Sun Dust Blood

The sun rules July, flattens, withers, blasts everything in sight. It chases the adults inside to reemerge in the evening with the bats and the crickets. They sit in the shade, barbecue skirt steaks and drink beer, play Scrabble on lawn chairs. Pools of black water covered with skeeters are all that remain of the Cachagua creek. Cars, bike, dogs—anything moving among the trailers kicks the dirt up into little puffs of dust. Someone is trying to tune his car horn to play Dixie, he never gets it right and the off notes blow all over the camps.

In the afternoon Randy and I sit on our bikes under the sycamore in front of his mom’s trailer to watch the Mexicans play soccer in the flat open center of the trailer park. They come down the hill laughing and throwing the ball at one another, some wearing cleats, some in sandals, some in work boots, one in ostrich skin Tony Lamas. The oldest, Hector, waves at us and twists his fist as if throttling a motorcycle and yells “Vroom! Vroom!”

Randy lifts his hand and says, “Hey Hector.”

Hector sets a cooler of Tecate under the leaning basketball hoop and splits the group into teams of four and three. Oaxaca versus Michoacan. One of the goals is a chained off fence leading towards the reservoir, the other the side of an oak tree where we sometimes see the eyes of an owl at night. Across the flat, Randy’s grandmother’s blue heeler has woken and noticed the commotion. She wails her ridiculous warning howl, teeth all gone and the sound like a broken siren. One of the Oaxacans shouts, “Muerte! Muerte!”

Randy says, “Mexicans don’t like dogs.”

A door slams and Eric gets on his banana seat bike and pedals twice before coasting down the hill toward the soccer game. He pedals straight through the players, trying to kick the ball from his bike. He pulls a brake slide in front of me, kicking up dirt all over my Mongoose. He nods at Randy, “Beaners.”

“Eric,” Randy asks, “Why do you always smell like piss?”

It is true, he really does smell like piss.

“Maybe it’s my nose. Can't tell the difference between piss and you,” says Randy. “The difference between piss and you.”

He turns back to the game. “The Mexicans are cool,” he says.

Eric watches me, his eyes are dark and small and he wants to know if I will laugh at him. A Oaxacan makes a run for the oak tree, moving fast down through the dirt with the ball out in front of him. As he reaches the goal, a Michoacan catches him by the shirt tail and pulls him off balance. They tumble to the ground and get up laughing at one another as the ball rolls under a parked Chevy. Someone else retrieves it. Oaxaca uno.

When they finish the game they will sit in the shade finishing the Tecate. Then they will climb back up the hill. No one knows where they come from, how they got here, when they will go again. They don't mind the heat.

“I got something to show you,” Eric says turning to Randy as if he has just thought of it.

“What?”

“Your momma's underwear.”

“Like you've never said that before.”

Eric pedals off toward the creek and turns back toward us. “You coming or what?”

We ride off behind him, reach the turn off to the store and Eric says, “You want to go get a coke?”

“No,” says Randy, “I want to see whatever it is your supposed to show us.”

“Let's get a coke first. Come on.”

“Later.”

Past the turn off the trailers are sparser and we ride down along the dry creek bed where weeds are wrapped around the granite boulders and the willow thickets are dense around the banks. Here and there a few stagnant puddles with small flies, moss dried out to the texture of seaweed. The creek is a sort of highway when it goes dry, kids and coyotes and stray dogs covering the ground with footprints, trash.

As we ride into the soft sand and bumpy cobbles, Randy comes into his natural habitat, wheelie-ing his Torker right up along Eric's rear tire. His hair, the perforated fabric of his football jersey are as yellow as the nylon pads on the frame of his bike. When we go to Hollister Randy wins trophies at the races, won this bike in fact, but hates to wear a helmet of any kind.

The creek bed becomes pure sand and Eric tells us to get off our bikes and push them along through the weeds. “Shh,” he says over and over again. “Shh!”

We prop our bikes along the bank and climb up through the willows. Eric tells us to wait and he peeks out from the bushes, standing tall, holding us back with his hand.

“Okay,” he says. We follow him into a clearing where an Indian Chief trailer is parked next to a car without wheels and an old hand-crank washing ringer. Grant Peterson's house.

“Like I've never seen Grant's house,” says Randy.

Grant is his sister's boyfriend but she makes me blush when I come to her house and she kisses my cheek and calls me her other boyfriend. She is deaf and her words are frighteningly loud, emphatic, impossible to understand. I have no idea what she means by BAH FAH until Randy tells me. She has a big machine in the trailer hooked to the phone and it spits out dot matrix records of her typed conversations. Records of people asking how are you, what are you doing tomorrow, nothing, is your mom going to be out, I wish I had an Appaloosa. Sometimes at night we all watch teevee, the screen black on the bottom with the broken translation of the spoken words. When music plays, little musical notes float across the black bar.

Jaylee cleans stalls at the Swanson ranch after school. Her face is freckled, her eyes watch everything. She is lean and will spend her life with horses.

Grant is a big hick, wears too tight Wranglers with chaw rings in the back and lays tile for Jimmy Randazzo.

Eric tells us to wait again, runs out with a sheetrock bucket that comes from nowhere, sets it upside down next to a window at the back of the trailer. He runs back. “We got to wait awhile.”

That means listening to Eric talk some more about Fresno and all the great things there. A couple of times Randy tells him to shut up but we are both curious about what we will see and so we are captive. I get tired of trying to pretend I don't care what is in the trailer and ask Eric what we are waiting for. He snickers,“Something you don’t know nothing about.”

Waiting, and then the sound of a truck in the distance. We lay on the ground as it comes up to the trailer and then poke out our heads when we hear the door shut. Eric rubs his hands. “Just a few minutes now.”

Gary and Jaylee are laughing in the trailer but then it is quiet. “Just about time,” says Eric.

We sneak to the trailer, my heart pounding and my feet dragging until we are next to the window with the bucket. There is no noise but the slight squeaking of the trailer rolling against its stanchions. Eric puts his finger to his lips and climbs up on the bucket. The trailer starts to squeak faster and the sound of low moaning comes from within. Eric rubs his dirty Toughskins, sticks his face against the screen. Then he climbs off the bucket and whispers, “Your turn.”

Randy climbs the bucket, says nothing, and walks back to his bike. Eric pretends to grab his mouth to stop from guffawing. He gets up and walks back into the willows. I want to walk away but climb the bucket anyhow. I stick my head up just enough to see inside. The trailer is moving fast now, Jaylee's cries louder.

Red curtains with little cactuses on them flap in the window. Angling my head to the right I can see into the bedroom. She is naked and on her knees, Gary kneeling behind her, his white butt flexing in the dark. He makes little grunting sounds with each thrust, Jaylee's back shines with sweat, her mouth open.

Summer drags on, heat shimmers on the roads, curled fly paper in the eaves, Lipton's ice tea at the store hard to come by. It is so hot we sit in the shade watching lizards doing pushups in the sun. We smoke weed that I steal from my stepfather in a little tin foil pipe. We shoot hoops in the powder dust, the ball brown after awhile. Under the maples by the dry creek, Eric and Randy catch flies and pull their wings off. Then they shake the flies in their hands and throw them at the ground where they stumble around witless. Eric squashes them with his heel. I laugh with them.

Eric goes to Fresno and when he returns tells us, “They got these bikes there called Peppershrees.”

“Peppershrees? What kind of a name for a bike is that?” asks Randy.

“You're a liar,” I say.

We lock eyes. It is ugly in there. There's pimple on the side of his nose.

“It's a thing they got in Fresno.”

We build bike jumps in the oaks, each one steeper than the last. We make one straight down the side of a hill too steep even to hold leaf litter on the bare soil. Only Randy goes down it, first dragging his Torker to the top. He points down and doesn't hesitate at all, dropping fast and hitting the jump in the middle. He catches air and turns his handlebars sideways. He lands and Eric and I watch him turn a doughnut, transfixed, joined for once by our awe at the impossible.

“I gotta learn to table top,” says Randy.

Sometimes I come by myself and haul my Mongoose to the top of the drop. I grip the bars, knuckles white, not able to even point the front tire downward. One day I will let go of the brakes, drop so fast that the world goes blurry, land perfectly. Then I will ride slowly to Randy's and tell him what I can do.

“Cool,” he will say and we will go to the store for iced teas and Abba Zabbas.

We go back and watch Jaylee and Gary a couple more times. Randy tells us his sister doesn't care as long as we keep quiet and don't tell her mom. Afterwards I hear her muffled moans in my head. Deep animal cries, choked and abandoned like the toothless alarm wail of her grandmother's dog. We sit in the oak trees lying to each other about what we have seen.

Eric says, “After he rubs his thing long enough, he gets this thing called an orgasm. It's like a little balloon that comes out of his thing and if he were just beating his meat it would float away. It feels rad.” Randy and I say nothing, unable to embarrass him without embarrassing ourselves.

Nothing floats away, it sticks and stains and dries up.

Randy comes by one day with a big red bump on his arm. My mom asks him what it is, whether his mom has looked at it. “It doesn't hurt,” Randy says.

My mom soaks his arm in warm saline and when it is good and soft squeezes it at the very middle. A small capsule of necrotic flesh bursts forth, as it dissipates we can see the clear impression of two fangs.

“Spider bite? I didn't even know. It didn't even hurt.”

My mom puts a bandage on it and tells me when Randy leaves that his mother is an alcoholic. “If it's not a wine bottle she doesn't notice it.”

Randy's family is large and complicated, relatives almost everywhere in the valley. Once upon a time his family was this valley, owning most of the land not owned by a few other families. They drank and fiddled it away, lost it for back taxes. They live now in trailers and run down houses, mostly broke and landless, driving backhoes and cutting hay. Sometimes his father lets Randy work, learning how to dig septic tanks, grade roads. They are all drunk by noon, and some day Randy will be too. It is inevitable. The descendants of pioneers are doomed.

By August, the guys who own the trailer next door should have been driving down for the weekend. They should be falling out of their enormous cadillacs in a flurry of flannel shirts, mustaches, straw hats, running shorts. They should be setting up the tiki bar in the shade under a live oak and pouring drinks. My stepfather should be bringing them a bag of weed and my mom cooing when they call her honeypie. Why have they not closed up The Back Door and come down from the city to pass me warm cans of Coors when my mom is not looking? Where is their shouting and whooping in the middle of the night, scaring the neighbors with glowing tiki torches in late summer drought?

A plague has come to the city, annihilating them, shuttering The Back Door. All is quiet next door, pine needles cover the yard.

Their absence makes the school year come on faster, evaporates the distance between summer and the return to captivity. Fresh packs of sharpened pencils, new corduroy pants, smelly vinyl binders and PeecChee folders, another pair of Hush Puppy shoes. Another year of riding the bus with the hicks who all smell of weed in the morning. They hate us in public, come to our backdoors in the autumn to buy bags for the winter. I hate them back, their skinny legs and baseball hats, their dumb love of anything violent and loud, their hypocrisies, their fists.

September arrives and the heat becomes bearable again. Warm and dry and it will not rain for awhile yet, sometimes doesn't rain at all. In a few months the weed will be harvested, the adults in curtained rooms with Fiskar scissors manicuring the buds. Our house will stink like a bag of skunks, the seal-a-meal running all day. Then it will be packaged up and shipped off, the sheriff's deputies and postmen looking the other way at box after box bound for New York, L.A., reeking of the coffee wrapped around the quarter pounds of green buds inside.

Then it is here, the first day of schooI. I walk to the bus stop in the morning, dragging my feet, willing the clock to run backwards. Past the neighbors' fence of painted cobblestones hoping there will be a lot of frost this year. When the frost comes the bus cannot risk the turns and turns and turns over the grade into town. When I get to the store, I am the first one there and walk back and forth along the only parking block. At least I am going into 8^th grade; that means a crop of bullies above me shaved off and sent to high school. It means Hannah and Shilo, who torment me with Valentine's cards and pinches on the ass will be gone. Small consolation for the coming year when weighed against the bus ride, the dorky shoes my mom has bought for me. Who the hell wears Hush Puppies, what are they anyway?

“My block.”

Eric has come from nowhere, is in front of me, his face suddenly next to mine. I can hear him breathing, his breath like sewage. “Get off.”

Before I can think of anything to say, his fists are in my face, his head down and butting against my stomach. I fall to the ground, wind gone, gasping. He grabs my head and rubs it in the dirt. I can feel my lip opening up, dirt and blood mixing and sticking to each other. And then he is gone. Randy is holding him by the neck. Eric pushes him off and gets up on the curb. “My block, fucker.”

Randy laughs. He laughs with Eric.

Down the creek and running hard past Dave's house, Dave the enormous black guy who collects cans by the side of the road and has polaroids of naked women on his coffee table. Past Randy's trailer and the one next door. Past the blue heeler on a leash. Hush Puppies slipping in the loose soil, backpack swinging, sweating into my cheap windbreaker. Too fast to think of some lie to tell my mom about my lip, too fast to think about missing the first day of school.

The next afternoon Randy rides into my yard on an old beaten Honda Trail 80, roaring like a chainsaw. He turns a doughnut in front of the rock wall where we are growing corn and leaves the engine idling. It is a sound like a dying animal, shrill and whining, ready to bite something nearby.

“Let's go for a ride.”

The bike is too small for both of us but I grab him around the stomache and we fly along over the dirt road, the rear fender bottoming out and the air smelling like oil. We go farther up the road to the dam than I have ever been. Past the pack station and past the spring in the side of the hill. To where the road emerges beneath the spillway and hits a short stretch of pavement that climbs to the reservoir. Randy shuts the bike off.

The reservoir is brackish and still, the tops of twenty year old drowned oak trees visible under the brown surface. The spillway is dry, moss and plants drying on the concrete.

“You can bring a chicken up here, throw it in the water and come back later and pick crawdads off it.”

“Cool.”

Crawdads are cool, Trail 80s are cool, everything is cool. Randy says that someone once died walking across the spillway. “He slipped in the middle and you could see his blood all down the spillway for a long time.”

“Really?”

“My cousin is a volunteer. He came up first and saw the body. Nobody knew who he was.

“Someday, when I am good, I'm going to ride this 80 right across there. Shouldn't be too hard.”

I pull some weed from my pocket and a small rosewood pipe I have stolen from my stepfather. We get baked and stare at the water for a while, giggling and stupefied by the sight of so much water. The mountains above are steeper than I have ever seen them, the hillsides dark in the afternoon sun.

Randy gets up and walks toward the fence at the spillway. My heart is beating too loud and I have the urge to run away. Whether into the hills or back to my house, the only real house between two trailer camps I can't decide. I will never have my own motorcycle or be the offspring of the people who once owned this place. I will always play second base while Randy hits the winning triple.

He is over the fence and starting across the spillway. His hand-me-down motorcycle boots shuffling quickly on the concrete. His arms are stretched out flat in the sun, not moving an inch, his balance is perfect. His shoulders are strong from whatever he has been doing all summer, his shirt worn to threads, arms sunburnt, the small of his back white as a fish belly. I look for a long time at the back of his neck, his blonde hair straight as broom straw. When he reaches the middle, Randy jumps around and flexes his arms like body builder, a calm smile on his face. He is a god, he will make it across. He will make it.

I will make it too. All I need is a broom handle or a rock, then the back of Eric's head, black and greasy, his mind filled with stupid ideas about Fresno. He won't see me coming and then there will be blood and he will lay on the ground infecting the dirt. He will lay on the ground and Randy, with no loyalty to anything, will laugh. He will laugh with me.