Safe

by Ryan Gattis

  Like, maybe she’s a ghost too.

  Like she’ll never let me go.

  9

  Back in the summer of ’92, I was seventeen, with shiny new scars on me, still sick to my stomach a week after what the doc called just-to-be-safe chemo, when I first saw the Pacific Ocean. I knew she existed. I knew she was close by. I mean, I saw seagulls all growing up, but never been to where they came from.

  I didn’t even really know what the word beach meant till I was standing on sand, just staring out at the moving blue and watching waves. Like, I’d seen maps, I got how the world was mostly water, but there’s a difference between thinking something and seeing it. Feeling it, really. Being caught up in it because everything you thought you knew is actually growing bigger by the second, and you’re not saying anything, or even breathing, really, till you get reminded to take your shoes off and your socks too.

  And so I did. That sand was hot. Gritty. Sneaking between my toes. It was too much, standing there like that. Sun on me. Feeling like I was seeing California for the first time even though I’d seen nothing else my whole life.

  Rose held my hand, I remember. She kicked my heels till my feet were in the water before handing me that sunscreen, telling me to rub it on the bald parts of her head, the ones that weren’t Mohawked. She didn’t really have one. Just tufts down the middle, so blond they were almost white. Like the thin feathers of baby pigeons.

  “We’ve come a long way, Saint Francis.”

  The hospital, she meant. Sometimes she just called me that after the place we met.

  We couldn’t have been more different from each other, but everybody else was older than us or so young it made you sad, and after kind of circling each other, we talked because there was nothing else to do when Uncle Scam paid to pump me full of anti-infective, antitumor chemicals. And she was there. Half-broken with a smile on her face. Gray-blue eyes. Her left lid a little lower than the other. She fell asleep sometimes when we were talking. Said she felt safe with me. And no one had ever said that about me ever. It still kind of fucks me up to think about it.

  “Far as we can get,” I said with my feet in the ocean. “We ran out of land.”

  She didn’t say anything, but her eyes told me, Good.

  It was easy to see she was sick. She had Hodgkin’s. “I got Hodgkinned,” she used to say. She was terminal. This was why she brought me to Cabrillo Beach. Said she wanted to look past Angels Gate lighthouse to Terminal Island and see if it called out to her to swim to it and never come back.

  It was the kind of thing I never knew if I should laugh about.

  I wish I had. Because seeing the gleam in her eyes when she knew she’d made me laugh was, like, everything. Yeah. Everything.

  Rose hated her name. Hated being named after a flower. The way she saw it, that wasn’t who she was or what she’d become. She liked me calling her Rosita. Liked the half roll on the R. She said it made her giddy, made her forget where she came from. Made her feel more like who she really was.

  She was canvas Converse, and ripped Tshirts she sewed back together by hand. She was caramel corn, sweet and salty and hard to chew sometimes if you got down to the kernels. She was box matches. She was men’s hats. She used to say she was just crumpled-up tinfoil. Some glittery trash, and pretty soon God was going to throw her away in a garbage can. It hurt hearing that.

  Her name wasn’t the only thing Rose hated. She hated her nose. Too flat. Her arms. Too skinny, too freckled. Her rogue eyelid. She wanted to cut it. She thought she was the furthest thing from beautiful. Nothing I said ever made any difference. Took me years after to figure out that trying to convince a woman that doesn’t think she’s pretty that she actually is, is like throwing coins in a well with no bottom. You wait for it to hit and pile up just so she can see it over time and start believing it because you believe it, but nothing ever lands. Nothing ever adds up.

  Rose didn’t have time for anything to add up. She only had that present. Her yesterday was gone, her tomorrow would never come, and she lived like it. She was like this exploding sun all the time, the closest thing a bone-skinny girl got to being a thumping bass line walking and talking. No surprise, she got me into punk rock. Bad Religion mostly. Through them, she made me see how punk spoke my language without me even knowing it. Punk didn’t come from where I came from, but it knew how mad I was before I even did. It just reached in, hit all my fuel I’d been building up, and lit it on fire. Bad Religion were a whole different L.A. One I’d never known before, and for two months that summer we drove everywhere we could in her beat-up Wrangler with the tape of Against the Grain smashing our eardrums.

  That song off that, “Turn On the Light,” that was her. Still is.

  When we went out together, she just wanted to take and then give when people weren’t expecting it. And me, I just wanted to be with her and I didn’t care what we did or who we did it to.

  We’d go to Santa Monica Pier and cut people’s fishing lines when they weren’t looking. If you could do it and not get caught, the other person had to put a five-dollar bill in the fisherman’s fish bucket. If we ever did get caught, Rose just pulled her hat off her head and people saw she was the sick kind of bald and she said she was real sorry, just playing a prank, trying to feel alive for a few more days and then she forced them to take one of the fives. Wow, did people ever crumble.

  Because what was it really? A lost bit of plastic? A hook? What was that compared to a cancer girl about to cry because you’re yelling at her. Nothing, that’s what. It was silence and embarrassment and turned backs, no one wanting to take the cash. I knew before, but I knew it for real then. People don’t like being confronted.

  And I learned something else too: death has a power. Death-coming-soon has even more. It changes up the rules of things. It creates breaks and slides where there might not otherwise be any. It’s a knife for this world. Opening things up. Letting things slide through. Giving you shortcuts when you don’t have time to go the long way. Especially when everybody can see on you that it’s true.

  10

  I texted Frank about tamale breakfast and he wrote back yes, so I told him Tamaleria La Doña in Compton. When he didn’t reply, I knew it was because he was already on his way so I needed to be there first.

  I’m pulling off the 710, getting down onto Alondra, waiting to turn left. I’ve been pushing it away, but it’s been piling up inside me, how the first time I was ever in San Pedro, it was with Rose. How the first time I ever really went anywhere but Lynwood, it was with Rose in her Jeep and it was to Pedro.

  Already I’m thinking about how every moment I ever spent with her got stuck inside me and changed how I saw things. The city. Even me. She did that. Just by being her, she came in with this invisible crowbar and broke me out of this jail I had inside myself, one I didn’t even know about. Rose took me to my first NA meeting. Sat next to me. Held my hand the whole time when I wanted to run. My world was like eighteen blocks wide when she met me.

  I bust a right on Atlantic while I’m staring at Dale’s giant bumpy donut he’s got on top of his shop. I go past a muffler place and a pet shop and a whole mess of tire shops clustered together. Ralda’s. Atlantic Tire. Vargas. Rios. It’s like the buildings are sitting still and staring at each other all day.

  My heart’s kind of hurting, more than usual. There’s a badass rose I got on my chest because her name never felt like enough. Tattoo is like thread under skin. It makes invisible stuff real. It catches up dreams and wishes and memories and ties them to you with ink so you can carry them and show people, but only if you want to.

  Going east on East Compton, I pass the spot when there’s no street spaces, hit a right on Gibson, and park just down from the do-it-yourself car wash. The cart pushers are out already, pushing rigs they stole from North Side Market, going through the car wash Dumpster, trying to fill up on the leanest day of the week. Tomorrow will be better. Mondays are trash days. There will be bottles and cans for the digging, and ma
ybe food too. It’ll be good again.

  If you’re worried about it, don’t be worried about it. It’s not a great neighborhood, but it’s not the worst. My Jeep’s fine. It’s only got a tape player in it. I eject Rose’s tape out of that, put it in its case, put the case in my jacket pocket, button it closed. When I get out, I grab the heavy grocery moneybag from under my seat, move around to the back gate, and open it up. I combo out the big lockbox bolted to the floor back there and push the moneybag down next to my tools before locking it back up. Couldn’t have done that in Pedro with DEA watching me leave.

  The outside of my Jeep is clean, the paint’s good enough on it, but it’s definitely no kind of target. It’s an ’87 Wrangler, same as the one Rose used to have. First big thing I ever bought. Took me forever to find one. You’d think you could find any car on earth in Los Angeles, especially with the Internet, but I had to do a deal with a guy in San Diego and take the train down to pick it up. Coming back was one of the best and worst drives of my life. I could feel her so near me and so gone at the same time.

  If you’re thinking it, yes, I know I’m living in a time capsule. Shit, I’m driving it. But I want to. At least I know I want to. I think some people aren’t much different from me. They like how things used to be more than they are now. But that’s gone. I know it’s gone. I just try to keep what I can.

  You wouldn’t know it by looking at the Jeep now, but I’ve had the entire guts taken out. New engine. New tranny. New everything. It’s also LoJacked. Only sticker on the back of it is a little one with that logo, and the VEHICLE RECOVERY SYSTEM typed underneath. Smart gangsters know better about that. It never stopped the baddest ones, but that level knows enough not to touch anything with black plates.

  When I walk past the car wash vacuums, I look to the lanes on my left and see some dude sitting in the cab of his truck and messing with his phone while his girl is out blasting over the hood with water from the long metal wand. She’s short. Like, five foot. And she’s arching the spray to reach the roof and a little unexpected rainbow’s popping out of it. I watch it for a second, water and air and colors, till I notice him looking at me like maybe I’m looking at his girl, so I nod my head up at him, turn, and go.

  Fresh corn. The smell hits you first, then gets inside you, tells you life is going to be okay today. And I’m so damn thankful I can smell it right now. Being inside La Doña is like being inside the littlest food factory on earth. Every inch of the room is full up. In front, it’s a standing and waiting area with a few scattered tables in front of a counter with a register. Behind that is a shucking station where at least three men are always pulling the husks off corn in rhythm. Sometimes there’s more. Next to them are boxes for unshucked and shucked, naked corn still on cobs, where another man picks these up and whisks all the kernels off them with a long-ass knife: quick, quick, like he’s playing a guiro or something.

  Behind him, ladies shape each tamale on big metal tables that have some kind of wax paper spread over them so the tamales don’t stick or get dry. To their right is a giant mixing thing to shred the corn up. It’s taller than the lady putting stuff into and taking it out. On the back wall a whole army of steaming pots is cooking up masa, and other ones steam up tamales.

  Men shuck. Women shape. That’s just how it is. Together, they make thousands in a day. No lie.

  Most people don’t eat here. They just pick up. I go grab a table on the far wall, so my back is covered and I can see the door. Above me, there’s a map of Mexico and black-and-white pictures of Zapata and Villa. It’s that in-your-face kind of raza place I can’t get enough of. No AC. Champurrado on the whiteboard menu. Wrinkly tios waiting in line, holding their cowboy hats in their hands.

  I got corn for me and a cheese. For Frank, two carne de res. He shouldn’t eat beef anymore because his doctor said so, but he won’t eat anything else, and Frank is Frank. He’ll keep being who he is till they put him in the ground.

  I kind of get lost watching the men shucking. Hands flash and green gives way to whitish yellow, again and again. It’s hypnotic. They’re all masters. No wasted movement. After the corn threads are thrown into a trash bag just for them, each husk leaf gets set down gently in a curved stack to be used for later, because that’s what the tamales get wrapped and cooked in.

  This place has a hum to it. I mean, there’s the drinks case with Mexican Cokes buzzing its buzz next to the front door, and fluorescent lights too, but neither of those is it. It’s just a feeling that people are doing what they do in here because they want to, and maybe some of them even love it. People are smiling at each other behind the counter while they’re doing what they’re doing, and that’s good, I think. That good feeling goes right into the food, which is fine by—

  “Earth to Mendoza.” Frank must’ve come in without me noticing, which is rare and he knows it. “Sometimes you’re just out there orbiting, you know that?”

  I definitely know that. And me looking down and smiling about it tells him so.

  He doesn’t smile back. Just shakes his head when I push his paper plate and wrapped tamales in front of him. Half his hair’s the color of steel and he still lifts weights three times a week. Pretty good for an old guy with a sandpaper face. He could shave at five in the morning and have stubble after breakfast. He’s got kind eyes, though, if he likes you. And if you know where to look.

  11

  Frank’s never been to La Doña before, and that can be a problem because he doesn’t always like going to places he’s never been. He’s mostly a La Fiesta Carniceria guy, this spot on Marine by Frank’s shop that does some killer carne asada tacos. He must not hate this place too much, though, because he almost smiles when he sits.

  “Jesus,” he says, “why make me drive over here? We got tamalies in Hawthorne.”

  Tamales are tamalies when Frank’s saying it. And why here, because I’m not as known here, but Frank doesn’t need to know that.

  “You got Mexicans all around you right now, Frank. You can’t be taking the holy son’s name like that.” I move my plastic knife up from doing surgery on my elote to wave in his face a little. “You’re liable to get cut. And I might even let them.”

  Frank laughs at that. It’s a good laugh. Strong. Like he has to go somewhere deep down to bring it up.

  He’s laughing because he knows if somebody ever for real tried to hurt him, I’d lose all sense of right and wrong. A light would go off inside me and I’d be that whirling devil again. Not like he’d need me to, though. He’s an ex-army engineer from the Vietnam days. He did some stuff back then. Stuff he’ll never tell me about, but I know it’s bad. Bad under orders is still bad. He’s killed, I’m pretty sure. It takes one to know one and I see it in his eyes sometimes. The weight of it. How he’d never want to do it again but would if he had to. Keeping that look on your face is just part of this job. Keeps people from messing with you. But if someone did, he’s got a gun on him right now in his ankle holster. CCW. Legal concealed carry.

  I kick his holster with the toe of my boot under the table just to show him I know where it is, and when I do, the rolled money wriggles around my ankle and I set my foot back down, quick and flat, so nothing falls out.

  I say, “You’d probably just take care of that yourself, though, huh?”

  He scoots back fast in his chair and shoots me a warning look, a you-fucking-know-better kind that I feel in the bumps behind my ears, and I know I shouldn’t have gone so far. Frank’s the kind of guy that when he looks at you wrong, you never want him to look at you that way again.

  I look at my tamale. I stab a little corn kernel. “Sorry, Frank.”

  I feel stupid. Like a kid saying sorry to his dad. I’m not looking up, but I know he’s still giving me the look to nail it in. I can feel it. We go a bit not saying anything. We just chew.

  He finally says, “You’re acting squirrelly.”

  That’s Frank’s way of asking me if I’m all right. He asks questions with statements because he
can see inside me too good. He mostly always has. He knows about my tumors on account of my visible scars and me not lying when he asked about them. I’m not about to tell him I’m smelling phantom smells again, for the first time since before. He can’t know that.

  And I’m sure not about to tell him I just betrayed all the trust he ever put in me since he’s had me running his shop, and that the evidence of that is locked up in my truck. And I’m not about to tell him that I don’t even know how much money it is. Almost don’t want to know till me and Mira can count it.

  “I guess I just been thinking about some stuff,” I say.

  He stops midbite and puts an eyebrow up at me. Like, Stuff?

  Frank’s face asks you questions too. He keeps chewing when I don’t say anything, swallows, and says, “Spit it out.”

  When I was young, being cool was about being wild, not giving a fuck. Basically, it was taking shit way past the point it needed to be at. When I was using, that’s just how it was. Drugs ran me. I didn’t even know half the stuff I was doing when I was doing it, and I remembered even less if I was lucky. All of it was shameful. All of it coming out of pain. I didn’t know that then.