Zellman laughed. “He met some lecturer from Biology at the meeting. I guess she’s got her own car.”
Doesn’t everybody? Victor studied the dashboard, the old-fashioned instruments.
Zellman said, “I wanted to play something else for you.” He took out the CD and put in another silver disc. Victor imagined him spinning them all on his fingers like an entertainer at a fair. Then he heard the opening guitar, and felt like a stick poked him in the breastbone. “Love Rollercoaster.” Ohio Players. His mother had danced to that. She showed him one night. The rollercoaster. Swaying her shoulders, moving her feet.
Zellman said, “You write really well. Distinctive ideas, man. You know the Chili Peppers version, right? You could try a piece on black originals and white remakes. Ohio Players were wild. I can send it to this zine.”
ONE TIME. HE was twelve, and the Celica was in the carport just under their floor and his mother passed out somewhere, and Sisia came yelling for him to come get her. Victor had pushed down on the gas with his shoe and seen the red light flash—he still had those stupid-ass shoes that lit up when you stepped—and then the car inched back out of the space like a basketball player working the ball into the paint. Back, back, back. He turned the wheel slowly and went off the curb.
He asked Irwin for his keys, so he could move the Honda closer to the porch when he washed it. “Dude, you should put some gravel down here, for the winter,” Irwin said, and Victor nodded.
“Yeah, bro, good idea.”
He felt the powerful vibrations of the Honda engine under his legs, in his forehead, and moved the car carefully across the dirt. The exhaust felt so strong he pictured a cartoon car, with puffs of smoke behind him, and the stereo system shook his fingers on the wheel.
When he got out of the car, the campus cop was staring at him from the street. “And that ain’t your vehicle? You just playin with it, like a toy? Your time about up, son.”
“Unless you from Detroit, I ain’t your son. I’m Glorette Picard’s son.” He shut Irwin’s door carefully, and kept his back to the cop. He didn’t hear the campus security car leave for a long time, but the cop didn’t say another word.
MARCUS SAID, “YOU registered for Spring?”
Victor shook his head.
“What? You can’t quit.”
“I’m not quittin. I just have to keep the lot goin right now, and the scheduling won’t work.” Victor heard his grandfather inside the screen, breathing noisy in the cold. Victor had built a fire, banked and low.
He said, “In January, I’ma pay somebody to watch the cars while I’m in class. Somebody who don’t want to steal a 64 Impala. Every couple days, Jazen and Tiquan cruise by and fuck with me.”
“Ah, yeah. Like a piece of steak sittin in front of a dog.”
“A Rottweiler.”
“A Rockwilder. That’s how Jazen would say it.”
They laughed, and Victor said, “Nobody would get that except you. Nobody across the street. Zellman might be tight with it, but he doesn’t get the six-four. Or Jazen.”
“That’s his ’Stang?”
“Yeah. Rolling Stones. Rollercoaster. He’s messin up my list.” He hesitated, even with Marcus. “See, I like makin lists. What cars and CDs and clothes go with each one. Dudes like him, then ones like Irwin with the big cash. Brothas like Jazen.”
House of Pain. Insane.
He thought of Zellman. Zine. “I gotta get you guys to hang. Listen to some music.”
MAYELI SAT WITH him in the Impala one night. She had taken the bus, because her aunt wouldn’t bring her. He said, “You not afraid?”
She laughed, low in her chest. “We didn’t even have current in Teakettle Village. Was dark all the time. Much darker than here.”
Current. He put his arms around her, and her lips tasted of coffee and lipgloss. Was that the slick sweetness?
“Quoi faire?” he whispered. “Means what you wanna do?”
“Stay here. Nice and dark, yes.”
But hours later, she said, “My auntie think you look like Nelly. She hates Nelly. She say you never work hard and your ideas maybe come to fruition, maybe not.”
Victor wanted to tell her to say fruition again. But it wasn’t funny. Would the woman rather have him out making major cash with Jazen? “Where’s your moms?” he asked Mayeli, and her back stiffened under his hands.
“She died. In Teakettle. She was fishing on a boat with my uncle—a wave knock over the boat. Call it a rogue wave.” She was silent for a long time, her breath trailing a veil of silver in the cold.
But the next day, she drove her aunt’s car to Iris Street, bringing coffee beans from Belize for his grandpère. Victor roasted and ground them like his grandmother had taught him, put them in the big drip pot she had brought from Louisiana forty years ago. His grandmother always said to his mother, “That pot older than you, ti-fille.” Pot always be older than her, Victor thought, and shook off the ripple that attacked his shoulder.
The fog hung in the trees now, leaves dripping like thousands of eyelashes. The coffee was darker, stronger than he’d ever tasted, and Mayeli said, “Because in Belize, we grow the food better.” His grandfather was on the second cup when Zellman, Patrini, and Jameson all came in at the same time.
Zellman came up to the porch and shouted, “My God. Who’s brewing that? Smells way better than Starbucks.”
“Me,” Victor said.
“Bro, you have got to let me have a taste.”
Victor poured him a cup, though his grandfather frowned and went back inside.
Zellman blew on the surface, steam and breath and fog all blending near the porch railing. “Okay, now I’d pay you five dollars for a cup of this to get me started before a stupid faculty workshop like today’s. Three hours of tedium and—”
“Tenure issues,” Patrini said, grabbing the cup.
Mayeli said, “He brew coffee every morning. He can make extra, certain.” She moved her eyelashes, not her eyes, at Victor. He shrugged, but she said, “Five dollar seem steep. Maybe two, yes?”
When Mayeli sat on the porch with him—“Looka the bonnet on the red car—get a bird gift for you!”—he felt like he was wearing his headphones. At night she tasted his neck, she let him pull her hair from the tight elastic, but when things got serious, she said, “I cannot have no baby. And don’t say it—nothing failsafe, no? Nothing trustworthy. And you not interested in a real job.”
He pulled away and thought he’d be angrier. But all he felt was broke. Finally he said, “I still want the big time. And then I want to get a master’s like Zellman.”
Mayeli twisted her hair hard into the knot at the back of her skull. She had cooked coconut rice, and he’d watched her wrist when she held the wooden spoon. He’d never seen his mother’s wrist or hand move like that.
He walked her back to the farmer’s market, where she had to meet her aunt. He said, “So you sayin you ain’t got time to wait?”
She kissed him, around the corner, before they saw the tarpaulin and silver frame where the t-shirts flew. “My brother coming next week. He get a tattoo say ‘Thug Life,’ for preparation. I worry about the money. Every day.”
Victor saw the flames from a carnitas stand, a drum barbecue, a Mexican woman heating corn tortillas like full moons amid the smoke. He thought, My mother never swirled anything into boiling water, never held a wooden spoon. Those tacos from El Ojo de Agua—my favorite food in the world. Carnitas tacos, with pico de gallo. Her fingers like sign language when she opened the bags.
HE PAINTED A small sign and nailed it to one of the porch pillars. It couldn’t get him into trouble, because it didn’t advertise anything except where he had begun his journey in life, a mile away at the city hospital.
La Reina.
Queen of somebody’s heart.
He had asked Zellman last week. Zellman said, “My favorite food? My mother makes this brisket. If I take a bite, I’m like seven years old.”
Victor had no idea w
hat brisket was, but he ate the last bowl of Mayeli’s coconut rice.
He sold the coffee in Styrofoam cups printed with beans. He detailed cars. Enrique brought a load of fine pea gravel and they raked it over the dirt. The wind made him nervous. Enrique saw campus security cruising past and said, “Quoi faire? Street a bayou and he fishin. Want to catch you wrong.”
The cop must have smelled too much coffee, Victor thought, because he stopped the car, got out, hitched up his belt, and walked into the yard.
He must have seen Patrini and Zellman with cups. Then Victor’s grandfather squinted and said, “You. Narcisse Belarde boy, you.”
The officer said, “Excuse me, now, sir. I’m thirty-six years old. Not no boy.”
“You Narcisse Junior.”
Marcus watched the campus cop look past the entire house, to the arroyo, irritated.
His grandfather said, “You know me? This Glorette boy. My Glorette.”
Then the man’s chest rose and fell under his khaki shirt. Victor saw it. My moms. Queen of the Westside every time she walked. Narcisse. The old Valentine. Damn.
The campus police car idled, big engine humming. “Somebody’s gonna catch you without a city permit. I’m not the only one patrollin.”
“You the only one keep drive past here,” Grandpère said.
“That won’t last forever.”
Victor waited until Belarde got back into his car, and then he said, “Nothin last forever, right?”
The cop pulled forward a few feet, closer to Victor where he sat on the low stone wall. “Now you sellin coffee? You crazy?”
Victor shrugged. “They got a bank inside Kinko’s, man. A Starbucks inside the Cinema Eight. You gotta diversify.”
BUT THAT NIGHT, he remembered where he’d seen Belarde’s scar.
His mother had just taken their things to Sisia’s apartment at El Dorado. A creamy yellow stucco building. Victor said, “I don’t know where the bus comes!” He’d screamed at her, the first time. He was in third grade. She was sleeping on the couch, it was early morning, and Sisia yelled at him, “Go out to Palm Avenue and wait!”
When he got there a yellow bus was already leaving, and he ran behind it for three blocks. Then a cop pulled up and said, “Hey, hey, little man, where you tryin to go?”
The scar. Belarde. He’d put Victor in the hot car and Victor said, “My mama moved yesterday and I can’t find my school.”
“What’s your name?” His shirt was pressed stiff.
“Victor Picard.”
“Picard?” The cop whistled.
He took Victor to the elementary school, which was only six blocks away. Victor had gotten turned around on the narrow streets lined with pepper trees and apartment buildings. He took Victor into the school office and signed him in late, said the boy’s mother had a flat tire and had called him for help.
After that, Victor had seen the patrol car three days in a row, idling at the corner of Jessamine and Palm, heat rising off the hood, Belarde looking up from a clipboard to meet his eyes and raise his chin an inch.
Then they’d moved again.
In the cold, waiting for the 7–10 pm classes to let out, he played his mother’s favorite songs over and over. Two cassettes she’d never let anyone take. She had never bought a CD, before she started losing everything. She even kept a damn 8-track once, he remembered, big as a square-cut pizza slice in his hands.
Now he played her music. “Poinciana.” Then Kool and the Gang: “Summer Madness,” with the organ and synthesizer. Even now, in November, in the stone wall his grandfather and Enrique had helped build for Mr. Batiste, whose Impala still smelled of his aftershave, a few crickets sang from their hollows.
ON VICTOR’S BIRTHDAY, the first day of finals in December, Jazen came for the six-four.
The lot was empty. Patrini had just left in the Volvo, his new girlfriend in the passenger seat, seatbelt tight across her chest like a Mexican bandit’s bullet-holder. Bandolier?
Jazen pulled over the curb and into the lot. “I’ma give you six-fifty, nigga. I done drove by here twenty times and you ain’t done shit with that ride. Tiquan open his big mouth and told this dude, and he want the ride now. Right now. I owe him.”
Victor said, “Ain’t—”
“This dude don’t play. I’ma give you—”
His grandfather opened the screen door with his foot. “I’ma give you fitteen second get out my driveway else I shoot me some window and tire.” The shotgun was a third arm next to his sleeve.
Jazen spat on the dirt and spun the Navigator through the lot and off the sidewalk, spraying gravel into Victor’s hair, tearing a chunk from the ancient cement curb.
“Gotta have four-wheel drive,” Victor said to his grandfather, “for that kind of maneuver.”
“I ain’t play word game with you, non,” his grandpère said, soft and evil like a serial killer in a movie. “Eighteen make a man.”
“Eighteen mean I gotta pull in more than four hundred a month from cars and coffee.”
“Not yet.”
His grandfather’s cheeks were traced with hundreds of lines. Like a broken windshield on an old car—not the new ones with shatter proof glass. Scrutinize. You can scrutinize somebody. Then is he scrutable? What about implacable? When is he placable?
Before dawn, Victor startled awake. He heard a huge engine—the streetsweeper again? Chinese dragon?—and then the rattling of chains.
“I call them last night,” Grandpère said in the dark.
A tow truck idled in the driveway. Marcus Thompson’s older brother Octavious got out of the cab. Then Uncle Reynaldo and Lafayette.
They were old-school lunatic. Nobody messed with them. They’d been drinking hard for years, and in the garage light, their features looked soft and blurred, like bars of soap with just a few watery rubbings to take the edges off. Their eyes were muddy, the irises rough-mapped.
Reynaldo nodded at him. “We frontin you the work, lil cuddy.”
They opened the hood on the Impala, pointed and talked, and then hooked it up to the tow truck. His grandfather had made coffee. Reynaldo drank his on the porch steps. “When we done, I’ma have this dude Nacho paint it candyflake orange, and I got this guy Jaime Becerra in El Monte for a buyer. You’ll clear big cash. You can register for whatever. And you won’t get shot.”
“I might still get shot,” Victor said. Fuckin little kid who gotta get rescued. “Might get shot walkin to the store.”
“Then buy a ride nobody wants.”
“Like your truck?”
Reynaldo crumpled up the paper cup and threw it at him. “Whatever works.”
The Impala rode high on the tow truck, flat tires at eye level. His grandfather watched silently.
“I’m still runnin the lot,” Victor said, after the street was quiet again.
His grandfather nodded.
HE GOT READY when he saw the Navigator turn the corner two weeks later. It was January. He had three night classes—Indigenous History, Intro to Sociology, and Zellman’s English lit class—full of women whose kids were grown, and retired guys, and people who worked all day. Mayeli’s younger brother Wilfredo, just arrived from Belize, took the 6:30–10 shift for the cars still parked in the dark.
Wilfredo was late, so Victor was already pissed when he heard the speakers. DMX. He put his books on the porch and ran to open the shed door, pulled the light-bulb string, then waited cool by the sidewalk. It was 6:40, winter night dark purple in the trees.
He had practiced.
“What you want now!” he shouted at Jazen. “You done already got the damn ride!”
“What the hell you talking bout?” Tiquan shouted back when the Navigator pulled into the driveway. “Where the damn car?”
“Wherever you took it to, fool!” Victor moved forward. His eyes were shaking with the headlights’ jittery bounce, from the speakers thumping the car, doors trembling.
“Who got it?” Jazen lifted his chin, and Victor saw the hesit
ation.
“Not you?”
Jazen shook his head, and Tiquan said, “That Pomona motherfucker came and stole it himself. We coulda made a grand offa him.”
“Yeah,” Victor said, taking another step forward. “What it matter who got it? I ain’t got it.” He was shouting louder now, feeling the cords in his throat tighten, his eyes burn with the cold. “And fuck y’all two times, cause you know who got my mother and you ain’t said shit. Ain’t did shit. Ran off Alfonso.”
“How he—” Tiquan began, but Jazen cut him off and wheeled the Navigator back, tires spinning in the gutter filled with rainwater.
HE FINALLY BEGAN to breathe once he was in the classroom. The murmur of voices, the shoe soles on tile, the rustle of paper.
When class was over at ten, he walked across the college lots. Wilfredo was sitting on the edge of the stone wall, hunched into his jacket, Irwin’s car behind him. Wilfredo said, “I tell you, I not washing the cars. I only wash my own car when I get one. Escalade. Black Midnight, okay? In that I get some thug love.”
Then Wilfredo stood up. He was fifteen, hated his own name, and his gold-edged teeth, and his voice. Everybody wanna be an American, Victor thought, watching Wilfredo hold out his hand for the cash. Everybody wanna be 50 Cent.
Wilfredo walked away, toward the bus stop downtown. Victor sat on the porch. Wilfredo and Mayeli’s mom had been drowned by one wave. Not even a storm. Just one wave out the blue. Mayeli was seven and Wilfredo was five. His grandpère was seven when the Mississippi River flood took his mother.
I had mine until last year.
The palm tree sparkler. Better than fireworks. You could have it every month, baby. Just look. Every month, but winter is the best, cause the moon’s all clean. Winter moon like the rain washed it.
Every moon got a name. The old lady down in Louisiana told me. Hunter Moon. Harvest Moon. Moon pull all that water everywhere.
You always got a moon, right here, and you always got a palm tree, baby. Can’t nobody ever change that. Sitting on her lap, on some balcony. The Riviera? You got a Riviera in France. You got a Riviera right here. She put her fingers like visors over his eyes, to block out the apartment lights, and all he saw was the courtyard palm tree, full moon behind it, the fronds tossing in the wind, their fringes throwing off silver fire.
Between Heaven and Here Page 23
