Halfway House (29 page)

“It
is
called Green Lantern, not Yellow Lantern. Anyway, what’s wrong with a color being someone’s weakness?”

Bobby crossed his arms. “Nothing, if you’re stupid.”

“They said I could go to the park with her every day,” Brent said as if there wasn’t another conversation going on. He sat next to Lewis, picked up a comic, and began thumbing through it.

Lewis snatched the comic out of the bigger boy’s hand and returned it reverently to his pile. “You’re just mad because you know in your heart that Superman would lose in a fight.”

“No, I’m not. You’re just jealous like everyone else. Superman is the mack-daddy of all superheroes. Just face it. He isn’t going to lose against the likes of Green Lantern.”

“Do you think so? I bet you didn’t know that the Green Lantern rings are made of Kryptonite. Superman would try and get close and fall down on his knees like a baby.”

“Who says the rings are made from kryptonite? Name the issue,” Bobby demanded.

Brent, who’d had a hurt look since Lewis had taken the comic book, glanced up as his face brightened. “I wonder if he can catch a Frisbee. I’ve always wanted a dog that could catch a Frisbee.”

“Of course they’re made from kryptonite.” Lewis was clearly exasperated by Bobby’s persistence and Brent’s inane interruptions. This was a serious conversation. “Why else would DC make both the Green Lantern’s ring and kryptonite green? They’re the same thing, duh!”

“Aha!” Bobby cried, holding up his finger. “But what if Superman painted himself yellow? Green Lantern would then be powerless against him, wouldn’t he?”

Lewis stared back at Bobby, dumbfounded by the question. He’d clearly never even considered the possibility.

Bobby crossed his arms and smiled smugly. He turned to Brent. “Wouldn’t he?”

Brent nodded automatically. “I wonder if she can sniff out bombs? That would be the coolest, I think. A bomb-sniffing, Frisbee-catching, German Shepherd.”

After great deliberation, Lewis finally shook his head. “No. That won’t work. It has to be real yellow. Paint don’t count.”

“Paint is as real as anything. You paint a house white, then it’s a white house. You paint a car yellow, then it’s a yellow car. Yellow is the color the rings can’t work against.” Bobby gave Lewis a look like he needed to be admitted to a funny farm. “It don’t matter if it’s crayon or paint or solid to the core yellow. The ring won’t work.”

“What are you two talking about?” Brent finally asked. “I thought we were talking about my dog.”

Both Bobby and Lewis looked at Brent, then each other. Lewis finally capitulated, his lopsided smile as good as any white flag. “Maybe that would work. At best it would be a stalemate, though.”

“Could you see it?” Bobby laughed. “A yellow Superman? Now that’s retarded.”

“Mega-retarded.”

“It’s not nice to say that word,” Brent whined.

“Jesus, Brent! Why the hell are you bugging us?”

“That’s not nice either.”

“Can’t you just leave us alone?” Lewis glowered. “We’re talking about big boy stuff.”

“No you’re not.” Brent leapt to his feet and put his hands on his hips. “You’re talking about stupid comic books and all I wanted to do was talk about my new dog.”

“Who cares about your dog?”

“You’re jealous that you don’t have one.”

“I don’t, but Bobby does.”

“Does not.”

“Does too.”

“How come I never seen him?” Brent asked

“Because he’s a paper dog,” Bobby explained.

Brent scoffed. “That’s not real. Not like mine.”

“You ever seen your dog?” Bobby asked.

“No. But they told me all about him.”

Bobby
tsked
.
“How real is a dog you’ve never even seen? At least I’ve seen my dog.”

“But he’s not real.”

“He is to me.” Bobby shrugged, pulled out his picture of Elvis Paper Dog and looked at it. “I talk to him. I play with him. Maybe I’ll go see him someday just like you’ll go see your dog.”

“How do you play with him when he isn’t even real?” And in the very asking of the question, both Lewis and Bobby realized that Brent would never appreciate the magic of a comic book, or have the ability to invent a three-dimensional possibility from a two-dimensional universe.

“You wouldn’t understand, Brent,” Bobby said, with great sadness in his voice.

“You’re not smart enough,” Lewis added.

“I may not be smart enough,” Brent said on the edge of tears. “And I may not know about comic books, but at least I’m getting a mommy and daddy. And not some stupid paper ones either, but some real live ones who are going to love me and give me a real live dog.” He stomped away.

“With all the real live dog shit that comes with it,” Lewis yelled at Brent’s departing back.

Bobby remembered feeling like they’d won the argument about the dogs, but he also remembered that he and Lewis had sat in silence for the rest of the afternoon, allowing themselves to get lost in the world of Hal Jordan and Green Lantern power, trying to forget that Brent had won the parent lottery and they were stuck with their comic books.

Two months later Brent returned with a broken arm and a broken spirit. His great parents had turned out to be the type who insisted that things be kept in their exact place. Brent, being a kid, had tried as best he could, but he was just a kid. They beat him and kept him in his room day after day, night after night, and only let him out for dinner. They treated the dog like their son, and their new son like their dog, saying,
“If you’re going to act like a dirty animal then we’ll treat you like one.”

They made him eat from the dog bowl, chained to the back porch with a dog collar painfully cinched around his neck. Brent eventually grew to hate the dog. He grew to hate himself. Much later, when he turned eighteen, he threw himself off the Frisco Bridge into the Mississippi River. He never got over the fact that he couldn’t live up to the family dog.

When Bobby and Lewis found out what happened to Brent and why he’d returned to the home, they’d laughed like all boys would. But as time passed they grew to understand their feelings, knowing that the only thing worse than not having a mother and father was having a mother and father who treated you like a dog. Not an Elvis Paper Dog, but a real dog that cowered and begged and peed when it was scared.

Bobby noticed Kanga standing out front. The man looked weathered like a ship too long at sea. His long gray hair was matted together in several places, proof that it had been slept on. Three days’ beard growth camouflaged his tan with the white of old age. He stooped as he began a circuit around the others, his head down, his eyes up and his lips moving, as if speaking with someone.

Bobby tossed his half-eaten burrito and now cold coffee into the trash and headed across the street. He paused only to let a Honda pass before he stepped on the curb before the halfway house.

The one-armed man and the pregnant woman paced back and forth like sentries at the gates of a palace. Bobby timed it perfectly and stepped between them. A pair of men dressed in gray shirts and pants and who were leaning against the side of the building’s front entrance noticed him approaching and headed in his direction. Bobby got to Kanga first.

“Hey, old man. Where have you been? I’ve been looking all over for you.”

Instead of replying, Kanga shuffled past him.

“Kanga, it’s me Bobby.”

The old surfer murmured something that sounded like, “You shouldn’t worry, honey,” then spun on his heel and headed the way he’d come.

Bobby hurried to catch up, but was intercepted by the two men in gray.

“You should leave,” said one.

“This place isn’t for you,” said the other one.

Both of them looked like they’d recently been in prison. Their eyes held the hard gleam of practical violence. There was only one way to handle these types. Bobby sneered as he said, “Fuck cares what you think. This is between me and my friend.” He stepped around them, then ran ahead to Kanga.

“When I met your mother she was the prettiest—”

“Kanga,” Bobby said, grabbing the man by his shoulders. “Snap out of it. This is Bobby Dupree.”

“Bobby?”

“Yes. It’s me. Let me get you out of here.”

“Can’t leave. Laurie...” he exhaled slowly, then inhaled. “...is here. She’s all alone.”

Bobby had to get him out of here. He’d been duped by the men in gray, or perhaps even drugged. By the looks of Kanga close up, he could easily be under the influence of something. The quaint belief that Laurie’s soul was here had transformed into something psychotic.

“It’s okay, Kanga. We’ll just leave for a little while, then come back later.” Bobby grabbed the old surfer by the arm and began to pull him away.

“No! You can’t take me.” Kanga jerked free and backed away. For a moment, his eyes were clear. “She’s here, Bobby. No kidding. I need to do what I always wished I had done.”

“She’s dead. Her funeral’s today, Kanga. That’s why I’m here, to take you there so you can be with her body.”

“Who needs her body when I have her soul?”

“But Kanga—”

“Laurie says she wished you guys had had that chance to go to Catalina together and see the stallions.”

“She said what?” Bobby had never told anyone about that conversation. “What did you say?”

But Kanga’s eyes clouded over again. As the aging surfer began to move, his gaze sought the sky, just as he’d done before. This time Bobby let him go and watched as the man began to silently converse with the air.

After a while Bobby headed down South Pacific toward Lucy’s place, the images of the people in front of the halfway house talking to themselves marching through his mind. What if they actually
were
talking to the souls of the dead there?

Green Hills Memorial Cemetery was located along Western Avenue on the side of a hill overlooking an abandoned Navy family housing subdivision, three abandoned apartment complexes, and just over the trees, the port of Los Angeles. The subdivision had once held two hundred families and was the reason for a strip mall, a Vons Grocery Store, and seven fast-food franchises. Once a burgeoning community wedged between San Pedro and Lomita, base closures of the midnineties had turned it into a ghost town. Only now was the strip mall recovering with a Jack-in-the-Box and a Starbucks anchoring the frontage. The grocery store was still an empty shell, but rumor had it that Vons would someday reopen, keeping hope alive for the retirees who’d bought homes around the mortally wounded neighborhood.

But the subdivision was an anachronism. In this day of homelessness and government programs, how two hundred homes could stand empty was a miracle...or a crime. All less than ten years old, the government had thrown a chain link fence around the outside of the subdivision, with no plans to open it to the homeless or families in need.

The problem lay with ownership. The homes technically belonged to the Department of the Navy, but they wrote off the area when they were ordered to move away by the Congressional Base Relocation and Closure Committee. Now whenever the city of Los Angeles approached the federal government about the subdivision, no one would acknowledge responsibility for the area.

In the meantime, LAPD S.W.A.T. used it for urban warfare training, practicing breaking down door after door in the endless rows of empty homes. Other police departments used the area for exercises, pretending to chase gangbangers from house to house, rendering the police process into a high-tech game of paintball and leaving once proud homes spotted with hundreds of red dots of red-like one-story victims of a chicken pox outbreak.

And across from these ten acres of urban blight lay Green Hills Memorial Cemetery, occupying the side of a gentle hill, with gravestones recessed into the short, green grass.

Two funerals were occurring today.

Near the entrance a dozen people stood around a simple brass casket containing the mortal remains of a seventy-five-year-old Croatian woman who’d survived Christian genocide and subjugation by the communists of her own country, and had outlived most of her siblings to die of old age in the home of her American grandson. Now two elderly friends from church and whatever surviving family members ushered her to heaven using the words of her native tongue, with everyone huddled in black and weeping.

Farther up the slope where the dead would have a view of the roofs of the abandoned homes and the span of the Vincent Thomas Bridge, a larger group had gathered to bury Laurie May Jenkins.

Bobby and Lucy stood closest to the casket as the Catholic priest from Holy Trinity Catholic Church read John 3:16. Next to Lucy sat his
abuela
draped in a mourning shawl, her quiet sobs as much a part of the background as the cars passing on Western Avenue.

Around and behind them stood fifty members of the 8th Street Angels dressed in black pants and starched white T-shirts. Their colors matched the ten police cars pulled to the curb behind the gathering. Policemen leaned against their cruisers or clumped together to speak in hushed tones, occasionally glancing toward the gangbangers.

Everyone had known Laurie. San Pedro was a small-town with small-town connections. Those who hadn’t gone to school with her had brothers or sisters who’d gone to school with her. Because of her friendship with Lucy, she had a special place in the gang hierarchy. And because she’d been a beautiful Latina, her loss was even greater.

But the Angels were there for other reasons as well.

They’d lost some of their own last night, among them Split, or as he was known to his mother, Tincho Ocampo. And they were up against it. MS 13 was an octopus with arms into everything legal and illegal. Their powerbase spanned two hemispheres. Their viciousness was legendary. That MS 13 wanted the territory of San Pedro was bad enough. That the Angels might be the only thing able to stop them was what held each of the gangbangers’ thoughts in a vice grip of fear.