FUEGO CANYON

THE SANTA ANA RIVER BETWEEN YORBA LINDA AND CORONA

The wind started up at three a.m., the same way it had for hundreds of years, the same way I used to hear the blowing so hard around our little house in the canyon that the loose windowsills sounded like harmonicas. The old metal weather stripping played like the gods pressed their mouths around the screens in the living room, where I slept when I was growing up. After I got off work this morning, the wind took a break, and I was knocked out for a few hours, waking up to hear Rose Sotelo’s radio next door playing ranchera music, tubas and trumpets thumping against the stucco, her canaries worried in their little songs.

But now that I was back on shift, the Harley was pushing hard against the biggest gusts, the Santa Anas blowing crazier than ever, the way they did in the afternoons. Fierce from the nap. Brazilian pepper trees, the ones that grew in every vacant lot or frontage road area along the 91 and the 55 freeways, had those long branches like ferns or seaweed, and when the wind blew them sideways like skirts I could see homeless encampments under a lot of the trees.

A Thursday in October. Santa Ana winds, ninety-four degrees. Fire weather. People were three layers of pissed off. Everyone hated Thursday. Wednesday was hump day, but Thursday was when people drove like they wanted to kill each other. Today everyone was thinking of Halloween—the women wondering what sexy costume to wear for parties now that grown-ups had taken over the holiday, the men pissed that the Dodgers had lost even though they were supposed to be the Boys of October, and now the 2019 baseball season was over. The kids already tired as shit of school and practice. Then the wind. Every few minutes, dust and trash flew across the lanes.

But fall winds always made me think of my mother, holding me tight in the old redwood chair my father had tied to the porch railing, up in Fuego Canyon, while the Santa Anas blew in the black night when they always started. My first memory—her talking to me before dawn, gusts so strong it felt like our house would go rolling down the canyon like a tumbleweed, the horses snorting in the barn, and my father down in the orange groves, making sure the trees didn’t dry out. “Nothing else is for sure but the wind,” she’d say while the eucalyptus leaves and bark flew past us. “We might not get rain, mijo. For a whole year. But we always get the Santanas.” My mother loved the wind, but she knew the flames would follow. And it wasn’t just that she was watching for fire—she would hold me tight and say, “We’re gonna look out for smoke, but right now, it’s like we’re in the ocean. Look at this, Johnny.”

Today I was looking at one box truck that had blown over on an exit ramp near Corona, an overturned big rig up near the Chino Hills, and downed branches on most of the surface streets. The famous wind named for right here, where I drove every day, the Santa Ana Canyon carved out by the river through mountains all along southern California. Hot as hell under my helmet. I kicked up the motorcycle and moved down the fast lane past the Katella exit. The old way to get to Disneyland. The Harley humming under me in the lane, and I never stopped thinking of it like a horse. Almost twenty years on the job and I still tensed up my right thigh when I was shifting the bike to change lanes—like my father taught me on my first horse when I was eight. “Let Mano feel where you want him to go. You have to love him that much and he has to love you, so he moves and you didn’t even open your mouth.” I was thirty-nine years old now and I saw my father almost every day—if I rode up to the ranch today for dinner, he’d laugh with the Vargas brothers who worked the cattle with him, watching the big cloud of dust the motorcycle would leave near the barn, and say, “Elegiré un palomino cualquier día. Preferiría cultivar heno que comprar gasolina.”

But under his laughter his eyes would be serious, if I went into the barn to check a dent in the body from where a rock had hit me when I pulled someone over to the shoulder, or to see if a tire seemed low, like someone had tried to put a nail in there while I was getting coffee. We took care of our own patrol bikes, washed them and kept everything running. My father raised me to know we could die on a horse, a tractor, in a 1964 Chevy Impala if someone shot at the car, and definitely, I could die on that California Highway Patrol motorcycle, since nobody in the world was happy to see me ride up unless they’d been in an accident and were scared of dying if I didn’t get them out of the car.

I had gotten three people that might have died out of their cars, in my time. I had crouched beside three people who died just before I got there. I never knew my own grandparents, but my friend Grief Embers told me his grandmother used to say if you lived where you were born, and you got to fifty, you saw every few miles the place where a soul you’d known left this world.

Back in 2002, when I was on my first solo patrols, I worked graveyard shift. Even the words made me nervous. That summer, in Santiago Canyon, I found the body of a young Cambodian girl, only twenty, whose car had hit a deer leaping across the toll road at three a.m. She and the deer lay fifty feet apart. The old Volkswagen Bug her surfer friends had restored had flown off the freeway and landed in the arroyo, and she was ejected. I shined the flashlight into her face and almost passed out. Her eyes. I put my fingers on her neck. Nothing. I called in the accident, and I sat next to the girl. The deer was making terrible noises from the brush. I knew it had managed to crawl a ways. And I was afraid to shoot it with my service weapon until my sergeant got there. We were way up in the mountains between Anaheim and Irvine. The sage and brittlebush smelled peppery where the car had crushed them. The blood left her with no sound.

She had a necklace made of dimes with holes punched in them, braided with red and gold embroidery thread. My mother had coils of those threads in her sewing box. When I went to notify the girl’s father, Samana Som, at the apartment where he lived next to his doughnut shop in Santa Ana, he sat down on the two cement steps. Put his head down, put his hands inside his black hair like two starfish. That’s what I remember. He sat like that for what seemed like forever, but was really about one minute. I know. That’s how I got through every shift. Ten seconds. Thirty seconds, to let someone pick their words to me. One minute was forever, for humans. It meant pain or fear or calculation.

He lifted his head and said, “She have a necklace. You don’t let someone take?”

“Dimes?” I said. “I’ll make sure you get it.”

“She grandmother make that when we come from Cambodia. We come from the killing field. That dime for break fever, and my daughter, she have fever all the time when she small. She wear that every day good luck.” He looked up at me. His eyes the same black as my own father’s. He said, “She grow up in the shop, always have to work, and now she want be a surfer, so we get up the same time. Two a.m. I start the doughnut and she surf for four hour and she come back to work.”

So every single day, every single dime I ever saw, every time I drove past Santiago Canyon on patrol, where people were flying down the toll road never looking at the deep ravines filled with sage and brittlebush, I thought about that deer leaping up out of the canyon, and that girl whose grandmother came from a place where no deer lived, where Samana Som had told me a story about that grandmother surviving a tiger attack in the jungle, the tiger crouching on a branch above her when she was a girl walking down a path to get water for her own grandmother. I saw that whole thing, the coins around her throat, every fucking day every time I drove by a doughnut shop, in the time it takes our brains to tell us an entire story.

Two seconds?

Then I’d light up a brand-new Mercedes S-Class, going eighty-five in the second lane, weaving around people, someone coming from the beach back toward the real world in a hurry, the freeway something to complain about.

I drove past countless canyons every day. Black Star, Santiago, Silverado, Coal, Gypsum. Hundreds of miles of strip malls, housing tracts, Disneyland, and Knott’s Berry Farm. But my dad’s words were always in my head—Johnny, there’s bones buried in every canyon in California. Algo muerto. Vacas, linces, perros. Coyotes, conejos, chavalos.

Then he always stopped. Took out his bandanna and wiped his forehead. Thought about the ranch cemetery further up the canyon. Where my mother was buried, in a metal casket that had been invisible under roses and lilies and bougainvillea blossoms. The next plot held two baby girls who had lived only hours. My sisters.

Then my father would say, Johnny. Don’t end as bones. Cause you’re all I got.

And every day, when I rode past Bee Canyon, I thought about the human I buried there, back when I was twenty. I’d never told anyone what happened in Bee Canyon. Not even my father, who might be the only one who would understand.

For the last fifteen years, I’d always worked second shift. Started at two p.m. Now I lit up a 2019 Tesla going in and out of the carpool lane like the 91 freeway was his own personal video game, like at 2:42 p.m. there was no way he shouldn’t be able to drive like Formula One. Arne Johansson. Thirty-two. Yorba Linda. Told me, “Hey, Officer, uh, Frias? Is that how you say it?”

I let him think about that. Then I said, “Yup.”


Copyright © 2022 by Susan Straight