When Detective Sanabria came to the Children’s Hospital some time later, he spent a good two hours at the foot of Danny’s bed. He felt especially useless before the sight of this boy’s prone body. Sanabria was beginning to question his place in the world, the assumptions about goodness, strength, and perseverance that had informed his life up to now; the hours of study in community college, his struggles at Cal State L.A. in classes like Applied Psychology and Urban Criminology, his monklike devotion to the reading of prolix police manuals that had ended with his consecration as detective. Here on the bed before him was a boy who had managed to get himself shot not once, but three times, twice with Sanabria looking after him, as it were. The girl with the gun in her Betty Boop backpack was in juvie, learning to draw pictures of weeping girl-clowns from her fellow inmates, and as unwilling as the rest of the knuckleheads to give up the name of the person who had sold her the gun. The gun traffickers operated a machinery of violence that churned up the fertile ground in Detective Sanabria’s corner of East Hollywood. He saw them as blood merchants filling a charnel house with the bones of children, stacking femurs and punctured skulls harvested from the streets, lining their foul clothing with the quarters, the nickels, and the rolled-up dollar bills of children.
The doctors’ prognosis was that Danny would never again awaken, that the forever of his wheelchair had become the forever of his sleep. Detective Sanabria stood up from his chair, walked over to the bed, and stood over the boy. He kissed Daniel “Danny” Cruz Jr. on the forehead, and then painted an invisible cross there with his thumb, a gesture the detective’s own Mexican mother annoyingly repeated each time they parted.
“God, I hate this fucking hospital,” he said, and left.
Two weeks later, Danny was awakened by a distant, highpitched wail, and saw a fuzzy object at the foot of his bed, a human-like figure that persisted in its unfocused, blurry state, until he blinked several times and it began to take form: First he saw Sandra, her face bloated and paler than he remembered, and then the infant she cradled in her arms, a baby girl with an even chunkier face and a broad, flat nose. “What’s going on?” he said abruptly, causing Sandra to startle and look up at him, and the baby to stop crying and look at him too.
“You’re awake!” Sandra called out, as the baby began to gnaw at her own wrist with toothless gums, sucking with a cracking sound that was like bubble gum popping. For a moment, Danny was hypnotized by the sight of the baby, by the two pink barrettes attached to her thin black hair, the way her jaws moved as she chewed, and by the flower-bud mouth that was revealed when her wrist fell away.
Suddenly, he felt the urge to sit up, to lift his back off the bed. He grabbed hold of the aluminum bars at his side, rose up, and felt the blood rush to his head, his eyes beginning a slow roll backwards, until he shook out the dizziness. Without saying a word, Sandra passed the child to him and he held her, feeling her tiny chest rise and fall against his shoulder. He listened to the fast, desperate pant of her breathing, and felt the warm flow of baby drool as it soaked through his hospital smock and dripped down his chest, past the wounds near his ribs.
Danny raised a finger and gently tapped her nose. For a moment, he worried he might hurt her, that the needles in his wrists might stick her, but the fear passed. Time ticked forward with no other sound than the occasional trumpetblaring of Sandra blowing her nose, and he noticed that the frame of the hospital room window was being filled, quickly, with the tangerine hue of a disappearing California afternoon. Danny saw his daughter’s future unfolding, the yellow march of many suns across the heavens, and the slow, slow progress of the months and years they would live together in the waking world, an epoch of quiet never broken by the sound of gunfire.
Sandra wiped her nose and got up from the chair, then looked at the baby and broke into a bright, childlike smile of wonder. “She fell asleep in your arms!”
Danny listened to his daughter’s breathing grow steady, and felt rhythmic puffs of wind beating softly against his chest. He kept very still.
PART III. EAST OF LA CIENEGA
THE GOLDEN GOPHERBY SUSAN STRAIGHT
Downtown
Nobody walked from Echo Park to Downtown. Only a walkin fool.
But in the fifteen years I’d lived in L.A., I’d only met a few walkin fools. L.A. people weren’t cut out for ambulation, as my friend Sidney would have said if he were here. But the people of my childhood weren’t here. They were all back in Rio Seco.
The only walkin fools here were homeless people, and they walked to pass the time or collect the cans or find the church people serving food, or to erase the demons momentarily. They needed air passing their ears like sharks needed water passing their gills to survive.
But me-I’d been a walkin fool since I was sixteen and walked twenty-two miles one night with Grady Jackson, who was in love with my best friend Glorette. I’d been thinking about that night, because someone had left a garbled message on my home phone around midnight-something about Glorette. It sounded like my brother Lafayette, but when I’d listened this morning, all I heard was her name.
Grady Jackson and his sister were the only other people I knew from Rio Seco who lived in L.A. now, and I always heard he was homeless and she worked in some bar. I had never seen them here. Never tried to. That night years ago, when he stole a car, I’d wanted to come to L.A., where I thought my life would begin.
But I had thought of Grady Jackson every single day of my life, sometimes for a minute and sometimes for much of the evening, since that night when I realized that we were both walkin fools, and that no one would ever love me like he loved Glorette.
I came out my front door and stepped onto Delta, then turned onto Echo Park Avenue. My lunch meeting with the editor of the new travel magazine Immerse was at 1:00. I had drunk one cup of coffee made from my mother’s beans, roasted darker than the black in her cast-iron pan. When I went home to Rio Seco, she always gave me a bag. And I had eaten a bowl of cush-cush like she made me when I was small-boiled cornmeal with milk and sugar.
All the things I’d hated when I was young I wanted now. I could smell the still-thin exhaust along the street. It smelled silver and sharp this early. Like wire in the morning, when my father and brothers unrolled it along the fenceline of our orange groves.
All day I would be someone else, and so I’d eaten my childhood.
When I got close to Sunset, I saw the homeless woman who always wore a purple coat. Her shopping cart was full with her belongings, and her small dog, a rat terrier, rode where a purse would have been. She pushed past me with her head down. Her scalp was pink as tinted pearls.
At Sunset, I headed toward Downtown.
Downtown, receptionists and editors always said, “Parking is a bitch, huh?” I always nodded in agreement-I bet it was a bitch for them. If someone said, “Oh my God, did you get caught up in that accident on the 10?” I’d shake my head no. I hadn’t.
And I never took the bus. Never. Walking meant you were eccentric or pious or a loser-riding the bus meant you were insane or masochistic and worse than a loser.
I had a car. Make no mistake-I had the car my father and brothers had bought me when I was twenty-two and graduating from USC. They wanted to make sure I came home to Rio Seco, which was fifty-five miles away. My father was an orange grove farmer and my brothers were plasterers. They drove trucks. They bought me a Chevy Corsica, and I always smiled to think of myself as a pirate.