Angels of Catastrophe

Instead of going to his room, Durrutti hit the street. He was mad about having given the gun to Jimmy. What kind of craziness had prompted him to do that? He was infuriated with himself for ever having bought the gat in the first place. He’d never even used the piece-he was scared of guns—and now he was facing the possibility of going to prison over it. He was sick to his stomach and he felt dizzy. He walked, blinded by the midday sun, not caring where he went. Ten minutes later he ran into Lonely Boy at the corner of Sixteenth and Mission Streets.

Catholic school kids were milling at the bus stop; the junkies next to the BART hole and the Parisian-style public toilets peddled syringes. The Honduran abuelitas—since the temperature was skyrocketing—were selling homemade tamales from under the shade of a multi-striped beach umbrella by the California Savings and Loan Bank.

Lonely Boy had shaved his head to the scalp; his round brown-skinned skull gleamed to perfection like a chrome hubcap. He was wearing blue Nike trainers, white athletic socks pulled up to the kneecaps, a pair of ankle-length overalls and a starched black Fruit of the Loom T-shirt. He unhooked the bib on his overalls, fingered his armpits and said to Durrutti, “You know the pendejo, the cop who got himself killed? Let me tell you something about that.”

The dead policeman was named Chamorro, a Nicaraguan born kid assigned to the narc squad. He was twenty-six years old when he bit the dust—missing his next birthday by three weeks—and he had left behind a wife and two kids. People on the street were saying he’d double-crossed a clica, some gangsters he was in cahoots with. His body had been discovered propped up against a tiled wall next to the Ton-Jo Cocktail Lounge with a dumdum bullet planted between his eyes and a rat stuffed in his mouth.

The bullet had torn his skull apart, making sure there would be no open casket at his funeral. The rat let everyone know he was a snitch. Chamorro’s death had been coming; no one was surprised when it happened. The growing tension in the Mission between the gangs and the police was one piece of the mosaic. Every day you saw more homeless, more nouveau-cuisine restaurants catering to the Silicon Valley clientele, more cops in their squad cars and another low-income residential hotel succumbing to fire.

Lonely Boy’s fatigued brown eyes shined when he turned to Durrutti and grinned, saying almost shyly, “I shouldn’t be speaking about this shit, but I know who did the shooting.”

He was teasing Durrutti and he knew it. Ricky could ask him directly who it was and Lonely Boy would never tell. He was too disciplined, a veteran soldado. He might insinuate and drop a coy hint, but his self-restraint would never permit a full confession so the air between the two men felt heavy with unspoken meaning.

A murder was a murder. Durrutti was no stranger to it. When he was a dope dealer, his nearest competitor had been a kid named Bobby Matlock. They were both eighteen and had attended the same crappy public school. He controlled the distribution of weed in the neighborhood and Durrutti dominated whatever LSD was being sold. Another dealer ripped off Bobby for two thousand dollars worth of sinsemilla and he had the kid assassinated for eight hundred and fifty bucks. No one batted an eye and Bobby Matlock was never caught.

Lonely Boy was another saga. His family was from El Salvador. He had a younger brother in juvenile hall on an assault charge and another one buried in a village cemetery back in Colmillo. His father worked as a part-time janitor at St. Martin de Porres and his mother sold flowers in front of Walgreen’s almost every day of the week. Because it would drive his parents mad with grief, he worried about getting arrested by the cops and deported.

He said to Durrutti, bending the harsh syllables of his adopted language, softening them with Spanish inflections, “That Chamorro, you know what he was doing, don’t you? It was messed up. The puto was trying to play the game from both sides. First, he came across all brotherly, saying he wouldn’t bust us if we played with him. He wanted us to run mota through him. He got a percentage and we wouldn’t get arrested. Safety guaranteed, that’s what he said. But then he stabbed us in the back. Chamorro said it was his job. My theory is, you do that, you lose. A man who betrays you, he deserves to die.”

Lonely Boy’s eyes burned into Durrutti’s face. Sherm-fired brown eyes that had not a glimmer of light in them, as if all the hope in Lonely Boy had been vacuumed out of his soul and replaced with the dark soil of resentment. He clenched his jaw and waited for a reaction, waiting to see if Durrutti would flinch at the mention of death and betrayal. When the other man didn’t, he continued, asserting, “Yeah, the pendejo turned around after taking our money and weed and he busted the vatos. He laughed at us when we said it was unfair. In a case like that, there is only one way out. You know how it is, the more a man has, the weaker it makes him. Greed kills you, homes. That’s what happened to that pinche Chamorro.”

Durrutti ventured into unknown territory and hazarded a new topic and said to him, “I’m trying to track down Jimmy Ramirez, but I can’t find him.”

Lonely Boy laughed, not kindly. “Of course not. With this kind of heat on Mission Street, the homeboy’s made himself scarce. Don’t you know he’s always been like that? Jimmy’s only out for himself, the fucking Mexican.” Lonely Boy angled his head, regarding Durrutti with suspicion. “Anyway, what do you need from him? Anything he got, I got too, you know.”

“Well, your business is your business. But you better watch yourself around his shit, that’s all I can say. He’s a fucking hoo-banging maniac.”

Durrutti’s paranoid radar went up. Unwanted advice was the last thing he needed. It just added to the static in his head. He was all ears and fears when he asked Lonely Boy what he meant. “Why’s that?”

Lonely Boy warmed up to the question. It was a role he relished, saying how he saw things, his view of the world. “For one,” he said, “the homeboy is unstable and his reputation is shit. He owes everyone money. He went through all my nephews, You know them? They live on York Street. And then his girlfriend left him after he ripped her off. That’s a no-no. You can steal from a man, but not from a woman, especially if you are sleeping with her.”

Lonely Boy folded his muscular arms over his chest and looked resigned. “But you know, I still try to be friendly and shit with him. I have gone out of my way to tell that Mexican that even though he can’t be down with the Mara Salvatrucha, on account of us being Salvadoreños and everything, it don’t mean he can’t hang out and party with us. He can come over and do the social thing. Casual shit. Nothing heavy. But no, he’s tight with that black guy, what’s his name? You know, the one with el grande Afro.”

“It’s fucked up is what it is. And another thing.” Lonely Boy spat on the sidewalk, narrowly missing a pigeon, who flew off in a flutter of grimy feathers. “Chamorro? That’s just the beginning. We’ve got a war going on out here. Only the locos will survive it.”

Lonely Boy was five foot tall, puro indio and built like a brick shithouse. He radiated a force field of malice. The vato loco snapped the fingers of his right hand and asked proudly, “Who do you think rules Mission Street?” He answered his own question with a smile, showing a row of brilliantly white and even teeth. “The motherfuckers who are willing to die for it, that’s who.”