by Jadie Jang
I gestured him to the other side of the car, the stretch of road where I’d left his buddies piled up. They were just starting to extricate themselves when I pushed him over on top of them with my foot.
One by one I released the mags and tossed them into the street. Then I popped the chambered rounds, caught them, and tossed them into the pile of gangbanger I’d built. Finally, I stacked the pistols carefully on the ground, on their sides, one on top of the other. I paused for effect; I really was talented at the theater of violence. When I was good and ready, and they were starting uncertainly to try and get up, I swung the sledgehammer over my head in a perfect arc, and smashed the two guns to smithereens.
I had driven the hammer with so much force, it hadn’t even bounced, but rather stuck into a new dent in the asphalt it had created. I yanked the sledgehammer back out of the road and admired my handiwork. The handles of both pistols had taken the brunt of the strike, the crook of each gun having warped into the asphalt in the negative shape of the hammer head. The barrels had bent upwards and the mechanisms had split, spewing springs and broken rods and bits of smashed plastic from the handles.
Kick ‘em for good measure! Monkey shrieked. I resisted. The sledgehammer was a pure show of strength, and the 70s had taken the lesson; well, that and me throwing the passenger one-handed. They stared at me in shock and I nodded once.
“Now get the fuck outta my neighborhood,” I said, and turned my back. The human in me did not like turning my back on assholes, but Monkey insisted on it as a show of dominance. A monkey show of dominance. Not that humans aren’t primates, but, ya know. Monkey.
It would’ve been a perfect display, too. Even the SUV and low rider drivers—who couldn’t see clearly what I was doing behind the ‘Stang—had frozen, staring at me through their side window and windshield, respectively. But just as I started to walk away, in slow mo, mission accomplished, a Tez-flavored blur whizzed past me and arc-leapt at the belatedly sorting pile of 70s.
“No, Tez!” I cried, “I dealt with them! Let them go!”
He may not have heard me. All I saw was a flurry of fists and feet, and … was that a backpack? He looked like a murderous schoolboy. All at once, various 70s legs and heads and torsos were being punched and kicked this way and that. He was really fast. I couldn’t get in there. I stood frozen for too many moments, looking for that opening that Tez wouldn’t allow.
While I was trying to figure out what to do—the only way to wade in and not get knocked sideways was to turn into something really hard, and then Tez might break his hand against me by accident—Tez chose a primary target: the passenger. I guessed he’d been the shooter and smelled of burnt gunpowder, because Tez hauled him out of the pile to focus his ire more effectively. The two he left behind weren’t unconscious, but were bloody and beaten and dazed. I chose the less dazed one; the backseater, who’d been somewhat protected from the brunt of the pile-beating by the dudes on top of him.
“Get up!” I yelled, shaking him. “Get up and get your friends and get outta here!” He looked at me confused for a moment, and then got up to comply.
Tez was standing in the middle of the road, holding the shooter up with one hand around his throat, and hammering his face to a pulp with the other. A look of such wild, lost savagery wore his face, that he must have terrified his audience. The lowrider squealed backwards out of its position, and the SUV clipped a parked car on its three point turn and screamed off after it.
I lifted my hand, and noticed I still had my sledgehammer in it. I turned the head to soft rubber.
“Tez!” I screamed. He paused for a fraction, and looked around at me, but his eyes were yellow, afire, and he couldn’t really see. Instantly, he returned to his savagery. Well, I tried.
Two wide steps and I was in striking distance. I grabbed his backpack and yanked it away from his back to get his attention. He dropped the passenger with a snarl, spun around, and swiped at me, but I was ready for him. I aimed the rubber hammerhead at his soft tissue—it would heal faster than broken bones—and lifted him gracefully away from me with a one-handed swing. He flew backwards over the parked cars and landed on his back on the sidewalk.
I leapt after him and stood him down, one foot on each wrist. He was slightly dazed from the impact and his eyes were empty. I crouched and shook his shoulder.
“Tez!” I cried. “Tez! Snap out of it! Tez!” I slapped his face.
His eyes focused on me. They were dark brown, and confused.
“What the fu—?”
“Tez! Talk to me. Who am I?”
“Maya? What’s going— what are you doing? Are you standing on me?”
Behind us, hidden by the row of parked cars, I heard the ‘Stang’s tires squeal as the three 70s finally made their getaway. Tez’s eyes glowed for a moment. He jerked.
“They’re getting away!”
“Let them!” He looked at me incredulously, eyes focusing again. “Look, you know who they are now, and they’re all beaten to a pulp. You can send the cops after them later if you want.”
I stepped carefully off of him and hauled him to his feet. He was still too confused to notice how strong I was. Good thing. Probably.
“Beaten to a … pulp?” He looked at his hands, the backsides of which were split and bloody, although already starting to heal. “I … did that?”
I grasped his chin, hard, and made him look at me.
“Tez, you were completely out of control. Completely.”
He looked at me and his mind seemed to sharpen all at once.
“I smashed that guy’s face in.”
“Yes, you did. Over and over.”
“That’s … that’s never happened to me before.”
I paused and let go of his chin, letting my knuckles rasp against the scruff for a too-brief moment.
“Yes, Tez, it has.” He frowned at me in puzzlement. “In Fruitvale on Tuesday night, when we found the stick. You went off on the 70s dudes and almost killed their werewolf.”
He shook his head, to clear it rather than to deny. “I don’t— I barely remember that …”
“Tez, it’s the walking stick. That damned stick is doing this to you. You’re full of crazy emotions right now and the stick is just … heightening it all. It’s making you giddy … and violent.”
He shook his head, but not in denial. “I can feel it. It’s so powerful. It’s starting to scare me. I can’t control it …” He swung away from me and slid the pack off of his back. He grasped and held the stick, through the bag, in two hands, his head bowed over it.
“Tez, you have to give it back to them—or to the San Antonios.”
“No!” He shouted, suddenly. “Can’t you see? It belongs to me!” He turned to look at me again. He gestured toward me with the stick, then pulled it back in to his chest. He looked at me, part rage, part pleading. “Can’t you see it? It’s mine! It was always mine!”
He was really starting to freak me out. That thing was really freaking me out. But I knew when not to push … sort of.
“Fine then. Do you want to call the cops or not?”
He looked struck, then horrified.
“Ambulance!” he cried. “I was supposed to call an ambulance!”
Now I was confused. “Ambulance … for who …?” But he was already running back to his house, digging in his pack for his phone.
When I ran up, a few frozen seconds behind him, Amoxtli was laid out on the walkway, blood seeping out of his belly. My god, what an asshole I was. I hadn’t even stopped to see if anyone was hurt. Jaime was kneeling over him, putting pressure on the wound, and Mike was on the phone with emergency dispatch.
We all heard a siren.
“You have to go!” Tez turned to me. “We can’t explain why you’re here! You have to go!”
The men looked at him, startled, then at me, for an explanation I couldn’t give them.
“Okay, I’ll go,” I said, knowing that Tez meant he couldn’t explain the reality of our associa
tion to anyone; he didn’t know I’d already made up a plausible story, and now wasn’t the time to clarify. Mike started to protest but I cut him off. “It’s better this way,” I said, not explaining, but got his number so I could check in later. Then, with a last look at Tez, completely absorbed by staring—and surreptitiously sniffing—at Amoxtli, I went to Tez’s Civic like it was nothing, started it with a hair, and drove off.
I couldn’t resist looking in the rearview. Tez hadn’t even noticed, but Mike and Jaime were watching me drive off with their mouths hanging open. Tez still had the backpack on his back and it wouldn’t be long before his Padrinos realized that there was something really wrong with him. And then they’d understand why I’d taken his car. Again.
And damn it: the one thing I’d tried to prevent—a gang war—had reached Tez’s door. It seemed, as I drove off, that I’d accomplished nothing in the past couple of hours: I still had the car, and still hadn’t found out anything about the stick.
… But hadn’t I? I’d connected Amoxtli to the Varelas, and Amoxtli to the stick (given his menacing response when I mentioned “magic sticks,” he knew something,) which meant his search for the stick’s instructions reinforced last night’s idea that the Varelas might have a special relationship with the stick. And, of course, just as I’d made that connection, Amoxtli had taken a bullet. Shit, was I about to lose another clue? Fuck, was Tez about to lose another family member?
I hit the steering wheel again and it made a complainy banging noise.
Everything in Tez’s life, from his Padrino to this ten-year-old steering wheel, was more fragile and endangered than I’d thought. Tez himself was in danger, and I didn’t even know yet what to wish for, for him.
I’d just have to check in at the hospital tomorrow, and hope Tez’s family was in for some long overdue good luck.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Sanc-Ahh Café, Oakland
Chucha’s funeral Saturday was hell.
It’s awful to be genuinely grieving for someone you feel you have no right to grieve, and to have to do it alone, among legitimate mourners, most of whom are strangers to you. Just exactly how distant I was from the family was made clear to me when I arrived at the funeral home, and couldn’t find Chucha’s viewing room at first, because I didn’t know her real name, which was Jesus Xochitl, of all things. I only found it by last name.
Then I went in and, not wanting to have to explain who I was to them, had to avoid Tez’s siblings, who seemed to be everywhere.
Tez, Jaime, and Mike, plus another middle-aged couple—I assumed Tez’s Uncle Carlos and wife—hovered protectively over the siblings—one of whom was absurdly larger than all of his elders. I just nodded at them from a distance, not even sure if they’d seen me.
In the casket Chucha looked waxy and made-up. That was the only relief: the dissociation from the corpse that I remembered from my foster mother’s funeral, that let you start to realize that your person was really dead.
I decided to skip the reception at their apartment that afternoon. Tez hadn’t bothered to come over and ask me for the car. I took this as a bad sign, so I kept it, reasoning that once he was clear enough in the head to remember the damned car and come find me, it would be safe to give it to him. I was probably also wanting at least one more chance to see him before being shut out.
There was another march planned for that day, but I couldn’t bear marching and protesting, so I spent the rest of the day at the Occupy encampment, at the kids’ activity tent, helping kids to draw flowers, and thinking of nothing.
That evening Tez showed up at Sanc-Ahh. I heard the door bells jingle and felt that whoosh of pressure, so I knew he’d come in. But there was no accompanying excitement in my chest, just a sense of dread. It took something for me to turn around. Apparently, Tez was feeling the same way, because I found him still hovering next to the door, as if he might want to just walk right back out.
I waved him over and he came, reluctantly, hangdog.
“You knew what I wanted the car for. That’s why you took it.” He spoke as if continuing a conversation we’d just been having. I realized that we sort of had been having that conversation, right after Amoxtli was shot.
“Oh really? What was that?” I said, suddenly full of pepper. He needed to tell me this time.
“You know. I was gonna take it directly over to Fruitvale and bash some heads.”
“‘Bash some heads’? Or kill someone?”
That stopped him for a second.
“I don’t know,” he said so low it was almost a whisper. He didn’t say anything for a while, and I was bursting with things to say. But I kept quiet.
“I tried to hide It,” he said finally. I glanced over his shoulder and saw that he still had the backpack with him. “Tried to,” not “succeeded.” “You were right. It’s messing with my head. I can’t really control It. I thought if I could walk away from It, maybe It wouldn’t affect me so much. But it didn’t really work.”
He looked up at me. “Even when I left It behind my head was all over the place. I can’t stop thinking about It. It’s calling to me, telling me that it belongs to me, that I should go get It and use It to kill my enemies and gather my … tribe, I guess. I think I’m going crazy, but I can’t let It go. It’s mine.”
“It’s … talking to you?”
“No, not exactly. I just … feel this pull to It. And I … feel those things. It’s not in words. I just feel things and feel this pull, so I know all this is coming from It.”
“That’s unusual,” Ayo said, and we both jumped. I hadn’t seen her come in, and she’d probably used magic to approach us invisibly … to eavesdrop.
Tonight, this didn’t bother me. In fact, I was relieved. Tez admitting that he was out of control was … a little terrifying.
“Nagualism isn’t big on power objects,” she continued, as if we hadn’t just given her startled-face. “That’s much more of a European influence. What is this thing supposed to do?”
I shrugged, and Tez furrowed his brow.
“I don’t know what It’s supposed to do,” Tez admitted, “but what It’s doing is making me stronger and faster—especially when I’m holding It—and It’s trying to get me to … I dunno. It wants me to … consume It? It wants me to use It as a power base. It wants me to root in the soil. It wants me to be the land.”
His eyes glowed amber now. I was freaked out.
“Ayo,” I said breathlessly. “It’s trying to possess him.”
“I’m not getting that hit at all,” she said calmly, examining Tez with her entire attention. “I think, rather, It wants him to possess It.”
Tez’s glowing eyes turned to her. “Yes,” he said. “It wants me to possess It entirely.”
“And how is that not ‘one ring to rule them all’?” I cried.
“I don’t know,” Tez answered, his eyes dimming again. “Shit. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I have to find Its Mount Doom. Maybe It has to be destroyed.” He looked so distraught at this, that I almost reached out to him.
Ayo straightened, completing her survey of Tez. “Let’s not jump the gun, shall we? I take it that”—she pointed at his backpack—“is the Huexotl in question?” Tez looked surprised for a moment, as if he’d forgotten that anyone else could see the damned thing, but then he nodded. “Well, then. Maya, take him to the back and show him around. See if you can find anything about magic sticks in the … you know. I’ll call Stoney in to take over here and join you when he comes.”
She waved a hand casually at the door to the office, as if she was just gesturing at it, but I felt my eyes flare slightly as her magic unlocked … and then I “remembered” what was back there, and felt a flush of pleasure.
I turned to Tez, smiling, and grabbed his hand. “Come on!” I said, feeling like a child about to show her new best friend around her room.
As I opened the door to Ayo’s office, it felt like light streamed out of i
t, although it was only the usual single fluorescent bulb. But the door at the back of the office, which looked like it led to a closet most times, was slightly ajar, unlocked by Ayo’s casual handwave. She’d also unlocked the wards around it for us, so that I’d remember what was back there and so we could both enter. I shivered, this time with a familiar delight.
That door actually led to a much larger space behind. This was Ayo’s real office space, her inner sanctum, and the place where she did—and kept—most of her research. It expanded out to encompass the entire width of the building, taking up the back half of both of the building’s storefronts—the cafe on the right and the rapidly changing business (right now a discount craft store) on the left—although Ayo’s wards prevented anyone from noticing that the two stores were yards shorter than they should be. Or maybe her magic made this space larger inside than it was outside. I’d never really decided which.
Tez’s eyes grew wide as we entered. No one knew the space existed except Ayo, Stoney, and me. Not even the short-term employees she hired now and again had access. The place was spelled for protection. Part of that protection was a spell that discouraged us from talking—or even thinking—about the sanctum when we weren’t in it.
The room was lighted by halogen bulbs in soft white globes and painted in shades of amber, so it looked like the sun was always rising or setting inside. But you couldn’t see much of the walls because the top third was absolutely covered in artwork—masks, implements, items of dress, paintings, scrolls—from cultures and traditions all over Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas. And the bottom two thirds were lined with card catalogues.
Yes, that’s right: Ayo had rescued some old library card catalogue cabinets—the really beautiful ones, made from exotic woods with brass hardware—and made them the primary furniture in the heart of her sanctuary. They lined three walls, with the fourth holding equally elegant filing cabinets, including a large flat file for artwork and maps. The center of the room, carpeted by a gorgeous Navajo rug, contained a beautiful, long, wooden library table, and a couple of comfy armchairs with a side table between them.
