by Ryan Gattis
But he’s not there.
I sniffle at that. I nod, relieved, and my lungs let go. I walk to the spot where Joker and his homeboys must have caught up to him, where they first stabbed him, and I stand near it. Someday, when she’s ready, Lu is going to want to know everything. She’ll want to know how many times he was stabbed. Fifteen or seventeen, by my count. The ragged shape of two wounds made it difficult to tell in the light I had, if the knife went in and just ripped out at a different angle, or if he had been stabbed twice in the same two spots. She’ll want to know how else they hurt him and I’ll have to tell her about the blunt object, likely a baseball bat.
Twenty yards away, just inside an open garage three down on the right with its overhead light off, a dot of orange flares up and fades. I freeze. Someone’s leaning on the trunk of a car while smoking a cigarette. I put my hand in my pocket and onto Wizard’s gun and I walk a few steps closer until I can see I don’t have anything to worry about, so I take my hand out and put it by my side.
She doesn’t notice me at first, but I recognize her as the nurse who tried to help Ernesto, the one who talked to Lu about what she saw. Her name’s Gloria. I know because my girlfriend’s dream is to be a nurse just like her. Irene is homegirls with Gloria’s younger sister, Lydia, and they both go to school for it now, nights. Irene’s got about a year to go.
From what I can tell about Gloria’s posture, the way she’s perched, she’s still seeing him, even now, because her eyes are on the alley floor too. She’s thinking about Wednesday night, I know it. She’s been looking at the space where Ernesto finally came to rest, at the place we found him after he’d been dragged and the wire had been removed from his ankles. This nurse, she’s been looking at what I’ve been looking at. A space where a person used to be. A place where a person no longer is. But she still sees Ernesto too, the memory of him.
I make a little noise, kick a couple pebbles, as I shuffle closer on the side of the alley across from her, but not too much. I don’t want to startle her but she still starts a little when she sees me, and the car beneath her bounces up on its axles before settling back down with her weight. If Gloria recognizes me as someone who was here before, she doesn’t show it. We share a look, though, a look I’m not sure goes both ways, but maybe it does. It’s a look of understanding, a look of, I know, I saw it too, and I’m not sure what that is exactly, or what it means if it means anything, but maybe it’s something for people to know they aren’t alone in feeling a bad thing.
I nod at her. She doesn’t return it. Instead, the lit cigarette returns to her mouth and that orange dot gets bright as she inhales. To show her I’m not a threat, I break eye contact and look away. I look up.
The sky is more dark purple tonight, not as black from smoke as it has been the past couple nights, which means fewer and fewer fires are happening. It’s almost over, I think, the riots, these days of freedom. Above us, I see the blinking red lights of a plane. It’s descending, going to LAX. I get thinking it’s the first airplane I’ve seen in a while and I start walking again. I don’t look to the nurse as I go. We’ve shared whatever it is we needed to.
9
I need to get to Irene’s so I pick up the pace. I can’t be out like this much longer. I sniffle and look back up at the airplane again, right before it passes out of sight. I wonder who’s on it anyway, and why they would fly into L.A. at a time like this. Maybe people who already had their vacations scheduled and couldn’t miss them. I didn’t even know people like that actually existed until I went to L.A. Southwest College for the crime scene stuff. I’d only ever seen those people on TV before that. Really, school is a whole other world.
And seeing it, navigating in it enough to get some new people skills I didn’t even know I needed, has me feeling like I’m two different people now. There’s me the homeboy, Clever, down for whatever, and there’s me the student, Robert Rivera. Mr. Rivera, as Sturm calls me. I’ve got a wall between those sides of me now. It’s kind of like I’ve got a double life.
In a way, I grew into it. Coming up as a little homie, eager to prove myself and be somebody, anybody. I dropped out of school at thirteen because Lu did. School for me was boring and slow. I picked stuff up quick and then had to sit around and wait for everybody else to get it. At home, my mom was never around but that’s not really an excuse, just a fact. I hung out with Lu instead of being alone and we did all kinds of dumb shit.
I might’ve kept doing that if Fate hadn’t seen something in both of us, if he hadn’t told me I was too smart to be banging how other homies were banging. I had to use my mind instead because it was a more dangerous weapon. He set it up so I could get my GED, and I didn’t even know there was such a thing for high school equivalency before he said so.
He got me a tutor and everything to help catch me up. That tutor was Irene. Four days a week she worked with me until I was reading better, writing papers, finding out there was a difference between spoken and written English, that I couldn’t just write however I wanted and make sense, that there were rules. She even had me doing algebra in no time. If it wasn’t for her and Fate, I’d still be running the streets and nothing else. They changed my life. I owe them both for that. I owe them everything.
I started at Southwest last year, because that’s what Fate wanted and he fronts the cash for it. I was scared of it at first, because I’d never even been out of the neighborhood before, but I found out I really like it. I found out I’m good at it. Maybe that’s dangerous, though, because it’s had me wondering every so often what a life outside the neighborhood would look like, or what I would even do to get it, but I’ve never told Fate that, Lu neither.
The other day I caught myself thinking about maybe getting a place with Irene, maybe even starting a family. Eighteen might be too young to be thinking that, but I know fools who had kids at fifteen, some even younger. I don’t know if Irene would go for it though. She’s not the government assistance type. Also, I’m pretty sure we’d have to get married. Her family’s pretty traditional. They came here to Lynwood in 1973 from Thailand when she was two. She doesn’t speak much Thai because her parents wanted her to be American and only that. They didn’t want any language barrier holding her back. She’s older than me by three years and the smartest girl I’ve ever met. She graduated Lynwood High a year early and got into Cal State L.A., but she couldn’t afford it when she didn’t qualify for a scholarship.
When I’m getting real close to her house, I go the back way, cutting past the garage on the end, hopping a fence, and stepping up onto the ledge of the brick foundation outside Irene’s room. I tap soft on the glass until she wakes up and blinks her big eyes at me from the bed. She’s five five, with light brown eyes and long black hair she sometimes likes to put up in a bun with a pencil through it. She Jazzercises every day in her room with a videotape, so she’s lean and muscular all over and she shows it when she opens the window wide enough to let me in.
She says, “You okay? I heard shooting.”
I’d never admit this, but she’s pretty like art is pretty. Every time I look at her, I feel pulled in, but a little terrified too, afraid I won’t ever be able to understand all of her.
“I heard shooting too,” I say. In that moment, I decide not to tell her about seeing Gloria tonight. It’d be too much to explain.
Irene sighs because she knows I’ve been up to no good and steps back to let me into her room. I straddle the window ledge and duck in. I slip my shoes off right away. Inside, it smells like jasmine, what I can smell of it anyway. She’s still got posters of Janet Jackson and Boyz II Men up on one wall and on another, and she’s got one for Ice Cube’s record AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, even though I’ve told her a hundred times it’s weird she likes black music, but then she hits me with how I love Motown and asks why I have a double standard. I don’t have an answer for that, so she won’t take them down, but I don’t think she’d take them down even if I did. That’s Irene. She’s loyal.
She h
ad a little place of her own with Lydia until last year, but when her dad got deported for working at a body shop he didn’t know was chopping cars, she moved back with her mom and her older sister. Now the two daughters work checkstands at Ralphs on the days, and at nights they do Thai massage at a place in Carson when they can pick up hours. Irene’s not big on it, but she never complains. Her mom has lung cancer and can’t work, so the daughters support her and try to save up for school and to get their dad back somehow.
I say, “How’s your mom? Any better?”
Irene shakes her head, but she smiles. “She’s on something called Taxol now. It’s new, comes from tree bark. She says it makes her joints hurt.”
“Does she know I’m coming by tonight?”
Mrs. Nantakarn used to hate me being here late at night, much less staying over, but she doesn’t mind as much since she got cancer and I started my degree program. A couple months ago, I even heard her ask Irene when our wedding is. She said she wanted to see one of her daughters marry before she dies, but Irene just told her to cut it out, that she’d do it when she was good and ready.
“I told her you might come tonight, so she had me make green curry just in case,” Irene says. “Speaking of moms, yours called looking for you. I think she’s worried.”
Irene still thinks the best of my mom. She doesn’t know the woman like I do. Truth is, my mom worries more about getting a fix than she worries about me, and if she called over, she needed money or a hookup, even though she knows I’d give her neither.
My mom’s O.G. She grew up in East L.A. She was in a gang from way back and so was my dad. They got married young and divorced young, too. So me being in a gang, even if it’s not the same one, it’s still like a legacy. My mom, she wishes I wasn’t involved. You play, you pay. She’s said that since I was a little kid. She knows from experience. It might not always be how you think it’s going to be, she’s said, but you pay one way or the other.
“Are you hungry? If you don’t want green curry, I can cook something else.” Irene yawns then, and after, she looks at me with one of those caring looks I know I’ll never get sick of. “Do you need anything?”
I’ve been sleeping on the floor in Mini Vegas for two days and I ache all over, so I say, “Can I get a massage out of you?”
10
Irene doesn’t say anything. She just steps up to me, so close that the crown of her head is under my nose. This is the type of woman she is. Tired, just woke up, but still taking care of me. I wonder how I got so lucky. I sniffle as she helps me out of my sweatshirt and I set it on the little chair with a stuffed puppy dog on it by her window. She hands me a tissue, and I blow my nose before telling her not to go anywhere near the left pocket and I leave it at that, because Wizard’s popgun is there and I know she wouldn’t like me having it. I chuck the tissue in the trash. She smells like cinnamon and clean bedsheets as she works me out of my shirt, lays a towel down on the carpet, and me on top of it.
“Mi corazón,” she says, and she knows it makes me weak when she talks Spanish at me, “is it time for you to get out yet, like out-out?”
Her voice still sounds a little husky from sleep. For a moment, I feel guilty waking her up and asking her to work on me, but when she starts, it all melts away.
Since I was fifteen I haven’t been able to raise my left arm above ninety degrees because we got into it with a bunch of Bloods at Ham Park after they came by with spray paint to cross out our plaqueasos right in front of us like they were tough. It was stupid. In the brawl that came next, a guy with a little round afro and a face like a pineapple got me down and stabbed me six times with a broken bottle. He cut up my left shoulder and left lat muscle real good. It was Lu who got him off me. She had a broken bottle of her own and she brought it down on his scalp again and again. Every time she cut his head and blood came out, his hair soaked it up. No kidding. It made a little sound when it did it too, every time, like fwoop.
I’ll never forget that. You can’t. He lived, from what I hear, but I wouldn’t want to see his head if he ever had to shave it bald is all I’ll say about that. By the time I was fixed up though, my left lat was an inch shorter than my right and I’m weaker on that side. It’s why Fate never asks me to lift anything too heavy, like bodies. You should see my scars. They look like little brown constellations, raised on my skin. Galaxies, that’s what Pint said when he did this little black-and-gray owl tattoo on my chest a while back. I always liked his description of them. It made my scars seem less like healed wounds and more like something bigger, something better.
Irene orders me onto my stomach and sets to working my feet. She bends my left leg at the knee and leans her weight into me, stretching my whole leg, my calf, my thigh, my hamstring. Thai massage is different from regular massage. It took me a while to get used to it, but now that I have, I can’t have any other kind. It’s more like stretching and pushing, which is one of the truths of our relationship, I guess. She’s always stretching and pushing me in different ways. She’s even doing it now.
“We could go anywhere,” she says. “You know, I don’t have to go to nursing school here. I can maybe transfer.”
“It takes money for that,” I say, “and what about your mom and your sister?”
“They can come with us, and we can always figure out something for money.”
“We could go all Bonnie and Clyde,” I say and laugh. “I’ll be Clyde.”
“I’d be a good Bonnie, but I can do without the guns,” she says.
“Flip over,” she also says, so I do.
I’m on my back, looking straight up at the ceiling, and she’s got the sole of her right foot in my left armpit. She’s slowly pulling my bad shoulder toward her. I feel the stretch go all the way down my spine and into my right hip. It burns a little.
“I can’t leave Fate,” I say. “Not ever. He needs me.”
“But what if something goes wrong? Not everybody’s as smart as you, baby. What if somebody did something that pointed back at you, or even snitched? What if you got locked up?”
I think of Apache. He may not be the smartest, but he does what he’s told and he always comes through. I think of how his only job is to drive the truck to an underpass and burn it. For a second though, Irene’s words get to me, and I’m scared he might fail, and if he does, what will happen to us.
“All I’m saying is, you’ve put your time in,” Irene says. “You know you can’t be banging forever, right? You’re going to have a degree soon. You could get a job. You can maybe even have a family someday.”
I say, “I could never do law enforcement. Hell no.”
“It doesn’t have to be that. Just think about it,” she says. “It’s like tutoring, right? I’m not telling you what to do, just asking you to think and work it out for yourself.”
“Are you saying get out like how my father got out?” I don’t realize how mad I sound about it until I’ve said it. “Leave his wife and kid and move away? Start a new family someplace else?”
Irene’s quiet for a second, but her hands don’t stop. I can tell she’s thinking about conversations we’ve had, the details of them. How I don’t like talking about my mom going crazy into drugs after my dad left when I wasn’t even two years old. How I don’t remember what his face looks like because Mom burned all the damn photos in a rage, but the second she found out he was living in Lynwood or Compton somewhere, she borrowed money from her parents and moved us here, making me the new kid in a place where that wasn’t an easy thing to carry, and how that meant I got beat the fuck up most days until Ernesto took big brother pity on me and started making sure I walked to school with the Veras, and how my mom was so deep into the hole she dug with her drugs that she never even bothered to search for my father, just tried to numb the pain every day. All that. And still, Irene’s hands never stop.
“You are not your father.” She says it like the conversation is over now. Over for good. Her words come out tough, like she’d fight me if I disagr
eed.
I groan then, but not about what she’s saying. I’m actually groaning because Irene’s pulling harder than she ever pulled before, and the stretch feels like it might pull my tailbone out. She knows I’ve been all involved for a long time, but she doesn’t know any specifics and I’ll never tell her. It doesn’t do to be pillow talking. In fact, the only time she ever sees Fate and anybody else is if it’s for food, if we’re barbecuing or something, and nobody talks business then, we just eat.
It goes on like this. She pushes. She pulls. She puts her hundred-and-twenty-some pounds of weight into stretching me. It hurts, if you want to know the truth. She says that I’m in charge of my life. It’s my choice. Her dad never got one, and my dad went too far, but I can do whatever I want. It’s tough sometimes how she talks like this. She doesn’t know everything I’ve done. She has no idea about the big picture. She comes from a good family. I don’t.
I was just an angry little latchkey kid getting in fights to prove how tough I was, how much I didn’t care I was alone. The only reason I’m something else now all started with Fate, and what Irene doesn’t understand is that this game started a long time ago for me. There’s no standing up now, no walking away from the table. I got dealt my hand when I got my name, got Clever. And sure, guys have gotten out before. They’ve moved out of the neighborhood and had kids, but that was before Joker, Trouble, and Momo got wiped out. There’s no other game in Lynwood now, just us and some Crips, but we’re good with them. We have an understanding. And I don’t know much about cards, but I know you’ve got to play what you’re dealt.
