Los Angeles Noir 2

LUCÍA

BY YXTA MAYA MURRAY

Echo Park

(Originally published in 1997)

Loca friend, you’re all messed up, Girl. What we gonna do? When a woman can’t walk it’s like she ain’t the same kind of woman. You ever seen a girl’s legs when they’re all broke like that? Star Girl, she used to be my pretty chola. She was mean as a shark and she was strong enough to twist and hook a fish as big as me. But I knew she was mine.

“I’m out of it, I ain’t grouping no more,” Star Girl kept saying now, and she had that dead light in her eyes. Almost like the sheep do after they figure things out. No, I didn’t want her different. I wanted my old Girl back.

But I saw what that C-4 did. She showed me after I brought her home from the hospital, and she was quiet and dumb the whole ride home cause of all them pills. I wheeled her into her bedroom so she can get some rest and I helped drag her up. Before she got shot we’d got her all set up special in her own place and she had this princess-pink bed from the Lobo money, a superfancy four-poster. It didn’t look so pretty now, though. You can’t climb under the covers if you don’t got your legs working right.

When I lifted up her shirt she looked down, and her face didn’t tight up with hurt or curl with shame. Nothing. “It ain’t bad, chica, you gonna heal right up,” I kept saying, making like it’s true. I turned the lamp on her naked skin and touched her light like I was her mama. Star Girl had this round thick scar on her back, a twisted tree-stump—looking cut. There’s white shiny skin lines like roots spreading out from where the doctors dug the bullet out. She was broke, all right. Her hands loose in her lap, like she can’t hold on. And I’d seen before how her legs looked smaller because she can’t use them no more, they was only hanging down from that silver wheelchair.

She shook her head again. “I’m out of it for good.”

“You’re out of it when I say so,” I tell her, trying to sound tough as nails. Like I’m still her jefa and she’s got to listen. But she don’t. She only turned her head to the window and rubbed her dry mouth. It’s all over, ésa, is what she’s saying to me. Can’t bring back the dead. Well don’t I know it. She’s looking outside at the blue-black night and what I see is her red eyes and them white cracked lips. There’s dusk colors washing down over her face that ain’t never gonna be the same.

It reminds me of something bad, that’s right. Something I can’t forget even if I close my eyes tight. No, I don’t have no shame, but it don’t matter. I can’t ever shut my eyes tight enough to black it all out.

So I opened them up real wide. I wouldn’t look away. Gonna get them for you, Girl, I thought to myself. You ain’t never known something better than a crazy angry woman, and when I saw her busted up, staring out by the window and the night’s coming down dark over her, something in me went SNAP. You’ve been here before, something tells me. So get loca mad before that monster eats you up.

I started dreaming about that C-4 shooter all night long. His blank face was teasing me and when I wake up, I almost feel his steel-chain hands grip down on my throat. My teeth are chattering like I’m freezing. I can’t even think about the business no more. The only thing in my head is how my Girl’s all broke up.

“You go and kill him, right, Beto?” I asked him. When I got back from seeing Star I wrapped my arms around his neck, trying to kiss his lips and cheeks like the sweetest, nicest sheep he’s ever seen. I made like he’s the prince and cried on him just like a girl so he feels sorry. “You’re gonna make him hurt, eh? Can you do it for me, baby?” I cooed, kissing his hands, his fingers. Acting like a geisha, but I didn’t care a stitch. Inside I was feeling wild and mean and it took all my strength not to bash him on the head. You just DO IT, I wanted to scream in his ear, and my hands was itching and burning from wanting to scratch at his face till he finds me that C-4 killer.

But I couldn’t. He was the boss of the Lobos now after that rumbla. It didn’t matter that it was Chico who came to me, these days Beto was maddogging his ass down the street and all the vatos was watching him. He wasn’t weak yet, like Manny got. The man was still full of fire, and it was gonna burn me bad if I didn’t work him right. “Stop your whining, ésa. Keep it down,” he’d started saying, waving at me with his hand when I’m telling him something. So I had to be more careful since he thinks he’s Mr. Bad. Fine, we’ll play it that way, I’m thinking. I’ll sheep you so hard you’ll walk weak-kneed all day. So Beto did what I want and that slick boy thought he was doing me favors. “Help me out, right?” I asked him again, and then smiled sweet. Yah, I’m thinking inside. You do for me. Tell your fools to drive on down to Edgeware and bring me home a dead man.

“All right, linda,” he said, looking down at me and getting that big-daddy face on. He puts his hands under my shirt where it’s warm and closes his eyes. “I’ll show that vato where I’m from.”

I should of known not to waste my breath. Beto got his homies running around asking questions and trying to get somebody from the eastside to rat out, but that didn’t do me one bit of good. “Eh, ése, you know about the C-4 that tagged a Lobo sheep? You tell me, vato, our little secret.” We didn’t get no names. Whoever tagged my Girl was hiding out where I couldn’t find him.

I got my hopes up when Beto sent these locos Montalvo and Rudy to Edgeware on a first-class mission to get me some answers about who shot my Girl. I sat up all night by my phone waiting to hear something, watching the wallpaper and the carpet and listening to some cricket chirp outside my window. I knew my bad time’s gonna end once I get that call. But you don’t send warriors on a job like that. Montalvo and Rudy was two baby-faced hot-blooded Oaxaca brothers who wore these red shirts and flashed their Lobos sets on the street looking for fights like blockheads so they could make a tough name for themselves in la clika. Instead of asking around cool and careful, they ran down to the Avenida de Asesinos, this dirty alley where the yellow dogs deal their powder. Them two started screaming RIFA and shooting crazy as soon as they see C-4 vatos giving them bad eyes. It’s no good to me. Montalvo got hit with one in the shoulder and came home showing off his emergency-room war wound like he was a hero, and Rudy was maddogging around cause he got so close to the Avenida. But they didn’t find out who that C-4 was.

“You got me a name, right?” I ask them after. I drove on over to where they lived, this cheapie flophouse on Savanna Street full of homeboys sleeping on the floor, flojos snoring on the couches, three tangled in a bed. There’s white paint peeling back from the shutters and these busted windows pieced with electric tape. It was a grouper crash, the place where the vatos go when their mamas yell them out of the house. I walked up and banged on their door early in the morning and didn’t even blink when Montalvo answers it and I see how one of his arms is wrapped up with bandages, a pink stain seeping through. “I know you got me a name, son.”

“Sorry, ésa,” Montalvo says to me. He’s wearing this baglady—looking T-shirt and boxers and I can see all the red on his skin from the Avenida. But under them scrapes he’s giving me icicle eyes to show he don’t care one way or another. “Couldn’t get nothing,” he said, then shrugs.

I knew I was in trouble when he looks at me like that, forgetting who I am. That I’m la primera. Something crawls into my belly then, sitting there cold and making me feel weak and seasick. “You didn’t find nothing because you don’t want to,” is what I say, knowing he thinks I’m just this crazy chavala who’s trying to get payback for a sorry crippled sheep. Montalvo don’t care I got Beto’s ear, one woman’s the same as the next to him. The neighborhood’s quiet with everybody still sleeping and I’m trying to make my voice mean and low, but instead it grows bigger, bending up and stretching like a howl. “You don’t want to,” I tried to say again but then I hear I’m only screaming sounds at him, crying sounds, filling up the streets and the sidewalks and the trees with my sad noise.

Those was some black bad days. I’d look in the mirror sometimes and see this white-faced llorona, with skinny bones sticking out her face and big shiny eyes, like I’m sick. I remind myself how I used to be swinging around here telling locos what to do, not looking like some old ghost. You’ve gotta be that strong chica, I’d whisper to myself, staring at what I see. You didn’t come this far to crack your head up. It don’t matter Star Girl can’t walk none, it don’t hurt you, does it? Sit tight, woman, I’d say, and try to smile. But all my talking didn’t make the bruja in the mirror run off, she just showed me her sharp bad wolf teeth.

A chica like me, she ain’t meant to be crazy. I don’t got time to be weak. I remember when I was a niña, tough as iron even then. Not the baby bandido hiding under the bed. I remember the one watching the world with her smart head and checking out what goes which way. There’s the busboys and slick suits walking in my mami’s house, there’s me standing out in the hall listening. And even when Manny was beating me down, I kept my nose above water. Remember to breathe, that’s what I do best. Breathe and keep living. So I didn’t know why I was going all loose now. It seemed like I couldn’t keep myself together no matter how hard I tried.

The only thing that made me feel strong was playing payback big. And I did it till it hurt.

“You all right, Lucía?” Chique asked me after I screamed crazy at Montalvo. I hadn’t been right in the head for a while there, shivering and talking to myself, hiding out in my house. I knew she was checking up on me. “What’s up, girl?” she said, standing over by the refri in her shiny black boots and mall-girl clothes and staring at my face like she sees something crazy there, like she sees my llorona. But she ain’t stupid. She didn’t try and touch me light on the arm, or tell me things are okay. She knew me good enough by then.

Back when Star Girl was walking, Chique knew she was always my second. I didn’t hide that I loved Star special. I’d give her the lookout jobs and made her the main picker, the big dealer. But Chique was my right hand now. She was the one doing the lookouts and keeping her ear to the ground for me just like Star Girl used to. Girl didn’t even wanna see me no more. Every day she’s not walking she just got harder and meaner, but not like before. This was the hard you get when you lose something. She’d told me that she didn’t want nothing more to do with la clika. “I paid enough, you see that,” she’d said, turning her head up at me from her chair so I see that pale mouth, her stringy hair. She didn’t even wanna get the C-4 who banged her. “It ain’t gonna make me walk now, is it?” She wheeled herself around her place, her squeakysounding chair moving over the carpet. I thought, Give Girl time, give her time. We’re gonna patch things up right.

Chique fit herself right into that empty space. She snugged herself by my side after the rumbla and acted like she’d always been my main gangster. And being a big head these days suited Chique good, I could tell that, turning my eyes from my wall and seeing her stand in my kitchen door waiting to hear what I’ve got to say. She just wanted to crawl up on top same as any other gangbanger, and with Star Girl gone she’d got this new shine in her eye. She’d permed her hair out curly and started wearing this butter-soft black leather jacket, a skin-tight skirt. Her skin glowed out like warm satin, and even though she was still pig-slop fat she was wearing it better, shifting her heavy ass back and forth down the street so you’d turn and look. The woman was even making sexy eyes at some of the vatos and acting tough with the sheep. She still had her head on straight, though. That girl could tell there was something up with me.

But she didn’t have to worry about me too hard. I’m a woman who’s always gonna keep standing strong. After all them days looking crazy at myself in the mirror, staring at my walls and my floors, I’d made up my mind. I already knew how I was gonna get my C-4. And having that plan set into me pushed up my bones, it put a shield in my hands. I was almost feeling good and scrappy again now that I knew what I was gonna do.

“So. Lucía. You all right?” Chique said again. She was staring at me patient.

“Just fine, ésa,” I told her, flashing out a grin. “You go on and get me some Garfield babies and I’ll be doing even better.”

It all comes down to Garfield, that’s where we fought our war. Garfield’s full of mainly westside Parker kids cause it’s on our side of the line but some of your C-4 babies go there too. Just walk around and look through the chain-link fence sometime. You’ll see them little niños from both sides playing recess ball and laughing on the playground, stomping the flat black asphalt and screaming down from the bars like little monkeys. They’re too young yet to know they can’t be friends, but I’m changing that. All over the school walls there’s Lobo and C-4 tags now, these big black and yellow sets tangled together and warring out over who’s the main clika. It used to be that Garfield’s nothing but a money bag for me, I’d look through the fence and only see curious-cat junior high schoolers with a little pocket change. Now Garfield looked lots different. I knew if I got them greenhorns to go with the Lobos, we’d get so big nobody could hide from me. Not even that blank-faced C-4 boy.

If you wanna take over a place, you’ve got to piss all over it. And the first thing we did is fuck with Chico’s head by crossing out all the C-4 tags and get a graffiti war started. Warming up. It was too easy, almost. We got the finest taggers here in the Lobos.

In the clikas, you got your warriors and you got your taggers. Taggers are usually third-raters cause they’re the little bow-legged stubby locos that can’t fight good. They got spray cans instead of pistols and go on their midnight tagging missions like they’re ninjas. A Lobo tagger will paint our set up on the buildings, on the storefronts, on the stop signs, so that everybody knows who we are. You’ve seen it. ECHO PARK! in thick black blocky letters ten feet high blasting on down from the freeway signs. Our taggers have got their names painted proud all over town, and that’s their black zebra stripes crossing out the lemon yellow C-4 tags on the walls. Around here, crossing out a homeboy’s set is serious business. If a gangster walks by and sees your big old black line drawn through his name, he’s gonna start hunting for you. He has to do something or else he loses face. Getting crossed out means somebody’s slamming on your manhood. And rebels think that if they don’t got their respect, they don’t got nothing else either.

Well, that never used to matter to me none. That was all scratching and crowing, a waste of my time. “See how many tags I got, homes?” the tagger vatos would say to each other, and there’d be red and black and blue all over their hands. “I got me twenty-three last night, ése. I’m doing firme, you know what I’m saying.” Stupid roosters. What did I care about that? The only thing that matters to me is money and my ladies. But I can play these boy games if I need to. The rules are real simple. You got to tag your territory or else it ain’t really yours.

“Go out to Garfield and cross out all the C-4 you can see, eh?” Beto told the vatos, with me standing behind him quiet. Now that Hoyo was dead—there’s this big rip hoyo tag up by the 101—the main Lobo taggers was Tiko and Dreamer. Tiko, he knew how to butcher streets ugly by running down the sidewalk with his thumb on the spray-gun trigger. Dreamer, though, he’s the best tagger in L.A. The number-one paint boy. A short dude, with this jailbird buzz cut and a slow buffalo walk, but he had these mile-a-minute hands. He was so fast with his can that even the cops knew his name. He’d tagged every big wall between here and Edgeware three times already.

Those two tagger boys started crossing out C-4 sets regular. They’d do it at night, dressing in black jeans and sweater, black cotton cap on to cover up. Dreamer would lead, and him and Tiko would sneak on down to Garfield quiet and careful with their black backpack full of cans, scope out all the C-4 sets, and then cross them out with a long black line and write up LOBOS after. They sprayed the whole school as black and red as a ladybug, and after a couple nights of missions there wasn’t an inch of yellow anywhere in sight.

We had some bad rumblas then. The taggers was dog-fighting bloody over walls and right-hand vatos from both sides was circling Garfield, not even doing coke deals now but trying to jump in the junior high babies. “Hey, ése, you come over here a minute?” Gangsters would run on down after school’s over and all the niños was walking home dressed in their sweaters and white scuffy sneakers. “You with us now, hear it?” the vatos would say, slapping them around a little. Most of them little boys would try and tough it out, but sometimes they’d be crying and looking around scared with their mouths hanging open. It didn’t matter. Either way they swore they’d go with whatever clika was beating them.

Even I started to get some grouping done. About a month after Star Girl got shot, me and Chique went down to Garfield with Beto’s boys looking for a couple of fresh-meat chicas to rough. Now that Girl was gone it was just the two of us, and I wanted a whole crowd of cholas under my feet. I wouldn’t set my sights on just one or two. I’d get myself a dozen, twenty, and they’d all be scrappy and mean-hearted. Not at first, mind you. I wouldn’t expect nothing of them pigeon-toes at first except some bawling and thumb sucking. But after I got through with them they’d be as tough as leather.

“Hey, cholita, pretty girl, you come right on over here, wanna talk to you,” Chique was calling out to the sixth graders, watching out for a good one. My old homegirl Chique, she was the best jumper I ever saw. She cornered this little thing with a swingy ponytail who was walking home, later we called her Conejo because she was a round-faced bunnyrabbit-looking girl, her nose and eyes getting all pink. “Yah, I’m talking to you, ésa,” Chique hissed at her, getting in her way on the sidewalk and then reaching down and grabbing her skinny arm. “You’re a Lobo now, ain’t you?”

“No, I ain’t nothing,” I heard Conejo tell Chique, making up this street voice, but she knew it wasn’t no use.

I was standing right there in front of them and giving Chique my proud eyes, but in my head I saw how it was when I jumped in Star Girl. How we’d been warm and laughing there on the cold grass after, looking at the sky and feeling like familia.

“Yah, chica, you is,” I heard Chique saying now, her breath coming up fast.

I looked off, over where a couple Lobos was messing with the little Garfield boys. They was the same as us, crowding and pushing and buzzing around like hornets. I could make out Rudy and Montalvo twisting around some scrubby-headed niño and Beto laughing at them on the side. Chevy was standing around with his hand in his pocket and hooting, “Chavala!” Even Dreamer was there, with his black shades on and arms crossed in front like a big head now that he’d done all them tough tagging jobs. And far out, outside them, there was my old tired man. He was peeking his head over the vatos and then sloping back and watching them quiet same as me. Oh yah, that’s good, I’m thinking. I see you, Manny. Loser boy. And looking at him then, it seemed like so long since everything. Wacha me, right? I got what I wanted. Here’s me jumping in a chola and there’s him, way gone.

I’d heard that Manny was crawling around here already, that he’d started walking the junkie streets just a few months after the rumbla even though he’d got hurt so bad. I have to say he’d healed up pretty quick, cause he looked almost as strong as he used to even though you could still see how his shoulder was bent in and hunched some from Beto’s knife. It almost made me sorry to see him outside, cause I know how cold that life is. He’s got this sheepdog face on like he wants to help out with the Lobo jumping, but the vatos was turning their eyes from him and butting up their shoulders so he can’t squeeze on in the circle. The homeboy looked poor too. He was wearing this raggedy old shirt and black wool cap pulled down to his eyes. I heard he was sometimes crashing at Chevy’s and making his ends by doing little stickups at liquor stores, pushing his guns in them bodega ladies’ faces the same as any old third-rater’s gonna do. I knew he was hoping like hell to get back on in with la clika, that’s why he’s standing over there like a scarecrow. But it couldn’t happen. Once you’ve been a jefe, that’s it. You get a stink on you.

“Why don’t you just head your ass on home, ése?” I screamed at him over the sound of Chique banging Conejo around, and the little one’s crying now. “Go on back to your mama!”

I don’t know if he heard me. Maybe he turned his eyes over my way to see me standing over my cholas and watching him hard. Maybe he don’t wanna see me cause he knows he’s just a beggar-looking Mexican wearing hobo clothes now. All I’m thinking is, Things sure are different, son, and I almost get softhearted there remembering how he used to be. But it don’t last. When I’m listening to them jumping sounds I start seeing that same picture again, there’s Star Girl on the grass, smiling up at me with the fog of her breath twining up in the night air with mine. And then there’s that woman sitting in her chair, and I see again how the dark sky’s coming. Yah, things are different now, I think on over to him again, but colder.

I turned back to look at Chique doing her work. “Beat her good if you have to,” I tell her. “Cause this little chola ain’t going nowhere.”

The Lobos grew bigger and spilled over with all of that new junior high blood. Soon we had almost double the number of vatos scamming the streets and fighting any C-4 they lay eyes on. Beto was strutting around with his bluffy big talk and his hitman swagger, but instead of a fedora he’d wear a Stetson. “You know you chose good,” he’d say, making a muscle and then trying to give me his weak-mouthed French kiss. Well baby, either way it don’t matter, I’d think on back to him. You could be anybody. You’re worse than anybody. With me too busy dreaming on the C-4’s blank face and with Beto playing king, the Lobo business had shrunk up and almost died. Now that Manny was gone Mario wasn’t coming by no more, and the locals had heard we’d run out of supplies. But so what. I’ll deal with that thing later, I told myself. I still had my own job to finish.

I’d got together a whole posse of chicas by then. I called them my Fire Girls. Hey, you’re on fire now, girl, I’d tell them after they got jumped in and they’d look over at me with their wet eyes and scuffed-up faces then try and give me a smile. We got that Conejo, she was a big crybaby at first, a second-generation Sunday school chavala chewing on her nails and running home, but she warmed up quick enough once I showed her how good gangbanging can be. After that we snatched Payasa. I named her that cause she’s clown funny with some big curly Bozo hair. And then Sleepy, this heavy-lidded cholita, and Linda and Thumper, these two sisters from Jalisco. Thumper banged her leg on the chair when she’s happy and Linda didn’t want no new clika name, so we let her stay the way she was. That was us, the Fire Girls. They was only twelve and thirteen years old but you want them young ones cause they can be the meanest. You just gotta kick that girlie out of them. It ain’t so hard, once you scratch their dresses off and give them baggies and lipstick and taks, they take to it real nice.

A woman’s clika does it different than the men. And not how you’d think, neither. I don’t got no pink-dress lunch club, there ain’t no softies in my gang. After we jump in a chica, she acts as wicked as a snake. She’ll take on a vato if we tell her to, smack him right over the head with a lead pipe if that’s what I want. No, a woman gang’s different than a man’s cause women need more love. The locos swing around Echo Park thinking they don’t need nothing. They’ve got their clika brothers, right, but a man can just stand alone if he’s got to. My girls, they’re looking at me for something they don’t got at home. Their daddies are whoring around and Mama’s crying in the closet or wiping up the kitchen sink and gritando ugly if their niña misses a confession. Everybody’s looking at the brother like he’s the man of the house and who cares about little sister? Well, I do, I tell them. I’m gonna care for you good, girl, you’ll be special here. You should see them open up, a woman’s gonna bloom like a cut rose in water if you talk to her special. And once you hook a chica like that, she’ll throw down worse than any man you’ll ever know. They can be some vicious kick-ass bitches if you work them right.

That’s why just after we’d jump them in by beating them down on the street and calling out, Take it bitch, I’d change from a wolf to a kitten so fast that all their hurt and scared would crumple right into my hands. “We’re your familia now, ésa,” I’d tell my little girls, touching them soft on their shoulder like I’m their mama. “And you ain’t never gonna be a sheep, all right? Now you’re acting like you got some respeto. Don’t forget it. I take care of my own, you hear that.”

I’d say all the right words that they wanted to hear and then they’d look up at me with their flashlight faces, those sunny smiles, but I didn’t feel their heat. I was saying the same things I told Star Girl and Chique all that time ago, but now I was talking through a cold wind. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get that feeling like before, like when I was just a little loca myself, jumped in and brand new under them stars.

But you do what you do. Me and Chique got them started off picking pockets on the downtown streets at six o’clock when all the businessmen are walking home fast and hungry for dinner. Conejo and Linda would bump the gabachos and Sleepy and Thumper would dig down and snatch the wallets then come running back home to me flashing dollar bills. I even got my own big head meetings going, with Chique standing right by my side and my Fire Girls bringing me the money then sitting down in my living room. Hushed, watching me. They was listening to everything I’d say, lined up in a row and looking like sparrows waiting on a wire. “Do it like this, ésas,” I’d tell them, showing them how to flick open a zipper on Chique. It almost made me feel like my old self, cause I could tell I hadn’t lost my touch.

But the main job I had for my girls was for them to keep their eyes wide, their ears open. They was my lookouts. I had them scooting around the westside and even the sidelines of Edgeware and Crosby, watching out and listening hard for anything I might wanna hear. “Check out for the C-4, eh?” I told them. “You keep quiet and you’ll hear some loco bragging sooner or later.” Those girls was perfect spies cause they get dark in the shadows, go green around grass. They’re invisible to men. If a chica stands around quiet long enough, a man just forgets her. He’ll let forty cats out of their bags before he turns around and sees her watching him, her ears as big as jugs.

Well. Maybe. Even though I had them chicas, it still took me months before I got my payback. That C-4 hid out from me so tricky that even with my girls poking around after him night and day all I got was ghost stories, nothing I could sink my teeth into.

“Hear he’s some C-4 big head, way up top,” Thumper told me, hooking her thumbs in her pockets and poking her beak out at me. Or there’s Linda, kicking the sidewalk with her sneaker and not looking me in my eye. “Lupe told me he was some C-4 vatito who moved away, jefa. Back to Arizona or something.”

No, it took me months. My babies was coming back home with rumors and empty hands, and that blank-face C-4 was just teasing me with a sawtooth smile. I was dreaming about him every night then, his shadow creeping over the park, the sounds of the shot ringing, the feel of that cold wet grass over and over and the yells and screams of the rumbla while I’m racing away with wings on my feet. And Star Girl with her white cheeks out on the bench, her dry mouth like a pale flower and her eyes staring out the window. It almost got me shook up again, cause things wasn’t fixing fast like I needed. Chasing that vato made my blood thin and my eyes cloud over, and that llorona started fighting me down harder than before. She’d raise up in me bigger and blacker and grin out from the mirror on late nights when I couldn’t sleep good. I wanted that C-4 boy so bad I could taste it bitter on my tongue.

So when my Fire Girls told me they can’t find nothing, when they’d scrape their shoes on the street and mumble into their hands, it got real hard to stay still. It got almost more than this chica could take. I’d pull out my pack and light up a Marlboro nice and slow, breathing in that black smoke deep to keep my hands from shaking the same as two leaves, to keep them from reaching out at my girls like biting snakes. Watch it, woman, I tell myself inside. Keep it cool.

“I don’t wanna hear that,” I’d say, slitting my eyes at them, my voice getting dark like the dusk before a bad fight. “You find him, eh? You go on out there and find out who my man is.”

But a woman don’t die from waiting. I’ve looked enough at the viejas around here to learn a lesson or two about long life. You’ve got to sit down on your ass sometimes and let the devil wander your way. And that’s when you catch him. When he ain’t looking.

I got my payback in the chilly autumn after a long hot summer of Lobos and Bomber rumblas. The enemies was busy hoofing up and down their turf and naming their streets, and the drivebys got random and cold blooded, even worse than before. The locals started hiding in their houses behind window bars and double-bolt locks, so the streets emptied and the air cleared of most everything except for the sounds of racing cars and shootouts and the once-in-a-while crying of a siren. Beto was getting himself a vato loco name even down in East L.A. from all the craziness, and I was grouping big too. Me and Chique and my Fire Girls jumped in five new fresh babies that winter, and they kept me rolling in pickpocket money and gossip news. Still. It seemed like my C-4 was gonna get the better of me, the better of my Star Girl. The Lobos and my cholas never stopped crawling around the Park and trying to sniff him out, but for a while there it looked like he’d hid out too good for even this mean perra.

I never forgot him for one day, though. I let all that fire-and-brimstone feeling sink down deep inside of me, so I’m swimming in it. I was looking up at the sky from the bottom of a lake, through all this black water. And it got so that I could see that llorona in the mirror and not feel scared no more, even if she jumps out and tears me with them wicked teeth. Well, chingado. I’m the one biting bloody now.

It was a cold California Saturday, the kind when there ain’t no rain or no clouds but the air’s sharp blades sticking you when you’re outside, that they saw what I could do. Don’t you mess with me or my own, I showed them. Cause you won’t wanna pay my price. I can hurt you in the soft little place you didn’t even know you had.

I remember every minute like it was yesterday. It’s a late foggy morning and I’m trying to cool out by kicking my feet up on my table and rolling Marlboro smoke rings off my tongue like Dolores Del Rio. I’m all alone just the way I like it. I don’t got to make nice to no jefe or landlord over chicas. I had a spell to sit there thinking my own thoughts. It was peaceful almost, a cigarette in my fingers and time on my hands, listening to the leaves rustle outside my window and the far-off holler of morning TV, but it don’t last. I’m not dreaming there ten minutes when I get jangled by these vatos who start screaming down the street.

Hey man! I hear them outside. Órale! some loco yells, and it sounds like he’s real close by. Their noise makes me sit up straight and bend my ear so I can hear better. Chique rushes me then, banging down my door with her two fists like the war’s coming. “This better be good,” I say when I open up, and she’s standing there looking chistosa, her permed hair funky twisted from the wind and her big red lips yelling at me how we got to go down to Garfield now, that she found out my shooter man.

“Some Lobos got his baby brother Mauricio down at the school, Lucía,” Chique tells me. I feel her hot breath on my skin and even though it’s so cold her face is sweaty, but then I can’t feel or see nothing. What she say? Baby brother. Baby brother, I keep thinking it over in my head. I know that name. I used to know it.

“All right, ésa, check it,” she says, and it’s like she’s trying not to jump out her own skin. “Montalvo caught this little C-4 tagger crossing out Lobo sets at Garfield and when he gets to beating on him, the baby starts going on how the Lobos better watch it cause he’s Chico’s brother, and how Chico will kill all of us, that kind of shit. ‘He’ll kill you and your women,’ he says. Like that one he took out at the rumbla. The one he shot in the back.

It takes me a minute, but then it hits me solid in the chest. The vato that started the whole thing finished it too. “We’re gonna talk straight up, Lucía. I hear there ain’t no other Lobo who’s got it together.” That’s what he told me through the crack in my door and I felt full of spice and flame when he said them words. Then he’s fighting Manny at the rumbla and after Beto takes over you couldn’t see nothing but arms and legs bending and the blur of faces. There was the sounds of guns popping and the pounding of the Bombers running up by the benches and so I’d raced off, leaving my Star Girl to try and kill the loco that took out her Ghost man, her with them weak hands she had and she couldn’t hold the gun right, but Chico don’t show her no mercy. He just walks up while her back’s turned and puts a clip right in her spine.

“How you hear this?” I ask Chique, filling out that C-4 blank face in my head. Halfie fuck. Greaser rubia hair like a girl, pinkie skin that can’t take no sun. You’re a strung-out white boy can’t do your fights fair, eh? Can’t walk away like a man. Got to go and bang on my chola cause you can’t hold tight. Old Chico. That’s the vato I’ve been dreaming about, and I know him too good. I knew you when, boy. When you was nothing. “How you hear?” I say again, but mostly so I hear my own voice out loud. I’m standing there in my doorway but it feels like my heart ain’t even beating.

“Girl, you’re gonna be the last Lobo to find out,” Chique says, pulling my arm and making me get in my car. “I guess there was some homeboys around and word’s spreading in the neighborhood like wildfire.”

When I got there, after screaming on over to the school like a dragracer and jamming on all the reds, I looked around to see what my battle was gonna be. I’d have to be careful, cause once a man goes down in this neighborhood it seems like everybody hears electric fast at the same time, and I knew the C-4s would be racing over here to help out their jefe’s baby brother as soon as they got wind. “Good thing, eh?” I said to Chique when we set foot on asphalt, eyeballing the playground for any badasses. But I didn’t see any Bomber locos yet. There’s just a crowd of Lobos far off, standing in a circle and looking down. Montalvo, Rudy, Madball, Dreamer. I see some of them have red warrior bandannas sticking out their pockets like blood roses, but now they look as still and timid as schoolteachers. And there’s some sheep on the sidelines, keeping their mouths shut but playing nervous with that fried hair of theirs. I even see Manny waiting on the outside as usual and wearing his loser hangdog face.

I can’t make out what they’ve got there. I figure it’s that Mauricio beat up bad on the ground cause they ain’t kicking or laughing at nothing, only keeping their shaved heads bent. Watching. It’s quiet as a cloud. There’s still a little baby blue morning color in the sky so nobody’s out yet, and you can’t hear a peep coming from the vatos. Nothing was coming from baby brother neither.

More Lobos show when I start walking up to that little circle. Beto comes around, and I see Chevy and Wanda driving up. Rocky and Tiko and Popeye are coming through the gate behind me. Even Cecilia’s racing on in and beelining for Manny. “It’s gonna be hot, ésa,” Chique’s saying next to me, and my heart starts steamrolling cause I know I’m gonna get that C-4 back after all this time.

“What you homeboys up to, eh?” I say, my voice breezy. I’m making my way up there slow the same as a big head would instead of running and flapping my hands like a henpecking woman, and I’m still keeping a lookout for any sign of C-4. “What up?” I ask again but nobody’s talking. I don’t get one sign from them till I get real close and then Dreamer looks up at me, and he don’t have no buffalo to him right then. He’s wearing this face as ragged and thin as worn cotton, and from the pinch of his eyes I see how he’s fighting down shame.

I push them open and see this red-colored beat-up kid bent up double on the ground like babies do in their mamas’ bellies. His shirt’s scraped off, his arm’s twisted the wrong way, and there’s that yellow tagging paint on his open hands, capping his fingers. I can’t make out his face, but that vatito looked right, dark like I remembered, and he wasn’t more than nine or ten even though his head’s half buzzed clika style and he’s got a Bomber tak scratched on his bony boy chest. He looked like Chico’s. But he’d took it bad. From what I can see of his skin, already blue and purple in places, there’s some stripe cuts bleeding down his ribs and slashing up his neck and face. I know them marks. He got them from getting kicked when he was already flat down. This puppyboy was whipped worse than any full-sized loco I’d ever seen except for old dead Ghost, but he still was breathing. I see his lips flutter up like they’d caught a breeze.

“This the baby brother?” I ask, and I see Manny standing behind them begging at me with his glassy eyes as big as mirrors, asking me can he have a piece.

Montalvo nods his head, looking at me careful but not like before when he was thinking I’m some bird-brained nobody screaming on his front steps. Now he’s scared he ’s the crazy Mexican cause he’d beat some empty-handed tagger baby near dead. “Yah, he was yelling something about Chico shooting off a sheep at the rumbla.”

“What’s that?” Beto’d caught up by then and the homeboys stepped aside easy, but when he sees Chico’s boy he shuts right down. He leans back on his heels and whistles low while the homies watched him careful to see what he’s gonna do. But he didn’t do nothing but keep standing there as dumb and fix-eyed as a cow, and they started coughing and twitching their heads around nervous.

“All right éses, looks like you done real good,” I start saying, keeping that voice of mine nice and light.

I could tell they was getting weak on me there, that they was gonna curl up the same as that boy on the ground if I didn’t make my move. But it don’t surprise me none they can’t take it. Like I said before, clikas used to have rules. We used to have some religion. Time was, the locos had to leave the pride-and-joy women and babies alone and keep the fighting to themselves. But not no more. Chico broke up my Girl and left her with that tree stump cutting her back open, the white shiny roots stretching down to her loose legs. My homeboys was staring at that C-4 baby like they don’t wanna know what their own monster hands can do, but I can look it straight in the face any damn day then swallow it down and smile. Baby brother there with the eyes beat shut ain’t gonna ruffle my feathers. He had it coming.

All of a sudden the light flickers and it looks like his eyes was gonna open, or that his mouth’s twitching like a smile, and I think he’s gonna sit right up and laugh at me the same as old Lazarus. But it wasn’t nothing but a shadow falling on his bent-up self. It flashed in my head then how Manny and me used to be the same, rock sharp and strong all the way through down to the bones, I remembered that when Manny moved quick by me and I hear his breath close to my ear and he blocks the sun from the baby on the ground. Manny was switching his hands up like he was gonna do something, gonna grab hold of that boy and beat him worse to show me he could still sing for his supper, but when I turn and look at him I see he don’t have his old hot stare or the same steel jaw sticking at me prideful. He’s only some burn-out veterano now, with a skinny face and glassed-out carga eyes, wearing that wool cap pulled low and some ripped-up dumpster pants. He’s not the same vato I used to know. With his mashed arm Manny couldn’t give a good featherweight punch these days even to save his own skin.

“Yah, you vatos done a real nice job here, but we better scoot off, hear me?” I say, pushing Manny soft with my hand, and he gave easy, backing down like a hit dog, and Beto’s vatos close around me again.

I know it for sure then. Nobody, nobody can tough it out like this chica can. I see past Manny how the sheep was looking over at me scandalous and making their tight mouths like I’m this empty-bellied bruja. Some even got muddy crocodile tears running down their faces from crying over the little C-4. Cecilia’s staring at me wicked out of that dirt-colored face of hers, thinking I’m some baby-eating witch who’s stealing up her brother. And my homeboys was circling me, their lips pulling sad like they’re some viejas at a funeral.

“Órale. Looks like he’s hurt bad,” Beto says, bending down and poking the brother with his finger, but the thing down by my shoes wasn’t moving an inch.

“Well fuck him then. Got it?” I start up, steel-tough sounding now and Beto gives me some cold-water eyes, the same as Manny got when he figured me out, but I don’t care. They can see me all they like cause I can tell we’re all gonna be standing around here like lazy brains when the C-4 bigs get here, and they’re gonna give us an eye for an eye cause it looks like we killed one of their babies. “Let’s GO, they’re coming quick, you hear that?” I’m yelling at them now, that llorona bumping up in me big. It feels dark and windy when I watch them walk away from the brother in slow motion, dragging their heels even though this is for my Girl, this is our payback, leaving a half-dead C-4 baby twisted on the ground like my Star Girl on the grass waiting for la chota to bring her back to Kaiser. The Bombers can’t just bang a Lobo woman and get off scot-free. This is the one thing that’s gonna make us equal.

“Come ON,” I say, hitting Beto hard in the arm so that he wakes up, and we scattered on out of there. I ran as fast as the vatos with the air cold on my cheeks, hearing the sheep crying behind me and leaving that busted brother with all the life bleeding out of him for Chico to find. I got this blast of heat that was singing through my arms and legs and making me feel like my old self again, knowing that soon he’d see his pride-and-joy C-4 baby and put his red wet face in his hands cause I hurt him so bad, the same as he hurt me.

I didn’t care about nothing then when I was pounding my way back. I wasn’t thinking about Chique or the Lobos or doing deals or even Star Girl with that dark sky over her face. I only felt cut loose and fire-hot inside, thinking how I’m the only one in this town who can do it. Wáchale, man! I felt that steering wheel tight in my hand and I was gunning my Maverick down the street, laughing loud as a banshee the whole way home cause I knew it. Check it on out. Nothing’s keeping this chola down. I’m the only woman or man in this place, the only one in Echo Park, who can scratch on up to the top and stay there.

“Lucía” is an excerpt from the novel Locas (Grove Press, 1997).