All Involved

by Ryan Gattis

  “I am,” I reply in English, but he looks at me like I’m lying.

  “Man protect what is his,” he says in English without any shame for how incorrect it sounds. “This America.”

  I nod. Mr. Tuttle, my A.P. History teacher, says nothing happens in a vacuum. Everything has context. If you understand the context, you understand the cause, and the effects that come out of it. So if the riot is an effect, what caused it? Rodney King and the video, of course, but there’s something else: a girl named Latasha Harlins. She was the subject of my social justice assignment last semester. I had to play devil’s advocate and put myself in an African American’s shoes.

  Less than two weeks after the beating of Rodney King, fifteen-year-old Latasha Harlins was shot and killed in March of 1991 by a Korean store owner named Soon Ja Du. There was video of that one too. Soon, a woman who looked like the old ladies in my building but was only fifty-one, shot Latasha in the back, and was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, fined, and given five years’ probation even though the crime she was found guilty of carried a maximum sentence of sixteen years in prison. Understandably, this was viewed as a miscarriage of justice in the black community and people were very angry. Nothing happened after that verdict though.

  Mr. Rhee derails my train of thought by pulling out a gun with a long silver barrel. He checks once more that it’s loaded. It is. The gold-bottomed bullets are huge in their chambers, thick like my pinkies. In their middles, they have black dots rimmed with little silver circles. They look eerily like eyes: six eyes staring at me from inside the cylindrical cartridge before he snaps it shut. I cannot imagine what they would do to a human body; maybe it would blow somebody’s whole head off.

  That’s when it occurs to me that we are technically vigilantes, and I don’t know how I feel about that. The term has a negative connotation, but really, it is just self-appointed citizens who fill the void when there is no law enforcement. The police told us to evacuate, to leave our homes and our businesses. At first, the radio told us to do that too, but then a lawyer called the station and said we shouldn’t. He said we have the Second Amendment. He said we have the right to protect our property and ourselves. When my father heard that, he asked me to explain. I said it was from the Constitution; it was our right to keep and bear arms. After I said that, everything changed. My father’s face reddened and he nodded. It seemed like whatever was about to happen was my fault when he opened his closet and took the guns out. Some I’d seen from when he took me to the firing range for practice and gun safety a year ago. Most I hadn’t. It was scary seeing them lined up on the floor. They looked like toys but heavier, shinier, and I just stood looking at them as my father picked up the phone and called Mr. Rhee.

  Mr. Park slams on the brakes and I jolt forward, hitting my chin on the shoulder of the shotgun seat. He curses at someone in front of the car as his brother rolls down the window and aims a gun outside. Whoever got in the way must have scurried off, because soon enough we’re moving again.

  At this point, I wonder if I’m a vigilante too. The thought scares me at first, but then it feels warm in my chest because I wonder what Susie Cvitanich would think. She probably wouldn’t believe me. Susie goes to my high school. Her family’s Croatian. She thinks I’m a straight arrow. Señor Aburrido Amarillo, she calls me when we’re studying A.P. Spanish in the library. That means Mister Boring Yellow. It sounds racist, but it’s not like that. It’s just that the Spanish words sound funny together.

  I pick the gun up from between my feet. It’s still in a scuffed brown leather holster that my dad must have gotten in the 1970s. Nobody ever tells you how heavy guns are. I guess it’s something you have to find out for yourself. As I weigh it with my hand and figure that it must be at least a pound and a half, maybe two, I’m sure Susie wouldn’t call me boring if she knew I was a vigilante.

  The more I think about that term though, the less I like it. I would like to think of us more as a posse. Truly, we are just a group of concerned citizens who live in the town and contribute to its daily life and commerce. Mr. Park and his brother run a dry-cleaning store. Mr. Rhee is retired, but he owned a liquor store before he sold it. My dad is the only one who doesn’t work in the neighborhood. He’s an engineer. He works for TRW. They might seem common, but what people might not know—the people who want to rob us, hurt us, and burn our homes—is that all the men in this car but me have at least three years of military experience. That is because military service is compulsory in South Korea. They all know how to use guns. If Koreatown is saved, it will be because men like my father are trained.

  Historically, posses were made up of law-abiding ranchers and shop owners. They were civilians, not sheriffs, but when the time came, they put on badges because they were asked to. They enforced the law when they had to, like when the sheriff needed help, but what happens when the police abandon you?

  The sheriffs never abandon the town in western movies. It’d be un-American. But it’s happening here. The National Guard is in South Central, but they aren’t up here. We don’t have badges, but we should. Mr. Tuttle says there is nothing more American than standing up for yourself when people are trying to bully you. It was practically the founding ethic of this country. Britain was a bully, so we beat them. There is nothing more American than defending yourself and others.

  Mr. Park takes one hand off the wheel to turn the radio up.

  “We have heard from a woman in trouble.” The disc jockey’s voice sounds panicked. “This is the address: Five Six Five South Western Avenue. Please help!”

  “Where is that?” Mr. Park, the driver, wants to know.

  His brother, the other Mr. Park, has a Thomas Guide in his lap and a flashlight in his hand that he smacks to get it to turn on. He flips pages before saying, “Sixth and Western. Left up here.”

  “When you hold a gun, do not think too much,” my dad says in Korean. He has his gun out. He pulls the top of it so far back that I can see the small round barrel at the front, but he’s only checking the chamber. I only see a fraction of the casing before the slide jumps forward with a heavy click. With a half wave, he motions for me to remove the holster on mine. “I would remind you of Ecclesiastes.”

  He means Ecclesiastes 3:3, I think—the bad times, not the good times: a time to kill, a time to break down. I take a very deep breath, the deepest one I can with my shoulders squished. Mr. Rhee pats my knee.

  “Gwen chan ah,” he tells me. It’s okay. “These are animals, not men.”

  My parents always told me school would prepare me for anything, that school was the most important thing in the whole wide world, but school never prepared me for anything like this. It couldn’t. My stomach drops as Mr. Park takes a wide turn on Western and accelerates up the block. For at least the sixtieth time, my father shows me where the safety is on the gun I’m holding, with one major difference: this time, he clicks it off.

  2

  Everything happens too fast. I’ve heard that in stories before, and I always thought it was so stupid, a trick almost, but now I know it’s true. When it’s chaotic, when there are too many things to pay attention to and your heart beats a hundred miles per minute, everything does happen too fast. There’s just no way to pay attention to everything. You can only do the best you can under the circumstances.

  Through the windshield, I see us coming close to a truck. It looks like four people are gathered around it. Two of them have handguns. My mouth goes dry when I see that. All of them are black.

  Mr. Park screeches to a stop at the curb—trying to scare them, I think. Whether or not he means to hardly matters, it works. All four of them jump back.

  Both Mr. Parks roll their windows down and open their doors like TV show cops and lean out, extending their pistols through the space where glass used to be, but still using the doors as cover. They’re both screaming. “Go or we will shoot!”

  They scream it at least twice, maybe three times as my dad and Mr. Rhee open their doors too and
they get out and point their guns, but they steady their arms on the tops of the doors, which leaves me to scramble out from the middle with the radio blaring behind me.

  “I am speaking with the woman,” the DJ says in Korean. “She says the shooting has stopped, and it sounds as though help has arrived. Whoever you are, thank you!”

  The truck with the looters in it reverses, trying to pull out, but it’s still attached to the building by a rope. The Park brothers scream at the looters to unhook it, and oddly enough, one of the guys flopped in the back of the truck bounces up and starts tearing at the knot, trying to free the rope.

  Blocks away, I hear a siren. As I stand in the street for a moment, I wonder, is it coming or going? My lungs feel heavy just breathing the smoky air. In front of us, the looters are well and truly spooked. They obviously didn’t expect us to fight back.

  I hear a crash and look behind and across the street, to a two-story mini-mall where a black figure raises his arm and drops it by a dark window. Several of the ground-floor windows are orange. At first, I don’t know why that is, and then it hits me: fire! Oh heavenly God, I think, this guy is setting fires!

  There’s no time to think and I need that. I need time to think. One second passes, and two, but I’m no better than when I started. I need to stop him somehow.

  “Stop or I’ll shoot” is the only thing I can think to shout at him. I feel stupid saying it, but I pray it’s enough.

  It isn’t. He doesn’t stop. As I run closer I see he has a crowbar in his hand now and he’s leaning back to smash another window when I stop and raise my gun. My dad told me to only fire warning shots, to shoot into the air. Scare them, he told me. Just scare them. I aim, certain I’ll miss. I think, If I can get close, I can scare him more.

  I line the black figure up with the metal sight on the end of my pistol, and then I aim to the right of his head, at a Korean movie poster I recognize in the video shop window: Death Song. On it is a cameo with a woman’s picture, almost round, surrounded by a field of white. It makes a perfect target in the dark. I squeeze the trigger slowly, like I’ve been taught, and the .22 pistol pops, jumping in my hands.

  This figure, maybe twenty yards away, stops, then sways. He drops the crowbar and it clangs to the concrete. I hear it from across the street. That’s when it occurs to me: I hit him. I hit him!

  Behind me, I hear the truck speed off and both Mr. Parks shouting to the store owner inside the convenience store, telling her she’s safe. It doesn’t occur to me to run over to the man I shot until Mr. Rhee does.

  It doesn’t even feel like I’m running. One moment I’m across the street, the next I’m in the parking lot, looking down on him and breathing hard, staring at blood leaking from his face into concrete cracks, as Mr. Rhee takes off his gray sweatshirt and presses it to the man’s cheek. There’s so much blood, more than I’ve ever seen.

  The siren I heard before sounds closer now. It’s coming toward us! Mr. Rhee tells me to run into the street, to flag it down if I can, so I do. From five blocks away, I can tell it’s a fire truck. Praise God, I think as I raise my hands and wave frantically.

  The driver has to see me, I think. He has to. When five blocks becomes four and three, and then two, he does see me, but he’s not slowing. He actually speeds up! When he hits our block, I have to run out of the street so I don’t get hit!

  When I tell Mr. Rhee what happened, my father manages to strike a deal with the Park brothers.

  “They will take him to the hospital,” he tells me in Korean. “They do not want you involved.”

  There is no further discussion. Both Mr. Parks pick up the body and waddle over to the open hatchback and tip him in; this guy, who looked so scary from far away, looks so thin and fragile up close, and there’s something else. He looks young—maybe a little older than me. The hatch slams down, cutting off my view, and then the tires spin as the Toyota speeds up Sixth toward Downtown, the same way as the fire engine.

  I’m sweating as I watch it go. I ask my dad if he’s dead, this man I shot.

  “Not yet,” my father says in Korean. He puts a hand on my shoulder and I can see a new look on his face, not anger, but pride. I think it is, anyway. I’ve never really seen it before, but I only have a moment with it, because then he’s dashing to the nearest fire hydrant and shouting for help to open it.

  I don’t know how long it takes. Two minutes? More? But the wrenched fireplug finally opens with a gush into the street, filling the gutter in seconds before taking over the asphalt street.

  With the truck gone, people appear out of nowhere. Koreans with handkerchiefs tied around their faces to manage the smoke. They’re trying to put the fire out. People bail from anything and everything: metal watering cans, red children’s toy buckets—anything. Old people and mothers bail from the gutter, and the water there reflects their hurried movements in front of bright orange flames and thick black smoke pouring from the strip mall’s windows. I don’t know why this trivia occurs to me, but it does: the average house fire burns at an average of 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit, and that gives me the most horrible sinking feeling. This bailing isn’t enough to save anything.

  That’s when I hear another siren, faint at first, but then louder. These are coming right for us, turning from Fifth and racing down Western to pull up at the curb.

  When I see the black-and-white police cars with their lights going, I say, “Praise be to God!”

  I run to them, filled with relief, but when I get there, one of them is repeating himself loudly to my father as if he’s deaf: “You cannot defend these businesses when the owners are not present.”

  I barely hear it over the sound of the fire. It’s groaning almost, and then a roof beam collapses behind us with a thunderous crash. My dad ducks and when he comes up, he has a look on his face like he can’t believe what the officer is saying. He points to the fire. Mr. Rhee steps forward too, and that’s when I notice another policeman is next to me. He’s pointing at my hand.

  “Do you have a permit for that weapon?” he wants to know.

  No, I want to say, I’m only seventeen, but I don’t. Instead, I stammer some sort of response in the negative, barely getting my tongue to work because my eyes are glued to windows blackening at their tops. In the hierarchy of emergencies, surely a large-scale building fire, with people possibly inside, must rank above borrowing a weapon to protect one’s neighbors, especially when it is utter chaos—

  The policeman yanks my arm behind me, disarms me, and throws me over the trunk of his car. My glasses go flying, clattering over the asphalt as handcuffs clamp down on my wrists and I yelp. My world is blurry when my father shouts and I hear people protest behind me in Korean but it’s halfhearted. They’re torn between helping me and fighting the fire.

  “Sir,” the officer says to me, “you’re under arrest for unlawful possession of a firearm.”

  “But—the fire!” Even though I’m maybe fifteen yards away from it, I’m sure I could roast marshmallows right where I am. It’s that hot. I try to rise. I try to do something—anything!—to help the sad little grandmothers and grandfathers. “Officer, we have to put out the fire!”

  An elbow pins me to the trunk by the back of my sweaty neck. As I twist to look to my left, it feels like the weight on my right eye orbit is going to crush it. Through the squad car’s back windshield I see the distorted outline of my father getting pushed in by his head, and in the reflection, a flame spouts so big it looks like a flamethrower from a movie. I see now that the hazy second floor is on fire too. Disgust rolls around inside me, mixing with something else: rage.

  It’s then that I have the first calm thought I’ve had since Mr. Park turned on Western: this building will burn to the ground, and worse, they’re going to let it. These public servants we pay who are paid to protect us, to serve us, they’re going to let—

  A realization hits me like lightning. I think, This is what injustice feels like. This disgusted-raging-helpless feeling, this waiting
for someone else’s better judgment to kick in, this praying for this officer, this cop, to realize how insanely stupid he is being and uncuff me so we can all fight this fire, so we can actually help people, so we can actually save something.

  Without warning the elbow leaves my neck and I’m pulled off the trunk, toward the door of the cop car. I stumble but he forces me up. The cop has to turn me to get me into the car beside my dad, and when he does, I double over and cough.

  It’s not acting, not really. My lungs really are dry. They really do feel like they’re going to crumble to dust inside me. When I’m coughing though, I’m summoning up every last bit of phlegm I have. When I’m done, I know I won’t have the words to convince him that what he’s doing is wrong, will always be wrong, so instead I go from bent over to standing straight up in less than a second, and this cop steps back reflexively, maybe to see if he needs to hit me to get me to obey, but his moment of apprehension is all I need because it gives me the opportunity to look him in his fuzzy peach face and aim.

  When I spit, every terrible thing I have inside me hits him full in the face.

  DAY 3

  FRIDAY

  CAN WE ALL GET ALONG? CAN WE STOP MAKING IT HORRIBLE FOR THE OLDER PEOPLE AND THE KIDS?

  —RODNEY KING

  GLORIA RUBIO, R.N.

  MAY 1, 1992

  3:17 A.M.

  1

  I haven’t slept since the riot began. I can’t get Ernesto Vera’s body out of my head. It’s like it’s burned in me, permanently, on my brain. His name, the look on his face—I can’t shake them, and I’ve seen more death than most people ever should. Part of that I asked for, I know. It’s my job. But part of it is my neighborhood too.