiburcio Vasquez—the Mexican hero whose body was dumped in the Tule Lake.
“You see,” the old man would say, “the past is always working on you.”
This is his way of telling me to stay clean.
Jesus and I stand around a bonfire for a few minutes, until our blood gets flowing again. I toss a tree limb into the flames and watch it rise. He’s standing on the other side, his image half blurred by the smoke, quietly sipping his beer. He smiles at me and bobs his head, thinking I’m paying attention to him, but I’m not. My mind is in the field behind him.
When I was five, my mother’s boyfriend at the time left her and I stranded in a field in Wyoming. The sugar beet season had ended, and he was pissed off because she wasn’t packed and ready to head back to California by the time he got off work. So, he loaded up the car and split. We lived in a mobile home ten miles from the nearest anything. My mom walked to the bus station with me in her arms, treading over endless rows of sugar beets. By the time we reached town everything was shut down, so we ducked into someone’s backyard. It was a storage shed. We slept there until just before the sun cracked. When we reached the bus station that morning, one of the workers had recognized my mom and loaned her money for a bus ticket.
The image of her and I alone in that darkness does something to me. It stirs me up, and puts a surge in my chest, and now I feel like running. Without a word, my knees kick up and my heels begin digging into the soft earth. Jesus yells, “Where the fuck you going?” I don’t answer. I can’t. My thighs pump like pistons. I high step fallen branches, gaining ground quickly. I can feel the white wetness of the fog moistening my clothes. My face dripping with it. I’m running blindly, expecting my eyes to adjust to the dark, but it never happens. Trusting the irrigation grooves beneath my feet, I step into a mud hole and fall to my knees, dropping a fist into the earth. I rise up again and continue on. I can hear Jesus, his voice growing shallow. “Yo, Loc! Get your ass back here…” I don’t stop. I run as far as my legs will carry me. I reach a small clearing, and begin swinging my arms wildly, jabbing at space, kicking and cussing. I reach down and grab a rock, two rocks, and fling them with everything I’ve got. They bounce off a tree trunk. One hits my foot. I break a branch off and snap it over my knee and begin to whip the invisible around me. I can hear it cutting through space. I clutch it like a shotgun and point up toward the moonless sky, firing one round after another. I can hear the blast echoing against the foothills. Each time I fire another shot, another opening in the blackness. Soon, a constellation of holes lights up the sky, and I feel as if I can breathe again.
When I return to the party I find Jesus inside the house. He’s rolling joints for a circle of cowgirls. They’re wasted and clawing at his thick arms for a hit. He’s swooning them with stories of how he once worked for his uncle breaking horses in the mountains of Nuevo Leon. I hear him yakking about roping and getting bucked, and other cowboy talk I’m not familiar with. He pretends he’s riding an invisible horse and flails about, spilling himself all over the girls. They giggle and blush and cozy up.
One of them, the fat one, gets up from the couch and makes her way toward me. Her face is caked with make-up and her sprawling tits are threatening the elastic on her halter top. “Hey Efrain,” she says, mistaking me for someone else. “Dude, I can’t believe you’re here.”
I nod and smile, wondering how long she’d been waiting to jump ol’ Efrain’s bones. She saunters up close and looks me dead in the eye. We stand there for a second without saying anything. I can feel her hot drunk breath entering my nostrils. And then she attempts to spit in my face.
“What the fuck?” I say, but she’s clueless.
Saliva dribbles down her chin and she tries to catch it before it falls onto her shirt. No luck. She slops it up with her long fingernail, wipes it on her pants, then laughs and staggers away.
I have to take a piss and decide to go looking for the bathroom. I find a door and open it. In the room, couples are tangled in the dark groping one another over a porn flick. “Shut the fucking door!” someone shouts. I swing my legs around and leave. I can tell my body’s on the verge of giving out because I can hardly speak and my eyes are snapping photos that I wont remember. With my eyes half shut, I feel my way up the hall for the bathroom door. When I find it, I fling my hose toward the hole in the toilet. Some of it manages to hit the target, but most of it ends up on the linoleum and my shoes. My eyes get heavier, and for a quick moment I catch myself drifting off right there on the sink. I slam my eyelids open, cup my hand and drink some of that tasteless liquid. Something is different about this night. Maybe it’s the red and green holiday deco that has me feeling sick, I don’t know. I shut my eyes to blink and forget to reopen them.
In the darkness of my mind I conjure up a photo, taken when I was a child. I’m in my batman underwear tugging on Tio Alejandro’s moustache. In one hand he’s holding a cup of Rompope, in the other, a gift. I want the gift. He gives it to me, but I can’t open it.
The water runs ice cold. My eyes flutter open and I’m back at the sink. It lasts a few seconds. Then, I’m out again.
Tio Alejandro is barricaded in a dark room. His little girl at his side tugs on his pants and begs him to make the cops go away. He tears off his shirt and leaves his tank top on to absorb the sweat. Wipes his face with the shirt and tosses it to the floor. Outside, a gang of cops is aimed and ready for him to make a move. They shout his name, plea with him to release the girl, but he has no intention of parting with her. The cops grow impatient, and so does Alejandro. In a desperate move, he lunges across the living room, past the opening in the curtains, toward the telephone. The bullet enters the window like a ray of light—threading glass and air and skin and bone, clean and silent.
A loud blast rattles the walls and startles me back to the sink. The water is still running. I slop my hair back, and then shut it off. Out in the hallway, there is a brief moment of stillness, a glitch in the drunken air. Everyone’s standing around petrified, wondering where it came from. Jesus finds me.
“We better get the fuck outta here,” he says, pushing me from behind.
“Why? Wha..?”
“Let’s go, man...”
We hear voices shouting out back. A girl runs into the house with her face all twisted up. “Shelly!” She’s crying.
Seconds later Shelly comes out of a room, pulling her skirt down and cussing. “Who the fuck? Goddamit!”
“Move, man, go!” Jesus says again, herding me toward the door.
Shelly flies past us and slams open the coat closet. She reaches in and yanks out a hunting rifle, then rushes out to the backyard. By now every last cowgirl is wasted and screaming her lungs off. Some idiots are heading out back to see what the fuck’s going on, but not us. On our way out Jesus grabs an unattended bottle of tequila and stuffs it down the front of his pants. Before we reach the knob the door is jammed up with bodies. He muscles through, and then reaches back for me. I shrink myself and inch pass. We break through and are off and running up the dirt road to his truck. Another gun shot fires out and echoes against the foothills. Jesus’s keys fall but I snatch them up. “You drive!” he yells at me. We jump into our seats and I floor it. The back end of his truck swings around and the tires screech as we bounce out onto the road.
“I don’t know what the fuck was going on,” he says, “but I wasn’t ‘bout to stay and find out, man.”
“Did you see the size of that chick’s gun?”
He looks at me and nods. “Bitch was pissed.”
“Didn’t even ask questions either, just up and got her gun.”
“Just like that.”
“Fucking Annie Oakley,” Jesus says, and we both bust up laughing.
Catela is only four miles from Woodlake. On both sides of the road are nothing but orange groves. It’s a straight shot. I’ve driven these back-roads so many times that I can do it blindfolded, drunk, and with my hands tied behind my back. Besides the oranges and maybe a few falling stars now and then, there is nothing else out here. Occasionally, you might spot a feral cat darting into a tree, or some half dead abandoned dog clawing its way onto the asphalt. But other than that, it’s just you and the blank.
Several minutes pass. Up the road, we spot two cop cars rush past us blaring lights and sirens. Jesus turns to look back. For a second it looks as if they’ll ignore us altogether, but then, from my rearview I see the red tails lights glow.
“Shit,” he says, “floor it, man. Go!”
I push my foot all the way down until it thunks, and the truck leaps and kicks off and I have to muscle the steering wheel to keep from losing control.
“We’re about to get blamed for some shit,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“Did you see any other wetbacks at that party?”
“What the fuck you talking about?”
“Us, man, you and I. Woodlake aint Catela…”
I check the rearview, and I can see headlights far off like a needle prick. Jesus jams his hand into his pocket and digs out his small bag of C. He bites it open.
“These motherfuckers will find any reason to bust a homeboy,” he says. “There, turn there!” He points to a narrow opening in the orange grove. “Cut out the lights.”
I follow his orders. “But we didn’t do anything,” I say.
He ignores me and looks back down the road where the headlights are getting brighter.
“Whatever you do, man, drive slow so we don’t kick up dust. That’s the whole trick, bro.”
He puts the leftover C into the palm of his hand and tosses the baggy out the window. I turn onto the dirt road.
“Dudes always fuck things up when they get all panicky and shit and try racing off like Dukes of Hazard. Just take it easy, man. Zero dust.”
I bring the truck to a near crawl as we slip between the orange trees.
“Slower,” Jesus orders. “Don’t fuck it up.”
I look over my shoulder and see the headlights approaching quick. Nothing in me says to slow down and everything in me says to gun it. But I do as he says.
“Whatever you do, Loc, don’t hit the breaks. We’re good man, just keep coasting.”
We both roll our windows down and listen. Branches are snapping beneath our tires, and in the distance dogs are howling and barking their asses off. He turns his body half around and keeps his eyes glued to the street. As we slip further into the grove, I count the number of trees we pass, thinking if we could at least get to twenty. Twenty trees deep would hide us good enough.
“Fourteen…fifteen…,” I whisper to myself.
“Shhh.” Jesus hushes me, “We gotta listen for the pig’s car.”
“Sixteen…seventeen…” I count in my head.
“There it is. I can hear it, man. He’s coming.”
“Eighteen…nineteen…”
“Here he comes…watch, he’s gonna fly past, just watch his dumb ass.”
I look into the rearview mirror. “Twenty…twenty one…”
“C’mon,” he says, his fingers nervously tapping the dashboard.
“Twenty two…twenty three…”
“Fuck. Where is he? C’mon…”
“Twenty four…twenty—”
“There he is…”
A flash of light zips past the opening at the end of the row.
“…and there he goes. The dumbass.”
Jesus turns around and plops back into his seat. We both take a deep breath and relax. He stares down at the bulge in his crotch. I look down too, and then back up at him, and we both start laughing. He crams his hand down into his pants and pulls out the bottle of tequila. He lifts it to see the brand.
“Cazadores,” he mumbles, unscrewing the cap and taking a long swig. He passes it to me. With one hand on the steering wheel I grab it and guzzle hard. Passing the bottle back and forth between us, we start the quiet road back to Catela.
Tim Z. Hernandez is a writer and performer from central California. His debut book of poetry, Skin Tax, received the 2006 American Book Award, and the Zora Neal Hurston Award for writers of color dedicated to their community. He received his B.A. in Writing & Literature from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. “Ghosts of Tiburcio Vasquez” is an excerpt from his debut novel, Breathing, In Dust, forthcoming from Texas Tech University Press early next year.