I nod enthusiastically. “That sounds great. I can’t wait!” I shout and the nurse flinches.
Oh, since the papers have been signed, two big men in white suits appear, and they have a wheelchair I suppose they want me to sit in. I wonder if I could make it to the sliding glass double doors. Wild on the streets once again. But don’t I need this. Don’t I need to find out why I’m the way I am. Don’t I need to dry out for the baby’s sake, don’t I, Douglas? Isn’t this all a pathetic cry for help? Yes, I guess it is. I’m one sick bitch. It’s bright and sunny here in this lobby, with fine, sturdy, modern furniture in soothing pastels. It might be time for a change. The doctor, balding and thin, comes up. He’s wearing running shoes. He extends his hand. I extend mine. I shove hard against his chin and knock him into Uncle Jack and it’s off to the races.
“Rika” is an excerpt from the novel Understand This (University of California Press, 2000).
LUCÍA
BY YXTA MAYA MURRAY
Echo Park
(Originally published in 1997)
Loca friend, you’re all messed up, Girl. What we gonna do? When a woman can’t walk it’s like she ain’t the same kind of woman. You ever seen a girl’s legs when they’re all broke like that? Star Girl, she used to be my pretty chola. She was mean as a shark and she was strong enough to twist and hook a fish as big as me. But I knew she was mine.
“I’m out of it, I ain’t grouping no more,” Star Girl kept saying now, and she had that dead light in her eyes. Almost like the sheep do after they figure things out. No, I didn’t want her different. I wanted my old Girl back.
But I saw what that C-4 did. She showed me after I brought her home from the hospital, and she was quiet and dumb the whole ride home cause of all them pills. I wheeled her into her bedroom so she can get some rest and I helped drag her up. Before she got shot we’d got her all set up special in her own place and she had this princess-pink bed from the Lobo money, a superfancy four-poster. It didn’t look so pretty now, though. You can’t climb under the covers if you don’t got your legs working right.
When I lifted up her shirt she looked down, and her face didn’t tight up with hurt or curl with shame. Nothing. “It ain’t bad, chica, you gonna heal right up,” I kept saying, making like it’s true. I turned the lamp on her naked skin and touched her light like I was her mama. Star Girl had this round thick scar on her back, a twisted tree-stump—looking cut. There’s white shiny skin lines like roots spreading out from where the doctors dug the bullet out. She was broke, all right. Her hands loose in her lap, like she can’t hold on. And I’d seen before how her legs looked smaller because she can’t use them no more, they was only hanging down from that silver wheelchair.
She shook her head again. “I’m out of it for good.”
“You’re out of it when I say so,” I tell her, trying to sound tough as nails. Like I’m still her jefa and she’s got to listen. But she don’t. She only turned her head to the window and rubbed her dry mouth. It’s all over, ésa, is what she’s saying to me. Can’t bring back the dead. Well don’t I know it. She’s looking outside at the blue-black night and what I see is her red eyes and them white cracked lips. There’s dusk colors washing down over her face that ain’t never gonna be the same.
It reminds me of something bad, that’s right. Something I can’t forget even if I close my eyes tight. No, I don’t have no shame, but it don’t matter. I can’t ever shut my eyes tight enough to black it all out.
So I opened them up real wide. I wouldn’t look away. Gonna get them for you, Girl, I thought to myself. You ain’t never known something better than a crazy angry woman, and when I saw her busted up, staring out by the window and the night’s coming down dark over her, something in me went SNAP. You’ve been here before, something tells me. So get loca mad before that monster eats you up.
I started dreaming about that C-4 shooter all night long. His blank face was teasing me and when I wake up, I almost feel his steel-chain hands grip down on my throat. My teeth are chattering like I’m freezing. I can’t even think about the business no more. The only thing in my head is how my Girl’s all broke up.
“You go and kill him, right, Beto?” I asked him. When I got back from seeing Star I wrapped my arms around his neck, trying to kiss his lips and cheeks like the sweetest, nicest sheep he’s ever seen. I made like he’s the prince and cried on him just like a girl so he feels sorry. “You’re gonna make him hurt, eh? Can you do it for me, baby?” I cooed, kissing his hands, his fingers. Acting like a geisha, but I didn’t care a stitch. Inside I was feeling wild and mean and it took all my strength not to bash him on the head. You just DO IT, I wanted to scream in his ear, and my hands was itching and burning from wanting to scratch at his face till he finds me that C-4 killer.
But I couldn’t. He was the boss of the Lobos now after that rumbla. It didn’t matter that it was Chico who came to me, these days Beto was maddogging his ass down the street and all the vatos was watching him. He wasn’t weak yet, like Manny got. The man was still full of fire, and it was gonna burn me bad if I didn’t work him right. “Stop your whining, ésa. Keep it down,” he’d started saying, waving at me with his hand when I’m telling him something. So I had to be more careful since he thinks he’s Mr. Bad. Fine, we’ll play it that way, I’m thinking. I’ll sheep you so hard you’ll walk weak-kneed all day. So Beto did what I want and that slick boy thought he was doing me favors. “Help me out, right?” I asked him again, and then smiled sweet. Yah, I’m thinking inside. You do for me. Tell your fools to drive on down to Edgeware and bring me home a dead man.
“All right, linda,” he said, looking down at me and getting that big-daddy face on. He puts his hands under my shirt where it’s warm and closes his eyes. “I’ll show that vato where I’m from.”
I should of known not to waste my breath. Beto got his homies running around asking questions and trying to get somebody from the eastside to rat out, but that didn’t do me one bit of good. “Eh, ése, you know about the C-4 that tagged a Lobo sheep? You tell me, vato, our little secret.” We didn’t get no names. Whoever tagged my Girl was hiding out where I couldn’t find him.
I got my hopes up when Beto sent these locos Montalvo and Rudy to Edgeware on a first-class mission to get me some answers about who shot my Girl. I sat up all night by my phone waiting to hear something, watching the wallpaper and the carpet and listening to some cricket chirp outside my window. I knew my bad time’s gonna end once I get that call. But you don’t send warriors on a job like that. Montalvo and Rudy was two baby-faced hot-blooded Oaxaca brothers who wore these red shirts and flashed their Lobos sets on the street looking for fights like blockheads so they could make a tough name for themselves in la clika. Instead of asking around cool and careful, they ran down to the Avenida de Asesinos, this dirty alley where the yellow dogs deal their powder. Them two started screaming RIFA and shooting crazy as soon as they see C-4 vatos giving them bad eyes. It’s no good to me. Montalvo got hit with one in the shoulder and came home showing off his emergency-room war wound like he was a hero, and Rudy was maddogging around cause he got so close to the Avenida. But they didn’t find out who that C-4 was.
“You got me a name, right?” I ask them after. I drove on over to where they lived, this cheapie flophouse on Savanna Street full of homeboys sleeping on the floor, flojos snoring on the couches, three tangled in a bed. There’s white paint peeling back from the shutters and these busted windows pieced with electric tape. It was a grouper crash, the place where the vatos go when their mamas yell them out of the house. I walked up and banged on their door early in the morning and didn’t even blink when Montalvo answers it and I see how one of his arms is wrapped up with bandages, a pink stain seeping through. “I know you got me a name, son.”