Hailey's War

by Jodi Compton

  twenty-eight

  We were going to see Payaso, the leader of El Trece.

  He lived about six houses away from Serena. That surprised me at first, then I felt stupid for being surprised. Their name, Trece, meant 13th Street. It wasn’t as if he’d live across town.

  Serena was wearing a trench-length down coat in a shimmering gunmetal color, with fur trim on the hood. The weather outside wasn’t cool enough to justify it, but she looked great, every inch the gangster. I’d borrowed a scuffed leather jacket, which, along with my boots, made me look like a young aspiring biker. I’d woken up this afternoon stiff from the beating, but I’d limbered up okay since, and I hadn’t put any makeup on the bruises; they were part of my credentials.

  It was a day after my initiation, a little before eight in the evening. The sky was overcast, the low ceiling limned with bright peach from the reflected streetlights. Serena and I crossed 13th Street, her strides long, her coat rippling around her calves. She began to coach me for the meeting.

  “Payaso’s interested in you,” she told me. “Mostly because of West Point. I told him about that.”

  I nodded.

  “If he offers you anything, a beer or a cigarette or a joint, accept it,” she said. “That’s hospitality around here. To refuse is rude.”

  “I know.”

  “When you talk to him, don’t front and try to act real tough,” she went on. “Don’t be a shrinking violet, either. Act like you respect yourself, but that’s all. And, this is important, if he plays with you”-she meant if he made a joke at my expense-“and you think of a comeback, don’t say it. He’s the man. Let him feel like the man. But don’t flirt with him, either. You’re here for business.”

  We were on the sidewalk in front of his house, where we’d stopped so she could finish her thoughts.

  “He’s not a bad guy, and I think he knows that you’re more qualified to lead the mission than he is. What I’m saying is, when the time comes, Payaso will let you lead, if you act respectful of him. If you front, he’s gonna have to front, and that’s not gonna be good for anyone.”

  “I understand.”

  “Okay.”

  We went up the walk. There was a metal port in the door, like from a Prohibition speakeasy.

  “Damn,” I said, impressed.

  “Yeah,” Serena said. “Old Payaso read about these things somewhere and decided he had to have one.”

  She’d explained “Old Payaso” to me earlier. The Payaso we were coming to see wasn’t the one who’d led Trece when Serena joined at fifteen. That had been the former Payaso, who’d shared his moniker with a promising fourteen-year-old. Sharing the name hadn’t made Lil’Payaso first in line to take over, but when Payaso was shot to death by rivals, Lil’Payaso became just Payaso, and in time he fought to lead Trece and won.

  A skinny, shaven-headed boy pulled back the port, saw Serena, and nodded. He closed the port, and a bolt slid back.

  “Not a lot of protection from gunfire to the face, that thing,” I said.

  “Not for him,” Serena agreed.

  The inside of the house wasn’t substantially different from Serena’s. There was a low throb of music and a pervasive scent of cigarette smoke, and about six or seven homeboys lounging in the living room. A pit bull barked once, not really interested.

  The only surprise was that I wasn’t the only white person there. A red-haired teenager was on the couch, in the arms of one of the boys. Her hair was braided in a complicated way up over her head, and her shirt was open nearly to the waist, revealing a lacy blue bra. It apparently served like a tank top or camisole; she seemed to feel no modesty about revealing it in front of a roomful of guys.

  I didn’t need to be told which one was Payaso. For one thing, the name was tattooed high on his pectoral muscle, which was laid bare by his wifebeater shirt. It was also implicit in the grouping of guys around him, the way they loosely surrounded and faced him. He didn’t look tall, maybe five-nine, but he had good muscle, like a fighter. When he saw us walk into the living room, he nodded to the white girl on the couch. “Go kick it with Mel and Jaime for a while,” he said to her. “We’re gonna talk some business.”

  The girl got up without argument, though she looked at me with veiled curiosity before disappearing into one of the bedrooms. I wondered if it was my white skin or the bruises from my initiation that she found more curious. I wondered if she thought I let a man give them to me.

  There was a small reshuffling as a place was made for Serena among the guys. I could already see where I was supposed to sit, in a straight-backed chair that had clearly been borrowed from a dining table and which faced Payaso directly, job-interview style. I took my place and let him look at me.

  “Trece eres?” he asked. Loosely translated, Are you one of us?

  “Por vida,” I said. For life.

  Payaso pulled an exaggerated face of skepticism, his long, mobile mouth turning down, but with a trace of amusement. “Funny, I ain’t seen you around the neighborhood,” he said.

  “I know.”

  His eyes flashed with humor. “I’m just playing with you,” he said. “I know who you are. You’re the famous Hailey.”

  “I doubt I’m famous.”

  “Warchild used to talk about you, not just recently, but a long time back. Talking about how you used to jump outta airplanes for the Army, shit like that, saying how tough you were.”

  This was news to me. I disciplined myself not to look back at her in surprise.

  Payaso said, “You want something to drink?” He looked at the boy who’d answered the door. “Get her something. Warchild, too.”

  “I’m cool,” Serena said. Apparently, her status with Payaso was such that it was acceptable for her to turn down hospitality.

  When the boy came back with a Coors for me, Payaso said, “Warchild tells me they just initiated you last night.”

  I nodded.

  “Yeah, you got some marks on you,” he said, and smiled. “I bet you didn’t know Latin girls were so tough, eh?”

  I shook my head modestly. Actually, I had expected a good beatdown from Serena’s sucias, but Payaso wanted to brag on his homegirls, and I wanted to let him.

  He said, “So now you’re In-soo-la,” exaggerating the second syllable. “What kind of name is that?”

  “Latin,” I said.

  “You really speak that?”

  “Mostly,” I said. “I couldn’t get a job translating or anything.”

  “There’s jobs translating Latin? I thought it was a dead language.”

  “It is,” I said, “but scholars are still doing new translations of the classic poems.”

  “Why do people translate things that have already been translated? What’s the point?” he said.

  I said, “The same reason that bands cover songs that someone else has recorded, I guess. To put their own spin on it.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. His homeboys were all watching and listening. I wondered if they really found this interesting, or if it was their way of showing Payaso respect, pretending to be absorbed in everything he found interesting.

  Payaso said, “So what’s my name in Latin?”

  “Fossor,” I said, for clown, jokester.

  “Fossor?” He frowned exaggeratedly again. It was easy to see where he got his moniker; he did have mobile, clownish features, with intelligence underneath them.

  I said, “Sorry. It does sound better in Spanish. Latin isn’t as pretty a language as a lot of people think. It can make a lot of things sound like an STD.”

  His guys laughed.

  “You were at West Point, too,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “What’s that like?”

  “Hard,” I said, “but like a lot of things, if you work hard and respect the underlying ideals, people respect you. It’s rigorous in a lot of ways: academically and physically and psychologically. A lot of people don’t make it. Including me.”

  This was risky. If
he wanted to know why I washed out, he’d ask now, and I didn’t know if I could refuse him. And if I did tell him the answer, I didn’t know how he’d feel about it.

  But he just said, “They got a lot of girls there? Are the guys cool with that?”

  “Most guys are,” I said.

  “What about guys like me? Does West Point take vatos?”

  “I don’t know if I’d call them vatos,” I said. “They take Latinos, if they’re as square as I used to be.”

  Payaso lit a cigarette, not offering me one. He took a drag, held it, and exhaled at length. Then his face changed, turning serious. I didn’t have to be told it was time for business.

  He said, “So tell me about the shit that went down in Mexico.”

  I told him the story. Fast through the part I knew Serena had told him already, about Lara and the arrangements to take Nidia to Mexico. More detailed on the things only I witnessed, like the ambush in the tunnel, and my run-in with Babyface up in San Francisco. Briefly, I talked about what lay ahead, getting Nidia back. In doing so, I salted the conversation with words from my military background, calling the information-gathering I was doing intel and a prospective mission against Skouras asymmetric warfare. I wasn’t just playing to Payaso’s earlier interest in West Point, but to every gangster’s romantic conviction that his life was part of a war. It was no coincidence that most writing done on the Mafia, for example, referred to lieutenants and foot soldiers.

  “These guys are serious,” I said. “I told Serena and I’ll tell you, this isn’t going to be a walk in the park.” Did that sound too authoritarian? I went on: “But I can’t do it without the kind of backup that you can provide, guys who can shoot and don’t scare easy.”

  “That’s us,” Payaso said, and his guys murmured agreement.

  He stubbed out his cigarette. “All right, Insula, me and my homeboys are in. Whatever you need. Those guys are gonna learn they can’t mess with a Mexican girl like that.”

  The guys around him nodded.

  Payaso added, “But I’m gonna need to know what you’re planning, though, the details of it.”

  I shrugged wryly. “As soon as I plan it,” I said, “you’ll be the first to know.”

  He stood up, and we shook hands, formally.

  Then he looked at Serena. “Warchild,” he said, “there’s a car out in the driveway, a blue Volkswagen. Go drive it to Chato, to his shop.”

  The car turned out to be a rather nice Passat with leather seats and a high-end sound system. Somebody out there was missing this car in a way insurance didn’t make up for.

  “You don’t have to go with me,” Serena told me. “I can just take you home.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll go with you.”

  “You want to drive, then?” she asked, abruptly reversing position. “I’m getting a headache.”

  I’d worried about being dragged into sucia business, and here I was, volunteering for it. I didn’t know exactly why, except that I’d felt bad for Serena, back in the house. I was used to seeing her among her sucias, the undisputed leader; I wasn’t used to seeing her take orders. I’d known gang life was hierarchical, but I’d felt a twinge of distaste nonetheless.

  I navigated her darkened neighborhood, then up onto the freeway. While I was merging into traffic, Serena flipped on the Passat’s sound system. There was a CD in the drive, but I didn’t notice the music until Serena said, “What the fuck are we listening to?” Alerted, I listened, and in a second recognized the song coming from the speakers: vintage Simon and Garfunkel, the lilting strains of “Feelin’ Groovy.”

  Without waiting for an answer, Serena jabbed at the controls, replacing acoustic music with rap. “Who listens to that shit?” she said, lower-voiced but still irritable.

  I didn’t answer. It would be easy to dismiss Serena’s outburst as ghetto monoculturalism, like a child rejecting a food she’s never really tried, but I knew her better than that. What she was really saying about the song’s easy, happy lyrics was not Who listens to this? but Who lives like this? Who feels this way? She didn’t. Nobody she knew did.

  After a moment, she spoke again. “You know what really bothers me?”

  “What?”

  “Payaso and his guys,” she said. “I knew they weren’t going to sign on to this for your sake, but they’re not even doing it for me. They’re doing it for her, Nidia, and they don’t even know her. It’s what she represents to them. The nice girl from the block, the sweet little virgen.”

  “But she isn’t, not anymore,” I pointed out. “She’s pregnant, for God’s sake.”

  “Yeah, now she’s the madonna, or she might as well be,” Serena said. I understood what she was saying. In the world Trece’s guys lived in, there were nice girls, and then there were girls who let themselves be passed around. There really wasn’t much in between. Someone like Nidia, who had slept with only one man, apparently for love-that was nearly as good as still being a virgin.

  “It’s messed up,” Serena said. “I’ve done more for them than a girl like that ever will. I’ve lied to the cops and hidden their guns for them. And still, they wouldn’t go to all this trouble for me. But they’re doing it for her.” She was just getting started. “Some little mousie, some little vic who thought that because she prays all the time that God was going to stop the traffic whenever she had to cross the street.” She repeated, “It’s messed up.”

  I said, “I wish you’d gotten in touch with this resentment a lot earlier. If you’d never asked me to take her to Mexico, I wouldn’t have gotten shot.”

  Serena gave me such a sharp look that I nearly swerved the car.

  “Kidding,” I said hastily.

  She shook her head. “That’s why I’m doing this,” she said. “I mean it, I’m doing this for you, Insula. Because you got shot, and that shit’s got to get paid for. It’s not about her.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Relax, I believe you.”

  twenty-nine

  Late that night, I was in bed with Serena, staring up into the dark, waiting to sleep.

  A lot of people wouldn’t have understood it, two adult women sharing a bed. But now I understood what Serena told me when I’d seen two of her sucias sleeping close together: Sleep was the most vulnerable time, and there was safety and comfort in numbers. My borrowed SIG was on the nightstand. Serena’s Tec-9 was under the bed.

  I knew she was straight, but I really couldn’t have told you what Serena did for sex. During her adolescent years, when she’d shaved her head to run with Trece, she’d had to put away her sexuality for later, like female soldiers pack away dresses. Later, when she became the leader of the sucias, Serena had celebrated her new power by growing out her hair. But if she’d reclaimed her femininity, sex was still full of danger. An alliance with Payaso or any of the Trece homeboys, no matter how consensual, would have cost her dearly in respect. Gangbangers commonly referred to a girl “sexing” a guy. It was a term whose closest analog was servicing.

  As for a boyfriend outside the gang culture, well, it wasn’t like UCLA grad students in Chicano Studies were going to come by her house with flowers. Serena was a victim of the ways she’d exceeded the limitations around her. I thought of her as a chola in the truest sense of the word: someone who lived between two worlds.

  “The girls were riding your bicycle a couple of days ago,” Serena said. She meant the one I’d taken from the charity donations center, not the Motobecane, which was still in San Francisco.

  “Risky tipped it over. They were all cracking up,” she said. “It’s funny to see them acting like kids.”

  “Kids,” I repeated.

  When we’d come in, I’d overheard Trippy talking to several of the homegirls. She’d seemed high-not pharmacologically, but on adrenaline-and I’d soon gotten the drift of what she was talking about. She was bragging about running into a girl from a rival cliqua, “some nothing hoodrat,” and beating her until she’d cried and begged for it to stop. Trippy hadn’t
said that the girl’s only crime had probably been being from the wrong neighborhood or flirting with the wrong guy, but that went without saying.

  I rolled over onto my stomach and rested my head on my crossed arms. I didn’t like Trippy and wouldn’t have even if we hadn’t had our dustup the last time I’d been staying here. I thought Serena had made a lousy choice in lieutenants, but that was an opinion I was going to keep to myself. I knew what Serena would tell me. She’d say that my kind of ethics were a luxury, that nice girls were eaten alive in her neighborhood, that Trippy and girls like her didn’t get to go east to war school and learn the rules of engagement.

  I changed the subject: “Listen, Serena, speaking of bikes and all, I can’t keep doing what I’m doing on city buses and whatever. God knows, when we find Nidia, we’re going to need a car to take her away in.”

  “You know Chato’s always got a couple of cars,” she said.

  “Too dangerous,” I said. “I’m not going to use this car for an hour or two and dump it. I’ll need it long-term, and sooner or later, some patrolling cop or meter reader will run the plate. I can’t afford to get arrested for driving a stolen car.”

  She said, “We’ve probably got a legit car around here you could use.”

  “True,” I said, “but I’m thinking of something specific. I don’t know if I can outrun Skouras’s guys if it came to a chase, but I don’t want to be in a four-banger, just in case. It’s got to carry a couple of soldiers and, eventually, a pregnant girl, and reasonably comfortably. It needs to be plain enough that I can do surveillance in it. And it can’t be a speeding-ticket magnet for cops or a theft magnet for-”

  “People like me?” Serena said archly. “So what you really need, then, is money.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “This mission is gonna run up expenses that go beyond just the car.”

  “We can help; I told you that,” she said. “Trece’s got some plata.”

  “Not that much,” I said. “You guys are living proof that crime barely pays.”