The perfume of the city carries notes of orange blossom and ozone. The whistle of hot wind is her voice, jaunty and wicked.
The earth is damp and cakes against my pant legs as I run. I want to wipe it off, but I don't stop. I can't stop because I need to leave. I'm sure he is dead, so I can't be here. I cannot be here when they wrench him out from under the felled tree, prying bits of him out like mislaid seedlings.
The empire laughs.
* * *
Three days ago, Martin called me into the office. After, not during, my shift. Company management says clocking out wastes too much time, so they save important meetings for when we're off the books. I was sure he was gonna fire me, but he did the exact opposite.
“Management wants you as a team lead,” he had said.
I didn’t know how to take it. I’d been begging for more hours since Nina and I moved in together, so I should’ve felt grateful. Instead, it felt belated. Remember your godmother finding out you liked Tony Hawk, and twelve years later she got you a skateboard too small to step on without snapping it in half? Felt like that.
But it didn’t matter how I felt because Martin was already entering my new schedule on the team calendar. “You’re not in school or anything right? It’s full-time. Weekends.”
Full-time. That meant more hours. That meant benefits. Health insurance. I’d already been without since my last birthday.
I licked my lips. “Yeah, man, when do I start?”
* * *
I got home at four in the morning and jiggered around with the thin wire we use to open the house’s side gate. It shuddered open, and the passage led to the in-law unit where Nina and I stayed. Neighborhood dogs barked and howled as I walked in. I did my best not to wake Nina, but she slept light.
“Fucking dogs,” she mumbled. Her frown was obvious. Bitter.
She needed her rest. Every morning, Nina rolled out of bed and followed the same route I took to get home, backwards. Down the 215, up the 10, both freeway-arteries running up the limbs of the Inland Empire, the place we called home. Those freeways carried passengers into the empire's crotch, on the east side, where goodies slide out of warehouses and other strange slits with the click of a mouse.
Nina says she likes driving through the Inland Empire at night. That the first time her parents drove into San Bernardino, it was night, too.
Pretty town, her mom had said while neon lights buzzed and the green gate of the city beckoned their Ford like open arms. Then dawn broke and the smog settled on the horizon.
Pretty when you don’t look too close, said her dad.
Nina sat up and stretched, her knuckles knocking against the headboard. “Bah, I couldn't sleep, anyways. Martin’s been on my back all month.”
I kicked off my shoes and frowned. “Sucks.”
It did suck. Our manager, the guy she rightfully bitched about regularly, was gonna be training me.
A car alarm went off. More dogs started howling; Nina’s face twisted and she groaned. “Martin, this shitty job, the hours — they’re gonna be the death of us.” Then she looked up at me and the tension melted. “What’chu got going on? You look like you wanna tell me something.”
“Got promoted to team lead,” I answered.
“Oh. Good.” She gave me a thoughtful — or maybe hopeful — look and combed her fingers through her hair. Black and thick and strong. “That come with a raise, or is it just more work for the same pay?”
I shrugged off my jacket and threw it on the ground. “Small raise. Not enough for you to quit yet.”
Nina exhaled. “Damn.” She said it all quiet-like, the way she does when she’s got more to say and won’t, so I left it alone. I reminded her to grab her inhaler. She crawled out of bed while I crawled in, settling into the spot of warmth she left behind.
I had time to kill when I woke up. So I drove. I drove by the old housing projects by the gorge and drove up the hills and mountains and edged along the Cajon Pass, where the burn scars of a fire season growing longer and longer remained blackened. Eventually, I headed south and made my way back to the northeast side of San Berdoo.
When I was a kid, my family lived in a mold-filled apartment out on the northern end of Waterman Avenue. Blacktop heat baked through my rubber-soled shoes when I stepped outside. I couldn’t keep pace with my brothers; they ran too fast for me to keep up, and cursed under their breaths when I caught up, so I learned to stop chasing them and kept to myself.
I got to know San Berdoo and the rest of the Inland Empire well in those days. There were fields back then. Rectangles of a hundred-thousand square feet of dry grass that rustled as the wind kicked up. Junk lots littered with shattered beer bottles that made the ground glitter like it was worth something. But the orchards? Those were my favorite. I remember biking to the edge of the city just to pedal through rows and rows of orange trees at sunset, when the world was washed with gold and the scent of citrus was heavy enough to get drunk on.
I grew up and grew old. So did the city. Nowadays, I drive by those same spots on four wheels instead of two. The fields are gone. In their place are walls of concrete, blindingly white. The warehouses.
You see, the city was founded on two industries: agriculture and shipping. Agriculture came first, and it came easy. Here, the summers were dry, the winters mild, the earth rich. Turns out fruit grows well here. The junction of all the big Southern California freeways and the geography allowed freight to make its home here.
Over time, shipping won out. The only fruit trees left are owned by people too stubborn or too rich to sell the land. Warehouses and diesel ruled.
I’d visit old friends if I could. The smart ones, the really smart ones left; there’s no work out here for them. The smart-ish ones choke on gas fumes all along the 210 or 10 or 60 all day, commuting to places where you don’t need to break your spirit or back to earn minimum wage. Everyone else, the ones who couldn’t leave, take odd jobs at odder hours to make ends meet.
It made for a lonely life. But I had Nina.
Our schedules didn’t match up, but she had a gap between shifts she used as a lunch break. So we met up at one of the Mexican joints with the red and yellow striped roofs and a name starting with “Al” and shared a wet burrito and thick-cut fries.
We talked about nothing special: shows to torrent, plans to move out of the in-law we were renting from her step-dad. I responded, and I listened absently while the hot wind kicked up a shivering miniature tornado of dead leaves and trash. A common sight in early October. Santa Ana winds and all that. But I thought I’d point it out anyway.
“Jesus Christ, you see that? It’s, like . . . like, witchcraft or some shit,” I said to her.
“Goddamn. Berdoo's cursed. Or is doing the cursing.” She laughed.
Then the laughs turned into coughs. Rough, mannish coughing. Coughing that was gonna leave her hoarse later, because she was absolutely hacking up a lung. She put her face to the crook of her elbow and waved me away when I tried to smack her back, because she hates it when I do that, but she gladly accepted the inhaler when I put that to her mouth.
“You good?” I asked.
She punched me in the shoulder, and the corner of her lip curled into a smirk. A good sign, but not good enough.
She’s had that mystery cough for a while. Maybe it’s allergies, desert dirt and pollen and heat scraping lungs raw. Maybe it was the Los Angeles smog, swept into the Empire’s valley by the wind and trapped here by the mountains. Could’ve been the diesel fumes from the trucks backing in and out of the logistics facilities. Or asthma: that’s common here, mostly because of the fumes.
Or maybe she just fucking had cancer, and we didn’t know because the company wouldn’t give her benefits.
Nina rested her head on her flat palm and stared at me, her eyes big and brown and shimmering. “Babe. I’m tired of working there.”
Now that I think about it, I brushed her off. I didn’t give her advice, didn’t bitch about the company to make her feel better, none of that. You know what I said? “Baby, we gotta pay rent.”
She looked like she wanted to say more. Instead, she just got quiet. “I know. Just saying.”
All I did was pay her tab, then give her a peck on the lips and a smack on the ass. But she did smile at that.
* * *
“Did you see the way they stacked the pallets? Put the heavier shit on top. It was leaning. Fuckin’ animals,” Martin said.
Martin and I were shooting the shit after our shift, sitting on the bed of my truck. By then, he’d been training me for two days. The work I’d was doing was pretty much the same crap I’d been doing before, but now I had to micromanage a dozen people in addition to that. I wasn’t liking the feeling of being a professional snitch, and Martin could tell, so that night he pulled out a bougie six-pack from some microbrewery he claimed to know the owner of.
It was my Friday night, and no bars were open, so I obliged him.
He waggled one of the empty cans in my face and cracked a grin. “Good to piss in during a busy shift, eh?” He’d started slurring his words.
Lightweight, I thought. I faked a laugh, but the sound of it was lost in the breeze.
“Can’t drive home like this.” He burped. “Let’s fuckin’ walk, man.”
We went to the edge of the parking lot and started edging our way into the old orange groves. The company had bought hundreds of acres of land, and while most of that had been built on, there were still undeveloped pockets here or there. The grove Martin chose to trudge through had been bought years back but hadn’t been cleared out. Or tended to, for that matter.
Instead of neat rows of trees, wild weeds crisscrossed along what used to be furrows. The space reeked of piss and fermented citrus. It looked more like a forest than anything intentional. All the while, the leaves rustled and tree branches creaked.
I rubbed the slight chill out of my arms while Martin continued blustering. I mostly ignored him until he started muttering names. “Jordan, Joseph, and Nina.”
It caught me off-guard. Nina and I don’t shit where we eat. None of our coworkers know we live together — or even know each other. I almost thought Martin was testing me, until I remembered he was too stupid to do that.
So I played dumb. “What about them?”
“Gotta get rid of ’em, that’s what. They cost too much to keep.” A stupid smile spread on his face. “That’s something you’ll need to do as a Team Lead. Fire people. I’ll show you how next week.”
I stopped walking. I had to; I couldn’t hear myself think, the blood was rushing so furiously through my ears. Yeah, I’d heard rumors that the company got rid of people who’d been working there too long. But rumor manifesting into reality like that?
“I didn’t know that was something we actually did.” I said it to myself, but Martin didn’t get the memo.
He replied, “Well, sure. On paper, seniority means raises, more hours. That shit. But the overhead on that ain’t sustainable. It makes employee turnover necessary.”
Nina’d been there for almost a year. And she was damn good at packing, at sorting, at reminding the girls on her crew what their rights were. She deserved more than she got.
I remembered her wheezing coughs from the day before and felt my fists balling up tighter and tighter, my nails digging burning crescents into the flesh of my palms. But I controlled myself. “Wouldn’t unemployment be a problem?”
“My mistake. You aren’t firing ’em. You're getting ’em to quit,” he corrected. “Cut their hours, give them shifts they can’t take. Make their lives hell. Then you don’t gotta worry about severance or any of that.”
Trees creaked and groaned around us. A branch, heavily splintered, fell directly in my path.
I couldn’t conceal how tight my tone had gotten. “That ain’t legal, right? Won’t they sue?”
Martin looked at me like I was stupid. “You think anyone here has the money to sue?”
I thought about Nina, scrabbling for an expired inhaler. No. No one does.
I heard the squelch of Martin’s shoes on rotting fruit and squinted against harsh-blowing air.
It wasn’t right. Anyone could see that. Shit, anyone could smell that, feel it scraping the inside of their lungs.
The sound of groaning tree trunks interrupted me. I barely registered the noise through the rest of the twitchy movements of the foliage, but there was a tree ahead of Martin, swaying. Splintering. It was about to fall, not on but ahead of him. Move him a few feet ahead and . . .
Maybe I imagined it, but I swore I heard the wind whispering.
Do it.
I sucked in a breath. A roiling gust of wind tickled the sweat on my brow and snapped the tree ahead of Martin in half. I jumped ahead one, two, three steps.
Pushing a drunk was easy.
* * *
I hunch over on my knees at the edge of the parking lot, expecting nausea to make me throw up, but it never comes. I’m just standing like an idiot over my sneakers, so I decide to weigh the options. Someone normal would have called the cops, so I do. Their whirling sirens arrive. Assess the damage. Take a report I stammer through.
The cop smells the liquor on my breath and zips up his windbreaker with a grimace. “Fucking drunks,” I hear him murmur as he and his partner drive away.
I sit in my car for a long time after that. It’s just me and the empire. I feel stupid for doing it, but I . . . I start talking. To the empire. To no one. “Are you fucking proud?”
Proud of yourself? Proud of me?
I don't know.
When the bubbly sensation leaves my bloodstream, I make my way back home.
I don’t talk to Nina for a while.
She understands.
As I gear up to go to work a few days later, I realize I haven’t heard her cough once since the accident. Maybe it’s the witchcraft of the city, of the Inland Empire. Or maybe it’s nothing. I pull up to the company.
The parking lot smells like oranges.