Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [68]
He came to the barn another night, and my brothers were working on a car. I stood in the doorway, watching him hold his right hand in a rag. Grady said to Lafayette, “She over there at her mama’s? Glorette?”
Lafayette said, “Man, she told me she was movin in with Dakar soon as he got a record deal. Said they was gettin a place together. I don’t keep track of that girl.”
Grady said, “I heard him say it. Dakar. He was playin bass in a club, and I heard him tell somebody, ‘I gotta book, man, I gotta get to L.A. or New York so I can get me a deal. Tired of this country-ass place.’ So I hatted him up.”
My brother said, “Damn, fool, your finger bleedin! He done bit off your finger?”
The red stain was big as a hibiscus flower on the dirty rag. Grady said, “He pulled a knife on me. Man, I kicked his ass and told him to go. He was gon come back and then book again, leave Glorette all the time. I just—I told him to stay away.” He was panting now, his upper lip silver with sweat. “Forever.”
He pushed past me and said nothing. I had already been accepted to college, and Glorette had told me she was pregnant with Dakar’s child—I’d seen a swell high up under her breasts, awkward on her body like when we used to put pillows inside our shirts in that refrigerator house.
I left for college, and when I came back in the summer, my brothers told me what had happened. Grady had been driving a Rio Seco city trash truck for a year, made good money, and he rented a little house. When Dakar didn’t come back, and Glorette had the baby—a boy—Grady took her in and said he’d marry her. But after a year of not loving him, of still loving a man who got ghost, she left him to get sprung herself—on rock cocaine—and she refused to ever love anyone again.
I walked through the Toy District again, the dolls and bright boxes and stuffed animals from China and Mexico. Glorette’s son would be a teenager now.
Often my mother would call and say, “Marie-Therese and them wonder can you get a scooter. For her grandson. Out there in L.A.”
To everyone from back home, L.A. was one big city. They didn’t know L.A. was a thousand little towns, entire worlds recreated in arroyos and strawberry fields and hillsides. And Downtown had canyons of black and silver glass, the Grand Central Market, Broadway, and its own favela.
That’s where I was headed now. I was close to 3rd and Main. If you hadn’t been to Brazil, and you hadn’t seen a favela—that’s what Skid Row looked like. The houses made of cardboard, the caves dug out under the freeway overpasses, the men sprawled out sleeping on the sidewalk right now, cheeks against the chain-link.
Were they all fools for something? Someone?
Would Grady Jackson still be on the street? Would he be alive?
All the men—sleeping with outstretched fingers near my heels, pushing carts, doing ballet moves between cars—black men with gray hair, heavy beards, bruise-dark cheeks, a Mexican man with a handlebar moustache and no teeth who grinned at me and said, “Hey, payasa.” A man my age, skin like mine, his hair dreaded up in a non-hip way. Like bad coral. He sat on the curb, staring at tires.
I kept moving. How would I find Grady among these thousands of people? And why would he still care about Glorette?
Sprung fool.
I glanced down an alley and saw a woman standing in the doorway of a port-a-potty. She lifted her chin at me. Her cheeks were pitted and scarred, her black hair like dead seaweed, and her knees gray as rain puddles. Then a man whispered in her ear and she pulled him inside by his elbow, and closed the door.
Glorette. She wanted to go wherever Sere Dakar went. He played the bass and the flute. He played songs for her. He left when she was seven months pregnant. Nothing mattered to her but living inside a cloud, and yet she was still beautiful. The bones in her face lovelier. She smoked rock all night, walked up and down the avenues like the guys who passed me now, their faces crack-gaunt.
A man waved and hollered high above me. Construction workers were gutting