I DROVE SOUTH ON Palm toward downtown, where the county hospital’s old brick buildings stood like a factory that fabricated people no one wanted. We had all been born here. I drove up and down the parking lot. No Navigator. I went into the emergency room. About fifty anxious faces looked up at each person who entered—me, then right behind me a woman wearing a housecoat and blue bandanna over her hair, pushing a huge man in a wheelchair. He was missing his right leg. An ancient Mexican woman sat in another wheelchair, tiny and wizened as an apple doll, surrounded by about ten people whispering to her as if she were a queen receiving court secrets.
I waited in line, and asked for Victor Picard or Alfonso Griffin. The woman said no one by those names had checked in.
If they’d gone back to Sarrat, Cerise would have called me.
At the entrance door, a woman said something to me in Spanish, pointing at my butt. I looked back, and a young man with her said, “You’re gonna lose your receipt.”
A folded piece of paper about to fall out of my back pocket. The poem. When had he written it? Was it about him as a child, watching the helicopter, or now?
The Villas. #24.
I drove past the Riviera and around the corner to Jacaranda Villas. Maybe this was the one. I parked under the old pepper trees. One was filled with bees—the entire trunk hummed in the heat, with no one in the courtyard except two small children getting out a Big Wheel from under the stairs. On the stop sign at the corner, it was written three times: SKEETA.
The same two palm trees in the center of the courtyard, bending toward the south as if bowing. My father had told me, “Glorette live in Jacaranda—sais pas when. We come to get Victor—he settin up there on the balcony. Hungry like a bird.”
I went up the stairs. The black slanting numbers on each door, the window coolers like growling white sugar cubes attached to each front window, the trembling white blinds moving aside in two of the windows I passed. Dark fingers held the slats down in an oval like an eye, and then they went blank again.
At #24, the blinds were torn up so badly that they hung like thick cobwebs in the window. I knocked, a flush of sweat breaking out along my shoulder blades. Would Jazen pull a gun on me? Would Victor even be alive? Would he come with me?
A young woman peered through the blinds and said, “What?”
“I’m looking for Victor or Alfonso or Jazen,” I said quietly, close to the window, not wanting anyone in the other apartments to hear.
She opened the door, her whole body slanted to the side, her fingers still buried in the hair of the girl sitting on the floor near the television. Videos flashed from the screen—cars leaping, asses leaping, necklaces and curled fingers, but the sound was off. A baby slept on the couch behind the girl, arms flung out as if flying.
“Why you lookin for Jazen?” the girl said, sitting on the couch again. She braided so quickly her fingers danced as if she were playing a saxophone, and the other girl closed her eyes.
“I’m looking for my godson,” I said. “He’s with Jazen.”
“The one just got out?” the braiding girl said.
“No,” I said. “That’s Alfonso. I’m looking for Victor.”
She shrugged, her hands still moving, harvesting hair and pulling it into place and curving the rows perfectly, bending her head to check the line. Then she glanced up at me. “He light? Like you?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“They were here a while ago. He says some crazy stuff.”
The girl being braided said, “He was talkin bout Akon. Had me bustin up.”
“He slept right there for a couple minutes. He was faded or somethin. But the other one, he had a tattoo on his head.”
“He was fit,” the other girl said.
“Jazen wanted me to do his hair, like right quick, and I said no cause I already had her. She got a wedding tomorrow.”
The other girl’s eyes were still closed. She was smiling. She was half done—her left side was long perfect braids radiated out in a sunburst from a side part.
“Jazen always tryin to hang here. I told him to come back tomorrow, cause I gotta sleep, and he said he ain’t had time then. I thought he’d get pissed, like he do, but he was just like, Shit, and then they took off.”
“You don’t know where to?” I said, and she shook her head.
I felt huge in the doorway, the metal strip humming in time with the coolers all along the balcony. Where had Victor sat? If I’d invited him to the reading, he’d probably have made them laugh, and he’d be eating breakfast tomorrow with Rick and Tony and me, talking about Gecko Turner in Spain, joking about white kids in Switzerland who wore South Pole and wanted to be Jazen.
Her fingers moved so fast it was hypnotic. The quiet in the room, the heavy stillness of carpet and limbs and the lolling comfort of the other girl’s head—it was like an island of Greek sirens.
I gave her my card. FX ANTOINE. My cell number. “Call me if Victor comes back, okay? The funny one. That’s who I’m worried about.”
She kept one hand in place and took the card. “You live in LA? FX like that crazy stuff they do in the movies.”
“Not much craziness to me,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Angie.” She put the card on the table.
When I had gone down the stairs, she came out to the balcony and called down softly, “Hold up. I forgot—he had borrowed my clippers. The one with the tattoo. Can you tell him to bring them back?”
Clippers? Alfonso?
I drove back down Palm toward the freeway underpass, where we’d walked on that last day of junior high, the day after Sisia had caught me outside school and grabbed my just-finished braid and pulled me toward her.
You ain’t about nobody, she said. I cut your hair that one day.
All five of us from Sarrat had long hair—Cerise and Clarette had curls like Spanish moss that hung to their shoulders, Bettina had sun-streaked, thin hair in baby waves along her forehead, and Glorette and I had black Indian-straight hair that our mothers kept braided tightly.
Toward the end of eighth grade, I’d taken the braid out every day before class and let my hair loose down my back. Every day I braided it again before we walked home from school, so that my mother wouldn’t get angry. But Sisia said, “Somebody need to snatch you bald, little bitch.” The rasp of scissors on my hair, metal vibrating down the strand and into the skull.
I turned west and drove through the older part of Rio Seco’s downtown—ancient Mexican restaurant, the dry cleaners, the ancient Singer store where my mother took her sewing machine for repair.
We saw an old man in a hat there one day—a soft brown boat on a bald head the color of a dirty egg.
“Lord, look like Mr. McQuine,” my mother whispered, and then she blew air from her nostrils before she put her hand on the glass door below the gold lettering.
“Who?” I said, and she startled.
“Nobody,” she said. “Somebody die long time ago.”
And once, when it was too hot to sleep in the summer, I had crept out to the porch and lain flat on a damp towel. My parents came out onto the steps and my father said, “Claudine boy in LA. Say he call her.”
I listened. Claudine was Bettina’s mother. She didn’t have a boy.
“The one from Mr. McQuine?” my mother said, sounding shocked. “Here in California? What his name—Albert? Eh, no.” Then I stood up and they were quiet.
The Singer store was shuttered. No one sewed now. My phone rang—Victor’s name on the screen. I said, “Are you okay?”
There was no reply. I started to repeat it, “Are—” and then heard the voices, the music, as if I were inside the Navigator. I held the phone hard against my ear.
“Why you got your phone open, fool?” Alfonso said. “You can’t be callin nobody.”
Victor said, “I’m just using the light. Let me check if it stopped bleeding.”
Was his voice clotted with pain? Was it only fear? Whose blood—his or Alfonso’s? I felt a lurch in my stomach—a roller coaster, a snapping whip.
“Don’t be textin neither,” Alfonso said. “Don’t nobody need to know where we are. Fuck that—I just got out. I ain’t goin back.”
Back to prison. The nasal voice of Akon: I’m a soul survivor. Short brother—the middle-class son of a Senegalese father. Singalee—the first Marie-Therese was from Senegal. I whispered, “I’m right here. Tell me what to do.”
Victor said, “Bourbaki,” and Jazen said, “Who the hell that?”
Victor was talking to me. I knew it—as if spiderwebs had been lifted from my temples. “Bourbaki,” he said again. “That’d be a cool name. For a warrior.”
I whispered softly, “But you’re not a warrior.”
“Sound like a damn sandwich,” Jazen said. “Don’t be callin nobody. Cops got GPS and shit.”
Victor was quiet. I breathed into the phone. Did he know I was here?
“My phone doesn’t even text,” Victor said finally. “Do you see me pushin buttons? I’m just tryin to see the blood so you ain’t gotta turn on the light.”
Whose blood?
“Keep it wrapped up, fool,” Alfonso said, his voice blurred. Was he the one shot?
“I ain’t turning on no light,” Jazen said. “Cops don’t need to see us. Saint Streets got all them old ladies sittin on the porch seen us go by his house like three times. They callin the cops just cause we DWB.”
Driving While Black. In the Saint Streets. Not too far from here.
“At least VP got us some cash,” Alfonso said.
“Not enough,” Jazen said. “Where your uncle stay? The one you stayed with last time you fucked up.”
Uncle? Alfonso didn’t have an uncle.
Alfonso said, “We need gas money to go that far.”
Jazen said, “Close the fuckin phone, nigga.”
Victor said, “You coulda left me at Mr. Thompson’s house.”
“He a teacher. He call the cops in a heartbeat. Close the phone, I ain’t playin.”
His voice was secretive. Afraid. Whose blood? Crumbs. He was leaving me crumbs.
But if Jazen had answered the door at the Villas, what the hell would I have done?
“Cerise,” I said into the phone. “Where does Marcus Thompson live?”
“What? He’s still married, Fantine.”
“I just need to drop something off at his house. From Victor.”
Children’s voices surrounded hers, like a corona of light. “Oh. Yeah, he always hooking up Victor with books and CDs. They live on St. Ignatius.” Then she laughed. “Right down the street from that house where you made me swim with them white girls.”