The Front of the Freeway (9 page)

“No, not yet you’re not. But that’s why you’re here, no?” Maybe it is. I want out, I want control of my life, and I don’t ever want to feel trapped again. But nothing comes for free, so here I am.

“You tell me. Why am I here?” The wooden crate groans as Cesar dismounts, slowly spinning to the middle of the cement closet, his massive arms spread to either side like windmill blades, two curled Vs quivering on his temples in the pale light.

“This is where it starts, Tony. I don’t need another employee, and I don’t think you want to be one. I have enough monkeys like Omar upstairs making my little empire tick. But for you, my friend, this is the beginning of something great and beautiful.” Cesar’s walking straight at me now, a colossal silhouette looming in the dust and the dark. “This city can be yours, and I want to help you take it.”

Cesar’s not a businessman. He’s a televangelist and a drug lord, packaging and selling a dream he knows I won’t see. He doesn’t care if I get out. He’s not even throwing down a rope for help. I can own this city so long as he owns me, buying from him at his prices. He’s trying to pull me out from one prison and into his own private custody all under the smiling guise of a colleague, but I’m not going to sign myself over. Of course, as long as he thinks he has me, he’ll work with me, and I need him to hold the door open even if it means disappearing once I’m through it.

“Business is good, Cesar, but whatever you have in mind I can’t promise you five million dollars tonight, so I hope you got something else.” With two tremendous strides, Cesar glides to the wooden crate beside me and rips off the lid like a strip of bark. From a stack of ten plastic-wrapped, chalk bricks he lifts three paper-white tablets and holds them in front of me.

“Three kilos. One hundred thousand.” Cesar scans my face earnestly hoping I’ll take the bait, his shoulders flexed to a knot under the weight of the bags. His house, his blow. Omar isn’t here, but I can feel him lingering at the top of the stairs behind me. I can’t let him set all the terms.

“A hundred?”

“One hundred, just to open business. This is as pure as it gets. I promise you that.” Cesar drops the bricks at my feet with a powdery thud and closes the crate. This isn’t a deal yet, my friend.

“Look, if I’m going to take these at thirty-three a kilo, I’m going to have to start selling grams at $120, and that’s about twenty-five a bump, just to make a profit. Now, if I’m trying to pass some of this off on one of these Hollywood girls, and I have to tell Cherry I want twenty-five of her hard earned single dollar bills just for a line, not only is she going to tell me to fuck off, but she’s going to start getting her fix elsewhere.” Cesar’s smug sneer deflates to a puzzled, sideways frown, and I know I have his attention. Maybe I’ve been working in nickels and dimes, but I came here prepared, and I’ve been watching Tony close enough to play the part. And if Cesar knows anything about Tony, then he’ll be expecting a show. “But say I can get Cherry lit for fifteen a hit. That’s seventy-five a gram, and I can do that for twenty to the kilo.” Cesar’s frozen in front of me, thoughtfully tugging at his lower lip, a sharp file of teeth flashing in and out of view. For a breathless minute he watches me, staring through the manufactured dusk.

“I heard you were a businessman,
chico
. But nobody told me you were a criminal.”

“There’s two million dollars of cocaine in this room. We’re all criminals down here.” Habitually, I move to dry my palms down the front of my jeans, but somehow in the cool darkness of Cesar’s basement, my hands are perfectly clean.

“Twenty-five, Tony. I wouldn’t give my mother twenty-five. Not a dime less.” I need Cesar. He’s the gas, water, and electricity I need to power this whole production, to start my own little empire. Tony may have shown me the door, but Cesar’s holding it wide open now. I need him, but he doesn’t know all that. But I know he needs Tony. He needs Tony’s connections, Tony’s resources; Tony’s charm. This is Tony’s city, and Cesar can’t get in without him. The only problem is I’m not Tony. But Cesar doesn’t know that, either.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t do that. Maybe there’s someone else in Los Angeles who will, I don’t know. But I can’t go higher than twenty. That’s the best I got for you.” Nine steps to the top of the staircase. That means I have nine steps for Cesar to stop me before this whole dream crumbles to nothing under my feet. One…two. Cesar’s a mute under the soft echo of my footsteps against the flat stone stairs. Seven more before I’m back under Tony’s wing and under Tony’s thumb. Four…five. Stop me, you giant bald son of a bitch. Six…

“Twenty-three and I’ll make sure Omar doesn’t put a bullet in your head at the top of those stairs.” Three kilos, $69,000. I can live with that. I can build something off of that. Cesar’s right; this is the start of something—just not what he thinks. This is for me. After a pause, I retrace my steps smoothly down the stairs and bury my dry palm in the swollen mass of a suffocating handshake.

“Next week, then. Somewhere neutral.” Cesar nods quietly, but my hand is caught in a closing vice, five knotted snakes curling tighter at the end of my arm. With a jolt, the giant pulls me to his body, his oversized lips pierced an inch from my ear.

“If you ever turn your fucking back on me again, my friend, I won’t hesitate to break it.” As faintly as I feel the warmth of his breath against the back of my ear, Cesar can feel power shifting under him, and he wants it back. I might be in the driver’s seat for now, with Tony and his reputation on my side, but Cesar’s desperate for a piece of it. This is a chess match he doesn’t know he’s losing. Fine with me.

“Of course,
amigo
. We’ll be in touch.”

“It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”

—Emiliano Zapata

I hate red lights. Not a car in sight, but I’m stuck at an intersection staring at a shiny, red dot, the whole world going by while I wait for a blinking metal pole to tell me that I can continue my life. I ought to just run it, but that would break the law, so I grit my teeth and stare right back while my foot cramps on the brake.

If nothing else, the long drive home, with all its interruptions, gives me a chance to call Tony and catch him up on things. The basement, the deal, Omar; Tony wants to know everything. He’s selling a brand, and he put his name on the purchase, so I get his concern, and I agree to come by his house tomorrow night. I tell him about the meeting next week too, and the seventy-five grand I owe Cesar. I don’t mention the six thousand I’m keeping on commission, but hey, it’s all about survival of the fittest anyway, right Tony?

Green.

I pull the hulking Mercedes around the block and leave it parked well out of my father’s eyeshot. He knows I’ve been working later and later every night at my new job, but I don’t know how to explain how a twenty-one-year-old dishwasher comes by luxury suspension. I hide the thick black key in the back of my jeans as I skip up the front stairs, pausing on the last cracked, stucco block to dig the house keys out from my front pocket. Behind me, a jagged silhouette of low, slanted roofs cuts the bottom of a painted Los Angeles sunset, a swell of purple and orange pastel clouds glowing like embers under a smoky, grey skyline, wide surges of color burning and then fading into the gathering night all around. I know it’s the smog that’s doing it, scorching and staining the sunlight, but I can’t remember ever seeing a sunset without the veil of vapor and gas. It’s always been there, that fluorescent, toxic mask, and I can’t imagine how bright the sun must be behind it. It’s almost 7:00, and the street is quiet, an empty stretch of gravel under the soft and sprawling Monet sky. No sirens, no barking dogs—it’s almost serene.

But it’s quiet.

For twenty-one years my father’s shift has ended at 5:00, and sometimes he’s not back until 7:00, but for at least a few hours after that I can’t remember the house ever being quiet. No commercials, no theme music; the air on the front porch is still, uncomfortably empty of any muffled, droning narration. I jam the short metal key into the screen door and twist the shallow lock clockwise, jerking the flat tin sheet open with a sharp groan. The house is dark, an Ikea-furnished mausoleum, muted sunlight seeping through the edges of the drawn curtains and coating the living room in a pail, dusted grey. No TV, no lights, no empty bottles—either my father’s conjured a social life in the last twenty-four hours or something’s up.

“Dad?” Nothing. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he went out for a drink with some guys from the force, or maybe he’s moved his solitary alcoholism to a public bar. Maybe I’m just paranoid, another fault I could attribute to his academy-hardened parenting. But after all, it’s just an empty house, and I have enough to worry about besides my father’s perpetual drain circling. I tap the light switch, and the room explodes into view, the dim grey vaporized in sixty watts of artificial sunlight. I could use a drink myself. I don’t need to empty half the bar like Dad, but I’ve earned a beer, I think, setting the inaugural bricks of my own company and making it out of Cesar’s alive all in an afternoon, and my nerves could use some consoling. It’s not the sort of anxious, lingering discomfort I’m used to, but the hangover from a slow drip of adrenaline that sharpens your mind and keeps your hand shaking for hours. Nothing a green glass bottle can’t fix, so two steps in the door, and I head straight for the refrigerator. Must be genetics.

I cross the slick, tile threshold into the kitchen, making for the fridge, but before I can tug the door open, a jagged edge snaps under my shoe with a soft, plastic crunch. I nearly lose my balance pulling my foot to the side, picturing another broken bottle and a heap of shattered glass, but lying in front of the fridge now in two small, orange fragments is a cheap refrigerator magnet and a lined sheet of paper. I squat down and grab the broken magnet first, a gas-station, LAPD memento with all the grip of a bar of soap. “Protect” flashes proudly from one hand and “serve” from the other. I toss them both on the counter and reach for the paper. He could have written the note in an earthquake, it would be just as legible, but this isn’t my father’s typical hurried, sideways scrawl. Long gashes of ink slice the page, five or six webs of incoherent black splatters and just two discernable words scratched clumsily across the top.
I’m sorry.

“Dad…” I drop the paper and rush to the hallway, half running at the narrow slit in the empty plaster wall. In twenty-one years I’ve never heard the house this quiet. In twenty-one years I’ve never heard my father apologize, either, not to anyone, not for anything. Not to a boss, not to a suspect. Not to my mother, and never to me. I punch open his bedroom door with both palms, raking my eyes through the shadows in the corners and behind the bed. Empty. Something’s up. The bathroom light’s off, but it’s the last room in the house besides mine. With a dull thud, I shoulder the door open and almost fall over the still body draped across the cold tile floor.

The adrenaline’s back, but not in a slow drip, this time. It’s gushing from deep in my burning, wrenching gut, squeezing my lungs, suffocating and sickening me all at once. I throw my hand against the light switch again, shattering the dark, and casting my father into full light next to an empty glass bottle and a tiny, empty pill case, Ambien pouring from its mouth like so many pale sapphires across the ivory floor. A thick pool of vodka and saliva glistens next to his head, dripping from his lips and sticking to his chin, his face as sickly white as the tiles beneath him.
What did you do?
I drop to the ground beside him, tugging his heavy, sagging arm out from behind the toilet and roll him to his side. His head rolls loosely with him, his jaw hanging uselessly from his stretched, colorless cheeks. I jam the back of my fingers against his upper lip, a dry strip of rubber against my knuckles, and wait for any trace of a breath, any meek touch of warmth. Nothing.

“Dad?” I’m screaming now, a desperate, scratching noise clawing out from my lungs. This can’t be it. I slap his cheek, hard, a dark red print glowing on his cold, bloodless skin, but his head rocks on the tile and falls back to his shoulder. Wake up.
Wake up.
The adrenaline’s turning to something else now, something darker, something panicked, frantically clawing at my stomach and beating around my chest. Do something. I grab his shoulders and pull his chest to mine, waiting for some resistance or some movement, or any feeble sign of life, but his arms and head drag gracelessly across the floor, his heavy form wilted in my arms. You coward. You were so cautious, so timid, what were you trying to save yourself from? Your morals, your paranoia—they’re all here in front of me, lying face down in the bathroom in a puddle of spit. My voice is gone now, caught in my stomach behind a vice closing in my throat, and I can feel my body shaking against my father’s cold figure.

Do something. I press two fingers to his neck and force them down beside his jugular, the way they do in movies. Find his pulse. He can’t be dead; I know he can’t, but part of me knows this is how it had to end. Wake up, go to work, pay the bills, watch TV. The mechanical routine, the programmed movements, it’s not a life, it’s not even close. How do you kill yourself when you’re barely even alive? I jam my fingers higher into his throat, the thin muscles in his neck rolling under my fingertips. Find his pulse. I suck in a gulp of air and try to steady my breathing, closing my eyes and feeling for any shift of pressure buried under his skin.
I just need a win.
That’s the last thing he said to me, but he was wrong, he didn’t just need something to go right. He needed something to live for. Something besides a job he hates, a house he can’t pay for, colleagues he doesn’t care about, a TV that doesn’t care about him, and a son that’s as hopeless as he is. But there’s no use thinking about all that, not right now, anyway. Just find his pulse. I lay him flat on his back, pulling at his forehead and tilting his chin straight up, and gently push my fingers into the rough, hair speckled strip of flesh under his jaw. And after a moment, the unmistakable throb of a hushed heartbeat limps quietly under my fingers in two timid pulses.