Gettin place 97814013060.., p.13
Gettin' Place (9781401306069), page 13
When he went outside, Marcus stood for a moment looking up at the hard-edged stars. Only two miles from downtown, less than that, and you could see the whole night sky here, littered with stars, while outside his apartment you could see only the diffused glare from streetlights and mirrored buildings and glowing offices.
“En boca cerrada no entran moscas,” a musical, birdlike voice said from the darkened courtyard to his left. His great-grandmother laughed, just two whiffles of sound, and Marcus walked over to sit beside her in one of the old wrought-iron chairs under the palm shelter that ran the length of the U-shaped central area.
Her hands lay on her knees like two golden, curve-legged spiders, and her eyes were only slits of silver in the dim light. Marcus smiled and lay his hand over one of hers. Spiders. Ants. Flies. All the words she had taught him while they picked olives and stirred them in the curing vats. “Flies don’t enter a closed mouth,” she had said just now, since he’d been standing there with his wide open to the sky.
“Pero it’s night, Abuela,” he said. He spoke a strange mixture of the nouns she’d taught him and other words he’d picked up, but he had no sense of grammar. He’d taken two years of French at Rio Seco High, because that was what college prep kids were taking, and he wanted to be one of them. No one cared about speaking Spanish then.
“Sí,” his great-grandmother said. “Pero en la noche, los murciélagos vuelan.”
Marcus nodded. His abuela loved anything that flew. She spent hours watching mockingbirds and jays, sparrows and red-tailed hawks; in the evenings, she waited for bats and moths to trace paths through the branches.
“Mi pequeño perico,” she said. My little parrot, Marcus thought, smiling. That was what she’d always called him, when he listened and repeated. But none of his brothers ever would sit still long enough to learn any of the words or sayings she loved so much. “Dos gringas, las muertas,” she said slowly, for him.
“Someone put gas en tu placa,“ Marcus said, thinking. “I forgot.” He frowned. “You didn’t see anything?” His abuela understood more than she could say, like most people who live around other languages but keep theirs.
She shook her head. Then she put one tiny, gnarled hand on the one he’d laid over hers. “El valiente vive hasta que el cobarde quiere.”
Marcus stood, nodding, but he was tired, and the words thudded dully in his brain without meaning. Valiente meant brave, but the rest was a blur. She nodded back, and he left her there, a tiny sparrow herself, with her black mantilla over her silver-sheened forehead and sharp nose, her shining black eyes on him.
He called, “Don’t work too hard, man,” to Kickstand, who leaned over the Cadillac.
“Shit,” Kickstand muttered. Marcus crossed behind the barn and headed slowly to the gate between the properties. He heard only his shoes on the bark and leaves, and his forehead hummed with fatigue. When he entered the eucalyptus and saw a stark, peeled-white trunk nearby with a rust-speckled hubcap nailed to it, he saw his father’s face. His father would know exactly what kind of hubcap it was, if someone came to ask. His father knew every inch of this land, and whoever had started the fire had wanted to shoot him, or to get him shot by the cops. Marcus stared at the facets of the hubcap. Cobarde. His abuela’s words shifted for him.
The brave one lives as long as the coward lets him.
He had to be careful walking through the trees on the other side of the wall, the ones around The Blue Q. People took care of business in the trees, sometimes love business, sometimes pharmaceutical business, sometimes old and never finished business.
Marcus never came here on a weekend night. Occasionally, he came in the late afternoon with Brother Lobo, who liked to sit and listen and talk in the confines of walls since the bullet had grazed his arm. But that was mainly a talking crowd. The weekend crowd was serious—drinking, eating, loving, and kicking ass for necessity and for sport.
He wound through the trunks, knowing Rock was at watch, as always, near the choc brew and the orange grove. He knew Jerry and Joe would be keeping muscled order in the front parking area, the way Uncle Oscar paid them to. But you never knew who might be in the trees here.
He heard soft laughter behind one, saw a thick elbow bent out in a vee where a man leaned into the lips, quiet now. He kept his head down and walked fast, a wire of heat racing through his groin. When they were little, he and Finis used to hide here, hoping to catch a glimpse of passion and flesh.
People milled about in the packed dirt near The Blue Q. Marcus slowed, checking faces that turned to see where he was coming from, who he was with. Usher Price’s oldest brother, Wheeler, nodded at him. Most of the men who drank and ate at The Blue Q were in their thirties and forties, the kind of men L.A. and Rio Seco people called “country” or “old-time” or “down-home.” Even if they were native Californians, guys like Wheeler and Rock and Jerry were down-home. But not me, Marcus thought. Demetrius can pull off both, he can go between here and there and anywhere. But I can’t.
At the door, Jerry took his five-dollar cover charge, laughing. “Yeah, nigga, you know your uncle don’t love you for free on no Friday night. Give up them ducats.” Marcus walked past the hand-lettered sign that had hung by the door for years: NO GUNS, KNIVES, OR ATTITUDES.
The smoke hung blue and heavy, as if ivy grew from the ceiling. Marcus saw that the tiny stage, just a wooden platform near the wall, was empty. The jukebox was playing “Float On,” and a few couples danced in the bare space near the wall. He had to smile. If Uncle Oscar or one of his friends wasn’t playing blues, the younger crowd played The Floaters or Earth, Wind and Fire or old Commodores. And that was old-time now.
The tables were crowded with people eating Aintielila’s greens and chitlins and Oscar’s barbecued ribs and hotlinks. Toward the back, the service window was open, the permanent menu above it, and Marcus could see his aunt moving in the kitchen.
He knew his brothers and uncle would be sitting at Oscar’s table in the far rear corner, where he could watch the whole place. Marcus saw Demetrius’s head moving while he talked, saw his brothers’ black hair gleaming in braids, except for Finis, whose hair was dusty and pulled into a thick, careless wedge with a rubber band. Finis’s head lay on his arms, and Marcus was relieved to see him intact.
Uncle Oscar’s face was the only one turned to his, the deep sickles framing his mouth.
“You better paid,” he said, one sickle deeper with a half-grin.
“You know it,” Marcus said, pulling a folding chair toward the others.
“I ain’t servin no sherbert gourmet food,” his uncle said.
Demetrius said, “You ain’t had to come. You ain’t gon want to help out on this now.”
Marcus didn’t wait, but took a breath of smoke and sauce. “Demetrius. One of the girls in the Granada, Pammy Sawicky, I know she wouldn’t come down here with no brother. Some white dude had to bring them onto the place, had to get em inside the gate to make it look like one of us did it.”
His brothers all looked at him. “How you know?” Julius asked.
“Cause I knew her in school.”
“Back when you was a brother?” Demetrius said, hard.
The others laughed, and Marcus said, “Shut up, damnit. I’m serious. And Daddy seen a white guy. So we gotta put this together.”
Uncle Oscar blew smoke from his cigarillo onto the table. “Yeah. We do. But while we doin that, somebody’s gotta be standin watch. That’s what I’m tryin to get y’all to understand.”
“I understand,” Octavious said. “But hold up.” He turned to Marcus, his green-tinged eyes murky in the dimness. “Why the hell you give my ride up the other day, man? First you take it and don’t ax me, then you let somebody take it and don’t say shit.”
“Oh, man, give Sissyfly a break,” Julius said. “She hard. Check her out.” Marcus turned, following Julius’s nod, and saw Bennie Proudfoot dancing close with a man near the wall, her mouth moving constantly up under his chin, her feet dragging, and her hips shifting hard.
“Who’s got her kids?” he said without thinking, and Octavious shook his head.
“SaRonn,” Octavious said. “Belisa tired a watchin em. Bennie lookin for love every day.” Marcus was surprised; Octavious didn’t spit the words.
SaRonn—he remembered the fringe at her neck, her eyes. He looked at Finis, whose eyes stayed close even with the mention of her name. “I don’t remember her at all,” Marcus said.
“She been gone a few years,” Octavious said. “Belisa said she was in L.A.”
Marcus thought, So maybe I ain’t gotta lie. Not this time. But he looked at Demetrius again, and at his uncle, who said, “When y’all sorry-ass fools tired a talkin about women, let me know. And tell me who gon be watchin.”
“I said I would,” Demetrius said. “Julius and Finis ain’t good for shit in them trailers.”
“I see what I need to see,” Julius said. Marcus watched him smile, unapologetic. Julius never backed down; he never cared enough about anything but what he wanted for himself.
“How are you gonna stay anywhere but home, with Enchantee waitin on you?” Marcus said. He wanted to say something about the new house, but he didn’t.
“Somebody gotta stay near the barn, and somebody need to walk the fences at night,” Uncle Oscar said. “With a piece. Cause whoever did it, they gon try it again if this one don’t work. Way them cops keepin Hosea look bad, but they gon have to let him go once they do they ballistics.”
“How do you know?” Marcus asked, frowning.
“Shit,” Uncle Oscar said. “Hosea gun so old they ain’t never seen no bullets like that. And your mama said somebody was shootin three, four times. Them women got bullets in em ain’t your daddy’s. What else they got on Hosea? Ain’t nobody seen nothin.” He blew smoke again. “But one a y’all better see somethin next time. Better catch somethin, goddamnit.”
Marcus looked at the gray smoke floating in a fist, then dissolving. He thought of the ashen wells under his mother’s eyes. “Demetrius, man, you gotta let me borrow a truck,” he said. “I gotta move somebody, a favor, in three days, and then I’ll come out to the place and walk. I’ll sleep instead a you, so Enchantee ain’t gotta be alone.”
Demetrius raised his chin. “I bet you worried about her, huh?”
“Save that shit,” Marcus said. “You got a truck?”
Octavious said, “Only truck runnin good right now is Daddy’s.”
They were all silent. Their father’s 1956 Chevy truck, a green so faded it was as pale as shallow water, was in the far corner of the barn. Kickstand kept it clean and checked; he’d been working on the brake lines when Hosea was shot.
“I don’t want to take the truck without askin him,” Marcus said, uneasy.
“Can’t ax him nothin right now,” Demetrius said softly.
“You better go on and take it, if you movin a woman,” Oscar said. “You ain’t never kept no woman. Look like you need all the help you can get.”
The only way Hosea knew that a dry Santa Ana wind was scouring his trees, sanding grit along the cars on the lot, was that a cold spark had passed from the nurse’s hand to his. The static in the room jumped blue when she’d plucked at his wrist.
The constant shifting of white shapes in and out of the room left him exhausted from holding himself rigid and watchful. Sometimes faces peered from higher up, from over shoulders, at him. He kept seeing the pale woman on the billboard above the injured man in Tulsa, the razor scallop of her lips where she smiled down at the street.
The cops wore dark jackets, but they flashed pictures near his face, and the photos showed more pale faces, more sharp smiles. “These two women…” “Where were you…” “Where was your son…” “Why was the gate…”
He said nothing. “He’s playing dead…” “Those two women are dead for real, Thompson…” “This isn’t a game…” “Maybe he’s senile…” “His son’s senile from angel dust…”
He waited. They would decide, no matter what he said or didn’t say. They were the kind of men who moved their mouths and wrote on papers and informed other men of what was already done. If he spoke, he might hurt Finis. That was all he could think about while his head was lined with velvet heat and his mouth was full of prickling coughs that had begun to rise from his chest to lodge in his throat. The smells of the hospital liquids and people and the stale, electric air hung in a web around him that at night grew smaller and smaller, shrinking down to the dome of harsh light around his bed and his body.
He waited for the next metal creak of the door and the next float-and-jerk shape to hover over him.
One box. That was it. Everything Mortrice had fit inside the box his mother had gotten from Tiki. His jeans and shirts, his cassette player and tapes, his two pairs of sneakers.
The kit stayed inside his pillow, with the .25. His bed was a secondhand frame Tiki had found at a yard sale years ago, and his mother said to leave it. “We gotta go fast,” she said, sitting at the dinette table, her upper body calm, her knee bouncing so hard that the table shook. “Just what we can carry.”
He could carry the kit. It had finally come in the mail, to Kenneth’s place since mail was hard to get inside the Gardens. Mortrice had ordered it from a catalog advertised in a Guns & Ammo issue he’d bought at the store. The kit was small enough to fit in a large coat pocket, but the zippered leather case contained all the tools needed to break down and clean the guns.
On the same page with the ad for the kit, he’d seen a course in gunsmithing. Not just cleaning, but altering the barrels, repairing weapons. You could send for that in the mail, too. You could learn it at home. He hadn’t told Kenneth about the course when they’d opened the package with the cleaning kit. Kenneth had nodded with pride and said, “You got skills, man, skills and sense. You gon be down, hell, yeah.”
The liquid warmth that had filled Mortrice’s chest when Kenneth said the words, the fingering feel like a cupped palm at the back of his head, was gone now. He’d only felt that when his mother sat beside his bed at night, telling him stories, telling him how when he was a baby she never let anyone else touch him because he belonged only to her, to no one else in the world. And now he was going out to leave her behind, only for an hour, and give up that tingling rise he’d just begun to recognize.
He had to choose, and Kenneth was waiting in the Monte Carlo.
“Mama, I’ll be right back,” Mortrice said, straight to her upturned face. He wasn’t going to wait for her to fall asleep. No sneaking around tonight. No sense. And he had sense.
He waited for her to answer. But she only stared at him, her eyes moving over his face, his big coat. After a long time, she said, “When?”
“Soon as I’m done.” He bit his lip inside his mouth.
“My brother comin in a few hours, Mortrice. He said first thing in the mornin. It’s goin on midnight.” His mother laid her palms flat on the table. “Ain’t no good-byes that work, baby,” she whispered. “I know.”
“I’ll be back soon,” he said, and he turned for the door.
They went all the way to Venice, Kenneth driving cool and smooth like he just wanted to see the water flashing dull under the clouds like melted lead. No one was in the back. Mortrice wanted to tell him, to get it over with, but Kenneth’s smile when he rocked slightly to the beat from the radio, his head turning slow and easy like a periscope to watch the streets, was too valuable to wipe away with the wrong words. Mortrice leaned back against the seat and dozed to the swaying car and the music.
They pulled up at Kenneth’s apartment, a green duplex with a carport cave. Mortrice went up the stairs, hearing Bam-Bam, Tony, and someone else inside.
His name was Capper, an older guy who’d just gotten out of Chino. He nodded to Kenneth and looked at Mortrice. “What up?” he said, his voice slow. “That your boy?”
Mortrice held his breath. The words meant anything. And Kenneth said, “Yo, man, that’s him. Lil nigga can break your piece down sweet, specially if it’s fuckin up.”
They all turned to look at him. Mortrice put his hands in his coat pockets and said, “I didn’t bring the kit, man. Not tonight.”
But Kenneth only said, “Cool. Capper ain’t goin nowhere, huh, fool? You can do it tomorrow.”
Mortrice sat on the couch, sweating under the coat collar, waiting to be alone with Kenneth again. I shoulda did it already, he thought. Dudes might stay around all night. And Bam-Bam think I ain’t about shit anyway.
Capper and Bam-Bam rolled the weed into fat cigarettes, and when the yellow smoke drifted toward the ceiling, Capper said, “Man, I missed that good chronic. The right shit.”
Kenneth drew in the smoke until it filmed his eyes. Mortrice sucked in the burnt-sweet taste and felt it coat his skull with the glistening resin the antidrug people always talked about when they came to school. He watched Kenneth move from room to room, feeling his head sway behind his eyeballs to the music.
When they were in the car again, Mortrice jammed in the back with the other two, and Capper in front with Kenneth, he saw the streetlights passing in long, lemony tails. They stopped at the red light on the street fronting the Gardens, and only a few gold lights shone in windows like broken teeth. Mama waitin for me, he thought, his head warm on the seat, his arm wedged against Tony’s, his body hurtling away from the green light in the cushioned, armored boat. “Kenneth,” he said, over the music. He heard his throat shouting. “I gotta get out.”
“So get out, nigga,” Tony said, slamming his shoulder into Mortrice’s.
But Kenneth turned and said, “What? You gotta go home? That what you think?”
Mortrice hesitated. The lights hurtled past him on both sides like glowing wires. “Yeah,” he said, but Kenneth pulled the car to a stop at a side street off Vermont, behind a row of stores.
“Why you say it like that?” Kenneth said, his face immobile now, hovering over the seat like a burnt-red sun in the neon light reflecting in the car.
