NINE DAYS EARLIER
“Do you ever think about Jonah?”
“Jesus, is that my Bible? I haven’t opened that thing in years. So you’re talking about the guy that was swallowed by a whale?”
“Yeah.”
“No, I’d have to say I don’t think about him. I wouldn’t think you would, either. I didn’t take you for particularly religious.”
“I’m not. That’s my point, though. When you’re not raised religious, you think of Jonah as the swallowed-by-a-whale guy, like Noah is the ark guy. But when you actually read the Book of Jonah, it’s not what you expect.”
“You read the whole book?”
“It’s three pages long.”
Morning in San Francisco. Jack Foreman, tall and thin, in his early forties, with a premature streak of gray in his light brown hair, was across the room, already dressed at quarter to eight, already having cleared away last night’s Ketel One bottle and two glasses, showered, dressed, and fixed and consumed breakfast and an espresso. He was now scanning the headlines of both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times, and at the same time keeping an eye on CNN with the sound off. I was still in his bed, naked, with my hair half raveled in the braids I forgot to take out last night, reading his Bible for no particular reason other than that it had caught my eye while Jack was still in the shower.
“The thing that’s strange about the story is, Jonah doesn’t seem to be scared of anything, even when he should be.”
“No?”
“No. The story goes that God tells Jonah to go to the city of Nineveh to preach, and Jonah doesn’t want to, so he gets on a ship for Spain. God sends a violent storm, and the ship’s crew is scared. But when they go down to the hold to find Jonah, he’s sleeping.”
“Yeah?”
“Sleeping. Through a storm that has veteran sailors scared. So they wake him up and tell him, ‘We’re pretty sure we haven’t done anything to anger our gods, might you have done something to anger yours?’ And Jonah suggests that if they think this is the case, maybe they should throw him overboard.”
“Huh.”
“They’re way out at sea. Jonah’s effectively asking to be drowned. The crew says no at first, but later they decide he’s right, and they throw him over, and then comes the whale part that everyone knows about. That’s what it takes for him to finally decide that maybe he’s in trouble. He prays to God-it’s kind of a pretty poem, by the way-and God intervenes, so the whale spits him up onto dry land. And then he does go to Nineveh, and everyone in Nineveh really gets with the program, from the king on down. They repent in a big way. And Jonah isn’t happy about it. He gets mad. He goes out in the desert and argues with God about destroying Nineveh.”
“He wants Nineveh destroyed?”
“Yeah, but the bigger point is, he’s arguing with the God of the Old Testament, the all-powerful white-beard guy who used to strike people dead. Doesn’t that seem a little insane? Shouldn’t Jonah be a little more afraid?”
“You think Jonah was suicidal.”
“No. I mean, not necessarily.”
“Then what’s your theory? You sound like you’ve been putting a lot of thought into this. You must have one.”
“No, sorry. I’m just a bike messenger. I don’t get paid enough to theorize.”
“Hailey…” he said, his tone a change of subject in itself.
“I know. You’re ready for work. I’ve got to get up and dressed and out. I’ll hurry.” I was already sliding his Bible back onto the bookshelf.
Jack was a newsman for the Associated Press, a Midwestern transplant to California by way of, apparently, everywhere. Photographs on the far wall of his studio, Jack’s own amateur work, attested to the width and breadth of his reporting career. Fellow reporters, editors, photographers, and other acquaintances looked out from pictures taken in the world’s capitals and war zones, places Jack had been a correspondent.
He and I had crossed paths several times at the courthouse, where he covered motions and trials and I, a bike courier, dropped off and picked up legal papers. But we didn’t get to know each other until the Friday night I’d literally backed into him in a tiny, crowded Asian grocery. When, after a few minutes of conversation, he asked me if I wanted company for dinner, I surprised myself by saying yes. Maybe it had been so long since I’d seen a guy who was neither a metrosexual nor a pierced and dreadlocked bike messenger that he had been exotic to me.
He was the first guy I ever slept with who wore boxer shorts. I didn’t tell him that, our first night together. Guys have lost erections over less.
Now, as I was pulling on my long-sleeved thermal shirt and cargo pants, Jack said, “Are you hungry? There’s bagels.”
I shook my head. “I’ll eat later.” It was my day off, and a small plan for the morning was forming.
I sat on the floor to put on my boots. When I looked up, Jack was watching me.
He said, “Every time I see you lacing up those boots, I think I’m sleeping with an undercover DEA agent.”
Bates Enforcers, heavy-soled black lace-ups with a side zip, draw a lot of attention.
“They’re comfortable, is all.”
Jack had never seen the gun. It was a.38 caliber Smith & Wesson Airweight, easy to conceal. Just five shots, but the kind of trouble I was likely to get into was the up-close-and-personal kind, and if I couldn’t get out of it with five rounds, I wasn’t getting out of it at all.
I stood and gathered up my single-strap messenger bag, putting it over my shoulder, when the newspapers on the counter caught my attention.
“Are you done with this?” I asked, indicating the Los Angeles Times Calendar section, its front page dominated by a profile of a young white hip-hop producer. “Can I have it?”
“Sure,” Jack said.
I slid the section of the paper into my bag, then walked ahead of Jack into the entryway, where my bicycle-it was my private transportation as well as my livelihood-leaned against the wall.
We emerged into the cool gray of June in San Francisco, me wheeling the bike and Jack holding the keys to his old Saab. He stopped for a moment, tapping a cigarette out of a pack, his first of the day. While he lit up, I looked downhill, toward the rest of the city. Jack’s studio was at the edge of Parnassus Heights, and the view was fantastic.
It’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t find San Francisco beautiful, and I couldn’t argue. I had been in San Francisco nearly a year. I had ridden every inch of its neighborhoods, the storied ones like Chinatown and North Beach, the quiet ones like the Sunset and Presidio Heights. Late at night, I had watched the lights of great containerships as they ghosted into the port of Oakland, across the water. I had seen this city in the rain, the sun, the fog, the moonlight, on moonless evenings illuminated by its own city lights. San Francisco seemed to pose for you endlessly, proving it could look beautiful under any conditions. People came from all over the country and paid exorbitant prices to own or rent a tiny part of San Francisco.
Only a philistine could stand on a hill, look out at San Francisco, and wish she were seeing the overheated sprawl of L.A. instead. But I did.
Jack had gotten his cigarette going; I could smell the fragrant-acrid smoke from behind me. I turned back to him and was just about to say, I’ll call you sometime this week, when he spoke first. “Hailey?”
“What?”
“When you say you’re going to get something to eat later, you mean later this morning, right? Not late this afternoon?”
“Yeah,” I said, baffled. “Why?”
“We had a lot to drink last night, but I didn’t see you eat anything. You’re getting thin.”
“Jack, my job burns, like, eight thousand calories an hour. I couldn’t do it if I wasn’t eating enough,” I pointed out.
He was not appeased. I said, “Something else on your mind?”
He said, “You treat yourself with a certain amount of disregard, Hailey. I’ve known you for six months, and how often in that time have you been injured on the job? First those stitches in your eyebrow, then that thing with your wrist-”
“That was an old break. The bone was weak,” I argued. “Look, I’m a bike messenger. I’ve been the top-earning rider for my service nearly every month since I hired on. I couldn’t do that without taking some risks. There’s a lot of competition.”
Jack closed his eyes briefly, then said, “You don’t want to be the most reckless bike messenger in San Francisco, Hailey. That’s like being the town drunk in New Orleans.”
“I didn’t know you cared.”
“You ever think about school?”
“I thought I mentioned that before,” I said. “I did a little school back east. It didn’t work out.”
“And you can never go back?”
“What’s with you today?” I asked him. “The thing I like most about you is that you’re free of all the middle-class rhetoric, and now suddenly you’re doing a guidance-counselor thing.”
Jack sighed. “I’m not trying to make you angry.”
“I’m not,” I said, relenting.
“Really?” He threw down the cigarette and stepped on it.
“Really. I’ll call you tomorrow. We’ll get together, I’ll eat a whole pile of food. You can watch.”
Besides, I hadn’t been lying when I said I was planning on having breakfast. Just not right away.
I didn’t own a car, which wasn’t supposed to be a problem in San Francisco. It’s said to be one of the world’s great walking cities-fairly compact, with temperate weather and beautiful neighborhoods. All true, but even so: forty-nine square miles. In my first weeks here, I’d chronically underjudged the time it was going to take me to walk places. Now, of course, I had my bike-an old silver Motobecane, very fast, with drop handlebars and paint rubbed off the top tube where someone had probably kept a chain wrapped around it.
I’d been a messenger for eight months, long enough to develop the cyclist’s long, flat ellipse of muscle in my calf-I didn’t have that even back east in school, when I’d thought I was in the best shape of my life. Now a short, easy ride brought me to my destination, the Golden Gate Bridge. Ever since I’d come out to San Francisco, it had become something of a habit of mine to come up here when I didn’t have any big plan for my day.
If you’ve driven in California and visited the Bay Area, the bridge you most likely drove on was the Bay Bridge. It connects San Francisco to the East Bay. It is heavily trafficked, double-decked, beautiful in an industrial way. But it isn’t an icon. The Golden Gate Bridge is, largely due to its location: It serves as a kind of borderline between the enclosed waters of the Bay and the open water of the Pacific, between the American continent and the rest of the world. It is open to cyclists and to pedestrians, many of whom are dazzled tourists. In its most mundane sense, it is the bridge between the city and the Marin headlands. But to twenty or more people a year, it is the bridge to eternity.
The Golden Gate Bridge is America’s foremost suicide destination.
The first suicide off the bridge was a WWI veteran who appeared to be out for a stroll until he told a passerby, “This is as far as I go.” That was three months after the bridge was opened; it was still in its infancy. Sometimes I wondered: If that man had stayed home and stuck his head in an oven instead, would it have changed the bridge’s destiny? Without his precedent, would the next person and the next have reconsidered, until it was understood that jumping off the Golden Gate just wasn’t done? There are other bridges in America that are as accessible and potentially fatal but have virtually no history of suicides, apparently because it just didn’t become a tradition.
Psychologists know there is a contagious aspect to suicide-not merely the destructive impulse itself, but also the where and the how of it. In Japan, they’ve had to close public attractions because they’ve become magnets for suicides. One person jumps into a volcano and more people get the idea. In other countries, the authorities intervene. In America, land of the individual destiny, not so much.
Cops who try to prevent suicides up here will tell you that they’ll see a pedestrian with that end-it-all look and ask them if they’re thinking of jumping. The pedestrian denies it and the cop has to take their word for it and move on. Then they’ll look back and the guy is just gone. It’s that quick. You don’t even hear anything. I know, I’ve seen it, too.
I asked a patrolman once how he recognized someone with the suicide look. He told me, “You’ll know it when you see it.” And I do. It’s in what they’re not looking at. Unlike the tourists, they’re not looking at the city skyline or the Marin headlands. They’re looking at the water. Or at nothing, because all their attention is directed inside, replaying the past and seeing the bleak endless nothing of the future.
That’s the thing I don’t understand: How exactly do they choose their spot? What says to them, This far but no farther? I’ve never asked a potential jumper how they choose their spot. It’s too flippant, and when I’m up here, I’m very, very careful. It’s probably the most careful I ever am.
There was a man standing by the railing ten feet ahead of me. He wasn’t even a particularly hard guess. He was pretty obviously homeless, skin leathery from sun and wind and maybe drug use. He wasn’t looking at anything in particular, and he was too caught up in his internal weather to notice me approach.
The men were usually easier than the women. They could usually be softened by a young woman taking interest in them. The women were sometimes hostile. They told me that someone like you couldn’t understand their problems. It was never quite clear what they meant by someone like you.
“Hey,” I said quietly.
He was a big man, maybe six-foot-six, with shaggy hair and a shaggy beard. I could imagine him, at a happier point in his life, dressing as a pirate for Halloween, scaring little kids and then making them laugh.
“Are you hungry?” I said.
He looked at me flatly. “No,” he said.
So much for the easy way, getting him off the bridge first, under a pretext. I said, “I thought you might want to get something to eat.” I paused. “You know, instead of jumping.”
He blinked, startled.
“I’m sorry to be so blunt,” I said, “but that’s the plan, isn’t it? Jumping?”
“So what?” he said, and it wasn’t hostile. He was probably too depressed to get really angry anymore. At least I hoped so. He was big enough that even if he wasn’t in shape anymore, he could still pick me up and throw me off the bridge without much effort. I thought of the edged ripples of iron-colored water below, of Jonah’s prayer: You cast me into the deep, and all the flood surrounded me.
I said: “I’m not here to tell you I understand all your problems or that everything’s going to be okay. But I’m hungry, and I’ve got enough money to buy two breakfasts. If you’re hungry, too.”
And then, at the worst time, my cell phone began to ring. I really should shut it off when I’m up here. I knew who it was: work. Someone had called in sick, or just hadn’t shown up. I was needed. And normally I’d have answered, except that right now the guy in front of me was about to make a life-or-death decision and I couldn’t just say, Hold that thought, I have to take this.
The man in front of me was curious: “Don’t you want to answer that?”
“Not really,” I said, and it stopped ringing, going into voice mail. I persisted: “What do you say? Breakfast? And you leave the bridge alone at least one more day?”
He nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, okay.”
I’d like to tell you that Todd’s story-that was his name-was original and fascinating. It wasn’t. I’d heard it before: A good and happy life in an average way, until the onset of a chronic illness, exacerbated by drink. He went on disability until the money ran out. His marriage failed. He was unable to pay child support, so his wife saw no reason for him to know where she’d moved with their two kids. He’d stayed with a buddy until the buddy’s wife wouldn’t have it anymore. That left no one to care that he was standing on the bridge, ready to jump.
Todd and I made a plan for him that involved having only one drink and going to the VA to look up the brother he hadn’t seen in twenty years, but who just might take him in. To level the playing field a bit, I told Todd part of my story-the part about going east to school and why I came back. Without that, the potential jumpers usually looked at me like some idealist who’d read a few too many inspirational books. Like if I weren’t doing this, I’d be at the mission feeding the homeless, or in Africa doing medical work.
In someone else, what I did on the bridge would be philanthropy. For me it wasn’t. A shrink would probably have a field day with it, trying to put the pieces together, how it fit with the reason I came back from the East Coast, and the reason I had to leave L.A. Those are two different stories, by the way. I’m getting to that.
I hadn’t left Todd behind at the diner for more than three minutes when my cell rang again, and with a stab of guilt, remembering the call I’d ignored on the bridge, I immediately brought the Motobecane to a stop.
“It’s me.” Shay Clements was the owner of Aries Courier. “Fabian just radioed in. His crank’s busted, he’s stranded on Market Street. Can you go meet him, pick up his packages, and make his drops?”
“Yeah.”
“Like, right now?”
Shay wasn’t being pushy. A courier service stood or failed on its on-time performance, and that in itself gave me a twinge of confusion: The hour that had passed between the phone call on the bridge and this one was far too much time for Shay to wait. But there wasn’t time to wonder about that. “I’m on it right now,” I said. “I’m literally standing over my bike.”
“Thanks,” Shay said after giving me the intersection where I was to meet Fabian.
“It’s no problem,” I said.
And it wasn’t. This was my work now, and I did it with the great humility life has taught me since I washed out of the United States Military Academy at West Point, just two months before I would have graduated and become a second lieutenant in the United States Army.
My name is Hailey Cain. I’m twenty-three and have one of the most popular first names for girls of my generation. Every year in school there were half a dozen Hailies or Haleys or Haileys in my class.
I’m Californian in a way that a lot of people are Californian: I was born somewhere else. My father was Texan, my mother from West Virginia. I was born in an off-base hospital near Fort Hood, Texas, where Staff Sgt. Henry Cain was stationed at the time. I missed being born on the Fourth of July by one day; my birthday was the fifth. Maybe I was born to be a failed patriot.
I take after my father in looks; I have his straw-blond hair and open face, except that mine is marked by a port-wine birthmark high on my right cheekbone. In my one photo of him, he’s a big guy, shouldery, and I have a similar mesomorphic build at five-foot-seven. My only really good feature is my full lips. In high school, reading beauty-magazine articles about the power of a sultry movie-star gaze, I’d wished I could trade my good lips for thick double-fringed eyelashes. My cousin CJ had waved that off, saying, Guys don’t fantasize about how eyelashes will feel wrapped around the johnson. CJ could get away with saying outrageous shit like that because he had never fully lost his Southern accent, and it gave everything he said a good-old-boy innocence.
After Texas, my father was posted in Hawaii and Kentucky and then Illinois, where he died in an accident, a truck rollover on the base. I was eleven at the time. The Army’s death benefit wasn’t going to keep my mother and me solvent very long; Julianne had never been what you’d call a career woman. So we went to California, where her sister Angeline had already moved with her husband, Porter Mooney, and their four kids.
Porter was a guard at the federal prison in Lompoc, and the Mooneys had a big falling-down house outside of town that recreated the way they’d lived in West Virginia. There were always half a dozen cars in the yard-Porter and his oldest son, Constantine, were mechanics par excellence. They didn’t just fix up cars and trucks; they worked on farm equipment, too, when people brought it to them. Behind the house was a half-acre of kitchen garden, and a dozen chickens roamed the yard. Angeline sold the eggs they didn’t need at the farmers’ market, along with sunflowers from the garden, and she gave piano lessons to local kids. There were always people who would sneer at how the West Virginia Mooneys lived, but the fact that six people got by comfortably on just one full-time salary and a few sidelines shamed the debt culture that most of middle-class California was mired in.
When Julianne and I arrived from Illinois, bereaved and nearly broke, theirs became an eight-person household. Porter and Angeline’s two oldest kids were almost finished with high school, and I never got too close to them. And the baby of the family, Virgil, was only starting first grade. But the middle son, my cousin CJ, he was a different story.
CJ and I were the same age, almost literally. We’d been born ten days and a thousand miles apart, and never met until I came to California. We were in the same grade and same class in school, and if it hadn’t been for that, I would have been friendless pretty much until high school. I was skinny and unprepossessing, self-conscious about my birthmark, shell-shocked over my father’s death, culture-shocked over my arrival in California.
I was used to moving-all Army kids are-but Santa Barbara County was different. People hear the words Santa Barbara and they think of wealth, and that was certainly true of the city itself, with its gleaming white Mission-style architecture and streets generously lined with bougainvillea. But where the Mooneys lived, east of Vandenberg Air Force Base, was mostly rural, and yet more racially and economically diverse than an outsider would have thought. In the halls of my new school quite a few of the white students, and some black, were the children of Air Force personnel or staff at the federal prison. Many others were Latino, the sons and daughters of agricultural workers, some of them undocumented. In this working-class mix moved the well-dressed children of winemaker families, new money that had recently gravitated to what was becoming a hotbed of viticulture. Old California was here, too, in the kids with Chumash blood, the Indians who originally settled the area. Our high-school salutatorian was a Japanese boy whose family had farmed its acreage for generations-all except for those years spent in an internment camp during World War II.
Put another way: There’s a certain kind of white person I like to tell about my first real kiss. It was with a classmate in the seventh grade who was black. Awww, isn’t that great, I can almost see the listener thinking. Then I tell the rest of it. The next day, three girls cornered me out behind one of the portable classrooms at the edge of the school grounds. They were black. Their leader was a girl who’d been the boy’s best friend since childhood and felt that she should have been first in line to get that kiss. Her two friends had held my arms while she gave me a pretty good beatdown.
And that’s all I say. Usually, it’s clear that the listener wants there to be more: some throat-clearing rhetoric about how I understand the social tensions that led to et cetera cetera cetera, or maybe that the girl and I had become friends later in high school. When I don’t say anything like that, sometimes people look uncomfortable, like I’ve said something racist, though they can’t identify exactly what it is.
The truth is that the girl and I didn’t become friends, but by a year later, if either of us thought about the incident at all, we remembered it as just girls fighting over a boy. It could have happened between two black girls or two white girls, but it hadn’t. The difference between the way middle-class educated people thought about race and the way people like me lived it was like the difference between what was in surgical textbooks and what happened in an Army field hospital.
When I say that the only thing that made those early years bearable was my cousin CJ, though, I don’t mean that he knew everybody at school and introduced me around, easing my way into social success. The Mooneys had arrived in California only a year before Julianne and me, and though CJ would later become Californian in a big way, it hadn’t happened by the time I got there. In sixth grade, CJ was already six feet tall, but too skinny, with rawboned hands. The other kids found his Appalachian accent incomprehensible and his first name laughably Southern. I never used it; I always called him CJ, which he liked.
CJ had one advantage over me, though: The other kids learned pretty quickly that he could fight, and they left him alone. I served my fistfight apprenticeship a lot more slowly and painfully. To his credit, CJ never jumped in and fought my battles for me. He understood, the way an adult wouldn’t have, that I had to earn my respect myself.
If nothing else, though, CJ’s friendship soothed the pains of early adolescence. At school, we ate lunch together when the longtime Californians and the Air Force kids were branched off in their cliques. After school, we halved the time it took us to do homework by splitting the assignments and copying each other’s answers. It was probably that joint arrangement that kept CJ’s grades up in junior high. It’s not that he wasn’t bright-he was-but his studies had never interested him much.
What interested him was music. CJ’s mother had started teaching him the piano when he wasn’t yet old enough to read, and though he was good at it, by junior high he rarely played, considering the piano to be a feminine, Victorian instrument. But he did love music, black music in particular-blues, gospel, and jazz. Even at thirteen, if he owned a CD by a white artist, I didn’t know what it was. He was forever slipping his headphones over my ears so I could appreciate something about Miles Davis or John Lee Hooker.
In the insecurity of youth, I’d felt I deserved my outsider status, but often I wondered why the other kids didn’t see the CJ I knew. He was kind and funny; he was smart. And he was an excellent kisser. That part, of course, I would rather have died than let the other girls know that I knew.
Yes, I’ve heard all the jokes about the South and kissing cousins. But most people I know have at least one I-didn’t-know-any-better incident in their early sexual history. CJ and I had just been experimenting. It wasn’t like we’d had anyone else to practice on.
I’d started things, one night when we were outside on a sleeping bag after dark, waiting to watch a rocket launch from Vandenberg. Offhandedly I told CJ that I’d never kissed with an open mouth, and I wanted to learn. CJ said that I’d get a chance soon enough and to be patient. Patience had not been my strong suit, so finally he relented and showed me. And kept showing me. Those satellite launches got delayed a lot. It wasn’t like there’d been anything else for us to do.
For about a year after that, making out was just something we did when we had time and privacy. It was mostly kissing, except that when I started getting my breasts, I let CJ cup them in his gentle, long-fingered hands. And the summer before we started high school-I admit there was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s involved in this-he let me touch him down low. He was hard, and when I wrapped my hand around him, I was amazed at how it felt, so powerful and yet vulnerable, all at once.
Then CJ rolled away from me, breathing hard, and said, “We probably ought to knock this shit off.”
And I said, “Yeah, I know.”
So we stopped. We were going to be in high school next year; it was time to put away childish things. No big deal.
In high school, we drifted apart a little. This was partly because Julianne scraped together the money to move us out of the Mooney home and into a rented house in town. But what really set CJ and me on different paths was something that happened to me in a bookstore, a few months before I finished eighth grade.
I was looking for a present for Julianne’s birthday. I knew she didn’t want a book as a gift, but I was mad at her for moving us out of the Mooney house, where I’d felt comfortable. In theory, Julianne and I had moved “so Hailey can have her own room.” In reality, it was so she could have privacy to entertain the Air Force guys she liked. I hated the house-it was cramped and Helen Keller could have done a more tasteful job on the color scheme-and disliked most of the men she dated. I missed the Mooney house with its warmth and life. So there I was, browsing, when I passed a display of educational books and a thick volume caught my attention.
It was Wheelock’s Latin. I wasn’t interested in foreign languages, but even so I picked it up and ran my finger along the words inside-difficult, opaque, more than merely foreign, almost alien-and somehow they dazzled me. This, I thought, was the language of ancient soldiers and empire builders, of discipline and honor. And it seemed to me that it was somehow my birthright, because of my father, who had been in my eyes a warrior. By the time I left the store, I’d not only bought my mother’s birthday gift but also the Wheelock’s, and it wasn’t long after that I understood that I would someday apply to West Point.
That’s a pretty big leap in logic, I know. The ideas that you have at thirteen rarely stand up to the test of time. But they’re very powerful in the moment; you feel things at that age with an intensity that few people can still access in adulthood.
Those feelings also run pretty hot and cold. I studied the Latin text voraciously for about five days before casting it aside in frustration. But I started up again when I began high school in the fall, and worked at it more slowly and patiently. When it was time for my appointment with the guidance counselor, and she asked me what I thought I might like to do for a living, I told her about West Point. Her eyebrows inched toward her hairline, and I couldn’t blame her: Nothing in my life that far suggested any latent achieverhood. To give her credit, she didn’t voice her skepticism. Instead, she asked me if I’d thought about the Air Force Academy in Colorado-remember, we were in Air Force territory. I told her to fuck off the way fourteen-year-olds tell adults to fuck off-“I’ll think about it”-and she nodded and then did something to my file that switched me from graduation track to college preparatory.
She explained the drill: four years of math, four years of English, three years of science, two years of foreign language. I asked her if there was any way I could get credit for studying Latin instead of the Spanish, French, or German our school offered. Her eyebrows made that same ascent and she said she didn’t see how that would work, and besides, for a military officer who might be stationed overseas, French would be a much more useful language.
I spited her by enrolling in Spanish instead, and on my own time I studied Latin. By the time I was a junior, the principal was sufficiently impressed with my resolve that he signed off on the deal that let me out of study hall twice a week to bus over to the community college to take Latin classes there.
It’s hard for me to explain what Latin means to me. My guidance counselor had been right: It wasn’t at all useful to a military career. But to be fair, I think Latin got me into West Point, because studying it was how I learned I could do difficult things. Hard things had happened to me-my father’s death, most of all-but Latin was the first burden I picked up of my own choice.
It has to be said that I wasn’t squeaky clean in high school. I got in some fights, and I got in some backseats. I can’t say I don’t know what a meth high feels like. You have to grow up in a small town to understand. On Friday and Saturday nights, things go on in farmhouses that would shock the ghetto. But I was always in homeroom with my schoolwork done on Monday morning, so the adults around me never knew. That’s something that all smart kids figure out pretty early on: As long as your grades are good and you don’t smoke or wear heavy eyeliner, the authority figures around you generally don’t look any deeper than that.
Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t a delinquent. I didn’t start fights, but I didn’t back down from them either, so I had some pretty good scraps with girls I wasn’t even sure how I’d offended. Some of it was about my plans for the future, I guess, my grades and West Point ambitions. Some people will tear you down for no reason other than that you’re trying to build yourself up.
And the sex? I never actually went all the way, not back then. Like many girls, I protected my reputation by making the distinction between giving head and giving it up. If my generation didn’t invent the idea of “oral sex isn’t sex,” we’d popularized it, and I wasn’t reluctant to show a guy I liked him in that way.
And maybe on some level I was competing with CJ, who was going through my female classmates at a truly amazing rate. Because while I was becoming somebody different, my cousin was, too.
All the Mooney kids adapted to California-their accents softened, and they called the freeway “the 246,” not just “246,” and so forth. But it was CJ who went native in a big way. In his freshman year he’d started going to the ocean with friends who had driver’s licenses, and the sun and salt water brought out gold lights in his reddish-blond hair, which he let grow out to his shoulders, smoothing out the tightness of its curls. He traded in his checked flannel shirts and dark-blue jeans for T-shirts and faded, ripped Levi’s and casually unlaced basketball shoes. Though I could always spot him in the halls because of his height, sometimes I barely recognized the skinny country cousin I’d first met.
In our second year of high school, CJ got his driver’s license, and not long after he bought a twenty-year-old silver BMW that he’d seen advertised “for parts” and rebuilt it from the ground up. He also won a starting spot on the baseball team, where he vexed opposing batters with the deep sinker and nasty screwball that Porter had taught him.
I don’t know if my cousin ever had the kind of life-changing moment that I did in the bookstore, but he told me a story about the time when, as far as he could tell, school turned around for him. It was in the middle of that sophomore year. CJ was getting books from his locker when a pretty black girl, a new transfer from Oxnard, took in his height-he was six-three then, on his way to six-five-and said teasingly, “Do you hang off the end of your bed?”
CJ had winked at her and said, “Only recreationally,” and not only had she laughed, the kids around her had, too.
By the end of that week, CJ and the girl from Oxnard were going out, and suddenly the entire female population of our school discovered, seemingly all at once, the aphrodisiac qualities of a Southern accent. CJ, of course, was happy to help them enjoy that discovery.
By our junior year I saw very little of him on weekends, not just because he was out with girlfriends-though he often was-but because once he got his car running, he could go to Los Angeles without waiting to ride along with friends. CJ wasn’t antisocial, but his interest in L.A. wasn’t the same as that of his friends. They went to surf and drink around campfires on the beach. CJ went to sweet-talk his way into L.A.’s music venues, the eighteen-and-over or twenty-one-only clubs where the new hip-hop acts debuted. All the money he earned repairing cars for his father went either to gas money or to two-drink minimums. He kept his grades up just high enough to stay on the baseball team, but that was all.
Teachers sighed and shook their heads about CJ Mooney, but there was no animus in it. The guidance counselor, she of the mobile eyebrows, saw that he’d inherited the Mooney gift with cars, put him on the graduation track, and loaded his schedule with shop classes.
They didn’t see what he was. Back then, none of us did.
Sure, it was obvious that he loved music. But in high school, what kid doesn’t? Even the fact that he was a white boy in love with black music didn’t raise any eyebrows; that was a story older than Elvis Presley.
Then, after our junior year, he dropped out of high school and moved to Los Angeles to try to find work in the music business.
Even in poor and rural areas, that doesn’t happen so much anymore. It caused a stir. At school, the teachers were shocked, the baseball coach cursed the loss of his best pitching arm, and the girls went into mourning. But his parents took it hardest. Several Mooneys of their generation had dropped out, but they’d made damn sure none of CJ’s had. They were convinced he was on the road to ruin: just seventeen, talented but with no marketable skills, in a town that ate gifted youth for breakfast and sent them home broke and failed. Both Porter and Angeline called me, asking me to talk to him. I said I couldn’t; it was his life. Secretly I believed what everyone else did-that in a year or two CJ would get disillusioned and come home-but I couldn’t be disloyal enough to say it aloud.
After that, CJ’s parents regularly asked me for news about their son. It wasn’t that he didn’t call them, but they thought I was getting the true, uncensored news of his life in L.A. “Really, how’s he doing down there? Is he working?” they’d ask. And I’d say he was getting by, because I didn’t want them to know the truth: Unable to get even the lowest-level job in the music business, CJ was supporting himself by dealing pot.
On the night before I left for West Point, I slept on the floor of his flophouse room, just like he’d done in my bedroom so many times before. He tried strenuously to give me the bed, but I said no, tomorrow I was going to be in Beast Barracks, and if I couldn’t tolerate sleeping on the floor, then the outlook was pretty bleak. CJ gave up, but joined me about halfway through the night, dragging a blanket down with him to nestle companionably behind me. I shouldn’t have let him, but I was secretly glad for his nearness, because it was the only thing that kept me from spending the night wondering what the hell made me think I could cut it at the United States Military Academy and deciding that it wasn’t too late for me to stay in California and go to community college.
The next morning, CJ drove me to LAX. Standing in the departures drop-off zone, he’d joked, “Look at you, baby, you’re the pride of the Mooneys, and you’re a Cain. That hardly seems fair.” Then he’d turned serious, pulled me close, and said, “I am so very proud of you, baby.”
I wanted to tell him that I was proud of him, too, the way he lived life on his own terms. But I couldn’t, because it would have sounded condescending. He was right: I was the standard-bearer of our family, making my place in the world, and he was the black-sheep under-achiever, going nowhere. In that moment, our paths in life seemed set in stone.
Funny how four years can change everything.
Four years later, I was getting off a Greyhound at the downtown L.A. depot, with no commission in the Army, no college degree, less than two hundred dollars to my name, and no place to live. It took the last of my pride to do it, but I called CJ at his office. By which I mean I tried to. I left several messages with a cool-voiced receptionist (“Yeah… his cousin Hailey… he’ll know who you mean”) and stood for two hours in the Southern California sun by a pay phone, tired and out of sorts, itching with impatience when passersby stopped to use the phone and tied it up. The next day I’d have a pretty bad sunburn.
Finally the phone rang. I only had to say, “Hello?” and, to my vast relief, I heard that familiar half-Appalachian, half-Californian drawl: “Where are you? I’ll come get you.”
His first words to me in person, as he was jumping out of the same old silver BMW, were, “Shoot, I am so sorry, baby. My people didn’t know who you were.”
“I know,” I said against his cheek, already enfolded in his long arms.
That was the month that CJ was in Vanity Fair’s music issue. In the photo essay of that year’s most influential figures, he was labeled “The Prodigy” and was photographed standing on a gritty hotel rooftop, the sun behind him sinking into layers of L.A. atmosphere, the camera angle low enough to make him look seven feet tall. He’s turned away from the camera, an abstracted visionary.
At just twenty-two, he had become one of L.A.’s most sought-after producers. No one doubted the depth of his understanding of hip-hop or his respect for it. Some people who saw him in deep concentration, listening to something only he could hear over headphones, said they’d looked at his eyes and thought at first that he was blind.
He had also taken back his name, in the liner notes of the two CDs he’d produced and on the Grammy he’d won. The name Cletus Mooney now commanded respect throughout the music industry.
Practically the first thing I asked him, that day in L.A., was which name he wanted me to use.
He said, “Whatever you want to call me is fine.” He checked the traffic before pulling out onto the street. As he did so, he said, “What’s wrong with your arm?” He’d noticed the cast on my wrist.
“Broken bone,” I said. “I fell. It’s no big deal.”
“You’re not out here on some kind of medical leave, are you?”
“No,” I said. “I… CJ, I’m not going back.”
I could see his confusion, and in a moment he articulated it. “You mean, you graduated early?”
He knew that wasn’t it, but denial is like that. Often there’s a short detour on the way to the unhappy truth.
“No,” I said. “I’m not going to finish.”
“Are you serious? Baby, what happened?”
“A lot of people wash out,” I said tiredly. “I warned you about that before I went. Do we have to talk about it?”
“No.”
“I’m okay. I’ll be okay.”
“I know you will,” he said finally. “Sure you will.”
I’m not sure what I was expecting from the place that CJ, with his newfound wealth, would call home. Maybe a retro-Rat-Pack condo with a wet bar, or a beach house in Malibu.
Instead, he drove us up into the hills outside the city, an ascent so steep and fast it reminded me of taking off in a plane, to an area of no particular repute, where acres of land separated the houses and amateur spray paint on the road warned: SLOW! CHILDREN AND ANIMALS. On the way, his cell phone rang so incessantly that he finally shut it off.
His driveway wasn’t even paved, and as we pulled up in a cloud of dust, I looked curiously at the home he’d chosen. It wasn’t big, but somehow rambling, built of weathered wood, with old sash windows with little scrapes on them from many cleanings. A live oak tree bent toward the roof as though it wanted to enfold the whole house. There was a deck with a hot tub in it, but no landscaping. The grass that surrounded the house was natural. A Volkswagen Corrado, clearly in mid-repair, stood at a small distance. I observed all this with a growing sense of familiarity.
For as shy as he’d been about bringing people to the Mooney home of his adolescence, CJ had chosen to re-create it here. It wasn’t until I’d known the adult CJ awhile that I understood. He had to live a certain kind of life down in the city: the velvet-rope-and-VIP-room life, riding in Navigators with the talent and their entourages, getting drive-thru from In-N-Out Burger after midnight and washing it down with Cristal. But when he was ready to buy a home, CJ chose a place where he could be who he really was: someone who listened to baseball games on the radio while working on cars with his hands.
“Nice,” I said. It was inadequate.
“I took just about the first thing the agent showed me,” he said. “I just wanted someplace quiet.” He watched a red-tailed hawk wheel overhead a moment, then went on. “Look, I’d like to stay here tonight while you get settled in, but I have dinner plans, and actresses can be touchy about things like broken dates.”
“My, an actress. Aren’t you something?”
“Hey,” he said, “I’m gonna ask you to think twice about how you talk to someone who walked away from a meeting with two very big record label executives to drive across town to the Greyhound station to collect your stranded ass.”
“I know,” I said, chastened.
He smiled at me in the old way I remembered, eyes crinkling. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “It’s going to be good, having you around.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but it’s only for a while, until I get on my feet.”
“No hurry,” CJ said.
“No, I understand that you bought this place so you could have some privacy,” I said.
He looked at me as if I’d said something incomprehensible, and said, “Not from you.”
I lived with CJ a month, long enough to find three part-time jobs-none of them particularly interesting or challenging, but the checks cashed fine. When I’d saved enough, I put down money on a tiny studio in town. CJ tried to talk me out of leaving, and I was reluctant, too, but I couldn’t have a life that was just an offshoot of his. And I wasn’t going far, just down into the city. So he yielded and helped me move.
I wouldn’t realize until later-when I had to leave-how much Los Angeles had gotten under my skin. Mostly I’d sat out the longstanding Love L.A./Hate L.A. debate. When I’d chosen to go there after leaving West Point, my decision had been fairly arbitrary. I didn’t have roots in Lompoc anymore. Julianne had moved away during my plebe year at West Point, and even the Mooneys, CJ’s parents, had done something quintessentially Californian: They’d sold their real estate at a profit and bought a bigger, cheaper place out of state, in Nevada’s Washoe Valley. But L.A. was the nearest big city to where I’d grown up. My feeling had been, I suppose if I’m from anywhere, I’m from here.
Later, if you’d asked me why I liked it there, I’d have given you everyone’s general paean to L.A.: the open streets and the palm trees and the laid-back vibe, et cetera cetera cetera. The truth was simpler: L.A. just felt like a place for people like me, young people raised on high-fructose corn syrup, long on energy and short on a sense of history.
I doubt I would have approved if I’d moved straight there after high school. I’d gone to West Point to test myself against hardship and privation, to see how little comfort and pleasure I could get by on. But I came home in a very different frame of mind. Then, I wanted what I called omnia gaudia vitae, all the pleasures of life, and L.A. was the place for that. Vietnamese iced coffee, British Columbian marijuana, Colombian cocaine, French film noir, Israeli krav maga training-you could get it all here, and if it was all imported, like the water supply and the workforce and even the iconic palm trees, who cared?
I told CJ when I moved into town that we’d still see each other all the time, and we did. He opened the doors to the West Hollywood clubs he was always waved into, and I spent many nights drinking and dancing, sometimes in his immediate company, other times only knowing that he was somewhere in the same vast and densely packed venue. I wasn’t ever lonely. CJ’s circle of friends, friendly acquaintances, and hangers-on was enormous, and they were always willing to share space at their tables, their drugs, even their bodies. I left footprints on the windows of a few Navigators and Escalades owned by guys I didn’t know very well.
Some mornings I dreamed of the clean citadel of West Point and woke up first disoriented, then unhappy. I chased that feeling away with strong coffee or a joint, or sometimes a hard workout.
I attained something of a reputation in CJ’s crowd as that mostly quiet girl with the birthmark and the occasional hair-trigger temper. From time to time CJ had to drag me away from a vending machine I was trying to bust up for taking my money or a bouncer twice my size I felt provoked by. Sometimes CJ had to wrap his arms around me from behind and negotiate over my shoulder, telling people that I was on mood-altering meds or just getting over a bad breakup.
Later, when I apologized to him, he always said, pleasantly, not to worry about it. Some of that was CJ being CJ, so mellow that one friend of his joked that his adrenal glands secreted some kind of cannabinoid substance instead of adrenaline. But I think CJ chalked most of it up to my washing out of West Point. It’s amazing the shit people will let you get away with if they think it’s coming from a place of anger and low self-respect.
Nonetheless, I always told him I was sorry-often too abjectly, because I was usually still drunk or high or stoned and therefore able to access my feelings in a way I couldn’t when sober. “I love you,” I’d tell him. “I’d kill anyone who’d try to hurt you.”
“Those are lovely sentiments; go sleep them off,” he’d say.
But underneath the fevered language, I meant it. The way I thought of it was, I had been born an only child, but in time, the gods took pity and gave me a brother and a sister.
The sister was Serena Delgadillo.
Technically, Serena and I went back to the seventh grade together. We’d both been chosen for an academic-achievement program called ReachUP, which singled out promising students in rural or disadvantaged schools in hopes of helping them compete with middle-class students at college admissions time. We’d also both played on the girls’ soccer team that year, alongside each other as forwards. No question, she was better than me. The daughter of migrant workers, she had learned soccer on the hard brown fields of California’s inland valleys from her four older brothers and other immigrant kids, all futbol fanatics.
We weren’t friends, but we were friendly. That had been a big step for both of us at the time. Like me, Serena was skinny then, with Kmart clothes and hair her mother cut in harsh black bangs directly across Serena’s forehead. It made her self-conscious except on the soccer field, where she lost her inhibitions, becoming speedy and fluid and exuberant.
Then, in eighth grade, something changed. Serena dropped out of ReachUP and grew distant. She began styling her hair in the high, lofty wall of bangs that hadn’t quite gone out of style among Latina girls back then, and I only saw her with other Mexicans in the hallways. We sat next to each other in study hall, but she only spoke to me once, to poke me in the shoulder and say, “What’s that?” She’d been looking at the Latin flashcards I was reviewing instead of doing my schoolwork.
“It’s Latin,” I’d said.
She’d flipped through a few cards. “Weird,” she’d said, shrugging, and had gone back to her homework.
The next year, Serena was gone. That was a common thing. Farmworker families are nomadic; the population of our school was always in flux.
I forgot her pretty quickly.
In my early days in L.A., after moving down from CJ’s place, I was broke. The one luxury I allowed myself was food from cheap ethnic places. That month, I’d discovered pho, the Vietnamese noodle soup made with oxtail and rare beef. Late one Saturday afternoon, I was waiting in line to get my fix, when I saw that I was being watched by a tall young Latina.
She was good-looking and slender, her cargo pants hanging off sharp hip bones, braless under a strappy tank shirt, her hoop earrings so large you could have worn them as bracelets. She had straight hair, not quite black, pulled back off her face, and almond-shaped eyes. When I caught her looking at me, she didn’t smile or say “Sorry” like a lot of people would have.
“I think I know you,” she said thoughtfully.
“Okay,” I said. She wasn’t familiar to me, but I’ve learned not to argue with people about that. When you’ve got a birthmark on your face, people can recognize you long after they’ve changed beyond identifiability for you.
“We played soccer together in junior high,” she said. “Remember?”
“Holy shit,” I said. “Serena?”
“Yeah,” she said, laughing. Then: “You’re at the front of the line.”
I bought my pho; she bought hers, and we moved off to the side to talk. She remembered that I used to hang out with “that Southern boy,” and that I’d been studying Latin. I asked her where her family had gone after eighth grade. She explained that her father had hurt his back and couldn’t do farm work anymore, so their family had come to L.A. looking for industrial work for her mother and aunt.
Then she said, “Did you ever get to West Point?”
I’d felt my mouth drop open slightly and couldn’t answer right away. First, because she must have heard that secondhand; I knew I hadn’t told her about what had been, back then, an unlikely dream. Second, because it brought up the fresh pain of saying, Yes, I was there; no, I didn’t finish.
“Yeah,” I said. “I was at West Point for a while.”
She said, “So what happened?”
“Didn’t make it all four years,” I said. “That’s a story for another time.”
Sometime after midnight we were in her car, or what I thought was her car. I was driving and she was in the passenger seat, leaning forward laughing, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s wedged between her thighs. I forget what story I’d been telling or she’d been telling, just that we were both laughing and laughing and then she’d said, “Slow down, okay, esa? You’re speeding. We can’t afford to get pulled over.”
And I’d joked, “Why, is this car stolen?”
And she’d said, “Yeah, it is.”
That was when I sobered up and really looked at her, and I realized that what I’d been registering as a birthmark high on her cheekbone wasn’t; it was three tiny dots, the tattoo that symbolized la vida loca, the gang life.
At that point I had a choice: I could have drawn on the battered last of my West Point ideals, said, This isn’t cool, and then found a place to pull over and walk away.
Instead, I said, “For how long?”
Serena knew I meant how long had she been in the life. She said, “Since I was fourteen.”
I said: “I’ll slow down.”
That was how I learned what happened to her in the eighth grade.
Gang life is popularly associated with the cities, but it’s been in the rural areas a long time. In our small school, Serena had drawn the attention of Lita, a leader in a girls’ gang. She recruited Serena, who’d said no, she couldn’t, her parents wouldn’t understand.
The next day, Serena heard that Lita had called her out. Serena’s refusal to join had been a loss of face for Lita, a slur on her pride. From now until Serena gave in and let herself be initiated, no day would pass without the prospect of a fight with Lita or one of Lita’s girls.
Serena wasn’t stupid. She chose to have sisters instead of enemies.
“Looking back,” Serena told me, “it was the best thing that could have happened. I wouldn’t have wanted to come to L.A. a total virgin. When I got here, I knew the life. Well, sort of. Nothing can prepare you for what it’s like in L.A.”
What most people don’t realize about urban gangs is how small their individual territories actually are. Many people have the vague idea that Gang A is on the East Side and Gang B on the West Side. In truth, the part of L.A. that Serena and her family moved to was like a checkerboard: Various Latino gangs-or rather, small splinters of the gangs, called sets or cliques-were spread out in small pockets throughout. A gang member could walk for only a few blocks, be in enemy territory, then a few more blocks and be safe again. Bitter, fatal rivals lived right on top of each other. It was impossible to ever feel truly secure.
It also made the question of gang allegiance an open one. Regardless of who controlled your particular stretch of your particular street, there was always a chance you could claim a different clique or an entirely different gang.
But virtually every young person claimed. Everyone needed protection, familia. Those who had no gang affiliation were in the worst of all worlds: considered untrustworthy by everyone, always at risk of being attacked, with no one backing them up.
Serena’s older brothers immediately claimed the 13th Street clique, or El Trece. Serena wasn’t unwilling to follow in their path, but this time her qualms were different from the ones she’d cited to Lita. She looked at the neighborhood girls who had affiliations to Trece and didn’t like what she saw.
“They weren’t really down,” she told me. “They were just hoochies who slept with the guys. They didn’t even get jumped in. They said they didn’t have to, they were ‘already down,’ whatever that means.” Her voice had filled with scorn.
It wasn’t anything you could have made a high-school counselor see, but Serena Delgadillo was an overachiever. One short year after she tried to refuse Lita’s initiation, Serena shaved her head, borrowed her older brother’s flannel shirt and chinos, and went to Payaso, the leader of El Trece, and asked to be jumped in. Her brothers vouched for her toughness, and Serena, bloody and bruised, became a member of the gang.
Serena had to prove herself over and over again, backing up her guys, stealing cars, driving getaway, lying to the cops, and doing a six-month stretch in the California Youth Authority camp. It was the ironically familiar refrain of a woman in a man’s job: She had to do twice as much as the guys to get equal standing with them. Through it all, she kept her head shaved and her clothes masculine. Sometimes the cops mistook her for a boy.
“I have a picture,” she told me that night, “but it’s at my house.” She looked up at me, slyly. “Unless you’re afraid to come to the hood to see it.”
“Let’s go,” I’d said.
She lived in a one-story house of pale yellow stucco, with an orange tree in the yard and bars on the windows. A motion-sensor light flashed on as we walked up the driveway. Not surprisingly, the dead bolt on the front door was probably the newest and most expensive thing about Serena’s home.
It wasn’t dark inside, though it was dim. We came into the kitchen, and Serena peered over a cracked Formica counter into her living room and then raised a finger to her lips. I followed her gaze and saw a rumpled sleeping bag. It rustled, and a girl stuck her tousled head out and looked at us.
“Quien es la rubia?” she said. Who’s the blond girl?
“Nadie,” said Serena. No one.
The girl withdrew back into her nest.
“Thanks a lot,” I said.
“You know what I mean,” Serena said mildly. “Are you hungry?”
We didn’t talk much while she cooked, out of consideration for the girl sleeping in the dining room. As she heated water to boiling and poured in some short-grain white rice from a ten-pound sack, I looked around the kitchen. There were photographs on the refrigerator, and the subjects were all male-some school pictures, others obviously taken to establish gang cred, as the boys posed with guns and cars. All, though, were bordered with colored paper. On the margins were roses and virgenes and the initials q.d.e.p.
“What’s q.d.e.p?” I asked Serena.
“Que descansa en paz,” she said quietly.
“These guys are all…”
“Dead,” she confirmed.
“No girls?”
She said, “I’ve got the roll call for my hermanas on my leg.”
“Your leg?” I echoed, not understanding.
She hiked her right foot onto the counter and pulled up the cuff of her pants so I could easily see the tattooed letters qdep high on her calf, and underneath that, two names: Tania and Dreamer.
I asked, “How did you decide whether to use the given name or their gang name?”
“Well, Tania didn’t have a moniker,” she said. “She wasn’t in the life, she was just kicking it with some homeboys who were on their porch and got blasted in a walk-up shooting.” She put her leg down.
Noting the way the names would descend to her ankle, I said, “What happens when you run out of room?”
She said, “Maybe I’ll get out of the life.”
When she was done cooking, Serena and I carried our late-night meal into her bedroom. Just before I followed her in, though, I heard the sleeping bag in the dining room stir, looked back, and did a slight double take.
Serena switched on a lamp and shut the bedroom door.
I said, “Either the girl out there has three legs, or there were two girls under that sleeping bag.”
“Yeah, there were.”
“Are you that low on blankets and sleeping space?”
“Well, the spare bedroom’s taken, and so is the living-room couch,” she said. “But the girls just like to be close. They’re not gay, it’s just that they like to feel…” She trailed off. “It’s safety in numbers. It’s just something you have to understand.”
“Sure,” I said. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
We sat on her bed and ate, and then Serena reached under the bed for an old wooden box. She rummaged inside and found a Polaroid of a group of teenage boys, all with heads shaved, in voluminous shirts buttoned only at the top, and creased khakis. Serena tapped her finger on one of them, sitting on “his” heels in front. “That’s me,” she said, “at sixteen, when I was banging hardest.”
I held the photo by the edges and marveled at it, half in amazement that I would never have recognized her, but also because the picture reminded me strongly of something else.
I had a photo from my West Point days that looked remarkably similar. It was me in full camo, posing with my Sandhurst team. Sandhurst is the war-games competition West Point holds every year against the British and the Canadians. All of West Point’s companies field teams, who compete against one another as well as the foreigners. Every team has one female member, and I was chosen from my company.
Of course, the Brits kicked our asses-they do almost every year-but our company had a pretty good showing, and that day I was glowing with the pleasure of just being part of it. And then we’d posed for the photo in which I, like Serena, had to point out to people which cadet among the guys was me.
When I told Serena this, she looked at me in shared fascination. That was probably the main reason we didn’t hug each other around the neck at the end of the night and go our separate ways. The outside world would have said we were nothing alike, but we were. Those parallels cemented our friendship, and that friendship would set a lot of other things in motion.
In time, Serena told me about her dreams of Vietnam.
They had started in early childhood, around five or six. They weren’t frequent, but they were vivid and remarkably consistent. Serena dreamed of explosions and bloody chaos in the jungle. She dreamed of white and black men in olive drab. She dreamed of snake-silver rivers and huge machines that hovered in the air, the wind they generated beating the grass flat.
“It was Vietnam,” she told me. “I know what you’re thinking, that it’s Mexico, right? But I’ve never been to Mexico, and even if I had, my parents are from the north; it’s dry as Arizona. There’s no jungle there.”
Serena believed that not only had she served in Vietnam as an American GI, but that she had died there.
I must have looked skeptical, because she’d gone on. “I saw white men and black men in my dreams back when I’d only ever been around Mexicans,” she said. “Come on, where would I see a helicopter at that age? Five years old?”
“There are helicopters all over California,” I pointed out. “They’re in the sky all the time.”
“Way up in the sky,” she corrected me. “Not down low where the sound of the blades feels like your own heart beating.” She placed her fist on her sternum. “I swear, Hailey. The first time I saw a helicopter up close, on TV, I knew that sound. I had this feeling like someone walked over the place my grave is going to be.”
The dreams had stopped around the age of fifteen, when she’d been jumped into El Trece. “When mi guerra nueva started, I stopped dreaming about the old one,” was how she put it.
I don’t think Serena told many people this story. At least she said she didn’t. But she wore a pair of dog tags as jewelry, dangling low under her shirt. And somehow her gang brothers had sensed something of her beliefs, because among the cheery, innocuous gang monikers they gave one another-Droopy and Smiley and Shorty-they’d given Serena the name Warchild.
Two years after her juvenile conviction, Serena did a second stretch, this time in jail. It was there that she finally began to let her hair grow. Jail was a clarifying time for her. She was eighteen now. By middle-class America’s standards, that was barely out of childhood, but gangbangers aged differently. For them, twenty was virtually middle-aged. Serena, having survived to eighteen, was a veterana. She had some thinking to do about the future.
The movies spread an old, common misperception about gang life: the “blood in, blood out” thing. It was a saying that meant that your gang jumped you in with a bloody beating and you stayed in until you were cut down in a bloody premature death… or, if you tried to leave the life, that your own gang assassinated you.
The less exciting truth was that gang members left the life all the time, especially girls. It was por vida in name, but age and motherhood often slowed girls down, sidelined them from the life. Others went straight after doing jail time. A few were even “jumped out,” meaning they failed to be tough enough or ruthless enough for gang life, and were beaten by their gang as a contemptuous dismissal.
Serena was not married, nor was she tied down to a baby. And modesty aside, she was more than veterana, she was leyenda, a legend, because of her exploits with El Trece. There were plenty of Serena stories in the neighborhood, not all of them true. Serena had jacked a pharmacy not just for prescription drugs, but carried away boxes and boxes of contraceptives that she’d distributed for free among the girls of her neighborhood. Serena had gone into Crip territory, Grape Street, and robbed a crack dealer there. In the sexy clothes of an aspiring actress, Serena had trolled Westwood and Burbank, stealing Mercedeses and Jaguars right from under the noses of the Beautiful People.
A reputation is capital, and in jail, Serena began to think about how she wanted to spend that capital.
She realized that she wanted to lead a girls’ clique, a satellite to Trece, the kind she hadn’t found when she moved to the neighborhood. And when it came time to name her cliqua, Serena knew one thing: It wasn’t going to be the “Lady” anythings, an innocent naming convention some gangs borrowed from high-school athletics.
Serena named her girls the Trece Sucias. It didn’t translate directly to English. To call them the 13th Street Dirty Girls just didn’t say it. The name sucias could evoke different things, the nasty girls or the sexy girls, but it also suggested dirty hands, with blood and guilt on them.
For all the fearsomeness of the name, though, Serena had higher standards for her sucias than a lot of leaders would have set. She wouldn’t take girls under fifteen, the quinceanera year being symbolic of womanhood in Hispanic culture. That might sound painfully young to the rest of America, but in gang life, it was a high standard-it wasn’t uncommon for children to start banging at ten or eleven years old. And the two crimes that the Trece Sucias specialized in-car theft and pharmacy burglaries-were both nonviolent, if done with enough caution.
And Serena was careful. Her crew only knocked over a few pharmacies a year, at quiet suburban locations Serena carefully scouted, and while she and a trusted second raided the back for lucrative prescription drugs that Serena resold around her neighborhood, younger girls swept the shelves of Pampers, baby food, cough syrup, and OTC meds-all things desperately needed among the young mothers of the barrio.
It would be nice to imagine Serena as a kind of urban feminist Robin Hood, but I knew better than to indulge in that kind of fantasy. Violence was inextricable from gang life: grudges and retaliations, attacks and counterattacks, beatings and shootings. I heard the stories Serena’s girls told, thinking I didn’t know enough Spanish to understand. And they routinely went around strapped, meaning carrying a gun.
But this lifestyle of retaliation and revenge was the price of having familia. In its perverse way, it was a virtue, the dark side of loyalty. Serena encouraged the same kind of loyalty among them that the guys had for one another. Unlike male gang members, though, girls affiliated with the same clique often fought viciously with one another, sometimes over gossip, more often over a boy. Serena said she’d never let her clique be divided over a man: “The sucias are for the sucias,” she told them. “We represent like the guys.”
I didn’t learn all of this at once, of course. But after that first night, Serena was surprisingly open with me, given that we’d hardly known each other back in school, and that I’d once been the straightest of straight arrows, Cadet Hailey Cain.
I think that Serena had been waiting for someone she could talk to. She had to front around the guys, with whom sharing her feelings would have been a liability. And she cared for her sucias, but they were little more than children, with short attention spans and narrow worldviews. There wasn’t anyone else like Serena in Serena’s world. The person who came closest, skin color notwithstanding, was me.
Maybe she understood, too, that I’d honored her when, in time, I told her the full truth about why I had to leave West Point.
I’d like to say that I was wracked with guilt over telling her something I hadn’t even shared with CJ, but it wasn’t true. I didn’t tell CJ because I knew he’d lie awake at night thinking about it. Serena wouldn’t. She understood about bad luck.
The day after I told her, we went to the Beverly Center, L.A.’s cathedral of capitalism, and did something the rest of the world wouldn’t understand but that made sense to us.
Perhaps it was inevitable that Serena started to kid me about getting initiated into her clique. She said I could become her second. I took it as gentle condescension. But she kept on it, asking me when I was going to take my beating, get jumped in for real. Slowly I began to realize that she wasn’t entirely kidding, and I began to understand. The things that set me apart from her sucias were, in fact, assets-chief among them my white skin and blond hair. Those alone would make me the ideal driver on a pharmacy job. I was the anti-profile; any LAPD officer would think twice before pulling me over.
“Look at the way you live now,” she said one evening, watching me gingerly put makeup on a bruise I’d gotten in a bar fight. “Getting beat on, partying, sleeping until noon, no plans for the future-how is that any different from la vida?” She’d put an arm around me and looked at us in the mirror. “Come and be mi gladia.”
“Gladius meus,” I said. My sword. Serena had learned all the words that went with her warlike life-milites, hostes, bellum, mors-but she tended to hybridize them with Spanish. “And no thanks. I’ve seen the beatings that your girls give each other jumping them in, and those are bad enough. I don’t want to go through the beatdown they’d give a white girl to make her prove herself.”
“Scared?” she said.
“You know better. But what’s the point? I’d never be one of you. What would my street name be? Blondie?”
“The girls will accept you if they see I accept you. And they can learn from you. Nobody ever taught them anything about fighting, about protecting themselves.”
“Think about what you’re asking me. To teach young gangbangers to be better shots, better at beating someone up? I really need that on my conscience.”
“You can teach them honor. Teach them when not to throw down, when to walk away.”
“Honor?” I’d said. “Been there, done that, didn’t get the gold bars. Listen, Serena, I don’t make moral judgments about what you’re doing. I’m happy you’ve got something that means something to you. But it’s not for me.”
She’d shrugged. “You’ll come around,” she said. That was how we left things. The last time Serena came by my place, I was waiting for my ride up to San Francisco, my old Army duffel at my feet. Serena had pressed the five-shot Airweight into my hands, told me to watch out for myself, and then kissed me on both cheeks, like an old-style gangster.
We hadn’t kept in contact. Ours wasn’t the kind of friendship that would survive long-distance. Which is why it surprised me to learn that she was trying to get in touch with me.
My living situation in San Francisco was pretty simple: I rented a room over the base of Aries Courier, in Japantown.
To get to my room, as I did when I came back from what had become a day’s worth of pickups and drops, I had to walk through Aries’s ground-floor space, which resembled a garage more than an office: bike frames and parts, freestanding filing cabinets, posters advertising bike races and rallies, a big, circa-1950s refrigerator full of Red Bull and Tupperware containers it was best not to open. When I came in, Motobecane over my shoulder, the owner, Shay Clements, was on the phone with his back to me.
Shay was a hard guy to figure out. Rather, he was the sort of person whom people assumed they understood immediately upon meeting him: bike messenger turned slightly bohemian entrepreneur. He was about thirty-five, six-foot-four with a straight, ice-blond ponytail and blue eyes and good facial bones. He still had the build of a cyclist. He wasn’t married, and I didn’t think he ever had been, but he would never lack for dates as long as there were coffeehouses and the kind of women who frequented them, looking for guys who were sexy in a left-wing way. You just looked at Shay and thought, pesco-pollo-vegetarian, knows some yoga asanas, votes Democrat.
In truth, like all blue-state small-business owners, Shay was remarkably Republican when it came to his own bottom line, full of complaints about regulations and taxes, and nearly as resentful of his own employees. Aries was all-1099, as riders put it, meaning everyone was an independent contractor, without job security or health insurance. This didn’t do much to foster loyalty. Riders regularly quit Aries without notice. This led Shay to look on his riders as irresponsible flakes. It was a vicious circle.
My relationship with him was a little better than that, largely because I was reliable. I didn’t kiss his ass, but I didn’t have to. As I’d told Jack, I was usually his top-earning rider. I got hurt sometimes, true, but I also rode hurt, so it didn’t cost Shay any downtime. Beyond that, if Shay wasn’t the warmest guy in the world, well, he probably thought the same about me.
Seeing me out of the corner of his eye, Shay waved me over, not interrupting his conversation on the phone. I came over without speaking, and he handed off a pink slip of paper, a phone message. Please call Serena Delgadillo.
Only then did I remember the call I hadn’t answered on the bridge. I took out my cell and brought up the call log, and sure enough, there they were, Serena’s familiar digits. I raised my eyebrows, but Shay had already turned back to what he was doing and didn’t notice my surprise. I slipped the message into my bag, lifted my bike to my shoulders, and went up the stairs.
Once in my room, I hung the Motobecane on its hooks on the wall, then went over to my little half-height refrigerator. I took out a pint bottle of vodka, drank, then kicked off my shoes and lay down with my bare feet up on the wall.
I’d lived over Aries for nearly as long as I’d been in San Francisco-not quite a year-and I still didn’t have enough possessions even to make this small room look lived in. There was the bed and a dresser and a mirror. The bathroom was down the hall, and the kitchen was the little refrigerator and a single-coil burner, with my few cooking supplies on a pair of high, plain shelves.
Had I been religious, a cross on the wall or a Buddhist altar would have given the room’s bareness a kind of monastic sense. But I wasn’t. Nor could I bring myself to care about personalizing the place. The things that made me who I was weren’t on display, but under the bed, out of sight: My Wheelock’s Latin, with my birth certificate and my only photo of my father tucked inside. A scarlet dress, never worn and still in the box. My class ring, set with real West Point granite, and my cadet sword.
Feeling the vodka filtering into my bloodstream, feeling relaxed, I dialed Serena’s number.
“Hailecita,” she said. “It’s been a while, eh?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s life up there?”
“It’s all right,” I said. “Kind of dull.”
“I figured,” she said, and the conversation lagged.
I tipped the bottle again, drinking. “This isn’t just a call to catch up, is it?” I said. “You want something.”
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s not a big thing, honest.”
“What?”
“There’s a girl up in your part of California who needs to go back to Mexico, to the village where her mother grew up and her grandmother still lives. The abuela’s sick, and this girl, Nidia, is going to take care of her.”
“Okay,” I said, meaning, Go on.
“This girl needs a, what do you call it, an escort. There’s no one who can take her, and I thought of you.”
“Me?” I said, surprised. “What, on my bicycle? I don’t even have a car. And what do you mean, there’s no one who can take her? I don’t want to be racial here, but don’t Mexicans do everything together? Go places eight to a car, sleep four to a bed?”
Serena laughed, unoffended. “Her family is undocumented, and so are a lot of the people they know. They’re scared to cross the border and try to come back.”
“They can’t put her on a bus?”
“She’s not just crossing the border into Tijuana,” Serena said. “Abuelita lives up in the mountains of Chihuahua state, the northern end of the Sierra Madre. It’s a long way, and off the main roads. And the family doesn’t want this girl to have to travel alone. She’s not a tough Americanized girl who knows what time it is. She’s different.”
“Oh, yeah? How’d that happen?”
“She’s really religious,” Serena said. “She used to want to be a nun, until she was thirteen years old.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Then she discovered boys.”
“She discovered a boy,” Serena said. “Johnny Cedillo, his name was. He was Dominican and part black, and her parents were kinda worked up about that until they saw how serious he was about her. He was talking about marrying her from high school on, gave her a ring, like, what do they call it? Not a real engagement ring, but-”
“A promise ring.” Some of the more sincere kids in my high-school class had done that.
“Yeah, a promise ring. They were real serious about each other. Nobody doubted they were really gonna get married and have beautiful little kids.”
“So what went wrong?” I said. “Where’s Johnny now? Did he go to Vegas, get a little on the side, and Nidia found out about it?”
“No,” she said. “He was totally into her, and since she was making him wait for their wedding night, as far as anyone knows, Johnny Cedillo died a virgin.”
“He’s dead?”
“Johnny didn’t go to Vegas. He went to Iraq.”
“Ah, shit.”
We were quiet a second, then Serena said, “The other problem with her traveling alone is that apparently this girl’s beautiful, a real knockout. In her neighborhood, even after Johnny went away to war, no one bothered her. It got around that she was saving herself for her wedding night with him, and even the vatos respected that. But strange men, on a cross-country trip? They’d hassle this girl no end.”
“Wait, back up,” I interrupted. “You’re talking about this girl like you know her, but you said ‘apparently’ she’s beautiful. What’s up?”
“I don’t know her personally,” she said. “But you remember Teaser?”
“Sure.” Teaser was Serena’s lieutenant, her most trusted among the sucias.
“She’s dead,” Serena said.
“Sorry,” I said. I didn’t have to ask how. Another name for Serena’s roll call in tattoo ink.
She went on: “Teaser was her cousin. They didn’t live in my neighborhood, Nidia and Johnny, so I never met either of them,” Serena explained. “But I guess they were pretty well known around their neighborhood. People looked up to Johnny; he was an athlete in high school and never got ganged-up, but he was a stand-up guy with his friends, not a squeaky-clean teacher’s pet type. That whole trip. Teaser would ask me why guys like that don’t go for girls like us, and I’d tell her, Because we’re girls like us, that’s why. She also said that people liked Nidia a little more because of him.”
“Liked her more than what?”
“Well, she’s pretty religious, didn’t go out or party. Not the sort of girl you’d expect people like us to like,” Serena said.
Then she realized she was getting off point. “Anyway, I got a phone call from Teaser’s sister, Lara Cortez, about Nidia needing to get to Mexico and asked if I could help. So I called Nidia’s family to talk about it, and I mentioned you. I told them that you could handle yourself and look out for Nidia.”
“You can handle yourself, too,” I pointed out, “and you’re someone they’d trust, a Mexican. Why not you?”
“I don’t have a passport,” Serena said. “They changed the rules about the border, remember? It takes weeks to get one, and the family doesn’t want to wait that long.” Then, in a lighter tone, she said, “Besides, you know what la vida is like. I gotta TCB”-take care of business, she meant-“here, in my neighborhood.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “those cars won’t steal themselves.”
“I don’t do that small-time shit anymore, you know that,” she said.
“Yeah, I know,” I said.
“And, I should’ve said right up front, you’d get paid. Her family’s sending some money to cover the expenses, but if it’s not enough, I’ll make up the rest. And I’ll match whatever you’d make per day up there.”
“You don’t know what you’re offering,” I said. “A good bike messenger pulls down a lot of money.”
It was a little-known truth about the job: If you were committed to it-steady and reliable in reporting for work but fast and heedless on the street-you could outearn some of the young suits you sped past on the street.
I stood up and walked over to the window, looking down at the traffic. “You’re doing all this for Teaser’s memory?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I know it may not seem like there’s much of a connection to you, but la raza can be a small community. And Teaser was one of mine. The sucias are for the sucias. You know how it works.”
“I know,” I said.
“No you don’t, not really,” Serena said. “You ought to get you some familia, someone who’ll never not back you up.”
I’d never told her about CJ. The two of them had been the bright and dark of my old life. They didn’t mix.
“But don’t worry about the money,” she said. “Times are good right now.”
I didn’t believe her. I’d seen the truth of Serena’s glamorous gangster life in the faded brown shag rug of her rented house and the twenty-year-old sedan under her carport.
But then she added, “You know, your pay wouldn’t have to be all in cash. I could open up the drugstore for you.”
Her gang brothers in Trece dealt coke; Serena had her pharmacy heists. Cocaine meant speed for the street, and Xanax and Ambien were peace for the evenings, when memories of West Point and Wilshire Boulevard troubled me most. Serena was smart. She once told me that drugs were money in places money couldn’t go. Clearly she hadn’t forgotten that. I hadn’t used since I’d left L.A., but now the prospect was tempting to me where mere cash wouldn’t have been.
I ran my hand through my hair. “I’m not saying yes right away, but let me think about it,” I said. “I’ll have to look at a map and figure out how many days this’ll take, then I’ll give you an estimate on what it’ll cost. I’d want to be sure the expenses were really covered.”
“They will be,” she said. “Whatever you need.”
“I just mean this trip is going to take the time it takes,” I said. “I’m not going to drive way over the speed limit, or push myself until I could get tired and make an error in judgment. I can’t be reckless on the road. You know why.”
“Yeah,” Serena said. “I know.”
What we were both remembering was the reason I left L.A.
If you keep up with the entertainment news at all, you’ve probably heard of a man named Lucius “Luke” Marsellus. He ran maybe the second-biggest gangsta rap label in America. Or, if you were an LAPD cop doing gang suppression in South Central about fifteen years ago, you knew him for different reasons. I could say that people who knew Marsellus when he was a teenager knew him “before he was famous,” but that wasn’t quite accurate. He just had a different kind of notoriety back then. There are different words for it-made guy, OG, veterano-but most gang members reach that status young. When you’re liable to be dead by twenty-one, you have to. Luke Marsellus was ganged-up by the time he was ten and a hood celebrity by fifteen.
At that age, Marsellus had become the right-hand man to a dealer named J. G. Deauville, a man who’d climbed the distribution chain from street-corner dealer to having two dozen guys working for him. And Marsellus was constantly by his side, his protection and enforcer. His shadow: tall, silent, feared. The extent of his crimes in Deauville’s service still isn’t known: The gang unit never made anything stick to him.
His boss wasn’t so fortunate. Deauville taught Marsellus a lot, but perhaps the most important lesson was this: Luck always runs out. He taught his lieutenant that the hard way: After years of luck, in which the DEA and the LAPD failed to touch him, the IRS nailed Deauville, like Al Capone before him, on tax evasion, and he went to prison.
Marsellus was the obvious heir to Deauville’s enterprise, but he didn’t do the expected thing. To the eyes of those who’d long been watching him-the police, the feds, gang rivals-he seemed to drop off the radar. Several smaller, warring gang sets carved up Deauville’s territory, and life went on.
Maybe a year after Deauville’s arrest, Marsellus resurfaced in an entirely new role. Using money he’d apparently saved from his gangland years, and completely unknown talent from the streets, Marsellus founded a rap label. He was twenty-two years old.
But he quickly proved to have a natural business acumen rivaling that of his old boss. Marsellus signed the coldest and angriest of the gangsta rappers; their live-fast-die-young words were echoed by white kids in the leafiest of suburbs. The usual suspects boycotted his music-parents’ groups, law enforcement-but that only sold more CDs.
So Marsellus became a legit businessman, but it’d be going too far to say that he’d entirely left his old ways of doing things behind. He made no apologies for the fact that his private security men were all ganged-up. And while nothing stuck to him, disturbing incidents followed the Marsellus name. A troublesome ex-girlfriend, reportedly about to sign a contract for a tell-all book, was beaten so severely she lost the hearing in one ear. A young white talent agent who’d lured several artists away from the Marsellus fold found a new line of work after a gunman put two rounds through the window of his house. Federal agents subpoenaed boxes and boxes of documents from Marsellus’s downtown L.A. offices, but no charges ever followed. The local cops hadn’t been able to nail Marsellus on anything in his dealing days, and in his newer, bigger life, the feds couldn’t, either.
This was how Marsellus ultimately defied them: He became respectable. When a South Central African Baptist church was burned down in what was assumed to be a hate crime, Marsellus paid to have it rebuilt from the ground up, not as the humble shag-carpeted refuge it had been before, but as a graceful edifice with high clerestory windows and slate floors. He bought a home in Beverly Hills. He was generous with his siblings, and threw storied birthday parties for his nieces and nephews. And when he married, the ceremony was attended by not only his large extended family and his music-industry peers but by a former congressman, and several well-known actors and pro athletes.
And about seven years after their marriage, Luke Marsellus and his wife became parents. They’d been trying in vain for some time to conceive, so when their son was born, it was cause for greater celebration than their marriage. In a ceremony even better attended than the Marsellus wedding, the infant Trey was baptized at the church his father had had rebuilt, wearing a christening gown from Neiman Marcus.
I learned everything I knew about Marsellus in my last days in Los Angeles. Before that, I wouldn’t even have recognized his face. Even CJ didn’t know him, not beyond shaking his hand at a fund-raiser.
I did remember liking some of the music Marsellus’s artists put out. Angry, unapologetic, fatalistic, unafraid-the music had fit with my life-after-West-Point frame of mind. In those days I hadn’t thought any further ahead than sundown. Those had been my omnia gaudia vitae days, and to be honest, I’d been partying a lot, whether it was beer and grass with Serena, or kaffir lime vodka shots in the Westside clubs I went to with CJ.
But on what I consider my last real day in L.A., I was sober. It was important to me that people knew that, or it would have been if I ever told anyone this story, which I didn’t. But I was sober and driving the speed limit that day on Wilshire Boulevard; it’s just that the late-afternoon sun was in my eyes, and when six-year-old Trey Marsellus ran out in front of my car, I hit and killed him.
I never saw Marsellus, not once. Trey hadn’t been with his father, nor any of his family. He’d been out with his young Haitian au pair. It had been her shrill screams that made me realize I hadn’t hit a large dog, which was what I’d thought at first.
The family, once notified, went directly to the hospital. I was taken to the precinct “while we straighten this out,” in the words of the traffic-division sergeant. Once there, I called CJ, but he didn’t answer.
I was at the precinct for several hours. The police hadn’t been sure at first what really happened. They couldn’t get anything out of the grief-stricken nanny. I kept saying that Trey had run right out in front of me-which was true, though what else would you have expected someone who’d hit a child to say?
Fortunately, there had been pedestrians who’d seen the accident-not the usual “I heard squealing brakes and shattering glass and turned to look,” but people who’d actually seen Trey Marsellus run from his nanny and dart from between two parallel-parked cars.
As the traffic sergeant said to me, “We’re not going to hold you, but don’t leave town, okay? Not until we’ve closed the official investigation.”
I agreed, walked stiffly out the front door, and went to the hospital. I had an immediate and all-consuming need to apologize to the family.
I hadn’t succeeded. Two very large young black men, with tattoos and exquisitely tailored suits, blocked my way. “The family’s not seeing anyone right now,” one of them said.
At the time, the question Who are these guys? didn’t occur to me. I was mentally numb, except for being fixated on making this right. “I need to talk to them,” I said. “I’m the one who-”
“The family’s not seeing anyone,” he said again, and I broke off, finally realizing they were serious.
CJ, who’d gone to the precinct too late, found me as I was walking back to visitor parking. He was pale and shaken, almost as if he’d been the one to hit a child, but he was immediately supportive. He took me back to his place, where I paced, angry and guilty, saying over and over that the kid had run right in front of me, that the sun was in my eyes, that I couldn’t have stopped.
“I know, baby,” CJ said. Then he asked me to repeat the boy’s name.
“Trey Marsellus,” I said.
“Mmm,” he said.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“What?” I persisted.
“I think you might’ve hit Luke Marsellus’s kid,” he said, pensive.
“Who?” I’d said.
An hour later it was on the news: Rap mogul’s son killed in Wilshire Boulevard accident. I still didn’t get it. The news reports cast him only as a respected music-world figure, not as Marsellus the South Central OG.
I should have known something was really wrong when CJ picked up a pack of cigarettes a friend had left on the coffee table and tapped one out. CJ almost never smoked, so this meant he needed something to do with his hands, which meant he was nervous. Which was bad, because CJ was almost never nervous.
“Are you okay?” I asked. Stupid question, considering.
“Yeah,” he said. He lit the cigarette, exhaled smoke, and said, “Listen, give the family a couple of days, all right? Marsellus is…”
“Is what?”
“He’s kind of heavy.”
“I can’t turn my back on this,” I said.
“I know,” he said, “but I need to think about how best you should approach him.”
As it turned out, CJ never did hit on the right way for me to talk to Marsellus. Something else happened first that changed everything.
Two days later, I was awakened by my phone ringing at ten-fifteen in the morning. I picked up the receiver and found myself talking to the traffic sergeant who’d taken my statement and then kicked me loose. His question was direct and to the point: Had Miss Beauvais, Trey’s au pair, been in touch with me?
No, I said, why would she have been?
I’m just checking in with you, he’d said.
Not seeing any significance, I tried to go back to sleep-I hadn’t been sleeping well at night-but an hour later, CJ was pounding on my door.
“Take it easy, would you,” I said, pushing hair out of my eyes and letting him in.
“Pack up your things,” he said as soon as I’d closed the door behind him. “Not everything, just what you really want.”
“What?” I thought it was a joke, though he seemed genuinely on edge.
“Trey’s nanny is missing. The cops are looking for her. Nobody’s seen her. Pack up just what you need, I’m getting you out of L.A.”
I pulled back. “What are you trying to say?”
CJ ran his hands through his hair. “Just listen to me, Hailey. I didn’t want to scare you the other night, but as soon as you told me Trey Marsellus’s name, I was thinking of something like this. I hoped I was overreacting.”
“Something like what?”
“This happened in New York,” he said. “A mobster’s son was hit by a car, by accident, and not long after that, the neighbor who did it just disappeared.”
I said, “You of all people know that ‘gangsta’ is just a figure of speech. Marsellus isn’t really a gangster.”
“Yes, he is, Hailey.” He paused. “I hear things, and maybe I don’t know for sure what’s rumor and what’s fact, but I meant what I said the other day, when I called Marsellus ‘heavy.’ He’s not a ‘no harm, no foul’ kind of guy. And he and his wife tried for years to conceive before finally having Trey. She hasn’t been pregnant again since. What does that tell you?” He answered his own question: “You took from him the one thing that can’t be replaced.”
My face felt hot. “Don’t you think I feel bad enough-”
“You’re not listening,” he said. I’d never heard CJ sound so frustrated. “Goddammit, what’s it going to take to get through to you? You can feel as bad as humanly possible; it won’t help. You killed this guy’s only son. ‘Sorry’ isn’t going to fix it.”
I said, “But if he’s really the kind of man you say, I think not apologizing and then running away is only going to make it worse.”
“There isn’t a way to make it better.”
“But-”
“No,” he said, taking both my hands in his. “I know what you’re thinking of, all that honor-and-duty bullshit you never really left behind, but that doesn’t apply out here, and it’s going to get you killed. West Point is over, and now L.A. is over for you, too. Pack your things.”
What convinced me that he was right was this: His hands were very slightly shaking. It had been a long time since I’d felt those kind of nerves, so his anxiety served as a kind of external gauge for me, of what I should be feeling but wasn’t.
“Are you sure about this?” I’d said.
“I don’t like it, either, baby,” he’d said quietly. “But this is how it’s gotta be.”
To this day I don’t know if there were any ramifications, criminally, for my leaving town before the traffic division’s investigation was officially closed. It had just been a formality, but the cops took a dim view of people skating when they’d been told to stick around. It was possible that if I was ever picked up on something minor in San Francisco, I’d be shipped back to Los Angeles and charged with some kind of obstruction. It wasn’t the charge that would be problematic, but jail would actually be the easiest place for Marsellus to get at me. Anyone gang-connected could.
CJ would have stayed longer with me in San Francisco, but I hadn’t let him. When we parted, we’d both acted with exaggerated casualness. He’d said, “Look, I’ll come up and visit you soon. I’ll be around so much you’ll be sick of me,” and I’d said, “Sure, I know,” and we’d hugged and then he’d driven away, toward the 101 back home.
In those first weeks, I’d lived with a drab, hollow feeling not unlike how addicts describe their first day without alcohol or a cigarette: Is this what my life’s going to be, from here on out? I’d alternated between that sense of lonely tedium and a stomach-clenching guilt. I’m not sure those feelings ever went away, but they did lessen. In time, I found an adrenaline-junkie job and threw myself into it. I made more money than I needed and stashed it carelessly in a coffee can. I made a few friends and drank with them. Drank without them, too. I met Jack Foreman.
But I still felt restless at times, particularly in early summer, when business at Aries was slowest and San Francisco was shrouded in the kind of weather coastal Californians called June gloom. That was probably why, in the end, I called Serena back and told her I’d take a girl I’d never met to the mountains of inland Mexico.
Several days later, sometime after nine in the evening, I was parked in front of a house in a working-class section of Oakland. It was an inexpensively well-kept place, with a small trimmed lawn, and no weeds between the stepping-stones that led to the house. There was a geranium by the front door, blooming red. This was where Nidia Hernandez was staying with friends.
Shay had looked pretty sour when I told him I was taking nearly two weeks off, but there was nothing he could do. I was an independent contractor; I worked, or not, at both my will and his. He could have fired me just as easily.
That afternoon, packing had been quick and easy. Hot-weather clothes, one heavy jacket for the evenings. A recently purchased guidebook to Mexico. A bottle of Bacardi and several minis of Finlandia, tucked protectively between layers of clothing. The little care package Serena had sent to me-a sheaf of twenties and fifties, the promised expense money, and a handful of Benzedrines wrapped in foil, to help me stay alert on the road. The rest of my pay would wait until I was on my way back up north; Serena and I had arranged that I’d stop at her place and we’d settle up then.
Finally I’d cleaned and oiled the Airweight, which was now taped under the front seat of the car I’d rented. I didn’t expect any trouble in Mexico. I was just being careful.
A young man with a peach-fuzz mustache answered the door when I knocked. “Are you Hailey?” he said.
“I’m in the right place, then.”
“Yeah, hello, yeah,” he said, and moved aside. I stepped into a narrow entryway of brown-checked linoleum, and the boy called to someone farther back in the house in Spanish so rapid I didn’t catch much of it, except for Nidia’s name.
A middle-aged woman came around the corner into the entryway. She was thin, with red-tinted hair pinned up on her head.
“Is it her?” she said in a gently accented voice. “Oh, please come in. My name is Herlinda.”
“Hailey,” I said.
“Come into the kitchen.”
I followed her. The floorboards felt slightly warped under my feet, and the house smelled of many, many meals cooked there. We rounded a corner, and I got my first look at Nidia Hernandez.
She was sitting in a chair slightly pushed back from the kitchen table, two scuffed suitcases at her feet. I could see where she’d draw unwanted masculine attention. Her hair was cinnamon-colored, in curls weighed down into near-straightness by their length. Her eyes were green-brown, and she had a heart-shaped face. She wasn’t very tall-maybe five-two-and slender except for the little potbelly a lot of girls had nowadays, the obsession for flat abs being over. She looked from Herlinda to me.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m Hailey.”
“Thank you for coming,” she said.
“I was sorry to hear about your boyfriend. Serena told me,” I said.
She nodded and said something that I thought was “Thank you” but couldn’t be sure: She was that quiet. We both looked to Herlinda to take over.
Herlinda did, fixing hot chocolate and offering pan dulce, both of which I accepted, although I wasn’t hungry. Then she spread a map of Mexico on the table and began the debriefing I’d been promised. “Have you ever been to Mexico?” she asked.
“To Baja California, yes,” I said.
“Did you drive?”
I nodded. It had been CJ’s idea, a road trip to a seaside town he’d heard about.
“Good,” Herlinda said. “So you know a little about driving on Mexican roads.” Even so, she went on to tell me things I’d already heard: that in isolated areas, drivers tended to go down the center of the road until they saw oncoming traffic, and that it was common for both parties to be jailed in case of a traffic accident. If I were in one, she said, I should be exceedingly polite to the police and keep my ears open for the subtle implication that a bribe would clear the whole thing up. I nodded assent. Her son leaned against the refrigerator and listened.
Then Herlinda turned her attention to the map. I saw a star, hand-drawn in ink, in the northern Sierra Madre region.
“That’s where we’re going?” I said.
“It’s the nearest town to the village,” Herlinda said.
My confusion must have shown on my face-I didn’t understand the distinction she was making-so Herlinda said, “You won’t take Nidia all the way; the road isn’t passable by car. You’ll take her to this town, and you’ll see the post office there. It has a Mexican flag over it. Take Nidia inside, and the postman will take her up to the village when he goes with the mail. They do it all the time, her mother says.”
“If the road’s not passable by car, how does the postman go up? Horseback?”
Herlinda smiled. “He has four-wheel-drive.”
I was embarrassed at my assumption. “If I’d known,” I said, “I could’ve got something with four-wheel.”
Herlinda shook her head. “It’s not just that,” she said. “The road’s narrow and it’s steep, and I guess city Mexicans don’t do well with it.” She left the obvious unsaid: Not to mention gringos.
Then she looked up at the kitchen doorway. I followed her gaze and saw a thin girl of maybe twelve or thirteen there, wearing a long pink nightshirt.
“You’re supposed to be in bed,” Herlinda told her.
“I wanted to say good-bye to Nidia.”
I moved from the kitchen counter and told Nidia, “I’ll take your bags out to the car,” thinking they’d want privacy for their good-byes.
Outside, I sat behind the wheel of the car I’d rented, a powerful V6 Impala. When I’d first driven it that afternoon, I felt a small rush of elation and power. Then, just as quickly, I’d been stabbed by a memory: Wilshire Boulevard and a hard thump from the front end of my car.
He darted out of nowhere; it was an accident; there was nothing you could have done. It had become my mantra in moments like these. But I wondered, if I ever owned a vehicle again, how long it would take before I could drive without thinking of Trey Marsellus.
It was in northern Arizona that I first tried to have a substantial conversation with Nidia.
We had been traveling by night. That was my plan until we got to the border. Nocturnal travel was cooler in the Southwestern heat, and it would lower our chances of setting off a speed trap, because despite what I’d told Serena about being cautious on the road, I was pushing my luck just a little on speed. I wanted the trip to be done in about seven or eight days. It would have helped if Nidia knew how to drive, but she didn’t.
So, mostly, she’d been dozing as we drove through the night, or sometimes working on a knitting project in her lap. We didn’t talk much.
I couldn’t decide whether I liked Nidia or not. She was polite to me. Very polite, in fact, as though I were an authority figure just by virtue of being chosen to take her to Mexico. If she disapproved of my occasional bad language, or the liquor I drank neat over ice when the driving was done, she didn’t say anything about it. But my occasional attempts at small talk had all died pretty quickly. I just couldn’t seem to make any connection with her.
Tonight I didn’t mess around with small talk at all: I turned down the radio and asked her something serious.
“So what’s wrong with your grandmother?”
She looked up at me. “What?”
“Your sick grandmother,” I repeated, “what’s wrong?”
“She’s very old,” Nidia said slowly.
“It’s just old age?” Her answer surprised me; it seemed like a flimsy reason for a girl of Nidia’s age, just starting out in life, to be dispatched to a remote village indefinitely.
Nidia added, “She hurt her leg. Her hip, I mean.”
“A fall?”
She nodded.
“So how’d you”-I didn’t want to say the first thing that came to mind, which was, draw the short straw-“become the one who goes south to take care of her?”
Nidia said, “It’s something I’m good at. That was my job for a long time, taking care of a man who was sick.”
Serena hadn’t mentioned that. “Sick with what?” I asked.
“Cancer,” she said.
“What happened to him?”
“He died,” Nidia said. “It was… it was very sad, he was-” She turned her face toward the window, and I knew she was fighting back tears. I focused back on the road, averting my eyes. She wasn’t really thinking of the cancer guy, of course. She was thinking of Johnny Cedillo, whom I deliberately hadn’t brought up, thinking it still too raw a wound.
Then she spoke again. She said, “Adriano was smarter than anyone I’d ever known. He studied math for a living, but not math like people usually think of it. Adriano’s work was the kind of math you can’t even really use. I asked him why he was interested in stuff like that, and he said it was like being an explorer in the desert, places no one had gone yet. He liked being out putting his footprints in sand no one had ever walked in before.”
Nidia wasn’t crying, but she was speaking quickly, as if she was distracting herself from her grief with trivia about the cancer patient.
“You guys talked a bit, then, it sounds like,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “I was working for him for a little more than a year. At first I just came over to make some meals, clean up his apartment. But then he got sicker and needed someone living there, so I moved in.”
“Where was his family?” I asked. “There wasn’t anyone to help take care of him?”
“No,” she said. “He had a brother who died, and his mother was already dead, too. His father was still alive, but they didn’t…”
“Get along?” I supplied.
“Maybe,” she said. “And he never got married. Adriano didn’t have a life like most people had. His mind was different. He just wanted to be a-what’s the word? Like a student, but even more serious about it…”
“A scholar?”
“A scholar,” she said. “He wanted to understand the universe, everything about it. I think God knew that. God took him early so he could finally have all the answers he wanted.”
God apparently had a protracted, painful way of curing intellectual curiosity, but I didn’t say that.
The following night took us through New Mexico, and then, aided by a short roadside nap, I pushed on until we crossed the little handkerchief-corner of westernmost Texas. Maybe my desire to get us over the state line before quitting for the day was symbolic. I was Texan by birth, though I couldn’t remember my early days there. So, around five, Nidia and I were rolling into El Paso.
I decided to spend a little more money on a hotel, checking us in at a place with a pool and some restaurants nearby. We needed somewhere nice. It would be Nidia’s last night in the States, and I was so tired from driving that my eyes felt gritty. I intended to get a long, long sleep tonight. Starting tomorrow, we were going to drive days instead of nights, and I was going to slow our speed way down. Herlinda had warned me about getting into a dustup with Mexico’s police, and I’d taken her words to heart.
Nidia and I brought our things in from the car, into a room where the air conditioner was already working hard, exhaling frigid air to keep the Texas heat at bay. I bought a Diet Coke from the vending machine, poured it over ice, and laced it heavily with Bacardi. I drank while sifting through my clothes, looking for something to wear in the pool. I hadn’t brought a suit, but right now, even though it was still about ninety degrees outside, the thought of a long soak appealed to me.
“Want to come?” I asked Nidia, but she shook her head quickly no.
I slipped my feet into a pair of rubber flip-flops. “Be thinking about what you want for dinner,” I said. “It’s your last night in America. There must be something you’ll miss.”
She nodded seriously, as if I’d posed her a study question for an exam later. I drained the last of the rum and Diet Coke and left.
There were too many little kids in the pool for me to swim laps, but I dived into the deep end, then opened my eyes and navigated around them until I came up for air in the shallow end. Then I sat on the steps, body half in and half out of the water, tipped my head back, and closed my eyes. Though it was nearly six, it felt like midafternoon. We were only a few weeks past the summer solstice, and the sun was fairly high in the Texas sky, the heat maintaining its midday levels.
When I opened my eyes again, I saw a guy looking my way. He was sitting on one of the lounge chairs, but he hadn’t come here to swim or sunbathe. He was dressed in business casual, dark trousers and white shirt, no jacket or tie. He was around thirty years old, with an athletic build and close-cropped dark hair that looked like it would curl if allowed to grow any longer.
“How’s the water?” he asked, unashamed to be caught watching me.
“Come in and find out,” I said, and raised my hand to rub my birthmark lightly, a gesture I thought I’d outgrown.
“Can’t,” he said. “I didn’t bring anything to swim in.”
But he got up from his seat and walked to the water’s edge, and sat on his heels to test the water temperature with one hand. I tried to decide how I’d describe his face to someone else: It was clean-shaven and soft, but not in a way that suggested flab or weakness, more like the slight jowliness of a mastiff or a Great Dane, that actually connotes strength. His eyes were Mediterranean, deep-set and heavy-lidded in the way that looks like world-weariness to a casual observer.
“You from Texas?” he asked me.
“California,” I said.
“I’m heading across the border into Mexico tomorrow,” he said. “Just into Juarez City, on business. It’s my first time. I hear there’s no real good time to cross; the traffic’s always backed up at the border. Have you heard anything about that?”
I shook my head. “I have to cross tomorrow, too, but I haven’t really thought about traffic. It’ll take the time it takes, I guess.”
We spoke a minute or two longer. I said I was on a “summer road trip” with a friend and left it at that. It was pleasant, after Nidia’s alternating politeness and silences, to be talking easily with another American. I wondered if his friendliness was just that, or if it was the beginnings of a pickup.
“Well,” he said, “drive safely tomorrow.”
Just friendliness, then. “You, too,” I said, and watched as he walked back to the pool gate and disappeared from my view.
“There’s a storm coming, and the people of this sleepy town…”
The TV was flickering with the sound low. I’d tuned it to the Weather Channel, waiting for the local forecast, but at present, the screen was filled with images of tornadoes wreaking havoc in the Plains States. Nidia was sitting cross-legged on the bed in her nightgown, her hair wet from the bath, watching the TV. I was rearranging the things in my backpack, putting what I needed in easy reach. Earlier, we’d had dinner in the hotel’s restaurant. I was ravenous, though I’d done nothing more strenuous than driving, and ordered a barbecued half-chicken and a baked potato and salad. I persuaded Nidia to have a real American meal on her last night here: a hamburger, fries, and a milkshake, the kind that came with extra in a tin cup on the side.
Still half listening for a change to the forecast for Texas and northern Mexico, I dug my passport out of the duffel bag and transferred it to my messenger bag, where it’d be more convenient in the morning. Nidia, of course, not being a U.S. citizen, only needed her Mexican birth certificate and a photo ID, not a-
That thought gave me pause. Nidia wasn’t a citizen. Unlike me, once she crossed the border, she had no legal way of getting back. Though she’d need to be in Mexico awhile, maybe even until her grandmother’s death, it seemed to me that Nidia’s family was abandoning her to indefinite life in Mexico.
Was that so bad? Maybe I was being an American chauvinist. Except there was a reason so many Mexicans, including Nidia’s parents, had come to El Norte. I wondered why Nidia’s mother hadn’t taken it on herself to go back and take care of her ailing mother, instead of sacrificing the hopes and plans of a daughter just on the cusp of adulthood.
“Nidia,” I said, picking up my cell phone, “I’ll be back in a minute, okay?”
She nodded, undisturbed.
I went out to the pool area-it was deserted now, though the water glowed an inviting warm turquoise-and made a call.
Serena picked up on the third ring. “Hailey, what’s up?” she said. “Where are you? Mexico?”
“We’re still in Texas,” I said. “Listen, I’m getting a funny feeling about this.”
“What’s wrong?”
“What do you really know about this family?” I said. “Did you know any of them except Teaser?”
“Why? What’s wrong?” she repeated.
I sat down on a chaise, still looking at the calm water of the pool. “Well, Nidia’s only nineteen,” I said. “Once she crosses the border, who knows if she’ll ever get back? Most Mexican parents who bring their families across do so at great risk, so their kids can have better lives. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense that they’re forcing her to go back.”
“Maybe it makes sense because their grandma is sick and needs help,” she said. “Mexicans are very family-oriented, and-”
“No. No way,” I said. “Don’t even start with that you’re-white-you-wouldn’t-understand rap. This girl’s fiancé died in Iraq, and then the cancer patient she was taking care of died, and now she’s going off to live in the middle of nowhere with an invalid? I think she’s had enough death and dying. I don’t think it’s right.”
There was a second or two of silence before Serena spoke. “Has she said she doesn’t want to go?”
A beat passed before I admitted, “I haven’t asked.”
“Well, she packed her stuff and got in the car, prima. Doesn’t that tell you something?”
“I’m going to ask her straight out.”
“I don’t think you should interfere,” she said. “This is about family. If this were your father, if he were sick, how far would be too far for you to go to take care of him?”
I closed my eyes. Nowhere, of course. I would have gone to the other side of the planet.
“Hailey?” she prompted.
“If I ask Nidia directly and she says she doesn’t want to go to Mexico, I’m not taking her,” I said.
“Fine,” Serena said, her tone short. “Go ahead. I can tell you what she’s gonna say, though.”
“I’ll call you later.”
I disconnected the call and walked back to the room. “Nidia,” I said as soon as I’d closed the door behind me, “are you absolutely sure you want to do this?”
“Como?” she said, confused.
I set my cell phone down on the dresser and said, “You’re undocumented. Once you cross the border, you can’t come back. Not easily. The U.S. is allocating more money to border security all the time.”
She seemed on the verge of speaking, but I needed to finish. “My hand to God, no one can make me muscle you off to Mexico if you don’t want to go. Just say the word, and I’ll turn around and take you back. If you can’t go to your family, Serena would take you in. I’m sure she would, for Teaser’s sake.”
It seemed like an odd thing to say, given the testy exchange we’d just had on the phone, but I knew Serena. If push came to shove, she’d help this girl.
“No,” Nidia said, straightening, and there was a sharp tone to her voice I hadn’t heard before. “I want to go. No one’s making me. You aren’t going to change your mind about driving me, are you?”
I licked my lower lip, surprised at how adamant she seemed. “Nidia,” I began. Then I turned and walked over to the window. The sheer inner curtains were drawn, but I could see the parking lot outside, the peach glow of the lights. I wasn’t looking for anything or at anything: I was about to say something delicate.
“I don’t want to offend you by talking about something that’s personal, but Serena told me about Johnny, your fiancé,” I said slowly. “He obviously cared about you a great deal. What do you think he’d advise you to do here?”
There was no hesitation before I heard her say, “Johnny would want me to go.”
I turned around to face her. There wasn’t any doubt in her green-hazel eyes. “Okay,” I said. “Then I’ll take you.”
She relaxed. “Good,” she said. Then she added, “My abuela needs me. That’s why.”
I picked up my cell phone from the dresser. “Listen, I’m going to go out and get a drink,” I said, scooping up my hoodie off the back of a chair. “Don’t wait on me. Get some sleep.”
I called Serena as soon as I was far enough away from the motel room not to be overheard through the walls. She obviously recognized my number on caller ID and answered with, “So?”
“She wants to go,” I said, turning my face up against a light breeze. “I’m taking her.”
“Told you.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, watching the white lights of the freeway in the distance. “Serena, you know I love you, right?”
“Wow, you get over being mad quick,” she said, amused.
“That’s not what I’m saying,” I told her. “What I’m saying is, I love you, but don’t ever throw my dead father into a conversation to score points off me again.”
I’d hoped that the world-weary-but-nice-looking guy from poolside would be in the bar, but he didn’t show in the time it took me to nurse two margaritas, so finally I just paid and left.
Mexico.
Crossing the border wasn’t a big deal. The traffic was the worst of it, inching up to the low brown structure of the border checkpoint, where forbidding signs advised that bringing a firearm into Mexico was punishable by Mexican law. But after showing our various forms of ID-my driver’s license and passport, Nidia’s Mexican birth certificate-we were told to drive on. They didn’t even ask about a gun. I smiled and finger-waved like an excited tourist as Nidia and I pulled away, the Airweight taped under my seat.
Then we were into the crush and color of Juarez, American logos competing with old Colonial architecture. Most of it I’d expected from pictures. Little things surprised me, though, like passing a storefront church advertising meetings of Alcoholicos Anonimos. You didn’t expect things like that in Mexico.
After that, we drove on the main highways in broad, bright daylight, jockeying among big semi-trailers. It was hot, and I worried about the air-conditioning straining the Impala’s engine, no matter how new and well-maintained the car, so I cycled the a/c on and off, alternating with the whipping wind of two rolled-down windows.
Our second day, we started out early, because this was the day I believed I’d get Nidia to her destination. I wanted to leave us plenty of time to navigate the smaller, secondary roads we’d take once we got off Highway 16. We’d be climbing up into the mountains, and I had visions of the Impala inching along behind a flock of sheep being driven by a sheepherder on foot, or following a lumbering farm truck at twenty-eight miles an hour.
And I was worried about Nidia, who’d shown a minor tendency toward car sickness even on the straighter roads. She never complained, but several times when I stopped for gas, she’d asked me for ginger ale, to settle her stomach.
Now we were beginning to climb up into the mountains. The sun had just gone down, and the traffic had thinned out as the trees and brush on the roadside got thicker. The surrounding landscape reminded me of the mountains of eastern Nevada, but more extreme: steeper, lusher, more remote.
Nidia had taken out her knitting again. When I asked her what she was working on, she told me it was to be a sweater: It got cold in the mountains at night, regardless of the season. I had to take her word for it-not about the weather, but that the knitting project would someday be a sweater. It was shapeless now, though I liked the yarn she was using, a dun brown variegated with pale pink.
We didn’t talk much, and I cruised the radio dial for any kind of American music. Like Herlinda had suggested, I’d taken to driving down the center of the road-there was no dividing line, anyway, and no traffic going the opposite direction. Once or twice, I thought I spotted a car about a half-mile behind us; I saw it on lower switchbacks in the highway, when I glanced in the rearview or out the window.
Ahead, in a steep mountain face, the dark opening of a tunnel yawned before the Impala. I slowed down and edged the car to the right side of the road in case of oncoming traffic, and as we drove into the narrow dimness of the tunnel, the radio cut out as though turned off. I reached down to flick on the headlights, and they flashed off what looked like a low wall of dark metal in front of us, a wall that resolved itself into a stalled car, sideways, blocking the road.
“Jesus!” I hit the brakes so hard that Nidia’s body snapped against the restraint of her seat belt and the shapeless knitting project bounced off the glove box and onto the floor. We skidded to a stop about six feet from the dark, stalled sedan.
“Sorry,” I said to Nidia, touching her shoulder. “Are you okay?”
Then I noticed headlights behind us. It was the car I’d caught glimpses of in the rearview. Unlike us, they didn’t have to brake hard or skid to a stop. They rolled up behind us to a smooth stop. It looked a lot like planning.
There was also a strong similarity in the make and color of the two cars, front and back. The driver of the car behind us had stopped in a diagonal position, so that we were effectively hemmed in. I did not like this.
“Que pasa?” Nidia said, frightened into her native language.
“I don’t know,” I said. I reached down and hit the electronic controls, locking all four doors at once.
Now, in front of us and behind, men were emerging from the cars. White men, well-built, with guns.
“Que pasa?” Nidia said again. “Que pasa?”
“Calmate,” I said, although I wasn’t at all sure that calming down was appropriate.
The men spread out around us in a circle. Seven white men in rural Mexico. This didn’t make any sense.
Nidia had her hands to her face. “El padre,” she whispered.
I reached under the seat and wrenched the Airweight free of its tape, but for the moment, I kept it out of the men’s line of sight. I didn’t want to start the shooting. I was far too outgunned.
Sure, five rounds is all most civilians will ever need. If you can’t shoot your way out of something with five rounds, you can’t shoot your way out of it at all. It had sounded good at the time.
“Nidia,” I said calmly, “take off your seat belt and get on the floor, as low as you can.”
She was staring at the gun in my hands. She didn’t move.
I reached over and unclicked her seat belt. “Down!” I said. “Ahora!”
She slid down, whispering what I assumed were prayers.
My mind was working pretty well in that cool, empty space where fear should have been and wasn’t. This had to be a case of mistaken identity. They thought we were carrying drugs, or drug money.
One of the men approached. Even from a distance, he was familiar, and up close he became the Young Nice Guy Businessman from the pool of the El Paso hotel. He gestured for me to roll down my window.
Carefully, still keeping the gun out of sight, I rolled down my window to a gap of about two inches and said, “We’re not carrying anything of value. No drugs, and no money.”
He stepped closer, close enough now to see the gun in my hands, but it didn’t seem to worry him. He said, “We want her.”
Nidia? “Why?” I said.
He said, “Not your problem.”
He was surveying me with what almost looked like friendly curiosity. He said, “Please just put the gun down and unlock the doors. My friend over there will take Miss Hernandez gently out of the car and your role in this will all be over.”
I understood that I was not going to shoot our way out of this, not with five rounds, probably not with three times that, had I been better armed. But the Impala was still in drive. If I hit the gas and smashed straight into the back end of the sedan in front of us, maybe I could just bull our way out.
Three problems: One, they could start shooting. Two, even if they didn’t, Nidia was on the floor without a seat belt and could get banged up pretty badly. Three, two of them were standing right in front of the car.
Of course, it was better for Nidia to get banged up than shot. As for the guys in front of the car, could I live with myself if they died of their injuries? Yes, I could, if it was Nidia’s life and mine against theirs.
I inhaled as though steadying my nerves and said to the guy outside the car, “Okay, just let me explain to her. Her English isn’t very good.”
Turning to Nidia, I spoke in Spanish, telling her, Brace yourself.
Then, crouching low behind the steering wheel, I stepped hard on the gas pedal. The Impala’s engine roared in response. The last thing I heard was gunfire.