If Coach Swenson thought his Monday morning sermon set us straight, like somebody died and made him God, nobody bothered to tell him he didn’t know squat. No use with small-time emperors who think they can tell the peasants how it’s going to be. Swenson didn’t have the foggiest idea that his puffed-up generalissimo act was a joke to us.
Not that I’m sympathetic, but it’s weird that, even back in ’63, a guy like Swenson would raise Hell about a post-football gang fight (or surfers hanging bare-ass out of car windows, another beef of his), but wouldn’t crack into the rape of Marta Vallejo or Quique Holguin getting his brains bashed in from a back alley mugging. Too rich for his blood—mainly because he was a hypocrite, like all the town’s big shots, with their heads up their asses.
From the Vallejo case, Wayne Pruitt’s vengeance killing, and Butch Roth not in jail over Oscar Ortega’s drag-race crash, a lot of what you’d call racial unrest lingered around on both sides of town. Gene caught wind of anti-Mexican vigilante talk among the Okies over Wayne’s death, and a rumor said a cop laying pipe with Roth’s old lady had “lost” Butch’s drunk-test results, all adding to the friction.
But the main event was still in transit.
That Sunday, Koufax and the Dodgers closed out the Series four-zip over New York, and Rockfield Boulevard was swimming in late-summer color. Green propellers twirled above Gregan Buick-Oldsmobile, orange neon throbbed across The Chuckwagon sign, and, in the nightly cruise, Detroit iron rumbled up the road, bouncing lights off the Union Pacific tracks between Pattie Town—the white section—and La Colonia.
Frostie’s Drive-in had closed early, but, eight or ten carloads pulled into the north-end lot, flirting with chicks and showing off. From his cousin Annie’s Merc Montclair, Gene and I watched older guys hammer back beers or Gallo tokay, Roy Orbison warbling Blue Bayou out of somebody’s radio. Then a slow-rolling Hudson Hornet pulled off A Street into Frostie’s alley, the same low-riders Pruitt chased off with his anti-cholo swearing a couple weeks back—before he got snuffed.
The car drew hard stares from the crowd, like a disease come to infect their lives, until a juiced-up chick screamed, “Go back to Beaner Town.”
The Hornet bumped to a quiet stop. After a beat—for effect, I guess—a little Chicano dude stuck his head out and yelled, “Chingas tus madres, hijos de putas.”
This hit the crowd like a skyrocket, everyone blinded by the nerve of this vato punk telling all these white dudes to go tool their mothers. Having shown their cojones, the chukes—short for pachucos—ripped out of the alley, fishtailing away down the Boulevard, a blue-and-silver plaque rocking in the back window—Los Playboys, the local Latino car club, bad-asses every one.
Frostie’s broke into chaos, white guys jumping into cars, peeling out after the chukes like a swarm of wasps. Others looping in off the cruise saw what was up and blew right back down the Boulevard. Gene and I jumped back in Annie’s car before she raced off to join them.
The Hudson squealed a left onto Fifth Street, past Vallejo’s Market, straight into Mex Town, us chasing it like dogs after a scalded cat. The “cat” turned left again, barreling up Garcia Street toward the SunRose packing plant two hundred yards away.
Owned by white farmers, SunRose sat next to the tracks off a wide, gravel lot where trucks pulled in to unload lemons, beans, and other crops. Now, with the lights out and no trucks around, the place was dark as a cow’s guts—with no back exit. When the Hudson flew through the open gate in a roostertail of dirt, it looked like a dumb-ass move in their own backyard. The chase cars raced in after them, headlights flaring in the billowing dust, and we pulled to a stop on Garcia—suddenly in the shit.
Hidden inside the dark perimeter of the lot’s chain-link fence sat two dozen low-rider coches full of mean-ass Chicanos. As our guys rolled in, the vatos hit their high-beams, lighting the place up like the LA Coliseum, and roared out, circling their victims, cutting off any escape. Scattered in the middle, disorganized, the white guys were caught in the open as a crowd of pachucos leapt from their cars. For them, this was payback—for years of abuse, for Marta’s rape, for Ortega’s death, and for the don’t-give-a-shit attitude of the law.
Our boys numbered about twenty, out-maned two to one, easy. The other side was moving in, and set up for it—clubs, chains, and black-angled tire irons in their hands. Some white guys had soda bottles and ball bats, some with tire irons from their trunks, but the rest were barehanded, feet shuffling, heads swiveling, looking for where the trouble was coming first.
Then I caught movement in the corner of my vision. It was Gene—running off down Garcia Street, the most chicken-shit thing. Not a word to me, just gone, around the corner and across the tracks, away from the fight, from the danger, from his friends.
True, Gene didn’t look for trouble, but he was no candy-ass. He got in some good shots on Tim Tuttle before Swenson broke that one up. Then in the lemon orchards, Gene trying to pull Oscar Ortega out of a burning car. He wasn’t a coward, but now he’d run away, and I was going to have to hold up our end alone.
I looked back and saw the first spurts of battle, knots of three and four Chicanos laying into the white guys, who’d fight if they could, or run and dodge between cars, the vatos hacking at them with clubs and such, hand-to-hand on the border of town, a cold form of justice, Big Mex on the white man’s property, whipping the white man’s sons.
With the first chukes still doing damage, and reinforcements coming in for the kill, three or four of them spotted me. But I was on the move, with a good lead, and lost them in the shadows, snaking out of sight between a DeSoto and an old Pontiac. Then I heard voices.
Around the car fenders, I could see a wide corridor cutting between two rows of cars, and three vato dudes stood close together in the clearing, shirttails loose, the boss talking fast in Mexican English as the other two crouched down and started moving away. The boss pivoted on his heel, hiding a cut-down twelve-gauge near his right hip. Wayne Pruitt had died from a shotgun wound. Then I realized I was looking at Chuy Muro, and I’d seen this shotgun one night in the gas station when he came in showing off, acting tough, a leader of The Playboys, and hardest of the hard-asses.
I figured Chuy might have bad intentions, but didn’t plan to ask. Then, just as more cars—a bunch—came roaring along the street, one of Chuy’s chukes ran back into view, chased by two patties with tire irons, leading them into the clearing—toward Chuy and the shotgun. The runner swerved between two cholo wagons as Chuy stepped into the open, his face in shadow, but not the twelve-gauge, which lay muzzle-up against his shoulder. The two dudes braked so hard in the dirt they nearly fell down. Everybody knew how Pruitt had died.
Muro brought the shotgun off his shoulder. The white boys stood stock still, bent forward, heads up, eyes cranked wide. Their hands were up, half in surrender, half hiding from the gun in some half-assed hope to protect themselves.
“¿Qué pasa, muchachos?” said Chuy, cool as an Eskimo breakfast. Hollering drifted over from the main fighting.
“Don’t shoot,” said the first kid. “Please don’t shoot.”
The second kid dropped the tire iron. “Don’t fucking shoot us, please.”
“‘Please,’ eh? You pretty fucking polite tonight, chicos. Like I was a white man, huh? You standing there shitting your pants and saying please.” I was about to shit my pants, too, if that loco gunman had spotted me.
Now he was shaking the shotgun at those pattie boys, like he was pissed-off but nervous at the same time. “You white motherfuckers got something to learn, ése, you hear me? Things changing here. You can’t come in our neighborhood and fuck with us no more. That shit’s over. You go home, tell your families, ése.”
Then his voice got a bit screechy. “You take your shit and your white boy cars and you get the fuck out of La Colonia. You go tell what I say to those rich white fuckers out there.” As Chuy tossed his head in the direction of town, a god-awful sound ripped out from behind me.
“Drop the shotgun!”
The two white boys had lowered their hands because Chuy had lowered the 12-gauge a bit. Now all eyes pivoted toward the sound. Chuy squinted in that direction, past where I was hidden, into the dark, like a little kid trying to understand a question, and maybe raised the shotgun back up a fraction, maybe by accident.
Was Chuy going to shoot those boys? Not likely. He was giving them Come-to-Jesus lecture, about what to tell their families and others about the changes to come once he turned them loose. He wasn’t going to give them a bunch of orders and then use the gun. Even so, they were probably still scared hollow.
Chuy turned a little more toward where the sound had come from, for just a quiet second, when all the sounds in the world disappeared, and there was only the dust and the night and the early autumn stars overhead. Or maybe it just seemed that way compared to what followed. Chuy still had a little grin on his face when the explosions happened behind me—three thunderballs jammed together, all crashing into my head at once, jerking Chuy into the air, snatching off part of his face, popping his chest open, chopping away some of his left shoulder. He bounced off a car fender and tumbled into the dirt. I’d never seen a man shot before and didn’t realize right away that, lying there twisted and still, Chuy was dead. He never saw it coming.
Bent down between the car fenders, I couldn’t see who was out there, who had fired the shots, and I wasn’t about to stand up to find out. I could see Chuy bleeding from his chest and head and neck into the dirt, but I figured I had to keep out of sight and hold my breath, or it might be my last one. It seemed like a week, but only seconds passed before I heard voices, two men, coming along the other side of the DeSoto on my right. I couldn’t make out the words, but a car went racing out of the lot, and I used the noise to shuffle under the Pontiac’s floorboards and out of sight. I twisted my head up just in time to see Sergeant Bill Draper step into the open space between the cars and where Chuy lay dead.
Draper held his piece at the ready in case he had to shoot again, and Joe John Tremmer was a step behind him, holstering his own blue-black police pistola. They both had their Broderick Crawford cop hats on, but had left the bullhorn back at the patrol car. The two white boys stood with their feet nailed to the ground, like a couple of human lampposts. Tremmer kept his eyes on Chuy, even when Draper spoke.
“You young fellows hurt?”
The boys flinched.
“No, sir, we . . .”
“No, sir, Mr. Draper.” Everybody in town knew Dookie Draper’s old man, part of the wonderful Rockfield Police Department.
“Well, you get on out of here, then,” he said, sliding his gun into its holster. “You shoulda never been here in the first place. Count yourselves lucky you ain’t hurt, so just get on home and forget what you saw. We’ll take care this.”
The two boys looked at Chuy dead on the ground, then at each other.
“Go on!” called Draper, raising his voice. “You didn’t see nothin’.”
The white kids split without another word, hoping, like Draper, that that would be the end of it.
When Chuy took the close-range slugs from Draper and Tremmer, the 12-gauge fell away from him, and now lay on the ground between the shot and the shooters. Joe John stepped over and picked it up, using his handkerchief, shaking off some of the dirt before snapping it open, probably to unload it. Draper had walked over to Chuy, bent down to touch him, then shook his head a little, not enough for Tremmer to see.
“Bill,” said Tremmer.
Draper didn’t reply, still focused on Chuy.
“Bill,” Tremmer said again.
“In a sec, JJ,” said Draper, not looking up.
Tremmer took two steps and bent down a little, the twelve-gauge chambers open, facing Draper. “You better have a look here.” Tremmer didn’t have rank on Draper but spoke to him like he did. Draper looked up at Tremmer, then down at the shotgun, where he held his gaze for a long while.
“It’s empty,” Tremmer said.
Draper blinked. Then he turned his head, looking through the night at me. He looked but didn’t see me, stuffed as I was into the grave-like dark between the bottom of the Pontiac and the ground, only my head and one shoulder aimed his way, my face buried in the dirt as soon as he glanced over. Then I heard a shuffle of feet and looked up again. Both of them were standing over Chuy.
“What do we do?” Tremmer wasn’t crying, but he wasn’t on top of the world, either. “This is bad, Bill.”
“Shut up,” Draper said. “Shut up. I’ll figure it out.” He knew they didn’t have much time. Kids and other cops were running around, and Draper and Tremmer had to radio in about the shooting. The other cops would have heard the shots and be headed our way. Draper said, “Stay here, don’t move,” then disappeared. He was back in seconds. He calmly took the shotgun from Tremmer in his left hand, slid in two shotgun shells—no doubt from the patrol car—and closed it. Then he drew his handgun.
“How many shots did you fire, JJ?”
“What? I . . .”
Draper’s voice got hard. “How many shots?”
“One.”
“When I tell you, let go another one over there,” Draper said, pointing to the ground twenty feet away. “When I tell you.” Then Draper lifted the shotgun and let go one barrel into the DeSoto’s windshield next to me, my heart thumping like a triphammer. Draper looked down at Chuy again, and took out his own gun and fired two rounds into the dirt in the other direction. “Okay, now,” he said to Tremmer.
Joe John did as he was told, one more cracking boom bouncing off the night. Then Tremmer looked back at Draper. With the shotgun still in his left hand, Draper holstered his revolver and reached his right hand out to his partner’s shoulder. Staring into Tremmer’s eyes, Draper talked in a rapid, commanding voice, but with a touch of nerves.
“Okay, JJ, here’s what happened. We came on Chuy aiming the shotgun at those two boys. We yelled at him to drop it. He ran for cover. We fired in the air, me two and you one. Got it? Then he turned and fired at us once, wild like. Missed us and hit the car. We fired again in self-defense, me two and you one.” Draper kept his hand on Tremmer’s shoulder, turned his head away for a couple seconds, then back. “You got that, JJ? You understand?”
Tremmer stood looking at his shoes, then nodded hard once, then again. “OK, Bill. I got it. We fired in the air. He shot at us. We returned the fire. Self-defense.”
“We instructed him to drop his gun, he ran, then we fired the three warning shots. We fired again at him only after he fired at us.”
“I got it, Bill. I know the story.”
Two other cops jogged into the clearing. “What’s all the . . .” When they saw Chuy and the blood, they stopped cold. “Holy shit! Bill,” one said, “is he dead?”
“We heard the shots but couldn’t get over here any quicker.”
“Tucker,” Draper said, in the I’m-only-saying-this-once sort of way, “we’ve gotta call this in. A terrible shame. Where do they get these guns, I wonder?” Then he swung his head, and Tremmer followed him back to the patrol car.
That ended the big fight, John Law showing up in that second wave of cars I’d heard, coming into Garcia from both ends, blockading the street, while I was spying on Chuy. That’s what Gene had done, not chickened out, but run off to alert the cops, and the county sheriffs, too, who’d come in with no sirens, figuring to surprise and arrest the whole crowd. The Mexicans had been pretty clever to use the SunRose lot with no way out for us, but with the cops closing the road, there wasn’t any escape for them, either.
Of course, it had been Dookie’s old man on the bullhorn. I wasn’t in love with Chuy Muro, but he was basically an okay guy, and I wasn’t happy to see him cut down that way, but what can you do? On the way home, I found Gene and he wanted me to tell the D.A. or somebody what I saw, but Chuy was dead, over and done. I couldn’t see any point in making a federal case out of it, with me stuck in the middle. Hell, nobody ever mistook me for a saint or a preacher.
by 
Awards and Honors
Lunate 500 Competition 2020: 2nd place
Solas Awards, 2019: Silver Medal, Men’s Travel
2018 Sheridan Anderson Short Story Contest, 2nd Place
Tucson Festival of Books, 2017, finalist, nonfiction Scholarship 2016, Vermont College Post-grad Writers Conference
Editor’s Choice, Traveler’s Tales, 2016
Solas Awards, 2016: two Golds, one Silver, Grand Prize, Third Overall
2014 - Invited Lecturer, UCSB College of Creative Studies
2014 Pushcart Nomination: review of Kofi Awoonor’s The Promise of Hope
2010 Tom Howard Non-fiction Contest
2009 New Millennium Writings Non-fiction Contest
2009 Margaret Reid Poetry Contest
2007 Tom Howard Poetry Contest
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