Rickie Trujillo

by Nicholas Bradley

  He wakes up with a sharp jerk of his legs and lies still on the bed as the dream slowly dissolves in the afternoon light. The fan provides a steady and comforting stream of air and sound. In the near distance, he hears the tailing-off roar of one of the corporate jets booming out of the airport.

  He sits up on the edge of the bed and wonders how much time has passed. A few minutes? An hour? He leans over and raises the yellowed shade to check the afternoon sky. The light is white and blinding.

  He gets up and goes through the kitchen deep in afternoon stillness. In the living room his grandmother still lies on the couch asleep. Her mouth is open, her brown wrinkled hands crossed at her stomach. He pauses and looks hard at her open mouth and chest to make sure she is breathing. At that moment, she takes in a deep breath with a snore. He smiles then, amused by the cartoonish noise of the snore.

  Her once black hair, which she used to brush until it shone, now lies in a grey mass under her head. Dark veins map her legs. The skin on her forearms has become papery dry and thin, easily bruised. Calluses dot her lined hands where fingers meet the palm. And the fingers themselves are knobby and bent. She massages them constantly, soaks them in basins of warm water, sometimes in ice water to reduce the swelling.

  She seems too fragile, too brittle to work as she does. How long can she keep it up? What will happen to him if she can’t work? Where will he go? Who will he live with?

  He shouldn’t have to worry, he thinks. None of this is his fault. He never asked for parents to abandon him, a grandfather to die too soon, a grandmother to grow old in just a few years… He hadn’t asked to live.

  But when he looks at her face to find a place to lay his anger, he cannot find it. What wells up inside of him at that moment of looking at her small, worn body he chokes back. He turns away from her and goes into the kitchen to call Alex.

  SATURDAY AFTERNOON

  CHAPTER 11

  Rickie and Alex are on their way to Wendy’s house when they are spotted by a carload of 18th Street gang members.

  On the south side of Sycamore Way there are two or three small street gangs and a handful of crews like the one Rickie and Alex formed; the north side of the boulevard and beyond belongs to 18th Street. There are a few tagging crews as well, but they tag well out of the immediate area. Everyone on both sides of the line lives in an edgy truce. If you don’t go on certain streets at certain times of the day; if you stay on your own blocks and on the established routes to the schools or the stores or on the main streets during daylight hours, you’re all right. Only occasionally does someone violate the unspoken agreement.

  If an upstart gang suddenly appears, news travels through the neighborhood and everyone waits for the inevitable result: one night someone gets jumped and badly beaten; a drive-by occurs on Vineyard; or someone is shot and killed as he sits at a light on Glen Ellen on his way home from work. The new gang, all studied stances and unforgiving expressions even the night before, is dispersed by morning. No one speaks of it. No one claims it. All that remains are the tags on cinderblock walls, dumpsters and back lot windows, markings whose reference quickly becomes obscure and so unimportant that no one even bothers to cross them out.

  Wendy lives in the neighborhood claimed by 18th Street. It is almost 5:00 o’clock that Saturday afternoon. The heat is beginning to drain from the day. Streets are quiet. Everyone is inside in air-conditioned rooms or sitting in front of fans or sitting outside under shade trees. Tonight, perhaps, it will cool down.

  Rickie and Alex stay on Landerman, one of the main boulevards heading north, for as long as they can, but they have to cut west into the neighborhood to get to Wendy’s house. They walk quickly now. No breeze stirs. If they stop to listen, they will be struck by the quiet. No jets take off. No music blares from someone’s backyard. No kids play in front yards and no dogs bark. A few cars pass slowly. The boys eye their occupants surreptitiously; open staring or prolonged eye contact might provoke an angry outburst—arms open, palms up, head thrown back in a threatening shrug: “What the fuck’re you looking at?” And then who knows what might happen?

  Rickie sees the old black Camry as he and Alex are about to cross the intersection to Wendy’s block. The car is pulled up to the curb in front of her house facing them. Quickly, hoping it’s not obvious what they are doing, Rickie leans on Alex and forces him to keep walking straight.

  “What?”

  “Eighteenth,” Rickie says under his breath. “On the right. In front of Wendy’s. Don’t look,” he says, but it makes no difference. They have been noticed. They walk past Wendy’s street, still heading west. The car pulls away from the curb and turns onto the street where the boys are walking. The car creeps along on the wrong side of the street, parallel and close to the boys. There are no cars parked on this side of the street, nothing between the boys and this car full of vatos.

  “Hey, pussies, where’re you from?” the driver asks, leaning out the open window. His short black hair is greased and in a net. Rickie and Alex don’t answer. Nor do they turn their heads. Rickie, who walks on the curbside of the sidewalk, glances without turning his head at the driver and at the open window in back. There are two people in front; there might be three people in the back. The windows are black with heavy tint.

  “Hey, I’m talking to you girls. Where’re you from, I said?”

  An old Toyota pickup turns onto the street and heads toward them. Lawn mowers and gardening tools are loaded in the back, two men crowded in the front. As they near the Camry and realize the situation, they swerve into the other lane and go around. Rickie glances back hopefully and sees the driver’s and the passenger’s faces in the side mirrors as they drive off.

  “Not talking?” he says, addressing Rickie. “Must mean you’re in the wrong ‘hood. That’s too bad.” He turns away and speaks to the others in a low voice. Everyone laughs.

  At the moment that he sees the back window go all the way down and the dull black barrel of the pistol appear on the edge of the rear window, Rickie becomes aware of the whole neighborhood. It is as though he has the ability to take a full 360-degree view with all of his senses. He is struck by how empty, how still everything is. With the exception of the truck disappearing in the opposite direction, nothing moves. No one comes out of a house on his or her way somewhere. No bird flies from tree to tree. No breeze stirs the leaves already flagging in the late spring heat. Where is anybody? It’s as though everyone and everything knows what this moment portends and has decided to hold its collective breath and let it happen. They are alone. No one will step in.

  Rickie throws out his left hand, catching Alex in the stomach.

  “Run!” he commands.

  They stop dead in their tracks and run back diagonally across a poor yard toward a white wooden gate, expecting at any moment to feel that searing pain in the back of a leg, or in the back or neck, or the red explosion in their heads. It is a dirt yard, swept and watered that afternoon. The gate on the far side of the house that leads into the back yard is painted white and made of wood, the paint peeling and the wood weather-beaten. They will get splinters in their hands when they vault it. There will be that moment when they’ll be at the top, a moment when they are no longer ascending and not yet descending, when each of them will be frozen mid-arc, when they will be easy targets. Rickie can imagine the laughter as the bullets rip into his back, the horrible pain, the blackness or, worse yet, waking up in a hospital to find himself with no feeling below the waist because his spine has been severed, condemned for the rest of his life to be bound to a wheelchair, fed by others, ass wiped by others, slobbering from the corner of his mouth…

  Rivulets of cold sweat run from Rickie’s armpits down his sides. He reaches for the top of the gate and pulls himself up as hard as he can.

  Have shots already been fired? Has there already been the rapid loud popping of a nine-millimeter? He can’t hear well because his heart is like the ocean in his ears.

  He jumps the gate in a bound, f
alls awkwardly on the concrete, hitting his knee hard. He watches Alex scrabble over the gate, balance for a moment and jump down. This time he hears the bullet hit a board a few inches from the top just as Alex clears it and falls on his shoulder. The piece of the board snapped off by the bullet hits Alex in the side of the head.

  “Shit,” he cries, snatching at the right side of his head. He pulls his hand away and stares at it, surprised that he finds no blood. He rubs the shoulder he landed on.

  The car screeches around the corner. The chase is going to continue.

  “Back over,” Rickie calls. Alex doesn’t get it. “Jump back over. They’re coming around the back. Quick!”

  The owner of the house, unshaven and bleary-eyed, in black shorts and an unbuttoned white shirt, stands up uncertainly from the folding chair where he has fallen asleep and comes toward them. A pit bull snarls and jumps behind a flimsy screen door.

  “You goddam kids! ¡Hijos de la chingada! Get outta here. You ruin everything with your gangs and tagging and drive-bys. Get out before I let the dog on you!”

  The dog jumps hard at the screen door. Rickie looks from the dog to the man’s face. His thick black hair is an uncombed mess, and his eyes are dark and bloodshot. A heavy black mustache covers his upper lip. Rickie sees the fear in the man’s eyes for the family he has hidden in the house, for his black Nissan parked in the driveway, for his neatly kept front and backyards, and his dusty pink and blue hydrangeas planted next to the front steps. In the tick of a second it takes to register all of this, Rickie feels a surge of anger and despair and a desire to lash out at this man and his stupid dog and whoever has made life this way.

  They vault back onto the driveway.

  “Which way?” Alex calls, out of breath, rubbing his sore shoulder.

  “Cross.”

  They run across the street, looking for a place into which they can disappear. Every house on this side is too visible from either end of the street. Each has a tall gate leading into the backyard with who knows what behind it—a Rottweiler, a pit bull, a German Shepherd.

  They run down the block toward Landerman Boulevard. They can see people crossing the street and a stream of cars going each way, a friendly sight but seemingly a galaxy away. Here, as their footsteps pound on the broken and raised concrete of the sidewalk, there is that stillness again, that eerie quiet as though the world in this neighborhood, on this block, has stopped spinning and everything but the two of them and the car of gangsters has suspended all activity, all motion.

  The car is getting too close. The boys heave into the alley that runs in back of Landerman. When they are halfway down the block, the Camry noses into the alley, too. They have to decide again. Go left, back into the neighborhood, or right, out to the boulevard where it will be safe.

  “Head for the street,” Rickie yells as he hears the Camry speed up in back of them. But right here there are no breaks in the back walls of the stores that line the boulevard. They try a few doors, but the alley doors are locked. Rickie’s lungs burn, his legs are tired and getting clumsy. He knows that the least little thing, a hump in the asphalt, a pothole, some piece of trash that gets tangled in his feet, will bring him to his knees.

  Suddenly he sees a metal gate open into someone’s backyard. He runs left. Alex follows him and slams the gate behind him. It swings open again as the car passes slowly. The gangsters can see the open gate, and they know where Rickie and Alex have gone.

  The boys step and hop their way gingerly past the overturned barbecue kettle, the rusting tricycle, the garden tools scattered about, and the exploded mattresses spewing their insides out on the driveway concrete. The screen for the sliding glass doors is torn and leaning against the wall. A hole has been smashed in the brittle siding of the wall next to the back door, revealing a stud and some wiring. They head for the gate that leads into the front yard.

  They hear the car squeal in reverse, still in the alley. Good, Rickie thinks: they have a minute or two. They kick the gate open into the front yard.

  They look up and down the quiet street. In the background, they hear tires squeal again; the car will be leaving the alley and coming around the corner. They need to move quickly.

  Down the block and across the street a small house sits beneath the deep shade of a tree in full early leaf. The house is old, single story and in an old style. The burgundy paint on the outside walls and the black paint on the ornamental shutters have both faded from years of neglect. Rickie’s grandfather would have something to tell Rickie about it if he were still alive.

  They cross the street and sprint through the yard past a For Sale sign lying on its back in the brown and overgrown grass. Just then the Camry turns the corner. Alex and Rickie crouch down and duck-walk as quickly as they can along the driveway toward the back of the vacant house. Broken glass lies scattered beneath a side window. They stand up straight, backs against the side of the house near the glinting pile of glass. Rickie puts his arm out against Alex’s heaving chest, backing him closer to the house.

  “Quiet, fool,” he whispers. “Shit, you’re breathing hard enough to be heard in Pacoima! C’mon,” he says. “Let’s try to get in.”

  “No. If they figure it out, we’ll be trapped in there. I’m going to go watch for them. Look for a way out.”

  “We’ll just jump the back wall.” Neither of them moves for a moment; they are bent over now, with their hands on their knees, breathing deeply to slow their pounding hearts.

  “Look for dogs,” Alex heaves. “I hate dogs.”

  Alex leans out away from the side of the house to view the street. Rickie goes around the side of the garage to the back wall and peers into the neighbor’s yard. The neighbor’s climbing rose bush and bougainvillea with its long thorns back up against this wall; the boys have to hope they won’t need to exit this way.

  “Hey,” Rickie calls quietly, but loud enough to be heard by a dog in the yard. “Hey,” he calls again. No dog.

  He turns and sees Alex squatting low and leaning over to view the street. He also sees that the back door is open.

  “Alex.”

  “I think they drove by,” Alex says in a low voice. “But we better wait.”

  Rickie joins him. They listen and watch for the car for five minutes more. Their breathing quiets.

  “C’mon, they’re gone,” Rickie says. He continues to speak in a low voice. “Let’s check this place out. The back door is wide open.”

  Alex leaves his position reluctantly, looking back frequently as they walk around to the back of the house.

  The yard is neat, empty of the junk that had been in the yard of the other place. The garage door is closed. To the left of the garage there is a little plot of grass. Fuchsias, ferns and Birds of Paradise have been planted in a narrow strip along the garage wall and along the tall metal fencing that divides this yard from the neighbors in back. Someone once worked hard to create this little oasis back here, but it has been abandoned to become rank and overgrown. A tall avocado tree shades the yard and the back steps.

  Inside, the place is bare and clean except for shards of window glass on the kitchen floor and in the sink. Next in line to the kitchen on the way to the front of the house is a dining room with built-in glass-fronted cabinets. Beyond it is the living room. A large mirror or painting once covered most of one wall. Where it hung, there is now a large rectangle of brighter yellow paint. Someone has tagged inside that space with black spray paint. It is inexpert and unpracticed. The boys stand in front of it and view it critically.

  “Do you have anything on you?” Rickie finally asks. “We’ve got to cross this fool out. This is nasty,” he adds as he inspects the tag close up.

  “Not for that mess. But check this out,” Alex says. He produces a can of Glade air freshener.

  “Where’d you get that?” Rickie asks with surprise.

  “It was right here. On the floor.” He points to the wall in back of them.

  “Spray it one time.”


  Alex sprays the air freshener and the room is filled with a heavy floral scent. Rickie nods his head in approval. “Old school. Do you remember by the handball courts in 7th grade? We got fucked up on this shit.”

  “And check this out,” he says, pulling a joint wrapped up in a plastic sandwich bag from his front shirt pocket.

  Rickie stares at him with admiration. “Fire it up!”

  They sit down with their backs against the bare wall and smoke the joint hungrily, pulling on it until the ember glows long and bright orange, inhaling the burning smoke deeply. In between hits they spray the air freshener into their mouths and inhale it. The heavily scented aerosol makes Rickie gag and retch as he huffs it, but he lets himself be pulled willingly into the black whirlpool as his limbs grow heavier and heavier with every inhalation. It is as though the air itself has taken on mass and weight, has become palpable and focused right above him, pushing him down and immobilizing him. Soon it will flatten him onto the floor, but he worries no more about that than he worries about the gangsters finding them. He knows he will not be able to claw his way back to mobility if they burst in through the back door. He can’t even stand, much less defend himself. But when he considers this, he discovers that he doesn’t care. Let them find him. Let them kill him. Death can only be a sweet deepening of this.

  He looks over at Alex. His eyes are half closed and twitching. He is slumped awkwardly against the wall ready to slip over on his side. Rickie does nothing to straighten him. The can of Glade rests on Alex’s stomach. Rickie feels the pall of darkness growing around him and wonders briefly before he passes out if they are going to die here. He doesn’t care as long as it doesn’t hurt.