Southland (21 page)
Jackie looked down at her hands, sorry she’d spoken. She could feel Lanier’s eyes moving back and forth between her and Angela.
Angela slumped a little. “I’m sorry. It’s hard to think about, even now. Curtis was my first boyfriend, my first real love. We were so young when he died, and it just shouldn’t have happened, you know?” She paused, looking down at her hands. “I don’t know how I would have gotten through it without Mr. Sakai. He was always real quiet and stoical, but I think the murders tore him up as much as they did me.”
Lanier sat back, suddenly feeling very tired. It occurred to him that he’d been selfish all these years, even more selfish than he’d been when his cousin had died. As if he were the only one that Curtis had left behind. “No, no,” he said. “
I’m
sorry.”
“We were together all through high school,” Angela continued. “All those years and my parents never knew. My folks were real religious, you know, and my father didn’t approve of me dating anybody. But Mr. Sakai was always good to us. He understood. Even though you’d think he wouldn’t, ’cos he was such a straight arrow, he always understood.”
“Do you remember when he hired Curtis?” Lanier asked. “Was it before or after Derek?”
“After. He’d just started working there when we got together. And he loved it. He loved all the stories Mr. Sakai told him, about when he was a boy and about the war, and he wanted to run a place like that someday, a little corner market. And he’d talk about how I was going to help him out, how we’d live in the house next door.”
Jackie suddenly felt a little jealous of this long-dead boy who heard things Frank wouldn’t talk about with her. Or maybe he
had
talked about them and she simply hadn’t listened.
Angela patted down the corner of a cushion. “His dad was never crazy about him working there. I’m sorry,” she said to Lanier. “I know he was your uncle, but it was true. He wanted Curtis to concentrate on school instead of working. Problem was, the more he didn’t want Curtis to be at the store, the more Curtis wanted to be there.”
Lanier scratched his neck. “How did they feel about you?”
“Well, Mrs. Martindale was real sweet about it. My parents were a lot like hers, I think—religious and strict. I don’t think she liked having to keep our secret, but she was good to us.” Angela stopped talking, and remembered. It had always surprised her that Curtis’s mother, who was so rigid about so many other things, approved of her son’s relationship with her. Angela feared Alma, respected her, and felt honored, always, that Curtis could even see her against the backdrop of the woman who made all others seem frivolous and weak.
“And what about my uncle?” asked Lanier.
Angela thought for a moment before answering. “Well, he was different. I wouldn’t say that he disapproved, but he wasn’t nearly as nice as Curtis’s mom.” She looked down and fussed with a string that hung loose from her pants. “But I don’t think it was personal; it wasn’t about me. It was more that nothing Curtis did was ever good enough. That was part of why Curtis liked the store so much, why all the boys did—because Mr. Sakai made them feel like men.”
“Did my uncle know Mr. Sakai?” Lanier asked.
“You know, I really couldn’t tell you.” She paused, scratched her temple, and looked up at Lanier. “It’s amazing how little I know about Curtis’s dad, considering how often I saw him. I just remember Curtis saying he wasn’t too happy they were living in L.A.”
“That’s right,” Jackie said. “His parents met up north, didn’t they?”
Angela nodded. “Curtis’s mom was living with her sister up in Oakland, and I guess she met Curtis’s father through work. They lived in Oakland for a while, and they moved down to L.A. when Curtis was four.” She paused. “Your grandfather was so good to them, you know, after. He always made sure they had what they needed.”
Angela looked down at her hands, and then up at Jackie. It took a great effort for Jackie not to turn away. “I was sad to see him go. He was such a big part of my youth, and I don’t think I could have made it through that time without him. We’d just sit up somewhere—outside, or in a coffee shop, ’cos I couldn’t stand to be in the store—and he’d let me talk to him, let me cry. He was always willing to take on other people’s sadness, even though he had so much of his own.” A few tears spilled down her face. “I think he did that for Curtis’s mother, too, at least at the funeral. I remember that everyone was crying during the service, grieving real loud. Mr. Martindale was falling apart. But Curtis’s mother was quiet up there, she was being so still, like she was in shock or something. But after the service, she was walking back through the aisle and Mr. Sakai was there, and he hugged her. I remember it so clearly—it happened right in front of me. He put his arms around her, and at first she tightened, you know, but then you could see her let go. She just gave in, and she let him hold her, and she cried and cried.”
Jackie felt something snag in her chest. The scene that Angela had just described seemed viable, not unusual—but in all of her grandfather’s dealings with people, Jackie had never seen him touch anyone.
“Is there anyone else still around from that time?” Lanier asked. He didn’t want to hear anymore about the funeral, which he had not been allowed to attend. He was too young, his mother had said, so he’d sat in his room, rendered silent by grief and guilt, slowly and methodically hammering to pieces all the planes he had built with his cousins.
“What about Curtis’s aunt?” Angela said. “Mrs. Martindale’s sister? She might be able to help.”
“The one in Oakland?” asked Jackie.
Lanier nodded. “Yeah. I forgot about her. Cory used to go up and visit her, but that was years ago. I think I heard she was in an old folks’ home. I don’t know which one. And shit, I don’t know her married name.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t help you there,” said Angela.
Lanier looked at her. “You’ve helped us a lot.”
He and Jackie got up to leave and they all exchanged phone numbers, work schedules, pleasantries. Angela shook Jackie’s hand and then turned and offered her hand to Lanier. He looked at it for a moment. Then he took it, stepped closer, and hugged her. They stood holding each other and there was such intimacy in this gesture, such mutual sorrow, that Jackie looked away. Lanier didn’t speak on the way back to Winchell’s, and Jackie felt, once again, as she sat hunched in the passenger seat, like a visitor in someone else’s grief.
A
SANTA ANA wind blew through the region in the last week of April, leaving everyone in the city restless and lusting for water. All the people who could walk, drive, take a bus, or hitch a ride headed toward the ocean, and the beaches were as crowded as they’d be on any August Sunday. But Curtis and his friends, landlocked, didn’t bother to go—the weather was too exquisite to endure the endless stuffy bus rides, or the cold stares that dark faces on the sands inevitably inspired. And they couldn’t swim, either, in the pool at Exposition Park; Negroes were allowed only one day a week, right before the water was changed.
The Catholic gardener, Kenji Hirano, saved the day. Hearing Curtis complain to Frank about the lack of relief from the heat, he went “Hmph” and beckoned Curtis with his gnarled, callused pinky. He led the boy next door to his house, both of them followed by Derek’s little sister, Angela, who’d started tagging along on everything Curtis did. There, in the garage, amidst all the tools and mowers and potting soil, was a huge pile of clear green plastic. Curtis used his knife to cut where the old gardener pointed, and then Hirano rolled up a big strip, ten feet wide and thirty feet long. Curtis and Angela carried it, awkwardly, to the Martindales’ house, where Jimmy and Cory, who’d been sitting on the steps, watched closely while they spread it out across the lawn. Curtis smoothed it like a sheet and then turned on the hose, covering the plastic with water. Setting the hose down so the mouth opened on a corner, he backed almost into the neighbor’s yard and then sprinted toward his creation. At the edge, he dove head-first, gliding across the slick, wet plastic like a base runner sliding into third. The boys didn’t need an invitation. They ran back to the edge of the lawn and flung themselves toward the plastic, sliding feet-first, belly-down, and sideways. Curtis put bricks on each corner to keep the plastic from moving. He kept soaking it with water, and sometimes he turned the hose on the boys and on Angela, the cool streams hitting their bodies and then exploding out like liquid fireworks. Other kids, attracted by the laughter and the water, appeared to take their turns. David and Derek showed up from the store, released by Mr. Sakai so they could go out and enjoy the weather. For hours they stayed out there, darkening in the sun, exhilarated by the water and the yielding plastic, which was as slippery and smooth as a dolphin’s skin. Frank and Victor appeared at dusk, bearing paper buckets of hot links and ribs from the barbecue church; the kids ate ravenously, quickly, and then went back to their play. And the hose leapt and twisted like a living thing, moving from one hand to the next, everyone shrieking in shock and delight when the water hit their bodies.
The next time Curtis saw hoses was on the evening news, from Birmingham, Alabama. There, during a peaceful demonstration, the police had set dogs and fire hoses on the crowds of black marchers. Sitting next to his mother in the living room, Curtis watched unbelievingly the images on the screen. A young black man smashed flat against a wall by the hurricane force of water. A mother losing hold of her child, the stream prying it loose, as invasive and precise as an ice pick. Two children, sitting down, being beaten by three policemen, their batons rising and dropping with a steady, sickening rhythm. A young girl of maybe six caught and shaken by a police dog, her arm enclosed in the shepherd’s huge jaws. The big, intimidating cops made him think of the ones in his neighborhood who sneered at him out the windows of their squad cars—even the black one, Thomas, who’d towered over him in the office at Audubon, and who scared him as much as any of the others. Alma kept saying the Lord’s name, softly, under her breath, and soon she went to the phone, where from her low mumbles and familiar manner Curtis could tell she was talking to Miss Vera and Miss Alice, who she always called when there were Negroes on TV. He swallowed hard, watching the hoses, and felt a chill like an ice cube applied to his spine, completely at odds with the still-steaming weather.
The next day in class, he was moody and distracted, not hearing when Mrs. Anderson called his name for roll. And he barely acknowledged Angela, who he usually met at her locker before the first bell rang, or at least smiled at and touched on the hand before they sat down—both gestures as necessary to her morning well-being as the coffee she had with her breakfast. She was a freshman, he was a sophomore, both assigned to the gloom and boredom of pre-algebra. Angela had first met Curtis the previous spring, at the store where her older brother worked, and while she’d noticed his smooth, tight, caramel-colored skin; his soft, sleepy eyes; the four bottom teeth that overlapped like a quartet of friends bent over a joke, she’d remained unmoved, her eyes compelled to follow him but her stomach and her heart left safely behind. But then, three moments that added more to her measure of him. Late that summer, she passed by the baseball field at the high school and saw him playing catch with two five- or six-year-old boys, who she learned later were his brother and cousin. The younger boys stood about ten feet apart, with Curtis facing them from a distance of perhaps twenty feet, the vertex of their
V
. He was throwing them grounders, and she watched while the boys let the ball go through their legs or bounce sharply off their shins. Once they crashed into each other. But Curtis, offering ball after ball, didn’t laugh at their mistakes. He instructed them calmly, telling them to pull their legs together and lay the glove down in front, so that the ball could not get past. Angela saw in his confident stance, his light flicking of the ball, his patient attention, a hint of manhood that made her pulse jump.
On that same field, but a hundred feet over, on the track, the second moment occurred. It was a month and a half later, one of the first days of school, during try-outs for the cross-country team. Angela was walking toward the field with two of her new friends when she caught sight of Curtis rounding the far end of the track. He was sprinting all-out, shirtless, looking more like a 400 man than a cross-country hopeful. With his long, streamlined legs; his huge strides which gulped up yards at a time; the way he didn’t seem to notice any of the people he passed, he looked like a strong young antelope running across sun-dusted plains. The display only lasted another thirty seconds or so, until he completed his lap. But his intensity and concentration—not to mention the beauty of his body as it hurtled through the warm afternoon, the washboard stomach she wanted to press her face against—unleashed an awe-tinged desire in the pit of her womb. And when Curtis showed up in her pre-algebra class the next morning, having been shuffled over from another classroom, Angela felt a wave of heat go through her as all-consuming as the strongest Santa Ana.
Then the third moment, in that very same classroom. Curtis strolled up to Mrs. Anderson, handed her his note, and fixed on her the most bold, playful smile that Angela had ever seen a student give a teacher. Mrs. Anderson shooed him toward a seat, but she smiled a little, tolerant in the way that teachers sometimes are of bright but irreverent students. Curtis turned back toward the class and grinned, both aware of the effect he had on the girls, whose titters and giggles swarmed the room like butterflies, and subtly making fun of it. There was something about the way he sauntered back to the one empty desk, shoes sliding deliciously across the linoleum, that made Angela know that this most serious of boys didn’t take himself too seriously. And his physical presence—the beautiful, tapered, long-fingered hands; the close-cropped, alwaysmoving head; the slim graceful waist that drew her eyes down and down—was almost more than she could bear.
That afternoon, at try-outs, he repeated his blazing 400 performance, and Angela waited for him at the finish line.
“Why you sprinting like that, fool? Track season ain’t till spring.”
He walked back and forth a couple of times, trying to catch his breath, running his hand over his finely-shaped head. “I like to push myself,” he said. “See how fast I can go.”
Angela examined her fingernails. “Waste of energy, if you ask me.”
“I
didn’t
ask you, far as I can remember.”
“Those some ugly-ass shoes you got on, too. Tell your mama she should get you a new pair.”
“Aw, girl, leave me alone. Why you hassling me?”
She continued to hassle him—on the track, in class, at the store after school—until he had no choice but to do something about it. He finally did about a month after school began, on an October afternoon so unusually hot that they had to sit under the bleachers to get some shade. Angela was chattering on and on about Mrs. Anderson and the test they’d just taken when Curtis leaned over and kissed her. When he pulled back, smiling, she straight-armed him. Elbow locked, hand flat against his chest, she said, “Boy, what makes you think I want your mouth all up in my face?” They looked at each other. Then she curled her hand around his neck and pulled him toward her.
She chose him. As much as her mother had chosen to leave their lying, thieving daddy in Cleveland for the straight-laced man they now lived with; as much as her oldest brother, Gene, had chosen—or been chosen by—heroin, and then had chosen the Muslims to help him kick it, she chose Curtis Martindale, and kept choosing him through all their years of high school. He delighted her with his teasing; with his sudden hugs and kisses; with his tenderness toward his brother and cousins. And he enraged her with his total refusal to listen to her, about school, or clothes, or the fact that his strides were too long when he ran. She both loved, and was annoyed by, how much he lived in his life—how a clear view of the snow-capped mountains on a January morning could make him happy for the rest of the day; how a snapped pencil or a blister on his foot would instantly ruin his mood. But despite his brooding father and the tense air in his house, Curtis seemed oddly, immeasurably happy. He had her, he had the boys, he had track and the store. He had his mother, whom he loved fiercely, and who always had his back. All of these elements made up the universe for him, which Angela gladly entered. There was no one else like him, the mischievous, beautiful, always-tender man of a boy. And he was hers, he was hers, he was hers.