“I’m sorry,” apologized Doña Maria. “Of course you want to use the phone.”
“I can come back another time,” Rafaela protested.
“Did you see the satellite dish? He came to check it out.” She pointed in the direction of the television. “For me, such a blessing, a little television now and then. Don’t you miss it?”
Rafaela hadn’t seen television for weeks now. She thought about Bobby and his Sony television, how he had chosen it so carefully, how much he wanted to impress her with this gift. Everything was a gift to her and Sol: all those amazing things he loved to buy. She had scorned his materialism, but it was his way of showing his love, of trying to delight her with the nice things that other Americans had. That is what he wanted to tell her. No, she didn’t miss television, but she missed Bobby.
“Sons of bitches!” Hernando yelled.
Doña Maria rolled her eyes. “Come.” She pushed Sol out the door. “Let’s get some corn. Maybe when we get back, he’ll be off the phone.”
“What is your son’s business?” Rafaela wanted to know.
“Oh, he dabbles in this and that. I don’t really know. Export. Import. I never know his business. This time it’s oranges from Brazil. Some problem with them. Poor Hernando. It’s such a headache.” She shook her head. They walked on. Doña Maria’s property extended over several acres. “See?” she pointed for Sol. “Corn. Rows and rows.” The stalks towered above their heads, thick with ears of corn, silk drying in brown curls.
“What will you do with so much corn?”
“Eat it, of course. As much as you want. The rest, Lupe will take to market for cash.” Rafaela knew Lupe did everything on Doña Maria’s place. Lupe cleaned, cooked, gardened, planted, and harvested. She fed the chickens, collected eggs, fattened the pigs, and slaughtered them when the time came. Rafaela thought about her argument with Bobby, about how she and Bobby did all the work without benefits, about exploitation. Now she had crossed the border and forgotten her anger. Lupe did all the work. Someone was always at the bottom. As long as she was not, did it matter?
“How stupid of me,” Doña Maria pouted, “I’ve forgotten the basket. And it was right there at the kitchen door.”
“I’ll go back,” offered Rafaela. “Besides,” she pointed at the canvas bag, “if you don’t mind, I’d like to put Sol’s bottle in the refrigerator.” Rafaela hurried toward the house which seemed quite near, but looking back, Sol and Doña Maria seemed suddenly quite far. It was perplexing to see the way in which the corn seemed to tower around them and swallow them up. As she stepped into the kitchen, she expected to hear Hernando’s loud voice still over the phone, but now there were two voices, speaking in even tones, pulsing heavily through the thick air.
“How many months?”
“This one’s not a baby. Two. Two and a half years.”
“What do they need?”
“Kidney.”
“One?”
“Yes.”
“Blood type?”
“It’s all there as usual.”
“How desperate are they?”
“Very.”
“Was the price suggested?”
“Yes. They agreed.”
“We’ll see what we can do.”
“Tell them to be careful. Not just any starving two-year-old.”
“They’re not getting the stomach. They’re getting a kidney.”
“The child shouldn’t be yellow, jaundiced.”
“Kidneys are cheaper. The child can live on just one. No?”
“It’s the same work.”
“I’ll call in a few days.”
“The doctor wants to go on vacation. We expect delivery Friday.”
“And today, what did you bring me?”
“A heart. It’s hard to believe they’re so small. The size of a golf ball.” The voice was approaching the kitchen.
Instinctively, Rafaela slipped outside the door and listened to the footsteps, the sound of the refrigerator door, and the soft clunk of plastic on the cold shelf. When the kitchen seemed empty again, she slipped in and opened the refrigerator door, foolishly gripping Sol’s bottle as an excuse. Cold air bathing her hot skin, she seized the handle of what she recognized to be a small hard plastic cooler. It was the sort she used to carry around back home to keep Sol’s bottles of milk chilled. It wasn’t very big at all. With the ice packed in, she could, at most, get a small bottle and a fruit in it. Perhaps because it seemed so familiar reminded her of her attachment to Sol—she was able to snatch that blue and white container nestled between leftover cake and a piece of cheese as if it were her own and stuff it into the canvas bag.
Export. Import. It was not just any conversation spoken in a bubble of intrigue. It did not make any sense, but it made Rafaela’s heart race. Suddenly she realized her recklessness. From the corner of her eye, she caught sight of Doña Maria’s son Hernando, a fearful meeting of faces in reflective glass. Who was this man whose yell and whose whisper both worked a terrible knot at a tender place in her womb? Not just any starving two-year-old. What could it mean? Sol. Sol was not starving. He was not just any two-year-old.
Rafaela stumbled from the kitchen, racing toward the field of corn with her new possession feeling suddenly very heavy, but the more she ran, the farther it seemed to be. She could see the distant figures of Doña Maria and Sol with his salted cob wandering in and out of the corn, wandering as if in some timeless space, at every moment farther and farther. Her heaving breath pummeled in her ears. How long would it take to run such a distance? Breathless, she stretched her arms reaching toward Sol. To everything there seemed to be an eerie liquid elasticity. How far must she race? How far must she reach to touch her Sol?
CHAPTER 19:
Hour of the TrucksThe Freeway Canyon
Manzanar concentrated on a noise that sounded like a mix of an elephant and the wail of a whale, concentrating until it moaned through the downtown canyons, shuddered past the on-ramps and echoed up and down the one-ten. There was an instinctual recognition of this noise by those who could hear it. The salutary marching orchestral backdrop à la Yojimbo/Atom Boy hinted at the original Godzilla theme. It was slightly cartoonish, and the timing was purposely out of sync as if the entire thing—even Godzilla’s wail—were dubbed. This was The Hour of the Trucks which Manzanar conceived of in his strangely organic vision, appropriate if one were to compare the beastly size of semis, garbage trucks, moving vans, and concrete mixers to the largest monsters of the animal kingdom—living and extinct, all rumbling ponderously along the freeway.
Manzanar knew the frustration of the ordinary motorist wedged between trucks—the nauseous flush of diesel exhaust and interrupted visibility—but he also understood the nature of the truck beast, whose purpose was to transport the great products of civilization: home and office appliances, steel beams and turbines, fruits, vegetables, meats, and grain, Coca-Cola and Sparkletts, Hollywood sets, this fall’s fashions, military hardware, gasoline, concrete, and garbage. Nothing was more or less important. And it was all moving here and there, back and forth, from the harbor to the train station to the highway to the warehouse to the airport to the docking station to the factory to the dump site.
The slain semis with their great stainless steel tanks had sprawled across five lanes, bleeding precious fuel over the asphalt. The smaller vehicles of the automotive kingdom gawked with a certain reverence or huddled near, impatiently awaiting a resolution. Police cars and motorcycles, followed by ambulances and fire trucks, sirened and blinked meandering and treacherous paths between lanes and over shoulders to the sites. Helicopters hovered, swooping-in occasionally for a closer shot, a giant vortex of scavengers. The great land-roving semis lay immobile, dwarfing everything—even the formidable red fire trucks, poising themselves defensively around the victims.
When the tanks blew and the great walls of flames flew up the brush and ivy along the freeway canyon, Manzanar knew instinctively the consequences, knew that his
humble encampment wedged against a retaining wall and hidden in oleander would soon be a pile of ash. To leave his perch and abandon his music to save his home would be a useless and dangerous enterprise. Anything of personal value he carried in one of his numerous pockets. He would lose some books, magazines, a lantern, cooking utensils, bedding, a change of clothing, soap. For those who had nothing, this was everything.
Manzanar continued to conduct, watching the fire engulf the slope. Even he, who knew the dense hidden community living on the no-man’s-land of public property, was surprised by the numbers of people who descended the slopes. Men, women, and children, their dogs and even cats, bedding, and caches of cans and bottles in great green garbage sacks and shopping carts moved into public view, sidling along the lines of abandoned cars, gawking into windows and kicking tires, remarking on the models, ages, and colors, as if at a great used car dealership. From Manzanar’s perspective, and given its length of one mile, it was the greatest used car dealership.
The vans and camper trailers went first; then the gas guzzlers—oversized Cadillacs with their spacious pink and red vinyl interiors, and blue Buicks. A sleek white limousine with black interior was in particular favor. A spacious interior with storage space was favored, while the exterior condition of a car was deemed of secondary importance. Never mind the bondo sanding projects in the works, a falling muffler, or the crushed brake light patched with red plastic. Boxy Volvos and Mercedes, and Taurus station wagons, had the advantages of space and sturdy structure. Some wondered if good tires weren’t a necessity. Compacts were more popular than two-seater sports cars. Porches, Corvettes, Jaguars, and Miatas were suddenly relegated to the status of sitting or powder rooms or even telephone booths (those having cellular phones). Convertibles remained as before: toys. Children clambered over them; adults sat in them and laughed.
In a matter of minutes, life filled a vacuum, reorganizing itself in predictable and unpredictable ways. Occasional disputes over claims to territory arose, but for the moment, there were more than sufficient vehicles to accommodate this game of musical chairs. Indeed it was a game, a fortunate lottery, and for the transient, understandably impermanent and immediate. Besides, great walls of fire raged at both ends. What to do now? What to do next? Kids lined up next to a black Beemer with smoked windows to call a 1-800 How Am I Driving? number. A commissary truck opened for business, as did a recycling truck. A moving van was emptied of its contents: washing machines, refrigerators, ovens, chairs, tables, sofas, beds, carpets, barbecue pits, lawn mowers, etc. Watermelons, bananas, and cantaloupes were hauled off one truck, as were Wonder Bread, Cacique tortillas, and Trader Joe’s fresh pasta. Someone passed out bottles of Tejava and Snapple. Cases of cold Perrier were taken to the fiery front.
A scattered chorus of car alarms honked and beeped. Why in God’s name anyone should evacuate a car on a freeway and trigger the alarm one could only speculate; the decision had been made by at least a dozen motorists. The variety and frequency of these car alarms fascinated Manzanar who accommodated them in his score with appropriate irony. These sounds joined the thudder of helicopters, the sirens of fire trucks, the commentary of newscasters, the opening and slamming of car doors, hoods, trunks, and glove compartments, and the general chatter of festive shopping and looting. It was one of those happy riots. Manzanar wondered if the storming of the Bastille could not be compared to the storming of this mile-long abandoned car lot. Perhaps not.
The Hour of the Trucks was an hour outside of the general rush, but it created its own intensity. In this case, it was quite a mess. As the semis went up in flames, there were the usual questions of traffic safety, whether trucks should be confined to operation during the hours between midnight and dawn or to truck-only corridors. As the homeless flocked onto the freeway, there were also the usual questions of shelter and jobs, drug rehabilitation, and the closing of mental health facilities. And as car owners watched on TV sets or from the edges of the freeway canyon, there were the usual questions of police protection, insurance coverage, and acts of God. The average citizen viewed these events and felt overwhelmed with the problems, felt sympathy, or anger and impotence. There was also an imminent collective sense of immediate live real-time action, better than live sports whose results—one or another team’s demise—were predictable, and better than CNN whose wars were in foreign countries with names nobody could truly pronounce. Of course everyone remembered the last time they had gathered on freeways to watch a spectacle; white Broncos had since become the vehicle of choice. Not surprisingly, the CHP and AAA together reported at least a dozen instances of white Broncos driven to some finality: E on the gas tank, over a Malibu cliff, to Terminal Island, etc.
Manzanar pressed on through the spectacle that the present circumstances would soon become, the chatter of silly and profound commentary, the cruel jokes, and the utterly violent assumption underlying everything: that the homeless were expendable, that citizens had a right to protect their property with firearms, and that fire, regardless of whether it was in your fireplace or TV set or whether you clutched a can of beer or fingered a glass of Chardonnay, was mesmerizing. All of these elements shifted bizarrely through the movement barely controllable by Manzanar’s deft style. Sweat poured from his brow, spattered from the tips of his white mane. Fear rose to his throat, clutching terribly. For the first time, he considered abandoning his effort as he had once abandoned his surgical practice, and yet an uncanny sense of the elasticity of the moment, of time and space, forced his hands and arms to continue. He was facing south on his overpass podium, and he knew the entire event was being moved, stretched. And he was quite sure that the direction was south. Yes, south, for the time being.
CHAPTER 20:
Disaster Movie WeekHiro’s Sushi
“Have you ever seen an I heart L.A. sticker? People here heart everything else—Ensenada, Hussong’s, Taos, Alaskan Huskies, Guatemala, even New York. That L.A. is a desert paradise, sunshine, blond people, insipid, romantic is B.S. Nobody hearts L.A.” Emi straddled the stool with crossed legs, toes balancing a black heel, her skirt slipping up and down her thighs. She leaned away from the bar momentarily and carefully masticated and moaned. Albacore, wasabi, shoyu, vinegared rice. To die for. Her eyes narrowed and glanced over at Gabriel’s conservative offering of kappa and tekkamaki. She watched him pincer a cucumber roll and swab it in shoyu.
“Hmmm,” Gabriel stuffed the thing in his mouth and nodded. “But I thought you liked the Rose Parade. All those Pasadena señoras,” he swallowed and continued, “playing Castilian Ramonas in black lace shawls on rows of prancing Palominos and bending bosoms to get an interview with Bill Welch.”
Emi grimaced. “Try that,” she pointed through the glass. “Just try it. It’s gooey duck, but I swear it’s not gooey. He wants that,” she announced to the sushimaker, then continued, “Did I tell you? A green-type from Colorado asked me whether we recycle the flowers after the parade. I told her we donate it all to a sachet business that retails in expensive Beverly Hills boutiques which in turn supports a home for battered wives and kids.”
“Maybe we do.”
“Speaking of sachet. I couldn’t get past the first chapter of that book.”
“Chandler? What’s the problem?”
“Orchids don’t smell. They don’t overwhelm you with a languid trop-i-cal perfuuume. Have you ever heard of orchid sachet? Fragrance de Catalaya? Ask any J.A. gardener. Ask any J.A. Ask my dad. Does his greenhouse make your head woozy?”
“Maybe black-and-white orchids smell. The famous Noir Orchid, Angel. I’m surprised a J.A. like you never heard of it.” The sushimaker plopped the gooey duck couple in front of Gabriel. “You may have to eat it yourself,” grimaced Gabriel.
“Just try it. We’ve got to find something else you’ll eat besides those kappas. You might as well eat in any supermarket deli. My mom makes those.”
“I like your mom’s better. She puts sesame seeds and jalapeños in mine. I even like the politically
incorrect Spam ones and those tofu bags, too.”
“Footballs.”
“Yeah.”
“Picnic sushi,” Emi sneered. “I can’t take you anywhere.”
“Take me to a Japanese American picnic,” he quipped.
Emi poured another round of tepid sake and stared over the head of the sushimaker at the TV. “I’m glad you have a TV,” she complimented him. “Some sushi bars are too Zen to have one.”
“I like sports,” said the sushimaker.
“Sports sushi,” nodded Gabriel. “Why don’t you make footballs?”
Emi rolled her eyes. The sushimaker continued, “Usually I got on ESPN, but people want a update on the freeway fire.”
Emi nodded. “And it’s hump day. Movie of the week tonight: Canyon Fires. Do you think it can compete?” Emi waited for Gabriel to be appalled.
“Compete?” He shook his head. After all, the movie was on full screen, but the station had conveniently carved out a corner box with continuous coverage of the freeway fire from the NewsNow copter. From time to time, captioning strutted by announcing a dead fireman and how many charred vehicles. The station couldn’t lose. Commercial time rolled along, and so did live action news.
“No difference,” observed the sushimaker. “Fire here. Fire here.” He pointed to the screen and subscreen.
At home, Emi had a set with its own screening boxes. “Look at this,” she had announced to Gabriel when she bought the thing. “I can watch four stations at once if necessary.” This feature had almost finished the relationship. It was taking things to the edge when Emi tried it in conjunction with one of Gabriel’s classic black and whites. He came back from the kitchen with Dos Equis, salsa, and chips only to find Murder, My Sweet in the lower left quarter of the screen, competing with Hard Copy, CNN, and The Three Tenors. If Emi had her way, she would watch TV at Circuit City. She was used to being in a control room watching her network and the competition simultaneously. At any moment, she could judge which channel had the more exciting screen.
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