The Poet and the Pistolero

New Colombia was a small fishing village south of Ensenada, Mexico, and far north of anywhere Trace ever wanted to be. All that is left of New Colombia today is a roadside taco stand, a beach strewn with shell casings, and a small chapel containing an orange loose leaf notebook crammed full of handwritten poetry in a delicate feminine scrawl.

The thatched huts of New Colombia burned behind Trace as he walked north on the highway that afternoon. Fire trucks from Rosarita Beach and Ensenada raced to save the lonely village in flames, paying no mind to the unkempt American with a .32 revolver in his hand. Trace’s car was in smoldering flames on the rocky beach. His suit was torn and singed but he escaped the battle without a single bullet wound. He didn’t know if he would make it to the border without being arrested for murder but he had no choice but to try. He remembered that Jack Kerouac’s friend Neal Cassady, legendary folk hero of the Beat movement, died this way. They found him in a coma alongside a pair of railroad tracks in Mexico in 1968, after a night of partying with booze and drugs. He was dressed only in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and the weather that night was miserable with rain and wind. It was presumed he tried to walk into town 15 miles away but fell asleep at some point in the journey and succumbed to the elements.

“Throw the gun away, dummy,” a voice spoke at Trace’s right shoulder. There was no urgency to the man’s voice; in fact he seemed amused.

“Toss the gun into the rocks,” the man ordered this time with urgency. “The Federales are heading this way. See the cars up ahead?”

Trace stopped at the side of the road. To his left the Pacific Ocean glittered. To his right rose the long stretch of asphalt and the golden hills where an occasional million-dollar mansion was built. His eyes felt like two heavy black orbs in his head. It was all he could do to force his eyes to focus. The man standing next to him was a bearded American, barefoot in torn jeans and a simple white cotton T-shirt. He was handsome and well-built but weathered. He probably, Trace reasoned, is one of the American expatriates who live on the Baja Peninsula to escape some bad, bad things they did back home. And since Mexico has no formal extradition treaty with America, that bad thing was, invariably, homicide. But if the choice was between the Mexican police and a fellow American who probably lost his cool one night after a drinking binge and sent his wife or girlfriend screaming into the hereafter, Trace was more than willing to accept the latter.

“Follow me,” the man ordered after Trace tossed the revolver into the churning ocean waves. He skittered down a rocky embankment on the beach side of the highway and rushed toward a tar paper shack with a warning shouted over his shoulder to look out for the scorpions hiding under the rocks. Trace tried to upset not a single rock as he followed his rescuer.

“You killed Jorge Moran,” the man accused Trace when they settled into the shack. It was only seven feet by seven feet with sand for a floor and a pit dug into the center for roasting fish and poultry. “Don’t worry about it, man, he was strictly small time. He didn’t even track on the Mexican Mafia’s radar.”

“He killed Yolanda,” Trace muttered.

“Who was Yolanda?” The man was rolling a joint with dirty and unsteady fingers. Outside, the scream and wail of sirens was growing more pronounced. Trace imagined that the whole village must have burned to the ground by then, including the little chapel that Moran built for Yolanda, the chapel where she married the small time thug and took her last breath on Earth.

“She was a poet I met in Silverlake.”

“You’re from L.A.? Cool!” The man laughed and exposed a row of broken teeth that were more likely the result of bar fights and scrapes with the Federales rather than simple neglect and decay.

Trace missed home.