Aquaboogie

by Susan Straight

  “Come on and slide some a this down your throat. Bring a shine of good luck to your forehead,” she shouted. Lanier looked up from the table, saw Rencie laugh. Rencie came closer to the fence, and her legs were thinner, narrow as new mulberry branches, pearly-ashed. While she grew smaller, her eyes seemed to expand, rounder and shiny, moving faster than her mouth or her hands.

  “Huh! I might as well be in Oklahoma with my daddy’s uncles. Always talkin bout luck and gimme a pigfoot and a bottle of beer. Play them old-timey songs.” She turned back to the street for a moment. “Beer ain’t gon give me no luck or nothin else. And ain’t no pig’s foot got enough meat on it for me.” Her voice trailed off, and she went back to the front of the yard, looked down the darkening street again. Closing the grimy door, covered with the children’s dark handprints, she looked at Lanier where he stood in the kitchen screen, and then the TV light, tinged pale blue as winter sky cleared by the wind, leaped into the sheets covering her windows.

  He lay in bed for three days, not going to work, his wrists aching. Someone had brought Lee Myrtle chocolate candy, and the smell filled the room, murky-sweet as the time one of Red Man’s sons had dumped a truckload of carob pods and the pigs had crushed them underfoot to chew out the sharp, sugary powder. Red Man’s junk was still there; Lanier had been slowly moving it out to the edge of the land. He closed his eyes, heard their voices, the cars and pigs and shouting, and then he got up, threw the phone across the room at the candy. The dial tone hummed when he picked it up; he called Lonzo again, picked up his .22 and got into the big Chevy.

  At Floyd’s house, he was still for a second, then felt his heart beat so loud it hurt his skin, the way it did when he woke up from deep day sleep because someone was shouting at Rencie’s or the telephone rang. He waited for the pounding to stop, but it felt harder, harder.

  The pigs weren’t used to anyone but Lanier moving around inside the pens and the men moved as a group: Lonzo, Red Man and Floyd and Roscoe, even Floyd’s brother Charles. Lanier and Lonzo cut out the largest male first, the huge black hog, and when Lanier shot him in the head, the other pigs called and screamed but it was almost practiced, like they hollered when he fed them. Then when he and the men shot again and again in the males’ pen, the females and younger ones raised their screeching immediately, high and long, like cars that waited at a red light and then accelerated, bursting forward together.

  They carried the slabs of back meat and ribs, the tripe and feet, all night and all the next day, driving; blood stiffened in the hair around his ears, in his knuckles, dried in the webbing of his thumbs. Lonzo drank two pints of Yukon Jack, screwed his grindstone onto the edge of the table where they’d played dominoes. The sisters on Picasso said, “You didn’t clean out them pigs with corn, and this smell fishy, full a that garbage,” but he left meat with them, with Maitrue and Frank Brown, Floyd’s wife, and there was still more. Viola was dead, Tates gone, too, and some of the older people were in homes now. No room in those senior citizens’ apartments for meat, small as the studio rooms were. Neither of Lanier’s daughters, none of Red Man’s or Floyd’s kids knew how to cure the meat or salt it, cook it either, unless it was already cut up and pancake thin, dry as old sponge under plastic in the store. Like the girl next door, Lanier thought, his fingers refusing to bend under the coat of blood; she’d looked at those apricots like they were strange, something she’d never seen.

  Floyd loved being right. He said carefully, “The zoning, man, they was gon get you.” Lanier looked at the sun rising just over the freeway. He drove toward the Westside with another load in the back of the Ford. Lee Myrtle was wrapping, tying, marking words on the sides, he knew. When he pulled onto Picasso Street, he saw that the door to his house was open, and then he saw Rencie’s door open, too.

  She sat near the jamb, in the still-dark living room, only the light tumbling from the TV so the bare walls seemed to close in and then recede. Lanier realized after a minute that the pounding rhythm wasn’t coming from the screen, but from the huge radio set beside it on the floor, and when he looked carefully at her face, her eyes weren’t focused on the flashing faces at all, but on the bar of red light that pulsed on and off at the radio’s face. He listened, watched, and it reached out a long line when the drums hit hard, weakened in their absence.

  “What you want, old man?” she said suddenly. “I thought you was somebody else, bringin me… What you bring me? You don’t know what…”

  Lanier molded the rough brown paper Lee Myrtle had split from countless grocery sacks, made it tight around the meat, and placed it gently in her lap.

  los angeles stories

  buddah

  “LOOK AT THIS LITTLE Buddha-head dude, man,” one of them said. He pushed closer. “He got them Chinese eyes.”

  “He got a big old head, too, man. I think we should make him say somethin. He don’t respect us,” another voice said from behind him. Buddah kept his lips pressed warm together and felt the voices slide forward, tighter, taking away the air. He couldn’t breathe, and woke from the dream with the dry heat pressing through the walls; hot air seemed to waft into the room as if a giant mouth were hovering around it. A tickle of sweat curled around the skin behind his ear. He lay still, listening for the snores of Rodriguez and Sotelo, the two boys who shared his room. But their beds were empty, he saw, and fear pulled at his ribs. Did Gaines and T. C. make them guys leave so they could jump me? he thought, and when he turned his head and felt the rough pillowcase against his neck he remembered that Sotelo and Rodriguez had gone home to L.A. on a week pass.

  It was his seventh day. I can’t go on home-pass till I been in this place for a month, he said to himself. They gon talk me to death, bout behavior and pattern of your life, and them Crips gon try and dog me every time I turn around. He opened the door and looked out at the bare land, the stiff yellow grass like dog fur in patches, that surrounded St. Jude’s School for Boys. Now everybody on they home-pass, and ain’t nobody left but me and them guys that messed up or don’t got nowhere to go, he thought. The gray-green weeds close to the fence shivered in the wind. Every day he thought of the miles of desert and boulders he had seen when the social worker drove him in from L.A. “Your program is six months,” the man had said.

  No one else was awake yet; none of the other boys were roaming the walks in front of the buildings, hanging over the balconies, waiting for an overheated car to pull in off the highway. If a woman ever got out to look for help, they would swarm like dust toward her. Buddah listened to the wind. Must be lettin us sleep cause nobody goin home. He looked down the railing to the other end of the building to see if Jesse, the counselor for the thirteen-to-fifteen-year-olds, was awake, but his door was still closed. A long row of doorknobs glinted in the sun. Third door Gaines and T. C. Sotelo said they ain’t got no home-pass. They gon be on me all the time, talkin bout am I gon buy Gaines some pants with my state money. Am I gon give up the ducats.

  He thought of the dream, the shapes pressing forward, and he touched the trunk on the floor by his bed. That circle of voices was how he had gotten his name, months ago. A delegation of Bounty Hunters stood around him when he neared the project. “Fuckin Buddha-head, can’t even see out them eyes, they so slanty.” He’d been waiting for it, and had gifts ready for them: a car stereo, sunglasses from the Korean store, and himself. “I can pull for you,” he whispered to them.

  At St. Jude’s, he had covered the scarred top of his trunk with a sheet of white paper, the way the others had, and written his name in curved letters:

  BUDDAH

  SOUL GARDENS BOUNTY HUNTER’S

  He thought the name might protect him here, but it had been a mistake. He wanted to be left alone, to collect his things invisibly, not to speak. That first night, when they were asked, Sotelo and Rodriguez read the trunk and told the other boys, “New baby? He’s red, man.” Bounty Hunters wore red bandannas, called each other “Blood.” Crips were blue-raggers, and shouted “Cuzz” before they sho
t someone.

  But there were only two other red rags at St. Jude’s, and they were in the oldest group. In Buddah’s group there were two Crips. Gaines and T.C. Harris had flashed their hands at him, their fingers and thumbs contorted in the signals Buddah had always run from. Gaines fanned his fingers out over his biceps and said, “Oh, yeah.”

  Now it ain’t nobody in the room but me, six more days. Buddah looked at the low, wide windows and imagined the shapes he would see at night, blocking the light from the parking lot when they walked past the curtains; he saw the room as dark and gold-toned as if it were night now, and the crack of light that would cut in as they opened the door.

  He let the lock clink against the metal edging of the trunk. It contained everything he had at St. Jude’s: the jeans, white T-shirts and cheap canvas shoes Jesse took him to buy with part of the state money. “You got to lock your shit up all the time if you want to keep it,” Jesse had said, and Buddah laughed through his nose. Locks ain’t about nothin. Shit. They tellin me bout locks.

  Buddah opened Sotelo’s nightstand and saw only paper covered with drawings of heavy-eyed girls. He bent and looked under Sotelo’s bed; he’d seen him drop something behind the head one night. This was the first time he’d been alone, able to look. He saw a blunt shape against the wall, lying in the folds of green bedspread. It was a short length of pipe, dull heavy iron. Shit, everybody must got one a these, he thought. He bent to Rodriguez’s side and heard Jesse’s voice, heard him banging on doors with the flat of his hand, calling, “Get up, hardheads, we got places to go.”

  Montoya’s clipped words came from the doorway next to Buddah’s. “Hey, man, Jesse, you wake up so early? You miss me already, man?”

  “Yeah, Montoya, I couldn’t wait,” Jesse said. “Get ready for breakfast.”

  Buddah slipped to his trunk quickly and dropped the pipe behind it. He heard it land, muffled, on the edge of his bedspread, and then Jesse swung open the door, saying, “Five minutes, Smith. How you like this heat?”

  Buddah looked at Jesse’s long feet on the hump of the doorway. Ain’t here to be likin it.

  “Still can’t speak, huh?” Jesse said. “Maybe you’ll talk at the beach if we cool you off.” He turned and Buddah saw the flash of a bird diving to the parking lot for potato-chip crumbs.

  They waited for Jesse near the long white van. Montoya, his hair combed smooth and feather-stiff, walked his boxer’s walk in baggy cholo khakis. Carroll, a white boy, leaned against the van, arms folded under the “Highway to Hell” that crossed his T-shirt. Buddah stood apart from them, in the shade of a squat palm tree, preparing to be invisible. His arms were folded too, and he pushed down on his feet, feeling the long muscles in his thighs tighten. The ghostly bushes past the fence turned in the wind.

  Won’t nobody see me. Them Crips be busy talkin shit to Jesse, and I ain’t gotta worry bout nobody else. I’ma get me somethin at the beach. It’ll be somethin there.

  The sound of electric drums, sharp as gunfire, came from the balcony. Buddah waited until they approached. T. C. wore new razor-creased Levis and a snow-white T-shirt, a blue cap set high and slanted on his sunglasses. He carried the radio, a box of cassettes and a can of soda, singing loudly, “It shoulda been blue” over the words of the woman who sang, “It shoulda been you.”

  Gaines followed him, pointing at Buddah when T. C. sang “blue.” “If we was at home, nigga, it be a .357 to the membrane,” he whispered to Buddah, taking the pointing finger and running it around his ear.

  Buddah pulled in the sides of his cheeks, soft and slippery when he bit them with his back teeth. Yeah, but I wouldn’t be wearin no red rag, cause I ain’t no Bounty Hunter. I’m a independent. Red, blue, ain’t about shit to me. He was careful not to let his lips move; he had to be conscious of it, because when he spoke to himself, he would feel his lips touching each other sometimes and falling away as soft and slight as tiny bubbles popping. Probably look like I’m fixin to cry, he thought.

  No bandannas were allowed at St. Jude’s, no careless hand signals, nothing to spark gang fights. Gaines looked carefully for Jesse, and smiled close to Buddah’s face. “The red rag is stained with the blood of disrespectful Hunters, slob. You gon respect us.” He got one a them devil peaks, Buddah thought, like Mama say when people hair all in a point on they forehead. Mama say them some evil people with peaks. He glanced away, at T.C., who was uninterested, popping his fingers and singing.

  You don’t never stop talkin. You always runnin your mouth, that way everybody look at you, know where you are. He saw Jesse appear from the office, and Gaines moved away. Not like me. I’m bad cause you don’t see me.

  It was easy because he was so small and quiet; he walked into the stores imagining that everything in his face blended together, skin, lips, eyes all the same color. He wasn’t hungry with hard rings around his stomach, like when he didn’t eat anything for a long time, but he wanted something else in his mouth, a solid taste like he had chosen whatever he wanted. When they still lived in a house, when he was ten, his mother left pots of red beans on the stove when she went to work in the afternoon. Sometimes she left greens and a pan of cornbread, or three pieces of chicken, one each for him, Danita and Donnie.

  He used to walk with her to the bus stop, saying nothing, watching her skin begin to shine from the heat, like molasses, with a liquid red sheen underneath the color. Her mouth moved all the time, to smile, to tell him to hurry and get back to the house and damn it, don’t be hangin out in the street. Say somethin, David! All right, now. Lock the door.

  He always waited until five o’clock had passed and then left the house, saying sternly to his younger brother and sister, “Y’all watch TV. Don’t move. I be back.”

  He stepped over the jagged hole in the wooden porch and walked past children riding bicycles, thin knees angling like iron pipes. The store was five blocks away, a small grocery store with a Korean man behind the register. Women crowded the store then, shopping before they went home from work. They walked around the stacks of cans blocking the aisle, picked over the bright, shiny vegetables and fruit.

  Fingering the quarter in his pocket, he brushed past the women near the bread and potato chips. He bent next to one woman, watching, and slid bags of potato chips into the pit of his dark blue wind-breaker; they rested silent and light against his stomach. For Danita. He imagined his eyes were like ball bearings, greased, so that he didn’t move enough of anything else to rustle. Zingers for himself. At the counter loaded with candy, he knelt to look at the bottom row and beside his knee, pushed a Butterfinger up the sleeve of his jacket. He paid for Donnie’s pack of gum, watching the Korean man’s eyes, comparing them to his own, holding his plasticlike jacket very still. I got somethin, he thought, looking at the man’s hands. I got your stuff.

  Walking home quickly, he always touched the food with the same pride. The store was different. He had slipped in and out, and something was changed, missing.

  “Oh, man, look who comin, Loco Lopez,” T.C. said. “He done lost his home-pass cause they busted him with that paint thinner. My man was high.”

  “Qué pasa?” Lopez said to Montoya.

  “Shut up, T. C,” Jesse said. “Let’s go. Only reason I’m takin you to the beach is cause it’s so damn hot out here I can’t think.”

  “I got shotgun,” T.C. said.

  Jesse looked at him hard and said, “Who are you, ghetto child goes to the beach? Where’s your lawn chair and picnic basket?”

  T. C. opened the van’s front door and said, “I left the caviar at my crib, homes. Too Cool only taking the essentials. And I been to the beach, O.K.? Me and my set went to Venice, and it was jammin, all them bikinis and shit.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t expect to pick up any girls at this beach, not dressed like that,” Jesse said. He looked at them. Buddah watched Gaines sit alone in the long seat behind T. C. Montoya and Lopez sat together in the back seat; Carroll and Buddah sat far from each other in the middle of the van
.

  “Anybody gets out of my sight, we go back,” Jesse started, turning onto the highway. “Anybody talks shit, like you guys did at the skating rink last week, T. C, we’re gone, right back to the Jude’s.” Jesse paused to look in the rearview mirror. “I’m takin you guys to Laguna. It’s not the closest, but it’s small, so I can keep an eye on you.”

  The back of Gaines’s neck glittered with sweat. Buddah felt the hot wind from the window scour his face; he watched T. C. rest his hand on the radio and pop his shoulders so they rippled. Buddah felt a tremor in his chest, a settling of his spine, and he touched the window.

  The low purplish mountains that rimmed the desert were wrinkled in strange, thin folds and trenches, like his grandmother’s neck. He saw her, sitting in her tiny yard in Long Beach the way she’d been the only time he’d ever visited her. She was silent like him, her body rocking slightly all the time, watching her greens and peas grow against the chainlink fence. The velvety skin near her hairline was still tight, and her eyes were slanted upward like his. The mountains came closer as the van began to leave the desert, and soon they were smoother, covered with burnt-gold grass and stunted trees. Buddah was thinking that he hadn’t seen a beach in Long Beach when the music began to beat through the van. T.C. drew circles with his hands in the air, and Jesse reached over and turned the radio off. “Man, you ain’t got no soul,” T. C. complained.