Taco Del and the Fabled Tree of Destiny

by Bohnhoff, Maya Kaathryn

  Hoot acts like he owns the place. He acts like that everywhere, and here, he just marches me up to this little log house and onto its big front porch and I meet Bags and Kaymart who will very soon change my sorry life, though I don’t know it yet.

  Bags is a crusty old dude with one dead front tooth and a lot of gray and white hair. Grizzled. That’s the word I read in books to describe a guy like Bags. He laughs a lot — sometimes at nothing I can hear or see — and he always looks like he’s got a secret and is thinking of letting you in on it. I can’t tell what color his eyes are. I don’t think they are any color at all, but they twinkle with his secret. I can’t help but wonder what it is.

  Kaymart, now she’s a different sort of person altogether. I feel like she’s studying me — not in a bad way, but like I’m something really interesting. She thinks a lot, Kaymart does, and even from the beginning, she thought things about me.

  I’m not used to that. People thinking about me, I mean. She asked me all sorts of questions about the Whisperers once Hoot told them what we were doing. I felt pretty dumb, let me tell you.

  “Voices?” Kaymart says. “What do they say?”

  “I don’t know,” I answer, and Hoot pipes up and says, “Dolores. They said dolores just now.”

  “Dolores? As in sad?” asks Kaymart, and Bags says, “I hear voices sometimes. Not as often as I used to, but I hear ‘em.”

  “As in the Mission Dolores,” says Hoot and jerks his head in that general direction. “Which is why we’re planning a forage into the land of darkness.”

  “I think you mean foray,” Kaymart says and looks at me studyingly. “Is that what you think it means?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “But it was a damned insistent voice and seemed righteously pushy when I tried to offer another explanation as to its intent.”

  “Well, that’s not good,” says Bags. “Damned dangerous territory just over there. Mission’s haunted, you know.”

  “Haunted? By what?”

  “Whisperers, I should say,” says Kaymart, and gives her old man this look. “Don’t scare the boys now, Mr. Bags. They seem to be on a quest of sorts — a fine thing to be on, in my opinion. Better than a lot of other things boys their age could be on.”

  Bags nods. “Be careful, anyway — just in case what the Mission’s haunted with is Potreros.”

  Hoot just grins. He likes quests.

  I am not in the mood for a quest of any sort by the time we leave the Farm. I would rather, I decide, hang here among the giant trees and the strange, blocky buildings and follow Kaymart around asking dumb questions about vegetables.

  I like the way the Farm smells — like spicy perfume. I do not like the smell of Potrero at all, which unless you’ve ever been up along the Border between Potrero and Embar you can’t fully appreciate. Potrero stinks ‘cause Lord E doesn’t give a toot about garbage pickup.

  Still, when darkness falls, we are at the trench from which Hoot will lead me, most likely, to my death. We do not go anywhere near the Checkpoints and I find myself wishing some knightie would spy us, stop us, and send us packing.

  None does.

  On the Potrero side of the Trench there’s another wall made of old junked cars and trucks and trolleys laced together with razorbarb wire. Runs for miles.

  Smeagols say there are no running trolleys in Potrero-Taraval. No running anything — water, electricity, you name it. All sorts of stories come out of Potrero-Taraval on the tongues of smeagols. Stories about gangs and burnings and rapes and horrible diseases; people stealing to eat, starving if they can’t steal. Sounds like something out of Mad Max to me. Like I said, we hear this stuff from Deadend and that bunch. Don’t know whether to believe them or not. I’ve never known truth to stand between a smeagol and a good story.

  All this haunts me; I realize I’m about to find out for myself if any of it is true. We go down into the trench where, if I stand on tiptoe, I can see over the lip. I move along behind Hoot, popping my head up here and there, while he looks for a place to slip through the machine wall.

  It’s a clear, calm night with only a shadowless sliver of moon — almost the kind I’d’ve prayed for if I’d thought of it. But I didn’t, so I thank God for thinking of me without being asked.

  About a quarter mile from where we drop into the trench, Hoot spies a chink between an old trolley and a mangled dumpster. About smeagol-sized. We go up over the edge, scat over to the wall of dead machines and squeeze through REAL careful.

  Peeking out from the little chink, we see the streets are empty. No. Scratch that. More-than-empty. I see nobody. No knighties, no by-standers, no bikers, no mimes, no street-vendors, nothing.

  Not, I s’pose, that I should expect to see ordinary people so close to the fringes, but I’m looking up a long hill and there’s nobody there, either. Besides which it is un-friggin’-believably dark in Potrero-Taraval. No street lamps, no fire-cans, no light bulbs, not even a candle.

  Maybe, I think, the knighties are hiding in the buildings. I take a look. But I can see from here that these buildings are also more-than-empty. Fact is, when I look up at the ones crowding the street, I can see right through some of them — and I’m not talking windows here, either.

  I shiver. It’s like looking through somebody’s flesh and seeing clear bluesky through their skeletals. Ooga-booga, as Creepy Lou would say.

  Hoot nudges me. “Two blocks,” he whispers. “Easy streets — you’ll see.”

  I get the sudden feeling Hoot has done this before.

  “Just for the record,” I say, “I’m not hearing any Whispers at the moment.”

  And just then, as if to make a liar of me, they whisper, Dolores again, and then something I don’t know — tsiaiaruka ka ruk.

  I shake my head, wishing they’d go away.

  “You were saying?” asks Hoot, somehow knowing.

  “Let’s go,” I say.

  I am known to exaggerate, but I do not exaggerate when I tell you that it was so dark on the Potrero side of the wall, I started to think the darkness was like fog. Not just any fog, but wu planchar, which is the kind that when you push it, it pushes back.

  This was that kind of darkness — pressing in all over. I could feel it kneading my face, weighing down on my shoulders, flattening my hair. I was sure if I ever got back to Embarcadero (Kingdom of welcome light!), I’d find the stuff on the bottom of my shoes.

  I can just see Hoot ahead of me in the dark, moving — so, I am moving too. I tug at his jacket.

  “Yeah?” he says, and the unexpected sound of his voice just about turns me into an abject coward, as opposed, say, to a merely trepidatious one.

  I start to hush him, but he says, “S’okay, Taco Face, just past new moon. The knighties are all up around Lord E’s headquarters, tucked in for the nighty.” He chuckles over his own dumb pun. “They tighten the perimeters when the moon’s new. That’s when the Haunts’re out.”

  Now, I’d never heard of these Haunts until Bags mentioned them back at the Farm, and I say as much, which launches Hoot into a description of these ghosts that about curdles my blood.

  I am pretending not to believe any of this, but as I am a dude who hears Whispers, and who is on his way to try to locate source of same. I feel I have very little grounds for bluster. But I say it anyway: ”I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  And in my head, the Whisperers say, cat-ta-us, which makes no sense, but which somehow makes me feel...okay. I mean, okay as in I am not scared spitless all of a sudden, though I realize my lack of belief in ghosts is possibly uninformed.

  “Which way?” I ask.

  “Down that way,” he comes back, but as he is wearing his black leather jacket (can’t say I’ve ever seen him not wear his black leather jacket), I don’t see which way "that way" is.

  “Straight down two blocks,” he adds a moment later. “And you don’t have to whisper. I’m not jazzin' about the Haunts. They’re really here.” There is a flash of almost white from where I
think his mouth might be. “Well, at least the Potreros think so. They don’t come around the Mission at night.”

  “How they figure to guard their border if they’re afraid to come down here?”

  Hoot giggles, which is a source of amazement to me. Big, cool dudes don’t, as a rule, giggle much. It tends to spoil the effect of being big and cool.

  “They think the Haunts are guarding the Mission border for ‘em.”

  My feeling of okay-ness slips a little and I pray that the Potreros are dead wrong about this. We plow through the heavy darkness for the longest two blocks I have ever skulked. I can barely see the broken buildings that hover over us, but I can feel them. Without eyes, they are watching.

  “Are you sure there’s nobody here?” I ask Hoot and then almost walk up his back when he just stops.

  “Here,” he says and I struggle to see where "here" is.

  I find an iron fence in front of me — the kind that’s like a row of spears stuck shaft first in the ground. I peer through the bars and am amazed that I can actually see something by the thin curve of moonlight.

  It is big and ghost-gray against the smothering darkness. Tatters of wu seda fly like silky banners from the bell tower. I begin to see where this whole Haunt idea came from. The Mission Dolores is not a home of ghosts, it is a ghost, a ghost in a monk’s habit of black wool and silver silk and gauze.

  Though the dark seems less heavy here, I still feel something pushing, pressing, pulling at me — reaching all the way to my immortal soul.

  Cattaus. My son, say the Whisperers, loud and clear.

  Whoa. Now, that part I understand. I just don’t understand what it means.

  I been hearing these Whispers for almost a year and this is the first time they come up with a word in any language I get. The possibilities mad-dash through my head — foremostly that I’m the sole survivor of a family of ghosts. So, now what — they’re calling me to the Glorious Place?

  “You hearing ‘em?” asks Hoot, and I’m all but knocked sideways because I’ve forgotten he’s there.

  “They called me ‘son.’”

  “ Zhende?” he says. “No kidding? Huh. Well, c’mon then.”

  “Where?”

  “Inside. C’mon.”

  He moves off and I barely have time to peel my fingers off the cold iron bars and follow him.

  “We don’t gotta go inside,” I protest.

  “Yeah, we do. This is important. We got us a quest.”

  “How do you know that? How do you know it’s important?”

  Hoot makes a rude noise. “What — you think this shit happens to everybody?”

  I can’t answer that. Or maybe I just don’t want to.

  Deeper into Potrero-Taraval we go, about half a block. Then we turn east. I can see a little better now, though I can’t say how. There is still no light to speak of, and now a sly fog has begun to creep about us. It’s a shabu dong — that’s Chinglish for Moving Form of Gauze — and it makes my skin crawl when I pass through it — like walking through a ghost, I think.

  Hoot takes me to a large and stiffly-leafed bush that has climbed all over the Mission’s outer wall. I think I’m s’posed to climb and start feeling for a branch to grab when Hoot clamps a hand on my ankle.

  I make this noise I had no idea could come out of a human throat and hit the dirt.

  “Geez, Chickpea! You wanna bring the whole of Potrero-Terribal down on us? C’mon!”

  And he drags me down and stuffs me under the bush.

  The next thing I know, I am standing in a strange forest of frozen stone. The shabu dong is here, too, and wraps itself around the strange shapes and around me and around what I think might be trees, but am not sure. Hoot comes up next to me.

  “Where the hell are we?” I ask.

  “Graveyard,” says Hoot. “How’re the Whispers?”

  “Whispering,” I say, and they are — like crazy.

  One big voice, a lot of little ones, all saying God-knows-what. It isn’t English or Chinese or Spanish or even Chinglish — which is what most Embarcaderans speak day-to-day — but it sounds vaguely like cross between the last two. In between all the unintelligibles I hear it again, Cattaus — my son.

  “Let’s stroll,” says Hoot, and we do.

  I’ve gone about a dozen steps before I realize something.

  “Graveyard? We’re scopin' ghosts?”

  “You don’t believe in ghosts,” Hoot reminds me, and leads on through a garden gone loco. (At least I hope all the light-sucking black stuff among the not-so-black stuff is greenery.) Through the graves we creep, and it occurs to me as we scuttle, to ask Hoot how he comes to know this side of the Border so well.

  For a moment, the only answer is the creak of leather as he moves.

  “Just a curious guy, I guess ... and kinda stupid.” There is a flash of white as he smiles back at me. “Thrills, y’know? The Potreros, the Haunts. Besides, I like this place, I guess. It’s got something.”

  It does. And that something suddenly reaches out and hauls me to a dead stop (you should pardon the term).

  Something ahead of us looms like a small mountain. By the sliver of moon and the silver of fog I see it as a jumble of pale stone. The shabu dong curls around and over it like giant see-through cat — gray fluff everywhere.

  And the Whisperers aren’t whispering now, they’re talking out loud.

  My son! they insist, but this is not mi madre y padre, that much I know for sure.

  “Who are you?” I ask, not really expecting an answer, but I get one, and it makes my insides quiver.

  Amah.

  The word is alien. I don’t know it...but I feel it. It feels old. Older than the walls of this Mission, old as the rocks in this little mountain, old as....

  “What is this place?” I ask Hoot.

  “Don’t know. Part of the graveyard, I guess. There’s some sort of plaque or something on the other side, but it’s real worn. I can’t read it. You might be able to make it out. Maybe we could make some light.”

  “Rather not,” I say, and turn my attention back on the Whisperers. “I wish I understood you guys,” I tell them.

  There is no answer, but for no particular reason my hair stands up all over my head. The shabu dong around the pile of rocks is doing something most un-shabu dong-like. It’s all moving toward the same spot, which is about ten feet from the tip of my nose.

  It’s a little chilly in the graveyard, but where I’m standing it’s sub-zero. I am aware that my mouth is hanging open, sucking in mist.

  Beside me, Hoot says, “Cool. What is it?” Like I should know.

  "It" was starting to look less and less like fog and more and more like something else — something sort of person-shaped.

  “Huh,” says Hoot. Then he tugs at my sleeve. “We should zhou now.”

  I shake my head. I’m scared spitless, but I don’t want to miss this — whatever it is.

  “No. I mean it,” Hoot tells me. “Let’s go. Now.”

  About the time he says "now," I hear something most un-ghost-like. Like shouting, for example, and the pounding of many non-ghost feet. And about this same time, Hoot just grabs me and shoves me into some overgrown bushes.

  “Zhou!” he says — which is to say, "scram most diligently."

  I do, momentarily forgetting the not-shabu-dong thing forming by the rock pile.

  Hoot and I scramble for yards on our hands and knees — him leading, me praying I don’t lose him in the shrubbery and wondering if he knows where the hell we are going. Suddenly, I realize there are no more bushes and Hoot is hauling me to my feet.

  “Zhou!” he says again, as if I need any more encouragement.

  We are in the open street now between the Mission and the Border. Behind us is the Mission wall; before us is another wall — a wall of fog. It’s a woolly zhentou — thick and silent and impossible to see through.

  We dive in and lose ourselves to Potrero-Taraval. I pray we don’t lose ourselves,
period.

  We don’t. Oddly, the zhentou stops right at the Border, and it is clear where we drop into the long, deep ditch. Behind us, I can still hear shouting, and the fog lights up with the flicker of torches.

  “I thought you said the Potreros never went there,” I say as we come out into the lesser dark of Embarcadero.

  Hoot blinks up at me from the trolley car wreck.

  “Things change, Taco Face,” he tells me.

  They do. They change muy mucho and all at once. The next night Hoot goes back into Potrero-Taraval, pulled by his own Whisperers, I suspect. He does not come back.

  As a result of this, I spend the next month or so — every day — at the Wiz, trying to do two things: One is to make sense of the loneliness; two is to figure out my Calling.

  I read. I listen. I watch. I VR. I talk to the Keepers of Wisdom and History.

  No ideas come to me.

  The Whisperers are of no particular help, either. I’m getting more words I can understand, but not make sense of, ‘cause I got no context. Sometimes now, I think I hear Hoot, too — in the alley outside my cozy — but I know that’s only the loneliness talking.

  I think a lot about finding another cat.

  I also read a lot about the California mission system. This does not inspire me to happy thoughts, but the subject sucks my interest like a vacuum.

  I mean the Haunts, ni dong. The Haunts that Hoot took me to meet that night at the Mission Dolores. I didn’t know what they were then, but now I was beginning to get the picture.

  Long ago, the Ohlone people lived here. There were many tribes, all of which referred to themselves as The People. This is called ‘ethnocentricity.’ Everybody does it.

  The thing that made my blood run deep-freeze was learning that that Mission — Dolores — had about 5,000 Ohlone buried somewhere around it as a more or less direct result of my ancestors' attempting to save their souls.

  Hoot and I’d been standing on a burial ground, and that pile of rock where the shabu dong did its little dance was a memorial — a tribute to the dead Ohlone.