All Involved (32 page)

Even better, I knew who she was. Cecilia something. I don't know her last name, but I'd seen her around, mostly with that curly-haired dude with pits in his face called Momo. That one is legit bad news, man. He always orders
lengua
tacos. He loves him some beef tongue drenched in
salsa verde,
like, so much that the taco basically falls apart in his hand and when it does, he finishes it off with chips. Don't ask me why.

I drop a hint to Listo that maybe Momo was responsible for what happened to Ernesto and what would he do if he knew my boss was with his girlfriend? I let that kinda fly around in the air and he gulps as he thinks about it.

I don't feel good doing it, but I think Ernesto wouldn't be mad at me cuz Listo used to try to fuck him out of money too.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Listo says, and his eyes look kinda panicked.

“Whatever you say,
jefe,
” I say. “I believe you, man.”

Listo doesn't like anything about doing it, but he leaves the room and comes back with $291 in cash and says he has to withhold for tax and whatnot. I don't fight him. I say thanks and leave. He doesn't tell me not to come back. But that's the message.

I'm okay about it. The bridge is burnt to a crisp, but it's a start. I got a nest egg. Now all I need to do is grow it up and hatch it.

Tortuga, Fat John, and me are all standing in my cousin Gloria's garage, which is sometimes where we meet up before missions. I let
us in with the key I know Gloria keeps around the side in a little stucco hole she plugs up with a rock. I tell her not to do that, that it's not safe and somebody's gonna steal her car someday, but she keeps doing it. You think she'd learn, but sometimes people don't learn unless bad things happen.

Fat John says, “Why are we here again? I know it's not to say what's up to your cousin and her sweet tits.”

“Just wait,” I say, too focused to get mad about the sweet tits comment, but before I can say what I want to say, Tortuga slaps me on the shoulder and nods at me.

“Well, I thought we were here cuz shit's going crazy out there,” he says. “I heard your cousin's homeboy Puppet set some fucking homeless bum on fire! Just, like, chucked gas on him, lit a match, and
whoosh
!”

Shit. Sleepy does have a crazy-ass junkie homeboy named Puppet and I've met him. He's bad news, man. I stare at Tortuga for a second and the only mental picture I got in my mind is James going up in flames. Shit is gross, man. It turns my stomach. This whole city is officially off-the-rails insane. Once again, I know I got to get the fuck out of here. Right now. Today.

“That's bullshit,” I say. “Besides, we're not here to tell stories and gossip like a bunch of bitches. We're here to do some business.”

I didn't expect Gloria to be home from work yet, but her little Geo Metro is right there in the middle of the garage, red as can be, kinda blocking where I need to get to, so I climb over the trunk and it dents a little under my weight but pops back up when I get off, and I go under the tool bench that's built in the wall that she never even goes near and I pull out my grandpa's old army bag that's olive green and taller than me. It clinks and clunks as I drag it over the concrete.

Tortuga says, “Is that what I think it is?”

When I've dragged the bag back over the car, I plunk it down on the oil-stained garage floor, unzip it, and say, “Check this shit out!”

“Holy . . .” Fat John makes a face like he can't believe what he's seeing. “What the hell, man?!”

“You're a legend for this, homes,” Tortuga says.

“Yeah,” Fat John says, “
yeah
.”

We just stand there for a minute, counting the cans. There's forty-seven cans of spray paint in that bag, and the only time most people have ever seen that many before is in the store. I got Krylons mostly, in silver and black, to keep it Raiders style. Got thirty of those. The rest are all mini Testor cans in red, blue, and white.

I been stocking up to go out with a bang. It's obvious.

“Well, shit,” Tortuga says, “now I know what you been doing while everybody else was keeping his head down. Straight up racking cans.”

Stealing cans is exactly what I was doing. I hit up Ace Hardware and put everything I could get my hands on in a backpack and ran. Up until now, Fat John and Tortuga didn't even know I had any.

I'm not stupid enough to ever show these paint fiends this much paint at one time. Sure, we're friends, but they'd fuck me over. They'd get drunk and break a window if either one was thin enough to squeeze through the opening and gaffle the whole bag. This is also why I won't be telling them that I need to be getting the hell out of Dodge too, cuz the less people that know, the better.

“I got tips, too,” I say and pull a little baggie out, one full of yellow and blue and purple glass cleaner tips that you can switch onto spray paint canisters to make the paint spray out with different techniques and styles.

One's a Windex tip I stuffed a bunch of needles in, and when you use it, paint flares out real good. I pick that one out and put it in my pocket. They can't have that one. It's special. Took me forever to figure out how to fuck with it just right.

Fat John sells weed sometimes. I know he's got cash on him.

“A buck a can,” I say. “I'll throw in a few tips for free.”

They both look at me like I'm crazy, but then Tortuga asks if I got mean streaks and I say no, just spray paint. He nods at that, like, okay, and then he starts doing mental math so I let him.

I pick out the cans I want first. Ten of them in Ernesto's favorite
colors: black and silver. After that, we cut up the rest real quick. Fat John takes twenty and Tortuga snags the rest. Fat John has to spot Tortuga, but only when Tortuga promises to hit him off with the money next week, along with some cakes and things from his mom's
panadería
when she opens it up this next week, which sounds like a fair deal.

I pocket the $37 and add it to my stake from El Unico, which takes me up to $328, all told. Now the business is settled, Fat John asks what's gonna happen to our crew with the merger into Big Fate's click happening. He's worried too.

The three of us are part of a click that's part of a bigger crew. A crew that started up way far away from here and feels even farther than that now. Tagbangers or not, they can't protect us from getting absorbed into a gang. To be honest, I don't know how the soldiers rolling up on Big Fate changes this situation. It might, but then again it might not, and I don't think I want to hang around to find out.

“Do it or don't do it,” I say. “That's really all the choice there is now.”

“Like,” Tortuga says, “can't we call the main heads though?”

I say, “They're not answering pages cuz they're putting in work up in Northeast, but I don't even think that matters now. We live in Lynwood. They don't.”

“True,” Fat John says, “that's true.”

Tortuga says, “So shit's on hold until we drop crew and go in with their neighborhood?”

“Pretty much,” I say.

“And you're sure,” Fat John says, “that you don't wanna join up? Even with that being your dad's old neighborhood and everything?”

“Hey,” I say, “I'm not gonna do this forever, but right now this is what I'm about. And why do you think I do graffiti anyways? I don't like people telling me what to do. What, I'm gonna join Big Fate's click and have a bunch of new motherfuckers telling me what to do and how to live?”

“What's a matter,” Tortuga says, “you don't want to end up like your old man, locked up twenty-three hours a day and fucking a fifi?”

I don't hit back verbally. I give Tortuga a real good glare, like,
all right, motherfucker, that's your free one
. As far as a fifi goes, I really don't think you want to know. When I found out, I wished I didn't.

So I change the subject. I tell them that everybody knows me as a bomber. But I want to do pieces too, like illegal though.

They nod at that like I'm preaching, but then Tortuga says, “How're you going to do that with the green lights on?”

“I got a plan,” I say.

“What plan?”

“I'll tell you later,” I say. “For now, I gotta go see my cousin.”

“Sure you do,” Fat John says and grabs his dick.

I punch him in his stomach, playfully but hard, you know? So he knows he can't insinuate shit around me anymore without some kinda payback. Tortuga laughs and we all say good-bye. When they're gone, I wait for a good five minutes and check the garage door windows to make sure they're not hanging around or nothing, snooping to see if I got more paint and I'm just hiding it.

I don't, by the way. But they'd think it.

After that, I throw the ten cans for Ernesto in my backpack and I pull something else out of the bag, something they didn't see.

It's my throwaway gun, a black .22 pistol cuz you can never be too careful. When I got it down good and firm in the back of my waistband, I pull my shirt out over it, do my belt up, and go inside to surprise Gloria.

Gloria's on the phone when I get in, twisting the cord all around her finger like it's a ribbon or something. She jumps when I shut the back door and gives me a look like I just stepped on the back of her dress or something.

The phone's mounted on the wall in the living room and she
takes a step forward and tries to shoo me out of the kitchen, but the cord's not long enough so she gets jerked back and comes up looking really mad, especially when I smile wide at her and go in the fridge for whatever's in there.

I see cheese pizza wrapped up in plastic cuz Cousin Gloria is boring and doesn't like toppings on her pizza, and I see some Chinese food in its little white containers and then I see something worth seeing. There's some
tamales
left over from what her mom made for Christmas.

Gloria must've unthawed them from the freezer the other night but couldn't finish them cuz they're sitting where the eggs usually are. I pick one out and pray it's a sweet corn,
queso,
and
jalapeño
one, but when I sink my teeth in, I find it's the boring pork.

Gloria waves her hand at me kinda frantically to get out and looks disappointed when I don't. Instead, I finish the whole
tamale
in two bites without using a plate. She glares at me then, and after that, her voice gets real quiet on the phone and she whispers to the person on the other end that she's really sorry but she has to go, and she'll see them soon, and then she hangs up and comes at me with a hand in the air.

She swings and misses and I make the mistake of laughing cuz that's when she gets me square on the cheek. She gets me good too. Like,
bam
. I see a couple quick stars, and as I'm rubbing my jaw where it's still stinging, I say, “Hey, that's not nice. That's not ladylike behavior, you know?”

She picks up a mug, sips, and says, “I don't care. You weren't invited.”

“I'm family,” I say and shrug. “Like, what would your mom even say if I told her you hit me?”

“She'd say you deserved it probably.”

“My aunt would never say that.”

“Yes,” Gloria says, “she
would
.”

We glare at each other a little before I ask her if she's got any money I can have.

“I don't have any cash,” she says.

“Sure you do,” I say, “you were saving up for the TV and everything.”

She puts her head down and says, “That money's gone, Jermy.”

She calls me Jermy when she's serious, so I back off a little. She wets a cloth and dabs at the floor where I was eating the
tamale
and must've spilled. After she tosses it in the sink, she tells me she had to spend all that money on something, but she won't tell me what. She tells me I'll understand someday.

After that, she gives me $10, but she says that's all she has cuz she and her coworkers won a scratchers pool at work. I seen her go in her purse and everything, so I can tell she's not lying. Ten bucks really was all she had. That's me at $338 then, which should just about be enough to get me to Phoenix and started up, I think. I hope so anyways.

After she hands me the ten, she says, “All right, have you seen Aurelio or what?”

Her little brother's older than me by two years, but I haven't called him Aurelio since we were kids. Sleepy, sure. Sleeps. Sleep Machine. Sleepertón, I call him sometimes. But not Aurelio. Never that.

“Haven't seen Sleepy and haven't heard about him. Why? You think he's out fucking up or something?”

She shrugs, which means yeah, not only does she think that, but she worries about it.
Constantly
.

I decide to change the subject so I don't got to hear about it for twenty minutes.

“Where's Lydia at? Where's the little man?”

“Together,” Gloria says. “She took Mateo to the Chuck-e-Cheese to give me a break.”

“Hey,” I say, changing the subject again, “can I borrow your car?”

She gives me a good long look over her white tea mug that she must've been sipping on while she was on the phone. It says
GILROY
:
GARLIC CAPITAL OF THE WORLD
on it. It has a little drawing of a garlic head on it too. It's done all up in a green outline.

“For what?”

“A thing,” I say.

“So, to do that graffiti nonsense you do.”

“No,” I say, and I think I play it pretty cool, pretty genuine, but yes, to do graffiti.

Obviously, yes.

“Sorry,
primo,
” she says. “I can't. I got a date.”

She hasn't had a date in as long as I can remember, so I say, “With who? Is it that Cookie Monster dude?”