Ditch Rider (12 page)

“
They blame you?”

“Probably.”

“It will make them feel better, but after a boy gets in a gang it is already too late for him. I see them come into the shop and I see they are in love with death.”

“The zipper embroidered on the jacket means they've been wounded?”

“Right. After that happens they get too tough.”

“One of the Four O's who was in the courtroom followed me into the parking garage after the arraignment, but very carefully. I didn't know I was being tagged.”

The Kid dropped his hand and sat straight up on the edge of the bed. “Who?”

“Nolo Serrano. Do you know him?”

“I know who he is. He has a Fast Five convertible, red and white,
muy suave.
” Sometimes I heard grudging respect or at least understanding when the Kid talked about gang members, but this time I heard respect for the car, contempt for the driver. “What did that
cholo
want?”

“He says he's the leader of the Four O's. He told me he would make sure nobody hurt Cheyanne in the D Home.”

“Why would he do that?”

“I don't know.”

“That guy will never last as a leader.”

“Why not?”

“He's too pretty. Nobody will respect him. He will have to prove how tough he is over and over again. One day he won't be watching or listening and somebody will kill him,” he snapped his fingers, “like that.”

“He told me that he'd been shot and after that he got into the gang life. He said he played the guitar, but he gave it up after he was wounded.”

“Yeah?” said the Kid. He used to play his accordion in a Norteno band—but he hadn't been doing it lately.

“It seems like he might have had some potential.”

“Him?” The Kid sneered.

I changed the subject. “Have you had any luck finding Saia's witness yet?”

“No. You want me to keep looking now that the girl is in prison?”

“Yeah,” I said.

******

The night got off to a smooth start, but later on it turned rough. I drifted in and out of sleep. A day
that
should have provided closure had only raised questions. A restless wind mirrored my scattered mind. A tree limb skated across the skylight, the dogs in the hood howled and barked, my neighbor's motion detector light flickered on and off. There were plenty of images that could have disturbed my dreams—handsome teens, ugly teens, rumpled prosecutors, snarling judges in flapping black robes—but the image that haunted me most was the grandmother's dark eyes.

14

I
N THE MORNING
I passed the trailer on my way to work, saw Sonia's car parked in the yard and pulled in beside it. The scratches and dings on the bumper and the hood marked her vehicle as a junker, although the frame around her license plate read T
HOROUGHBRED
T
OYOTA
.

“Come on in,” she yelled when I knocked on the door. “I knew it was you. I saw your car pull up.” She was sitting on the sofa smoking a cigarette and cradling the doll Miranda in her arms.

“How are you doing?” I asked.

“Gettin' by.”

“Cheyanne told me the school wants Miranda back.”

“They've been calling me at work. I'll take her over there today.” She looked down at the doll. “Cheyanne was a real happy baby, always smiling and laughing. How in the hell did she turn out to be a murderer? Can you answer me that?”

“No.”

“Would it have made any difference if I'd stayed home with her? If I hadn't worked nights? If I'd cuddled her more?” She stared at me through a filter of smoke.

“I don't know,” I said. I wasn't anybody to be giving mother/daughter advice, but I did it anyway. “It might help if you weren't always turning Danny into the good child and Cheyanne into the bad.”

She took a deep drag and exhaled. “I do that?”

“Yeah. Talk to Cheyanne. Tell her you're human. That you never took mother lessons. That you make mistakes. You can still change things.”

“I worry about what will happen to her in there…”

So did I. Nolo Serrano's promises hadn't changed that.

“I worry about what's gonna happen when she gets out,” Sonia continued.

“There are plenty of cases of people who commit bad crimes and go on to make something of their lives,” I said. “Anthony Saia told me Leo did time.”

“A year,” Sonia replied, rubbing her cigarette out in the ashtray. “I met him right after he got out. He was tough as nails, but he learned something inside. He finished his GED, started pumping iron, learned to manage his anger—that's what his probation officer called it—anger management. When Leo gets pissed off now, weightlifting calms him down. We had Danny, he got a job. He's been a good father to Danny. You watch them on the soccer field sometime if you don't believe me. He'd do anything to
keep
Danny out of the gangs. Leo and I split up after Danny was born. When we tried to get back together later it was hard because Cheyanne was older and she was jealous and she didn't have a father of her own.”

“Is that when she tried to commit suicide?”

“How'd you know about that?” The eyes behind the smokescreen turned wary.

“Saia told me.”

“How'd he find out?”

“The police filed a report on the suicide attempt.”

“Oh, yeah, a cop came to the hospital. Does that Saia know everything there is to know about us? Ain't there no privacy left in this town?”

“Not after you get into the system.”

“I thought Cheyanne was trying to get attention. She and Leo fought all the time. That's one reason we don't live together now. Did you ever meet a kid who got along with a stepparent?”

“Not yet.” She wouldn't like what I had to say next, but I had to say it. “It's an explosive situation when there's a guy and a young girl sharing a house.”

Her hand, which had been reaching for another cigarette, stopped in midair. “What are you saying?”

“Cheyanne has a lot of resentment toward Leo. Leo has a temper. He has a record. They were alone together the night she got beat up.” I shouldn't be thinking about that night anymore, but it wouldn't let go of me.

Sonia struck a match, lit the cigarette and blew out the match with the cigarette dangling from her lip. “What kind of a mother do you think I am? You think I'd have a guy in my house who'd mess with my daughter? They weren't alone anyway. Danny was here.”

True. But Danny was nine years old.

“If you knew Leo better you wouldn't be making accusations like that.”

Maybe. I'd gone about as far as I could down that highway, so I changed directions. “Did you ever meet a kid named Manuel Serrano who calls himself Nolo?”

“I don't think so. What does he look like?”

“He's around sixteen or seventeen. He wears a black hat that says
BROWN POWER
, and he has a zipper embroidered on his jacket.”

“I don't remember him.”

“He stopped me after the arraignment and told me he'd look after Cheyanne in the D Home.”

“How's he gonna do that?”

“He says he's the leader of the Four O's.”

“
If he says he can protect her, I'm not gonna say no.” She reached into her pocket, pulled out a roll of bills and handed them to me. “I did good last night,” she said. “I'll pay you more when I can. All right?”

“All right.”

She yawned. “Gettin' past my bedtime.”

And past time for me to go to work. I put the bills in my purse and told Sonia I'd let her know when the next hearing was scheduled.

******

While we waited for the psychiatric evaluation and for Judge Joseph to make his decision, I fell back into the real estate and divorce routine, which didn't seem so bad compared to a case as ambiguous as Cheyanne Moran's. Divorce may seem ambiguous to the participants, but to the observer it isn't—especially when you've seen as many as I have. Cheyanne was as comfortable in the D Home as could be expected. Actually, she seemed more comfortable than I would have expected. When I told her I'd met Nolo Serrano and that he'd said he was looking out for her, her response was to study her bitten-down fingernails.

“Do you know him?” I asked.

“I've met him.”

“Do you think he can make good on his promise?”

“No one's been hassling me so far except for that psychiatrist. That guy wants to know everything.”

“Are you cooperating?”

“Sort of.”

“Sort of is not good enough. You have to work with him.”

“Okay, okay.”

Cheyanne was looking better. The swelling had receded from her eyes and the colors had faded. The cuts on her face were healing. The stitches had been taken out, so she didn't have that rag doll look anymore, but it was too early to tell whether she'd have permanent scars. If she did, the scars would be close enough to the hairline that they could be concealed—if she chose to conceal them.

When I'd said what I had to say, the guards took her back to her room and let me out through the triple doors and electronic gate. The usual collection of tough guys was standing by the entrance showing their colors.

******

Cheyanne
was surviving in the D Home. The Kid and I were getting by in my home, making the adjustments it takes to live together: deciding when to get up, what to watch on television, divvying up the chores. We could tolerate the same level of messiness, so cleaning wasn't a conflict. I did as little gardening as possible, he did none. We both chased the gray cat away. He liked baseball (and
Walker, Texas Ranger),
I liked crime shows (except for
Walker, Texas Ranger),
but the different types of programs we liked hardly ever aired concurrently. Food was no problem; we both liked it hot. Cooking and dishwashing were easy. We got takeout and the plastic dishes and utensils went in the garbage. The Kid didn't care for the garbage detail, so I walked it down the driveway every week. The tradeoff was he made the coffee and he got up early so that I woke to the smell of coffee brewing. Usually he was gone by the time I got out of bed, but that was okay; neither of us were morning talkers. We both worked hard—me with my mouth and my brain, he with his hands. Some people might think that made us incompatible, but I didn't feel that the fact that his work wasn't verbal made him inferior or dumb. I'd never thought there was that much status in being a lawyer; half the population might admire you, but the other half hates your guts. To me it's attitude that counts, and the Kid's attitude toward work was good. We didn't get as far as mentioning the big C word—commitment—but were working on the little one—consideration—which helps if you're trying to live together. Life was still a dangerous place, but it was gentler when he was around.

Occasionally I saw Danny ride by on his bike. I didn't see Sonia, Leo or Patricia, and Tabatoe stayed away, frightened off by the gray cat.

Anna and her boyfriend, known to me as the stereo king for the power of his car speakers, were drag-racing down the breakup road, playing chicken on the highway of love. This guy had never learned anger management, and he vented his rage by driving by the office and pounding the pavement with his speakers, or by calling and hanging up if I answered, yelling if Anna did. That drama kept the office from becoming too boring.

One night on my way home from the Women's Bar Association meeting I saw a nearly full moon climbing over the back of the Sandias. The Kid's truck was parked in my driveway, but I wasn't ready to go home or to bed, so I kept on driving. There are times when driving comes easier than falling asleep. I headed north on Fourth Street past the old adobes, the new subdivisions and the church at Alameda. I watched the moon rise and listened for what it had to say. In New Mexico the moon speaks. There was a box in my glove compartment that spoke too, in a raspy, seductive voice, but I focused on the moon and ignored it.

I passed El Pinto restaurant, which seemed to be expanding at the same astronomical rate as the city. Where Fourth Street turned to Roy and headed east toward the Sandia Casino, I went north on 85 through Sandia Pueblo. Sandia is the place where urban sprawl becomes the big empty. One side of Roy
is
city, the other is land. Albucrazy doesn't peter out into suburbia—it ends at the Sandia Pueblo on the north, the Isleta Pueblo on the south, the mountains and the Cibola National Forest on the east. The only way it can expand is west of the Rio Grande, and that's what it's doing. Maybe the Petroglyph National Monument would form a barrier on that side. Maybe not. Still, you could go fifteen minutes in any direction and be out of the city, which was what made living in it possible for me.

The moonglow was so bright that I could see the cottonwoods beside the river and the Sandia pueblo church nestled on the east side of the road. The mountains took on definition from the moon. There was a place out here that kids called the twilight zone where they went to take drugs and spin their cars out. A jet crossed the sky from east to west, leaving a contrail that turned luminous under the light of the moon. At first it was a tight, bright line, then it began to widen and dissipate.

I didn't pass a single car as I drove through Sandia. I continued north until I reached the village of Bernalillo, where I stopped at the Range Cafe in the old monastery. It was too late for the cafe to be open, but I wanted to turn around and take a good look at the sky. The first contrail had faded to a chalk line, but another jet was crossing from north to south. The moon was higher now, and it turned this contrail into a long dark shadow.

15

A
FEW DAYS
later, when I came back from lunch with a pack of Nicorette gum, Anna told me that Anthony Saia had called.