Sheila had some trouble with the kitchen. One thing, she spent about an hour the day before cleaning it all up with Fantastik and Mop & Glo and all that. The real official cleanup for killing things that can’t be seen with your naked eye. And now there was a bunch of dirty ass shit in here, and stacked on her dinette too. Like who hasn’t got sense enough to stack crates of bullets on the floor, thank you.
Lillian knew her roommate was a fussy person. She saw the look on her face.
“Sheila, girl, it’s just for today. They call up about Compton Avenue and they gone.”
“Yeah, they in here now, though.”
“Sheila, the man just paid the rent.”
“Girl can’t add.”
“Your half the rent.”
“Can’t buy peace of mind.”
“Buy a whole lot of other stuff,” said Lillian.
Charles Gates banged on the glass of the kitchen door with his fist and the three women jumped.
“Here’s Cinque,” announced Charles Gates. “He likes the place. He thinks it’s fine. He’s calling up today.” He sounded breathless, excited. He added, “I’m skipping work today, helping Cinque out.”
“Who cares?” said Sheila sulkily. Someone was honking in the driveway.
“That’s my ride,” said Charles Gates, beaming. “I’m telling them to go on without me.”
“How they know you suppose to be here? Cocky turkey.”
“Charles, what?”
“You never guess who’s in here. Cinque, that’s who. The Symbionese Liberation Army who took Alice Galton. They got guns and they got bombs. You want to see him? They just show up, middle of the night, blam, out of nowhere. I’m, like, wooo. This is different. I’m staying. I’m helping Cinque today. You want to see him?”
The other man looked at his watch. “I gotta open today,” he said, apologetically. “Maybe I’ll come see him tonight.”
LETTER TO THE PEOPLE
May 18, 1974 Women’s Bathroom Hollywood Station, Vine Street
It’s an odd note that Tania duplicates in her Palmer script on sheets of blank notepaper she finds in Ray Fraley’s glove compartment, taking whispered dictation from Teko and Yolanda. The brief message will be deposited at several prearranged dead drops around South Central Los Angeles. What it means is that tomorrow another communication will be left in the restroom at the bus station. If conditions are favorable, there may actually be a physical reunion there between the divided forces of the SLA.
They stop at a drugstore off Hollywood Boulevard to buy Scotch tape before getting on the freeway and heading back toward Inglewood. On one occasion Yolanda believes she sees Dan Russell’s van up ahead in the number two lane, and she slows so abruptly that Teko slides off the backseat, landing with his knees on Ray Fraley’s back. Teko curses and snarls but Ray Fraley gives only a sharp inhalation, because he is afraid to cry out.
1466 East Fifty-fourth Street
Sheila’s kids came into the kitchen for breakfast.
“I’m hungry,” said Timmy, the eleven-year-old.
“I’m hungry,” said Tony, the eight-year-old.
But there were all these boxes, bullets and the like, stacked up in front of the cabinet where she kept cereal, and she wasn’t about to touch them.
Who’re these white people? What’s all this stuff? It was a different kind of morning, just say. She put glasses of milk in front of the kids.
“Yuck!” said Timmy.
“I want Lucky Charms!” said Tony.
“We don’t have no Lucky Charms, you know that,” said Sheila. She got up the courage to take the boxes of cartridges and gingerly move them to another spot. They were heavy. She opened the cabinet. No cereal. In the other room, Cinque was handing Crystal a twenty and sending her to Sam’s to buy beer, bread, cold cuts, and cigarettes, and Sheila asked her nice to buy some cereal and milk. Crystal shot her some look; probably she was counting on keeping the change. Sheila wasn’t going to hold her breath, just say.
Dead Drop 1
UNITED STATES POST OFFICE, COMPTON STATION
He says, Are you telling me these trucks stayed right here? and I said, Yes, sir. And he looks at me funny and says, They’re dirty, these trucks, because they are parked on this street all night. At first, you know, I think he is joking. But still I’m looking him right in the face because it’s near impossible to tell. He’s a real cold fish. Cold fish eyes. By and by I’m like: he means it.
So what I said?, I said to him, We ain’t got the keys, sir. And he says: What? What did you say?
Yeah, like that. I tell him, We’d like to keep ’em looking clean too, sir, but we ain’t got the keys to the trucks. The carriers come back and park them where they like. Been doing it that way a long time, I guess.
Well I, well you know, you know what I heard was. What I heard was that they sent him over here from Century City ’cause he’s reweighing all the damn flats up there. Says he knows the mailroom boys in all the office buildings are fudging on the first class rates. Every now and then he finds one that’s under by ten cents or so and he sends a bunch of ’em right back. Lawyers going bananas in their fancy offices. You know how they like to send out their flats.
Say, now what’s that gal up to?
You lose something under there, miss?
Damnedest things people do.
Sure be happy to help you find it. No questions asked.
Well, she’s got her mind fixed on something. Not that I’m ever sorry to see a lady in that position. Anyways, that’s why I’m heading out to the hardware, get these here keys copied. Bet you lot of people get their mail late today, I’ll tell you.
Tania stands and readjusts her wig and casts a quick glance around her. The man and his companion, both wearing uniforms that seem somehow even more drab, even less convincing an assertion of authority, than those worn by ordinary letter carriers, watch her abstractedly while they talk. She is a sort of oddity here in Compton. The drop is under one of the drive-up mailboxes behind the post of fice building; the Lincoln waits around the corner. Tania is unarmed and feels exposed here without the others. As she hustles back, more anxious about getting to the car than she is concerned about the LETTER TO THE PEOPLE’S surviving the curiosity of the two postal employees, she catches a sidelong glimpse of her own photograph, hanging among the wanted posters.
1466 East Fifty-fourth Street
Sure enough, there was no breakfast in the bag Crystal lugged back. Sheila hoped it was nice and heavy. Cinque cracked open one of the quarts of Colt .45 and lit a cigarette while Crystal carried the remaining stuff into the kitchen, where the fat white one right away started making sandwiches. She was pretty nice, the only one didn’t creep around like she was in a museum of black people or something. Sheila asked for two sandwiches for Timmy and Tony right away, then called them in from the front room, where they were watching cartoons with the white man. The kids ate a sandwich and Charles Gates had one and Crystal too and the pile of sandwiches for Cinque and the white people looked pretty skinny, but the fat one didn’t seem to mind too much. Sheila took another nerve pill.
Charles Gates took his sandwich into the front room, where he stood eating it, looking on as Cinque and the white dude watched the street through the windows. Cinque spoke to him without turning around.
“You think you could find us a cheap van or station wagon? Just buy it from whoever?”
“Well, I could look around.”
“Just need to run, that’s all.” Cinque reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of cash. He counted out ten twenties, two fifties, and two hundreds.
Charles Gates suddenly had this great entrepreneurial idea: He’d call around to friends on behalf of the SLA, offering fifty dollars for the afternoon’s use of their car, and then offer copious apologies when the SLA disappeared with it. It was such a sweet idea he started right away, walking to the pay phone down at Sam’s. Hey, man, I said it’s for the SLA! No takers, though, and they all gave him sh
it about it. Think I’m lying? He walked back to the house, fingering the cash in his pocket, to tell Cinque he’d try again later. He’d hold on to the money, right, just in case he had to make a deal quick.
Dead Drop 2
MABE’S, NORMANDIE AVENUE
Mmmmm-hmm. So I say, I’m a tell you what you need to do, girl. You better watch your mouth. Mmmmm-hmm. ’Cause I don’t want to hear that. ‘Cause that’s some feeb excuses. ’Cause that’s bull. I never had no problems getting in the movies. I hand them they money and they say, Come on in, Sharifa, same as everbody else. And she say, she say, Why you don’t believe me? See my ticket? Show me some raggedy-ass stub she be picking up off the ground somewheres. This here girl a genius of deception, I tell you. Mmmmm-hmm. And she goes, they say I dressed in-appropriate. And I say of course you are dressed in-appropriately. You dressed inappropriate ly in here. You dressed in-appropriately when you be going down to the church. You dressed in-appropriately when you lying on your sofa at your house. You are a in-appropriate person by in large, you knowm saying? That’s why my momma tell me not to book around with you when we kids. That’s why you pregnant when you eighteen, fool. Mmmmm-hmm. That’s why you gots four kids and no money. Mmmmm-hmm. But they let anybody in the movies. They let Woolsy in and he a screamer. They let gang kids in and they be ripping on the seats with they knives. And I give you five dollars to be taking my kids to the matinee, and I want to know where it’s at and what you did with them when they wasn’t at the movies like I said. I’m sorry, I just saying the truth ’cause God don’t like a liar and God don’t like ugly. That’s what I tell her.
Honey, what can I get you?
Just coffee? Honey, you look hungry!
All right, all right, just axing ’cause you look like you need a real meal.
In there. Uh-huh.
Damn, they got a what you call, Hamburger Hamlet, right up near the Forum if she only want to eat where the white people at.
Well, if she just need to take a pee, I let her. Not like some cheap white restaurant lady.
In the ladies’ room Yolanda raises her shirt and untapes the note from her abdomen. Stiffly, she lowers herself to her knees to peer under the sink and, feeling satisfied that conditions are OK under there (on the basis of criteria she invents on the spot), she tapes the message to the underside of the basin. She rises and dusts off her knees and then leaves the room. She places a quarter next to the steaming cup of coffee and is about to walk out, but then she stops, fixing the coffee with sugar and plenty of milk to cool it. She drinks it down quickly, feeling upon her the eyes of the counter woman and her single customer. She tells herself that she feels closer to these people every day. She is trying hard to love them.
Meanwhile …
It is 8:55 and a police sergeant lifts a bullhorn to his lips.
“To those inside the house at Eight thirty-three West Eighty-fourth Street, this is the Los Angeles Police Department. We want you to come out of the front door with your hands up. We want you to come out immediately. You will not be harmed.” He lowers the bullhorn and looks at the device while he awaits a response, as if he expected to see smoke curling from it. One hundred twenty-five cops and federal agents are here, ready for a siege, ready to see blood rain from the poor shack they surround and fix their attention on, 125 law officers wearing jumpsuits and flak jackets, laid across rooftops with powerful scoped rifles trained on Prophet Jones’s hovel, concealed in the shrubbery with M-16s and tear gas canisters, crouched behind unmarked cars, all squired by dozens of members of the press, who stand back across the street with notepads and doughnuts and cardboard cups of tepid coffee. Their attention is beginning to wander. The LAPD commander on the scene notes this and imposes himself on the FBI supervisor, calling for immediate action. The agent agrees.
There is a ritual uneventfulness to what follows, the way that brutal and violent games intersperse bursts of outraged fury with prolonged and decorous procedural maneuvers. Four FBI men break from cover to dash toward the house, two covering with M-16s as the others fire Flite-Rite rockets bearing CS tear gas through the front windows of the building. Then all four men disappear again, to rejoin the waiting.
Five minutes later another team of four agents storms the house, breaking down the door and rushing in with rifles. The remaining lawmen and the press wait.
Then one of the agents emerges from the house, his gun put up, and removes his gas mask. He is supposed to be indignant—he says, “Shit!”—but he’s actually relieved to live another day.
Dead Drop 3
CRENSHAW ACRES SHOPPING CENTRE, INGLEWOOD
So I’m out here with my staple gun and my flyers, going around and hoping for the best. They do run away sometimes and you just have to face that and I said to Ralph last night just before bed when I’d gone outside and called for her for a little while with no luck that you just have to face it. Cats aren’t the most domesticated of creatures, you know? It is the essence of their appeal if you ask me. They were in the wilds aeons after dogs had already made themselves right at home among man, because I suppose dogs had more of a function in a hunter-gathery kind of culture like they liked back then. Then of course people started growing things and storing grain and before you know it you have mice and rats getting into the grain and that’s just not good at all for the good people of the Fertile Crescent or wherever it was and so cats sort of insinuated themselves and the people looked the other way and then the next thing you know they’re carving these big statues of them and praying to them! And from there you get the common house cat that we all know. But common as they are, you become oh so attached to them. The last one I had, it was all over at seven, kidney problems, that’s how the males go. I’ll never have another male again; it breaks your heart. But we moved recently, not too very far from where we were, I suppose she may have gotten confused. Somebody over there is probably feeding her, and I’ll be heading over there with my flyers and my staple gun, and then I’ll be off to the Humane Society to check the binders and see if anyone’s reported finding her. There’s always a little hope.
Young man, do you need to get in here? I don’t mean to be blocking your path but as I’m telling this young lady here I want to cover this bulletin board nicely because—oh, excuse me!
Some people just aren’t very nice these days. Well, I don’t let it bother me, though I do hope that it’s a nice sort of person who spots her. I’ve heard terrible stories about vivisectionists, do you know, who slice open living animals for science—science they call it!—they roam around looking for lost pets to take to USC for secret experiments. It’s too horrible to even think about! So I won’t.
Yes, young man, I can, and I would. I’m just not so spry as a strong young fellow like you … oh, you look perfectly healthy to me, young man, your knee may have been injured once upon a time but I’m sure it’s healed completely, the young are lucky that way, but please do not push past me, I told you that I will move out of your way just as I did before, you have only to ask.
It gets worse and worse. It really does.
This is General Teko’s most daring move yet. The drop is on the community bulletin board of the Crenshaw Acres Shopping Centre-directly across from Mel’s Sporting Goods! It was while scouting out this drop, during their first day in L.A., that Teko had spotted Mel’s and made a mental note to return for supplies. There is some bright yellow police tape demarcating the crime scene in front of the store and plywood covering the plate glass panes that Tania’s bullets shattered. Otherwise things look pretty peaceful. The old biddy is staring daggers at him but looks away when he meets her eyes. He wonders whether she noted the relative incongruity of the LETTER TO THE PEOPLE amid the ads for dance lessons and used cars or if his photograph has been broadcast locally. The radio has already aired news reports that the police have surrounded a “bungalow in the ghetto area of Compton.” And here he is back at the scene of the skirmish. He looks at his watch. About five to nine.
1466 E
ast Fifty-fourth Street
Some girls came to see Crystal. They wanted to know if she wanted her hair cornrowed. She was wearing it in a sort of sloppy natural and she and her two friends went in the bathroom and studied their hair in the mirror. One thing they knew was that it was one hot-ass day. They wanted their hair out of the way if this was how summer was going to be. Casually, one of the girls asked Crystal who were all the white people in the house.
“They the SLA,” said Crystal authoritatively. She poked out her lips and opened her eyes big. It was her mirror face.
“The who?” said one friend.
Cinque stopped in the hall and poked his head in the bathroom door.
“How you sisters doing?”
One girl, Cathy, rolled her eyes. The other, Rondella, asked him: “Who’s the SLA?”
They were going to start a revolution and get the police. Not necessarily in that order. They were recruiting too. Interested? The girls shook their heads.
Crystal decided not to get cornrows because Rondella, who was good at it, wanted three dollars. She walked out with the two girls when they left the house. While they stood on the shaded porch, two of the white girls came out. One carried a rifle, and the other had her pistol out and was cleaning it. Cathy and Rondella were bugging out. They went off to tell people what they’d seen at Sheila Mears’s house.
Trance Page 8
