Oakland Noir

The Bridge Tender by Nick Petrulakis

Fruitvale Bridge

“Are those sirens? Gotta be. What do you think? Fire? Police?” She tilted her head and tried to catch more of the siren symphony below us. Whether or not the sirens were headed to the bridge depended on which side the call came from. If it came from the Alameda side, those sirens were ours; if the call came from the Oakland side, the sirens wouldn’t be headed our way, not yet. Always too much going on in Oakland, never enough in Alameda.

“You were talking about your boy,” I said, and that made her look back at me.

Because the sun lay low — and behind — her face was shadowed by her black curls, making it hard to see the eyes that were soft brown, a shade lighter than her skin. But just the mention of her son made her smile. I had to remember that.

“You’d like him,” she said. Then the wind got strong and she had to finger some of those curls away from her face. She’d started crying again so she took a deep breath and then released it, slow. “Close your eyes,” she said, yelling because of the wind.

I did, shut out the deepening sun, and everything got louder. The wind against my ears, the traffic from the bridge below us. But not the sirens, they’d grown faint — so they hadn’t been for us.

“You close your eyes strange,” she said.

I cupped a hand behind my ear.

“Salty people,” yelling again. “You make your eyes all squinchy when you close them. Rest of us? We just close our eyes when we close our eyes.”

I smiled, but then a gust shot up from over the water, shot up from way down, buffeted hard against me, and I rocked back, scared again, because when you’re sixty-five feet in the air — legs dangling from the side of a railroad bridge, and your eyes are closed, and you feel an unexpected blast of wind against your chest — you fucking rock back and clench your hands even harder against the rail, digging grit into your palms, slicing your skin with flaked paint, and you involuntarily breathe in and hold it, and then realize that only two seconds have passed since you smiled.

I wanted to check my fingers, see if I’d cut them, but I’d have to open my eyes and loosen my grip to do that.

Exhale.

“No peeking,” she said, still loud. “Now, make a picture of my boy inside your head. First, think about chubby cheeks. But chubby cheeks with attitude, am I right? Now amp up the cute. Definitely amp up the attitude.” The wind quieted. “I used to have cheeks like that.”

I pictured her reaching up, almost touching her face with her delicate hands, then stopping.

“It was time for the talk,” she said. “You know? The Talk. Everyone thought he was too young.”

Dead air.

With my eyes shut I was left to wonder what she was doing in the sudden still of the day. Smoothing her dress? Strumming the nylon rope with her left hand?

“They don’t know how curious he is. My boy kept asking questions, real crazy ones. ’Specially after he got Hammer.”

I missed what she said next because of the wind. It rushed at me again and I opened my eyes. It was bright, and she was lovely in the bright light — lovely in her yellow dress, her red sneakers.

Lovely and close. But not close enough.

I squinted from the light and tried not to gawk at her. Or the view — one of the best things about working bridges. The Coliseum in front of us with the hills after; San Francisco behind us with its bay. Its own bridges, its own views.

She stopped talking, seemed to judge the distance between us. Had it changed? Had I moved closer? No, not yet. So she started in on the rope again, tapped it with a fingernail painted as red as her shoes.

“Everybody said getting a kitten was stupid. That I was stupid. For getting my boy a cat. And a black cat? Bad luck, am I right? But my boy said that was dumb. Thinking black brought bad.”

She smiled again and started crying. Visions of her boy kept her doing that. Cry, smile, cry.

“A female kitten, right? But he called her Hammer. MC would’ve made it a boy’s name, but just Hammer? He didn’t see a problem with that.”

The wind stilled again and a toddler’s shriek cut up through the hush. We peered down at a mom — dressed as Cinderella ready for the ball — pushing a faded green stroller along the bridge below, then I looked at the water churning under that bridge, swirling, the surface of the estuary curling out like breath, the waves an exhalation, angry immediately under us but the whorls calming the farther they spread.

“What’s that mom see when she looks up?” she said, and let go of the rope, pointing down, the slanting light catching a flash of shiny red from her nails.

“She’s not looking at us,” I said as we heard another shriek, “she’s got that baby to worry about. And even if she did look up, Cinderella wouldn’t notice us, not with those clouds.”

If she could let go of her rope, I could let go of the rail, so I did, hitched one thumb over my shoulder at those beautiful clouds, did it fast and then grabbed the rail again. The grit under my palm familiar now, comforting.

“You want me to look at some pretty clouds?” She shook her head. “Not me, I’m past all that.”

“Okay,” I said, “okay.” And I held the rail tight. As long as I clutched the rail I was safe, I wouldn’t fall. “Cinderella, she’d see this rail bridge we’re sitting on, suspended by those tall, Erector Set towers.” I nodded at one, then the other. “That tower in Oakland, that one in Alameda, separated by six hundred feet of water.”

“This Erector Set ain’t pretty, but she sure works hard.” She palmed away more tears. “Story of my life right there.”

“This bridge is important — she connects us to California. Don’t diminish her.”

She wasn’t listening. “What does that mom see right now?”

Right after she said mom, she touched her belly. A short, soft movement.

“If she looked up, which she didn’t, by the way, no one is looking up, no one sees us. But if she did, she’d think she was seeing one bridge when of course it’s two. Ours, right here, the rail bridge, looking like an oversize, elongated H,” I pressed harder on the girder we sat on, “with this huge section of track that just moves as one piece up and down, and when it goes down it connects the rails on the Oakland side to the tracks on the Alameda side.”

Another cry from below but I couldn’t see Cinderella. Strollering back into Oakland, she was blocked from my view by the north tower.

“Then there’s the bridge for cars below us. The Miller-Sweeney — my Miller-Sweeney — a workhorse drawbridge. But we all combine them since we’re neighbors, and make one span out of two, and call it the Fruitvale Bridge.”

“You’re not listening to me,” she said, and she slapped the girder. “What does she see right now?”

I tried to pitch my voice lower so she had to strain to hear. “Right now she sees what’s directly ahead of her, the traffic on Fruitvale, cars headed into Oakland, a few full of trick-or-treaters coming this way to Alameda.”

“No, that mom saw us. She saw our legs kicking back and forth. Someone saw us, right? At least one someone saw us, and that someone found a phone and called the police.”

“We’re not kicking our legs back and forth,” I said.

The wind blew and I felt like I was falling, like I’d lost my grip, so I leaned back until the vertigo went away and I was left with the wind and a pretty woman sitting next to me on the bridge — a pretty woman pretending nothing was wrong, nothing out of the ordinary, even as her nails nervously tip-tapped a nylon rope tied to her neck.

Then the wind eased and we could hear a BART train half a mile off accelerating out of Fruitvale Station.

I glanced at the fingers of one hand. Only my thumb had been cut. I put it in my mouth, tasted dust and blood.

“After I finished the Talk,” she said, “my boy just looked at me. I started thinking maybe he was too young, maybe they were right and I shouldn’t have said anything. But his questions... he always has so many questions. Like, Where did Hammer come from? And he didn’t mean the pound, right?”

The breeze whipped one of her long black curls in front of her eyes. “He didn’t want me making up some fool story about storks, he wanted to know. So that’s why we had the Talk. But after?” She reached for the curl, wrapped it around her finger. “You know how some kids, when they have a question for you, they do that dog thing and tilt their head?” She tried to tuck the curl behind her ear but the wind got brutal for a second. “Know how I mean, right? When they look at you all confused? My boy never did that. He’s never been confused in his life. But he did it right then. Just that once. Went all spaniel on me and tilted his head, thinking about this hurt I just made real. You ever see your mom cry?”

“No.”

“Lucky you. First time my boy saw me cry. First and only. I’ve had plenty of reasons to, but I never did, until then. This wasn’t the birds and the bees. He got the truth. The awful, hurtful truth.”

I think she said hurtful, but we had the wind again, so loud, so high up. Above the buildings, above the trees. Maybe she’d said helpful?

“My boy looked over at Hammer, who was asleep on my bra. That kitty had dragged it into a spot of sun. My boy looks from his cat to me and he asks, It’s the same for cats as it is for people? I just nodded. Mom, he says, I think you better get fixed like Hammer so it doesn’t happen to you again.”

We laughed, both of us, and it was the prettiest sound I’d heard since I’d braced myself against the V support behind me. I took the cover of laughter to try and inch closer, but she’d gone quiet and as soon as my body moved, hers tensed. So I stopped, of course. I had to.

“That idea from my boy?” Again a soft touch to her belly. “The best advice I ever got. But stupid me, right? Did I follow it?”

A car crossed the bridge, honking, and the honk was contagious because two other cars, then three, joined in. The last was an orange Volkswagen, and, in honor of the day, black triangle-eyes and a blocky mouth had been shoe-polished onto the hood, transforming it into a rolling jack-o’-lantern.

She waited like she knew how, and then all those cars were over the bridge and gone. “You didn’t answer my first question about the sirens. Police or fire? I guessed fire.” Then she forgot that she was past it all now, forgot that beauty couldn’t sway her anymore and suddenly she was distracted by the view.

Alameda stretched out long and low on one side of the estuary; shopping center here, houses with their docks along the water starting there, but most everything screened by trees, so many trees lining the streets. On the Oakland side it was warehouses, the glass recycling plant closest with its smokestacks — tall and oversize like on the Titanic. Below them, rising from behind the chain-link fence, were icebergs of crushed glass glittering in the setting sun.

But then the warehouses stopped at the freeway — all traffic, no trees — and the buildings of Fruitvale began. Beyond there were houses on the other side of International, continuing on to 580, then up into the hills where the trees finally regained control.

She looked around us. “Is it always so pretty up here?”

“You are,” I said.

Her gaze came back, away from the hills, searched for the outboard motor someone had just started — there, a few docks down and away, the motor spewing smoke, the smoke more blue than black. Why wasn’t she looking at those clouds? The clouds that were behind everything, those beautiful clouds taking on color. In the late afternoon there was pretty all around — even Oakland looked pretty because we were far enough away that you couldn’t really see the city. If you could really see Oakland you’d turn from it like she’d just done. But now, almost dusk? With the sun picking out some of the windows — glint, flash — from some of the houses from some of the hills?

Glint, flash, glint, as the sun moved lower.

“Very pretty,” I repeated. “Please tell me you know that.”

Her fingers on the rope, strumming it. Her fingers so long. Not strumming. Tapping. Fast, fast, fast, slow. Why hadn’t I noticed that before?

“Do you still play piano?”

She tensed again, looked down at her fingers. Tap tap tap taaap.

She laughed. “I thought you were doing some mind reading there, something fancy. But you aren’t fancy at all, are you? And you most definitely don’t know pretty.”

Some hot, wet smell caught us — diesel, dead fish — swirled around and then was gone.

“Can you get that picture back in your head?” She smiled, thinking about her son again.

I nodded, then tapped my forehead like she’d been tapping — the first four notes of Beethoven’s 5th. Tap tap tap taaap.

“He’s going to be so handsome, the cute is a phase, I can tell. He’s going to leave that all behind and then...”

And then nothing from her.

“What, like Jim Brown?” I asked.

“Nah, he’s going to be more movie-star handsome than football handsome.”

“Jim Brown was a movie star too.”

She would have been good in an old movie, in that dress. The yellow so faint that in this light you could mistake it for white. A breeze caught the hem and it whispered and I was staring again. I did that when she stopped talking — it was easy to stare. The dress, so sheer, and the fact that she wasn’t wearing anything else. Underneath was just her in that beautiful dress and red sneakers, each sneaker with a big white star on the side. It should have been a ridiculous look but it wasn’t, not on her.

She was a watcher, like me, and she was watching again, noticed my gaze.

“The shoes. I know.” And now she did kick her legs back and forth. “It was the same day he got Hammer. He was so happy. My boy’s never happy, not ever. But that whole week he was happy. And that day? He couldn’t stand it, right? He said, I got my most favorite wish. Now it’s your turn.”

“He made you buy those shoes?” I said.

“I know, right?”

I noticed that one of them was untied and she dangled it from her foot. This beautiful woman just dangling a red sneaker like she hadn’t a care in the world — when obviously she was being crushed by it.

I thought she was going to kick the shoe off but she left it there, dangling high over the water.

“You think I was going to disappoint him? Not that day.”

“Can I move a little closer?” I asked.

Behind her, the sun had almost disappeared and her face gained detail in the softer light.

“No. Just stay.”

“Okay, okay, I’m staying.” There was too much space between us — six feet, probably more. Too much space. “It’s just, the sun’s almost gone, and with this wind you must be getting cold.”

“Is it that obvious?” She looked down — right, then left. “I guess it is.” She drew her arms around herself. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

I didn’t have to think about that. “I steal books.”

Two geese — not enough for a formation — flew at us, then the lead angled its wings and the other followed, up and over.

“Well, just one book. But lots of copies of that book. Every time I see it, I steal it. Then I burn it.”

“Burning books is wrong,” she said.

“Not if you copy a poem from a book, put that poem in a letter to a girl, and tell the girl the poem is yours.”

“You tried to show off by writing a letter you didn’t write?”

“Pretty much.”

“So, your plan is to steal every copy of that book and this girl, she’s never gonna know you lied? Is that right?”

“Pretty much,” I repeated.

“What do you do, break into people’s houses and go hunting for books? That’s messed up.”

“Not houses,” I said. “Sometimes libraries, but mainly it’s bookstores. If they’re selling it, I just—”

“Steal it. That’s the Eighth Commandment you’re breaking right there.” She looked at the railroad tracks next to us, then back at me. “The trains, they hardly ever come anymore. Why not?”

“Just less need. This year is their last.”

“I thought they’d run forever,” she said.

“You’ll have to trust me on this one.”

She continued tapping on the rope. Blue nylon bigger around than the fingers she tapped it with.

“1999 is the end of a lot, then,” she said.

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“Oh? Can you keep the trains running?”

“No,” I said.

“Then shut up.”

The clouds behind her glowed like embers from the sun’s last light.

“How long have you worked here?” she asked. She was just killing time now — that couldn’t be good.

“Five years,” I said.

“How did you decide this was for you?”

The questions were as ridiculous as her shoes should have been, but she was earnest — like she really thought there might be answers.

“I stay because I like being in the middle. Not Oakland, not Alameda. I like it, being halfway. At first it was just a job. It’s not like in kindergarten when all the other kids were saying astronaut, or Wonder Woman, that I said bridge tender.”

“That’s what you’re called?”

New sirens now, not going somewhere else. They were headed here.

“Someone has to be on site in case the bridges need raising, so yes, that’s us. Bridge tenders.”

“But the trains are ending. So you’ll be watching over nothing? Halfway over nothing?”

With the sun having just disappeared, the clouds were magnificent, glowing even brighter orange, brighter red. She moved her head, heard the sirens for sure. Behind her — San Francisco’s skyline, backlit with the glory of those clouds. The clouds really on fire now. And the tears on her face, so many tears.

“Your son—”

“Don’t,” she cut in. “Please. Not him, not now.”

“But you’re his mom,” I said. “A good one.”

“You don’t know anything. Not one thing. Not about him, not about me.”

On the water, a lone rower in a single scull leaned forward, then pulled back on her long oars, her motion powerful, fluid. Lean, pull. Lean, pull.

“How many of you work here?” she said as her fingers tightened on the rope. Where had she learned to tie a knot like that?”

“Four. There’s at least one of us here around the clock.”

“And you have to raise the bridge for boats? Whenever? They have right of way, always?” She was talking so fast.

“Don’t do this, not today,” pleading now. “Not on such an easy day to remember, a holiday.”

“It’s not Christmas.”

The rower was already on the other side of the bridge. Her boat skimmed fast, its narrow shell slicing open the skin of the water.

“This is gonna cause trouble for you.” She started crying again. “Sorry about that.”

I wanted to get her away from thinking about the trouble she could cause. “What’s your son’s name?” I asked.

“No, that’s mine.” A flurry came out of the orange light and carried away what she said next, so she repeated herself: “What’s yours?”

“I’ll tell you if you tell me,” I said.

“No, you didn’t answer my question.” She cried harder, shaking from the tears.

“Okay, okay. There’s two times a day when the bridge is down and stays down — an hour in the morning, two at night. Otherwise, yes, we’re all of us at the mercy of the boats.”

Her nose had started running so she blew it, wet and messy, into her fingers, wiped her fingers on her dress. Then she looked between us at the railroad track nestled between girders.

“This one’s almost always up. Only comes down for the trains, am I right?” She tugged on the other end of the blue nylon, checking that it held. “How high are we?”

“Not that high. It just feels that way with Oakland there, and Alameda here, and the road and water below.”

She shook her head. “Not high enough to just jump. That’s why.” She tapped the rope.

Oakland, I wanted to tell her, it’s so very pretty right now. And San Francisco? With its outline on fire? “Look,” I said.

“No.” She drew the back of her hand against her slick cheeks before she tugged on the rope again. Then her fingers slid up the rope’s other end to the figure eight she’d tightened against her neck.

“Your son,” I tried to say, but I was crying now too, and I couldn’t see the fire in San Francisco — it was just a smear of red.

“So curious,” she said. “He is so curious. And going to be so handsome.”

The sirens were loud, the wind couldn’t take away the sirens, not now, and they were coupled with flashing lights strobing from between the trees, the red light mimicking the colors of the clouds. The wind was so strong, I was trying to dry my eyes, but there was no way.

“Please, c’mon. Please. I can help you but you have to help me. I get it, okay? It’s the hardest thing in the world, the asking. I’ve never asked for help. Ever. So I understand how hard it is. I get it, I do. You don’t want to ask for help. I don’t want to ask for help. But this is my life — keeping people safe on my bridge. Let me do my job. Right now. I’m begging, okay? Help me. Please.”

“I have to go now.” She put her hands down. Her long fingers on the girder, feeling the grit like I felt it but finding no comfort in the roughness, none.

Oh God. I swung my arm out, pivoted as fast as I could, the dirt and chipped paint ripping the skin on my fingers that still held on while my other hand shot toward her, reaching through nothing. But I was too far away, six feet was too far, she hadn’t let me get any closer, not even an inch, and it was like she didn’t have any last words — I have to go now — because they were gone as soon as they were spoken, erased by the wind, and the final thing she did was look up before she pushed herself off the bridge.

Her dress blurred yellow through the air. She fell so fast. Five feet, ten — then the rope snapped taught and her body jerked. The shoe that she’d dangled was flung off, and fell graceful and red through the wind.

I watched it fall, and fall, and hit the water.

The Wishing Well by Kim Addonizio

Pill Hill

There are no magic walnuts in this story, or wise flounders who speak in rhyme.

Or princes hacking their way through brambles for princesses who shit roses.

None of that here.

All of these people are doomed — they just don’t know it yet.

They’re all jittering and talking and jonesing in the Kaiser Dependency Recovery Center.

They’re keeping their fate at bay, just barely, maybe thinking they’re getting a handle on their lives. They hold out a little hope.

I don’t belong anywhere near them.

We sit in a circle talking about our week and one guy says, “I know I’m going to start using when I start hating people, judging people on the bus,” and the woman next to him says, “What do you do when you start to get critical, then?” and the guy — he’s a meth head — leans back in his chair, crosses his arms, and answers, “Just say to yourself, Who the hell am I?”

Exactly.

My friend Elena has two subjects of conversation: her family and the lottery. The problem and the solution.

Elena never has money for cigarettes because her monthly check goes to stuff she can’t buy with food stamps, to PG&E, and to the corner liquor store for SuperLottoPlus tickets.

Elena is my next-door neighbor. I’m here at Kaiser to keep her company. She’s recovering, and I don’t intend to.

I believe that alcohol and drugs are a life choice, not a sickness.

A sickness is when you love someone you shouldn’t. There is no recovery.

Elena’s granddaughter Darnique lives across town in East Oakland with her shit-for-brains father, Elena’s son Anton.

Anton makes movies, which means he illegally downloads and sells them.

Anton also sells drugs, which means people come and go from his place at all hours.

He puts Darnique’s glue and colored markers and construction paper on a high shelf so she can’t get to them when he’s not around.

Among other, worse things.

I feel bad for Darnique because she’s another doomed soul who doesn’t know it.

Or maybe she does.

During the break, Elena smokes my cigarettes. “Last week Darnique be talkin’ about people who kill themselves from stress. Why she askin’ about that?” Elena says. “She only ten years old. I tell her, Uh-uh, girl, you gonna live a long time. Those people that kill themselves, they just got nobody to talk to.”

There is a gun in this story, so probably you know what that means.

Elena doesn’t know shit. I like her.

“So, what’s your story?” a guy at the Kingfish asks when I’m about six beers in.

“Just a girl having a drink,” I say.

Though “girl” at forty-five is kind of a stretch.

“Feel my ears,” he says.

He’s clearly looking for something, rather than someone. We both know what it is.

“Like stones,” I say, touching them.

“I used to wrestle. It smashes the cartilage.”

The Kingfish is close enough to walk home from, which makes up for it not serving hard liquor. Plus, there’s fresh popcorn and a shuffleboard table. The guy and I slide a few pucks down the table, and then we walk to my place, and soon we’re naked on my living room rug and he shows me some wrestling moves.

My house is a little 1920s bungalow on a quiet street, a few blocks off Telegraph Avenue.

Usually quiet, anyway. Every so often someone runs through the backyard. Once I opened my back door and two cops were there, looking for a gun someone dropped.

Mostly older black folks live here. There’s a white lesbian couple that keeps chickens. There’s also an old Polish guy in a wheelchair who owns three houses on the block. One he lives in, and the other two look condemned.

“What’s your story,” the wrestler says again, when we’re sitting on the front porch afterward.

Not like he really wants to know.

I tell him anyway.

I tell him my parents died a few years ago in a car crash and left me some money, enough for a down payment on this house and something left over.

I tell him about Nick taking out a whopping loan on our equity line of credit at the bank — I put him on the mortgage as a tenant-in-common — without bothering to mention it. I tell him how I kicked Nick out when I found out, and how much I hate him. I keep saying his name: Nick, Nick, Nick.

Fucking Nick.

Right now all the houses on the street are dark and somehow seem smaller, like they shrink a little when the light goes out, and I imagine that everyone else is asleep and not having bad dreams.

“I guess I should go,” the wrestler says.

I find the dropped gun the next day, in the potted bamboo on the deck, and I keep it.

Nick and I were together ten years, which means things were both good and bad. When I think about him, I think about us having sex.

And sometimes him standing at the stove cooking.

But mostly the sex.

Everyone you love leaves a hole in you.

A blast crater.

Soon there aren’t any more flowers or birds and the rivers dry up.

The wrestler’s been gone about ten minutes when a car pulls up next door and cuts its lights. I pull back a little, into the shadowed part of the porch where the streetlamp doesn’t reach.

The back door of the car opens.

Someone gets pushed out.

There’s a little chiming sound from the wind chimes.

There’s a motorcycle backfiring on the freeway two blocks away.

I’ve never seen a dead person. I’ve seen birds lying stiff under a tree, or next to a window they slammed into. Once I saw a half-eaten deer in the Oakland Hills. I watched my cat be put to sleep. They looked like nothing — a rock, a fence post, a throw rug.

This looks like shit-for-brains Anton.

He’s lying on the curb where they pushed him out.

The car drives off without turning on its lights. It passes the house where the Polish man lives. It passes the house where the old woman sits on her porch all day, her hands folded in her lap. I follow the car until I can’t see it anymore and have to imagine where it goes.

I head inside, get a bottle from the built-in shelving, and drink without looking to see what’s in it.

Gin.

I met Anton a few times in Elena’s kitchen. She was making macaroni and government cheese, ground beef round and Hamburger Helper, chicken thighs. He was just this side of sullen, talking to me but not making eye contact.

I try to imagine where Anton has gone. If he might see my parents and pass on a message.

He let Darnique go to school without breakfast most days. Once he slammed her head against a washing machine.

So fuck drug-dealing movie-making shit-for-brains Anton.

The message I would give my parents is this: Please come back.

And this: I know you were both drunk off your asses when you crashed the car.

I add some Snapple Lemonade to the gin.

I call Nick.

My mother used to read me stories. They ended happily, but before that there was usually sadness or difficulty. I never understood why they ended just when the good part was starting.

Elena tried to kill herself at least once that I know of. She had a baby back in Tennessee. The baby was born crack-addicted, and died.

I learned this from Darnique.

I tried to kill myself at least twice. There might have been a third time, or I might have just been drunk and taken more pills than I realized.

This was always after Nick had sex with someone else.

I love Nick with all my heart and soul, and he’s a complete asshole.

He comes right over when I call.

“I’m scared, Nick,” I say. “What if they come back? What if they know I saw their car? What about Elena? She’s going to come outside with her coffee in the morning, come over here to bum a cigarette, and see her dead son lying there. Should I call the cops?”

“I’m sorry about the money,” Nick says.

“You’re such a dick,” I say. Then he kisses me and we go to bed.

Afterward I lie awake. Nick is snoring a little. I can hear cars on the street.

I imagine that my heart looks like the moon, the surface all fucked up from space rocks.

The moon has no atmosphere.

Red lights swirl around the bedroom.

Elena mourns Anton with a houseful of people and a lot of potato salad and ribs.

I bring her a grocery bag from the Alameda Food Bank. Tangerines. Chocolate fudge Jell-O. Cans of tuna and vegetables.

At her church they play tambourines and talk about Jesus’s love.

There is no God.

Nick and I bought a grill.

Which means he’s moved back in.

“Next time I’ll bring you a barbequed turkey,” I tell Elena.

“I ain’t had no barbequed turkey ever,” Elena says. “Ain’t you got to defrost it first?”

“We’re getting a fresh one.”

“Fresh? Where you get that at?”

“Andronico’s, in Berkeley.”

Which means in a galaxy far, far away.

Darnique comes to live with Elena. They get out the glue and glitter and colored markers. Elena cornrows Darnique’s hair. She makes her Eggo Cinnamon Toast waffles for breakfast.

Everything works out fine, except in the end it doesn’t.

Elena will get diabetes. Darnique will be pregnant by fourteen.

I’m nobody’s fucking fairy godmother.

This is the part where the gun goes off. I was drunk, and mad at Nick again after he’d been back a couple of months.

It turns out he had another girlfriend.

Everyone leaves me sooner or later.

I kind of waved the gun around and screamed at him. Then I aimed it at my head, but I changed my mind and turned it toward him instead.

Years before, when Elena tried to kill herself, the recoil of the gun jerked her hand away from her temple. The bullet only grazed her neck, leaving a little scar.

So I knew to hold the gun steady.

There is no recovery.

When I was little, my parents used to take me to bars with them.

Shit works out for other people sometimes, but not for me.

And not for the other women in here.

In here we’re all doomed, and we know it.

My parents’ favorite bar when we lived in San Francisco was the Wishing Well.

It’s gone now.

I sat on a stool and drank Shirley Temples.

In my glass, three bright-as-neon cherries were impaled on a plastic sword.

I pulled it from the melting ice.

They were cold, and delicious.

A Murder of Saviors by Keenan Norris

Toler Heights

I remember hearing about the incident in the news, and considering it with all the sentimentality of a seven a.m. BART train crowd, battered black briefcases and visionless stares. I’m a real romantic, you can tell. Perfect for reporting on Oakland’s death spirals — not so much for San Francisco, but this story doesn’t have shit to do with San Francisco.

The kid was found in the commercial truck bay of the plaza that divides East Oakland from the suburbs just beyond. A gravel ramp runs up from the bay to the upper level of the plaza, where there is a police station. Someone had tracked the victim’s blood up the black ramp, right past the police. Granted, it was a rough section of town, but even by tough-town standards, this seemed impetuous. Not only were the police stationed there, there were also a children’s dance studio, a decent-quality supermarket, and a Wells Fargo bank in the plaza. A murder committed so close to so much innocence and authority was rash, even if it happened in the early morning, before business hours.

Nobody knew what to make of it, least of all the local media and police. The press gave the boy’s name — Shaun Sobrante — his age — sixteen — and his surprisingly strong grade-point average — 3.3. The local gumshoes, going light on the investigative aspect of their work, redundantly noted the manner of his murder and the fact that there was no known culprit, nor motive, nor any witnesses. This was a prediction and justification of what came next: nothing.

The police offered only the unhelpful fact that Shaun was apparently unaffiliated with street gangs and had a marijuana possession charge on his record. The intent-to-distribute case was still pending at the time he was murdered. I recall wishing that I was a police investigator, or a paid reporter on the crime beat, so I could put in some real work on the case. That’s assuming there was still such a thing as a “crime beat” when it came to local news. It sure didn’t seem like it.

Where Shaun’s murder barely registered with the media or the law, it resonated deeply along the blocks surrounding the plaza — his community. Shaun’s elaborate graffiti visage went up on the wall of a handball court at the nearby middle school. His funeral brought out several hundred mourners. A basketball tournament was staged at the courts on Seminary Avenue, to mark his passing and the deaths of the many other young people who’d lost their lives to East Oakland violence. Underground rap music blared his name in deafening tribute down the boulevards.

And an Oakland-born businessman with friends in high places came home and founded a school in his honor: Sobrante Preparatory Academy.

The charter schools had swooped in like a black murder of crows over Oakland, resectioning the city’s schools and recalibrating its civics. No Child Left Behind money was flowing to a few select men and women handpicked to recode the curriculum. It was only later, after Principal Hill at Sobrante Prep excited my investigative streak, that I learned of this trend, but I might as well set the stage with it now so that what happened, the whole mystery at the heart of things, will come clear to you faster than it did to me.

There was James Chavo of the Native American Middle School; Lexington Fowler at Inspired Tech Academy; Mrs. Majesty Blanche Boudreaux at Leaders Born High School. There were others too, believe me. The time was ripe for saviors: our president was a great born-again Christian and the City of Dope, that Too $hort had told us couldn’t be saved by John the Pope, was being born again too. No, it was no longer the drug-plagued eighties, or the bullet-riddled nineties. It was a new century and saviors were everywhere in Oakland. The town was being chartered out.

By the time of the Sobrante murder, the schools were already receiving quite a bit of press for their ties to the Republican Party and their exceptional test scores. Chavo at the Native American school in the Laurel District was said to be a miracle worker — his students’ Annual Yearly Progress scores had reached 860 for two years in a row, an elite level rarely accomplished by any but the most privileged private schools. Chavo was also said to be a born-again of particular fervor and Bible-beating prowess. Fowler’s Inspired Tech Academy was, like the Native American school, situated in one of East Oakland’s diverse, borderline neighborhoods, where the announcement of an AYP above 800 was often followed by word that a police informant had been executed in an alleyway, or that SWAT was busting in someone’s door down the street. The kind of neighborhood that could go either way at any moment. Fowler, for his part, had been among Bush 41’s Thousand Points of Light back in ’90 or ’91, and he had not lost favor with the paradise-inclined mind of 43, the son.

Everything about the charters was story-worthy. Yet there was an undercurrent in every article that went uninterrogated. Each piece would mention, in passing, the schools’ high teacher turnover and militant reliance on nineteenth-century schoolhouse discipline. Chavo, it was reported, angrily ended a pep rally in mid-hoorah because some boys were sagging their pants in violation of his dress code. Fowler, meanwhile, took it upon himself to patrol the halls of Inspired Tech and volubly chastise girls if they were cuddled up with the lower-performing boys. Mrs. Majesty Blanche Boudreaux, the Tribune reported, actually went to the trouble of keeping a public tally of students whose grade-point averages statistically qualified them for acceptance to four-year colleges and universities, implying that the rest were wastrels and losers. Cash Hill bought ad space in the Tribune where he proclaimed his school would be “the lynching that Thug Life and all the other culture cancers have coming.”

Why weren’t these signs of unstable leadership investigated? I can’t say. What I do know now, but only suspected back then, is that local newspapers were experiencing the wrath of the Internet, and budgets were being slashed like a machete dropping cane. Investigative reporting was going the way of my own broken dream of being the next Woodward, Pilger, and Wells, all wrapped into one. News anchors and popular editorialists might demand high salaries, but the actual nature of their work was inexpensive. By contrast, the costs for actual investigative work could spiral stratospherically. What if the story went deeper and involved more players than originally expected? What if the saga ran longer than anyone suspected it would? A news agency couldn’t just pull out midinvestigation and act like the story had run its course. It was an all-or-nothing deal — and the media increasingly opted for nothing.

I had always imagined myself haunting the halls of the state capitol, doggedly delivering on the intentionally obscured issues of political glad-handing and corruption. Maybe if I made it out of local news, I’d one day work for CNN or CBS, and find myself holed up with Congolese rebels or unembedded in Iraq or Afghanistan. At the very least I’d end up on the Big Pharma beat, stalking CEOs from boardrooms to brunch dates with doctors on the make. But by the time I was out of college, that deeply researched reporting on local politics and events was dead. If it had to do with a war in the Middle East — fuck the Congo, Uganda, or Sri Lanka — there was always money and a few warm bodies to throw at it. But what went on in Sacramento day to day, let alone Oakland, might as well have been happening on another planet.

I was still trying my hand at freelance reporting back then, although a year clear of school I was just as broke and unpublished as I’d been on my graduation day. Oh, the pride of my parents, you can only imagine. I picked up a part-time job at a Mexican supermarket on East 14th near the Allen Temple Baptist Church, and I worked parking lot security for the church on Wednesdays and Sundays. My savings had run dangerously low before the part-time jobs and I had been forced to move into a three-bedroom duplex off 85th Avenue where I was the only tenant. This was way before gentrification so I could afford it. Nobody but a naïve college kid wanted that rattrap, which was right above a homeless encampment that doubled as an open-air drug den. Looming over the many elderly, addled homeless was a billboard advertising pet rescue and adoption: Save Fido. Rescue Kitty. Happy, smiley, white Disney cartoon people nuzzled their anthropomorphic pets right on top of rickshaw shopping carts, broken black people, syringes, and vials. The landlady was more than happy to get my six hundred dollars in rent every month. Half the faucets didn’t work, the electrical outlets were all ungrounded so powering up my PC was taking my life in my hands, and there was no heating or air-conditioning in the whole place. The building was as dangerous, really, as anything outside its walls. But I wasn’t ready to give up on myself as a journalist. I had no desire to admit defeat and fall back on my parents in suburban Sacramento, so I holed up in the hood and held tight. I drank a lot, and read books about washouts on the outskirts of Hollywood throwing their ideas down the toilet along with their liquor vomit.

I wasn’t sure if I was embarking on an article about a hero leading a great educational effort in an East Oakland ghetto, running a preparatory academy literally founded upon a murder scene and dedicated to the victim — or if what I was after was something more sinister. But I had to tell the story everyone else was slighting, even if my only means of publication was a blog that no one but its author ever read.

I started schooling myself on the inner workings of Sobrante. Eventually, I wanted to talk to the principal himself, but first I needed to know more about his operation from people around the fringes. I couldn’t interview students who were minors without complications arising, so I settled for janitorial staff, clerical workers, and former employees who were already making their presence known on Glassdoor.com.

“A Trump-like figure,” one post read, “a mannerless Wall Street lout.” It was the language of a teacher or HR staffer from the hills, maybe even from Marin, who was trying to compute the existence of a man so connected and yet so uncouth.

“The educational equivalent of a prosperity preacher,” another post read.

“Like the Eddie Longs and T.D. Jakes of the world, he’s receiving the largesse of the Bush administration — except instead of faith-based initiatives it’s No Child Left Behind federal funding,” another writer noted.

Others were more opinionated: “What a black cracker! Not to play the ‘race card,’ but is there any chance in hell that white kids would get guinea-pigged like this by an education fascist?”

Glassdoor disrobed the town and had a million stories to share about its birthday suit, but it was still just a website. For all the Internet could reveal and make accessible, it couldn’t replace the intimately felt reality of genuine reporting. There was no flesh to grasp onto online, no facial cues, hushed tones, or eyes that would rather wander a million miles than meet your own. No viscera. Everything was cloaked in keyboards and anonymity. I had to get on the campus (through the plaza mall, past the Wells Fargo and the dance studio) and talk to real people, on the record.

“The dress code is selective,” said one staff member who declined to be identified. “For the record, remember what a charter is and isn’t. There are private schools in Oakland’s enclaves with bigger endowments than state universities. These schools serve two, three hundred children at most. We are not private, kids actually go to school here. Our endowment is the overtime wages Hill shorts us on. If we didn’t receive public monies, we wouldn’t exist. But at the same time we’re not true public schools because we’re not union or school board regulated. There’s no unions, no boards — just Hill. Hill regulates us and himself. As far as this school is concerned, he is the state. Only the federal government has any say over him, and you know the feds don’t come to Oakland unless it’s a drug bust. Plus, he’s got friends in the White House.”

“Friends?”

“That’s what I heard.”

“Duly noted.” I moved us back to firmer ground: “The dress code is selective, how?”

“Selective like this: If your GPA is above a 3.0, your standardized test scores are above proficiency, and you’re a girl, you can wear a cropped halter top and high heels. Your blouses can expose back and shoulders. If you’re a boy with those same credentials, you still can’t sag your pants, because Hill thinks that’s coded communication between gang members. But you can wear your hat at any angle you like, you can wear jewelry, and you can curse without facing reprimand. These privileges are not open to the low-performing student.”

I remember pausing to take stock of a few of the class photographs that adorned this woman’s office walls. The children wore an array of outfits, some with pants sagging ludicrously low, evidently in open rebellion to the rules. Others wore their shorts high-water, like old men, Urkel, and wary boxers. Several of the girls wore “stunner shades,” huge block-shaped goggle-like sunglasses that seemed to only come in hot pink, flame orange, or neon blue. These young ladies were also bursting out of their tiny shirts emblazoned with provocative insignias, which drew my attention that much more shamefully to their taut teenage breasts. “These must be the straight-A students,” I cracked.

“No,” she shrugged, “not even close. This crew isn’t exactly headed to Harvard Yard.”

“But I thought only the smart kids could dress like they want.”

“In theory, that’s the rule. But Hill can’t patrol the halls every morning and afternoon inspecting each student’s clothes. He has a school to run, and day-trading to do,” the woman reminded me. “That would be unrealistic, even for a demagogue. The dress code mostly comes into effect the day before standardized tests, and everybody knows it. I think he learned it from Chavo over there at the Indian school. Baggy jeans, exposed boxer briefs, halter tops, and visible bra straps will get you suspended on test day, if you’re bad at taking tests.”

“Is that legal?” I asked ignorantly. Was the place where I lived legal under any compliance code? Was the homeless encampment on the street outside legal? Where were their permits? What about the police who curb-crawled the neighborhood nightly, extorting the prostitutes and shoestring pimps? Where was running a protection racket out of a police station endorsed under the law?

“I asked the same question when I first showed up here.” She nodded at me somberly. “I don’t anymore.”

AYP scores came in: Sobrante rated a 650, hardly in the elite category that the Native American Middle School consistently claimed, but it was at least a hundred points higher than the public high schools deep in East Oakland.

According to my inside sources, Principal Hill was unsatisfied. He blamed the mediocre score on race and culture. One source had surreptitiously recorded Hill’s rant on her phone: “If these Negroes would consent to an eleven-month school year for their children, we could social engineer our way to a 900 AYP in no time flat. I promise that on my brother’s grave. We could create a black Bill Gates. We could make us a Mexican Stephen Hawking, minus his ALS. You know, you can’t get that shit if you learn to salsa at three years old. Think about it, you ever known a Mexican falling out of his wheelchair with ALS? Mexicans are a healthy people with a healthy culture, but Negroes are a lost people. They require some inhumanity. They need to be reeducated by any means necessary, and the eleven-month school year is the nicest way of doing it. It could be twelve months. If it were really up to me, I’d do like Mao and send them all back to the land, beat it into them. The Marxists had a good idea — they just applied it to the wrong people. The rich don’t need reeducation. Whites and Asians do not need reeducation, and if they did, they wouldn’t bitch about it like blacks do. They would do whatever was necessary not to become a subservient class.”

The recording exposed everything that was wrong with Mr. Cash Hill. The guy was sounding more fascistic by the moment. Whatever his business acumen, whatever his connections to born-again Bush, his guidance of children was taking a dark turn. There was no way such a man would have been allowed to lead affluent white children, and no telling what such a man would do to the poor and powerless.

Unfortunately, I knew I couldn’t print any of this, or even post it to my blog. It’s against California law to record or publish people without their permission. I know FOX News all but destroyed ACORN using it as a tactic, but I’m just a small-time citizen journalist. Hill would be up my ass with lawsuits and countercharges; my underwear would be up for auction if I tempted fate like that. Even now I wonder what will come of it, if he is out there somewhere reading my words, plotting to put me before a judge. All for exposing his mad love.

I located a janitor who had moved on from the high school for reasons he wouldn’t discuss. But he admitted on the record that he’d more than once wandered into Principal Hill’s motivational sessions while fetching things from the janitorial supply closet. Inside he’d find some banished child wearing a dunce cap that read, DEPORT THIS LATINO, or, CRACK BABY BRAIN, or, DANGER: LAZY NEGRO HAPPY SLAVE. Then there was the tiara, always given vengefully to the boys that bucked against rule and order — BITCH, it read in bright white sequins.

“It’s not right to teach children that way,” the janitor said, “even if they is in high school and they did somethin’ wrong.”

Add to the alleged wrongs an oft-used method one HR employee explained to me: “You lock the unruly student inside one of the windowless classrooms or a storage closet. All they miscreant asses need is a tablet of some kind and a writing instrument. You turn off the lights and you leave ’em there, go about teaching those who want to learn, then come get he or she who was actin’ out from the lock-up at three p.m. when school is out. Now that’s a policy that ain’t on paper, but one that is practiced here without apology. Shit, if Principal Hill ran East Oakland like he runs this school, these streets wouldn’t be lookin’ the way they look, I can tell you that much.”

I was not looking forward to Hill entering local politics, though perhaps that was where all this was headed. With him at its helm, East Oakland would either transform into a sprawling, chocolate-city suburb, or it would be overtaken with roving bands of disgruntled ex-employees and students who’d been kicked out of the school system.

If Principal Hill would have been a lightning rod as a mayor, Principal Chavo at the Native American school would have been the thunder, plus a few downed power lines. In a turn of events that made local news, Chavo pulled his own card by cursing out a contingent of Berkeley School of Education students who were touring his campus. Apparently they disagreed with the principal patrolling the halls on standardized test day and suspending kids on the spot for the merest of infractions. One kid (who might not have been the sharpest of students) just looked at him wrong and was gone. In another instance, Chavo swooped straight into a classroom, asked everyone if the test was too hard, and then kicked out all those who raised their hands. Several dozen students ended up on the curb, waiting to be picked up by parents, guardians, or whoever scooped them up. Some of the graduate students were concerned by the haphazard pickup situation, others by the initial disposal. Chavo didn’t give a damn and had them put out of doors as well.

The Berkeley students went to the papers and local TV. After that, the scrutiny on Oakland’s charter school movement increased. Mrs. Majesty’s custom-made job applications, with question after question about prior union involvement, came under suspicion; Glassdoor was inundated with anonymous complaints; meanwhile, Principal Fowler’s penchant for ridding his school of strapping young men, and his frequent cancellation of football games, pep rallies, and school dances suddenly seemed rather suspect.

And Principal Cash Hill, though he had only been in the booming business of high school education briefly, was not immune. A few mothers, wrung raw by the world and by Hill’s commandments, complained to the newspapers about the new push for an extended class schedule to ten or eleven months. Their children were not robots, they inveighed. The Ivy League was not the be-all and end-all of life in East Oakland, they said, just in case Hill was unaware. My blog even received some attention — mostly from the lame local media that plundered it for my “exclusive interviews” with employees from the school. I had yet to publish the really explosive stuff about racist dunce caps and locking kids in storage closets. I was holding off on that until a couple more shoes dropped. Also, the “legitimate” reporters had a bad habit of publishing my content without crediting me. Of course, I could have sued them, but in news everything is about timelines — nobody reads the retractions.

Then the Oakland Police Department reopened their investigation into the murder of Sobrante Prep’s namesake. A press conference was held, to which I was not allowed entrance. I waited outside next to a network news van parked between the plaza mall and the McDonald’s. The gathering was not large and I could hear the spokesman at a distance, describing how Shaun Sobrante was a college-bound student, a good kid, and what had happened to him was an unmitigated tragedy. But he had made a fateful mistake and had gotten himself kicked out of the public school system. Shaun had been asking around about the new charter schools; in particular, he was roaming the plaza halls trying to get a meeting with Principal Hill. Enrollment at what was then called Forging the Future Preparatory Academy was low. There was opportunity there, maybe even for a kid with a pending court date for drug possession. It was unclear if Principal Hill had ever met with Shaun, or whether the school had a policy then against accepting children with pending criminal charges. Charters could keep a lot of things private back then.

“That’s all we know right now,” the spokesman said. “That, and the fact that it’s a shame that Shaun never got a chance to attend the fine school that bears his name.”

I imagined the spokesman exiting stage left, cameras flashing on his retreating profile like a harried president disappearing into the White House’s inner sanctums.

I knew it was time to interview Cash Hill. Not the next morning, not that night, but right then. And unlike the local media, I knew how to find him.

I’d never dialed it before, but I’d had Hill’s cell phone number on speed dial for some time. It was given to me by the disgruntled janitor, who shall remain nameless. I called him while standing beside the network news van.

“Cash Hill?”

“Who’s this?”

“The closest thing you have to a friend in the Oakland media. I know you’re aware of the televised press conference that just went down at the police station right outside your school. I know you know there’s scrutiny on the charters right now. You need to set the record straight — about Shaun Sobrante, your school, and the proposed eleven-month schedule.”

“Eleven months isn’t shit!” he shouted. “Nothing comes by expectation alone; anyone who tells you success can be had without resistance is lying on their mama! Of course there’s people that hate me, so what? When we have our black Bill Gates, they’ll thank me. History will absolve me.”

“Fair enough. You want to go on the record with that?”

He repeated himself — on the record. “This over now? I’ve got work to do.”

“You’ve got a public image to maintain, Mr. Hill. People will begin to question the seemliness of naming your school after a murdered child whom you refused to enroll. Unless you get out front of this story. Tell me about yourself, Mr. Hill. I’m not interested in a hit piece or a shock story. I want the people of Oakland to know you, to know why you are enraged about education in the town, and the radical measures you’ve taken to change it.”

Apparently this struck a chord. Thirty minutes later, I was standing at the doorway of Hill’s Oakland Hills home. The big man, adorned in vaquero hat and boots, a Sobrante Academy blazer, and slim-fit jeans, summoned me in. He was an imposing man in person, just as he appeared in his newspaper advertisements and TV interviews. He was hard-jawed, broad-shouldered, tall, muscular, lean, and rough-hewn. He looked more like a boxer than a broker, and more like a broker than a school administrator. I could see him striding around Wall Street, but it was much harder to imagine him sitting down to give careful attention to a kid’s homework assignment. I wondered if he had any children of his own and scanned the walls of the front room for pictures, but I just saw photograph after photograph of Hill with a woman I took to be his wife. She was dark and striking, angular and alert in her posture, with typically round, lush African facial features that contrasted with her otherwise straight, narrow frame. She was beautiful and she was everywhere, but there were no children in evidence.

Shrouded and dark, curtained in deep blue and purple, the front room felt oceanic. I had the sense that I was sinking into something.

Hill led me down a winding staircase, typical of homes in the hills, and I felt I was wandering beneath the earth into a small, dark chamber. The room he led me to was crowded with shelves and was so tight we had to angle and sidestep our way around before arriving at an area where there was space to stand and furniture in which to sit. The shelves didn’t contain many books, I noticed. The few that were there were balanced against dozens of trophies and plaques. At a glance, the books were professional manuals and black nationalist tomes, while the memorabilia celebrated graduations, certifications, and administrations. There was a framed photograph of Hill shaking hands with Bush 43. Something, maybe a signature, was scrawled across the front.

Hill sat down on a large leather chair and motioned me to an office chair nearby.

“We gotta lynch Thug Life on every oak tree in Oaktown!” he thundered. There would be no small talk, I ascertained. “We’re making inroads, with President Bush’s emphasis on faith-based living and institutions, and the charters breaking up the bad public schools and the bloodsucking teacher unions. Once we get what Malcolm called them foxy white liberals outta office, we’ll be on our way to real change. Anyway,” he said, suddenly breaking from the rhetorical mode, “Shaun Sobrante was a political expedient.”

His words fell cold in my mind. “What does that even mean?” I asked.

“Look, kid, if you haven’t noticed, Oakland’s the kind of place where people get shot every once in a while.”

We were clocking in at a murder almost every other day at the time.

“It’s not a soft city. Sobrante was interchangeable with others that are just as dead as he is. But he was in the news, there was populist momentum there. As far as not enrolling the brother — you know what I say about Thug Life: it’s not tolerated, its perpetrators are not allowed at my school. I don’t know why he got killed any more than I know why the last hundred murders happened, but I will say this: you get iced outside a police station, sounds like the 5-O put that work in themselves and are just tryin’ to relocate the blame. But you and I know that that shit would never see a courtroom, so what’s the point? Better our expedient than their victim.

“I’m not into murder mysteries, kid. That’s why I got the hell outta them East Oakland flats when I was eighteen, saw the writing on the wall. Crack was hittin’, bullets was about to be flyin’. But education and capitalism saved me. I capitalized on my brain and some elite private institutions. You see, public schools and universities don’t give a fuck about minorities. They’re like the Democrats — they got us by the droves. Private institutions, they actually care, they teach and nurture us. That was when I realized public education was fatally flawed. I went from USC to an Ivy League MBA, and then after that I got my real education on Wall Street. Got to be where the kid from East Oakland was about as grassroots as a skyscraper. One day I woke up, checked my bank account, and I was actually kinda rich compared to everybody but my colleagues.

“I’d been asked by an old friend from East Oakland to come speak at her high school. Janie McPherson, her name was. She’s Mrs. Cash Hill now, but back then Janie told me I was the kind of role model the kids needed. I had risen up from the same dust, you might say. Back in the day, I just wanted to get the fuck out. But I was aged and experienced when Janie came calling. I had learned some things, been through some things.” He paused. “It took my close—”

Hill, shockingly, let forth a noise so desperate and clipped I wasn’t sure what it was — a choke, a gasp for air, a cry for peace. I didn’t even react to it until after he had regained his voice. “My own family, my brother. Some thug put a bullet in him out of mistaken identity. For no damn reason, just a gun and a mistake.

“In college, I never went to no black-issues rallies, didn’t take no African American studies. I didn’t go see no ghetto violence movies like Boyz n the Hood when they came out. I had seen the caskets closed for real, why I wanna go see Hollywood tell that story all over again? I wasn’t really tryin’ to change the world or know it three times as deep. You understand me?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, not in sympathy, but because I didn’t understand. I was a wannabe reporter, diving after my idea of the truth, as unconcerned with the feelings of others as Hill was with his students’ feelings when it came to standardized testing.

“After my brother, it was different. So I done did my speech at the little school, and in the Q&A this light-skinned shorty in the front row with cornrows and amberish eyes asks me, Do you ever wish you could trade places with your brother? That’s why I’m on fire like this. That’s why I came home.

“That the story you were searching for?” Hill questioned. “My side of the story, my blood.”

“And as for Shaun Sobrante?” I pressed — not because I thought it right or appropriate to do so, but because I was young and lost in complexity and bloodshed, and I didn’t know what else to say. “You’re willing to let me publish that he is your political expedient?”

Hill took a moment to consider that. I could tell by the way he held himself that he was walking out of his history and back into the present. He shrugged. “Maybe Oakland will understand.”

Oakland did understand. But it also didn’t.

There was a second press conference, this one downtown, led by not a spokesperson but the chief of police. “We have no suspects and have made no arrests in the Sobrante murder investigation,” he said. “It’s our determination that the integrity of the crime scene was jeopardized by the amount of time and foot traffic that probably went by between when the crime was committed and when law enforcement arrived on the scene. Forensics are minimal and would likely be inadmissible in court. No witnesses have as of yet come forward, either. It’s a tough case... Sobrante Prep? Look, it isn’t for me to comment on the ethicality of naming a high school after a dead child, who was not allowed to enroll at that very school due to a criminal charge. It should be noted that charges are not indictments, and indictments are not convictions. I think Principal Hill’s published comments on the matter speak for themselves: unfounded insinuations about police involvement in the death. He was our expedient. The police department deals in people, not expedients.”

Oakland PD was steadfastly unwilling to do interviews with me, or any other journalist about the matter. FYI: the strictest no-snitching policy of all is the one amongst law enforcement itself. But retaliatory information leaks, they’ll give you those in a heartbeat: Cash Hill’s serial harassment of underachieving students and his flirtations with grade fraud quickly came to light. The Chronicle, the Trib, the Merc — everybody ran the story. Federal funding for the school was jeopardized.

East Oakland rallied to the black man’s defense, reminding law enforcement that there was no love lost, ever. Despite the dunce caps and other creative cruelties, parents started to send their children to the besieged savior in droves — just to spite the police.

The Sobrante case went cold, and justice was of another world.

Meanwhile, Cash Hill’s days were numbered. Heightened demand to attend his school only increased the cost pressures, until it was him or Sobrante itself — one or the other had to go.

I’ve heard tales about Cash Hill’s whereabouts since — that his ghost walks the halls of Sobrante Prep; that he went back to Wall Street; that he was sent to Havana to kick up dust and overthrow the communists; that he fell in with an evangelical venture capitalist and created a for-profit online education business bearing his brother’s name. If he had told me his brother’s name that afternoon, I could at least go searching and find out if the school — or even the brother — was real, rumors, or lies.

But Hill had never spoken his name when he and I were down in that dark chamber, high in the hills. Around here, cases go cold as corpses, and mysteries stay mysteries.

Divine Singularity by Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder

Piedmont Avenue

I should have known that bitch was lying. All the “Sorry, Maggie, I’m working late” and “last-minute business trips.” What utter bullshit. I followed her last night, waited outside her office in Jack London Square and watched her walk to her car. I parked closer to the train tracks, out of sight, safely hidden by bustling tourists crowding the streets doing God-knows-what in this part of town. It must be the only place in Oakland that gets visited solely on its name alone. Jack-fucking-London. The place appeals to people whose tastes never made it past their high school reading list, if you ask me. Anyway, I watched that snake as she crossed 2nd Street and climbed into her fire-red Wrangler. She was wearing her slightly out-of-fashion teal power suit. I’ll admit, I once thought it was quirky and cute, but now it just screams LESBIAN. I mean, she already drives a Jeep, isn’t that enough? And how was I ever attracted to a woman who wears that much product in her hair? I used to joke that she looked like Molly Ringwald OD’d on gel. As I watched her sitting in the Jeep, messing with her phone, I received a text: Sorry Maggie, gonna be late tonight. Finishing up a contract with an old client and then for some new place called Divine Singularity, LOL, so lame <3.

Sure, Sarah. We’ll see.

I started up my car (not a Jeep, thank you very much) and followed her from a distance. It was probably the only time I was thankful for Bay Area traffic, as it’s great coverage when stalking your lying-piece-of-shit partner. She drove through Lake Merritt to those ranchero-style homes near Piedmont. Oh, so you got yourself a fancy bitch now, huh? I could see through her rear window that Sarah was on the phone with someone. Her gestures were exaggerated, almost comical, like how she gets all flustered when we’re arguing. Or how she gets sometimes when we’re fucking. I could feel my ears burning as the blood pulsated in my head and my belly dropped.

Sure enough, she turned into a fancy brick home in Piedmont, complete with an obnoxious yellow fence around a blossoming garden, and no... a wishing well in the yard? How tacky. I drove past the house as Sarah turned into their half-circle driveway. She was so preoccupied on the phone that she didn’t pay any attention to me. A part of me wishes I had kept driving, just so I could maintain a snippet of blissful doubt. But instead, I turned around.

The typical cheating signs began a few weeks ago: she’d become more secretive, almost defensive, with her phone calls and texts, spending unexplainably longer hours in the office. But what finally made me follow her were the texts I’d read the night before last. I had never looked through Sarah’s phone before. I really don’t condone this type of behavior, but she’d been acting so strange lately and was in the shower when it buzzed, so I picked it up. I told myself I was only checking quickly to see if it was important, if it was an emergency that I needed to notify her about.

Three unread texts from a number not yet added as a contact, a number without a name. How convenient.

536-7856: You cannot do this to me Sarah. [Sent 6:58 p.m.]

536-7856: I will convince you to change your mind. [Sent 6:58 p.m.]

536-7856: Meet me tomorrow evening. I will make it worth your while. [Sent 6:59 p.m.]

Which brings me to now — sipping on too-strong rum drinks decorated with tiny umbrellas in the Kona Club after she didn’t come home last night. The bar smells a bit like wet towels, but the room is dark, and I need some alone time. That lying, sniveling piece of shit.

I flag down the bartender. I’m making it a goal to try every tiki drink in the joint before sundown.

“This one,” I point to the menu, “the... Macadamia Nut... Chi-Chi? The fuck is a Chi-Chi?”

The bartender is one big man-bun in an aloha shirt; a beach bum surfer who probably hasn’t been to the ocean in twenty years. He nods at me while he wipes down a glass. “Sure,” he smiles. “But maybe you should take it easy after this one.”

“That’s not what I asked you, Endless Summer.”

“I love that movie, but that doesn’t even make sense. Are you calling me Endless Summer? My name is Big Mike.”

“Pleased to meet you. I’m Maggie. Now Chi-Chi! With extra umbrellas!”

He serves me my drink, albeit reluctantly, and I replay once again the events of last night. Seeing Sarah’s face in the window and the hulking silhouette of whoever was in the room with her. What a beast. I always knew she liked them more butch, the lying dyke... I watched from the window of my car for a few minutes, contemplating whether or not to confront them. Whether or not to knock on the front door and spit in Sarah’s stupid face when she and her new lover answered.

I could have said something clever, like in the movies when couples break up. Something like, Ha! You can have her! Psssh... good luck! Or even better, Good riddance! Or maybe I would joke about how she dresses terribly, or is lazy in bed, or always lies about being a gold star... I should have told them I hoped they would be happy together and then told Sarah to pick up all her shit from the house. I should have told her I never even loved her... Fuck.

But the truth is that seeing them together made me feel like something was breaking inside me. The truth is that I sat in disbelief in my car for several minutes, as I watched them through the window. The truth is that when I saw the other woman embrace Sarah, pushing her up against the wall like that, I had to turn away because I thought I was going to be sick.

Aloha Shirt hands me my Macadamia Nut Chi-Chi, a cheerful little drink to offset my sour mood.

I can’t take it any longer. I pull out my phone and text her: I saw you last night. Why did you do it? [Sent 7:22 p.m.]

I put the phone down on the bar and close my eyes. The syrupy sweetness of the drinks is starting to give me a headache without a buzz. Okay, maybe a little buzz, but it’s the warm, sugary, tipsy precursor-to-a-hangover — not worth the high. I keep thinking of all the fun Sarah and I used to have, all the good times: the late-night cuddles and movies; the uncontrollable laughing at the stupidest shit; or when she would squeeze my hand sometimes suddenly, as if to make sure I was still there and still real; or, oh God, the sex...

I snap out of it and look at my phone. A note appears under my sent text: Message Read 7:24 p.m. It is now 7:49 p.m. with no response. I rationalize this in several ways: Maybe she can’t text because she is hurriedly driving home, eager to apologize in person. Maybe her phone died as she was texting back — she was always forgetting to charge it overnight. Fuck. She stayed out overnight.

My throat tightens as I begin to accept that: Sarah read my text and chose not to respond. She has not contacted me in nearly twenty-four hours. On purpose. I gulp down the rest of my sickeningly decadent drink.

I cannot believe she didn’t come home, that she didn’t call or send a message. I had to remove the battery from my own phone to prevent myself from contacting her first. I don’t even remember driving home. I was just suddenly there, chainsmoking cigarettes despite having quit over a year ago, sipping the cognac we kept in the cupboard for special occasions. This was a “special occasion” all right, over four and a half years of a relationship abandoned. I didn’t even cry. I just sat there dumbfounded until the night melted away into dawn and I woke up sweating in an empty bed a few hours later.

My phone starts buzzing before I can start to tear up again. One new unread text message.

Sarah: Where are you? [Sent 8:36 p.m.]

Where am I? That’s all she has to say for herself? She wants to know where I am? Where are you, bitch?

Me: I’m at the Kona Club getting wasted. What the fuck do you care? [Sent 8:42 p.m.]

I sit there stewing for a moment before I realize that the sneaky bitch is asking where I am so she can sneak in the house when I’m not there. I pay my tab and leave in a rush to confront her. I walk briskly down the road toward our home. We (or soon to be just I) live in one of those little duplexes off of Piedmont Avenue. To be clear, not Piedmont — the ritzy-town-inside-a-town where that whore lives — but just the street in North Oakland. It’s a deceiving area: in the daytime it can be almost bourgie, with little shops selling useless — but organic! — items lining the street, but nighttime is when it gets interesting. Yoga moms and young radicals teach their children about gentrification by giving them books on the subject, while making sure to shield them from the unsightly homeless living in the alleys.

As I pass Sandro’s Healthy Lifestyle Boutique, the overwhelming smell of spicy herbs and essential oils wafting from within makes me turn my head. There’s a sign showing hands photoshopped over a lavender om symbol attached to the side of the building: Soon to be the new home of Divine Singularity Yoga Studios. Well, I’ll be damned. I peer inside. Colorful glass bottles of assorted tinctures and vitamin supplements line the shelves. So this is the place Sarah was working on? I make a mental note and keep walking, eager to get to the house before she does.

Our apartment is a fraction of a building that used to be a single home, with one and a half bedrooms and a “balcony” not large enough for a step stool, let alone the both of us. As an amateur interior designer, I try to make the place feel homey by using light colors and as many collapsible, compact fixtures as we can find to open up the space. Sarah’s work is a bit more practical, building DIY websites and writing “personal” blogs for people who can’t be bothered to do it themselves. She blogs for several businesses on Piedmont Avenue, including Sandro’s, which was always a hoot because we have never followed any hip, healthy lifestyle plan. In fact, we used to joke about the regression of health fads like the Paleo diet. I mean, didn’t cavemen have a life expectancy of something like thirty-five years?

Sarah snuck in “health facts” borrowed from ancient cultures, because that’s what nouveau-hippies are into these days — as if somehow appropriating the cultural traditions of others will bring them longevity and happiness. Sarah once wrote a blog for a boutique chocolate company whose pitch was that “the ancient Mayans ate cocoa for centuries.” I’m sure they did, but they also cut the still-beating hearts from virgin sacrifices and wore animal heads as hats. Sure, chocolate is fabulous, but that really seems beside the point. As nonwhite, nonhippie nonconformists ourselves, we found it both flattering and confusing to see advertisements selling different ethnicities to others — as if we have our shit figured out any more than anyone else. However, Sarah and I were perfectly willing to sell white folks permission to use our cultural identities, since it helped us start a little nest egg that might one day get us a “real” home to call our own.

These rambling thoughts end abruptly as I approach our apartment. Sarah’s Jeep is not in the driveway. Walking in, I realize no one has been here since I left a few hours earlier. My dirty glass and empty bottle of celebration cognac sit where I left them, and Sarah’s collection of boots and shoes, always an unsightly tripping hazard, still clutters the hallway.

I shake my head to clear the sugary alcohol clouds and reach for my phone. Shit. I check my purse and coat, but it isn’t there. I suddenly feel agitated and annoyed that I came back. Do I really want to be here waiting when she gets home, like I have nothing better to do than sit around feeling sorry for myself? It’s true, of course, but I don’t want her to see it. I put my coat back on and return to the bar to retrieve my phone and some dignity.

Aloha Shirt Big Mike greets me as I walk back in. “Hey, Maggie, some lady came by looking for you a few minutes ago.”

“Who? What did she say?” I’m a little dumbfounded, a little angry.

“She asked if Maggie was here, and I said you just left.”

Sarah came here? Does that mean she came to explain? Have I been overreacting? Thoughts flood my already cluttered mind.

“Did I leave my phone here?”

Big Mike thinks for a moment. “Oh, yeah. I did find a phone.” He opens a drawer by the register. “Here you go.”

“Thank you. Can I have one more Chi-Chi, please?”

“Extra umbrellas?”

“No, it’s okay. I’m cutting down.”

He laughs and starts mixing and shaking. I open my phone to three unread messages.

Sarah: I thought you were at Kona Club? [Sent 10:16 p.m.]

Sarah: Where are you now? [Sent 10:32 p.m.]

Sarah: You fucking cunt. I’m coming to get you. [Sent 10:47 p.m.]

“The fuck?” I say aloud. Even at our worst, Sarah has never spoken to me like that. It would have been a deal breaker for either of us.

“Everything okay?” Big Mike asks, sliding over a bulbous glass of fluorescent liquid.

“I don’t know.” My phone’s screen saver pops up, a picture of Sarah and me arm in arm at Stinson Beach, smiling.

“She’s cute,” he says.

“I know,” I sigh. “So is that all she said when she came in? Did she seem... okay?”

“Who? Her?”

We share a puzzled look. “This isn’t who was asking for me? Are you sure?” I hold the phone closer and point at the picture of us: the wind had been blowing Sarah’s red ringlets into my face and we were both laughing as I tried to spit out the strands.

“Nope.” He wipes down a glass. “I’d remember her. This one was... you know.” He shrugs.

“You know, what?”

“She was...” He stands straight and puffs out his arms and chest. “A big ol’ gal.”

I stare at him blankly. The woman from last night. The one I’d seen with Sarah. She had come to see me? Where was Sarah?

I quickly google Oakland news. A few shootings here and there, a vegan bake sale to end gentrification, a youth center displaced by a tech start-up. I scroll on, numbly. Then I see it: Unidentified woman found dead in Piedmont Friday morning. Foul play suspected.

My mouth suddenly tastes like bile and a coldness trickles down my spine.

The phone buzzes in my hands. I drop it on the counter and clasp my hands to my mouth, trying to find my bearings. Another text. My hands shake as I lift the phone and unlock the screen.

Sarah: There’s no use in running. [Sent 10:59 p.m.]

My head is hot and my mouth is dry. I feel dizzy.

Sarah: I’ll kill you like I did your cunt girlfriend. [Sent 11:01 p.m.]

“Are you all right?” Big Mike looms over me, his husky figure silhouetted in the overhead lights. Flashes of the previous night come rushing back. Sarah. Was she... Were they... arguing in the shadows? When she pushed Sarah against the wall, was she — holy shit, Maggie, are you so fucked up you mistook violence for sex?

I have to get the fuck out of here.

A cool wind rushes through me as I hurry out the door. The streets are empty. I start walking, trying to gather my thoughts. Do I call the cops? What do I say? Fuck, I wish I hadn’t been drinking. The air is cold on my face, but not refreshing. I open my phone to dial 911 and see there’s a new text.

Sarah: You look good from behind. [Sent 11:13 p.m.]

I whip around, but there’s no one in sight anywhere. I walk faster and frantically start dialing. My phone beeps as it drops the call. I try again, and again. Shit! Returning to the bar would be backtracking too far — and if this psychopath really is following me, I might run right into her. I realize I have to run. The gates of the Mountain View Cemetery are at the top of the road. I need to hide. I need to hide and call for help.

I reach the entrance and glance back quickly. There’s almost no light, but I can make out a figure trailing me down the road. I squeeze through the tall iron gates and dash up the paved road, past mausoleums and oversized ornate tombstones.

This place is like a park during the day, with families picnicking on the immaculately trimmed lawns, and guided tours pointing out the more famous interred. Now it’s dark and suffocating. I duck behind the brick archway of a memorial and cup the phone to cover any light from the screen. The battery icon is flashing red. I dial 911 and raise the phone to my ear, trembling.

A low voice answers, “Hello?”

I whisper, high-pitched hiccups escaping between sobs, “I need help. There’s someone after me and I think she killed my girlfriend. I’m in the cemetery—”

“Hi, Maggie,” the voice replies.

I jerk the phone away as if it were alive.

Sarah’s picture is on the screen. 911 is on hold. I frantically press the button to hang up. The battery icon flashes one more time, then the screen goes black. I can’t hold back the choking sobs. Suddenly a firm hand grips my shoulder.

Screaming, I leap up and start sprinting blindly, cold tears streaming down my face. I weave between monstrous weeping angels and huge marble headstones gleaming in the moonlight; I run until my lungs burn and I cannot feel my legs. I scramble uphill through narrow stone pathways, past a pyramid adorned with an eagle and an obelisk jutting from the ground. I look over my shoulder: no one is behind me. I reach a crumbling mausoleum with a broken wooden door. Inside, it smells musty and damp. Things are crawling on the ground but I try to stifle the panic. As my eyes adjust I see a stone tomb in the center of the cramped room. I crouch behind it, covering my mouth to steady my breathing, letting my nose run and tears roll silently down my cheeks.

What the fuck is happening? Sarah, I’m so sorry. Time slows down. I can’t complete any thoughts other than, I’m sorry, I’m sorry... I’m consumed with fear, guilt, and regret. Will this be the last thing I feel? Is this what happened to Sarah?

Footsteps crunch in the gravel outside. Louder now, heavier. The sliver of light from under the mausoleum’s door is broken by a shadow. I hold my breath, and the shadow retreats. I allow myself a glimmer of relief.

Then the brittle door is kicked open, coming off its hinges. I whimper pathetically as the figure ducks inside.

“You bitches just don’t know how to let things be.”

“What the fuck do you want?! Who the fuck are you?” I kick out my legs, cowering farther into the corner.

“All she had to do was back off,” the voice continues, coming closer. “The same with you.”

Through the shadows, I can make out her face. “Sandro?” I stammer.

I’ve seen her dozens of times as I walked past her shop. The bulging, oversupplemented muscles and henna tattoos are unmistakable. Her nose ring glitters and I see dark scratches across her face. Sarah...

“That fickle bitch,” Sandro spits. “Helping that fucking yoga studio take over my space, driving me out with all that Divine Singularity bullshit.” She says the name in a mocking sing-song voice.

“Wh-what?” I am genuinely shocked. “It’s her job, Sandro!”

“She was a motherfucking double agent!” Sandro screams. Then through clenched teeth: “I work. So. Hard. I paid Sarah good money to write the health blog. I order the supplements from China myself. I make my interns keep perfect inventory. Then I find out she’s helping some yoga shithead take over my place? Do you have any fucking idea how impossible it is to find decent commercial space in this city?”

“You’re crazy! You don’t do anything! You throw money at other people to do your work for you! You’re a fucking lunatic!”

“You people are all the same. You want handouts but have no loyalty, no vision. I gave Sarah an opportunity — and she betrayed me.” Sandro’s eyes are wide with rage. She lunges forward.

I try to fend her off but she slams my head into the stone wall, over and over. I think of what I saw last night, through the window, my last glimpse of Sarah.

Over and over, I think of Sarah.

White Horse by Katie Gilmartin

Bushrod Park

Two women walking down the street together doesn’t make sense to anyone when one of them is Negro and the other white. Unless the Negro woman is carrying a bag of groceries or pushing a carriage with a towheaded baby inside. But even then, not after dark. And certainly not if both are dressed to the nines, she in her smart hat and neatly pressed gloves. We always felt eyes on us. The way a hook trolling through water looking for a fish catches on some weed or stump and holds fast, those eyes snagged on our dark and light bodies as we passed. Trying to figure out: what was the relationship between these women that led to the two of them walking down a street together after dark? They don’t like the answer they come up with. Or they like it too much. Roll it around in their minds, caress it with their tongues, till they resolve that the right thing for them to do, the only thing for them to do, is to join us.

So we always walked alert, careful. Quickly and with determination, making it clear we had a place to be and it wasn’t here on this sidewalk explaining how we came to be walking together. We walked side by side, but not too close, and we never held hands. One day, a year or so ago, we’d gone for a walk up in the hills, where redwoods tower so high they were once used for navigation by boats in the bay. It was a sweet afternoon of dappled sunlight, and when she was sure there was no one to see us but those trees, Mabeline slipped her hand in mine. As it settled in, palm against palm, fingers nested, there was no comfort in it; no home there, the way our bodies felt when we slid against each other, the curves familiar and essential. Our hands were strangers to each other. After seven years of loving, I didn’t know her hand inside mine.

On the sidewalk we kept walking when men offered to take us home, bristled when we politely declined. Our place was in the Bushrod neighborhood. The men that followed us were eager to make jokes about bush and rod. There were three or four variations, you can figure them out yourself. We kept walking, as they told us what they believed we did together and then prescribed a remedy for the ailment they presumed we had. We kept walking, hoping to get where we were going before they’d grab an arm — Mabeline’s usually, if he was a white man; mine, often, if he was a Negro, trying to tug us toward a shadowed doorway or dark alley.

That particular night we were headed to the White Horse, so our stroll was brief. Sam greeted us at the door with a curt nod, a nod that warned us not to allow our alert caution to relax down around our shoulders as it usually did when we entered the welcoming warmth of the dark bar. The subdued murmur as we moved inside confirmed it. We’d heard there’d been two unfamiliar visitors the past weekend, with collars buttoned a little too tight for our comfort.

The crowd was thinner than usual, though not by much. Storm clouds led some to flee, but the regulars planted ourselves firmly for the night. We had too few places to let go of any one of them easily. Mabeline and I made our way to the bar, nodding at familiar faces, sizing up the ones that weren’t. The two men in tight collars weren’t among them. Henry, usually a warm bath of friendliness, served our drinks with a thin-lipped smile and we settled at a table with two couples we knew. Mabeline and I sat facing the rear of the bar, where we could watch the passage that led to bathrooms and the back door. Barbara and Lou had eyes on the entrance. Lester and Evan viewed the bar. We were each other’s eyes.

The White Horse had never been raided, at least not in anybody’s memory. The place either had some kind of charmed existence or the other shoe was due to drop. We’d all been watching that Senator McCarthy and his Pervert Inquiry unfold across the headlines, reading about the postmaster general’s campaign to eliminate filth from the family mailbox. We’d all felt the same ice water flowing through our veins. We wondered when, and how, the crackdown would come for us. Maybe this was it: two men in tight collars.

Mabeline didn’t believe in charmed existences, nor did she much worry about other shoes. She was a practical woman. “I’ll bet the Johnsons haven’t been giving the cops their usual fat envelope.”

“You think that’s all this is about?” Barb asked.

“That’s always what anything is about.”

“Well, my drink is still overpriced and watered down,” Lester reported, “so the money’s flowing in like usual.”

“Maybe the police just need to show off.”

“No elections on the horizon,” Lou countered.

“Maybe the Johnsons hired two friends to wear their best suits and scare us away.”

“Could have been some shoe salesmen from out of town,” Evan suggested.

“Could have been Santy Claus’s travel agent, but I don’t think so.” Mabeline looked at me sharply. “You’re not forgetting our agreement?”

I shook my head. “I’m not forgetting our agreement.” Keep your head. Whatever happens, keep your head. I shook my head, and meant it.

Mabeline had known me to be released from jail the morning after a raid and get tossed right back in, fighting with the desk clerk over whether or not she was still inside. She’d known me to be released early and spend the rest of the night under a lamppost not thirty yards from the police station, watching for her to emerge, till I was picked up for vagrancy and thrown back in when she herself was already safely home. That wasn’t the worst of it, either. Some man would disrespect her, and instead of ignoring it I’d slug him. Soon enough we’d both be limping home, bruised and battered. Making a bad situation worse, that’s what she called it. I’m an expert at that. I wanted to be her knight in shining armor. She knew I wanted to ride that horse for her. She’d made me swear that after any raid, once I got released I’d go home, sit down at the kitchen table, and wait for her there.

“Trouble’s cousin just arrived,” she announced. Otis was a young queen who hadn’t yet learned to handle his liquor — or his hands. Last Saturday he’d had his knuckles rapped twice by the bartender, who kept a yardstick behind the bar for that very purpose. Bartenders at the White Horse smacked anybody with the first glimmer of a leer in their eye, before they got so far as putting a hand on a knee, a head on a shoulder, an arm around a waist. All the bars that catered to our kind did much the same thing, though others managed it without the humiliation of a ruler. Since a court ruling had made it legal for our kind to congregate, the cops had to find a new justification for raids. Often as not they created that justification. Luring in youthful ardor was a favored way to do so. Otis was chatting eagerly with a friend, putting quarters in the jukebox, waving his hands around — a bird of paradise in a funeral arrangement. Lester went to speak with him, quietly. The bird’s finery drooped, but only slightly. The ones who are a little crazy to begin with get crazier under pressure. I know something about that. I’d grown up in a small town, fighting my way out of most situations. Fighting my way into the others. Not keeping my head.

Mabeline and I had met in the dark, labyrinthine passageways of a ship we were building at Mare Island Naval Base during the war, when the world discovered that women, even Negro women, could do all kinds of work we’d been unable to do five minutes before. Suddenly, riveting was just like sewing, and soldering was just like icing a cake, tasks we were all assumed to be adept at. And suddenly we had decent-paying jobs. We’d ride the same streetcar to and from work, and I noticed her — lips slicked a dark red, eyes with lashes long enough to catch mist when the fog settled deep, and a compact, curvy figure that made me wonder how flesh could be so sculpted and so firm. I also wondered whether she felt my eyes on her, and whether they felt good to her, or bad. She gave no sign that I could read.

At first glance you might think Mabeline was just a cream puff, but you’d be wrong and sure to discover your mistake. I was topside at the end of my shift when I noticed a glove missing, so I headed back down into the maze of steel passageways. Retracing my steps, I heard a muffled cry. Sound bounced and echoed in that hard place, distorted and disorienting, so it took me awhile to find them, and along the way I heard his taunting voice say wetly to her, “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the fruit.”

When I reached it the room was gone, its definition lost in darkness — I saw only the white-hot glow of her blowtorch and the crotch it was dangerously close to. Her words were a low, controlled murmur: “The next time you decide to help yourself to a measure of my body, or to show me the great glory God gave you, I’ll be going to see your wife.” She bit the word off like an epithet. “I’ll be telling her about that mole just to the left of your thing. And just in case, when she asks you how a darky girl like me might come to know about it, just in case you plan to tell her I’ve been throwing myself at you, I’ll also let her know that I’m the one who sent you home with the crotch of your work pants singed to ember.”

As the tip of that torch crept closer to the center seam of those dungarees, I heard a yelp and a whimper, neither coming from Mabeline. I couldn’t tear my eyes away as the torch hovered there, as the fabric darkened and the slightest whisper of a plume of smoke formed. The whimper turned to a yowl. The torch crept to the right, then to the left, creating a blackened patch of fabric that I knew could burst into flame any moment. Then the torch leapt to the side, where it found a headlamp on the ground next to a work pail with its contents spilled across the floor.

She bumped into me at the doorway and hissed, “You in line? I may have to start charging.” Then she checked her movement, seeing my eyes — seeing them focus on the darkness where the man she’d left behind stood. “Leave it,” she spat. I gave her room, then followed her out. Later, I hung nearby to make sure she got on the streetcar okay. Of course she got on the streetcar okay. I followed because I wanted to be the one ensuring she got on the streetcar okay.

A week later she asked if I wanted to join her for a drink after work. She didn’t need to drop any hairpins and wait to see if I picked them up. During the war it was easier to blend in, with so many women wearing pants to work, most keeping their hair shorter for safety, and saving scarce lipstick for weekends. But I was still obvious to anyone who knew the signs. We didn’t discuss that encounter in the hull. We talked about work, about the war. We talked about the difficulty of getting meat and sugar, eyes dancing with smiles around the latter. I walked her home, and she allowed me to kiss her in the hollow of her doorway. When we surfaced she gripped my gaze in the dim light. “I don’t need any knight in shining armor to save me. Second, I gave him reason not to retaliate — you had none. Third, you’d have put both of us at risk: think what kind of rumors he could have spread.” Then she turned and disappeared in her door.

On my back porch I stared up at the night sky, turning over her words, savoring the kiss, pondering the proximity between them. A spiderweb stretched from the eaves to the corner post, its impossibly fine lines etched against the sky’s blue-black glow. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I saw a lower half emerge, catching the faintest light from a neighbor’s window, shimmering against silhouetted trees. Suddenly the fat body of the largest spider I’d ever seen dropped precipitously from the roofline and dangled there, legs arranging and rearranging in some inscrutable purpose. It swayed slightly with the air currents but remained casual, luxurious, arranging and rearranging, on its back no less, as though it were bathing rather than suspended a hundred times its body length above the ground from a thread so fine I couldn’t see it. I marveled at the confidence it had in that thread, to trust space that way, to dangle there. I wondered if anything would ever sustain me so sturdily, would endow me with that kind of trust in life, so that I might dangle, calmly arranging and rearranging. Mabeline became that thread for me.

’Course, we lost our jobs as soon as the men returned from war. I was back at the cannery, Mabeline back in a kitchen. But come evening, she was on the back porch with me.

“You ever been with a Negro girl before?”

“No. You ever been with a white girl before?”

“No. But it’s not the same thing.”

“Isn’t it?”

“White people believe all kinds of crazy things about Negro girls.”

“Do Negroes believe all kinds of crazy things about white girls?”

“Well, I know you ain’t Miss Ann.”

“I ain’t Miss Anybody.” I paused. “Who’s Miss Ann?”

Mabeline hesitated, then said, “She was a friend of my aunt’s. But they had a falling out.”

“What was it about?”

“About Miss Ann not understanding.”

“Not understanding what?”

“Anything.”

“Well, I want to understand everything about you.”

“That could take awhile,” she said, in a voice so slow that if she’d been on a bicycle she’d have tipped over.

When the war ended we went to the California Hotel to celebrate — Mabeline loves music. We generally encountered fewer hassles at tony places. Not because the people were any nicer, but because the wives would pull their husbands back, saying, That’s your best suit. Musicians filled the air with jazz so raucous it made colors stream and waft up the aisles. As we floated out on those currents, some man came up close behind Mabeline and started sniffing loudly. She ignored him, but I was ready to haul off and hit him right there in the lobby. Mabeline grabbed my arm, saying grimly under her breath, “Forget it.”

She pulled me outside to hail a cab. I kept my gaze on that man — there he was, his eyes still on Mabeline. I watched him watching her, my gaze moving between them. A cab passed by. Then another. It stopped up ahead, for other passengers. Another cab approached and I rushed forward, throwing my arm up and piling Mabeline inside. I wanted her away from that man. When I turned to her, her eyes were angry. The cabbie never stopped watching us in the rearview, so we waited till we got home to speak. Mabeline said there were too many things to talk about.

It took me awhile to understand: she wasn’t mad about me getting that cab — didn’t I see that she couldn’t get one herself? Yes, it was good that I could do that for her, but didn’t I understand that I should be mad too, mad that she couldn’t get us one? I explained that I wanted to be the one to get cabs for her, I wanted to lay down my cloak for her, I wanted to do all those things, but she insisted that I still didn’t understand. “Those things only become a welcome gift,” she said, “when I could have done them myself.”

So then I saw how much of what I had to give could only be an insult, an offense, to Mabeline. Cannery pay is always more than kitchen pay. Those steaks I bought for her — they were a gift she should have been able to buy herself.

Around nine thirty a shadow crossed Evan’s face. I followed his eyes: two men in tight collars had just been served at the bar. Glances ricocheted around the room. The bartender stood sentry, his gaze piercing the smoke the way a lighthouse beam cuts the fog. Conversations were suspended in the air for a moment, hardly something you’d notice in another bar. In the lull Mabeline murmured, “We’ve got company.” Then voices resumed and bodies began to move. Two women rose from the bar, leaving their drinks behind, ambling to the front door mighty fast. Several men slipped quietly out the back. I glanced at Mabeline; her eyes were narrow slits.

“They look too young for cops,” Lester said.

“They recruit ’em young, hung, and handsome for just this purpose.”

“The applicant pool must have been small,” Mabeline noted drily.

“Quite a flamboyant tie on the one. Is that puce?”

“The better to eat you with, my dear.”

“It’s actually quite tasteful. Can’t be department issue.”

The two men got their drinks and came toward our table. Our breaths bottomed out as their shiny shoes squeaked past. They unbuttoned their jackets and settled in at the table behind us. Hands wrapped around their glasses, they leaned back in the universal bar code of invitation. Mabeline and I had front-row seats when Otis weaved his way from the corner, waved merrily as he circled a tableful of friends, and slid sloppily into a seat at the strangers’ table. “Haven’t seen you here before!” he warbled gaily.

The two men smiled, eyes and all. Mabeline swore under her breath.

“You from around here?” Otis queried.

Both nodded, and said they were from San Francisco.

“Oooh, the big bad city!” Otis crooned.

“I’m Fred,” one guy said, extending his hand. “And this is Buck.” I considered the old saw about cops always having single-syllable names as Otis complimented Fred on his tie. Otis gestured to it, leaning exuberantly across the table, his hand landing inches from the glass and the hands of Officer Puce. After a moment Otis slid one seat closer, his hand diddling around on the table near Officer Puce’s beer.

“Jesus,” Mabeline whispered, snapping open her purse and extracting her reading glasses. She slid them on, then quickly smeared away lipstick with the back of her hand, leaving a red streak across her cheek, a macabre mockery of a smile. Then everything happened at once. Otis gave Officer Puce’s hand a fond rub, the cop reached in his back pocket for handcuffs, Mabeline hitched up the front of her dress, pulling it high over her cleavage as bright lights came blasting in the front door. Just before they blinded us Mabeline held my eyes with hers to steady me.

The wagons pulled up to the front of the building, but not to the back. The newly initiated thought this was lucky, and a few made a run for it. Those of us who’d been around awhile knew things were headed south. Wagons at both doors meant they’d load us up, haul us off, and book us. No wagon out back meant other things could happen in that dark alley. Things that made getting hauled off to jail seem like your best option.

The barrage of officers herded us against a wall, shined lights in our eyes, called us faggot, bulldagger, and queer, called some of us nigger and coon. They especially liked mixing words from the first category together with words from the second, in various combinations. A cop with a bent nose and a Southern drawl came down the line with a smile, checking faces. He lingered on Mabeline. I could smell his sweat as he hovered, breathing on her. My body was taut as the mooring line of a warship. I remembered Mabeline’s eyes and held my breath. I waited for him to pass. As he turned, his eyes already on the next woman down the line, he reached out his hand and cupped Mabeline’s breast in a smooth, curving motion. Gave it a squeeze just as he let go. I forgot Mabeline’s eyes and swung for his jaw. He reared back. Blue bodies rushed over, blue arms grabbed me and pulled me toward the back door. He followed, dragging Mabeline.

I tried to keep quiet, tried not to let my body make a sound as it hit the wall, the trash cans, the ground, the ground again. I didn’t want Mabeline to have to hear all that while the bent-nosed cop pushed her against the wall and felt her up. I kept it quiet until he pushed her down on her knees and said, in his Southern drawl: “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the fruit.” When I heard him say those words, and knew Mabeline was there, and knew it was my fault, I lost it and I roared. Two more blue bodies came and I wanted him to come over too — I roared and raged and clawed and tried to make the cop with the bent nose come over. But he didn’t.

My face was pitted with gravel, my legs somewhere far away. All of me ached, no part any more than the others. I assessed the sounds. Almost dawn. No one around. Mabeline gone.

Eventually I gathered enough focus to move. My neck, my arms, then my legs. I headed slowly toward the police station, but halfway I changed course, limping home, toward the kitchen table. When I arrived, the apartment was silent. I gathered the percolator, the coffee, the water, placed it all on the stove, and settled myself at the table. I waited.

At some point I had to check the gash near my eye that wouldn’t stop weeping. In the bathroom only one toothbrush was in the little glass. I opened the cabinet. Half of it, empty.

What I never told Mabeline: those were the words that strode, uninvited, into my head the first time I laid eyes on her, the first time I saw her beauty there on the streetcar. I didn’t want those words. I didn’t want what those words made of her, what those words made of me, and what they made me make of her. Those words were tracks under a train I didn’t want to ride, but the ticket stub was already in my pocket.

So I tried to protect her from those words, out in the snarl of the streets, the maze of the ship, the cage of a raid, the madness of my mind. I wanted to ride that horse. For Mabeline.

Opened in or before 1933, Oakland’s White Horse Inn is the oldest continuously operating Queer bar in the United States.