I knew the cops in the black-and-white, the porky red neck everyone calls Bubba, and his skinny, tan-skinned partner, Palo. Those weren’t the names they had pinned on their uniforms: their official names were Raymond Galloway and Darnell Wilson, but down here they were Bubba and Palo. That night I was working the four to midnight shift at Bob’s ARCO, Last Chance Gas. I waited until the cops had pulled up to the Cage before I unlocked the door and slipped out of my Plexiglas cell.
“Hey, Albert, how’s it goin’?” Palo asked as soon as I had finished propping the door.
“Okay. How about you?”
“Pretty good. Hey, look, you talk to a young white guy today driving a Lumina?”
“Yeah, a couple of hours ago. Is he in some kind of trouble?”
“Why don’t you tell us about him.”
I knew they weren’t going tell me anything until they found out what I knew, so I told them. The guy had come in about six o’clock. It was still light out, that yellow, golden color it gets on a warm summer evening. . . .
“Is this the Last Chance Gas Station?” he asked through the grill in the Cage. Well, it used to be a grill. After the subway movie with the scene of a guy pouring gasoline through a toll booth slot I told Old Man Matansas, ‘Close up the holes and put in a microphone or I quit.’ So now where the grill used to be there’s a microphone wired into an old boombox.
The guy’s voice buzzed a little, but I could understand him well enough.
“Yeah, this is the last gas for a mile. All the rest got burned up or shot out of business.” The guy took a long look at the inch-thick Plexiglas on the front of the Cage.
“Looks like you’re pretty well protected.”
“Nines won’t go through it,” I said tapping the inside of the sheet with my knuckle. “Most everybody around here’s got a nine or a .45. I don’t know about those Teflon bullets. Lotsa guys’d like to get some of them but nobody’s tried one of them on me yet.”
I saw the guy studying the front of Cage, staring at the scratches and the places where three slugs were still jammed into the plastic from when Old Man Matansas first built it and someone wanted to see if it worked or not. Matansas just filled in the holes with some kind of liquid that hardened over the bullets, like the mosquito in Jurassic Park that was caught in tree sap, except that down here we have bullets caught in Plexiglas. Sometimes I wonder what some scientist a couple of thousand years from now will think if he digs up a piece of the Cage with those slugs still buried in it. What will he make of us?
“They told me you might be able to help me out.”
“I just sell gas. You want anything else you’ve got to find it on your own.”
“Not that. I’m a writer, Tim Hastings. I’m doing a story on the Shrines. I heard you know a lot about them.”
“Oh yeah, a writer? Who do work for?”
“I free-lance. I’ve got a buddy who works for one of the airline magazines, Jet Stream, the one they have on all the Global planes. He thinks they’d buy a story about the Shrines. I asked around and I heard that you’re the local expert.”
He was right about that. I had painted my first picture of a Shrine two years before, the one on Verdugo near Howard. An eleven year old kid got shot there on his way home from school. There was something about the colors of the Shrine, the off-center symmetry of the bunches of flowers crowded around the white plastic cross, the texture of the rosary beads looped over the corner of kid’s picture next to the plaque describing how he was killed that appealed to the artist in me.
First I studied the Shrine, took a picture, then went back to the garage where I kept my paints and stretched canvases, and started to work. But the first painting didn’t come out right. It had no soul. I needed to know more about what had happened there, who had been killed and how and why, though lots of times there wasn’t a “why” that made much sense.
I bought a journal and filled it with notes about each of the Shrines. I photographed them, made eight by ten color prints, and pasted them in the book then copied down the stories from the plaques and put them in the journal as well. Finally, I created a map with the location of each new Shrine and the names of the people who had been killed there. Sometimes I brought the notebook to work so that I could study the photos and sketch the outline of a painting when I wasn’t flipping switches on the pump panel in the Cage. Yeah, Hastings was right. I was an expert on the Shrines.
“What do you want to know?”
“Someone told me you had a map of where they all are. Could I get a copy of it?”
“I don’t have any copies.”
“Could we make one? I’ll pay you . . . .”
“I don’t give my notebook to anybody. It’s personal.”
“I heard about your paintings. I was thinking that my story would be better with pictures. Maybe they’d pay you for the right to publish a couple of your pictures to go with my story.”
“What if you’re a lousy writer?” I asked him.
“What if you’re a lousy painter?” He laughed and I laughed too.
“I’ll make you a deal,” I told him. “I’ll tell you about the Shrines. You let me read your story and I’ll let you see my paintings. If I like your story and you like my paintings, maybe we can put them together for that magazine. Okay?”
“Okay,” Hastings said, reached his hand toward the ‘Glas, then pulled it back.
“You got a pen or something?”
Hastings pulled a miniature tape recorder from his pant’s pocket, clicked a couple of buttons, and set it on the ledge near the speaker.
“All set,” he said, pointing to the recorder. “Where’s the first one?”
“Okay, the closest one is on Santiago, half a block north of Gloria.”
“Who’s it for?”
“That’s the Shrine for Rosa and Elena Moreno. Elena was nine years old. She and her mother were walking down Santiago to the bus stop when some bangers drove by looking for a guy. Rosa and Elena were passing the guy’s house when the shooters opened up with a shotgun and an AK. Killed them both.”
“What about the guy?”
“He’s still walking around. Likes to brag about the scar he got on his leg from one of the shotgun pellets. It’s a very nice Shrine. The grandmother, Rosa’s mother, put it up. Just below the cross it has a picture of Rosa and Elena at Elena’s eighth birthday party.”
“Did they catch the guys?”
“The cops? You think someone’s gonna go to court against those guys? The one with the shotgun, he got killed a couple of months ago. Somebody cut him up behind the Limbo Club. The AK guy, he was in jail for a drug thing but the cops had to kick him loose when their witness disappeared. He’s still around.”
“Great system we’ve got.”
“You people make the rules, not me. So, you want the next one?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, after Elena’s Shrine, go right on Sixteenth then left on Monaco. At the end of the block, near the park, is Demond Hawkins’ Shrine. It’s the one with the gold cross and the plastic pot with white-silk lilies.”
“What happened to him?”
“He and a couple of his friends had been playing ball in the park. He was twelve when they killed him.”
“By accident?”
“No, they meant to shoot him. Three guys showing the colors were walking by, told him to give up his money, then they got pissed off that he only had a couple of bucks. They told him that he was breaking the rule.”
“What rule?”
“You gotta have at least five on you. They don’t like it if you leave your cash at home. Anyway, he told them, ‘fuck you,’ two was all he had. So they killed him as a lesson.”
“They weren’t arrested either I suppose.”
“No, one of Demond’s friends told the cops who one of the guys was. It turned out that Hawkins had a record, grass or something, and the ID was shaky, so the DA bargained it down to ADW, assault with a deadly weapon. The guy’ll be out in about eight months.”
I looked up from my notebook and saw an ‘I just bit into a lemon’ expression on Hastings’ face. What was I supposed to do? As long as the Anglo bleeding hearts on the juries figured that why you killed someone was an excuse for killing someone, nobody would be sent away for anything. After two years of studying Shrines, if I had my way, I’d grease ‘em all.
“Okay, the next one is Rosemary Chang . . . .” I read through most of my book while Hastings’ tape recorder took down all the details. Around the middle of the list was the Shrine on Decker Avenue for Sister Mary Rene. I looked up at Hastings halfway through the details on that one and realized that he would have to give it a pass.
“You can’t visit the Nun’s Shrine,” I told him.
“Why not?”
“You’re the wrong color.”
“You’ve got to be kidding!”
“The hell I am. You go down there, you’re going to get yourself killed.”
“That’s crazy!”
“Crazy or not, that’s how it is. Stay away from the Nun’s Shrine.” Hastings looked at me like I had just told my kid bother to clean up his room. Right then a couple of cars pulled in and I had to sell some gas. Hastings waited a minute then picked up his recorder, waved to me, and climbed back into his Lumina. . . .
“That was the last I saw of him,” I told Bubba. “What happened?”
“We found your name and address on a slip of paper on the front seat of his car,” Palo told me. “Somebody shot the shit out of him.”
“Where? Was it down on Kansas, near Euclid?”
“Yeah, how’d you know?”
“That’s where the Nun’s Shrine is. I told him he couldn’t go there.”
“That’s Vaqueros’ territory, isn’t it?” Palo asked, but he knew that it was. “Bad enough he was driving a red car, but wearing a red shirt too - those are Diablo colors,” Bubba muttered, shaking his head. “Some Vaquero’s going to be bragging tonight about capping him. Probably’s already notched his gun, for all the good it’ll do us. Okay, thanks, Albert,” Bubba said, closing his notebook and turning back to his car. “I guess that’s all we need.”
I watched Bubba and Palo head for their black-and-white, looked up at the three slugs buried in the Plexiglas wall behind me, and then followed them back to their car.
“Wait up a minute,” I called just as Palo was closing the passenger door. “Did you find a tape recorder in his car?”
“Whatever was in that car’s evidence. Then it goes to the next of kin, Albert. You know that.” Bubba started to pull the lever down into gear.
“No, you don’t understand. I don’t want the recorder, just the tape.” Bubba and Palo sat there and stared at me. “Look, he was a writer. That was his last story. Somebody ought to write it. I just want the tape, whatever he dictated before they killed him.”
“You’re a writer now? I thought you were a painter.”
“He shouldn’t have died for nothing. It’s a damn fifty cent tape! Who cares about it except me?” Bubba and Palo looked at each other. “You’re never gonna do anything to the guys who murdered him. The least you can do for Hawkins is to let me find someone to tell his story!”
Bubba didn’t say anything, just sat there, then exhaled a long frustrated sigh and nodded to his partner. Palo tilted his head, gave a little nod back and opened the trunk. He fumbled inside for a few seconds then looked at me across the car’s roof and tossed me a micro cassette.
“We can’t help you out, Albert,” Palo said, giving me a hard look. “We don’t know anything about a tape. The recorder we found in his car was empty when we got there.”
“Yeah, I understand. If there was a tape, somebody must have taken it before you got there,” I agreed. Palo got back inside the car.
“You take care of yourself, Albert,” Bubba called to me as he drove out of the LCG.
The next day I called the Jet Stream Magazine office and after about five minutes of getting switched around I found Tim Hastings’ friend. I don’t know if Hastings was a good writer or not, whether or not he would have ever gotten the story published if he hadn’t been killed for wearing a red shirt in a neighborhood where the approved color was blue. Maybe he would have done a better job than I have, but he never got the chance and I did the best I could.
They published my Shrine painting with the article. If you visit the Nun’s Shrine next to the silver cross with the black rosary beads and the picture of Sister Mary Rene you’ll see a carved wooden pen that I had Manny at the furniture store make for me. The photograph under it in the plastic frame is a picture of Tim Hastings. There’s another plastic frame next it which contains a copy of the story.
I don’t work at the Last Chance Gas anymore. I kept looking up at those slugs only a quarter of an inch of plastic away from killing me and couldn’t stop thinking about being shot because I was wearing the wrong color shirt or walking in front of the wrong house or listening to the wrong music or sitting in the wrong restaurant when one of the animals on two legs walked by and noticed me.
I knew I had to leave the neighborhood, leave it or die. Some days I still think of Tim and his shrine.