I got out my side and stood on the curb behind the car. The headlights and the spotlight of the police car were so bright I couldn’t see anything around us so I couldn’t tell where we were. Betty came over and stood next to me.
“Have a seat,” the Turk told us. I looked around.
“I am not sitting on that dirty curb,” Betty said.
“Sit down.” His voice was hard and mean. Betty smoothed down the back of her dress like ladies do and sat on the curb with her legs kind of slanted to one side. The sides of her white high-heels were going to get scraped on the street. I sat down next to her. The cement was wet and cold.
The Turk walked to his car. He reached in and talked into the microphone of his police radio just like he did on the rightaway. He walked back over to us and shined his flashlight into my face. I looked away.
“I know you.” I didn’t say anything. “I know you.”
I turned back toward him, but I kept my eyes closed and the light turned the insides of my eyelids bright red. The light went off at the same time I heard the snap of the flashlight switch.
“You’re one of those kids with the dead tramp. I remember that thing on your face.” I still didn’t answer him. I almost thought he was going to handcuff me right then and there.
Betty talked in her white voice again. “You still haven’t told me why you stopped me.”
I heard his boots slap the ground when he walked closer.
“Let me see your car keys.”
“They’re still in the switch.”
The Turk got the keys and snapped on the flashlight again and opened the trunk. He moved things around, then he pulled out the handle of the bumper jack and held it up and shined the light on it, like showing that Betty was hiding it, and he found it. I looked at her. She rolled her eyes and shook her head. He put it back and slammed the trunk shut, then came around to my side and opened the glove compartment and shined his light inside there and under my seat.
The police car radio called him, and he went to answer it. Then he came back and stood in front of Betty. His boots were as shiny as Cruz’ fake Florsheims.
“What’re you doing on Broadway?” Broadway’s an east-west street on the north side of the train tracks.
“Coming home.”
“Coming home from where?” Betty didn’t answer.
“Why didn’t you use Mission Drive or Valley?” Both of these streets were on our side of the tracks, in Sangra.
“It’s a free country,” Betty said. The Turk moved real close and stood in front of her so his belt buckle was in her face. He stood there so long I could’ve counted the lace holes of his boots. Then he threw the car keys on top of the trunk. “Next time take Valley.” After he said that, he went to his police car and got in and drove away past Betty’s car. I watched the taillights until the police car disappeared in the dark.
“Let’s get home,” Betty told me. I helped her stand up. My butt was cold and itchy. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.
The front porch and front room light were on at Grandma’s house. Betty didn’t turn off the motor.
“What did the Turk mean about taking Valley?” I asked her.
“He means Broadway’s for whites and Valley and Mission are for everyone else. I wanted to ask you what he meant about the dead tramp, but it’ll have to wait for another time. I promised your dad I’d get you home early.” She shook her head. “Do me a favor and don’t say anything to your dad about the policeman. It’ll only make him mad.” I dragged my fingers across my lips to zip them shut. Hush-hush.
Betty leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. I smelled her perfume again. “Thanks for going to the show. I’m glad you were with me when I got stopped.”
“Thanks for taking me, Betty.” I said. “I had fun.” I got out of the car and walked up to the front door. When I turned around to wave goodnight, she was already gone.
In the dream I was lying next to that tee-cat in the parking lot, and my legs were bleeding, but they didn’t hurt. I woke up on the couch in the front room, and my underwear was soaked. I got up and stripped the couch without even thinking about it. When I went into the kitchen, my dad was on the phone. I dumped the bed stuff out on the side porch. When I came back in my dad was waiting for me.
“Ted just told me what happened last night. Are you all right?” I wondered what Ted told him.
I asked my dad, “Can I go to the bathroom first?” I went in, but I couldn’t pee. I didn’t have any left after last night. I got in the shower and stood under the spray trying to think how to answer Dad. I gave up and finished my shower. I put on clean underpants and went back into the kitchen. Dad was sitting at the table. He looked at me and pointed his chin to tell me where to sit. I sat down facing him still in just my underpants.
“Well?”
I started to tell him about the show and Cruz’ singing group, but he waved his hand. He wanted to hear about the Turk. I figured Betty already told Ted who called my dad so I spilled the beans. That’s when Dad taught me about prejudice.
Well, not really. I already knew what prejudice is. At lunch time, white kids make fun of the tacos we bring from home. They call us wetbacks and greasers and T.J.’s. At the San Gabriel show, the Witch lets us see the first movie, then kicks us out.
And people say things to me about my port-wine stain too. Grown-ups stare at me and kids call me “matchhead” and “scarface” when they point at my birthmark. Dad told me things I already knew, but I didn’t know it was called prejudice.
I went back to the front room to get clothes to wear. Rudy’s door was closed. I didn’t remember hearing him come in last night. I looked back to see if Dad was still in the kitchen. He wasn’t. I knocked soft on the door. I waited for a time and knocked again. I opened it real slow.
Light was coming through the open blinds. I could see everything in the room. The bed was made, and there was an open empty suitcase on top of it. I went out and closed the door behind me.
I went in the kitchen and made myself a mean Sam sandwich and poured some Valley Fresh in my school thermos. I put the sandwich and the thermos in my school lunchbox and went up to the club. It was Sunday. I knew I should go to church with Grandma and Mom, but I didn’t have to serve Mass, and I had too much to think about to talk to God. I sat on the cardboard and chewed on the sandwich, but it didn’t feel good in my mouth. I swallowed without tasting. And the milk tasted sour like it always does when you drink it out of a thermos.
“Was I all right?” I thought about my dad’s question, and I felt like what Rudy must feel like. Wherever he was, he must’ve felt like the Turk knew him and had an eye on him and was waiting for just the right time to arrest him and send him back to prison.
I’ve seen pictures of the war in Italy in Life magazine at the school library and I’ve seen war movies. I thought about Rudy fighting in the war.
In the movies, you don’t see people really die. They just fall down when they get shot. And the good guys never get hurt. They don’t even get dirty. I thought about Ted’s burns and his Purple Heart. I got asco, and I didn’t know if it was because the ham was bad or the milk was old, but I wanted to lean over the edge of the roof and throw up. The club didn’t feel good all alone, and I wanted to get down and find Danny and Marco and Little so we could be together when the Turk came for us.
I put the rest of my sandwich back in the lunch box and poured out the milk and watched it hit the ground in a white splash. Then I put the thermos in the lunchbox and climbed down the rusty fence.
When I got to the kitchen, Rudy was at the sink.
“Hi, Rudy.” He turned around. He was holding a glass of water.
“Ey, Liddo Man.” He looked tired and sick.
“I haven’t seen you around. Where you been?”
“Oh, here and there.” He shook his shoulders and leaned back on the sink. “When do you start school, kid?”
I put my lunchbox on the counter next to him. “I already started,
” I said. “We went back right after Labor Day.” I wanted to wash the fence rust off my hands, but he was standing in the way. When he figured that out, he moved to the side so I could use the sink.
“Right,” he said like he knew that, only he forgot. I washed my hands and wiped them on a dishrag.
“Rudy, can you do me a favor? Can you call me Manuel or Manny? Call me Man if you want. Just don’t call me Little Man.”
Rudy gulped a drink of water, put his glass in the sink, and leaned on the counter.
“My friends call me Man, like in Man-on-Fire, because of my birthmark. Call me Man, okay?”
“Ey, that’s pretty good. Man-on-Fire. That’s a righteous placa.”
“What’s a placa?”
“That’s another habit I got to kick,” he said. “A placa’s a nickname. We use a lot of nicknames in the pinta. In the joint.” He chuckled. “In prison.”
He caught me staring at his red knuckles. He put his hands in his pockets.
“Ey, Man-on-Fire,” he said real quick and happy, like he just got a good idea. “You got time to talk? We got to get to know each other, you know? We got to catch up.” Rudy had a funny way of talking, kind of sing-songy and chipping the ends off his words.
Rudy put his arm around my shoulders and steered me out to the porch. I sat down on the hobo chair, but then I got up so Rudy could sit there. He put his hand on my shoulder and leaned on the little porch wall and crossed his arms.
“So, you got a ruca or what?”
I like Kiko Yamanaka, but she’s not my girlfriend. “Nah.”
“I had a girlfriend in seventh grade,” he said. “A gabachita. Her name was Inga Lindstrom.” He smiled to remember. “She was like a white girl, you know?”
He got quiet and looked past me at the screen door. I turned around to see who he was talking to, but there wasn’t anybody there. “She had blond hair and light-blue eyes. And pecas, freckles on her nose.
“Well, she wasn’t actually my girlfriend.” He said actually like ack-chully. “We didn’t go out on no dates or nothing, you know? We just kind of hung around together for seventh grade. She couldn’t never be like my real girlfriend, you know? Because she’s gabacha and I’m Chicano. But we used to hold hands in the cafeteria and out in the yard. And once in a while when we were by ourselves, we would kiss. That’s all we did was kiss a couple of times.”
He stopped talking. I waited to see if he would say some more.
“That was a long time ago. And the last time I seen you, you was what, two years old?”
“I think I was four,” I said. “But I don’t remember much.”
I wanted to know so much about him. I wanted to hear his side of the story Grandma and Cruz told me, but I was scared he would get mad or something so I sat there and didn’t say nothing.
17
You play baseball?” Rudy asked me. His voice made me jump a little.
“Little League.”
“Oh, yeah?” Rudy smiled. “I love baseball. When I was a kid, I played wherever there was a game. Pretty good outfielder. What do you play?”
“Second base.”
“You any good?”
I wiggled my shoulders. “All glove, no bat.”
Rudy nodded. “Your dad could pitch swift. He could’ve been in the big leagues, you know? Like Raul Valdez.”
He stopped talking and looked down.
I decided to take a chance.
“What happened, Uncle Rudy—Rudy? Why did you go to prison?”
He laughed a little sad laugh and shook his head. A part of me was sorry I asked him. He looked up at me then he turned and looked at the mountains so all I could see was the back of him. Then he pointed at Mount Wilson.
“Do you see that heart with the arrow through it?” he said.
I was shocked. I thought I was the only one who saw the heart. Nobody else ever said anything about it.
“You see it too?” I asked him. I got up and stood next to him.
“Oh, yeah. It looks just like a heart with a arrow going through it. Can I tell you something?”
“Sure.”
“Whenever I look at that mountain it reminds me how many times I broke my mother’s heart. That’s the worst part of things. That’s what I hate the most about my life. All my life. Everything bad I ever did. Like that arrow going right through her heart.”
He was talking to the mountain. He had his hands in his pockets. Then he took them out and put them on the top of the wall in front of him so he could look at the backs. The knuckles were puffy and red. He went over and sat down in the hobo chair. He looked tired now.
“Sometimes I wished I was never born. For your grandma, you know? Like if I wasn’t born, her life would be happy.” He shut his eyes. “I don’t want you to do this or anything, okay? Don’t even think about doing it. Just because I told you. It’s not no way to solve your problems, so don’t try it, me entiendes?”
I didn’t know what he was talking about.
He started talking real slow like you do when you’re not sure if you should say what you’re going to say. “One time when things were going real bad, I went out to the tracks and stood there between the rails. I wanted the train to just hit me and take away all the trouble I made. I thought about it, what it would feel like, you know? When the train hit me? I thought it would hurt like hell for like a split second, then no more pain, you know? Maybe it would be like drowning. I wanted to drown myself on those tracks just to stop giving pain to the people I love. But I didn’t have the guts.”
He stopped talking again. By this time I was sitting on the arm of the hobo chair. I wasn’t looking at him. We were both looking at the broken-hearted mountain.
“I hated the way my mother would have to go to court to beg one judge after another to give me another chance. Then when I would get the chance, I would jack it up and go back to juvvie. I thought when the judge made me choose between the service or the joint, I could finally make my family proud of me. So I enlisted in the Marines.”
I was surprised about the Marines. Cruz said Rudy was in the army like Dad.
“You were in the Marines?”
“First Marine Provisionals. Semper Fi.” He smiled but it didn’t last long. “Even that went wrong. Right after boot camp, our outfit got sent to Algeria in North Africa. That place is like the Mojave Desert. Your dad ever take you to the Mojave?”
I shook my head.
“Ask him to take you there sometimes. It’s different than the Arizona desert when we were liddo kids.”
I always thought Africa was pure jungle like the Tarzan movies.
“We seen some righteous action along the north coast of Africa. This is the bad part. I don’t know if I should tell you, you know? Being that you’re a little kid and all. But then your dad probably already told you about other bad things I did. But before I tell you, I want you to think of something first.
“See that wounded heart up there on the mountain? The funny thing is, if you go to Alhambra or El Monte and look at the mountain from there you don’t see no heart. What you see is a small mountain in front of a bigger mountain. There’s no wounded heart if you look at it from a different angle. They’re just mountains. It’s only from here that they look like they do, you know?”
I promised myself I’d try to remember to look at it from Alhambra the next time I was there.
“Okay, well, I’m going to tell you something not even your dad knows. You don’t have to keep it a secret, but you don’t have to go telling the whole world either, me entiendes?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s this little town on the Algeria coast called Arzeu. It’s even smaller than San Gabriel. About the size of Sangra. Just a little port town on the sea. Well, we have to take it to get to a bigger city called Oran.
“We take Arzeu pretty easy, you know? So we’re on our way out of town towards Oran, eight of us in the bed of a deuce-and-a-half. I’m sitting with my back against the headboard next to Jim
my Beane. I’ll never forget him. He was this cracker kid from Alabama. A farm kid a year younger than me. He lied about his age to get in the Marines.
He hated the farm and the ‘Corps was his way out. Just a farm boy from Alabama who didn’t know enough about Mexicans to be prejudice. He though I was Italian. He would say it like ‘Eye-talian.’ He called me ‘Dolfo’ and I called him ‘Frijol,’ you know? I tried to teach him about Mexicans but I couldn’t get it through to him that I wasn’t Italian. He kept saying when we get to Italy, I should tell him which ones was my kin so he wouldn’t shoot them.
“I’m tired and sleepy so I don’t really know what happened, you know? But sudden-like, I hear a boom and the truck bumps up and down, sudden-like and real hard, and then the deuce-and-a-half starts tipping over. I’m sliding off and everything is happening in slow motion. I can feel my ass sliding along the floorboards, and then I guess I black out because the next thing I remember I’m on my hands and knees in the middle of some dry weeds and hot sand. My helmet is off, and my head hurts, and my ears are ringing.
“I look around and see the truck all upside down in a ditch next to the road. The front tires are spinning slow and black smoke is coming from underneath. Then I see my squad. There’s bodies scattered everywhere. I check to see if I’m bleeding. I don’t see no blood, but my ears are ringing and my head’s pounding it hurts so bad.
“I get up and try to run to the closest man. He’s face down on the dirt road. My legs don’t work good, but I do the best I can to get to him. It’s this guy named Gentry. All I know about him is he’s a white guy—a lance corporal—and he’s from Fresno. I roll him on his back and he’s choking and his face is a bloody mess. I put my fingers in his mouth and pull out his tongue and a bunch of broken teeth. He’s moaning real bad, but I don’t know what I can do for him. I go to another guy who’s facedown in the ditch. He isn’t moving. When I get to him and turn him over, it’s Jimmy Beane. When I see him, I throw up all over him. I guess the deuce-and-a-half must’ve rolled on him because his head’s crushed and he’s covered in blood. All I can think to do is hold his hand.”
Iron River Page 10