Chapter 19

I’m stuck.

Stuck in the jungle.

If the police really picked up Demon, it’s not safe for me to be seen out and about.

The hippie curandero has set up an outdoor shower. In slow motion, I strip off all my clothes. Every time I move my neck, every time I bend my arms, pain screams through my nervous system.

Wincing, I slink naked to the coral tree behind the trailer. I stand on four paving stones set over a thick layer of moss. A tin bucket punched with holes hangs from a branch above my head. I turn on the tap and a garden hose fills the bucket. Ice-cold water drips down on me. My sore muscles seize up. Everything hurts. I’m covered in cuts and bruises, but still my hand creeps to the familiar patch of dark flesh on my forearm. I grab it. I pinch it, hard. Fresh pain floods my brain like fire, but I don’t stop.

“Motherfucker,” I whisper. “What have you done? What have you done?”

After I get dressed, I send Eddie out for some Advil. I tell him to get me a new hoodie from the discount store and to pick up a six-pack for Rafa for letting us stay here.

When he’s back, Rafa makes us lunch. It’s fresh tortillas and calabacitas, cut-up vegetables from the garden. My mouth is sore, but every bite makes me feel stronger. I clean my plate. So does Eddie. It’s simple food, farmer’s food, exactly the kind of thing our mom made for us when we were growing up.

After lunch, Eddie and I wash the dishes. Rafa rolls a fat joint, smokes it, and falls asleep in a hammock.

“Homie knows how to live,” Eddie says.

Inside the trailer, I take out my backpack. In the outside pocket is the old sock where I keep my money. I take out the roll of cash and count it. It’s all there. Two thousand dollars—a deposit, first, and last month’s rent on the apartment I was hoping to get for me and Eddie.

Ten months of savings.

I look at it for a moment.

I know what I have to do.

“Take this.” I put the roll in my brother’s hand. “Go see Yoda. Have him send a tow truck for Vanessa’s car. If this covers the cost of replacing the interior and a loaner car for her, do it. If there’s too much damage, see what kind of a car he can find her for two grand. A good one. Reliable, not too beat-up.”

Eddie looks at the money. “Where’d you get this?”

“I worked for it, cabrón.” I think about all the nights I spent mopping floors and scrubbing toilets on my knees. “I had big plans for that. But…this is more important.”

“Are you sure?”

I think about Vanessa, getting out of her car carrying groceries, her briefcase, her daughter’s backpack—carrying the weight of her world, all by herself. Guilt slams me hard. Did she get a ride to her test this morning? Did she make it on time? “Yeah,” I say, “I’m sure.”

Eddie takes the money. The wad is too big for his wallet so he rolls it up with a rubber band and puts it in his backpack.

“Make sure any car she ends up with is legit,” I say. “The last thing I want is for Vanessa to get caught with a stolen car. Papers, transfer fees, everything. Everything has to be legal. Okay?”

“You got it, boss.” Before he zips up the bag, he takes out my keys. “I gave Vanessa all her keys back. But here are the rest of yours.”

The ring is light. Two keys from work—the back doors for Defiance and Serenity. Plus the three keys Miguel the church groundskeeper gave me at the carnival.

Eddie looks at them before he hands them over. “How did you get a key to the storage unit? Dad never gave me one.”

I freeze. “What?”

He points to the small padlock key. “That one. Right there. Dad’s storage unit.”

Questions flood my aching brain. “Where is it? And how did you know about it?”

“It’s under the freeway. Right next to the nursing home on the other side of the park. He took me there a couple times. He used to keep shit there he didn’t want Mom to find.”

Almost a year has passed since Dreamer died. I didn’t know he had left anything behind. “Do you remember the unit number?”

Eddie nods. We both have a good memory. “Yeah. It was 96. I remember because he always used to joke that 69 turns to 96 when you’re full.”

“Dirty-ass old man.” We laugh a little bit. In spite of the ways he let us down, he was our father.

Eddie checks himself in one of Rafa’s feng shui mirrors and rubs his beard. He picks up the backpack. “All right. I’m gonna go. How about you? What are you going to do tonight?”

I search my brother’s face and realize that he looks like me. Both of us look like Dreamer. The ghost of our dad haunts our faces. I rub the padlock key between my thumb and forefinger.

“I’m going to wait for it to get dark,” I say, “then I’m going to work.”

After sunset, Rafa turns on his lights. He’s rigged a car battery to a few strings of dusty Christmas lights hung in the trees.

“See you tomorrow, Ghost.” He raises his beer bottle to me. He’s sitting on the overturned bucket, high as shit, enjoying a spiritual journey.

“Good night.” I zip up my new black hoodie and leave him and the jungle in peace.

I sit in the back of the bus and take the short ride to the park. I walk in the shadow of the overpass to the public storage units that Eddie told me about. Unit 96 is an outdoor unit at the end of a long row.

No one is here. The orange streetlamps give off weak light. I slip my key into the padlock and turn. The lock springs loose. I grab the handle and lift the metal door. The slats rattle and squeal.

The dark unit is empty except for three boxes.

Except for Eddie, Mateo, me, and a sack of misery, heartache, and bullshit, here is everything Dreamer Rosas left behind. All of his worldly possessions. Three fucking cardboard boxes.

I drag them into the light. I take a knee and paw through them. Inside the first are old financial documents—tax returns, pay stubs, receipts for mortgage payments, account statements, and past-due notices. The second box holds copies of police reports, court documents, paperwork for bonds—a slime trail of his time in and out of jail.

Disappointment weighs on me. I don’t know what I wanted to find here, but it wasn’t this.

Then I open the third box.

Two framed photos and a binder.

I pick up the first framed photo. My sister, Esperanza. It’s her third birthday. She’s sitting by a Little Mermaid cake and smiling at the camera. She’s wearing a purple dress. You can see three sets of hands on the back of her chair—me and my brothers, but we’ve been cut out of the picture. Esperanza’s hair was curly, like mine. Her party hat is crooked, and there’s a punch stain around her mouth. She was always running around, trying to keep up with us. My baby sister—tough and sweet and always laughing.

I trail my finger through the dust on her face, as if I can wipe away time and circumstance. I touch the glass and press it gently.

Is there another world, another universe, where she didn’t die? Where we’re all together, unbroken?

I wipe my eyes with my sleeve and tuck her picture back into the box.

The second framed photo is from my parents’ wedding, taken during the reception in the church hall. I recognize the cabinets that line the wall behind them. My dad is wearing a white tuxedo. He’s shaved bald—gangster style, before he got a job and grew out his hair. He’s tall and built, with that droop-eyed face that made him look either high or menacing depending on the situation.

My mom is dressed in a big white satin gown with puffy sleeves. Her hair is permed and she’s wearing blue eye shadow. Her crown of white flowers matches the white flowers in her bouquet. In the bright flash of the camera, she and my dad look happy but nervous. They were only twenty years old.

I look closer. Under the bouquet, they hold hands. You can tell they’re holding on tight from the grip and the way their fingers are pale. It’s almost as if they knew what was coming—that their marriage would be a roller coaster. A terrifying one, especially in the end.

Dreamer had found a good woman and gone straight for her. He left the gang. The stress of living drove him back to Hollenbeck. Neither he nor my mom knew how to cope, and it broke them. Even after fourteen years of marriage, it broke them.

Vanessa’s words come back to me. “Two months. You can be good for two months, can’t you?”

It’s almost like she was bargaining with me. Like she knew I would backslide, and the best she could hope for was two months.

I couldn’t even give her that.

Few people find love. Of those, even fewer know how to take care of it.

I failed her.

I put the photo back.

There’s one more thing in the box. It’s a thick black binder, one a kid might use for school. I tip it toward the light and flip it open.

It holds receipts for payments, going back almost fifteen years. The newest one is dated just before my dad passed away.

What is this?

I squint.

The receipts are from Tierra del Sol Board and Care Facility in Sunland, a half hour’s drive north of Los Angeles.

Patient’s name—Hortensia Rosas.

Who’s that?

Her last name is Rosas, but my dad said all his relatives were dead.

I turn through the pages of the binder, looking for more clues, but I can’t find any.

A truck pulls up to a unit across the driveway. The slamming doors shock me out of my trance. I take the last receipt from the front of the binder, fold it and put it in my backpack. I close the binder, put it back in the box, and put the boxes back in the unit.

My head is full of fresh questions. I close the metal door and click the padlock back in place.

---

I make it just in time for visiting hours. Regina is sitting by Spider’s bed. When I lower my hoodie, she says, “Hijole. That must have hurt.”

“It did.”

She stands and I give her an awkward hug. Her eyes are red from crying.

“He told me what you did,” she whispers. “Thank you, Ghost.”

“Homeboy would’ve done the same for me.”

She grabs her jacket from where it hangs on the chair. “I’ll let you two have some time.” She leaves, closing the door behind her.

I sit down in the chair. There are weird tubes and things attached to Spider’s leg. He’s hooked up to monitors and an IV drip. He’s not as pale as he was when I brought him here, but he still looks weak. I know he lost a lot of blood last night.

“Look at you,” I say.

“Shit, look at you. Who did that?”

“My buddy Demon.”

“That fucking lunatic.” Spider holds up his fist. He’s weak as a baby bird. I bump it.

“What did the doctor say?” I ask.

“Well, first of all, I wasn’t shot in the ass.”

“That’s good.”

Spider goes on to tell me about his surgery this morning and the thing attached to his leg.

“It’s a wound vac,” he says. “Supposed to make me heal faster. That’s what they tell me anyway. But they could tell me anything and I’d believe them. I’m on really strong painkillers right now. I’m high as fuck. This is some good shit.”

We talk. Spider tells me the police came to question him this afternoon, and not just LAPD either. There were guys with badges from other agencies. ATF and LAFD and FBI. Alphabet soup.

“What did you tell them?” I ask.

“Jack shit,” says Spider. “Fuckers got nothing to place me at the scene.”

Still, we both know this is bad. A multi-agency task force. Because the attacks were racially motivated, everybody’s going to crack down hard on this. The spotlight’s on Hollenbeck. Everybody will be watching, including the feds.

“Demon’s been arrested.”

I remember the shredded glove. “He cut himself on the glass. They’ll get a DNA sample.”

Attempted first-degree murder. No judge is going to grant bail. Demon is fucked.

“What about Ruben?” I ask. “Did he come see you?”

Spider shakes his head. “No. No one can find him.”

“What?”

“Regina went over to the house this afternoon. Ruben’s wife said he left two weeks ago. He didn’t say where. All his numbers are disconnected.”

It’s worse than I thought. No Ruben, no Demon. The law is cracking down on Hollenbeck and our leaders are nowhere to be found.

“Wait a second,” I say. “It’s you.”

“It’s me, what?”

“You’re next in line. Until Ruben turns up, you’re in charge.”

Spider nods. “I’ve been thinking about that ever since Demon got picked up.”

“What are you going to do?”

“What Ruben would’ve done. Tell everyone to lay low and wait for word from Pelican Bay.”

Hollenbeck takes all of its orders from homeboys inside the prison system—the highest of the high in the Organization are locked up in Pelican Bay, the supermax state prison in Northern California. Those were the leaders who ordered this hit on black families in Hollenbeck Gardens. They were the ones who green-lit my dad.

For the first time in a long time, I see a crack in the wall. I see light.

“Spider,” I say, “I need something.”

Homeboy studies my face. “Name it.”

“Cut me loose.”

“What?”

Spider is loyal to the gang. He’d bleed for Hollenbeck. He wouldn’t feel sympathy for me if I told him I’ve lost my way.

In the last few weeks, Ruben and Demon and the young homeboys have taught me something that I didn’t see before.

Gang leaders find the missing piece inside of us and promise they can fill it, but only if we have honor. Only if we’re brave. Only if we do what they say.

It’s nothing but manipulation. Nothing but older men using younger men to do their dirty work.

But I don’t share these thoughts with Spider.

“My anxiety—it’s gotten worse,” I lie.

I remind him about the attack I had when I first got out of prison. I show him the bruise on my arm. I tell him I couldn’t throw the Molotov cocktail because I was having another breakdown. Demon thought I was being a pussy. But I tell Spider it was my anxiety.

I lie.

I lie to save my own life.

Spider listens. After I finish, he’s quiet for a long time. We listen to the hum and beep of the machines in his hospital room. People talk quietly outside. The elevator in the hall dings and the doors slide open. I hold my breath.

“All right,” he says at last. “You’re retired. Give me a week to let all the homeboys know. They’ll leave you alone.”

Instead of saying thank you, I take his hand and give it a squeeze.

“Motherfucker,” he says, and smiles.

---

My reflection in the glass door scares me. I put up my hood, get off the bus, and walk to Defiance.

All the lights in the gym are off and the back door is locked. I stash my backpack, change my T-shirt, and start my work.

Everything is sore, so I move slowly through tasks that should be easy. I fill the mop bucket and wheel the vacuum cleaner out of the closet. I open a new trash bag and do my rounds. Like it always does, my routine calms me down.

Spider is going to be okay. Demon is off the streets. I’ve been retired from the gang and when word gets out, I’ll be safe to walk the streets of my own neighborhood without being afraid I’ll get taken out.

I should be happy.

But all I can think about is her.

The way she laughs, loud and deep. The way she runs around in those heels, as if it were as easy to chase a little kid as it was to chase a better career. The way she blots her pizza and halves her churros and worries about the way her ass is getting bigger—so weird to me, like worrying about your bank account getting bigger. Why wouldn’t you want something awesome to get bigger?

I’m so distracted that I don’t notice the laughter until my hand is on the doorknob of the office.

I freeze.

A woman’s giggle.

Goddamn it.

Not again.

Through the blinds in the office, I see them. Barry and Chantal. My boss and the little white girl trainer from Connecticut. She’s bent over his desk with her tits smashed against the surface. He’s behind her, shirtless, with his warm-up pants pulled down to his knees. I’ve never seen so much spray-tan in my life. They’re going at it hard enough that paint chips are flaking off the wall where the corner of the desk is banging against it.

Chantal has gone all porn star. She’s squeaking like a mouse. “Gimme that big cock. Yes. Give it to me. Give it to me, you big stud.”

“Yeah, take it, you slippery fucking slut. Take it.”

My hand drops from the doorknob. As silently as I can, I step backward and leave the hall. Now would probably be a good time to clean the toilets. Conveniently, I could barf in one if I needed to.

In the bathroom, I get on my knees and scrub.

Try as I might, I can’t get the image of them out of my head. I mean, not in a perverted way, but in a philosophical way.

What would it be like to be that free? To get it on whenever you wanted, not caring who saw you, and not giving a shit who judged you?

I flush the toilet and move on to the next one.

What would it be like to have a family who could front you the cash to do the things you wanted—to start your own business, to move across the country, to become an actor?

Flush. Next.

I know Barry and Chantal. They’re nice people.

And I know what you’re thinking—I’m jealous of them.

The truth is, I’m not. They had no more say over where and how they were born than I did.

I just wonder. Who would I have turned out to be if I’d had what they had?

When I finish my shift, I’m exhausted, but I don’t want to get on the bus back home. Vanessa isn’t waiting for me when I get back. I’m not ready to face that reality yet.

I walk to the beach. The heavy fog wets my hair and skin. I sit on the cool sand and look out as far as I can over the dark water.

I was once locked up with a homeboy who was doing twenty-five to life. I asked him, “What’s the first thing you’ll do when you get out?”

He didn’t hesitate. “Take off all my clothes and jump into the ocean.”

I understood that desire. To be surrounded, embraced, taken away on a current, and stripped of all control. Instead of being bottled up and forgotten, to be poured out into the great darkness where we could rejoin the world at last, just another tiny drop in the sea.

The fog lifts slowly. It thins out until, here and there, little rips show patches of blue sky. Then, all at once, the sun burns away the fog and the world is covered in light.

I tried to be a different man. I tried to do the right thing. But I didn’t take the steps I needed to take to transform from the inside out. I didn’t make the big changes I needed to make for the new life to take hold.

I failed.

I stand up and brush the sand from my legs.

I walk to Bay City Brews and sit in the parking lot like a hobo until Alan pulls up in his Volvo.

“Hey, Sal. This is a surprise.” He unlocks the door for me and sees my face. “Holy crap. Are you all right?”

For the first time in two days, I say something honest. “Not really.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“Yeah, but…maybe not yet.”

Alan nods. In silence, we have coffee and toast. His daytime crew trickles in. Alan takes care of some paperwork before we head to the back room.

We don’t talk.

We set up the capper and bottle a batch of saison he’s calling Beach Bonfire. We take samples of a lager we put up a week ago and do an inventory of his supplies before putting in a new order.

“It’s time to check your beer,” he says. “Are you ready?”

My first recipe—the Hefeweizen brewed with fresh hoja santa from Vanessa’s garden.

I watch as Alan fills two glasses from the tank. Bubbles rush up through the unfiltered golden liquid and form a snowy white head.

“Looks good,” Alan says. “Let’s see how it tastes.”

We clink glasses and drink.

The flavor fills my mouth. It’s not like anything I’ve ever tasted and yet—it tastes familiar. Bitter and sweet, spicy and cold. The hoja santa fills my nose and all of a sudden I’m seven, standing in my mother’s garden, holding her basket while she gathers herbs.

“Un poquito de esto, un poquito de aquello,” she whispers. “A little bit of this, a little bit of that. That’s the secret recipe, Salvador.”

I put the glass down on the metal countertop. I can’t breathe. A sob escapes from my chest, broken and ugly.

Alan puts his arms around me.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t know…what the…what the fuck is wrong with me.”

“Nothing is wrong with you, Sal,” he says quietly. “Nothing at all.”