by Ryan Gattis
Kerwin breaks the quiet with a whisper. “All your dad’s stuff is burnt?”
“All except this,” I say, pointing at the house with my chin. My dad bought it from the Kellys, one of the last white families to leave Compton.
“There used to be a gas pump here,” I say and point at a long line of dirt on the back lawn where the grass can’t grow anymore.
Kerwin wants to know why, so I tell him this house is older than gas stations. My dad has been buying and selling property for about a decade. My mom says he always wanted to improve South Central, wanted to make it better, so he bought one building and sold it, then he did two. That got to be a pattern. After four sales, he got the tile business on Western, and now he has five buildings: three in Compton, one in Watts, and one in Lynwood, but the Victorian house with vaulted ceilings, two bedrooms, a library, and a den in Compton, it was always the pinnacle.
“This was my dad’s dream,” I say. “Proof he could build something not just good but beautiful. That’s what my mom thinks anyway. For a long time, my dad only seemed happy here. I’d go with him on weekends when he came to fix it up.”
I remember how the saw was always in the kitchen. For years, the house smelled of freshly cut wood and had sawdust everywhere. I’d bring him whatever he needed, a hammer, a wrench. He taught me how to wire lighting at fourteen. To this day I know the work I did then was one of the only things that ever made him proud of me. It helped that I never fell off anything, never stepped on a nail. I was careful. I got that way quick though when the belt might be the penalty for any misstep.
“The neighborhood changed quick though,” I say. “All kinds of these old houses got knocked down. Warehouses got built, but you saw it when we drove in. Pretty soon, no one wanted to live on this street anymore.”
Kerwin shrugs. “Who’d want to live next door to a warehouse?”
It’s not the kind of question that needs an answer, but I do it anyway. “No one.”
Despite the neighborhood changing, my dad still kept working on restoring this house. We got by renting out four apartments in one complex and five in the other, but we couldn’t rent out the Victorian, and we couldn’t sell it.
“It’s just a relic in the wrong place now, but it has been for a long time. The worst part is, people around here know it. They know nobody lives in it and when people know that, bad things happen.”
“What type of bad things?” Kerwin is from South Central. He knows what type of bad things go on around here, but he can’t keep himself from asking. Maybe none of us can. Maybe that’s just human.
“A dead body got dumped on our property, in our alley. We found out when two sheriffs showed up at our place in Lynwood and wanted to take my dad in for questioning. Maybe two months after that, a gang rape took place in the backyard under that avocado tree.”
I point at the tree. We’re not standing too far from it now, the old scene of the crime, and I’m looking at it because something is off about it. It’s not just that it’s heavy, with branches weighed down from fruit that we didn’t pick this year because we never got around to it, it’s that there’s something at the base, on the other side of that great big trunk. It being the back end of dusk, I can’t make out what the shape is for the life of me. It’s too big to be a dog, but that’s what it looks like. A dog lying down, stretched out under the tree.
“Hold on.” I drop my voice to a whisper. “You see that?”
Kerwin’s right next to me, crouching in the dirt.
“Yeah,” he says, whispering right back.
“Are those?” I’m squinting now, trying to make out the long shapes on the ground, extending away from the trunk. It’s not a dog after all. “Are those legs?”
“Yeah,” Kerwin says. “They fucking are.”
10
These legs are bare from what I can tell, hairy too. At the end of the right leg, on the right foot, is one white sock. We move forward together, Kerwin and me. As we get closer, we circle to the side and I see how dirty the bottom of the sock is, almost black. We see the whole body it’s connected to next, propped up against the trunk, sitting up with its legs stretched straight out.
I hear Kerwin breathing behind me. He’s got a Dodgers minibat with him, must’ve brought it from home. It’s wood, maybe a foot long, the kind they give away in limited quantities as a promotion item for going to a certain game.
“Is he shot?” Kerwin wants to know. “Is he stabbed or what?”
“I don’t see blood,” I say.
It’s clear now this person has no pants on at all, just red-brown boxer shorts. On his top half, he’s wearing three flannel shirts and they’re all open at the cuff and pulled up at the elbows to dangle. It’s hard to tell if the chest is rising and falling with all that cloth there.
“You touch him,” I say to Kerwin. “Poke him or something. See if he moves.”
“No, you.”
I tell him, “You’re the one with the bat!”
Kerwin looks at his hand just to confirm he’s holding the damn thing and then shrugs like maybe he will poke him with it, and maybe he won’t.
That’s when I notice there’s something on this guy’s arm.
I say, “Hey, do you see that?”
I point. Kerwin squints. We both do.
“Yeah,” Kerwin says. “Ugh.”
There’s a needle sticking out of this guy’s arm crease, but not like a syringe. Just a needle. It almost looks like somebody wanted the syringe and the needle was stuck in his arm, so they just unscrewed the damn thing, leaving this metal needle sticking out of him like a half a safety pin that got jabbed in. There’s dried blood around it, some dabs and dots, and down the forearm is a tattoo in long, L.A. Times–style cursive letters.
I point at the tattoo. “What’s that say?”
Kerwin has to tilt his head sideways to read it. I do the same, but it’s hard to tell from all the dirt and dried blood on him. I want to brush it off but don’t.
“Sleepy,” I say. “I think it says Sleepy.”
“Is he dead or what?” Kerwin has his hand over his mouth. “He looks dead.”
“I don’t know,” I say, but I’m thinking he is. The skin on this guy’s face is half bearded and matted with dirt. He’s the color of my dad’s used ashtrays. Ants roam his leg hair, and there are even a few bumps from bites that are so raised and red I can make them out without much light.
“Do it then,” I say, and when Kerwin hesitates, I nudge his shoulder with my own. “Do it already.”
Kerwin pokes the body with the bat. He puts the fat end of it on the guy’s chest, right over the heart, and pushes. A little air comes out, like a sigh or something, and we both jump back, but the guy’s eyelids don’t even flicker. They don’t even move.
I’m thinking out loud. “That could’ve been, like, trapped air or something, right?”
“How would I even know that? It’s your turn. Tell you what, though,” Kerwin says as he hands me the bat, “damn, am I glad we aren’t on acid for this.”
“Me too,” I say.
Now, I don’t know what I’m about to do with a bat that he didn’t just do, so I hold it at my side and take a step forward and reach toward the face with my free hand.
This freaks Kerwin out. “Mikey, what are you doing?”
My heart’s pounding up in my throat, and I don’t know what I’m thinking beyond that I just need to see if he’s breathing shallow and if I feel his breath on my finger I’ll know for sure, but I can’t reach far enough standing back, so I step closer. As I’m putting my foot down though, my sole crunches down on something. I look down to confirm what it is and I step back quick, only to find it’s the guy’s right hand. I didn’t even see it in the near dark. As I’m realizing this, I hear Kerwin draw in a fast breath and the first thing I do is look up into the guy’s dirty face to find that his eyes are open.
I jump back right into Kerwin, bounce off his shoulder, and somehow manage to keep my feet. The guy
scrunches his face up at us. He smacks his lips a few times before he opens his mouth.
“What’re you doing, fool?” His words come out slow and dusty. It’s not even like he’s mad, just confused and dehydrated. “Why’d you step on me?”
I don’t hang around to answer and neither does Kerwin. We’re already retreating, walking fast backward, not taking our eyes off this guy we thought was a corpse, and we’re not about to have a conversation with him either. This guy keeps talking though, keeps saying hey, as we go, like he’s trying to get our attention, but we’re moving too fast toward the front of the house, toward my dad.
“Oh fuck,” Kerwin says. “I about had a heart attack. Oh shit!”
I’m right there with him too. I don’t know what freaks me out more now, the fact that I thought we found a dead body or that the dead body ended up being alive.
When we get to my dad on the porch, he’s looking in the window on the right side of the door. My boots crunch glass before I realize that the front window he’s looking through isn’t even there. It’s been broken out and my father is staring in through the hole. When I look over his shoulder, what I see makes my stomach drop, but it definitely explains the man at the tree.
11
Druggies have been flopping here, more than just the guy under the tree. A pack of them. Maybe they even spent the whole riot here. Inside, it smells like a monkey cage. The floor of the library, with its built-in bookcases, is littered with broken vials, a broken glass pipe, and a few more syringes without needles. In the corner where I used to build forts out of two sawhorses and a tarp so I could drag a hanging light underneath and read Treasure Island is a pile of wadded newspapers that our unwelcome houseguests have been wiping their asses with and then keeping nearby. I have no idea why anyone would do that, but it makes me not want to see the bathrooms.
I say, “One of them is still under the avocado tree.”
My dad nods up at me. I watch him weigh this information before saying, “Some Goldilocks shit, huh? Did he look dangerous?”
“No,” I say. “He didn’t even move.”
My dad looks back the way we came, to the outline of the avocado tree against the purple-black dimness, but there’s no way he can see the body from that distance, and it doesn’t look like he cares, either.
He spits off the porch and says, “Leave him then.”
My dad pulls out his pack of cloves, takes one out, and lights it. He takes a pull and breathes out smoke as he says, “This house is plagued.”
Kerwin looks at me with concern. I’ve seen my dad’s crazy faces before, I know them better than anybody, and seeing how the vein in his forehead is working, I know he’s on the tightrope of rage right now. When he turns to me, I see a spark in his eyes.
He says, “How did that kid burn down Momo’s house?”
I’m still thinking about the guy under the tree when I snap out of it and say, “He threw a Molotov cocktail through the front door.”
My dad says, “That it?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” my dad says and heads for the truck.
When he gets to the bed, I watch my dad pull the cardboard box to him and open it. From inside, he takes out a glass bottle of whiskey three-quarters full, uncaps it, and stuffs a rag as far down the neck as it will go.
“Whoa,” Kerwin says and takes a step back. “Is he gonna—?”
I look behind us, into the street, to see if anyone’s watching, but no one is. We’re all alone.
I say, “Dad?”
But he’s not listening as he walks past me—I hear liquor sloshing back and forth in the bottle as he goes—and when he gets to the porch that we reslatted by hand, he takes his clove cigarette out of his mouth and touches it to the rag.
“It’s mine,” my dad says. “I can kill it if I want to.”
12
How I feel right now is confusing. I don’t want him to do it, but I understand why. All the work he put in—we put in—and all that time we spent. Every bit of it goes up in flames the second the bottle hits that back corner of the library and catches on the newspapers and the bottom of an inset bookcase, still empty after all these years.
I blink and my dad is back in the truck and starting it. The radio jumps to life as he guns the engine before sliding over in the seat and popping the passenger-side door. Halfway through a chorus, a Shirelles’ tune pours out into the night, “Dedicated to the One I Love,” and my dad is yelling at me over the top of it.
“Mijo, get in the truck! Let’s go!”
But I can’t. I’m too busy watching the Victorian die.
“Kerwin, goddamnit,” my dad says, “get in.”
When Kerwin does, and shuts the door, my dad yells at me again.
“Don’t make me put you in here!”
I don’t feel my legs moving, but I must be walking because I’m up in the truck and into the bed, and then I’m sitting down with my back flush to the cab, just like Kerwin was before, and I hear him say to my dad, “He’s in!”
The truck peels out in reverse and I watch El Segundo Boulevard race up to meet me as my dad takes the turn too quick and the right-side tires go off the curb. I’d bounce right out of the truck if Kerwin didn’t have a hand on my shoulder.
I’m about to thank him when he says, “I got you!”
I’m looking back behind us, too busy wondering if this is the last fire of the riots, or if somewhere, for other reasons, people are doing the same things. I get my dad’s logic. It’s the one property he has fire insurance on, so he might as well, but burning the house won’t break us even—the payout would never be enough to get us back to zero on all three properties—but right now it’s the only way to lose by less.
It occurs to me then that maybe that’s how these riots are for everybody around here. You know you’re gonna lose, but you kick and fight to lose as little as possible. It could be property, or health, or a loved one like ERNIE, but it’s something and when it’s gone, it’s gone for good. No one feels peace tonight, and we haven’t for days. The curfew may be lifted, but it doesn’t mean things are normal, or that they’re fixed, or that they will be anytime soon.
In L.A., it only means that things are different from the last time you could go out at night, and from now on, when we talk about these days, we’ll talk about what they did to us, we’ll talk about what we lost, and a wedge will get driven into the history of the city. On either side of it, there will be everything before and everything after, because when you’ve seen enough bad things, it either breaks you for the world, or it makes you into something else—maybe something you can’t know or understand right away, but it might just be a new you, like when a seed gets planted, yet to be grown.
Kerwin turns up the music, and the chorus hits as the boulevard spools out beneath me with its yellow dotted line racing alongside before falling away into asphalt blackness. I think about how the guy with a needle in his arm has a front-row seat to this as wind whips my face.
A warehouse next to the nearest burned apartment complex quickly blocks most of the Victorian from my view, and all I can see is the library window flickering orange like a winking jack-o’-lantern eye before we get too far down the road and that light is gone too. All that’s left to see of the house then is where it’s going, skyward, as a black tower forms above it. I’m hoping to see it better the farther away we get, to understand more, because maybe if I see the rest of the neighborhood and how it burned, if I see how other people were targeted and suffered too, I can understand, but right now all I can focus on is our house, and how much it hurts to see it go, and how the distance doesn’t give me any perspective.
So I close my eyes.
I put both my hands palm down on either wall of the truck’s bed and hold tight to metal and chipped paint as the rhythm of the street bumps me forward and back. Through the window behind me, I hear the song winding down. I hear it running into the wind, tangling with the whooshing sound of it, and I picture how thin
gs used to be. I see how the Victorian looked when I was fourteen, faintly blue in early morning light. I see underripe avocados in the grass, hard and green, the kind I used to pick and play soccer with, and beyond the tree that dropped them, I see one of the apartment blocks stands tall like a sentry, its roof only just going orange in the dawn. Something turns heavy in my chest when I imagine my own neighborhood, the one I grew up in, intact again. I see Ham Park’s wooden handball wall still up, kids playing on it and grown men too, and the thumping sounds of their Saturday games echoed for blocks, and as far away as Momo’s house, it just sounded like a heart beating—and maybe it was even the city’s heart, beating too fast. In my head right now, Momo’s house is whole again, his car’s parked out front and he’s walking to it with keys in his hand, nodding a hello at me as I go by on my chopper, and that’s when it hits me: my memories are the only places I’ll ever see any of it again, and I wonder if this is what writers are supposed to do, rebuild places in their minds—places long gone, places that disappear, and I wonder if that’s true, is it true of people who disappear too?
The song’s fading out now. I hear the girls’ voices melt into the bass line as what’s left of their harmony gives itself up to the wind and the grumble of the truck’s engine. For two good breaths, I don’t hear anything but sirens far away. I don’t hear anything but the truck worrying its axles. When a new song begins, a different kind, one with a loud drumbeat, I don’t recognize it, and it’s a small thought that hits me then, but I feel it rumble and grow with each building whipping past. With each block, I feel myself agreeing with it. L.A. has an engine too, and it won’t stop. It can’t. It’s a survivor. It will keep going, no matter what, and it will push right through these flames and come out the other side of them as something broken and pretty and new.
Glossary
Abuela/abuelo: grandmother/grandfather
Adónde: literally, “where at?”
