All Involved (39 page)

Instead, there's an empty space where our building used to be.

“
¡Hijo de su chingada madre!
” My dad sits up in his seat, on the very edge of it. “All this shit I built up to lose.”

My dad smashes his hand against the steering wheel a good few times. I wince, but I'm glad somehow. A few years ago that would've been me getting thumped.

As we get closer, we see the husk of what's left, a black shell sucking up the last of the setting sun. Here and there, little bits of unburned white wall show through. The rest is black. My eyes skirt past it then, over to the Victorian—which appears untouched—but beyond it, in the next lot, isn't another apartment building like I'm expecting, one that used to be the mirror of the first, same plans and everything: white walls, black roof, and thirteen apartments. But there's nothing there either. It's still a mirror, just a black one, because now the Victorian sits unharmed between two blackened lots, because two of our buildings got torched to the ground.

It's getting hard for me to breathe as my dad pulls past the Victorian and into the little alley that runs alongside it. From there, we get a good view of what's left of the second apartment building as two blackened support studs stick out of the lot like charred goalposts. We park there, on the dirt, next to the untouched Queen Anne Victorian he owns, the one he's been fixing up since I was nine. My dad built the white picket fence out front himself. Behind that is a symmetrical one-level with two peaked towers that push out either side of the front door, making it look like a face with two rectangular windows for eyes, a door for a nose, and a flat porch for a mouth.

I'm relieved it survived, sure, but I'm still taking in how the two apartment buildings are completely gone when something finally occurs to me, something going to school for small business management should have made me think of days ago.

“Dad,” I say, “are we ruined?”

It's a stupid question. The answer is right in front of me. Since I've been taking accounting, my dad has been showing me loan statements for the past few months. He's trying to teach me how to run the business when he's gone. Between these three properties, he has sunk in over a million dollars. He mortgaged himself up to his eyelashes to get that kind of money.

That's because my dad never skimps on materials when he fixes anything, but he has to cut costs somehow, so he declines all insurance except earthquake protection. He figures if he fixes something up fast enough, it'll be fine. The Victorian is the only exception to that rule. It was built in 1906, back when the Sunset Strip was one big poinsettia field.
This
he has insurance on. It's his baby.

My dad has got his eyes closed when he takes a breath in and it comes out in a cough. I can't watch him like this, so I pull Kerwin down the alley to where an ancient gas pump used to be, next to an avocado tree so big that it could've been in the movies.

Kerwin breaks the quiet with a whisper. “All your dad's stuff is burnt?”

“All except this,” I say, pointing at the house with my chin. My dad bought it from the Kellys, one of the last white families to leave Compton.

“There used to be a gas pump here,” I say and point at a long line of dirt on the back lawn where the grass can't grow anymore.

Kerwin wants to know why, so I tell him this house is older than gas stations. My dad has been buying and selling property for about a decade. My mom says he always wanted to improve South Central, wanted to make it better, so he bought one building and sold it, then he did two. That got to be a pattern. After four sales, he got the tile business on Western, and now he has five buildings: three in Compton, one in Watts, and one in Lynwood, but the Victorian
house with vaulted ceilings, two bedrooms, a library, and a den in Compton, it was always the pinnacle.

“This was my dad's dream,” I say. “Proof he could build something not just good but beautiful. That's what my mom thinks anyway. For a long time, my dad only seemed happy here. I'd go with him on weekends when he came to fix it up.”

I remember how the saw was always in the kitchen. For years, the house smelled of freshly cut wood and had sawdust everywhere. I'd bring him whatever he needed, a hammer, a wrench. He taught me how to wire lighting at fourteen. To this day I know the work I did then was one of the only things that ever made him proud of me. It helped that I never fell off anything, never stepped on a nail. I was careful. I got that way quick though when the belt might be the penalty for any misstep.

“The neighborhood changed quick though,” I say. “All kinds of these old houses got knocked down. Warehouses got built, but you saw it when we drove in. Pretty soon, no one wanted to live on this street anymore.”

Kerwin shrugs. “Who'd want to live next door to a warehouse?”

It's not the kind of question that needs an answer, but I do it anyway. “No one.”

Despite the neighborhood changing, my dad still kept working on restoring this house. We got by renting out four apartments in one complex and five in the other, but we couldn't rent out the Victorian, and we couldn't sell it.

“It's just a relic in the wrong place now, but it has been for a long time. The worst part is, people around here know it. They know nobody lives in it and when people know that, bad things happen.”

“What type of bad things?” Kerwin is from South Central. He knows what type of bad things go on around here, but he can't keep himself from asking. Maybe none of us can. Maybe that's just human.

“A dead body got dumped on our property, in our alley. We
found out when two sheriffs showed up at our place in Lynwood and wanted to take my dad in for questioning. Maybe two months after that, a gang rape took place in the backyard under that avocado tree.”

I point at the tree. We're not standing too far from it now, the old scene of the crime, and I'm looking at it because something is off about it. It's not just that it's heavy, with branches weighed down from fruit that we didn't pick this year because we never got around to it, it's that there's something at the base, on the other side of that great big trunk. It being the back end of dusk, I can't make out what the shape is for the life of me. It's too big to be a dog, but that's what it looks like. A dog lying down, stretched out under the tree.

“Hold on.” I drop my voice to a whisper. “You see that?”

Kerwin's right next to me, crouching in the dirt.

“Yeah,” he says, whispering right back.

“Are those?” I'm squinting now, trying to make out the long shapes on the ground, extending away from the trunk. It's not a dog after all. “Are those legs?”

“Yeah,” Kerwin says. “They fucking are.”

These legs are bare from what I can tell, hairy too. At the end of the right leg, on the right foot, is one white sock. We move forward together, Kerwin and me. As we get closer, we circle to the side and I see how dirty the bottom of the sock is, almost black. We see the whole body it's connected to next, propped up against the trunk, sitting up with its legs stretched straight out.

I hear Kerwin breathing behind me. He's got a Dodgers minibat with him, must've brought it from home. It's wood, maybe a foot long, the kind they give away in limited quantities as a promotion item for going to a certain game.

“Is he shot?” Kerwin wants to know. “Is he stabbed or what?”

“I don't see blood,” I say.

It's clear now this person has no pants on at all, just red-brown boxer shorts. On his top half, he's wearing three flannel shirts and they're all open at the cuff and pulled up at the elbows to dangle. It's hard to tell if the chest is rising and falling with all that cloth there.

“You touch him,” I say to Kerwin. “Poke him or something. See if he moves.”

“No, you.”

I tell him, “You're the one with the bat!”

Kerwin looks at his hand just to confirm he's holding the damn thing and then shrugs like maybe he will poke him with it, and maybe he won't.

That's when I notice there's something on this guy's arm.

I say, “Hey, do you see that?”

I point. Kerwin squints. We both do.

“Yeah,” Kerwin says. “Ugh.”

There's a needle sticking out of this guy's arm crease, but not like a syringe. Just a needle. It almost looks like somebody wanted the syringe and the needle was stuck in his arm, so they just unscrewed the damn thing, leaving this metal needle sticking out of him like a half a safety pin that got jabbed in. There's dried blood around it, some dabs and dots, and down the forearm is a tattoo in long,
L.A. Times
–style cursive letters.

I point at the tattoo. “What's that say?”

Kerwin has to tilt his head sideways to read it. I do the same, but it's hard to tell from all the dirt and dried blood on him. I want to brush it off but don't.

“Sleepy,” I say. “I think it says Sleepy.”

“Is he dead or what?” Kerwin has his hand over his mouth. “He looks dead.”

“I don't know,” I say, but I'm thinking he is. The skin on this guy's face is half bearded and matted with dirt. He's the color of my dad's used ashtrays. Ants roam his leg hair, and there are even a few bumps from bites that are so raised and red I can make them out without much light.

“Do it then,” I say, and when Kerwin hesitates, I nudge his shoulder with my own. “Do it already.”

Kerwin pokes the body with the bat. He puts the fat end of it on the guy's chest, right over the heart, and pushes. A little air comes out, like a sigh or something, and we both jump back, but the guy's eyelids don't even flicker. They don't even move.

I'm thinking out loud. “That could've been, like, trapped air or something, right?”

“How would I even know that? It's your turn. Tell you what, though,” Kerwin says as he hands me the bat, “damn, am I glad we aren't on acid for
this
.”

“Me too,” I say.

Now, I don't know what I'm about to do with a bat that he didn't just do, so I hold it at my side and take a step forward and reach toward the face with my free hand.

This freaks Kerwin out. “Mikey, what are you
doing
?”

My heart's pounding up in my throat, and I don't know what I'm thinking beyond that I just need to see if he's breathing shallow and if I feel his breath on my finger I'll know for sure, but I can't reach far enough standing back, so I step closer. As I'm putting my foot down though, my sole crunches down on something. I look down to confirm what it is and I step back quick, only to find it's the guy's right hand. I didn't even see it in the near dark. As I'm realizing this, I hear Kerwin draw in a fast breath and the first thing I do is look up into the guy's dirty face to find that his eyes are
open
.

I jump back right into Kerwin, bounce off his shoulder, and somehow manage to keep my feet. The guy scrunches his face up at us. He smacks his lips a few times before he opens his mouth.

“What're you doing, fool?” His words come out slow and dusty. It's not even like he's mad, just confused and dehydrated. “Why'd you step on me?”

I don't hang around to answer and neither does Kerwin. We're already retreating, walking fast backward, not taking our eyes off this guy we thought was a corpse, and we're not about to have a
conversation with him either. This guy keeps talking though, keeps saying hey, as we go, like he's trying to get our attention, but we're moving too fast toward the front of the house, toward my dad.

“Oh fuck,” Kerwin says. “I about had a heart attack. Oh shit!”

I'm right there with him too. I don't know what freaks me out more now, the fact that I thought we found a dead body or that the dead body ended up being alive.

When we get to my dad on the porch, he's looking in the window on the right side of the door. My boots crunch glass before I realize that the front window he's looking through isn't even there. It's been broken out and my father is staring in through the hole. When I look over his shoulder, what I see makes my stomach drop, but it definitely explains the man at the tree.

Druggies have been flopping here, more than just the guy under the tree. A pack of them. Maybe they even spent the whole riot here. Inside, it smells like a monkey cage. The floor of the library, with its built-in bookcases, is littered with broken vials, a broken glass pipe, and a few more syringes without needles. In the corner where I used to build forts out of two sawhorses and a tarp so I could drag a hanging light underneath and read
Treasure Island
is a pile of wadded newspapers that our unwelcome houseguests have been wiping their asses with and then keeping nearby. I have no idea why anyone would do that, but it makes me not want to see the bathrooms.

I say, “One of them is still under the avocado tree.”

My dad nods up at me. I watch him weigh this information before saying, “Some Goldilocks shit, huh? Did he look dangerous?”

“No,” I say. “He didn't even move.”

My dad looks back the way we came, to the outline of the avocado tree against the purple-black dimness, but there's no way he can see the body from that distance, and it doesn't look like he cares, either.

He spits off the porch and says, “Leave him then.”

My dad pulls out his pack of cloves, takes one out, and lights it. He takes a pull and breathes out smoke as he says, “This house is plagued.”

Kerwin looks at me with concern. I've seen my dad's crazy faces before, I know them better than anybody, and seeing how the vein in his forehead is working, I know he's on the tightrope of rage right now. When he turns to me, I see a spark in his eyes.

He says, “How did that kid burn down Momo's house?”

I'm still thinking about the guy under the tree when I snap out of it and say, “He threw a Molotov cocktail through the front door.”