Exposure (9 page)

The following Wednesday evening, Rialto wins a closely fought cup tie against SV Catalunya. Immediately after the game, Otello does a brief and breathless television interview in the cramped space off the players’ tunnel, then heads for the locker room. As he opens the door, the hubbub fades slightly. Over at the entrance to the showers, against a backdrop of steam, Gabriel, Airto, Bernardo, and Enrique are standing in a line, wearing white towels around their waists, shaving one another’s armpits. When they and the rest of the squad see Otello’s face, they crack up. After the shortest hesitation that he can manage, Otello joins in the laughter.

B
USH EASED THE
shed door open, lifting it against the hinges so that it wouldn’t squeal. The girls weren’t awake, and because it wasn’t a Sisters of Mercy breakfast day, he didn’t want to disturb them. The longer they stayed like they were, folded against each other in their sleep, the better. He smelled the threat of rain in the air, which was bad news for the windshield business but maybe good news for the errands. You had to look on the bright side, even if you ended up drowned like an unwanted puppy.

He slipped out and softly hefted the door shut, and when he turned around, he saw Nina and Fidel. They were sitting on the sorry-looking bench by the back door to the bar. Nina had a pile of potatoes on a sheet of newspaper and was peeling them. She had a bowl of water between her feet, and the peeled potatoes — big yellow ones — were in it. Fidel sat beside her as if he just felt like coming out to admire the patch of gray sky that swung above the yard like a dirty hammock God had just climbed out of.

Bush thought,
Uh-oh.
Because Nina and Fidel didn’t sit in the yard peeling potatoes on a regular basis. Not at this time of day, anyway.

“Yo, Bush,” Fidel said, smiling.

Nina let a long shaving of potato skin fall onto the newspaper and lifted her face. It was still fine, Nina’s face. Some old Spanish aristocrat blood had gone into the making of it. That was what Fidel liked to say, adding, “She’s a class traitor, man. Like all hardcore revolutionaries.” Now she had on that distant, tender expression she wore when she was troubled.

Fidel used his foot to hook an upturned plastic beer crate closer to the bench. “Spare us a minute,” he said. “Park your ass.”

Bush went over to them and sat. “Some problem, Fidel? Nina?”

“Well, maybe not,” Fidel said.

“And maybe yes,” Nina said.

“You wan’ us to leave?” Bush asked, because it was the obvious question, and he was always expecting to have to ask it.

“Hey, man, whoa,” Fidel said. “Nothin’ like that. It’s just Nina and me, we thought we should have a talk with you. On account of what’s going on, you know?”

Bush looked at their faces in turn. “Like what?”

Nina wiped the potato peeler on the hem of her skirt and said, “Are the girls still asleep, Bush?”

“I think so, yeah.”

“I, we . . . we’re worried about them. And you.”

“We’re always careful, Nina, honest to God. No one knows we’re here, on my life.”

“I know that,” she said. “You’re cool, Bush. You do okay. But the thing is, you’re not here all the time. No, listen, don’t bristle up. We know you have to do what you do. But . . .”

“What’re the girls doin’ that I don’ know about? They havin’ boys back here or somethin’?”

Nina almost smiled. “No. Nothing like that. Which is amazing. At their age, with a place to go, I’d’ve —”

Fidel gave her a mock-shocked look, and she touched his plump arm. Which gave Bush that solitary feeling again. He waited.

Fidel said, “You must’ve noticed how there’s a lot more police on the streets these past weeks, huh? And Ratcatchers?”

Oh, yes, Bush had noticed that all right. Recently the early morning journey to work had become difficult, and the journey back . . . He’d had to find ever more elaborate routes, check every alleyway before turning into it, watch every unmarked van that passed by or stood parked. Many of the vacant lots and archways below bridges, gathering places for kids, were semi-deserted now. He felt nervous, exposed, slinking through the city.

“Yeah. Somethin’ to do with the election, is what I hear.”

“Right. Those sonsabitch so-called New Conservatives.” Fidel spoke the phrase with a sneer that caused his heavy mustache to spread its wings. “They want to say, ‘Hey, look how our Safer Streets Campaign and our Child Protection Order and so on have cleaned the city up, so vote us in again.’ Forgetting to mention it’s their damned economic policies is what forced kids to hustle and pull tricks on the street in the first place.”

Bush looked down at his feet. He didn’t know anything about politics. He didn’t
think
it was the government that had kicked in the door of a shack eight years ago and shot his mother’s boyfriend and then his mother when she started screaming. It might have been. He’d only seen their feet because he was on his blanket, which was under his mother’s bed, with his hand over Bianca’s mouth.

He said, “Yeah, well. Things’ll prob’ly settle down when it’s all over.”

Nina said quietly, “Fidel, I think you should tell Bush about what Donato told you last night.”

Fidel resettled his mustache with his thumb and forefinger. “Okay. Yeah.” His eyes were uneasy, though. “Donato’s a friend of ours from the student days, comes in the bar now and again. Works for the city, in the department of waste management. He likes to say, ‘All the crap in the city comes across my desk, and a heap of it stays there.’ Anyway, he was in last night, and he told us something he wasn’t supposed to. It seems . . .”

Fidel’s voice trailed off, then he inhaled lengthily through his nose and looked directly at Bush. “You must’ve wondered, of course you have, about what happens to the kids they take off the street.”

Bush shrugged. “Yeah, well. I dunno. I guess they get sent off to one of them screws, but I ain’t never talked to somebody who’s been to one.”

Fidel laughed, a mirthless bark. “Screws.
Screws!
Man, I’d like to meet the bureaucrat who decided to call those places State Centers for Rehabilitation, Education, and Work. He must’ve had a sense of humor. I’d like to meet him and shake him by the throat.”

“Fidel,” Nina said.

“Okay, okay, sugar. I’ll get back to Donato in a second. But this is important, right? And it’s like no one wants to talk about it. There was some state programming on the TV three nights back. You know, an ad for the government. And it had a bit of film in it of one of these screw places. That’s what it said it was, anyway. Didn’t say
where
it was, mind you. Showed a bunch of happy-looking kids doing farm work and sports and learning computers, stuff like that. And it just didn’t look right, did it, Nina? Way too good to be true. It was like one of those old propaganda movies from Stalin’s Russia, but in color.”

Bush had no idea what Fidel was talking about. He shifted on the uncomfortable crate and said, “Yeah, well, you know, me ’n’ the girls don’ aim to get took. Like I say, we’re always careful. You don’ need to worry. Now, uh, I better get going . . .”

“Wait,” Nina said. “Please.”

“Yeah,” Fidel said, “’cause this is the bit. Last night Donato comes in, and we get talking politics, as usual. Then he says he wants a quiet word and we go off into a corner. I figure maybe he’s broke, gonna ask for credit or something, but no. What it is, he’s got a story he needs to get off his chest. Seems that a couple of days earlier, one of his guys comes into his office, late in the day. This is a guy drives one of those big garbage dumpers, you know? He looks real shook up, won’t say anything to Donato until the two of them are alone in the office. And what he tells Donato, eventually, is this.

“He’d been on the early shift and taken his truck out to this big landfill site where they bury all the crap, yeah? This is out east somewhere, way past Santa Monica. He gets there just after daybreak. He backs his truck up to where there’s always a guy who directs him where to make the drop. It’s like a ramp down into this great big dip, okay? But the guy isn’t there, so the driver gets out, thinking,
What’s going on?
And he sees the people who work at the landfill all looking down into the dip, and there’s a man, the foreman, with a knife in his hand. He’s right where yesterday’s stuff was dropped — this, like, avalanche of garbage, yeah? And there’s seventeen big black plastic bags in a straight row half covered with other rubbish. For some reason the foreman had thought this didn’t look right. Maybe they weren’t there the night before or something. So he’d gone down and cut one of the bags open. There was a girl inside it. He’d cut another one open, and there was a girl inside that one, too. He felt some of the other bags, and it seemed to him there were probably bodies inside all of them. Donato’s guy, the driver, said it was weird, the scene. It’s a scummy place, you know, with paper and crap hanging off the wire fence. And all these people standing there silent like they were in church.

“After a while the foreman gets up and walks out of the dip and goes to the cabin, where there’s a phone, and calls the police. Takes the best part of an hour for the cops to get there. Meanwhile, the landfill people have gone down and opened the other bags and there’s a girl, a kid, in every one, man. Every damn one.”

Without taking his eyes off Bush’s face, Fidel reached over and took hold of Nina’s hand. Nina gripped it, looking down at the skinned yellow potatoes in the water in the bowl between her feet.

“And when the cops do get there, it’s not just the usual blueflies. As well as the uniforms, there’s a car of plain clothes. And the main man calls all the people there together and tells them this is a major crime scene and not to say anything to anybody about it in case it jeopardizes the investigation. Makes them sign a piece of paper that just about sentences them to death if they do say anything. Then the bodies are loaded into a police truck and taken away.”

Nina looked past Fidel at Bush but couldn’t see him. He had reduced himself somehow. Had lowered his head and folded his arms across his body, become just a curtain of dreadlocks above a pair of dusty knees. The only part of him that was moving was his left foot, which was jiggling, fast, against the sole of its blue flip-flop.

“So,” Fidel continued, “the driver eventually gets to make his drop in some other part of the site and heads off. On the way back into town, he gets this powerful need for a coffee and a cigarette, so he pulls into a place where the Santa Monica road crosses the interstate highway. There’s another waste department truck in the lot, and when he gets into the café, he spots the driver, on account of they all wear these yellow vest things, you know? So he goes and sits with this other guy, and they get talking. And guess what? This other driver’d had the same thing, on another site, the previous week. Twelve bodies. All young girls. And the same routine: the cops come, make everybody take a vow of silence, more or less at gunpoint, and take the bodies away.”

On the far side of the yard, a high window in Señor Oguz’s factory opened, and female talk flew out of it like angry birdsong.

“This other driver told Donato’s guy that all the girls had been killed the same way. Shot in the head. And that they’d been . . . that things had been done to them. Before. You know what I’m sayin’?”

A mournful sound came from Bush, which Fidel took to mean
yes.

“Then,” Fidel said, “Donato says to me, ‘I know you got girls living out in that shed. Are they okay?’”

Bush stood up. “This’s bullshit, man. Jus’ bullshit. Stories like that, they go around all the time. I hear it all the time. Like, you never wonder who put them stories out?
Jesus!
How come I never hear someone say a thing like that happen to his sister or somethin’? Huh? How come?”

Fidel shrugged and shook his head slowly. He suspected the kid didn’t spend much time talking to other people on the street, but he didn’t say it.

Bush stood there, turning his angry face this way and that as though he was looking for a good direction to run in but couldn’t find it. So when Nina spoke, her voice was calm and cautious.

“You may be right, Bush. But we’ve known Donato for thirty years. He’s not a fool. I don’t think he’d have told Fidel about this if he didn’t believe it was true.”

Bush jabbed his fists into his pockets. “So what you sayin’ here, Nina? It’s not like I can keep the girls with me all the time, you know? Have’em hangin’ around my turf. We’d get moved on jus’ like that. Or you think I can make’em stay in the shed all day? How can I do that?”

“Well,” Fidel said, hesitantly, “maybe you could keep with them for a while. Like you say, things will probably settle down after the election.”

“Man, how can I do that either? I got a nice thing goin’ uptown, you know? I got an understandin’ with the door guy. I don’ get no hassle. An’ you know how it works — I don’ show up there a while, someone else’ll move in. Then what do I do? Start over someplace else? You know how hard that can be?”

“Yeah. I do know.”

“Bush,” Nina said, “I need to say this, and I don’t want you to fire up on me, all right? What we’re worried about is Bianca.”

“Bianca’s all right. Bianca’s cool, okay?”

Nina took her glasses off and pinched the skin over the bridge of her nose between her fingers. “Man, Bianca is
not
cool. That’s one thing she is not. She’s a really sweet kid, but she’s sort of
disconnected.
It’s like she’s not in the same world as the rest of us.”

Bush took his hands out of his pockets and wrapped his arms across his chest. “She’s okay,” he said, scowling at the ground.

Nina sighed. “I was down at the market yesterday. Bianca and Felicia were there, just hanging out along with a bunch of other kids; some I knew, some I didn’t. But the thing is, Bush, Bianca
stands out.
No one looks at her just once — you know what I’m saying? She’s very beautiful. And when that’s not a blessing, it’s a curse. She doesn’t understand that, Bush. I think you do, though.”