Denise Hamilton - Los Angeles Noir

She shook her head.

It might make them take you more seriously.

He thinks he can handle it by himself. But he can’t, she said, then shrugged and turned away.

I clicked my tongue and shook my head. You shouldn’t of sent Manny. Confrontation isn’t his thing.

I didn’t send him, he went over himself, she said. Veronica seemed irritated, crossed her arms and glanced away.

Wait here, I said.

Where are you going?

I need to get something from the house.

She yelled after me what was I doing, but I kept on thumping up the paint-flaking front steps. I slammed through the door and swept through the hall like a sudden gust. I moved into the back where my brother and girlfriend and their daughter lived, my brother who refuses to talk to me, blames me for having been a bad influence when we were teens. I rifled through his closet and drawers, looking, and I thought about Emerson, who until last year had used a walker to get around. He was growing stunted for his age, with his trunk becoming shorter in proportion to his legs. Veronica and Manny were in denial. They spoke as if his cheerful laugh wasn’t a reflection of mild mental retardation, as if his slurred speech could really only be due to limp muscles in his neck and body. As if he’d someday win sports, avoid teasing, charm girls into giving him female companionship.

Tomas, what are you doing? my mother said.

She stood in Gabe’s doorway; her hair was messy, she had probably been napping.

Nothing.

What are you looking for? she said. Gabe will be home from work soon.

You want to help me look?

She hesitated. For what?

Never mind, I said. I found it in the bedside table, took the icepick out, and palmed it, felt the weight of the wooden handle, the thinness of its blade. It looked like an enormous hypodermic needle.

She blocked the doorway.

Tomas, you said you wouldn’t! she said. You’re on probation. You said you were finished with that life. My mother grimaced; she had suffered through my days of adolescent rage, my anger at being a halfie.

I went to the rear window, slid it open sideways, popped out the flimsy screen. I started to step through, but then paused and turned to her.

It’s not about my old life, I told her. I’m not going back.

You said.

It’s about Veronica’s child.

She had begun crying but stopped now. She furrowed her forehead as she looked at me. Veronica was like a daughter to her. We spent five years living in my tita’s house after coming here from the Philippines.

A kid beat him up at school. And Manny got beat up by the kid’s father when he confronted him.

She touched the wrinkled lapel on her robe as if she knew it needed to be smoothed, but she didn’t smooth it. Somebody hurt Emerson?

I nodded.

She looked at me for a long moment, and then stepped out of the doorway to let me pass.

I drove over to Veronica and Manny’s apartment. As I headed north, the dilapidating bungalows of my inland Mar Vista neighborhood gave way to better-kept houses and lusher streets. They lived in what used to be the crappy part of Santa Monica, along the southern border, in the same rentcontrolled apartment Manny’s mother raised him in, up on the once-seedy hillside roads near Rose Street, just inside the Santa Monica line. When I was smaller, gangs from nearby Venice and Mar Vista claimed the blocks as territory, and I’d notice their cars patrol it, though most of the white people living in the small houses had no idea. But the neighborhood was changing. Many of the bungalows and apartment complexes had been torn down and replaced by trendy condos.

Veronica was two years older than me. Like me, half Filipino-our moms are sisters-but she grew up in Santa Monica north of Montana and went to a private alternative school founded by hippies in the ’70s, full of rich white kids now, mostly affluent and movie industry. She tutored me in math-would come down south to wherever we lived at the time, in the triangle of south Santa Monica off Pico where all the Mexicans and blacks lived, the house Mom rented in Mar Vista, the apartment in Venice.

After we finished the schoolwork, Veronica would reward me with play. She took me and my brother Gabe everywhere-to the beach, the parks, movies, malls. She was a fun tomboy-wasn’t afraid to play basketball in the driveway or on the courts across the street from our church. We played rough volleyball on the sand. I did well in school mostly to please her.

After she left California for Reed College in Oregon, I got into trouble. I’m sure Veronica thought it was because she left, but I was enmeshed in adolescence, a new school, new neighborhood, and I probably would have ended up gangbanging even if she’d stuck around. People act surprised when they find out I got involved in Chicano gangs at St. Dominic’s-a white liberal Catholic parish. But it gave me the respect I needed after being dogged by both whites and Asians. I knew Manny at St. Dominic’s. He was a bookish guy, tall, thin, with a chip on his bony shoulder. A Jesuit’s pet. He disapproved of my dressing like my Mexican friends, even passing as one, thought I was ashamed of being half-Filipino. We were the only Filipinos at school.

The truth is, he may have been born in Quezon City, but he grew up in Fremont and Santa Monica and is as suburban as you get. He was as much a poseur as I was.

One day he gave an oral report on his native country. During the Q-and-A, I pointed out an inaccuracy in the way he pronounced a Tagalog word. People laughed. He reddened and glared at me. A month later he reported that I had turned in a paper written by another classmate, and I got an F.

When Veronica flew back for family visits, she seemed shocked to see me with my Spanish tattoos, the business I’d started training attack dogs, the shaved head. Once, at a restaurant with her mom and dad, I took her aside and showed her my pistol-as if that would impress her. But unlike the other relatives who gave up on me, she still came over to our neighborhood, picked me up, and we’d go surfing together. At Bay Street if we were lazy, or up the coast to Zeros or Topanga if she felt like the drive. An old bond. But she was different now, too. Something about the confidence with which she moved on her board, the swell of her breasts against her black tank top, the beads she let dangle around her wrists and neck even in water, an impervious indifference to the stares of local surfers. We’d come back, shower, and walk to the Rose Café for breakfast. She was a tomboy but nonetheless drew stares, with her long bourbon-colored legs, her pretty half-Asian face with its high cheekbones. The neighborhood may have become trendy, with new oceanview condos nearby, but the blocks around my place still had black kids selling pot to people in fancy cars. Veronica drew catcalls from the Mexican laborers waiting for work; yet none of it fazed her.

I was surprised when she married Manny. He’d gone to UCLA and worked as a youth counselor while majoring in Social Work. The idea that an awkward man like him could help “at-risk youth” was a joke, I can tell you from my vantage point-they needed the mentoring of someone they could relate to, someone who had gone down that road and been pulled back by a guiding hand. It didn’t seem to work out, because not long after they had Emerson, he quit-or lost?-his job to become a stay-at-home dad.

We’re keeping Emerson at home for a while, Veronica told me when he was old enough to enter kindergarten; she worked as the manager of a popular Mexican chain restaurant. We’re a bit worried about the other kids, she said.

He’s going to have to deal with school sometime, I said.

I know, she said, But he’s still a bit behind.

As if he’ll ever fully catch up, I thought. But every time I came over, the kid laughed at my face, grabbed his walker, and hurried my way, clattering that metal contraption across the floor and slamming against banged-up furniture and walls in the process.