They were lying, obviously. Shit, there’d been plenty of nights in the past when I felt anything but safe on the Northside streets, and I was born here. Downright vulnerable, truth be told. Looking over my shoulder, checking out everyone cruising. And that was way before any so-called gentrification. On the other hand, I wasn’t all that uptight about what was going down. After all, I didn’t fit the victim profile, right? Know what I’m saying?
I asked Petey about the shootings one Saturday afternoon when we were stretched out at his house, drinking beer, snacking on Taco Bell nachos and conchas from Panadería Rosales.
“It’s crazy, no doubt,” he said. “Could develop into a mini race war if one of the hipsters returns fire, or just shoots the first Mexican he runs into, because he’s lost his cool, his mindfulness, like they say. Everyone thinks the shooter must be a Latino.”
“Always that way. That’s what I think, truth be told.”
Petey smiled in that way he had that made me nervous. “And you got no real reason for thinking that, right?”
I squirmed in my seat. Sometimes talking with Petey was complicated. I hadn’t learned how to outargue him, and he’d been in debate mode since the second grade. “I’m just saying that odds are that the shooter’s someone you and I probably know. That’s all.”
“Yeah, I get it,” he said. “Nothing changes. But what’s worse is that it’s stirred up the cops.” Petey talked between mouthfuls of beer and soggy tortilla chips. “That always means trouble for everyone but the troublemakers.”
“That can’t be good. There’s more patrols around here, for sure.”
Petey nodded. “Two skinny white boys get pegged and the blue army invades. Used to be that a Mexican kid was getting shot every other day and there wasn’t a cop anywhere within five miles of the Northside.”
“Yeah, like when the Inca Boys and the Northside Mafia were gunning for each other. Shit, I was in La Raza Park the night they lit it up with automatics and shotguns. I hid under a park bench like a punk. Not a cop in sight until the shooting stopped and Dogface had cashed out.”
“And Pony Boy ended up in a wheelchair.” Petey paused. Pony Boy had been his best friend when they were kids. He hadn’t seen him in years.
“Ah, the good old days,” I said, like a wiseass.
“Shit. You crazy, man.”
The third shooting went down in the Locavore market parking lot. Weird to say, but that guy was lucky. He lived. He was carrying a bag of organic groceries and Colorado wine to his Subaru when a bullet opened up a stream of blood from his hip and he dropped to the asphalt like a brick tossed off a roof. Wine and bread and apples and cheese scattered around the bleeding man. No one saw the shooter, but the rep for the cops told the ten o’clock news that the bullet must’ve come from a passing car. Strictly a guess, since no one saw nothing. Or maybe the cops knew something they weren’t revealing. As usual.
The Northside got a little tense after that.
Two days after the third shooting, Petey and I sat on the cracked steps of the porch of my mother’s house, enjoying the view of four demolished or almost-demolished homes that were surrounded by orange construction net fences and massive dumpsters overloaded with junk and probably asbestos. My mother had so far resisted the tidal wave of offers for the old house, and when I asked her why she didn’t take the money and move, she looked at me with her one good eye, shook her head, and simply said, “Where the hell we gonna go, mi’jo?” I didn’t have an answer. Still, the money sounded good to me.
I asked Petey what he thought about the drive-by theory. “That make sense to you?”
“Maybe,” he said. “But that means there’s at least two people involved.”
“The driver and the shooter.”
“Yeah. Which could happen. But these types of shooters usually act alone. They don’t trust other people, obviously. But it might be a pair of locos. There’s always exceptions to rules.”
“How can it be that no one’s seen anything? It’s like ghosts are taking pot shots at anyone foolish enough to go out on the street. Nobody sees nothing.”
“Damn good question,” Petey said, but he didn’t have a clue.
I didn’t see Petey for a few days. I had to take care of a bunch of stuff for my mom — pay bills, pick up prescriptions, clean up the storage shed — and Petey was kept busy at work. He had a good job with a printing company downtown, but occasionally he’d work late into the night because of a big order or a rush job. He was trying to save money. He’d decided he should finally marry Christina, so he was putting in as many hours as he could.
I was between gigs myself, and I couldn’t earn a little extra cash making deliveries for my Uncle Orly anymore, but that’s another story. He wouldn’t be back on the streets for at least three years, with good behavior.
When I handed Mom her high blood pressure pills, she just kind of sighed. She stuck the bottles on the shelf over the kitchen sink and sighed again.
“What’s wrong, Ma?” Something was bothering her, and I knew she would never simply tell me. I always had to dig it out of her.
“Oh, Eddie. Nothing. Nothing for you to worry about. No te preocupes. No es nada.”
Shit. Speaking Spanish was another bad sign. “Come on. Don’t be that way. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing new. Same as always. These damn drugs and the electricity, and now we’re gonna have to fix the car. And the house taxes. How are we paying the taxes? They’re twice as much as last year. It’s always something.”
“Money. You’re talking about money and how we don’t have much.”
“We never have.” She took in a deep breath, and then she tried to smile. “But we always seem to make it through, don’t we? It’ll be okay. Just feeling sorry for myself.”
Well, that made me feel like crap. “I’ll go talk to Jake and ask him to put me back on his crew. That was a good job, while it lasted. Outdoors, exercise. He’s getting busy again now that winter’s almost over. He told me to look him up when landscaping season came back. I can do that. Jake paid good, remember?”
She nodded. “And you almost killed yourself. Your asthma acted up, that’s what I remember. I had to take you to the clinic. That’s what I remember. We’re still paying on that bill. You can’t do that kind of work. You could’ve died. That’s what I remember.”
“It was just allergies, Ma. I’ll get something for that. I’ll be okay. Don’t worry. I got this.” Not really, but I had to step up.
She picked up a card from the counter.
“I’m going to call this guy who says he buys ugly houses. What do we want to stay here for anyways? I’ve been thinking. You’re right, the money is good. That one guy said he’d pay three hundred thousand for the house, as is. We could be out of here by the end of the month.”
That shocked me. She had to be very worried to consider selling. “You don’t want to do that. You should get another bid. And like you always say, where we gonna go? Whatever money you get will just go for another house, a more expensive house, with more bills and expenses.”
I realized I was contradicting everything I’d been telling my mother for more than a year, but I knew selling the house would break her heart. She got married in that house, took care of my dying father in that house. I had to get a job. It was as simple as that.
“And anyhow, it’s not a good time to sell,” I said.
“How can that be? Look around here. Everyone’s selling, moving out. Even Maggie’s gone.” I knew how much Mom missed Maggie, who’d sold her house last year after living across the street for decades.