by Ryan Gattis
I take one last look at ERNIE, and I hope he had a good life, the best life he could have had, all things considered, and then that seems stupid to me, because I never knew him, so I just get in the truck and we go.
6
On the way to Cecilia’s room in Acute Care, in the elevator that smells of ammonia and doughnuts, I eavesdrop on two nurses talking about something that happened in the lobby outside St. Francis’s Emergency Room on Friday night.
“These two gangsters walked in waving guns around,” the shorter of the two nurses says. “Nobody knows why they did, but they did. And they both walked right up to a family of three that got burned in a house fire, minor burns, you know, but still, and they were waiting for help, this family, holding wet washcloths to their arms and necks when these gangsters went and put guns in their faces, even a little girl’s.”
A concerned sound escapes the tall nurse then, and she says, “How old was the little girl?”
“She couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve,” the shorter nurse says. “The odd thing was that these two gangbangers didn’t seem to want anything. They weren’t there to rob anybody. They didn’t ask for wallets. Mainly, they were just there to terrorize people, you know? To strut around like they were tough or something.”
“I never known homeboys to just show up and do something like that for no reason. I bet they were looking for somebody and maybe they couldn’t find him.” The tall nurse sniffs. “How long did it go on for?”
“Twenty minutes,” the shorter nurse says, “and then four National Guardsmen showed up, aimed their rifles at them, and told them to get the hell out or there would be serious consequences. They said it like that too. Serious consequences.”
At this point, one of the nurse’s pagers goes off behind me with three shrill beeps. I don’t know which one it belongs to, because my dad and I got into the elevator last and are politely facing the doors, but I hear them both check.
“Duty calls,” the taller one says and exits on floor four when we get there.
We’re headed for floor six, and to my relief, the shorter one stays on.
“Excuse me for listening in,” I say, “but what happened after that, after the National Guardsmen got there?”
She eyes me for a moment, as if she’s trying to decide if I’m worthy of hearing the rest. She has black hair, blue eyes, and an upturned little nose like a ski jump.
“The gang members actually backed off, saying something like, ‘okay, man, whatever, it’s no problem, we were just having some fun.’ ”
I blurt, “Wow, that’s ‘having some fun’?”
She gives me half a shrug and tilts her head at me like she’s trying to figure out if I’m sheltered or just naive, because around here gangbangers do all kinds of things all the time, and why wouldn’t they do something even crazier when there was nobody there to stop them? I’m neither. Sheltered or naive, that is—but she wouldn’t know that. She’s just making me nervous with how pretty she is. I wonder if she knows that now. My dad does. I feel him smirking beside me.
The silence is almost awkward now, but I wonder if there’s more to the story than that. “So that’s it? They just left?”
“Yup,” she says, “they left, but when they did, the whole room broke out clapping.”
“Cool,” I say. It’s not the best response, but at least I said something.
As we get off on floor six, I thank her for telling me how it ended and she blinks her blue eyes at me and says, “No problem,” as the doors close.
7
Visiting hours started at 10:30 A.M. but we’re here now, a little after one. All hallways in hospitals look and feel the same to me: white walls, white floor tiles, fluorescent lights, and impersonal, clean, echoey. At the desk a nurse who has a weird, layered haircut that looks like gray cabbage tells us that Cecilia should be just finishing her lunch and they’re prepping to discharge her to—
She stops herself right there.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “are you family? I can only tell you if you’re family.”
I say no before my dad does, because I know he would.
“It’s good you’re not,” the nurse says. “If you were, I’d have to put the full-court press on for personal and insurance information. We’ve done a lot of free work lately.”
She hands us the guest sign-in clipboard and while I’m writing my name and my dad’s, the nurse tells us the whole medical center has too many patients. Right now they’re just trying to treat and release. After that, she tells us Cecilia’s room number. When we get there, the door’s open.
The room she’s staying in was built for two but in addition to the two normal beds, there’s a gurney parked in the space along the wall below the television. Both it and the other bed are unoccupied. Out the window, I see Lynwood Park and its greenness, six floors down. It has a baseball diamond and a playground with yellow tape around its perimeter.
I knock on the door frame. Cecilia is up and cramming herself into jeans. Her hair is flat and limp from the shower, heavy on her shoulders as it drips a growing wet patch onto a T-shirt that reads: THE CITY OF LOS ANGELES MARATHON, YOUR LIFE, 1989. These aren’t the clothes she was wearing when I brought her in.
“Hand-me-downs.” She says it like she’s reading my thoughts. “Can you believe this shit? Hospital people all telling me my clothes were too smoky to keep. Said they were a hazard and they had to get rid of them. They’re lying, that’s what I think.”
She fusses with the top button of the jeans. She’s paler than when I last saw her, if that’s even possible, like she lost ten pounds from sweating in the time between. The scrapes on her chin and cheek have scabbed over though. She looks better, all things considered.
She says, “They wanna send me to treatment, but I’m not going to that shit.”
The way she talks is odd. It’s like we’re there, she registers us, but we’re not. Her words don’t seem for us, but more just because she wants to say them to whoever happens to be standing in front of her.
She keeps going. “These hospital people thinking they’re so smart, saying I’m lucky they don’t report me to the cops for illegal drug use, but how they going to report me when they don’t even know my full name?”
She laughs at that, like she’s smart, and I can feel my dad’s eyes on me then, burning an I-told-you-this-girl-was-fucked-up look into my cheek, but I don’t acknowledge him.
She says, “I got to get back to Momo.”
Wow. This is definitely the last thing I want to hear. I don’t even know how to respond to that, but I manage to say, “I don’t think that’s such a good idea. This could be, you know, a fresh start for you.”
Her eyes look wild after I say that, like I just suggested something crazy.
“It is so a good idea,” she says. “I want Momo. He can be my fresh start.”
Already I feel like I’m drowning here, so I do something risky. I’ve got no choice.
“It’s better for both of us if you don’t remember how you got to the hospital. Momo thinks I rescued you and that you were okay and you robbed me of thirty-one dollars and took off. Can you remember that number if he ever asks you? Thirty-one?”
She looks appalled that I’d even suggest it. “Why would I lie to him? I wouldn’t lie. Not to Momo. I love him.”
It goes on like this, me trying to convince her to go along with what I told Momo and she doesn’t want to, so we never get anywhere, and I walk out frustrated and scared for what might be coming when Momo finds out I lied, because when he knows that, he’ll want to know why, and the last thing a scary dude wants to hear in that situation is that you were just trying to do the right thing and protect her from him.
My dad doesn’t say anything to me in the hallway, or in the elevator—no, he holds it until we’re in the lobby before he says, “Do you think your life would be a lot easier if you’d just let her burn in there? If you never even got involved?”
I don’t respo
nd. I just aim myself at the exit and walk.
“Listen,” my dad says to my back, “you shouldn’t worry about it. I’m telling you, if she goes back to him, okay. Fine. Won’t be the first time a woman ever went back to a bad man. And who cares what she says to him?”
My dad, for all his faults, has never hit my mother.
I stop where I am. I turn to him and say, “What do you mean?”
“I mean she’s a druggie, hijo. Wake up! Nobody knows that better than Momo because probably he made her like that. He already knows he can’t trust her because his house burned down on her watch. Anything that comes out of her mouth now is going to be seen as an excuse, or like she’s covering her ass. So it doesn’t matter what she tells him. Even if he comes back to ask questions of you, you’re more reliable than she is. He’ll believe you instead.”
My dad raises his eyebrows at me and I say, “How do you even know all this?”
My dad sighs again, and he examines the linoleum beneath our feet. It’s plastic, fabricated to look like white rock. He kicks the toe of his work boots at it because he thinks it’s cheap shit, but he understands, because it’s easy to clean.
He brings his eyes back up and looks at me like he’s not sure what to tell me before he shrugs and says, “Your old man knows more than you think.”
It’s just like him to say he knows something without saying anything specific. There’s no fighting it. My dad, he’s an expert on everything.
“I’m worried he’ll kill her if she goes back,” I say.
“This girl is not yours to worry about,” he says to me. “You’re too sensitive, mijo. Didn’t I raise you tough enough? What happens from now is not your business.”
There it is. Sooner or later, every conversation where we butt heads comes down to me being too sensitive.
I say, “You really don’t think it’s worth it trying to save someone’s life?”
My dad’s forehead wrinkles up and he looks sad as he pats his front shirt pocket for his clove cigarettes before taking them out and slowly removing one from the pack.
It’s this brown stick that he points at me when he says, “But you already saved her life when you dragged her out, hijo. What you can’t do now is save people from themselves. The rest is on her, and trust me, druggies will only disappoint you and make you sorry you ever tried.”
It sounds so heavy when he says it, like maybe he’s tried to save a druggie before and failed, which is weird, and I don’t even know what to say to that, because I’ve never even heard my dad use that word before today, so I break eye contact with him and look at my watch. It’s past the time I told Kerwin we’d pick him up, but I don’t need to call. He’ll be out in front of his house when we come by, just sitting there, waiting.
My dad leaves me and walks out into a late afternoon that looks hot and white beyond the sliding doors. He expects me to follow, but he’s giving me a moment. Out those doors, cars are moving but they’re slow, cautious. It’s like the world is starting to get going again, but it wants to look both ways first before it really tries.
8
When we pick up Kerwin, who was waiting outside just like I thought, he gets a choice: sit in the back of the pickup truck or cram in the cab with my dad and me. He picks the bed, which is good because he’s big and black: six foot two, wide shoulders, and a bit of a belly on him. My dad and I are both glad not to be sharing the front seat. Kerwin sits with his back to the cab and his legs extended out in front of him. He props an elbow up on a cardboard box my dad has in the back. I open the window between us and we yell at each other.
Kerwin starts. “Remember how those black dudes threw tires at us the other night when we were out tripping on fires?”
I look at my dad, but his mind is elsewhere, so I answer how I want to. “That actually happened? I thought I hallucinated it.”
“One hundred percent real,” Kerwin says and laughs.
Kerwin and I are in a band together, Forty Ounce Threat. I play bass guitar and sing. Kerwin’s lead guitar. It’s Oi! music mostly, street rock and roll.
I’m in charge of the radio as my dad drives us south into Compton. I find KRLA, hoping for some soul, but there’s a doo-wop group on that I don’t recognize. In the rearview mirror, I see Kerwin bobbing his head as we go left on North Alameda from Imperial and I roll my window down to watch the city passing.
We’re only going six blocks or so. This whole area is pretty much just industrial and manufacturing, and none of it seems affected by the riots. There’s auto glass places, granite places, lumber places. When we pass Del Steel, I notice their warehouse looks fine. They do ornamental stuff. My dad works with them every so often. L&M Steel, in their curved-roof warehouses, seems fine too. My dad says this area used to be hopping in the ’60s, plenty of business to go around, but now it’s lying down to die. There’s cheaper steel from China and it comes pregrinded or heat treated. On top of that, American workers cost too much money. Manufacturing has been going elsewhere for some time. Even before the recession, it was going somewhere else.
When the song is over, a DJ comes on and says Mayor Bradley has lifted the curfew, so that’s it. The riots are over.
“Welcome back to sanity.” There’s sarcasm in how the DJ says that.
My dad snorts.
The streets feel normal to me right now. At least, it feels like whatever normal was before the riots. It’s South Central as I’ve always known it: mostly quiet, with people going about their business and working hard. Still, people all over the world think Los Angeles is a city of angry black folks now, a city of arsonists and gangbangers. Those people must think that what happened to Rodney King was isolated, but they don’t know that everybody’s got a Rodney King in his neighborhood, somebody the cops beat like a drum for good or bad reasons. He might not be black, either. He might have brown skin instead.
After we pass Banning, we get our first glimpse of destroyed property. We smell it before we get there though. I don’t know if I ever knew what company was in this warehouse. It’s completely gutted now, but the charred skeletons of two walls are still standing. Against the white walls of another warehouse behind, they look more like charcoal sketches than anything that ever used to be solid. In front of them, an old man in a Raiders cap hacks at the roof with a hand ax—the roof that caved in and is now flush with the ground. I roll my window up and ask my dad what this place used to be.
“Machine tools,” my dad says.
“Do you know who owns it?”
My dad doesn’t. We turn onto El Segundo from North Alameda and I see Willard Elementary School on the corner. It hasn’t been burned, but someone cut the fence with wire cutters for some reason, which makes me think that maybe somebody tried to rob the school, but I lose track of that thought because I’m expecting to see our two-story apartment complex, white with a black roof and thirteen apartments, right next to the school—but there’s nothing there.
Instead, there’s an empty space where our building used to be.
“¡Hijo de su chingada madre!” My dad sits up in his seat, on the very edge of it. “All this shit I built up to lose.”
My dad smashes his hand against the steering wheel a good few times. I wince, but I’m glad somehow. A few years ago that would’ve been me getting thumped.
As we get closer, we see the husk of what’s left, a black shell sucking up the last of the setting sun. Here and there, little bits of unburned white wall show through. The rest is black. My eyes skirt past it then, over to the Victorian—which appears untouched—but beyond it, in the next lot, isn’t another apartment building like I’m expecting, one that used to be the mirror of the first, same plans and everything: white walls, black roof, and thirteen apartments. But there’s nothing there either. It’s still a mirror, just a black one, because now the Victorian sits unharmed between two blackened lots, because two of our buildings got torched to the ground.
It’s getting hard for me to breathe as my dad pulls past th
e Victorian and into the little alley that runs alongside it. From there, we get a good view of what’s left of the second apartment building as two blackened support studs stick out of the lot like charred goalposts. We park there, on the dirt, next to the untouched Queen Anne Victorian he owns, the one he’s been fixing up since I was nine. My dad built the white picket fence out front himself. Behind that is a symmetrical one-level with two peaked towers that push out either side of the front door, making it look like a face with two rectangular windows for eyes, a door for a nose, and a flat porch for a mouth.
I’m relieved it survived, sure, but I’m still taking in how the two apartment buildings are completely gone when something finally occurs to me, something going to school for small business management should have made me think of days ago.
“Dad,” I say, “are we ruined?”
9
It’s a stupid question. The answer is right in front of me. Since I’ve been taking accounting, my dad has been showing me loan statements for the past few months. He’s trying to teach me how to run the business when he’s gone. Between these three properties, he has sunk in over a million dollars. He mortgaged himself up to his eyelashes to get that kind of money.
That’s because my dad never skimps on materials when he fixes anything, but he has to cut costs somehow, so he declines all insurance except earthquake protection. He figures if he fixes something up fast enough, it’ll be fine. The Victorian is the only exception to that rule. It was built in 1906, back when the Sunset Strip was one big poinsettia field. This he has insurance on. It’s his baby.
My dad has got his eyes closed when he takes a breath in and it comes out in a cough. I can’t watch him like this, so I pull Kerwin down the alley to where an ancient gas pump used to be, next to an avocado tree so big that it could’ve been in the movies.
