Underbelly (5 page)

“You got in the face of those two no-dicks,” the old man said, smiling thinly. “Always in here buying a beer for us peasants or haw-hawing about what big men they are. Shit,” he drawled. “I survived the goddamn Chosin goddamn Reservoir Campaign.”

“Mulgrew Magrady,” he said, sticking out his hand.

The other one returned the handshake and said, “Sanford, Gene, but they call me Freddy on account of the old TV show with Redd Foxx.” Gladys delivered his drink. “But I'll tell you this too. Now I heard this later, after my shop was gone and him in his chair, she had some kind of situation with her husband then, the Prescott you mentioned. Worked with Floyd he did.”

“Situation?”

The old man was sipping his drink and paused. “He got hisself on the slab. I know that.”

“Accident? The same one that crippled Floyd?”

Sanford hunched his boney shoulders. “If you think having a carving knife sticking out of your chest is an accident.”

“Sally do that?”

The old man regarded Magrady. “He was found in the apartment of this fairy he was bungholing on the side. The sweet boy had an alibi, he was at his sick mom's. And even though John Law questioned her, Sally wasn't charged.” Sanford continued his drinking.

“I appreciate this.” Magrady left. At a Dawn to Mid-Nite, a cut-rate version of 7-Eleven, Magrady bought and micro waved a chicken and jalapeno burrito. He ate that and drank a grape-flavored Gatorade as he waited at the bus stop. As evening came on, he arrived at the meeting of the coalition of community groups doing work around gentrification. It was being held in a Lutheran church on Figueroa, three blocks north of the USC campus.

“Prone out,” a voice yelled from the darkness as Magrady ascended the church steps.

A police chopper thundered overhead and suddenly he was back in 'Nam, back on the LZ as the mortar rounds exploded in his ears.

Disoriented, Magrady's reality tilted sideways then spun corkscrew fashion into a tornado of sensations. In a distant part of him he knew he was face down on the landing of the church, and that several officers were rushing past him. Some not minding in the least that their thick-soled sure-grip Oxfords stepped on his hands and arms. But the main show was given over to the flashes of gore and death making him nauseous and the booming that kept him off kilter.

The flashback fully descended on him at the thunderous whoop and stab of the overhead light of the swooping police helicopter. Magrady didn't try to move or speak. As far as he could tell, there was no officer standing over him with their nine or Monadnock T-handled nightstick cocked to rat-a-tat-tat the rhythm of compliance on his skull, but he was immobilized nonetheless.

The war's replay uncoiled and Magrady relived, yet again, a soldier named Edwards die spectacularly before him. His entrails splattered over the sergeant's torso as he sought to get his men together for evac on the Hueys while simultaneously seeking to isolate the source of the incoming VC fire.

Breathing like a labored steam engine and his heart lodged his throat, Magrady heard in real time cops and civilians yelling at each other as pews were upset, their wood splintering and objects crashing and shattering on the earthen tiles of the church. Magrady had once gotten a sweet little gig to replace those tiles in a rear portion of the sanctuary due to damage from a broken toilet pipe. He rolled over on his back, his chest finally rising and falling at a more normal rate.

A female cop's face slid into view over him. She was handsome and alert in a stressed out kind of way, and blinked hard at him.

“Is he one of those Sudanites? A village elder or something?” she incorrectly asked someone out of his line of sight,
pointing at him. “They're coming over here now, right? All that shit that's going on over there in their desert villages.”

A heavy man's voice sighed. “That's one of ours, Reynolds. He's an American black. We can't give him back.” The man chuckled. How right he was. Where indeed would Magrady go if he was kicked out of the U.S.? Or put on a boxcar with other malcontents and shipped out of town on a rail, the method of forced relocation practiced at various times on hobos and union agitators in the '30s by the cops and goon squads in the pocket of the big bosses.

He hummed “Joe Hill” as he'd heard Paul Robeson singing it on the 78 platter his mother used to play when he was a kid. Another round of shouting started up, only this was orders given from command to the grunts. The flashback wore itself out and some gendarmes roughly got Magrady on his feet. He, along with the other members and staff of several community-based organizations, were culled together on the lawn of the raided Lutheran church.

“The fuck, man?” Janis Bonilla demanded of the cops en masse. “We don't need a permit to be on private property. We're going to sue the shit out of your donut-eatin' asses.”

“Take a chill pill, Ms. Bonilla.” A stout LAPD captain addressed her, separating himself from the grouping of cops but not actually moving closer to her. “This was about the illegals at this meeting.”

Bonilla and several others glared at him openmouthed.

Armed men and women emerged from inside and around the corner of the building. Stenciled on the back of the new arrivals' jackets was the word ICE in big yellow cap letters, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security. Accompanying them were unfortunates in plastic restraints—members of the assembled community organizations.

“This is bullshit,” somebody said, and there was loud agreement from the gathered. It was the young woman with the glasses Magrady had seen at the UA offices. Amy, that was her name.

The captain smiled knowingly. “This is a new day of joint cooperation. If it bothers you, take your concerns up with your do-nothings in Congress.” He walked off.

Bonilla muttered “tea bagger,” and began making calls.

H
OURS LATER
B
ONILLA STILL SEETHED
, swirling diet soda in a can. The police and ICE had departed with their undocumented arrestees along with four citizens detained on charges ranging from a bench warrant on a jaywalking beef to overdue child support payments. Naturally the community groups held an emergency meeting after the round up. There would be a formal response involving public interest allies like Legal Resources and Services, and a press conference at UA's offices was planned for the next morning at 10 a.m.—in time to be broadcast on the afternoon news. Already, an e-blast had gone out to political and advocacy blogs about the action, and buzz was building.

“You gonna mention SubbaKhan tomorrow?” Magrady asked.

“I should,” she answered, taking a long pull on her drink.
It was already past one in the morning. “But yeah, I know that would be irresponsible, wouldn't it?” Bonilla had already had this discussion with her executive director. There was, at this moment, no evidence indicating the blitzkrieg originated within the Stygian inner sanctum of the all-consuming kraken that as far as Bonilla was concerned, was headed by the tentacled triumvirate of Dick Cheney, William Kristol, and the truly scary eviscerating automaton, Ann Coulter.

“Plus you'd get fired,” Magrady offered. “You'd be breaking the detente. Y'all gotta be lining up for your free drinks at the Emerald Shoals opening like the other community partners and unions.”

“But it can't just be coincidence,” she insisted, glaring at him.

“Look, my boy Stover could have alerted his buddies to keep their antennas tuned to your doings.”

She said, “He does have a fierce hard-on about you, that's for sure. I mean, it wasn't your fault about what went down in 'Nam.”

“There's that,” he said, gesturing with his hand in an effort to halt her from going into painful history. One service-related and guilt-wracked visit to the past was all he could take for an evening. “The other thing to consider is that you have a snitch in your midst.”

“What, like a police spy? Like back in the day of Chief Gates and his Public Disorder Intelligence Division?”

PDID undercover cops had infiltrated community groups as agent provocateurs. Bonilla was a student of L.A.'s activist archives. She'd spent hours reading through such files and articles from the '70s and '80s down at a place in South Central called the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, a repository of that kind of material. Magrady had accompanied her on more than one outing there to read through old papers from such now defunct groups like the Coalition Against Police Abuse, CAPA.

“I was wondering if it wasn't some turncoat secretly on the payroll of your arch enemies,” he opined.

Bonilla didn't say anything.

“Maybe I'm being paranoid, but if I were the head of SubbaKhan, kicked back at my desk puffing on my Arturo Fuente maduro, I'd be figuring out how to stay one step ahead of you Hugo Chavez-quotin' subversives.”

“That would be illegal,” she remarked.

“I'm not sure it is. And even if that were so, how would you prove it?”

“It worries me the way your mind works.”

He smiled broadly. “Me, too.”

Bonilla, who'd been pacing, sat down. They were in the small kitchen of her apartment in a 1920s-era building, replete with Zig-Zag Moderne touches on the façade. It was situated on Catalina in a blended area of Koreatown and Pico-Union. Where one could spot
carnicerías
with life-sized plastic bulls on their roofs next door to Korean wedding gown shops, whose display windows contained ice beauty mannequins with thousand mile stares looking out past the neon Hangul onto the changing city.

“That would be some shady shit, ya know?” Bonilla stated.

“I ain't saying you gotta go all black-ops and start waterboardin' fools to talk, but you do have low-income and poor folk you're working with.”

“That's bourgeois thinking, Magrady,” she groused. “I'll have to send your monkey ass to the re-education camp.”

He chuckled. “Or am I being the real Stalinist here? You got people who are barely getting by, Janis. Maybe they have a medical condition or their kid is in trouble with the law yet again. It's not hard to find out who has what problems. If it's legal entanglement, a lot of that's public records, right?

“So one day a swell-dressed man or, better yet, smart-looking woman shows up on my dilapidated doorstep and says 'Hey, we're not asking you to be a sell out or anything like that.'”

“Oh, no,” Bonilla snarked.

He continued in character. “We're not asking you to put the finger on anyone, but just let us know, you know, in a general way what they say at those meetings you go to. Now don't draw attention to yourself, don't be asking a bunch of questions.” Magrady spread his arms wide and slumped in his seat. “Sit and
listen and every now and then we'll call to ask a few harmless questions and in exchange, a few hundreds in nice, crisp twenties will find their way into your house fund or maybe junior gets community service rather than jail.”

“Then why bust us for our undocumented members? If I was a spy, I'd want to wait until I had something more juicy.”

He wiggled his fingers on both hands. “One branch doesn't know what the other is up to. If the spy is on the private ticket, there wouldn't necessarily be coordination with the popo. Anyway, this is just early morning after we got our ass kicked speculation. Like I said, y'all are easily targets of opportunity, or this went down simply because those self-absorbed, Lhasa Apsoowning loft-dwellers you despise have been complaining, and this is how the cops respond.”

Bonilla rubbed the back of her neck. “We have been trying to recruit some of those latte liberals as allies. It's not like they shouldn't have a place to live. But they also can't act like their shit, and that of their boutique pooches, don't stink. Their attitude is it's them bringing up the neighborhood while the poor get booted out.”

“How's that working out? Getting them to see you have some common interests?”

“Don't be cute. It doesn't suit you.”

“I take your point,
subcomandante.”

She was reflective, then. “You think that's what Floyd was doing? Why he was hinting about how he was about to get over?”

“Except it seems he had the goods on someone, doesn't it? And there is that SubbaKhan magnetic swipe card he had.”

Bonilla pointed at Magrady. “He saw the CEO try to rape this woman. She resisted and when they fought, he accidentally bashed her head in and Floyd, who'd been hired on a disabled program, was in the office late and decided to blackmail the dude.”

“Amusing. I saw that movie too. Only that guy was a professional thief.”

“Just trying to be as devious as you are, champ. So what if Floyd stole that card from a SubbaKhan employee?”

“Could be. Of course that raises the question of where the hell Floyd could have been with the employee.”