with dun-roofed houses and condos and licorice-colored streets and cul-de-sacs. The long slab of the Tijuana mesa rose sharply from the ocean, then ran east seemingly forever, split once by Smuggler’s Gulch, immediately south of him. No one called it that anymore. They called it Goat Canyon. But no goats or smugglers ever passed through that split in the mesa these days. Only rancid black and chemical-yellow trickles from the colonias and maquiladores came through, finding their way to the riverbed.
In the motel parking lot below, the movers were hauling bed frames, snagging them together, metal clanging. The man from the city truck was still spraying his green and orange marks on the asphalt, occasionally eyeing the Mexicans.
From his satchel Klinsman withdrew his spiral notebook and jotted down his thoughts about the thermostat, put in a reminder to scan for it in the captures he and Rita had taken. Then he sketched a pull-chain and a doorknob, one pair with tape squares on their ends, one pair without. He darkened the tiny circles at the centers of the last two sketches, the pencil lead forming a reflective slick.
He fought against reverie, against indulging more in the views, sounds, smells, tastes of the past, against the strawberries for which Oscar had chided him. He noted the factory outlets built along the riverbed to the east, where some of the strawberry fields had been, asparagus fields, too, where on hot days he could lie within the green ferns, look at the blue sky, the black turkey buzzards circling, and listen to the stalks growing. So fast, yes, he could hear them sprout and stretch.
I could hear them, he wrote in pencil.
Klinsman climbed down from the roof, smoothed himself, and entered the small lobby, surprised to find the clerk manning the counter as though nothing were happening. He was a bony guy with dentures that were too big for his mouth and horn-rimmed glasses that seemed to crash down on his face, making him grimace and wince around his shiny incisors. He wore a polyester guayabera the color of soap. You could get the shirts for three bucks along the walk to Revolución, amid stands hawking tire-tread sandals and paintings of Elvis on velvet. It looked good on him, right and safe.
Klinsman told the man who he was, that he was doing a story. “On your motel. We think it’s a landmark.”
The clerk wrinkled his nose. Klinsman feared the heavy glasses would tumble from the old guy’s face.
“You mean before the teardown?”
Klinsman rubbed the back of his neck as though he were tired, chewed imaginary gum.
“Yeah. Before that. When is that again? Exactly?”
“Three days. They’re not supposed to be gutting the place yet. I’m supposed to be here running the place as usual. Right up to the end. But they asked if they could sneak in early, and I said to hell with it.”
“No one’s been checking in, huh?”
“Oh, yeah. Some yesterday even. But to hell with it.”
“Room 8?”
“Three, 5, and 9. I like to space them out in case they want to make noise.”
“Lonely men down from LA.”
The clerk weighed and bounced his dentures with his lower jaw. His pale arms hung like sticks from the stiff sleeves of his guayabera. “No,” he said, getting his teeth right. “And a woman.”
“Yeah,” said Klinsman. “Marta Ruiz in room 9.”
The clerk leaned his head way back, trying to get Klinsman within range of his bifocals. He sneered his upper lip above his dentures, where it stuck.
“An old colonial like you, up from Guadalajara,” guessed Klinsman. “Come to stay here one more time.”
“Nah,” he replied, his throat rattling, then clearing with the long sound. “A pretty Mex. Your age. Standing like you. Just like you.”
Klinsman looked down at himself. “How am I standing?”
“Like someone who owns the place.”
“A pretty Mexican? How pretty?”
“Very pretty. Like cactus pear. With dew on the needles.”
Klinsman had to brace his boots apart. “But not named Marta Ruiz.”
“Nahhh.” He pushed his big glasses into place, where they balanced fleetingly before sliding down one notch. “Something else, I’m sure.”
“Something prettier,” said Klinsman. “Like cactus pear?”
“Yeahhh.” He rattled it out long. “With red in it.”
Klinsman rubbed the back of his neck again, bowed away from the old guy.
“Where’d you get that shirt?” the clerk asked as Klinsman turned to leave.
“Next to the place you got yours.”
Klinsman started to push open the glass door, step into the sunny parking lot, where one of the workers was singing a Oaxacan lullaby, about a coatl who loved a mountain cat.
“You still have the scar?” the clerk asked from behind.
Klinsman turned, keeping the door ajar, letting in the lullaby, the part where the coatl gets rejected and vows to travel the world. He looked at the clerk, who was tilting his head way back again, getting Klinsman into focus.
“The snakebite,” said the clerk, drawing out the last syllable in a kind of reenactment.
Klinsman pulled up his pant leg, hitching it above his boot edge so the clerk could maybe see the two red puncture scars along his shin, innocent as desert flowers.
12.
At the age of nine, in a paradise of sorts, Aaron Klinsman was asked to help hunt down a subspecies of Crotalus lepidus, a type of pit viper, what everyone on the ranch came to refer to as the big Mexican rattlesnake. His father, the only real doctor in the borderlands at that time, had gotten a special deal on some irrigation pipes from one of his patients on the Mexican side. The pipes arrived on a flatbed, where they waited unattended until the family had finished Saturday lunch. Rust and Baja powder had cast the pipes the color of sunburned flesh. They lay like giant straws, the ocean wind playing organ notes through the hollows as Aaron and his eight older brothers and sisters stood watching the winch hook find its way to the first pipe.
As the first pipe was tilted upward by the winch, a great shushing sound came forth. Instead of dirt or water or rust, what flew from the downward end of the pipe was a six-foot snake, striped in green, gray, and black, thick as a bread loaf. When the snake came free, it formed an S in the air, caught the afternoon sun in the silver ladder of its belly scales, and fell dead in the weeds by the reservoir. Its body whumped like a feedbag on the hard summer sedge.
Klinsman’s sister Connie ran to the snake first. Quickly she was there, kneeling, petting its spade-shaped head, trying to quiet the angry glare in its eyes. Alejandro, the ranch hand who had shown them all how to shoe horses and lay pipe, arrived next to take gentle hold of little Connie’s wrist and make sure the snake was as dead as it appeared. He flopped the upper jaw and nodded.
They
