Daniela sees the hint of the whiskey on his lined, ruddy face. He’s sixty-eight years old, she thinks. To her he’s still more than a man and almost a god.
When the conversation thins, Daniela pushes her plate aside and stands — staring at him, heart pounding — another established piece of this long-standing rite.
Father Tim does likewise.
She goes to him and offers him her cheek to kiss, then they take each other in a long embrace during which Daniela’s heart beats even harder and she hugs him with strength and love, all that she has, as she has always done, and will forever.
By the hand she leads him down the hallway and into their room.
Two hours later, Daniela walks into Bowl Me Over in Santa Ana and sees Jesse, bussing tables in the Burgers & More café. He’s got on the red Bowl Me Over apron with the big bowling ball knocking laughing pins into the air. He waves and gives her a rare smile, then swiftly masks it with his standard blank scowl.
She goes to the café bar, orders coffee, and waits.
A moment later he’s across the counter from her.
“Mom. Like, what do you want?”
She studies his slender face, so much like his father’s, his black hair swept back, eyes brown and tender. The nests of pimples in the hollows of his cheeks.
“I’m working tonight,” she says. “Just wanted to see you. I’ll be home late.”
“Any updates on the murder?”
“Sorry.”
“I know you can’t tell me anything. It’s cool.”
Jesse looks past her and smiles.
Daniela turns, and Lulu Vega gives her an unsweetened look as she takes the barstool beside her.
“Hi, Daniela. What are you doing here?”
“Visiting my son.”
“Me, too!”
Daniela’s suspicious eyes lead her to the far side of the café, where four Barrio Dogtown gangsters are settling into a booth. They’re gazing hard back at her, a swarm of shaved heads, white singlets, khakis, and ink.
When she turns back to Jesse, he’s looking at them, too.
Her first thought: Go over and say hi, badge them, shake things up. Maybe warn them off of Jesse and Lulu. Just let them know a cop is watching.
Second thought, though: Is Lulu Vega affiliated with Barrio Dogtown?
Her third: Don’t humiliate Jesse.
“You know them?” she asks Lulu.
“Everybody knows Barrio Dogtown. The fat one is Flaco Benitez. He went to high school with my brother. Came to our house a few times. Mom hated him but Dad thought he was funny.”
“Lulu and me are going out after work,” says Jesse.
“Lulu and I,” says Mendez.
“Not you, Daniela — Jesse and I,” says Lulu.
“Clever, Lulu. I get it.”
Daniela eats a light dinner for appearances, mad-dogging Barrio Dogtown between her house salad and a small sashimi platter.
Watching her son clearing tables, she feels the familiar avalanche of guilt descending on her. Jesse has never shown suspicion of her. Never inquired about her occasional absences. Never questioned her grand lie, that he was fathered out of wedlock by a U.S. Air Force flight mechanic named Javier Lopez who died before Jesse was born. In the few pictures she has shown him, Lopez is a good-looking, big-smiling man. Six months pregnant and thinking ahead, she had scavenged them from an Azusa estate sale scrapbook that she bought for twenty-five cents.
Her mom and dad made a stoic show of believing her tall tale, Papa having forgiven her sin of the flesh with the holy man, Mama not.
All of which makes moments like now — seeing Jesse torn between a bratty manipulator like Lulu and a seducer like herself — borderline unbearable.
She feels the telltale ache of love in her guts, love of Jesse and his father.
She waves to Jesse, loading his bus cart. Pays up and leaves an exorbitant tip that her son will get a part of, then heads for the Bear Cave.
But first veers off to the Barrio Dogtown bangers, swings open her blazer to reveal her Sheriff’s Department shield, and leans over their table.
She rattles off a terse greeting in Spanish, gets four surprised faces, then haughty grins that escalate to laughter.
“You stinking dog fleas leave my son alone,” she hisses.
More laughter.
Then curses, following her out.
16
Gale and Mendez sit in his plain-wrap Explorer, casing the Bear Cave from across the street. The bar is part of a strip mall east of the old Huntington Beach downtown. In the streetlights Gale sees some scraggly palms, sagging telephone lines, and an oil pump gnawing patiently in the near dark.
“The pump stinks,” says Mendez.
“The smell of money,” says Gale.
“Smell of benzene and lung cancer. Nice bikes, though.”
Gale counts twelve Harleys, two Indians, and one Kawasaki Ninja parked apart as if segregated. Their chrome and colors ripple in the neon blue of the Bear Cave’s sign.
Gale loves motorcycles. He rode with friends after Sangin but didn’t want to join a club. Sold his Fat Bob for ten thousand dollars and put that down on the 4Runner.
An older white Econoline is parked away from the bar, in front of Hair Affairs salon, long closed for the day. Through his binoculars, in the faint light from the storefront, Gale can see the body rust through his binoculars and the Bear Cave sticker on the bumper.
“Never thought I’d be so happy to see a beat-up old van,” says Gale, entering the license plate numbers on his phone.
“Think it’s enough for a search warrant?”
“No, but I’ll write it up anyway.”
“Jeffs is six-four, two-sixty,” says Mendez. “Red hair and beard, as of last week. I guess we won’t have any trouble spotting him. Interesting sheet, too. A DUI, six months in county for a bar fight, a dropped rap for carrying a gun within a thousand feet of a school. Trunk of his car. Judge ruled the search was illegal.”
“That thousand-feet law is tough,” says Gale. “You’re going past schools you don’t even know are there. On school grounds is a different thing.”
A beat while Mendez composes her rebuttal.
“I think it’s a good law,” says Mendez. “I worry about Jesse at school. It gets into my mom head that a bullied kid, or some crazy, is going to bring his birthday gun to school and open up. Lew, Jesse was bullied into a fight, freshman year. Older kid. Jesse whaled on him. Cost them both three days’ suspension but it never happened again. The two boys actually became friends.”
Gale considers this, wondering if he would have been as good a father as Daniela is a mother. Before the war, he had looked forward to that. But after the war, it was only a distant concept.
Then he was back from Sangin, the hospital weeks, then:
Bourbon, then pain pills, his future shrinking, watching Marilyn’s collapse through the haze.
Seems like hundreds of years ago. At forty-three he feels ancient and futureless and unrecognizable.
He watches as three burly bikers crash through the Bear Cave door and move to their choppers. They do look like bears.
“That’s a happy ending you don’t see every day,” says Gale. “The boys becoming friends, I mean. Happened to me, too. Eighth grade. Some dumb, good-Indian dead-Indian stuff, but it got to me. Charley Webster. We fought and got kicked out for two days. But years later in high school we got to be pretty good friends. Double-dated on grad night at Disneyland.”