“You know why I’m here?” Cray asks.
Erwin’s brows rise in a question. He’s still smiling. Cocksure.
Cray straight-arms him and sends Erwin backpedaling for balance. He follows him into the apartment, kicks the door closed behind him with the heel of his boot. Erwin’s finally lost the smile. The switchblade drops from Cray’s sleeve, into his palm. The blade slides into place with a snik that seems loud in the confined space of the apartment.
“Somebody’s got to stand up for those kids,” he says.
He never gives Erwin time to reply.
* * *
Danny Salmorin shows up with his partner in tow. Cray doesn’t know why he’s here. All Cray did was call 911; he never mentioned Danny to the dispatcher. Never even mentioned his own name. Just said, “There’s a dead man here,” gave the address, then hung up. Sat down and waited for them to come.
Roland Johns is a tall black man, almost as broad-shouldered as Cray. He’s from the neighborhood—like Danny, he’s one of the few of them that made good. He looks at the body sprawled in the middle of the living room floor, takes in the cut throat, the blood that’s soaking Erwin’s thick plush.
“What are you doing here?” Cray asks. “Where’s the uniforms?”
“I like him in red,” Roland says around the toothpick he’s chewing on. “It’s really his color, don’t you think? Someone should’ve done a makeover on him years ago.”
Danny ignores his partner. “We were in the area and caught the call,” he tells Cray.
Cray gets the sense that maybe they were waiting for the call. But that’s okay. Dealing with people he knows’ll make it easier to get through this.
“Was he carrying?” Danny asks.
Cray shakes his head. He watches Danny reach behind his back and pull a .38 from the waistband of his pants. Danny wipes the piece clean with a cloth he takes from the pocket of his jacket, then kneels down. He puts the .38 in Erwin’s hand, presses the fingers around the grip, then lays the gun on the carpet, like it fell there.
For a moment Cray doesn’t understand what Danny’s doing. Then he gets it. The .38’s Danny’s throwdown, serial numbers eaten away with acid. A clean weapon he’s been hanging on to for an occasion like this. No history. Can’t be traced. Lots of cops carry them.
“This is the way it went down,” Danny says. “Sonny sets up a meet. When he tells you he wants access to the youth programs in the gym, you argue. He pulls his piece. You struggle, next thing you know he’s dead. You call us like a good citizen and here we are.”
Cray shakes his head. “I can’t do it. That’s playing the game his way.”
“You already played it his way,” Danny says. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“That’s right. And I’ll take the fall for it.”
“Bullshit. You want to do time for getting rid of a piece of crap like that, makes his living selling kids to short-eyes and worse?”
“Maybe we should start arresting people for killing rats and roaches, too?” Roland adds.
“It’s not right,” Cray says. “I did what I had to do, but now I’ve got to stand up for it.”
“Let me tell you what’s not right,” Danny says. “You going back inside, the gym closing up—that’s not right. You think we don’t know what you do in there? The women’s self-defense courses. The youth programs. The sliding scale on memberships so nobody gets turned away. You’re bringing some sense of community back into the neighborhood, Joe. You think losing that’s worth this dipshit’s life? Play this my way and you’re not even going to court.”
“I crossed a line—”
“Yeah, and now you’re crossing right back over it again. Sonny Erwin lived on the other side of the line, Joe, and we couldn’t touch him. You did us all a favor.”
Beside him, Roland nods. “You broke a big link in the chain,” he says. “This is going to put a serious cramp in a lot of freaks’ lifestyles.”
“I still broke the law,” Cray says. “Where are we going to be if everybody settles their problems this way?”
“You making a career of this?” Danny asks. “You gonna be some kind of superhero vigilante now?”
“You know it wasn’t like that,” Cray says.
Danny nods. He looks tired.
“Yeah, I know,” he says. “Thing I need to know is, do you?”
The next day Danny catches up with Cray outside the cemetery, after the service. He offers his condolences to Juanita, treats her respectfully. Holds the door of the cab for her so that she and her kids can get in. Mona’s sitting in the front with the driver. She nods to Danny.
Cray and Danny watch as the cab pulls away from the curb, drives away under skies as dirty grey as the pavement under its tires.
“You clear on last night?” Danny asks.
Cray shakes his head. “Not really.”
“You think Roland and me, we’re on the pad or something? Running our own businesses on the side?”
“I’ve got no reason to think that.”
Danny nods. “We’re living in a war zone now, Joe. The old neighborhood’s turned into a no-man’s-land where a freak like Sonny Erwin can market kids and we can’t touch him. When we were growing up we could leave our doors unlocked—remember that? Sure, we had to deal with the wiseguys and their crap, but things still made sense. Now nothing seems to anymore. Now there’s no justice, no forgiveness—it’s like we’re not even human anymore. Nobody’s looking out for anybody but themselves. Christ, half the department’s on the pad.”
“What’re you trying to say?” Cray asks.
“I’m saying it’s not right. We’ve lost something and I don’t know that we can ever get it back. All of us who live down here, who don’t have the money or the moneymen in our pocket, we get tarnished with the same brand, like there’s no right, no wrong. Just us. The unforgiven.”
“What I did last night wasn’t right,” Cray says. “I’m pretty clear on this.”
Danny shakes his head. “It was against the law, but it was right, Joe. It was something that had to be done only nobody else had the balls to do it. Who wanted to do the time?”
“I could’ve done it.”
“You’re already doing time,” Danny says. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. The way we’re living now . . . we’re all doing time. That’s what it’s come to.” He shakes his head. “You tell me. Where’s the difference?”
“You ever been inside?” Cray asks.
“No, but you have. Why do you think I’m asking you?”
Cray nods slowly. He looks down the street, but he’s not seeing it. He’s thinking about being kept four to a cell that was built to hold two. How you couldn’t scratch your ass without a screw watching you. How you had to walk the line between the sides, the blacks and the Aryans, and if you couldn’t fit in, you did your time in the hole. How you fought back with whatever it took so you didn’t end up somebody’s girlfriend.
“We have choices out here,” he says. “We can make a difference.”
“You make a difference,” Danny says. “With the gym and with what you did last night.”
“Last night I deliberately set out to kill a man. I never knew I had that in me. Never knew that I could plan it and do it, like I was ordering a new piece of equipment for the gym.”
Cray frowns as he’s speaking. The words seem inadequate to express the bleakness that has lodged inside him.
“There’s a big difference,” he adds, “between what I did and killing someone who’s in my face, somebody jumps me in an alley, tries to hurt my family. I got through this by knowing I’d have to pay for it. You understand? But now. . .”
“Now you have to live with it.”
Cray nods.
“You see what I’m trying to tell you?” Danny says. “You are paying for it. You’re doing your time, only you’re doing it on the outside where you can still make a difference. Same as me.”
“Same as you?”
“Acc
essory after the fact.” Danny gives him a long, serious look. “You think I don’t respect this badge I’m carrying . . . what it stands for? You think what went down with Erwin didn’t keep me up all night? I’m asking myself the same questions you are and I figure we handed ourselves life sentences. We’re doing time like everybody else, except we know it. And we know why.”
Cray nods again.
There’s a long moment of silence.
“So if you could roll back time,” Danny finally asks. “Would you do it the same?”
Cray wonders if Danny hears the children’s voices, the sweet angel chorus that echoes faintly in the back of his head and makes his heart break to hear. He wonders if it ever goes away.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I’d have to stop him.” Their gazes meet. “I’d have to do whatever it took.”
“Yeah,” Danny tells him. “Me, too.”
There’s nothing more either of them has to say.
My Life as a Bird
From the August, 1996 issue of the Spar Distributions catalogue:
The Girl Zone, No. 10. Written & illustrated by Mona Morgan. Latest issue features new chapters of The True Life Adventures of Rockit Grrl, Jupiter Jewel & My Life As A Bird. Includes a one-page jam with Charles Vess. My Own Comix Co., $2.75 Back issues available.
“MY LIFE AS A BIRD”
MONA’S MONOLOGUE FROM CHAPTER THREE:
The thing is, we spend too much time looking outside ourselves for what we should really be trying to find inside. But we can’t seem to trust what we find in ourselves—maybe because that’s where we find it. I suppose it’s all a part of how we ignore who we really are. We’re so quick to cut away pieces of ourselves to suit a particular relationship, a job, a circle of friends, incessantly editing who we are until we fit in. Or we do it to someone else. We try to edit the people around us.
I don’t know which is worse.
Most people would say it’s when we do it to someone else, but I don’t think either one’s a very healthy option.
Why do we love ourselves so little? Why are we suspect for trying to love ourselves, for being true to who and what we are rather than what someone else thinks we should be? We’re so ready to betray ourselves, but we never call it that. We have all these other terms to describe it: Fitting in. Doing the right thing. Getting along.
I’m not proposing a world solely ruled by rank self-interest; I know that there have to be some limits of politeness and compromise or all we’ll have left is anarchy. And anyone who expects the entire world to adjust to them is obviously a little too full of their own self-importance.
But how can we expect others to respect or care for us, if we don’t respect and care for ourselves? And how come no one asks, “If you’re so ready to betray yourself, why should I believe that you won’t betray me as well?”
“And then he dumped you—just like that?”
Mona nodded. “I suppose I should’ve seen it coming. All it seems we’ve been doing lately is arguing. But I’ve been so busy trying to get the new issue out and dealing with the people at Spar who are still being such pricks. . . .”
She let her voice trail off. Tonight the plan had been to get away from her problems, not focus on them. She often thought that too many people used Jilly as a combination den mother/emotional junkyard, and she’d promised herself a long time ago that she wouldn’t be one of them. But here she was anyway, dumping her problems all over the table between them.
The trouble was, Jilly drew confidences from you as easily as she did a smile. You couldn’t not open up to her.
“I guess what it boils down to,” she said, “is I wish I was more like Rockit Grrl than Mona.”
Jilly smiled. “Which Mona?”
“Good point.”
The real-life Mona wrote and drew three ongoing strips for her own bi-monthly comic book, The Girl Zone. Rockit Grrl was featured in “The True Life Adventures of Rockit Grrl,” the pen-and-ink-Mona in a semi-autobiographical strip called “My Life as a Bird.” Rounding out each issue was “Jupiter Jewel.”
Rockit Grrl, aka “The Menace from Venice”—Venice Avenue, Crow-sea, that is, not the Italian city or the California beach—was an in-your-face punkette with an athletic body and excellent fashion sense, strong and unafraid; a little too opinionated for her own good, perhaps, but that only allowed the plots to pretty much write themselves. She spent her time righting wrongs and combating heinous villains like Didn’t-Phone-When-He-Said-He-Would Man and Honest-My-Wife-and-I-Are-as-Good-as-Separated Man.
The Mona in “My Life as a Bird” had spiky blonde hair and jean overalls just as her creator did, though the real life Mona wore a T-shirt under her overalls and she usually had an inch or so of dark roots showing. They both had a quirky sense of humor and tended to expound at length on what they considered the mainstays of interesting conversation—love and death, sex and art—though the strip’s monologues were far more coherent. The stories invariably took place in the character’s apartment or the local English-styled pub down the street from it, which was based on the same pub where she and Jilly were currently sharing a pitcher of draught.
Jupiter Jewel had yet to make an appearance in her own strip, but the readers all felt as though they already knew her since her friends—who did appear—were always talking about her.
“The Mona in the strip, I guess,” Mona said. “Maybe life’s not a smooth ride for her either, but at least she’s usually got some snappy come-back line.”
“That’s only because you have the time to think them out for her.”
“This is true.”
“But then,” Jilly added, “that must be half the fun. Everybody thinks of what they should have said after the fact, but you actually get to use those lines.”
“Even more true.”
Jilly refilled their glasses. When she set the pitcher back down on the table there was only froth left in the bottom.
“So did you come back with a good line?” she asked.
Mona shook her head. “What could I say? I was so stunned to find out that he’d never taken what I do seriously that all I could do was look at him and try to figure out how I ever thought we really knew each other.”
She’d tried to put it out of her mind, but the phrase “that pathetic little comic book of yours” still stung in her memory.
“He used to like the fact that I was so different from the people where he works,” she said, “but I guess he just got tired of parading his cute little Bohemian girlfriend around to office parties and the like.”
Jilly gave a vigorous nod which made her curls fall down into her eyes. She pushed them back from her face with a hand that still had the inevitable paint lodged under the nails. Ultramarine blue. A vibrant coral.
“See,” she said. “That’s what infuriates me about the corporate world. The whole idea that if you’re doing something creative that doesn’t earn big bucks, you should consider it a hobby and put your real time and effort into something serious. Like your art isn’t serious enough.”
Mona took a swallow of beer. “Don’t get me started on that.”
Spar Distributions had recently decided to cut back on the non-superhero titles they carried and The Girl Zone had been one of the casualties. That was bad enough, but then they also wouldn’t cough up her back issues or the money they owed her from what they had sold.
“You got a lousy break,” Jilly told her. “They’ve got no right to let things drag on the way they have.”
Mona shrugged. “You’d think I’d have had some clue before this,” she said, more willing to talk about Pete. At least she could deal with him. “But he always seemed to like the strips. He’d laugh in all the right places and he even cried when Jamaica almost died.”
“Well, who didn’t?”
“I guess. There sure was enough mail on that story.”
Jamaica was the pet cat in “My Life as a Bird”—Mona’s one concession to fantasy in the strip since Pete was allerg
ic to cats. She’d thought that she was only in between cats when Crumb ran away and she first met Pete, but once their relationship began to get serious she gave up on the idea of getting another one.
“Maybe he didn’t like being in the strip,” she said.
“What wasn’t to like?” Jilly asked. “I loved the time you put me in it, even though you made me look like I was having the bad hair day from hell.”
Mona smiled. “See, that’s what happens when you drop out of art school.”
“You have bad hair days?”
“No, I mean—”
“Besides, I didn’t drop out. You did.”
“My point exactly,” Mona said. “I can’t draw hair for the life of me. It always looks all raggedy.”
“Or like a helmet, when you were drawing Pete.”
Mona couldn’t suppress a giggle. “It wasn’t very flattering, was it?”
“But you made up for it by giving him a much better butt,” Jilly said.
That seemed uproariously funny to Mona. The beer, she decided, was making her giddy. At least she hoped it was the beer. She wondered if Jilly could hear the same hysterical edge in her laugh that she did. That made the momentary good humor she’d been feeling scurry off as quickly as Pete had left their apartment earlier in the day.
“I wonder when I stopped loving him,” Mona said. “Because I did, you know, before we finally had it out today. Stop loving him, I mean.”
Jilly leaned forward. “Are you going to be okay? You can stay with me tonight if you like. You know, just so you don’t have to be alone your first night.”
Mona shook her head. “Thanks, but I’ll be fine. I’m actually a little relieved, if you want to know the truth. The past few months I’ve been wandering through a bit of a fog, but I couldn’t quite figure out what it was. Now I know.”
Jilly raised her eyebrows.
“Knowing’s better,” Mona said.
“Well, if you change your mind . . .”
“I’ll be scratching at your window the way those stray cats you keep feeding do.”