The New Black (28 page)

“Is it fun at your dad's?” I ask as they sit at the table, shoveling Cheerios.

“It's okay,” Kendra says like that's what she's been told to say.

“We have bikes over there,” Cassie adds.

X

Hundreds of pigeons have occupied the shopping center parking lot where Tracy meets Tony to hand off the kids. They perch on the street lamps and telephone poles and march about pecking at garbage. Everything is streaked with their shit. When a car approaches, the birds wait until the last possible second to scoot out of its way. Tracy and Tony meet here because it's equidistant from both their places. He won't drive any farther than he's required to by the court.

I had to beg Tracy to let me come with her. She's worried that I'll start something. I like that, that she's worried, but I assure her that I'll hold my tongue. My hope is that when Tony sees me, he'll figure that she's pulled together some support and back off his custody demands. He's a hardhead though. We almost came to blows once over who was going to pick up a check at dinner.

The girls wait like little diplomats, wise in their silence. Carrie, strapped into her car seat, reaches out to touch the window of the minivan. Five minutes pass with just the radio playing. I watch the pigeons, the people pushing their carts out of the supermarket and filling their trunks with groceries. A cloud wanders across the sky, and I track the progress of its shadow.

After ten minutes I ask, “Is this normal?”

“He's very busy,” Tracy replies, sarcastic.

There's a candy store next to the market. It's just opening up.

“Take the kids in there,” I say. “You guys want candy? Take them in there and buy them something. Here's some money. I'll keep an eye out for him.”

The girls are imbued with new energy. They screech and bicker and fight for the handle that slides open the side of the van.

“Look what you started,” Tracy says.

I shrug as she flips down the sun visor and checks herself in the mirror there. The girls, already outside, practice tightrope walking on the yellow lines painted on the asphalt.

“Calm down,” Tracy yells. “You want to get hit by a car just for some candy?”

Tony pulls up next to the van shortly after they enter the store. He's driving a new Volvo. He squints when he sees me, then gives a lazy wave. I'm all smiles as I hop out and walk around to his open window. He grew up on the East Coast somewhere and moved to California after college. Tracy cut his hair, that's how they met. He works in computers. I rest my palms on the roof of his car and bend over to talk to him.

“Yo Adrian,” I say. I used to kid him that he sounded like Rocky.

“Jack.”

“They should just be a minute. The girls were getting cranky, waiting so long.”

Tony lights a cigarette. The ashtray is overflowing with butts.
Don't you sometimes see a chick and just want to tie her up and slap her around?
He asked me that once while he was still married to Tracy. We were camping in Yosemite, all of us. The women and kids had gone to bed. I remember looking up at the stars and down at the fire and thinking,
Whoops!
He pushes his sunglasses up on his nose and flicks ash out the window, between me and the car door.

“How's Liz?” he asks. “Good, I hope.”

“You know us. Slow and steady.”

“Are you still selling, what, restaurant stuff?”

“Why do you have to be that way, showing up late and everything?”

“Did she tell you to say that?”

I check to make sure Tracy and the kids are still in the store before continuing.

“She was raped, man, and you're coming at her with lawyers? Have a little compassion. Act like a human being.”

“I said, did she tell you to talk to me?”

“I'm her brother. I took it upon myself.”

I meant to approach this a bit more obliquely. Three years ago, two, I'd have had him eating from my hand, but these days I feel like all the juice has been drained out of me. We stare at each other for a second, then look away at the same time.

“She was wasted,” he says. “Ask her. She was coming out of a bar. She barely remembers. Read the police report. There are doubts.”

My vision flickers and blurs. I feel like I've been poisoned. Kendra runs out of the store toward us, followed by Cassie. I push myself away from the car and search the ground for something—a stick, a rock. The pigeons make horrible fluttering noises in their throats.

“Hi, Daddy,” the girls sing. They climb into Tony's car. Tracy watches from the store, half in and half out. I wish I was a gun. I wish I was a bullet. The girls wave bye-bye as Tony drives off.

“Can you believe that a-hole has a Volvo, and I'm driving this piece of shit?” Tracy says.

“He shouldn't smoke in front of the kids,” I reply.

We pass an accident on the way back to her place, just a fender bender, but still my thoughts go to our parents. When they died I was almost to the point where I could see them as people. With a little more time I might even have started loving them again. What did they stand for? What secrets did they take with them? It was the first great loss of my life.

X

Tracy wants to treat us to lunch in Tijuana. We'll ride the trolley down and walk over the border to a steak house that was written up in the newspaper. That's fine with me. Let's keep moving. What Tony said about her is trying to take root, and I won't have it. She's my sister, see, and what she says, goes. I don't want to be one of those people who needs to get to the bottom of things.

We drive to the station. The crowd that boards the trolley with us is made up primarily of tourists, but there are also a few Mexicans headed for Sunday visits. They carry shopping bags, and their children sit quietly beside them. Tracy and Liz find two seats together. I'm at the far end of the car, in the middle of a French family.

We skirt the harbor, rocking past gray destroyers big as buildings. Then the tracks turn inland, and it's the back side of trailer parks and self-storage places. The faded pennants corralling a used-car lot flap maniacally, and there's always a McDonald's lurking on the horizon. Liz and Tracy are talking to each other—something light, if their smiles are any indication. I wave, trying to get their attention, but it's no use.

The young son in the French family decides to sing. He's wearing a Disneyland T-shirt. The song is in French, but there are little fart sounds in it that make his sister laugh. His mom says something snippy to him, but he ignores her. Dad steps in, giving the kid a shot with his elbow that jolts him into silence. There's a faded tattoo on Dad's forearm. Whatever it is has teeth, that's about all I can make out.

X

To cross into Mexico, we walk over the freeway on a bridge and pass through a turnstile. I did this once before, in high school, me and a couple of buddies. If you were tall enough to see over the bar, you could get a drink. That was the joke. I remember a stripper in a gorilla suit. Tacos were a quarter. The only problem was that the cops were always shaking someone down. The system is rotten here. You have to watch where you're going.

Tracy's got things wired though. Apparently she's down here all the time. It's fun, she says. She leads us to a taxi, and we head into town, passing ramshackle body shops and upholstery shops and something dead squished flat. Dirt roads scurry off into the hills where entire neighborhoods are built out of old garage doors and corrugated tin. The smell of burning rubber sneaks in now and then and tickles the back of my throat.

Calle Revolución is still the main drag, a disco on every corner. It looks tired during the day, like Bourbon Street or downtown Vegas. Hung over, sad, and a little embarrassed. It's a town that needs neon. We step out of the cab, and Tracy laughs with the driver as she pays him off. I didn't know she spoke Spanish.

I want a drink. The place we go into is painted bright green. Coco Loco. They sell bumper stickers and T-shirts. We get a table on the second-floor terrace, overlooking the street. Music is blasting inside, and lights flash, but the dance floor is empty except for a hippy chick deep into her own thing. The waiter is all over us as soon as we sit down.

I order tequila and a beer; Tracy and Liz get margaritas. Some poor guy in a ridiculous sombrero chachas around with a bottle of mescal in one hand and a bottle of Sprite in the other. For a couple of bucks he pours a little of each into your mouth and shakes your head, all the while blowing on a whistle. The sound of it makes my stomach jump. I'm startled every time. When my tequila arrives, I drink it down and guzzle half the beer.

“You guys wait here,” Tracy says. “I have to run an errand.”

“In Tijuana?”

“Tylenol with codeine, for a friend who hurt her leg. They sell it in the pharmacies.”

“Wait a minute, Trace...”

“It's cool. I'll be right back.”

She's gone before I can figure out how to stop her.

Everybody around us is a little shady. It hits me all of a sudden. Not quite criminal, but open to suggestion. A man wearing mirrored sunglasses and smoking a cigar gets up from his chair and leans over the railing to signal someone in the street. His partner is having his shoes shined by a kid with the crookedest teeth I've ever seen. The sombrero guy blows his whistle again, and a big black raven lights on the roof and cocks his head to stare down at us.

X

Liz insists that Tony is full of shit when I tell her what he said in the parking lot. I lean in close and speak quietly so no one else can hear. She says that men always cast aspersions on rape victims, even the cops. “You should know better,” she says.

“I didn't mean anything like that.”

“I hope not.”

“She can do whatever the fuck she wants. Get her head chopped off, whatever.”

“That's nice. That's just lovely.”

It's the alcohol. It makes me pissy sometimes. Liz doesn't know the worst of it. Like the time I went out for a few with one of my bosses and ended up on top of him with my hands around his throat. He didn't press charges, but he also wasn't going to be signing any more checks for me. To Liz it was just another layoff. Quite a few of my messes have been of my own making. I'm man enough to admit it.

The bathroom is nasty, and there's nothing to dry my hands with. My anger at Tracy rises. She's been gone almost an hour. “Hey,” I yell to a busboy from the bathroom door. “You need towels in here.” He brings me some napkins. I have to walk across the dance floor to get back to the terrace. A kid bumps me and gives me his whole life like a disease. I see it all from beginning to end. “Fly, fly, flyyyyy,” the music yowls. “Fly, fly, flyyyyyy.”

X

They still have those donkeys painted like zebras down on the street, hitched to little wagons. I remember them from last time. You climb up on the seat, and they put a sombrero on your head that says
KISS
ME
or
CISCO
and take a picture with some kind of ancient camera. Liz and I hug. We look like honeymooners in the photo, or cheaters.

There are those kids, too, the ones selling Chiclets and silver rings that turn your fingers green. Or sometimes they aren't selling anything. They just hold out their hands. Barefoot and dirty—babies, really. So many that after a while you don't see them anymore, but they're still there, like the saddest thing that ever happened to you.

Liz and I stand on the sidewalk in front of the bar, waiting. The power lines overhead, tangled and frayed, slice the sky into wild shapes. Boys cruise past in fancy cars, the songs on their stereos speaking for them. The barker for the strip club next door invites us in for a happy hour special, two for one. It's all a little too loud, a little too sharp. I'm about to suggest we have another drink when Tracy floats up to us like a ghost.

“You know, Trace, fuck,” I say.

“What a hassle. Sorry.”

A hot wind scours the street, flinging dust into our eyes.

X

The restaurant is on a side street, a couple blocks away. We don't say anything during the short walk. Men in cowboy hats cook steaks on an iron grill out front, and we pass through a cloud of greasy smoke to join the other gringos inside. It's that kind of place. I order the special, a sirloin stuffed with guacamole.

Tracy pretends to be interested in what Liz is saying, something about Cassie and Kendra, but her restless fingers and darting eyes give her away. When she turns to call for another bottle of water, Liz shoots me a quizzical look. I shake my head and drink my beer. The booze has deadened my taste buds so that I can't enjoy my steak. Tracy cuts into hers but doesn't eat a bite. The waiter asks if anything is wrong.

We go back to Revolución to get a cab. The sidewalks are crazy, tilting this way and that and sometimes disappearing completely. You step off the curb, and suddenly it's three feet down to the pavement. Tracy begins to cry. She doesn't hide it. She walks in and out of the purple afternoon shadows of the buildings, dragging on a cigarette, tears shining.

“Must be one of those days,” she says when I ask what's wrong.

We leave it at that.

She cleans herself up in the cab, staring into a little round mirror, before we join the long line of people waiting to pass through customs. We stand shoulder to shoulder with strangers, and the fluorescent lights make everyone look guilty of something. There are no secrets in this room. Every word echoes, and I can smell the sweat of the guy in front of me. Four or five officers are checking IDs. They ask people how long they've been down and what they've brought back with them. When it's my turn, a fat blond woman glances down at my license, matches my face to the picture and waves me through. We're all waved right through.