Rickie Trujillo Read online

  “Why aren’t you finished with the first one?” Phelan asks. He looks at Rickie with pale blue eyes.

  “I can’t see it.”

  “Move up closer.”

  “Naw, I’m good. I’ll copy it from Veronica.”

  “That’s not the point,” Phelan says. He shakes his head.

  “I know, Phelan. Chill, dude. I’m just messin’ with you. I’ll give it a try.”

  Phelan looks at him for a long moment; he doesn’t push harder.

  “What?”

  “I know you can do this stuff. Or used to be able to before you gave up.”

  “I’ll start now,” Rickie says with a smile.

  “Where have I heard that before?”

  “I will. You’ll see. I’m going to get an A in this class.”

  “It won’t happen by wishing for it, you know.”

  The teacher checks the class. Most are still busy doing the warm-up. The dim light and the cool air seem to keep everyone calm and working, even though it’s the last period of the day on Friday.

  “C’mon. Try, Rickie. It won’t kill you.”

  When the teacher turns to work with other students, Rickie goes back to practicing his tag on the clean sheet of paper he’s borrowed. He is barely aware of the class going over the warm-up.

  Why didn’t he just stand up and go to a computer? Why did he have to fight with Maltrey? He’s a good old guy, patient and slow. Some students even kid him—“Hey, Mr. Maltrey, what’ve we got in that thermos today? Margaritas? Rum and Coke? Ah, I know—Mexican coffee,” some smartass will call out—but Maltrey still teaches, even if he’s in a haze. Rickie likes him. Rickie knows that he, not Maltrey, is the problem.

  He looks up and watches Phelan, who is leaning in as other students read their corrections aloud to one another. Rickie pays attention with half an ear. He likes watching others when they aren’t aware they’re being watched; likes being able to view everything at a distance as though through a telescope, detached like that, though still able to see clearly. It makes him feel somehow untouchable, powerful. He can’t remember when he started doing this, but he thinks it was when he was a little boy witnessing his parents fight, or if not witnessing, then listening to them when they were out of sight. He remembers lying in bed and pretending that the bed was a boat that he had set sail in. He would gather the covers about him and hold them close so that only his head was exposed. As long as he was in this bed, in this boat, he could sail safely and warmly across the stormy sea. When he imagined it well enough, he drifted through the voices that rose like the wind and the lashing spray of words and the slamming doors into peaceful sleep.

  He likes this feeling best of all, this detachment from everything: the silence, the inner stillness.

  CHAPTER 2

  Rickie continues to enjoy the cool shade of the oak trees, reluctant to move. The principal has looked away now and is talking with a group of skate boarders. It gives Rickie a chance to envision what will happen on Monday.

  He’ll have to see his Probation Officer, Ms. Lopez. Maltrey won’t let it go; he’ll report the incident to the principal. Then Garcia will know who Rickie is. There will be a meeting of school police, the principal, Maltrey, Wagner, Lopez, and Rickie’s grandmother—Lopez will translate for her. Maltrey will write up that Rickie was defiant and threatened him. They will kick Rickie out and he’ll end up in another school at least. Maybe worse.

  Lopez will stick up for him at that meeting. She’s good. Rickie’s in one of her counseling groups with other kids on probation. When she asks questions, she listens to the answers. She sits quietly and actually hears the outrage from the boys like Mauricio who had to be removed from the house after he’d been beaten by his mother’s boyfriend; or like Ernesto who was jumped by a gang of punks in the park, who took his new phone that he can’t afford to replace. Lopez hears the aching and almost wordless pain of those kids who are ignored, who are so unimportant that they’re all but invisible shadows at home and at school, who sit off by themselves as though they’re ashamed of taking up space. Lopez learns their names and makes them come into the circle. She knows how dangerous the isolated ones are.

  Lopez has been to Rickie’s house to talk with his grandmother, who tells the officer about Rickie’s parents and his grandfather. Lopez has been inside apartments crowded with two or three families and garages turned into makeshift living quarters; she knows about the fathers who stand on corners to offer themselves as day-laborers and the mothers who work as domestics; about the black kids who live in group homes or in the shelter with large, worn out mothers; about the white kids who live in leaky trailers with impossibly skinny and short-tempered mothers and their violent boyfriends. She knows who’s talking shit to whom, who’s going to get her ass kicked, who’s been jumped, who’s been flashed or propositioned by some pervert in a van with his hardon in his hand. She’s from East L.A., and she’s tough.

  “I don’t have time for your bullshit,” she tells her clients. “You be honest with me, and I’ll be honest with you.” She doesn’t let a dean or a cop or the principal dismiss a kid without reminding them of the truths about life in this neighborhood.

  Lopez and others encourage Rickie to express his feelings, but people don’t realize that the only feeling he can easily identify is the red anger that sometimes overtakes him. Anger: at his father and his mother for deserting his brother and sister and him; at God for allowing his grandfather to die; at his grandmother for still attending church and worshipping that God; at teachers and other adults who don’t see him or hear him and only want him to do what they want him to do; and at punks who think they can bully him. This anger is too big and terrifying to let take form in his body, like a bad genie in a black and red and roiling cloud that will overwhelm him. They don’t realize, people like Lopez, the danger in allowing that thing to come to life.

  But Lopez will be on his side; she’ll try to keep him at the school so that she can monitor him. He knows she likes him, sees something worth saving that others don’t; she even told him that he has a nice smile that makes him handsome. But this time she’ll lose; he knows he has crossed the line.

  CHAPTER 3

  The front steps and the wide entrance to the school have emptied. Only a few students remain in conversation with Jim Garcia out at the sidewalk. When they leave, the principal will mount the steps and maybe want to speak with Rickie. He doesn’t want that, doesn’t want to be known yet. Rickie walks slowly down the steps, past this remaining group, and crosses the street. He heads for the bus stop, relieved to remember again that it’s Friday. Monday is a weekend away.

  He walks east past the elementary school playground on the north side of the street and the 7-Eleven across from it, where he recognizes a few kids from class buying chili cheese dogs and chips and sodas. He doesn’t have any money on him, hasn’t eaten all day in fact, because he didn’t ask for money from his grandmother this morning. He doesn’t some mornings. He knows they live close to the edge. If he wants money, he needs to get a job. After baseball season, maybe.

  He scans the people in 7-Eleven to see if he knows any of them well enough to mooch some chips or a bite of hotdog from one of them. He doesn’t. He walks on by, past an office building with scaffolding to the second story that he and Alex, Dennis and Tony climbed the past Saturday night, late. They peered down into the restaurant open 24/7 across the street to see what people do late at night who aren’t tagging or partying. The customers they could see sat alone or in tired, unspeaking couples. Rickie wanted to be there, too, served by a waitress who called you “Sweetie” and who brought you coffee and a sandwich in this restaurant casting its warm light out onto the sidewalk of an otherwise dark and deserted street.

  The boys tagged the windows and the bare sandstone of the building. Rickie looks up—there it is, his tag, “Grt Whyt,” in simple angular black letters. Not a bomb—no color, no clownish bubble letters, no art like the work he has seen on the concrete sides of the
L.A. River or on the walls along the 10 freeway in East L.A.—just sharp, angry angles that remind him of shark’s teeth. Strong. A claim, a reclamation of the neighborhood, not only from other tagging crews, but from the white people as well who own this building and think they can clean it up and take it from the neighborhood. He has taken it back. No one has dared to cross him out; no one has buffed his tag.

  He stands at the bus stop next to Starbucks. A homeless man wearing a wool cap, fingerless gloves and a dirty coat even in this heat, pushes a shopping cart filled with matted brown blankets and plastic grocery bags stuffed with unidentifiable junk onto the sidewalk and waits for patrons to come out of the coffee shop. Most ignore him. A few give him some coins, which he inspects dismally after they pass by. Rickie looks into his sad, bloodshot eyes, and shrugs his shoulders—no money.

  By the time the bus comes, a few more kids from the high school have joined Rickie. He gets on, shows his pass, and goes to the back. The other kids sit in the front. The bus driver checks Rickie, recognizes him as a tagger, and keeps him in the mirror. When the bus arrives at his stop, Rickie waits for a boy and girl to get off. They ride the same route each day, going and coming, but they never exchange more than a nod or a Hi. Long ago he sized them up as good students, whose mothers, or mothers and fathers, will move them out of the neighborhood to some place like Santa Clarita as soon as they have enough money. These kids go home to someone waiting for them. And even if there is no one, the place will feel as though someone is going to be back soon. They go home, have a snack, sleep until dinner, help clean up, do their homework, take a shower and go to bed. Rickie has heard them talk about life at home, so safe, so assured. On the weekends, they help with the housework and do the weekend’s homework. Maybe someone plays soccer or softball. Otherwise, they stay inside most of the time to watch TV and play video games, or they go to the park as a family. Trouble doesn’t follow them and it won’t find them. It finds people like Rickie.

  CHAPTER 4

  The heat throbs. For the past week, it has given weight to each day as soon as the sun rises, seems to engulf trees and the poor cinderblock houses, desiccate grass and shrubs, bake cars parked on the streets or in driveways until they pulse with hot, close air. Paint peels. Wood dries and splinters. Metal sears unsuspecting fingers. The air smells only of dust and dry things—a flat, funereal scent.

  Rickie gets off the bus ahead of the boy and girl, who stand still for a moment, dumbstruck by the heat but also waiting for Rickie to get ahead of them. He crosses the street and walks the uneven sidewalk alone and in silence, merging with the heat and the baked landscape.

  His face does not register much thought or emotion, just the self-absorption of his seventeen years. His eyes, however, are active, not to understand the landscape he sees in front of him, but seeking information he will need to process quickly; he needs to be wary and aware in this neighborhood of drive-bys and carloads of vatos locos who jump out and nearly beat you to death before they jump back in the car and scream off laughing. He can’t afford to be surprised.

  He walks, not seeing the details of the neighborhood he walks through. As far as he knows, things have always been as they are now; they have a weight and a past. He doesn’t understand the importance of this neighborhood of small post-war houses, old now and many in need of repair, or take in the occasional brave lawn, the usual dirt front yards, the open windows with curtains tied in a knot to allow the passage of air. He doesn’t notice the shirtless men and the women in poor dresses sitting with their heads down, hands clasped between their legs under shade trees in back yards with broken appliances or milk crates pushed off to the side; with maybe an abandoned car which little ones pretend to drive; perhaps a chicken or two pecking in the clumps of grass; or a garden plot with small plants of green or red chiles standing in moist and darkened mounds. Or, if he sees these things at all, they signify nothing, even though his grandfather had explained their importance.

  Abuelo told Rickie—whom his grandparents and brother and sister call Junior—about these streets and neighborhoods, things that Rickie only imperfectly understood. They drove in his grandfather’s pick-up truck one Sunday morning. The man pointed out windows open on the second story of large block apartment buildings and the foil on the west and south-facing windows to reflect away the sun’s heat, and he told how the people in these buildings were like them and didn’t have air-conditioning or couldn’t afford to run it. He told Rickie that the materials used to build these places were cheap; that’s why boards warped and doors didn’t hang correctly, and paint faded and peeled or turned to chalk so quickly. If he lived in one of these apartment buildings, his grandfather said with a laugh, he would always worry about electrical fires because he knew about the cheap wiring and fixtures that barely met code. He had put some of it in himself, he said, and then he laughed again.

  It made no difference how careless the workmanship in these places or how small and old the houses seemed now, he said. This neighborhood represented a huge step on a journey that had begun with a driving ambition and desperate need; that had led to long dusty walks, running, hiding in stinking culverts, resting in the shade of boulders, surviving in shacks that were little more than sticks and pieces of cardboard in makeshift camps reeking of dirty diapers and rotting fruit; that had meant taking a chance on harrowing night journeys in the backs of trucks, hidden behind and under who knew what, always with a fear of vicious dogs and men, some in uniform on both sides of the border, who counted lives and a person’s few possessions as nothing and would dispose of either with cold, disparaging eyes.

  He and his grandfather sat in the parked truck in the lot of Home Depot, the old man smelling warmly of tortillas and coffee and the sweat of work clothes, and the man told the boy that along with one crossing, another crossing took place, one you had not accounted for, were not warned about: You had entered a country that was a no-place, an indifferent landscape where you would remain anonymous and tolerated only so long as you rode the early morning or late evening buses and quietly took care of the homes and children of the rich, swept darkened hallways and backrooms, mopped bathrooms, vacuumed thick carpets at night as though you were a ghost, and lived in the neighborhoods others had abandoned.

  “Everything around us,” the old man said with the door of the pick-up open, ready to move on into the store, “this neighborhood, which is the only world you know, and the police who patrol it and the churches which draw from its people and the schools which educate you and all the other children… This neighborhood tells us that this is not home. It wants us to move on or go back to our home country. But then it wants us to stay here, too, to do the backbreaking work no one else will do. These people don’t know what they want.

  “But we stay, mi’ jo, even though we are sometimes alone and sometimes in fear, and we do good work, in spite of everything, and we survive,” and the old man laughed and got out of the truck.

  The shades are pulled and the drapes drawn, but the hot stillness has entered his grandmother’s small house. He closes the front door behind him. Slants of sunlight come in at the window and cut across the kitchen floor into this room, showing the worn and dirty armrests of the sofa, the dark blanket that covers the cushions, the mismatched tables and lamps, the shabby glider that someone gave them. Everything is nearly used up. Except for the TV. She has left it on, abuelita, as she often does. She says she likes to have the beautiful men and women of the novelas and the handsome newsreaders there in her living room, even if she’s not there. The thought of them in her house comforts her, particularly while she is away cleaning other people’s houses in different parts of the city. These people protect her casita as well. She believes that they somehow care about her and will not let anything bad happen to her house while she is away. Her grandchildren cannot convince her otherwise.

  She wanted a nice TV to house her television friends, she said, so she bought this large one and the dark wooden cabinet to hold it. It is her pri
de. She polishes the wood daily, dusts the screen, sits in the evenings with her hands folded in delight and laughs at the comedians and admires the voices of the beautiful singers so lavishly attired.

  Rickie punches the button to turn the TV off and listens in the silence for the whirr of the fan next to it that usually sends a welcome breeze toward the sofa. It’s off. He thinks about turning it on and sitting on the sofa to cool off, but he doesn’t. He walks into the kitchen instead, rummages in the fridge until he finds some pizza left over from mid-week, and eats it as he stands in the cold air from the open refrigerator door.

  Two more weeks of school. Baseball playoffs tomorrow and the championship next weekend if they win. Then summer. He’ll have to get a job; his brother will insist on it, but he doesn’t want to. Rickie hopes that his arrest will make getting a job difficult. He really wants to stay home and sit in front of the fan, or kick it with his homies at their houses.

  Some worry presses in on him, a dark necessity looming in the distance, but what is it? He should know what it is, but he can’t bring it to mind. He doesn’t want to know it.

  He reaches for a soda. Abuelita would yell at him for standing with the refrigerator door open like this.

  Rickie goes into his bedroom. His whole world is here, everything he cares about. On top of a crocheted blanket his grandmother has folded on his dresser, there is a sort of shrine to his baseball playing. Team photos, many trophies, a photo of himself as MVP on the cover of a phony Sports Illustrated taken at Knotts Berry Farm, and his all-star caps from the past years. The trophies are reflected in the mirror in back of the dresser, doubling their number. He is the sole occupant of his own Hall of Fame. He used to envision what this dresser would look like by the end of high school. His older brother, Bill, told him he would buy a glass case in which to store his trophies, and they had laughed about how big it would be.