Creek Running North

“Serrano” means “of the mountains,” and the chile so-named is like its home sierras, in Puebla, in Hidalgo; verdant green, hard-ridged in places, sharp-pointed, fiery hot. Take two of them and a sharp knife, cut stem to point and then again, to quarters, and flat sides down upon the board, cut slices paper-thin. Mind fingertips! Your knife should be sharp enough to take them off without you knowing for a second, maybe two, and barring that, when you raise them to wipe sweat from your eyes the juice of the Serrano blinds you. Work slowly, with deliberation.

(You may decide to scoop out ovaries and seeds before you slice, for the greatest measure of heat contained therein. No one will think the less of you, and if they do they will not say so unless they are your kin.)

The chiles sliced, remove them to a bowl, ceramic or of hard lathe-turned wood with pores well-sealed, heartwood that will not absorb what you give it, and cover the sliced chiles with the full juice of a large lime. Heat will diffuse outward, sour in.

Wash your hands as if you had been picking poison oak.

In a spot where he once stood to watch the nights roll past as looming ships half-seen out on the current, their outlines masked by river fog and dark, there grows some mint, spearmint, its roots confined in kiln-fired clay against the certainty that they would infiltrate every square inch of garden. Take some of that, a handful, and the tops of Florence fennel fast-bolting in the summer heat, a tablespoon of leaves. Pull the mint stems quick against the grain between thumb and finger to strip the leaves, and cut them with the fennel leaves until they are near-paste. Scrape them off the board with the sharp side of the knife. Stir them into the lime and chile.

Wash your hands again. The Serrano chile is not as hot as some: you can eat a slice or two without expiring. The Habañero is more than ten times as hot, the brave chiltepin of the desert washes five times more. And yet the chiltepin is a meteor, its heat near-gone in minutes. The Habañero’s secret, hidden from the novice by its staggering heat, is that it also passes quickly over the tongue: two minutes and the novice can speak again. Grown well the Serrano’s heat can linger on the tongue for an hour, and its thick meat has smeared that heat on the cutting board, the handle of your knife.

Halve three yellow mangoes, ripe and soft, and score the flesh crosshatched with a paring knife. Invert the halves. Thick juice will run down your arms, drip onto the counter. Outside, two hunting California towhees kick leaf litter, scamper on his grave. One of them, if it was the same one, has come ten times this week through the back door to fling itself against the window where you drip mango juice. The back door has been open more than not the last ten months, though lately only to provide the rabbit shelter from marauding cats, and the insistent world pokes fiery eyes into the house, scratches at the accumulated litter of your life to see if anything alive is beneath. Scrape the crosshatched meat out of each inverted mango half, carefully, so that it falls onto the dry slope of the bowl, slides into the lime and chile without splashing.

Some will splash anyway: wash your hands again.

A sweet red pepper sits on the counter. The Serrano’s cousin, spirit broken and without heat. Its seeds are bitter and tempting, but the mix of bitter in the bowl already just overwhelms the sweet. Scoop out the seeds and fleshy ovary that bears them, and cut the rind into small pieces. The bright red will contrast with the ripe mango, a note of visual interest in the bowl, a bit of resistance to the teeth. The bell pepper’s is a different sort of sweetness, an earthy musk, a bridge between mango and Serrano. Stir it into the mix, the mango becoming liquid with each turn of the bamboo paddle, flavors melding.

The onion sets around his grave are too young to harvest: you can see that plain through the towhee-smudges on the window. Find a sweet red onion in the refrigerator, enough to give you half a cup or so when diced. Open the towhee’s window against the fumes lest you rub an eye with capsicum. One drop from underneath an eyelid, one moment spent in absent reflection and forgetting, gazing out the window at the lovage and fennel, at the towhees scratching around the upturned earth where you weeded his grave the day before, a spotted fledgling harassing them loudly for food, singing vireos on the timber bamboo and the slantwise sun lighting up Sobrante Ridge and the memories come like a Habañero swallowed whole, one absent-felt itching trickle and reflexive wave of hand; one such unguarded moment and all is lost.