Old Baby

By Chad Fore

We came from Guanajuato on foot, my mother pregnant with me. Nine brothers and
sisters, a terrible trip I never heard much about. We left everyone including my grandma, a
healer who ate a special cactus and had visions, and told us not to go. Our plan was to make it to
Angels Camp, where my uncle Chuyine worked in the almond orchards, but Mom went into
labor in a ditch outside El Monte and lost a lot of blood. We made it only sixty miles further
north to a settlement they were calling Sherm, along the railroad in a valley. Creeks in all the
canyons, which eventually joined the river, which joined the ocean forty miles west. Hot like the
Dickens. Oranges, lemons, avocadoes. My father and brothers built a log house in a side canyon
headed up the lake, what they used to call Lime Canyon, next to a creek you could barely jump
across that ran five months a year. We shot quail for dinner and wiped our asses with old
newspapers we collected in town. Mom died when I was six. In fifth grade, I was in a school
play I’ve forgotten the name of, in the role of Benevolent Gentleman #3. My father said I was the
most convincing actor (‘The other kids kept grinning like idiots’). I quit school that summer to
work in the orchards. To my father, I was the bravest, smartest, most athletic in the family. The
most natural horseman. ‘By a mile!’ he’d say. The most serious, too, he said with pride (‘Joke,
joke, your life is a joke,’ he said to my brother Nacho, the only one of us who dared have a sense
of humor). Each winter, my father asked what I thought he should plant. After church, he asked
me to interpret the homily. When I was ten, I pulled a toddler from the pools up at Swallow’s
Nest who almost certainly would’ve survived without my help, and my father started saying of
me: ‘Even if he died now, he lived a great life.’ My brothers and sisters hated me. When I was
twelve the dam broke. It had been built under the direction of William Mulholland. The morning
of the flood, the dam keeper noticed a muddy leak and called Mulholland, who said not to worry.
Twelve hours later, three minutes until midnight, a hundred-foot wall of water smashed through
the camp just below the dam, killing all the workers, the dam keeper and his wife, daughters and
dogs. The flood swept through the Santa Clara Valley, hitting five towns, washing bodies to the
sea. Mulholland was fine. We lived in the hills above town and the flood came through the
riverbed, a good ways below us to the south. Half past three, Chach Dominguez rang the bell
down at the gate, and that’s how we found out. The new dam. St. Francis Dam out in Canyon
Country. Bring tools. Every able body.

My brother Nacho and his crew had been camped near Kemp, just above Blue Cut, forty
feet from the river, halfway through the months-long job of stringing powerlines from Saticoy to
Saugus. Edison Camp, they called it. Dad gave my older brothers, Chuy, Sal and Eddie, each a
shovel, and me the new pitchfork with the smooth wooden handle. We came to the road, what
they used to call the canyon road, and turned south toward town. At the pepper trees, my father
said, “I guess they’d at least have the sense to get to higher ground,” meaning Nacho and his
crew, and no one said anything, so I said, “Definitely.”
A little further on, Sal turned to me and grabbed the pitchfork.
“Go home,” he said, and then I heard the screaming.
My father took the pitchfork back. “He has the best eyes of us all.”

High fog, no stars or moon, and with the power knocked-out it was dark as a closet. We
paused at the base of Modelo Peak, the town below us to the south and west: whistles, sirens,
shouting, horns. Brief explosions in the distance, electrical wires shorting. Got about to Disco
Sally’s when a naked man, his pale body glowing, ran across the road in front of us and started
scratching at a wall of rock, trying and failing to climb it. Then, staying low in the ditch on the
side of the road, looking back over his shoulder, he ran a ways in the direction we’d come from,
and bolted up a wash.
Park Street, Olive Street, Orchard Lane, everything normal on the north side of town
apart from the total darkness, the groups of people talking in the street, the old man screaming on a porch being held in a chair by his family, the figures rushing past with shovels and blankets.
We reached Center Street, the only street in town with businesses, squat brick buildings built at
the turn of the century. The bank stood on the northeast corner of Center and Main, and then, as
you went east down Center on the north side: Morelia’s Meat Market, Elva’s Liquor, the grove
of olive trees where the bike path came out, the Blue Bird Café. On the southeast corner, across
from the bank, was the laundromat, then: Brenda’s Pupuseria, feed store, train depot, public use
sand pile. Men with tools had gathered in front of the bank at the edge of the flood. Inside, I saw
tidy desks with their pens, notebooks and green lamps just so. The south side of the street was
gone.
“I tried to warn them but they looked at the sky and seen it wasn’t raining, thought I was
pulling their leg.”
“Found her up a tree, embarrassed she was nekked.”
“Three living, three dead for me so far.”
“Riding a ship bed next to her husband and son in the other bed, side by side until she hit
a log and tipped, and that’s the last they seen her.”
Channels of water rushing through rocks, branches, boards, piles of mud, chunks of
houses and barns, all of it all chewed up. Dead chickens. Live chickens on bits of wood. Caddy
corner from where I stood had been the haunted Round Rock Hotel, but there was no sign of it now, not even the giant round boulder in the corner of the yard. I heard a sickening slap and
turned to see men team tossing wet bodies onto wagons, which were bound for the dance hall,
now a makeshift morgue.
“Bloated horses. Electrocuted cows.”
“Sixteen-inch pipeline bent double.”
“I hear a roaring like a cyclone and couldn't get the damn door open. Them behind me,
‘Daddy, Daddy.’”
“Floated along on the roof until it got by the bank. Scrambled up the razorback of a
hillside.”
“Two, three!” A body slapped the wagon.
“Water hit the mountain and rebounded back toward camp and made a whirlpool. Men
thrown about like sticks. Those with their tent flaps closed at least had a chance.”
“No fingernails like she’d been trying to claw herself free.”
“Buried to the neck in muck and slime, breath still in him.”
“Clutching her dead baby and five hundred dollars.”
“All they lost was one cow.”
“Floating on a water tank in an evening dress.”
“Escaped with his family in the car but stopped to warn his neighbor, Jim Clemons, came
back and the car was gone.”
“I’m going to check the ranch,” Sal said.
“Take Bartholomew,” my father said. “In case there’s trouble.”
My brother looked like he wanted to say something, shook his head and walked off down
the street, light coming into the sky.

Our pockets overflowed with the flags they’d been handing out in town, sticks with red
cloth attached. We passed the horse stables and campsite, over the bridge, the creek flowing,
gently as usual, into the flood. Houses on their sides looking terribly small. Bridge trusses. Oil
stove. Half a sewing machine. Fenceposts wrapped in barbed wire. Two bare legs sticking out of
the muck in front of us, feet rolled outward in a relaxed posture.
“Help me,” I said, running ahead and grabbing a leg, its curly hair rough against my
palms. Sal walked straight past. I dropped the leg, which made the foot bounce, stuck a flag in
the ground and ran on.
“Do you think Nacho slept with his tent flap closed?”
“Be quiet.”
Giant tires, a palomino horse. I ran ahead and left a flag next to another naked dead man,
this one on his back, eyes open, touching his neck as though tugging down the collar of a shirt
(they lose all color in the eyes when they drown). We reached where the road split, the left
branch going up Pole Creek toward Balcom Ranch and Fleisher Ranch, the right continuing east
out of town in the direction of Rancho Camulos, where Mom was buried.
“You go that way,” I said, pointing up the creek, and Sal kept on straight.
“Alright,” I said. “We’ll meet back here.”

I clutched the pitchfork like a weapon. The Cardenas family, who owned all the fruit
stands and bred German Shepherds, lived up Pole Creek. The Lechlers and Lechler Museum.
Wendy Gutierrez, a quiet girl I had a crush on who wore little green slippers. Ponces, Uribes.
Once, in grade school, everyone made me a card on my birthday, and on the back of Jimmy
Uribe’s card it said Please be my friend, every letter a different color. I could still feel the dead
man’s leg hair in my hands and see the foot bounce. I’d made it a quarter mile up canyon, around the first bend where the stand of palm trees and abandoned delivery truck had been, when I took my first wet step, and I saw all around me the dogs.

Henry Rodriguez found me waiting for Sal at the split. Henry was in his sixties then, his
sons older than my oldest brother. He lived on the way out of town, on the corner of Main and
Via Fustero, a stout little man in glasses I’d waved to hundreds of times and never spoken to in
my life. They called him Old Baby on account of his face.
“What do you know?” he said, jogging up.
“It’s quite a mess,” I said.
“Up Pole Creek?”
I nodded and said, “I’ll run and let them know, and arrange everything. There’s no hurry
now,” I said, burst into tears and fell against his chest.
“Alright,” he said, patting my back. “Alright, alright, alright.”
He said: “Times like these, you envy the dead.” A phrase I’d heard back in town that
would catch on in the coming weeks.
Sal cleared his throat. He stared at me wildly as I pulled away from Henry.
“How’s the ranch?” Henry said as Sal walked up and wrenched the pitchfork from my
grasp.
“Fine,” he said, pockets overflowing with flags.

One of the dogs in Pole Canyon had been alive, bounding from one dead dog to the next,
sniffing them, butting them, barking if I got too close like she was scared I’d try to take them
away.
At home I found my sisters, Chela and Vivian, at the table with my father, his back to me,
a single candle burning between them.
“And Nacho?” I asked, and my sisters looked down. “I heard that the ones who slept with
their flaps closed at least had a chance. And he hated wild animals, so maybe he had his shut.
Stands to reason.”
He didn’t turn. “Old Baby.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Dad,” I said, but he didn’t turn.

—

About Author

Chad Fore is a Chicano writer whose work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Minnesota Review, Sierra Nevada Review, and The Hopkins Review. He was a finalist for the 2023 Iowa Review Award in fiction and the 2022 Indiana Review Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the Bellingham Review 2021 Tobias Wolff Fiction Award. A draft of his most recent novel-in-stories, To a Man With No Future, was a finalist for the Gival Press Novel Award 2022, and a semi-finalist for the 2023 Hidden River Arts Hawk Mountain Short Story Collection Award. His novella, Love Child, was a finalist for the 2023 Texas Review Press Clay Reynolds Novella Prize. He was a prize winner in the Maclin Bocock – Albert Gurard Fiction Contest (Stanford University, 2006), and a recipient of the Virginia G. Piper Fellowship in Creative Writing (Arizona State University, 2010-2013). He holds a Masters in Fine Arts from Arizona State University, where he teaches in the English Department. He worked as an investment banker before becoming a teacher.