by Susie Bright
What’s Cody asking? Come on, Milo! Focus. Attention.
“. . . I need to take a whizz. A piss palace?”
Oh, thank goodness.
Milo points to the bathroom.
* * *
Fuck a duck. Fuck a big, quacking duck!
Palm slap against his forehead.
Cody takes a piss and rezips.
This Milo must think he’s stupid. Must think he’s a loser, like Tyler does. Like everyone does, right?
Yeah, even Frank Liberty. Cody imagines Frank laughing his ass off, telling Mrs. Liberty—Yeah, dumb juvie kid believed me. Ha-ha. Little loser even said he was gonna get a tat: Death and Taxes.
Cody’s face flushes. An embarrassment so familiar, like a second beating heart.
His mind goes all wrecking ball.
Fuck you, Milo. Little know-it-all.
He reaches down and touches his good luck charm. Nice and heavy, there when he needs it.
Time for a demo.
Cody steps out of the bathroom.
Zero in on Milo.
Why is the kid just standing there like an idiot by the cash register? Why’s he got his hands in the air?
Oh, shit on a shingle. Dump on a bump. Some dickhead with a flowered cloth tied over his nose and mouth, pointing a gun at Milo.
Cody ducks low behind the cold drink case for a better look.
The dickhead with the gun? No fuckin’ way.
Yes fuckin’ way!
He knows the thickness of that neck, the bend in the arm from where it broke. Hell, he even recognizes the yellow floral print of the scarf.
Tyler.
Asshole cut up Mom’s favorite scarf to rob Ferrell’s Donuts.
And what’s this? No! Flamin’ poo on a shoe! There’s a long wet stain spreading down the front of Milo’s pants.
Little Milo, with the dead dad and no homies and a crap donut job where he pays taxes, just went and pissed himself. All because dickhead Tyler stuck a gun in his face.
He should do something about this.
And before Cody has another thought, he is doing something.
* * *
Milo’s mind camera—tracking shot:
Ninja Statue of Liberty, legs akimbo, a soldier yell of outrage. Whips out a set of nunchucks, whirls them in a ferocious figure eight. Whoosh.
Dialogue:
“Thanks for telling me about this place, Code-ster.”
“Not why I told you, Tyler.”
“Easy, boy. Looks like you were planning this job yourself.”
“Naw, just a demo of my skill. Was gonna mess up some fritters big time. Send them to the trash can.”
“You want in then? Father/son action?”
“Don’t get all flesh-and-blood-ish with me, dickhead.”
“Put down the numbnuts, Cody.”
“Pay your taxes, Tyler!”
“Huh?”
“Don’t mess with my homie Milo!”
At the sound of his own name, zoom in.
Cody’s nunchucks moving fast, snapping from shoulder to shoulder, like the Statue of Liberty patting himself on the back.
Back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and—
Oh no!
Disaster.
The ’chucks hit the countertop, drop, hit the floor, bounce.
A lunge. A stumble.
Too much too fast for Milo’s head to record.
A shout.
An explosion.
The bakery case glass shatters.
The smell of gunpowder. And apple fritters.
Then Milo watches. The symbol of our entire country slumps on the floor. Green fabric billowing out. A red stain spreading across his chest.
No! Not a symbol.
Not dialogue.
Not a fake scene.
Milo’s knees go wobbly.
Camera off off off!
* * *
Shit! What the fuck!
Wave the gun in the air. Slam fist on the counter.
Think, Tyler. Think!
Don’t look at the mess on the floor.
Stupid little Cody. Couldn’t control the numbnuts! Trying to be a hero. What am I always telling him? Wrong place, wrong time. Again.
Tell the other one to open the cash register.
“Now! Pronto!”
Stuff bills in pockets. Leave the coins. Fifty dollars, maybe sixty. That’s it?
Donut kid looking at him too hard. “Take a picture, why don’t ya?”
Fuckin’ jacked up now. Kick the white plastic table set.
Got a big, big problem on my hands.
The old lady. Cody’s mom. Got a soft spot for the kid.
This whole mess is her fault, spoiling him, not smacking him when he gets out of line. And now she’s going be all fucked up and crying and shit and he’s gonna have to smack her and that means more crying and who’s gonna to have to live with that drama?
Him, Tyler, that’s who!
Throw the coffee creamer against the wall. Use the butt of the gun to spider another donut case.
Plus, her birthday’s coming up. Cody once again wrecking it, three years in a row. Coulda won money on that bet.
Hold on! Ding ding ding. Got an idea.
Donuts. That’ll make her feel better. Always does.
That’s the kind of guy Tyler is. When tragedy hits, always right there with something thoughtful.
Order the donut kid: “Get me one of those pink boxes. Start fillin’.”
Two jelly, two blueberry, two old-fashioned, two cinnamon crunch. No, make it three cinnamon crunch. She really likes those. Two chocolate. One apple-filled. What do you mean one more? Oh, baker’s dozen special. Nice.
Seems like an okay dude, this donut kid. Thoughtful. Not a loser like Cody.
Too bad.
Point the gun. Pull the trigger. Feel the kick.
Wipe off the prints. Put the gun in the donut kid’s hand.
Naw. Move it to Cody’s hand.
Doesn’t totally add up. But it’s the best Tyler can do given the circumstances. Cops’ll be scratching their heads over this one.
Open the door. Hear the buzzer. Don’t tilt the donut box. Take one last look at the scene.
Fuckin’ Cody. Look what he made me do.
PART IV
Killer South
THE STRAWBERRY TATTOO
by Maceo Montoya
Aptos
When David started barking, Marcela knew something awful was about to happen. His first bark, a sudden low growl, could’ve been mistaken for a man clearing his throat. But by the second and third, it was clear that David was doing his best impersonation of a bulldog ready to attack. When she followed his eyes, past all their colleagues at the hotel bar, she saw that he was staring at her boyfriend, Vicente.
“Shit,” she said.
Someone else added, “What the hell is going on?”
Marcela and David used to sleep together. They were both English instructors in Avanza, a community college program geared toward disadvantaged students, most of them Latino. Marcela and David taught at different colleges now, Marcela in the Bay Area, David near Sacramento—but they ran into each other periodically at these team-building workshops. This semester, they’d gathered at the Seascape Beach Resort in Aptos.
Marcela was married when they first met, and so was David, but their attraction was so strong, at least on her end, that she refused to drink at the conference mixers in case she found her defenses weakened. At the next conference, after her marriage collapsed, she downed two tequila shots, found David, and practically dragged him to her room. He was stocky, muscular, with tattoos all over his body: on his back an Aztec warrior carrying a half-naked princess; on his chest the Virgen de Guadalupe, the rays of her halo crawling up his neck; and on his rib cage a giant bulldog in full color. She knew he’d gone to Fresno State.
“Damn, you got some serious school pride,” she said when she first saw it.
“Something li
ke that,” he said.
David reminded her of the boys she grew up with. He may’ve been a college-level English professor, with an MA in comparative lit, schooling poorly prepared students in basic grammar and critical thinking, but he hadn’t shed his upbringing. With his shaved head and carefully manicured goatee, he looked like a cholo, often talked like one. One unfortunate night, he acted like one too. At a conference in Sacramento, Marcela and David went for a beer run for the after-party. While David went inside the liquor store, she stayed out front to smoke a cigarette. A guy passed by and asked her if she had a light. She fumbled in her purse for her lighter and the guy asked, “Whatchu up to tonight, girl?”
She was about to say something friendly and dismissive, when she heard the door jingle behind her.
“Better back the fuck off, motherfucker,” David’s voice was right at her back.
The guy looked up. “Who the fuck you think you talking to, son?”
She tried to intervene. “David, stop—”
She didn’t even see the punch, just a flurry, and suddenly the guy was knocked out cold.
Marcela screamed. “What the hell, David?” She grabbed his arm, but he jerked it away and she tumbled backward, almost falling. Marcela stumbled in her heels across the parking lot. She made it to the corner when she turned around, hoping David would be right behind, but there he was, holding a case of Tecate in one hand, standing over the guy and barking like a mad dog.
They never talked about the incident. They slept together a few more times, but then she heard he was still married and just had a kid. She avoided him from then on.
* * *
Everyone’s attention was on David’s barking act now: their academic colleagues, the bartender, and several recently arrived hotel guests. Marcela stared at Vicente. He was smiling as he mouthed something in David’s direction.
Vicente was the most beautiful man, straight or otherwise, Marcela had ever met, down to the unblemished smoothness of his skin and his thick, shiny hair with never a strand out of place. She wished she had his eyelashes, his eyebrows, his nose and shapely lips, even his permanently minty breath. She was envious of his arms, and his thin, muscular legs. It was unfair so much beauty had been bestowed on a man.
There were drawbacks to his perfection. He heightened her insecurities, even though Vicente soothed her with compliments. But he could also act like the model on a magazine cover—unattainable, enigmatic, as perfect as he was blank. They’d been together almost six months and it drove her crazy.
This current moment was a good example of his inscrutability. What was Vicente mouthing in David’s direction? Why the hell was he smiling?
David was the opposite. He was a man who wore his heart on his sleeve, and right now he was reacting, pure and simple.
“Come on, David, stop it,” a male colleague said.
David’s barking grew more aggressive. He set his glass of whiskey on the bar counter and now both arms were free to emphasize his canine-about-to-pounce stance.
The bartender tried to intervene: “Sir, excuse me, you’re going to have quiet down or else I’ll have to call security.”
Without taking his eyes off Vicente, David stopped barking and said, “I’ll quiet down when this piece of shit wipes the smile off his face.”
Only at that moment did the others finally turn toward Vicente, who stood with his arms crossed, his smile unwavering.
God, he’s so handsome, Marcela thought despite herself and the circumstances. But how could she ignore his perfect white teeth, his dimples, that confidence?
Vicente looked around and shrugged.
Satisfied, everyone now turned back to David, except for Marcela, who kept staring at Vicente, waiting for him to look at her. But he was fixed on David. There was a certain twinkle in his eye, and again he mouthed something, less perceptible than before, but Marcela was ready for it.
Bow-wow, she thought. That’s what he’s mouthing. Bow-wow, like a little dog. Bow-wow, like the poet Francisco Alarcón’s dog. Earlier that day, a colleague in session had described her appreciation for the Chicano poet’s verse about his bilingual dog. How when he came home, the dog greeted him, Bow-wow—and in case he didn’t understand, the dog then barked, “Güau-güau.”
Vicente had made a strange comment. He interrupted to ask what kind of dog it was.
“What?” the speaker didn’t get it.
“I haven’t read the poem. So I’m curious, does it say what kind of dog it is?”
“It’s a bilingual dog.”
“No, I mean, is it a bulldog or something, or is it nothing but a mutt?”
People were quiet for a moment, but then Vicente smiled and everyone realized it was a joke and a few people chuckled to be polite.
Marcela shook her head and tried to alleviate the tension. “Ay, you tell the worst jokes, Vicente.” He laughed good-naturedly and leaned back in his chair. Not a minute later, David abruptly rose from his seat and walked out of the conference room. No one gave it a second thought, and not until now did Marcela think that the two were connected: Vicente’s stupid joke and David’s exit.
Vicente did it again. Speaking softly now: “Bow-wow.”
David barked in response and lunged toward Vicente. Two other men tried to restrain him but their efforts were pointless. David pushed them aside like the featherweight academics they were.
A glass fell off a table, hitting the floor with a dull thud; someone cried, “Oh my God!” In three bounds, David was on top of Vicente. Vicente didn’t attempt to move. He didn’t even flinch. David tackled him to the floor, where he straddled him and began punching Vicente’s face in a left-right combo.
Marcela kept thinking it would stop, that David had to stop, but he’d lost all control. No one dared step forward. Vicente’s head was limp and soft, like a rag doll.
Hotel security pushed through the crowd and grabbed David from behind, cutting short one last punch. They dragged him backward. He gave little resistance, and his wide-eyed expression made him seem as shocked as everyone else. Vicente lay prostrate on the ground, blood streaming from his nose and mouth, his face already swollen. One of the security guards said into his walkie-talkie, “Call the police. Get an ambulance too!”
The Avanza conference attendees, so accustomed to doling out advice to desperate young people, were at a loss. They stared at Vicente’s limp body, fearing the worst. Marcela overcame her shock and rushed to his side, collapsing. “Vicente!”
As if beckoned from the dead, he turned his head to her. The last thing she expected was for Vicente to smile and reveal a mouthful of bloody teeth.
“An ambulance is coming!”
“No, I’m fine.” He coughed. “Tell them I don’t need one.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Really, I’m fine,” he said. “Just give me a sec.” Vicente rose onto his elbows, turned, and pushed himself to his knees. He grabbed a table and with a little hop, hoisted himself up onto his feet. He looked around at everyone. “I’m all good,” he said. “Don’t worry about me.”
Frederico, a counselor at Davis, said, “Vicente, bro, you should go to the hospital, man, it doesn’t look good.”
Vicente waved him off. “I’ll just ice up, get some rest.” He turned to Marcela. “Help me to the room, will you?”
Marcela held his arm and together they walked slowly toward the elevator. She turned back to look at their colleagues, wanting someone to stop them. But no one said a thing.
They stepped onto the elevator and a few seconds later the doors slid closed. After a long silence, she realized she’d forgotten to press the floor number. She pressed 3 and stood back, staring at the tile floor, trembling. Mirrors surrounded them. She didn’t want to look up. She couldn’t bear to look at Vicente’s face.
“Baby,” Vicente said.
“Yeah?”
“Look at me.”
She slowly looked at Vicente’s reflection in the mirror. One eye had shut completely.
He stared at her through the slit of his other. He started to laugh, revealing his blood-smeared teeth.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she said. She felt tears streaming down her cheeks.
He let out a long satisfied sigh. “I needed that,” he said.
“You—what?”
The elevator dinged and the doors slid open. An elderly white couple was waiting outside. They were dressed for dinner, bubbling with excitement. When they saw Vicente their eyes bulged in unison. The woman gasped, “Oh my God! What happened?”
Marcela was too upset to respond.
Vicente had no problem finding words: “You know, just a little scrap with a bitch-ass nigga.”
* * *
Vicente slept for an hour with ice-wrapped towels covering his face. Marcela watched over him from a rolling desk chair. Her heart steadied. She knew David was capable of violence. She’d seen it firsthand. She knew what the barking was all about too. After the liquor store incident, she’d confided to a friend from her writing group. Like David, he had grown up in Fresno. “He must be a Bulldog,” the friend said.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“It’s a Fresno gang. That’s what they do. They bark to show how crazy they are. I swear, look it up on YouTube.”
“It’s psycho, that’s what it is,” Marcela said. “A grown man barking. And what the hell, wasn’t he supposed to have left that life behind?”
“Vatos locos forever,” the friend said, doing his best Miklo impression from Blood In Blood Out before bursting into giggles.
But as enigmatic as Vicente could be, violence hardly seemed in his nature. In addition to his physical beauty, he was polite, almost debonair, as if he’d been raised at an English boarding school, at least how Marcela imagined one. He rarely cussed. He never raised his voice. He didn’t even fumble when he spoke, rarely letting slip an “uh” or an “um.” He used words that were odd coming out of a first-generation Mexican kid, such as “preferably” and “perhaps.” Vicente adhered to the rules of chivalry as though he’d come across a guidebook, holding doors open for others regardless of gender, the first to give up his seat, always insisting on clearing the table and washing the dishes.