Excerpt: ‘Mecca’

Five canyons between the Santa Ana River and the mountains that separated Orange County from Chino. Every canyon had a name, my father taught me, when I was learning to ride Mano, and we went down the trails between the river, the railroad tracks, and the base of the hills. At the end of each ravine, a white sandy place where water and stones poured down the mountains after a storm. From the west, Box Canyon and Bee Canyon. From the east, Gypsum Canyon and Coal Canyon. And in the middle, we lived two miles up a dirt ranch road into the hills, on Anza Ranch, in Fuego Canyon. Named for Fire.

He taught me three things to survive living in a canyon: They always burned, eventually. They always flooded, as even an inch or two of rain would gather in the arroyos and rush into the canyons as murderous torrents. The third—that was the bones.

My father showed me and Manny Delgado how to get home to Fuego if we got lost when we hunted rabbits, or if we had to find a stray calf, or chase off coyotes. He showed us how to look for rain clouds, and when not to be up in the ravines because they’d flood or burn.

Manny and I grew up together, since we were three, when his parents got here from Jalisco. All those years, we were gonna run a custom car shop. Restore Impalas, 1959–64, and Chevy trucks, the old Apache from 1958–59. When we were sixteen, we restored a 1959 Cadillac with the fins—a Batmobile. Now he ran the shop with his dad, in Fontana. He and Lena got married in 2002. She was manager at a KFC in San Bernardino.

All my friends and cousins were married, had kids. Everyone except me. And Leti had packed up for good two days ago.

Before I put on my helmet and got back on the road, I looked at Fuego Canyon, across the riverbed. The faint pink of old fire retardant high up on the mountains above, from five years ago. The water tank my father taught us to use as compass center—Anza Ranch water, for the cattle we ran up in the hills. And below that, down the dark line of trees like a vein of green, that lined the ranch road, there was a scarlet only I would know to look for. My mother’s bougainvillea vine, thirty years old now, and my father never stopped it from growing for hundreds of feet, blooming in red waves all over the canyon.

Then I looked at Bee Canyon, about a mile east. When I was twenty, I’d killed a man in Bee Canyon, and his bones were buried there. Every time there was a flood, I worried that his skeleton would wash down into the river and catch on the rocks or circle around in some fucking eddy, where a bike rider or homeless person would see it and call somebody. I always hoped he’d washed all the way down the Santa Ana, into the Newport Channel, and out to the Pacific Ocean, one bone at a time.

I had never told anyone what happened that day. Not Manny, who knew every damn thing about me; not the other guys we used to ride with, Bobby Carter and Grief Embers. All four of us had gone to the academy up in Sacramento for CHP, but I was the only one who made it through training and got a badge. I’d been on patrol barely six months when I shot the man, with my service weapon.

I’d never told my father. Not the priest at Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Never confessed my crime to anyone.

Only two people saw me shoot, and only one knew he was buried. That man was a phantom, a ghost, and he died five years ago himself, in a mental hospital.

The wind ripped down the arroyos now, pushing me against the bike. My uniform boots brown with dust. Chispa—one spark, from a mower or fallen power line or tossed cigarette butt. Fuego.

Every time there was a wildfire, I hoped it wouldn’t burn deep into Bee Canyon, because if his skeleton wasn’t gone, and the Sikorsky helicopters dropped water in that ravine, they might finally wash him out of the grave I dug with a pick—all I had—and the rocks I laid on top to keep him there.•

Join us on June 18 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Susan Straight will sit down with host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Mecca. Register for the Zoom conversation here.