I’d got together a whole posse of chicas by then. I called them my Fire Girls. Hey, you’re on fire now, girl, I’d tell them after they got jumped in and they’d look over at me with their wet eyes and scuffed-up faces then try and give me a smile. We got that Conejo, she was a big crybaby at first, a second-generation Sunday school chavala chewing on her nails and running home, but she warmed up quick enough once I showed her how good gangbanging can be. After that we snatched Payasa. I named her that cause she’s clown funny with some big curly Bozo hair. And then Sleepy, this heavy-lidded cholita, and Linda and Thumper, these two sisters from Jalisco. Thumper banged her leg on the chair when she’s happy and Linda didn’t want no new clika name, so we let her stay the way she was. That was us, the Fire Girls. They was only twelve and thirteen years old but you want them young ones cause they can be the meanest. You just gotta kick that girlie out of them. It ain’t so hard, once you scratch their dresses off and give them baggies and lipstick and taks, they take to it real nice.
A woman’s clika does it different than the men. And not how you’d think, neither. I don’t got no pink-dress lunch club, there ain’t no softies in my gang. After we jump in a chica, she acts as wicked as a snake. She’ll take on a vato if we tell her to, smack him right over the head with a lead pipe if that’s what I want. No, a woman gang’s different than a man’s cause women need more love. The locos swing around Echo Park thinking they don’t need nothing. They’ve got their clika brothers, right, but a man can just stand alone if he’s got to. My girls, they’re looking at me for something they don’t got at home. Their daddies are whoring around and Mama’s crying in the closet or wiping up the kitchen sink and gritando ugly if their niña misses a confession. Everybody’s looking at the brother like he’s the man of the house and who cares about little sister? Well, I do, I tell them. I’m gonna care for you good, girl, you’ll be special here. You should see them open up, a woman’s gonna bloom like a cut rose in water if you talk to her special. And once you hook a chica like that, she’ll throw down worse than any man you’ll ever know. They can be some vicious kick-ass bitches if you work them right.
That’s why just after we’d jump them in by beating them down on the street and calling out, Take it bitch, I’d change from a wolf to a kitten so fast that all their hurt and scared would crumple right into my hands. “We’re your familia now, ésa,” I’d tell my little girls, touching them soft on their shoulder like I’m their mama. “And you ain’t never gonna be a sheep, all right? Now you’re acting like you got some respeto. Don’t forget it. I take care of my own, you hear that.”
I’d say all the right words that they wanted to hear and then they’d look up at me with their flashlight faces, those sunny smiles, but I didn’t feel their heat. I was saying the same things I told Star Girl and Chique all that time ago, but now I was talking through a cold wind. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get that feeling like before, like when I was just a little loca myself, jumped in and brand new under them stars.
But you do what you do. Me and Chique got them started off picking pockets on the downtown streets at six o’clock when all the businessmen are walking home fast and hungry for dinner. Conejo and Linda would bump the gabachos and Sleepy and Thumper would dig down and snatch the wallets then come running back home to me flashing dollar bills. I even got my own big head meetings going, with Chique standing right by my side and my Fire Girls bringing me the money then sitting down in my living room. Hushed, watching me. They was listening to everything I’d say, lined up in a row and looking like sparrows waiting on a wire. “Do it like this, ésas,” I’d tell them, showing them how to flick open a zipper on Chique. It almost made me feel like my old self, cause I could tell I hadn’t lost my touch.
But the main job I had for my girls was for them to keep their eyes wide, their ears open. They was my lookouts. I had them scooting around the westside and even the sidelines of Edgeware and Crosby, watching out and listening hard for anything I might wanna hear. “Check out for the C-4, eh?” I told them. “You keep quiet and you’ll hear some loco bragging sooner or later.” Those girls was perfect spies cause they get dark in the shadows, go green around grass. They’re invisible to men. If a chica stands around quiet long enough, a man just forgets her. He’ll let forty cats out of their bags before he turns around and sees her watching him, her ears as big as jugs.
Well. Maybe. Even though I had them chicas, it still took me months before I got my payback. That C-4 hid out from me so tricky that even with my girls poking around after him night and day all I got was ghost stories, nothing I could sink my teeth into.
“Hear he’s some C-4 big head, way up top,” Thumper told me, hooking her thumbs in her pockets and poking her beak out at me. Or there’s Linda, kicking the sidewalk with her sneaker and not looking me in my eye. “Lupe told me he was some C-4 vatito who moved away, jefa. Back to Arizona or something.”
No, it took me months. My babies was coming back home with rumors and empty hands, and that blank-face C-4 was just teasing me with a sawtooth smile. I was dreaming about him every night then, his shadow creeping over the park, the sounds of the shot ringing, the feel of that cold wet grass over and over and the yells and screams of the rumbla while I’m racing away with wings on my feet. And Star Girl with her white cheeks out on the bench, her dry mouth like a pale flower and her eyes staring out the window. It almost got me shook up again, cause things wasn’t fixing fast like I needed. Chasing that vato made my blood thin and my eyes cloud over, and that llorona started fighting me down harder than before. She’d raise up in me bigger and blacker and grin out from the mirror on late nights when I couldn’t sleep good. I wanted that C-4 boy so bad I could taste it bitter on my tongue.
So when my Fire Girls told me they can’t find nothing, when they’d scrape their shoes on the street and mumble into their hands, it got real hard to stay still. It got almost more than this chica could take. I’d pull out my pack and light up a Marlboro nice and slow, breathing in that black smoke deep to keep my hands from shaking the same as two leaves, to keep them from reaching out at my girls like biting snakes. Watch it, woman, I tell myself inside. Keep it cool.
“I don’t wanna hear that,” I’d say, slitting my eyes at them, my voice getting dark like the dusk before a bad fight. “You find him, eh? You go on out there and find out who my man is.”
But a woman don’t die from waiting. I’ve looked enough at the viejas around here to learn a lesson or two about long life. You’ve got to sit down on your ass sometimes and let the devil wander your way. And that’s when you catch him. When he ain’t looking.
I got my payback in the chilly autumn after a long hot summer of Lobos and Bomber rumblas. The enemies was busy hoofing up and down their turf and naming their streets, and the drivebys got random and cold blooded, even worse than before. The locals started hiding in their houses behind window bars and double-bolt locks, so the streets emptied and the air cleared of most everything except for the sounds of racing cars and shootouts and the once-in-a-while crying of a siren. Beto was getting himself a vato loco name even down in East L.A. from all the craziness, and I was grouping big too. Me and Chique and my Fire Girls jumped in five new fresh babies that winter, and they kept me rolling in pickpocket money and gossip news. Still. It seemed like my C-4 was gonna get the better of me, the better of my Star Girl. The Lobos and my cholas never stopped crawling around the Park and trying to sniff him out, but for a while there it looked like he’d hid out too good for even this mean perra.