On a Clear Day

  “What we have to do is to stop the corporations and the political groups who want to tell us what to think, and what we should dream about, or what we should eat or wear, or what should amuse us according to what their accountants are telling them. On one hand, it’s not a lot to ask to be free to struggle on our own; on the other, it’s affecting the whole world, isn’t it?”

  “I think you’re being foolish, but I wish you luck,” Rafael said.

  “Thanks, Rafael.”

  We ate the rest of the meal with the kind of light conversation people save for good food and good friends. I loved it, even though I knew everyone was thinking on some level about what I had said, and none of us was comfortable.

  Finally, the dinner was over and Mrs. Rosario asked Lydia to bring out her dessert.

  She went into the living room and came back with an enormous plate piled high with sugar cookies. She looked at me and smiled, and then the plate fell from her hands and crashed onto the linoleum-covered floor.

  “Oh!” Mrs. Rosario cried.

  “All this talk about fighting has her upset!” Ramón said as Isobel and Mrs. Rosario started picking up the cookies.

  Over coffee, Rafael and Ramon agreed that the Mexican football league was prejudiced against other Latino teams. Anja asked Rafael if he knew that they played football in Czechoslovakia. Ramon said that they might play it there, but they weren’t really serious. Anja and I listened to football talk until she was falling asleep.

  Upstairs. Text message from Michael.

  M: Are you okay? We will need you in Florida.

  D: Yes, I’m all good.

  Before we drifted asleep, there was a knock on the door. I opened it and it was Lydia. She came in and looked around the room.

  “How you doing?” I asked.

  “Did you know I was smart?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Anja hugged Lydia.

  17

  Florida. It was sticky hot, and two minutes out of the airport, I was beginning to stink. Michael had made reservations for us downtown, but Drego wanted a different place to operate from.

  “The people I deal with don’t do well with security cameras,” he said.

  “Whatever.” Michael shrugged it off. “We go to our hotel first and make plans.”

  The drivers at the taxi stand were asking people where they wanted to go. It was clear that if you wanted to go to Gated Miami, they would take you. If you wanted to go anywhere else, you were on your own.

  We copped two cabs and went to the Paradise, a hotel-casino overlooking the water. It was beautiful. The outside of the hotel, with its steel- and glass-encrusted concrete, shimmered in the midafternoon sun. Anja said the building looked as if it was moving.

  The hotel had a security system like the airport’s. You stood near the scanner so they could scan your ID chip while they took your picture, and then you were given a key card, which, I presumed, matched your chip. There were bowls of fruit on the counter, and the vacant-looking dude with the plastic smile told us to help ourselves. Me, Anja, and Mei-Mei took fruit; the guys didn’t. I hoped the guys were hungry, and I knew I wasn’t going to share my fruit.

  “So what’s our plan?” Drego cut to the chase.

  “First, we need exact times, or as near to them as we can manage, of Natural Farming’s plans and of Sayeed’s plans,” Javier said.

  “Wait—if we know that Natural Farming is going to take over CTI, and we can show what it means …” Tristan was looking at Michael, not Javier. “Why can’t we just expose the whole deal?”

  “Because people don’t want to believe it’s bad for them,” Anja put in. “That’s the main reason we don’t fight back. It’s simpler to just close our eyes and hope for the best. We always look for the easy way out. Lose twenty pounds in ten days. Get a college degree in six months. When we face hard problems, things fall apart for us. We lose the innocence that questions what’s happening to us and go slouching off to Bethlehem or some other place. It’ll be easier for people to deal with if we give them something smaller, something a lot easier to hang on to, like a connection between Sayeed and Natural Farming.…”

  “Then they’ll be open to believing the bigger issue.” Tristan finished the sentence for Anja. “I get it.”

  “What’s Bethlehem got to do with this?” Javier.

  “Nothing, really,” Anja said.

  “Can we rely on any of the bloggers?” Mei-Mei.

  “If we can make it easy for them,” Michael said. “Nobody wants to stick their necks out.”

  Michael said we had to stay in touch with each other and to report any problems. As we were breaking up, he motioned to me.

  “You okay going with Drego?” he asked.

  “Yes, sure,” I said.

  “After this is over, we’ll have to find each other,” he said. He smiled.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said again.

  What the hell did that mean? Find each other. I wasn’t lost.

  Mei-Mei made a big show of kissing Drego before he and I left for our other locale. I guess that was her way of saying he was her man or something. Witch.

  Drego was driving. He was taking us through the streets to a motel that he said the gangs would respect.

  “We have to make a stop first,” he said.

  Drego seemed jumpy, and there were little beads of sweat on his upper lip. He was driving too fast, as if he was pissed, blowing by black teenagers standing around in the streets. One of them pointed a gun at the car but Drego didn’t stop. The housing here was six times worse than in the Bronx. We passed rows of stacked shipping containers, painted garish colors and with windows cut into the corrugated tin. This was what was passing for housing here.

  Drego was on two phones. I hoped he wouldn’t kill us on the way. He went down a narrow street, past a one-legged man sitting in a wheelchair, and stopped in front of a small store.

  “We’ll get out here,” he said.

  Drego was on the street. I opened my door and tried not to notice the stench.

  “Don’t worry, we look the part,” Drego said.

  We did. He was black and lean, and I was Latina. I could have been his woman. He was back on the phone again, this time giving his coordinates.

  “Yeah, yeah.” He was talking into the phone and looking around. “Two minutes.”

  He took me to the corner, took a deep breath, and held up two fingers for me to see. Okay, we were going to be picked up. Down the street, a man and woman hustled along pushing a baby in a shopping cart. The man had a limp. It was a third world country with the walking wounded roaming the streets. They stopped and stared at us.

  That’s what the world had come to, people being scared of each other, people eyeing each other suspiciously even though they didn’t have anything to steal. Everything that wasn’t in the gated community was up for grabs, even lives.

  The couple stood watching us, and I moved closer to Drego. I put my head on his shoulder so it looked as if we had something going on. He smelled like aftershave lotion. The couple moved on, the woman nervously peering behind her as they passed on the other side of the street. From my window in the Bronx, it would have been an interesting scene; up close, it was just sad.

  I saw the one-legged guy in the wheelchair roll up to the car. He nodded toward us, and Drego nodded back.

  The car that approached us had a body that was nearly rusted through, but the sound of the engine was strong. I held my breath as it pulled up.

  “Yo, Slice!” Drego.

  Drego threw up a halfhearted black power salute and got in next to the driver. The back door opened and I half slid, half got pulled, into the rear seat. Drego ran his greetings and started laughing. I’m sitting on some big black dude’s lap. Shit. There was another guy sitting next to us with a sprayer, a sawed-off automatic weapon. I wondered if I was going to live until sundown.

  The guy whose lap I was sitting on didn’t say boo to me. The only ones who talked were the drive
r and Drego.

  “You meet this Sayeed dude?” Drego.

  “Yeah, he talked a lot of shit,” the driver, a long-headed guy answered. “Little Frankie was dealing with him mostly. They hit it off good.”

  “Who’s Little Frankie?”

  “He runs West Side,” Long Head said. “His father’s a cop.”

  Lap Guy shifted, and I wondered if he was trying to cop a cheap thrill. I didn’t move.

  We drove for a few minutes, around one block twice, and then pulled into a driveway. Drego got out. I was glad to get some fresh air.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “We got to be doing this again, sister,” Lap Guy said.

  Not anytime soon, I thought.

  There was a guy in front of the building. He said something to Drego that sounded like “slap,” and Drego raised his hands chest high and a little away from his body. The guy frisked Drego quickly but thoroughly. Then he came to me.

  “Slap!”

  I raised my hands and he went over my body. Then he stood aside, and the door opened. Typical gang stuff, I thought.

  Inside, the scene was like an old master painting, except instead of some beautiful Italian chick in robes, with the sun coming through the window, and fruit and a silver bowl on the table, there was a dingy room with red shiny drapes and lacy curtains that could have been either off-white or beige. What gave the room its old master look was a hard yellow light that came from a corner lamp. It was a reading lamp that formed a conical beam, bathing the gloomy-assed room in gold. The tacky chairs around the table were old and not too sturdy-looking.

  The room smelled like tobacco, or maybe tobacco and air freshener. Either way, I felt like puking. The guy who had searched us pointed to two chairs, and we sat down. I wanted to know what Drego thought about this, but I didn’t want to ask him. I did ask myself why I wasn’t scared when I thought I should be. Then it came to me that this was all a little lame. The dude who had searched me was real enough, but the scene, in a shabby room like this, was surreal. When another black guy and a girl came in and sat at the table, I wasn’t expecting much. The guy was light-skinned, good-looking, with really neat cornrows. He was dressed casual, but his clothes were tailored. Good cut, good style.

  The chick was a step-down. She might have been young once, but it was hard to tell when.

  The guy was smoking a blunt and offered it to Drego. Drego took a puff and passed it to me, and I just passed it to the chick.

  “You don’t indulge?” the girl asked. Skinny brown-skinned girl looking out of a pimply face through shiny eyes.

  “Not when I’m working,” I said.

  She smiled. Bad teeth. Crack hag.

  “Thanks for letting us drop by,” Drego started in. “You got my message. What’s happening on your end?”

  “This guy Sayeed is coming in, dealing heavy paper,” Cornrows said. “He’s getting everybody’s attention and talking about bringing some power to the streets. You know, you can rap all you want, but if the backbeat is pure Benjamins, you going to get some ears perking up.”

  “Word.” Drego.

  I was supposed to be paying attention, but instead I was stumbling around Dante’s circles looking for an exit. Cornrows was running his mouth about the money that Sayeed was passing out and how everybody was lining up to get their palms covered, and the crack hag was fumbling through her works! She was flicking her needle with her index finger right there in front of me. I was busting my eyeballs trying to blink them back into my head, and she was flicking the end of the needle.

  Girl, don’t tell me you are going to shoot up in front of us!

  Drego was steady on Cornrow’s case, like that fat detective on reality television, pumping questions a mile a minute. Cornrow glanced at the girl and then made a gesture like “the hell with it,” and he kept running his mouth to Drego.

  She was skin popping, injecting herself under the skin. I was thinking she either couldn’t find a vein or she was still kidding herself about having a light chippy. Either way, the voice in her mental GPS was lying to her.

  Out on the street again. Back in the same car. On the dude’s lap. He fondled my breast and I moved his hand.

  “You’d be nice to play with,” he said in my ear.

  I didn’t answer.

  “What do you think?” Drego asked. We reached our car and Drego laid some green on the one-legged man who was watching it for us. We were driving again and I resumed breathing.

  “He’s light, she’s sick, and these people are primitives,” I said.

  “Put that down in your game book,” Drego said. “They’ve been doing this shit for fifty years. In the nineties, they were steady pumping guns into the ghettoes, building low-level mini-armies, and letting us shoot up each other. They’re still doing it. You’re not going to find any favelos anywhere in the country with sophisticated weapons.

  “You can control primitives. They think they got power because they got bows and arrows, or slingshots, or Glocks … whatever, but any weapons can be taken back whenever the man, or the army, or C-8, or whoever else is in charge wants to take them. All they got to do is to balance the weapons they let them have with the amount of drugs they let them have, and everything remains static.”

  “What about Sayeed?”

  “Sayeed is just another punk with a name and a half-assed rep,” Drego said.

  “The guy back there said he was dealing a lot of cash,” I said.

  “My grandfather once said to me that when blacks were segregated, the police, they didn’t bother black businesses.” Drego turned up a street and sped up past some guys huddled around a garbage can on a corner. “You could have a few dollars in your mattress, but you couldn’t buy anything. You couldn’t buy a boat because you wouldn’t have any place to put it. You couldn’t buy a house unless it was in the ghetto. You couldn’t buy a diamond watch unless it was worth half of what you had to pay for it. Sayeed is showing big money, but it won’t do him any good. That’s why all the dope dealers used to get caught. They couldn’t spend their money, so they showed it off and got busted. Sayeed hasn’t learned that yet.”

  “So you’re not scared of Sayeed?”

  “Yeah, I’m scared of him,” Drego said. “He’s paying the brothers in the city with paper, and they’re paying him with some phony power. Power will get your ass higher than crack any day in the week.”

  “I guess.” I was already trying to figure a way to include what Drego was saying in my computer model.

  “We’re just driving around?” I asked. I was seeing the same scenes.

  “Got to make sure we’re not being followed.” Drego.

  “What if we are?”

  “Then we give up more information than we have to,” Drego said.

  “How did you get into swinging with Michael?” I asked.

  “Everybody wants the same thing,” Drego answered. “We all want respect, a good life, and whatever else makes it on television. If we can’t get top tier, we go for second. If we can’t get second, we go for whatever we can get our hands on. Sometimes it gets down to fighting in the gutter for crumbs. I was fighting a step up from the gutter. When Michael called, he offered me the same fight I was already dealing.”

  “But on a higher level.”

  “Something like that—hey, who’s that girl over there?”

  He slowed the car down. There was a person on the corner, small in the light from a lamppost. It could have been the crack hag we had just seen. Or another one.

  “Get in the back,” Drego said. “Quick!”

  I scampered over the back into the small rear seat. Drego stopped the car a few feet from the girl. He got out quickly and walked around the front. As she turned, he swung at her. I couldn’t believe it! He grabbed her off the ground and headed toward the backseat. I unlocked the door, and in a heartbeat there was a body across my lap.

  Drego was in the front seat and we were moving again.

  “Keep her head down!” he
said.

  I pushed her head between my legs and clamped down. She was whimpering, and I felt like shit. What were we doing?

  Anja had said that all the players in C-8 were true believers. They thought they deserved everything they got and the rest of us were holding them up. Was this what we were doing? Were we becoming true believers and saying it was okay to treat people like dirt?

  We drove for two minutes until we got near an empty lot. Drego stopped the car, pulled the girl’s head up, and pulled her face close to his.

  “Who’s Pretty Boy work for?” he asked. “Who’s the guy Sayeed is dealing with?”

  “What?” she was asking. Only it came out “Wha?”

  “Who the fuck is Pretty Boy dealing for?” Drego said again. “I ain’t got all night. She’s going to kill you if you don’t give it up.”

  The girl twisted her head as much as she could with Drego holding her by the jaw. When she turned her face toward me, I saw it was the same chick who was shooting up before.

  “Conrad,” the girl mumbled.

  “Conrad Butler?” Drego. “And don’t lie or she’ll shoot you.”

  “Yeah. Really.” She was twisting again, obviously scared, trying to see what I was doing. I slid my hand behind my back.

  “Get rid of her.” Drego.

  I opened the door, and she started moving away from me. I put my foot on her back and pushed her. Drego had the car moving as she hit the ground.

  “Conrad Butler is from Atlanta. He took over half the South when things were getting dicey around five years ago,” Drego said. “Get in the front again so dudes don’t think I’m pimping you.”

  “How?”

  “Blackouts,” Drego said. “Anybody who stood up against him got killed along with their whole families. He’s a total scumbag.”