Los Angeles Noir

THE GIRL WHO KISSED BARNABY JONESBY SCOTT PHILLIPS

Pacific Palisades

It’s 2:30 in the morning and I’m all alone closing down Burberry’s when my cell goes off. The caller ID says it’s Cherie, which probably means a conflict with tomorrow’s schedule, but I pick up anyway.

“Hi, Tate. I need you to help me out with something.”

“Right now?”

“Are you almost done closing?”

“Fifteen minutes.”

“Can you come out to Pacific Palisades when you’re done?”

“I guess so.” I live in Koreatown, so the Palisades is miles out of my way; like half the guys who walk into Burberry’s, though, I have a great big boner with Cherie’s name on it, and if she asked me to shovel shit I’d ask her how fast she needed it shoveled. “Where, exactly?”

She gives me an address in the highlands accompanied by minutely detailed instructions, including a warning to park at the base of the street. I rush through the rest of the closing process and on the way out buy a package of condoms from the machine in the men’s room, dropping an extra fifty cents for the strawberry-flavored ones. When I set the alarm my hands are cold with sweat, and pressing a finger to my wrist I clock my pulse at eighty. Thirty-four years old and I feel like a teenager heading to the prom with a diabolical cross between the homecoming queen and a middle-aged hooker.

It broke a hundred in the Valley today for the fifth day in a row, but the night air is cool and quiet. I pull my old Saturn onto the westbound 101, so nearly deserted at a quarter to 3:00 that I hate to merge onto the 405 after a mere three exits. The 405 is even better, though, ten lanes of empty, untrammeled joy; I’ve had flying dreams that were less spiritually nourishing, and I’m not even speeding. Well before 3:00 I’m headed west on Sunset toward the Palisades, window rolled down for the breeze on my neck and bare arms.

The shops and restaurants of the village are dark as I pass through, the only moving vehicle in sight an LAPD cruiser that crosses in front of me just before my right turn onto Via de la Paz. At the crest, the cruiser turns left and I turn right, taking it slow, careful not to miss any of the indicated streets. The house is at the top of a nearly vertical, circular one, and when I park the Saturn at the bottom I make sure the hand brake is on and the wheels turned out.

Cherie is the ur-cocktail waitress, tall and leggy with hair dyed blond, hanging straight with an inward flip just below her jawline, and looking at her face and body you wouldn’t take her for more than forty.

In which case you’d be wrong. She came to L.A. from East Lansing, Michigan to be an actress back in the ’70s. Knowing that, you might take her for the embodiment of a cliché-prettiest girl in some provincial town comes to L.A. with dreams of stardom, never gets a part, ends up bitter and old, taking drink orders in the Valley-but here again you’d be wrong: Cherie did make it for a while. On cable you can still catch her in old episodes of Starsky and Hutch and Barnaby Jones, and at least one Columbo (in which she plays-unconvincingly-a cocktail waitress). Once in my presence she made the unlikely claim that she was the producers’ first choice for the Linda Evans part in Dynasty, and Dean Berg, who tends bar in the afternoons, swears she did an episode of the original Star Trek. While we all cherished the thought of her in one of those short red uniforms with the leather boots, when he repeated the claim in front of her, she busted a gasket and said she didn’t even come out here until years after the show went off the air. When Cherie’s annoyed she clenches her teeth, and she’s spent so much of her life in a state of annoyance that the muscles lining her cheeks actually bulge outward. Her jaw didn’t unlock for three days after that.

We get guys all the time with crushes on her, some of them very young; they come in on a daily basis for months sometimes before they accept the fact that she’s never going to respond to their devotion, and lots of them keep coming even after that, just to pine. She’s worked at Burberry’s since at least ’91, long after the end of her acting career. What she did in the meantime is a mystery, but according to Dean she lived for a while with Lyle Hobart, one of the owners. Lyle is married these days to a former Playmate of the Month who doesn’t let him set foot in Burberry’s without her, so terrified is she of Cherie’s lingering influence on her weak-willed husband. Her fears aren’t misplaced; it’s due only to Lyle’s protection that she’s still employed. I’ve been at Burberry’s since my divorce, a year ago, and she’s the most unreliable waitress I’ve worked with in ten years of on-and-off bartending: noshows, bad arithmetic, ignored customers, the whole roster of waitressing sins. Her looks, combined with a certain flirtatious affability, have kept me-have kept the entire male portion of the staff-from turning on her, but the other waitresses loathe her, and she wouldn’t last a week anywhere else.

The house is at the summit, the street curving downward in either direction away from it. The front door is locked, the windows all dark, so I double-check the address before ringing the bell. From the outside it looks modest, but in this neighborhood at this altitude facing seaward you’d be looking at a couple million dollars’ worth of bungalow. When the door finally opens it’s Cherie, and she greets me with a finger to her lips.

“Hey, Cherie,” I say.

“Shut the fuck up,” she hisses, beckoning me inside.

It’s completely dark, and she takes my hand and leads me down a staircase into what turns out to be an enormous living room with a panoramic view of the Pacific. There’s another staircase leading down, and outside I can see more house going down the hill, and I understand that this is one of those four-story houses that you enter through the insignificant-looking top floor. I try to revise my estimate of the house’s worth and fail. This is one of those places you read about on the front page of the Times’ real estate supplement, the part Harry Shearer reads aloud on the radio Sunday morning. For the first time I begin to feel uneasy about what Cherie might be doing here.

She’s in her uniform, and she sidles up to me and slops her mouth onto mine. Up close she smells like cigarettes and perfume and wine, and her mouth doesn’t taste half bad, considering.

I pull away, determined to find out while I still can exactly what I’m buying into. “So what’s the favor, Cherie?”

“The favor is I’m horny, stud, and I want to make it with you.” One of Cherie’s more endearing traits is a tendency toward ’70s slang that dates her in ways her face and body fail to.

“Just all of a sudden out of nowhere?”

“All of a sudden I got this great housesitting gig and I thought it was sad to be staying in a beautiful pad like this without a lover to share it with.”

This is the first I’ve heard about any such job, and just as I’m thinking, Who in God’s name would be fucked up enough to hire Cherie as a housesitter? I find myself distracted by how nice her tits feel pressing against my rib cage, and the sensation of her tongue in my mouth is having its own clouding effect on my wits.

“You’ve never shown any interest before.”

“Oh, but I’ve been thinking about it, big boy. I see the way you watch me. Parts of me. You want a glass of wine?”

“No thanks.”

“Meth?”

I shake my head no and she takes me by the hand down the other staircase and down a hallway to a magnificent bedroom, and for the first time since I got there she turns on a light, a bedside lamp. The bed is made, the walls covered with framed gold records and what looks like dark red velvet. In the light I give her a careful up-and-down appraisal and find that she looks very, very nice indeed, down to the one nonregulation item in her uniform: a pair of black high-heeled shoes, the kind that would kill her on an eight-hour shift.

“You want to get naked, or are you one of those guys who gets turned on by the uniform?” she asks, and by way of an answer I jump her.

In three and a half minutes it’s over, which embarrasses me but seems to be fine by Cherie. Cheerfully she doffs the remainder of her uniform and heads for the bathroom, and while she’s in there I wander to the wall to take a look at one of the gold records. To my surprise I know not only the record but the guy who produced it, Gary Hinshaw. Gary is the nicest famous person I’ve ever met; he used to hang around the bar when I worked at Chez Kiki, and he switched allegiances when they fired me and I moved over to Burberry’s. This was a serious step downward in the hierarchy of Valley restaurants, so it was encouraging to have a friendly face following me to the new job, especially one who quickly endeared himself to the rest of the staff as a talented raconteur and prodigious tipper. The funny part is, I didn’t even know what Gary did for a living until Dean told me one day.

“He’s a record producer. You never heard of him?”

“I guess I’ve heard his name. I knew he did something in the music business.”

“Starting in the early ’60s. You ever hear of the Carlottas? The Essentials? Jesus, you kids have no sense of musical history.” Then he went on to name some later groups, a few of whose records I remembered fondly from high school, and I was finally impressed. This also cleared up the question of how, even in L.A., even with money, a guy who looked like Gary had such a way with women. When a 350-pound man with hairplugs and a nose like a yam walks in with a different stunning woman every other week, the temptation is to think call girls, but they didn’t strike me that way. Several of them became regulars at Chez Kiki in their own right, and from what I could see they mostly stayed friendly with Gary once he’d moved on to fresher game.

Gary hasn’t ever brought any of those women into Burberry’s; I had assumed that this was because it wasn’t the kind of place you could bring the kind of woman you might take to Chez Kiki. Now that I think of it, though, one of the prime beneficiaries of his largesse has been Cherie, and it becomes suddenly obvious to me that he’s one of the abject worshippers. The housesitting gig makes sense now, and I ever so briefly feel ever so slightly bad about fucking Cherie right in what I assume is Gary’s bedroom.

After maybe five minutes she comes out all dressed back up.

“Maybe we can go again after we’re done, if you feel like it.”

“After we’re done with what?” I ask, trying to come up with a graceful way of declining her request, whatever it’s going to be. I have the uneasy presentiment that what she wants me to do is something horrible and pet-related: a faithful Irish Setter, dead of thirst, or maybe a million-dollar showcat roaming around the neighborhood in heat.

She leads me back up the staircase to that room with the view and through to the kitchen, where something smells funny. Not food-gone-bad funny, but it’s an aroma not completely out of place in a kitchen. When the light comes on, I see that the source of it is a quantity of Gary’s blood, which has pooled on the tile floor beneath his enormous torso.

“What the fuck,” I say.

“Yeah,” Cherie says.

He looks even bigger lying there on the peach-colored tile, the force of gravity pulling all that adipose tissue down from his chest toward the floor. There’s a blood-soaked hole on his tentlike yellow shortsleeved shirt, quite low on the abdomen. I take a good long look at that shirt and note that it’s moving, slowly and rhythmically.

“Holy shit, he’s alive!” I yell.

“He won’t be for long.”

“When did this happen?”

“About fifteen minutes before I called you.” She leans back, arms folded under her breasts, hips against the counter next to the sink, waiting for me to ask her what I’m supposed to do next. What I do is take out my cell and start to dial 911. She grabs for it, and I have to yank it out of her reach.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Calling an ambulance.”

“If I wanted a fucking ambulance I’d’ve called one myself. You’re going to help me cover this up.”

“Was it self-defense?”

“Are you kidding me? The big fucking ape. Take a look at this.”

She unbuttons her sleeve and pulls it back to reveal a big pink rectangular bandage. When she peels away its corner there’s a fresh red welt, round and dark.

“Cocksucker burned me with a cigarette, and when I objected he pulled a gun on me, swear to God.”

For the first time it occurs to me how fast she’s talking, and I remember her offering me a hit of meth when I first got here. “How fucked up were you guys when this happened?” I ask.

“He had some crank, we were messing around a little bit.”

Something else strikes me. “How come you’re in your uniform? You didn’t work today.”

“Sometimes I wear it on my off days.” This, I know, is a lie, and under the pressure of my stare she cops to it. “Gary likes to fuck me while I’m wearing it, okay? Just like you do, so don’t smirk. Sometimes he likes to tie me to a chair and do stuff. That’s what he wanted to do tonight, but with him being so cranked up and things already getting out of hand”-she holds up the burned wrist as evidence-“I decided that was a bad idea. So he got the gun and started trying to force me into the chair, and I took it and shot him. Simple.”

“That’s a pretty good story, why don’t you just flush the crank down the toilet and tell it to the cops?”

“I don’t function well with cops. They give me the willies.”

“They give everybody the willies, but we have to call 911 and get an ambulance.”

“Like fuck we have to. Look, Tate, I want to be famous again someday, but not for being in this year’s trial of the century, got it? That’s why I called you.”

“What did you think I was going to do? Finish him off?”

She shrugs. “He’s not long for this world anyway. Just help me get rid of him, someplace where nobody’ll find him for a long time. What do you think of the Angeles National Forest?”

“Never been.”

“Doesn’t it seem like they’re always finding corpses out there? Angeles National Cemetery, more like.” She laughs, a staccato, high-pitched giggle I’ve never heard from her before, and the batshit crazy sound of it scares me a little bit more than I already am.

“Won’t people be looking for him?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time he’s taken off without telling anyone. He’s a world-famous nutjob anyway, and by the time anybody figures out he’s really gone, the evidence’ll be cold.”

“Where’s the gun?” I ask, the brilliant idea being that I’ll take it from her and call 911 like a sane person. When she produces it I lunge for her, and to my utter and complete astonishment she fires at the floor next to my feet, drilling a jagged hole into one of the tiles and scattering dusty shards in all directions. I drop the cell and she kicks it out of reach.

“Fucking hell, Cherie. Way to wake up the neighbors.”

“I knew you were going to try and take the gun. Soon as you asked for it. Now, you listen.” She raises the gun so it’s pointing at my face rather than my belly. “You fucked me while he lay here dying, and that makes you my accomplice.”

Rather than pointing out the flaws in her logic, I concentrate on placating her. In between our words I discover that I can actually hear the thin whistle of Gary’s breath, and it occurs to me that I’d better get help to him sooner rather than later.

“All right, then, take his feet,” I tell her.

“I’m not putting down this gun.”

“I can’t carry 350 pounds of Gary up those steps all by myself.”

“We’re going downstairs, to the garage. Gary’s got a Hummer.”

“Hummer’s no good, it’s too conspicuous.”

“Fuck conspicuous, you do what I tell you. Take him by the feet and drag him.”

I start pulling him toward the staircase. It’s harder than I thought it would be, hauling a sixth of a ton of deadweight across the tile, harder still when I reach the carpet of the living room. Then Cherie starts down the steps ahead of me to turn the light on downstairs, and I step over Gary and kick her right in the ass. She stumbles-did I mention those heels?-and when she hits the landing with a squeal of pain and outrage, she twists around and fires at me. I’m already headed up that other set of stairs to the front door, though, and as soon as I cross the threshold I haul ass down the sidewalk toward my car. There are low-hanging branches in my way, and ducking under one of them I lose my balance and hit the sidewalk, scraping the hell out of my right elbow.

“Get back here, you fucking coward!” I hear when she gets outside, and I keep sprinting, secure in my assumption that she’s not crazy enough to open fire on the street.

The first shot hits the car parked in front of mine, and I dig in my pocket for my keys, then fumble with them for what feels like about a minute and a half before I manage to open the Saturn. I haven’t got the door closed yet when I turn the engine over, and the next shot shatters my driver’s side window. Wetting my pants, I say a silent prayer of thanks that I took a dump before I left Burberry’s. Chugging into reverse I jump the curb, and then I ram it into gear and make a U-turn, swiping an SUV, the passenger-side mirror making a horrible scraping sound against it. In the rearview I can see her standing there in the middle of the street, taking aim, and I swerve to my right as she fires again. It misses me by a mile.

The cell is back on Gary’s kitchen floor and there are hardly pay phones in L.A. anymore, not in this kind of neighborhood anyway. But there’s a supermarket at Sunset and Via de la Paz, and on a hunch I pull into the lot and find a pair of them mounted next to the doors. My engine is still running when I make the call to 911, and I can hear a siren coming from the south. When the operator asks me the nature of my emergency, I’m momentarily at a loss. I tell her Gary’s address and she says they’ve already got a prowl car on the way to the street after reports of shots.

Tongue-tied, I manage to get across that they’ll need an ambulance too, and that an armed, dangerous, and crazy woman is probably on the premises, cranked to the gills. “She’s an actress,” I add, in case additional precautions need to be taken.

After hanging up I slump against the wall, illuminated by my headlights, the breeze soothing on my wet pants front. I wonder how long until the sun comes up, and in the distance to the east I hear another siren approach, this one of a slightly different timbre than the first. I can feel the tension start to drain from my shoulders, and I put my weight back onto my feet just as I catch sight of a vaguely familiar, battered red Corolla pulling into the lot and heading toward me, the face behind the wheel bearing down on mine, jaws clenched so tight they’re bulging, and all I can think is how pretty she still looks.

KINSHIPBY BRIAN ASCALON ROLEY

Mar Vista

As I pulled into my driveway I saw my cousin Veronica sitting on the bungalow porch steps with her face buried in her hands. She heard my shoes snapping acorns on the path and looked up, stood, and came toward me. Her tank top revealed the butterfly tattoo on her shoulder. A rolled-up mat stuck out of her satchel. I tossed her my windbreaker: cool damp ocean air was coming up the street. I thought maybe she’d come over after yoga in nearby Venice to see if I wanted to go surfing-something we used to do as teenagers, on afternoons after she tutored me in math-but her eyes were bloodshot.

What’s wrong? I said. I noticed something blue on the side of her face and moved her hair aside. Did he hit you?

She flinched. No.

Your face is blue.

I told you, it wasn’t him.

Who, then?

Please, Tomas. I didn’t come over about this.

I crossed my arms. I asked her to explain. She glanced down as she fingered her satchel strap and told me she’d come to talk about her boy, Emerson.

She said, Manny went over and tried to confront the bully’s father, and he got beat up after carpool. Only a few blocks from school.

Some kid has been bullying Emerson? I said. My hands fisted, the pulse hot in my knuckles.

Yeah.

How long has this been going on?

Two months, I think. That’s when we started seeing bruises.

And you didn’t tell me?

Sorry, she said.

I bit my lip, tasted warm blood, looked down my street. In the June overcast, no shadows cast on the silvery asphalt, but the glare was enough to make me squint. Gulls squawked overhead.

Where does it happen? I said.

I don’t know. At school, we think.

And the teachers?

They don’t do anything.

Nothing? I thought they were big on PC stuff nowadays, teaching tolerance for people who are different.

Veronica rolled her eyes. She said, They talked to the kid we think is the ringleader, Harley Douglas. They talked to his parents. But nobody actually saw anything, and Emerson won’t say that Harley hit him, though he’s the one who picks on him the most. The principal promised to investigate.

I felt the heat in my face; my cousin did not come over much anymore, and now I knew what had brought her today. Emerson had a metabolic disorder that impaired his balance, sensitivity, and muscle strength, and caused developmental delays.

Emerson can’t really even talk, I told her.

He can, she said with slight annoyance; she shoved her clenched hands into my windbreaker pockets. Just not well. He claims he’s been falling on the playground.

And you’re sure he’s not?

Yesterday someone sliced his leg braces. Here, look.

She pulled them out of her backpack. The braces, a contraption of plastic parts held together by joints and straps, had been cut clean.

Motherfuckers, I said.

Tomas.

What did the parents say?

They didn’t believe us. Said we were making false accusations against their son. Then Manny went over to confront the guy, after he noticed Emerson’s slit braces. The father’s a soccer-dad from hell. Goes to all the school games. Eggs his kid on to commit fouls, yells at the other parents. The jerk beat up Manny in front of Emerson and Harley. He looks terrible. Needed twenty stitches.

Did he file an assault report?

She shook her head.

It might make them take you more seriously.

He thinks he can handle it by himself. But he can’t, she said, then shrugged and turned away.

I clicked my tongue and shook my head. You shouldn’t of sent Manny. Confrontation isn’t his thing.

I didn’t send him, he went over himself, she said. Veronica seemed irritated, crossed her arms and glanced away.

Wait here, I said.

Where are you going?

I need to get something from the house.

She yelled after me what was I doing, but I kept on thumping up the paint-flaking front steps. I slammed through the door and swept through the hall like a sudden gust. I moved into the back where my brother and girlfriend and their daughter lived, my brother who refuses to talk to me, blames me for having been a bad influence when we were teens. I rifled through his closet and drawers, looking, and I thought about Emerson, who until last year had used a walker to get around. He was growing stunted for his age, with his trunk becoming shorter in proportion to his legs. Veronica and Manny were in denial. They spoke as if his cheerful laugh wasn’t a reflection of mild mental retardation, as if his slurred speech could really only be due to limp muscles in his neck and body. As if he’d someday win sports, avoid teasing, charm girls into giving him female companionship.

Tomas, what are you doing? my mother said.

She stood in Gabe’s doorway; her hair was messy, she had probably been napping.

Nothing.

What are you looking for? she said. Gabe will be home from work soon.

You want to help me look?

She hesitated. For what?

Never mind, I said. I found it in the bedside table, took the icepick out, and palmed it, felt the weight of the wooden handle, the thinness of its blade. It looked like an enormous hypodermic needle.

She blocked the doorway.

Tomas, you said you wouldn’t! she said. You’re on probation. You said you were finished with that life. My mother grimaced; she had suffered through my days of adolescent rage, my anger at being a halfie.

I went to the rear window, slid it open sideways, popped out the flimsy screen. I started to step through, but then paused and turned to her.

It’s not about my old life, I told her. I’m not going back.

You said.

It’s about Veronica’s child.

She had begun crying but stopped now. She furrowed her forehead as she looked at me. Veronica was like a daughter to her. We spent five years living in my tita’s house after coming here from the Philippines.

A kid beat him up at school. And Manny got beat up by the kid’s father when he confronted him.

She touched the wrinkled lapel on her robe as if she knew it needed to be smoothed, but she didn’t smooth it. Somebody hurt Emerson?

I nodded.

She looked at me for a long moment, and then stepped out of the doorway to let me pass.

I drove over to Veronica and Manny’s apartment. As I headed north, the dilapidating bungalows of my inland Mar Vista neighborhood gave way to better-kept houses and lusher streets. They lived in what used to be the crappy part of Santa Monica, along the southern border, in the same rentcontrolled apartment Manny’s mother raised him in, up on the once-seedy hillside roads near Rose Street, just inside the Santa Monica line. When I was smaller, gangs from nearby Venice and Mar Vista claimed the blocks as territory, and I’d notice their cars patrol it, though most of the white people living in the small houses had no idea. But the neighborhood was changing. Many of the bungalows and apartment complexes had been torn down and replaced by trendy condos.

Veronica was two years older than me. Like me, half Filipino-our moms are sisters-but she grew up in Santa Monica north of Montana and went to a private alternative school founded by hippies in the ’70s, full of rich white kids now, mostly affluent and movie industry. She tutored me in math-would come down south to wherever we lived at the time, in the triangle of south Santa Monica off Pico where all the Mexicans and blacks lived, the house Mom rented in Mar Vista, the apartment in Venice.

After we finished the schoolwork, Veronica would reward me with play. She took me and my brother Gabe everywhere-to the beach, the parks, movies, malls. She was a fun tomboy-wasn’t afraid to play basketball in the driveway or on the courts across the street from our church. We played rough volleyball on the sand. I did well in school mostly to please her.

After she left California for Reed College in Oregon, I got into trouble. I’m sure Veronica thought it was because she left, but I was enmeshed in adolescence, a new school, new neighborhood, and I probably would have ended up gangbanging even if she’d stuck around. People act surprised when they find out I got involved in Chicano gangs at St. Dominic’s-a white liberal Catholic parish. But it gave me the respect I needed after being dogged by both whites and Asians. I knew Manny at St. Dominic’s. He was a bookish guy, tall, thin, with a chip on his bony shoulder. A Jesuit’s pet. He disapproved of my dressing like my Mexican friends, even passing as one, thought I was ashamed of being half-Filipino. We were the only Filipinos at school.

The truth is, he may have been born in Quezon City, but he grew up in Fremont and Santa Monica and is as suburban as you get. He was as much a poseur as I was.

One day he gave an oral report on his native country. During the Q-and-A, I pointed out an inaccuracy in the way he pronounced a Tagalog word. People laughed. He reddened and glared at me. A month later he reported that I had turned in a paper written by another classmate, and I got an F.

When Veronica flew back for family visits, she seemed shocked to see me with my Spanish tattoos, the business I’d started training attack dogs, the shaved head. Once, at a restaurant with her mom and dad, I took her aside and showed her my pistol-as if that would impress her. But unlike the other relatives who gave up on me, she still came over to our neighborhood, picked me up, and we’d go surfing together. At Bay Street if we were lazy, or up the coast to Zeros or Topanga if she felt like the drive. An old bond. But she was different now, too. Something about the confidence with which she moved on her board, the swell of her breasts against her black tank top, the beads she let dangle around her wrists and neck even in water, an impervious indifference to the stares of local surfers. We’d come back, shower, and walk to the Rose Café for breakfast. She was a tomboy but nonetheless drew stares, with her long bourbon-colored legs, her pretty half-Asian face with its high cheekbones. The neighborhood may have become trendy, with new oceanview condos nearby, but the blocks around my place still had black kids selling pot to people in fancy cars. Veronica drew catcalls from the Mexican laborers waiting for work; yet none of it fazed her.

I was surprised when she married Manny. He’d gone to UCLA and worked as a youth counselor while majoring in Social Work. The idea that an awkward man like him could help “at-risk youth” was a joke, I can tell you from my vantage point-they needed the mentoring of someone they could relate to, someone who had gone down that road and been pulled back by a guiding hand. It didn’t seem to work out, because not long after they had Emerson, he quit-or lost?-his job to become a stay-at-home dad.

We’re keeping Emerson at home for a while, Veronica told me when he was old enough to enter kindergarten; she worked as the manager of a popular Mexican chain restaurant. We’re a bit worried about the other kids, she said.

He’s going to have to deal with school sometime, I said.

I know, she said, But he’s still a bit behind.

As if he’ll ever fully catch up, I thought. But every time I came over, the kid laughed at my face, grabbed his walker, and hurried my way, clattering that metal contraption across the floor and slamming against banged-up furniture and walls in the process.

Tito Tomas! he’d scream, laughing.

Hey, sunshine, let’s go out for a walk, I’d say, grabbing him and lifting him into a bear hug.

Veronica had stopped taking Emerson out to the playground, because he couldn’t keep up with the energetic activities and ended up alone. And she resented the stares of the mothers and nannies, the other children especially. Manny, to his credit, believed this to be wrong. He insisted on dragging Emerson out to the parks and malls. He insisted that other people were fucked up to stare. They argued over it. She’d search the neighborhood to find him. They screamed at each other in public.

Manny tried to make Emerson use his walker everywhere. The neurologists and PTs told them it would keep his muscles stretched. But Emerson refused. He threw tantrums at malls, dropped down to his knees and cried, drawing the stares of passersby who looked at Veronica as if she were abusing her disabled child.

Go on, leave us, I would tell her. Go shopping.

She’d hesitate but walk away, letting me kneel down beside her boy. I’d smell his sweaty, musty hair. I cherished his boy-smell, these sweet moments, the joy and sorrow I drew from these fleeting seconds of male bonding of which I wanted more. I would whisper in his ear, make him laugh, coax him with promises of ice cream-and have him using his walker in no time.

He let me take him to Douglas Park, played on the slides and swings, tossed bread at the ducks in the pond, walked over grass. The park had changed since I was a kid. Gabe and Veronica and I used to wade through dirty pond water, catching tiny frogs and tadpoles in the reeds. Now the pond had been converted into a fancy Japanese water garden, complete with babbling streams, wooden benches, landscaped boulders. Even the ducks looked cleaner. The kid’s play area had new bright play equipment, handicap accessible, and the mothers seemed different now, too. Thinner, more stylish.

Manny resented my ease with Emerson. The boy let me take him to the basketball court across the street from St. Dominic’s after Sunday mass. Manny watched with jealousy as Emerson used his walker on the crowded court, without shame or self-consciousness, and let the black teenagers lift him up to dunk the ball.

Nothing I did was good enough for that chump. After I got saved and became a youth minister at an evangelical strip-mall church in Culver City-where I ran the boys’ club, as well as addiction recovery groups-you’d have thought he’d come round to me. But he never did.

I drove my truck up to their apartment complex and started circling the block, looking for a parking spot on the narrow side streets. I smoldered over exactly how to do what I wanted to do. Remembering my mother’s worried face, I thought, Hold on, don’t do anything rash, you’re risking a lot of hurt and pain here, will let down a lot of people if you get caught breaking probation. They’d put you away for a long time. When you got out, how old would Emerson be? But then I remembered his slit braces in Veronica’s hands and that was it.

I pulled into the driveway behind one of their neighbor’s cars, blocking it in. I stomped around to their garden apartment and banged on the green door. The front blinds moved, then shut. I banged on the door again. It finally opened.

Manny wore a sling, his face blue and black, a piece of skin torn below his eye, stitched. It looked as if someone had pressed barbed wire into his face.

Veronica’s not here, he said.

I want to see Emerson.

He’s at your tita’s place, Manny said. He spoke a bit snidely, as if I should have known.

Get in my car, I said.

What?

We’re going for a drive.

He tried to protest so I grabbed his shirt and pulled him out of his apartment. I put him in the truck and we sat there, engine off, windows open. The air smelled of sun-warmed avocados fallen on the grass.

So, Veronica tells me you got yourself beat up by some kid’s father, I said.

Manny shook his head. Lips tightened, angry no doubt that Veronica came to me. It wasn’t like that, he said.

That was a smart move, I said. Now Emerson will really have his peers’ respect.

You don’t understand. I couldn’t not do anything. We tried talking to the teachers, the principal. They said they were investigating, but they need to expel that kid now, Tomas, to keep him out of Emerson’s face.

So you went over to the father and got beat up.

Fuck you, Tomas.

Maybe you lost your cool? Made them defensive.

You’ve got a lot of nerve, Tomas. This is my son we’re talking about.

His jaw trembled with anger. I felt hot, my shirt damp against my vinyl seat. The fermenting avocado smell made me feel like hurting someone. But I told myself to hold my temper, let him talk.

I said, Tell me what happened.

And he told me.

That’s not a satisfactory explanation, I said.

What the fuck do you want from me?

I plucked one stitch from his face, causing him to kick the dashboard in his struggle. He cursed. I quieted him with a look and said, When Veronica came to me this morning, her face was bruised again. I should really hurt you. But I am going to give you an opportunity to redeem yourself. To be a real husband and father.

Manny began to speak but seemed to think better. Then he asked, Where are we going?

Where does Harley Douglas live?

Venice.

Do you know the house?

Yeah, he said after a pause.

We drove down the hill to Main Street and headed south past the arty boutiques and cafés and restaurants. We crossed Rose and headed into Venice. Beyond the older buildings to the west I caught flashes of bright ocean. We crossed over streets that used to be canals nearly a century ago, blocks where amusement park rides and buildings had once stood.

We reached Abbot Kinney, with its more boho shops, looking a lot like Santa Monica’s posh Main Street had when I was a kid. The martial arts studio where I used to study Filipino stick-fighting when we lived in Oakwood, the black neighborhood inland to its north, the old bungalows and cottages ravaged by cool salty nights. But Harley Douglas lived on the ocean side, on the gentrified streets. Many of the weathered buildings had been renovated, or replaced by condos. I noticed a beautiful woman walking a pure white husky, while sipping from a paper coffee cup. The neighborhood is one of the few in Los Angeles where people actually walk.

When we lived near here it was a different place. The old buildings colonied by hippies were falling apart then. Some were empty, condemned. Our house was on its last legs. On stormy evenings, Pacific Ocean winds would blow against the clapboard walls on our creaking block.

Even then, some of the older structures were starting to be torn down and replaced by upscale condos, but in the summer of ’94 a gang war broke out between the blacks and Mexicans and the construction stopped.

From the look of things now, real estate had soared again.

That’s where they live, Manny said, pointing to a narrow modern structure of steel and wood and glass four stories high.

I parked across the street.

That’s a pretty funky house, I said.

He’s an architect. Designed it himself.

You got beat up by an architect?

He used to be a military engineer. Apparently he has a black belt.

He’s still an architect.

What are we doing here? he asked.

Sit, look, listen, I said. Tell me about the father. Tell me what he looks like. We need to plan.

The house was made of ecologically friendly materials, and utilized solar energy. His first floor was concealed by a shiny hammered metal wall softened by elegant bamboo. Its entrance opened to a narrow alley, but the sound of waves echoed among the buildings. He must have had quite a view. I could see the upper levels above the bamboo. They were walls of glass that revealed glimpses of affluence and style-leather furniture, a drafting table, pieces of skylight and sky.

I made the preparations and dropped Manny at the boys’ club. Then I drove back to Venice and parked near the architect’s house. I stood and waited in front of a condo complex across the street, smoking. When a man left Harley’s house and headed down the sidewalk with a little English bulldog, I followed. He matched Manny’s description of the father: shaved head, artsy glasses. When he neared my parked truck, I hurried my step. Perhaps he sensed me coming up, because he turned. One look at me and he got a bit nervous.

Hi, he said. A moment passed. Can I help you?

He wore tortoiseshell glasses, black turtleneck, jeans, and a black-faced Omega watch.

Nice day to walk your dog, I said.

He looked upward as if he hadn’t already noticed the overcast sky, the June marine layer, with its thick smell of ocean salt. In the humid air my joints throbbed.

Yeah, sure, he said. He spoke uncertainly, his tone part fear, part annoyance.

Your dog pooped on my lawn, I said.

He seemed relieved-an explanation for my body language. I’m sorry about that, he said.

You’re supposed to scoop it up.

Like I said, I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. He started to pass.

Get in the truck, I said, pointing.

What?

I pulled out the ice pick, set it against his chest. Like I said, get in the truck.

He noticed the tinted windows. I pressed the point against his nipple, which was visible through his microfiber shirt, and he obeyed.

What do you want from me? he said. You want my wal-let?

Put on this bandana. Cover your eyes.

In our family, my grandmother’s brothers fought as guerrilla soldiers in the jungled mountains of Laguna and Quezon during the Japanese occupation. Two had been Philippine Scouts and on the American payroll before MacArthur retreated to Australia. I only knew them years later, as old men, drunkards who loved to boast in a mixture of English and Tagalog and Spanish. They visited Los Angeles and stayed with us several times, trying to claim the veterans’ benefits they had been promised. I thought they were losers because they kept asking, even though they never got anybody to listen to them. They struck me as dreamers. Then they got me drunk when I was nine. They told me I took after them, the Laurels (that’s my mother’s maiden name). Indeed, a few years later I grew tall and broad-the conquistador’s barrel chest, they called it.

They don’t seem like soldiers, I told my mother and her sister. We were visiting them in San Pablo, an old Spanish-Malay city among coconut haciendas south of Manila, and they drank San Miguel beers from a crate on their picnic table. I was at a separate table, where the women sat.

That’s only because they’re old, Mom said.

What did they do?

Eduardo and Pedro were the worst, she said. They ran the hacienda like gangsters. They once shot a man for looking at their sister the wrong way.

Wow, I said. What else?

She said, One of their brothers-Tio Bien, the good one, the gentle doctor-visited the farm one year from Hawaii, where he was living. He hired a skit to travel on the railroad between the farm and the city of Tagkawayan.

What’s a skit?

It’s like a platform made of bamboo, Mom said. It has wheels and a little lawn mower engine. Boys run them over the train tracks like homemade taxis. Anyway, Tio Bien hired one and was riding into town to drink some halo halo, when the skit was stopped by bandits. He gave them his watch and money, but they shot him in the kneecaps anyway. Then they left. When he got back to the hacienda, his brothers grew furious. They found out from tenant farmers what village the bandits came from. They rode there on horseback with machine guns from the war. They shot into the thatched nipa huts.

Why didn’t they find out who did it? I asked. They could have hit anyone. Even a baby.

They weren’t thinking about that, Mom said. They were sending the message that this is what happens if someone hurts our family.

I shook my head, furious, bothered. My mother and aunt spoke with disapproving low voices, almost whispers, shaking their heads with shame. But they were also secretly proud, I sensed.

When I got jumped into a Latino gang, my mother and her sister and their brothers may have been disappointed in me. But on a trip I took back to Manila, my grandmother’s brother Eduardo took one look at me-the broad muscles, the weight-lifter’s shoulders, the tattoos covering my arms and back-and he nodded in approval.

You are a true Laurel, he said.

That night, we got shitfaced on San Miguel gin.

In my church we have an inscription that indicates the bread and wine are not His body and blood, but only symbols, remembrances of the Father. But I have a secret heresy. When I eat from the loaf, when I sip from the cup, I feel in my heart His presence and know I have consumed real flesh and real bodily fluid that is absorbed by my body. It is the Philippine Catholic inside me. I have other secret idolatries. There is a tattoo of the Virgin Mary on my back, from the base of my neck down to the crest of my buttocks; her shoulders spread across my shoulder blades, her feet step on the serpent coiled at my hips. All the other tattoos my congregation knew about, and I removed them by laser-across my arms and shoulders, my neck, my chest. When we went out to the frigid stream for full immersion, I kept two layers of undershirt on so they would not see the Holy Mother beneath.

They would not understand. But about some things I cannot let go.

I took Veronica to my church once. She hadn’t been to Mass in years. She said the rituals were meaningless, rote, hierarchical. I wanted to expose the unborn baby to Jesus, and thought our more spirited evangelical service might rekindle the piety of her childhood. But she looked surprised at the Spartan worship space and asked where the altar was. She puzzled at the aluminum chairs we had instead of pews, scanned the floor for kneelers.

When the Christian rock band played and the clapping started, she moved and swayed, even smiled. Her eyes teared during the witnessing, as a man read a letter from an eleven-year-old boy who had written an autobiographical story about hearing his alcoholic father beating his mother through the bedroom wall, then confessed that this boy was his own son. A feeling passed through the crowd like a cool insuck of breath through our bodies. Veronica looked around with surprise.

She seemed impressed when I showed her the boys’ club facility and explained our drug rehab programs and outreach ministries.

Afterwards I felt hope as we stepped out onto the crunchy gravel, the strip-mall glass glistening across the boulevard.

What did you think? I asked.

I liked it, she said.

You think you might want to come back?

She seemed sad as she smiled at me. I don’t think so, Tomas, she said. She touched my arm, and her fingers lingered.

Well, if you ever change your mind…

She looked sorry. As if I had shown her my ugly baby and expected a compliment.

Veronica kept active even during her pregnancy. She continued to wade in the waves and liked to lie out on the beach. She let me feel her sandy abdomen, the growing baby within. We knew it was a boy from the ultrasound, but had no idea there was anything wrong with him. He kicked beneath her warm skin. With my ear against her taut belly button, I could hear sounds of him-or Veronica-moving. Could hear the muted rumble of collapsing waves.

The boys’ club behind the church building used to be a martial arts studio. It still smelled of Japanese floor pads, bare feet, must, and male sweat. It smelled like an old futon. The blindfolded man sniffed at the change in smell, the warmer temperature. He jerked when I shut the metal door and snapped the lock. I sat him on a chair in the center of the room and bound him there.

I’m going to take off your blindfold now, I told him, after I flipped over the only sign with our congregation’s name on it.

From behind, I pulled off the bandana. He looked around and said, Where am I?

But I was gone. I was in a hallway behind mirrored oneway glass we had installed to observe the group sessions and recovery groups that met in that room.

I turned to Manny, who sat next to me on an aluminum chair against the wall; watching Harley’s father through the one-way glass.

Is that him?

Yeah.

Okay, I said, and pulled the ice pick out of my satchel. Place the tip of the blade on the soft part below the kneecap. Make sure you really punch it through the cartilage. The knee’s like tree bark. If you don’t get below the surface, the tree doesn’t die.

Manny looked at me. You don’t actually expect me to do this…?

I do.

He crossed his arms.

Do it for Emerson, I said.

What’s all this to you?

In my family-the Laurels-we protect our own, I said.

I held the blade out to him, but he shook his head. I walked into the other room. I knew Manny would be watching from behind the mirrored glass. Harley’s father looked up at me.

Who are you? he said.

I kneeled before him, my face close to his own. His chair rattled as his bound hands struggled. I touched his cheek, brushed it softly.

Do you have a son? I asked.

Yes.

Do you love him?

Yes.

I am a father too, I said loudly enough for Manny to hear, and then I reached down and stuck him.

THE HOUR WHEN THE SHIP COMES INBY ROBERT FERRIGNO

Belmont Shore

One good deed… One good deed is all it takes to get a man killed. One good deed, one step in front of the other. Yancy staggered down Pomona toward the beach, straightened his shoulders and kept walking. Not far. Pomona ran parallel to Alamitos Bay, close enough to smell the waffle cones at the ice cream parlor on Second Street… and the strawberries. He had stopped for a Jamba Juice before they hit the house on Pomona. Mason had complained, eager to get started, but Yancy insisted. A large Strawberry-Kiwi Zinger with protein powder and spirulina. No idea what that shit did, but why take a chance. Full of antioxidants and nutrients specially formulated to increase longevity… live forever, the sign said. Yancy laughed, and pain shuddered through him.

Beautiful day in Belmont Shore. The yuppie jewel of Long Beach. Late afternoon, the hard chargers on the freeway now, heading home from the job. They spent so much for the Belmont Shore address, but they were hardly ever home. Working late at the job. Cardio classes at the gym. Cursing their way through traffic, radiators boiling over. Spinning the wheel, faster and faster, hamsters in Porsches. Beep-beep.

Three young mothers wheeled their babies down the street. On their way back from the bay. Towels wrapped around their waists, breasts cupped high and tight in their bright bikini tops. Coconut oil glistening. Talk, talk, talk, while their babies lolled in the shade of the strollers, hands next to their sleepy pink faces. Husbands on the way home. Mexican maid cooking dinner. Just enough time for a yoga class.

One of the wives looked at Yancy, saw him watching. She smiled, and Yancy smiled back. He stepped onto the grass, let them pass. Half tempted to bow. Some sweeping flourish. Probably fall on his face. He watched them glide down the sidewalk. The one who had smiled stared at something on the sidewalk. Blood. She looked back at him, hurrying now, and Yancy hurried too. Get to the beach. He wanted to walk on the sand. Listen to the waves. He wanted to walk down the beach until he got to the Queen Mary.

Here he was, born and raised in Long Beach and Yancy had never set foot on the Queen Mary. Fucker had been docked in Long Beach Harbor for thirty years, but he had always dismissed the idea of visiting. Tourist trap. Floating mall. Overpriced and snooty to boot. Assholes dressed as commodores selling postcards and saltwater taffy. So here he was now… at the end of it all, determined to make it aboard. Maybe the guy from the fish-and-chips stand would pipe him aboard. The Spruce Goose had been parked right next door when Yancy was a kid. Parked in a huge dome. Awesome fucking airplane. Bigger than the biggest jumbo jet and made out of wood. Yancy used to imagine the Spruce Goose busting out of its dome some Halloween night, jumping the Queen Mary, the two of them going at it like Godzilla and Mothra. The Spruce Goose was long gone. Moved to Oregon or Kansas or some state far away, after flopping with the tourists here. Not enough shit to buy. Just a giant airplane that some guy actually built and flew once, skimming across the waves in Long Beach Harbor. One time, a hearty fuck-you, and then he landed and never flew it again. Yancy had gone to see it three or four times, brought his younger brother James, the two of them standing there for hours just looking at it.

Sirens in the distance as Yancy crossed onto the beach, sand crunching underfoot. Police or ambulance. Headed to the house on Pomona probably. What a mess. He had asked Mason if he was sure about the address. Asked him twice. Mason was sure. Mason was always sure. New guy, PJ, was jumpy. Mason’s nephew. Bony kid who talked too much, like he was afraid if he stopped jabbering they would see the fear in his eyes. As if Yancy could miss it.

The beach almost empty this time of day. Just a few windsurfers making the best of it and families of Mexicans from inland who didn’t like mixing with the Anglos sunbathing on the bay. The offshore oil rigs pumped quietly a few thousand yards off the coast, the rigs planted on fake islands painted in pastels of green and pink and blue. They looked like cheap condos out there. Yancy walked along the bike path that wound through the beach, a twisting path to the Queen Mary. Couldn’t be too far. Couple of miles maybe. He could do that. Good to have goals, that’s what that English teacher told him one time. What was his name? Yancy shook his head. Mr. Something…

The house on Pomona… supposed to be the usual crash and bash. Knock on the door, then bust it open with the swing-arm and rush inside. Mason had bought the swing-arm from some junkie who boosted it out of the back of a SWAT van. Twenty-five-pound steel battering ram. Your tax dollars at work, that’s what Mason used to say before he broke down a door. It had only been funny the first time he said it, but that never stopped him. The three of them had clustered around the front door on Pomona, PJ hyperventilating, Yancy trying to calm him down, and Mason rearing back with the swing-arm-here we go, men, your tax dollars at work.

Must have been thirty or forty pigeons on the bike path ahead, pecking away at bread crumbs that some asshole had left. So much for survival of the fittest. Yancy walked right through them, the birds squawking as they gave way, then closing in behind him to return to the bread. Yancy kept moving. Making pretty good progress. The Queen Mary visible in the distance, just beyond the pier. His feet hurt. The concrete too hard. Better to feel the sand. Better to be barefoot.

A wino rummaged through a trash can nearby, pulling out half-eaten burgers and loose french fries. Yancy held onto the trash can while he took off his boots. Eight-hundred-dollar Tony Lama lizardskin. Custom-made for Yancy’s flat feet. The boots worth every penny. He handed them to the wino.

“I don’t shine no shoes,” said the wino, a french fry dangling from his mouth. “I got my pride.”

“They’re for you. Keep them.”

The wino didn’t react at first, then warily took the boots. He grinned, started to put them on. Stopped. Shook one of them. It made a sound. He turned the boot upside down and blood splashed onto the sand. The wino jumped back, stared at Yancy, backing off now.

Yancy peeled off his socks. One white. One red. Tossed them into the trash can and walked toward the water. The sand warm between his toes. Unsteady now. The sight of blood. It never bothered him… unless it was his own.

The house on Pomona was supposed to be fat with coke and cash, but Yancy knew as soon as they got inside that it was a mistake. Three guys sitting on the couch drinking cans of Diet Pepsi and watching tennis on TV. Never met a dope dealer that didn’t crave sugar… and tennis? Give me a fucking break.

Where is it, motherfucker? PJ had shouted, waving his gun. Turn it over, motherfucker, or I’ll blow your fucking brains out!

Which was way too Tarantino, even if it was the right house. Yancy had gone over everything with the kid before-hand. Gone over it ten or twenty times. Yancy did the talking. We bust down the door, flash the fake badges, and always speak in a soft, polite manner. Violence, then calm. Violence to get their attention, calm so they did what you wanted them to. After they gave up the dope and money, then it was back to the violence. A fast finish and out the door. Last thing Yancy wanted was some doper with a grudge looking for him. Unacceptable. No witnesses was the order of business, except when you broke into the wrong house. Times like today, when it happened, and it did happen, you just apologized, put away the badges, said send a bill to the city, and hauled ass. No muss, no fuss, no bother. Not today though.

Yancy lurched across the sand, the beach dotted with clumps of brown oil from the offshore rigs. He splashed into the ocean, walked in until it reached mid-calf, then headed north, paralleling the shore, straight for the Queen Mary. Cool water, real tingly, a nice little wake-up. He bent down to roll his pants up, lost his footing, and flopped down. Sat there soaking his ass in the ocean. Yancy saw a family of Mexicans eating dinner on a blanket, radio blasting, niños playing in the sand. Mamacita pointed at Yancy-look at that silly gringo!-laughing, and Yancy waved back. He stood up, put his hands on his knees until his head cleared. Walked on. Soldiered on down the beach. A small plane cruised overhead, trailing a SECOND ST. SPORTS BAR $2 TEQUILA SHOTS banner. Yancy kept his eyes on the big boat. Man needed a focus. Something to aim for. Queen Mary was the biggest thing in the area.

Getting hard to breathe. Little gurgly sounds every time he took a breath. Tempted to take off his bullet-proof vest, but no telling what that would do. The cinched vest probably the only thing holding him together. Shallow breaths helped. First time in his life he had ever been winded. Yancy lettered in football, baseball, and track in high school. Couple of his records still unbroken at Long Beach Poly. Go Rabbits! Yancy laughed and it hurt worse than ever. He got a scholarship to Cal State, Long Beach, but only lasted a semester. Long enough for Mason to call him college boy. Like Yancy was supposed to be ashamed for not moving his lips when he read a newspaper.

Splash splash splash in the shallows. He left a light chum of blood trail in the water. A geezer in plaid Bermuda shorts approached, a sunburned beachcomber working his way along the tideline with a metal detector, moving it back and forth, back and forth. Yancy’s uncle did the same thing every weekend after the crowds were gone. All along the beach, head down, earphones cupped in place, oblivious to everything but the beep-beep that signaled the mother lode. Or a buried beer can. Uncle Dave… the treasure hunter. Man had gone to every one of Yancy’s football games, cheered himself hoarse, then told him afterwards every mistake he made, every dropped pass, every poorly chosen cutback.

“Any luck?” called Yancy.

The beachcomber lifted one earphone.

“Any luck?” repeated Yancy.

The beachcomber glared at him. Shook his head. Moved on.

Right, pops. Keep your secret stash. Guy probably found a class ring with a glass stone a month ago and now claimed the beach. His old lady was probably glad to get him out of the house, packing him tunafish sandwiches with the crusts cut off. A seagull screamed at Yancy, swooping low. Could be worse. He could be drawing buzzards.

More sirens now. Meat wagons on the way.

Yancy had waved his badge at the yokels watching the tennis match, started to apologize for ruining their front door when PJ barreled over to the couch, started pistol-whipping the biggest one. Yokel went down like a bag of shit.

Yancy had looked over at Mason, like, You brought this asshole to the party, you vouched for him, now jerk his leash. Mason just rolled his eyes.

Maybe if the yokels had taken the beating, things might still have worked out okay, but this buff dude with a Rolex, probably the guy who owned the home, this buff dude grabbed PJ, and just like that, PJ capped him. Just jammed the gun in his face and pow pow pow. Guy’s head made like a melon. Nothing for Yancy to do at that point except let nature take its course. PJ had his rage on full throttle. No way you could get in the way of that. The other guy on the couch had his hands up, like, Don’t shoot, man, I surrender. PJ shot him in the eye. Tapped a couple into the pistol-whipped guy on the floor. You would have thought it was Fourth of July, what with the sound and PJ grinning, bouncing around, stepping on teeth, face sprayed with blood. Yancy turned away, watched the tennis player on TV holding up a gold trophy, his clothes so white… Yancy turned at the sound of a toilet flushing. A girl came out of the bathroom.

Yancy stayed in the water as two young men in black suits approached. Bible patrol. They hit the beaches every day, trolling for converts. Or maybe it was easy duty to score points with God. The Bible boys stayed on dry land, stepping back every time the waves rolled in. Doing the hokeypokey. Ugly-ass shoes on the boys. Big black shoes with thick crepe soles. Jesus could walk on water, but they didn’t want to put it to the test.

“Could we talk to you for a minute, sir?” asked the one with the dusting of pimples across his cheeks.

“I’m in kind of a hurry.”

“Always time to hear the good news,” said the other one. The one with the frayed collar and the thin lips. “We just need a few moments. Could change your life.”

“My life’s already changed.”

“Are you all right, sir?” said the one with the pimples.

Yancy walked on. The one with the pimples kept pace for a few steps, then gave up. Other fish in the sea. Yancy was a lost cause. He believed in God… his God, not theirs. That was the problem. No way God forgave everything you did. What kind of a chump would that make God? You do all kinds of evil shit your whole life, then at the last minute you say you’re sorry and the pearly gates swing wide? No way. Heaven would be filled with con men and hustlers if that were the case. No, God was a referee. He kept score, that’s it. At the end of the day, you were either in positive or negative territory. God didn’t hear sorry. He didn’t hear boo-hoo. He just added things up. You had to respect that motherfucker.

He was tired. Now I lay me down to sleep… the prayer his mother taught them, him and James… Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. God bless Mama and James and Yancy. Good luck with that last one. Better to trust putting one foot in front of the other.

Would be nice to call James. He was probably still at work. Welder at the port. Sucking in lead fumes for eighteen dollars an hour and benefits. Rented apartment and a car with rust on the door panels and maybe a movie once a month. Amazing the things that made people happy. Wife and a little girl, Cleo. Another one on the way. Kathy sexy and skinny when he married her, now her hips were spreading like a jumbo jet. Yeah, amazing the things that made people happy. Yancy had gone over there for Christmas, bought too many toys for Cleo. Too many expensive toys. James and Cleo exchanging looks. Yancy making excuses why he had to leave early.

Limping now, he walked under the pier. Concrete piling crusted with barnacles. Cigarette butts floating on the water. Voices from the pier echoed around him. Vietnamese fishermen trying for dinner, casting their lines with easy flicks of their wrists. Skaters and skateboarders rolling. Music, music, music… Keep walking. The Queen Mary closer now, the railings edged with silver. Three smokestacks stark against the sunset.

Everything would be different if the girl hadn’t walked out of the bathroom back at the house on Pomona. She hummed as she closed the door behind her, clutching a baby. Must have been changing it when the killing went down. It… he, she, whatever. Yancy didn’t know from babies. What he knew was taking down dopers and getting away clean.

Yancy tried to make her disappear, make her go back into the bathroom, pretend she hadn’t seen anything. Mason knew better. He had his faults, but he knew what he had to do.

The girl stood there, mouth moving like a fish, no sound coming out. Eyes shifting from the bodies on the floor to Mason. She half-turned her body as Mason raised his pistol. Half-turned her body, as though that would protect the baby.

Maybe that’s why Yancy had done what he did. Stupid thing. No explaining it really. Just as Mason tightened on the trigger, Yancy shot him in the head. He shot PJ too, but not before PJ shot him four times. Kid was quick, you had to give him that. Three of PJ’s rounds hit Yancy in the vest, but the impact of the rounds twisted him, and the fourth bullet slipped under his arm, bounced around inside him, tumbling like a load of laundry in a dryer. Good thing PJ liked a 9mm Glock. All the young guys did. That’s what they saw in the movies. Yancy preferred a.45. He felt the comforting heft of the.45 in his jacket with every step. Mean gun, no grace to it, but one shot in a vital area and you were dead. Case closed. 9mm had no stopping power. Man could walk forever with a 9mm slug in him. Yancy was proof of that.

The girl was unhurt. Hysterical, of course. She found her voice after he killed Mason and PJ, the girl screaming so loud he could hardly wait to leave.

Funny… he had made such rapid progress toward the Queen Mary at the beginning, but now he seemed to be moving slower and slower. He walked along the edge of the water, where the sand was hard-packed. He kept walking but didn’t seem to be getting any closer. It was like… he was being allowed to approach his goal, get it in sight, but there were limitations. Like the Queen Mary was off limits. Going to be dark soon. At this rate… he was never going to get there.

He just wished he could figure out why he did what he had done at the house on Pomona. Killing Mason… how could he explain that? Mason was making the right move. The girl had seen them. Could ID them. Rules were rules. Mason followed the rules… it was Yancy who had broken them. PJ was a hothead and Yancy knew he wouldn’t work with the kid again, but Mason and he had partnered for three years. Mason had thrown him a party when Yancy killed his twelfth man. His first dozen. Mason made a big deal about it, rented a suite at the Four Seasons and hired a couple of hookers for each of them. Top-quality ladies too. Mason talked too much and stank up the car with fish tacos and jalapeño burritos, but Mason was dependable. Yancy was the one who’d had a change of heart, and that bothered him. It was like his whole life up until now was wrong somehow.

The girl didn’t remind him of anybody. She wasn’t particularly pretty or gentle or sad or any of that other crap that always made the movie bad guy spare her life. And that bit about her trying to protect the baby… he didn’t even like babies, and besides, that was just a reaction on her part. No courage or nobility to it. She probably didn’t even know what she was doing. Yancy coughed, spit blood into the water. He was too tired to convince himself, but what he had done in that split second at the house gnawed at him. Throwing away his life, that’s what he had done. Nothing wrong with his life… nothing… and yet he had tossed it aside with the squeeze of a trigger. Blowing away Mason and PJ… Now what was he supposed to do? Ask James to get him a job at the port?

Yancy stumbled up onto the dunes. Soft sand with not a speck of oil on it. Sand like sugar, heaps of it… and he had a perfect view of the big boat. He sat down. Just a little break. A little rest before starting back up again. He lay back on that pure white sand. Stretched out his arms, scooped them back and forth. Made sand angels. He and James used to do that when they were kids. Spreading their arms wide, the two of them making flapping sounds. Wings big enough to carry them to heaven. Now, though, his sand angel was sloppy and uneven… broken somehow. Yancy lay still, arms poked out at a crooked angle. Just a little rest, that’s all he needed. He watched the Queen Mary floating there in the blazing sunset. Every seam and rivet in sharp focus. Ship of gold. Close enough to touch.

WHAT YOU SEEBY DIANA WAGMAN

Westchester

It was a street like any other street in Westchester. Small square homes lined up on either side like kindergarteners on their first day of school. Tidy but timid, they were little houses where your neighbors might live, where your mother might live, where you might live if it was all you could afford in Los Angeles. Two bedrooms, one bath, sometimes a small sun porch in the back. On Orange Street it was still 1965. The yuppies hadn’t found it and torn up the green lawns to do drought-tolerant landscaping with native plants.

Orange was my childhood street and I was stuck there. I’d inherited the house from my mother and I had nowhere else to go. After living in New York City and other points east, I’d come back to L.A. to take care of her. Not that she needed me; she was dying and there was nothing I could do. But I moved right back into my childhood room. I slept in my twin bed with the brown plaid polyester bedspread. My blue ribbon from freshman football was hanging where I’d stuck it in ninth grade on the bulletin board over my desk next to my picture of Bruce Lee. Everything in my room was the same as I’d left it, but covered in a shroud of dust. It made me sneeze. My mother would call out while she still could: God bless you.

Sneeze.

God bless you.

Some days it was our only communication.

Then she died and I stayed in my room and she went to Heaven. At least that’s where she had always told me she was going. And I wasn’t. She would be singing with the Heavenly Choir and I would be roasting in the flames of Eternal Damnation. If only I had died before I was twelve and got caught jerking off in the Sunday school teacher’s car. My mother never forgave me. The Sunday school teacher wouldn’t let me back in her class. From puberty on, everyone agreed I was just like my father, the missing felon.

The first few days after she passed away, I watched a lot of TV and didn’t eat anything. I wanted to see how long I could go without food. It was just something to do. The commercials made me really hungry. So, after eighty-one hours and twenty-two minutes, I ate. Whatever she had in the house. Cans of peaches and kidney beans. Dried prunes. I even made a devil’s food cake from a box mix that had probably been on the shelf since the last time I’d been home. My birthday, three years earlier. We’d had a fight and she’d never made me the cake.

Once I was eating, I started pacing. I made a route from the TV to the kitchen to the back door. Touch the door. Turn around. Kitchen to my mother’s room, and touch the headboard on her stripped bed. Turn around. Into the bathroom. Touch the glass poodle on the window ledge. Turn around. Into my room. Touch the empty fish tank, the blue ribbon, and the row of James Bond books. Back to the TV.

The glass poodle broke. Guess I tapped it too hard that time. It fell on the tile floor and shattered. After that I was careful to wear my shoes. Even in the middle of the night. I enjoyed the crunch when I went into the bathroom to pee in the dark. It sounded as if I were walking on potato chips. That made me laugh. I pretended I was an explorer in the Amazon and I was crushing cockroaches the size of hamsters. I imagined I was king of the world and I had jewels strewn before me wherever I might walk-even to take a shit. Eventually the pieces were all broken down in a fine, annoying grit that stuck to my rubber soles. When I started trailing glass dust all over the house, I cleaned it up.

Cleaning was good. I cleaned a lot. I moved the TV cabinet and cleaned behind it. I found a Christmas card from 1979 when I was six years old. I remember that Christmas. I remember wanting something so badly and praying for it as hard as I could, but what I got was something different. I liked it too, but it wasn’t what I’d been asking for. I can’t remember what it was, only the want like a tight place in my chest. I pushed the couch to the middle of the room so I could get the dust bunnies along the baseboard. I hoisted the armchair on top of it. That looked pretty good to me, so I climbed up and sat in it. Of course I tipped over and fell. I banged my arm hard on the colonial-style coffee table. As if they had coffee tables in the Colonies.

Immediately, I carried the coffee table out to the curb. That was enough of that. Someone driving by would take it home to his mother and she would be so happy. The front door opened in the house across the street. I didn’t know those people. Out came a young black girl, in candy-pink capris and a tight white tank top with glitter in a heart on the front. The neighborhood was mostly black people now. Not that it mattered to me or my mom-even before she was dead.

The girl was carrying her car keys, but she stopped at the door to her little red Chevette. “Sorry about your ma.”

She made me notice the flowers in the yard next door and the blue sky.

“She was old,” I said. “And sick.”

“You puttin’ out that little table?”

“I always hated it.”

The girl laughed. Her teeth were as white and sparkly as her shirt. She nodded. She knew what I meant.

“Do you live there?” I asked.

“It’s my brother’s house. I’m just staying with him for a while.”

“Welcome to the neighborhood.”

She shrugged and her brown shoulders gleamed in the sunshine.

“Wanna come in? Have a drink or something?” I asked.

“I got to go. I’m late for class.”

Loyola Marymount University was right nearby. She didn’t look like one of those stuck-up Loyola students. Stupid Jesuit school. I’d been destined for it starting at about, oh, maybe two years old, but that was another way I’d disappointed my mother. Too dumb to get into Loyola.

“Not LMU?” I asked her.

“Over to the aviation college. I’m gonna be a flight attendant.”

“See the world.”

“Exactly.”

She got in her car then and drove away and I was glad to know she’d be back. I left the coffee table out, but I pulled it off the sidewalk and onto the edge of my lawn. Just in case she wanted it for her mother. Then I went into the house and sat down on the couch. I could see the table through the big picture window. I could see her brother’s house across the street. Later, I’d be busy doing other things and I’d walk through the room and look out the window and see her struggling with it. I’d come out and lift it into her car. Then she’d have to take me over to her mom’s with her so I could help her get it in the house. We’d have fun and then she’d be a flight attendant and fly away.

And one day, awhile after that, I’d see her on an airplane. I’d be sitting in first class, in a really nice suit, blue, no, maybe dark charcoal-gray, and I’d be flying on my way to some big deal and there she’d be.

“Would you care for a beverage?”

“Don’t you remember me?”

And of course she would and she’d be so impressed and she’d look great in her cute stewardess outfit like a military uniform and we’d go right to the airport bar after and talk and talk and talk. Every tired businessman in his wrinkled old suit that came in would be jealous and looking at me, and she’d be looking at me too.

I practiced walking through the living room and glancing out the window. The phone rang and I lost my concentration and I realized I might actually miss her coming to pick up the table if I wasn’t watching every minute. I got the phone out of the kitchen and sat down on the couch with it.

“Hello?”

“Gabe? That you?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“How they hangin’?”

“Who is this?”

“Who the fuck do you think it is?”

Guess I was concentrating so hard watching for her to return that I wasn’t listening very well. It was Marcus, of course. He was my one buddy left from high school, the only other kid I knew who didn’t graduate. He had his own apartment and some kind of import business.

“I got some more work for you.”

I didn’t want to work right then. I was waiting. If I left and went to his office and did something, I might miss her.

“I need you, Gabe. And don’t tell me you don’t need the money.”

Of course that got me thinking. If I had some money, I could ask her out someplace, not just over to the house. I hadn’t showered in a few days or changed my clothes, so I told him I’d be there in a while.

“Hurry,” he said. “It’s important.”

I drove my mother’s car over to his office on the south side of the airport. I went past Dockweiler Beach, the noisiest oceanfront in America. I pitied the tourists who parked their RVs down there for some fun in the sun and then had to shout over the planes coming and going all day. When I was a kid there were houses nearby, but the land had been bought up for the airport expansion. Now it was just weeds growing through cracked cement-the roads were there but the houses, the streetlamps, everything else was gone. It was the driveways that gave me the creeps, parking for no place.

Marcus’s shop was in an industrial park. Row after row of white industrial buildings, like carryout boxes stacked on a metal shelf. They all looked the same except for the company logos. Marcus’s shop was the only one without a sign, just a glass door up three cement steps. I always told him he needed to hang something up.

The same old tired secretary, Kimberly, was sitting behind the desk. Her hair had gotten blonder and more and more like broom straw over the years. She smiled at me and I saw how her maroon lipstick was bleeding up into the wrinkles over her lip.

“Hey, Gabe.”

“Hey, Kimberly.”

I sat and waited. Actually, it was nice to be someplace other than the house. I’d been to the funeral home, of course, and the funeral, but other than that I hadn’t been anywhere. The brown-and-beige-flecked carpeting was soft under my feet. I could feel the glass grit from the broken poodle coming off my soles into the fibers, and I felt bad, but I was glad to be rid of it. Marcus had someone come in and clean anyway. I shuffled my feet back and forth, back and forth. Kimberly looked up at me.

“I like the new carpet.”

She nodded and went back to what she was doing. Whatever that was. I sat on the same beige Naugahyde couch Marcus had always had. I think his parents had it back when we were in high school-in the den. I picked up a magazine off the end table. It was about golf. I tossed it back on the table.

“What the hell you got golf magazines for?” I asked Marcus when he came out.

“Come on,” he said.

I followed him out the door and around to his little storage unit in the back. The sun glared at me, reprimanded me, and I hadn’t done a thing wrong.

“Do you play golf now or what?”

“Pay attention.”

“Golf is a loser game.”

“Will you shut up?”

He unlocked the garage door and lifted it open. I liked the way it looked flat when it was down and then folded like a paper fan when he opened it. I ran my hand over the part I could reach. You couldn’t even tell it would fold.

“Gabe. You with me?”

“Jesus, Marcus. You act like I’m an idiot. “

“This is important.”

“My mom died, but I’m just the same.”

“Your mom dying’s got nothing to do with it. This is all you.”

“That’s right. One hundred percent prime American man.” I laughed. He gave a snort.

Behind some boxes there was a square silver metal suitcase that looked like it held equipment of some kind.

“Grab that,” he said. “Put it in your car.”

It was lighter than it appeared. I’d expected the weight of a piece of machinery. “What’s in here? Hundred-dollar bills?”

“I’m donating to Toys for Tots.”

I laughed. Marcus wouldn’t donate a rotten egg to his starving mother. I carried the case back around to my car. I opened the trunk.

“Don’t put it back there. Put it in the backseat.”

“It’s a fuckin’ suitcase.”

“Backseat.”

“Yessir.” I closed the trunk, walked around, and threw the case on the seat.

“Shit! Be careful.”

“It’s a metal case.”

“I told you it’s fragile.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“I did.”

“No, I’m sorry, Mr. Big Shot Importer, you did not.”

“Then I’m telling you now.”

“Then I heard you now.”

He handed me a piece of notebook paper with a map drawn on it. It wasn’t far away. It was parking lot number 4 in the Ballona Wetlands.

“What am I supposed to do in a parking lot?”

“The guy who wants this will meet you there.”

“In a parking lot? This sounds mighty fishy.”

“To who?”

“Ballona Wetlands-fishy-get it?”

Marcus shook his head.

“Or should I say birdy-it’s a bird refuge, after all.”

“What the fuck would birdy mean?”

“Good point.” I started to get in the car, and then I stopped. “It’s five minutes away. Why don’t you take it yourself? Or get old Kimberly to do it on her lunch hour.”

He wasn’t smiling. “You want the money or not?”

I shrugged, and then I thought of what fifty bucks would buy me and my pretty brown girl. I felt a burn like hot liquid run down my throat into my chest. And lower.

“Wanna come over later?” I asked Marcus. “I got someone I want you to meet.”

“Just get this done. Then we’ll see.”

“Can you give me some money now? I’m starving. I need to get a burger or something on the way.”

“I’ll give you twenty now, but don’t stop till after you make the drop-off. This has to be there-A.S.A.P.”

“A.S.A.P. What are you, some kind of general?” He looked pissed off, and that made me laugh. “And you did not ever tell me before it was fragile. You did not.”

He growled. I loved it when he growled. That meant I’d got him good.

I waved goodbye from inside my mother’s car. It still smelled like her, that perfume she always wore, and the hairspray. She never got that old-person smell like some people. She just smelled like herself until the day she died, and then she had a weird shit smell cause her bowels sort of let go. There was a used Kleenex in the cup holder. Maybe her last Kleenex from the last time she drove the car. I didn’t like to think what was wadded up inside it. It had bothered me all the way over to Marcus’s and I had meant to take it in and throw it away in Kimberly’s little metal trash can, but I forgot. It made me mad to see it, so I opened my window and threw it out. I didn’t want to litter, but I just couldn’t stand seeing that tissue anymore.

This was all I ever did for Marcus, take shit places. Sometimes it was one box, sometimes it was many boxes and I’d get to drive the van. I liked his van; it was more official than Mom’s car. Usually I just took the boxes to the airport and waited around while the guy did all the paperwork.

Awhile back I had asked Marcus, “If you’re an im-porter, how come I’m always taking boxes away? Shouldn’t I be picking them up?”

“I use the smart guy for that.”

We both laughed at that one. I knew the other guy who worked for him.

This was the first time I’d taken anything to a parking lot. I didn’t care what Marcus was into, and I knew I was safe or he wouldn’t have asked me, but it was odd. When I stopped for my burger I would open the stupid case and look inside. Maybe I really was Santa Claus delivering toys. Somehow I doubted it.

I headed away from the airport, toward Westchester proper. There was an In-N-Out on Sepulveda, and if it wasn’t crowded I could just dip into the drive-thru and be on my way in minutes. I had to eat. It was after noon and I’d had nothing. Goddamn traffic. All around me. Who were all these people? Westchester had been a quiet place when I was a kid. I remember watching the gnats cluster in the sun right in the middle of Lincoln Boulevard. I remember crouching on the sidewalk in front of Baskin-Robbins and feeding ice cream drips to the ants. Mom always ate rainbow sherbet. I always had mint chocolate chip. I should have brought her some sherbet when I first got home and she could still eat. It made me feel sick suddenly that I hadn’t. I hadn’t brought her anything. I saw my Baskin-Robbins, but it just looked ugly, sandwiched between Starbucks and an expensive juice place. I felt so sad. And old. Thirty-three and I felt like I was a hundred years old. I wasn’t hungry anymore. I figured I’d just get on with delivering the stupid old case.

I turned onto a side street, Winsford Avenue, and wound back through the neighborhood toward Lincoln. Winsford wasn’t as nice as Orange Street, my street. Nothing looked as nice anymore. The sky was gray and nobody had a green lawn and the goddamn planes kept going overhead.

Then I saw it. I had to turn on 80th to meet up with Lincoln, and there it was: the Collier School of Aviation Technology. Her school. It was right here and I was driving right past and I knew it was another moment of destiny. It was brown cinder block, about three stories high, just a box, but what more did a school need to be? I could see the fluorescent lights on in the upstairs classrooms. That’s where she was, sitting under that vibrating, humming, greening light, listening to a lecture or maybe practicing carrying a tray of coffee cups down a turbulent aisle. Bump. Bump. Her hip jostling against my shoulder.

“I’m so sorry,” she’d say. Then she’d turn and see me. “Oh, it’s you.”

“I wondered when you’d notice.”

I drove into the parking lot. I circled through until I found her Chevette. She really was there. All I had to do was wait. But I had the stupid case to deliver. It was quarter to 2. Her class was probably over at 2. I couldn’t get to the Ballona Wetlands and back in fifteen minutes. I could leave her a note if I had a piece of paper and a pencil, a note that would say, I was driving by on my way to an important meeting and saw your car. Hope you had fun at school. See you later. But she didn’t even know my name.

I sat in my mom’s car thinking about it, trying to decide what to do. She might remember me if I drew a picture of the coffee table, or of the birdbath with the plaster angel in my front yard. But again I’d need a piece of paper and a pencil. I must’ve sat for a while, because then I saw her. I saw a whole bunch of young stewardesses-to-be coming out of the building. They were walking together and talking and they were all so pretty, and then there she was. Prettiest of all. I saw those pink pants and that bright white white white top. She made me smile.

I got out of the car. “Hey,” I called to her.

Of course she looked startled. Who wouldn’t? She was not expecting me, her neighbor with the coffee table, her funny-guy neighbor all showered and shaved and standing by her car. She frowned.

“It’s me,” I said, “the guy from across the street.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“You comin’ over here or what?”

She took a step toward me, then plucked at her girlfriend’s sleeve and pulled her over too. They stopped a little ways away. “What are you doing here?”

“I want to be a stewardess too.”

“We’re called flight attendants.”

“Lah dee dah. Well, I’m a goods-and-services transport technician.”

“What’s that?” It was the girlfriend who asked. Truth is, I can’t even remember what she looked like, I was so blinded by my girl’s shining radiance.

“I make deliveries.”

They both laughed.

“I was driving by on my way to an appointment-”

“A delivery, you mean.”

“And I saw your car. You wanna go with me?”

“On your delivery?”

It was a stroke of genius, thinking of that. I could see she wanted to. She was intrigued. What did I deliver? And where? I was in a service industry just like hers and we were interested in each other’s work. Sitting at the kitchen table at night, I’d ask her about the funny passengers she helped and if there were any babies on the flight, and she’d ask me about Roger the airport guy, and Marcus, and Kimberly. We’d talk and tell each other stories over dinner.

“Your chariot awaits,” I said to her, and I bowed.

“I’m bringing Chara with me. Okay?”

That was her girlfriend obviously, and I was naturally a little disappointed. “Okay.”

Chara got in the backseat. “Ooeee. What’s in there? It smells.”

“It does not,” I said.

“You’re not sitting right next to it. It’s like Clorox or something. Nasty.” She pushed it away from her.

“It’s fragile, so be careful.”

My girl sat up front. She turned toward me and smiled and her brown eyes were big and happy. They were beautiful eyes with black lashes so long and thick they looked like the bristles in my hairbrush. I wanted to feel them against my cheek; butterfly kisses, my mother called them.

“Where we going?” she asked.

“Ballona Wetlands.”

“What for?” Chara in the backseat was a complainer, I could tell. “I need to get home.”

“Won’t take long,” I said. “I’m just giving that suitcase to someone. My friend’s in the importing business. Stuff from all over the world.” I looked at the clock on the dash. It had been quite awhile since I left Marcus. I knew the guy would be there waiting. I hoped he wouldn’t be too pissed that I was late.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

“Terrell,” she said. “I was named for my dad, Terry, and my aunt, Ellie.”

“It’s pretty.”

“What do they call you?” Chara asked from the back-seat.

“Gabe, short for Gabriel.”

“A real angel,” Terrell said.

“He sure is white,” said Chara.

“Nothin’ wrong with that.”

Right away, Terrell and I were together in the car, a duo. Immediately we were joined and Chara was on her own. I don’t know how long they’d been friends. I don’t know if they even really liked each other, but I knew Terrell was mine. She was falling toward me. I could feel the pull, like she was the iron shavings in my old science kit and I was the magnet.

She couldn’t help turning to me. I was happy. “You’re awfully skinny,” she said. “You need to eat more.”

“After this, I’ll take you for a burger or some french fries.”

“I’m starving,” Chara said.

I wanted to make her get out of the car. I should have, but of course I didn’t. We’re all so nice to each other, nice and polite, until we’re not. Maybe if we were rude in little ways at the very moment we got annoyed, we wouldn’t kill each other later. I drove down the hill past LMU and turned left off Lincoln into the Ballona Wetlands Preserve. I saw the wildflowers blooming and the bog smell was pleasant, earthy, and wet, like a mud puddle in the backyard. We bumped along. The road wasn’t well paved. Terrell squealed when we bottomed out in a particularly large pothole, and I laughed at her.

“How are you gonna be a stewardess if the bumps bother you so much?”

“Flight attendant.” Chara corrected me like a school-teacher.

Terrell just giggled. “I sure don’t like the bumps,” she said to me, and me alone.

She had told me a secret. I felt bigger then, like I’d grown six inches taller and thirty pounds heavier and I had hands and feet like a big man. I wanted to touch her shiny shoulder, but I didn’t because of Chara.

“There,” I said. “There’s the parking lot.”

My piece of paper said parking lot 4 and I saw the little wooden sign with the yellow number 4. The sky was like a baby store-pink and blue. The lot was empty. Marcus would kill me.

“There’s no one here,” Chara said.

“Will you shut up?” I couldn’t hold back.

“I’m getting out of this car.”

“Don’t.”

“I refuse to be spoken to like that. I’m gonna call my brother to come get me.”

“Stay in the car.” This from Terrell. “Please?”

“I don’t want to stay with that smelly old thing.” She pushed the case hard and it made a thump against the other door.

“Don’t touch it!” I shouted.

“What’s in it?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Money. Drugs. You know, Terrell, how they make it smell so the dogs can’t sniff it?”

“Chara.” Terrell frowned, but her friend was getting hysterical.

“It’s not good. It’s not safe. Where are we? What are we doing here? I want to go home! You tell him to take me home!”

Terrell turned around and leaned over the seat. “What’s the matter? What’s wrong with you? Gabe here lives across the street from my brother. He’ll take us home, soon as we deliver this.”

“Stop the car!” Chara screamed.

She opened her door. I slammed on the brakes and she fell forward onto Terrell’s seat. She screamed, and when she came up her nose was bloody. I hadn’t meant to stop short, but I didn’t want her to fall out onto the street.

“Oh my God,” Terrell said.

Chara was scrambling out of the car. She stumbled in the dirt parking lot. She was wearing a little skirt and ridiculous high heels.

“His mother just died!” Terrell called to her. “Wait.”

Chara was trying to run away.

“Where is she going?” I couldn’t help but ask. We were way back deep into the preserve, surrounded by bog and birds and not much else. A black town car came down the road toward us, moving fast, dust in a plume behind it. I breathed a big sigh of relief. My guy. He was later than I was.

Chara was flagging him down.

“Chara!” I shouted. I had gotten out of the car. “Stop. That’s my guy. That’s who I’m meeting.”

Terrell was out of the car and running toward Chara now. The town car had stopped and I could see the man had rolled down his window. He was big; he looked too big for the town car. He was hunched over the steering wheel so his head wouldn’t hit the ceiling. He frowned up at her, at Chara. She was crying and her nose was bleeding and she was begging him to let her in the car, to take her away, to call the police.

“He’s got something bad in that case!” she said. “He’s a crazy man!”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I hollered.

Terrell reached her before I did and she pulled on Chara’s arm. She was trying to drag her away from the car and apologize to the man at the same time. He seemed amused. He was looking at the two girls, he was looking at my girl and he was smiling.

Couple of silly females, I’d tell him. Chara just fell off her goddamn shoes. Marcus and Terrell and I would laugh about Chara later. I’d sit on that creamy Naugahyde with my arm around her and we’d be drinking a beer and laughing about poor Chara and her stupid shoes.

The guy reached out his window and grabbed Chara’s arm with his giant’s hand. He started to roll forward. Chara had to run along with him. He sped up. Terrell was running too, trying to peel his fingers from Chara’s arm.

I hurried back to my mother’s car. I opened the back door and the case fell out onto the ground. It fell hard and I worried about breaking whatever was inside. I picked it up. Something inside had come loose. Something was bumping around in there.

“Here!” I came running toward the town car. “Take it.”

Chara was trotting now, and blubbering. On those spike heels she was jogging, but she was getting tired. She stumbled and then she fell and made this horrible choking sound, but he didn’t let go, he just dragged her along next to him. Terrell screamed then. A beautiful, high scream, as much like a bird as a woman, in so much pain it hurt my heart to hear it. She put her fists over her eyes.

Good, I thought. Good. No one should see this. My sweet baby can’t see this. The driver dragged Chara until she stopped flopping, and then he dropped her. She lay there and he backed up and ran right over her. Then forward. There was this popping sound, loud as a firecracker but more hollow and round, and then a scuffling, and when I looked again, Chara’s legs were flat, but her arms were clawing in the dirt. I wanted her to die so she’d stop that noise, stop scratching. She was like a fly with its wings plucked off. Terrell had fallen to her knees. I had the case in my hand.

“Here!” I screamed again at the guy. “Here!”

Take this, leave my girl alone. Take this suitcase.

I ran toward him, but he was spinning his car in the dirt, doing a 360, heading for Terrell. She got up. She was no fool, and she started to run. She zig-zagged back and forth so the car couldn’t follow her. Made me so proud the way she ran and tried to save herself. She ran like the wind, like a nymph, like an angel. I was coming straight toward the car. I held the case in front of me. He was coming for both of us.

“Stop!” I screamed at him. “Stop!”

I flung the case at the car, but the catch opened in the