Hailey's War (6 page)

“It was Vietnam,” she told me. “I know what you're thinking, that it's Mexico, right? But I've never been to Mexico, and even if I had, my parents are from the north; it's dry as Arizona. There's no jungle there.”

Serena believed that not only had she served in Vietnam as an American GI, but that she had died there.

I must have looked skeptical, because she'd gone on. “I saw white men and black men in my dreams back when I'd only ever been around Mexicans,” she said. “Come on, where would I see a helicopter at that age? Five years old?”

“There are helicopters all over California,” I pointed out. “They're in the sky all the time.”

“Way up in the sky,” she corrected me. “Not down low where the sound of the blades feels like your own heart beating.” She placed her fist on her sternum. “I swear, Hailey. The first time I saw a helicopter
up close, on TV, I
knew
that sound. I had this feeling like someone walked over the place my grave is going to be.”

The dreams had stopped around the age of fifteen, when she'd been jumped into El Trece. “When
mi guerra nueva
started, I stopped dreaming about the old one,” was how she put it.

I don't think Serena told many people this story. At least she said she didn't. But she wore a pair of dog tags as jewelry, dangling low under her shirt. And somehow her gang brothers had sensed something of her beliefs, because among the cheery, innocuous gang monikers they gave one another—Droopy and Smiley and Shorty—they'd given Serena the name Warchild.

Two years after her juvenile conviction, Serena did a second stretch, this
time in jail. It was there that she finally began to let her hair grow. Jail was a clarifying time for her. She was eighteen now. By middle-class America's standards, that was barely out of childhood, but gangbangers aged differently. For them, twenty was virtually middle-aged. Serena, having survived to eighteen, was a
veterana
. She had some thinking to do about the future.

The movies spread an old, common misperception about gang life: the “blood in, blood out” thing. It was a saying that meant that your gang jumped you in with a bloody beating and you stayed in until you were cut down in a bloody premature death … or, if you tried to leave the life, that your own gang assassinated you.

The less exciting truth was that gang members left the life all the time, especially girls. It was
por vida
in name, but age and motherhood often slowed girls down, sidelined them from the life. Others went straight after doing jail time. A few were even “jumped out,” meaning they failed to be tough enough or ruthless enough for gang life, and were beaten by their gang as a contemptuous dismissal.

Serena was not married, nor was she tied down to a baby. And modesty aside, she was more than
veterana
, she was
leyenda
, a legend,
because of her exploits with El Trece. There were plenty of Serena stories in the neighborhood, not all of them true. Serena had jacked a pharmacy not just for prescription drugs, but carried away boxes and boxes of contraceptives that she'd distributed for free among the girls of her neighborhood. Serena had gone into Crip territory, Grape Street, and robbed a crack dealer there. In the sexy clothes of an aspiring actress, Serena had trolled Westwood and Burbank, stealing Mercedeses and Jaguars right from under the noses of the Beautiful People.

A reputation is capital, and in jail, Serena began to think about how she wanted to spend that capital.

She realized that she wanted to lead a girls' clique, a satellite to Trece, the kind she hadn't found when she moved to the neighborhood. And when it came time to name her
cliqua
, Serena knew one thing: It wasn't going to be the “Lady” anythings, an innocent naming convention some gangs borrowed from high-school athletics.

Serena named her girls the Trece Sucias. It didn't translate directly to English. To call them the 13th Street Dirty Girls just didn't say it. The name
sucias
could evoke different things, the nasty girls or the sexy girls, but it also suggested dirty hands, with blood and guilt on them.

For all the fearsomeness of the name, though, Serena had higher standards for her sucias than a lot of leaders would have set. She wouldn't take girls under fifteen, the
quinceanera
year being symbolic of womanhood in Hispanic culture. That might sound painfully young to the rest of America, but in gang life, it was a high standard—it wasn't uncommon for children to start banging at ten or eleven years old. And the two crimes that the Trece Sucias specialized in—car theft and pharmacy burglaries—were both nonviolent, if done with enough caution.

And Serena was careful. Her crew only knocked over a few pharmacies a year, at quiet suburban locations Serena carefully scouted, and while she and a trusted second raided the back for lucrative prescription drugs that Serena resold around her neighborhood, younger
girls swept the shelves of Pampers, baby food, cough syrup, and OTC meds—all things desperately needed among the young mothers of the barrio.

It would be nice to imagine Serena as a kind of urban feminist Robin Hood, but I knew better than to indulge in that kind of fantasy. Violence was inextricable from gang life: grudges and retaliations, attacks and counterattacks, beatings and shootings. I heard the stories Serena's girls told, thinking I didn't know enough Spanish to understand. And they routinely went around strapped, meaning carrying a gun.

But this lifestyle of retaliation and revenge was the price of having
familia
. In its perverse way, it was a virtue, the dark side of loyalty. Serena encouraged the same kind of loyalty among them that the guys had for one another. Unlike male gang members, though, girls affiliated with the same clique often fought viciously with one another, sometimes over gossip, more often over a boy. Serena said she'd never let her clique be divided over a man: “The sucias are for the sucias,” she told them. “We represent like the guys.”

I didn't learn all of this at once, of course. But after that first night, Serena was surprisingly open with me, given that we'd hardly known each other back in school, and that I'd once been the straightest of straight arrows, Cadet Hailey Cain.

I think that Serena had been waiting for someone she could talk to. She had to front around the guys, with whom sharing her feelings would have been a liability. And she cared for her sucias, but they were little more than children, with short attention spans and narrow worldviews. There wasn't anyone else like Serena in Serena's world. The person who came closest, skin color notwithstanding, was me.

Maybe she understood, too, that I'd honored her when, in time, I told her the full truth about why I had to leave West Point.

I'd like to say that I was wracked with guilt over telling her something I hadn't even shared with CJ, but it wasn't true. I didn't tell CJ because I knew he'd lie awake at night thinking about it. Serena wouldn't. She understood about bad luck.

The day after I told her, we went to the Beverly Center, L.A.'s cathedral of capitalism, and did something the rest of the world wouldn't understand but that made sense to us.

Perhaps it was inevitable that Serena started to kid me about getting initiated into her clique. She said I could become her second. I took it as gentle condescension. But she kept on it, asking me when I was going to take my beating, get jumped in for real. Slowly I began to realize that she wasn't entirely kidding, and I began to understand. The things that set me apart from her sucias were, in fact, assets—chief among them my white skin and blond hair. Those alone would make me the ideal driver on a pharmacy job. I was the anti-profile; any LAPD officer would think twice before pulling me over.

“Look at the way you live now,” she said one evening, watching me gingerly put makeup on a bruise I'd gotten in a bar fight. “Getting beat on, partying, sleeping until noon, no plans for the future—how is that any different from
la vida?”
She'd put an arm around me and looked at us in the mirror. “Come and be
mi gladia.”

“Gladius meus,”
I said.
My sword
. Serena had learned all the words that went with her warlike life
—milites, hostes, bellum, mors
—but she tended to hybridize them with Spanish. “And no thanks. I've seen the beatings that your girls give each other jumping them in, and those are bad enough. I don't want to go through the beatdown they'd give a white girl to make her prove herself.”

“Scared?” she said.

“You know better. But what's the point? I'd never be one of you. What would my street name be? Blondie?”

“The girls will accept you if they see I accept you. And they can learn from you. Nobody ever taught them anything about fighting, about protecting themselves.”

“Think about what you're asking me. To teach young gangbangers to be better shots, better at beating someone up? I really need
that
on my conscience.”

“You can teach them honor. Teach them when
not
to throw down, when to walk away.”

“Honor?” I'd said. “Been there, done that, didn't get the gold bars. Listen, Serena, I don't make moral judgments about what you're doing. I'm happy you've got something that means something to you. But it's not for me.”

She'd shrugged. “You'll come around,” she said. That was how we left things. The last time Serena came by my place, I was waiting for my ride up to San Francisco, my old Army duffel at my feet. Serena had pressed the five-shot Airweight into my hands, told me to watch out for myself, and then kissed me on both cheeks, like an old-style gangster.

We hadn't kept in contact. Ours wasn't the kind of friendship that would survive long-distance. Which is why it surprised me to learn that she was trying to get in touch with me.

My living situation in San Francisco was pretty simple: I rented a room over
the base of Aries Courier, in Japantown.

To get to my room, as I did when I came back from what had become a day's worth of pickups and drops, I had to walk through Aries's ground-floor space, which resembled a garage more than an office: bike frames and parts, freestanding filing cabinets, posters advertising bike races and rallies, a big, circa-1950s refrigerator full of Red Bull and Tupperware containers it was best not to open. When I came in, Motobecane over my shoulder, the owner, Shay Clements, was on the phone with his back to me.

Shay was a hard guy to figure out. Rather, he was the sort of person whom people assumed they understood immediately upon meeting him: bike messenger turned slightly bohemian entrepreneur. He was about thirty-five, six-foot-four with a straight, ice-blond ponytail and blue eyes and good facial bones. He still had the build of a cyclist. He wasn't married, and I didn't think he ever had been, but he would never lack for dates as long as there were coffeehouses and the kind of women who frequented them, looking for guys who were sexy in a left-wing way. You just looked at Shay and thought,
pesco-pollo-vegetarian, knows some yoga asanas, votes Democrat
.

In truth, like all blue-state small-business owners, Shay was remarkably Republican when it came to his own bottom line, full of complaints about regulations and taxes, and nearly as resentful of his own employees. Aries was all-1099, as riders put it, meaning everyone was an independent contractor, without job security or health insurance. This didn't do much to foster loyalty. Riders regularly quit Aries
without notice. This led Shay to look on his riders as irresponsible flakes. It was a vicious circle.

My relationship with him was a little better than that, largely because I was reliable. I didn't kiss his ass, but I didn't have to. As I'd told Jack, I was usually his top-earning rider. I got hurt sometimes, true, but I also rode hurt, so it didn't cost Shay any downtime. Beyond that, if Shay wasn't the warmest guy in the world, well, he probably thought the same about me.

Seeing me out of the corner of his eye, Shay waved me over, not interrupting his conversation on the phone. I came over without speaking, and he handed off a pink slip of paper, a phone message.
Please call Serena Delgadillo
.

Only then did I remember the call I hadn't answered on the bridge. I took out my cell and brought up the call log, and sure enough, there they were, Serena's familiar digits. I raised my eyebrows, but Shay had already turned back to what he was doing and didn't notice my surprise. I slipped the message into my bag, lifted my bike to my shoulders, and went up the stairs.

Once in my room, I hung the Motobecane on its hooks on the wall, then went over to my little half-height refrigerator. I took out a pint bottle of vodka, drank, then kicked off my shoes and lay down with my bare feet up on the wall.

I'd lived over Aries for nearly as long as I'd been in San Francisco—not quite a year—and I still didn't have enough possessions even to make this small room look lived in. There was the bed and a dresser and a mirror. The bathroom was down the hall, and the kitchen was the little refrigerator and a single-coil burner, with my few cooking supplies on a pair of high, plain shelves.

Had I been religious, a cross on the wall or a Buddhist altar would have given the room's bareness a kind of monastic sense. But I wasn't. Nor could I bring myself to care about personalizing the place. The things that made me who I was weren't on display, but under the bed, out of sight: My
Wheelock's Latin
, with my birth certificate and my only photo of my father tucked inside. A scarlet dress, never worn
and still in the box. My class ring, set with real West Point granite, and my cadet sword.

Feeling the vodka filtering into my bloodstream, feeling relaxed, I dialed Serena's number.

“Hailecita,”
she said. “It's been a while, eh?”