NORTH HOLLYWOOD
When you stand in the hills over Los Angeles the world turns upside down. Above you the night sky is black dirt, and below you the million lights of the city glitter like a bowl full of stars. It felt right to Polly that they’d come to an upside-down world. She felt pretty upside down herself.
Polly ate a chiliburger and looked at the stars below while sitting on the hood of the green monster, which was what she’d named the car they’d bought when they’d gotten to Los Angeles and dumped Magic’s car. It was the best chiliburger—maybe even the best food—she’d ever had. So good she made an mmmm when she took a big bite like somebody from a dumb commercial.
Her dad smiled and went back to counting the money in his lap.
“Tastes good, right?” he said. “Your uncle Nick said one time, stealing was the best sauce in the world. It’s ’cause you’re a little more alive than you used to be.”
They’d just come from robbing a liquor store, which was a thought she could have only in an upside-down world. It seemed like stealing was a thing that should have bothered her. It didn’t. It turned out she liked it. In these first days in L.A., Polly felt like she was meeting this girl for the first time, this girl with watermelon hair and gunfighter eyes.
Polly mock-fed the bear a dollop of chili. The bear waved farts away from his butt. The bear giggled silently. Her dad laughed through his own chiliburger. Polly and he laughed together, and it was like hearing a song she hadn’t heard in a long time.
He’d explained everything to her on the fifty-mile ride to Los Angeles. About how the blue-thunderbolt bad guys were called Aryan Steel. How they wanted to kill the two of them. How they’d killed her mom and Tom.
“There’s only one thing I’m good at,” he’d said as they’d driven in stop-and-go traffic into the behemoth of L.A. “That’s robbing. Now Aryan Steel, they’ve got a lot of businesses. Lots of cash. What I’m going to do is keep robbing them and robbing them until they want a truce.”
“Won’t that just make them madder?”
“At first,” he said. “But deep down, they’re businessmen. If I cost them enough, they’ll do whatever they can to stop me.”
“Us,” she said, looking down at the corpse of a coyote on the side of the road. If you drive on the highways all day, she thought, you see a lot of dead things.
“Huh?”
“We’re going to rob them,” she said. “I’m going to help. That was the deal.”
They’d found the apartment a few days ago. An old Thai woman who was happy to have cash for the rent and no questions. Furnished, with two bedrooms, but they hardly ever used them. They slept on the couches in the living room, the teevee going all night. Her dad liked noise when he slept. It turned out she did too.
He woke in the morning and did his exercises. Polly and the bear watched. After, he sketched out what he knew about Aryan Steel. It turned into classes. Polly thought about school, her empty seat, if any of the kids missed her. Probably not, huh? But that was okay. She didn’t miss them either. She had her own school now. He sketched on paper, how different gangs worked, how they fit together. He had worse handwriting than Polly. Polly took over the sketches. He talked to her about Aryan Steel.
“It’s jail people who run things on the outside,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because people on the outside come inside. All of them, once in a while, they all come inside. So sooner or later, the ones on the inside will get their hands on them.”
He mapped the gangs down for her. Shot callers and associates. He had her put Crazy Craig at the top of the pyramid. He was the head. Below him, a couple of shot callers, lifers like him. One named Moonie, one named Despot. He told her about their tattoos, how they all told stories. There were the gangs with names like the Nazi Dope Boys and Peckerwood Nation. He told her how the gangs paid taxes to Aryan Steel. How it was all about money. She learned it all.
“There’s lots of these folk in L.A.,” he said. “We just got to find them.”
“What are we looking for?”
“Dirty whiteboys,” he said. “The kind that does business with the Steel. We need a thread to pull. We find where the dirty whiteboys gather, we’ll be able to find our way in.”
“And then what?”
“We take the fight to them.”
She woke the day after they’d robbed the liquor store to find him standing over her.
“Get up,” he said. Something different in his voice, harder.
“What?”
“Up,” he said. She got up.
“I want to see how many push-ups you can do.”
“I’m not good at them.”
“That’s what doing them is for. To get better.”
Her arms burned after just a couple. Her breath grew burrs, scraping her throat. Nate sat back. He watched her. She did five. On six her arms burned. She let her face touch the cool of the floor.
“One more,” he said.
She pushed up with shaking arms. She made a noise. She did it. She rolled onto her back to look at him.
“You got to feel weak to get strong,” he said.
“Huh?”
“Your uncle Nick used to say it. Means if you want your muscles to get strong, you got to push them until they’re weak. It’s like that for most things in life. If you feel strong all day, you’re probably not getting any stronger.”
She nodded.
“Now you ready to start learning for real? You sure?”
To tell it true, she wasn’t. She wanted to run and hide. She didn’t want to feel weak even if it led to being strong. But the girl with watermelon hair couldn’t hide.
“I’m sure,” she said.
He shoved furniture around so they had enough carpet to move on. He got down on the floor.
“We’re going to start with chokes,” he said. “There’s two kinds of chokes. There’s strangles and blood chokes. What’s the two kind of chokes?”
“Strangles,” she said, “and blood chokes.”
“Strangles, you know that word strangling, right? It means can’t breathe. Strangles are okay. They work all right. But do me a favor, hold your breath for as long as you can.”
She breathed in, sealed her nose, let her cheeks puff out. He did the same. She felt like a balloon, like her butt was connected to the ground by a string and that was the only reason she didn’t float away. Her dad’s eyes bulged, like holding his breath was killing him, and Polly’s breath burst out in a laugh.
“No fair,” she said. She felt jumpy, something like a jagged sugar rush.
“You did pretty good,” he said. “That’s the problem with strangles. Air chokes, strangles, they take a long time to work. Now the other kind of choke is a blood choke.”
He moved her around so his chest was against her back. She breathed in. The smell of him made her feel bulletproof.
He snaked his left hand under her chin so that his elbow cradled the center of her throat. His bicep pressed against the left side of her throat, his forearm against the right.
“You take the left hand, your choking arm, and you grab your right bicep. It’s just for leverage,” he said. “I’m going to choke you now. When you feel it, just tap my arm. What are you going to do?”
“Tap your arm,” she said.
“Right. When you squeeze a choke, you squeeze with your whole body. Like this.”
The arm around her throat tightened slowly, and his chest pressed into her back all at once. And there wasn’t any pain or anything like that. It was just that the world started to get smaller and farther away. And it was only right before the world disappeared all the way that she understood what was happening. She tapped his arm. The pressure on her neck went away and the world came back.
“You okay?”
She nodded. At least maybe she did. She felt a stranger in her own body.
“Tap sooner than that. You don’t need to go to sleep to see it works. Did it work?”
She nodded like yeah. So weird that nothingness was so close to her, always, and she’d never even known. She wondered what else she didn’t know, and the sugar rush intensified.
“We’re starting with chokes,” he said, “because you’re small. Chokes, you don’t have to be big and strong. See, all you’re doing is squeezing those two little arteries at the side of the neck that go up and feed the brain. And even a little girl like you is strong enough to squeeze them.”
He turned around.
“Now you do it to me.”
She moved behind him. She stood on her knees. He leaned back against her so she could get her arm around his neck.
“Start at the back of the jaw,” he told her. “Under the ear. Move your hand all the way under my neck. Your arm will fit better.”
She put her left hand to his jawline and moved her hand under his chin until her elbow hooked around his Adam’s apple. Her face pressed into the fuzz at the back of his head. He hadn’t shaved it in a while and the fuzz was soft when she put her cheek against it. It smelled like boy soap and sweat.
“Now grab your other bicep with that hand,” he said. She did it.
“Your other hand, the one that’s not under my neck, put it behind my head so the back of your hand is against my skull. And what you’re going to do is, squeeze against the sides of my neck with the one arm and push against the back of my neck with the other. Squeeze it from all sides. Like a snake.”
“Okay.”
“Now squeeze,” he said.
She squeezed.
“With your body too,” he said, his voice thin. She leaned her chest into his back, felt her whole body as a single thing, like a snake, she thought, and she squeezed and he tapped her arm, two sharp taps. She let go. He leaned forward. He coughed. When he turned to her she could see his eyes were watery.
“You did it,” he said.
“I did? For real?”
“For real,” he said.
She felt something strange, a thrumming in her muscles, a thrumming in her mind. It took her a second to find the word for what she felt. It was a word she hadn’t got to use for herself in a long time. The word was power.
“Show me more,” she said. He nodded like hell yes.