Funkytown. That’s where he had to go after school today, because he couldn’t find any way to talk to his Uncle Marcus at school. He couldn’t just casually walk up after ancient history and tell his uncle that his mother wanted something. The date. She knew the date, and she needed a ride.
Mortrice hung with B-Real and Chris at lunch. B-Real helped him classify everyone by their clothes and music and words and cars. It was easy when you knew the rules. The codes.
All the white kids, who’d seemed a floating and faceless mass that swarmed around him like swerving headlights the first weeks, had their own categories. Goths wore black clothes, had bottle-black hair and skin as pale as mayonnaise. Tweakers were high on speed, wore dirty clothes, and had faces full of sores. Caspers were rich, with thick sweaters and teeth like white fences.
Brainiacs were mostly white, but a few brothers and Chicano kids joined their tight knots at lunch. B-Real said they were practicing for a Model United Nations, so they kept calling themselves by countries.
The brothers were either Jocks, scattered Brainiacs, or Worlds.
Worlds came in all colors. Whatever their hair, they wore dreadlocks, and wire-rimmed glasses, beads, berets. They listened to reggae and other off-beat music. Mortrice thought that B-Real, in his soul, wanted to be a World.
But he was from Olive Gardens. And Worlds got their asses kicked in the Gardens.
Mortrice sat in his last class, English, studying the heads in front of him. He looked down at his hand. He was tattooed now, the cut from the metal sliver etched dark from the gunpowder he’d rubbed in while it healed. On the plump, meaty backhand side, in the cleft of webbing, was where girls tattooed their man’s initials and a heart or cross surrounded by teardrops if he was doing time.
I got a better one, he thought.
And he knew what he would do if Chris and B-Real took him to the guy they said could get him a gun. The guy who knew a dealer who’d sell him a nine. He had a name picked out for them, and a place for their marks.
He went to Funkytown on foot, telling Chris he didn’t need a ride, so no one would see him talking to his uncle. He walked through the fancy area of hotels and big buildings, then circled back around to the restaurants in the narrow doorways, the shops with incense and vases and bread. B-Real like this place, he thought. I don’t really know what go on in the brother’s head. He think he could put him on a beret and be cool over here. He don’t know shit.
He knew his uncle had had a meeting after school, and he waited near the archway trying to look casual, hoping he wouldn’t see any 5–0 patrol cruising. When his uncle stepped past the thick concrete doorway, he was careful to say, “It’s Mortrice, right here, it’s me.”
His uncle had swung around like an opening door, smashing backward against the cement. “Damn, don’t be sneakin up on people!” he said.
Mortrice held himself still. “Ain’t nobody sneakin. I was just standin here.” He watched his uncle move slowly up the stairs. “Why you all nervous?”
“Life is a nervous proposition, okay?” Marcus said, more like himself.
In the apartment, definitely decorated World, Mortrice didn’t sit on the black leather couch. He touched the brass candlesticks on the windowsill and said, “I only came cause Mama say next Saturday. That’s the day. She need you take her somewhere.”
Marcus looked surprised; Mortrice had thought he’d know what she was talking about. “She say where?” he asked, and Mortrice shook his head, smelling incense.
“Just say can you pick her up after lunch.”
“Yeah,” his uncle said, sitting on the couch, rubbing his forehead. “Tell her yeah.”
“What you drivin?” Mortrice said, leaning against the wall. “That old truck?”
“Only till my dad’s shoulder moves better, stops hurtin him.”
Mortrice hesitated. “You nervous cause a them bodies?”
Marcus looked up. “What are you talkin about?” he said, hard.
“You told me.” Mortrice looked at his uncle’s murky, tired eyes.
“I forgot,” Marcus said. “Yeah. I mean, no, I’m not sure what the hell’s goin on.” He frowned at Mortrice. “Why? You know somethin?”
Mortrice shook his head, moving for the door. “I just axed, okay? I heard at school the dude dress like a woman was wearin makeup. This dude, I heard him say that fit his band he was startin. The Hummanequins. Somethin like that.”
His uncle was still frowning, eyes squinting and forehead crumpled like he was hurting, so Mortrice said, “Don’t forget, she said Saturday.” He ran down the narrow steps and through the arches that felt like tunnels.
At the Gardens, he went into the apartment to check on his mother. She was sitting at the table in the one small room, smoking. She’d begun smoking when they’d moved here, and she sat there holding the cigarettes tightly, watching the ashes grow like caterpillars, staring at the shiny purple fabric she’d hung over the curtains already on the window.
After a while, he told her, “I gotta go see this friend. From school. He gotta give me somethin I need.”
She nodded, her eyes moving fast. They were clear and glossy, since she slept for hours, and her braid was always neat. But her hands never stopped tapping and shaking and curling around the embers.
He went four doors down to where Chris lived. The guy who knew the guy—he was supposed to meet them there today. Julius. He had been with Chris’s mama, and he was going to hang out today. Chris said they could get him to take them to the guy with the guns.
“What up?” he said to Chris.
“Ain’t nothin but a party,” Chris said, rolling his eyes toward the apartment behind him. “Shit. Too many people in there all the time.”
Mortrice followed him inside. A large, soft-faced woman sat in a kitchen chair, in the same position as his mother, but this woman was sorting through black-eyed peas, and her legs filled the chair with flowered rolls. She glanced up at them, and then shook her head.
Two women sat on the couch, dark and full-faced like the older one, but their bodies were angular and knuckled. One held a crying baby, and the other talked on the phone. Two small girls trailed in and out of the bedroom carrying pillows, and another girl about ten snatched the pillows back and disappeared.
Mortrice followed Chris on his circling motions through the living room, back out to the narrow strip of concrete fronting the apartments, inside again to ask, “Mama! Julius comin by or not?”
The pretty woman, her eyes tilted up and mouth lined with brown, was saying into the phone, “Niggaplease. You know you lyin.”
“Mama!”
Chris’s mother put her fingers over the phone and said, “Who in the hell know but him? Okay?”
After a dizzying hour of motion, Chris had interrupted his mother enough times that she’d hung up and hollered at him, “I wasn’t lookin for that fool Julius to come by! I was tryin to talk to somebody else! Get out my face, boy!”
Mortrice heard a car pull up to the walkway, though, and he turned casually so that he wouldn’t seem too eager to meet the man. A woman got out, her face full-cheeked and her eyes tilted high, too, but her skin light copper and her hair in a bun. She held a small boy who cried big, stuttering sobs. “I wanna go home now!” he said.
“Shit,” Chris muttered beside Mortrice. “My auntie and some more noise.”
Enchantee looked at the boys hovering in the doorway like slumping, broken-backed dolls wearing the wrong clothes. Her cousin Zefi’s boy Chris and another little Gardens gangster. She went inside, D’Junior burying his face in her already wet neck, and her aunt said, “Oh, no. Uh-uh. They rippin and runnin enough in there without another one.”
Enchantee tightened her jaw. “You see I just got off work. I came by to visit. I ain’t leavin him here. He don’t believe me, neither.” She set D’Junior down and pushed him away from her legs. “Go! Go play with your cousins!” He stumbled toward her, eyes splashing fresh, and she pushed harder. “Do I look like I’m playin?” she shouted. “Go on!”
He turned, wailing, and the girls herded him toward the back room. Enchantee could hear the ten-year-old, Stevie, say, “Don’t pay no tention to her. They get like that.”
Enchantee went past her aunt to the tiny kitchen for a glass of water. She hated doing that, showing them all that she wasn’t spoiling him by being too kind. Sign of weakness: Can’t have that. Whenever she held D’Junior and talked to him softly, trying to explain something like why she had to go to work, or why the girls didn’t like to share, her aunt and cousins rolled their eyes and tipped their heads to the side scornfully.
“Makin him weak,” her cousins would say.
“He do it cause he better,” her aunt would say. “Cause you told him to or he get his ass beat. Ain’t no need to tell him nothin. Put that boy down.”
Because that’s the way Auntie was raised, and they were raised, and that was the only way, Enchantee thought. The kitchen was a slot barely wide enough for one person, but every dish was clean and the floor smelled of ammonia. The bathroom was another slot, and the bedroom was exactly the square size of the living room. Every room was clean, from the curtains to the walls. Aunt Zepherine’s worst insult, which she uttered often at Olive Gardens, was, “She keep a nasty house.”
Enchantee turned to look out the door. Each woman had her own little square of grass to share with the upstairs neighbor. Upstairs people had railings for hanging wash, but downstairs people had to use the chain-link fence. She could see the clothes, like flags, strung all along the boundaries of the complex, see the shadows of the two boys like sentries.
Her aunt glanced up. “What you want?” And that don’t mean she can’t stand me, Enchantee thought. She glanced at DeeDee and Zefi, expressionless on the couch.
“Two worst things ruin a week,” she said, sitting at the tiny dinette table. “Sick kid and a sick truck.”
“What he got?”
“Just a cold.” Enchantee reached for the black-eyed peas, leaning forward to listen for D’Junior. She heard no screaming from the bedroom.
“He all right,” her aunt said. “What you want, now?”
“I wanted to ask you about Mrs. Smith, live on Plymouth Hill. You said you hated her house.”
“Huh? Why you want to know about that house?” Her aunt got up to dump the peas into a pot.
Enchantee watched the people gesture wildly on a soap. “Her daughter Abby, the one I went to school with, she has a boy same age as D’Junior. She wants them to play together this week. Play date.” She smiled and went on. “She needs somebody to watch him, help her out. An assistant. She works for the paper.”
“She wants a maid,” Zefi said from the couch.
“No, they got somebody to clean,” Enchantee said, irritated. “And she’s payin seven bucks an hour. Cash. Demetrius said the differential went out on the big truck, so we need the money. He’s been workin on it for days. And you know his daddy got them big hospital bills comin.”
Her aunt was silent for a time. “Mrs. Smith—she didn’t want to see you while you was there. She was a artist, she always said. Painted flowers from her yard. Always talkin about she was sensitive for noises and smells, so her kids had to be somewhere else and I had to tippytoe around.” She paused, her dimples pooling when she closed her mouth. Then she said, “The toilets had to have blue water, smelled like it went straight in my eyes. And flowers all over. All them smells was too sharp, made my head hurt.”
Enchantee watched her aunt get down a bag of potato chips. Like magic, the bedroom door opened and the girls came out, hearing the crackling plastic. Her aunt poured the chips into a big bowl and set it on the table. “Y’all know better,” Enchantee said to the reaching hands. “One handful, and don’t make a mess. You, too, boy.” Her aunt was strangely silent.
Enchantee ate a few chips, hearing the girls laugh and D’Junior say, “I’m a rabbit—look!”
“It was the things she said,” her aunt said, harsh, her arms folding tight under her full chest. “She thought she was perfect. When I told her I couldn’t come no more, I heard her talkin on the phone in the kitchen. Talkin bout I was so fat and probably rather sit home and get welfare.”
Enchantee bit the inside of her lip. She and Janine had talked about that at work, how when you stood in the grocery checkout line, people automatically looked at how you paid for your food. Glancing. Especially if you had kids with you.
Her aunt said, “Look. I had me a figure when I came out here to California. I was seventeen. Your mama had passed, and they sent me out here with you. You was three.” She stopped, looking up at the low ceiling. Zefi and DeeDee had gone outside to talk to someone in a car. Enchantee stared at her aunt’s glowing neck, the fold like a necklace. “All the women in them houses downtown figured I already had a kid, I wasn’t nothin. The men seen you and thought I might as well have some more. When they daddy came round, wasn’t no good to say no.” Her aunt stopped. “And then she talk about I’m so fat. She didn’t know me for shit.”
Enchantee stared down at the gold flecks in the Formica table. She remembered hearing men at The Blue Q talk about her aunt, about “all that good jelly shakin on them bones.” She couldn’t say anything.
Her aunt walked into the bedroom, turning to say, “Go on and work for her daughter. You think you ain’t me anyway. So you probably be fine.” Her laughter huffed from her chest, and Enchantee felt her face flush hot.
In the car, D’Junior said, “I see a motorcycle, Mama.”
“Mm-hmm.” Enchantee felt them fall into the chant-and-response of late afternoon. She stared at the cars on Pepper Avenue, racing along the riverbottom. She hadn’t seen Demetrius or the flatbed truck in his father’s yard.
“I see a bumpdragon,” he said.
“A what?” Enchantee frowned.
D’Junior pointed to a Volkswagen in the distance. “Daddy tell me.”
“Whatever.”
“I got a present,” he sang. “Stevie gived it to me.”
“Yeah?” she murmured, seeing the stream of cars on the freeway entrance.
“She said it was for boys. Not girls.”
Enchantee went up the ramp and wedged the car into the slow lane, thinking they could eat pork chops and rice. Yeah. And the last of the apricots from Alma. “What is it?” she said absently.
“See?” D’Junior uncurled his fingers, and a shining copper-nosed bullet lay long in his small palm.
“What are you doin with that!” Enchantee shouted, snatching the bullet, the car swerving. She righted the steering, clenching her hand around the heavy thing.
“It’s mine!” he shouted back. “Stevie find it in the yard! She said it’s for boys!”
Enchantee stopped listening, even when he cried and screamed. She drove with one hand, refusing to open the other, seeing the bullets in the yard where they’d lived in Treetown. She’d found one herself, when Demetrius had still been touching her pregnant belly, and she’d told him they had to move. The constant sounds of shots that had just begun, then, from the Gardens, were like thudding cantaloupes against her windows. She’d seen the shells in the street; she’d seen the bullet in his heart, in her baby’s heart.
Blindly, she drove into Rivercrest. Demetrius had always had a gun, but she had never actually seen it. He kept it in his truck, or when he walked his father’s property. When she pulled into the driveway, seeing him lying underneath the flatbed on the street, Demetrius Junior stopped crying.
“Mama! See Madison and Morgan? They ridin bikes!”
Enchantee dropped the bullet into her pocket. She watched him run into the open garage and take out his Big Wheel, and she wiped his wet face with her sleeve, walking out to the street with him.
“Be right back,” she called to Demetrius’s boots.
Across the street, Janny, the twin girls’ mother, was standing in her driveway wearing what Enchantee thought was the uniform of stay-home mothers in the development: jeans, boots, a V-necked pastel T-shirt, and lines of blue drawn inside her lower eyelids.
But Enchantee liked Janny, because she always made fun of the fertility drugs she’d taken when she got desperate for kids, of the way the twins liked each other more than her, of the uselessness of trying to keep the house clean.
“Hey,” Janny called. “We need a guy for racing purposes!” She smiled at D’Junior charging forward on the Big Wheel. Enchantee put her hand into her pocket and felt the bullet wedged tight into the lining. She smiled.
Marcus rubbed his eyes hard when he parked at Donut Place. It was Monday morning, and he’d been grading papers all weekend. He needed two soft glazed, some yeasty layers of fat and sugar, before class.
Som’s wife, Phally, came out from the back, where Marcus knew they spent much of their time with their small son. Marcus always heard him playing behind the thin wall dividing the shop from the back. “Oh, Mista Teacha!” Phally said. “I look for you.”
“Marcus,” he reminded her, but she always shook her head, her licorice-dark eyes wide.
“In my country, teacha get respect from every people,” she said. “Not like here. My husband nephew, he never study, he stay out from school.”
“Then I hope he’s smart,” Marcus said. Som came from the back, his eyes bleary but opening when he saw Marcus.
“I hope I see you,” Som said, coming around the counter to propel Marcus toward the back. “Come, come back here, because my nephew, he get me in trouble at the school and I don’t do nothing. You have to tell them they don’t know about this. This is from my country.” Som’s voice rose and fell softly, as always, the cadences strange and faintly Spanish to Marcus even though he knew Cambodian wasn’t close.
The nephew stood in the crowded back room, his thin chest rising hard under a black T-shirt, his forehead sheened with sweat. His skin was dark, his hair waving black and his eyes long and tilted. He looked blankly at Marcus, and his uncle grabbed his arm and spoke angrily in Cambodian. Som turned to Marcus. “He just come home, just now, he stay out all night and my wife, she scare where he go.”
“Hey, Samana,” Marcus said. “I’ve seen you in Mr. Whalen’s class, right?” He smelled gasoline, acrid and sharp, on the boy’s shirt. “You run out of gas?”
“Yeah,” Samana said, smiling slight and thin. “You run out of doughnuts?”
His uncle interrupted with another stream of Cambodian, and Samana said, “Okay! They call me into the office and the school cop guy, he want me to tell about my uncle. About my skin.”
Marcus saw the long, purple stripes on the side of Samana’s neck when he turned to show them. They were hickey bruises like they had to have been applied by a girl with precision lips and teeth, Marcus thought, but then Samana showed Marcus his inner arms, also lined with oblong marks. He turned and raised his shirt when his uncle poked him, and the stripes radiated from his spine like branches.
“The police, they come to arrest me,” Som said. “They say I have to go to jail, me or my wife.”
“They think you beat him up,” Marcus said. “That’s what it looks like. A hell of a belt, or a stick.”
“No, no,” Som said, shaking his head. “He take the bad wind, he have fever from the bad wind.”
The boy looked bored, leaning against the TV now. “It’s like you get sick, and you have to get the shit out.”
His uncle’s face darkened, and he pushed the boy hard enough to jar his elbow from the wood-grain top. “See? No respect. But I don’t go to jail.”
Marcus felt his throat grow warm, remembering all the beatings he’d seen his friends get, with switches still running sap. “How’d you do that to him?” he said casually.
Som pulled a dime from his pocket, and took a jar of mentholatum from a shelf. He squatted, applied a shiny smear to his inner arm, and scraped hard with the dime. The serrated edges pulled red trails in his skin. “This take out the bad wind. You do it good. The headache go, fever go. You finish.” He looked up at Marcus.
His nephew said, “It only work if you’re Cambodian,” smiling at Marcus. But his eyes, as black as the empty screen, darker than any brother’s Marcus knew, were not amused. Marcus frowned—something about the voice was echoing in his head.
“Why didn’t you tell them at school it was just a cure?” Marcus said to him while his uncle went back to the front of the shop. Marcus folded his arms.
“I don’t like tell Cambodian stories,” Samana said, sitting down on the couch and leaning his head far back. Marcus stared at a long, fresh scratch just along the boy’s jawline, under the bone. It was hidden when he snapped his head back down.
“You tired, huh? Staying out all night partying?” Marcus said, turning for the doorway.
“Yeah,” Samana said, his voice flatter than his uncle’s, without as much lilt. “American style.”
Marcus heard the siren when he took the box of doughnuts from Som, and they both stared through the plate-glass window at the patrol car speeding past, heading toward Treetown. “Always trouble down there,” Som said. “So early the morning.”
Marcus rubbed his razor cut again. “Trouble out west,” he murmured, to Som’s frown. “Thanks for the doughnuts. I’ll pull Samana out of class tomorrow and make him tell his story at the office.”
Near the window, Marcus saw the garlanded shrine in the corner. Phally knelt to put three fresh doughnut holes and a steaming cup of coffee at the feet of the Buddha, between the gently smoking sticks of incense. Som called, “I do that cure on you, if you get a bad wind, okay?”
“Only works on Cambodians,” Marcus said.
“No! Work on the skin,” Som called.
Marcus started across the parking lot, thinking, Treetown got their own remedies. Uncle Oscar tell you a drink of his choc cure any bacteria or virus. That alcohol knock the sickness and you out cold.
After work, he went to the gym. He’d been hoping to see Tony Salcido in the Palmas Deli or maybe Kurt’s place, but now that he saw the familiar stride on the StairMaster, Salcido’s eyes slid away quickly.
Marcus changed from his school clothes in the locker room. Salcido wasn’t going to talk to him. He hadn’t come by Marcus’s apartment or his father’s place since Marcus had told him about the weapons. After Harley’s questioning, Marcus had stayed inside his apartment for days, going over and over the story, knowing how concocted it sounded to the detectives. Harley had waited for him in the school parking lot one day and said quietly, “We did the ballistics, Marcus. The nine fired the bullet into your friend from the old days. Pammy Sawicky. But it’s a stolen weapon, and no fingerprints, right? They all got scoured off by the trash and water movement. Pretty convenient. And the tire iron was wiped nice and clean. So thanks for the find, but any time you decide to let us in on the rest, you let me know. I’m still figuring we’ll have to make that other find, right? The person we discussed? You’ll keep in touch, and so will I, right?”
He didn’t want to talk to Salcido about the killings. He wanted to ask if Rubén had seen any traces of Finis. Marcus had finally ventured back out to the riverbottom, trying to walk casually down the paths past homeless guys with elaborate shelters in the cane. Many of them had been burned out two years past, when a series of fires had swept through the cane and trees, but now the brush was thick with summer, and Marcus saw hammocks, beds, bamboo furniture. He didn’t see his brother.
Usher hadn’t seen Finis at the Kozy Komfort. And SaRonn hadn’t been home when he stopped by her house. Marcus walked behind Salcido, knowing that too many law enforcement guys worked out at this gym for Salcido to be friendly there. Not since I’m a Thompson. From Treetown. Shit.
Salcido stared at the TV screen, and Marcus went to the last machine in the row. A short, soft-bodied woman with blond hair in a smooth cap around her forehead smiled at him when he stepped up. He smiled back, thinking she looked like someone he’d seen, but then he concentrated on the flashing numbers.
“Didn’t you go to the art college?” the woman said. “In—”
“In 1982,” Marcus said. “Just for a year.”
“I remember you. You went out with my roommate. Enchantee.”
“Yeah,” Marcus said, looking down at the red bars pulsing and blinking.
“I’m Abby,” she said. “You don’t remember?”
“Marcus,” he said. “Yeah, I do. But I don’t know if Enchantee would want me to tell you.”
“What?” She laughed, leaning closer. “Come on. She and I just got to be friends again.”
Marcus grinned. “She told me you helped her with her makeup or something.”
Abby threw back her head to laugh, and her pale neck was laced with lavender veins. “She’s still so beautiful,” she said, her eyes glinting. “And she never notices anyone looking at her.”
“Yeah,” Marcus said again.
“Well, what are you doing now?”
“Teaching history at Rio Seco High.”
“Oh, I loved that place. But I started skipping class, and my mother sent me to private school. I kicked around a lot before I went to the art college. I’m the food and travel writer for the newspaper now. We’re doing that new weekly magazine.”
“Yeah, I like that,” Marcus said. “You gave my buddy’s place a good review. Chipotle Chile.”
“I love that place!” she said. “They’re doing a great job.”
Stepping off, her hair sticking together in tiny spears over her forehead, she said, “Come by sometime, because my fiancé and I are always having people over. We get bored in quiet old Rio Seco—we were in Boston before. But downtown’s really trying harder. Chani and I are taking our kids to the Streetscape thing next week, you know, the art market and concert evening.”
“Chani?” Marcus asked.
“Oh, she used to go by that in school.” She toweled her face. “Hey, here’s Bent right now.”
A thin-shouldered man with a blond ponytail put his arm on her shoulders. “This is Marcus,” Abby said. “We went to the art college, with Chani. Bent’s writing about music for the paper.”
“Nice to meet you,” Bent said, and Marcus nodded.
“You like any particular kind of music?” Marcus asked.
“Well, jazz, blues, classical, Stones,” Bent said. “I’m not too much into metal or New Age. Hey, I’m over thirty and I admit it.” He smiled. “But I love rap.”
“You like women singers, you should listen to the university station on Thursday nights. My friend does a hell of a show.”
Bent nodded eagerly. “Cool. Hey, I hope we see you sometime, so we can talk songs.”
Abby added, “Come on by. We’re trying to get a salon going! Like the old days. Chani’s got my number.”
Marcus saw Salcido watching him when the couple left. Salcido stepped off his machine, too, and lifted his chin for farewell.
It was still early when he looked into the Chipotle Chile, but Javier saw him and unlocked the glass-paned door.
“Hey, I’m not even beggin for food today,” Marcus said to Kurt, who sat in the corner booth with Javier and another man. “Just wanted to tell you congrats for the good pub in the paper.”
But Kurt didn’t smile. He was reading a letter on the table. Javier said, “They cremate the box, too? That’s crazy.”
“Who?” Marcus asked, sitting next to the unfamiliar man.
“Bessier. Jean-Luc Bessier.” Kurt looked at Marcus’s frown. “The guy that got killed a few weeks ago down in Treetown. It was in the paper. Back page,” he said bitterly.
Javier said, “His family doesn’t want to pay for his body to go back to France. That’s where he’s from.”
Kurt folded his arms and leaned against the wall. “No front page fucking headlines for a dead faggot. No one cares. No one wants him. No services. I don’t even know the fucking guy.”
“Marcus, this is Ernesto, he works at the coroner’s office taking pictures,” Javier said. The guy nodded at Marcus. “He told us no one’s claiming the body.”
“We’re gonna get some money together to cremate him. Have a service on the ocean,” Ernesto said.
“Faggot funeral,” Kurt said, closing his eyes.
“Fucking stop it,” Javier said. “Quit whining. We need to get the money together. I’m gonna put out a jar in here for people who know.”
Marcus watched Javier write out a sign for the big jar. “Funeral expenses for a friend,” he read. He saw the chiseled face and swerve of red hair, and he closed his eyes, too. He couldn’t say anything. He didn’t want to imagine what the face looked like now, where the long red hair was.
“I’ve had to do this too many times already,” Ernesto said. “But usually it’s AIDS. I’m so tired of people dying.”
“Me, too,” Marcus said at the same time Kurt did. When they looked at him, he pulled out his wallet. “Here’s the first donation,” he said, dropping a twenty into the jar and heading out the door, thinking of how the dead man’s eyelashes had been thick as fans above his startled eyes.
Whenever he walked, he felt a corresponding stride or swinging pair of eyes. Twice now, Mortrice had startled him by stepping out from the darkness to talk. And when he drove to Treetown, he always felt a pair of headlights as persistent as trailing gnats.
He pulled his father’s truck into the space near the barn, and Kickstand’s face appeared from behind the hood of an old Cadillac. “You still foolin people, drivin your daddy’s truck?” Kickstand said. “Makin em think you somebody got sense?”
“Everybody over at Uncle Oscar’s?” Marcus said.
“He got a ton of chitlins over there, gettin ready for all them Texas and Oklahoma people celebrate Juneteenth,” Kickstand said. “I’m from Texas. And nary one a you Treetown niggas probably bring me no chitlins back.”
“Oh, man, I’ll try not to forget you,” Marcus said, grinning. “Except I ain’t got no sense.”
He tried the kitchen door, since, for the first time, his mother had begun to lock it. Getting out his key, he saw that all the windows closed. No one was inside, and he studied the row of keys on the wall pegs. He picked the single key attached to a polished green stone.
In the late afternoon light, hundreds of gold strings looked hung from the trees near Finis’s trailer. Inside, the air was close and already dark. Marcus opened the window near the table and let in a dusty glow that touched the bones, stones, and glass covering every surface except the small bed.
He didn’t want to disturb the order Finis had carefully arranged here, the bones in several piles that he could identify as small animal teeth, cow vertebrae, and long, thin extremities. The stones were random to Marcus. He stared at four jagged glass shards as big as his palm. They were brown, but iridescent with mottled purple, gold, and magenta swirls.
He remembered the day Finis had found them in the baked-hard ground across the river, up in the Diamondback Hills, not too far up because the boys were afraid of the tangled snakes people said writhed in dens among the boulders.
Marcus looked at the rounded pebbles edging the dusty sink. Marcus touched the line of green stones connected like a caterpillar near the faucet, and locked the door carefully.
He didn’t look at the leaves near the wall when he walked the few feet to his uncle’s. The police had trampled them thoroughly. Marcus saw the wrought-iron gate, locked, too, and he wedged his tennis shoes into the stones to climb over.
The men were gathered in the back dirt area behind the kitchen, where white five-gallon pails of chitterlings sat between chairs and several metal washtubs full of water. Marcus looked first for his father, who was sitting motionless, his left hand clamped around his elbow; when the shoulder hurt, Marcus had seen, his father held himself like that.
“This downtown fool probably done forgot how to clean chitlins,” Uncle Oscar said, looking up, and Marcus’s father lifted one side of a grin around a cigarillo.
Demetrius said, “You want to eat em, you got to clean em.”
Marcus picked up a short, sharp knife on the counter inside the open back door and sat down on the folding chair between Demetrius and Octavious. Julius was inside, talking to his aunt.
Marcus began scraping the shit off the pale intestines, pushing hard. “You know somebody told us once he use a power drill with a wire brush to do this?” he said.
“Old man out there past the Gardens,” Demetrius said. “Gaskins.”
“Any way you do it, it’s gon be work,” Oscar said. “I seen men stretch em out across the yard, they was so long before they cut em. I seen women pick at em with they fingers, gettin the stuff off. I gotta have me the right knife.”
Then they were silent. Marcus watched the lumpy, grayish-white leavings, as thick as cottage cheese, drop from his blade. His uncle did fifty pounds a week, and everyone in Treetown and on the Westside came here for the chitlins and sauce. Marcus turned the tough, sliding meat over and began on the other side. He waited. It was all they talked about now, when they were gathered like this.
“Po-lice got mad when I told em ain’t no white women been over here,” Oscar said, his knuckles laced with shine. “I told em don’t nobody round here have no interest in a white girl. They didn’t like that.”
“They think some drunk dude came over from here and tried to get some white stuff in the parkin lot,” Demetrius said. “And when she wouldn’t give him none, he killed her. Put her and her friend in the Granada.”
“The fence been cut both places and mended,” Marcus’s father said. “Been rolled back and fixed.” He looked at Marcus.
“How the hell that explain the fuckin dude?” Octavious said. He shook his head and picked up his bottle of beer.
Marcus was quiet, dropping the chitlin into the washtub and closing his fingers around another. He thought of Bessier’s mother, getting the phone call from America, and hanging up.
“Julius,” Demetrius shouted into the doorway. “I still think somebody pissed off at you.”
Julius leaned out, both hands bent backward around the door frame like a kid. “I ain’t messed with no white girl. You crazy? I got enough trouble with the sistas around here.”
“And they men,” Octavious said.
“Only women get real mad at that fool,” Oscar said. “And ain’t no woman did that.”
Demetrius spoke softer now. “Okay. I’m thinkin all the time, and I’m—Maybe one of the other garages is mad cause I been askin around about the city contract.” The others stared at him. “I was lookin to raise us up, man. I asked a couple people how to get one.”
Only two garages in the city had the police contracts—Rotella and Layton. They got all the abandoned or illegally parked vehicles, and they made big money on storage fees and lien sales. Like the Lexus, Marcus thought. “You and Layton are cool,” he said. “Y’all been tight since school.”
“I know,” Demetrius said. “But maybe Rotella, or even somebody else that wants it, too.”
“No,” Hosea said finally. “Somebody wants us in jail. Me, or one a you.”
“Cops?” Octavious said, frowning. “Ain’t none of us been throwin down for a long time. They used to hate my ass, but…”
Oscar interrupted him. “Don’t no cop want you like that. If he did, he just pull you over and kick your sorry black ass. Ain’t you seen that boy on TV enough times now? Beat the shit out of him. If po-lice wanted you, they just stomp you. Stomp you out this world.”
“Like nobody else in California speedin,” Marcus said, thinking of all the times he’d been driving eighty in the Lexus through the desert and had seen the white headlights hurtling toward him in his rearview. He’d seen cars racing out there, exotic cars going faster than a hundred.
“I bet the brother was talkin shit to his homeys in the car, had the sounds on too loud, and he didn’t even know they was followin him,” Julius said from the doorway. “Remember that happened to Tiny D, back in the day, and they kicked his ass.”
“Remember Sarita’s cousin, the football player got killed in that place by Long Beach? Signal Hill,” Marcus said. “Said he hung himself. Didn’t like brothers drivin through there.”
“Remember when they brought that batter-ram and knocked down them two houses on Grove?” Demetrius said. “Two old ladies lived there, and the police wrecked them cribs. Wrong house.”
“That one dude got shot tryin to come out the door,” Octavious said. “Drug raid on the wrong house, too. Remember, in eighty-five?”
Demetrius said, in a strange, tangled voice, “Enchantee’s mama got killed for wrong.” Marcus and the others stared at him, his face down tight to his work with the knife, stretching the gristly tissue. “Her mama was nineteen, ridin with her brother. Judge down there in Georgia took away his license for a year after this white lady run into him. And he was drivin anyway, so when the cops tried to stop him, he kept goin. They ran him off the road. Killed em both. Enchantee was three. They lived in this little cabin, she said. Two rooms. And her aunt brought her out here.”
He threw the cleaned intestine into the washtub. “All y’all are here, ain’t nobody watchin the place. Kickstand only one over there.” Marcus watched Demetrius stand up and walk to the stone trough to wash his hands. “I’ma go keep a eye on things,” he said, and he headed back toward the trees.
“Julius, get out here and do some work,” Octavious called, but Aintielila came to the doorway.
“He done gone out the front,” she said. “You should know.”
Marcus’s father said, hoarse and soft, “Everybody got one lazy fool. One child won’t work.”
Marcus and Octavious were smiling, but Aintielila said, “Less they ain’t got no child at all.” Marcus watched her turn in the doorway and disappear back inside.
He scraped the white stuff like sodden cotton, thinking about what Brother Lobo had told him. The white man who kept coming to bother Aintielila, the way she called to ask for the songs. No one but Uncle Oscar really knew her at all, and in the crowd and smoke of The Blue Q, she kept her face an impassive shell around her eyes. And Texas—why had his father acted so strange when he’d heard “Texas”?
Marcus was surprised when Octavious spoke up again. “Maybe somebody really wants Finis,” he said. “Made it look like he did it. Scared him off.”
Oscar slung more meat into the washtub and stood up. He was thin and short, his fingers surprisingly long and flecked with white now. “Finis don’t exist,” he said, pushing his cap far back on his forehead. “He don’t exist for no white man. Finis a shadow man.”
“What you mean?” Marcus began, but Oscar said, “Hold up.”
He went inside and came back with mayonnaise jars filled with swaying dark rust liquid. Putting the jars down on a stump, he pulled sugar packets from his pocket and emptied one into each jar. The choc beer frothed and rose, and he brought one to each man.
Marcus drank the thick, sour-sweet choc, smelling faintly of molasses and yeast. “Best lunch I got,” Oscar said.
Marcus’s father was silent after he drank his. Marcus watched him stare out toward the trees, wondering what he saw.
“Shadow man,” Oscar began again. “Me and Hosea don’t exist, neither.”
“You gon spell it out?” Marcus said, impatient.
“I ain’t got no Social Security card,” Oscar said. “You ain’t neither,” he added, nodding toward Hosea, who shook his head. “Shit, I ain’t never looked for no government to give me money. After I seen my friend Lanier come out the service with half his toes gone, and they ain’t gave him nothin.” Oscar paused, downing his beer. “Hell, I’m Social Security. Me. I got this place to sell if I need money. Live in a trailer. Lanier bring us meat when he owe us. I don’t need nobody.”
“Ain’t good to need nobody,” Hosea said, still looking at the trees where Demetrius had disappeared. “Ain’t good to have your name on all them papers.”
“Papers?” Octavious said, and Marcus watched their fingers clenching across the knuckles when they scraped.
Aintielila came to the doorway. “Octavious. Go next door—y’all got a tow call,” she said, and then she disappeared again.
“All them papers the government want your name on,” Oscar said. “Got a paper for every move you make, so they can watch you. Hell, you don’t exist neither, Eight. Kickstand, Julius, none a you. Just Mr. Teacher here.”
After Octavious left, Marcus thought in the silence about all the Treetown men who worked different jobs for cash: mechanic, tree trimmer, concrete, odd jobs, and hauling. Like his brothers and Usher and the Proudfoots. After high school, they had ceased to appear on official papers.
He remembered when the census takers had come around, and the city of Rio Seco had published population numbers. Treetown laughed. A white man at the door? Nobody lived there, nobody employed or seeking work. Nobody here but us mice. Except welfare women, who had stacks of paper with their names and everything else about their lives.
“Only reason the government want your name on some paper is so they can get they money,” Oscar said, grasping another chitlin. “We got annexed down here, what, last year? No sidewalks, no streetlights, still got septic tanks, and the city want taxes. Shit. Go down there to them nice new government buildings near where you live, boy. They want licenses for everything you do. Mechanic, roofing, sellin liquor. All they want is more money. Say, ‘You need a license to prove you know what you doin. Doin good work for the damn citizens.’ ”
Oscar paused to spit onto the dirt. “If I don’t do good work, a nigga can come back here and kick my ass. He can kick Eight’s ass, he don’t like the way y’all towed his car. He can tell people don’t come to us. Or he can go downtown to them fancy offices and complain on paper. You got a white auto shop, somebody complain at the city, the shop boss shrug and say to his buddy down there at city hall, “Oh, well.”
“Liquor license is different,” Marcus said.
“No, it ain’t,” his uncle said. “Drinkin—they don’t care what you sellin. Shit, them sherberts downtown by you drinkin every day. They just don’t like what we drinkin, what cup we use, and do we eat pigsfeet steada—what that Spanish shackin food you told me about?”
“Tapas,” Marcus said, grinning.
“Yeah,” his uncle muttered. “Shit.”
“What’s this got to do with the guy who got killed, the girls?” Marcus said, feeling his cheeks fall back into place. His father and uncle were silent, drinking from the jars. Marcus remembered the three figures by the canal, all disjointed moving parts, shoes and the black cap, black gloves, an elbow as white and bent as a straw.
“All this time,” he said, his voice impatient, “you been tellin me to figure out why some white guy with a ponytail was drivin a Jeep, messin with these girls. You shot at him, Daddy, but you won’t tell me nothin. You never have.” He took a breath, looking at his father’s half-closed eyes. “I mean, did a white guy used to own this land? Did you or—” He glanced at the doorway. “Did you guys or Aintielila have any trouble with a white owner a long time ago? Did you have some trouble in Oklahoma or somewhere? Or Texas?” He waited in the sharp silence.
His father finished the choc beer and finally spoke. “Nothin but trouble in Oklahoma. But that don’t have nothin to do with California. I came here lookin for work, I had met Salcido on the road. First, I didn’t want to ax nobody for nothin. I slept in the pecan grove down there by the river, was a whole bunch of us there. Mostly Indians. I cleaned the canals with the Indians for a while, and then I got some work in the groves. Met up with Salcido and started layin stone.” He paused, staring at the empty jar. “No white man ever owned nothin on this side a Pepper Avenue. Never. Just Archuleta. It was Indians here first, all along the river. Then Spanish came from New Mexico, and white came from Boston or around there. The whites liked the weather, that’s what Archuleta used to say, but they didn’t like the Spanish or the Indians. Hated adobe and stone. They built downtown, only wood, like Boston. Plymouth Hill. That was bankers, lawyers, doctors. They had people to clean and cook. Across the river was the farmers, and they had people to work the groves. But wasn’t nothin but Spanish in Agua Dulce, and Archuleta on this hillside. I started workin for him, buildin the barn, workin the trees when he was too old. And never had no papers.”
“Ain’t nobody lookin for me or your daddy, no matter what you think we done before,” Oscar said, meeting Marcus’s eyes with his red-rimmed ones. “We ain’t never been in California. We ain’t never got paid nothin but cash. Ain’t never paid nobody else nothin but cash. Demetrius take care of Arrow Towing, right?”
Marcus’s father nodded slowly. “My name ain’t even on the land. Your mama’s name on the papers from Archuleta. 1957. Archuleta knew he was dyin, and he ain’t had no people. He sold the land to her and Lila for hardly nothin. They names on the papers.” He closed his eyes. “Only one would want me is a ghost,” he whispered. “And wasn’t no ghost I seen in the Jeep.”
Marcus opened his mouth again, but Oscar said, “See? We ain’t here. So who could be wantin payback for somethin we don’t know about? We ain’t here.” Marcus watched their mouths close tight around their cigarillos, and they swallowed smoke.
At the darkened house across the rock-lined gutter, where two pink slashes were painted on the facial boards near the roof, Mortrice watched Chris talk to the girl wearing the arm cast. She laughed and shook her head, and Chris snaked his shoulders around to do a dance step for her.
B-Real sat in the front seat of his mother’s old Nova. Mortrice sat in the back. B-Real said, “Man, I don’t know why Chris want to talk to that girl. He been thinkin she was fine since we was babies. And all she do is work for the rock man.”
They watched when two men approached the porch and leaned close to speak to the girl. Chris stood in the porch shadows. The men bent forward as if they were touching the cast, then twirled suddenly and dipped their hands into their pockets.
“He ain’t gon front you no more,” the girl called when the men were about to jump across the stone channel. “Y’all done had enough. He gon be lookin for you.”
“We gotta go,” Mortrice said, keeping his voice hard. He was the one now. He was from L.A. He was giving orders. “Honk him, man.”
Chris bounded off the porch when he heard the horn, and he got into the passenger door. “She done loved me all her life,” he said. “She just don’t know it yet.”
“Come on, fool,” Mortrice said. “The dude suppose to be waitin.”
They had driven around for an hour, waiting for the man named Julius to show this time. All the way east to where cows still roamed a lush field near the riverbottom, and Mortrice had smelled the night again, the chuffed, chewed grass. You didn’t see them cows? Kenneth had said. Don’t nobody care about nothin way out here. Don’t nobody care about no dead nigga out here in Rio damn Seco.
B-Real drove back up Olive Street to the Gardens, and before they’d even entered the parking lot, Chris said, “There go Julius right there.”
He was a thin man with a thick braid touching his spine, and when he turned to see the car, Mortrice saw his broad cheekbones and black goatee. “Yo, Chris,” Julius said, peering into the car. “You lookin for me?”
“Why you dog me out last time, man?” Chris whined. Mortrice said nothing. No use to bring up the past. Go on and do what you gotta do now, Kenneth had said. Mortrice winced, trying to stop the voice from echoing in his skull.
Julius slid in beside Mortrice, and Mortrice kept his eyes straight ahead. “Get on California and go all the way toward Hillgrove,” Julius told B-Real. “You little fools is sweatin, y’all so anxious. What you need a piece for? You ain’t got nothin to steal.”
Chris turned halfway around. “Fools from the Westside and way over in San Bernardino keep comin into the Gardens, tryin to sweat us,” he said. “You gotta be strapped. Huh, Mortrice? Everybody in L.A. strapped.”
Mortrice felt the eyes turn to him. “Mortrice? What kinda name that?” Julius said, laughing.
“Name my mama give me,” Mortrice said, hard. “You sayin she wrong?”
“I don’t even know the lady,” Julius said. “And I would if she lived in the Gardens, okay? I know all the ladies in Treetown and the Westside. Plenty in San Bernardino, too. What’s your mama’s name?”
Mortrice pictured the sapphire flashes beating muted at the window when he’d left with B-Real a few hours ago, the TV screen blaring at his mother while she sat smoking, staring at the purple fabric draped over the curtained window. “Sofelia,” he whispered. “Her name Sofelia.”
He waited for the man to say something stupid about the name, but he heard only a hiss of breath through nostrils.”You been livin in L.A.?” Julius finally said, his voice higher. “Long time?”
“All my life,” Mortrice said, frowning. “But my mama from here.”
“Man, your mama’s my baby sister,” Julius said, slapping his thighs nervously. Mortrice stared at him. “Who brought you to Rio Seco?”
“Dude name Marcus,” Mortrice said. “My uncle.”
“Oh, shit!” Julius said, shaking his head. “Oh, shit.” He looked out the window and said suddenly, “Lookahere, lookahere. You gotta turn left, my man, and go down this street. Yeah.”
Mortrice saw a row of Spanish-style houses, all on long dirt lots. He saw dogs leaping at fences and campers parked in driveways, white and Mexican kids playing outside. “So you my nephew,” Julius said, staring at him. “Cool. Cause Zach don’t like no strangers at his crib. I’m about the only brotha he know. And we go way back to Juvenile Hall, long time ago. But Hillgrove people keep to theyselves. Yeah, yeah, right here, lil man.”
Nephew. Maybe Julius lived at the fenced place Chris had shown him that night. Your people. That’s what he’d said. Mortrice kept his mouth closed. He wanted to concentrate on the gun right now.
They walked down a long dirt driveway toward a small stucco box of a house, the same light tan as the earth here. “Zach can see you comin, now,” Julius said. “Mr. Zachary,” he called softly. “Call off your Rottweilers, okay, cause it’s only Julius.”
Mortrice felt his heart knocking at his chest. They needed this redhaired man who stepped outside his door slowly. They needed more toast if they wanted to protect themselves from the glaring, hooded eyes watching them through car windows everywhere they went. From guys like Bam-Bam who were getting sent out to the country when they got in trouble. From everyone.
Zach grinned slowly and nodded toward the door. Julius led the three boys inside, where they stood awkwardly in the small front room. Mortrice could smell marijuana smoke in the curly red hair that passed him. Zach leaned against the wall, folding his arms high on his chest, just under his grin. He had a red beard as crinkly as a scouring pad taped to his chin.
“No hickeys, man?” Zach said to Julius, and they both laughed. Mortrice kept his face expressionless, not looking at Chris or B-Real.
Julius turned to them and said, “Me and Zach, at the Hall, we was the ladies’ men. Shit, I’m too old to get marks on me, man. Hey—this is my nephew, Zach. Mortrice.”
Mortrice nodded. “I didn’t see this guy before,” Zach said, his voice more guarded.
“My sister Sofelia’s kid,” Julius said, staring at Mortrice. “Yeah.” Chris and B-Real shifted their feet, uncomfortable, but Mortrice met the bottle-green eyes under the red brows.
“What you need?” Zach said, quiet now.
“These lil men feel that the world has gotten to be a dangerous place, man, and they feel the need for protection,” Julius said.
Mortrice waited, thinking that Julius was the kind who talked just to hear the words flow like insects swarming around his face. One of those southern-sounding country guys, spinning too many slow words around females. The older men in L.A. were like that, some of them.
“Use a rubber,” Zach said. Mortrice worked the inside of his cheek between his teeth. Then Zach smiled. “That’s what Julius shoulda done all those times.” The smile faded. “You sure, Julius? I don’t need no fuckups.” Julius nodded.
Zach led them from the front room to a back bedroom. Mortrice saw a woman’s clothes on a chair. The bedroom was tiny, the plaster walls veined with cracks.
Mortrice stood behind him when he touched the dark wood arching over a little cave built into the wall, one of those holding a plaster saint with her palms limp, as if she were dropping money on the ground. Zach pulled at a carved panel under her, and a door swung open to reveal a smaller cave with two shelves. Mortrice didn’t let himself lean forward. Zach was watching him, he knew. The top shelf held six guns. The bottom held a foil-wrapped brick of something and several baggies of weed, and more guns.
“Man, this guy owed me big-time. He brought me all these forties from the highway patrol,” Zach said.
“That what them big-ass things is?” Julius said casually. Mortrice looked at the barrels and grips; the .40s looked awkward to him, like heavy muscle and chicken bone.
“Say property of CHP right on em,” Zach said. “Got em from the manufacturer, cause they never been fired.” He stared hard at Mortrice, then pulled a gun from the top shelf. His eyes were the color of mustard, and his reddish beard swung like a sponge when he turned suddenly, holding what Mortrice recognized as a Ruger .9. Mortrice felt B-Real shift behind him, but he didn’t move. “This what you want?” Zach said, quiet.
Mortrice reached out for the gun, felt the cool, squared-off length and metal weight. “All you little perpies want nines,” Zach said, his eyes holding Mortrice’s. “Me, personally, I like this one.” He bent suddenly and pulled out a huge semiautomatic from a holster under his shirt. “The Desert Eagle,” he said, pointing it at Mortrice’s mouth. “Forty-four. My new favorite.”
Mortrice shifted his eyes to the thick black barrel, the bluing reflecting the lightbulb like a hot, silver eye. The metal spur lapped over the pale fingers.
“Them Israel soldiers like em,” Mortrice said. “Mercenaries.”
Zach slid the gun back under his shirt. “Yeah. Mercenaries.” His beard shifted, stiff. “Who’s got the dinero? I know Julius don’t have it, cause he spends all his on the ladies.”
“Nothin better to waste ducats on,” Julius said. He glanced idly into the hidden shelf. “You get this hash from that place?”
“The best, direct from Afghanistan,” Zach said. “My brother, downtown, he gets some, too. He says downtown freaks only want speed and Ecstasy. Rich assholes don’t like to smoke.” He turned suddenly to Mortrice again. “A hundred. Nephew.” He worked his fingers until he saw the money. “My brother, he just found out this year he’s got a son. Big as you. He never knew he stuck his dick in the wrong place.”
Mortrice pulled the bills from his pocket, hearing B-Real and Chris breathing hard behind him. Kenneth’s money, he thought. My money. He’d worked for it, cleaning the guns, touching the scabs of dried blood on the shottie.
“All right then, man,” Julius said to Zach, moving out of the bedroom now that Mortrice had stuck the gun into his pants behind his loose T-shirt. Mortrice looked at Chris and B-Real now; their mouths were tight.
“Hey, Nephew,” Zach said, close to Mortrice’s skull. “You got the same cool blood as your uncle, right? No mouthin off.”
“Right,” Mortrice said, feeling the ridge of metal along his spine.
Chris and B-Real spoke up when the car had turned back onto California toward downtown. B-Real said, “Man, you just stuck it down there, didn’t even check to see if it was loaded.”
“Shit, man, lemme see it,” Chris said.
“Shut up, both y’all,” Julius said. “Why the man gon give you bullets? And you ain’t seein shit in the car. Five-O everywhere, fool.” He turned to Mortrice. “Take me to see your mama, boy. I can’t believe this. Can’t believe Marcus wouldn’t tell Mama. They always talk about I’m hard-hearted, and he the one. Know who Mama been waitin for.”
The tattoo, Mortrice was thinking, their voices flying past him. Mama always put that oil on me before. She ain’t put none on since we came here. I need the tattoo. He looked down at the darkened web between finger and thumb. The tattoo only for us, he thought. For protection. Keep everybody off us, less we gotta get on them. He remembered two Chicano guys he had seen at school, with words inked on the slick, bumpy inside of their lips and letters across their knuckles and teardrops beside their eyes.
The light was off when B-Real pulled into the parking lot. Mortrice stared at the darkened window. “This where we stay,” he murmured to Julius, who followed him to the door. He opened it and saw the empty chair, the cold ashes in a plate.
Sofelia had said, “Take me to Aintielila, okay? Please, Marcus?”
He drove the few blocks there, while she shivered and wrapped her arms tight, fingertips yellow where she dug her hands into her skin.
“I can’t hide this no more,” Marcus told her when he pulled into The Blue Q parking lot. “I can’t do this to Mama.”
“You won’t have to,” she said, her eyes closed. “This is the day. I tried to remember. And Mama don’t want me.”
“What?” Marcus began, but she shook her head and tried to pry open the door handle, still shaking. She fell from the truck into the dirt, half on her side, and bottles of shampoo and conditioner fell from the bag she held.
“Sofelia!” Marcus shouted, running around the truck to help her up. “What the hell are you talkin about?”
She kept her eyes trembling tight, the lids jumping as if lightning played behind them. “I can’t look at all that sky,” she whispered. “Big pieces of sky.”
Marcus led her around the back, to the kitchen, and he called, “Aintielila!” He hoped his aunt wasn’t carrying her pistol in her apron pocket, hoped she didn’t think he was the white man. “It’s Marcus! And Sofelia?”
“Who?” his aunt said, moving to the doorway. “Lord have mercy!”
She ran forward and hugged Sofelia, held her in the embrace Marcus couldn’t ever manage with a woman. Her neck was a perfect cradle for Sofelia’s head.
Marcus carried the bag inside after them. Sofelia sat on a wooden chair near the huge sink and whispered, “Aintie. Can you help me?”
His aunt took the bottles without asking questions and propped Sofelia’s neck over the sink on a big towel. Marcus hesitated, and his aunt glared at him and shook her head.
He went into the darkened front area, cavernous with chairs lined at the walls. Walking slowly around the room, he dropped to his knees and crawled along baseboards until he came to the kitchen window where food was handed through. Crouching underneath the shelf, he could hear their voices.
“Aintie,” Sofelia murmured. “You washed my hair, and combed the shiny stuff in it. Back then. What you put in my hair?”
“Brillantine,” his aunt said softly. “Shine it up nice.”
“Then you combed it all out and made a braid over my forehead. Cause I was goin to the concert with Tiki. Mama said I couldn’t.”
“She did,” his aunt said. “She worried about you.”
Sofelia was quiet. Then Marcus heard her say, “Did you miss me, Aintie?”
“Yeah, baby. We all missed you.”
“I know Mama missed me. But she hate me now.”
“No.”
“She think I’m dead.”
“She think you in love.”
Sofelia was silent. “I love my son.” Another long pause, and Marcus heard water swishing in the sink.
“I seen the riverbottom on TV, on the news. They was talkin about some fires, and I seen the trees. I remembered.”
They waited. “I went to the concert. I got on the bus. Tiki had moved to L.A., and she told me L.A. was better, more parties than out here in the country. She came to the station. She said my hair was pretty, and I said you did it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We was outside, in a big stadium, and people was all around us. Funk Festival. Me and Tiki and her friends was dancin. Then some boys sat with us in the stadium. One boy sat with me. He said I was so pretty, he never seen nobody from L.A. so pretty. He told me, ‘Come on, I buy you a soda. Tell your friend you be right back.’ He took me to a place under the stadium, and threw me on the ground.”
Marcus clenched his eyes shut, holding his knees.
The cold milk flooded like a jellyfish down Alma’s chest. She had been working in the orange trees for hours, hoeing in rabbit leavings. The baby girl, Jalima, was crawling now, and Alma had only shrugged when her pink overalls turned brown from the knees down.
Julius had bought new clothes for Jalima last week. He was good about that, with all three children, working odd jobs and bringing them what they needed. Clothes, toys, the video games Kendrick loved. He just didn’t want to take care of them, Alma thought, looking at her dirty hands. Nobody wants to take care of kids. You don’t get no breaks. Them girls Julius fool around with, they too busy drinkin and smokin. And he too busy runnin around. She moved along the floors now, snatching shoes and socks and trucks and paper.
Clutter. Alma wouldn’t allow it, not after all those years of traveling in the station wagon whose floorboards were ankle deep in debris and socks and foil and torn flannel. She’d hated sleeping in that tangled cocoon. She swept the wood floors quickly now, throwing the boys’ things into their room.
But standing in the room that smelled like sweat and sticks and orange peels, looking at the beds, she felt a sharp slant of sadness inside her belly. They were slipping away from her, all the grandchildren. She was happy that the baby was crawling, of course, but now the tiny hands pushed at her to get down. The harder Alma held her, wanting to kiss the shell-like ears and feel the velvet inner arms crooking around her neck, the more the baby squirmed for her new independence.
Alma leaned against the wall, holding the broom. The baby still slept with her at night, but Hosea slept on the other side now and then. She had felt his thumbs in the hollows of her cheeks, his forefingers framing her temples, and his lips against her neck.
He was back in the coldhouse most of the time now, he and the boys walking, walking, their faces loosened now and then when they laughed at something Kickstand said. Alma sighed and went into the kitchen to cut crinkle-edged circles of yellow squash, laced inside with seeds like fairy necklaces.
Sofelia had called herself a fairy for years, tiptoeing around the tree roots to surprise her brothers, carrying an old parasol and wearing tulle skirts that Alma had made for her. Alma closed her eyes and lay down the knife.
The harder she tried to hold on, to Sofelia, to these last children, the more they pulled away. Especially the boys. Because after they’d finished her chewed-for-them meat and green beans, after they’d learned to drink from straws and comb their own hair and button their flies and twirl a steering wheel with one hand, how could she protect them? She hadn’t protected Sofelia, or Finis, and now she couldn’t even see them. Their shoes and boot soles and tires had crunched relentlessly down the gravel and turned suddenly silent on the asphalt of Pepper Avenue.
She heard heavy footsteps outside the kitchen door now, saw Julius’s face in the doorway. “What you want now?” she asked.
“Mama,” he said. “Sofelia livin out here. In the Gardens.”
Alma looked at the yellow coins of squash floating under her fingers. “What you mean, livin here?”
In her third son’s eyes, she saw the triumph of a jealous child when he spoke. “Marcus brought her out here. To the Gardens. Swear to God.”
She dried her hands absently and went outside. The afternoon light was playful and gleaming in the trees. She started down the driveway, and Julius caught up with her. “Mama, let me drive you. Come on.” She began to walk toward Grove Avenue, and when she’d reached the corner, Julius slowed beside her in the Volkswagen from the yard.
“She ain’t home,” Julius said when she got in awkwardly, holding herself tight in the small seat. “Her son showed me where.”
“Son?”
“He bout fourteen, fifteen,” Julius said, squinting through the dusty windshield.
Alma tried to add the years in her mind, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t think at all, couldn’t see the face she thought she should. The one turning under the parasol, elfin and blinking.
She stared at the passing houses. Ocie Mae Williams, Zenia Smith, Concha’s old house. Some empty, some with children. Julius pulled across the bare dirt before the parking lot of Olive Gardens.
Nothing but women, girls, and babies. Not like the families when these big buildings were small shacks and people sat outside peeling oranges and building fires. These women smiled at Julius, holding babies and hanging clothes and sipping from cans.
Alma stood in front of the closed, grimy door. No one was there. Julius said, “The boy gone, too.”
“She live here?” Alma asked again. “Here?”
“Mama,” Julius said, fingers at her elbow. “Come on. Let’s go over Marcus’s place downtown.”
He drove back down Olive, back down Grove, and when he turned on Pepper, passing Oscar’s place, Alma saw Hosea’s truck. The one Marcus was driving. “Look,” she said, pointing.
“When you comb, it loosen up my brain,” Sofelia whispered. Marcus heard his aunt’s feet moving on the floor. “I never let nobody touch my hair since that day. I did it myself. Nobody never touched me after that. Except my son.” She paused. “That boy kept me down there a long time. He slapped me and I had blood in my mouth. He laid on me whole buncha times. It was dark, had chairs and tables down there, all around me. Just a little space. He had some cigarettes.” She paused. “He said, ‘You need a Spanish fly. Make you treat me better.’ He put it in my mouth. And I don’t remember nothin for a long time.”
“Oh, baby,” Lila said, her voice twisted with sobs.
“Then when I could see somethin outside my head again, not all the dreams, I was in a alley. It was cold, like night. I didn’t have no pants on. Mama said they was too tight. I had my shirt, and in my pocket was Tiki number. I had to crawl, like I was a baby. I thought I was a baby goin long the fences at home. But some lady in a car seen me, and she didn’t know me. She looked at Tiki’s number and take me where Tiki stayed.”
“Your friend was lookin for you?” Lila said, tears in her words.
“She say it been more than a week.”
Marcus felt the moisture running down his collar, felt a ball of rage at the back of his skull. We woulda killed him. The Jungle Brothers. Country-ass niggas. We woulda killed his big-city ass.
“I couldn’t think about nothin for so long. I slept in Tiki bed. I didn’t know where I was. She told me how I did, how I acted, long time ago. I didn’t know anything. Then I knew I was havin a baby. I knew I wasn’t no crawlin baby in the dirt. Me and Tiki was thirteen. All that time the boy was on me, slappin me, I could hear drums over us from the concert. I wanted to hear some music.”
“Why you didn’t call us?” Aintielila said. Marcus edged out from under the window and walked toward the doorway, wiping his face with his shirt. “Why you didn’t come home?”
“I thought Mama and Daddy be so mad. I use to hear the boys say they kill anybody mess with me. I thought they kill the baby.”
“What?” Aintielila said. Marcus watched them now, Sofelia sitting straight in the chair, her long hair wet and gleaming strings over her shoulders.
“Tiki said maybe they kill him, I heard her one night. But I didn’t remember nothin for a long time. After the baby come. I couldn’t come out Tiki’s room, I stayed there forever. They taken the baby out so he could walk after a while, but I stayed in there.”
Marcus said, “Sofelia? You okay?”
Her eyes were blank on him. Aintielila combed steadily, her face impassive now. And they heard a loud car pull into the yard.
“Your uncle out with your daddy,” Lila said. “Go on, see who that is.” Her mouth tightened, her eyes glanced out the open door.
Marcus went around the corner and saw his mother and Julius running toward him, around the stone trough. His mother grabbed him by the elbows, her head just under his chin, and she slapped him across the face hard enough to jar his teeth.
When she saw her daughter sitting empty-eyed in the chair, her hair streaming like black lava down her arms, Alma stopped a few feet short of touching her. She stared at the amber skin, the mouth open. Sofelia’s face dropped forward like a wilting flower, and Alma turned to see Lila watching her.
Instead of the waiting love and relief she’d always expected to bloom inside her, she felt a surge of anger as dark as oil in her lungs. “You got her?” she whispered harshly to Lila, who stood with her hard face and the belly that hadn’t known children. How could Lila, who only knew men and laughter and drinking, have her baby girl? But when she turned back to Sofelia, not seeing Lila shake her head, she heard the distance of her daughter’s small voice saying, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Mama.”
Sofelia still didn’t leap up to embrace her. Alma bent down and took her daughter’s stiff neck onto her shoulder, put her arms around her, and Sofelia sat as wooden and unbending as a grown boy.
“Mama,” Marcus began, but Alma turned, feeling the dark liquid spread from her chest to her belly.
“No,” she said. “Nary one a you never felt pains for no child, and I can’t believe you could do me this way. Keep her from me. No.” She pulled Sofelia up and said, “We goin home now.”
But as soon as they left the doorway, Sofelia shrank under her mother’s touch, fading away. “I can’t,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”
Marcus stepped forward and lifted her into his arms. Alma saw him stagger a minute and then right himself, walking down the dirt parking lot toward the street. Alma turned to her sister-in-law and said, “Never. I never forget.” She saw Lila bite her lips until pearls of red showed.
“I think she come cause she know about when I…,” Lila began, but Alma turned away before she could hear the rest. She followed her children down the tree-lined drive.
Julius took her arm when they walked along the outside fence, traffic hurtling past them. Alma stared at Sofelia’s hair waving over her brother’s arm. When they neared the gate, she saw the van and the men with cameras.
“Excuse me! Excuse me!” a man in a suit shouted. “Is this young woman injured? Do you need an ambulance?”
Alma stared at the van: CHANNEL 7 NEWS. The man pushed a microphone near Marcus, who swatted it away with his shoulder and kept walking, turning into the gate that Julius swung open. Alma moved quickly past the man shouting at her and bent her head to make it up the slight incline to her kitchen, where she thought she knew what to do. The voices faded when she reached the blue starfish beside the open door.