The Front of the Freeway (5 page)

Immediately, a stout, white tank-top hurls into Tony, dragging him down to the crumbled rock floor under a mass of furious, twisting muscle. The second white shirt moves to help but Pauly snaps a heavy, bullying fist into his lips, a pool of blood rushing from his mouth down his neck, dying the crisp white cotton on his chest a warm shade of crimson. Pauly snatches the blood-soaked cloth and holds the sagging body up by the collar, matching his first hit with two sickening, fracturing blows, splashes of hot red blood peppering the cold grey concrete. Tony clings desperately to the bulging, flexed arms pinning him to the alley floor, writhing under the weight of a heaving, grunting body as Martín leaps from the van and scrambles across the lot towards him. Impulsively, I jump from the truck after him, squeezing my knuckles into a fist and making straight for the lanky Korean, pushing himself up from the gravel with one hand, cupping a swollen cheek with the other. Without a thought, without hesitation, I throw the whole of my weight into a wild, lunging punch, a cloud of chemicals blotting my vision, numbing adrenaline in control of my limbs. This isn’t my fight, I know that, but there’s something there, some faint loyalty wrapped up in even fainter familiarity with this group, and above all some eager allegiance to Tony. Besides, I’m in as deep as any of them now, and I if I have to choose, I know my side.

My fist carries cleanly through the Korean’s sharp chin as smoothly as if I had hit air, but the jolt spins him in a short circle as he collapses back to the dirt. Half diving, half falling, I crash on his limp, folded body and pin it against the turf, locking his arms to his back for good measure. Behind me, Martín takes two hurried steps and snaps his foot into the ribs of Tony’s hulking, grappling blanket, a piercing crack and an agonizing scream erupting from his lungs. Pauly drops the wilted body from his fist, finally letting it sag motionless to the concrete, and tears the other cursing, panting figure off of Tony. With a sharp knee against the wrestler’s cracked rib, Pauly rolls him to the ground and extends a hand to his friend.

Tony lies still on his back for a moment, gasping and staring blankly up at Pauly’s outstretched paw, still tinted a dark, wet scarlet, but after a moment he grasps it and rolls to his feet, brushing gravel off of his shirt and jeans as he fights to steady his breath. After a moment, Tony turns to survey the lot, one blood-sopped cadaver draped motionless over the alley floor, the other squirming meekly beneath me, and suddenly a vicious laugh explodes from his lips, a sinister, primal yelp lost somewhere between relief and pleasure.

“Five for the white rice, five for the brown rice, five for the teriyaki,” he barks, dragging me off the whimpering general by the back of my shirt. He rolls the Korean onto his back and jams the flat of his shoe against his neck, digging his laces into the gashed and swollen chin beneath his foot. “That’s fifteen grand, you stupid fuck! Fifteen!” He punctuates
fifteen
by shifting his weight onto the Korean’s jugular, the veins around his collar bulging and squirming under Tony’s shoe. “And now look at you. You’re all dirty!” Tony draws his foot back and sharply kicks his heel into the beaten customer’s nose, another shriek and another spray of blood bursting from him as he rolls onto his stomach, hands cradling his shattered face. Tony stoops next to him and grabs the brown paper sack with one hand, resting his other on the back of the Korean’s shaved, trembling head. “If I were you, I’d get the fuck out of Los Angeles.”

Without another word, Tony turns and climbs into the van, brown lunch-sack in hand, Pauly and Martín filing in silently behind him. I scramble in close behind, taking one brief glance back across the empty lot, now strewn with three humbled bodies soaking in tiny, swelling puddles of blood. Tony slaps the back doors closed behind me as Pauly slumps into the driver’s seat and twists the van’s roaring heartbeat to life. With a lurch and a groan, we slide out of the alley as softly as we entered.

Nobody says a word at first, Martín huddled mutely behind the cooler, Tony tapping his fingers pensively along the plastic tubs, still lined neatly across the floor of the trunk ready for normal business. I watch the scales’ glowing electronic screens flicker and quiver as the numbers oscillate with the soft vibration of the engine, three darting cat-eyes flashing fiendishly in the cool dark of the cabin. After a minute under the erratic growl of a stammering transmission, Tony plucks the thin roll of paper from the front of his ice-cream apron, now streaked with long webs of blood hanging between the thin bars of color, and draws a lighter from his jeans. With his hands wrapped around the lighter’s hot, flickering crown, he dips the tip of the stem into the flame, inhales slowly, and turns his eyes on Martín.

“Hey, David Beckham, when the fuck did you learn to kick like that?” Martín grins modestly at the floor while Pauly erupts in agreement from the driver’s seat, shouting about Pelé and the Mexican Adam Vinatieri between fits of profane and incoherent acclamation. Tony passes Martín the crisp, smoking stalk of a reward, which Martín eagerly accepts, pinching the paper with a quietly satisfied smile. After two long drags and two slow breaths, Martín passes me the stem and I gladly accept, happy to soothe the furious chemicals still churning in my gut, content to forget the pools of blood drying in the alley behind us. Therapists call it work-related stress. By the time we leave Koreatown, the empty, frozen truck gives way to the warm, quieting haze of Tony’s cigarette, the hot and panicked anger of the transaction washed gently away in deep, straining breaths. Another right, another left, another half-burnt stem, and the van rocks to a halt half a block from my house.

Tony kicks the doors open again, crawling out of the van somewhat more slowly this time, a wide breath of fog following him out onto the street. I hardly recognize it at first, the dark patch of road in front of my neighbor’s house vibrating gently through the smoke, but Tony calls for me, and I stagger out of the truck to meet him. From behind the truck, I can see the front of my house, bright flashes of blue and white light painted onto the windows by a flickering television, my father likely unconscious on the couch in front of it, but Tony slams the doors behind us and turns to me, sprawling red veins engulfing the whites of his eyes.

“Look, Julian, I told you I didn’t need you to do anything,” he starts, squinting at me carefully through the failing evening light. “I didn’t think anything like that was going to happen—just kids trying to make a name, you know?”

“Yeah, I know,” I lie, unconvinced this is going to blow over as smoothly as he would like me to think. But this is his world, not mine, so I just nod and focus on keeping my bloodshot eyes attached to his.

“I just wanted you to take it all in, you know? I told you that you didn’t need to get involved. But you did. You helped me out back there, and I won’t forget that.” I hardly noticed Tony’s hand still sewn to the neck of the lunch-sack, but now he digs out three crisp, forest-green, paper rolls from the wrinkled brown bag and jams them into my jeans pocket. I stare blankly at my pocket for a second, bulging with more than I could have made at the kitchen in a month, and then at Tony, an amused, sideways smile cutting across his cheek.

“Freezers, ice-cream trucks. You’re not a typical drug dealer, Tony.” Tony’s wry smirk unfolds into a soft laugh, as gentle and charming as the mist still seeping from the back of the van.

“I told you, man, I’m no drug dealer. I’m a CEO. And you’re going to be one, too.” My head cocks to an angle as I search his ruby eyes for meaning. A dealer, a CEO; above all else, he’s a salesman, and tonight I’m his audience, but I bite anyway.

“How’s that?”

“Because you’re smart. There’s some kind of genius bubbling around down here, but it’s not the kind of smarts Rodrigo or your Dad or any of them want to think about. It’s the kind of genius that scares them, that creeps around in the dark and chews up their nightmares. That’s us, JT. Smart. Their worst nightmare.” Dreams, nightmares; puddles of blood and rolls of hundred-dollar bills. Hanging around Tony, it’s hard to tell the difference. But he was right when he said we’re cellmates. He started out in the same dead-end, punch-clock, nine-to-five prison I’m in, and I don’t think I could stand living if I didn’t believe there was something else out there, something worth clawing out of here for. If there’s even a chance he knows the way, I’ll follow him, at least until we’re on the other side. But I wonder just how far down he’ll have to take me first. “You work tomorrow?”

Work. Grease, plates, and Rodrigo. The thought washes over me like a cold sweat, and Tony must have seen that, because his smile twists to a knowing grimace and he nods sympathetically.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. I’ll pick you up at 3:30.” With that he turns and disappears into the truck, a gust of smoke puffing out from the cracked door, Pauly happily bellowing at Martín inside. The truck wobbles and jolts, and soon I’m standing alone in the street, the dimming smoke clearing from my skull, fading with the gurgling motor of the truck.

3:30 tomorrow. Tony never asks, so you can never say no. But as I roll my thumb over three thousand dollars folded snugly in my pocket, I’m not sure that I could.

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

—Oscar Wilde

“See, the problem is, a lot of these guys who need money are stupid motherfuckers. They need money so they go where all the money is—a bank or a gas station, or Blockbuster or whatever. And they walk in there with a gun thinking that JP Morgan or Tommy Arco never thought someone might show up and say, ‘oh, um, hey, give me the register.’ And why do you think these men go in here, JT?”

“I don’t know, Tony, why?”

“Because they are stupid motherfuckers! Are you a stupid motherfucker, Julian?”

4:05. Tony’s a half-hour late and he’s already preaching, chopping a flattened hand against the steering wheel with every exasperated line as we wind through the patchy afternoon traffic.

“I’m still listening to you. I must be out of my mind.”

“Yes, that’s fine, but you are not dumb. You are not going to walk into Shell in a ski mask and think the cops won’t be there in 30 seconds, or that Jacky Chan behind the register isn’t going to go ape shit with a machete. We are not suicidal, and we are not dumb.”

We are parking. Tony’s silver matchbox purrs to a halt out front of Sarah’s Baby Barn and Tony pulls his flat, black bill down to his tinted, glass eyes. He drops another hat in my lap, turning to reach for a simple black pistol in the back seat. He never said where we were going, but he might have mentioned who we were riding with.

“No. Fucking…no.”

“No? No, what?”

“I’m not about to stick up Baby Gap, Tony!”

“Why the hell not?”

“What do you mean why not? I’m not going to shoot some old woman over fifty bucks!”

“With what, this? This shit isn’t even loaded, it’s just for show.” Tony the maestro waves his gun like an orchestra wand, and I’m losing a staring match with the dim, hollow eye at the tip of the barrel. “Come on, no one’s going to die—look, stop shaking your head and listen! Grandma runs her little business and can’t hire a lot of help; can’t buy a lot of security, right? But I bet she’s got a few hundred in that register. We walk in there and wave this bitch around, borrow a couple dollars from fucking… Becky’s baby shower, and bounce. No cameras, no bother. Cops won’t be here for another twenty minutes, and there’s your rent in sixty seconds, alright?” Tony punctuates alright with a jab at my shoulder, a flexed knot against the little cannon’s cold metal nose.

“I’m not doing it.”

“You want to go wash some more dishes instead?”

“Better than breaking rocks.”

A smirking white crescent cuts across Tony’s narrow jaw. “You got all these rules in your head, JT, and they’re not going to help you. You want to die with your head in a sink?”

Tony rests his hands coolly on the steering wheel and I still don’t understand how this is all so easy for him. My knuckles are still tender from yesterday’s meeting, and now he wants to do business with a baby-store at gunpoint. With the tip he left me last night, I can’t imagine he needs to risk an armed robbery for a couple hundred dollars, either. There’s something else going on here, I know it. He’s not dumb. There’s a bigger picture. Maybe I just can’t see it yet, but if the alternative is back in the kitchen, harpooning my palms on kitchen blades for a piggy-bank salary, then maybe he’s got a point. No cameras, no security. A couple hundred dollars from an overpriced Fisher Price crib, and nobody gets hurt. Maybe all I need is a jump start, something to build on, and maybe all that’s in my way is the lock on that register. Maybe all I need is Tony’s help, and he just needs to see how far I’m willing to go. Through the display window I can see the little metal box on the counter and a pump somewhere in my chest starts pushing battery acid through my arms and lungs.

“Alright, give me the gun.”

I’m shadowing Tony through a frail white doorframe into a pink-and-blue nightmare, four estrogen-caked walls surrounding a labyrinth of stuffed animals. I try to glance coolly at the register, but I freeze instead, my foot sunk and hooked in a feathery bog of plush purple carpet; through the display window, I hadn’t noticed a grey haired relic hunched over a walker next to the clerk’s counter. The old woman stands in a cramped arch, spine climbing like a rollercoaster track to the hunch of her back before dipping off towards her neck and swooshing around to the rigidly cocked boarding station in her skull. She turns, smiles, and nods her ancient grey head kindly at me.

Fuck.

Maybe she’s aged beyond reliable testimony, but I can’t execute a decent robbery with the Golden Girls watching any better than I could stick up my own grandmother. Suddenly, I feel sheepish standing next to a yellow baby crib dressed like the Unibomber. I look for a cue from Tony, but my partner is distracted, busy stashing an expensive looking baby-monitor in his obnoxious, zebra-print jacket.