Pacific Beat

Chapter 16

They started off for the coast, threading first through the barrio side streets of Santa Ana where the houses stood behind wrought-iron fence work to keep the thieves out — even the windows were latticed with metal that tried to look decorative but was, in fact, a barrier against the junkies, crackheads, gangbangers, drifters, home invaders, cutthroats, and occasional killers who wanted in. Then down Fourth Street, past the cafés and shoe stores and taco stands; past the record stores blasting mournful Mexican ballads; past the pawnshops and the beauty parlors; through the crosswalks filled with women in dresses, burdened by groceries, laboring flatfooted from the marketplaces toward home. Men moved even more slowly along the sidewalks, men with cowboy hats and heavy jackets and sun-darkened faces, men without work, without applicable skills or pressing destinations, with weary legs and exhausted backs and expressions — barely visible beneath their hat brims — of acceptance, resignation, and faith that the Virgin Mary or certain saints would eventually deliver them from this hostile land of dreams manana, manana, manana.

Raymond watched them go by from behind his sunglasses. “I wish they had more to do,” he said finally. “They’re wasting their lives.”

“They’re trying,” said Jim.

“They don’t understand the system. If they understood the system, they’d be running this place. All they are now is cheap labor. This whole county’s nothing but a day-work center for them. It’s pitiful.”

“Another ten years, thing’s will be different,” said Jim. “Someone will get them together, and they’ll find out what numbers mean.”

Raymond’s relation to his own race always had baffled him. Sometimes Ray seemed proud of his blood, other times ashamed of his people. What struck Jim was Raymond’s indecision, his unpredictable swings between sympathy and contempt. Raymond, for instance, hadn’t associated with the other Mexicans in school. He hung with the white kids, and took German. He had devoted himself to an Anglo — two years his senior — from an age so young that Weir couldn’t specifically place it anymore. But Raymond, among his family, was different. Weir spent hours with Ray at the Eight Peso Cantina when they were boys, eye-high to the great bar that runs the length of the place, checking the floor for dropped change, running minor errands and accomplishing minor chores, always under the quietly watchful eyes of Raymond’s father and mother, Nesto and Irena Cruz. And there, among parents and relatives, Raymond’s Spanish rolled off his tongue with rapid grace, his face took on a fresh new physiology as his lips and cheeks formed the words, even his eyes seemed to glitter with a new energy when he was in the Eight Peso. Later, Weir had come to understand it as the face of belonging.

One incident stood out in Jim’s memory. They were high school sophomores, standing together in the quad one afternoon before lunch. Ann was with them. A fight broke out between a big white kid named Lance and a little Mexican named Ernie. Later, Jim found out it was something about Lance’s girl. Lance was a football player, a nice-looking boy with an athlete’s body and a head of sun-bleached hair. Ernie was a dark, silent boy nobody seemed to know. A crowd closed in on them as Lance’s fist slammed into Ernie’s face, the sudden eruption of blood hushing the students, but drawing them closer, as if in witness of some holy act. Lance threw Ernie against the brick wall of the cafeteria and started punching again. Jim could hear the pop of knuckles on flesh. Ann begged Raymond to stop it. And Weir could still remember the look on Ray’s face as he turned to him, a look of sadness so profound that he stood paralyzed, deaf to Ann’s entreaties, hypnotized by the heavy precision of Lance’s big arms as he slammed away at the Mexican. Without looking at either Jim or Ann, Raymond simply said, “Watch.” And to Jim’s astonishment, Ernie began to slip the punches and dodge the blows. His face was bleeding hard. Lance tired and slowed, hit the wall with a fist intended for Ernie’s stomach, and suddenly, the Mexican was all over him. His hands were lighter and faster than the big boy’s, and no single punch seemed to take more out of him than another, but they chopped away at Lance-straightening him, backing him up, moving him away from the wall and back into the open space, where for a moment he swayed, his head tossing side to side like a treetop in some violent storm, before his knees buckled and he fell — one comely, well-developed muscle group at a time — flat on his face, moaning already and trying to cover himself with the fallen brown needles of the quad’s centerpiece pine.

Raymond had looked at Jim once, sickness and fury in his eyes, and walked away. It was two weeks before he showed up at school again — flu, he said. Years later, Jim realized that what had made Raymond so sick wasn’t a virus at all, but deep and gnawing anger: at Lance for his stupid white arrogance; at Ernie for the stitches it took to close his stubborn macho face; at himself, for not trying to stop it, for knowing that no one would really win, for letting down Ann, and, most of all, for his failure to take a side, commit himself in this momentary crucible of life to a position that he could defend with dignity and truly call his own.

“They deserve something better,” said Ray. “But they have to earn it. Nothing comes free, nothing comes easy. You want your treasure, they want theirs.”

Jim guided the truck down Fourth, out of the barrio and into the white suburbs of Tustin, a city that, for years, had actually maintained a sign on this boulevard that read WELCOME TO TUSTIN — THE BEVERLY HILLS OF ORANGE COUNTY. Jim could remember thirty years ago, when there had been an odd bit of truth in this. There were big stately homes in the foothills, small ranchos tucked behind stands of eucalyptus and avocado overlooking mile upon mile of emerald green citrus groves. The smell of the orange blossoms-visceral, opiate — rose on invisible thermals. Main Street looked like a dictionary definition of itself — solid brick buildings housing the five-and-dime, the garage, the pharmacy, and an occasional Victorian manse converted to professional offices. But in the late sixties and early seventies, Tustin had sold out. Franchises now ruled every street corner — the Golden Arches, the Jack in the Box, the garishly unmistakable logos of oil conglomerates, grocery chains, convenience networks, and fast-food distributors — all bawling for consumer attention. It was astonishing to Weir, as he gazed out through the eye-watering smog, that in the city of Orange, just a few miles from here, a special plot of ground had been planted with orange trees so people in the future could see what they really looked like. They had literally paved over the trees and put up a tree museum. At some point, he thought, isn’t enough enough? The Beverly Hills sign had been taken down years ago.

Then onto the freeway at a crawl, merging at ten miles an hour into a slow lane doing thirty, max, a restless river of cars stretching from as far as he could see in his rearview all the way out of sight ahead of him, where they vanished, brake lights flashing and exhaust systems belching, into the dominating pollutant haze in the west.

And yet, incredibly, thought Weir, the beat goes on. Jack-hammers tore out old asphalt to widen the off ramps and add freeway lanes; foundation crews and framing teams scurried to cover the last inches of unbuilt land; developers crammed thousands of identical units over hillsides and small valleys while city councils and the Board of Supervisors approved it all from on high with furtive sweeps of the ballpoint. It seemed to Weir to be less the land of dreams than the land of disregard. It’s all for sale under the spacious skies, he thought, every last amber wave of it, view lots with a peek of purple mountain majesties, God shed his grace on thee.

“This why you wanted to get out?” asked Ray.

“Yeah.”

“People have to live somewhere.”

“I know that. I’m not so sure Virginia’s right, the way she looks at things. But I’m still young enough to pack it in and light out for the territory. She’s not.”

“Trouble is, there’s no territory left.”

“I guess we just eddy back, or maybe north,” said Jim. Friends of his had joined the rush into the Pacific Northwest and were now busy trying to shut the gates behind them, much as Virginia was doing in Newport. But the question remained: When do you stay and fight, when do you get out and quit complaining? Jim could think things through only so far. Maybe it was as simple as just following one’s heart.

But he was beginning to understand that Ann’s death had nearly severed some cord in him, a cord that once had included Poon and Jake, that connected him in blood and spirit with this place. There was in Jim a sense of things unraveling. It was down to him and Virginia now. And Ray, and maybe Becky. It felt like the Alamo.

Forty minutes later, they rolled down the peninsula and into the neighborhood, into the heart of what would soon become the Balboa Redevelopment Project, if PacifiCo and the other builders had their way at the polls, sank Virginia’s beloved Proposition A, and staffed the mayor’s office with friends like Brian Dennison, so eager to exercise the city’s power of eminent domain. Weir looked out at the huddled duplexes and small bungalows, the unassuming 1940s-style cottages, the boulevard palms that had grown to majestic height through the decades.

It was the opposite of the suburbs here: no uniformity, no franchised street corners, no “planning,” no slick production values at all, just the clean air that blew in off the Pacific, miles of thundering ocean butting up against the land, and the unrepentently modest houses that had stood here for half a century.

Jim had seen, in the papers, concept sketches of the redevelopment. The “theme” of the new Balboa was Early California, a faux mission look featuring red tile roofs, arching colonnades, and courtyards and fountains. The Eight Peso Cantina was a two-story restaurant called the Newport Sailing Club. Poon’s Locker was part of a financial-services minimal. Ann’s Kids was a sushi and burger emporium called Taka-Fornia. Virginia’s house was a maritime museum, to feature “elements of Newport’s historic past.” Ann and Raymond’s house was gone completely, airbrushed away to make room for a three-story parking structure that would be “architecturally integrated into the Early California look.” The pier would be made over with a mock-adobe material that was waterproof and “seismically forgiving,” and would feature a “five-star” restaurant at the end.

Weir remembered now that Virginia and Becky and a handful of other citizens had been arrested near the entrance of PacifiCo Tower for protesting this plan and ignoring repeated warnings by security. They had termed the project “Mission Impossible,” and gotten the local news stations out for the march and arrest. Cantrell had refused to file charges, and pointed out that they were less concerned with the opinions of the protestors than the safety of their employees, some of whom had been “harassed” by the I demonstrators.

Looking out at the old neighborhood, Jim could only conclude that it wasn’t right to change what was working fine to begin with.

Working, he thought, except for the traffic, which had stopped dead on Balboa Boulevard.

Working, he thought, except for the flashing lights of cop cars gathered down the street.

Working, except for the helicopter hovering low over an old yellow motel called the El Mar.

Working, except for the black-clad Newport Beach Police SWAT team, bristling with armament, crawling all over the place like ants.

He could see Phil Kearns-standing in the motel courtyard, talking to the SWAT captain.

“They found Goins,” said Raymond. “I knew it.”

Weir pulled along a red curb and parked. Raymond was already out, running down the sidewalk.