Even after Pops got sent back to El Salvador, we stuck to the Bel-Lindo. Our old neighbors knew how things was for us—no moms, no pops—and they kept an eye out and told us when an apartment went empty so we’d have a place to crash for a couple of nights.
When people got evicted, they didn’t bother cleaning the walls or carpet or nothing before they split. Those empty units could be pretty sick. Used condoms and weird stains and a million cockroaches, some dead, some alive. Torn-up photos, suitcases that didn’t zip, broken dishes. All kinds of random shit.
When Eddie forced the door to 17B, he knocked over some trash bags. He gave them a kick, spilling used toilet paper everywhere.
“Nice work, shit-for-brains,” I told him. “You check the kitchen.”
“Fuckin’ Mexicans never flush it,” Eddie grumbled. He used his foot to push a Barbie doll head over toward the trash pile, then he headed for the kitchen.
I went into the bathroom to see if there was anything worth keeping. An old, gunked-up bottle of dollar-store pine-scented cleaner was all I found under the sink, and I thought the drawers were empty till I pulled the bottom one all the way out. At the back there was a message in girly writing Sharpied right onto the rough wood.
I aint doing this cuz you cheated on me. Not cuz you hit me. Its cuz if I dont Im scared I wont ever leave you. The way Ima go, I wont have no way to come crawlin back. I aint gonna have this baby. Where me and him is goin, nothing can hurt us.
I stood up fast, not wanting to think about what I just read. But it was like the girl’s message skipped my brain and jumped into my legs, and I started kicking the shit out of that drawer. Every time I kicked it shut, it bounced back open, and finally I just had to shove the drawer back in.
I walked out of the bathroom, and there was Eddie chowing down on some old crackers like nothing bad happened in this shithole. But I didn’t want to talk about what I found, neither. So when he tossed me a package of Pop-Tarts, I caught it and opened it up. Some girl and her baby was dead, and here I was, eating her food like it didn’t even matter.
When we threw down our blankets, Eddie passed out right off, but I lay there thinking for what seemed like forever. I almost wanted the neighbors to get into it or for somebody to break a bottle in the parking lot, anything. It was too damn quiet, and I was stuck with what I knew about that girl beat up on by her man and thinking she had to offer herself just to get away from him. Finally I went and sat in the bathroom and got out my black book.
Mostly I tagged for MS-13, but when I got my hands on enough cans, I’d work out a real piece, like the one I did to honor my moms on the wooden fence between the Bel-Lindo and the vacant lot. I showed that shit off for two weeks before it got painted out by some punks on a city work crew getting their community service hours. Erased, just like that. Some writers take pictures of their work and show it off that way. Me, all I got to keep was the memory of killing it out there with my cans, the thrill of throwing something up on a wall without getting caught.
I was still thinking about the girl who wrote the message. Thinking about her by drawing. I started by sketching in the shapes. “Bel-Lindo” in big letters across the top. Over the bottom half, trash spilled out of some bags to spell out, AINT SO PRETTY. I drew an X-ray shot of one of the trash bags to show a girl all curled up around herself. And inside her stomach I drew an even smaller figure with the weird alien eyes and big head you see in pictures of unborn babies. I put a speech bubble out from him that said, “Damn! Already fukt!”
After a while, Eddie banged on the door and asked if I had the runs or was I jacking off? That made me laugh. I put away my black book and went out, but I still couldn’t sleep. Sometimes you just can’t.
CHAPTER 7: NOW
At breakfast, Gabe doesn’t say anything about my file, and I decide not to push it. I spend the morning shooting the shit with Tigs, but then Pakmin comes and takes him away. After I’ve counted the twenty-four ceiling tiles about a million times, Pakmin comes back down the corridor and stops in front of my cell. His mustache is a little uneven, like maybe he trimmed one side and forgot the other. It makes him look funny, but I make sure not to laugh. Don’t need more trouble than I already got, especially not in here. So I get busy thinking serious thoughts while Pakmin slides my cell open.
“You’ll miss rec for today,” he says.
“Hell if I care,” I say, but really I’m bummed because when you’re shut up inside, even half an hour out in the sun feels damn good.
Pakmin tells me to follow him, and we walk back into the meeting room where he took me yesterday. For a second, I think maybe I’ll get to see my file again. But then we go through a different door and down another hall. Pakmin stops at a third door and turns to face me.
“Are you ready to talk about what happened?”
“I was just hanging with my boys.”
He shakes his head. “Don’t you see? You and I both know that’s not true.” When I don’t say anything, he goes on. “The truth comes out here one way or another. It always does.” While he speaks, he strokes the longer side of his mustache, smoothing out the hairs against his skin.
“Look, sir,” I say, trying to play him right by bullshitting some respect, “why am I in here? Why am I all isolated? I mean, what’s with the meals in the cell?”
“We do the questioning. You do the remembering.”
“Here’s an idea. Why don’t you just tell me why I’m here?”
“We have a program in place for you, my friend,” Pakmin says. “The focus will be on observation. The subject won’t know that you can see her.”
He turns his back to me and unlocks the door in front of us. He stands there holding it open for a couple of seconds before I get my head on straight enough to walk through it like he expects. Because as soon as I hear him say “her,” I can’t help but think, Becca, Becca. Let it be Becca. But just as fast I realize that that would mean wishing my Becca into lockup, and that’s the last thing I want.
Still, it’s got to be someone I know. Like how Baby Tigs spends time watching his cousin. They’re hoping we’ll snitch on somebody, right? I mean, why else would they bother? We don’t allow females in our click, but sometimes the homegirls get mixed up in our shit anyway. Plenty of girls hang around looking to catch some action. Sometimes they’ll do the driving for a homeboy or make a delivery. Could be one of them got picked up.
Pakmin leads me over to a long rectangular window of thick, tinted glass. When we get closer, I see that it looks into a meeting room like the one he took me to before. There’s a girl sitting at the table with her arms crossed tight over her tits, but I don’t know her. I mean, I know a lot of girls without really knowing them, chicks from the hood we partied with or ones we picked up when we sneaked into the movies. But I don’t recognize her.
She’s white for one thing, and I can pretty much count the white people I know on two hands, beginning with this girl who works nights at the Stop ’N Go and ending with the truancy officer who comes poking around the Bel-Lindo.
Anyway, she has dirty blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail and big, brown eyes. Maybe it ain’t fair, but I decide she’s probably been around the block a few times. At least she has the body for it. Nice and thick, tits and thighs sort of straining against the fabric of her navy county issues. Her mouth has got this sort of permanent pout. The lips are classic Angelina Jolie, full and puffy.
I’m planning out what moves I’d make if there wasn’t this glass between us when I realize that Pakmin has been talking this whole time. I need to get my brain back on business. Who the hell is she? And what the hell does she have to do with me?
“What’d you say?” I ask Pakmin.
He huffs into his mustache like maybe he’s not going to repeat himself.
“Sorry, sir,” I say, psyching myself back up into fake respect mode.
“I was saying that the idea behind the observation is that it may remind you of what you’ve forgotten or failed to sh
are with us. Pay attention, friend. You are not guaranteed these observations; they are a privilege. Maybe something she says will ring a bell. Maybe not. That’s your problem.”
“Should I—”
He raises a hand to shut me up because at that moment, the door to the meeting room opens. In walks this butch-looking lady, also white. Her hair is short and spiky; she wears a gray polo shirt and khakis; and she has the build of a football player with tits.
“Someone will be back for you later,” Pakmin says. He turns and walks out, locking the door to the observation room behind him.
I watch the meeting that’s happening on the other side of the glass. I can hear them talking, but not through the window. The sound comes from little black speakers up by the ceiling.
“I’m Janet,” the butch lady says, holding her hand out to the girl. “I’ll be meeting with you for counseling sessions while you’re here.”
The girl doesn’t move to take Janet’s hand, and her look says that she knows this do-gooder routine. I know it, too, from teachers and counselors in middle school who used to sling around that “I’m gonna show that I trust you” crap. Acting all sincere and shit, when they don’t know a damn thing about you.
Janet finally pulls her hand back, squares her football-player shoulders, and sets a bright woven bag down on the table. It’s the kind of thing that might come from some charity for orphans in Guatemala or from Wal-Mart. No way to tell. Janet sits down and pulls out a file folder, some papers, and a book. The girl leans back in her chair, arms still crossed.
“You answer to Lexi?” Janet asks, looking up from her papers.
“Yeah, when I feel like answering,” the girl says.
Janet sits there writing on a notepad. I can tell that the girl is getting bored, and she looks more pissed off than ever. I just stare at her, waiting for some kind of spark. Lexi. I say the name a couple of times. But this girl’s got no place in my life.
Finally Lexi busts out with, “Aren’t you supposed to counsel me and shit?”
Janet gives her a long look.
“So we’re just going to sit here?” Lexi asks.
“I get paid no matter what,” Janet says. “All your lawyer cares about is having a piece of paper that says you’re in therapy. It’s all the same to me. I’ve got plenty of work I can do while you sit there.” She smiles, and her nostrils flare out. The only person I’ve ever seen with bigger nose holes was my sixth grade English teacher, the last one whose name I can remember. Mrs. Hampton. We used to call her class Hampton Hell.
“Seems kind of fucked up, if you ask me.”
“Oh, I’m ready whenever you are.” Janet closes her folder, but when Lexi doesn’t say anything, Janet goes back to shuffling papers.
Lexi starts fidgeting and making these heavy sighs. Without looking up, Janet tosses the book toward her. It’s a paperback, and the cover says Watership Down, whatever that means. There’s a picture of a rabbit in a field on it. Some cheesecake story.
“I hate reading,” Lexi says. There’s one thing we have in common.
“Don’t read, then.” Janet slides over a notepad and a stubby pencil. “Try writing down whatever words first catch your attention when you flip to a page.”
Lexi takes the notepad, but instead of opening the book and writing down words, she tears out a piece of paper and starts folding it. After a minute, I realize that she’s making a paper fortune-teller like the girls in my elementary school used to.
Janet looks up. “Let me know how that works out for you,” she says, “or if you feel like trying my suggestion.” She reaches over and takes back her pencil.
Lexi rolls her eyes and leans back in her chair, but after a couple more minutes of Janet ignoring her, she drops the chair legs back down and grabs the book. “Give me the fuckin’ pencil and I’ll do your damn game,” she says to Janet.
Janet rolls her the pencil.
Lexi flips through the pages of the book for a while; then she starts scratching words onto the notepad.
A little while later Janet closes her folder and looks up. “What’ve you got?”
“You want me to read the words?”
“Sure,” Janet shrugs. “Why not?”
“Fine,” Lexi says. “Bridge. Ditch. Fighter. Bite. Luck. Soft. Patrol. Silver. Dog. Lost. Whisper. Burrow. Starch. Jacks. Stumble.” Lexi sets the notebook down on the table. “That’s it. Oh, except I think I came across ‘Fuck you, bitch’ on one page. Can’t remember which one, though.” She gives Janet a fake smile and then laughs.
Janet doesn’t react. She just says, “Thanks for sharing your words,” and goes back to her papers.
“So?” Lexi says after a minute. “What does it mean?”
“What does what mean?” Janet looks up.
“The words I picked. That’s supposed to say something about me, or some shit, right? Isn’t that the point?”
“Nah, it was just something to do. But I like how ‘whisper burrow’ and ‘jacks stumble’ sound. Hey, time’s up.”
Janet sticks her hand out to Lexi for another shake. Lexi doesn’t budge, so Janet pulls her hand back and walks out the door. A minute later a guard comes and takes Lexi out.
I expect Pakmin to come back for me any minute now that there’s nothing left to observe. After what feels like forever, though, there’s still no sign of him. I walk toward the other end of the room, which is way longer than I noticed at first. It’s empty except for a few plastic chairs like the one I’ve been sitting in, but there are lots of other windows. The big ones like the one I watched Lexi and Janet through are all dark, I guess because nobody is on the other side of the glass. Saving energy and looking out for the environment even in lockup. But at the end of the observation room, I see a few smaller windows. One of them is lit up, so I walk toward it.
In a second I’m staring into a cell. There’s some serious discrimination going on here. Whoever stays here has it a hell of a lot better than me and Tigs back on our block. Instead of bars, they have a plain white door with a rectangle of reinforced glass. The blanket is nicer, and there’s even a desk bolted to the wall.
The same guard who picked Lexi up from the meeting room unlocks the door and lets her in. She throws herself onto the bed and says something, but I guess the microphones in her room aren’t turned on because nothing comes out of the speakers by the ceiling. I take a crack at this mind control thing to try to get her to change clothes so I can see her tits, but no luck. She lies there picking at her arm, like maybe she has a scab there or something. After a while, she reaches over to the desk and pulls out a spiral notebook and a pen. For a long time she doesn’t write anything, just pulls a piece of her hair into her mouth and sucks on it. Then she scribbles in the notebook for a while before she flops onto her side.
I get bored of watching her and keep thinking Pakmin has to come for me soon. I’m looking around the observation room, and I realize that the long wall opposite the one with the windows onto Lexi’s side is also covered with mirrored glass panes. Maybe this is how the things look from the other side of the windows I’ve been looking through, and I’m guessing that Pakmin or somebody like him is probably watching me right now. I kind of have to laugh because now “observation” takes on a whole new meaning. Pakmin is watching me watching her. Waiting to see what the rat watching the rat will do. And maybe there’s even another row of windows behind that one, and somebody else is watching Pakmin watch me watch Lexi.
It makes me think of these bottles of drinking water my grams used to buy when she’d visit us. They had a label with a picture of a happy family carrying one of the bottles, which also had a picture of a family carrying a water bottle, and I imagined that that just went on forever. If you thought about it right, it seemed like you’d never run out of water because on every label there was a tiny water bottle with a tinier water bottle on it, all the way until you got to these little fairy-sized drops of water inside containers so small they’d be almost invisible. Or like how
when you’re standing between two mirrors in just the right way you can see yourself shrinking into infinity.
CHAPTER 8: NOW
I’m cranky and stiff as hell from falling asleep in one of the plastic chairs in the observation room. Gabe is the one who takes me back to my cell, ignoring my questions along the way. He hums something that sounds to me like the Dora the Explorer theme song. Regina was crazy about that show when she was little, watched it every chance she got.
Once we’re back on the cell block, Gabe passes me my dinner tray before locking me up.
I wolf down my food and stick the tray back in the slot. My cot is a saggy piece of junk, but it feels good to stretch out after sitting for so long. What I need is to figure out who this Lexi is and what she has to do with me. Problem is, my thoughts pinball all over the place, bouncing away from me before I can get them lined up.
Somehow Pakmin and his pals have decided that I know something about this girl. Is that what they want from me—dirt on some cracker bitch? I think up all the chicks who are friends of friends and even the ones who are friends of girlfriends of friends. I try to remember the faces of the white girls in my classes in middle school. I rip through my memory over and over, but I draw nothing but blanks every time. Thing is, even if I was a snitch, I got no idea what they picked her up for. I could make some shit up, but Pakmin’s no fool. A pain in el culo, but not a fool.
I turn my situation over every which way and start to feel the heat coming up into my face. I’m trapped in a corner no matter how I look at it. Before I can bring myself under control, I’m up kicking the shit out of the cot. It doesn’t satisfy, but it’s the only thing in the cell with any give to it.
I guess I go on nailing it, because Baby Tigs hollers at me from across the way. “What the hell! You lost the last scrap of your piss-pathetic brain?”
The Knife and the Butterfly Page 3
