IF HE HADN’T had to pee before midnight, by the end of the hottest damn week in August, he wouldn’t have seen the woman who called herself Fly down the alley yelling at Sisia and Glorette.
A rat ran across the phone wire above his head just when he stepped behind the dumpster at the back doorway of Los Tres Cochinitos. He ducked, but the rat leapt into the branches of the tree across the alley, and he could smell the rotting fruit on the ground in someone’s back yard. Nectarines. Damn—the rat was leaving Los Tres for dessert.
When he first started with Jazen, he had to figure out this part of the Westside. Block after block of apartment buildings between downtown and the freeway to LA. Then the long strip of business along Palm Avenue, which ran for ten miles through Rio Seco. But this alley was like a long dirt road with its own traffic. Old wooden houses on one side, with mostly Mexican families now, fruit trees like the nectarine that leaned over the fences. On the other side, all the back doors—video store, nail salon, El Ojo where two women made the best tamales, and Los Tres Cochinitos—The Three Little Pigs. Their food wasn’t as good, but the cartoon pigs on the sign were comedy.
Why the hell would Fly come here? The van her old man drove had New York license plates. They came to the Launderland yesterday, washing clothes, and Alfonso heard her say, “LA one more fuckin hour drive. And your punk-ass van wanna break down here. Country-ass place.”
It was about eleven. He usually tried to wait until midnight to pee the first time, but it was over a hundred again today—and he’d already drunk two Cokes trying to keep awake while Jazen talked and talked about Angie, the girl who braided his hair. She didn’t want to get with him. Never. Not even when he said she could be the one. The only reason JZ wanted her was because she still said no.
Alfonso zipped up his jeans and turned back to the alley and another rat skittered across the wire. This one was huge—must be pregnant—slow. Almost fell, rolling off and holding on upside down like an acrobat in the circus.
The nine was in the car with Jazen. But you couldn’t shoot here in the city anyway.
He had shot the fool from LA in the ankle last year. Dropped him from a block away.
The first time Jazen came up to him at school, when they were juniors, Jazen said, “You one a them Sarrat niggas, live out in the groves, right?”
Alfonso already knew it was best to just look at someone. Don’t say shit.
“I heard you a good shot. You on the football team?”
Alfonso had lifted his chin.
Lafayette and Reynaldo had taught him to shoot the summer when he was twelve. Sarrat was all orange groves, and palm trees near the river-bottom with wild grapevines covering the trunks. You saw Chia Pets on TV—these were monster Chia Pets, Alfonso used to think when he was little. The rats kept eating the tomatoes and red peppers in Lafayette’s mama’s garden, and chewing on the oranges in the grove.
Lafayette and Reynaldo had been watching Alfonso practice on gophers in the irrigation furrows and rabbits in the riverbed. Drought year, and their pops Enrique was pissed about the poor orange crop. Lafayette’s mama held out her hands for the cottontails Alfonso carried in his belt, the way Lafayette showed him. “You a good shot, you,” she said, smiling, and gave him the hindquarters after she fried the rabbit.
“Taste like chicken,” Reynaldo joked across the table.
“Taste like rabbit,” she said, squinting outside at the heat hanging heavy on the trees.
The next week Lafayette handed Alfonso the old .22 rifle and told him, “Them rats, they gon fly, and you better hit em in the air.”
Lafayette lit the base of the palm tree on fire, and when the flames reached the tangled vines, the rats leapt out as if diving into an invisible ocean. They sprang into the air. Then they dangled for a second. Like Kobe. Hang time. Alfonso sighted them through the wire shaped like a diamond and pulled the trigger. He killed twelve rats in twenty minutes and Reynaldo said, “He got it. He a natural shot.”
Alfonso looked down the alley. The streetlight at the next corner, Hyacinth, shone on the wires coming from behind each business to the poles across the dirt, along the chainlink fences that hid the backyards. Wires glowing like liquid mercury, like when he broke the thermometer to see the squirmy drops and his moms beat the shit out of him.
They walked into the alley from Hyacinth. Tall black silhouette with high heels. Shorter thin silhouette with red sandals and her hair like a cloud piled on top of her head. Sisia and Glorette.
The brown van pulled around the corner. Fly. She parked behind El Ojo de Agua and Alfonso heard her yelling at Glorette. “I told you, bitch,” she said, her voice so strange it was like she spoke another language. Chess and the fools who hung out at Sundown Liquor said her voice sounded like Spike Lee, and they laughed forever. She had come up on Jazen and Alfonso her very first night, when the brown van was a lot less dusty. She was about twenty-five, short, with powerful thighs in her black Lycra shorts and her stomach poking out like bread under the sports bra. Old dude in the driver seat. Pimp. There was a white girl around last week, and the pimp kept messing with her. She was from Palm Springs, she’d told JZ in the liquor store. Alfonso had seen New York corner her in the alley, push her toward the van. But she twisted loose and ran. The pimp went after her, and she actually threw a rock at him. JZ and Tiquan thought that was hilarious.
But now it was just Fly trying to work the alley, running off two Mexican women yesterday. The pimp was around, even if you couldn’t see him. Alfonso knew he was always watching from some parking lot.
Her deal was the van, tricked out with a stereo and satin sheets and drinks. She was pissed that hardly anybody went for it. Maybe that shit worked in New York. She had ashy dark brown skin and her hair was short, straightened and shiny with waves the first week she got here. But she must not have known where to get it done. By now the waves were all fucked up with lint and dust, and her hairline was rough.
She’d been yelling at Sisia and Glorette for about three weeks. Now it was like she was bored, and chasing them in the alley.
Sisia had laughed at her the night before, in the parking lot of the Launderland. “Get you a hose and wash down the van and you same time. Dusty here in Cali.”
“You old out here in the alley.”
Jazen and Alfonso had laughed. The women sounded like insane female rappers.
“Don’t nobody want to get in no van. Dirty sheets and lice all up in there.”
“Shut up. You so old and ugly they close they eyes. Say, back that azz up so I ain’t gotta see that face.”
Sisia spat on the van’s hood. She said, “I get mines.” She had a face like a pitted cast-iron frying pan and a body like a black Barbie. Fly was right. But the men still stopped Sisia and Glorette. New York was working for money. Sisia and Glorette were half strawberry. They’d take rock most of the time. And nobody wanted to get in the van cause they thought the pimp would rip them off. They just wanted head in the alley, in their own cars. They were used to the system.
Fly hated Glorette. Alfonso could tell. She hated Glorette’s face.
Alfonso only paid attention to his own mother’s face until he was about four. His moms Bettina was big and pink and freckled, with thin brown hair she always wore in a scrunchie and bangs that stuck out like antennae after she sweated. The other women in Sarrat—Fantine, Cerise, Clarette—they were vague and beige and never around. But Glorette—her skin was gold as the fake coins they gave out at Chuck E. Cheese. Her hair hung down to her waist when she washed it and sat on the porch to let it dry. She looked like she was wearing makeup even when she wasn’t.
His mother drew on her eyebrows, and the first time he saw her without them, he was scared shitless.
The woman called herself Fly yelled, “I told you bitches, you played out.” Even the way she said bitches was New York. Sisia yelled something back. But Glorette just stood there, looking up at the sky like she was so bored. She didn’t even recognize. She was so beautiful that the same men would always want her. Chess, Sidney, a couple different white dudes who came every week, and guys cruising down Palm who just saw her face and stopped.
Fly rolled her van right up behind the women now and hollered, “You two old and played out. You played out. Move long now, move long with yo yellow country ass.”
That was for Glorette.
Alfonso heard Glorette laughing when he headed back to the Navigator, and the van sped past him in a rush of dust.
IF HE HADN’T had to go home on that Wednesday in May and give his mother some money for the twins so she could buy school pictures, he and Jazen wouldn’t have seen Victor walking down La Reina Road away from Sarrat, and they wouldn’t have picked him up, and he wouldn’t have started rolling with them now and then, and Victor wouldn’t have gotten Alfonso thinking about all those SAT words. The analogies. The damn analogies stuck inside his head like a bad song. Bad lyrics. Like when his mother played “Heaven Must Be Missing an Angel.” That Tavares shit that stayed behind your forehead all night.
Then every night when Alfonso saw Glorette, he kept wondering if Victor had taught her any of the words, whether she thought about the analogies when she lit up the pipe every night.
Victor was carrying a big book. He got in the back and said to Alfonso, “Test is next Saturday. I been studying for two months. So many words rolling around in my head it’s like the lotto machine—I never know what word shows up.”
“Like what?”
“Magnanimous. It’s magnanimous that JZ stopped the ride for me, cause it’s hot as hell out here and I had a stride ahead.”
“Like generous?”
“Like generous with—something else. Generous with whip cream and shit.”
They all started laughing, and then JZ turned the stereo down a little. The speakers were bumping next to Alfonso’s leg. Chamillionaire. JZ said, “Where your moms stay now?”
“The Villas.”
Glorette moved every three months. Sometimes she lived with Sisia. Whoever wasn’t being evicted. You could keep a place about three months without paying. So if Victor was staying with her, and walking out to Sarrat to hang with his grandpère, and studying for this SAT test, he—
“Oh, shit,” Alfonso said. “You right. Magnanimous, anonymous, magnificent—all that shit you have to hear when you in English class.”
“Or watchin CNN.”
“I ain’t doin neither.”
“You lucky.”
But Victor looked out the window, and when Alfonso glanced back at him, his twists all sculpted so they looked messy—the way poindexters hung out back at Linda Vista High—he could tell V didn’t think Fonso was lucky at all. Thought he was a fool.
IF HE HADN’T been such a good shot, and he hadn’t been so cut from playing football and working out, Jazen wouldn’t have pressed him. It wasn’t like you had an interview and shit. Jazen just kept pressing him, kept saying, “You the one, nigga, I need your time.” One day Jazen came by the parking lot after school and said, “You want to roll? I gotta make a run to Rialto.”
Alfonso rode shotgun and knew something must be in the dash. Mostly he was just big. Football big. Guns showing in the t-shirt. Keep the arm out the window so they could see.
And J gave him a hundred dollar bill.
After that he showed up once a week or so, and then Alfonso had seen the pickup place and couldn’t really say Naw, man, I ain’t up for it, I got practice. And then one night in January they got stopped, and the cops took pictures of him and JZ up against the brick wall with shirts off and arms up, and he was a known associate.
Riding with Jazen was like riding with some grumpy old man. Like Bernie Mac, only nothing was funny. All he did was complain. Sitting with Moms was like sitting with some nightmare doll that wouldn’t shut up. She could talk about shoes or Glorette or the twins or BET or Jada Pinkett Smith or the weather.
But Victor was hilarious. He had always been hilarious. Like a cross between a comedian and a professor. He knew so many words and so many songs and so much shit that everything he said worked. Jazen had hated Victor since he met him. Back when JZ first showed up at Linda Vista as a freshman, when his moms moved back from New Orleans. They were all in freshman football together, and then Victor quit because he hated the coaches, and JZ quit because he hated practice, and Alfonso was the star at strong safety until he ended up at Juvenile Hall after patrol pulled them over the second time and found the gun.
It wasn’t Alfonso’s gun, but he was a known associate.
IF VICTOR HADN’T been so funny, and Jazen hadn’t been so bored, they wouldn’t have picked him up after school a few times in the first week of June. “Loquacious.”
“The fuck that mean?”
“Somebody who talks a lot.”
“My mama.”
Victor laughed. “Yeah. I was out there cause my moms told me Grandpère was sick and I had to hang with him, and I kept trying to study and your moms was all up on everybody’s porch all the time.” Then he made his voice cautious. He stopped smiling. Scared of us, Alfonso thought. “I mean, she just—”
“Shit, nigga, she crazy. My moms is fuckin crazy. She just drink that Hennessy and talk. Every minute she ain’t asleep. Why you think I try not to be out there?”
If his own moms didn’t talk so fuckin much, she wouldn’t have driven every human out of the house. Even the twins tried to stay in the groves most of the day. Tavares and Tenerife. Named for the band, and some city her cousin Fantine told her about. Canary Islands.
Alfonso had turned eighteen, and now his mother was talking yang about he was the man of the house. That was bullshit. She had the twins with some fool from San Bernardino named Tommy and he was doing five years for little shit. Driving the twins without car seats, got a ticket for that and for speeding, and then the tickets went to warrant, and then he got pulled over for expired tags, and then they found out he didn’t pay child support. Tommy was man of the house.
His father Alphonse was man of his house. He lived in Rialto in a shitty studio apartment. They hadn’t let him back in Sarrat for ten years, since he brought the cops down there to the orange groves when he was running from some deal. Enrique had told his father he could never come back. Enrique didn’t want cops there. Which is how they all knew Enrique had done some shady shit in his own past, way back when he bought the land.
Sarrat was ten houses in the orange groves, and his moms would wander up to anybody’s porch so all those words he imagined like gallons of fucking alphabet soup could come rolling out of her mouth.
“You goin out to Sarrat, or you headin to The Villas?” Jazen asked Victor.
“Villas.”
The Navigator headed away from school. Jazen said, “Y’all some country-ass niggas. Out there in the trees and shit.”
Alfonso always had to think ten seconds before answering Jazen. All day long. It was tiring. You never knew whether Jazen wanted to argue or laugh or just talk and talk. “We ain’t in the trees now.” Was that enough to remind JZ of why he wanted Alfonso to ride shotgun? It wasn’t a shotgun in the glove compartment.
Gloves. Who in the hell gon have gloves in there now?
“The whole book fulla words?” Alfonso said.
Victor opened to a page and said, “You got analogies. A whole section. They give you two words and you figure out the relationship, like this: Debater: laryngitis. So you go, a debater needs to talk, and laryngitis means he can’t. You got five choices: Pedestrian: lameness. Actor: applause. Doctor: diagnosis. Swimmer: wet. And writer: paper.”
Jazen said, “Pedestrian: lameness. If lameness mean the motherfucker can’t walk. Cause if the motherfucker just lame, then it could be player: lameness.”
Everybody was laughing when they turned onto Palm, near the 7-Eleven and the Launderland. Victor said, “Ligneous: wood.”
Alfonso said, “You gotta know science to do the English part? Damn.”
Victor said, “Cellular: microbe. Nautical: water. Igneous: rock. Osseous: bone. Fossilized: plant.”
Jazen said, “Shit.”
Alfonso said, “Osso Buco. Some dude was cookin that on the food channel when I was at my moms’ the other day. So that had bones and shit. Nautical is, like, boats. They always got boats in them ads for Nautica. How long you get for each one?”
“Not very long,” Victor said. “Igneous is a kind of rock, and sedimentary I remember is the one with layers, like sand. Igneous was the other kind.” He turned the page. “It’s D. Osseous. Bone.”
“Give me another one,” Jazen said, pulling into the 7-Eleven. The Villas were two blocks away, down Hyacinth, one of the narrow side streets where all the complexes got named for flowers. Jacaranda Gardens, Jessamine Villas, Hyacinth Court. Like SAT words.
Victor hadn’t even looked up from the book. He read, “Lullaby: barcarole. Choices are birth: marriage. Night: morning. Cradle: gondola. Song: poem. And carol: sonneteer.”
“The fuck?” Jazen said, hands on the wheel. “You gotta know Spanish, too?”
Alfonso looked at the hundreds of pieces of darkened gum on the sparkling cement in front of the 7-Eleven. Black moons. The sun was going down. Victor’s moms Glorette would be out here soon, with Sisia. Victor wasn’t paying attention. He was murmuring to himself. Christmas carol. Sonnet was a poem, right? What the hell was a barcarole? A gondola was a boat. In Venice. “It’s C. Cradle: gondola.” Victor looked up. “So barcarole must be a song about water. Lullaby and cradle.” He blinked at the face watching them through the 7-Eleven window. Mr. Patel. With his arms folded, frowning at the music bumping from the speakers.
Jazen got the three lines on his forehead. He was pissed. Bored. He lifted his chin and Victor opened the door, and Alfonso watched him hike the backpack up on his shoulder when he headed fast across the alley and down toward the Villas.
That was Friday night.
Alfonso heard shooting around one in the morning. Then the Blue Bird circled over the apartments, and patrol went racing over there.
He heard what happened Monday. Sisia had taken two fools back to Glorette’s apartment for some extra money, and the fools got in a fight and one shot up the place. Patrol took Victor, too, cause he was in the bedroom asleep. With the book, Alfonso thought. Probably had that book under his fuckin pillow. Victor was still seventeen, so they took him to the Hall and no one showed up to get him for three days. The SAT had been Saturday morning. Eight am.
IF HE HADN’T seen Victor tonight at 7-Eleven, he wouldn’t have the analogies stuck in his head again. “Hey, man,” Alfonso said. Victor was buying pistachios and coffee. “You drinkin coffee? It’s August, man, fuckin 106 today.”
Victor poured hazelnut creamer into the coffee. “I got registration for city college tomorrow. I’m still thinkin about my schedule and I got a lotta reading tonight.”
Alfonso got another Coke. “What you reading?”
“James Baldwin.” Victor held up his pistachios. Pink. “These damn things keep me alive, man. Salt and coffee. You know what Baldwin said? Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
Alfonso looked at the nuts. What was he supposed to say—I saw your moms in the alley earlier and she had a bag of ramen? She said ten for a dollar, over at Rite Aid, and you go through them motherfuckers.
“Yeah,” Victor said. “City college. Like thirteenth grade.”
Alfonso had seen Victor’s eyes the week after he’d missed the SAT. Small and pink-rimmed like he’d cried in secret for days. The last test he could take before applying to USC or UCLA. He said the fucking words wouldn’t leave his head. They were all floating around there like moths that come out the cupboard if you buy some flour with worms in it and then they hatch. “What you takin?”
“Psych, English lit, world religions, and world music.”
“Damn,” Alfonso said. He remembered the quad, the old brick buildings, the big jacaranda trees.
He’d checked out the football team, junior year, back when the coach was recruiting him. One of the players took him around and when Alfonso said, “You gotta take English class, right?” the quarterback said, “I speak that language fluently already, my brotha.”
“Where you stay now?” Alfonso said. “You need a ride?”
Then Victor grinned and shook his head. “See? Where do you live is a standard construction. Because most white people live somewhere. But we always say where do you stay. Because historically we’re used to being there just for a brief time, Fonso. A minute. I stay in Jacaranda right now. With my moms.”
Alfonso laughed, and then Victor said, “You still live with your moms?”
Alfonso looked out at the traffic on Palm. “I stay in the damn Navigator most the time. I hate bein at my moms’, and I’m startin to hate ridin with JZ.”
“For real?” Victor frowned.
Alfonso nodded. “Yeah.”
Victor lifted his chin toward Jacaranda Gardens. “Save your money, dude, and let’s get a place. But not down there. By the college.”
Alfonso laughed again. “Save my money. Man, my moms get all my cash.” Then he stopped.
“And my moms gives all her cash to you,” Victor said softly.
She gave it to JZ. Or somebody bought rock and handed her the little pebble instead of a twenty. “I’ma come down there with you tomorrow,” Alfonso said. “Check in with Coach Ken.”
“If you ain’t just talking shit, meet me up there at the quad at nine, man,” Victor said, and held out his hand.
IF HE HADN’T taken the first hundred, he wouldn’t be ridin right now. What the youngsters like Tiquan didn’t know was how hard it was just to listen to people talk all day and night. They thought his job was the easiest—ride in the Navigator most of the night, then chill at his mother’s house during the day. But that meant watching every minute for who might try to run up on Jazen. Like last year when the LA fool showed up to stay with his cousin in The Riviera and wanted Launderland and the whole alley because he thought Rio Seco was country and Jazen would just back down. He came up on the Navigator with a .45 one night, talking about city mouse, country mouse, and he’d be back tomorrow.
All night Jazen talked about it while Angie redid his braids, and Alfonso wished he would shut up so he could see the way the scenario would play out. How would the fool approach? He could take out an animal fifty feet away that had frozen and crouched in what it thought was camouflage. Wild grapevines under the cottonwoods. Oleander bushes with their nasty poisonous leaves.
Uncle Lafayette said that was how his own father had killed the man who tried to take the orange groves and the land away. Back in 1950-something. Oleander and scorpions. Said he overheard some Indian dude tell his moms the story one night. Dude was drunk. But he said he and Enrique buried the white man under cement and he’d left a sign. A round black stone with a white eyespot in the south corner.
Alfonso had seen the stone, on the old rockwall shed near his mother’s house.
Enrique had killed like five guys. He was an old man who just watched everything. His eyes moved first, then his head, when he checked you out. They said he could still shoot gophers in the dark, he was that good. But Enrique said, “Never shoot nobody, me.”
He’d killed them. With his hands. Bullet or no, they were dead.
That was all the story anyone cared about. TV, movies, books. Victor had told him that once. What you learn from Russian novels and American movies is that there’s only one story—how somebody had to kill somebody else, and did they get caught or not. He said the world was only about punishment. And sex.
The LA fool came up the alley from Jessamine, walking toward the Navigator where it was parked behind Sundown Liquor while JZ was talking to Chess in the parking lot under the pepper trees. Chess bought rock for Glorette every Friday night. It was a trip.
The LA fool had his right hand in his coat pocket. Alfonso leaned both hands out the car window and shot him in the ankle from nearly a block away. He went down like his bones turned to jello. The ankle bone. Must have hurt like a motherfucker. JZ stayed cool. He got in the car and drove away slow.
What Tiquan and the youngsters didn’t know was his mother woke Alfonso up after he’d only slept maybe three hours, so she could talk about his father, and about the man she was seeing now who sold bootleg DVDs and was always trying to get Alfonso to carry some in the car, like the Navigator was a little Mexican pushcart with mainly paletas inside but also ears of boiled corn and cotton candy dangling from the sides. With those little silver bells so you could hear the man coming from blocks away. The Navigator had woofers and Lil Wayne.
Alfonso just wanted to save up enough money to get his own apartment. A big ass bed and headphones in his ears with that ocean-wave shit playing, and sleep all day. Pull down the shades and turn off the cell. Nobody talking. Twenty hours of sleep.
IF HE HADN’T had to pee again after midnight, and hadn’t wanted to talk to one more damn person, he wouldn’t have been in that part of the alley when the one called herself Fly started messing with Glorette again. Jazen was calling girls in front of Launderland. Only a little product in the third dryer from the left.
No bathrooms in Launderland or the 7-Eleven, and unless you bought something in the taqueria, no bathroom, and even then the two Mexican ladies looked at Alfonso like he was crazy if he went in there more than twice in one night, and it could be fools from Siete Street Locos in there, and even though Alfonso wasn’t Westside Loc Mafia, Jazen claimed them when it was useful, and Siete would shoot anybody black now anyway. They called it snail hunting.
Or he could go to Angie’s apartment in The Riviera, four blocks away. But there were always girls there, and he was tired of talking.
Alfonso had no choice after midnight. He’d been drinking Coke, laughing to himself about how Coke had come from cocaine and Georgia and, what, they had put the powder in the soda back then? and it was a leaf from down in Colombia and some dude had to plant it and water it and pick it—just like sugar cane when he was in Louisiana, and that was a stalk—and then somebody had to, what, dry it? Wait—there was a paste and then powder, and that was Victor made Alfonso think all this anyway, the analogies and the sentence completions. Dirt, mud, earth, sand, powder.
Alley dirt like powder. People walking and driving all the time, so the bathroom situation wasn’t working. Crackheads looking for JZ or heading to Launderland. Men looking for Sisia and Glorette and the other strawberries. Mexicans coming out the back door after they ate at Los Tres or the taqueria because someone who looked like la migra came in the front. The Mexicans who worked there, dumping wash water or trash or taking a smoke break.
He passed the open back door of the nail salon. The two Vietnamese women were playing cards with a man. That chemical smell rushed out and made his eyes water.
The only place to go was the space between the shed and the wild tobacco trees. The back of somebody’s yard, and they’d cut the chainlink fence and put in a metal shed, and there was a gap along the side. A little cave under the bushes. He felt bad for a minute, for whoever lived there, but he had no choice. He wasn’t buying another taco, and he didn’t want to go another block to the video store or Sundown Liquor. The old dudes were always in the parking lot there—Chess and Lafayette and Reynaldo played dominoes under the pepper tree in the back, and they’d yang and yang about why he was riding with JZ.
Punk ass. Knucklehead. You gon do time. Just wait. Somebody gon get killed.
He slid himself along the metal wall. It was hot as a griddle after pancakes. Still smelled new. He peed on the dried weeds at the base of the shed. Then he heard the wheels of a shopping cart. He stood still against the hot metal.
Glorette. She kept a shopping cart sometimes. She had the ramen in a plastic bag. Ten for a dollar.
She had stopped to smoke. She must not want to share with Sisia this time. He heard the hiss of the match and the sucking in of her breath. He looked out carefully. He hardly ever saw crackheads smoke. The rock glowed like a tiny star inside the pipe. An old air freshener tube. Somebody else made them with a blowtorch and sold them.
She dropped it on the dirt. The smallest sound. Then he heard Fly. “I told you.”
She had come up behind Glorette. The van was nowhere. Fly had walked. Maybe the old dude had taken the van and left her.
Fly was saying something to Glorette. About her hair. How it was a weave. She grabbed Glorette’s bun and jerked her head back, and then all the hair fell out the bun and over Fly’s arm. Like black seaweed.
Glorette didn’t say anything. Her face was turned up to the sky. What was she lookin at? What was he supposed to do? Head out there and punch Fly for being a crazy bitch? The nine was in the car. What if her pimp came rolling down the alley in the van?
Shit. Fly was still pulling the hair back and Glorette’s neck was bent like a giraffe. Her legs so thin, buckling under her like a giraffe. Gazelle. Antelope. Doe. Shit. Victor’s words. That was Victor’s moms.
Fly was bent over the shopping cart. Doing something. She was still talking, but it was too low for Alfonso to hear. He closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see any weird shit. Was she stealing the ramen? That would be fucked up. Then he didn’t hear her anymore.
He waited for Glorette to walk past the shed. Walk away. But she didn’t. He heard another rat, on the roof of the shed. Whispering clawed toes. Right over his head.
Alfonso looked back out at the alley. Glorette was on her knees. But not all the way to her knees. Her hair was tied to the handle of the cart. Her head was jerked back so far she was staring at the night sky and her mouth was wide open.
She wasn’t moving.
He edged out from the shed wall, the metal corner burning up. Glorette’s bottom teeth white like a little bracelet lying in her mouth. No breath. Nothing. Noise all around—music bumping from an apartment window, dogs down the block, helicopter a few miles away—but having a person this near and total silence made him so scared he felt one more drop of pee slide out. Victor’s moms. Her ramen like books stacked in the bag. She came to his moms’ yard once when he was little and showed him how if you stood in the right place, the full moon would light up the palm fronds like some god plugged in the tree.
Shit. Alfonso pulled his head back in and then he heard Sisia hollering, “Glorette! What the hell you doin? You was supposed to meet me at twelve. I been waitin all this time!”
She came down the alley. Her high heels crunching in the sandy dirt. “What you trippin on, girl? Why you down here like this? Where he go?” She sounded pissed. “See, you had to have that one. I told you I wanted him, cause he wasn’t so bad, and you start laughing and say he want you. You had to take him. He wasn’t lookin right in the head. Anybody go with some bitch like New York there got a problem.”
So the pimp had tried to get both of them? Or another dude? But that was Fly, just now. No one else.
Alfonso steadied himself against the metal wall. A new wasp nest above him. Sweat ran down his back into his waistband. If he came out now, Sisia might think he did this, that he went off on Glorette. For what? For product?
Because JZ told him to. He was the killer. Anybody would believe that. He did what JZ needed him to do. They’d think Glorette had stolen some product. They’d tell Victor, Dude, Alfonso was right there, man. Cold-blooded. I never knew he was such a cold motherfucker.
“No. No. Glorette.” Sisia was slapping her face. Alfonso moved his head slowly. One eye around the corner. The ridged tin burning his cheek. Sisia had untied Glorette’s hair. All that hair. She was picking her up. The body so thin. Like a movie. And she put Glorette inside the shopping cart and sat down in the dirt and cried.
He kept his face against the wall. After a while Sisia got up and left. He heard only her heels in the dirt again. Not the cart.
She couldn’t call patrol either. She couldn’t say what had happened. They might think she was the one. They’d take her in.
Alfonso slid down to a squat and waited. Two more rats crossed the wires to the nectarine tree and he could hear them in the dry leaves. A few trucks and cars with systems went by on Palm, a block away—bass and drum like heartbeats when you weren’t in the car right next to the speakers.
He waited for a long time for quiet. Complete quiet. It came, and he couldn’t even hear crickets. No heartbeat. Nothing.
He edged out of the space where his own pee had dried long ago. He didn’t want to look at Glorette. She was dead. No blood. Fly hadn’t had a knife—he’d have heard. When Fly tied her hair back like that, maybe she broke Glorette’s neck. He was frozen, a few feet from the cart, and a breeze came up and rustled the plastic bag. Victor’s dinner. Then Alfonso felt his face filling with tears—how did his cheeks and mouth and everything feel big and salty? He hated that, when he was a baby and his mother had laughed. The plastic moved soft, sounded like glitter thrown in the air.
Alfonso ran toward the corner where the nail salon was closed now, and just when he reached the sidewalk Chess came around and almost knocked him down. “Hey, youngblood, you need to chill,” Chess said. “You ain’t playin football now. Why you in such a damn hurry? You jack somebody?” He started laughing. “Lookin all suspect. You just get some in the alley?”
Alfonso backed off. Chess used to be a baller, back in the day. He had bow legs in his sweats. Chess held up his hands and Alfonso headed across the street. The Navigator was gone. Don’t go down the alley, he thought. Don’t go that way. But he heard Chess say, “That Sidney fool ass up there?” and he made himself walk slowly down Jacaranda.
He didn’t run. At Jacaranda Gardens, Victor’s apartment window was dark. He stood in front of the door marked with a million dark fingerprints from people banging on the gray paint, and then he was afraid Chess had followed him, so he moved down the walkway, holding on to the wrought-iron railing, past all the window coolers that growled and growled, and knocked on Angie’s door.
She was braiding a girl’s hair in front of the TV and he said, “Can I sleep in the back? Just for a while?”
She raised her eyebrows. “Where your bighead partner?”
He said, “I don’t know. I ain’t seen him for awhile. Please?” He thought he would faint. Like a girl. She nodded.
HE DIDN’T WAKE until near three the next day. Angie had stuffed a towel under the door so it had stayed quiet. He opened the door and smelled burning hair. Angie was flat-ironing someone. “I didn’t say nothin to nobody, Fonso,” she said, pulling the hair toward her like sparkling black threads. “I figured you needed to rest. You looked like you had a fever.”
The hair. It made him nearly throw up, and he ran to the bathroom and washed his face. The smell of lotion and shampoo and hair. Alfonso went out to the front room and said, “I’m cool. But thanks.”
She nodded.
Little kids played in the courtyard. Someone barbecued on a little Weber between Angie’s door and Victor’s. Victor’s door was closed. The blinds dangled and shivered in the wind from the AC.
He walked down the hot sidewalk. It was too far to walk home. To Sarrat. He walked the other way, to the city college. He was supposed to meet Victor. The quad was deserted. Victor must have found his moms. The sun was blazing. He found a pay phone. A fucking pay phone. He’d left his cell in the Navigator. Jazen said, “Who the fuck this?”
“Me,” Alfonso said.
And Jazen was silent. For a long time. He finally said, “I don’t know what the hell happened in the alley, but Chess put the word out he gon kill you. You better get gone for a few days, man. On y’all farm out there in the trees.”
HE STAYED IN Sarrat four days, listening to his mother’s voice like a radio you couldn’t turn off. That first night he came out and walked in the orange groves, when he knew Enrique was looking for him on the Westside. He knew his mother lied about where he was. In the morning, he got the golf cart out of the shed where he’d hidden it, after the stupid white kid gave it to him in payment. He’d heard saws in the barn. He knew the old man was hunting. But after he talked to Enrique, Alfonso slept with his little brothers in one bed, their breath ketchup-hot and red. He knew he’d have to go back to Jazen in three more days, because his mother would be out of cash by then, and the bootleg brother wasn’t coming around.
If Jazen hadn’t already gotten Tiquan to ride with him for the day, and Tiquan hadn’t insisted on staying in the backseat that night since he was a youngster and thought this was his chance, and if Chess hadn’t been drunk enough by eleven that he stood there in the parking lot of Sundown Liquor and waited for them to drive past and then shouted at Alfonso, “She just fuckin disappeared? Like the Rapture? No, young-blood!” If he hadn’t lifted his hand with his index finger like a gun so that Alfonso would know he was going to come sooner or later, and if Tiquan wasn’t a little fool and he’d just let Alfonso do what he needed to do….
Chess finished pretending to shoot him and held out his palms like “What, you don’t believe me?” and Alfonso aimed just for his left hand, the pink outside edge. But Tiquan rolled down his own window and fired, too.
Alfonso’s bullet went through the webbing of skin between Chess’ last two fingers. Tiquan’s went into his chest.
ALFONSO TOOK THE old white Toyota truck. He wasn’t going back to Chino. Jazen had kept the truck in a storage yard off Palm. It was lowered like from the nineties, and when Alfonso drove it across the desert, through Arizona and New Mexico and Texas to Louisiana, to his mother’s Uncle Henri who had a wooden house way out in the canefields, he kept the radio off most of the time. First he heard words—all those words, like Victor’s moths. But by the second night, he just heard humming.