Hailey's War (19 page)

“These guys are serious,” I said. “I told Serena and I'll tell you, this isn't going to be a walk in the park.” Did that sound too authoritarian? I went on: “But I can't do it without the kind of backup that you can provide, guys who can shoot and don't scare easy.”

“That's us,” Payaso said, and his guys murmured agreement.

He stubbed out his cigarette. “All right, Insula, me and my homeboys are in. Whatever you need. Those guys are gonna learn they can't mess with a Mexican girl like that.”

The guys around him nodded.

Payaso added, “But I'm gonna need to know what you're planning, though, the details of it.”

I shrugged wryly. “As soon as I plan it,” I said, “you'll be the first to know.”

He stood up, and we shook hands, formally.

Then he looked at Serena. “Warchild,” he said, “there's a car out in the driveway, a blue Volkswagen. Go drive it to Chato, to his shop.”

The car turned out to be a rather nice Passat with leather seats and a high-
end sound system. Somebody out there was missing this car in a way insurance didn't make up for.

“You don't have to go with me,” Serena told me. “I can just take you home.”

“It's okay,” I said. “I'll go with you.”

“You want to drive, then?” she asked, abruptly reversing position. “I'm getting a headache.”

I'd worried about being dragged into sucia business, and here I was, volunteering for it. I didn't know exactly why, except that I'd felt bad for Serena, back in the house. I was used to seeing her among her
sucias, the undisputed leader; I wasn't used to seeing her take orders. I'd known gang life was hierarchical, but I'd felt a twinge of distaste nonetheless.

I navigated her darkened neighborhood, then up onto the freeway. While I was merging into traffic, Serena flipped on the Passat's sound system. There was a CD in the drive, but I didn't notice the music until Serena said, “What the fuck are we listening to?” Alerted, I listened, and in a second recognized the song coming from the speakers: vintage Simon and Garfunkel, the lilting strains of “Feelin' Groovy.”

Without waiting for an answer, Serena jabbed at the controls, replacing acoustic music with rap. “Who listens to that shit?” she said, lower-voiced but still irritable.

I didn't answer. It would be easy to dismiss Serena's outburst as ghetto monoculturalism, like a child rejecting a food she's never really tried, but I knew her better than that. What she was really saying about the song's easy, happy lyrics was not
Who listens to this?
but
Who lives like this? Who feels this way?
She didn't. Nobody she knew did.

After a moment, she spoke again. “You know what really bothers me?”

“What?”

“Payaso and his guys,” she said. “I knew they weren't going to sign on to this for your sake, but they're not even doing it for me. They're doing it for her, Nidia, and they don't even know her. It's what she represents to them. The nice girl from the block, the sweet little
virgen.”

“But she isn't, not anymore,” I pointed out. “She's pregnant, for God's sake.”

“Yeah, now she's the madonna, or she might as well be,” Serena said. I understood what she was saying. In the world Trece's guys lived in, there were nice girls, and then there were girls who let themselves be passed around. There really wasn't much in between. Someone like Nidia, who had slept with only one man, apparently for love—that was nearly as good as still being a virgin.

“It's messed up,” Serena said. “I've done more for them than a girl
like that ever will. I've lied to the cops and hidden their guns for them. And still, they wouldn't go to all this trouble for me. But they're doing it for
her.”
She was just getting started. “Some little mousie, some little vic who thought that because she prays all the time that God was going to stop the traffic whenever she had to cross the street.” She repeated, “It's messed up.”

I said, “I wish you'd gotten in touch with this resentment a lot earlier. If you'd never asked me to take her to Mexico, I wouldn't have gotten shot.”

Serena gave me such a sharp look that I nearly swerved the car.

“Kidding,” I said hastily.

She shook her head. “That's why I'm doing this,” she said. “I mean it, I'm doing this for
you
, Insula. Because you got shot, and that shit's got to get paid for. It's not about her.”

“Okay,” I said. “Relax, I believe you.”

Late that night, I was in bed with Serena, staring up into the dark, waiting to
sleep.

A lot of people wouldn't have understood it, two adult women sharing a bed. But now I understood what Serena told me when I'd seen two of her sucias sleeping close together: Sleep was the most vulnerable time, and there was safety and comfort in numbers. My borrowed SIG was on the nightstand. Serena's Tec-9 was under the bed.

I knew she was straight, but I really couldn't have told you what Serena did for sex. During her adolescent years, when she'd shaved her head to run with Trece, she'd had to put away her sexuality for later, like female soldiers pack away dresses. Later, when she became the leader of the sucias, Serena had celebrated her new power by growing out her hair. But if she'd reclaimed her femininity, sex was still full of danger. An alliance with Payaso or any of the Trece homeboys, no matter how consensual, would have cost her dearly in respect. Gangbangers commonly referred to a girl “sexing” a guy. It was a term whose closest analog was
servicing
.

As for a boyfriend outside the gang culture, well, it wasn't like UCLA grad students in Chicano Studies were going to come by her house with flowers. Serena was a victim of the ways she'd exceeded the limitations around her. I thought of her as a
chola
in the truest sense of the word: someone who lived between two worlds.

“The girls were riding your bicycle a couple of days ago,” Serena said. She meant the one I'd taken from the charity donations center, not the Motobecane, which was still in San Francisco.

“Risky tipped it over. They were all cracking up,” she said. “It's funny to see them acting like kids.”

“Kids,” I repeated.

When we'd come in, I'd overheard Trippy talking to several of the homegirls. She'd seemed high—not pharmacologically, but on adrenaline—and I'd soon gotten the drift of what she was talking about. She was bragging about running into a girl from a rival
cliqua
, “some nothing hoodrat,” and beating her until she'd cried and begged for it to stop. Trippy hadn't said that the girl's only crime had probably been being from the wrong neighborhood or flirting with the wrong guy, but that went without saying.

I rolled over onto my stomach and rested my head on my crossed arms. I didn't like Trippy and wouldn't have even if we hadn't had our dustup the last time I'd been staying here. I thought Serena had made a lousy choice in lieutenants, but that was an opinion I was going to keep to myself. I knew what Serena would tell me. She'd say that my kind of ethics were a luxury, that nice girls were eaten alive in her neighborhood, that Trippy and girls like her didn't get to go east to war school and learn the rules of engagement.

I changed the subject: “Listen, Serena, speaking of bikes and all, I can't keep doing what I'm doing on city buses and whatever. God knows, when we find Nidia, we're going to need a car to take her away in.”

“You know Chato's always got a couple of cars,” she said.

“Too dangerous,” I said. “I'm not going to use this car for an hour or two and dump it. I'll need it long-term, and sooner or later, some patrolling cop or meter reader will run the plate. I can't afford to get arrested for driving a stolen car.”

She said, “We've probably got a legit car around here you could use.”

“True,” I said, “but I'm thinking of something specific. I don't know if I can outrun Skouras's guys if it came to a chase, but I don't want to be in a four-banger, just in case. It's got to carry a couple of soldiers and, eventually, a pregnant girl, and reasonably comfortably.
It needs to be plain enough that I can do surveillance in it. And it can't be a speeding-ticket magnet for cops or a theft magnet for—”

“People like me?” Serena said archly. “So what you really need, then, is money.”

“Yeah,” I said. “This mission is gonna run up expenses that go beyond just the car.”

“We can help; I told you that,” she said. “Trece's got some
plata.”

“Not that much,” I said. “You guys are living proof that crime barely pays.”

“So what's your idea?” Serena said. “Gonna go to Bank of America? That's a loan program we could use around here. ‘Whether you're starting a small business or starting a gang war, BofA is here to help.'”

I rolled over again, looking up speculatively at the ceiling. “That's not exactly what I have in mind.”

LAX has a great energy: the constant flow of people whose lives are in motion
, and, of course, the diversity. It's hard to think of anywhere else you see such a racial and economic mix of people. It's like a gigantic jury pool.

It was also a useful place for me to meet someone: accessible by public transportation and crowded enough for me to blend in. You'd think I'd chosen it as a place of meeting. I hadn't. Nonetheless, around four in the afternoon, I was sitting in a bar off a main concourse, people-watching, with an ice-choked Pepsi in front of me. I'd been there about fifteen minutes when I saw him: CJ, half a head taller than the people around him, wearing tight, wash-faded cords and a T-shirt with the classic picture of Che Guevara over the legend
I Have No Idea Who This Is
. He was carrying no bag, just his Dobro guitar in its case, and a small box wrapped in paper from the Sunday comics and a red self-adhesive bow, the artless way men wrap a birthday present. It had been CJ who chose our meeting place. His flight to New York left in fifty-five minutes.

“I like your shirt,” I said, by way of greeting.

CJ said, “Funny, I was just about to say I liked yours. I think it's a healthy step in you moving on from your relationship with the Army.”

Serena had loaned me a few things, but I was getting fond of the Navy T-shirt, which was why I was wearing it.

He set down his guitar. “I don't feel really great about you being in L.A. like this,” he said, sliding onto the opposite stool.

“This isn't even L.A.,” I said. “And I'm pretty sure someone like Marsellus travels by private plane.”

“People think someone like me travels by private plane,” CJ said, “yet here I am.”

I said, “I doubt you're even going first class, dressed like that.”

“First class is a waste of money,” he said dismissively. “I just want to get there; I don't need my ass kissed.”

“Maybe,” I said, “though I'd expect you could use the extra legroom. Speaking of, isn't your guitar too long for a carry-on?”

“I always clear it with the airline in advance,” he said. “If they lose my bag, that's no big deal. I wear the same thing two days running—people just assume I went home with a girl and never got back to my room to change. But I lose this”—he nodded at the guitar case—“then we have a problem. I promised some people I'd play for them.”

At that moment, the cocktail waitress approached. “What can I get you to drink today?” she asked him.

CJ shook his head. “Nothing, thanks. I'm not staying.”

She said, “Are you sure? It'd take me no time to bring out a Rolling Rock, or mix up something.”

Women loved to get things for CJ. And because I didn't want to see him leave quickly, either, I said, “How did you know? He
loves
Rolling Rock.”

She smiled at me as though we were co-conspirators and went back to the bar.

CJ said, “You want me to miss my flight?”

“I didn't notice you telling her that if you wanted your ass kissed, you'd go first class.”

He gave me a look and said, “Someday I'll understand why asking favors and having them granted actually makes you meaner instead of nicer,” putting the newspaper-wrapped, ribboned box on the table between us.

I glanced down, gently shamed by the sight of it. “CJ, I—”

Then the waitress, true to her word, came back with the Rolling Rock. She noticed the box. “Somebody got a present.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Lucky you,” she said, and walked away, CJ watching the swing of her hips as she went.

I tried again: “Listen, I don't know how to thank you for this. I'll probably be years repaying you.”
If I'm alive to do it
. “You don't even want to know what it's for?”

“That isn't a lot of money for me,” he said. “And I know things have been tough for you.”

It was best to let him think I'd let debts pile up, so I didn't say anything to that.

He drank a little Rolling Rock and then said, “I'm sorry I haven't been up to see you.”

I shrugged. “It's okay.”

I saw It in his pale eyes, that he was weighing his next words. Then he said, “You should know … Marsellus's wife left him.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“Or he asked her to move out, I don't know,” CJ went on. “I just thought you'd want to know. I'm not saying it's anything to do with Trey. Marriages fail for a lot of reasons.”

“I know,” I said.

But my voice must have sounded leaden, because I saw the sympathy in his gaze as he spoke again. “Hailey, we've talked about this,” he said. “That boy's death—”