All Involved (28 page)

“Flip over,” she also says, so I do.

I'm on my back, looking straight up at the ceiling, and she's got the sole of her right foot in my left armpit. She's slowly pulling my bad shoulder toward her. I feel the stretch go all the way down my spine and into my right hip. It burns a little.

“I can't leave Fate,” I say. “Not ever. He needs me.”

“But what if something goes wrong? Not everybody's as smart as you, baby. What if somebody did something that pointed back at you, or even snitched? What if you got locked up?”

I think of Apache. He may not be the smartest, but he does what he's told and he always comes through. I think of how his only job is to drive the truck to an underpass and burn it. For a second though, Irene's words get to me, and I'm scared he might fail, and if he does, what will happen to us.

“All I'm saying is, you've put your time in,” Irene says. “You know you can't be banging forever, right? You're going to have a degree soon. You could get a job. You can
maybe
even have a family someday.”

I say, “I could never do law enforcement. Hell no.”

“It doesn't have to be that. Just
think
about it,” she says. “It's like tutoring, right? I'm not telling you what to do, just asking you to think and work it out for yourself.”

“Are you saying get out like how my father got out?” I don't realize how mad I sound about it until I've said it. “Leave his wife and kid and move away? Start a new family someplace else?”

Irene's quiet for a second, but her hands don't stop. I can tell she's thinking about conversations we've had, the details of them. How I don't like talking about my mom going crazy into drugs after my dad left when I wasn't even two years old. How I don't remember
what his face looks like because Mom burned all the damn photos in a rage, but the second she found out he was living in Lynwood or Compton somewhere, she borrowed money from her parents and moved us here, making me the new kid in a place where that wasn't an easy thing to carry, and how that meant I got beat the fuck up most days until Ernesto took big brother pity on me and started making sure I walked to school with the Veras, and how my mom was so deep into the hole she dug with her drugs that she never even bothered to search for my father, just tried to numb the pain every day.
All
that. And still, Irene's hands never stop.

“You are not your father.” She says it like the conversation is over now. Over for good. Her words come out tough, like she'd fight me if I disagreed.

I groan then, but not about what she's saying. I'm actually groaning because Irene's pulling harder than she ever pulled before, and the stretch feels like it might pull my tailbone out. She knows I've been all involved for a long time, but she doesn't know any specifics and I'll never tell her. It doesn't do to be pillow talking. In fact, the only time she ever sees Fate and anybody else is if it's for food, if we're barbecuing or something, and nobody talks business then, we just eat.

It goes on like this. She pushes. She pulls. She puts her hundred-and-twenty-some pounds of weight into stretching me. It hurts, if you want to know the truth. She says that I'm in charge of my life. It's my choice. Her dad never got one, and my dad went too far, but I can do whatever
I
want. It's tough sometimes how she talks like this. She doesn't know everything I've done. She has no idea about the big picture. She comes from a good family. I don't.

I was just an angry little latchkey kid getting in fights to prove how tough I was, how much I didn't care I was alone. The only reason I'm something else now all started with Fate, and what Irene doesn't understand is that this game started a long time ago for me. There's no standing up now, no walking away from the table. I got dealt my hand when I got my name, got Clever. And sure, guys have
gotten out before. They've moved out of the neighborhood and had kids, but that was before Joker, Trouble, and Momo got wiped out. There's no other game in Lynwood now, just us and some Crips, but we're good with them. We have an understanding. And I don't know much about cards, but I know you've got to play what you're dealt.

Sometimes, though, it's like Irene's hands won't take no for an answer. She has the strongest grip of anyone I've ever met. The more they work, the more she's telling me that I'm still Robert, too, that I'm him and Clever both. And maybe that's the problem now, because I'm starting to open up to the idea that maybe life can be different for me. I blame school for that. I blame her, too. Still, she stretches and she pulls, she makes me see the good, and somewhere along the way, I grow. It's always been this way for us. It's how I got my GED. It's how I got into Southwest. It might even be how I do something else someday. If I did, I think it'd be the only way. And after all the bad things I've done, I'm not so sure my life deserves a happy ending, but Irene always wants to give me one, by push or by pull.

MAY 2, 1992

1:22
A.M.

A good thing about reputation is you only have to do something once, and have someone see it, for word to spread. I did scalp somebody, but it's not as bad as people think. I mean, that fool was already dead first, cuz I only did it after I put a .22 up his nose and pulled the trigger.

It was good except for it burned all the hairs out of his left nostril, the blast did. The rest of it, like where the bullet went from there and how it fixed him up, was almost instant, really, cuz it was a low enough caliber to stay in his skull and not exit out. It just scrambled his brains like some eggs, so he didn't suffer or nothing. It was quick.

It was the third thing I ever did for Fate, yeah, maybe four years ago, in the summer. This Blaxican, that's half-black, half-Mexican, guy from the neighborhood, went by Millionaire, had been stealing from the click, fucking up the Mini Vegas money, and thinking nobody was noticing. See, Wizard didn't always run the casino house. First it was Millionaire. It was his original idea. But it later turned out he was doing what he was doing cuz he had these two girls he liked to buy presents for a lot. He liked to take them to the mall in Baldwin Hills and go shopping. So if you couldn't tell from the name, he wanted everyone to think he was big, but he wasn't anybody. We used to call him Hundredaire to his face. I remember he was always worried about his appearance too. When word got
around from one of his exes that Millionaire was one of them Hair Club for Men guys cuz even though he was young he was losing his hair and trying to do something about it, I knew what I had to do. So one day he comes back to his apartment and I'm already in there with my cousin, Cricket (RIP), and I'm there with Clever, cuz we did up the lock, and they're there watching when I pull back the shower curtain and ask Millionaire all polite to get in the tub so I can do what I got to, and he does, and I do, so that's good. I didn't tell anybody I was gonna scalp him though. I just told Cricket and Clever that I had my knife on me and it was one of them spur-of-the-moment-type things, but really that wasn't true. I'd premeditated it. It ended up working out though cuz it made me known. It made me feared, too, cuz no one but Cricket and Clever knew I scalped him after, not before. Nobody else knows that, though. People been making up all kinds of stories about that day. It was Clever that came up with the name Apache for me though. I've been known that way ever since.

I tell you that story just so you know I'm not under any delusions. I know I'm the brave, not the chief. I do what I'm told. I have a role and I do it. Like now.

The O.G. turning this city truck right onto Wright Road from MLK is named Sinatra. I don't know why he goes by that. He's old as hell, maybe forty, forty-five, and he's smoking a cigar with the label still on it like a little yellow ring. It's one of them thin ones, a
cigarillo,
which is cool cuz it suits him, you know?

He's thin all over, not like Clever's toothpick ass, different. This Sinatra, he's skinny sick. Yeah. He's got big eyes. One of them's green and one of them's brown, and they're out of proportion to his nose. He's got a little stubble-beard made up of sharp lines, too, almost like calligraphy. It's thin on his face, patchy, and right before it gets to the tops of his ears, it dies out completely. It doesn't even connect up to his hairline.

In my head, I'm memorizing him to draw later. A number 2 pencil for the sketch and then maybe I'd layer black ballpoint on top
before I erase the pencil out and it's just ink that's left, except for little marks where I pressed with the pencil. Sometimes I like how you can still see those if you look close.

The bag of clothes Clever wants me to burn with everything else sits cherry between Sinatra and me. I've got my arm up on it, mushing the top down so I can keep an eye on my driver.

“I got something on my face?” Sinatra doesn't turn to look at me. He stares straight ahead.

“No,” I say, “I'm just glad it's not me driving. I've never driven nothing this big. I mean, how do you even see everything with these mirrors all weird like this?”

The side mirrors are like double-deckers, one on top of the other. The top one's rounded and sticks out and I can see more out of it but it's all warped. The bottom one is flat and it just lets me see straight back but I can't see as much. In both of them, Payasa's driving my car behind us at a good little distance.

“You get used to it,” Sinatra says.

Him and a guy called Bluebird jacked this truck on Wednesday from a city worker in Florence about a half hour after the riot started. I guess the worker was out on a job and listening to a Hall & Oates tape instead of the radio so he didn't know about what was happening in the streets. He was still out trying to do his job when Sinatra and Bluebird stuck him up at gunpoint and hauled him out of the truck. They snatched his vest, kicked him in the teeth, and took off. Sinatra came through before my time, before Fate's too, I think. He don't really do much anymore, but with things being crazy how they are, opportunity brings people together.

There's hardly any cars on Wright Road besides us, just one going the other way and then nothing but a bum walking the wrong way on the other side of the road. There's nothing on Wright worth protecting, not malls or anything, so Clever figured there wouldn't be any Vikings, or Guards, or anyone else around.

When we come up on Cortland, I go in my pockets and bring out the matches Clever gave me. Six different packs just in case.
This area always makes me think of Millionaire. I left his scalp in the sink for one of his ladies to find, but I dumped his body not far from here, in a place everybody calls Lil Texas that's just off Cortland in the abandoned warehouses. But right now, for this, not even Lil Texas is big enough. Clever says we need to burn everything, and the only way to make sure a burn has time to do what it needs to do is park it under an underpass so no one can see the smoke until it's too late, he says. And from where we are, I can see the 105 right now.

I think about Lil Creeper for a second, cuz we always used to smoke out and talk about driving up on top of it before it was done, just to be the first, you know? Just to take its virginity and see what it looked like when it was only us up there, only our view. Yeah. Don't get me wrong, that fool is crazy, but he's funny sometimes, just the kind of person you should go on top of an unfinished freeway with.

We're almost to where Clever wants us, and Sinatra's easing the truck under the bridge and onto this little strip of shoulder left under the scaffolding that looks like the skeleton of an animal made out of wood, kind of, like we're going into its mouth.

I had a cat once. I called her Teeny cuz she was so small when I got her. I drew her a lot over the years as she grew up too. I have a whole book of sketches in it with just her. Orange tabby, good muscles. She could jump real high. Green eyes like wet stones too. Chirpy little voice. Sweetest cat you ever seen. I called her cat-dog sometimes cuz she'd even play fetch with me. She liked to chase squished-up balls of aluminum foil cuz of the sound they made, and when I'd throw them, she'd bring them back to me. She used to like biting them too. Well, one day, halfway through one of these fetch sessions, she starts coughing up blood and all meowing like she's dying. Took me over an hour to get her in to see the vet and get her looked at, only to be told nothing could be done cuz she'd chewed up a bunch of tinfoil and it'd cut her up inside, and the whole way to the animal hospital she had cried and fitted and spat up blood before the vet put a shot in her. That was nice of the vet,
you know? Teeny didn't have to suffer. Nothing deserves that. She died quiet in my arms, eyes closed, like she was sleeping. How it should've been.

I hate seeing things suffer. Not anything. If a thing needs to get done, okay, that's business, but it don't need to be long and drawn out or nothing. Take that guy in Payasa's front yard. Ranger plugs him in the neck, okay, that needs to get done and he got shot from far away so I'm not mad, but now this guy's there on the ground and he's suffering. Nobody needs to see him die like a fish out of water in front of us, all flapping around with his gills open. It just needed to be over, so I stepped up. Swift is mercy. I don't know where I heard that, maybe from Clever, but I like it. For me, it fits. Bad things happen, they do, but when they do, they can be quick every time and it's better for everybody.

See, that's why when Sinatra turns the keys and the truck shudders off and he leans over to eject that tape from the stereo halfways through some song about crime paying, I put the barrel of my gun to his temple and pull the trigger.

There's a bang so loud in the cab that it makes my ears ring and behind his head the door goes red and gets a hole in it. Sinatra flops a little after that but it's just nerve reactions. He's all gone.

I open my door and step out of the truck and trade Payasa two packs of matches for a big bottle of the cheapest vodka on earth. I uncap it and pour it over the whole inside of the truck, just throwing it everywhere, mostly over the dash and wheel and carpet where the
cigarillo
rolled and it kicks up, but definitely I throw it on Sinatra too, on his thin beard and now I know for sure how I'm going to draw it. A black felt-tip, with no undersketch. Short, quick strokes.

It needed to be done, Fate said. Sinatra's face has been getting seen all over the city. These trucks have numbers. They're registered, and at some point, this truck's getting reported stolen if it hasn't been already, and at some point they're going to come looking for it when everything gets cool enough to actually care about things like trucks instead of riots, and the guy Sinatra jacked it from
will know him cuz he didn't wear a mask and that's not good for us cuz Sinatra knows us and what we did tonight. There's something else too though, and it's that word has gotten around about Sinatra, how he got careless in some roughhousing with his ex-wife on Thursday night. He shot her in the back but she lived. She's over at St. Francis now. He might not have known we knew, but we did. We hear everything and we act when we need to. The law would've been coming for him eventually, and we just needed to make sure he had nothing to trade when they got him. Sinatra needed to go, so he went.

Since the floorboards are already going pretty good, I light a match and toss it quick to the seat. The black plastic of the clothes bag flames up and shrinks back in the heat. I roll the window down a few inches so the fire can get good air, close the door, and hike myself up so I can see over the lip of the truck bed where Payasa's got a fire going. I toss my gun in, my gloves, and another lit match just in case before I hop down with my hands in fists, careful not to touch anything with my fingers. Then we get in my Cutlass, me behind the wheel this time, and I flip a U-turn and point us back toward MLK and I park by the side of the road and we watch the truck burn in my rearview.

When I was coming up, one of my jobs was to be lookout for the
veteranos
when they burned stolen cars. They'd make me stay till the engine blocks dropped out mostly, but if we could get away with it, if nobody was coming, we'd stay till they blew. Cars never blow up how they do in movies. I mean, maybe that would happen if you threw something down in the gas tank, but if you're just lighting the interior, you're going to be waiting awhile. I think it was pretty much about fifteen minutes every time for the fire to touch the fuel and pop off, and the size of the explosion always depends on how much gas is left in there. I didn't see how much was left in the city truck.

Even with things as they are, it's not smart for me and Payasa to stay that long. I mean, Clever's got people hitting Wards, and he's
got emergency calls all over, but he only told us to wait until the fireworks go off.

I study the shapes of the flames until then. Flickers, I guess you could call them. Yeah. I watch the orange climb up the metal construction lights like living vines or something. The cab windows pop first, spraying glass everywhere. Right after, the horn starts going nonstop, and then, when it gets hot enough, the glass and bulbs of the construction lights smash out. By then, the fire's kicking up black smoke on the underside of the bridge, and the concrete stays black, like it's being painted with soot almost.

Payasa says, “So when do we—?”

Bang!
We hear another one right after that, all loud too, and that's when I put us in gear and push the gas pedal down nice and easy and as we pull out of there, it sounds like a couple more fireworks go off in the truck behind us, two more blasts and two faint dings in the truck bed cuz the fire's so hot now it's setting off the extra bullets in the guns, the ones left over from before.

My car smells like raw meat still, and we haven't even cooked it all yet. The little homies Fate had clean the trunk out didn't do such a good job. Three hours they worked on it for, and there's no stains on the spare or anything, but the carpet's all discolored back there and I'm starting to think like it'll never be clean, like I might always smell rotten hamburger meat. That's when I decide I need a new car. It's time to sell this to some fool who don't know no better. That don't fix anything now, though, so I roll my window down halfway to bring some of the night air in.

Payasa turns to me and says, “Got any sherm?”

Sherm's the same shit Fate said to lay off tonight. I do have some though. I just haven't used it.

“Fate said no more,” I say.

“Yeah, but he said before, not
after
.”

“It's not good after,” I say, “only before.”

She gets to staring off into the distance for a minute. I never really fucked with watercolors before, but seeing how the night sky looks kind of wet even when it's not, I want to try, cuz the way that black is all soft around Payasa's face and the way yellows from streetlamps hit her nose in profile, it's real nice. She's pretty, you know? And I don't say that in like a sex way, but in like a she's-my-little-sister way, and seeing as how she don't have any more big brothers left, we're just gonna have to be that for her now. Me, and Fate, and Clever, and everybody.