Little Bastards in Springtime (46 page)

Sava laughs into my ear. I feel her whole body taking up space beside me, I feel her moving and breathing like she’s in the room.

“You should come out here, the light is amazing,” I say. “We could go to university together or something. I’ll write all my shit down, like you told me to, and get clearer about things. Whatever it takes. It’s paradise, I promise you.”

‡ ‡ ‡

T
HE OFFICE BUILDING GLITTERS INSANELY IN
the sun, like a giant blood diamond thrown carelessly into a desert wasteland. I sit in the car, waiting for Rosario to come out. I watch shiny limos go by with tinted windows, I watch the red-bloomed bushes sway in the ocean breeze, I flip through radio channels, landing on PBS shows that explain the world with complicated words, religious shows that bury it in hot-headed warnings, country and hip hop for eardrums of various colours, Mexican drug ballads with accordion combos and full brass bands.

Rosario opens the back door, dumps a kilo of paper on the seat, swings in beside me. She’s very athletic for a lawyer.

“Drive, Jevrem,” she says. “Get me out of here. They just don’t care that their employees can barely get by. They would let people starve to death to protect their profit margin.” She sighs, takes off her sunglasses, rubs her eyes.

We drive five minutes, then get out of the car, and Rosario skips around on the beach, calling out to the ocean birds and shouting at me to relax, to open up, to get my heart pumping in my chest.

“That’s what California is good for,” she shouts at me. “You need to
moooove.
Come on, let’s run for a bit.”

“I can move, if I want,” I say. “When cops are chasing me.”

She shakes her head. “You and your uncle, so tough.”

We’re running side by side on the sand and she’s calling out,
isn’t this amazing
, and I’m nodding, trying to catch my breath, wondering what happened to my soccer lungs from childhood, hearing Pero’s and Mahmud’s sharp high cries for the ball all around me. It’s the birds. Rosario grabs my arm and pulls me toward the water.

“Hey,” I say, “I’ve got clothes on.”

“Oh, who cares? Come on, Jevrem, live a little.”

Then I’m tumbling under foamy waves, every part of me going in a different direction, all my cells and molecules shifting around. The sun and Rosario’s face appear and disappear, I go limp, I learn to breathe bubbles.

Sitting on the hood of the car, we watch water pool around us then run in narrow rivulets down the slope and over the edge. Rosario tells me about meeting wild Ujak Luka, a crazy man, a tornado in his own skin, a jittery mofo who did everything hard, liquor, coke, women, running from nightmares. And then one day, from one moment to the next, he went sane.

“He went through the eye of a needle, I don’t know which
needle, but on the other side he was a fine specimen.” Rosario smiles. “Ask him about that,” she says, “how that’s possible.”

I stop at a hundred stop signs, I make a thousand turns, Rosario shouting directions at me as we race through a maze of neighbourhoods with squat bungalows, ornamental shrubs, stubby palm trees, open-air carports. Brakes smoking, gears grinding, anything to avoid L.A. highways. We get home to buildings on fire with sunset light. Baby Jevrem-Javier is shrieking for dinner, the young globe-hopping farmhands with wise baby-faces are walking off the fields. In their quarters a bonfire is being lit. Tonight, like every night, they’ll sit around, smoke weed, strum guitars, sing folksongs from the tune-in-drop-out give-peace-a-chance days, have serious and informed discussions about how to save the world, lie facing up at the stars, asking each other how to think about a hundred billion galaxies. In the kitchen, Ujak Luka is feeding thirty academics from Mexico City with produce and chickens. A think-tank, Ujak Luka tells me, is not only something for right-wing business magnates and cranky ex-generals. If Papa weren’t rafting on the river of time, he’d love it here, talking all night long with people just like him, obsessed with a better life for the poor bastard underclasses of the world. He’d learn Spanish for that, for sure.

When I’ve finished eating with them, I wander outside and join the farmhand kids and smoke and toke with them, sitting on an orange crate. They ask questions like, what’s it like living in a socialist country? And I reply, I don’t know, I was born too late. And, what’s it like living in fascist times? And I say, it’s like a dream that starts off okay then slowly turns strange, with normal people acting bizarrely, letting their fear be turned into paranoid ideas, and just when you think it can’t get more
surreal, just when you’re hoping to wake up, it turns into a nightmare more mean and fucked-up and savage than anything you could have thought up in your own twisted imagination. Then you’re doing things you never knew you could do, and you’re seeing things that shouldn’t be in this world, and you’re escaping to places you never knew existed. You’re fighting for your life, basically. That’s what I tell them, but it doesn’t really describe the runaway-train feeling of terror watching everything good being forsaken right in front of your eyes.

W
HEN
everyone’s asleep, I take Ujak Luca’s beat-up van like they said I could and drive into L.A., into the basin full of cities, looking for angels and devils. It’s heaven to be at the wheel and I cruise the streets of South Central, searching for their city of flames, their militias of unemployed, their spring of rage and riots, their tribal deceptions, Crips and Bloods, Latinos and Asians. To understand, to make the connections, that’s what everyone’s telling me to do, between here and there, then and now, my history, their history. Because the people here were divided and conquered too, set to battling among themselves, their power destroyed. I think about Baka and her idea of righteousness, and take in the wide sprawling roads, the low, flat buildings, the towering street lamps and electrical poles. I cruise along slowly, I light up a fat organic spliff, I think about Dušan and his smoky room, the twins, how they moved like one little creature, Mama and Papa, how they fitted together perfectly when they argued, when they talked, when they laughed and worked hard, the family acting like life would be normal forever, like families do. Of Sava, my comrade-in-arms, how I love her even if it’s doomed, or maybe it isn’t.
(Tell me, Sava,
after you’ve read this and given it some thought.)
Of the Bastards, our nights of fevered action and days of floating about without a clue.

The radio blasts thrashy Euro-punk and I see Sarajevo, a grey day, when the clouds are heavy and thick as smoke, when they hang so low they brush the roofs and cars and pavement of the streets. The kind of day when Dušan and his friends would drift through the streets smoking and joking and looking for a laugh. And I think about how you go on when life has been wrecked, how you build a new one, who you blame, who you forgive. I take in the concrete-box stores, the hut-houses and tiny bungalows, the large chain-link-bordered yards, the grassy alleyways, the tangles of phone wires, the pink walls, the turquoise window frames, the giant bulbous graffiti. I search for colours and territories, spot Korean convenience stores, Ethiopian jazz clubs, Mexican grills. The palm trees give that vacation vibe, the cypress trees make me feel at home.

My deepest gratitude to Jackie Kaiser, Chris Casuccio, Jane Warren, Phyllis Bruce, and Andrea Griggs.

KATJA RUDOLPH
was born in Sussex, England, and moved to Canada with her family when she was seven. She holds an Mphil in social and political sciences from king’s College, Cambridge, and a phd in theory and policy studies from the university of toronto. She lives with her partner and two children near toronto and is at work on her third novel.

Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.