All Involved (9 page)

“You set yourself up,
pequeña mosca
. Nobody to blame but you. You should've been shooting
mayates
if you wanted to shoot somebody.”

Right now, Scarlet's getting close, screaming like her pussy's about to explode. Out the corner of my eye, I see one of the shotgunners creep upstairs. Damn. That's some cold shit. She doesn't even know what's next.

Me, though, at least I see it coming. At least I know it's last words time. At least I get that respect.

“Tell my sister I love her. My brother too. And my mom. Tell them.”

“Sure,” the voice behind me says, “we'll get right to that.”

The shotgun goes off upstairs, just boom. It sounds like a fucking rocket hitting the house. Up there, Baseball screams and calls my name out. But before he says any more, there's another boom and it's all silence.

It's only like that for a second or two before the restart whistle from the basketball game cuts into me and I jolt as the crowd gets to their feet, cheering all loud in anticipation. When the whistle goes again, and the ball gets inbounded and some guy I never heard of chucks the ball up from way behind the three-point line, even the announcers hold their breaths.

Big and round and cold, I feel the shotgun barrel kiss on the back of my neck. I try saying a prayer. I try saying,
Our Father who art in heaven
and all that, I try saying,
hallowed be thy name,
but the right words get stuck down in my chest and I can't find them, so I just breathe out, letting go of all the air inside me as I close my eyes instead.

 

 

APRIL 30, 1992

8:14
A
.
M
.

Payasa's couch is from the 1970s, lumpy as fuck. I didn't get any kind of sleep from laying there all night, gripping a gun and listening to every car going by, certain each one is Joker's gang coming back on us—until it isn't, until it drives right by and then I worry about the next one.

The fingers on my right hand are all cramped up, so I shake them out as I squint at yellow light coming through the tops of the front windows, up and over old striped curtains. It's morning. I know that.

I couldn't've been down for more than a few hours cuz Payasa had to go see her mama after, just to tell her what happened with Ernesto and how she did justice to the ones that did it, but what came next was ugly. Like,
Exorcist
ugly. Pitching, crying, screaming. Names of saints getting called out. Payasita getting big blame, but Lil Mosco getting more. We only left when her auntie came over—the one who can't talk cuz she bit her tongue clean through as a little girl when a horse kicked her in Mexico—and she started making
pozole
at whatever o'clock in the morning.

On the ride home I drive us back by Ernesto to see if the coroners scooped him up yet and they hadn't. Guess the city was too busy being on fire cuz his body was still there in the alley with his sister's striped black-and-white flannel covering his face like them
sad flags that get draped over soldiers' coffins. If that shit doesn't drill a hole in your stomach, then nothing will, homes.

I hear the fridge door open and close, then Clever sliding around the kitchen in his house shoes cuz he's too lazy to pick his feet up. He's hungry, but he'll never get more than juice for himself. He'll wait for me to cook before he eats anything. Eggs, maybe, even though we only got four.
Papas
. We got no bacon left. No tomatoes neither. There's still some
chorizo,
but it's cold. Didn't end up eating any of it on account of last night.

Payasa's door is closed. She's still in there with Lorraine. They've been quiet all night. Cemetery quiet, I call it. I got to know if she's okay, but I don't look forward to her maybe finding out about some shit I did, shit that's been eating at me so much it's bubbling up.

And it burns kind of, and I don't want to think about it right now if I don't have to, so I walk over to the TV and slap it on, dial down the volume, and retreat back to the couch, expecting the same as every other half-wise gangster in L.A., you know? Straight law and order.

Like, cops out in full force with their vests on, locking shit down. Sheriffs throwing shackles on fools, and slamming them into caged backseats so they can haul their asses off to process. Statements. Fingerprints. Photos. Jail. You know, just a bunch of thuggish motherfuckers in uniform running a big-ass net along the streets and scooping up the
idiotas,
the drunk ones, the drugged-up ones—the ones that stayed way too late at the party and now gotta pay for what everybody else did.

But when the screen hums on and the crispy tube static fades, a picture forms from all those blobby colors getting mashed together. A picture forms when they sharpen into shapes. Into city blocks. Into running people. Into running people
carrying
shit. And I don't see what I'm expecting. Not even close. I see the exact fucking opposite.

And I blink to make sure I'm actually seeing it jump off in Compton, where all kinds of shit is laying out in the street. Everything looking like a tornado hit it. Clothes, toilet paper, smashed TVs, drink cans, some shit that looks like cotton candy blowing
around but can't be. No way. There's busted glass everywhere, on sidewalks, over curbs, and into the street, looking like shiny confetti you never wanna touch.

And fires. Shit. There's fires in garbage cans. Fires in minimarkets. Fires in fucking
gas
stations, man! There's fires on top of fires, and they're spiraling into the sky like they're holding it up. Table legs, I call it. That's what the smoke looks like.

The news switches to a camera on a helicopter, and the sky—man, the sky isn't even blue or that halfway kind of gray we get on the worst smog days. It looks like wet concrete. A gray so dark it's almost black. It looks heavy as fuck.

That's when it hits me I'm staring at a war zone. In South Central.

It's like somebody packed up all the shit I been seeing in Lebanon almost my whole life, put it in a box, shipped it over, and opened up that chaos in my backyard. It's some Gaza Strip shit.
La neta,
homes.

And this whole entire scene says the same to me as it says to every other knucklehead who ever thought bad thoughts across this whole city: now's your fucking day, homie.
Felicidades,
you won the lottery!

Go out there and get wild, it says. Come and take what you can, it says. If you're bad enough, if you're strong enough, come out and take it. Devil's night in broad daylight, I call it.

Cuz the world we live in's completely flipped now. Up's down. Down's up. Bad is fucking
good
. And badges don't mean shit. Cuz cops don't get to own the city today.
We
do.

I feel, like, a jolt of electricity go up and down my neck and I can't pick the phone up fast enough. I page five, six homeboys to get their asses over here as quick as my stiff-ass fingers can dial. I go through numbers from memory until I hit about twelve and then stop cuz I know they'll spread the word how it needs to be spread. We need wheels. We need to roll deep. Already right now it looks like we're behind.

Step one is to jump shit off in Lynwood. You know, get it chaotic like how it's jumping off in Compton cuz that'll spread cops out thinner than they already are. I'm planning shit in my head then.
Places to hit. Shit to gather. Where to hide it. I pick up the phone again and page Lil Creeper.

If ever there was a day made for that fucking
cucaracha,
it's this one. He was put on this earth for ripping and running and stuffing dope in himself and nothing else. Even wasted, even half asleep,
nobody
gets locks off like he gets locks off. Shit might as well be aluminum foil in his hands. Nobody else can look at an iron gate and, in two seconds, figure out how to bust it or get it open like he can.

When the phone beeps for me to key my number in, I do. And I leave my usual code at the end so he knows to call back quick cuz it's serious, and if he doesn't, well, that's when bad shit happens. That's when a homie gets sent to pick his ass up.

Clever scrapes into the living room then, sipping at his juice from one of them Dick Tracy plastic cups you get for eating at McDonald's. He puts his eyes on the screen and stops dead as I hang the phone up in its cradle.

We both watch a pharmacy on Vermont get torn the fuck up while some news dude on the corner just goes on about how this shit doesn't have anything to do with Rodney King, or the verdict, and how it's about poor people with no morals getting an opportunity to do bad and how he can't believe they're taking it. And I'm like,
really?

But he still goes on about how this isn't his America, the one he knows and loves and believes in. I have to chuckle at that ignorant, been-living-so-long-in-the-burbs-he-doesn't-even-know-what-the-fuck's-real-anymore shit, cuz that's when Clever cracks up and says what I been thinking in my head the whole time.

“Welcome to
my
America,
cabrón
.”

Fate's not so common a name, not in Spanish. I never heard of anybody else with it. I get asked where it's from sometimes, how'd I get named that, but I never say it's cuz I caught a bullet when I was
twenty, and I'm not gonna tell you who shot it or from what click cuz I didn't tell the sheriffs that neither when they asked. It was a big fucking caliber though, and something must've been defective with the bullet or casing cuz even from twenty feet away, it didn't go all the way through me. It stuck.

Didn't go more than an inch deep, but I bled on my neighbor Mrs. Rubio's front walk like you wouldn't believe. All's I remember from that besides the ambulance ride with the fucking sloppy EMT who couldn't find my veins for shit is the
abuela
herself coming up all calm and sitting Indian style next to me, fanning her blue dress out and putting my hand on top of it, on the lace fabric in her lap, as she talked about how I had
una
fate
grande
and I'd live. Right then, I thought she was saying it wasn't my fate to die, but when she said it again, I heard it right.
Una fe grande
. She wasn't talking about fate at all, but a big faith instead. It was too late though, my brain had caught the word
fate
and liked the sound of it, and I promised myself that if I lived, that'd be my name.

I never told Payasa the whole story and I can't think why now. She knows about the bullet, sure, and she knows an
abuela
was there, but not that the granny gave me that name, even by accident. I guess sometimes if you spend enough time with people, you don't question them, not where they come from, not where they got their name, or how. It just is. It's just accepted. But I kind of want to tell her now.

Payasa asked me a long time ago if I'm sorry sometimes for what I done. I told her no then, but it's yes. For sure it's a yes. I don't regret anything though. Me, I'm a soldier. I always went where I was needed and I was always down.
Always
. Even as a lil homie, when circles got called out in the dead end by the park, older homeboys passed me up every time cuz they knew I was down. Nobody's ever had to call my ass out. Not even once.

“You're cool,” they'd say, or, “This fucking homeboy's down,” and then they'd use my ass as an example to the other lil homies on how to be. That always felt good.

Right now, there's people here in the living room that need
telling what to do. I count 15 out of our 116—and that's not even including the lil homies outside trying to be down and earn their stripes. I look at them, all the faces in this room, and I think, this is why I do what I do. For them.
La Clica
.
Mi Familia
. All of it for them. They're why I had to give Lil Mosco up.

Yeah, that shit's true. I did it. Payasa won't never hear it from me, cuz what's there to say about it? But the truth's the truth. And I'm sorry, for real, but I don't regret that shit neither.

But right now though, I do wish she could jump inside my head and read my mind, see through my eyes, and understand, like, in an instant, the decision I had to make when the big homies came to me and sat me down and said Lil Mosco's name was in the fucking hat. The green light was on, they said, and I had to choose: either one knucklehead that keeps fucking up, or the whole entire crew. That was that, you know? You can't argue with them, or tell them how they're wrong. He had to go. You take that shit on the chin like a boxer that knows he's got to take a fucking dive.

If I didn't send Lil Mosco to Riverside, it would've been open season on us. All of us. Everywhere. All the time. That shit's a fact. And 1 was not equal to, or greater than, 116 last I checked. Even I know that and I quit school halfway through eighth grade.

But Joker and them getting Ernesto in the same day? That shit tore me
up
.

It was the worst possible timing there ever was, and when that Serrato kid came to the door at first, I almost spilled to Payasa cuz I thought the kid was talking about Lil Mosco and I was tripping on how that could even be possible and it didn't hit me till a few seconds later that it wasn't! It hit me like a sucker punch is what it did, that it was Ernie laying dead for no good reason. And when I knew that, I knew I should've given up Lil Mosco sooner and that burned in me. I also knew I had to do whatever I could to let Payasa do what she had to do. I let her overstep some bounds to do some shit I never would've let no
chola
do cuz that was some vengeance shit and it was righteous.

But Lil Mosco? Shit. I
had
to give him up. Payasa knew better than anyone how he had a bad head on his shoulders. Which was why I gave so many rules, you know? Number one, don't do no fucking drugs. Number two, drive the speed limit, fool. And third, and most especially, don't take nobody with you. Had to make sure it was only him he dragged into it. And I even gave him my car to do the drive in.

Lil Mosco threw himself in that hat. That's just a fact. And I had to make sure we didn't end up in it too. Cuz it wasn't just us. It was our families. The big homies could do it if they wanted to. They've done it before. There's no going against that. It wasn't ever a real choice. It was a no-brainer. Like, think about how it would've gone if a big homie showed up at Payasa's mom's new house, rang the bell, and put a gun to the peephole when he saw the light behind it get blocked by her head? Shit. Makes me sick just thinking about it.

There's another rule I got, one body is not worth everybody. No matter what.

If Payasa would've come out her door before, maybe I could've pulled her aside before the homies came through and made her see the sense to it.

But Ernesto happening? I got no words for that shit. Nobody saw that coming, but that's this crazy life. It comes at you how it wants to, whether you're ready or not, and sometimes it takes what it shouldn't. Sometimes, that's the only thing you can count on it doing—taking.

Her door's still closed. She doesn't even say shit when I knock, so I'm just looking down at every gun in the house sitting in a pile on the coffee table in front of the couch. There's twenty. It's not enough if we're gonna protect ourselves from whatever Joker's big brother ends up coming back with.