Between Heaven and Here

by Susan Straight

  Alfonso had no choice after midnight. He’d been drinking Coke, laughing to himself about how Coke had come from cocaine and Georgia and, what, they had put the powder in the soda back then? and it was a leaf from down in Colombia and some dude had to plant it and water it and pick it—just like sugar cane when he was in Louisiana, and that was a stalk—and then somebody had to, what, dry it? Wait—there was a paste and then powder, and that was Victor made Alfonso think all this anyway, the analogies and the sentence completions. Dirt, mud, earth, sand, powder.

  Alley dirt like powder. People walking and driving all the time, so the bathroom situation wasn’t working. Crackheads looking for JZ or heading to Launderland. Men looking for Sisia and Glorette and the other strawberries. Mexicans coming out the back door after they ate at Los Tres or the taqueria because someone who looked like la migra came in the front. The Mexicans who worked there, dumping wash water or trash or taking a smoke break.

  He passed the open back door of the nail salon. The two Vietnamese women were playing cards with a man. That chemical smell rushed out and made his eyes water.

  The only place to go was the space between the shed and the wild tobacco trees. The back of somebody’s yard, and they’d cut the chainlink fence and put in a metal shed, and there was a gap along the side. A little cave under the bushes. He felt bad for a minute, for whoever lived there, but he had no choice. He wasn’t buying another taco, and he didn’t want to go another block to the video store or Sundown Liquor. The old dudes were always in the parking lot there—Chess and Lafayette and Reynaldo played dominoes under the pepper tree in the back, and they’d yang and yang about why he was riding with JZ.

  Punk ass. Knucklehead. You gon do time. Just wait. Somebody gon get killed.

  He slid himself along the metal wall. It was hot as a griddle after pancakes. Still smelled new. He peed on the dried weeds at the base of the shed. Then he heard the wheels of a shopping cart. He stood still against the hot metal.

  Glorette. She kept a shopping cart sometimes. She had the ramen in a plastic bag. Ten for a dollar.

  She had stopped to smoke. She must not want to share with Sisia this time. He heard the hiss of the match and the sucking in of her breath. He looked out carefully. He hardly ever saw crackheads smoke. The rock glowed like a tiny star inside the pipe. An old air freshener tube. Somebody else made them with a blowtorch and sold them.

  She dropped it on the dirt. The smallest sound. Then he heard Fly. “I told you.”

  She had come up behind Glorette. The van was nowhere. Fly had walked. Maybe the old dude had taken the van and left her.

  Fly was saying something to Glorette. About her hair. How it was a weave. She grabbed Glorette’s bun and jerked her head back, and then all the hair fell out the bun and over Fly’s arm. Like black seaweed.

  Glorette didn’t say anything. Her face was turned up to the sky. What was she lookin at? What was he supposed to do? Head out there and punch Fly for being a crazy bitch? The nine was in the car. What if her pimp came rolling down the alley in the van?

  Shit. Fly was still pulling the hair back and Glorette’s neck was bent like a giraffe. Her legs so thin, buckling under her like a giraffe. Gazelle. Antelope. Doe. Shit. Victor’s words. That was Victor’s moms.

  Fly was bent over the shopping cart. Doing something. She was still talking, but it was too low for Alfonso to hear. He closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see any weird shit. Was she stealing the ramen? That would be fucked up. Then he didn’t hear her anymore.

  He waited for Glorette to walk past the shed. Walk away. But she didn’t. He heard another rat, on the roof of the shed. Whispering clawed toes. Right over his head.

  Alfonso looked back out at the alley. Glorette was on her knees. But not all the way to her knees. Her hair was tied to the handle of the cart. Her head was jerked back so far she was staring at the night sky and her mouth was wide open.

  She wasn’t moving.

  He edged out from the shed wall, the metal corner burning up. Glorette’s bottom teeth white like a little bracelet lying in her mouth. No breath. Nothing. Noise all around—music bumping from an apartment window, dogs down the block, helicopter a few miles away—but having a person this near and total silence made him so scared he felt one more drop of pee slide out. Victor’s moms. Her ramen like books stacked in the bag. She came to his moms’ yard once when he was little and showed him how if you stood in the right place, the full moon would light up the palm fronds like some god plugged in the tree.

  Shit. Alfonso pulled his head back in and then he heard Sisia hollering, “Glorette! What the hell you doin? You was supposed to meet me at twelve. I been waitin all this time!”

  She came down the alley. Her high heels crunching in the sandy dirt. “What you trippin on, girl? Why you down here like this? Where he go?” She sounded pissed. “See, you had to have that one. I told you I wanted him, cause he wasn’t so bad, and you start laughing and say he want you. You had to take him. He wasn’t lookin right in the head. Anybody go with some bitch like New York there got a problem.”

  So the pimp had tried to get both of them? Or another dude? But that was Fly, just now. No one else.

  Alfonso steadied himself against the metal wall. A new wasp nest above him. Sweat ran down his back into his waistband. If he came out now, Sisia might think he did this, that he went off on Glorette. For what? For product?

  Because JZ told him to. He was the killer. Anybody would believe that. He did what JZ needed him to do. They’d think Glorette had stolen some product. They’d tell Victor, Dude, Alfonso was right there, man. Cold-blooded. I never knew he was such a cold motherfucker.

  “No. No. Glorette.” Sisia was slapping her face. Alfonso moved his head slowly. One eye around the corner. The ridged tin burning his cheek. Sisia had untied Glorette’s hair. All that hair. She was picking her up. The body so thin. Like a movie. And she put Glorette inside the shopping cart and sat down in the dirt and cried.

  He kept his face against the wall. After a while Sisia got up and left. He heard only her heels in the dirt again. Not the cart.

  She couldn’t call patrol either. She couldn’t say what had happened. They might think she was the one. They’d take her in.

  Alfonso slid down to a squat and waited. Two more rats crossed the wires to the nectarine tree and he could hear them in the dry leaves. A few trucks and cars with systems went by on Palm, a block away—bass and drum like heartbeats when you weren’t in the car right next to the speakers.

  He waited for a long time for quiet. Complete quiet. It came, and he couldn’t even hear crickets. No heartbeat. Nothing.

  He edged out of the space where his own pee had dried long ago. He didn’t want to look at Glorette. She was dead. No blood. Fly hadn’t had a knife—he’d have heard. When Fly tied her hair back like that, maybe she broke Glorette’s neck. He was frozen, a few feet from the cart, and a breeze came up and rustled the plastic bag. Victor’s dinner. Then Alfonso felt his face filling with tears—how did his cheeks and mouth and everything feel big and salty? He hated that, when he was a baby and his mother had laughed. The plastic moved soft, sounded like glitter thrown in the air.

  Alfonso ran toward the corner where the nail salon was closed now, and just when he reached the sidewalk Chess came around and almost knocked him down. “Hey, youngblood, you need to chill,” Chess said. “You ain’t playin football now. Why you in such a damn hurry? You jack somebody?” He started laughing. “Lookin all suspect. You just get some in the alley?”

  Alfonso backed off. Chess used to be a baller, back in the day. He had bow legs in his sweats. Chess held up his hands and Alfonso headed across the street. The Navigator was gone. Don’t go down the alley, he thought. Don’t go that way. But he heard Chess say, “That Sidney fool ass up there?” and he made himself walk slowly down Jacaranda.

  He didn’t run. At Jacaranda Gardens, Victor’s apartment window was dark. He stood in front of the door marked with a million dark
fingerprints from people banging on the gray paint, and then he was afraid Chess had followed him, so he moved down the walkway, holding on to the wrought-iron railing, past all the window coolers that growled and growled, and knocked on Angie’s door.

  She was braiding a girl’s hair in front of the TV and he said, “Can I sleep in the back? Just for a while?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Where your bighead partner?”

  He said, “I don’t know. I ain’t seen him for awhile. Please?” He thought he would faint. Like a girl. She nodded.

  HE DIDN’T WAKE until near three the next day. Angie had stuffed a towel under the door so it had stayed quiet. He opened the door and smelled burning hair. Angie was flat-ironing someone. “I didn’t say nothin to nobody, Fonso,” she said, pulling the hair toward her like sparkling black threads. “I figured you needed to rest. You looked like you had a fever.”

  The hair. It made him nearly throw up, and he ran to the bathroom and washed his face. The smell of lotion and shampoo and hair. Alfonso went out to the front room and said, “I’m cool. But thanks.”

  She nodded.

  Little kids played in the courtyard. Someone barbecued on a little Weber between Angie’s door and Victor’s. Victor’s door was closed. The blinds dangled and shivered in the wind from the AC.

  He walked down the hot sidewalk. It was too far to walk home. To Sarrat. He walked the other way, to the city college. He was supposed to meet Victor. The quad was deserted. Victor must have found his moms. The sun was blazing. He found a pay phone. A fucking pay phone. He’d left his cell in the Navigator. Jazen said, “Who the fuck this?”

  “Me,” Alfonso said.

  And Jazen was silent. For a long time. He finally said, “I don’t know what the hell happened in the alley, but Chess put the word out he gon kill you. You better get gone for a few days, man. On y’all farm out there in the trees.”

  HE STAYED IN Sarrat four days, listening to his mother’s voice like a radio you couldn’t turn off. That first night he came out and walked in the orange groves, when he knew Enrique was looking for him on the Westside. He knew his mother lied about where he was. In the morning, he got the golf cart out of the shed where he’d hidden it, after the stupid white kid gave it to him in payment. He’d heard saws in the barn. He knew the old man was hunting. But after he talked to Enrique, Alfonso slept with his little brothers in one bed, their breath ketchup-hot and red. He knew he’d have to go back to Jazen in three more days, because his mother would be out of cash by then, and the bootleg brother wasn’t coming around.

  If Jazen hadn’t already gotten Tiquan to ride with him for the day, and Tiquan hadn’t insisted on staying in the backseat that night since he was a youngster and thought this was his chance, and if Chess hadn’t been drunk enough by eleven that he stood there in the parking lot of Sundown Liquor and waited for them to drive past and then shouted at Alfonso, “She just fuckin disappeared? Like the Rapture? No, young-blood!” If he hadn’t lifted his hand with his index finger like a gun so that Alfonso would know he was going to come sooner or later, and if Tiquan wasn’t a little fool and he’d just let Alfonso do what he needed to do….

  Chess finished pretending to shoot him and held out his palms like “What, you don’t believe me?” and Alfonso aimed just for his left hand, the pink outside edge. But Tiquan rolled down his own window and fired, too.

  Alfonso’s bullet went through the webbing of skin between Chess’ last two fingers. Tiquan’s went into his chest.

  ALFONSO TOOK THE old white Toyota truck. He wasn’t going back to Chino. Jazen had kept the truck in a storage yard off Palm. It was lowered like from the nineties, and when Alfonso drove it across the desert, through Arizona and New Mexico and Texas to Louisiana, to his mother’s Uncle Henri who had a wooden house way out in the canefields, he kept the radio off most of the time. First he heard words—all those words, like Victor’s moths. But by the second night, he just heard humming.

  BRIDGE WORK

  SHE WAS THERE the first day Mike’s crew started the earthquake retrofit of the Central Avenue bridge, coming out from the huge oleander bushes that lined the banks along the freeway. He’d never been up close to a horse, only seen pictures of them, but that’s what her legs looked like. Big and round at the thigh, narrow and long at the calf. She had on those tight bike shorts like most of the hookers around Rio Seco.

  Mike watched her make her way down the loose dirt, hidden from the freeway by one pepper tree and the huge humped oleanders. The only other people they ever saw here along the interstates were homeless, or prisoners doing cleanup with their bright orange shirts and matching plastic bags. He didn’t like to look at them, since he probably knew some of the guys or their sons. “Hard to tell if it’s men or women, since everybody wears ponytails,” his wife Shelly would say, staring from the slow lane. “I guess it’s better they pick up trash than just sit around in jail. I can’t imagine being out there in this heat.”

  I’m out in the heat every day, he thought, with Gary and Les and Jose. Happy to be sweating even in August because Sanderson Construction had gotten the contracts for all the retrofits. Ten bridges in Rio Seco County, and this was his crew’s first. They were setting up the scaffolding, clearing out remnants of someone living in the black cave of overpass. Newspapers, a box soft from someone’s sweat. Coke cans and a pair of socks. Men’s socks. Not hers.

  She stopped at the edge of the scaffolding, and the crew all glanced down. “Twenty bucks,” she said. “For whatever.”

  Her hair was dark blonde, the color of dried foxtails along the street, and her lips were so chapped Mike saw a trace of blood in a crack. Maybe that was why she kept her mouth closed when she talked.

  “Come on,” she said, nodding at Jose. “You want a guera, or what?”

  Jose was surprised, Mike could tell. “You speak Spanish?”

  “Sometimes,” she said, her breath heaving her small breasts under the tank top. “When I need the money.”

  Les laughed and said, “Go for it, Jose, come on. She wants you. You’re the one.”

  Mike watched Jose look back at the company truck parked in the sandy spot on the other side of the bridge, like he expected Danny Sanderson, the boss’s son, to holler at him over the radio any minute. Les thought that was hilarious. He was constantly ragging on Jose. “You can’t use the truck, you gotta take her back to the bushes,” Les said. “Unless you don’t want none. Too early in the morning, right, cause in Mexico you always slept late? Cause you didn’t have a job.”

  “Shut up, man,” Gary said. He hated almost every word Les said. Mike tried not to listen, especially when Les talked about women, because Mike was the only one married and Les usually added on to the end of whatever sex story he told something like, “Well, shit, I guess Mike wouldn’t know, since he’s been screwing the same woman since the Iron Age.”

  Gary was only twenty, never been married. Jose’s wife was somewhere in Mexico and he’d been here ten years, and Les was divorced. Twice. That was why he didn’t like women too much, except in a bar and then, Mike guessed, preferably in the dark.

  “I got the same job as you now, cabrón,” Jose said, and the girl moved her feet in the dirt, turning around.

  “Whatever,” Mike heard her mumble, and then Les said, “Hey. Can you cuss good in Spanish? English, too? Can you say whatever I tell you to?”

  She shrugged, and Les climbed on down the scaffold. Jose said, “Shit,” and shook his head.

  Gary called, “Hey, Les, I’m not doing your work, I mean it.”

  Les just disappeared into the oleander behind the girl. The bushes were so big and the leaves pointed like knives, each hedge was like a line of green-splintered explosions. The county had planted those oleanders along the freeway when it was finished, when Mike was five, and he remembered the stems stuck like arrows in the steep-banked dirt when his dad drove along the black road for the first time, hauling a truckload of crated oranges to Los Angeles. His dad
used to rent a house out in Sarrat from the Antoines, and Mike picked oranges after school.

  They kept working on the scaffold, laying the wood planks. Didn’t hear anything, didn’t say anything, until Les came back through the tunnel between bushes, the top of his blond brushcut bobbing along like a furry sun. He kept his head down because he was buttoning his jeans, and when he looked up, Mike could tell Les wanted to make sure everyone saw him doing that.

  “WHAT’S A GUERA?” Gary asked the next day, at dawn. Mike hadn’t seen her since she came out ten minutes after Les the day before, and headed straight down the sidewalk toward the store. Maybe she’d come back after dark, he’d kept thinking while they laid out the rebar. Down Central was a church, a park, a Kentucky Fried, and a liquor store. She was too young to drink, he thought, but hell, she was too young to be asking for twenty dollars and laying down in the dirt. She couldn’t be much older than his daughter Katie.

  “A blondie,” Jose said. “Guera means white girl.”

  “She’s not a true blonde,” Les said, with that shitty grin like he’d had yesterday, when Mike couldn’t believe he’d walked off the site without even looking back at him or the truck or the sign that said Sidewalk Closed. “All the way down, if you know what I mean,” Les said. Shut up, Mike thought. Shut the hell up. Man, it’s my crew, been my crew five years, and you do too much talking, too much deciding about lunch, and way less work than anybody else. Les was forty, five years older than Mike, and he got away with a lot because of his size and the way he could charm the secretaries and even the guys at the yard with his stories. Mostly the crew just wanted him to shut up because every story got old at dawn on a site, especially under a bridge.

  There were crews working all over California, Mike figured, after all the quakes in the last ten years. He’d be smelling the pee and wet dirt and exhaust, climbing up and down the scaffolding as they built it, remembering bunk beds. A line of stuck traffic bumped and screeched behind them early on, but by ten, the street was pretty quiet. That’s when she came down the hill, scuffling and concentrating until she got to the bottom of the scaffold.