Five minutes into class, Javier knew it was a wash. The post-lunch narcosis had set in, leaving everyone’s eyes at half-mast. A flat- faced boy sitting along the side was completely out, his head back against the wall, mouth open as if ready to catch raindrops. At the front of the class, Mr. Patel stood stroking his mustache, a massive thing set off with dimples on both sides like parentheses. On the wall hung a picture of him from his salad days in private equity ringing a stock exchange bell, a moment that had launched dozens of indulgent stories, and Javier could see Enrique doing his best to bait another one out of him.
“So, hold up. It’s called a hostile takeover?” Enrique asked, bug- eyed in wonderment. There wasn’t a curious bone in his body, but he appeared suddenly seized with the spirit of inquiry.
Javier knew Patel was in on the act and would often parry these obvious bids to hijack his lessons, though today he seemed to welcome the diversion. By the time he finished with his mustache and went to recap the markers, the class had already started closing their notebooks and pulling out their phones. Javier never tired of the act, but as this was their second year with Patel, the anecdotes were getting recycled. He glanced over at Gio, absorbed in today’s sketch, a human jaw so lifelike Javier found himself working his own back and forth like he was trying to pop his ears.
Javier had already taken the class, AP Economics, last year. He was there for the view, nothing else. Patel’s room on the second floor of East Valley High was the only one with an unobstructed view of the lunch scene at Gaither Middle School across the street where his younger brother Alex now sat perched between two friends on the back row of some low-rise bleachers. Javier knew the two friends, Beto and Augusto, no problem there. Whenever Javier checked Alex’s phone in the evening, it showed only these three in the chat. Dumb memes and gamer videos. But the signs were there, first with the sagging jeans, his denim crotch more like a hemline, then with the Raiders gear, a sartorial middle finger to the school dress code. And now this week’s yo-homie flourish— one pant leg up knee-height, a throwback look that had been making the rounds on social media.
Halfway through lunch, the pair from Denker would arrive, Itchy and Scratchy, the former notable for his insistent, vacuous smile and the latter for his slightly forlorn appearance. They’d take the bleachers two at a time, stepping over lunch trays on their way to the back row. Itchy always had on a pristine ball cap turned at a jaunty angle, a shiny decal still affixed to the bill, and Scratchy, hands shoved deep in his pockets, wore a hoodie that bisected his skull and swung off the crown of his head as if glued in place. Itchy would plop down next to Alex, stick one hand in the bag of chips, then drape an arm over Alex’s shoulder, a telling combination of coercion and brotherhood that had grown over the first semester. Three months ago, Alex would have given the boy all shoulder, kept his eyes on his phone. Here it was October, now with the dap and the head nods, a steady drip of street-love like water for the thirsty. Itchy, the salesman, brought the hype, and sad-sack Scratchy brought the promise of violence. Javier held the most contempt for guys like Scratchy, follow-ons who kept the whole charade going. Javier had known a handful of Scratchies—his friend, Chuey, exhibit A—and knew they had more choice in their lives than the Itchies of the world who couldn’t help but inspire the worst in others. Scratchies lacked imagination, and without them, Itchies were just gas.
The Gaither lunch bell rang. Scratchy scanned the quad like a farmer looking for a good place to plant corn. He clutched the side of his jeans and climbed down the steps, a pop-and-lock that gave him the appearance of old age. Then Itchy stood, having sold Alex a vision of vida loca now for ten minutes, and offered the cherry- on-top out of view of the school cameras. His hands, belt-high and with the fluid grace of an interpreter for the deaf, flashed the Denker trademark S-R-V: the first letters of the three street names, Sepulveda, Roscoe, and Van Nuys, which bounded their neighborhood, Barrio Horseshoe, or as everyone called it, the Shoe.
There was no fourth street because the southern boundary of the Shoe was a lunar landscape called Dogtown, a 500-acre vacant lot in the middle of East San Fernando Valley big enough to site a football stadium. Fifty years ago, when this part of Los Angeles had been mostly farmland, the area had been a man-made lake. Seen from above even today, it resembled an enormous footprint minus the toes. On Google Maps, it was cryptically referred to as a hazard abatement area, a lake long since dried up and now a tent city for the Valley’s destitute. Both code and law enforcement took a hands-off approach, certain that a close look would trigger enough paperwork to keep everyone behind their desks for months.
Javier watched Alex slow-walk to class like he was underwater. Another bad sign.
“Dumb and Dumber come by?” Raffa broke in.
Class was ending, Patel now returning to the mundane world of homework and Friday’s quiz. Javier looked at the whiteboard and made a mental note of the page numbers to read and the problem set to finish. Raffa knew Javier had been watching Alex and the daily ritual. “He’s in eighth grade, big brother. They’re all stupid.” Raffa zipped up his backpack. “Trust me. Jocelyn belongs in a cage.” Jocelyn was his sister. “I say put ‘em all on an island, come back in a year. Whoever survives gets to go on to high school.”
Javier thought of smiling but couldn’t. “Kid’s a follower, and he’s angry about something.” He stuck his notebook in his backpack and watched Alex disappear around a building. “Those two mooks been working him since August.” He couldn’t shake the fact that it was Alex, not Beto or Augusto, who’d been the target these past three months.
The bell rang, and the class stood to leave. Javier nudged Gio who was now staring at McRibbs, the skeleton parked in the corner, its head tilted toward the floor as if he’d dropped a set of keys. Enrique was already macking on the girl next to him who had the hunched posture of someone expecting a bomb to go off. Javier, Raffa, and Gio left him there and walked into the hallway traffic, a human salmon run after fourth period.
Raffa turned to Javier over his shoulder. “Relax. He’s gonna join a tagging crew, throw up his placa three times, get busted on the fourth when he shows up on camera.” They wound down the stairwell and outside to the quad. “Then Mendez’s gonna turn the jets on his ass.” Raffa took out his water bottle, offered a sip first to Gio then to Javier; both declined. “Then you’ll take him to Walmart to buy a new set of chones.”
Officer Mendez was the school police officer who’d made it his life’s mission to put wayward boys like Alex back on the path their mothers wanted them on. Twice a year he’d round up the Gaither frequent fliers and put them into a room with a group of veteranos who’d lived the life, done the time, and now put the fear of God into boys like Alex. Their facial scars webbed with stitch lines belied a history of violence, their jailhouse tats now blurred and illegible. Eight of them would put their chairs in a row, a firing squad for each of the Gaither bad apples.
See this paperclip? That’s what Papi will use to ink his initials on your neck, entiendes? Then another would push in closer, an ugly, staring face with dead eyes. Each fatherless boy, an unexpected spark of need suddenly welling up, as if summoned by this stranger, so close now, he could hear the man’s breath whistling through his nose. One by one, their chairs scraping the floor, until they formed an OG semicircle. One of them—whichever one still had his prison swole—would whip off his shirt to reveal a torso slabbed with muscle.
Gonna put salt on yo ass. Hahahahahaha. Yo ass taste better with salt. More riotous laughter then Mendez would get up and leave the room to take a call, and that’s when some of the boys would pee themselves.
The three of them got to the main office where Raffa fist- bumped Javier and Gio and then pushed a shoulder into one of the double doors and disappeared inside. He worked two hours a day answering phones, sorting mail, translating for parents, and helping with the reams of paperwork that were forever breeding newer, smaller piles. Like Javier, Raffa was on a glide path to college. They had each, in fact, already accrued enough credits to have graduated by now.
“Only double-hinged joint in the body, Javi.” Gio tried wiggling his jaw. “But mines mostly up and down, you know. I can still hear it click, though...” He smiled and trailed off. He and Javier had been mistaken as brothers in fifth grade when they first met. Most teachers had to look at their necks to tell the two apart. Javier wore a gold Our Lady, though their hairstyles soon diverged. Once in his first home, Gio’s hair quickly became a mop he trimmed himself with school scissors; Javier, by contrast, had always been twos on the side and fives on top. The one other distinguishing difference was the scar over Javier’s left eye where his father had taken batting practice, the dead white tissue of a slow healing wound stitched up country style back in Oaxaca. In the pigmentocracy of the barrio, Javier and Gio were both slightly more on the almond end of things, though not coffee bean dark, with bee-stung lips framing their fish angled mouths.
“You ever notice how skeletons all seem like they’re smiling?” Gio mused apropos of nothing. He made a Cheshire smile, revealing two rows of fun-house teeth. An orthodontist could look in Gio’s mouth and see his daughter’s college tuition. It was, in fact, Javier who had taught him how to brush.
“Spring’ll be here faster than you might think, Gio,” Javier said. “The Needles sisters are gonna change the locks, put your shit on the curb.” Javier had been trying to chip away at Gio’s blithe indifference to aging out, convince him to put in some job applications, start lining up food stamps. His eighteenth birthday would be his last as a ward of the county.
“Emancipated.” Gio gave Javier a coy look and chuckled as if considering the full weight of the term, then wandered off toward the unlit section of the hallway past the main office, a no-man’s- land that led to a stairwell with a pair of locked doors at the bottom. Kids went to vape there, some using it to take a leak when the bathrooms were locked. Halfway down the hall Gio stopped in front of a wall display, eternally lit by a pair of fluorescent tubes, trophies from generations ago, art projects from students now old enough to have kids of their own. He leaned in, trying to read something.
“Dinner, Thursday,” Javier half shouted. “Ma’s playing catch-up on Rebelde.” It was Mama’s novela, and over the course of two weeks while he slept on their couch one summer, it had become Gio’s too. The saccharine storylines, a fifty-minute mental oasis for Mama and half the women of the Shoe, served as a stand-in for Gio’s family narrative, his own like a phantom limb that he could feel but that no longer existed.
Gio kept staring at the display and nodded his response, his detachment sudden and complete.
Javier’s phone buzzed, a text from Mama. She’d be working another double tonight which meant there’d be a frozen brick of noodle soup in the sink when he got home. The freezer was full of them, gallon Ziplock bags stacked like sandbags. She never said no to more work—and there was always more work—and she had the joint and back pain to prove it. Javier would often greet her when she returned from overnights with a tube of high-octane Mexican balm that he’d rub into her knees and shoulders but mostly her back where a couple of discs had turned to sponge. The doctors might as well have put a zipper between her L3 and L5 vertebrae she’d had so many surgeries.
The college off-ramp wasn’t more than ten months away for Javier, and as much as Mama had insisted early on that education es lo mas importante, she’d been steadily dialing back the rhetoric as the medical bills had started arriving with big red letters stamped all over them. But more than that, she’d come to rely on him to keep Alex, a born rule-follower, from slipping further into the streets. Javier’s carefully built Jenga tower had a couple pieces sticking out.
CHAPTER 2
Carlos rode the boom lift thirty feet up, stepped onto the deck of the viaduct, and worked his way through the final course of rebar, checking the snap ties as he went. By noon, it would all be covered with two hundred yards of cement, an act of finality that had left him sleepless and bleary-eyed. He got to the unfinished edge and gazed out at the yuccas standing in the morning sun, their knobby arms raised as if surrendering. The only movement, the only noise, came from the survey team a quarter mile ahead, hammering stakes and taking measurements through transits. His phone buzzed with a text from Raymond, the lead surveyor. It was an image of a tortoise craning its neck.
Carlos pulled out his walkie. “How many?”
A pause. “I count about twenty, twenty-five.”
Carlos hissed. Nothing meant more trouble for projects like this than habitat issues, and the desert tortoise was at the top of the protected species list in this part of California. He kicked a water bottle off the deck, his head now flooding with a list of change orders, cost overruns, impact reports. The Sierra Club would have an injunction by the end of the week, his crew would scatter, and the job would be bad-mouthed in the trades, falton as they would call it. It was the bane of every publicly funded project. Things were always stop-and-go, and for subcontractors, consistency was king.
“We’ll need some video. Get a geotag on it and send it over.” He paused then added, “Tell your guys to go home. We gotta pull them off the job.”
A moment later Raymond came back on the radio. “One more you need to see.”
Carlos opened the next text. It showed the flat underside of one of the tortoises, four legs helplessly splayed out. Along one edge of the shell, a small strip of aluminum had been riveted to it. The last picture was a closeup of the tag, showing a bar code and a set of Chinese characters.
# # #
Tasha passed through the metal detector and retrieved her phone on the other side. She saw Carlos had sent her a video then tapped the screen to see a clip showing a pod of tortoises ambling across the desert. The image needed no explanation.
Muthafucka
In her two years as Communications Director for Senator Rittenhouse, she’d had to learn ways to corral her temper—deep breaths, long drinks of water, long drinks of Grey Goose—but today all she wanted to do was throw her phone across the capitol rotunda. The rail project was her ticket to Washington, with or without the Senator. If things went pear-shaped here in Sacramento, she’d be back running school board elections in Los Angeles.
She arrived in the back of the Senate chambers in time to catch the last legs of the reauthorization debate. Support was split for the bullet train, which was now so far over budget it would require a fourth round of bonds. An eleventh-hour deal with a large off-shore hedge fund had given the project new life. The Speaker could bring the reauthorization up for a vote either now or tomorrow. Three hours ago, it would have been a lay-up for Tasha. She’d already put in an offer for a two-bedroom condo in Georgetown.
The vote count on the screen and the adjournment clock ticking down lent the usually staid chambers a charged air. The Speaker stood at the rostrum, gavel in hand, talking with a staffer over his shoulder. From the steps below, a senate page reached up and slid the Speaker a note. He read it and pulled out his phone, scrolled through some texts, then brought down his gavel twice. The vote would be delayed until tomorrow at 8 a.m., an eternity in the deal- making days of late August in Sacramento. Careers often turned on these votes, and Tasha felt hers slipping away. The Sierra Club was probably already setting up the presser with their righteous refrains. She’d done her best to curry favor with the green slice of the electorate, keeping the Senator at or above eighty percent favorability. Coastal set asides, old-growth logging regulations, that stupid little fish in the delta. And this had come at considerable expense to the donor list, a hit she knew was worth the points he’d scored with the base.
All those years triangulating, positioning, counter messaging, all the miles on the road, in the air, prepping, dodging, deflecting, polling, vetting, all that code-switching, hi-watt smiling, all the hours briefing and debriefing, and for what? So that a thirty-second video could expose him as an environmental hypocrite? Tasha knew this was no accident, and she knew who was behind it.
