The Water Museum (4 page)

“What's that?” Junior said, leaning over.

“That's like,” Shadow said, “that's like freakin' shrimps down there!”

They watched evil-looking white crustaceans scuttle out from under the shadow of their boat.

“Dude,” said Junior. “That's totally awesome.”

“No disrespect or nothin',” Shadow replied, “but you're talkin' like a white boy. You a vato or a gabacho?”

They paddled down to the railroad bridge, ducked their heads, and made their way under it, horrified by the vast networks of spiderwebs under there. A baseball cap floated in an eddy. “Because,” Shadow said, “you got to be something. If you ain't something, you're nothing. That's a fact.”

They kept cutting south as they paddled west. They went into the darkness under I-5, where they could hear the whoosh of the cars overhead, the thrum when trucks went by. The whole bridge clanged and clicked. When they busted out of the shadows, close to the southern bank, they could see broken old buildings. White birds standing in the water. Bright yellow flowers formed a fluorescent haze on the bank.

“That's mustard,” Shadow said.

“No way.”

“Yes sir! Mustards come from, like, flowers. You didn't know that?”

Shadow Boone, Barrio Naturalist.

Junior looked down.

“Fish!” he cried.

“Oh shit!”

Under the boat there was a little swirl of curious sunfish.

“Check it out,” Shadow said. He dangled a finger in the water and wiggled it. Several of the fish rushed over and tried to nibble it. This delighted Shadow, and he insisted on playing this game with the fish, even though his antics threatened to capsize the canoe. Junior waited him out, and after a while they resumed paddling. “I'ma come back as a fish when I die,” Shadow said. “I'ma be a big fat catfish. How about you, peewee?”

“I'm not coming back,” said Junior.

Shadow paddled.

“That's deep,” he finally said.

They were going far now. They couldn't even see the hill anymore. Total silence. Junior looked up on the bank. Bushes and planks and boxes and a lean-to.

“Shadow,” he said. “Check it out.”

As they floated by, carried now by the current, they saw faces staring out at them from the bushes. Gaunt, haunted faces. Silent Mexican men hiding from the Border Patrol. Waiting for night. One raised his hand in a silent greeting.

Shadow and Junior dug in with their paddles and moved downstream.

They paddled past a wrecked car sitting beneath a bare tree. Chickens scratched around the chassis. Suddenly, they broke out into an even bigger body of water. To the south, they saw the skeletal towers of the power station.

“The sea!” shouted Shadow.

“That's not the sea,” said Junior. “This is the cooling pond. Big Ángel used to go fishing here.”

They let the canoe drift while they ate their sandwiches.

A sea turtle broke the surface of the water and blew air at them.

“Jesus Christ!” shouted Shadow.

Junior had heard about this—the turtles congregated around the power station, enjoying the warm water. He was about to tell Shadow all about it when a Border Patrol helicopter roared overhead, made a sharp turn, and swooped down upon them.

White trucks skidded to a stop on the banks and bullhorns commanded them to beach the canoe. Shadow was mouthing off before he even got out of the boat. “Fuckin' racists! I'm an American citizen! That's right! That's right! You can't do shit to me, gringos cabrones! I am USA all the way!” he raised his fists. “USA, all the way! USA, all the way!”

But it turned out he wasn't USA all the way at all. When the Border Patrol agents got them to the station, they discovered that Shadow García was illegal. He'd been born in Tijuana and his parents had snuck him over the border as an infant. He'd been in the USA illegally all this time and never knew it.

“But I ain't no Mexican,” he said. “I'm a Chicano. I'm a Dodgers fan.”

He and his family vanished that night. Junior never saw Shadow again. He sat through “Mr. Hitler's” endless droning lectures, taking notes for those failures, Chango and Little Ángel. But he never did read Louie and Clark. And he never again went downhill to the gravel lot.

Shadow wasn't the kind of guy who sent postcards. And sooner or later everyone forgot all about him. And Junior never mentioned him again. He never did find out what happened to that pinche canoe.

I
t wasn't like Junior only hung with white people now. But he didn't see much Raza, he'd be the first to admit. Not socially. That's why you leave home, right? Shake off the dark.

As soon as he picked up the clamoring cell phone, he had that old traditional homecoming feeling: Why'd I answer this? He didn't recognize the number—some old So Cal digits. He stared at the screen for a moment, as if it would offer him further clues.

An accented voice said:

“Hey, bitch.”

“Excuse me?”

“Said: Hey. Bitch. You deaf, homes?”

“You must have the wrong number,” Junior said, about to click off.
Homes,
he said to himself.
What is this, nineteen eighty-six?

“Junior!” the guy shouted. He used the old hectoring fake-Beaner accent the vatos had affected when mocking him in school: WHO-nyurr! “I bet you got some emo shit for a ringtone. Right? Like ‘The Black Parade,' some shit like that.” The guy laughed.

“I've been talking to you for, like, one and a half minutes, and you already insulted me. I don't even know who you are.” He knew who it was—he just didn't want to talk to him.

His ringtone was Nine Inch Nails, thank you very much. Emo! Shit.

“I'm out, ‘homes.'”

He clicked off and pulled on his Pumas. Got his jog on along the beach. It was one of those rare sunny days, and everybody was out looking in their Lycra and spandex like a vast roving fruit salad. He tucked the celly in his shorts pocket. Who's the bitch now, he wanted to know.

His nemesis caught him again as he was cooling off, jogging in place beside a picnic table, breathing through his nose, pouring good clean sweat down his back—he could feel it trickling down the backs of his legs. “You let me penetrate you,” his phone announced. “You let me desecrate you.”

“You again?” Junior said.

“It's me! Damn! It's Chango!”

Junior wiped his face with the little white towel he had wrapped around his neck.

“Yeah. Right? I should have known an' all.”

“That's what I'm sayin'.”

“Fucking Chango.”

“Right?”

Junior could hear Chango smoking—he still must like those cheap-ass Domino ciggies from TJ. They crackled like burning brush when Chango inhaled.

“Why you calling me, Chango?”

“What—a homeboy can't check on his li'l peewee once in a while? I like to make sure my boyz is okay.”

“I haven't talked to you in ten years,” Junior said. He sat on the tabletop and lay back and watched the undersides of gulls as they hung up there like kites.

“So?” said Chango. “You think you're better than us now, college boy?”

Apparently the one thousand–mile buffer zone was not enough barrier between himself and the old homestead.

“Nice talking to you, Chango. Be sure to have someone send me an invitation to your funeral. So long. Have a nice day.”

“Hey, asshole,” Chango said. “I'm gonna live forever. Gonna be rich, too. I'm workin' on a plan—cannot fail. You gon' want some of this here.”

“A plan?” Junior said.

And when he said it, he felt the trap snap shut over him and he couldn't quite figure out how or why he was caught.

It was a short flight. Lindbergh was clotted with GIs in desert camo and weepy gals waving little plastic American flags. Junior caught the rental-car bus and grabbed a Kia at Alamo. No, he wasn't planning to take it across the border. Put it on the Visa, thanks. Oh, well—the homies were going to give him shit about the car. It would be badass if they rented '67 Impalas with hydraulic lifters so he could enter the barrio with his right front tire raised in the air like some kind of saluting robot. He didn't smile—he was already thinking like Chango! He poked at the radio till he found 91X and The Mighty Oz was cranking some Depeche Mode. At least there was that.

On his way south, he hopped off the freeway, onto Sports Arena, but Tower Records was gone. What? He pulled a U and tried again, as if he'd somehow missed the store. Gone? How could it be gone? Screw that—he sped to Washington and went up to Hillcrest and looked for Off the Record. He was in the mood for some import CDs. Keep his veneer of sanity. It was gone, too. Junior sat there in the parking lot where the Hillcrest Bowl used to be. He could not believe it—all culture had vanished from San Diego. His phone said, “You let me penetrate you.” Chango. Junior didn't answer.

He'd only come to check it out. It was a crazy adventure, he told himself. Good for a laugh. Chango had picked up a magazine in a dentist's office. New dentures: our tax dollars at work. He thought it was a
Nat Geo,
but he wasn't sure. Some gabacho had written an article about abandoned homes along the I-15 corridor. Repos. Something like six out of ten, maybe seven out of fifteen or something like that. Point was, they were just sitting there, like haunted houses, like the whole highway was a long ghost town, and the writer had broken in to look around and found all kinds of stuff just laying around. Sure, sad shit like kids' homework on the kitchen table. But it's on a kitchen table, you catch my drift, Chango demanded. There's whole houses full of furniture and mink coats and plasma TVs and freakin' Bose stereos. La-Z-Boys! Hells yeah! Some have cars in the garages. And it's all foreclosed and owned by some bank. But the kicker—the kicker, Yuniorr—is that the banks can't afford to resell this stuff, so they send trucks to the houses to haul the stuff to the dump. Friggin' illegals driving trucks just drag it all out and go toss it. A million bucks' worth of primo swag. “You tell me, how many freakin' apartments gots big-screen TVs that them boys just hauled home? You been to the swap meet?” And Chango had noted, in his profound research (he stole the magazine from the dentist's), that the meltdown had banks backed up. Some of these houses wouldn't be purged for a year or more.

“Ain't even stealin', peewee. Nobody wants it anyway. Worst case is breaking and entering. So I got this plan and I'm gonna make us a million dollars in a couple of months. But I need you to help.”

“Why me?”

“You know how to talk white. Shit! Why'd you think?”

Junior motored down I-5 and dropped out at National City. He was loving the tired face of America's finest city—San Diego was a'ight, but National was still the bomb. The Bay Theater, where he used to see Elvis revivals and Mexican triple features. He'd kissed a few locas up there in the back rows. He smiled. He checked the old Mile of Cars—they used to call it The Mile of Scars, because sometimes Shelltown or Del Sol dudes would catch them out there at night and fists would fly between the car lots. That was before everybody got all gatted up and brought the 9s along. Junior shook his head; he would have never imagined that fistfights and fear would come to seem nostalgic.

He drove into the old 'hood, heading for W. 20th and Chango's odd crib over the hump and hiding behind the barrio on the little slope to the old slaughterhouse estuaries. He wanted to see his old church, maybe light a candle. He never meant to go all “mi vida loca” in his life. He didn't mean to go so far away and not come back, either. St. Anthony's. America's prettiest little Catholic church. He smiled. They'd sneak out of catechism and go down behind the elementary school and play baseball on the edge of the swamp. There was a flat old cat carcass they used for home plate.

He turned the corner and beheld an empty lot surrounded by a low chain-link fence. He slammed on the brakes. It was gone, like Tower Records. Things seemed to be vanishing as if all of San Diego County were being abducted by aliens.

He jumped out of his car and watched a man watering his lawn, surrounded by a platoon of pug dogs.

“Where's the church?” he called.

“Burned down! Where you been?”

“What? When?”

“Long time, long time. Say, ain't you that García boy?”

“Not me,” said Junior, getting back in the car.

He drove past his old house. Man, it sure looked tiny. Looked like all his old man's gardens were dead. He didn't want to look at it. It had a faded
FOR SALE
sign stuck in the black iron fence.

The barrio had a Burger King in it, and a Tijuana Trolley stop. Damn. All kinds of Mexican nationals sat around on the cement benches savoring their Quata Poundas among squiggles of graffiti. Junior shook his head.

He dropped into the ancient little underpass and popped out on the west side of I-5 and hung a left and went to the end of the earth and hung another left and dropped down the small slope toward the black water and there it was. Chango's house. His dad's old, forgotten Esso station. Out of business since 1964. Chango lived in the triangular office. He'd pasted butcher paper over the glass and had put an Obama poster on the front, with some Sharpie redesigns so that it now said:

He'd given the pres a droopy pachuco mustache and some tiny, irritating homeboy sunglasses. Junior knew that Chango, ever the classicist, would still call the glasses “gafas.” He knocked on the glass until Chango woke up from his nap.

“Car's for shit,” Chango noted as Junior drove.

“Where we going?” Junior said.

“You remember the Elbow Room? That's where we're goin'. Down behind there. Hey, the radio sucks, ese. What's this? You should be listening to oldies.”

Junior punched the
OFF
button.

“Damn,” Chango muttered. “Shit.” He looked like a greasy old crow. All wizened and craggy, all gray and lonesome. His big new teeth were white and looked like they were made out of slivers of oven-safe bakeware. His fingers were yellow from decades of Mexican cigarettes. “For reals,” he was saying. It was apparently a long-standing conversation he had with himself. His various jail tattoos were purple and blurry and could have been dice rolling snake eyes and maybe a skeleton with a sombrero and on the other forearm an out-of-focus obscenity. He had that trustworthy little vato loco cross tattooed in the meat between his thumb and forefinger. “Tha's right, you know it,” he said.

He'd shown Junior the article. It was by Charles Bowden, and did, indeed, confess to uninvited recon sorties into the creepy abandoned homes. One found these places by looking for overgrown yellow lawns and a sepulchral silence.

They pulled around the old block where everybody used to drink at the Elbow Room, except for Junior, who was too young to get in. They rattled around into a dirt alley and Chango directed him to stop at the double doors of a garage. They could hear Thee Midniters blasting out.

“That's some real music, boy,” Chango said, and creaked out of his seat, though he managed to sway pretty good once he got erect, swaggering like an arthritic pimp.

Inside, a Mongol associate of Chango's had dolled up a stolen U-Haul panel truck. He wore his vest and scared Junior to death, though lots of vatos liked the Mongols because they were the only Chicano bikers around.

“Sup?” the Mongol said.

“Sup?” Junior nodded.

“Sup?” said Chango.

“Hangin',” said the Mongol.

There was a time when Junior would have written a poem about this interaction and turned it in for an easy A in his writing workshop.
Oh, Junior, you're so street, as it were.

The van was sweet, he had to admit. It was painted white. It had a passable American eagle on each side, clutching a sheaf of arrows and a bundle of dollars in its claws. Above it:
BOWDEN FEDERAL
and some meaningless numbers in smaller script. Below it:
Reclamation and Reparation/Morgage Default Division.

Junior was all caught up in dreams of a little house and a lot of books. Junior wasn't all that interesting. He wanted a garden. He was tired of the game. All he needed was some real money.

He stared at the truck.

“You misspelled ‘mortgage,'” Junior said, shaking his head.

They gawked.

“So what?” Chango said. “Cops can't spell.”

“The plates are from Detroit,” the Mongol pointed out. “An associate UPS'd 'em to me yesterday.” He turned to Chango. “Your sedan is out back.”

Chango bumped fists with him.

“Remember, I want a fifty-inch flat screen.”

“Gotcha.”

“And any fancy jewelry and coats for my old lady.”

“Gotcha, gotcha.”

“And any stash you find.”

“You get the chiba, I got it. But I'm drinkin' all the tequila I find.”

Chango, in his element.

Junior had to admit, it was so stupid it was brilliant. It was just like acting. He had learned this in his drama workshop. You sold it by having complete belief. You inhabited the role and the viewers were destined to believe it, because who would be crazy enough to make up such elaborate lies?

He followed the truck up I-15 in a sweet Buick with stolen Orange County plates. Black, of course. He wore a Sears suit and a striped tie. His name tag read
MR. PETRUCCI.

“Here's the play. We move shit—we're Beaners,” Chango explained. “Ain't nobody gonna even look at us. You're the boss. You're Italian. As long as you got a suit and talk white, ain't nobody lookin' at you, neither.”

To compound the play—to sell the illusion, his college self whispered—he had a clipboard with bogus paperwork clipped to it, state tax forms they had picked up at the post office.

Three guys in white jumpsuits bobbed along in the cab of the truck—Chango, a homeboy named Hugo, and the driver, Juan Llaves. Hugo was a furniture deliveryman, so he knew how to get heavy things into a truck. They banged north, dropping out of San Diego's brown cloud of exhaust and into some nasty desert burnscape. They took an exit more or less at random and pulled down several mid-Tuesday-morning suburban streets—all sparsely planted with a palm here, an oleander there. Plastic jungle gyms in yellow yards, hysterical dogs appalled by the truck, abandoned bikes beside flat cement front porches. Juan Llaves pulled into the driveway of a fat faux Georgian half-obscured by weeds and dry grass and looking as dead as a buffalo skull.