I was alone. He crouched near the foot of the bed, looked carefully around the room. We were alone. Something was missing from the wall, near the light switch. On closer look he figured it was the thermostat, one of those old round dial types with the glass center. Its two thin sensors dangled from torn plaster, wires skinned and curled at the end. He checked the two rooms on either side of number 9 and found the thermostats still there. Three of the movers were now watching him.
Klinsman pretended to leave, went instead to the back, used a rain gutter and honeysuckle trellis to climb onto the roof of the motel. He was careful not to walk above the lobby, where the clerk might hear him as he made his way up the pitch to the top. He sat on the ridge beam, where he could think and breathe a little.
Who would take an old thermostat? He couldn’t recall if it had been there last night but was pretty sure he’d have noticed if it wasn’t, his eyes keened by the odd tape pieces and covered mirrors. Rita could have doubled back on her own to take it. Oscar could have hurried down in his truck this morning, ahead of Klinsman’s trolley ride. Or the woman on the bed. She could have returned for it. Maybe nobody in particular had taken it. Maybe it had just been erased, vanishing as so much of this landscape had vanished, sometimes in sweeps, sometimes in bits.
He imagined himself a gargoyle on the ridge beam, crouching, familiar, knowing. The ocean breeze was stronger down here in the South Bay. A pond smell was heavy in the salt air, which meant the tide was in full ebb, sucking the Tijuana sloughs with it, walling the waves up high. Glimpses of the breakers’ white blown-out tops feathered between the far beach houses and dunes. The bullring, marking where the Mexican beach began, looked like a flying saucer landed at the sea edge. Everyone described it this way.
The lowlands between him and the sea, where Aaron had once ridden his Stingray bicycle and played among the little ranches, farms, dairies, ponds, swamps, and graveyards, were now covered 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.