Safe

by Ryan Gattis

  He’s not letting go. He’s fucking with me. But I give him the look. The one that says, You’re not allowed to fuck with me over this. The one that says, This means nothing to you, but everything to me, and I’ll die for it if I have to. I’ll drive this Jeep into a wall. I don’t give a fuck.

  He lets go. I turn the tape off.

  “You’ve changed a lot, you know.” It’s not a question. He says it like it’s the furthest thing from a compliment. “You remember or what?”

  The only thing I say is “Eli Gomez never forgets.”

  Which is my way of telling him, yes. I remember. I remember a lot.

  Two days in a row we’d been partying. No sleep. Coke. Coffee. The other Coke. Whatever it took to stay awake. I was crazy. Really out of my head. And it was Blanco’s dumbass idea to try to calm me down with video games. Like that would ever have worked. Because all it did was the opposite. All it did was trip me out. Hard. I got no recollection of this, but apparently I started screaming that I had a spider on me. On my leg. On my thigh. So that’s where he drove the knife in, and after, he told me he got it. He killed the araña. I woke up alone in a St. Francis ER sitting bay with its white curtain pulled half-back. Name on my sheet said Eli Gomez, obviously something Blanco made up when he checked me in.

  “Just never say I didn’t pay you back,” he says.

  “This’s you paying me back, right now?”

  Blanco smiles and switches the subject. “Where’s this other address, anyways?”

  I tell him.

  And when I do, a change hits his face. It goes from real to mask in a heartbeat.

  His voice’s flat when he says, “You sure about that?”

  He doesn’t need to ask. He knows I’m sure.

  “That’s Rooster’s too.”

  He says it like the name is supposed to mean something to me, but he sees it doesn’t, so he says, “Maybe we skip this one. You got others?”

  I tell him those too.

  Blanco nods through each one. “Fuck. They’re all his. La DEA’s got his number, huh? Fucking good.”

  I say, “What’s he to you?”

  But I already have an idea. He’s a lieutenant, maybe. A lot like Blanco. Maybe they’re even on the same level. Running different shows. Maybe they compete.

  Blanco doesn’t answer me. He’s calculating, silently running figures to see how this might work for him. This is exactly what he’s good at. Exactly why he’s lasted this long. Knowing details. Knowing who owns what. Knowing what’s vulnerable. And I see Blanco getting cocky again as he’s moving through the mental math, and he’s got a look like he’s thinking how if Rooster’s going down, it means he’s coming up.

  When he smiles, I know it’s because he’s unable to resist the chance to get over on a rival. It’s the kind of thing that would give him rep forever. It’s the kind of thing only Blanco is crazy enough to do.

  “Clark Street,” he says. “That’s the one.”

  “It’s Clark and what?”

  “Atlantic,” he says, “just off where Clark dead-ends into it.”

  “So I keep going then?”

  “No, we’re going somewhere else first.”

  44

  We stop off at a pay phone and Blanco gets out to make a call that doesn’t even take a minute. After that, we go to a little house on Wright Road. In the nineties, it would’ve been bugging at all hours. But it’s quiet now. More and more families moving in these days. This place even has a big playground set in the side yard. One with a red plastic slide. I pull into its driveway and the front door opens behind a heavy metal security door. I see white lamps on inside, a silhouette looking out.

  Blanco rolls his window down and nods at the figure.

  From inside the house, we hear the television. Sounds like stand-up.

  “I don’t need no backing,” Blanco says to me as he slides the watches off his wrist and sets the rattle down, “but, you know, just in case.”

  He hands me the other gun and gets out.

  I follow.

  When we get to the metal door, it gets opened by the finest chick I’ve seen in a long time. Magazine-cover fine. TV fine. So fine I got to stop for a second and check myself before I go into the living room, where there’s one long L-shaped couch facing the TV, and behind it, sitting on top of a low table about two feet off the ground, is another couch. It’s like stadium seating or something, so people behind the main couch can see too. Sitting up there is a little abuelo, fast asleep, threatening to lose control of a limp hand and spill his can of beer all over himself. But he hasn’t. Not yet.

  There’s no doubt that she’s the jewel of this house. Pictures of her at various ages are on two of four walls. In person is best though.

  In her midtwenties, she’s got long straight black hair pulled back. Eyes like faded jade with bits of brown in it. The kind of nose people get cut every day in Beverly Hills to try to have. Mayan lips. Some café con leche skin tone. Little tank top. Littler running shorts that she’s clearly just lounging in. September’s when it gets hottest in L.A. And right at that second, I’m grateful they’ve only got the one AC unit sticking out of the house.

  Elvia, her name is. I know because Blanco calls her that.

  “Elvia,” he says it all sweet, “I need to get up with your man.”

  She takes a step back into the room like she knows what this means. She’s got bare feet. Long and lean like a runner’s. I see her bones tensing there, through skin.

  Blanco sniffs as he closes the distance between them. “Don’t play, now. If he’s on Clark Street for tonight, I need you to say.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” she says.

  She’s looking away, to a room with a closed door. Her kid’s room, I’m thinking.

  On the TV, a dude in a suit is making a joke about women and hair dryers. How they both blow, or something. I don’t recognize him. Somewhere far off, an audience laughs.

  “His business is my business now,” Blanco says as he puts his arms around her and hugs her.

  I watch Blanco push his hip into her so she can feel the gun in his waistband.

  The cold metal shape of it.

  “If I wanted to get at you, you know there’s nobody that could ever stop me, right? No walls, no doors neither.”

  The menace of it twists into me. And I’m thinking, I don’t need to be a party to this. Because Blanco’s tone carries a promise of pain in it. An or else if she doesn’t do what he says. And she gets it as he steps back from her, and she stands there, waiting for him to say what he wants.

  “Call him and tell him he’s gonna open the garage and let us in.”

  The muscles in her neck strain like she’s having to swallow something she doesn’t want to.

  “You do this,” Blanco says, “and you’re doing him a favor.”

  She doesn’t ask how. Doesn’t have to. Because Blanco makes it crystal.

  He says, “You do this, and you won’t have to catrina yourself up and carry his picture around on Día de los Muertos from now on.”

  She gets that he means killing. It’s in his eyes too.

  Elvia goes to an old green phone mounted to the kitchen wall, dials a number, has a little argument about how she’s calling because she has to call, and yes, she knows she’s not supposed to, but he has to know about this. She never raises her voice. She stays calm. Conveys the information. Tells the voice on the other end there are two of us. To expect us. Soon.

  She puts the phone back on the cradle.

  “It’s done,” she says without looking Blanco in the face.

  And that’s that.

  At least, she must think it is, and I do too. Till Blanco leans back and opens the metal security door and a dude comes through. A skinny little homie. Maybe eighteen years old. Peach-fuzz mustache and a little shuffle-walk. He looks a little off, if you want the truth. Like, not all there.

  “This’s Snapper,” Blanco says to Elvia. “Maybe you can cook him something, because
he’s staying for a bit. Make sure your family’s okay. When we get up out of Clark Street just fine, he’ll be on his way.”

  So that was Blanco’s call from the pay phone, I’m thinking. Calling this dude to come keep an eye on Elvia while we’re knocking over the drugs house.

  Pretty smart.

  And that’s the problem with Lynwood, what’s always been the problem with Lynwood. See, everybody knows everybody, and when that happens, you know who’s precious to who. And when you know that, you know weak spots. And when you know those, all you have to do is dig into them to make something happen.

  Glasses

  Monday, September 15, 2008

  Evening

  45

  First time I’ve had to breathe all day and it’s at home. Leya made macaroni and cheese with peas and cut-up hot dogs, one of my all-time favorites, but I have to tell her that I ate already.

  She’s cool with it, kissing me on the cheek and wrapping it up for the fridge. She knows something’s up with me but she’s not pushing.

  She’s got a divorce case to go over in the living room while the TV’s babbling in the background. She can focus like that, just have noise around and be good. I’m in Felix’s room down the hall, hearing her shuffle papers.

  He’s sleeping and I’m just staring at him holding the back of his right hand in front of his mouth like he’s smelling it. I don’t know why he does that. I don’t think he even does. It’s unconscious.

  I tried undoing it once, just moving his little hand away from his mouth and putting his arm by his side and under some covers, but he woke up and screamed so I never did that again.

  I learned that time. So, now, I just look at this little miracle baby, and the dog’s chilling at my feet, putting her big old jaw on the top of my shoe.

  I say miracle since we tried for years and then there was the umbilical thing with him. We had four miscarriages first. Three were on the earlier side, one was second trimester, and the first ones were hard, but that last one was a death in the family. Completely.

  Twenty-six weeks old our little girl was. Stillborn, the doctor said. I had to go to the church and get her buried myself since Leya refused. We weren’t gonna try anymore after that. It was too hard.

  When Felix came, it was natural. It was a surprise, and we didn’t take any chances. Leya was thirty-four, on bed rest almost the whole time. I got paranoid.

  I’d check her stomach every second I could to make sure there were still kicks in there. I was so scared he wouldn’t make it that I don’t think I even believed it until he came out crying and looking like he hated everything about air.

  Every minute’s a blessing with my little boy. I even try to put my words in Felix’s dreams. Every night, I try. What I do is, I tell him what I hope for him. I tell him what I want him to be, how he needs to be better than me.

  I feel like there’s a secret room inside him, a room inside a room even, one that I can fill up with good things and advice, stuff he should know if I talk to him at night like this. The more I do it, the more I can build a voice in the back of his brain that will guide him through everything even when I’m not here.

  Tonight, I’m telling him if I ever have to go away and never come back, he’ll be okay. I tell him maybe he won’t get over it, but he’ll overcome it.

  I tell him that he’ll always know, deep down inside him, that his father loved him more than everything. His father loved him so much he wanted to change and he tried to change.

  After, I’m swiping my face with my shirt while the dog looks at me with her head up and eyebrows tweaking like she’s worried about me. I pat her head and duck out. I’m not even all the way back down the hall when Rooster’s phone rings.

  I stop right where I am. Leya’s scrambling to switch off the TV and turn around to look at me. This phone just about never finds me at home.

  I pick up on ring two. “Bueno.”

  Terco’s running his mouth on the other end about how something’s wrong since Elvia just called him out of nowhere, asking all sorts of questions she shouldn’t have, and then telling him two people are coming to where he is and to open the garage.

  He don’t hear it, but I swallow hard. I got expletives going in my head then. His house was on the list I gave Collins.

  I know it’s Ghost now. It has to be.

  He got that list somehow. He’s going straight down it.

  Terco says, “Did you hear me? What should I do?”

  I got to make a decision now. A call that will blow up everything I been working to build, but I’m in a corner and there’s no other decision to make.

  “You know what to do,” I tell Terco. “Better be quick.”

  I hang up before he does. I call Collins. He don’t pick up. Nobody does, and I don’t know what I’m expecting since it’s late but I leave a message.

  I tell him not to hit the spots I gave him. Whatever he has planned, don’t do it. There won’t be nothing there to take if he does. I’ll explain later.

  I call Lonely. He answers on ring one, like always.

  “Send your boy to the store by Avalon and you come scoop me up,” I tell him, and then hang up.

  The store is Terco’s place and Avalon isn’t the street with the same name. It means Big Danny’s gonna pick Rooster up, since he’s the king like Arthur.

  And Lonely’s coming to get me since we live close. I don’t need to say right now to him, he knows right now.

  Leya’s got brave eyes when I turn back around and go back into Felix’s room. What I do is, I don’t wake him but I kiss his forehead. I smell his hair as deep as I can. I try to get the smell of his little molecules so deep inside my lungs that he’ll never leave me, even if I have to breathe shallow the rest of my life.

  I rub the dog real good on her ribs where she likes it, and when I come back out, Leya’s standing in the dark of the hallway, lit up like a silhouette with the living room behind her. She signs I love you in my direction since she picked it up from me, and it puts half a sob in my lungs I can’t get out. It just sits inside me like a bubble that won’t pop.

  Me and her, we put our fingers on a map of California once and picked a place we’d never been to, talked about, or even heard of before. She knows she’ll have to go there without me and wait.

  “Empty the safe,” I say. “Wake him up and go to Cardiff-by-the-Sea.”

  Before she can respond or say no, I go right up to her and kiss my wife with all I have, since I know it might be the last time I ever get to.

  This is me telling her, you’re the mother of my child and I respect you and honor you and put you above even myself.

  This is me telling her, if something happens to me tonight, you go, you survive. You have to live past me. You have to, or I can never rest in peace.

  And then I have to let go. When I do, she makes a little sound like I’m hurting her by going, and I know I am. I give her a look that says, I’m sorry and I know, since I’m hurting me too.

  At the open front door, I give her a last look as the headlights of Lonely’s car swing past me and push into the living room, lighting my face up before hitting the far wall and disappearing. I send Leya’s sign back to her then, I love you, and I’m gone.

  Ghost

  Monday, September 15, 2008

  Late Evening

  46

  On the drive over I’m wondering if I did Elvia harm by bringing Blanco in. How maybe I’m responsible, how whatever happens to her might be on me. My stomach thinks it’s all my fault. It’s kicking and punching at me from the inside, saying, Yeah, dummy, it is.

  We get through “L.A. Girl” and almost all of “She.” They’re Rose’s songs. Always will be. But on the drive, I’m thinking about Elvia too, worrying about her getting through all this when we roll up on the Clark Street house.

  It’s obvious that this is the kind of place where anything could go down. It’s right off Atlantic, a big main street, so there’s quick ins and outs. The property borders
on an alley, which means you can do drop-offs and pickups from multiple angles and not always have it looking the same or suspicious to neighbors.

  It’s a good spot for doing invisible business. As good as one can be, anyways, because it’s not just dark around here. It’s the dark putting on sunglasses and a black coat and going to chill in a cave. Like, dark-dark.

  Of course that’s on purpose.

  About twenty feet off the ground, a long streetlamp arm clamped to a power-line pole has its bulb out because somebody put it out.

  Apart from that, it’s got good vantages. You can see from all directions. Up and down Clark on the front, down an alley on the side all the way to Carlin, really. The driveway’s not out front. It’s at the back, off the alley. Across that alley, there’s an apartment building with a high metal fence. All heavy with bad stucco, that place looks exactly like the kinds of spots I used to get high in not far from here. And just thinking that, I feel those memories in my throat, but I don’t say it. Don’t need to. They burn enough on their own.

  I pull a left into the alley and then drive past the house before throwing it in reverse and backing up into the garage, which is open when we get there. Just for us. I don’t pull all the way in, though. I leave the Jeep’s nose poking out just in case someone wants to shut the garage and try to lock us in.

  “Demolition Girl” is starting on the speakers with a shouted, “One, two, three, four,” before guitars and drums come in just as I kill the engine.

  The door to the house is partway open and there’s a light on inside.

  Blanco leads, he’s got both guns, and I’m right in behind with my tools.

  The kitchen’s different here than most drugs houses I’ve ever seen. It’s clean.

  And it actually looks like somebody lives here. Car calendar on the wall. This September’s a ’65 Mustang with a girl on the hood. New microwave. There’s an oven with a green towel hanging from its handle. Fridge is old but clean. There’s a broom beside it, leaning on some cabinets that don’t look banged up. In the middle of it all is one of those tables you go to a warehouse to get and then come home and build it yourself. Sitting at it is Elvia’s man.