Southland (28 page)
“It was cold in there. Very cold.”
She looked at him. “What? Where?”
“The
freezer
,” he said. He hit the table with his fist. “Big white policeman in front of the store and dead black boys in the freezer.”
“How do you know it was cold?”
He stood up and hovered over her. “I was there! I was there when Frank found them!” He was staring, eyes wide. Two deep furrows split his forehead, his cheeks had gone red, and his eyes looked like something was boiling.
“You were?”
“I was outside,” he began, “just looking around on Sunday, when everything was over. I had a bad feeling and went to Frank’s house and told him to come to the store. There was some broken glass, you know, from one of the windows, and we kicked that around before we went inside. We thought the place would be looted but it wasn’t. Frank was relieved because he thought it was just the windows, and then we went back to the freezer so he could check on the meat.” He paused, and his eyes grew wider. Around them, Jackie could hear the sound of balls on wood; of people laughing and calling out to each other. “He saw that the door was locked, and then we knew something was wrong. Someone took a padlock from off the shelves and the key was on the floor. Frank unlocked the door and opened it, and that’s when we saw them. They were sitting on the floor in a corner, all huddled together. The two older boys had put the smaller boys between them, and they had their arms around each other. Frank saw them before I did. And his face.” Hirano’s eyes got wider, and he crossed himself. He leaned closer to Jackie, but she could tell he wasn’t looking at her; he was seeing the boys in that freezer. “His face, I hadn’t seen a face like that since the war. He ran right over and started touching them and shaking them and laying his hands on their heads. Their eyes were open and they were covered with frost. And he knelt down in front of Curtis and took his face in both hands and pressed his forehead against the boy’s forehead. And he started to shake, and when he pulled away, I saw that his tears had fallen onto the boy and melted tracks on his face. And then Frank just knelt there and put his head on his knee, and I went back out into the store.” He paused again. “I just walked around and around in there. Didn’t know what to do. Frank finally dragged the bodies out of the freezer. He wouldn’t let me help. He pulled himself together and he called his wife then, and I tried not to listen but I couldn’t help it. He said, ‘They’re dead. He’s dead, my love. They murdered him.’ And I stayed there with him while he called some other people. The morgue. The other boy Derek came in and he ran away crying, and then Frank made me go home and the store was closed down, and then he and his family moved away.”
Jackie felt sick. She found it difficult to breathe. When she spoke, her voice sounded thin. “Didn’t anyone call the police?”
Hirano looked at her incredulously. “What’s wrong with you?” He put his head in his hands for a moment. “I never told anyone. Never. The boys were dead and that policeman was never, ever punished. Nothing ever happened to him. I saw him take the boys in and I didn’t think he’d kill them. I didn’t think the Lord would let that happen.”
He stood up now and found his ball and set himself to roll. He took four big steps, swung the ball back higher than before, leaned forward, and let it go. It hit the wood so hard that Jackie thought it might break through the floor. Then it bounced, and barreled home, and smashed into the pins. They broke violently and flew over the edge. Not one was left standing. Hirano remained where he was, staring down the lane.
Twenty minutes later, Jackie was standing in front of the store. She’d come straight to Bryant Street after her talk with Hirano, who’d promised to testify, and who’d also given her the whereabouts of Frank’s old friend, Victor Conway. She wasn’t sure what she was doing here, but her hands had practically steered of their own volition. Once again, she left the car at the curb and stared at the store—the boarded-up windows, the crumbling walls. She tried to picture this place as it had been when Frank ran it, and also on the day he’d found the bodies. The bustle, the activity, the sorrow. Now, the sidewalk in front was cracked and uneven, whole chunks of concrete sticking out of the earth. And the store itself looked desolate—not just old and closed, but dead. She saw that more graffiti had been painted across the boards; that more trash had collected in the doorway. She saw the green stucco house to the left of it, Hirano’s, and Conway’s, the tan frame house across the street. She saw the dry brown grass and bare earth in the yards, the fractured walkways, the barred windows and doors. And looking at all of this, she felt the sinking sensation of loss—not just for Frank, but for this neighborhood, and for the boys who’d lived and perished in the store. She wanted to rest somewhere, and glancing down at her hands, she noticed they were shaking. She’d known all along that Frank had found the boys, but hadn’t pictured the scene until now. This was enough to think about, but there were also her grandfather’s words.
“They’re dead. He’s dead, my love. They murdered him.”
And she’d known immediately, when she’d heard this, that the first person her grandfather had called, the person he’d addressed as “my love,” had not been her grandmother, but Alma.
T
HE BELL rang as someone entered the store. The man had been sitting behind the counter filling out order forms, but now he stood to greet whomever was coming in. He’d expected a customer, but it wasn’t; it was her. From the shadowy light of the three uncovered bulbs he could see that she was tired. Her steps were slow and dragging; her eyelids looked heavy. But her chin was up, her neck and back were straight, as always.
She approached and said hello to the man and then inquired about her son. Normally the boy was there at that time, but he’d complained of a headache coming on and so the man had sent him home early. The man explained this to the mother and she nodded, looking around her. There was no one else in the store just then. The air was thick with unsaid words.
The man told her that the boy had left a notebook for school; he had it in his private office. He invited the woman to step around the counter and come into the room to retrieve it. The door was open and he walked straight to his small, tidy desk, where the green notebook lay on a stack of white paper. The woman took two steps into the room, glanced at the man, and looked away. The man stood still for a moment. Her glance was both accusing and sad. She hadn’t been in there since he’d changed it around, and he’d forgotten she knew it before, and the office he used now held little relation, for him, to that other place, which existed only in memory.
The man picked up the notebook and handed it to the woman. She thanked him, and they spoke about the boy’s progress in school, about his various responsibilities at the store. The man inquired after the woman’s other, younger son, and she said that he was well; he’d just started playing little league baseball. The man nodded and smiled, genuinely pleased. He couldn’t bring himself to ask about her husband.
They fell silent for a moment and looked at each other. He saw in the woman of thirty-five, the younger woman she had been when he met her. But he, to her, looked totally different. Family or work or the neighborhood had roughened his skin and bent his back. His hands, though, were the same—long and graceful. Now, he folded those hands in front of him and cast about for what to say. After a moment, she told him she had to go.
They walked through the store together and to the front door. He noticed useless things as they moved down the aisle—that the cereal boxes were crooked; that the chicken noodle soup was almost gone. Finally, at the door, she turned. She was about to extend her hand to him, but then appeared to change her mind. “Thank you for everything. We both owe you a lot.”
“You owe me nothing,” said the man, and he watched her walk away, down the street and around the corner. When she was gone, out of sight, he put the “Closed” sign up and went back into his office. He sat there in the dark until it was time to leave.
V
ICTOR CONWAY knew about returns. Not homecomings, which imply that somebody notices, somebody cares, somebody raises a glass, maybe, to mark the occasion, but quiet, unspectacular returns. He’d left Angeles Mesa, too, a few months after Frank, and when he returned, a dozen years later; when he bought a house a mile away from the house he’d grown up in and just across the street from his old friend’s store, most of the faces he remembered from his childhood were gone. New houses had spread like wildfire and new businesses had sprung up on the boulevard, but all of these places were full of strangers. The whites he knew had left, and the ones who remained seemed more private to him, more defensive. The Japanese of his age had vanished too, although he saw in a few of the older ones a dimple, or a stance, or a tilt of the head, that he connected to the kids he grew up with. And a lot of black families had moved out as well—some trading up to better neighborhoods, some dying out like his parents, and others resurfacing in Watts. It was Watts that he’d returned from, swimming upstream against the flow of people down into the ghetto.
He’d moved there in the summer of ’42. Graduation took place in June, but the event was pointless without Frank and David Hara and Steve Yamamoto, and the other Japanese kids who’d been herded away that spring. In July he married Janie, and the two of them moved into the one-room cottage behind her parents’ house in Watts. Janie’s parents had lived in Watts since it was Mudtown, a country village with dusty wagon paths and hoot owls sitting on fence posts. It had been mixed then, still was, although the scales were being tipped by the influx of Southern blacks, who were mostly settling south of 103rd. A week after the wedding, Victor went down to the shipyard in Long Beach, where the bosses who’d been shaking their heads no for so long were finally, because of the war, nodding yes.
Like most of the other black workers the shipyard hired during the war, Victor was assigned to the night shift. Getting home was no problem—there was an 8:30 Red Car from Long Beach to Watts, and even though the train broke down regularly or stopped to let freight trains pass, he could usually count on getting home by 9:30 or 10:00. But getting
to
the shipyard was another story, a new puzzle every day. The Red Car didn’t run that late at night, and Victor didn’t own a car. So every evening, before his shift, or during cigarette breaks, he’d have to arrange a ride for the next night. Finally, Pipes Sullivan took care of this problem. Sullivan was his leaderman—their gang welded and riveted gun emplacements—and he lived on 104th Street. He and his brother Horn restored an old Buick they’d bought from the junkyard and charged a nickel a ride to be part of their car pool. So every night, seven young men would crowd into the seats, long lanky arms and legs all jockeying for room, the men laughing, smoking, passing a bottle around, the car chugging through the streets of L.A. Although their shift started at midnight, Victor left about 10:30 every evening. The trip took forty minutes, and they had to pick up all the others at Imperial Courts and Nickerson Gardens, the housing projects built to accommodate the war workers. And the Sullivans and Timmy Grace would wash up at the shipyard since the tiny apartments in the old split-up house where they lived were not equipped with bathing facilities. They washed at night, because the foreman who came on in the morning objected to seeing Negroes in the showers. And Timmy and the Sullivans had to be clean; they had women to see in the morning.
The hours were long and the pay was low and Victor barely saw his wife—just between 8:00 p.m., when she got home from cleaning the Burns house, and 10:30, when they heard the honk of the Buick. Victor and Janie had time only to eat a quick dinner, which was usually made up of the cheapest cuts of meat—the ham hocks, the neck bones, the tongue. They would catch up on their day and then lie down for a while on their mattress if the mood arranged it. But it was fine, they were making it, until the swing shift started letting out early.
While Tim Grace and the Sullivans were inside washing up, Victor stayed out in the yard with Bill, Harris, and Colter, having a final cigarette, a final joke before their shift. Usually, they punched in as the swing shift was ending, and they nodded at the occasional colored men mixed in with the hordes of white women and the few white men who’d been rejected from the fighting. But in the fall of ’43, without warning or explanation, the swing shift started getting out at a quarter to twelve. Rumor had it that the foreman had lost his senses over a whore who could only achieve orgasm if he entered her precisely at midnight. But whatever the reason, the crowd of four-to-twelvers began to pass through the doors while Victor and his friends were still out in the yard. Some of the just-released women would gather on the other side of the entrance, smoking and laughing, complaining loudly that the war had thinned out the pool of available men, leaving them precious few to pick between. Victor and his friends ignored them, resenting their presence, hushed their voices and tightened their circle. But one night about a week after the women had started to gather, one of them left the group and walked over. Victor watched her approach—he couldn’t imagine what she wanted—noting the white cotton shirt which was now smudged with grease, the denim pants, the fake leather shoes. A few tufts of red hair poked out from beneath the white rag on her head, and as she got closer, she removed the cloth, shaking out the thick hair that reached down to her shoulders. The men went instantly stiff and swept their eyes around the yard. But the woman seemed not to notice, and she made a bee-line for Victor.
“I’m out of smokes,” she said when she reached them. “You got any?”
Victor glanced at his friends, who shrugged, and then over at the group of women, who were watching him closely.
“Yes, ma’am,” he answered, careful to avoid her eyes. “But it seem like your friends already got some.”
The woman smiled, exposing teeth that were crooked and yellow. Despite her stylish haircut and just-applied rouge, she looked aged and worn, thumbed-over. “They do, honey, but they’re sick of me asking. Why don’t you be nice now and give me a smoke?”
At “honey,” all the men looked around again, with more urgency and fear. Their hands fiddled with cigarettes, with loose strings on their shirts, with the suddenly itchy skin on the backs of their necks. Victor looked down at the woman’s shoes, debating whether it was safer to give her a cigarette and maybe overstep his bounds, or
not
to give her a cigarette and appear disrespectful. Finally, he pulled a pack out of his front shirt pocket, tilted it, tapped it against his palm, and offered the pack with a single cigarette sticking out of the top.
“Thanks, sugar,” said the woman. And when she reached over to take the smoke, her hand closed lightly over Victor’s and lingered a moment. “My name’s Peggy,” she told him as she pulled her hand away. “It’s good to make your acquaintance, Victor. I’ll pay you back tomorrow.”
And as she returned to her friends, Victor was so shaken by the way she’d touched his hand that he didn’t realize she’d somehow known his name.
All the men were relieved when it was time to punch in. Victor spent his whole shift looking over his shoulder, and on the Red Car the next morning, Harris and Colter told what they had learned from their fellow tackers—that this whitewoman named Peggy liked her men young, strong, and black; that she’d noticed Victor her first night smoking outside with her friends; that she’d asked some of the colored men who worked in the copper shop with her if they knew the tall oak-brown boy with the dimple in his chin.
That night, as they smoked, she came over again, talking more, staying longer, trying to engage the other men. All of them, including Victor, said as little as they could, but the whitewoman didn’t seem to notice. By the third night, Victor felt more capable of standing his ground, but then, a week later, Peggy asked if he had a girlfriend.
“No, ma’am. I got a wife,” he said, and his voice swelled with pride.
The whitewoman tilted her head a bit, considering him with mock disapproval. “A wife? A handsome young boy like you? Now what’d you go and do that for?”
“We been together a long time, ma’am. Since we was fourteen.”
“Your little wife, does she work, too?”
“Yes, ma’am. She cleans house for a family up in West L.A.”
The woman smiled a bit now. “So you don’t see much of each other, do you? You must get real lonely.” And her mouth did something with “lonely” that made it sound like something else. Victor just kept staring at her hand, where she rolled a cigarette between her fingers. The other men looked around again, their eyes settling on a couple of whitemen standing off in the distance. They didn’t want to be there, but they weren’t about to leave Victor alone with this hungry whitewoman who didn’t seem to notice or understand or care what kind of danger she was putting him into.
It was almost a relief to find the cat in his locker. At first, Victor thought it was alive, despite the strange position (propped up on its hind legs with its front paws pressed against the wall), because of the open eyes, which looked up at the shelf where his extra shirts lay folded. But then he noticed how flat the green eyes were, like calm, dirty water, and when he lifted the little body out, it was rigor mortis—stiff. He lay the cat on top of the bench and looked it over—it had dull black hair, a thin body, a long skinny tail, and no mark to tell him how it had met its death. He felt no revulsion, only sadness, and a strong, sudden current of fear. But he’d been waiting for something to happen; had not gone anywhere—not the bathroom, not outside, not over to catch the Red Car—without taking at least two other men with him, and he felt justified now, corroborated. He wrapped the cat in a dirty towel and dropped it in the trash. Then he changed into his work shirt and blue denim overalls and walked over to the outfitting dock.
There were other, smaller signals, which Victor tried to ignore. The sneers from the whitemen as he moved around the shipyard. The way some of the larger men, like Trip Stevenson, bumped him as he passed them on the gangway, once clipping him so hard that he was knocked to the floor. The loud conversations during breaks about black and white babies being even worse than regular niggers.
Through those weeks, Peggy kept bothering Victor, first outside, and then, when he and his friends stopped smoking there in an effort to avoid her, inside, on the outfitting dock, even following him onto the ship. The Sullivans, who usually visited their Long Beach women in the morning, stopped seeing them so they could drive Victor home. The previous winter, eight black men had been beaten in separate incidents outside the shipyard, two so badly that they never returned—and that was simply for having the audacity to work there. No telling what would happen with a whitewoman in the mix.
Throughout those few weeks, the air at the shipyard seemed thin, dry, sharp enough to cut. Every evening, when Victor left his house, he kissed Janie and pulled her close, and kissed Christopher, their new son, and his wife laughed at his intensity, not knowing where it came from.
He felt like a man waiting out his execution, and then one night, Peggy sat down on a bench beside him.
“You want to have breakfast with me tomorrow?” she asked. “I could pick you up at eight.” She punctuated her question with a light touch on his arm, three fingers hovering and alighting like butterfly wings. He felt a shudder go through him that he knew she mistook for excitement. Their backs were to the group of whitemen lounging by the rail, and Victor felt the air go even sharper, the collective suck of breath, at Peggy’s question, at her butterfly touch. He didn’t dare to look behind him, but he said, voice shaking, loud enough for the whitemen to hear, “No, thank you, ma’am. I got to get on home.”
That touch was the final insult, and he knew it. All the next week, his friends surrounded him, always, men covering his left and right, his front and back. But they didn’t protect, didn’t think to protect, the one place where he was vulnerable. On Monday afternoon, Victor woke up around five and went up to his in-laws’ house to play with Christopher. Janie wasn’t there at eight, which was when she usually got home. Nor was she there by eight-thirty, or nine or nine-thirty. They waited, Victor and his in-laws, with growing concern, until finally, Victor decided to go and look for her. He walked quickly to the bus stop where she usually got off, but nobody was there. Then he started home, slowly, listening and looking, and as he passed Cordelia’s Beauty Shop, he heard a quiet moan. He stopped and waited. Another moan—from there, in the alley. He ran around the corner and saw his wife on the ground. Her shoes and purse were scattered, her sweater was ripped, her white domestic’s dress shoved up around her hips. She was curled against the wall, as if asking it for comfort. Victor heard a sound come out of him that was not quite human; he rushed over, knelt down, and rolled her over. Her lip was split, her eye was swollen, there was a golf-ball-sized welt on her cheek, and dried specks of blood covered her chin and forehead. Victor choked back his own tears and tried to sound strong. “I’m here, baby, it’s all right. They won’t hurt you no more.” He carried her home, yelling to her parents as he reached the door that they should put the baby away. All that night he and her parents stayed with her—cleaned her off, put her in bed, pressed ice packs to her head. He thought of work only once—at ten-thirty, when the Sullivans honked—and then shoved the thought out of his mind.
By morning, it was clear she’d be all right, and she did not lose the baby that was three months inside her. After crying off and on through the night, Victor felt empty and dazed, and when the Sullivans picked him up the next evening, all the men in the car stayed silent, but they kept touching him, laying hands on his head, on his still-shaking shoulders and arms. In the locker room, as Victor got dressed for work, one of Mr. DeMarco’s men said that the boss wanted to see him. Victor knew what was coming. When DeMarco fired him for missing a day of work, Victor didn’t even try to explain. And out on the dock, when Trip Stevenson and the other whitemen sneered, confirming what he already knew, he felt too lost and tired even to conjure up rage. The whitewoman wasn’t there that night—maybe they’d gotten her, too—and Victor never saw or heard of her again.
