Between Heaven and Here Page 8

  I couldn’t, Glorette said softly. I couldn’t go in there. And his daughter cocked her head and frowned at Glorette.

  What does that mean? You couldn’t? You couldn’t walk into class and sit next to me like you were supposed to? Because you think you’re too fine?

  Glorette got out of the truck then, in the dark, and ran into the trees. He knew immediately that someone was bothering Glorette in the science class.

  When Fantine said she was going away to the east for college, and Marie-Claire cried, Fantine said, Resistance is futile, maman. Enrique could barely understand what his own daughter said half the time, but she said that clearly, and explained it, and it was close enough to French that Enrique knew it meant there was no need to fight.

  The eucalyptus trunks glowed in the faint moonlight. They shed bark all year, smooth and white. The trees from Australia. Not here. This was his forest now. He came here alone to sleep in the truck, think about the cypress swamp back in Louisiana, the plash of water when animals leapt from the trees into the bayou ahead of his boat.

  The frozen forest in France, where he’d walked for five days trying to find his company. Each step on the ice like a gunshot, and he was afraid the German snipers would hear him. Crawling instead so it would be quieter. The branches heavy with snow that muted all sound. The birds gone away after the firefight? Dead from the cold? Flown to Louisiana like all the birds he’d shot in the ricefields and roasted over winter fires with Gustave?

  He put his head back on the seat. The air was still warm—maybe 70—and the wind that never stopped here in California moved the leaves like he was underwater.

  Animal feet in the dried foxtails. He didn’t want to see his wife’s face. He’d left her a body. He slept sitting up here. Like his mother’s aunt said the slave woman who was his ancestor slept—sitting up in a chair, near the fire, watching to make sure no one stole her daughter in the night.

  Glorette was dead. Fantine would be here in the morning.

  Fantine had yelled at him once when she was in high school, thought she was the smartest human ever born, and he made her hoe the milkweed from the irrigation furrows to keep them clear. “This is a fiefdom! We’re all peasants and serfs and you’re some lord, right?”

  Enrique said, “Me—just a farmer. Don’t nobody fief, oui?”

  THE HEAT WOKE him, sun burning the side of his face and the sound of saws snarling from the barn.

  But he’d heard the snapping of dry bark—someone was walking in the eucalyptus grove toward the truck. He got out the .45. Never. He’d killed them all by hand. His head was filled with syrupy light and heat. The smell of menthol all around.

  Someone coming. The same path Beto had always come, up from the river. Beto walking toward him every day back then, after he’d gone to wash in the river he’d known as a child. Beto telling him they could have just made Atwater sick with the oleander branches, trimmed to skewers threaded through two rabbits. Roasted them in a fire here, brought the meat to Atwater, and he ate it for two days. Jimsonweed boiled into a liquid added to his beer.

  Beto wanted him sick. A joke. But Enrique wanted him dead, after he signed over the land.

  Two scorpions he’d caught under a rock. Kept in a jelly jar.

  They like to get down in the foot of the bed where it’s warm. That’s what you said. We ain’t had no scorpion in Louisiana. Have moccasin snake. But you can see snake come. You can’t see this when you get in the sheets.

  The sound approached so slowly. Hesitant. A ghost. A hunter.

  The shade was swarming with heat. Near eleven.

  How the hell had he slept that long? Marie-Claire must think he’d gone out to find Archuleta and got killed.

  He was an old man.

  He pointed the gun toward the sound. Wheels snapping the bark.

  Alfonso sitting in the golf cart. Grinning young fool. Tattoos on his collarbone and his skull. He’d killed Glorette. He worked for the other boy. His job was to ride. He’d killed Glorette because the fat boy had told him to.

  “I ain’t wakin up like that no more, Uncle Enrique. I left my gun in JZ’s ride. I ain’t up for that now. I’m tired. I’m ready to be out. So if you gon get me, go on. Then you have another body. However many you got.”

  His grandmother, Claudine—the first one raped by Mr. McQuine. She must have told him what Enrique did.

  The boy wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t. His eyes were light green as mulberry leaves. Suddenly the clearing was filled with color. Eucalyptus trunks gleaming fresh new skin, like washed bone. The heat bore down on the leaves, and the reflection of the golf-cart taillights was like cherry Kool-Aid splashed across them. His own daughter said that was Glorette’s favorite—the dark red drink she poured into the old jam jars.

  Alfonso kept his hand on the gearshift of the cart. “I went by the barn. Lafayette puttin a cross on the coffin. He nailed decorations on the cross. Like metal flowers. Reynaldo went up there start on the—”

  He paused. “Start diggin. So you ain’t gotta do it.”

  The sound of the saw—growling through the trees—had stopped. A pickaxe in the barn?

  “Gustave waitin for you. He sittin on the porch. He look bad. Axed me did you show up by Glorette’s place last night and get hurt.”

  Enrique swallowed the little saliva left in his mouth. His teeth dry and huge behind his lips.

  “And that old man up there at the house. The priest.”

  “He bless the body?”

  “I seen his car parked at your yard. You can’t miss that old Buick Regal. I ain’t went inside. I see Glorette almost every night. I don’t want to see her now. Like that.”

  Enrique slid the gun off the windowframe. The dash drawer hung open like a jaw. He put the gun inside. He found the bandanna and wiped his face. “How she get like that?”

  Alfonso didn’t answer. Then he said, “You know, I slept out here a couple times. In the trees.”

  “You?”

  Alfonso nodded. “I seen you come out here sometimes. I used to sit out here at night. When I first got out the club. It was so much damn noise all the time in there. And my moms don’t never shut up. Jazen always got the sounds on in the Navigator. So I came out here just to chill. I had me a Mexican blanket I got at the swap meet. I used to sleep right there.”

  “I find that blanket, me. I throw it away.”

  “Yeah. You thought some homeless dude broke in, huh? But I was out here about two weeks before you saw it. You used to park right here and chill, too. I heard you snorin.”

  There was no need to pretend he’d been watching the fences, like he used to, when homeless men might steal oranges to sell on the street.

  “Make you tired, huh?”

  “What?”

  “They always think you the one.”

  “The one.”

  “The one gotta take care the problem.”

  Enrique looked into the sickle-shaped leaves. “No problem out here.”

  “No problem back there neither.”

  “What you mean. Back there?”

  “In the alley. What happened in the alley. Ain’t no need to take care of it. Problem gone.” Alfonso got out of the cart and picked up a few rocks in the dried wild oats.

  When his grandsons sat at the kitchen table doing their math homework they said, “Problem solved!”

  “Problem solve?” Enrique said, looking at the boy’s tattooed skull. Green letters.

  Alfonso was quiet. “No.” He threw a rock over the fence into the riverbed. He’d been able to throw a football or baseball farther than anyone at the high school. Then he started riding with that boy near the Launderland.

  “Problem took off. Ain’t solved for nobody else,” he said. “But I ain’t solved it, if that’s what you mean. I ain’t you.”

  What was he supposed to say? Only one and not four? Alfonso had shot someone in the alley, when he got sent to prison. Shot him in the leg.

  “I ain’t killed nobody close up and
shit,” Alfonso said softly. “I liked to shoot them rats when Lafayette showed me. But I ain’t up for aimin at nobody like I had to. And I ain’t up for touchin nobody neither.”

  Claudine must have told Bettina, or Alfonso, that he’d bashed in McQuine’s skull with the piece of wood before he lit the car on fire. That he’d looked into McQuine’s face.

  Enrique found the packet of Swisher Sweets on the seat beside him. He waited to hear if there was more. If he knew more.

  “What you think you up for?” he said.

  Alfonso threw another rock. Then he walked back to the cart and leaned against it. “I just wanted to play football. I just wanted to hit people and have em get up and then I hit em again. All day. I like to hit em in the chest and knock em all the way back. I like to hit em sideways. But I needed that cash. If my moms wasn’t so crazy—”

  Enrique got out of the truck, his legs stiff. The eucalyptus seed pods were brown buttons underfoot. He touched the roof of the cart.

  “They got ghost, man. The problems. You ain’t gotta do nothin.”

  “Ghost.”

  “They gone.”

  “Mean you make em ghost.”

  Alfonso shook his head. “I ain’t you.”

  “How you know they gone?”

  “I seen em go.”

  Then he said, “I got this for you.” He nodded at the cart. “Rich white kid gave it to me. He owed somebody. His dad got it for the mail. Their house is up in Hillcrest, man, so high up the fuckin driveway is half a mile. Webster used to ride the cart down the hill for the mail.”

  He patted the steering wheel. “So you can ride down here real quiet and don’t have to raise dust or use up much gas. If you just checkin shit out. By yourself. Or if you just forgot one little thing—like a shovel or something. You ain’t gotta take the truck. You and Gustave, man. You can style.”

  Then he turned and walked into the trees, the back of his head shining in the light, the stubble of his hair glistening with sweat, and underneath the letters Enrique couldn’t read.

  ALFONSO

  IF HE HADN’T had to pee before midnight, by the end of the hottest damn week in August, he wouldn’t have seen the woman who called herself Fly down the alley yelling at Sisia and Glorette.

  A rat ran across the phone wire above his head just when he stepped behind the dumpster at the back doorway of Los Tres Cochinitos. He ducked, but the rat leapt into the branches of the tree across the alley, and he could smell the rotting fruit on the ground in someone’s back yard. Nectarines. Damn—the rat was leaving Los Tres for dessert.

  When he first started with Jazen, he had to figure out this part of the Westside. Block after block of apartment buildings between downtown and the freeway to LA. Then the long strip of business along Palm Avenue, which ran for ten miles through Rio Seco. But this alley was like a long dirt road with its own traffic. Old wooden houses on one side, with mostly Mexican families now, fruit trees like the nectarine that leaned over the fences. On the other side, all the back doors—video store, nail salon, El Ojo where two women made the best tamales, and Los Tres Cochinitos—The Three Little Pigs. Their food wasn’t as good, but the cartoon pigs on the sign were comedy.

  Why the hell would Fly come here? The van her old man drove had New York license plates. They came to the Launderland yesterday, washing clothes, and Alfonso heard her say, “LA one more fuckin hour drive. And your punk-ass van wanna break down here. Country-ass place.”

  It was about eleven. He usually tried to wait until midnight to pee the first time, but it was over a hundred again today—and he’d already drunk two Cokes trying to keep awake while Jazen talked and talked about Angie, the girl who braided his hair. She didn’t want to get with him. Never. Not even when he said she could be the one. The only reason JZ wanted her was because she still said no.

  Alfonso zipped up his jeans and turned back to the alley and another rat skittered across the wire. This one was huge—must be pregnant—slow. Almost fell, rolling off and holding on upside down like an acrobat in the circus.

  The nine was in the car with Jazen. But you couldn’t shoot here in the city anyway.

  He had shot the fool from LA in the ankle last year. Dropped him from a block away.

  The first time Jazen came up to him at school, when they were juniors, Jazen said, “You one a them Sarrat niggas, live out in the groves, right?”

  Alfonso already knew it was best to just look at someone. Don’t say shit.

  “I heard you a good shot. You on the football team?”

  Alfonso had lifted his chin.

  Lafayette and Reynaldo had taught him to shoot the summer when he was twelve. Sarrat was all orange groves, and palm trees near the river-bottom with wild grapevines covering the trunks. You saw Chia Pets on TV—these were monster Chia Pets, Alfonso used to think when he was little. The rats kept eating the tomatoes and red peppers in Lafayette’s mama’s garden, and chewing on the oranges in the grove.

  Lafayette and Reynaldo had been watching Alfonso practice on gophers in the irrigation furrows and rabbits in the riverbed. Drought year, and their pops Enrique was pissed about the poor orange crop. Lafayette’s mama held out her hands for the cottontails Alfonso carried in his belt, the way Lafayette showed him. “You a good shot, you,” she said, smiling, and gave him the hindquarters after she fried the rabbit.

  “Taste like chicken,” Reynaldo joked across the table.

  “Taste like rabbit,” she said, squinting outside at the heat hanging heavy on the trees.

  The next week Lafayette handed Alfonso the old .22 rifle and told him, “Them rats, they gon fly, and you better hit em in the air.”

  Lafayette lit the base of the palm tree on fire, and when the flames reached the tangled vines, the rats leapt out as if diving into an invisible ocean. They sprang into the air. Then they dangled for a second. Like Kobe. Hang time. Alfonso sighted them through the wire shaped like a diamond and pulled the trigger. He killed twelve rats in twenty minutes and Reynaldo said, “He got it. He a natural shot.”

  Alfonso looked down the alley. The streetlight at the next corner, Hyacinth, shone on the wires coming from behind each business to the poles across the dirt, along the chainlink fences that hid the backyards. Wires glowing like liquid mercury, like when he broke the thermometer to see the squirmy drops and his moms beat the shit out of him.

  They walked into the alley from Hyacinth. Tall black silhouette with high heels. Shorter thin silhouette with red sandals and her hair like a cloud piled on top of her head. Sisia and Glorette.

  The brown van pulled around the corner. Fly. She parked behind El Ojo de Agua and Alfonso heard her yelling at Glorette. “I told you, bitch,” she said, her voice so strange it was like she spoke another language. Chess and the fools who hung out at Sundown Liquor said her voice sounded like Spike Lee, and they laughed forever. She had come up on Jazen and Alfonso her very first night, when the brown van was a lot less dusty. She was about twenty-five, short, with powerful thighs in her black Lycra shorts and her stomach poking out like bread under the sports bra. Old dude in the driver seat. Pimp. There was a white girl around last week, and the pimp kept messing with her. She was from Palm Springs, she’d told JZ in the liquor store. Alfonso had seen New York corner her in the alley, push her toward the van. But she twisted loose and ran. The pimp went after her, and she actually threw a rock at him. JZ and Tiquan thought that was hilarious.

  But now it was just Fly trying to work the alley, running off two Mexican women yesterday. The pimp was around, even if you couldn’t see him. Alfonso knew he was always watching from some parking lot.

  Her deal was the van, tricked out with a stereo and satin sheets and drinks. She was pissed that hardly anybody went for it. Maybe that shit worked in New York. She had ashy dark brown skin and her hair was short, straightened and shiny with waves the first week she got here. But she must not have known where to get it done. By now the waves were all fucked up with lint and dust, and her hairli
ne was rough.

  She’d been yelling at Sisia and Glorette for about three weeks. Now it was like she was bored, and chasing them in the alley.

  Sisia had laughed at her the night before, in the parking lot of the Launderland. “Get you a hose and wash down the van and you same time. Dusty here in Cali.”

  “You old out here in the alley.”

  Jazen and Alfonso had laughed. The women sounded like insane female rappers.

  “Don’t nobody want to get in no van. Dirty sheets and lice all up in there.”

  “Shut up. You so old and ugly they close they eyes. Say, back that azz up so I ain’t gotta see that face.”

  Sisia spat on the van’s hood. She said, “I get mines.” She had a face like a pitted cast-iron frying pan and a body like a black Barbie. Fly was right. But the men still stopped Sisia and Glorette. New York was working for money. Sisia and Glorette were half strawberry. They’d take rock most of the time. And nobody wanted to get in the van cause they thought the pimp would rip them off. They just wanted head in the alley, in their own cars. They were used to the system.

  Fly hated Glorette. Alfonso could tell. She hated Glorette’s face.

  Alfonso only paid attention to his own mother’s face until he was about four. His moms Bettina was big and pink and freckled, with thin brown hair she always wore in a scrunchie and bangs that stuck out like antennae after she sweated. The other women in Sarrat—Fantine, Cerise, Clarette—they were vague and beige and never around. But Glorette—her skin was gold as the fake coins they gave out at Chuck E. Cheese. Her hair hung down to her waist when she washed it and sat on the porch to let it dry. She looked like she was wearing makeup even when she wasn’t.

  His mother drew on her eyebrows, and the first time he saw her without them, he was scared shitless.