ON THE FIRST Monday in October, the campus police car rolled to a stop in front of the lot, and the officer got out slowly, eying the four Hondas parked in the trampled grass under the pecan trees. Victor was sitting on the porch, reading the William James book for World Religions class. For the first time, he’d washed crow shit off Irwin’s Acura.
On his headphones: Average White Band’s “Schoolboy Crush” and Gino Vanelli. Marcus had given him a Black-White-Guys mix. He slid the headphones down.
“How you plannin on protectin these vehicles, son?”
Big old campus security brother, Victor thought. Gotta say vehicles. Like a real cop.
“Son?” The cop said it again.
Guarding them with my life, pops, he thought. I ain’t your son. You ain’t my daddy. I’m just doin my job. Pops.
“With my eyes,” Victor said. “Sittin right here. All day.”
“I don’t.” He looked at the officer’s big shoulders and belly in the uniform. No prostate trouble for me, dude. Prostate. Prostrate. Prosthetic. Your proboscis. My prognosis.
The officer walked to the lot’s edge. “You got a permit for this?”
“For sittin on my grandpa’s porch?”
The man stopped and folded his arms high on his chest, looking at the small house, the peeling yellow paint on the porch pillars, the picture window Victor had just washed. “Your grandfather? He buy this place from old Mrs. Batiste?”
The cop looked vaguely familiar. Light-skinned, eyes hidden behind the requisite shades, but something about his mouth. Victor thought, So you tellin me you know everything about the street.
“Yeah.”
“You done bought four Hondas and you lived here since September?”
“Nope.”
“So these ain’t your cars, son?” Now he took off the sunglasses and glared at Victor. His badge said N. Belarde.
They ain’t yours either. Uniform don’t make every damn car in the college lot yours. And you definitely drivin a Nova or Camry. Somethin old or boring.
“I take care of em like they’re mine.” Victor didn’t move from the chair. The hoods of the cars faced him, since he had Irwin and his friends back into the spaces he’d marked with chalk in the dirt. He wasn’t ready to back the cars in yet himself, because even though he’d be eighteen in December, he’d never learned to drive, which in Southern California meant his life was seriously fucked-up.
THEY WERE ALL of the opinion that what he’d missed was a crib, and then a bed. A bed with a comforter featuring Transformers or Ninja Turtles. Wait—Mutant Ninja Turtles. Vital distinction for somebody. Bedspread, comforter, quilt. How did the middle one comfort you more than the others?
He’d missed Flintstones vitamins, his aunts had said. He had to look up Flintstones on the school computer. Flint was a stone, so the word seemed pointless, but Fred was funny.
The teachers in conference with his mother at school, her sitting all legs in the desk-chair, staring out the window at whatever trees grew in the elementary school courtyard; his aunts in the kitchen of Uncle Enrique’s house in the orange groves of Sarrat; the cops in the fluorescent room when they’d taken him to jail after the idiot had shot up the apartment in The Riviera.
His mother knew trees. Showed him how to find bees in the pepper tree trunks, spiders in the eucalyptus bark shedding long flat sheaves.
In fourth grade, they studied California Indians, and Victor found a perfect piece of bark for his project. She took him to the riverbed, where the paddle-shaped cactus grew everywhere, and on the smooth green skin were cottony white insects. Their blood was magenta, a color he’d never seen, even among her eyeshadows and nail polish. She showed him how to paint the bark with designs in bug blood.
She used to keep the bark picture in her trunk. The lock had been busted over and over, when people broke into it, but they threw the bark aside looking for money or rock or jewelry. Then someone got pissed when he couldn’t find anything, and he broke the bark in half and threw it on the floor.
So she glued it together, and wrapped magenta ribbon from Rite Aid around each end, and hung it on the wall. No one would care about it then. And he saw her staring at it sometimes, when she lay on the couch. At each apartment, she hung it on the wall near the door.
The bug was cochineal. An SAT word. A fucking SAT word.
IT WASN’T THAT big a deal. She had sex with men who weren’t his father.
His father had disappeared before he was born. So she couldn’t have sex with him. Sere Dakar, some musician from Detroit.
Other moms had sex with their husbands, whom they hated, according to Bir and Amitav, both of whom told Victor that their parents had arranged marriages back in India before they came to California. Amitav’s mother had only hung out with his father for three hours before they got married.
Other moms had sex with other women’s husbands, according to all three Logans who actually spoke to Victor after AP Art History. Or they had sex with guys they met at bars downtown, especially Marlo’s Place and Greensleeves and So Cal Brewing Company. The guys bought them drinks and dinner. His moms got two or three rocks.
Morsels. Kernels. Nuggets. Pebbles. Not shards—that would be sharp and splintery. Not crystals—that would be glittery and multifaceted. Grains—too miniscule.
Decomposed granite was grainy. Three kinds of rock—igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic?
On Fridays, she’d had sex only with Chess, who was annoying as hell. Old-school brother with bow legs who had played three years of college ball at UCLA and bragged about his nickname, which apparently came from his ability to move the other players around the court with some skill. As he did now at the YMCA. So Victor rolled his eyes and left to hang out when Chess showed up, promptly at 11 on Fridays, with food and, yeah, rock—even though he acted like he wasn’t that guy.
Chess had been shot in the parking lot of Sundown Liquor five days after Victor’s mother died, in August, and though the cops never found out who’d done it, Victor’s cousin Alfonso had disappeared that night. Whether that was about money or rock, Victor didn’t care.
He knew it used to take $100 for Chess to keep Glorette at his crib all night. Even though that meant quiet, and if they had a TV at the moment Victor could watch whatever he wanted, he used to hate Fridays.
The shows were dismal. He sat up with his SAT book and made lists. Dismal, distinctive, dystopian, utopian, Sisyphean. In Oneida, New York, they practiced eugenics in an attempt to create a utopian society. Sisyphus rolled that boulder up every time. His mother put another tiny rock in the pipe.
They weren’t even shiny.
But she had the system down, until that night.
BACK ON THE first Saturday in May, he was registered to take the SAT. His high school history teacher, Marcus Thompson, had paid for it—and he’d left ten dollars for Victor to buy the number two pencils and some coffee for that morning.
“Make sure you eat,” Marcus said, awkwardly.
Victor said, “We got plenty of food.”
He remembered being really hungry when he was three. She didn’t come home. He sat on the balcony. Maybe Jessamine Gardens. He couldn’t remember anything except his stomach was eating his backbone. He could feel something creeping up there. Vertebrae. He couldn’t breathe and so he sat outside, and his uncle Reynaldo found him because they were looking for his mother.
Kindergarten? When he coughed really hard and finally she came home and put him in the shower with her and they sat in there all night, the moisture beading up on her hair like pearls and then collapsing into nothing. The water going inside his lungs and somehow cleaning out the burn.
Memphis. The only name he had for the man. When he was ten. The cigarettes. Memphis lit a new one for each time, and when he was done he left them on the floor of the bedroom.
But now she had it down. He was seventeen. So she left ramen, orange juice (and she bought Tropicana, not that Sunny Delight shit), and pistachios in the kitchen. The staples. And most nights, she brought home the scheduled items from El Ojo de Agua. He said to her, “Shrimp burrito from the Eye?”
The Eye of Water. Jesus Espinoza, this guy in AP History, said that was from a town in Michoacan, where his father was born. Some shrine.
The shrimp burrito had beans, rice, cabbage, tomatoes, sauce, and fried shrimp. $3.99. It was the size of a small log. A dusty white log. And Victor ate one every Tuesday. Wednesday was fish tacos. Thursday was tamales.
Friday was Chess, and Saturday she was gone until dawn. Sunday she slept. He ate whatever his grandfather brought from Sarrat—gumbo or beans and rice or ham. Always oranges.
She had her part as down as she could, and Victor had his part down cold. Perfect 4.0. Registered for the May 6, 2000 SAT. Last one of the year. Everybody else would be juniors, but he could finish college apps late and Marcus would help him.
It must have pissed off those other moms, when their kids mentioned him. This black dude with weird hair and he’s really light so he’s like, not even really black, and his mom is, like, a crack ho—that’s just what everybody says, okay, she is—and he gets like, 97 or 98 on everything. Like, never lower. For reals.
He had the second-highest grade in the class in AP European History, the second-highest in AP US History, and the third-highest in AP Art History.
No one could beat Logan Maas. He would be number one in the senior class even if he did smoke weed every day, even if he’d told Victor one night that his dad put him in a closet when he was twelve because he brought home a B”, and his dad was pastor at a big church and loved to say Spare the rod, spoil the child. No one would get number two away from Amitav Kumar, even though he blazed out with Logan, and loved to joke that his mom was seriously pissed that he was the only number-two Indian at any high school in Rio Seco. Probably in all fucking Southern California. Probably in other states, too.
Logan and Amitav kept asking Victor to blaze, and he’d hang with them in the parking lot at Jack in the Box, where everyone went to get high because it was two blocks from school and the lot was huge, with pepper trees all around the edge where no one paid attention, and the cops never went to Jack. They all ate at Logan Huntsman’s father’s deli. Every day you’d see squad cars parked there.
The four other Logans—the secondary Logans, who hung out with the two Hunters, the Piper, and the two Dakotas—hated his ass. Two girl Logans and two boy Logans. Brown-haired girl Logan had green eyes like olives, one of those girls who wore her hair in a ponytail and it was thick and long so you could see the reason they called it that. She asked him all casual as often as she could without seeming insecure, “So what’d you get on the test?”
“What I always get.” Victor loved saying that. He didn’t even have to give her the percentage. It was always 97 or 98. Mrs. Mumbles had to take off two or three points for everyone—even if she had to make up some shit about one word being awkward or you forgot a comma or a space in MLA format.
But he loved Mrs. Mumbles. Mumford. She’d been at the high school for so long she’d had three generations of Logan and Hunter and Piper. She’d had their parents named Ted and Betty in the sixties, and their parents named Horace and Eleanor in the thirties. He’d seen their pictures in the hallways.
But Mrs. Mumbles didn’t buy into all the hype, and the old families and fundraisers and the right mom or wrong mom at Back to School Night. She never looked any of them in the face. She stared at some spot in the room and mumbled about funeral art of India and Impressionists and Cubism. She didn’t give a shit that Victor’s mother, who came to Open House because he’d told her it was the last time she could ever do that, sat in the back like the most beautiful zombie statue in the history of the world.
She was luminous. In winter, the nights shitty and cold, her skin got dulled like the gold-leaf frame of a painting if soot and years laid a patina of darkness or haze. Then she would sleep for two days, and when the sun came out, they’d go out to the orange groves. Eat gumbo and oranges, see the grandparents, and she’d take a long shower and put almond oil in her hair.
She’d be gilt again. And the other moms at Open House hated the way she gazed bemusedly at their fleece vests and mom jeans for two seconds before dismissing them and staring at the paintings on the classroom walls.
The SAT plan was to get number-three scores. Logan had taken it twice, Amitav three times. Logan got a 1500, perfect score, and Amitav 1490, in October. Victor didn’t have the money in October, and in November she got pneumonia after a cold windstorm when she stood in the alley too long. His aunt Fantine helped him one weekend with vocabulary words. He chanted to himself all day and most of the night.
Luciferous. Loquacious. Lucid. Lucent.
He listened to Classical KUSC, just to hear adagio and arpeggio and adelante. One program featured the high school students who won national competitions in piano or violin or cello. In the interviews, they sounded like who Amitav’s mom wished he was.
He listened to NPR, looked up the SAT word of the day in the school library, and read the dictionary. She’d stolen a pocket dictionary from Rite Aid for him.
She never stole ramen or orange juice or nail polish or lotion or candy from Rite Aid, but she said that same dictionary had been sitting in the same revolving rack for a year. She said she knew that because she folded down one page, at the word Poinsettia.
Her favorite song was “Poinciana,” and that word wasn’t in the dictionary.
If no one was going to use it, and it was $12.99, she said it was fate. And she could put it back when he was done, if he didn’t mess up the pages.
But that Friday night, May 5, some idiot came up to the apartment with Sisia and wanted Glorette. Chess was already there. The idiot was from LA. He had green eyes and big heavy cheeks like two burlap bags hanging around his nose. Had dooky braids like you saw on little girls, so he thought he was hardcore, which Victor never understood.
He shot five rounds from his Glock and called it a night. But when the cops came they cuffed his mother and Sisia, he heard them yelling, and then they busted down the bedroom door and took Victor, even though he’d been in bed with his headphones on the whole time, and the gunfire had sounded like the crack of palm fronds falling in the wind and hitting the concrete balcony.
ON A RANDOM night in August, somebody had killed his mother and put her body in a shopping cart behind the Eye. The next morning was supposed to be his assigned registration date for city college.
His uncle Enrique was probably still trying to figure out who’d done it. They’d tried to make him believe she died on the couch at their house, out in the groves. Like she’d walked all that way to take a nap.
But his grandfather didn’t care about revenge. He was just sad—so sad his voice went down to the whisper of sandpaper on already smooth wood. They had buried her next to his grandmother, in the cemetery at the edge of the orange groves. Then Victor had slept in his mother’s old bedroom for days, smelling the oranges hot on the trees, since his life was over.
But five days later Marcus Thompson shook him out of the sheets and stood there glaring. When Victor was a freshman, Marcus had said, “Man, call me your distant uncle, whatever, just let me get you through school and into the big time. The smartest idiot I’ve had in ten years.”
But Victor knew why. Marcus had been seriously in love with Glorette when they were seventeen. Totally sprung. He was married now and had a stepdaughter, but he still loved her. Chess, Marcus, Sidney Chabert who worked at the video store—they never got over his mother. On the dresser were bottles of perfume, dusty on their round shoulders, and inside one drawer were Valentines from her sophomore year. Queen of My Heart, someone named Narcisse had written. Funky French name.
His mother, in the rusted shopping cart.
He turned over and pressed his cheek against the pillow.
Marcus said, “I got you a new registration date. Get up. Get up.”
“Fuck that! Everybody calls it thirteenth grade, man. I ain’t goin.”
Amitav and Logan were already at Berkeley. Blazing in a dorm room now. The two Hunters were at UCLA.
“Get up.” Marcus rolled him out of bed and he fell on the floor. His grandfather and Uncle Enrique stood in the doorway. “He has to go to college,” Marcus said. “I mean it. He has to get—”
Victor knew the ending. Marcus wanted to say “—get out of here,” but facing the old men who’d picked oranges and shot rabbits and rebuilt trucks, who’d tried to save his mother again and again, he knew better.
“Victor has to get started,” Marcus said. “He can transfer after two years to the big time.”
His grandfather said, “Take them damn thing off your ear. Put them clothes and books in the truck.”
THEY BOUGHT A house in the city, on a narrow street at the edge of the arroyo. His grandfather had met Mrs. Batiste forty years earlier, when they’d come out from Louisiana. Her husband died ten years ago, and she went to live with her son Darnell. The little house was empty, and it was across the street from Rio Seco City College.
“We put in them pecan tree for her back in 1970,” his grandfather said. “Nothin across the street back then but a field and some old junkyard.”
Now the city college had expanded, building a new stadium and classroom buildings all the way to the edge of the former field. Victor carried his bag up the three steps of the cement porch and leaned against one of the wooden pillars. The house was old, pale yellow peeling paint, black wrought-iron railing around the porch that made his eyes burn with tears for a moment when he touched the rusty pitted metal. Like the railings on every second story of every apartment building he’d lived in with his mother.
The tears descended into his sinus cavities, as always. He never let them out. Sinuses and sinews and secretions and synapses.
His grandfather took one tiny bedroom, and he took the other. The kitchen was dusty, with cracked linoleum tiles and a counter with gold speckles inside. Formosa—that was ants. Formidable. Formica.
Fucking thirteenth grade. Cars racing in and out of Lot 8 across the street. Victor had seen the two girl Logans in cheer squad uniforms, leaning close to a side window on a Blazer and putting on lipstick. Of course.
The night before classes began, Uncle Enrique drove up in his ancient truck. Victor’s grandfather had never had a truck—he always rode with Enrique.
They sat on the porch after they ate the red beans Enrique’s wife had sent in a huge pot. Victor had spent the day weedwhacking the grass and trimming the lowest branches on the pecan trees, to keep from wanting to kill himself.
They lit Swisher Sweets. It was September 5, and over a hundred degrees. They spoke in French too fast and slurred for Victor to make out more than a few words. His mother’s name.
His grandfather hadn’t said anything to Victor most of the day. Victor sat on the bottom step. Babysitting. His grandfather should be working the groves with Enrique. He had nothing to do here but sit in his recliner and make sure Victor stayed alive.
“You get them book at the school?” Enrique finally said.
Victor nodded. He’d only gotten into two classes. World Religions and English Composition in a stack on the folding chair.
“You look in that shed there?” Enrique said.
“Maybe a washer,” his grandfather said.
Victor went into the big side yard, almost a second lot. He remembered delivering oranges to this woman years ago, and getting a bag of pecans. She used to grow sugarcane, too. A few stalks rustled behind the house. The shed was an old leaning wooden building, narrow and long. He slid the wooden door sideways. There could have been a washer at the back, but all Victor saw was the ancient Impala, pale blue, the windshield full of cobwebs that hung low like ghostly sails.
“INDIAN DUDE SHOWED me how to make these,” his mother said that day, crouching in the sandy dirt near the cactus. She pointed to a small tree. “He said that was Indian tobacco. Dude named Beto. He used to smoke it when he was little.”
“We part Indian?” Victor had asked her.
“Not that kind. Not California. When I was ten and went down there to Louisiana, the old lady said, ‘The first one come from Senegal. Marie-Therese. And some a them was Houma. Indian.”
“That’s all?”
“She was a mean old lady. Spoke French. The white men was French, back in the day.”
He remembered looking at the tobacco tree. “What about my daddy?”
“Sere Dakar. Dakar’s a city in Senegal.”
“He was African?”
“No.”
BACK ON THE second Tuesday of September, Victor was on the porch looking over his notes for World Religions. The class had him tripping. Professor Barr was about fifty, with eyes green as a wine bottle and hair dyed the glistening red of pomegranate seeds. She moved her fingers like she was dancing. Hinduism. Buddhism. Counting karma. Classifying people, animals, in a hierarchy so final even death didn’t free you.
It was 8 am. A lowered black Acura, custom muffler, racing car, kept cruising past looking for a parking place on the street. Five times. Six. Cars had been swerving into the narrow gravel drive to turn around, then racing off. Victor closed his book and stood up just when the driver pulled up and said, “Dude! You got parking in your yard?”
He was Asian. He kept the car idling, the speakers bumping Nelly. “Serious, bro, I can’t be late for class again or they’ll kick me out. How much?”
“How much you pay for the student lot?”
“I didn’t get the lottery, bro. Never any spaces anyway. I’m always late to class, less I get here six in the morning.”
Victor stared past him. Not a clue what students paid, or how much money they’d spare for an extra hour. “You got class every day?”
“Every day. I got five tickets already on this street cause it’s one-hour parking and shit.”
“Twenty dollars a week.”
“Bro! You rock.”
Irwin was his name. Chinese-American. He told his three friends, all of them wealthy kids who were doing their first year at city college to get their grades up for university. By Wednesday, the four Hondas parked in a row, black and dark blue, gleaming.
Thursday morning was Professor Zellman’s class, at nine, so Victor got up at dawn to make Louisiana-style drip coffee for his grandfather, who was always awake by sunrise. His grandfather would have to watch the cars, just for two hours.
He carried a load of his grandfather’s clothes and bedding out to the old washer. He had used his grandmother’s old sifter to lay flour lines in the lot after he’d weedwhacked the grass short. He was raking the few branches he’d trimmed, and when he heard Jazen’s voice from the street, the words flew around the leaves for a moment before settling on his head.
“You farmin now, nigga?”
Jazen and Tiquan grinned from the open windows of the Navigator. Country Grammar bumped from the speakers.
“Rakin leaves.” Victor waited. “Where’s Alfonso?”
“In the wind. He vacated.” Jazen studied the house. “You stay here now?”
Victor nodded.
“You heard that old dude Chess got gotted?”
Victor shrugged. If Chess had gotten killed by some fool in love, he didn’t want to know.
Jazen said casually, “I’m sorry about your moms. They catch the nigga did it?”
Victor said, “How you know it was a nigga? How you know it wasn’t a white dude?”
Tiquan said, “Ain’t no white dude been—”
But Jazen’s face went cold. “He don’t know shit.”
Victor stared back. “Don’t matter who did it.”
“Always matter who did it. Matter who got gotted, matter who gotted em. But you ain’t interested.” Jazen stared him down.
“No. I ain’t.” Victor felt a splinter in the wooden handle, and Tiquan looked past him and whistled, high and sharp as a rock thrown at a telephone wire.
“That a six-four?” Tiquan said, pointing at the shed. “Damn. You gon sell me that, right? I give you cash right now.”
“Ain’t runnin.”
“I can see that. I don’t care. I know this dude got nothin but six-fo’s and he want another one.”
“Ain’t mine.”
“Don’t gotta be yours.”
“Ain’t for sale.”
The Navigator moved off like a blue house on wheels, and Victor heard the bass all the way inside his kneecaps.
HE HAD NEVER told anyone—not his mother, not Marcus—about that night a month before his mother died, when he’d taken a ride with Alfonso and Jazen because he’d been walking back from school in the dark and they saw him. He’d never told Marcus how it felt, the neon lights at Sundown Liquor flickering behind his eyelids. He knew Alfonso had a gun in the glove compartment. The Navigator bumping old-school House of Pain—“Insane in the membrane, insane in the brain”—and the moon hanging low like a damn Mento. Like a commercial. And somebody want to pull up hard at the light—checkin and assessin—and you think, Hell yeah, step or drive.
Then they’d passed Launderland, and he’d seen the empty shopping carts parked around the telephone pole at the Lamplighter Motel—like silver ponies with fat bellies waiting all patient. This ain’t the Wild Wild West. And I ain’t got a horse.
How when they dropped him off, the neon still shook in his forehead.
You can’t always get what you want. Irwin had been singing that one day when he came for his Honda. But he wasn’t riding with Jazen.
“I never kill nobody, me,” his grandfather said once when Victor was ten, when he’d asked about the shotgun in the living room. “Enrique kill somebody.”
“He kill a man?” Victor said.
“He kill two man. But I never kill nobody, cause he do. He the one.”
Victor had looked at his mother, sleeping on the couch, her hand cupped, held upward like she was asking for something from the ceiling. Rock. A fucking eighties drug. Disco bumped into funk and then messed up by his mother and her friends. All of them thirty-five and couldn’t grow up. Leggings and tank tops, like Flashdance reruns. Moving apartments every three months—pay a deposit, no rent, and stay ahead of eviction. Only thing moved every time was the glass-topped table she loved so much, Victor’s futon, and the trunk she’d had since she was nine, a metal box imprinted with the American flag.
His grandfather used to say to her, “Co fa?”
Quoi faire? What you gonna do? She sat on the floor, painting her toenails the color of cherry juice. Grandpère would say, “A secretary. They hire all the time at the city.”
“And nobody grab my ass, want some for free?”
“You can’t run the street toujour. Non.”
Then she went back to the strip on Palm Avenue: Launderland, which was always warm in winter when they’d been standing outside; Sundown Liquor, where the men filed in and out, one by one, like the leaf-cutter ants he’d seen on TV, but carrying brown paper bags.
That time someone had stolen her mud-brown Celica from the carport at Hyacinth Gardens, and they had no phone, no breakfast, no spoons. Someone had walked off with their spoons. They ate ramen noodles for lunch and dinner with plastic forks, and Victor drank the broth, telling himself bitterly that the tiny green dots floating in the salty soup were vegetables.
Even though his grandmother used to demand him when he was little, his mother wouldn’t give him up.
His grandfather whispered to him, “You think you kill somebody if he hurt you?”
His grandfather wanted to know if it ever got that bad at the apartment.
Victor didn’t answer.
WHEN HE WAS little, she couldn’t leave him forever at night. Sisia would watch TV for a few hours, and then his mother would come back while Sisia went out. Sisia had a face like a black orange, with pinprick scars, and her fingernails were long and painted.
His futon was always in the only bedroom, always on the other side of the wall where the TV stood if they had one, and he could hear the chunk when the channels changed.
Sometimes his mother had to bring them home. He put pillows over his head, but his ears had the canals that went into his brain. He’d seen a movie about the human body at school.
That Christmas, he asked his uncles for headphones. Uncle Reynaldo said, “Lil man wanna hear some sounds. You think Santa comin down the chimney with some music?” They bought him a Walkman, which he hid inside his shirt while he slept.
When he was eleven, she left him alone for longer. She went out at eleven and came home around four.
He never wore the headphones while she was gone, in case someone broke in.
Only once. Around Christmas then, too, because someone had put winking lights around the palm tree trunks in the courtyard. Some dude jimmied open the front door. Splintered the cheap frame. The lights had stopped blinking. The voice said, “Shit, ain’t nothin worth nothin in here.” Footsteps into the room.
Victor moved quickly from the futon to the closet. He had practiced this a hundred times, stacking three boxes under his mother’s few hung-up clothes. He lifted himself to the shelf above the clothes and lay covered with an old sheet he’d left there.
He heard the man’s breath, in the closet doorway, and then the soft kicking of his futon, and then the footsteps went back outside, and the cold air came inside until she returned.
THE THIRD TUESDAY in September, he checked on the Impala at 7 pm. Jazen and Tiquan didn’t steal cars. But they could pay someone who did. Not that many 1964 Impalas in minty, dirty condition around—everyone wanted them.
He closed the shed door. “Hooptie,” he said to the car, “as soon as I get some dinero, I’m hooking you up for me.” Then he’d have to learn to drive, practice where no one could see him.
He walked the six blocks to the tiny Mexican market called La Reina. Rice, bananas, tamarind soda, and some chorizo. He hated taking money from his grandfather, who was napping in his chair, so he spent some of Irwin’s cash. On the way back, around eight, he kept to the edges of the college lots around the huge campus. He saw Professor Zellman walking toward him, styling his hornrims, his hair gelled up, his thick-soled shoes. Working it. His black restored ’65 Mustang fully sweet. He’d driven it all the way out from Brooklyn when he got this teaching job. Fort Greene, said it all the time. He had them read Vibe and The New Yorker and Rolling Stone instead of just the textbook, then write papers: compare and contrast, persuasive, descriptive. The class was tight.
“Goddamnit!” Zellman was bent near the driver door. Glass sparkled near his feet.
Victor moved the grocery bag to his other arm and stopped near a pepper tree on the sidewalk. Zellman always talked about how he loved NWA. But I ain’t his nigga with attitude. Wasn’t even here when the window got broken. Would he even remember me? I got the A and kicked ass on the compare and contrast paper.
He waited until Zellman scrabbled in his briefcase for the celly, then crossed the street, holding his breath until a campus police car sped past him.
THAT WEEKEND, HE met Mayeli.
She and her aunt were running a booth at the weekly farmer’s market downtown. Victor had gone to look for used CDs, but he saw the t-shirts waving like stiff ghosts. T-shirts with flags—Mexico, Italy, Puerto Rico, England. Anywhere people came from before they got here. Tight—who came up with that idea?
She smiled at him. About eighteen, with honey-dark skin and cheekbones so high they were soft pillows under her eyes. Hair pulled back into a bun, gleaming around her forehead like a new vinyl LP. She said, “You got another flag you want, we print it so.”
Her voice wasn’t California. It wasn’t Jamaica. Somewhere between. He leaned on the booth, keeping his hands from the stark white cloth, and said, “Where you from?”
“Belize.”
Then, unlike Rio Seco girls who would go on and on, tell you all about themselves in long breaths, more than you wanted to know, so you would want them and want to buy something from them or for them, she closed her lips. Not like she was pissed. Closed them soft over her teeth, like she would rather listen.
Oh yeah.
Victor figured eight or nine hundred dollars to drop a new engine in the Impala and get a life. Maybe he could find a new backseat at Pick-A-Part, the junkyard. Take Mayeli to the movies. I ain’t askin for much.
On Monday, leaving World Religions, Professor Barr was complaining to another woman about parking permits. “Thirty dollars a month!” she said. “To park two days a week, where I’m employed! And I can’t ever find a space! I don’t believe a factory wouldn’t charge me to park so I could come to work!”
That night, taking clothes from the washer, he saw the dust raised from his feet against the hard-packed dirt and grass of the lot. The dust hung in the fall air for a moment, in the yellow glow of the old streetlamp against the high blue glare of the college lot lights.
He went to Professor Zellman after class, but he didn’t hand him the flyer right away. “I heard you pay thirty dollars a month to park in the faculty lot,” he said, trying to appear non-threatening. “I live across the street, on Iris. You could park in the lot next door for twenty dollars a month, and I can get somebody to wash your car once a week. Detail, too, if you want, for ten dollars more.”
Zellman squinted. “Picard, right? Victor? You wrote about Memphis Minnie and Led Zeppelin for the compare-contrast? They did the same song? Your paper’s right here. Brilliant.”
Then he laughed. “You know, my dentist has this service in his parking lot. You sure you’re not from Brooklyn?”
Victor smiled. “I’m from here. I got a flyer. People can do two days a week, three, whatever. And I’ll watch the cars better than campus security.”
Professor Barr had come up beside them. She didn’t laugh. Her brows had been drawn on with a pencil. She whispered, “All religion begins with the cry ‘Help!’”
“William James?” Victor asked politely. He was still remembering the pictures she’d shown in class of the untouchable man who’d had acid thrown in his face for daring to drink out of the well of a Brahmin family during a heat wave.
Zellman threw up his hands and said, “James wasn’t parking, no doubt. Just tying up his horse.”
THE CROWS WERE the biggest problem so far, landing purple splotches of shit on a few hoods. So he washed those cars, too. Huddling in the trees, crows were the first to get pecans every year, smart enough to drop them on the street, wait for cars to smash the hulls so they could pick out the raw soft meat.
Victor stood in the empty lot at dusk. Three cars left. He studied the nuts hanging like green mini-bananas, thinking about the slingshot his grandfather had made when he was a kid. Thumping speakers shook the leaves when someone slowed, and he heard laughter. “Aw, nigga, now you the damn scarecrow!”
He turned. Jazen and Tiquan. “I can lend you my nine, you get tired standin there like a fool.”
Victor said, “Some fools stand. Some sit.”
“Talkin shit now?” Tiquan said, and Victor turned away. Loquaciousness isn’t an attribute. Then Tiquan said, “I got five hundred right now. Five bills.”
Victor kept walking back toward the shed, and Jazen said, “You can’t even drive that ride. A waste.”
But Jazen didn’t add anything—the car accelerated, and when Victor glanced back, the campus police car slowed at the curb. Beefy arm. Sunglasses pink with sunset. Like a bad movie.
“Friends a yours?”
Victor shook his head.
“You get a permit, son?” the officer said, glasses off. A scar on his arm when he dangled the glasses out the window. “Or I gotta call the city?”
Victor waited for him to add whatever he’d add—threat or boast or more unnecessary information. Like Jazen, or like a girl. But he was silent as long as Victor was, and then the car glided away.
Long horizontal scar. Keloided up, like a fat pink caterpillar made of satin. Like something Victor had seen before.
ON THE SECOND Thursday in October, the campus cop didn’t cruise past, though Victor had watched for him all afternoon. At four, Zellman put his briefcase on the porch steps and said, “What you hearin?” He nodded toward Victor’s headphones.
Victor slid them down. “Chili Peppers.”
“Red Hot Chili Peppers?”
Ain’t no other ones, Victor thought. He lifted his chin.
Zellman frowned. Victor knew he was surprised. White band. “What’s up next in the rotation?”
Tryin to figure me out. Wanna hear me say Nelly. My price Range is Rover. Shimmy Shimmy Coco Pow.
“Clifton Chenier,” Victor said. “His favorite.” He nodded toward his grandfather, who sat in his chair in front of the window.
Zellman grooved his shoulders two times. “Zydeco. Love it.”
“Yeah,” Victor said. “See you Tuesday.”
But Zellman shook his head. “I’m coming in tomorrow. Friday. We have a meeting all morning.”
“Cool,” Victor said. But when Zellman pulled out, Victor opened his notebook. Zellman and Barr—Tuesday Thursday. Monday Wednesday Friday—Patrini, the math lab tutor. Irwin and his friends every day.
If they all came at the same time—shit. The lot could hold about seven cars easily. If he had to move cars—shit. He needed to practice backing in and turning.
His grandfather stood in the doorway and said, “Them pecan gon fall this week. They say the wind come.” Victor threw a rock from the stash he kept on the porch and five crows rose up screeching at him. “Me and Enrique used to fight them bird for some pecan.”
Victor sat on the porch, highlighting pages about caste systems and religions in India. His grandfather went inside to make coffee. Only two Hondas were left.
Every day he walked across the street to go to class, and he walked home. He was gone only two hours at a time, and his grandfather watched the cars. He’d been born a mile from here, lived in every apartment building off Palm Avenue, rode a bus to school or walked. Rode in Enrique’s truck to the orange groves. He’d been nowhere. He’d done nothing.
His grandfather had taken epic journeys. He walked a hundred miles with Enrique when they were little kids. When he came out with his coffee—so sweet Victor could smell the sugar—Victor said, “You ever eat a crow?”
His grandfather hated chicken. He shook his head. “They sit in them tree laugh at us after the flood. Nobody eat a crow. We ain’t had no gun. Only them soldier—they shoot Enrique’s maman because some meat.”
Victor didn’t know what to say. He wanted to know what kind of meat. Was it chicken?
“Then a white man come get us.”
“All of the people?”
“Non. Me and Enrique. I was seven. Enrique, he was four. Them people on the levee, they don’t know us. He take us to Plaquemines Parish cause Enrique people there. My peoples gone. He have a mule wagon. They call him a drummer. He sell pot and pan and scissor, he sharpen them tool. Some day he let us ride on the wagon, but if he buy some things and they sit on the wagon then I have to walk. Walk all day. Sleep at night in the woods.”
“What he give you to eat?”
“He buy a chicken sometime. From a farm. Tell us pull them feather. I hate them little bump in the skin. Close my eyes and pull them feather and feel em float back in my face.”
“That’s why you never eat chicken?”
“I don’t want no bird. All them feather, all them bone.”
“How long did it take you to get there?”
“A long time. It was cold when we get there. He gone to all the place he always go. People say you buy two little nigger? He say I take them to Plaquemines. They say that a long way south. He say I get there when I get there.”
His grandfather looked across the street at the new stadium, the lights up high. “Then one day he stop at a store and say Where Almoinette Antoine? Walk one more day and he leave us at her house.”
Victor tried to picture it. Sometimes people in the apartments would say, “I’ma call Child Service on her. She need to leave that boy with somebody responsible.” But every day, he put on his clothes and shoes and went to school, so they couldn’t say anything. And he never took off his shirt around anyone. Not even her. She never saw the scars.
“She was old?”
His grandfather frowned. “Non. Not old, not young. She never have no children. She just say Come in here take a bath cause I clean the floor. She was Enrique’s aunt. We work on the oyster boat back then. Marinovich and his people get the oyster, and me and Enrique put in the sack and carry all them sack to the dock. She have oranges, so we pick the oranges when they ready. That how Enrique find this place, when he get out the war. California. He see all them orange on the tree.”
“You were in the ocean? On a boat?”
“Oyster boat go all in the Gulf. They know where the oyster bed stay. I can’t see nothing but water, and they know where to stop. Pull out them tong and rake them oyster and put em in a sack.”
His mother had been to the beach once. Newport. At night. With his father. She told him the story three different times—when she was high and sleepy.
Victor had planned to “Hit the Beach for Senior Ditch Day,” with Logan and Amitav, but when they opened the door of Logan’s Jeep, he said, “I’m cool. I gotta study.” It was a Tuesday, sunny and hot in October, and he kept picturing all the other Logans and Hunters, the blankets and towels and coolers, the words flying around.
His mother was talking half to herself, in the doorway. He was in bed. She said the waves were like white clouds that hissed when they fell over. Black mountains and then like a thousand snakes hissed when the water hit the sand. She said that was the night he was conceived.
Conception. Conceit. Concave.
Con man. He finna run a con on Glorette. You cain’t run no con on her. She ain’t foolish. She just high. Well, that one dude run a con on her. Seventeen years ago. Left the evidence behind.
THAT FRIDAY NIGHT, Patrini never came back for his Volvo.
Mayeli’s aunt dropped her off so he could play her a new CD. The Kuffs. She ate red beans and rice, laughing when his grandfather whispered, “Victor say you from down past Mexico, you used to them refry beans, no?”
“Not true!” she said in that accent. She called it Creole. The Beatles and some Spanish and when she wanted to mess with him, whole sentences he couldn’t understand. “We have red beans and rice in Belize. And Sunday dinner—stew chicken. So I cook for you one day, yes?”
Her aunt wouldn’t come inside when she picked her up, wouldn’t even get out of her old Galant. “She says Belizeans are not the same black as Americans,” Mayeli whispered apologetically. “She thinks is perilous for us to speak.”
“Say it again.”
“What?” She grinned, hand on the old cut-glass doorknob. “Perilous?”
“Yeah.”
Perilous—I ain’t got shit, can’t drive. She ain’t gotta worry. Pitiful.
When she left, and his grandfather went to sleep, the Volvo was still there. Victor sat in the Impala, shed door open, facing the Volvo. He’d thought it would be funny to sit here with Mayeli and eat drive-thru food, but it was fucking pathetic. And when he’d kissed her, she slid her hands up his t-shirt sleeves and onto his shoulderblades and laced her fingers.
His back.
He heard cars leaving after the football game. SUVs with their huge tires whining, the low-riders and Sentras bumping stereos. The street grew quiet again by midnight, and Victor felt tears running down his face, hot on his collarbone. He didn’t raise his hands to wipe them.
He wasn’t even crying for his mother. She had scars on her ankles. He didn’t know if Memphis did that.
He’d never really seen his own scars until last month, in the bathroom in this house. No matter how he tried to stand on the toilet when he was little, and twist to look in whatever medicine chest mirror, he could see only one or two. But here, the mirror was bigger. He could see all seven.
He was from Memphis. He wouldn’t leave. He had light brown skin and whiskers that had embedded themselves like chocolate sprinkles from the Halloween cupcakes at school. His eyes were swimming in red. Like blood.
He drank Cisco, and that meant he didn’t pass out like Chess, who drank Johnnie Black, or Sisia’s brother who drank tequila. Memphis just got more pissed as the sun fell. He never told them his name. It had been two days. He was waiting for something. To carry back to Memphis. They were his entertainment. He made Victor change the channel. It was back when Urkel was on TV.
Lil nigga never smile.
He don’t have to smile. His mother stayed in her chair at the glass table. Memphis had moved the couch across the door. That ain’t his job. My job. I smiled for you yesterday.
He turned to Victor, who sat on the floor near the TV, where Urkel was so close his glasses looked like lakes. You betta smile, lil nigga.
I smiled.
Not today you ain’t. You been in them books.
Victor had waited for hours, until Memphis fell asleep on the couch and his mother put her head down on her arms and her mouth opened. Then he stood up slowly, legs like Gumby, and went into his room to do his homework. He had missed school.
Memphis woke him by pulling off his t-shirt. He lit a cigarette. Seven cigarettes. Two eyes. One on each shoulderblade. Five times in the center of his back in a curve that must look like a grin. If you saw the whole thing.
Which only Memphis had. Pink buttons now. Black before they fell off. Never seen his back, but in bed three little black discs.
THE STREETSWEEPER WOKE him. His heart dangled in his throat for a moment. When he was little, he thought the streetsweeper was a monster. A Chinese dragon, like he’d seen in a parade on TV. All the lights, whirring brushes, hissing past him now to raise dust that settled on Patrini’s Volvo.
He’d fallen asleep in the Impala. Zellman was staring at him, the ’Stang idling in the driveway. Zellman pulled up next to the Volvo and rolled down the window.
“You listening to the radio in there?”
Victor shook his head.
“Wanna hear something?”
Victor got out of the Impala and closed the shed door. He got into Zellman’s passenger seat. “You always up this early?” Zellman said.
Victor could smell his aftershave. “Sometimes. Why you here? On a Saturday?” Sun poured through the branches. “You worried I wasn’t takin care of the Volvo?”
Zellman frowned. “Hell, who’d steal a Volvo?” He put in the new Outkast CD. “I gotta work on something in the library. A piece about pimpology for this new zine.”
Victor closed his eyes. He couldn’t think. Outkast. Wearing what his mother said looked like leisure suits. “I was waitin for Professor Patrini.”
Zellman laughed. “He met some lecturer from Biology at the meeting. I guess she’s got her own car.”
Doesn’t everybody? Victor studied the dashboard, the old-fashioned instruments.
Zellman said, “I wanted to play something else for you.” He took out the CD and put in another silver disc. Victor imagined him spinning them all on his fingers like an entertainer at a fair. Then he heard the opening guitar, and felt like a stick poked him in the breastbone. “Love Rollercoaster.” Ohio Players. His mother had danced to that. She showed him one night. The rollercoaster. Swaying her shoulders, moving her feet.
Zellman said, “You write really well. Distinctive ideas, man. You know the Chili Peppers version, right? You could try a piece on black originals and white remakes. Ohio Players were wild. I can send it to this zine.”
ONE TIME. HE was twelve, and the Celica was in the carport just under their floor and his mother passed out somewhere, and Sisia came yelling for him to come get her. Victor had pushed down on the gas with his shoe and seen the red light flash—he still had those stupid-ass shoes that lit up when you stepped—and then the car inched back out of the space like a basketball player working the ball into the paint. Back, back, back. He turned the wheel slowly and went off the curb.
He asked Irwin for his keys, so he could move the Honda closer to the porch when he washed it. “Dude, you should put some gravel down here, for the winter,” Irwin said, and Victor nodded.
“Yeah, bro, good idea.”
He felt the powerful vibrations of the Honda engine under his legs, in his forehead, and moved the car carefully across the dirt. The exhaust felt so strong he pictured a cartoon car, with puffs of smoke behind him, and the stereo system shook his fingers on the wheel.
When he got out of the car, the campus cop was staring at him from the street. “And that ain’t your vehicle? You just playin with it, like a toy? Your time about up, son.”
“Unless you from Detroit, I ain’t your son. I’m Glorette Picard’s son.” He shut Irwin’s door carefully, and kept his back to the cop. He didn’t hear the campus security car leave for a long time, but the cop didn’t say another word.
MARCUS SAID, “YOU registered for Spring?”
Victor shook his head.
“What? You can’t quit.”
“I’m not quittin. I just have to keep the lot goin right now, and the scheduling won’t work.” Victor heard his grandfather inside the screen, breathing noisy in the cold. Victor had built a fire, banked and low.
He said, “In January, I’ma pay somebody to watch the cars while I’m in class. Somebody who don’t want to steal a 64 Impala. Every couple days, Jazen and Tiquan cruise by and fuck with me.”
“Ah, yeah. Like a piece of steak sittin in front of a dog.”
“A Rottweiler.”
“A Rockwilder. That’s how Jazen would say it.”
They laughed, and Victor said, “Nobody would get that except you. Nobody across the street. Zellman might be tight with it, but he doesn’t get the six-four. Or Jazen.”
“That’s his ’Stang?”
“Yeah. Rolling Stones. Rollercoaster. He’s messin up my list.” He hesitated, even with Marcus. “See, I like makin lists. What cars and CDs and clothes go with each one. Dudes like him, then ones like Irwin with the big cash. Brothas like Jazen.”
House of Pain. Insane.
He thought of Zellman. Zine. “I gotta get you guys to hang. Listen to some music.”
MAYELI SAT WITH him in the Impala one night. She had taken the bus, because her aunt wouldn’t bring her. He said, “You not afraid?”
She laughed, low in her chest. “We didn’t even have current in Teakettle Village. Was dark all the time. Much darker than here.”
Current. He put his arms around her, and her lips tasted of coffee and lipgloss. Was that the slick sweetness?
“Quoi faire?” he whispered. “Means what you wanna do?”
“Stay here. Nice and dark, yes.”
But hours later, she said, “My auntie think you look like Nelly. She hates Nelly. She say you never work hard and your ideas maybe come to fruition, maybe not.”
Victor wanted to tell her to say fruition again. But it wasn’t funny. Would the woman rather have him out making major cash with Jazen? “Where’s your moms?” he asked Mayeli, and her back stiffened under his hands.
“She died. In Teakettle. She was fishing on a boat with my uncle—a wave knock over the boat. Call it a rogue wave.” She was silent for a long time, her breath trailing a veil of silver in the cold.
But the next day, she drove her aunt’s car to Iris Street, bringing coffee beans from Belize for his grandpère. Victor roasted and ground them like his grandmother had taught him, put them in the big drip pot she had brought from Louisiana forty years ago. His grandmother always said to his mother, “That pot older than you, ti-fille.” Pot always be older than her, Victor thought, and shook off the ripple that attacked his shoulder.
The fog hung in the trees now, leaves dripping like thousands of eyelashes. The coffee was darker, stronger than he’d ever tasted, and Mayeli said, “Because in Belize, we grow the food better.” His grandfather was on the second cup when Zellman, Patrini, and Jameson all came in at the same time.
Zellman came up to the porch and shouted, “My God. Who’s brewing that? Smells way better than Starbucks.”
“Me,” Victor said.
“Bro, you have got to let me have a taste.”
Victor poured him a cup, though his grandfather frowned and went back inside.
Zellman blew on the surface, steam and breath and fog all blending near the porch railing. “Okay, now I’d pay you five dollars for a cup of this to get me started before a stupid faculty workshop like today’s. Three hours of tedium and—”
“Tenure issues,” Patrini said, grabbing the cup.
Mayeli said, “He brew coffee every morning. He can make extra, certain.” She moved her eyelashes, not her eyes, at Victor. He shrugged, but she said, “Five dollar seem steep. Maybe two, yes?”
When Mayeli sat on the porch with him—“Looka the bonnet on the red car—get a bird gift for you!”—he felt like he was wearing his headphones. At night she tasted his neck, she let him pull her hair from the tight elastic, but when things got serious, she said, “I cannot have no baby. And don’t say it—nothing failsafe, no? Nothing trustworthy. And you not interested in a real job.”
He pulled away and thought he’d be angrier. But all he felt was broke. Finally he said, “I still want the big time. And then I want to get a master’s like Zellman.”
Mayeli twisted her hair hard into the knot at the back of her skull. She had cooked coconut rice, and he’d watched her wrist when she held the wooden spoon. He’d never seen his mother’s wrist or hand move like that.
He walked her back to the farmer’s market, where she had to meet her aunt. He said, “So you sayin you ain’t got time to wait?”
She kissed him, around the corner, before they saw the tarpaulin and silver frame where the t-shirts flew. “My brother coming next week. He get a tattoo say ‘Thug Life,’ for preparation. I worry about the money. Every day.”
Victor saw the flames from a carnitas stand, a drum barbecue, a Mexican woman heating corn tortillas like full moons amid the smoke. He thought, My mother never swirled anything into boiling water, never held a wooden spoon. Those tacos from El Ojo de Agua—my favorite food in the world. Carnitas tacos, with pico de gallo. Her fingers like sign language when she opened the bags.
HE PAINTED A small sign and nailed it to one of the porch pillars. It couldn’t get him into trouble, because it didn’t advertise anything except where he had begun his journey in life, a mile away at the city hospital.
La Reina.
Queen of somebody’s heart.
He had asked Zellman last week. Zellman said, “My favorite food? My mother makes this brisket. If I take a bite, I’m like seven years old.”
Victor had no idea what brisket was, but he ate the last bowl of Mayeli’s coconut rice.
He sold the coffee in Styrofoam cups printed with beans. He detailed cars. Enrique brought a load of fine pea gravel and they raked it over the dirt. The wind made him nervous. Enrique saw campus security cruising past and said, “Quoi faire? Street a bayou and he fishin. Want to catch you wrong.”
The cop must have smelled too much coffee, Victor thought, because he stopped the car, got out, hitched up his belt, and walked into the yard.
He must have seen Patrini and Zellman with cups. Then Victor’s grandfather squinted and said, “You. Narcisse Belarde boy, you.”
The officer said, “Excuse me, now, sir. I’m thirty-six years old. Not no boy.”
Marcus watched the campus cop look past the entire house, to the arroyo, irritated.
His grandfather said, “You know me? This Glorette boy. My Glorette.”
Then the man’s chest rose and fell under his khaki shirt. Victor saw it. My moms. Queen of the Westside every time she walked. Narcisse. The old Valentine. Damn.
The campus police car idled, big engine humming. “Somebody’s gonna catch you without a city permit. I’m not the only one patrollin.”
“You the only one keep drive past here,” Grandpère said.
“That won’t last forever.”
Victor waited until Belarde got back into his car, and then he said, “Nothin last forever, right?”
The cop pulled forward a few feet, closer to Victor where he sat on the low stone wall. “Now you sellin coffee? You crazy?”
Victor shrugged. “They got a bank inside Kinko’s, man. A Starbucks inside the Cinema Eight. You gotta diversify.”
BUT THAT NIGHT, he remembered where he’d seen Belarde’s scar.
His mother had just taken their things to Sisia’s apartment at El Dorado. A creamy yellow stucco building. Victor said, “I don’t know where the bus comes!” He’d screamed at her, the first time. He was in third grade. She was sleeping on the couch, it was early morning, and Sisia yelled at him, “Go out to Palm Avenue and wait!”
When he got there a yellow bus was already leaving, and he ran behind it for three blocks. Then a cop pulled up and said, “Hey, hey, little man, where you tryin to go?”
The scar. Belarde. He’d put Victor in the hot car and Victor said, “My mama moved yesterday and I can’t find my school.”
“What’s your name?” His shirt was pressed stiff.
“Victor Picard.”
“Picard?” The cop whistled.
He took Victor to the elementary school, which was only six blocks away. Victor had gotten turned around on the narrow streets lined with pepper trees and apartment buildings. He took Victor into the school office and signed him in late, said the boy’s mother had a flat tire and had called him for help.
After that, Victor had seen the patrol car three days in a row, idling at the corner of Jessamine and Palm, heat rising off the hood, Belarde looking up from a clipboard to meet his eyes and raise his chin an inch.
Then they’d moved again.
In the cold, waiting for the 7–10 pm classes to let out, he played his mother’s favorite songs over and over. Two cassettes she’d never let anyone take. She had never bought a CD, before she started losing everything. She even kept a damn 8-track once, he remembered, big as a square-cut pizza slice in his hands.
Now he played her music. “Poinciana.” Then Kool and the Gang: “Summer Madness,” with the organ and synthesizer. Even now, in November, in the stone wall his grandfather and Enrique had helped build for Mr. Batiste, whose Impala still smelled of his aftershave, a few crickets sang from their hollows.
ON VICTOR’S BIRTHDAY, the first day of finals in December, Jazen came for the six-four.
The lot was empty. Patrini had just left in the Volvo, his new girlfriend in the passenger seat, seatbelt tight across her chest like a Mexican bandit’s bullet-holder. Bandolier?
Jazen pulled over the curb and into the lot. “I’ma give you six-fifty, nigga. I done drove by here twenty times and you ain’t done shit with that ride. Tiquan open his big mouth and told this dude, and he want the ride now. Right now. I owe him.”
Victor said, “Ain’t—”
“This dude don’t play. I’ma give you—”
His grandfather opened the screen door with his foot. “I’ma give you fitteen second get out my driveway else I shoot me some window and tire.” The shotgun was a third arm next to his sleeve.
Jazen spat on the dirt and spun the Navigator through the lot and off the sidewalk, spraying gravel into Victor’s hair, tearing a chunk from the ancient cement curb.
“Gotta have four-wheel drive,” Victor said to his grandfather, “for that kind of maneuver.”
“I ain’t play word game with you, non,” his grandpère said, soft and evil like a serial killer in a movie. “Eighteen make a man.”
“Eighteen mean I gotta pull in more than four hundred a month from cars and coffee.”
“Not yet.”
His grandfather’s cheeks were traced with hundreds of lines. Like a broken windshield on an old car—not the new ones with shatter proof glass. Scrutinize. You can scrutinize somebody. Then is he scrutable? What about implacable? When is he placable?
Before dawn, Victor startled awake. He heard a huge engine—the streetsweeper again? Chinese dragon?—and then the rattling of chains.
“I call them last night,” Grandpère said in the dark.
A tow truck idled in the driveway. Marcus Thompson’s older brother Octavious got out of the cab. Then Uncle Reynaldo and Lafayette.
They were old-school lunatic. Nobody messed with them. They’d been drinking hard for years, and in the garage light, their features looked soft and blurred, like bars of soap with just a few watery rubbings to take the edges off. Their eyes were muddy, the irises rough-mapped.
Reynaldo nodded at him. “We frontin you the work, lil cuddy.”
They opened the hood on the Impala, pointed and talked, and then hooked it up to the tow truck. His grandfather had made coffee. Reynaldo drank his on the porch steps. “When we done, I’ma have this dude Nacho paint it candyflake orange, and I got this guy Jaime Becerra in El Monte for a buyer. You’ll clear big cash. You can register for whatever. And you won’t get shot.”
“I might still get shot,” Victor said. Fuckin little kid who gotta get rescued. “Might get shot walkin to the store.”
“Then buy a ride nobody wants.”
Reynaldo crumpled up the paper cup and threw it at him. “Whatever works.”
The Impala rode high on the tow truck, flat tires at eye level. His grandfather watched silently.
“I’m still runnin the lot,” Victor said, after the street was quiet again.
His grandfather nodded.
HE GOT READY when he saw the Navigator turn the corner two weeks later. It was January. He had three night classes—Indigenous History, Intro to Sociology, and Zellman’s English lit class—full of women whose kids were grown, and retired guys, and people who worked all day. Mayeli’s younger brother Wilfredo, just arrived from Belize, took the 6:30–10 shift for the cars still parked in the dark.
Wilfredo was late, so Victor was already pissed when he heard the speakers. DMX. He put his books on the porch and ran to open the shed door, pulled the light-bulb string, then waited cool by the sidewalk. It was 6:40, winter night dark purple in the trees.
He had practiced.
“What you want now!” he shouted at Jazen. “You done already got the damn ride!”
“What the hell you talking bout?” Tiquan shouted back when the Navigator pulled into the driveway. “Where the damn car?”
“Wherever you took it to, fool!” Victor moved forward. His eyes were shaking with the headlights’ jittery bounce, from the speakers thumping the car, doors trembling.
“Who got it?” Jazen lifted his chin, and Victor saw the hesitation.
“Not you?”
Jazen shook his head, and Tiquan said, “That Pomona motherfucker came and stole it himself. We coulda made a grand offa him.”
“Yeah,” Victor said, taking another step forward. “What it matter who got it? I ain’t got it.” He was shouting louder now, feeling the cords in his throat tighten, his eyes burn with the cold. “And fuck y’all two times, cause you know who got my mother and you ain’t said shit. Ain’t did shit. Ran off Alfonso.”
“How he—” Tiquan began, but Jazen cut him off and wheeled the Navigator back, tires spinning in the gutter filled with rainwater.
HE FINALLY BEGAN to breathe once he was in the classroom. The murmur of voices, the shoe soles on tile, the rustle of paper.
When class was over at ten, he walked across the college lots. Wilfredo was sitting on the edge of the stone wall, hunched into his jacket, Irwin’s car behind him. Wilfredo said, “I tell you, I not washing the cars. I only wash my own car when I get one. Escalade. Black Midnight, okay? In that I get some thug love.”
Then Wilfredo stood up. He was fifteen, hated his own name, and his gold-edged teeth, and his voice. Everybody wanna be an American, Victor thought, watching Wilfredo hold out his hand for the cash. Everybody wanna be 50 Cent.
Wilfredo walked away, toward the bus stop downtown. Victor sat on the porch. Wilfredo and Mayeli’s mom had been drowned by one wave. Not even a storm. Just one wave out the blue. Mayeli was seven and Wilfredo was five. His grandpère was seven when the Mississippi River flood took his mother.
I had mine until last year.
The palm tree sparkler. Better than fireworks. You could have it every month, baby. Just look. Every month, but winter is the best, cause the moon’s all clean. Winter moon like the rain washed it.
Every moon got a name. The old lady down in Louisiana told me. Hunter Moon. Harvest Moon. Moon pull all that water everywhere.
You always got a moon, right here, and you always got a palm tree, baby. Can’t nobody ever change that. Sitting on her lap, on some balcony. The Riviera? You got a Riviera in France. You got a Riviera right here. She put her fingers like visors over his eyes, to block out the apartment lights, and all he saw was the courtyard palm tree, full moon behind it, the fronds tossing in the wind, their fringes throwing off silver fire.