Halfway House (6 page)

Seeing Lucy’s mother working in the kitchen, Laurie hurried into the other room. Soon the happy sounds of reminiscing drowned out the old woman’s snores. Lucy gestured toward the couch. Bobby took a seat facing the kitchen and the old woman in the chair. Lucy sat facing him.

“That’s my
abuela
. You can talk in front of her. Even if she was awake, she don’t speak English.”

Bobby finished taking in the room. Everything seemed so domestic, so normal. By looking inside the house, one wouldn’t know it was the headquarters of an L.A. gang. The image of the grandmother snoring over Lucy’s left shoulder was almost too surreal to believe.

As if reading Bobby’s thoughts, Lucy spoke. “So what is it you want from us? The 8th Street Angels are local, so our power in L.A. is limited. We don’t like to project too far out. Most of the guys are kids. I give them jobs or things to do to keep them from doing something stupid and ending up in jail, or worse.”

Bobby shrugged. “I don’t know how much you can help me. My problem is unique. I don’t know if anyone can help me.”

“I told Laurie I’d help out if I could. I owe her, so you are part of the payback. Tell me what I can do and let me be the judge.”

“Okay, here we go. I was raised in an orphanage in Memphis, Tennessee. I got a letter from the lady who took care of me after she died. The letter says my father was Elvis Presley and that he’d left his Double Platinum Award for
Heartbreak Hotel
to me as my inheritance. The award, a platinum anodized album inside of a picture frame, was stolen from the orphanage before I even knew what it was. I think I know who stole it. If I’m right, there’s a good chance the album is here in L.A. I was kind of hoping you’d be able to help me get it back.”

A siren sounded close-by. Bass beats from the car out front thundered a hip-hop rhythm. Lucy glanced at his cell phone once, read the text message, then resumed staring at Bobby.

“And he sang that Bee Gees song to me...” said Laurie from the kitchen as the two women broke into fits of laughter. The seconds dragged on until Lucy finally spoke again.

“Where do I find this album?”

“A man named Alvin Verdina.”

“Do you have an address?”

“Nope.”

“Any other information besides a name?”

“He was a teacher in Memphis. He taught algebra, so if he’s teaching here, he should be in a database somewhere.”

Lucy’s bright blue eyes were piercing and strange for his Mexican heritage. He leaned forward so that he was only an inch or so away from Bobby’s face. “Are you fucking with me?”

“Nope.”

“All this about Elvis and
Heartbreak
Hotel
, is it true?”

“Yep.”

“And Laurie knows about this?”

“Yep.”

Lucy sat back and expelled air from his lips. He shook his head as he started to chuckle. The gravelly sound awoke the old woman, who began to cough laboriously into a rag. When the sound of her gagging stopped, she shoved the rag into a pocket of her housedress and glared directly at Bobby. She had the same blue eyes as her grandson. Either that or she was glaucoma blind. Whatever it was, her unblinking hatred unhinged him.

He tasted copper. The smell of burnt toast filled his nostrils. He recognized these as warnings of a grand mal seizure and tried to focus.
Please God. Not here. Not now
. He wanted so much to remain cool. He
needed
to be cool. The grandmother swam before his eyes as his vision dimmed. The copper taste grew unbearable. A wave of heat shot though him. The old woman raised her finger and pointed at him. He heard the slurred sound of Lucy crying
What the fuck!
and then Bobby felt his body go stiff.

Then he felt nothing.

Obituary from the Long Beach Press Telegram

Lashondra Van Johnson went to God Tuesday Morning. Daughter of Ruthie Duane, Lashondra graduated from San Pedro High School in 2006. She worked as a cashier at Vons Food Store in San Pedro and was known for her quick smile and personal attention. In lieu of memorial services, please send donations to the Assemblies of God Church, San Pedro, California, in care of Ruthie Duane.

She soared momentarily, like a torrent of water held under pressure for too long, then released to spurt free. Higher, higher, and higher, until she could feel the heat of the Lord, the fire of his gaze scouring her of sin. Too terrified to open her eyes, she basked in his grace, reveling in the release of her prison without bars. She smiled beatifically, the memory of a hymn from the Assembly of God choir, a heartbreaking soundtrack to her salvation.

But then the pressure died, and as she began to descend she opened her eyes. A face glared at her from the heavens, neither man nor woman. The face was everyone, everything, one person she’d tried to forget forever. She screamed, her soundless shriek carrying her to the earth where she struck, bones snapping, flesh ripping. She had no breath, but she had pain and it grasped her in a fiery claw. Talons of agony spider-danced along the lengths of protruding bone that shot away from her body at impossible angles. Her right arm. Her collarbone. Both her legs. Her back. Shattered. Broken. Bent. Twisted.

But she did not cry.

She did not bleed.

And she knew why.

She had no more to give. After months of self-revulsion and self-recrimination, something she couldn’t tell a single soul, she’d finally gotten the courage to save herself from herself. The cheap knife had only been used once last Thanksgiving to cut the turkey when she’d pretended nothing had happened. Inexperienced, Lashondra remembered how easily the edge had sliced the skin of her finger as she carved the bird. Through Christmas and New Year’s, the memory held. Past Valentine’s Day and the Irish holiday, long after the wound had healed, she relived the exquisite sense of the metal passing through her flesh. Then came her mother’s birthday, then her own, and then the birthday of the little one, and as Lashondra sat with a cupcake and a candle and sang the sad song to the ghost of a one-year-old who would never be, determination took her and propelled her to this moment.

Was it last night or the night before when she’d taken the same knife that she’d used on the great American holiday to sever the veins in her wrists? She’d learned how to do it well. Not across like in the movies, but lengthwise from elbow to wrist.

Unable to move, Lashondra peered from beneath her shroud of hurt. She was on a great plain. Somewhere behind her she heard the ocean. Before her, in the direction of her feet, was a single black spot on the horizon. Past it she saw the cranes of the harbor, ever-present markers of San Pedro and home. But this place couldn’t be home. There was nothing around her but a plain of dust. She noticed the sky as if for the first time. Gone was the celestial presence, and in its place was a slab of flaking red heaven, pieces of it falling like blood that had dried in the sun.

The sound of breaking glass burst through the silence.

A car skidding to a stop.

Gunshots.

A long sigh, like air escaping a balloon.

The sound of a baby crying.

Not just any baby.

Her baby.

And not just one, but tens, hundreds, then thousands of babies, creating a cacophony of wet diaper, heat rash, sour milk, chafed, blistered, hungry and colicky cries. The noise was a physical thing that grew and grew, and with it, the pressure of her deed.

The ache that she’d felt these two plus years returned like a Louisville Slugger to the head. She didn’t want to end up like her mother, in and out of methadone clinics. Lashondra had wanted a future. She’d wanted to be a model or a clothes designer or an accountant. She’d wanted to be a strong, proud, black woman, a keen example of what one could be, if given the chance. She’d never wanted to get pregnant. She’d never wanted to have the child. She’d never wanted to be a mother. How could she be? She was just a kid herself. Just a sixteen-year-old sophomore in high school, not yet smart enough to survive the world. And they expected her to be a mother?

And Theopolis, the man-boy who’d stolen her heart, and then took her soul when he’d insisted she have the child. No abortion for him. He’d given his seed and wanted to see it grow. He wanted a Little T to his Big T. He wanted to harvest his seed, to have children to worship him, and had made Lashondra both farmer and farm.

And when the baby came, her mother smoked crack in the backyard bushes, and T rode shotgun in a Camaro up and down South Pacific Avenue like he was a Compton Gangster. Lashondra never saw either of them when she needed help; and she always, most desperately, needed help.

For the thing they’d named Yolanda Phipps was nothing more than a creature that produced tears and rage and excrement. It stank and consumed and railed against the world, never-ending, never-ending, never-
fucking
-ending. In the long dark hours of the night when the thing raged in its bed, she’d considered joining her mother in the bushes, momentarily understanding why she’d given up, turning a high eye to the universe, trading reality for the sanguine peace of a single-celled crack organism.

That temptation had been what had finally spurred her to action. Lashondra had convinced herself that it was self-defense. To succumb to the tears and the rage was to chase the crack lion along the backstreets of San Pedro. Gone would be any aspiration, any future, any chance she had to overcome what was already an almost insurmountable genesis—African-American, female, fatherless...and now unwed mother. She could embrace the grand cliché and be like her own mother—and add the words
crack
whore
to her resume—or she could simply become a murderer.

So as the thing raged and spat and shit in the white and pink crib with the seahorse mobile ratcheted to a tired and useless tune, she grasped the edges of the pillow and pressed it to the creature’s gaping maw. Never had something so soft and so tender been so hard to press down as the pillow when the thing that was her baby began to thrash.

And although she’d silenced that first great scream, here and now in this dead universe between heaven and hell, a million babies raged, the noise a physical manifestation pressed against her face and skin.

She felt a pressure against her back.

Then her thigh.

Her arms.

Her head.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw black stalks grow from the flat plain. Like the sped-up video of a green bean growing she’d seen in biology the year before she’d given birth, the stalks grew impossibly fast, a million of them covering the entire plain in a black wave of grain. An undetectable wind captured them and poured across the surface of the stalks, causing them to undulate like an ocean far out at sea. Buds began to form on the ends of the stalks. Growing from nothing to a round plumpness, promising the bloom of a flower, the buds grew and grew. As one they opened. But instead of the black rose she’d expected, five tiny fingers unpeeled from a fist and waved in the air, fingers moving like the legs of an insect back and forth as if they’d just discovered themselves and the ability to grasp.

Then the hands took her. They lifted her up and propelled her broken and rent body toward the black speck on the horizon.

The babies raged.

The hands propelled.

The tiny fingers raked her skin.

And soon, too soon, she was taken to the speck which was the halfway house, that place where her mother had spent months trying to beat addiction, that place where Lashondra had actually spent her sixth birthday when her mother had promised she’d stop doing the drugs, only to find her later bent over a sink as one of the gray-garbed wardens pumped her from behind, like a game of adult choo-choo train her six-year-old mind could not grasp.

Only this was not the same halfway house.

Beneath a blood-red sky, atop a sea of dead baby arms, the horizon twisted by the broken skeletons of the harbor cranes as if the bodies of giants had fallen and died, the house pulled at her. She felt herself lifted free of tiny hands, carried upon vile winds to twist and pirouette around the house in a maelstrom of souls. Unlike Dorothy, who’d giddily ridden the Kansas twister in a death-defying dream, Lashondra was already dead, already damned, and knew that the end had nothing at all in common with yellow brick roads or munchkin lands or a seat at the right hand of her lord. She was a moth caught in the convection currents of a supernatural campfire, spinning and spinning, out of control, until eventually, she’d burn to nothing…

And that nothing became her ambition.

As a nurse, Laurie had seen grand mal seizures before, so she knew what to do. What made her pause was that it was Bobby who was having the seizure. At first she thought he might be having a drug reaction. She’d seen that before, too, but she couldn’t imagine Bobby being the kind of person to take such drugs. Yet as he fell stiff and his muscles began spasming, she knew in her heart what was happening. And she cursed. Not because she was angry that he was epileptic, but that he’d kept it from her. Part of her understood why he’d kept it a secret, but the love-struck girl in her wanted to know everything about him. She had a thing for Bobby Dupree and not knowing something special about him was simply unacceptable.

Grabbing a wet towel from the kitchen counter, she rushed into the living room. To Lucy’s credit, he didn’t freak out. Instead he just stared, a little wide-eyed, not knowing what to do. The irony of a gang leader who knew the perfect survival trajectories of drive-bys being suddenly agog wasn’t lost on her. She stepped around
abuela
and slid the coffee table out of the way before Bobby could crack his skull.