EXHAUSTION FINALLY DRAGS JOE UNDER, BUT HE DOESN’T sleep long. A fly trapped in the truck, buzzing and bouncing off the windshield, wakes him, and the rising sun quickly turns the cab into a sweatbox. He stumbles out onto the street and pisses in an empty lot, his back giving him all kinds of hell. In the old days, he could sleep anywhere and pop right up in the morning, ready to rock. Not anymore.
A red fire department SUV is parked in front of the house when he drives down the hill. Junior, Robert, and Candy are standing there with Starbucks cups in their hands, talking to a firefighter. Joe gets out and walks over in time to catch Junior yelling, “Bullshit, man! That’s bullshit!”
“I didn’t write the law,” the firefighter says. “An inspector has to certify it’s safe before you can go in.”
“When’s that gonna happen?”
“Hopefully later today. There’s a backlog.”
“And what are we supposed to do until then? All our stuff’s in there.”
“You might want to make arrangements to stay somewhere else.”
“Do you know what caused the fire?” Candy asks. “Was it a rat?”
The firefighter ignores the question to go back and forth with Junior about the inspection. When he realizes nothing he says is going to mollify him, he retreats to his rig and sits staring at his phone.
“We’ll wait him out,” Junior says. “He can’t hang around all day.”
“Fuck it,” Robert says. “Let’s bum-rush the place.”
Joe doesn’t mention sneaking in last night, doesn’t want to stir the pot.
“Whose truck is that?” Junior asks about the F-150.
“A buddy’s,” Joe says.
“What are you gonna do?” Robert asks him.
“I’ve got a job today,” he says. “I’m on my way to work.”
This is a lie. He’s not at all sure what he’s going to do, but whatever it is won’t involve these clowns. Now isn’t the time to ask Junior for a refund of his rent, so he wishes everyone good luck and splits.
He buys coffee at McDonald’s and drinks it sitting on a bench by the lake in Echo Park. The homeless who camp there under the palm trees are starting their day. They crawl out of their tents and stagger past wary, muttering geese to the public restrooms, where a security guard monitors the growing line. First cigarettes are lit, first beers opened, first fixes cooked up. A haze of dope smoke gives the palms the ghostly quality they have in old photos of the place.
A lunatic smeared with filth and wearing only a greasy loincloth stands next to the path that circles the lake. He scares the hell out of the runners and dog walkers by bellowing, “I hate you!” at the top of his lungs as they pass by. The yelling gets to Joe. He tells the guy to knock it off.
“Fuck you!” the lunatic replies, then plops down on the grass to groom himself like a chimp, sniffing whatever he picks out of his beard before flicking it away.
Joe’s phone rings.
“Where’d you end up sleeping?” Emily asks.
“A guy I work with let me crash at his place,” Joe says.
“Is that where you’ll be staying now?”
“I’m figuring things out.”
“Let me buy you breakfast,” Emily says.
Joe meets her at a hipped-up diner in Los Feliz. He washed at the park’s outdoor sink and changed his shirt but still worries she can smell the last twenty-four hours on him when they hug. They sit across from each other in a booth, and she makes him tell her again about the fire. He finishes up as their food arrives.
“Do you have everything you need?” she says. “We can go shopping.”
“I’m good,” he says.
“What about money?” she says. “Do you have enough?”
The question pisses Joe off. “Don’t ask me that,” he snaps.
“Why not?” Emily says.
“Because my problems aren’t yours.”
“And mine aren’t yours, but all I’ve done since we met is lay them on you.”
“That’s different,” Joe says, digging into his pancakes.
“Okay, fine, but it’s supposed to work both ways,” Emily says.
“Can we talk about something else?” Joe says.
Emily reaches across the table and wraps one of her index fingers around one of his. She asks if he’ll be looking for a new place in the same neighborhood. He tells her he’s thinking about moving to the Valley, where rent’ll be cheaper. He might even be able to swing his own apartment there.
A rambunctious toddler dashes across the restaurant. She ends up on Emily’s side of the booth, staring up at her.
“Hello there,” Emily says.
The child’s mother hurries over, apologetic.
“She’s fine,” Emily assures her, and addresses the baby again. “Where were you running to? Or were you just running?”
Joe gets a text from Wahid: Is he free to work at the store from noon to eight or nine? He’s off at the bar tonight, so texts back, Absolutely dude.
Emily picks up the baby and sits her in her lap.
“What a doll you are with those big blue eyes.”
Out of nowhere, the kid starts to cry.
“I better take her,” the mother says.
Emily passes the baby to her, saying, “Something must have scared her.”
“Shhhhh,” the mother whispers in the little girl’s ear, but she won’t be calmed. The mother turns to her skater-daddy husband, jerks her head toward the door, and carries the child outside.
“She thinks it was my fault,” Emily says.
“What are you talking about?” Joe says.
“She thinks something I did made her baby cry.”
“Kids cry all the time,” Joe says.
“I have a kid,” Emily says. “I know how to hold one.”
She’s working herself up. Joe tries to distract her by telling her about Wahid and his family, how the first job the dad got in the States was at a dildo factory in Chatsworth. It takes him a while to shift her focus, but he eventually gets her talking about a documentary she made about a Chinese restaurant.
She insists on paying for the meal, then they walk up the street and go into a bookstore. She browses, and he pretends to, picking up random books and leafing through them.
“Do you read?” she asks him.
What’s he going to say in a bookstore, everyone there hearing the question and listening for his answer? “When I have time” is what he comes up with.
When he leaves her at her car afterward, she says, “I know you’re a tough guy, but please tell me if I can help you out somehow.”
“I will,” he says.
“No, you won’t,” she says.
The liquor store doesn’t have a parking lot, and the closest spot Joe can find is in front of a tenement two blocks away. It’s not even noon, but dope dealers are already working the stoop. Their lookout whistles when Joe gets out of the truck. There’s no way he’s leaving behind his backpack and the trash bag containing the rest of his stuff. He also takes the gun and heroin out of the toolbox and buries them in the pack.
Wahid’s going to a funeral. His uncle was hit by a car in Koreatown.
“Some drunk bitch in a BMW,” Wahid says. “She drove all the way back to USC with his blood on her windshield and was in jail only two hours.”
Joe stashes his bags in the back room. The shift kicks off slow, four or five customers an hour. Beer, cigarettes, lottery tickets. Joe plays poker on his phone, watches Judge Judy on the TV tucked under the counter, and pages through a Ferrari magazine he finds in a drawer, Wahid dreaming big.
Things pick up when school lets out and kids come in to buy candy, chips, and sodas. Whenever there are more than two kids in the store at once, Joe steps out from behind the counter and pretends to straighten merchandise in order to make sure they don’t fill their backpacks with Takis and Skittles. A tough little chica with green hair calls him out for this, asks what he’s looking at.
“I’m restocking,” he says.
“Bullshit,” the girl says. “You’re profiling us. The terrorists that own this place are always up our asses.”
“How do you know they’re terrorists?” Joe says.
One of the two boys with the girl ululates loudly. The other says, “They’re Muslims. They hate us. Don’t you know anything?”
“Yeah, I do,” Joe says. “I fought in Iraq.”
“So fucking what?” the girl says, to raucous laughter from her pals. She sets her Mountain Dew and Doritos on the counter. “Get your ass over here and ring me up.”
Joe lets it go. He was a shithead, too, at their age.
After the schoolkids come men stopping in after work for Tecate tallboys and the cans of beans and quarts of milk their wives have texted them to pick up. Powdered with drywall dust, spattered with paint, sweat-stained, and dog-tired, they still manage a laugh for a friend’s stupid joke and a respectful “Buenas tardes” for the old church ladies dressed in black.
During a lull, Joe calls Keith. He was going to wait until the dude contacted him, but in light of his sudden homelessness, he wants to know how long he’s going to have the truck. The call goes to voice mail, so he texts What’s cracking? No response.
At six he zaps a frozen burrito in the store’s microwave and eats it at the register. He gets sleepy after that, nearly dozing off while staring at the security cam monitor, so he downs a Red Bull and a Five-Hour Energy Shot. The caffeine does a number on him. His mouth’s so dry, every swallow is an effort, and his hands shake as he counts out change.
Wahid gets back at eight thirty and pays him off. He tries to use one of the twenties to buy a twelve-pack of beer, but Wahid says, “No, my friend, take it, take it.”
It’s just about full dark. The streetlights have come on. Joe’s relieved to find the truck where he parked it. Lots of people besides the dealers are out now, the whole neighborhood. A ragtag pickup soccer game swirls in the middle of the street, old men, young men, kids all getting in on the action. Laughter and joyous shouts ring out when a mother leaves her stroller to stand in as a goalie. She goes head to head with a fat loudmouth and blocks every kick he tries to get past her.
Joe stows the garbage bag and his backpack in the cab, then opens a beer and leans against the truck to watch the game. A paletero hawks popsicles from his cart. An old woman slices a mango and feeds it to a chihuahua wearing a frilly red dress. Twenty different songs blare from twenty different radios.
A scream rises above the din. The years Joe’s spent in bars tell him it’s trouble. A girl and two boys spill out onto the stoop of the building he’s parked in front of. The boys are fighting. One’s getting the best of the other, punching him repeatedly in the face, but Joe glimpses a knife in the other kid’s hand.
The girl screams again, and people yell for the kid to drop the weapon. The guy he’s fighting, though, goads him, spreading his arms wide, slapping himself on the chest, and shouting, “Mátame, culero, mátame.” The kid with the knife lunges.
Joe drops his beer and moves toward the stoop, yelling NO! along with everyone else. Two more kids charge out of the building and tackle the guy with the knife. The knife flies out of his hand and lands at Joe’s feet.
The crowd whistles and cheers as a siren approaches. Joe panics, remembering the gun and drugs in his backpack. He runs around to the driver’s side of the truck, presses the fob to unlock the door, and climbs inside. His head’s buzzing as he pulls away from the curb. A couple of the soccer players jump out of his way, one of them yelping and slapping the fender as the truck passes by.