by Ryan Gattis
The freeway’s mostly empty. There’s nothing to do but stare at new red, blue, or black graffiti that says, “Fuck the Police,” and “Fuck the National Guard,” and “Kill Whitey,” and try not to take it personal while I aim the engine straight and go fast. We pass two LAPD cruisers with their lights on going back the other direction but that’s it. I’ve never seen anything like it.
Gutierrez is one of our commuters. During your probationary period, you have to live inside the city limits, but after that, you can move wherever you want. If you can work shift trades and if it’s okay with your captain, you can work whatever schedule fits your needs. The lone thing to worry about is company morale because people being far away all the time can affect continuity and teamwork, but as I said, that’s up to Captain Wilts. He’s one of the good ones. We have firemen living in San Francisco, San Diego, and Vegas that I know of, but the farthest flung is Gutierrez. He lives on Maui, a little house in Napili with his wife and second-grader, and he flies in for his shifts.
Goddamn. You know how sometimes in the heat of the moment you forget things, and later you remember them and it makes everything worse? That’s what it feels like to remember Gutierrez’s wife and kid. Kehaulani and Junior, their names are. Well, Junior’s just a nickname. He’s got his daddy’s name. He’s next in the line. Cute kid too, wide brown eyes like his mother. Earlier this year I met them before they did a Disneyland trip, the kid’s first. In the station house, Junior asked me if I wanted to see what he was planning to give the tooth fairy and when I said yes, he pointed inside his mouth and showed me where a tiny white tooth was loose. He flicked it back and forth like a light switch just for me. After that, he giggled and asked me if I thought Mickey might want to see it too.
I check Junior’s daddy’s pulse again. It’s the same.
“You better be okay,” I say to him.
I’m royally pissed at that jury right now. I’m pissed at everything, but I might as well be pissed at them specifically. They come back with even one guilty, this doesn’t happen. The least they could’ve given us was a scapegoat—but no. The whole city’s paying for it now, and Gutes is paying more than his share.
Junior’s dad works trades so he’s on one month, and off one month. April, he was on, so May he’s scheduled off. If this riot doesn’t happen, if the city doesn’t blow up, he doesn’t stay out on emergency duty and he’s sleeping at the station house and then catching a flight first thing. I know because I’ve driven him to LAX a bunch of times. Every firefighter has a second job, comes with the territory of so many off days. On his off months Gutierrez does real estate. From what I understand, he does pretty well at it. The part that messes with me the most is that technically, he should have been off-duty when he got cinder-blocked.
Goddamn. That one gets to me, that thought. It spirals into guilt and I let it. I’m the king of beating myself up. Nobody else is better. Except perhaps my mother with the way she self-inflicts. As Croatian Catholics, it’s practically our birthright. This particular one starts up like a stabbing pain in my stomach. It ripples out hot from the middle of me, to my fingers and toes and back. It’s telling me this is all my fault, how we shouldn’t even have executed a quick pickup, how I should’ve trusted my gut, because if I had, Gutierrez would be okay. He’d have gotten home to his family in one piece. Not now though. Not now.
3
The STL radioed ahead for them to meet us at the entrance to the ER, so when I pull up, there’s already four whitecoats out there rolling a gurney. I slide over and hold my shirt tighter to his face as they open the passenger-side door real slow and three pairs of hands come through the opening and cushion him before they open it all the way and lower him down.
“We got him,” they say to me.
I don’t want to let go, but they say it again. So I have to let go.
For a second I just sit there and watch them settle him on the cot and put a c-collar on him before trying to put an oxygen mask over his mouth and realizing that isn’t as easy an undertaking as maybe they thought it’d be. When they get him going and pass through the doors, it feels like a small part of me gets ripped away as he goes.
I grab my heavy jacket out of the cab because it doesn’t seem appropriate for me to walk around in my sweaty, bloody undershirt, and I’m already through the doors by the time it seems ridiculous to me to wear my coat indoors, but it’s too late, it’s on.
Before I can blink, Captain Wilts is next to me.
“They’ll take good care of him,” he says. “There’s nothing we can do now. Listen, the STL wants us back in service, so seventy-nines are sending us a firefighter. They’re running him down here in the plug buggy.”
We can’t run an engine with just three people, so they’re replacing Gutierrez so we can keep going. I know that’s how it works, but it still hurts.
“I need the pisser,” I say and excuse myself.
“Sure,” Cap says. His voice is worn out. It sounds about how I feel right now.
In the washroom, I scrub my hands twice. I wash them too hot and only use the mirror to make sure I don’t have any blood on me. But I do. There’s a sticky dry drop matted in the hair of my left eyebrow like old red honey, a few more flecks over my ear, and even one inside it. How they got there, I’ll never know. I scrub them all. After I’ve used about twelve paper towels to dry my hands, I button my coat up all the way so if I see her, she can’t see the blood on my undershirt.
The ICU’s not far away. I know where it is and how to get there. I figure I’ve got about ten minutes before the new guy gets here, and I need to see her, to see just one good thing today. It’s not that it would make everything better but maybe it would keep me from sinking. I don’t know. That sounds stupid. But maybe it’s true. I pass a bald Asian janitor pushing a mop with his Walkman up too loud and treble-y. I recognize the song, “To Be with You,” and I shake my head because it’s way too cheesy and I’m actually a little embarrassed, because when I heard it last week on the radio, I thought about Gloria and had to stop myself getting used to the idea because maybe she doesn’t feel the same.
When I turn the corner and see her standing right in front of her station, I get a hitch in my step and then have to act like it’s natural. There’s something different about this woman. It’s hard to explain, but the way she walks, the ways she carries herself, you can tell she loves her job and she’s steady, someone you can count on. I like that. She’s different from the girls I grew up with, none of them interested in college, all of them now married for years. The ones that seem to be left for dating are either working a longshoreman gig or they’re driftwood Pedro girls ten years younger than me, the ones who grow up wanting nothing more out of life after high school than to hostess at the Grinder until they land a guy with an ILWU card so they can quit, sit at home, have kids, watch soap operas, and take two vacations a year on Catalina Island—Slav Hawaii, as my mother calls it.
It’s the Hawaii thought that ambushes me, and once again I’m thinking about Gutierrez and what happened and how I could have prevented it. I swallow it down. I think about finding the gangbanger who did it, surprising him, making him pay.
I try to bury that inside me too, because right now, Nurse Gloria’s talking to the tall blond nurse—what’s her name? I forget, but she’s like a fast-forward button on a VCR, that girl. Second time I ever met her, she asked me out, and it’s not that I wasn’t flattered or that she wasn’t attractive, but it put me off a bit. I guess I’m a little more traditional. I like to do the asking. It’s how I was raised.
Anyway, the blond one sees me coming and does some kind of secret code nod to Nurse Gloria, who turns to look at me and—sometimes, the way she looks at me, I can’t tell if she thinks I’m just right or not enough. It’s this in-between kind of look I can’t place. I try to muster up a smile or something, but I can’t stop thinking about how sticky the steering wheel felt in my hands.
“Good morning, Nurse Gloria,” I say, and it com
es out quieter than I want.
Maybe it’s stupid, using her title like that when I greet her, but I can’t help it. In my line, everybody goes by last names, and I guess it’s somewhat true here too, because I’ve only ever seen last names on people’s name tags. So the one time I happen to meet her and look at her tag and call her Nurse Rubio, she immediately tells me to call her Gloria, and before I can think, I blurt out Nurse Gloria and she laughs and calls me Fireman Anthony and that was that.
“Good morning, Fireman Anthony,” she says.
It feels good to hear her say that, familiar. Since she doesn’t smile, I don’t smile either. Now, she doesn’t look unhappy to see me, but she doesn’t look happy, either. I can tell something’s going on behind those eyes, though, and I don’t know what it is, but I want to find out. She’s got a poker face so good that I sometimes wonder where she grew up, and if it was rough there, because I get the feeling that she could turn her toughness on and off like a tap.
I look at my hands, and I see I didn’t get all the blood off around my fingernails, so I dig them into my pockets as she says, “From what’s coming in, it doesn’t look good out there. What’s going on?”
She touches my arm with the tips of her fingers and drops her hand fast. It’s so slight that I figure it could have been a mistake, but I hope it wasn’t. For this moment, I want to try to tell her what happened with the cul-de-sac and Gutierrez as succinctly as I can, but no sentences come out, no actual words even, so all I end up saying is “Uh.”
It’s like I’m stuck in neutral somehow, and the worst part is, I’m trying to get to drive, trying to shift down but my brain just won’t go. What a dumb-ass.
She’s probably thinking exactly the same thing because she’s looking at me now, not sizing me up exactly, but like she’s looking for what’s wrong with me and she’s not quite sure what it is. It’s almost like she’s diagnosing me. We pass an awkward moment that way, me looking at her white nurse’s shoes and how they’re only scuffed on the insides, like maybe she rubs them together without really thinking about it, and I’m not saying anything and she isn’t either. She’s just looking at me, and that’s when I know I need to break the silence somehow, to say anything, right now.
“You be sure to take care of him,” I finally say.
I half wince as soon as it’s out of my mouth. Idiot! That makes no sense because I didn’t tell her about Gutierrez at all, or where he is, and that reminds me that already I’ve stayed too long, but I can’t get words together for how good it’s been just to see her, so I don’t say anything. Everybody’s waiting on me.
I’ve got to go, I think.
“You have to go,” she says, like she’s reading my thoughts.
That settles it. I will never play cards against this woman ever, but I admit that the thought of having her on my team is a different story. I must tilt my head as I think that because she gives me a little smile that takes away any comeback I could possibly come up with.
“Be safe out there,” she says.
The tone is so polite, but it’s almost like an order—a polite order—that I don’t know what to say, so I just kind of nod automatically and go. I’m so frustrated and embarrassed with how our exchange went that I don’t even look back. I just pull my hands out of my pockets and look at my nails again, how there’s still blood underneath my index and ring, and I think about Gutierrez again, and Junior and the phone call he and his mommy will be getting real soon to tell them what’s going on, and I walk faster.
4
I compartmentalize. I admit it. I put everything that just happened in a box inside me and try not to open it. Sirens are off as we head back out and I’m not out front this time. The STL’s vehicle is back up where it belongs, which is good because I’m not exactly at one hundred percent just now. I’m in the middle of the pack, cushioned in front and back. We’ve got a new guy in the place of Gutes, McPherson, and we’re heading back north, just a little column of lights as we go up the freeway. The STL’s already calling out an address on the radio, the newest winner of our little portion of the LAFD lottery, but I’m not really paying attention. I’m trying awfully hard not to pick at the box full of thoughts about Gutierrez and his family or how badly it went with Nurse Gloria or what I would do to that gangbanger’s face with a hammer, so I just stay in formation. I try to distract myself. I wonder how many structures are going to burn to the ground because there aren’t enough engines to go around.
You know what’s hilarious though? What the news thinks of all this burning. The guys on television go on and on about how they can’t believe people are torching their own neighborhoods. They think it’s sad, some kind of thoughtless, primal rage thing. It’s not. It’s mostly planned and it’s one of three things—grudge, mayhem, or insurance. By the way, this isn’t an official definition or anything. It’s just what I think. It’s grudge if one guy doesn’t like the other guy for whatever reason, so he takes advantage of the chaos to do something about it, so even the race stuff, like what the blacks are doing to the Koreans, goes here. It’s mayhem if you’re deliberately setting it for the heck of it, or if you’re trying to cover a crime, or using it as a distraction to draw emergency assistance elsewhere so you can commit a crime somewhere else, which the gangs definitely do. They did it before the riots, they’re doing it during, and they’ll do it after. In fact, I can tell you right now that I really don’t look forward to this summer. All the shit going down now is going to require retribution, if not in the next few days then later, into the summer even. The last and likeliest, it’s insurance if you’ve got a business in a run-down part of the city and it’s not making as much money as you want but you do have fire insurance and you’ve been paying hefty premiums on that policy for damn near too long and then one day the racist cops get acquitted and all of a sudden up pops the opportunity to torch your own premises and get away with it—all you have to do is blame gangs or looters, so why not?
When I first heard the verdict, I was sitting next to Charlie Carrillo on the bleachers at Peck Park in Pedro. Carrillo’s 53s, but we went to high school together and now we play on a local baseball team. I’m a catcher. It’s the most important position on the field so far as I’m concerned. You could play a pickup game without a shortstop if you really, really had to—you know, eight on eight—but without a catcher? No chance. The catcher is the constant. He calls every pitch, and he’s there through every pitching change. Without him, there is no game. Anyway, we’d just finished practice and we had a little radio between us that was going.
So I was sitting next to Carrillo as the newscaster reads out the particulars about the jury acquitting Briseno, Wind, and Koon—which reminds me, what kind of unfortunate name is that for a cop in a race case anyway? There’s also mention of failure to reach a verdict on Powell, but something else bugs me.
As I’m unbuckling my leg pads, I turn to Carrillo and say, “How come the news makes such a big deal about all the white cops? Briseno isn’t white, is he?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s Briseño,” Carrillo says, “which is Hispanic.”
Carrillo’s Hispanic too, so he would know.
“It’s not exactly fair saying he’s white if he isn’t,” I say.
“It suits a story, I guess. White versus black.”
“Yeah,” I say, “but it’s shading the facts.”
“Big deal,” Carrillo says, “they do it all the time. No accountability in that line of work, you know that. The day someone on TV has to write an incident report on a fuckup and admit responsibility for it like we do, that’s the day no one wants to be a newscaster anymore.”
“True,” I say, “but I’m not sure it matters now. All hell’s going to break loose.”
I called in right after that and asked if they needed me at the station, but I got told that since I was scheduled for the next day, I should just come in then.
So I did, after all hell really had broken loose, more than anybody thought. Of cours
e, I didn’t know then that our esteemed black mayor, Mr. Tom Bradley, was going to go on television and say it was time to take it to the streets or something to that effect. The guys at the station wouldn’t shut up about that. They couldn’t believe it. They felt betrayed, like he threw us under the bus when he said that—put us at greater risk—and I get that, I feel betrayed too, but I’m a realist. It would have exploded regardless. Do you really think people were sitting at home, waiting to see what the mayor said before they decided to riot? Me neither. Crips were out and around Florence and Normandie before Bradley even went on television.
I’m looking at the aftermath spread out before me as I try to prepare myself to get back in the thick of it. From my seat, it looks like Los Angeles has been air-raided. It looks like bombs went off. Pockets of orange blaze on either side of the 110, some in pits of black, here and there, because the fire knocked out the electricity on the block, and not for the first time I think this is what hell must look like. There are no stars tonight and there haven’t been any for two nights straight. The canopy of black smoke hanging in the basin is too thick to see through.
I status-check and inform Cap that I’m under a quarter tank of fuel, and if I am, the unspoken truth goes, everybody else is too. Cap relays this. It’s the crucial time when the Strike Team Leader will either decide to fuel us all the way up wherever we can and maybe stay out another six hours, or head to R&R to do that and take on some new hoses in the meantime. All he says to Cap over the radio is thanks though, which doesn’t help tell me which way he’s leaning. This has an implied meaning too—shut up and do your job.
5
We don’t have as far to go as we thought because we get called off a Slauson fire and told to exit sooner because we’re closer to another one. There’s a structure fire on Manchester and Vermont, half a block south. I do my job and get us there. CHP do theirs, too, locking down the block at both ends, giving us the whole street to work with and more important, two exits. I face out on Vermont, my nose pointing toward Manchester because it’s the most viable escape route.
