That was all I needed.
I sat in the front seat of Pocho’s 1981 Oldsmobile Cutlass and took the gun when he handed it to me. It was heavy in my hands. My heart beat rapidly, thumping inside my chest as the car pulled away from the curb.
Judd was sitting on his front porch under the yellow beam of the porch light. He looked up as we rolled by. I pointed the gun at him.
“Pow,” I whispered.
He went white with fear, and I liked the feel of power the gun gave me. I was in control now.
• • •
We drove to another neighborhood, cautious, low in our seats, watching the oncoming cars, knowing we were in enemy territory. We parked Pocho’s car under the shadow of a low-hanging pine tree, then jumped out and ran to a Chevrolet Impala. I held the gun tight against my side. Pocho gripped a screwdriver in his hand and pulled his sleeve down over his fist. He broke the car window with a sharp blow and crawled in behind the steering wheel. He hit the ignition, knocking away the key lock, and started the car with the screwdriver. I slid into the car then, the pebbles of broken glass rubbing against me. We rolled away from the curb in the stolen car as a porch light came on in the house behind us.
“Hurry,” I said.
Pocho turned the corner.
“They got any music?” he said, and started going through a stack of tapes on the front seat.
“Leave it,” I said as I rolled down the window. “Watch the road.”
My heart was pumping. I was ready, but Pocho was making me too nervous, like hot wire jumping through my skin, the way he was searching through the cassettes, clattering the plastic. He turned on the overhead light, read the titles one by one, and threw each out the window. Long lines of brown tape flew in the wind behind us.
“All they got is country-western,” he said.
“Are we here to listen to music?” I said, and turned off the overhead light. I tore the tapes from Pocho’s hand and started going through them, using the gun muzzle like a finger to separate them.
“Here. Patsy Cline,” I said. “I like her.” I pushed the tape into the cassette player and sweet sad music filled the car.
Pocho tried to rip it out. “I don’t want something that’s going to bring me down.”
I hit his hand. “Leave it,” I said.
Groups of kids stood outside on the sidewalk, backlit by the light from houses. Their heads turned as we passed, checking us out, the same way we watched cars in our neighborhood. No one seemed alarmed yet. I looked at the houses falling behind us. The shifting lights from televisions inside colored the front windows.
“It feels like a fire’s burning inside me,” I said, stroking the gun.
Pocho nodded.
“That guy shouldn’t have capped her,” I said. “Not Ana. She was just kicking it, keeping it real. She never did a drive-by, never hurt anyone.”
“You ready?” Pocho said.
“Yeah.” I was ready to shoot, eager to blast the guy who had killed Ana. “No one hurts Ana without hearing from me,” I said, feeling the devil squeeze my heart. “No one.”
“Here,” Pocho said in a whisper, his voice straining with anticipation. He stopped the car at the curb near three trash cans waiting for pickup. The foul smell of garbage crept into the car, but I couldn’t roll up the window, not now, with our mission so close.
Pocho turned off the tape player and pointed to a wood house with a long porch. The porch was crowded with people old and young. A pink unicorn piñata hung from an oak tree in the front yard.
“Must be some kid’s birthday,” I said.
“Check out the car,” Pocho said.
A Monte Carlo was parked in the drive. It could have been the one that drove by that night, the one used by the bangers who shot Ana, but I wasn’t sure. A Monte Carlo is a gangbanger’s dream car. Any GM car is. And maybe they had stolen a car, like we had, for their mission.
“There,” Pocho said. “Coming out on the porch now. That guy.”
“He’s the one?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re sure?”
“Blast him.”
Suddenly Pocho slammed on the gas and tires squealed, burning a path of rubber behind us, the back end of the car fishtailing.
“Do it. Do it!” Pocho shouted as we sped toward the house.
“You’re crazy,” I said. “There’s all kinds of people on the porch, kids and old people. I’m not going to shoot and kill some baby.”
“Shoot!” he shouted.
“No, not this way,” I said. We sped past the house.
Pocho turned the corner tight, then stopped the car with a jerk. I fell forward and hit my head against the dashboard.
“Now they know we’re here,” he said.
“I don’t care,” I said, and opened the car door. “I’m not killing a baby. You take your busted self back home. I’ll handle this. If somebody’s going to get blasted for Ana, it’s going to be the right somebody, not some baby or someone’s grandmother.”
I climbed out of the car and slammed the door.
“Get back in,” he growled, and backed up the car, following me.
“No,” I said. “I want to see him when I shoot him. I want him to see the pain in my eyes when he dies, not some anonymous flash from a car so that he doesn’t even know what hit him. I want him to know it’s me and that I’m here for Ana. I want him to know he’s going to die.”
“Get in the car!” Pocho yelled. “They know we’re here. They’ll be waiting for you.”
I didn’t care. I turned the corner and started walking toward the house, the gun in my right hand, muzzle pointing toward the sidewalk. A bougainvillea hung over the redwood fence near the house, and my feet crushed the fallen blossoms, staining the sidewalk red.
I could hear the people on the porch talking and laughing and teasing some boy.
I walked up to the front fence that was heavy with honeysuckle, the gun at my side.
“I’m here for Ana!” I yelled. “Chancey, you know her? Anybody here know her?”
They all stopped talking and stared at me.
The guy Pocho had pointed out said something to the others. Then he hopped off the porch into a line of purple azaleas, his feet sinking into the wet soil, and walked toward me, almost tripping over a green garden hose that stretched across the lawn. He ducked under the piñata swaying from the oak tree and stopped. He didn’t dress the part. He looked like a college student in his blue T-shirt and Levi’s. He wore a single gold earring, his black hair long and pulled back in a ponytail.
“I know Ana,” he said, and looked behind him as if he was afraid the others might hear him. Then he whispered, “I’m Raul.”
I didn’t understand why he was telling me his name or why he seemed so worried that the people behind him would hear what he said. But it didn’t matter.
“This is for Ana,” I said, and drew the gun up to fire.
A woman on the porch screamed, “She’s got a gun.”
I could hear feet scuffling, mothers grabbing up their children and pulling them inside, footsteps running down the driveway to the back of the house.
I held the gun at him. He didn’t move and he didn’t look afraid. He smiled at me like this was a big joke. When I looked into his brown eyes, I saw Ana’s eyes staring back at me with love. Suddenly the gun felt too heavy to hold. I lowered my arms.
“You don’t have to be so dramatic,” Raul whispered. “Just tell me where to meet Ana.”
“You crazy?” I shouted.
“Hey, what’s up?” a lazy voice said behind Raul.
Two vatos wearing sunglasses had jumped off the porch and strolled toward us. They wore black baggy shorts that hung below their knees and white socks pulled up to their knees and black tennis shoes. They kept their heads back and had the look. I knew they were strapped by the way their hands played under their T-shirts.
“Where you from?” asked one with the name Chucho tattooed across his neck.
“She’s fro
m nowhere,” Raul said to them in a rough voice. “Stay back so I can talk to her.”
Why was he trying to protect me?
“Hey, we just come to see what she’s doing outside her neighborhood.”
Raul took control. “Look, you guys, get back. I can handle my own. This doesn’t concern you. It’s just between her and me.”
He waited until they were back on the porch. They lit cigarettes and watched us with the coolness of death.
Raul turned back to me. “Where does Ana want me to meet her?”
Tires squealed. Pocho drove the car around the corner and stopped it behind me, engine racing, ready to escape.
“Come on,” he yelled. “Shoot.”
I lifted the gun again and clicked off the safety.
“Ana’s in heaven and you’re going to hell,” I said.
He gripped the fence. The honeysuckle shook, making the air too sweet to breathe.
“Don’t say that, even as a joke,” he said.
My mind was whirling. I was too confused. The gun started shaking in my hand.
He spoke rapidly. “Ana said she was going to take a test.”
“What do you care about her algebra test?” I asked, looking at him over the trembling barrel of my gun.
“Not an algebra test,” Raul said. “A test to see if she was pregnant. I would have snuck over, but I had to go to Fresno to work the fields with my uncle. I couldn’t send anyone to tell her, not in enemy territory. That’s the only reason I didn’t go over to find out. I wasn’t running out on her. I hope she didn’t think that. I want to marry her. She’s my life.”
“You trashin’ liar.” I spit out the words. “Ana wouldn’t have gone with some guy out of the neighborhood. Not someone we hate.”
A siren shrieked in the distance.
Pocho started screaming “Kata, Kata, Kata” in the car behind me. He repeated my name like an engine, pumping the words with a steady rhythm, trying to bring me back to him.
“You’re Kata? Ana must have told you about me?” Raul said.
I shook my head.
“Tell her I’ll sneak over tonight. After midnight. Tell her to leave her window unlocked.”
“Ana’s dead.” The words felt miserable on my tongue.
He looked at me like he didn’t understand.
“A drive-by,” I said. “Some of yours shot her. The funeral was today.”
Raul reached over the fence and grabbed my sweatshirt, his face churning with the blackness of a storm. Honeysuckle brushed against my face, the delicate blossoms filling my eyes.
“Tell me you’re lying!” he roared.
I lifted my arms to push him away and remembered the gun. This was all too much for the vatos on the porch. They started firing.
Raul dropped to the ground. When he did, I fired back at them. The recoil smashed through my bones.
I fired and fired, the police siren sounding louder and louder, the thumping blades of a helicopter approaching rapidly, people in the house screaming.
I fired the gun until I had no more bullets, then stood there, still pulling the trigger, waiting for a bullet to find me and take me to Ana.
“Kata!” Pocho screamed. Suddenly his fierce hands pinched my arms and yanked me behind a tree. Pocho held me against him. I could feel his heart beating in his chest, his jagged breathing a wind against my ears.
When the shooting stopped, he pulled me out into the street. I started to go to the car, but Pocho jerked me back just as a beam of white light swept over it. We ran from the searching light of the helicopter to a house across the street and darted into the backyard. Protected by shadow, we climbed over a fence and ran down an alley, finally stopping to rest behind a line of trash bins on the next street.
I was crying. “I never shot at anyone before.”
“Forget it,” Pocho said. He took the gun from me, wiped it on his T-shirt, and tossed it into a storm drain. Then he grabbed my hand to make me run again.
“Forgive me,” I kept saying over and over, like counting off Hail Marys on a rosary. “I hope I didn’t hurt anyone. Please, God,” I cried. “Don’t let anyone be hurt.”
Then the fog rolled in. It curled around the streetlights, absorbing sound and locking silence around us. Usually I enjoyed the damp heaviness of fog, but this was a strange neighborhood. Pocho pulled at me, and we hurried across the street. At the corner about twenty women held candles. The candle flames shimmered through the veil of fog. The women looked ghostly and unreal. In some neighborhoods gang fighting was so out of control that mothers made a human wall between war zones at night. They gathered and lit candles, trying to stop the killings.
I didn’t like being so close to the border between two gangs’ neighborhoods, both enemies to us, and I knew Pocho didn’t either, because he took my hand and pulled me along, trying to make me run faster. We dodged into the next alley and clung to the shadows along the fence.
A police car drove down the cross street, and then I heard the thumping rotor blades from the sheriff’s helicopter overhead. The helicopter’s searchlight broke the foggy darkness and shone over the street like strange moonlight.
We crawled under a car parked on the next street. I lay there with my cheek resting in broken glass and dirt.
Pocho lay next to me. “Why didn’t you shoot him?” Pocho said.
I told him what Raul had said about Ana.
“Not Ana,” he said.
“Ana told me she was pregnant,” I said.
“Then it was mine,” Pocho said, but his voice told me he was forming a lie.
“I believe Raul,” I said. “I saw his eyes.”
“What does that mean, you saw his eyes?” Pocho said, his lips moving against the dirt on the street.
“My grandfather said true lovers share the same soul.”
“So?”
“I saw Ana in Raul’s eyes. They share one soul.”
“So you fired at his house, and now they know your face and they’ll all be hunting you down and the sheriff, too. Jesus, Kata.”
“I couldn’t kill Ana,” I said. “He had Ana’s eyes.”
“Your grandfather had too much imagination, and so do you. You see things that aren’t there all the time, so what makes you think this was any different? God, Dreamer, wake up.”
“Raul told the truth,” I said.
The helicopter light swung to another block. Pocho pulled himself from under the car and started running again. I followed him, my chest blazing with pain.
Pocho stopped. “It’s safer if we split up,” he said. “I’ll go back the way we came. You go home.”
“No,” I said. I knew Pocho was going to try to draw them away from me so I’d be safe. I wasn’t going to see another friend take a bullet because of me. “I’m staying with you.”
Pocho pushed me hard and backed away from me. “We’ll both be dead if we don’t go different ways,” he said.
“Come back,” I wailed.
He threw our gang sign at me and took off running in the direction we had just come from. I knew I couldn’t catch him. He was gone already.
I cut across the street and turned at the next corner, running, not looking back, my lungs choking for air, sweat beading on my cold forehead. Then I heard footsteps behind me. I turned, thinking Pocho had come back, but instead I saw a group of bangers running after me, fast and sleek like a pack of wolves, splitting up now to cover any direction I could run.
I let out a desperate cry and ran down the nearest driveway. I flung myself over the back fence and went down hard, landing on my hand. Splintered wood and dust fell into my face. I could hear pounding footsteps on the other side of the fence. I dived under a boysenberry bush, the thorns pricking my skin and cutting into my face. I froze and held my breath as the fence rattled against my back and the vatos flung themselves over and into the yard.
My muscles ached from holding so still, and my lungs grew hot from wanting to pull in oxygen. I closed my eyes tight so I wouldn?
??t see the bullets coming.
A back porch light came on. The back door opened and a high, angry voice filled the night air. “Get out of my yard!”
“Bullshit,” one of the vatos spit.
Then the man on the porch stepped aside and two pit bulls ran into the yard. Rough shouts filled the backyard, and the vatos disappeared into the night, the dogs growling at their heels. I waited until I thought they were on the next block, then pulled myself up and started walking again, my twisted hand throbbing, the tiny boysenberry thorns digging into my temples.
When I finally got home, I tiptoed into the kitchen. I didn’t think my heart was ever going to slow down. I wondered if Pocho got away safe.
I walked into the living room.
“Kata …”
A scream struggled up my throat, but I stopped it. Mom was sitting in the dark.
“What are you doing up?” I said.
“Waiting for my daughter.” She had never waited up for me before—ever.
“No men to keep you busy?” I said. The empty space between us had grown too large for her to close it now by staying up late, waiting for me.
“You found those words pretty easy,” she said. “Maybe you got more you want to say? Go ahead.”
I shook my head, but I doubt she could see me in the dark.
She sighed and went to her room. I felt like I was watching her ghost. I wished she had loved me enough to wait up for me back when I needed someone to wait up for me, back when I still had a chance.
I went to my bedroom. I fell across my bed and drifted into a dream. Night dreams took me places I was always happy to go. But this half-waking dream kept me in my room, tied to the earth and all my troubles. The wind came into my dream, rushing around me with a great softness, whispering to me in a language I didn’t understand, telling me of ancient and secret magic, trying to show me how to lift myself up and away from this life. I struggled to understand the words carried on the wind, but the answers remained lost in the wind’s wailing.
A sound jolted me fully awake. I sat up in bed, listening, looking for the danger.
A shadow stood at my window. I sucked air into my lungs, expecting a spray of bullets to blast through the glass. Instead a hand reached up and knocked. I climbed from bed, went to the window, and pushed it open.