All Involved (37 page)

When it's our turn to order, I tell the counter girl what I want and she writes it down. She says, “That it for you?”

“That's it,” I tell her.

“That's not enough for you,” my dad says, “and I really don't need you telling me you're hungry later. Get him some fries too.”

It's embarrassing. Of course, it'd be less embarrassing if the counter girl wasn't so damn cute, which she is. Her name tag says Jeanette, and I'm about to apologize to her for my dad when a guy behind me taps my dad's shoulder. My dad shrugs him off, but he's already got a story going.

“Sir, I'd never be a problematic on purpose, but I'm hungry. I'm diabetic. I haven't eaten right since this whole thing started.” It sounds like he's reading a list. “A guy named Terry upriver from me got lit on fire . . .”

He goes on like that. It might be true or it might be a rap he pulls all the time, but I doubt it somehow. I watch my dad size him up as a black dude who has had a bad couple days. He looks like a bum. He looks exhausted, this light-skinned black man. He couldn't be more than five foot four with his long black T-shirt and dirty shorts to cover his chopstick legs. He's leaning on a cane that has feathers tied to it. His hair's pulled back in a little braided ponytail that's fraying and limp on the end, but he does have a big scar down his nose in the shape of the letter
C,
like someone tried to cut a nostril off and missed. His cheeks are dotted with faint freckles, and he looks stoned out of his gourd—pupils so wide that they only show thin circles of blue irises on either side.

My dad tells him to tell the counter girl what he wants, which is odd, because my dad
never
does that. The guy orders a bacon cheeseburger and fries with extra seasoning salt. This guy then tells me I got a real good man for a father and asks what my name is, so I say Mikey. He asks my dad's and learns it's Miguel. He says his name is James. He says he's glad to meet us, and of course he is because my dad just bought him food. In fact, I can already see my dad tuning out as James thanks him again for the kindness. To my dad, he did his deed and he wants to be left alone.

While this is going on, I watch Jeanette take the order down, and make a handwritten note on the receipt for James's stuff as “to go,” which is good, because James is going on about Vietnam now, about being a vet, and how unappreciated that is in this country, before switching to talking about the river.

People are watching us as my dad pays. Until the change comes back, I stare at the mashed-up tile on the floor, one with a million different pebbles in it, all squashed flat. My dad would know what it's called.

My dad finally cuts James off. “Listen, I got you food and they'll bring it out, so go sit by yourself. We got our own problems. We don't need to hear yours, too.”

It might sound cold, maybe, but that's the truth. Everybody's got problems. That's just how it is. Best to just shoot straight with people and let them know what you can or can't do.

“Goldarn,” James says, “there's no call to get rude on it.”

I don't know what goldarn means, but he sounds southern from all I can tell, not from around here. His speech has a lilt to it, a softness that doesn't fit with how messed up he looks. As I'm trying to figure him out, my dad takes my elbow, which I wriggle out of and glare at him. He looks at me, sighs, and makes his way to a corner table. I go to the condiment station and grab ketchup, a bottle of Tapatío, and some napkins. James follows me there.

“Telling me to sit by myself,” James says, “that's mixing messages right there. Our Lady would never do that. She'd never say that.”

“Payasa,” a male voice at a nearby table says behind me, “handle this shit.”

A muscular girl a few inches taller than me gets up from where she's sitting with three guys and steps in between James and me. She's a real
chola
. I can tell by the way she angles a look at me. She's got light brown eyes, the color of brown beer bottle glass with light shining through.

“Excuse me,” she says, “is this dude bothering you?”

“No,” I say. “It's fine.”

“Okay then,” she says to me, but she turns back around and gets in James's face. “You better step out if you want to eat that food these nice people provided you with. They didn't have to do that. I wouldn't've.”

I edge away to the table where my dad is sitting, and I see James has a look in his eye now, a glint of crazy.

“Land of the Free,” James says to the girl. “I'm a vet, goldarnit.”

“Yeah, we heard that the first time,” she says. “Thank you for your service. Now do everybody a favor and shut the fuck up.”

James's jaw drops at that, and he starts huffing as he pulls up the sleeve of his tracksuit jacket to reveal a forearm with two long scars down the length of it.

“A machete.” James draws a finger down his forearm. “I'm a vet, goldarn son of a bitch! Land of the Free!”

I'm no expert, but I guess it could be a machete wound. I look to my dad to see if he thinks the same, but he's looking down, reading a chunk of the newspaper he brought with him from breakfast.
BRADLEY LIFTS CURFEW TONIGHT
, the front page headline says, and beneath it:
HE WON
‘
T SPECULATE ON DEPARTURE OF TROOPS
.

“Shit,” Payasa says. “That ain't nothing.”

I slide into the wooden booth, still staring at Payasa as she pulls up her shirt to show a cluster of scars along her side.

“That's not a scar,” she says, pointing at James's arm. “
These
are scars.”

It looks like a blind person tried to write Roman numerals on her, mostly
I
's, an
X
, and a
V
. It takes me a moment before I realize they must be old stab wounds. I count ten of them and I'm not done before she puts her shirt down.

“Land of the free,” she says, “but only if you pay your fucking share.”

She's about to clock him, I think.

James must think that same thing too because he takes a step back.

“I
already
paid,” he says, but he's whining now. He lost this contest somehow, in a way I don't quite understand, but I know it happened, because he's different now, more hunched. “I paid a blood share, that's what I paid. This is a black city!”

People were uncomfortable with the display before race got brought into it, but that comment just snaps the room in half. The dining room looks about fifty-fifty, black and Hispanic, with a Samoan family thrown in. I see people taking sides in their heads, getting ready to react if something is about to go down. I watch my dad take the Tapatío bottle off the table and turn it around in his fist
like he'll use it if he has to. It's so calm, so quiet, that I almost missed it. He does it without taking his eyes off the front page of the sports section that says,
LAKERS REFUSE TO BE SWEPT ASIDE
.

Payasa laughs. This doesn't diffuse the tension in the room. It makes it worse.

“No,” she says, “this ain't a black town, but maybe you should stick around. In ten years, there won't even be rib shops anymore, just taco stands.”

James's eyes almost bug out of his head. He looks like he might explode.

“You know why though? Cuz we fuck more than you,” she says. “We have more babies than you, and we stick around too. We already won. It's just a matter of
when
.”

James opens his mouth, but the counter girl saves the whole situation by handing him his food in a bag. He stares at the girl, at Jeanette. She mouths the words
just go
to him, and he must decide that isn't a bad idea, because when he does go, he backs out the door looking at Payasa.

“Yeah,” this
chola
says with a look of self-satisfaction on her face, “that's what I thought. Go back to eating your meals, everybody. You're safe now. Show's over.”

As she sits back down, my dad puts the Tapatío bottle back on the table and slides the thin tin ashtray to him before going in his chest pocket and pulling out a pack of cloves. I give him a look to show him I don't appreciate having to eat next to someone smoking, but he bats it right back at me with a look of his own.

“What? I'll put it out when we eat,” he says.

Across the street from our table is St. Francis's glass tower stuck to a rectangular building topped with a little cross. Next to that is a strip mall done up with white siding that I know my dad would pronounce as terrible. At the end of the mall is a payday loan place with armed guards standing out front with rifles. Two doors down from that is a nail place, but it's closed. None of this is as interesting as Payasa.

I turn my eyes to the girl, to the table she's at. She's faced away from me, rolling her muscular shoulders. Her hair is done in two tight braids on either side of her head. They look like pigtails, except fiercer. I've never really seen a female gangbanger before. Here and there, but not standing up like this, not as an enforcer.

I watch her table for a moment, and it makes sense now why she was the one standing up. The three guys there are all hurt. It doesn't take much logic to figure out that they've just been to the hospital. One of them is in a wheelchair with a leg elevated. He has a sling around his arm too. The skinny one next to him has a wrap around his head, and I notice he's staring hard at my dad's hand—at the scar, I guess. He's got dead eyes like my dad sometimes gets when he doesn't want anyone to know what he's thinking, but something's going on in there, because this guy pushes his food away from himself and turns his whole body toward the window. I wonder why he'd do that.

Lately I've been trying to keep my eyes open for stories, and I decide there has to be a good one in how those four ended up at their table looking like
that
. I also decide I wouldn't want to meet who did that to them because they look about as tough as it comes. I'm going to El Centro Community College for small business management because my dad wants me to, so I can help him with everything, but I really want to be a writer instead, so I sneak English classes whenever I can get them.

“My burger's overdone,” the one in the wheelchair says. “We should've done Tam's.”

“Don't worry about it,” the biggest one says. His partially tattooed arm is in a fresh cast that doesn't have any signatures on it. “If I could cook, you wouldn't have to eat it, but I can't, and Tom's is close, so Tom's it is. You're welcome.”

He sounds like my dad, a provider—more than a little put-upon.

“My bad,” the other one says.

They don't say much after that, and it occurs to me they're pretty exhausted themselves. My dad and I finish up, but only after I make
my stand by not eating the fries he ordered. He eats them, staring at me the whole time.

When we leave, I feel eyes on us again, but I don't turn. As we're walking out into the parking lot, I see a bus parked on Norton. The side of it is covered in graffiti, but I can't read it. Maybe an
F
and something. A
P
or a
K,
maybe? It looks like a
K
. I walk toward the bus and step over a little wall, into the nearby bank's parking lot. From there, I see the back of the bus, and I can read what's there, clear as day—it says ERNIE. In the bottom leg of the last
E,
it says R.I.P.

To my dad I say, “You see that?”

“Sure,” he says as he fumbles with his keys.

I ask him what he thinks about it.

“I think he died,” my dad says and shrugs.

He gets in the car then, but I keep looking because it's there to be seen. Next to me, the truck starts up. I step back down. It occurs to me that you don't get something like that unless somebody cares and unless something really sad happened to you. It's a tribute, and it's meant to be noticed. Not everybody who sees it will care, but at least when they put eyes on it, they'll know he existed. I wonder what Ernie's story was, what he went through for his name to end up on the back of a bus like that.

My dad honks the horn at me.

“Okay, fine! I'm coming,” I say. “You don't have to honk at me!”

My dad yells from inside the cab with his window up. “You're the one who demanded to go to the hospital!”

He's right. Of course he's right, but if anything has changed in me since the riots began, it's that I'm noticing things now. I'm seeing,
actually
paying attention to my city again. Before, I'd stopped seeing it. Moving around L.A. was just something that happened in between the important stuff of eating or hanging out with friends, but now, after five days of it, with the National Guard coming in, and the U.S. Marines coming in and making things safe again, moving around actually
is
the important stuff.

I take one last look at ERNIE, and I hope he had a good life, the best life he could have had, all things considered, and then that seems stupid to me, because I never knew him, so I just get in the truck and we go.

On the way to Cecilia's room in Acute Care, in the elevator that smells of ammonia and doughnuts, I eavesdrop on two nurses talking about something that happened in the lobby outside St. Francis's Emergency Room on Friday night.

“These two gangsters walked in waving guns around,” the shorter of the two nurses says. “Nobody knows why they did, but they did. And they both walked right up to a family of three that got burned in a house fire, minor burns, you know, but still, and they were waiting for help, this family, holding wet washcloths to their arms and necks when these gangsters went and put guns in their faces, even a little girl's.”

A concerned sound escapes the tall nurse then, and she says, “How old was the little girl?”

“She couldn't have been more than eleven or twelve,” the shorter nurse says. “The odd thing was that these two gangbangers didn't seem to
want
anything. They weren't there to rob anybody. They didn't ask for wallets. Mainly, they were just there to terrorize people, you know? To strut around like they were tough or something.”