Wild Instinct

36

Two hours of restless sleep later, Daniela Mendez is following Jesse’s old but spiffy-clean silver Corolla from a safe distance, her TeenShield app stuck inside his phone like a virus, secretly tracking him from home, through Tustin, then into Barrio Dogtown in Santa Ana.

Jesse’s first stop is the little stucco house on Edgar Place, where he went inside with Lulu and his gaming duffel and a case of Modelo and didn’t come out for an hour.

Daniela pulls up well short of the house, turns off the engine, and waits. Sees the candy apple red Chevelle lowrider, the magnolia tree surrounded by fallen blossoms, the brown lawns, the graffiti on the walls and curbs.

Jesse gets out, dressed in his new cholo finest: white singlet, black Dickies work shorts, knee-high white socks, and black high-top Converse All Stars. She’d found it all on the floor of his cluttered closet, still in the Walmart bags and boxes, no real attempt to hide them.

Worst of all, notes Daniela — Jesse has shaved his beautiful hair sometime after she kissed him good night and the time his alarm woke her up just over an hour ago. He must have been quiet about that, sneaking the electric shaver she got him for his fifteenth birthday out to their little garage so as not to wake her.

Now, skinny and tall with his bald, dark-whiskered head, Jesse looks like a cartoon character in cholo clothes, dressed up for a show on TV.

How can he not see this?

How can he cut off all that beautiful, black, wavy hair?

How can he try to show off those attempted muscles in his cute, spindly arms?

Although, to be honest, they are growing some, the muscles. Also in the back of his closet: Muscle Milk protein drinks guaranteed to pump him up.

Lulu’s got on lavender short shorts and a tight T-shirt the same brown as her skin and a white straw fedora with pink Day of the Dead skulls painted on. She leads the way to the front door, which opens well before they get there.

Through her binoculars Daniela recognizes fat Flaco Benitez from Bowl Me Over, smiling at them.

Less than five minutes later, the three of them come back out, Flaco carrying the boxed Raptor TX-395 camera drone, smiling again and chattering away.

He puts the drone in the trunk, then gets into the car, his weight rocking it as he drops into the passenger seat. Lulu sits in back.

Then down Civic Center Drive toward the Sheriff’s Department, just a short drive from Flaco’s place.

Daniela watches from three cars back as Jesse passes the Corner Market on Raitt Street, where Cesar Chavez and Ted Kennedy spoke about civil rights and labor.

Then Jesse swings into the El Salvador Park parking lot and they get out. Daniela remembers Father Malone telling her first-grade class about the famous gang truce that took place at El Salvador Park in the early nineties. She was six. Tall, handsome young Tim Malone — active in reaching out to gang-culture youth — said this truce was made with the help of God in heaven. Tim had helped bring some of the combatants together to hash out the truce.

Daniela thinks of Father Tim — so idealistic and full of saintly spirit back then — now unwilling to even make eye contact with their own son.

Which would be the first he’s looked into his son’s eyes since Jesse was seven days old.

God, she loves them.

Swallows so hard it hurts.

She finds a good place along the street, gets out her binoculars. Glasses Jesse leaning over his car trunk for the drone and, as he does this, Flaco rubs Lulu’s butt. She swats his hand and hops flirtatiously away.

Two more cars arrive and park on either side of the Corolla. A Chevy Malibu and an old Dodge Magnum. Three young men and a hefty chola get out and head straight for their homies, all fist bumps and signs, no smiles except Flaco and Jesse, just tough salutes before getting down to serious business here, whatever that might be.

They set off across the lot for the grassy slopes of the park, the chola carrying a plastic Vons grocery bag that looks heavy. Cell phones, Daniela reasons, based on her El Jardin restaurant stakeout.

Which of course makes her wonder if Bishop Buendia is going to show, or if he’s too busy rescuing the troubled boys of Camp Refuge.

And lo, she thinks, as if on cue, here comes Buendia’s ’55 aqua-on-white Bel Air, lowered and gleaming, the chrome moons bright as mirrors, fuzzy fucking dice dangling from the rearview. To Daniela it’s funny but gorgeous. She’s always known that whatever it is in Mexican-American blood that so adores old American cars altered to scrape the asphalt, grumble and hop and raise and lower — well, she’s got it, too.

Bishop Buendia, portly and white-suited and cherub-faced, his hair pomaded and his priestly purple stole proclaiming his favor in the eyes of Christ, exits the Bel Air with an air of untroubled authority.

Through her field glasses, Daniela watches him follow the seven youngsters across the broad grassy park. Then he veers away from them, takes a few long swallows from a drinking fountain, and sits on a green bench in the shade of a white gazebo.

The magnificent seven now huddle in the grass, gathered in a loose circle around the drone. Only Lulu remains standing, probably to keep the grass off her legs.

The chola hands Jesse what looks like a cell phone from her bag. Jesse flips the drone onto its back in the grass and it looks to Daniela that he’s attaching the phone to a gimbal.

To use as a camera, she thinks. Seven little spies, with Bishop Buendia in supervision. Shooting pictures of who? What?

You can probably buy a setup like that for three hundred bucks, camera included.

Then the spies take off, leaving Jesse standing alone in the middle of the park with the drone resting upright on the grass and the controller in his hands. He seems to be toggling and adjusting the settings; hard to tell from here.

Bishop Buendia observes from the shade of his gazebo.

Daniela watches the young spies split up and head around the park’s structures — an auditorium, an amphitheater nestled in the trees, the staff and security buildings.

They’re out of her sight now, and Daniela checks in on Buendia again, then lowers her binoculars. The sun is low still and casts a soft orange light.

Daniela watches the drone wobble into the air, gets her binoculars up fast, and sees the spindly thing climbing and heading toward the buildings. No sound, and its four propellors and landing legs are hard to make out against the background of trees.

A moment later it’s above and beyond the trees, and Daniela thinks she wouldn’t be able to describe it if she didn’t already know what it was, the Raptor TX-395 camera drone, red and black just like the box it came in. And she thinks: Come on, baby, do your job. Shoot that video, send it back to base camp by satellite or internet. Pinpoint where the bad guys are. Show the target house is empty and safe for entry. Or maybe, if gunmen are standing by.

Checks her watch and three minutes later, here comes the Raptor back her way, already over the amphitheater, the six merry spies running hard to catch it, looking up and laughing.

Jesse stands in the green grass, a rail of a boy with a newly shaved scalp and a smile on his face, and Daniela tells herself she can never, never lose him.

As the drone lowers toward Jesse, Daniela sees that the phone is no longer attached. Accidentally dropped in flight? Dropped on purpose by Jesse like a bomb? Pried off by one of the spies?

Suddenly the Raptor slows, hovers, and climbs away, headed toward Bishop Buendia.

Jesse pivots with little steps, still smiling, working the controls, piloting the Raptor toward Buendia, who stands, looking up as the drone hovers not ten feet above him.

Buendia softly claps.

The hell is going on, Daniela thinks. What is this, like, a jamboree for wannabe bangers?

The six spies converge on Jesse, with Lulu in the lead, brandishing a cell phone that she hands over to Jesse. They circle him, shadow-jabbing and feinting kicks like UFC fighters warming up, some of them shooting the action on their phones, Jesse watching them from the center of things, a man in charge.

He holds up the phone that Lulu brought from beyond the amphitheater buildings, which Daniela decides is the same one that the Raptor took off with.

Not a spy drone at all, thinks Daniela, returning her magnified gaze to her proud-looking son.

A delivery drone, just like Amazon.

He raises it high, turning in Bishop Buendia’s direction.

Daniela glasses the portly, white-suited Bishop Buendia, who remains seated in the gazebo, facing his neophytes with an approving smile.