Where to Choose

by Penny Mickelbury

  “You really think so?” her mother asked, the slightest tremor in her voice.

  “I know so. I love you too much for any other thing to be possible,” the daughter replied.

  Carole Ann eased the car out of the aggressive traffic on Washing­ton Boulevard and into the parking lot of a dingy and congested strip mall. She backed into a parking space, facing away from the sun, and, leaving the engine running to keep the air-conditioning going, she opened the Thomas Guide, the invaluable street map of Los Angeles that was the size of the telephone book of a small city, and began the search for the address Robbie had given her. Either she’d copied his directions incorrectly or he’d given her incorrect di­rections, because she could not find the address and she’d been rid­ing in circles for fifteen minutes and she was becoming frustrated. Besides, if she didn’t find the location in the next five minutes she’d be late. And she had the feeling that late would send the wrong mes­sage.

  She jumped at the sound, tapping on the car window, and recoiled when she turned to find a face staring at her, only the glass separat­ing him from her. She forced herself into a quick recovery and pressed the button that lowered the window.

  “Yo, mami. You lost?”

  Carole Ann peered into dark glasses that reflected her own im­age. “As a matter of fact, I am,” she said, grateful that she sounded calm and relaxed. She proffered the paper on which she’d written the address Robbie had given her. “Do you know where that is?”

  A tattooed hand, strangely graceful and attractive, received the paper. The body straightened and the face vanished, leaving in Car­ole Ann’s sight line the tops of a pair of jeans, several inches of bronze washboard abs, and the fringe of a cut-off white tee shirt. Then the face reappeared, sans dark glasses and wearing what might have been a smile, which revealed three gold teeth beneath a needle-thin mustache.

  “This ain’t far. Left at the light and left again at that old school building. Down a few blocks. Then there’s a church, Saint Camilla’s. That’s the street you lookin’ for. You have to find which way to turn, right or left.” He grinned and gold glinted.

  “Thanks very much,” Carole Ann said. “I appreciate your taking the time to help.”

  “No problem, mami,n he said, face still in the window.

  Carole Ann nodded, forced a smile, and pressed the button to roll up the window. Only then did he stand up and back away. Backed up, angled left, and leaned against the ugly El Dorado she’d seen parked at Robbie’s. The one she’d asked Tommy to ask his contact to run the plates on. Had he followed her from Addie’s? He must have. She turned slightly for another look at him and was certain that he was no undercover cop. He was the real thing: A Los Angeles gang-banger, and he was still standing there, leaning against his car, when she eased hers into gear and forward out of the parking lot and into the stream of traffic.

  She kept a vigil on the rearview mirror, then wondered why. He didn’t need to follow her this time; he knew exactly where she was going. And the thought frightened her. Whoever he was, he was a full-fledged gang member. Nothing pretend about him. And she was going to meet a group of men who probably were not gang members but about whom she knew precious little beyond what they’d told Robbie: That they had information for her regarding Enrique Nunez. That had been sufficient when she talked to Rob­bie an hour ago. Now, checking her mirrors, she was uncertain. Was she endangering them by bringing whoever was in the El Do­rado to them, or was she entrapping herself?

  She slowed as she approached the abandoned school building and contemplated the nature of waste, peculiar to the American cul­ture. Americans tired of things, or outgrew them, and tossed them out. Or allowed them to rot. She thought of Angie polishing Dottie’s briefcase, preserving the leather because she didn’t believe in waste. She alone among the masses, for the bedraggled school was surrounded by waste and neglect, by a neighborhood of dead or dy­ing houses. What could be said of the people who had lived in them? What could be said of the ones where there remained signs of life? Or what masqueraded as life. For certainly the neighborhood still was peopled. There were cars and bicycles in the hardscrabble yards, and scraggly, scruffy dogs and cats ambling about in the brais­ing heat. The several people Carole Ann saw appeared ancient— the reason, perhaps, for the demise of the elementary school.

  St. Camilla’s was only slightly less shabby. It must once have been a lovely structure. Small by California church standards, reflecting perhaps the reality that this neighborhood never had been more than modest, the Moorish-influenced design nevertheless was regal and graceful. Its once alabaster exterior now was a dingy, dirty, crumbling gray. The formerly elegant wrought-iron fence that sur­rounded it sagged and gaped in places, though the front gate was closed and apparently locked. Why, Carole Ann wondered, when a child could have pushed the side fence to the ground?

  She reached the corner and looked in both directions from the church. More sad houses to the left, a park with a ballfield and what appeared to be warehouses beyond to the right. She looked at the di­rections Robbie had given her. “Across from the park,” she’d writ­ten, and she turned right.

  This end of the block could have been the other side of the world. The houses here, and the yards, were immaculate. The park was a community garden, the largest Carole Ann ever had seen. She could not identify everything that grew, but she knew enough to recognize healthy fruits and vegetables when she saw them. She counted eight people working the rows, and another six resting in the grass. She parked and got out of the car and looked across the street toward the warehouses. Only they weren’t warehouses.

  She crossed the street and stood directly before the building upon which was written, in red calligraphy, DAME QUE ES MIO CULTURAL CENTER. Next door was a small grocery store with a table of fresh produce in front. Next to it was a medical facility that, according to the block lettering on the window, housed a women’s clinic, an AIDS clinic, a dentist, a podiatrist, a psychologist and a podiatrist. Next to it was a barber shop. There was a steady stream of foot traffic into and out of all the doorways to the building, and while there were cars parked on the street, Carole Ann could not discern the source of so many people.

  The door before her opened and she stood face to face with Ray, David, and Jose. Though she was expecting to meet them, she was startled by their sudden presence. Her fear returned, then abated just as quickly.

  “Thank you for coming,” Ray said with a slight bow.

  “Thank you for inviting me,” Carole Ann said, returning the gesture. Then, with a slight grin, “But you knew, of course, that I would?” She deliberately made it a question.

  Ray smiled and lifted his shoulders slightly and dropped them. “I don’t claim to know anything for certain, but, yes, I thought the message would bring you.”

  Carole Ann looked around her, taking in everything she’d so far seen. “The message got me here, but now that I’m here, I confess I’m almost more interested in these surroundings that in Ricky Nunez.”

  Now he smiled a real smile and stepped aside with a gesture that indicated she should precede him into the door from which the three of them had exited. She did and they followed. Then she stood aside to allow Ray to lead the way down a hallway, which opened into a room that could have been a gallery, were it not for the pres­ence of computers and video equipment and maps and other indica­tors that it was a place of work.

  The walls were covered with cultural artifacts—masks and tools and weapons and baskets and full-body costumes and pipes and drums. It was as if somebody indiscriminately had emptied a mu­seum collection. There were clay items, and straw, and metal. A ten- foot-tall tepee occupied one of the rear corners of the huge room, and in the adjacent corner was an adobe hut. Photographs of indige­nous peoples’ ceremonies covered that wall space not otherwise oc­cupied—red people and brown people and black people. She traversed the room, awed by the sheer magnitude, the amount and scale, of the collection. And she realized that she felt transport
ed. She also felt a sense of familiarity, as if she’d been here before. “This...this is...”

  “Not a gang headquarters.”

  “If it is, sign me up,” Carole Ann said. “I’ll pay my dues and proudly carry my card or wear my colors.”

  “You already wear your colors,” Jose said solemnly, and Carole Ann was reminded of her reason for being in this place.

  “What do you know of the history of Mexico and California?” asked Ray.

  She considered his question and her answer. “What I learned in school, I suppose,” she said, realizing that it hadn’t been very much. Her hosts agreed with her.

  “Then that’s not much, and the part that’s not lies is probably just flat-out wrong,” David said with a sigh.

  “Did you know that Spanish is not the language of the indigenous people of Mexico?” asked Ray, and when she frowned, he recited the date of the Spanish invasion and Carole Ann understood the impact of this brief history lesson. “The reason we display culture the way we do here is because none of us can ever be sure who we are. You can’t really call yourself an African American because you can’t ever know for sure not only where in Africa your ancestors might have come from, but what they might have mixed with along the way. And you’ll never know the language of your ancestors, just as I’ll never know the language of mine, only that it wasn’t Spanish.” Carole Ann listened with real interest as they explained that the name of their organization referred not to any sort of land reclama­tion scheme but rather to a reclamation of culture and mores and language. “Not only wouldn’t we want to reclaim the parts of Cali­fornia and Texas and Nevada and Utah that once belonged to Mex­ico, we wouldn’t know what to do with it if we could. The Anglos have made a mess of the land!”

  Reflection and introspection were shattered by the arrival of what felt and sounded like a million schoolchildren, though there could have been no more than thirty of them, second or third graders, Carole Ann guessed, shepherded by three teachers. Their sudden presence reminded her to ask the question she’d pondered outside earlier: Given the ab­sence of cars and the relatively inconvenient location of the place, where did all the people come from? And she was as impressed with the answer as with the entire setup.

  “We’ve got four shuttle buses and we bring people from all over. We only have to do it once. They make the return visit on their own. Same with the schools. We have to convince them to bring the first class.” He pointed to the tour in progress. “That’s the fifth class from that school.”

  “I am truly impressed.” More than that, she was overwhelmed. And puzzled. And curious. “I apologize in advance for my rudeness, but where did the money for this come from?”

  The question surprised them and the answer surprised her.

  “City of Los Angeles via the LAPD,” said David, and explained how the three of them had been arrested seven years earlier while walking in the Westwood section of L.A., a ritzy enclave of expensive homes not far from Malibu and the ocean. It also was UCLA’s neighborhood, and the Strip in Westwood was a convenient and pop­ular hangout for students, which Ray, David, and Jose were then. But to the police, they didn’t look like UCLA students. After all, they were Hispanic and they were dressed in baggy jeans and tee shirts and their hair was long and they sported earrings.

  After thirty-six hours and a couple of beatings, they were re­leased. They never were charged, never processed, never given a reason for their detention. The city settled quickly and qui­etly.

  “Not many young people would have invested their riches this way,” Carole Ann said, waving her arm around to encompass every­thing from the artifacts on the walls to the produce garden across the street.

  “When he was twenty-eight, Langston Hughes wrote an essay challenging his peers. He told them to stop worrying about what others thought of them and to build temples for tomorrow. We had temples, once, your people and my people and all the ancient peo­ples, and they were destroyed.”

  Carole Ann twitched as if she’d received an electrical jolt. “What did you say...who said what about temples?” She was hearing Arthur Jennings say those exact words.

  “Langston Hughes—”

  “Don’t get him started,” Jose interrupted with a grin, punching Ray on the shoulder. “No matter what you might think, she didn’t come to hear one of your lectures. She came to hear how Enrique Nunez is a bigger scumbag than we thought. Speaking of which,” he glanced at his watch, “I’m on in about ten seconds.”

  Carole Ann watched him hurry toward the student tour group and was aware that both Ray and David were watching her watch Jose. He was speaking now, hands moving about, body and face ani­mated. Giving a lecture. Her emotions registered.

  “Jose is a cultural anthropologist,” Ray said slyly. “I’m an ethnol­ogist, and Dave here is a sociologist. And now that we’ve enjoyed our revenge, this is what we brought you here to tell you,” Ray said, im­mediately relieving Carole Ann of her chagrin and embarrassment.

  Angered that anyone would use the name of their organization to perpetrate violence, the three of them decided to launch a major search for Ricky Nunez. They called on every possible source of infor­mation, cashing in a few IOUs along the way. After all, they were products of el barrio and counted among their childhood friends, not to mention a brother or cousin or two, the members of several gangs. It hadn’t been difficult to locate people who knew Ricky or to fer­ret out why he chose to say he was down with the Dame Que Es Mio organization.

  “It makes a perverse kind of sense,” Ray said when he’d com­pleted explaining what he knew of Ricky Nunez and his activities. “Here you have a guy who, on his best day, is a fuck-up, and some­body sets up a deal where he can run back and forth to Mexico like a jefe mejor and get paid big bucks for his trouble. You think he cares if it’s dangerous or he could get busted? He only cares that he makes enough cash to stay high and pull girls. As for the rest of it, he may not even understand what he’s doing. And he sure as hell wouldn’t have enough sense to figure out that what he’s doing has no rela­tionship to Dame Que Es Mio. ”

  Carole Ann agreed. And most certainly it could be the link be­tween past and current evils in Jacaranda Estates. She easily could fathom a connection to Dottie Miller. But how to explain the at­tacks on Fatima Asmara, Sadie Osterheim, and Peggy Hendricks? How did they tie in? And why hadn’t Arthur Jennings told her this piece of information? He’d been so forthcoming—why conceal this? Unless he hadn’t known.

  So engrossed was she in trying to forge and weld connections be­tween past and present, between fact and speculation, that she was unaware that Ray had spoken.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you. What did you say?”

  Ray’s demeanor was more serious than before and Carole Ann gave him her full attention. “I was saying that Enrique Nunez is a loud-mouthed, pot-smoking, beer-guzzling idiot. The people he’s in­volved with are not. They are mean, greedy bastards, and if you plan on getting in their way, you better be careful.”

  She acknowledged the warning and thanked the three of them— Jose had returned with whispered thanks that it wasn’t his job to teach eight-year-olds all day long. They shared a brief moment of levity and Carole Ann prepared to take her leave. She was stopped by Ray’s hand on her arm.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked, looking grim.

  “Try to extricate myself from the pile of crap I’m buried under,” she replied equally grimly, “and try to bury Ricky and his cohorts un­der an even deeper pile in the process.”

  “I told you, those people play rough. I don’t think you know how rough.”

  She considered the body count, including Dottie Miller, and added the emotional and psychological toll, including her own. “I think I’ve got a pretty good idea,” she said, and turned toward the door. “Miss Gibson!”

  She turned back to them. Jose had his hand raised as if to ask a question in class. “Carole Ann,” she said. “My name is Carole Ann.”

&n
bsp; “Carole Ann,” Jose said. “When the bar gives you your license back, we need ourselves a good lawyer. Even in the old days, the tem­ple builders had themselves good lawyers.”

  She studied them for a long moment, nodded, turned, and walked toward the door, thinking that the sense of familiarity she experi­enced when she first entered the room stemmed from the fact that it reminded her of Angie’s home.

  Tommy had been as fidgety and wiggly as a four-year-old while she’d talked on the telephone to Arthur Jennings. He crossed and un­crossed his legs; tied and untied his sneakers; scratched his head, ears, and nose; got up and sat back down; picked at his fingernails. She was beginning to learn his behavior, and when he was excited or nervous, he fidgeted. They both felt they were close enough to the truth of Jacaranda’s buried secrets to warrant excitement, but Car­ole Ann was a seasoned pro at concealing all emotion, while Tommy either wore his emotions on his face or on his sleeve. Or he fidgeted.

  “No, Arthur Jennings hadn’t known that Enrique Jamilla was an illegal,” she said, hanging up the telephone, “but given that infor­mation, and the involvement of Hector Nunez, and the probability that Jacaranda Estates itself is involved, he points the finger at the management company. The one we can’t find.”

  “Yes!” Tommy jumped up and pumped his arms as if he’d just scored a three-point jumper from midcourt. “It all makes sense. What’s his name? The management company guy?”

  Carole Ann perused her notes. “Pablo Gutierrez—” She stopped short and whispered a curse and looked at Tommy, waiting for him to make the connection.

  He instantly sobered when understanding dawned. “That’s the name of the dude old Mr. Asmara offed,” and when she winced, he apologized for his choice of words, but began to fidget again. “They’ve gotta be related. Gutierrez. Pablo and Pedro.”