Southland

by Nina Revoyr

  And although Kenji didn’t like this name, he nodded and smiled, anything to bring a moment of pleasure to her eyes. “And if it’s a girl?” he asked.

  “Same thing.”

  They laughed and squeezed hands and began to pray together, and then they heard the doctor come in. Kenji pulled the blanket aside and saw a big, red-faced man shuffling toward their corner.

  “Hello, Mack!” the man called out cheerfully when he caught sight of Kenji. “You know, I’ve never seen a yellow belly in a uniform before.”

  The nurse, who walked behind him, lowered her eyes, and Kenji decided it would be best to say nothing. As the doctor reached the side of the bed, though, Kenji caught a whiff of liquor, and he looked at the man uncertainly.

  The doctor touched Yuki’s stomach and then moved down between her legs, his hands huge and clumsy as two-by-fours. “Looks like this one’s stuck in there pretty good.” He was going to have to perform an operation, he said, but the nurse reminded him that there was no anesthesiologist in the camp. He swore, and sighed, and reached behind him, producing a long needle from a cart the nurse had brought over. “This here’s a local,” he informed the Hiranos as he administered the shot to Yuki’s belly. They waited a few moments. Then the doctor pulled out a knife. He placed it against the dome of Yuki’s stomach, and at the precise moment that the tip broke through her skin, Kenji felt a piercing pain in his own flesh. Yuki did not feel it, though, even as the hakujin doctor pulled the knife downward, a bit crookedly, a path of blood springing up where the blade had cut. Kenji crossed himself and muttered. He had accidentally caught a small shark once, off the pier at San Pedro, and when he split its belly, the wound had looked something like this. Now, the doctor hooked both his thumbs in the incision and pulled Yuki’s flesh apart like a loaf of bread. Kenji felt sick. Yuki couldn’t face the doctor or look at her own numbed stomach, so she stared instead at her husband’s face. Kenji tried to hold his expression together. Then the doctor put the knife down and the nurse handed him a huge pair of forceps. He wriggled them in through the wound. He seemed to strike something, because after a few more grunts and adjustments, he braced himself against the table and started to pull. His face was even redder now, and the smell of whiskey was rising out of his pores. Kenji tried not to look too closely at the procedure, saying under his breath, “Please, Jesus, take care of them, please.” He watched his wife’s eyes grow wider. The doctor seemed to be yanking very hard, as if pulling a stubborn tooth. The nurse looked at him in alarm, inquired, “Doctor?” But then, with a final yank and grunt, the doctor pulled the big tooth free. Kenji saw immediately that the baby, red and slick, was very still. Its head was crushed on both sides between the forceps. Then, to his horror, he saw that the stubborn tooth had brought its roots with it; the gaping mouth in Yuki’s belly was pumping blood. She screamed at the sight of it, since there wasn’t any pain, although she began to feel something tugging at her chest, her legs, her arms, her heart, something pulling hard from inside. The doctor swore again and pressed towels to her stomach, one after the next, but the blood bloomed through them all and oozed and bubbled between his fingers. Kenji looked past the doctor at his wife, and her eyes were bright with comprehension. He’d been holding her hand and now he brought his face up to hers, touching her softly with his fingers, whispering into her cheeks, her ears, her eyes, her lips, until the yawning mouth in her belly was silenced forever.

  Twelve years later, Kenji didn’t know what to do with his hands, which still shook from not strangling the doctor. They quivered and jumped all the way back to Camp Shelby, and then over to Italy, where the hakujin they did kill didn’t satisfy his rage. They shook through the year his family lived in a government trailer in Lomita, where they were sent after the war because their neighbors in Boyle Heights, upon receiving word of their return, promptly set fire to their house. And they shook for eight years after Kenji’s parents bought the new place in Angeles Mesa. The only way he could keep them still was to give them occupation, which was why he had so enjoyed holding guns, and then his father’s gardening tools. Jobs that didn’t require his hands weren’t appealing to him, and not useful anyway, since it took hard labor and constant pep talks with himself to keep from going after each burly hakujin he saw with flushed cheeks and cheap whiskey on his breath. Sometimes his gruff pep talks alarmed the people he passed on the street or the families he gardened for, but they didn’t mind because he did do such a beautiful job on the lawn, honey, don’t you think? Even if he is a bit odd. And he was even starting to learn what to do with his hands when they weren’t holding a pair of shears or pushing a mower. He took up smoking, buying a pack every other day from Frank Sakai’s store, even though, three years later, his father would die of lung cancer. And then one afternoon outside of Frank’s store, Jesus came up to him again, dressed in his normal white robes this time. He looked at Kenji and pointed over toward Crenshaw Boulevard. “You must bowl, my son,” He said. “Fill your hands with the nourishing weight of sport.” Then He disappeared into the store, where Kenji was sure He was going to buy some fruit. Kenji followed, but when he got inside, there was no one there but Frank.

  “Did you see Him?” he asked. “The Son of God. He was here.”

  Frank didn’t lift an eyebrow. “No, I must have missed Him.”

  Kenji stared, eyes wide. He looked hard at the fruit bins, and then turned back to his friend. “Nevermind,” he said. “Tell me, Frank, could you teach me how to bowl?”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  1994

  REBECCA, ON Monday, practically skipped into class, and her mood was so different from her usual nonchalance that Jackie knew something wonderful had happened.

  “What’s up?” Jackie asked when Rebecca sat down beside her. “You get laid last night?”

  “No,” she answered, plopping her bag down. “I got a job.”

  “Are you serious?”

  Rebecca nodded, looking pleased with herself. “Yep. Remember that Legal Aid office in Westlake I interviewed with?”

  “The place off Alvarado, with two lawyers for like five hundred clients?”

  “Yeah, that one. Well, the funding they’d been working on came through last week, and they just called me about an hour ago and offered me the job.”

  Jackie pounded her lightly on the shoulder. “Get outta here! You got probably the only public interest job in the country this year.”

  “Yeah, well, they’re going to make me suffer for it, too. Salary’s thirty-two grand a year, and with all my damn loans, I’m still going to be living like a student.”

  The professor cleared his throat a few times, signaling that he was about to begin, so Jackie bent in close to her friend and lowered her voice. “Well, let’s celebrate. What should we do?”

  “Get drunk, of course. But you’re buying, girl, ’cos I’m about to increase my debt.”

  Their professor made a few announcements about moot court results and speakers coming to campus. They both half-listened for a moment, and then Jackie leaned over again. “Hey, you know,” she said, “There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  Rebecca turned toward her with her eyebrows raised. The tone of Jackie’s voice suggested that something out of the ordinary was about to be imparted. And Rebecca’s obvious interest suddenly made Jackie self-conscious. She’d toyed, half-seriously, with the idea of telling her friend everything—about the store, James Lanier, Curtis Martindale, the will. But she hadn’t known she might really do it until that moment. “Later,” she whispered, turning back toward the front of the lecture hall. She stared straight at their teacher’s neat blond hair for an hour and did not take a single note.

  That evening, Jackie drove down to Hawthorne. She was meeting Lanier at a Winchell’s there, and together they were going to see Angela Broadnax. Jackie’s hunch had been correct—among the cards that Lois had collected at the funeral were ones from Angela Broadnax and Bradley Nakamura. According to her card, Angela Broadnax w
as a supervisor at the DMV office in Hawthorne, and Jackie had called her on Monday. She’d mentioned James Lanier, hoping that Angela would remember him. She did. Then Jackie told her who she was, and what she wanted from her brother. There’d been a long silence on the other end of the line. Then Angela Broadnax had said, “Listen. Derek’s dead. He OD’d on heroin ten years ago. I don’t think he ever got over what happened to Curtis and David. But there are some things about that time that you should know about.” Jackie had waited, holding her breath, for Angela to continue—but Angela wanted to talk to them in person.

  When Jackie pulled into the Winchell’s parking lot, she saw Lanier sitting at a table by the window. He was wearing a jacket and tie, and he looked more business-like than usual. She was thrown slightly off-kilter, her discomfort reminding her that she really didn’t know this man at all. As soon as she walked in, though, and he raised his head and smiled, he became familiar again, James Lanier, a man who was becoming a friend.

  “Hey,” he said when he saw her, voice muffled by a donut. “Ready to go?”

  “I guess so,” she replied, sliding into the booth. “Are you? You’re all dolled up tonight. What’s the occasion?”

  He glanced down at his outfit. “Oh, this? I had meetings with possible sponsors all day. Besides, I think I’m a little nervous. At least in my jacket and tie, I feel more grown-up.”

  “Why are you nervous?”

  He broke out into a shy, boyish grin. “Well, she remembers me, right? And what I remember most about her was that I wasn’t all that nice to her. As far as I was concerned, girls just took Curtis’s attention away from me. Besides, she was older and I was just a little kid. Who knows what kind of trouble she saw me get up to?”

  Jackie laughed. “What—you think she’s not going to respect you because she saw you crash your tricycle when you were three?”

  “I never crashed my tricycle. Let’s go.”

  Lanier drove, and they talked about meaningless things—the weather, city politics, the new 105 Freeway, which they’d both ridden, the day it opened, like an amusement park ride. At one point Lanier mentioned the dinner they’d had, and then asked, “How’s your friend?”

  Jackie didn’t know whether he meant “friend” innocently or as the euphemism it sounded like. “Fine,” she said, wishing Lanier would change the subject—which he did, moving on to his opinion of who should win that year’s Oscars. They covered a dozen topics in their five-minute drive, discussing everything except the task at hand, the woman they were going to see. Jackie didn’t know whether this silence had to do with Lanier’s nervousness or with the possibility that they were about to learn something definitive.

  Angela Broadnax’s apartment was in the back of a small building on Ramona Avenue. The walkway was bisected by a long, deep crack, clearly fresh, caused by the earthquake. Through the open window Lanier and Jackie could hear loud voices—not angry, just raised, as if the people were talking to each other from separate rooms. The voices both belonged to women, or girls, and when the door was pulled open after Lanier’s firm, three-point knock, a striking, dark-skinned woman stood before them, looking harried, and behind her stood a smaller, younger, smoother-skinned copy, who was unquestionably her daughter.

  “Hi,” the woman said, making room in the doorway. “You must be Jimmy Lanier and Jackie Ishida.”

  Her voice knocked Lanier over. Dragged him back thirty years. And before his mind fastened on what her face had looked like, he remembered the low, gravelly voice. Asking Curtis What you want, honey? as she leaned toward the open refrigerator. Singing along with the radio as they sat on the porch at dusk. “Yes,” he responded. “And you’re Angela Broadnax.”

  Angela shook their hands before moving aside to let them in. She was Jackie’s height exactly, but Jackie felt smaller in her presence. Although she was in her mid-forties, she looked a decade younger—her hair was shiny and black, and her skin only wrinkled—and then only lightly—around her eyes and her tense, tight mouth. She wore a blue sweatshirt, but her pants were dressy and gray; it looked like she’d come home from work and only halfchanged to cook. And cook she clearly had—the house smelled, luxuriously, of chicken and spices. At the table sat a young boy of eleven or twelve, who was reading while he ate.

  “Thanks for coming,” Angela said, indicating that they should sit on the couch. “As you see, I’ve got a handful here, and I don’t like to leave them at night.”

  “Mama,” said the girl, suddenly and loudly, “I’m going over to Rhonda’s.” She stood there defiantly, thin arms crossed, as if she and her mother were alone.

  Her mother just looked at her, fist on hip. “Renee, this is Jimmy Lanier and his friend Miss Jackie Ishida. You say hello to them now, and don’t act like they’re not here. And you ask if you can leave. You don’t announce it.”

  She didn’t mention that she knew Lanier—Jackie wouldn’t have thought she did if she hadn’t kept calling him Jimmy—and Jackie liked her for this.

  Lanier, though, was focused on the fist. The womanish, stubborn fist propped up on the hip, hard close-to-the-skin bone against bone. It was a gesture he’d seen her make a hundred times, and from the axis of that stance a world of memory spun out, the girl whose body framed the fist against the hip. He remembered her soft, lanky arm over Curtis’s shoulder. The face lit and laughing when Curtis kissed her on the forehead. The hard languid stride that both challenged and beckoned; and suddenly Curtis was sitting beside him again, jostling and winking, showing Jimmy, who was still too young to really understand, the way her ass moved when she walked.

  That long-ago girl’s daughter looked sullen now, and seemed to be thinking of talking back. But she must have decided against it, because she uncrossed her arms and looked at the guests. “Hi,” she said reluctantly. Then, to her mother, “Can I go to Rhonda’s place? I’m gonna do some homework tonight.”

  “Yes,” her mother replied. “You can go. But be back by ten. And I’ll expect you to show me what you’ve done.” Her voice was stern, not angry, but the girl rolled her eyes as if she’d been dealt some major injustice. She gathered her things and stomped out the door without saying goodbye, and her mother looked after her, silent. Then she turned back to her guests, trying to smile. “That’s my headache. Sixteen and moody from morning to night. Ricky,” she said, nodding toward the boy at the table, “never gives me any trouble.”

  The boy was so engrossed in his book that he dropped a piece of chicken and ended up with a forkful of air.

  “I worry about him a little,” Angela continued. “Twelve years old and he doesn’t really have friends. But I’d rather he keep to himself than have friends like Renee’s. Some girls now rougher than the boys I knew when I was coming up.”

  “Renee and Ricky Broadnax,” said Lanier, trying it out. And he remembered Derek now, the flat broad face, the ever-ready grin.

  “Drake,” Angela corrected. “They have their daddy’s name, even though they’ve seen the man maybe six or seven times in the last five years. I took my own name back when we got divorced.” She nodded toward the doorway. “That one started to get wild as soon as he left. She was always full of the devil, but she was never out of control until their dad was gone. And Ricky just got quieter. Ricky,” she said now, raising her voice, “are you done eating?” He looked up at her and nodded, glancing with curiosity at Jackie and Lanier, as if noticing them for the first time. “Come over here, sugar,” she beckoned, and he obeyed.

  When Angela introduced her guests, Ricky shook their hands gravely and said, “Nice to meet you.” Lanier grinned at him, eyes softening. Then Angela instructed the boy to put his dirty plates in the sink and to go to his room and read. She watched him while he carried the dishes, turning her attention back to Jackie and Lanier only when his door had clicked shut.

  “You want something to drink?” she asked. “I have coffee, juice, maybe a couple of beers.”

  They both protested, saying that they’d just drank, j
ust eaten. Angela leaned forward in her chair, taking stock of Lanier. “You know, you look the same,” she said. “You still got that worried expression.” She remembered him clearly, the quiet boy who was her boyfriend’s appendage, and she saw, like a ghost that hovered behind him, the texture and shape of his loss.

  Lanier placed one hand flat against his knee and put the other right on top of it. “Well, Ms. Broadnax…”