Hailey's War

by Jodi Compton

  Instead, I started walking.

  If San Francisco was bigger than it looked for a person on foot, Los Angeles was huge. East L.A., where I was headed, wasn’t even in L.A. proper. I wasn’t sure how many miles lay ahead of me. I did know that in the oppressively bright, hot weather, I was going to have a wicked sunburn.

  It’s just another road march, I told myself. At West Point we had done them all the time, with our rifles and heavy rucks on our backs.

  A lot of what I’d learned at West Point was going to be useful here. The officers who’d taught us had foreseen the day when we might be dropped into a hostile landscape without resources and would need to survive by our wits. We’d learned to ignore hunger and other physical privations. We’d been taught to be resourceful, to find what we needed to survive in the territory around us.

  You can do this, I told myself. You’re made outta this.

  I had a basic plan. I was going to find a fast-food place where I could get a meal for less than ten dollars, and then I was going to keep walking until I saw my destination: the donation center for one of the nation’s largest charities.

  Sometime before midnight, I was breaking into Serena’s car.

  This hadn’t been Plan A, which had been to wait outside until she came home from some late-night mission or errand, and then brace her from out of the shadows. It had seemed like a pretty good idea at the time. It was rare for gangbangers to go places unaccompanied-they had an innate understanding of the fire-team concept-but Serena did it more than most, a combination of her bravado and her need for privacy. So I had a better-than-average chance of catching her alone.

  Unfortunately, I’d arrived too late. She was inside the house, probably for the night. Staging a raid on the home base of the Trece Sucias was out of the question. Too many guns and trigger-happy girls inside.

  So, Plan B: the car. I knew it didn’t have an alarm. In Serena’s neighborhood, the only kind of car you could park outside was an old and inexpensive one from which the sound system had already been stolen. That described Serena’s car, a pale blue Chevy Caprice with no radio.

  Fortunately, I’d thought ahead and supplied myself for a break-in.

  When I’d gotten to the donation center, I’d wandered casually to the back and slipped unseen into a supply closet. Then I’d made a small barricade of boxes in case someone opened the door and looked inside. I spent three hours sitting with my legs tucked up against me, behind those boxes, until I’d heard the volunteer workers close up and leave.

  When I came out, I was alone in an acre-sized warehouse of used goods. One-stop shopping. By the time I left, I was wearing a heavy flannel shirt over my Navy T-shirt, and thicker socks under my work boots. I had a canvas backpack strapped to my back, into which I’d tucked a sharp boning knife from the housewares section, a long, tough screwdriver I’d found on a table laden with assorted tools, and a wire coat hanger. I was also pushing a ten-speed bicycle. That had carried me to Serena’s place.

  Now I crouched against the passenger door of the Caprice, working quietly and feverishly. Unlike Serena and her girls, I had no experience breaking into cars. I’d only seen it done, under innocent circumstances-several times I’d seen my uncle Porter come to the aid of people who’d locked their keys inside their own cars. This was a very different situation, and not the brightest idea, not in a barrio neighborhood where anyone who saw me wasn’t going to call the cops. They’d grab a gun and TCB themselves.

  But the door gave way to the force I applied with the long screwdriver, just enough that I could get the wire coat hanger in and trip the lock. I was in.

  I lay in the backseat for an hour, staying alert until I was pretty sure that Serena wasn’t coming out on some late-night whim, like a trip to the 7-Eleven. Then, finally, I curled up and closed my eyes and gave in to my exhaustion.

  fifteen

  Everyone gets sloppy. Even someone like Serena. If she walked out of her house every day scoping for assassins, she’d have cracked up long ago. She didn’t look through the windows at the interior of her car before getting in. She just unlocked the door and slid behind the wheel.

  I rose up from my crouched position, grabbed her hair from behind the headrest, and laid the boning knife to her throat. She jumped, startled, but she also grabbed my wrist, ready to fight faster than most people would have been.

  “Don’t,” I said. “Stay still.”

  “Hailey?” she said, incredulous, her eyes going to mine in the rearview mirror.

  “Don’t touch the wheel,” I said. “If you lay on the horn and get your sucias out here, they’ll shoot me, but not in time to save you.”

  “Where the hell did you come from?” she asked.

  I ignored that. “Put your hands on the wheel.”

  “You said not to-”

  “I am not in a joking mood, Warchild. Put your goddamn hands in the eleven-and-one position on the steering wheel and don’t take them off.”

  She did it.

  “Are you strapped?” I asked her.

  “Of course.”

  “Where?”

  “Right side pocket.”

  She was wearing loose olive-green cargo pants, the kind with generous pockets for carrying a weapon. I couldn’t take my right hand off her throat, nor could I reach her right leg with my left hand. Stalemate. “Okay,” I said. “We’ll let that be for a minute. You know better than to reach for it.”

  “What are we doing, Hailey?” she said.

  “A little Q and A. Did you set me up, down in Mexico?”

  “What?”

  “I said, did you set up that little girl, Nidia, and me to get jacked?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. She’d recovered from her initial shock and didn’t sound all that scared. I’d known she wouldn’t be.

  I said, “We got ambushed. I nearly died, and she’s missing. You were the one who set the whole thing up. And you knew I was down there and when I was supposed to be back, but you didn’t report me missing. That looks pretty bad, Warchild.”

  She said, “When you didn’t come back from Mexico, I assumed you were dead.”

  “Maybe you didn’t assume. Maybe you knew how and why.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head very gently, in order not to increase the pressure of the knife on her throat. “I called Teaser’s sister, Lara. She said that no one knew where Nidia was, either. I knew something went wrong. I can prove it.”

  “But why didn’t you report it?” I pressed her.

  “Hailecita, use your head! Have you ever known me to call the fucking cops about anything? We all know the fucking jura doesn’t care about illegal Mexicans! What were they going to do?”

  I said, grudgingly, “What did you mean when you said you could prove it?”

  “I added you to my roll call,” she said. Her tattoos on her calf, she meant. She added, “Can I show you?”

  It meant reaching down and pulling up the hem of her pants. “Are you fucking kidding me?” I said. “You think I’ve never heard of an ankle holster before?”

  She drew in a steadying breath. “Okay, listen. I’m going to, real slow, pull my leg up where you can reach. You can get the nine I’m carrying in my pocket, okay? And then you can hold that while you reach over and look for yourself. Okay? Will that work?”

  “Keep your hands on the wheel,” I warned.

  Carefully, I let go of the hair I’d been gripping in my left hand, leaned back just a little, and slid my left arm diagonally past the headrest, crossing over my right arm, which was still holding the knife. Then I couldn’t get my arm down to her leg, because my elbow was locked in the wrong direction. I lifted my weight up slightly from the backseat, putting myself in position to turn my arm downward.

  Serena flinched. “Hey!”

  The shift in my weight had caused me to increase the pressure of the knife on her throat. “Sorry,” I said, glancing at her neck in the mirror. The knife hadn’t broken the ski
n.

  I said, “I can’t reach. Lift up your leg a little farther.”

  She did. I felt her body shake a little; she was laughing nervously. “This is some crazy shit, prima,” she said.

  I angled my arm down toward her thigh and managed to slide my hand into her pocket, feeling the cool metal of her nine-millimeter. Gently, I extricated it, drew back my arm, and set it down on the seat next to me.

  “Feel better?” she said.

  “Yeah, but I still don’t want you going for your ankle. Pull your leg up where I can reach.”

  Serena was five-nine, and it wasn’t an easy task for her to keep her hands on the wheel and slowly draw up her right leg, ease it past the automatic gearshift, and prop it on the dashboard. When she did, her knee was almost to her shoulder. I leaned forward and slid my arm along her leg, toward her ankle.

  “Ghetto yoga,” Serena said, a shimmer of near-laughter in her voice.

  “Shut up and let me do this,” I said, and with effort, I reached the cuff of her pant leg and slid it up, revealing the tattoo I remembered.

  Two names had been added since I’d last seen it. The third from the bottom read, Teaser. And just below that, I saw the newest and freshest name, Hailey. It was like looking at my own obituary.

  “Jesus, Serena.”

  “I told you,” she said. “You went down to Mexico and didn’t come back. I figured you were dead, prima.”

  It wasn’t logic that they’d understand in the suburbs. But gangbangers lost people all the time. In Serena’s world, it made sense.

  I eased the knife away from her throat. “You really just assumed I was dead, with no body, no news report, nothing? Next time, try to be a little more aspirational, will you?”

  “You been expanding your word power, eh?” she said, amused.

  “Yeah,” I said, starting to laugh. “I did a sleep-learning program while I was in my coma.”

  Her laughter dried up. “You were in a fucking coma?”

  “For two months,” I said, unable to stop laughing, like it was the funniest thing I’d ever told anyone. “I fucked up, Serena. That little girl, I let them get her. I didn’t know how serious it was. If someone had told me, maybe I could’ve protected her. God, I fucked everything up.”

  I was crying now, my arms crossed on the back of the driver’s seat, my face tipped down, forehead touching my wrists. The knife was still in my hand. Serena got out of the car, opened the back door, and gently took the knife away from me.

  “Come in the house,” she said.

  “Not like this. I don’t want your girls to see me like this.”

  She nodded like she understood, although it didn’t make much sense; I’d never had any standing with the sucias to lose. Serena walked away, plucked an orange from her tree, and peeled it, standing in the late-morning sunshine in her driveway.

  I pulled myself together, got out of the car, and walked over to the spigot at the side of her house. I turned on the water and splashed my face clean.

  “Weren’t you on your way somewhere?” I asked, straightening up.

  “It can wait,” Serena said. “Believe me, prima, you’ve rearranged my day.”

  * * *

  Her house was like I remembered. Same homeboy memorials on the refrigerator, same subtle pulse of music from the sound system. One of her girls, heavyset with brown-red hair crinkly with a perm and then mousse, looked up from the television as we entered.

  Serena was rummaging through her kitchen shelves. “What would you like?” she asked. “Chorizo and eggs?”

  “Not right now.”

  “Coffee?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “A beer?”

  I shook my head.

  “Mmm. Some Vicodin?”

  “Oh God yes.”

  sixteen

  A half hour later I was in Serena’s bathtub, floating in a cloud of strawberry-scented bubbles and Vicodin peace. I was listening to my own voice telling Serena, who was sitting cross-legged on the closed toilet seat, about Mexico, about the tunnel rats, as I’d started to think of the seven armed men, and their leader, whom I thought of as Babyface for his soft features.

  “You’re sure it was about her?” Serena said. “They wanted her?”

  “That’s what the guy said.”

  “So none of this was about a sick abuelita up in the mountains.”

  I shook my head. “Nidia made that up.”

  “She lied? I thought she was really religious,” Serena said.

  “I think she was. Is, I mean,” I said. “But scared. When push comes to shove, people lie.” I paused. “She was so quiet on the drive up, and I thought it was just that the two of us didn’t have anything in common. But now I wonder if she wasn’t feeling guilty. She knew there was heavier shit going on that she wasn’t telling me about.”

  “You said she ‘was’ religious, then you changed it to ‘is,’” Serena said. “You think she’s still alive?”

  “I don’t know,” I said slowly, “but it seems like if they wanted to kill her, they would have done it and dumped her right next to me. They took her with them, which means they wanted her alive.”

  “Just because they needed her alive for the moment doesn’t mean they needed her alive for very long,” Serena pointed out.

  I must have looked disturbed, because Serena said, “We’ve got to be realistic about this.”

  I didn’t answer, tipping my head back and letting the warm water crawl through my scalp.

  Serena said, “Come on, get out before you fall asleep in there.”

  When I stepped out of the tub, before I could get the towel around me, I felt her eyes on my body, the healed wounds that couldn’t yet be called simply scars.

  “They don’t hurt anymore,” I said, “if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  A few minutes later I was wearing one of Serena’s T-shirts and a pair of boxers, pulling back the covers of her bed. She was still standing in the doorway.

  “Thanks for letting me crash here,” I said.

  “That’s what Casa Serena’s always been about, prima, a place where my homegirls can go to ground. You’re not the first.”

  “But how many of the girls you’ve taken in were holding a knife on you just minutes earlier?”

  Serena shrugged. “Around here, shit like that happens.” She looked at me thoughtfully. “Out there, if I’d said, ‘Yeah, bitch, I set you up,’ would you have cut my throat?”

  Her words gave me a chill, even through the Vicodin calm. I said, “I don’t know. You had a gun. That would have made it very dangerous for me to back down.” But then I shook my head. “I don’t think it would have mattered. I couldn’t have cut you.”

  “That would’ve got you killed, then.”

  “You mean, if you’d admitted to setting me up, and I let you go, you’d have shot me, anyway?”

  “Of course.”

  I couldn’t pretend her answer didn’t hurt. She saw it in my face. “Come on, Hailey. If you had a legitimate grudge, what else could I do? That’s the number-one thing that gets people killed in la vida. It’s always retaliation. If you had a grudge against me, if I’d done something to make you my enemiga, and I let you walk away, that’s like”-she searched for a comparison-“like leaving rat poison around in the kitchen. It’s something you just don’t do. It doesn’t matter that I started it.” She saw my disapproval. “It’s the same reason I don’t hold it against you that you braced me with the knife. You had a legit reason. I respect that.”

  I shook my head. “Thanks, I guess.”

  “De nada.”

  “One other thing? That tattoo, my name on your roll call?” I gestured to her leg. “Can you do something about that? It’s going to give me the creeps, seeing it all the time.”

  She winked and said coolly, “Might as well keep it. You know?”

  I said, “That’s cold, Warchild.”

  She turned sober: “Sorry.”

  seventeen


  The Trece Sucias, who were almost exclusively Mexican-American, would have surprised an outsider with the diversity of their features and coloring. At first glance, they all conformed to gang style, with cheap tattoos and hard masks of eyeliner and dark lipstick, long nails painted fuchsia or black. Some sharpened those nails to points for an unexpected weapon in a fight.

  Up close, though, you saw the differences. Their hair was reddish, golden, black, or brown; skin creamy pale or tawny gold. In Juicy Couture and Skechers, for example, Heartbreaker would have blended in with the UCLA girls on Melrose Avenue. She was five-ten, with a lean, flat volleyball player’s stomach, golden-brown hair, and wide-set greenish eyes. Her cousin and closest friend, Risky, was a small, fine-boned girl who could have been taken for Italian, with straight brown hair, brown eyes, and pale skin. Trippy, Serena’s lieutenant since Teaser died, was tall and strong, with chestnut hair in sharp bangs across her forehead and long down her back. Teardrop had classic Hispanic looks, straight black hair and rich brown skin.

  The four of them, who made up less than half the sucias’ number, were in Serena’s living room when I came out a little after ten. I’d slept all day, and I still didn’t feel too hot. The girls were playing with Teardrop’s baby daughter and talking in Spanglish. I fixed myself a bowl of cereal and sat at the table to eat. They ignored me, except when Teardrop said in Spanish, Look, she’s all red, meaning badly sunburned, and the rest giggled. I told myself it wasn’t a slur I needed to answer and pretended I didn’t hear.

  I’d told myself more than once that it was stupid to seek validation from a tribunal of gang girls. Underneath the hard shell of gang identity, they were just teenagers, emotional and naive, sentimental about babies and their abuelitas, desperate for the slightest affection from a homeboy. Most of them knew little of the world outside East Los Angeles. I, on the other hand, had jumped out of planes in Airborne School and boxed on my company’s team back east, sparring with guys my height and weight in the ring. But none of that mattered to the sucias. To them I was less than, just because I was white and unaffiliated.