The Gettin Place

Marcus headed for Chipotle Chile, Kurt’s restaurant, to return the car. He knew Chile would be crowded, but Kurt and his friends Lakin and Javier always had room for him at the table closest to the kitchen, where they sat watching and gossiping when they could. Talkin shit, he thought, opening the door hung with red chile ristras and blue corn; that’s what they call it at The Blue Q. The two places might as well be in different countries.

That was what he thought most nights when he ate here or in the Japanese place, when he saw a movie at the art theater. He ended up unconsciously translating things into his father’s or brothers’ words, then stepping back to look at the chasm dividing the phrases and foods and scenes.

He slid past the crowded tables, the flying elbows and shouts of the crowd, and swiveled his knees into the booth near the exposed kitchen. People here liked to watch their food cook.

“Starving by now?” Lakin asked. She was Finnish, a dark-haired, paper-skinned small woman who worked as a prep cook and hung out all night.

“You got it,” Marcus said. Kurt was swerving around the kitchen, his wide cheeks coated with sweat.

“Must be making something for an old man,” Javier said, grinning. His ridged teeth glowed against coppery skin. He was from New Mexico, and he’d decorated the place with the chiles, indigo corn, and wooden furniture.

“Thanks,” Marcus said, catching their puzzled frowns. But he didn’t want to joke around. He settled back, watching people moving their mouths around food and phrases and arguments. His father’s voice slid behind his ear: Thirty years old and still workin on your history, huh? Teachin ready-made history, his uncle would add. Somebody else’s history.

But when he’d asked for his, for their history, he’d gotten lips held tight around cigarillos and brusque dismissals. All his life, for school and for himself, when he’d questioned them about what they did as children, about how they’d come to own land that touched, they’d turned away, saying, Nothin to do with you, boy.

A hand deposited a plate beside him. Lakin laughed. Kurt had fixed him up quick with fat, spicy pinto beans in a bowl and inky-dark tortillas. Marcus bent his head to the beans, the mist clouding his eyes. He didn’t know if it was because he kept picturing his father lying on his back in the hospital bed. But he couldn’t help it. Beans, he thought. Same thing everybody’s eatin in Treetown. And they munchin on yellow corn tortillas. Not much difference. But it is.

Marcus chewed the beans in their thick red sauce, nodding. He couldn’t talk. His head was too full, like a flu swelled there. Bullets. That’s what they called beans at home. “We havin bullets again, huh? Surprise—bullets and corn bread.” Kurt and Javier and Lakin and him—they all knew each other from here, from movies and downtown architecture and beer, but they didn’t really know him.

“Who’s movin and shakin tonight?” he murmured when he was done, when he’d drunk a beer and his head felt slightly smaller.

“Oh, we’ve got some city council guys, we’ve got a bunch of museum women, we’ve got opera people,” Lakin said, scanning the crowd. They could see almost everything from this back table, but this wasn’t a prized location. Obviously, since they were allowed to stay in it frequently. “Some reporters I recognize from the newspaper,” she said, dropping her voice. “They’ve been talking about that double murder down there in Treetown. What a rough place.”

Javier shook his head. “See that girl over there?” He inclined his forehead toward a table where four women sat, slumped elegantly over dessert and coffee. “I heard her crying in the bathroom before. I think she knew one of the girls that got killed, because she kept saying to her friends that she had told her to stop. Something like that.”

Marcus stared at the woman’s face, her eyes pink-rimmed inside mascara, her freckles stark on her forehead. “See over there?” Lakin went on. She loved to categorize people and recognize faces belonging to regular customers. “She’s a museum and charity type, she’s in here all the time, and that’s her new husband, Web something. He’s like a developer or something. Big bucks. And he looks younger than you, Marcus.” She touched him with her elbow, but the teary woman had gotten up and headed for the bathroom again, and she fixed her eyes on Marcus.

He tried, smiling back. She was wearing a black miniskirt and a big sweater, and her brown hair was thin-curved behind her ears. “Shella Frohling,” she said. “We went to school together. I guess you heard about Pammy.”

Marcus saw her eyes grow glossy. He nodded, and suddenly he knew his father had heard him use the dead woman’s name back then. Watch out, brother, that white girl gon do a Pammy Sawicky on your black ass, the guys would say to each other.

He blinked hard, and said, “Yeah. I remember you. You guys were friends.” He stood up. “You want to go outside for some air?”

Her calves, in black tights, were as round as baseballs. Marcus stared at the moving muscles because he didn’t want to run the gauntlet of faces.

Pammy Sawicky. In high school, she went Chicano first, wearing Pendleton shirts buttoned at the chin and then falling open to show a ribbed white undershirt. Her lips were dark red, her brows a thin-penciled arch, and her khakis were creased.

Then, sophomore year, she was black. All of a sudden, she hung out near the fenced parking lot with the few Treetown people. She got rides to the Westside, Marcus remembered, and was always hanging from the window of some brother’s car. Her thick brown hair was corn-rowed, her scalp glowing pearly between the braids. Marcus watched her. She put her hands on her hips and said, “He ain’t none a my man,” when someone challenged her.

Marcus followed Shella to the pedestrian mall, where restaurants had set up chairs and tables and hung trees with sparkling white lights. He sat down beside her. “You hung out with Pammy senior year,” he said. “I remember.” She nodded, turning away to light a cigarette.

Senior year, Pammy went back. “Like nappy hair in a rainstorm,” Treetown girls said. It was the football season, and when Pammy, who had still been dating Lee Terry, a Westsider, disappeared from school for a week, Marcus remembered being curious about the lack of her pale, animated face near the fence. When the assembly was called to parade and then elect football’s homecoming queens, the dark-haired Treetown and Westside and few Agua Dulce kids sat in one area of bleachers. It was 1978. Four white girls walked, their dresses shimmering, their arms stiff-curled into elbow crooks of football players. One black girl, from the Westside, Leticia Smalls, walked with Jerome Taylor, a fullback. Treetown and Westside cheered. And then Pammy Sawicky came out, in a gold-toned satin dress, her hair straight and turned under at the ends, on the arm of a football player from Southwest High, on the other end of the city. Blond bristly hair, bull neck, straight smile. Her fingernails weren’t red, black, and green. They were pink.

“You won homecoming queen senior year,” Marcus said to Shella, and she nodded.

“And Pammy got beat up at the game by some girls from Treetown,” Shella said. “You helped her out.”

“Yeah.” Marcus looked at the twinkling tree lights, the passing people still carrying briefcases from work. Pammy had called him a nigger. She’d spat, “Fuck you, nigger. I don’t need you.”

“Pammy was hanging around downtown a lot,” Shella said. “Not around this part, but by the bus station and the bars down on California.” She pushed her hair behind her ears tightly. “I heard she was doing a lot of drugs. Speed.”

Marcus nodded. Speed was the white drug. Once you went back, you better stay that way. “I never saw her in Treetown,” he said. “Never.”

Shella nodded. “I know. That’s why I can’t figure out why she’d have been sitting in a car down there.”

Marcus smiled. “Yeah.” He remembered one day, after the fight, when Pammy had come up to him in a hallway, no one else around, and said, “Hey. I’m really sorry. About what I said to you.” Pammy had paused, her eyes darting behind him, then back to his face. “I mean, you aren’t like that. What I mean is, my dad always said there’s a lot of different kinds of people. There’s niggers, but you aren’t one.” Then she’d turned and fled back down the hallway.

Marcus stood up, smiling wider, falser, at Shella. “I can’t figure that out myself,” he said.

Marcus went out to buy a newspaper the next morning, and when he got back inside the apartment, a message had been left on the phone. “Marcus, this is Natalie Larchwood.” Marcus smiled. The principal at Rio Seco High.

“Mr. Whalen graciously and conveniently waited until our teachers’ meeting this morning to tell me that he might schedule surgery in November and need a leave of absence. Marcus, I’d planned to try and give you a few freshman history classes and some study halls, but in any case, please come by on Friday to discuss a contract. I think this might work out well. Thanks.”

Marcus slapped the wall and said, “That’ll work out fine. Hell, yeah.” He made coffee, glancing at the newspaper but not wanting to open it yet. Finally, he sat in front of the big window overlooking the tiled domes of the downtown Moorish-style buildings.

The photos and names on the front page of the city news section stared out at him, and the coffee burned into his throat to meet something rising there.

LIFELONG FRIENDS FOUND BRUTALLY SLAIN

Rio Seco police detectives are working overtime to investigate the deaths of two Rio Seco women whose bodies were found locked in a burning car at a dilapidated towing yard in the western edge of the city, an area known as Treetown.

Pamela Sawicky, 30, and Marissa Kent, 29, were burned beyond recognition, and their distraught families only learned of their whereabouts when coroner’s officials obtained dental records to identify the women. Sawicky was the daughter of Rio Seco City Councilman Warren Sawicky. Kent was a Rio Seco native working as a pet groomer in the downtown area.

“Pammy was my pride and joy,” the distraught city councilman said yesterday. “She had some problems in the past, but she was turning her life around. She had just moved back home to attend city college. I lost her mother ten years ago, and I am angry and devastated. I want to find out who would commit such a heinous act. The Lord calls it specifically—an eye for an eye.”

Sawicky had been arrested twice for misdemeanor drug charges. Kent had never been arrested.

The women were found when police responded to a call about gunfire in the area and found a man with a rifle. Hosea Thompson, 76, brandished the weapon at officers and was shot in the shoulder. He has been treated at Rio Seco County General Hospital, where he is held in the jail ward, but police will not say whether he is the sole suspect in the double homicide. Investigators are seeking another resident of the address for questioning.

Homicide detective Ron Harley said ballistic tests would be run on Thompson’s weapon, but that anyone who might have seen the two women on Thursday night should call him at the department. Information about their whereabouts could help police learn how the women died.

Marcus bent his head toward the photos smiling out from the page, his mouth as dry as cardboard. One woman was blond and square-mouthed, like an athlete. Marissa Kent. The other was narrow-eyed, brown-haired, with grainy skin. Pammy Sawicky. He lifted his eyes. He had to find Finis quick. He was the other resident. When the police had assumed the two women were crack-head sisters from Treetown, nobody had been too worried. But now, with everybody in Rio Seco seeing these two faces, all hell would break loose. Marcus hadn’t seen Pammy Sawicky since graduation night. But maybe Finis had. He didn’t even know her, but if she was doing speed, maybe somehow he’d run into her near the Kozy Komfort. Why would the two women have gotten into the Granada, which hadn’t moved in years? Finis wouldn’t have had anything to do with it; he’d never be capable of even a short conversation with a white person who didn’t know his music. Marcus pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt, breathing hard. Finis had to say where he’d been that night, and since.

He walked quickly toward Pepper Avenue, cussing the fools who’d stolen his car. White people on the land, his father had told Mrs. King. Could somebody have been angry about a repair job or a car they’d bought off the lot? But Marcus had never even seen a white person buy a car from his father. He strode faster, past the closed pink doors of the Kozy Komfort, shut up like a dollhouse, and decided not to take the back way along the canal since that would look strange to the police probably watching the house. Along the roadside after the underpass, he put his hands casually in his pockets. Two cops in an unmarked car were parked beside the last shell of a building on the other side of Pepper, about a quarter of a mile before his father’s gate. The walls were a mosaic of graffiti, intricately overlaid colors, and Marcus concentrated on the curving painted shapes instead of the sunglasses and mouths of the men watching him. He nodded at them, hoping they already knew who he was. Which brother. You don’t want me, he chanted over and over.

His mother was sweeping nervously near the kitchen steps. The barn and yard were empty. When she saw him, she blinked swimming eyes.

“Demetrius and Octavious went on a tow. Julius holin up at some woman’s house on the Westside. Kickstand—that what y’all call him?” Marcus nodded. “He say he ain’t workin till this mess cleared up.” She paused, pushing the angled broom deep into a corner. “And your daddy won’t say nothin to nobody. Them police keep comin, tell me that, ask me about Finis. I been waitin for you to come and look for him.”

Marcus looked at her maroon cheeks, flushed and spread wide. He knew his mother wouldn’t say anything to the police, but not because she thought Finis had something to hide. He had no interest in white women, and he was unable to kill spiders because it was bad luck. But his mother, like most Treetown women, was terrified of policemen. They’d seen doors bashed in by the battering rams during drug raids, the wrong family prone and stomped on the wrong floor; they’d seen the wrong man shot, the wrong woman shoved into a wall. They’d seen the right ones fall, too, at times, the burglar smacked and cuffed, the drunk fighter held tight by uniformed arms. But he knew his mother’s tongue was frozen dry to the roof of her mouth whenever a policeman even nodded at her, even though now and then an officer brought a car or some other small business to the yard.

“A woman called me this mornin, say she read the paper and Finis been stayin with her. SaRonn. She live on Jacaranda, Marcus. She said he ain’t there right now, but go see her. Here.” She ducked inside the kitchen door, reaching for the wall where keys were hung on hooks. “Take Octavious’s car.”

Marcus shook his head, smiling, and touched the key ring with the silver eight attached. “Long as you don’t tell him.”

He eased the cherried ’64 Impala onto Pepper Avenue. Avocado-green flake on the outside, red leather tuck and roll on the seats, and black dash. Spoked rims. This was Octavious’s baby, his statement to the world. And he didn’t like anybody else driving it.

Marcus turned quickly onto Grove Avenue, the narrow ribbon of asphalt edged with sand. After a quarter mile, a few houses appeared on the side, and he turned left on Olive Street. Four even smaller streets radiated off this one, and this was where most of Treetown’s houses were lined. Verbena, Lantana, Dracena, and Jacaranda. At the far end of Olive Street was Olive Gardens, a hulking pistachio-green box of stucco.

Marcus went slowly down Jacaranda. The wood-frame houses here were set far back on their big lots, nearly half-acre size, and most had pecan or pepper trees scattered around. Laundry and swings and ropes and punching bags hung from branches. Marcus remembered several of the houses where old ladies had lived when he was younger, the porches curtained with variegated ivy, the windows hidden by untrimmed bushes. But he saw young women on a few of these porches now, watching him.

SaRonn. He didn’t recognize that name at all. He hoped she would be looking for him. He was almost to the end of the street, where it curled around in a comma blocked by trees, when he saw a woman wave at him from the yard of a tiny yellow house.

When he stopped carefully near the small rock-lined ditch that passed for a gutter on all the Treetown streets, he heard a loud, hollow smash on the trunk of the car, once, twice, three times. Shit, he thought, they said guys are gettin jacked for car rims. What the hell. Octavious probably don’t have a weapon in here. He was reaching forward to open the glove compartment when a heavy female voice said, “Eight, I’ma kick yo black ass. You know I’m outta milk, goddamnit.”

Marcus let his hand drop from the glove compartment, hoping this woman wouldn’t damage his face before she saw it. “Hey,” he called. “It’s not Eight. It’s his brother.”

Marcus made sure the voice had moved past the door before he opened it, so the owner of the voice would be separated from him by good, heavy sixties craftsmanship. He swung plenty of metal between them and got out.

Had to be a Proudfoot, he thought, with her slanted-up eyes and broad forehead and the heavy bun of hair, with dangling braids the size of caterpillars over her ears. There were so many Proudfoots in Treetown that he had trouble keeping them straight, and Octavious was living with one.

Not this one, though. Octavious and Belisa Proudfoot had been together three or four years; Belisa was smaller, just as loud, but without the muddiness in her eyes.

“You which brother?” this woman shouted. “I ain’t seen your ass before.”

“Shit.” She folded her arms, feet in slippers wide on the dirt. “He told me he would get me a car, cause mine been broke down, and he ain’t done shit. I seen him this mornin with Belisa, and I told him I needed some milk and other stuff for my kids. Nigga said he come back and give me a ride. I ain’t seen his ass.”

“He’s on a tow,” Marcus said. He turned to look behind him for the woman named SaRonn, hoping she had a softer voice and fresher eyes.

“Then he don’t need his car, do he?” the Proudfoot woman said. “Give me his keys and let me make this run. I’ll be right back.” Before Marcus could move, she had snatched the keys from his fingers and grabbed the door handle.

Marcus moved closer to her, smelling beer and wood smoke on her clothes, but she shoved him with her shoulder and got into the car. “I can’t let you take Octavious’s ride, sista,” he started, trying to reach into the window, but she started up the car and said, “Get the fuck out my way. I said I’ll be back.”

Marcus saw the plume of dust rise up to his face, and he whispered, “God damnit! She’s gone wreck Eight’s car and he’s gon kick my ass.” He realized that people were watching, and he tried to shrug. “I can’t be hittin a woman, though, right?”

A woman smiled at him. “You Marcus? I’m SaRonn.” Her cheeks were as dark and gold as the raw honey he’d seen Mr. Lanier collect from near the orange blossoms, and one thumb-print dimple went deep into the left side near her mouth. She wore faded jeans and a white T-shirt, and her hair was cut short over her head except for a crimped fringe of hair at her nape that he saw when she turned to walk into her house.

A small girl was in the doorway, he saw, a miniature SaRonn about two years old. “Come on in,” SaRonn called.

There were five of the narrow, long houses on the lot, he saw, all in a row. Each front door was covered by a peak-roofed overhang with a slanted yellow section radiating out, propped on thin pillars of wood painted blue. They looked like the top halves of drooping stars, he thought, following her inside.

Her front room was glossy wood floor, a couch covered in a Mexican blanket, and a big TV playing music videos. Her daughter skated on a small hand towel, shrieking with glee, over the shining floor.

“I just waxed it, and she’s on a magic carpet,” SaRonn said, sitting on the couch. “I wanted to tell you about Finis. Your brother, right?”

“Yeah,” Marcus said, though he couldn’t imagine that a woman as pretty as this, as unruffled as this, would be seeing Finis. Well, seeing him, but not fooling around. “I guess you can tell me now, before Octavious kills me.”

She laughed. “I don’t think Bennie’s gon wreck his car. She just hates walkin, and you know there’s no store around except the liquor store.”

SaRonn’s eyebrows lifted in warning. “Now, don’t start,” she said. “She’s gon get some beer. But she’s gon get some meat and milk and the rest, too. She’s got three kids. Her husband was treatin her so bad, beatin on her when they lived in San Bernardino. She left him and came on back here. She stays in the back house, farthest from the street.”

She smiled now. “Not like that, okay? He found out I just got cable and this new TV, and he sits where you are, watchin MTV for, like, five and six hours. Then he falls asleep on the floor. Willa pokes him in the ear and he doesn’t even move. Huh, Willa?” She looked at her daughter, who nodded.

“I remember you,” SaRonn said, smiling dimple-deep again. “I was in your sister’s class. Sofelia. She ever come back?” Her grin faded.

Marcus shook his head. He fought the urge to tell her that Sofelia called him, that she should call him tonight. He stared at this woman’s eyes, the saffron irises rimmed with black.

“Finis been goin to work early in the mornin, with the Mexican guys layin concrete. You know him—all he said was, ‘Chain gang, baby.’ ”

“Sounds like him,” Marcus said. “Most people don’t even listen to him no more.”

But SaRonn shook her head, the wispy tail of hair touching her neck. “I kinda like breakin the code.” She stared out the side window. “You know, I danced with Finis at a party once, a house party on Pepper, remember back when it was houses all along there, and stores?” Marcus nodded. “Finis was older, and he was so quiet, but I liked his eyes. You got em, too. Ice-tea eyes.” She grinned again, and Marcus stood up, uncomfortable. Her daughter skimmed down the short hallway.

“I better go lookin for him,” Marcus said, watching a dust devil spin across the field behind the trees.

SaRonn stood, too. “I was just gon say a few months after that party, his eyes weren’t like that anymore. He smoked some wack, huh? That’s what I heard.”

Marcus nodded. Back then, in the seventies, wack was everywhere. First, angel dust came east from L.A., and when country people found out how easy and cheap it was to make PCP, drug labs came up everywhere in the Rio Seco area and the desert. The easiest way to get an angel dust high was to dip a cigarette, usually a Kool, into liquid PCP. A Super Kool. Some guys smoked a lot of Super Kools; some died of cardiac arrest, some became manic, pointless wanderers, and some were lucky and just appeared mildly retarded.

Finis had smoked only one. At a party, too. Someone had given him a Super Kool, and the kaleidoscope of his brain had shifted permanently.

“But I used to see him walkin, and I remembered how he danced with me. I don’t mind hearin him talk about songs,” she said softly.

“I’m the only one can usually figure out what he’s talkin about,” Marcus said, hoping the thumb print would come back. “Now I got a fellow scholar to check with, right?”

“Yeah.” She went to the door. “He said he’s workin the Alta streets. In Agua Dulce?”

Marcus nodded. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll check you later. Cause I’m prayin the Proudfoot come back with Eight’s car.”

“I’ll take care of her,” SaRonn said. “You take care of Finis. And yourself.”

Marcus walked along the dry water channels back toward Grove Avenue. Some of the older houses along here had little arched bridges over the ditches to their driveways. He stared at one house, one of the ivy-covered porches, remembering when the old lady had died. Clara Mae, his mother had called her, crying, when they went to the wake in her house. Now the ivy was dangling dead stems, and he saw the peeling facial boards. On the right side, three hot-pink lines slanted like war paint. A young girl about fifteen sat on the steps, wearing a cast on her arm. She stared him down, but when he passed the driveway, she looked away.

He hadn’t told SaRonn a single lie, he realized, turning the corner and facing the wind. He hadn’t thought about himself long enough to compose one while they talked. But he hadn’t met anyone from Tree-town for a long time, a woman who didn’t already know everything about him and his brothers. The other women looked at him and smiled and lies fell from his mouth like empty sunflower shells. Colette, from Chicago—he told her he hated sushi, even though he loved it, because she made fun of brothers who ate trendy food. He told her he’d gotten his B.A. in four years, instead of seven, and that he’d been working in L.A. before he came to Rio Seco.

Alana, the blond woman he’d met at the sushi restaurant downtown, who smiled and asked if she could sit at his table, believed that he was new to Rio Seco, too. She was from Minneapolis, working at the local arts foundation across the street. She loved hearing that he’d studied art at the wonderful Deglet Noor building downtown.

But after they believed him, he wanted to talk about movies and music and where they should eat. He picked the films carefully, and when the women sat in his apartment, drinking mineral water or a Japanese beer, looking out the large window at the tiled domes and creamy walls holding palm shadows, and he sat carefully beside them, close enough to smell the scent from their necks but far enough away not to make them wary, he never talked about himself again. And they loved it. They told him everything.

But then, in the morning or the next bright day they saw him, their eyes would shift away from how much he knew, how little they’d discovered. And Marcus would get tired of the whole framework. He’d been saddest about Colette, who took him as a challenge, who put her hands behind his neck and said, “If you don’t start talking, I’ma strangle you and you can keep all that information to yourself forever.” But she had moved back home to go to graduate school.

Marcus strode fast along the long stretch of Grove Avenue lined with empty land, patches of trees, furrows where someone had disked an acre, and far to his right, the leafy, bending tops of the pecan trees in the big run-wild grove along the riverbottom.

SaRonn. He didn’t remember her. Back then, at the house parties, there were so many beautiful girls in Treetown that brothers from the Westside, from San Bernardino and L.A. and Pomona, came to check out the weekend gatherings in someone’s front room or backyard. Enchantee. Her cousins, the Perry girls, with their gleaming dark skin and baby hair sculpted into waves on their foreheads with sweet oil. The Proudfoots, who, back then, with their braided ear curls and scornful eyes and their pride in slippers and curlers and shapeless T-shirts that only made them look longer and leaner and sexier because they didn’t care, always angered Treetown brothers by choosing outside men. And his sister, Sofelia, who would have been the loveliest if she’d stayed around.

He didn’t remember her friend, or that house party. But sometime back then, when Rio Seco was growing bigger and more people had moved in from L.A. and other cities, the fights over women or crap games or a forty ounce went from Thompson-style punching and boxing to strangers driving past the crowded porch with guns. Olive Gardens turned crazy, and most of the women were having babies and getting married. Except Enchantee, who he didn’t want to think about, and Sofelia, who had disappeared.

“Let me find Finis and just get back to the pad,” he said to himself. “And hope Bennie don’t wreck Eight’s car. I know Finis didn’t have no part of this thing with the two women. The cops gotta find out somethin soon. And I don’t want no part of hangin around the place until they do.”

He looked out at the first houses of Agua Dulce, scattered along the road now, looking like Mexico. Chickens jerking their heads in the dirt yards, plaster walls topped with wrought iron, old stucco houses painted blue and pink and pistachio. He saw the wrappers from Mexican chile candy, the soda bottles from Tijuana. And when he turned up the street that led suddenly steep up the hill, the graffiti read:

He had Güero in one class. The name meant “white guy,” and the kid was very pale, with thin black hair combed straight back and a soft fringe of moustache. Some kids from Agua Dulce were bused to downtown, and some were bused to another school. Like Treetown, there were no schools here.

He saw Salcido’s huge building-supply yard below him once he passed a few streets. The yard ran close to the riverbottom’s edge; pale sand, gray gravel, red brick, and block stones rose in piles with wooden buildings behind. His father and Salcido had built many of the stone-and-cement gutters he’d passed today, and they’d built the barn. Salcido’s son Rubén was the one who always gave Finis cement work.

Alta Vista Place. He began to climb the steep hill terraced with narrow streets like layers on a cake. Alta Sierra. Alta Loma. And the last one, Alta Linda. Marcus had peered down each street, and finally, he saw the trucks.

Finis was wading in plush, liquefied cement. He didn’t see Marcus, who looked at the other three driveways where Rubén was spraying water onto the damp burlap covering the new work. The cement had to wet-cure for several days, and the winds had been fierce and drying. Three days, at least, Marcus thought. Finis gotta be accounted for.

Finis wore knee-high rubber boots and backed away slowly from the smoother like the spongeless mop that he ran across the trembling surface. Over and over Finis did it, pulling the smoother toward him and pushing his ankles through the gray soup. He loved repetitive jobs like this, picking olives and painting and digging and cement work.

“Hey,” Rubén’s brother Bebos called, too. He was cleaning the truck, which had finished mixing.

But Finis never stopped his movement, still concentrating on the skimming and stepping until he was finished, lifting his boots neatly from the last patch of cement and then making his melting footprints disappear.

He lifted his chin to Marcus, his face as blank as the smooth gray now, his eyes surrounded by a tiny mesh of crosses from all his miles of walking and squinting into the sun. His smile was always private.

“Why you didn’t come to the pad all this time?” Marcus said, impatient now. “Daddy got hurt, man. And some bad shit happened over there.”

Finis nodded again, judging his work with sweeping eyes. “Rubén!” Marcus called. “He done?”

“Yeah,” Rubén said, coming to stand beside them and survey the four driveways all in a row, with their wooden formings still around them. Like four new graves, Marcus thought suddenly, turning away.

“Your brother Tony, he didn’t tell you the cops were lookin for Finis?” Marcus asked Rubén.

Rubén frowned, rubbing his jaw and leaving gray dust along his neck. “Tony’s been testifyin or somethin, I ain’t seen him for a few days, man,” he said in his sibilant, clipped Agua Dulce accent. “Why?”

Marcus knew the Salcidos didn’t read the paper any more than the Thompsons did. “Some trouble at the yard,” he said. “Somebody else’s trouble.”

Finis walked beside him down the sloping street, and Rubén called, “Negrito! Come by tonight and get your money from Big Pops!”

Finis waved without turning around and sang, low, “Money, money, money, money—MONEY!”

Marcus was silent. The Salcidos called Finis Negrito Indio, Little Black Indian, and Marcus smiled to himself, thinking that with Finis’s stoic appearance and his short, secret answers, he looked about like a Hollywood Indian.

They could see the riverbottom laid out in a wide straight swath from up here. The trees and bamboo and vines were still winter-brown mesh, but patched with dark green. The golden, sandy riverbed cut through the center, threaded with only a narrow silver line of water. Marcus felt the memory of the river like twirling in his chest, and he said, “Come on, let’s go home by the old trail.”

The aspirin-sharp smell of the damp sand around the willows hit him as soon as they left Grove and plunged into the opening where a wide path led to the thickets and cane and the river. Finis followed him on the silent cushion of dirt and new grass.

He remembered all those years following them, Finis and the others, when they went hunting. Marcus was the tracker, and he’d slant off away from them to stare at the decomposing granite boulders on the hills, at the banks of the riverbed where red willow roots glowed under the dappled light. When the boys took their BB guns, and Demetrius his .22 rifle, they’d say, “Ain’t no need for you to come, baby boy. You won’t shoot, anyway.”

He wouldn’t. But among the arrowroot and silty mud, he was the one who saw the long-toed print of raccoon, the star-shaped print of possum. Mr. Williams over on Jacaranda would pay ten dollars for a fresh-killed possum if it was warm when you handed it to him. And Marcus’s abuela made thick, red, spicy stew with rabbit. He’d find the scattered beads of rabbit droppings, and when the boys finally listened, walking his way, he felt sweat fan out along his back under his coat.

But if one handed him a gun, and they saw the rabbit hump through the tumbleweeds and then hunker down like he was invisible, if they saw the possum finally hanging by its tail in a pepper tree, he’d hand back the gun. Or drop it and turn away.

Finis, now treading soft behind him, had loved to hunt, too, loved to hand the meat to their mother. He always sang, even back then, and because he was more than a year older, he’d been to see Superfly with the others, even though Marcus had begged to go and had been left home. One night, nearly midnight, Marcus followed Finis, who sang softly of Superfly, the tail ends of words floating back: by and by, no questions why, do or die…

The sky was hard and purple, stark with the fall moon, Marcus remembered now, looking at the wind scouring the willows ahead of him. The hunting moon. And the raccoon wasn’t afraid of Marcus when he ambled out onto the trail between them. A young one, Marcus thought, that’s why he ain’t scared. The raccoon’s fingers dangled when he stopped to look at Marcus, and then Finis turned. Finis shouted, “Move, Marcus! Lemme shoot! Move!”

But Marcus was frozen, watching the raccoon scurry for the underbrush, and by the time the others got there, Finis was so angry he nearly cried when he told Demetrius about the missed chance. Finis had turned to Marcus then and said bitterly, “Sissyfly, Marcus, that’s you.” He began to sing,

Marcus turned and ran back up the trail so they wouldn’t see the shining snail marks on his cheeks, and hid in the storage lot for hours.

Now he turned to see Finis walking, docile, his eyes focused on the path. “You only sing somebody else’s songs now, my brother,” Marcus said, hard. “Don’t make up none a your own.”

Finis said nothing. His face, darker than Marcus’s from hours in the sun, was thinner, more than slightly older. Marcus looked at the neat new braids in Finis’s hair. He knew SaRonn had plaited the long thickets for him.

“Cops probably waitin for us,” Marcus said to himself, walking faster. Along the trail, he saw coyote shit: berry seeds, small bones, and chewed fur.

When they came out past the pecan grove, at Pepper Avenue where the rubble from the old flood-destroyed bridge still lay piled along the edge, he saw the car. One police vehicle was parked near the storage lot, on the strip of frontage road, and he knew the other one was probably still on Pepper Avenue.

The two cops near the lot looked up, but they didn’t move. No one was in the barn or the yard. Marcus was about to turn the knob on the kitchen screen when he heard the hearty voice. The two men came out from beside the barn, one writing, and Marcus saw that they’d been looking at tools. They think one of us bashed somebody? he thought quickly.

“Radio said you were coming,” the shorter cop said. His moustache was thick, a brown shelf over his mouth. He smiled. “Strolling through the riverbottom, huh?”

Marcus said, “Taking the quiet way,” without any hesitation. If he waited and thought, he’d say the wrong thing. His blood rang in his temples.

The other officer looked older, and he was taller, but he was only watching. “We’re just looking around,” the first one said. “Glad to finally see Finis here. Finis, right?” He stared at Finis, who smiled slightly, his eyes focused on the barn. The man looked at Marcus. “Country boys strolling in the riverbottom. Down in peaceful Tree-town. You’re Marcus. I’ve seen Finis here several times, seen all your brothers, but I never met you.”

“Nope. You live downtown. Teach at Rio Seco.” The man smiled. “I went to San Domingo.”

Marcus nodded again, feeling like a puppet. San Domingo was out in the valley past French Oaks. Snowy white rancher population. When football teams from the city went there, taunts like “nigger” and “wetback” snaked all through the sidelines, Marcus remembered.

The officer turned, businesslike, to Finis, who stood with his hands loose and his smile fixed tight. “Where you been these last coupla nights? Since the two women got burned up over there?”

Finis said softly, “Not just knee deep, she was totally deep…” Marcus took a long breath. Funkadelic lyrics. Finis was talking about SaRonn.

“You best not be lyin, be denyin, comin from Mississippi, child,” Finis whispered. Marcus moved slightly to attract attention.

“You best not be jokin, you better be strokin, in Far East Mississippi,” Finis said.

Marcus added, “He’s been working with Rubén Salcido on cement jobs for four days, starting right at six A.M.“ He saw them look at each other when they heard Salcido’s name.

“You trying to make nice cover stories for him? You been working hard on this?” the younger one asked.

“I was worried about him,” Marcus said quickly, before he lost his guts. “I checked it out.”

“No,” Marcus said, trying to slow down. “I always worry somebody’s gonna hurt him.”

The older officer stepped toward Finis and said, “Nobody’s gonna hurt him. We’re just going to take him downtown to talk to the homicide guy.” He turned to his partner. “Salcido’s been testifying in that used-car guy’s case. If he comes by, we can check.”

“What you got in your pockets, bro?” The younger cop reached for Finis’s jeans. Finis looked at Marcus, raising his fingers like a blind man touching someone’s face.

“Nothing,” the cop said. Then, when he stepped back to write something on his notepad, Finis reached deep into his front pocket and brought out a clenched fist. He moved toward Marcus, opening his fingers over Marcus’s upturned palm. Marcus couldn’t ask, not in front of the cops.

Two teeth, star-ended like molars, and a long white cigarette of a bone. It was bleached, chalky, thin in his hand. “Cherokee people, Cherokee tribe, so proud to live, so proud to die,” Finis said softly, flat-toned.

When Finis got into the backseat, Marcus went to the kitchen door. He held the bones tight, but he had no idea what Finis was talking about. I’ll put em in his trailer, Marcus thought, and his mother’s face appeared above him, streaked with tears, looking out through the window.

Indian bones. All over the riverbottom. Bottles mottled with rainbows in the glass when he found them buried in the sand. Indian people. Shards of dishes. Animal bones. People bones. That finger bone.

Put em in the bunch. They go in the bunch. Except the finger bone. I need that. In my pocket. When I get back.

“I got rules in here, okay? You know I got rules. Cause it’s no rules out there. No rules outside this door.” Mortrice’s mother touched her glistening fingertip to his hairline, his hollow neck, and the knob at the top of his spine. Protection oil, from a special bottle she got at a botánica full of candles and herbs and bottles.

When he turned his back to her and bent forward, exposing the knob, he thought, Gardens Gangster Posse Rules. Say they rule all over school. They write it on the wall. Every bulletin board. Wrote it on the chalkboard in marker one day, and can’t nobody get it off. Forever.

Back in elementary school and junior high, he’d sat under those bulletin boards, staring at the words. Underneath them, the pockmarked board was blank. There were no rules listed. At home, his mother always whispered about rules. He knew exactly what they were. But in school, during those years, he’d waited nervously for the instruction.

They were simple, once he’d found them out from the homeys. Protect your homeys. Kill for your homeys. Die for your homeys. Now he was going to be a freshman in high school. He was going to be the sergeant at arms. He knew all the rules.

His mother sat at the spider-legged dinette table now, facing him, and Mortrice slumped back on the couch, feeling the dabs of oil gather warmth from his skin.

“My brother Marcus comin to get us this weekend,” his mother said. “Mortrice.”

She had been saying that all week. Her voice was low and soft as the humming beat he heard all night from the radio beside his bed while he waited. He had to go out in the evenings whether she let him or not. She didn’t know why. But she knew he slipped out sometimes. Not through his ground-floor bedroom window, covered with wrought-iron bars. Through the front door, after she had finally slipped into exhaustion. He wouldn’t confront her. Not his mother, with the softest voice in the Gardens, with her cheekbones rising like pillows toward her eyes, her hair in a long fat braid down her spine. And now she’d begun to anoint him with the oil at night, before he went to his room. Because she knew.

“I know,” she said now. “We movin to Rio Seco cause I know what’s gon happen. I can’t have you gettin killed off in these streets. That’s where you think you live now. I hear when you come back through the door at night, Mortrice. We goin this weekend.”

Mortrice had seen the place before, but his mother didn’t know that. Whenever she said the words, “Rio Seco,” like a chant, he saw a skull in the riverbottom cane. He closed his eyes, felt the springs in the couch. He could hear the music outside, from the cars parked in the courtyard with doors open and Kenwoods blasting DJ Quik. All the men sat outside in their rides, and since it was nearly dark, the women were moving back inside the apartments before the shooting began.

His mother was silent now, staring at the faint black stripes behind the heavy drape she kept pulled over the window. The living and eating room was usually dim with shifting shadows, like a bear’s den he’d seen in a schoolbook. They had lived in this apartment all his life, and his mother was in permanent hibernation. But she was so beautiful, so quiet, that Mortrice knew why his father had loved her. She never sat outside with the other women in Soul Gardens, loud-talking and hollering at her kids or the men. Her mouth was nearly always closed, a full, mauve mark even though she never wore lipstick. No makeup, no bows in her hair, even though she did hair for other women. His mother sat inside her lovely den, with fabric shimmering on the walls and beads hanging in the doorways, or she quickly traversed the ten feet of cement to Tiki’s next door, where she did hair in Tiki’s always crowded front room. She rarely spoke there; only her eyes traveled from mouth to mouth when others laughed or argued.

She talked only to him, mostly at night, like now, and when she did, her voice moved as gentle and soothing as it had back when he slept with her, back when he was three or four, when the shouts and shots outside had frightened him, and he would crawl under her arm to hear about the riverbottom, the tall bamboo that shivered in the wind and the vines hanging like drapes over the tunnels where she and her brother had filed like Indians.

At night, after the harsh street lamps in the project parking lot hissed to glaring life before someone shot them out, she told him about the trees speckled with apricots and lemons, about the wild pigs in the riverbottom, the rabbits racing through the olive grove. Once, in a whisper thick from her throat like she could barely breathe, in a voice he’d never forgotten, she’d told him about her five brothers who could kick anyone’s ass.

When he’d started school and had to be a little man, he’d stopped showing his fear, and she’d stopped talking about the riverbottom and Rio Seco. He hadn’t slept in the sheet that smelled of her Jergens and peppermints for many years. At night now, he lay in his own narrow bed listening to the shouts and laughter he knew, that he couldn’t be afraid of: Lil Tony, Bam-Bam, P-Dog, and the others his age. And the deeper, slower voices of the older homeys. The Original Gangster few, the ones who weren’t dead, who ran the courtyards.

He lay in his own bed, waiting to go outside and do his job, the one everyone knew he did best. He was patient and thorough and silent.

His mother said, “This weekend. Mortrice.” All he could do was nod and go into his room to wait until it was time.

Mortrice knew Kenneth was his father. He knew it. He saw Kenneth look at his mother, saw that he nodded to her but never spoke, and even so, he knew Kenneth was the one.

Way back when Mortrice was ten, beginning to defend himself in the courtyards over lunch money and thrown elbows and insults, Kenneth had watched him. One afternoon, when a boy from across the broad avenue had challenged Mortrice on the sidewalk after school, casually, with the left side of his teeth showing in a sneer, Mortrice had glimpsed Kenneth’s midnight-blue Monte Carlo parked nearby, four heads silhouetted low while the occupants drank Olde English 800 and cooled off. He’d looked at the widening square of perfect teeth, like ten white doors facing him, when the boy taunted him. Then he ducked his head suddenly to slam the grin backward onto the glittering sidewalk. He straddled the writhing chest and clenched the ribs between his knees, slamming the boy’s head against the cement. Past the teeth were white egg curves of skull and something inside the soft part that hated him.

Kenneth and the others got out of the Monte Carlo and came slowly across the street, and Mortrice felt them all behind him, silent until the blood ran from the boy’s thick curls and trickled down his forehead. “Yo,” someone said, and he got off the boy, who stumbled against a chain-link fence and pushed himself upright, walking a jagged line down the street.

Mortrice only nodded, waiting for the breath clotted in his chest to loosen and spread to his closed-off throat.

“You ain’t even gotta get a name, lil homey. You cool. Mortrice. I heard your mama say it.” Mortrice fixed his eyes on Kenneth’s fingertips on the brown bottle. “Mortrice. It got somethin in it like… Shit, man, like rigamortis or somethin. Like death.” Kenneth turned to the others, and they nodded and smiled, pulling whistled air through their teeth with satisfaction.

Mortrice stared at Kenneth’s light cheeks and forehead, as pale as graham crackers, and the sprinkling of freckles. When he got home, he went to the bathroom to study his own skin. Slightly darker. He’d already found three small moles on the inside of his wrist. His mother’s face was smooth and flawless, her broad cheekbones tinted magenta under the brown. She had no freckles, no marks anywhere. But now he knew where his marks had come from.

He had seen the way Kenneth squinted at his forehead, his knuckles, that gaze shifting only with each long-blinked pause. And last week, before Mortrice had said anything about what his mother had begun to murmur, Kenneth had taken him to Rio Seco. He had known, somehow. He had known because of their shared blood. Their marks.

Mortrice lay on top of the sheets, fingering the thin scar splitting his right eyebrow where Bam-Bam had hit him three months ago when he finally got beat in. Their posse was still small. Ten homeys had stood around him in a tight knot, kicking and slashing with fists, and though Mortrice’s brain told him to curl into a ball, his blood trembled with stiff anger and made him lash back, tangling his fists with theirs. When they were finished, they had laughed at him, still spinning on his back. “Yo, man, break dancin went out long time ago,” P-Dog said. Then they helped him up. His ribs were bruised, his face streaming blood, but he was proud of the deep splits all along his knuckles.

Now the scars were pale threads wrapped around his fingers. He hadn’t gotten the tattoo on the back of his neck yet. He closed his eyes and clenched his fists. His mother was serious. Two more days and one of the kick-ass brothers would come, probably in a truck, from Rio Seco.

He reached under the pillow for the .25, and the handgun’s barrel was still cool even though his head had left a hot dent in the cloth over it. In Kenneth’s apartment, Mortrice loved to sit at the glass table and watch his own hands turn and open and clean the guns; he loved the smell of oil and bluing and powder. He would be sergeant at arms. He was the only one with patience enough to read the gun magazines and send away for the kit. He read the instructions every night, and at the glass table, he rubbed the gun parts with the rag that was nearly translucent from oil, so that everything glowed clear and polished around him.

But he couldn’t leave her alone. He opened his eyes again and saw the pumpkin color of the sulfur lamps beginning to glow. He heard her open the door, and she stood in the dimming doorway. “I’ma go call,” she whispered. “Right now.”

She was always alone if she wasn’t next door, or with him. She walked only those few feet to Tiki’s, like now. Tiki got the groceries. Mortrice’s mother cooked, sat in the front room, and went next door to do hair. With the sweet-sheened dollars, she paid for the groceries and hair supplies and his clothes.

In the back of an old textbook from school, Mortrice had three hundred dollars in flattened bills. Kenneth had paid him to take care of the guns. The others liked to ride, to shoot, but when they were finished, they had no idea what to do with the dirty, often jammed weapons.

Last week, when he was supposed to go out with the other new homey, Paco, to prove they were down, something happened. No one came to get him from the place where he waited near the Dumpster. He had crouched there, watching the older men string out along the chain link to drink from big bottles, watching the small boys scatter and run like schooling fish until late, watching the women peer outside from triangles pulled in their drapes. When the sky grew cloudy and electric after midnight, he went inside. His mother was asleep on the couch, her neck long and curved to the side like a bird’s.

The next night, Kenneth had pulled up to the asphalt just outside the door. He’d sat right there, where Mortrice’s mother could see him, and when she’d gone outside, huddling in her doorway, she’d called, “You ain’t takin him.”

“He comin,” Kenneth said casually, his arm dangling from the open window of the Monte Carlo. “Ain’t nothin goin on. Just me and him.”

Mortrice slid past her, astonished at the empty backseat he could see from the doorway, and she closed her eyes, leaning against the grimy wood frame. Tiki called from next door, “You need to leave that boy alone.” She stood with her two daughters in a broad line of crossed arms.

“Shit, I’m old enough to be his daddy,” Kenneth called. Mortrice hesitated at the passenger door of the Monte Carlo. “I’m older than his mama. I ain’t gon hurt him. Niggas hurt theyselves. Every nigga gotta choose.” He had a strange, closed-in look on his face when Mortrice slid onto the seat.

They were alone on the freeway. Mortrice had ridden the freeways for a few months now, from Venice to Lennox, Pomona to Fontana, but this was the longest they’d ever driven. And Mortrice wasn’t sure if he’d done something wrong. He hadn’t done anything but ride, listening to music and pulling smoke into his lungs and waiting for the metal pieces laid out in perfect order for his fingertips.

Kenneth drove slower, more hesitant tonight. His voice was quicker and angry, though, almost like he was talking to a woman instead of spilling out far more words than Mortrice had heard him say before.

“You know where we goin?” Kenneth barked when Mortrice saw that they had left the unbroken constellation of L.A. lights.

“We goin to the country,” Kenneth said, and Mortrice read more signs. Hacienda Heights. Diamond Bar.

“We was drivin last night,” Kenneth began again, abruptly, staring ahead at the sparse traffic on the wide lanes. “Shit, I don’t remember where we was goin. Some expedition. Lil homey name Paco—you only seen him once. He just showed up last week. He told me, Can you call me Paco? And stutterin and shit. Stay over there in the three hundreds, somebody told me. We was ridin, he was three deep in the back with Bam and Kool, and we hit this bump in the street, man, like a piece a wood or some shit.”

Mortrice looked out the window when Kenneth paused. Paco. A small boy with dusty hair and huge eyes that Mortrice had looked away from, because of their fear. He didn’t want it. He smelled a strong, green sharpness now, like the odor of heated, packed grass from the school lawnmower. He saw a black mass of shifting shapes far below the slow lane, heard a bellow, and saw stacked bales of hay like huge cinder blocks.

“The shottie go off back there,” Kenneth said. “I think Kool had lil homey holdin the shottie, and it went off in his face.”

Mortrice turned his eyes toward Kenneth, keeping his breath shallow and even, his mouth closed like his mother’s, and the green smell turned brown in his nostrils as he tried not to see the pellets and the blood.

“Shit, I didn’t even know this lil nigga, didn’t know where he stay or nothin. Kool said some lady got him, not his mama. He don’t have no people. Kool and Bam trippin and shit, and lil homey, you know, he went out, like, instant. Face all gone like that. He had it point-blank.”

Mortrice kept his gaze on the two dark moles at Kenneth’s temple. Marks. My people got marks.

He slowed the car, and Mortrice saw that they were coming to a bridge. When they crossed the riverbed, the water was like a narrow sidewalk of silver. The shining was surrounded by pale sand and then tall patches of dark, and the Monte Carlo was off the bridge, heading down an exit ramp.

“We put him down here,” Kenneth said, driving slowly, peering at the bushes beside the narrow road along the river. Mortrice saw festoons of bare vines hanging from the trees. He knew that this was his mother’s riverbottom, and his breath came harder. He smelled wetness and skunk.

“It was like he was sleepin on his back, cause his boots was all straight up,” Kenneth muttered, and the car stopped at a sandy field. “I know you ain’t got no fuckin mouth, Mortrice. Like death and shit. I’m just checkin, like, checkin it out. Get out the ride, man.”

Mortrice stood on the damp sand, and Kenneth waited, his face immobile through the windshield, like he was listening to one last song on the radio. Then he crunched into the bushes, and Mortrice followed.

“It was real cold out here, man. The country,” Kenneth said, low. “It was a tree like this where we went in.” Mortrice saw a gnarled trunk, burnt wood glittering like charcoal in the moonlight. Kenneth bent suddenly under a low, reaching branch and moved into the bamboo.

Mortrice held his breath, lowered his head, and pushed through the feathery green. He followed the sound. Raising his head in a clearing, he saw Kenneth standing straight, the bamboo arching over him like a tent. “Like he still sleepin, man. Shit. His arms still folded,” Kenneth said, and Mortrice saw a figure lying on its back, hands on his chest. When they took one more step, a blur of ember eyes and long tail leaped from the face, and Mortrice dropped to his knees.

Paco had no face. His flesh was gone, even his eyes, and only the gleaming white skull smiled above his jacket.

Mortrice knew he had slept. He heard his mother close the front door. She had called Rio Seco. They were coming to take him. He couldn’t leave her.

“I bought lil homey them shoes.” That was all Kenneth had said in the car, much later. When they flowed through the L.A. streets, never-ending lights and stores and windows, finally stopping at Kenneth’s apartment, he had said nothing to Mortrice. He’d popped the trunk, and pointed. Mortrice stared at the shotgun, spattered with black blood. He’d reached inside to pick it up, cradling the heavy barrel, touching the brittle pattern that fell away from his fingers.

His mother opened the bedroom door and stood, watching him. He pretended to turn in sleep, slowly, sliding the .25 into the fold of his sheet, but he didn’t put his finger inside the trigger. He lay his whole palm over the small gun and waited.

When Sofelia called, Marcus was pacing in front of the big window, watching people in the courtyard. There was a festival going on downtown that let crowds sample foods at many of the new restaurants. A tapas fest, they called it, after the Spanish bar food. It was the first in a series of “new ethnic and regional favorites to kick off fall!”

“Daddy got shot by the cops, by accident,” he told Sofelia quickly. “I’ve been waitin to tell you. He’s okay, got hit in the shoulder, and he’s in the hospital.”

“Bullets,” she whispered, so low he could hardly hear. Women’s voices crowded behind her.

“You havin trouble?” he asked. “You still want me to come? You gotta let me tell Mama.”

“No, no, Marcus, don’t tell nobody,” she pleaded. “I’ll tell you where I am, and you gotta come get me and my son. They gon kill him. I know it.”

Marcus held the phone to his ear and saw two women with red hair, nearly wine-dark, cross near the palms. They laughed, swinging small purses. One lived in number 3, he knew. “Sofelia,” he said, “I gotta get a truck. You got a lotta stuff?” He couldn’t believe their conversation was so everyday, after a blank space of more than ten years.

“Okay.” Marcus hesitated. He was talking to a woman he didn’t know at all. “I guess you don’t need much, cause Mama got everything.”

Before he realized what she’d said, his mind played idly with “stay” again. But then he frowned. “What?”

“Marcus, please,” Sofelia’s voice pleaded, breaking hoarse. “I’ma tell you where to take me when we get back.” He heard her breathe hard. “When you comin? Nothin’s workin on him no more.”

Marcus watched the figures flash through the arched entryway, and then he looked at his calendar. “Three more days, okay, so I can get a truck.” He exhaled softly. “Where you stayin now?”

When he’d hung up, he looked at the address in L.A., somewhere off Imperial. He hadn’t been to that neighborhood in a long time, since college. He hadn’t left his ordered, comfortable downtown route this much in years. Marcus stepped back from the window, and when he turned off the light, he could see himself rubbing his temples in the dark glass.

Walking through the bustling streets of the festival, he smelled garlic and tomatoes and perfume and beer, but quickly he was in the darkened, empty area of downtown that emanated only brick and cement and traces of exhaust, then the hay scent of vacant lots. When he passed the Kozy Komfort, he saw tiny dark figures moving hurriedly in doorways. I wonder if the cops let Finis go yet, he thought. I hope he go straight home and don’t hang out tonight.

He passed the entrance to his uncle’s place, just a square cut into the trees, an open gate, but dust still hanging from all the cars. He knew they’d be partying big-time back there tonight. The eagle had flown, and he would be landing at The Blue Q.

Turning at his father’s gate, he saw the barn lights, and Kickstand and another man looked up quickly. “I didn’t know who the hell that was, sneakin up all pitiful,” Kickstand said when Marcus neared the circle of tools.

Kickstand spat sunflower seeds into the dirt. “I’m workin late on this sorry fool’s old carburetor.” The other man grinned sheepishly, willing to accept Kickstand’s abuse as long as it took to fix the ancient Cadillac. “All your brothers gone over your uncle’s,” Kickstand added. “Somethin come up.”

Marcus looked at the lit kitchen window. He didn’t want to see his mother; he didn’t like lying to her. She wasn’t as easy as other women, he thought, shaking his head. And he had a hard time keeping Sofelia’s secret.

But she opened the kitchen door and waved at him. He knew she’d have seen him; from where she usually sat at the table, sorting beans or working, she could see everyone who drove onto the place.

She was at the old wooden table now. Marcus hugged her, smelling the burnt brown sugar of her hair. “How’s Daddy?” he asked. “They found anything out?”

She shook her head. “I only know what Revia King tell me every night when she get off.” She glanced at the old tile clock on the wall. “She don’t come by till near eleven. And all she can say is how he feelin, that his infection been goin down. But she don’t know nothin about what them police do when they go in there and talk to him.”

His mother bent her head to the table and circled her neck with her fingers, a tight collar, rubbing hard. When she looked back up, he saw the gray smudges under her eyes, like shading from a pencil, and his heart twisted inside. If he told her about Sofelia, she would still have his father to worry about, but the two pain creases between her eyes, the ones he swore had cut into her skin when Sofelia hadn’t come home and his mother had started squinting hard down the driveway all day, might fade a little.

“You find somethin out about your daddy?” she said, seeing him straighten and prepare to talk. “He wanted me to tell you—he told Revia about a white boy in a black Jeep. He ain’t told nobody nothin yet. He say they gon do what they gon do, the police. Like always.” She paused, frowning. “But he said, ‘Tell Marcus about the Jeep.’ Revia was sure.”

Marcus thought of Pammy Sawicky, of the kind of white guys who sold speed at the high school and how they got older and sold it from houses and bars. He remembered one from school—Buddy Louden. But the rest of Buddy’s friends had been Harley riders, guys who didn’t hang out with brothers. He had no idea of how to trace a white guy.

He shook his head. He wasn’t going to mention anything to Demetrius except Pammy Sawicky. He didn’t want to set himself up to blow anything, to sound stupid. “Mama, I’m goin over to Uncle Oscar’s to talk to Demetrius about a truck. Kickstand said somethin came up.”

She shrugged. “He called over here and said he wanted to talk to em. He didn’t say why.” Standing up, she put two fingers along Marcus’s cheek. “I think he don’t want to scare me. But I don’t see what worse could happen.”

When he went outside, Marcus stood for a moment looking up at the hard-edged stars. Only two miles from downtown, less than that, and you could see the whole night sky here, littered with stars, while outside his apartment you could see only the diffused glare from streetlights and mirrored buildings and glowing offices.

“En boca cerrada no entran moscas,” a musical, birdlike voice said from the darkened courtyard to his left. His great-grandmother laughed, just two whiffles of sound, and Marcus walked over to sit beside her in one of the old wrought-iron chairs under the palm shelter that ran the length of the U-shaped central area.

Her hands lay on her knees like two golden, curve-legged spiders, and her eyes were only slits of silver in the dim light. Marcus smiled and lay his hand over one of hers. Spiders. Ants. Flies. All the words she had taught him while they picked olives and stirred them in the curing vats. “Flies don’t enter a closed mouth,” she had said just now, since he’d been standing there with his wide open to the sky.

“Pero it’s night, Abuela,” he said. He spoke a strange mixture of the nouns she’d taught him and other words he’d picked up, but he had no sense of grammar. He’d taken two years of French at Rio Seco High, because that was what college prep kids were taking, and he wanted to be one of them. No one cared about speaking Spanish then.

“Sí,” his great-grandmother said. “Pero en la noche, los murciélagos vuelan.”

Marcus nodded. His abuela loved anything that flew. She spent hours watching mockingbirds and jays, sparrows and red-tailed hawks; in the evenings, she waited for bats and moths to trace paths through the branches.

“Mi pequeño perico,” she said. My little parrot, Marcus thought, smiling. That was what she’d always called him, when he listened and repeated. But none of his brothers ever would sit still long enough to learn any of the words or sayings she loved so much. “Dos gringas, las muertas,” she said slowly, for him.

“Someone put gas en tu placa,“ Marcus said, thinking. “I forgot.” He frowned. “You didn’t see anything?” His abuela understood more than she could say, like most people who live around other languages but keep theirs.

She shook her head. Then she put one tiny, gnarled hand on the one he’d laid over hers. “El valiente vive hasta que el cobarde quiere.”

Marcus stood, nodding, but he was tired, and the words thudded dully in his brain without meaning. Valiente meant brave, but the rest was a blur. She nodded back, and he left her there, a tiny sparrow herself, with her black mantilla over her silver-sheened forehead and sharp nose, her shining black eyes on him.

He called, “Don’t work too hard, man,” to Kickstand, who leaned over the Cadillac.

“Shit,” Kickstand muttered. Marcus crossed behind the barn and headed slowly to the gate between the properties. He heard only his shoes on the bark and leaves, and his forehead hummed with fatigue. When he entered the eucalyptus and saw a stark, peeled-white trunk nearby with a rust-speckled hubcap nailed to it, he saw his father’s face. His father would know exactly what kind of hubcap it was, if someone came to ask. His father knew every inch of this land, and whoever had started the fire had wanted to shoot him, or to get him shot by the cops. Marcus stared at the facets of the hubcap. Cobarde. His abuela’s words shifted for him.

He had to be careful walking through the trees on the other side of the wall, the ones around The Blue Q. People took care of business in the trees, sometimes love business, sometimes pharmaceutical business, sometimes old and never finished business.

Marcus never came here on a weekend night. Occasionally, he came in the late afternoon with Brother Lobo, who liked to sit and listen and talk in the confines of walls since the bullet had grazed his arm. But that was mainly a talking crowd. The weekend crowd was serious—drinking, eating, loving, and kicking ass for necessity and for sport.

He wound through the trunks, knowing Rock was at watch, as always, near the choc brew and the orange grove. He knew Jerry and Joe would be keeping muscled order in the front parking area, the way Uncle Oscar paid them to. But you never knew who might be in the trees here.

He heard soft laughter behind one, saw a thick elbow bent out in a vee where a man leaned into the lips, quiet now. He kept his head down and walked fast, a wire of heat racing through his groin. When they were little, he and Finis used to hide here, hoping to catch a glimpse of passion and flesh.

People milled about in the packed dirt near The Blue Q. Marcus slowed, checking faces that turned to see where he was coming from, who he was with. Usher Price’s oldest brother, Wheeler, nodded at him. Most of the men who drank and ate at The Blue Q were in their thirties and forties, the kind of men L.A. and Rio Seco people called “country” or “old-time” or “down-home.” Even if they were native Californians, guys like Wheeler and Rock and Jerry were down-home. But not me, Marcus thought. Demetrius can pull off both, he can go between here and there and anywhere. But I can’t.

At the door, Jerry took his five-dollar cover charge, laughing. “Yeah, nigga, you know your uncle don’t love you for free on no Friday night. Give up them ducats.” Marcus walked past the hand-lettered sign that had hung by the door for years: NO GUNS, KNIVES, OR ATTITUDES.

The smoke hung blue and heavy, as if ivy grew from the ceiling. Marcus saw that the tiny stage, just a wooden platform near the wall, was empty. The jukebox was playing “Float On,” and a few couples danced in the bare space near the wall. He had to smile. If Uncle Oscar or one of his friends wasn’t playing blues, the younger crowd played The Floaters or Earth, Wind and Fire or old Commodores. And that was old-time now.

The tables were crowded with people eating Aintielila’s greens and chitlins and Oscar’s barbecued ribs and hotlinks. Toward the back, the service window was open, the permanent menu above it, and Marcus could see his aunt moving in the kitchen.

He knew his brothers and uncle would be sitting at Oscar’s table in the far rear corner, where he could watch the whole place. Marcus saw Demetrius’s head moving while he talked, saw his brothers’ black hair gleaming in braids, except for Finis, whose hair was dusty and pulled into a thick, careless wedge with a rubber band. Finis’s head lay on his arms, and Marcus was relieved to see him intact.

Uncle Oscar’s face was the only one turned to his, the deep sickles framing his mouth.

Demetrius said, “You ain’t had to come. You ain’t gon want to help out on this now.”

Marcus didn’t wait, but took a breath of smoke and sauce. “Demetrius. One of the girls in the Granada, Pammy Sawicky, I know she wouldn’t come down here with no brother. Some white dude had to bring them onto the place, had to get em inside the gate to make it look like one of us did it.”

The others laughed, and Marcus said, “Shut up, damnit. I’m serious. And Daddy seen a white guy. So we gotta put this together.”

Uncle Oscar blew smoke from his cigarillo onto the table. “Yeah. We do. But while we doin that, somebody’s gotta be standin watch. That’s what I’m tryin to get y’all to understand.”

“I understand,” Octavious said. “But hold up.” He turned to Marcus, his green-tinged eyes murky in the dimness. “Why the hell you give my ride up the other day, man? First you take it and don’t ax me, then you let somebody take it and don’t say shit.”

“Oh, man, give Sissyfly a break,” Julius said. “She hard. Check her out.” Marcus turned, following Julius’s nod, and saw Bennie Proudfoot dancing close with a man near the wall, her mouth moving constantly up under his chin, her feet dragging, and her hips shifting hard.

“Who’s got her kids?” he said without thinking, and Octavious shook his head.

“SaRonn,” Octavious said. “Belisa tired a watchin em. Bennie lookin for love every day.” Marcus was surprised; Octavious didn’t spit the words.

SaRonn—he remembered the fringe at her neck, her eyes. He looked at Finis, whose eyes stayed close even with the mention of her name. “I don’t remember her at all,” Marcus said.

“She been gone a few years,” Octavious said. “Belisa said she was in L.A.”

Marcus thought, So maybe I ain’t gotta lie. Not this time. But he looked at Demetrius again, and at his uncle, who said, “When y’all sorry-ass fools tired a talkin about women, let me know. And tell me who gon be watchin.”

“I said I would,” Demetrius said. “Julius and Finis ain’t good for shit in them trailers.”

“I see what I need to see,” Julius said. Marcus watched him smile, unapologetic. Julius never backed down; he never cared enough about anything but what he wanted for himself.

“How are you gonna stay anywhere but home, with Enchantee waitin on you?” Marcus said. He wanted to say something about the new house, but he didn’t.

“Somebody gotta stay near the barn, and somebody need to walk the fences at night,” Uncle Oscar said. “With a piece. Cause whoever did it, they gon try it again if this one don’t work. Way them cops keepin Hosea look bad, but they gon have to let him go once they do they ballistics.”

“Shit,” Uncle Oscar said. “Hosea gun so old they ain’t never seen no bullets like that. And your mama said somebody was shootin three, four times. Them women got bullets in em ain’t your daddy’s. What else they got on Hosea? Ain’t nobody seen nothin.” He blew smoke again. “But one a y’all better see somethin next time. Better catch somethin, goddamnit.”

Marcus looked at the gray smoke floating in a fist, then dissolving. He thought of the ashen wells under his mother’s eyes. “Demetrius, man, you gotta let me borrow a truck,” he said. “I gotta move somebody, a favor, in three days, and then I’ll come out to the place and walk. I’ll sleep instead a you, so Enchantee ain’t gotta be alone.”

They were all silent. Their father’s 1956 Chevy truck, a green so faded it was as pale as shallow water, was in the far corner of the barn. Kickstand kept it clean and checked; he’d been working on the brake lines when Hosea was shot.

“You better go on and take it, if you movin a woman,” Oscar said. “You ain’t never kept no woman. Look like you need all the help you can get.”

The only way Hosea knew that a dry Santa Ana wind was scouring his trees, sanding grit along the cars on the lot, was that a cold spark had passed from the nurse’s hand to his. The static in the room jumped blue when she’d plucked at his wrist.

The constant shifting of white shapes in and out of the room left him exhausted from holding himself rigid and watchful. Sometimes faces peered from higher up, from over shoulders, at him. He kept seeing the pale woman on the billboard above the injured man in Tulsa, the razor scallop of her lips where she smiled down at the street.

The cops wore dark jackets, but they flashed pictures near his face, and the photos showed more pale faces, more sharp smiles. “These two women…” “Where were you…” “Where was your son…” “Why was the gate…”

He said nothing. “He’s playing dead…” “Those two women are dead for real, Thompson…” “This isn’t a game…” “Maybe he’s senile…” “His son’s senile from angel dust…”

He waited. They would decide, no matter what he said or didn’t say. They were the kind of men who moved their mouths and wrote on papers and informed other men of what was already done. If he spoke, he might hurt Finis. That was all he could think about while his head was lined with velvet heat and his mouth was full of prickling coughs that had begun to rise from his chest to lodge in his throat. The smells of the hospital liquids and people and the stale, electric air hung in a web around him that at night grew smaller and smaller, shrinking down to the dome of harsh light around his bed and his body.

He waited for the next metal creak of the door and the next float-and-jerk shape to hover over him.

One box. That was it. Everything Mortrice had fit inside the box his mother had gotten from Tiki. His jeans and shirts, his cassette player and tapes, his two pairs of sneakers.

The kit stayed inside his pillow, with the .25. His bed was a secondhand frame Tiki had found at a yard sale years ago, and his mother said to leave it. “We gotta go fast,” she said, sitting at the dinette table, her upper body calm, her knee bouncing so hard that the table shook. “Just what we can carry.”

He could carry the kit. It had finally come in the mail, to Kenneth’s place since mail was hard to get inside the Gardens. Mortrice had ordered it from a catalog advertised in a Guns & Ammo issue he’d bought at the store. The kit was small enough to fit in a large coat pocket, but the zippered leather case contained all the tools needed to break down and clean the guns.

On the same page with the ad for the kit, he’d seen a course in gunsmithing. Not just cleaning, but altering the barrels, repairing weapons. You could send for that in the mail, too. You could learn it at home. He hadn’t told Kenneth about the course when they’d opened the package with the cleaning kit. Kenneth had nodded with pride and said, “You got skills, man, skills and sense. You gon be down, hell, yeah.”

The liquid warmth that had filled Mortrice’s chest when Kenneth said the words, the fingering feel like a cupped palm at the back of his head, was gone now. He’d only felt that when his mother sat beside his bed at night, telling him stories, telling him how when he was a baby she never let anyone else touch him because he belonged only to her, to no one else in the world. And now he was going out to leave her behind, only for an hour, and give up that tingling rise he’d just begun to recognize.

“Mama, I’ll be right back,” Mortrice said, straight to her upturned face. He wasn’t going to wait for her to fall asleep. No sneaking around tonight. No sense. And he had sense.

He waited for her to answer. But she only stared at him, her eyes moving over his face, his big coat. After a long time, she said, “When?”

“My brother comin in a few hours, Mortrice. He said first thing in the mornin. It’s goin on midnight.” His mother laid her palms flat on the table. “Ain’t no good-byes that work, baby,” she whispered. “I know.”

They went all the way to Venice, Kenneth driving cool and smooth like he just wanted to see the water flashing dull under the clouds like melted lead. No one was in the back. Mortrice wanted to tell him, to get it over with, but Kenneth’s smile when he rocked slightly to the beat from the radio, his head turning slow and easy like a periscope to watch the streets, was too valuable to wipe away with the wrong words. Mortrice leaned back against the seat and dozed to the swaying car and the music.

They pulled up at Kenneth’s apartment, a green duplex with a carport cave. Mortrice went up the stairs, hearing Bam-Bam, Tony, and someone else inside.

His name was Capper, an older guy who’d just gotten out of Chino. He nodded to Kenneth and looked at Mortrice. “What up?” he said, his voice slow. “That your boy?”

Mortrice held his breath. The words meant anything. And Kenneth said, “Yo, man, that’s him. Lil nigga can break your piece down sweet, specially if it’s fuckin up.”

They all turned to look at him. Mortrice put his hands in his coat pockets and said, “I didn’t bring the kit, man. Not tonight.”

But Kenneth only said, “Cool. Capper ain’t goin nowhere, huh, fool? You can do it tomorrow.”

Mortrice sat on the couch, sweating under the coat collar, waiting to be alone with Kenneth again. I shoulda did it already, he thought. Dudes might stay around all night. And Bam-Bam think I ain’t about shit anyway.

Capper and Bam-Bam rolled the weed into fat cigarettes, and when the yellow smoke drifted toward the ceiling, Capper said, “Man, I missed that good chronic. The right shit.”

Kenneth drew in the smoke until it filmed his eyes. Mortrice sucked in the burnt-sweet taste and felt it coat his skull with the glistening resin the antidrug people always talked about when they came to school. He watched Kenneth move from room to room, feeling his head sway behind his eyeballs to the music.

When they were in the car again, Mortrice jammed in the back with the other two, and Capper in front with Kenneth, he saw the streetlights passing in long, lemony tails. They stopped at the red light on the street fronting the Gardens, and only a few gold lights shone in windows like broken teeth. Mama waitin for me, he thought, his head warm on the seat, his arm wedged against Tony’s, his body hurtling away from the green light in the cushioned, armored boat. “Kenneth,” he said, over the music. He heard his throat shouting. “I gotta get out.”

But Kenneth turned and said, “What? You gotta go home? That what you think?”

Mortrice hesitated. The lights hurtled past him on both sides like glowing wires. “Yeah,” he said, but Kenneth pulled the car to a stop at a side street off Vermont, behind a row of stores.

“Why you say it like that?” Kenneth said, his face immobile now, hovering over the seat like a burnt-red sun in the neon light reflecting in the car.

“I gotta go to Rio Seco with my moms tomorrow, maybe for…” Mortrice paused. “Maybe for a month, man. I don’t know. She trippin.”

Kenneth smiled, a fingernail crescent with no teeth. “So she trippin. That don’t mean you gotta trip.”

Mortrice was silent, and Tony said, “Who care about the little mothafucka? Come on, man, let’s get with the expedition and shit.”

Capper said lazily, his voice floating forward, “This little nigga tryin to front? He think he gon break him off some in Rio Seco? He been marketin some product?”

Mortrice shook his head and realized Capper couldn’t see him. “No, man, I ain’t doin nothin.”

Bam-Bam said, “He ain’t sold nothin noway, cause he ain’t been around enough.”

Kenneth said, “He think he gon be the sergeant at arms and shit. He talkin bout he can take care of everybody. Huh, Mortrice? You ready, huh? Got your shit in the mail.”

Mortrice said, “When I get back. I’ma help her out. When I get back, I’ma…” His tongue was coated with sand.

Capper said, “He goin to Rio Seco. We sent two niggas out to Rio Seco already, man, remember? When they got out Chino, they went out there to them apartments. The Westside.” He finally turned his head slightly so that Mortrice could see his profile, his heavy, square cheek wider at the jaw. Prison food, they’d been teasing him about. “Kenneth, man, I thought you was takin care of shit while I was gone. This little nigga think he gon go off on his own and shit. Hey. What his name?”

“Hey. L.A. already in the house, okay? Already in the country out there, Rio Seco. And ain’t no extra room for frontin. If your mama takin you home, and you ain’t with the homeys in that posse, I don’t want to hear shit.”

“No,” Kenneth said. “He ain’t gon hang with them. He choosin now. He need to stay here. He got shit to do.” He turned back to Mortrice, his freckles dark across his forehead. “You choosin a woman. You a homey for life.”

“Live for your homeys, die for your homeys,” Bam-Bam murmured. The mingled breaths drew water from the windows, and Mortrice closed his eyes.

“Walk, then, nigga.” Kenneth turned and started the car. The others were silent.

Kenneth shrugged, looked out the window at the darkened street they faced. His curls were suffused with red light from the liquor-store sign behind them. “Wherever you goin.”

Mortrice pushed open the door. He knew it wasn’t right. You got beat in, you got beat out. He heard the music go up loud, but no one said a word. He closed the door, looking only at his hand, and felt himself swivel to walk down the sidewalk, toward the liquor store and the light. The Monte Carlo screeched down the narrow side street, and he lifted his head.

When he reached the corner, waiting at the broad avenue shuttered with black wrought-iron bars and metal shutters, he heard the car behind him again. He was about to turn, but he began to walk. He went past the liquor store, down the next block, and he hadn’t heard the engine move with him. He slowed, and the deep-throated cough of the shotgun came from almost a block away.

He didn’t turn; his back was a shell. The metal studded his back with tiny embers that burned so hard they pushed him into his face, onto the cement, while the tires far behind screamed in a loose circle and sped the other way.

This shape was white-jacketed, but a man’s deep voice said, “They’re moving you.”

Hosea opened his eyes. Behind the hands grabbing IV poles and screeching parts of his bed, the homicide detective said, “He’s takin you down to the other ward. Your whacko kid’s out, too. Your ballistics came back, and we’ve got people that saw some things you didn’t. Cause you might not have been around during the shooting part.” When Hosea’s bed swung around sharply, bringing him closer to the hairs curving like antennae from the mussed head, the man said, “But you were around for something. And if something happens again, we’re gonna see it. Don’t think we won’t.”

The air in the hallway reeked of sweat and metal. Hosea heard men’s voices. Jail ward. He saw deputies in the doorway of one room, heard shouting. Then swinging doors closed and he was hurtling through icy walls.

He kept his eyes closed then, until all movement had stopped. When it was silent in the new room, he looked up at the television playing on the wall. A pleated drape separated him from a sleep-breathing presence in another bed. And Hosea was cold—so cold, with the rushing hallway air still in his ears, and this new icy-walled room like a refrigerator.

His shoulder ached with a dull pain deep inside the bone, but his skin didn’t throb with heat the same way it had for—for how many days? He stared at the television, which held no clues about the date. White women with hair thin and curled stiff, like spiderwebs sprayed bronze, spoke to each other across a coffee table in one of the rooms he always glimpsed when he saw Alma or the grandkids watching evening funny shows.

A white woman came in to check him after a time, this one young, with long dark hair in a braid. She touched each item lightly—the bed, IV, table, him—and said, “The doctor on this floor will stop by soon. You just came from—” She hesitated. “From the other ward. He’ll be checking on you.”

She stopped, frozen at the sight of the TV screen, and when the exchange was done, she laughed lightly and went back outside.

Hosea looked at the grinning women, their hands bent stiffly around their coffee cups, their backs ramrod straight, their eyes as empty as dry washtubs. Like Mrs. Hefferon, whose eyes had seemed as glassed-blue and blank as returned milk bottles. The woman in the elevator—the one who’d screamed when Dick Rowland stumbled and touched her. Dick Rowland, who shined shoes, who’d laughed in the barbecue place. He’d touched her by accident, his feet throwing him there too close to her arm, and the river of men had wanted to cut pieces of his body and burn him alive. That’s what the men said—the mob wanted his flesh for hers.

Hosea shivered in the thin sheets, the ones the pale hands pulled at while he lay burning and stiff. The two white women whose faces had hovered in the detective’s hands, over and over—someone would want him, or his sons, or whoever would do, for flesh. Maybe they would burn his land, start the palm fronds and trees on fire. For flesh.

The smell of it. The sweet-terrible smoke, carrying blood, had settled in his head, and the sifting kept bringing back the things he hadn’t seen in so long. He reached his hand to his shoulder, covering the dressing where the puckered hole would appear. His father’s French bullet hole was a writhing trail of raised skin. His grandfather’s brand, where the man had marked him for life like an animal, was a twist of shining scars. Hosea clenched his eyes closed, feeling his skin crackle. Who would come for his flesh?

“I can’t do this! This is like a fucking war zone! What the fuck kind of triage is this, when this kid and the others are sitting here for hours, waiting, because we’ve got people with bigger holes in them?”

The hissing-hoarse whisper came from behind the curtain in the small stall where Mortrice lay. He had seen doctors moving around, seen a nurse who came and cut off his bloody, torn shirt.

“Okay! You’ve made your point. He wasn’t life-threatening. He isn’t screaming. No one’s in a state of rigor mortis, okay? You’re gonna have to get used to life down here or move on, Vangen. Go.”

A short, thin man with brown hair reaching back in a deep scallop from his forehead came through the curtain. Mortrice glanced at the face, the hairline, and then he turned his back.

There wasn’t anyone to call. His back had been burning like pepper was pushed deep into his muscles, but he knew enough about bullets and scars to be sure he wasn’t dying. He was getting more marks. He lay stiff while the doctor picked the shotgun pellets from his flesh. Five. He let his tears soak the coarse sheet under his cheek, remembering the grit from the street rubbing there. He couldn’t call his mother. How could he get back home?

He didn’t even know where the ambulance had brought him. He knew the name of the hospital—people always talked about it. But he didn’t know where he was. He closed his eyes, imagining the coppery pellets holding his skin. Kenneth. Kenneth had told him to walk. Had given him more marks. Scalding water ran from his lashes, and he waited until the doctor was finished to rub the moisture fiercely into his cheeks.

When he was sitting up in the small stall, hearing the fever groans and screams of someone who’d been shot, the cops came.

“Who did you, homey?” The redheaded one started, shaking his head at Mortrice’s back patched with white. He was short and square, his shoulders so wide to Mortrice it looked like he had sandbags under his uniform.

“So you were just walkin, out by yourself for a stroll on Vermont, and somebody you never seen tries to cap you?” The redheaded one leaned against the bed. “Cause you were exercisin?”

“Man, people try to cap guys all the time,” the other one said. “But from where you told the doctor you live, and where you were, man, I’d say you got dropped, huh?”

Mortrice stared past them at the drops of blood someone had left on the floor nearby. His? Two black dimes now, waiting for someone to pick them up. He heard the hoarse whispering of the doctor somewhere else.

“Okay, homey,” the redheaded cop said, nodding. “Who’s gonna take you back to the Gardens?”

Mortrice was still silent. Shit. I can walk. Almost light now, probably. I got some money. Take the bus.

“Let’s go,” the redheaded cop said, pulling his arm gently to ease him off the bed.

In the back of the patrol car, Mortrice’s heart beat more wildly than when the doctor dug into his back. He wore only his big coat, since he’d left the shredded, bloody shirt in the hospital. Kenneth would see him. Someone would see him in this car and he’d be dead for real. He closed his eyes, but he saw Paco’s glowing skull against the dark earth, the folded black hands on his chest. He began to choke, coughing and trying not to cry.

“He’s cold,” the redhead said to the other cop. “Where can we get him somethin?”

Mortrice watched the streets slide past, and the car swerved into a liquor-store parking lot. He watched the redhead go inside, and in the glass storefront, he saw the cop gesturing to a rack of T-shirts. The owner, a Korean man, gestured back a few times, and then the cop laughed. He came out carrying a wad of cloth, throwing it into the backseat.

Mortrice examined the shirt. BUDWEISER. KING OF BEERS. He took off his coat, feeling shamed, and slipped the shirt over his head. His bandages stretched and stung.

They turned onto Mortrice’s street, and after two blocks, he said, “Hey. Drop me now. Uh, please, can you drop me now?” When the car slowed, and the eyes turned back to him, he said quickly, “Thanks. Please.” If Kenneth or anyone else saw him… even neighbors, who had big mouths… if his mother saw him…

The redheaded cop draped his arm across the seat so he could look full at Mortrice. “Hey, homey. I hope I’ll never see you again in my life. Be careful, okay?”

Mortrice felt the eyes on his like rays for a moment, and he looked away. He scrambled out of the car and onto the sidewalk, dizzy in the gray dawn.

The truck shuddered smoothly in the slow lane, and Marcus caught the glances of drivers in newer cars, cellular phones attached like limpets to their ears. Grim sherberts, his uncle called them in a slow, disdainful growl. Like the grim reaper, he’d say. “They ain’t never happy. Drive like they got a sheriff trailin they ass, talkin on the phone, lookin at a magazine, listenin to a damn cassette. I done heard French, Spanish, chantin, everything. They can’t just drive. That ain’t good enough.”

He came up behind a car merging onto the freeway. The bumper sticker on the Toyota van said DRIVER CARRIES NO CASH. SHE’S A MOM. Marcus had to laugh. It sounded like Enchantee complaining this afternoon.

She’d stopped by the barn to pick up Demetrius Junior just when he was getting the truck. She’d been invited to a party downtown, and she wanted Demetrius to come. D’Junior had clambered onto her and held her like a monkey, and Marcus saw her swaying back and forth unconsciously while she talked to the men; her wrists were curved under her son’s bottom, her chin resting in his hair. “Demetrius,” she’d said. “All I do is go to work, go home and work, and go crazy. And you’ve been workin around here for days.”

“Daddy ain’t back yet,” was all Demetrius said, not looking up from the oil filter he was examining. “I’m just keepin an eye out.”

Enchantee had shifted her son on her hip and said, “Demetrius. Whoever did this, everybody says it’s a random thing. You need to stop this vigilante stuff and come home.” She lowered her voice. “I know you guys are packin. And you know how I feel about that.”

Demetrius stood up and wrapped his arms around her from behind, tickling D’Junior’s neck. “Everybody in California’s packin. I’m just protectin myself, baby, you know that.” He looked over at Marcus. “And Sissyfly here’s gon spell me tomorrow, huh?”

“Save the old name,” Marcus had said, but Demetrius had already forgotten him.

“Go head on to the party. Chill out with your old roommate—what was her name?”

Marcus had backed the truck out of the barn, with Kickstand’s watchful eyes on the exhaust. “You know you bet not do nothin foolish in L.A. and leave no marks on that truck,” Kickstand called.

Marcus smiled now, cruising slow through the tracts outside Rio Seco. He’d told them he was going to L.A. because he wanted to make sure they thought the truck could handle that, but though they’d all pressed him about what woman he even knew in L.A., he was silent.

He’d sure as hell drive careful to this Solano Gardens address Sofelia had given him on the phone. He hadn’t seen his sister since she was thirteen. He still pictured her trying to wind her thick, wavy hair into a bun, pulling baby hairs down onto her forehead and slicking them with Vaseline into shining, sculpted waves. Her face was a triangle, wide cheekbones and delicate chin, and all the boys in junior high were following her around. Her brothers were supposed to keep an eye on her, to knock back rough hands or older players. No Treetown boy said “Mmm, mmm, mmm, I can’t wait to get some a that after the dance” about Sofelia, because a Thompson would hear and some ass would be kicked. No Westside boy better cross that pecan-tree marker on Pepper Avenue looking to rap with Sofelia. And she was a spoiled, solitary girl until then, Marcus remembered. She had as many clothes as his mother could make or buy, and her hair was always perfect; he watched her play alone in the yard, though, pirouetting under the trees, talking to herself in the olive grove. She was too young to go anywhere with the oldest boys, and too old to want to follow Finis and Marcus to the riverbottom anymore. She started stopping off at Olive Gardens on the way home from school, to hang out with girls who lived there.

And then, a few months later, she was gone. She had sent her mother a letter saying that she’d met someone and was going away. She said something had changed and that she couldn’t come home. She said she would come back someday, but that her mother shouldn’t worry. She loved her.

The police shrugged when Alma showed them the letter. Marcus had seen his father stand against the kitchen wall, only watching them, his mouth a grim moon and his jaw leaping with muscle. His mother had cried for several years, and then she’d kept the swimming, glossy tears inside her eyes, and finally, the liquid seemed to have collected in a reservoir that drew plumpness away from her forehead and left the two deep scores between her brows.

Sofelia had a son, he thought. The reason she started callin me, the reason she’s comin back to Rio Seco. She’d never mentioned a man’s name, but she’d said somebody might kill her son. Bullets. He stared at the dusty expanses between sprawling tracts. We out in the country. I don’t even know how old this boy is, but he can’t have a Rio Seco problem. He can’t be connected to Daddy’s place. It’s gotta be some random thing that those women were partying in the Granada. With some fool.

A brown Mercedes surged ahead of him from an on-ramp, and Marcus tapped the truck’s brake, scowling at the driver already zigzagging through traffic. He’d loved the way the Lexus handled on the freeway, responsive and sleek, a thrill when he’d raced through the desert night just to feel the dark wind slip past his elbow.

“Bet not dent this truck,” he muttered, and felt clammy sweat on his shoulders. He shook his head, embarrassed to know that even at this age, he was still afraid of his father, of messing up. And from Kickstand’s voice and the others’ glances, he knew they wouldn’t want to be driving the truck too far, either. His father was impressive. Impassive. Demetrius and Octavious laughed about it, Julius and Finis obviously didn’t think about it, but Marcus resented his nervous palms and faster heart whenever he approached his father.

“Where you get that pipe cutter, man?” someone would ask Julius, who was in a woman’s yard using the ancient tool to sever long pipes into manageable salvage for the iron man.

“Do Daddy know you got it?” Demetrius would ask, and Julius would shrug, his eyes veiled.

“Daddy know where every hubcap and engine and hammer is, man, all the time. He gon kick your natural ass if somebody steal that pipe cutter,” Marcus would add.

But he thought now that it wasn’t often their father had whipped them. Julius had stolen baseball caps and shoes from a store, and he’d gotten the switch—a green plum branch across the legs. But that was Mama, wielding the wood. Finis had run away to the riverbottom. Mama had done that beating, too, Marcus realized. He tightened his hands on the wheel, remembering what his father had said when Marcus had refused to fight a boy in Olive Gardens, a boy who’d blackened his eye and smacked Sofelia so hard in the face her gums were laced with blood.

“I can whup you or life can whup you,” his father had said. “Your mama can beat you or life can beat you.”

His mother had laid the switch across his legs twice, then cried and said into his neck, “You can’t let nobody hurt your sister. Never. You gotta be a little man, Marcus. You nine now.”

Sissyfly. Brainiac. Baby boy. He heard all the names, approaching downtown Los Angeles. Julius and Finis had caught the boy, slapping him down until he cried.

The buildings nestled in haze to his right, and the horizon was turning rusty with the tired Monday sun. He looked for the buildings of USC next, working his teeth on the sides of his mouth.

He’d gone to USC that first year, freshman year, fresh outta Treetown on a partial track scholarship with a Westside boy named Tommy Flair. He saw the dorms, remembering the girls with alligators on their shirts, the potpourri, the boys with boat shoes and no socks. The ivy-laced brick walls and stark white modern buildings he and Tommy passed each night when they ran, worried that they wouldn’t be fast enough in the spring. The fall crispness burned into their lungs when they sped around the philosophy building and campus security guards tackled them, threw them face down, and kept their necks under thick soles. The third time it happened, Marcus froze his spine, a different guard’s splayed fingers pressing his chest into the asphalt; in his mind he heard, I can beat you or life can beat you. He raised up an inch against the whorls of flesh, but Tommy’s widened eyes told him to stop.

They came home within a month of each other. Marcus glimpsed the Felix the Cat car dealership he used to see from his dorm window. Tommy had become a cop. Marcus worked for his father, dropping pins from tow chains, forgetting winch cables, refusing to understand spark plugs and timing chains. He went to the art college for a year. Then he took history classes, spreading out the fees, finally getting his teaching credential. Next week I’ll get my Treetown and downtown and Cambodian and Guatemalan kids. Give them classical Greek civilization when they’re more interested in the barbarians.

He got off on Vermont, heading past block after block of barred storefronts. Furniture, cheap clothing, electronics. Liquor stores everywhere. He passed the Jamaican restaurant where someone had taken him that college year. More storefronts, strip malls, and then he turned on the street Sofelia had named.

Near the housing project, he passed young boys with plaid Pendletons and their khakis switching back and forth in the empty fall of material under their butts. A few older men leaned against the chain-link fence surrounding the complex. I’m a stranger, and a farmer, in this truck, Marcus thought. Eyes followed him when he turned into the court and looked for her door number.

Other doors were open, and music mixed with laughter flowed from apartments and car windows. But Sofelia’s door was closed. Then Marcus saw her heart-shaped face, peering out from a slice she’d pulled in her drapes.

He stood by the truck for a moment, waiting for her to come running out. He’d seen the smile bright in the dimness behind the glass. But when the door opened, she hovered inside, her arms moving up and then down like a baby bird’s. Marcus stepped through the doorway, and Sofelia’s arms went around him as tight as wings, her heart pounding against his ribs.

When she finally pulled away, she bent to pick up the box near her feet. Marcus said, “You in a hurry? You don’t want to tell me nothin before we get on the road?”

She dropped the box and hugged him again, murmuring, “I missed you. I—I don’t know nothin else to tell. We have to go.”

She went into a back bedroom and came out carrying a shopping bag. Behind her was her son. He had her pointed chin and wide forehead, and his skin was flawless mahogany. No acne scars, no stiff hairs. The boy stared at Marcus with his hands tight on a gym bag. His eyes were dark and too glossy, like fresh oil. He went out to the truck, moving stiffly, and Sofelia said, “Mortrice. He been in the bed all day, said he sick. Had his covers all pulled up around him.” She shook her head, and Marcus saw the boy throw his box into the back and get in after it, his face contorted when he faced them from where he sat against the cab.

Enchantee drove slowly up the steep area called Plymouth Hill. It was above historic downtown, a few terraced rows of streets lined with the biggest, oldest mansions in Rio Seco. Not the new-money castles and stucco giants on the outskirts of the city, but the Spanish-style and Tudor-style and Victorian houses built for the first Pilgrims to make it out to wild California back in the old days.

She’d been here before, when her aunt had worked houses around here, picked up by women at the gathering place in Treetown by the old market, one of the buildings the city had razed along Pepper Avenue. Her aunt, Demetrius’s mother, many Treetown women had sat on that old wooden bench when they needed money because someone had broken an arm or a man was sick or had disappeared. The Plymouth Hill women needed bodies because someone was graduating or a man was retiring with a huge party.

Enchantee felt her forehead prickle with nervous heat. Abby had said this was a casual get-together for her and Bent, for newspaper people and friends to relax. Even though Enchantee knew she wasn’t the kind of newspaper person Abby meant, something in her wanted to see Abby’s son, see where she lived now. She remembered vivid fragments from college: Abby’s jewel-green Herbal Essence shampoo, her fascination with Enchantee’s sketches and drawings, the way she’d painted Enchantee’s fingernails and called her Chani. A new girl, an artist. That’s what she’d been in the dorm room, down the arched plaster hallways.

When she went through the gate in the high brick wall, surrounded by dark hedges and bloodred roses curving over trellis structures, their blooms like tiny thunderclouds in the dim evening light, she remembered this house. Her aunt had come out of that gate, to the car where Enchantee waited with her cousin Johnnie and Johnnie’s boyfriend, and announced, “I ain’t workin for her again. Gotta be silent as death in there the whole day, so she can paint. No. Uh-uh. I see her comin, I’ma look the other way.” Her aunt had settled herself into a soft heap in the backseat by Enchantee, her hands frosted with ashy, dry skin when she held them up and shook her head.

Abby passed by the open door, a flash of red in the envelope of gold light. Enchantee stood there, not sure what to do. A couple came up behind her. “Hello,” the man said. The woman nodded, and Enchantee nodded back. They looked like reporters, with their satchels and rumpled hair and easy smiles, but she wasn’t sure until Abby said, “Hey, guys!”

“Chani!” she added, curling her hand around Enchantee’s shoulder to draw her into the living room. Enchantee saw people sitting and standing, the wood-paneled room bright, little trays of food on tables and glasses on a bar in the corner.

Abby said, “I’m so glad you came!” Enchantee looked briefly into her face, at the gray eyes framed with golden shadow, and she smiled because it sounded like Abby really meant that. “This is Bent, my, uh, what are we calling each other today, babe?”

The reporter with the comma ponytail shook her hand. Enchantee said softly, “We met, in the parking lot.”

His face grew red palms like he’d been slapped, and she saw how easily he was embarrassed. “I, I’ve met so many people,” he started, and Abby interrupted.

“It’s okay,” she laughed. She said to Enchantee, “He’s been overwhelmed by my mother’s social shit, and now I’m getting to him.” Bent was still flushed, and Enchantee couldn’t tell if it was because Abby was telling her everything. “Go on in, tons of people from the paper are here,” Abby called behind her when she pulled Bent toward the door to meet someone else.

Enchantee hesitated. She scanned the room, but of course the faces speaking to each other animatedly were only vaguely familiar. A small boy with a cap of pale hair like Abby’s came careening through the doorway, running into Enchantee’s knees; he looked up at her with sapphire eyes, finding nothing in her face, and pushed her legs away to propel himself through the living room.

“Dylan!” Abby called to him, but he rocketed through the clumps of calves like a pinball, heading into the hallway on the other side.

Enchantee glimpsed a feather-haired woman she’d seen at the newspaper emerging from there, and she watched the collision. The woman’s coral, cracked cheeks trembled, and she said, “Young man, I think your mother and the rest of us have had enough of your behavior.” She leaned against the wall, her eyes fierce on Abby moving through the guests.

The boy stopped cold and said, “I’m sorry,” his voice as high as a bell, and Enchantee smiled, knowing he knew his mother was approaching. She went closer to him. He was only slightly older than D’Junior, she could tell, and suddenly she missed her son, would have rather had his warm hand curled in hers when she moved through these rooms.

“He hasn’t had a nap, Aunt Carrie, I’m sorry,” Abby said, her voice high, too. She saw Enchantee and smiled. “This is my offspring. My heart.” She linked her arms around his neck loosely.

“Where’s your mother?” Enchantee sat down on the leather couch beside Abby, who rocked her son slightly. He stared at Enchantee’s face.

“She’s in Palm Springs, at a concert,” Abby said, leaning back, her own eyes nearly closed, and Enchantee recognized that conduction of boy warmth that melted the mother with the child. “That’s why I’m having this. It’s kind of hard, us being here in her house. We’re saving money for our own place.”

“Are you Mexican?” Dylan said suddenly, his voice gravelly now. “We didn’t have Mexicans in Boston. I didn’t saw any. But Bent says I saw some now.”

“Dylan,” Abby said quietly. “Chani’s not Mexican. And Mexican people do live in Boston. You just…”

“He doesn’t understand colors and shades on people yet,” Abby said, bending to lay him down on a blanket she pulled from the couch.

Demetrius Junior does, Enchantee thought. She looked at the huge office, with black windowpanes in diamond patterns, a fireplace, a large wooden desk in the corner, a television, and books on the walls. This room was as big as her aunt’s living area.

“Connie!” Abby whispered, pulling the blanket in a cocoon over her son. “I’m glad you came. Hi, Web. How’s my big sister treating you? Better than she used to treat me?”

Enchantee stood near the wall, watching the two blond sisters hug each other. A man Demetrius’s age watched with amusement. His brown hair was combed straight back from his heart-scalloped forehead. “We won’t bore you, Web,” Enchantee heard Abby say. “If it’s not real estate or politics, it’s not worth words, right?”

They went down the hallway, and Abby turned back to Enchantee with a curved arm. “Come on,” she said. “Mothers just want to have fun.”

Mortrice lay in the truckbed, his back starred with pain. He raised himself up when he felt them get on a freeway. His uncle looked like a country-ass nigga. Soft. Had on jeans and a Lakers T-shirt. His mother had said he was a teacher. Nigga can’t teach me shit, Mortrice thought, looking at the freeway signs. He turned his head to the wind to see the sign with RIO SECO—54 MILES.

When they’d left downtown and the belts of light past L.A., after they’d passed through three valleys, by his count, he had watched the black mountains ringing the basin like huge faces with sharp noses and parted lips. Huge men on their backs. Bodies like women, sleeping. Or dead.

To his left and right, he saw faint red-gold glows like distant sunsets. But they were lights gathered at the base of the hills. Then long stretches of empty blackness hurtled past.

His mother sat in the cab. He’d watched her move quickly from the doorway to the truck seat, saying nothing, her face fierce and closed, like it was a long journey. He knew he had never seen her leave the apartment. Now her shoulders were pressed against the glass; he turned his head to the side, saw fabric wrinkled near his head.

The river sounded a hollow space under the truck, and he sat up hard, scraping his back on his bag. The silver skein stretched endlessly to the west. And his uncle angled the truck off on the same ramp Kenneth had taken him down. Marcus closed his eyes. He wouldn’t see the tree. He would wait until they had turned at least three times.

One. Two. Three. He saw a downtown smaller than L.A., with old, strange buildings full of curves and bells and red tile. The truck stopped in front of an apartment building with as much wrought-iron as the ghetto.

“This where you stay?” Sofelia stared at the Las Palmas building, her mouth closed tight. She’d refused to stop at their parents’ place, or anywhere, just yet. She’d asked him to take her, just show her, where he lived.

She shook her head. “I got a place. Tiki’s sister got a place, and she’s goin to Alabama for a while. She got a sick aunt. I’ma stay there.”

“Damn, Sofelia, you said you were worried about your son!” Marcus drove slowly. “Olive Gardens got plenty of gangs, too.”

“Gotta be better than L.A.,” Sofelia said, watching out her window. Marcus wondered what she remembered, but he was afraid to ask. He drove down Pepper Avenue. The boy’s head didn’t move.

“When you gon see Mama?” Marcus turned on Grove Avenue, and Sofelia lowered her head onto her chest.

“I’ma have to tell her,” he whispered back, cruising past the darkened streets, glancing down SaRonn’s way. “She’s been hurtin a long time.”

Sofelia shook her head, lifting a shine-tracked face. “No,” she said. “I have to tell her. Soon as I can.”

Marcus pulled into the parking area of Olive Gardens. The brown stucco boxes were side-by-side like trains pulled into a square. Marcus looked at Sofelia. What could have happened to make her leave, to make her keep her silence for this long? Why the hell would she want to come here instead of home? She sat, frozen, against the door. Marcus touched her index finger, and she folded forward like a closing book.

Her son had gotten out of the truckbed, and he opened the door, cradling his mother’s shoulders. “Come on, Mama,” he said, the first time Marcus had heard his voice. He pulled her slowly from the seat, and Marcus quickly came around to help him.

They led her to the door and knocked. A heavy, gold-skinned woman with pink rollers as tight as snails on her head opened it. She said, “Come on in, girl. Tiki just called to see was you here.”

Sofelia sat on the couch, her face blank, while Marcus and the boy brought in the few boxes and bags. The TV was on, the news was starting, and Marcus looked at his watch. Ten o’clock. He stood awkwardly near Sofelia, and suddenly the woman hollered, “See? They show that Rodney King video damn near every day.”

Mortrice scanned the ghostly faces hovering in a circle around the brother getting proned out, over and over, LAPD style. He saw mouths open and close, imagined them hollering it out like they did: “Prone out! Prone out now!” Mortrice glanced at the boots, the baton, the faces above spread-wide legs. They beatin him into the set, what it always look like to me. LAPD Posse. Or they beatin him out.

Enchantee was in the kitchen, putting away the glass she’d used and tossing the paper plate with olive pits. The bullet-shaped black olives were sour-salty. Demetrius’s great-grandmother made olives that were reddish-brown, like apples.

She’d felt crowded by the backs turning and swerving in each room, by the bright, fleeting smiles and words. She’d barely talked to Abby again, but she’d met a nice woman who worked on the recipe page. Enchantee had told her about Alma’s meals that took all day stirring and had no recipes, and the woman had agreed that working mothers should be able to use Noodle Roni without feeling guilty.

Enchantee moved toward the door. “You’ve got to try these olives while I get your drink,” Abby was saying to someone. “I’ve got Kalamata from Greece, Spanish olives, and these great big fat ones from Northern California. Olives are making a comeback. And I’ve heard they used to press a great olive oil here in Rio Seco.”

Enchantee paused, waiting for people to move, and she saw the two older women sitting on a huge couch near the hallway. When the tide of people deposited her behind them, she leaned against the wall. Nearer to her, the puffs of hair, red and white, looked like two plump, short-tailed birds perched on the couch back. She heard Carrie Smith Donohue say, “Well, I see how angry people are that the sheriff and the police haven’t managed to charge anyone in those two awful murders down there in Treetown.”

The other woman said, “Two young girls like that. And the councilman was right—that area is completely out of control. I wouldn’t drive down there for anything.”

“Well, I have,” Carrie Smith Donohue said softly, and Enchantee held herself still against the wood paneling to listen. “I’ve taken a look at some of the buildings down there. You won’t believe how old some of them are.”

“No, I mean some are historic. Some of them are as old and possibly valuable as the adobes in San Diego’s Old Town.” She paused and took a sip. “Of course, they aren’t preserved…,” she went on, but her friend turned brightly to her.

“I hadn’t been to Old Town in ages, but my daughter-in-law took me last year and it was marvelous. Such cute little restaurants, and a wonderful gift selection in the shops. She bought Christmas presents for everyone.”

Enchantee waved at Abby, and Abby hurried over, catching her in the hallway. “Wait! Chani!” She paused, out of breath. “I’m so glad you came. Hey, do you know anyone who could help me out in the afternoons? I still haven’t found the right person to watch Dylan—that’s pretty obvious, from tonight. And we’re starting on this new magazine format.”

“You didn’t find anybody to come here?” Enchantee looked at Abby’s flushed neck and swinging hair.

“I did, but she didn’t work out with Dylan. She didn’t understand kids. And the hours are so unpredictable.”

“I’ll ask around,” Enchantee said. She watched someone take Abby’s elbow; Abby mouthed “Thanks” when the person drew her over to the olive trays. Enchantee walked slowly toward the library.

Peering inside the darkened room, she saw the television flickering and Dylan on the couch, blanket over his head like a hood, calmly sucking his thumb, eyes intent on the screen. “It’s that video,” he said without looking at her. Enchantee saw the ring of men, the eyes bulging in the dark face when it rose momentarily. She dropped her gaze to the small face floating like a moon against the couch, and let out a shuddering breath.

The doctor talked of physical therapy for his shoulder, of a sling, of movement and medication. Hosea had closed his eyes for a long time. The medicinal air seemed to rest behind his eyeballs, aching and cold.

When he opened them, hearing the man behind the partition whuffle, from laughter or pain Hosea didn’t know, it was night. The room was dim and grainy. The images he’d seen so many times on the television were grainy, too. Shifting, violent, jerky, darker night. A boot was raised now, the knee bent. Hosea felt the grit rubbed into his palms, his neck, felt his cheekbone ground into the cinders. A white woman’s face abruptly filled the screen. Hosea felt the medicinal stench sear his throat when he tried to breathe.

“Serves the nigger right for not stopping,” the thickened voice said from behind the drape. “He didn’t obey the officers of the law.” Hosea turned away from the sound, and he saw the telephone inches from his head.

Marcus waited to turn onto Pepper Avenue when Enchantee’s car passed, her amber face small in the window. He followed her through the gate of his father’s place, catching her arm when she got out of her car.

They went straight to the living room, where Kendrick, Jaman, and D’Junior were lying on a blanket watching a movie. They were laughing and kicking each other. Enchantee bent down to pick up D’Junior, and Marcus’s mother came out from the bedroom down the hall.

Her face was lifted high, her eyes wide. “Your daddy called, from the hospital. They lettin him out. Go find Demetrius, he walkin round here somewhere. You two go and get your daddy. I’m makin up the room.” She ran to Marcus and hugged him, pushing him with her chest toward the kitchen. “Go on and hurry. They lettin him out. He said come on.”

Her voice burbled and rang bright; he could hear it when he walked past the closed-tight coldhouse to stand at the road leading to the storage lot. “Demetrius!” he shouted. “Marcus!”

That was how they identified themselves, whose holler ricocheted from tree trunks.

“Demetrius,” he yelled again, and then he listened. No stick thocking tree trunks, no whistling, no answering call.

A hissing spark flared in the pepper trees between the road and the bluff overlooking the riverbed, and Demetrius strode from the low branches. He drew hard on his cigarillo, his other hand curled loose over the gun in his waistband, and Marcus thought, He was watchin where Daddy always watch. From that chair. He look like a bigger man. But he’s gon get this land, he’s the one like Daddy. Same ways.

“I knew where you was, fool,” Demetrius said. “Where you always stand and holler. Too lazy to walk around and look.” He took a deep drag on the cigarillo and blew smoke into the ferny leaves.

“Enchantee gon love you walkin around with a piece, Mr. Vigilante,” Marcus said. “Whoever did this ain’t fool enough to come back.” He stared at Demetrius’s broad, brick-flushed cheekbones in the light shining slanted from the barn. He thought, I ain’t the one look like Daddy, or think like him. But I’ma be the one find out who did it.

“Always bringin up Enchantee,” Demetrius said, cocking his head, his eyes narrow slants. “You think I don’t love Enchantee? I don’t listen to her? You ain’t never been married, man, okay? We hear each other, me and her. I work my ass off to pay for that house she wants.” He turned and then spun back. “You know what, Marcus? I ain’t gon call you baby boy. But I’ma tell you this. You better do a twelve-step program and get over her. That’s what they call it, right? Downtown people. You need to find twelve other women and get done with it. Cause I had my twelve other women before I met Enchantee. And she was it. No question. You ain’t seen me fool around, ain’t seen me question myself. Get yourself right, man, and don’t keep sweatin me.”

When he began to walk toward the barn, Marcus said, “Daddy called from the hospital. We have to go get him. Come on.”

Demetrius said nothing when Marcus got into their father’s truck and started the engine. He went into the barn, to put away the gun, Marcus knew, and came out to sit in the cab.

When they got to the lobby, harshly bright against the night, Marcus watched Demetrius put his hands in his pockets, the oil-veined fingers hidden. He stared at his brother for a long moment, at the work shirt and creased boots; Demetrius hated talking to official-type white people, like those behind the information desk, as much as their father did. Marcus glanced at his own jeans and T-shirt—moving-Sofelia clothes. But he stood close to the desk and smiled. “We’re looking for Mr. Hosea Thompson, please,” he said, smiling just wide enough to be friendly. Not scary, not country.

The door to their father’s room was open slightly, and Marcus pushed it slow, peering around to see him sitting stiff on the side of the bed. His father looked up as if blind. “Daddy?” Marcus whispered, and Demetrius echoed.

Their father’s head trembled and shuddered, and he moved his eyes to their faces. “Let’s go,” he murmured hoarsely.

He was wearing his hospital gown and dark-blue work pants. But his feet were bare. Marcus saw only a pulled-shut partition on the other side of the darkened room. No nurse, no one discharging his father, giving instructions or pushing a waiting wheelchair.

Demetrius went to the closet and found the boots. He and Marcus each bent to a foot, and Hosea was silent. Marcus looked up to see his father’s face, sculpted harsh in the tiny light over the sink. His eyes were nearly hidden by his cheekbones. Three etched Xs marked the skin at the outer corners, and a straight-carved crease dropped the length of his face. His father’s nose was curved as hard as a bird’s. They each dropped a boot, and took an elbow to help him from the bed.

“You just decided you leavin, right?” Marcus whispered when his father leaned on them heavily for a moment, then drew himself away.

“Who the hell else supposed to decide?” his father said. “Better be me or God.”

Demetrius said, “Come on, then,” his voice gruff and nervous. They went out the door, the chortling snore from behind the curtain never letting up, and Hosea began to walk straighter, steadier, when they reached the elevator.

In that glaring light, Marcus saw his father sway. His hand, when he grabbed it, was as hard and callused as a turtle shell. Marcus saw that his father’s flesh had melted away, his cheekbones full and taut, as if curved shields had been slid under the skin. He looked past to Demetrius, with the same wide, sharp bones he had, they all had. And in the shining steel doors, he saw himself, blurry, looking exactly the same.

CHAPTER THREE

LIFELONG FRIENDS FOUND BRUTALLY SLAIN