NORTH HOLLYWOOD/ENCINO/KOREATOWN/GLENDALE
These next days were the best of them all, so good and wild that later on Polly could only remember them in choppy flashes all out of order.
Food tasted different again, like a layer of dead skin had been scraped off her tongue. They kept eating Mexican food, lots of it. Soft tortillas with pork-fat warmth. Crisp pork, sour pickled onions. Sauces bursting red or green, fire on her tongue, fire down her throat. Her dad couldn’t handle the heat. It made him sweat and hiccup. But she loved it. “You get that from your mom,” he said, and it hurt to hear that but it helped too.
She was growing; she could feel herself growing, her skin stretching, a dull ache in her nipples at night.
They settled into a routine. She hadn’t realized how much she craved one. They woke, they did exercises. Push-ups, jumping jacks. Prison-yard exercises, he told her. He figured out how much to push her. She learned to like being pushed. To like misery.
He taught her how to box. How to shoot out the jab like a cannon shot, how to bring it right back so she wouldn’t be open. How to raise the hands to keep herself safe.
He taught her how to wrestle. How leverage turned into strength. She got the physics of it. Levers and fulcrums became chokes and wristlocks. Sometimes she dreamed of wrestling faceless people. Sometimes winning, sometimes losing.
He taught her how to fight dirty. Thumbs in the eyes, fish hooks. She blushed when he taught her to kick a man in the crotch. How weird evolution was, she thought, to put that stuff there like a shut-off switch between a man’s legs.
In the afternoons she read books they found in secondhand stores. She practiced chokes with the bear. Afterward they danced. They found out all three of them loved big loud hip-hop. The bear did the twist, the swim. He shook, he skanked. She made him dance song after song.
There was a thing they never said to each other, a thing that ought to be said, dad to daughter and daughter to dad, but later on she’d know that even though they never said it, it was true, that she felt it with everything she had and that he had too, and surely that was good enough.
At night, they hunted.
Polly began to live for that time from the moment you started the job to the moment it ended. It was like stepping out of a rocket ship to take a space walk.
They took down a white power club in the Valley. tonite steeltoe h8 on the sign above the door. Polly kept watch from the driver’s seat, her hand hovering over the horn to give the two-honk signal if something went wrong. Music bled out the windows of the building, low bass notes, drums like machine gun fire. She bobbed her head to the beat.
Kids with shaved heads so fresh their scalps were ghost white, their swastika tattoos drawn on in markers, ran as her dad moved into the club with the sawed-off. He took the gate money while the Odin’s Bastards bouncer foamed at the mouth and swore vengeance. Later that night they bought steaks at the grocery store with white power money. They grilled them at midnight, gobbled them down rare. Pink juices on her chin, down her throat.
There was a chop shop too, maybe before the club, maybe after. They broke in at two in the morning, Polly manic from robbery rush and no sleep. She giggled while he boosted her through a broken window. He passed her the gas cans and the Sterno bomb he’d built that afternoon. She doused the room. Gas fumes stung her eyes. She heard a bok-bok-bok and she wondered if gas fumes had driven her nutso. But no, there it was again. Even though her heart did crazy things she followed the clucking. She opened an office door. She found a rooster in a cage, black with a bright white Mohawk of feathers. She passed the cage over to her dad through the broken window before she lit the wick to burn the place down.
“It’s a fighting cock,” he told her as they drove away from the garage, the bird squawking in the backseat.
“I couldn’t let it burn,” she said. The bear put a friendly paw up to the cage. The rooster pecked it. It said fuck you in chicken.
They let it go in MacArthur Park. They shooed it into the night. Her dad tried to chase it. It spread its wings. He kept his distance.
“Are you chicken?” Polly asked. The bear knee-slapped.
The night turned red and loud from fire truck sirens on the street below them. The rooster flapped into the dark. Now they were both laughing. Her dad put a hand on Polly’s shoulder and squeezed. She rested her hand on his as they watched the big fire engines roll past them.
“Did we do that?” she asked. She knew the answer. She just wanted to hear him say it.
“We did that,” he said. She leaned against him. Breathed him in. The flashing lights of the fire engines strobed against their faces.
Tiny Tim was an Aryan Steel tax collector, and he was the biggest person Polly had ever seen. Her dad explained it to her. How all the whiteboy criminals in the state owed taxes to Aryan Steel. Ten percent. They called it the dime. Tiny Tim’s job was to collect the dime.
Tiny Tim had to duck his head to avoid hitting it at the top of doorways. Sometimes he forgot. He finger-fished his nose and ate his catches every moment he didn’t think he was being watched. Polly and her dad, rolling behind him in the green monster, had to hold their laughter in like kids in church. Polly pressed her face against his shoulder to block out the hilarious sight of it.
They followed Tiny Tim all day. He carried a backpack with him. It got heavier every stop. They followed him to a house in Little Armenia.
“We’ll do it here,” her dad said. “You know what to do?”
She nodded like yeah and asked, “What’s here?”
“It’s a place men go,” he said.
“There’s women in there,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Ladies of the night,” Polly said. He laughed. “Shut up,” Polly said. “That’s what they’re called.”
“Where’d you get that?” he asked.
“I read,” she said. “Don’t laugh at me.”
“Ladies of the night,” he said. “Here he comes.”
Polly’s skin got all tingly, the way it did before their missions. She’d learned that the energy that flooded her body was fuel. Before, she’d been a rocket ship stuck in its docking even as its engines roared, burning itself. Now she flew.
She looked up to see Tiny Tim thwack his head on the doorframe as he walked out the door. He rubbed his stubbly scalp as Polly slipped out of the car. She stood to face him as he reached the sidewalk. She tasted sweetness on the air and said, “Hey mister.” Tiny Tim turned to her. Her dad came up behind him. He kicked Tiny Tim behind his knee, and the knee crackled like burning wood as the big man dropped. His scream was higher pitched than she would have thought. Both his hands flew to his crushed knee. Polly grabbed the backpack. The two of them ran to the car. They burned rubber.
She opened the backpack. It was stuffed with money almost to the rim.
“Holy shit,” Polly said.
Polly counted money. Thousands of dollars. They flapped in the wind like palm fronds.
“We’re rich,” she said.
“Not yet,” her dad said. “But we will be.”
“What’s that mean?”
“The next job,” he said. “I think it’s the last one. The one that will make them quit.”
That should have made her feel free. Instead, she got that trapped-rat feeling she hadn’t felt in weeks. Like Venus was ascendant.
“What is it?” she asked.
“The Steel’s bank,” he said. “That big dude was just one of the tax collectors they’ve got. There’s one for every part of L.A. that has whiteboy business. And when they’ve made their collections, they take them to this old warehouse in Chinatown. It’s where they hold the money before it’s shipped off to be laundered. We hit that, we can buy our way out of the greenlight.”
“How’d you learn about the bank?” Polly asked. “Charlotte didn’t tell us about that place.”
“She told me,” he said. All sorts of wrong notes in the music of his voice. The music of Venus ascendant.
The car walls closing in on Polly. Her clothes tightening like a snake.
“When?” she asked.
“Last night,” he said. “I’ve been going to see her.”
Polly threw a double-handful of cash out the window.
“She’s one of them,” Polly said to the bear once they were back in the house.
“Talk to me, not him,” her dad said.
“She’s one of them,” she said. But what she meant was you lied to me.
“She’s not like that,” her dad said. “She’s a kid who got confused. She’s helping us.”
She’d never seen him look so weak before. Not even when he’d been shot. She turned away from him, not wanting to see his dumb face. She tried to shove the lid back on the pot inside her. Bad thoughts bubbled over anyway. Ruined, they chanted. We’re ruined.
She spent hours training herself, sweating, punching pillows, rolling on the floor. Anything that kept her brain in the moment. She was choking out a pillow when he opened the door from the bathroom and called to her. She kept choking the pillow, going through the checklist in her head. Move hand here, squeeze here.
“Polly,” he said again. “Come here. Stay pissed if you want, but you got to see this.”
She walked into the bathroom. Nate had stripped off his jeans. He hiked up his boxer shorts to show her the place where he’d been shot. It had been getting better, almost healed up all the way. But now it was purple again. And at the center of it something hard and gray bloomed.
“Is it infected?” she asked. The word hospital hospital hospital looped in her head.
“No,” he said. “Touch that gray part.”
She moved her hand to it, slow. Her fingers brushed hard metal.
“It’s the bullet,” he said.
“The bullet?”
“I’ve heard about this,” he said. “My body’s rejecting it. It’ll keep crawling out my body until one day there’ll be enough of it for me to grab and just yank it like a big ol’ splinter.”
And she could see by his eyes that he liked it. He thought it was cool. Polly didn’t. She didn’t believe in magic, not at all. But it felt like an omen. Like the gods’ way of saying nothing stays buried forever.