Iron River (18 page)

 

 

 

 

B
radley sat cross-legged on the floor of the Whittier Explorer Academy weaponless defense gym and listened to the training sergeant explain the wrist break. He watched the demonstration without paying attention to it, imagining instead Erin last night onstage at the Whiskey and later in their bedroom.

“Daydreaming, Jones?”

“Absolutely not, sir.”

“Then get up here and show us what you’ve learned.”

The other Explorer sat down and Bradley took his place, bowing slightly to the instructor, then waiting relaxed. The gym was well lit and the floor was padded and there were speed and heavy bags along two walls, and body-size attack targets and huge medicine balls along another.

“Grab my wrist,” said the instructor, whose name was Grgich. He was stout and short-limbed, midforties to Bradley’s eye.

When Bradley took his wrist, Grgich did a slow-motion twist-grab-turn and easily moved Bradley around and down to one knee. Bradley tapped out and Grgich waited a moment, then let go.

“Again,” he said. “Half speed.”

Again Bradley was forced to one knee, but when he tapped out, Grgich waited, keeping the pain up. Bradley was a second-dan black belt in hapkido, and the last time he’d used the art, he had badly broken two men. Again, Grgich wrenched him around and down and held him past the tap.

“Your turn.”

Bradley rose and felt the heat of the pain in his face. One of the other Explorer trainees was a pretty young woman, and Bradley caught the worry in her expression.

“Your app said you have some experience at this,” said the instructor. “But I’m here to tell you that on the street, everything changes. Whatever you think you know, forget it now.”

“Right.”

“You bet it’s right.”

Grgich took Bradley’s wrist, and Bradley did the twist and grip, but the man used his strength to break it and with his other hand he spun Bradley and bent his arm sharply behind him and forced him to the mat. Bradley tapped out and Grgich held fast, then let go and backed away.

“Don’t go easy,” he said.

Bradley righted himself and took a deep breath. Again, Grgich clamped down on his wrist. Bradley faded very slightly to draw Grgich off balance and to judge his strength. Then he kihaped loudly, as Master Paulson had taught him, the kihap having several purposes—an exhale that focuses energy, a battle cry, and a summons of focus and power. Bradley’s twist and grip came as fast as a gunshot. He turned the heavy man’s weight against him and drew back on his arm and eased him to his knee upon the mat. Grgich didn’t tap out, but Bradley released him and stepped away.

“That was good,” huffed Grgich. “Again.”

“There’s no reason to do it again.”

“This is training and you are the trainee. Again.”

Grgich gripped his wrist, and Bradley felt the ungoverned strength of the man. He kihaped and locked the instructor’s wrist in his hand and twisted up the arm and turned him. But he felt the continuance of Grgich’s rotation and he felt him lower and pivot fast so that the instructor was facing him again, their wrists still locked, Grgich off balance, leaning in. Bradley’s instinct told him to turn and throw his enemy, but his desire to succeed as an Explorer overrode it and instead he allowed Grgich to throw him over his back to the mat.

Bradley rolled once and bounced to his feet and continued to bounce like a boxer waiting for the bell. He thought of Erin and this kept him from attacking.

Grgich stood panting, face flushed, hands up in a fighting stance. Then he let them down.

“Next.”

After the weaponless defense class, Grgich approached Bradley at the water dispenser.

“I was there when you met Coleman Draper. At the recruiting booth.”

“I remember.”

“When I saw your name on the trainee roster, I was surprised. I didn’t think a little shit dribble like you could make Explorer.”

“I’ll make Explorer.”

“I can’t believe they let you in.”

“They let you in.”

“You and Draper hit it off?”

“We had beers and that was it.”

“I’ll be watching you, Jones.”

Bradley dropped the paper cup into the trash and headed off for the firearms safety class.

The pretty trainee sat down next to him and introduced herself as Caroline Vega. Her handshake was firm. She was dark-haired and brown-eyed, and even in the unflattering Explorer uniform, she appeared to be built with strength and good form. She had had no trouble learning the wrist break. They watched the handgun demonstration, then shotguns, rifles, and pepper spray. Bradley day-dreamed about Erin. He felt a strong physical desire to be near enough to smell and hear and see her. The first time she had looked at him, Bradley felt like he had walked into a beautiful room. Three years now. They were children then. Erin was the only goodness in the world that interested him now that his mother was gone. He had large appetites for pleasure and for beautiful things, but what he wanted most was to be near Erin and to see her. Nothing else mattered that much. Bradley was not an introspective man, but it amused him to know that only one person on earth owned his heart and that if she were to leave him or vanish or die, he would become nothing more than a scourge upon the land.

“Why are you doing this?” asked Caroline. It was break time and they stood in the shade of an olive tree in a campus quadrangle.

“It might be a decent job someday. You?”

“I want a place to start. Base camp.”

“So you can what, boldly go where no woman has gone before, explore strange new worlds?”

She laughed, but Bradley could tell she felt belittled, which is what he had intended.

“I guess.”

“I know what you meant,” he said. “You meant there’s more to life than a cotton-poly uniform blouse and ten-hour shifts.”

She looked at him with a skeptical lift of an eyebrow. “I’m going to burn through L.A. one way or another. This is just the beginning. There’s money and pleasure and a thousand ways to get them. That’s what I’m doing here, looking for a
way.
And you want to know something else, Bradley Jones? I know you. I know who you are. Allison Murrieta had it right. And you’re doing the same thing here that I am. Good luck, hombre
.
By the way, I liked you better with long hair.”

She started across the quad.

“Wait.”

“I don’t
wait,
” she said over her shoulder.

He watched her walk back into the classroom. When he took his chair, he saw that she had moved to the back of the class. He turned and found her and nodded and she stared him down. She had scribbled a phone number on the cover of his LASD Explorer class syllabus.

 

 

 

For the rest of the firearms safety class and all the way through criminal law, police procedures, and community relations, he pictured Erin at different moments. He could remember the moments clearly, her clothes and her scent and the way she wore her lovely red hair, and he could rerun a particular smile or expression, and he could hear the sound of her clothes sliding off her skin and the sound of her voice onstage as she sang. And as he remembered these things, Bradley smiled inwardly at his outlandish luck. Thousands of young men had seen her perform, and half of them fell in love with her on sight. Bradley had fallen, at the Whiskey on Sunset, before the first song of her first set was over. On his third straight two-show night, he finally caught her eye and she had looked back wholly at him. He was sixteen with good fake ID and a solid vodka buzz on.

She smiled and that was her first real smile only for him and that is what Bradley pictured as he listened to the last remarks about next Saturday’s training sessions. There were to be 184 hours of instruction over eighteen weeks.

Two weeks down, thought Bradley, and less than a million more to go.

 

 

 

Still in his Explorer uniform, Bradley slouched in a chair in the women’s shoe department at Nordstrom. He listened to the music and smelled the medley of perfumes and shoe leather wafting over, and stared at Erin. She was modeling stage boots. She wore a tan miniskirt and her legs were long and pale and the heels of the boots elongated them and coaxed the muscle beneath the skin. She passed so close, he could smell the lotion on her legs. He sighed.

“Too high a heel?”

“There’s no such thing.”

“Too rhinestony?”

“More the merrier.”

“Too something. These are too something.”

Erin strode away from him and left a soft feminine eddy of scent behind her. She pointed out three more pair, and the salesman carried the boxes back to the stock room.

“Four pairs and no dice,” she said. She stood in front of the floor mirror, turning her legs to it this way and that, examining them as if they were accessories and not a part of her.

“It’s impossible to watch you do this,” he said.

“Oh?”

“You know it’s impossible. That’s why you’re with me.”

He heaved up from the chair, went to the couture department and found three beautiful dresses in her size and carried them back to shoes and laid them over the seat beside him. He sat and watched her finger one.

“They’re beautiful. I know what you’re doing.”

“Yes, you do.”

She looked down at him and set her hand on the back of his neck as she flexed her legs again for the mirror. The current boots were black and lightly studded.

“Keepers,” said Bradley.

“I found these, too.” She knelt on both knees in front of him and pulled from a box a short red boot in faux crocodile with little chains for laces. She leaned in and set one hand on Bradley’s leg and held up the red boot with the other.

“It was made for you,” he said.

“I think so, too.”

She looked at the boot, then up at him. The most beautiful room in the world. Bradley felt the surge of emotion, stronger than adrenaline, stronger than violence, stronger than drugs or alcohol.

He took her hand and stood. “We’ll take these two pair,” he said to the salesman.

Erin took off the black boots and handed them to the clerk and followed Bradley to the fitting rooms in couture. He held out the three hangers with the expensive dresses as if bearing a flag or the colors of some exotic authority. He nodded crisply to the couture saleswoman and stood aside to allow Erin to enter first the hallway of fitting rooms. The door to room seven squeaked as Erin pushed through. Bradley hung the dresses on the wall hook, then closed the door and slid the lock. Erin turned his head hard with both hands and rose on her toes to lock her mouth to his.

 

 

 

An hour later, Bradley sat in Rocky Carrasco’s new lair in El Monte. Rocky was Herredia’s California distribution chief, a second-generation
Eme
captain, compact and knotted with muscle, and covered head to toe in tattoos. He had bullet scars on his arms, and knife scars on his stomach, and a twinkle in his eyes.

“El Tigre will be happy,” he said. “I’m always happy to make money. How about you, Bradley? Are you happy?”

“Fully satisfied and happy.”

“You’ll make a good husband.”

Bradley studied the illustrated Rocky. There were numbers and letters and an Aztec warrior and a sacrificial maiden and a dripping heart between two hands and knives and the sun, all in color. The chain links around his biceps were etched in rough black, prison-style, and Bradley figured were probably the first tattoos Rocky ever got.

“Did you ever think that you put too much faith in one thing?” asked Bradley.

“You mean like Jesus or money?”

“In a person.”

“Like a brother, man?”

“Like a woman.”

“A woman? Sure, when I was your age. A young man needs to believe. He needs to worship with all of his big heart and small brain. So he dies for love or for his god and country. But can all love and all gods and countries be worth dying for? No. Then you get older and you become disappointed. In her. In yourself. The Mexicans have a saying—it’s not what a woman is worth, it’s what she costs.”

“I don’t understand that. It sounds clever, but I don’t know what it means.”

“It means that you will pay a price for your lovely red-haired
tesoro.
”

“I believe she really is a treasure. I’d pay everything for her.”