Gettin place 97814013060.., p.32
Gettin' Place (9781401306069), page 32
Hosea hadn’t seen Marcus since Sofelia had come home. He breathed heavily. He’d thought his youngest son, the one who knew how some white people thought, at least, the one who’d always planned everything out cold and calculated, would have been able to figure this one. But now, each night, walking the property, Hosea remembered men hunting men in the Texas thickets, in the black trees, and there had been no figuring that. No boundaries. The Texas voice Marcus had described brought back the howling voices spiraled through the charred stumps.
He walked alone tonight, carrying Demetrius’s new shotgun, keeping his fences comfortably close to his shoulder. His father had told him many times, “You gotta know the boundaries if you want to survive, boy. I ain’t lyin. Learn them lines.”
He’d learned the invisible guidelines in Tulsa: the foundation of his house, the alley, the corner of Greenwood, and then the whole heart of the lively street where people knew his father. The clotheslines and back door to Miss Letitia’s. Hosea turned away now from the sight of smoking, faint, concrete outlines and blackened poles, of the bones arranged in stiff piles.
The boundaries of his grandfather’s farm had been too wide at first. All he could smell was singed hair on the pigs, and he remembered his father’s voice saying, “I ain’t cut out for farmin. I’d rather work on cars. All day. I’ma teach the boy to work on cars, he always have a trade.”
But his father was dead. Hosea had plowed at his grandfather’s, plowed miles of straight lines and turned for another row. His mother and the baby had gone with the man she’d married, the musician, ivory-gray face and sharp hat pulled low. Eventually, Hosea knew the fences, the walls, the well, and the barn.
When he’d left the farm at sixteen, his stepfather’s deafening blow clapped inside his ear, he didn’t look behind him at the rusty-gold stone walls or the pasture where the white mule widened her black nostrils.
He’d gotten lost in the trees in Texas. The only way he’d escaped was by swinging the ax at a man. He’d become a shadow then, as insubstantial as night smoke.
He remembered the fires consuming the stumps in the Texas forest, the trunks he’d cut and dragged. The white men on horses, watching. Then down below, always, bent backs. The dogs. Big Boss Man—you ain’t so big, you just tall, thass all. Whenever Oscar sang the Jimmy Reed song in The Blue Q, Hosea saw the height added by horses weaving among the trees.
He’d listened to Oscar’s slow voice, full of bitterness when he sang. Boss man. Oscar had shot a white man—boss man or policeman or stranger, Hosea had never known. The night he’d come to Rio Seco, looking for a place to stay, he’d put a bullet in a green eye. “He wasn’t gentlemanly with Lila,” Oscar had said, hoarse and breathless, wary-eyed with the brother he barely knew. Lila’s eye was fist-swollen, and blood had dried in a black swath like a sash along her dress.
Alma had nursed her, but Lila had held herself silent and distant. Now, Hosea thought, now that Sofelia had gone to her aunt first and sat mute in Alma’s bedroom, his wife wouldn’t speak to his brother’s wife. She said Lila was dealing secretly with white people about her land.
Shadow men. Hosea had told Marcus no one even knew he and Oscar lived here. They were invisible. He leaned against the tree, studying the hanging folds of creamy skin above his head. He’d never known if he’d killed the young guard, if the ax blow thudding as soft as wet burlap had split the skull or only knocked him out. All through the thicket, in the Texas creek beds where he’d crouched and slept on his haunches and killed birds for quick-charred flesh, where he’d shit and held his belly and cried and turned his hearing ear for dogs, he’d felt that blow in his wrist and hadn’t known.
Maybe the man’s kin had found where Hosea lived; maybe the voice Marcus had heard by the canal was paid by the kin. Maybe Hosea wasn’t a shadow now. The dark gold ponytail had flipped like a thin scarf onto the Jeep’s roof. No one but Thompsons and cops knew what Marcus had heard; Thompsons hadn’t told anyone, and the cops didn’t believe the damn story anyway. Texas. A ghost. Or the ghost’s child? Boss men? Sherberts? Drug addicts?
He heard bark loosen and fall, hollow against the eucalyptus leaves, and then he heard feet treading, cautious, inching over the shreds of dried tree skin. The steps paused, moved, paused again, and Hosea waited.
He saw no pale face. Nothing. Then a bulky black form appeared from behind a tree trunk, and when the shotgun leaped in Hosea’s hand, the boy’s eyes shone bright and he said, “Hey, uh—Grampa.”
Sofelia’s boy. Hosea’s blood felt thin, draining from his neck and back. “Where you suppose to be?” he said, his voice hurting him.
The boy looked at Finis’s trailer. “She give me the key.”
“Who?” The boy was silent, staring at the gun. “Your gramma?” The boy nodded. “Well, shit, you only what—fourteen? What the hell you doin walkin around?” The mouth still didn’t open, and Hosea turned to leave. “You shoulda been sleep. Stay wherever you suppose to stay, damnit.”
He walked along the fence near the olive grove, the shotgun too heavy in his arms. He knew the old gun. He wondered where all his sons were. Where was Finis? He’d taught them all to shoot, but he’d told them to fight with their fists. They’d never shot anything but food. “Shoot what you gon eat,” he’d said, over and over. And he’d only shot food, too.
Sofelia didn’t speak; her son didn’t speak. Why had they come here, come home, now? Was the boy trying to sell something on his land? Hosea frowned, staring at the cool slippage of canal beyond the wire.
Whoever came with hands holding matches and gasoline and guns, whoever floated onto his place for payback or money, he’d have to send metal cracking through those bones.
Mortrice kept the kit in the oversized pocket of his big jacket. Since his mother left the apartment that day, and his uncle Julius had come to tell him she was at the house in the trees, Mortrice had worried about where to keep the guns and the kit. The apartment was still empty, and he had a key, so he spent some time there with Chris and B-Real and another boy, Teddy, who said he wanted to be down with them. They watched TV in the dark apartment and looked at the guns. They’d been out in B-Real’s car several times, cruising down different streets and looking at graffiti.
Rio Seco was easier to figure out than L.A., Mortrice thought. It was smaller, and divided nice and clean. Treetown. The Westside, where Westside Loc Special thought they were the shit. Agua Dulce was Mexican guys. Hillgrove was where Zach lived—rough white dudes and bikers. Funkytown—his uncle Marcus. And farther up the hill, Moneytown.
Just like school, everybody had their uniforms. Their houses were like clothes. Everybody had territories and eyes looking out to watch and see who cruised through the lines.
He sat in the trailer now, alone, the .9 on the tiny table in front of him. He had to clean it, because Chris had taken it out and practiced shooting cans in the hills. Fool thought he didn’t have to take care of a gun. Mortrice had stared for a long time at the arrangement of stones and bottles and bones on the small Formica table. His grandmother—the word felt strange—she had said not to move anything. She said Finis was gone somewhere.
Mortrice counted rows of ten green stones. Ten clear rosy sharp ones. Ten shards of blue glass, and ten of a swirly purplish one. But the bones chilled him.
There was a hand laid out in the center of the table. Couldn’t be anything else, Mortrice knew. The tiny end fingerbones were as small as matches, and the longer ones, only three of them, were as straight as cigarettes. The hand was splayed in the center of the colors, chalky and glowing. Every time Mortrice thought about moving the bones, he saw Paco’s skull, the same color. Wasn’t nothin wrong with his fingers. Just his face.
He spread newspaper on the bed and broke down the .9, examining each part. He began to clean the barrel with the strong-smelling solvent in his kit, pushing the long-handled brush through the channel over and over.
Nobody had sweated them yet, not face to face, but somebody had shot at the Gardens parking lot three times this month. Chris said he and Teddy had been talking shit at school. But they didn’t know who wanted to shoot yet. Yet.
Mortrice swabbed out the solvent, pushing cotton cloth through the barrel several times. Then he lightly oiled each part.
All B-Real liked was the name. He’d sprayed it on the freeway overpass and all over the Gardens. But it was Mortrice’s idea. His name. He was the one.
AK-1. In L.A., you could read the graffiti like stories.
B$
ROLLIN 60S
K$
meant these Crips were Blood Killers and working for money.
W/S XVII P/V
meant Westside, the street number, and por vida. For life.
Anybody Killer. He’d written it on paper in the apartment, in the dark, before he’d shown it to anyone. No colors. Just black. No Crips. No Bloods.
TO
AK-1
TG
Olive Gardens. Original Gangster. That’s what Kenneth was. Now it was him.
He was 1. Chris wrote AK-2, B-Real AK-3, and Teddy AK-4.
“Look. You could see yourself up there,” he’d told them. “On the wall.” They stared at the black paint on the block walls around the complex. Every time we add a digit, we change the set name. Everybody somebody.
He heard light footsteps on the dirt outside the trailer, and he froze, pulling a sheet of newspaper over the disassembled gun and the kit. “Yo, man,” someone said at the window. “Mortrice.”
It was Kendrick. “What you want?” Mortrice said, holding the flimsy door partly open.
“Man, what you doin out here?” Kendrick said, his nostrils flaring. “You gettin high?”
“Shut up,” Mortrice said. “I ain’t gettin high.”
“I smell it,” Kendrick said, leaning into the space. “Smell like gasoline and glue and shit. What is it?”
“It ain’t nothin,” Mortrice said, angry. “I ain’t gettin high. Go back to your bedroom.“
Kendrick pulled his face back like a turtle. “I ain’t no baby,” he said, but when Mortrice closed the door, the footsteps eventually faded.
Mortrice carefully put the .9 back together. Chris had said, “I ain’t done nothin, man, all I did was shoot it.”
“Yeah,” Mortrice had said. “And every time you shoot, fool, you get gunpowder and residue and shit in there. You gotta take care a your piece. Or it ain’t gon take care a you.”
He slid the .9 under the pillow and lay back, staring at the curved, close ceiling. When he had to walk between the old house and the trailer, he felt as vulnerable as a roach, scuttling through all these damn trees, dangling branches like spiderwebs in his face. And then open space all around here, until he got to the trailer. The silver walls felt narrow and flimsy, like a spent shell casing.
This was his mother’s place, the land she’d whispered stories about. Home. All these leaves and hard faces and dirt. In the apartment, he was surrounded not just with the walls at his elbow to protect him, but the other rooms all around and then the walls around the parking lot. He thought again of their writing on the walls, as thin and slanted as chain link. AK-1.
Kendrick was a wannabe. He was only twelve. But he’d seen the apartment, and the other guys, and he wanted to be down. Mortrice thought about the special gun Teddy was making in the apartment. Teddy had learned how in juvenile placement, he’d said. He’d been taking apart a tape recorder and an ink pen when Mortrice left.
Teddy wanted money. He was always selling shit, stolen stuff. Mortrice had fifty dollars in his sock, fifty dollars his grandfather had given him yesterday.
The scary-looking old man, with his sandpaper voice and slanted cheeks, had surprised Mortrice when he’d slipped away from the house. Mortrice had been passing the small stone shed when the voice called him from the doorway. “Come over here, boy.”
Mortrice stared at the lifted-high chin and the half-closed eyes; the man sat on a wooden crate, but he seemed to be looking down at Mortrice. “You think you grown peoples?” Mortrice shrugged, thinking about that word. Peoples. My peoples. “You fourteen?”
Mortrice nodded.
“You my oldest grandson, I guess. Your mama ain’t well. You doin okay?” Mortrice had shrugged again. The old man reached into his pocket and pulled out five tens. “Here. You might need you some shoes or clothes. Some snacks. You can’t get you a paper job till you sixteen, but you want to work in the barn, Demetrius pay you.” The man nodded, dismissing him, and Mortrice had walked quickly on the path through the trees, the shifting dark that scared him. No stark edges or fences or cement to tell your way.
He closed his eyes, his hand partway under the pillow to touch the edge of the piece.
CHAPTER TEN
Each plate Marcus served was elaborately arranged with herbs or decorative leaves along the rim; the sauces pooled around the meat like brilliant suns, and the blue-corn tortillas were stacked like indigo moons.
Marcus tried everything Kurt cooked. He savored the carnitas and the four different salsas. But though he didn’t tell Kurt, since the entree had been one of the most popular at Chipotle Chile after Abby Smith mentioned it in her influential restaurant review, the olive tamales were never close to being as smoky or rich as his mother’s.
When he was doing something mindless like sorting silverware, he could hear the clattering oil in his mother’s pan; oil only sounded that comfortable in old cast iron on a hot stove, with people hanging around waiting for the spicy chorizo and slabs of red snapper in his mother’s kitchen, on a Friday night like this one, Aretha on the radio. He’d catch himself staring at the lovely plates, the broiled salmon with cilantro Kurt made because everyone loved the healthful oils. He would feel a pain behind his lungs when he paused at the counter, seeing the same blue-flowered plates his mother had gotten years ago from a rich Plymouth Hill woman. If the men ate outside, they got the tin plates or old speckleware, but those twelve dishes his mother washed carefully after each meal.
Marcus took his break outside, walking down the pedestrian mall in the warm evening light, his throat full with the tautness in his mother’s face when she’d slapped him, with Sofelia’s voice a flat ribbon winding hurt around the chair legs where he crouched.
On the old white stove, his mother and his abuela always made fish tacos. Fried food is bad for us, he thought and smiled to himself. But he remembered the fish man’s van coming down Pepper Avenue. Three dollars’ worth of red snapper turned into twenty or more tacos—the thin pink strips into fat golden commas, corn tortillas oiled and warm, Abuela’s sauce of tomato, onion, chiles, and vinegar. Not much food, but we fatten it up.
He wheeled around and walked back to the restaurant, passing all the outdoor tables along the walkway. He’d held himself rigid all last week at school, waiting for someone else to mention his thuggish guest appearance on TV. But Natalie Larchwood had only mentioned a special-needs student when she’d called him into the office yesterday, even though her eyes had studied him carefully and her fingers had constantly rearranged the flowers on her desk. Maybe everyone had forgotten the news after a day or two—like always.
Inside Chile, the noise was deafening, and Kurt signaled him. “Get some air?” Lakin called near the kitchen. “Cause there’s no breathing now.”
As long as he kept his mind on the bright patter and the work, he liked it. Bullshitting with Kurt and Javier and Lakin, and music, movies, particular customers. While he was dishing salsa into bowls or putting out tiny bouquets, he could still hang comfortable. Not like when he tried to work with his father or Demetrius, towing stalled cars or digging a trench. He’d always dropped gravel on someone’s back or caved in irrigation pipes. Here, he could listen to Kurt talk about Pauline Kael or Oprah, and he could take five orders for cerveza and chile rellenos.
He hadn’t been to his father’s place for days, and he didn’t know how to talk to his mother. He watched Kurt dicing green chiles, rocking the blade without looking up at Marcus, when Kurt brought up the ashes. “Bessier had a snake tattoo on his thigh; Ernesto said when the coroner saw it, the old man acted all disgusted and told faggot jokes.” Kurt paused, glancing up. “Hey, it’s not safe to make ethnic or racist jokes anymore, but faggot jokes are just fine with most people, right?”
“Hey, you know,” Marcus began, but Kurt bent his head again.
“I’m not talking about you. So after he was ashes, we didn’t have enough money for a plane or anything to scatter them. I kept thinking about the snake, about this guy’s life, so I took Javier and Ernesto up to the top of Diamondback. You know where that is, huh?”
Marcus nodded. “My brothers used to take me hunting up there.”
“Well, it’s a lot different now. We had a hard time even getting up there, because of all the development. Cottonwood Canyon Ranch stuff. Anyway, we hiked up the back trail and went over the top. I figured he could look down on the whole city, you know? There’s that spring up there, you know, the one that leaks down into a gully and makes an oasis?” Marcus nodded again. “We put his ashes in there, floated them down the little bit of water.”
“You didn’t see any rattlers?” Marcus asked.
Kurt only smiled. “We weren’t scared of snakes.”
After he finished stacking dishes and sweeping the floors at Chile, he sat in his apartment thinking of ashes. Pammy Sawicky and her friend were ashes, too. His father always swept the ashes from his little fireplace in the coldhouse and scattered them into the soil for his mother’s roses. Marcus’s head ached: Trying to sift all the images, he kept hearing his uncle’s phrase—shadow men. His father, his uncles, his brothers: no paper traces.
Bessier was a shadow man. Maybe that’s why Marcus kept seeing the face, the beauty some people hated enough to avoid even a glimpse.
Someone knocked hard on the door. Marcus blew out the candle he’d lit, calling, “Who is it?”
