The Starshine Connection (10 page)

“What men?” Kiko said, all innocence. He picked up a French fry and bit it in half. He was determined to be a man in Slayton’s
eyes, but the steam from the food brought his appetite roaring up.

“The
cholos,”
Slayton said. “The ones who hit you. The ones who chased us.”

“Oh,
them,”
Kiko said, as if only a dummy could not see the connection. “Sure. They chase me. They hit Kiko all the time.”

“I need to know—”

“But the
cholos
are nice to me too!” Kiko interrupted. His initiative was a good sign. “They say I’m a
cholo.
They let me smoke up with them. Kiko gets
stoooooonnned.
They laugh at him, but I get them back because they get
stoooonned
and Kiko laughs. Right back at them!”

“Is that why they still come around?”

“No. They don’t really pay attention to Kiko anymore. Except to hit him; they still hit him.” Apparently Kiko thought of himself
in the first, second, and third person simultaneously. He chewed in pouting silence for a while, having dredged up less pleasant
memories. At last, he looked back up. “They come back for Mercy.”

Slayton did not understand.

“Mercy is Kiko’s girlfriend. They all said Kiko did not have a girlfriend, that he was ugly. But Mercy is my girlfriend. She
gave me a kiss. My girlfriend. She gave them a kiss too. But she’s my girlfriend.” The way Kiko repeated the word, it sounded
as if even he did not really believe it.

Slayton tried to tread as lightly as possible. “Tell me about Mercy, Kiko.”

He had hoped to key a specific memory in Kiko—everything seemed to be a stimulus for a short, episodic version of reality.
Apparently Slayton did not need to lever it out of Kiko; there was only one real episode, and Kiko explained his memory of
it as best he could. As he spun the story out in halting phrases, clearly embarrassed by some of it, Slayton was able to synthesize
it into the series of events that most likely had taken place.

Even high on dope, someone like Kiko would have very limited entertainment value for the low-riders who abused him. There
was no way to humiliate him—he’d do anything to keep from getting beaten up, or simply to attempt in the only way he knew
to win some kind of favor—so the answer lay in the outrageousness of things Kiko could be convinced to do.

The
cholos
had tired of pounding on him. The jump to sexual humiliations was an easy and obvious one. Slayton knew that eighty percent
of Chicano slang had to do with sex or bodily functions, in that disproportionate way that all slang has of reducing its users
to biological basics.

They had stoked him on dope and wine, then torn off his clothes, then shoved him into a back bedroom with a
pichón
who was at least as well-fortified. She was crudely sexy, jammed as she was into tight black underwear which she slowly peeled
away. The
cholos
had crowded into the narrow room to watch, and laughed raucously as Kiko found himself the father of a wholly unwilling and
misunderstood erection. He ejaculated just as unwillingly, to the coarse adulation of his audience. The girl did a wholly
unexpected thing, whether motivated by pity or by the load of dope in her, no one would ever know. She strode over, a bit
wobbly but purposefully, and kissed Kiko on the cheek. There were tears in her eyes.

Slayton doubted whether this was Mercy—or if there was even anyone by that name—but was sure that this had been the woman
of Kiko’s fantasies, his girlfriend.

“She was so pretty,” Kiko kept saying, as if that made everything alright. It seemed to soothe him.

The preliminaries dispensed with, the
cholos,
at least five of them, proceeded to take their pleasure with the woman in the bedroom… and with Kiko. Kiko had probably kneeled
before every member in the gang at one time or another, and it did nothing to keep the crap from getting pummelled out of
him, save for providing delays between stompings.

It was also clear that Kiko had been given Starshine, described as
agua fria,
cold water. Low-riders certainly could not afford the stuff if they were not linked up in some way with the manufacturing
and distribution ring itself. The evidence was shaky, but coalescing fast. Kiko’s reference to Starshine was clearly distinctive
from the times the
cholos
had invested niggling portions of their
mota
and liquor. He also thought that Kiko might make more effective deterrent evidence against the use of Starshine for someone
like Anna Drake than all the preaching he might do. It was entirely possible Kiko had been screwed up chemically by the special
moonshine.

“Kiko, I want you to go back to the barrio with me. I want you to point out the
cholos
to me. They won’t see us this time. Understand?” It was the only possibility Slayton had.

“Sure,”
said Kiko, polishing off his french dip. “We’ll hide. They won’t see you, they won’t see Kiko. But Kiko will see them!”

“Then we’ll go see Mercy. Would you like to see your girlfriend, Kiko?”

“Sure! I know where she lives!”

Slayton mentally uncrossed his fingers. It was the break he had been hoping for. Kiko was clearly excited by the prospect
as well. Not getting beat up and seeing Mercy all in the same day! It was almost too much for Kiko’s mind to encompass, but
now an idiotic smile seemed permanently nailed onto his face.

If Kiko could only point out Mercy to Slayton, that would be all Slayton needed. He did not want to implicate the retarded
man in his own actions in any way. Kiko had more than his share of problems.

Lucius knocked on the hotel room door. Kiko jumped.

“Hey, Ben,” Lucius said, his smile fading at the strange sight of Kiko sitting amidst the wasteland that had been the dinner
tray. “Uh—who’s this?”

“A special guest of mine, Lucius,” said Slayton. “Why don’t you two sit and chat while I grab a fast shower? Kiko’s a conversational
whiz.”

“Then what?”

“Then you and me and him are going to dress ratty and cruise the barrio in that eyesore you picked out for me.”

“What the hell for?”

“How can I tell you this, Lucius?” Slayton gave a sympathetic shrug. “Kiko’s going to find me a girl.”

One evening of indoctrination in the barrio was all that Slayton had required. He realized now that the brand new-looking
Trans-Am would attract no notice in that neighborhood. Despite the general poverty of the area, the low-rider cars dozing
against the curbstones in a dozen places obviously had a lot of money dumped into their customization. It was the same phenomenon
Slayton had observed in the Bronx, years before—red Cadillacs for welfare families. And the life-icon of Los Angeles, above
all, was the automobile.

Kiko managed to direct Slayton without having any useful knowledge of locations; he knew places, but not names. He indicated
where to turn, and became agitated if there was any significance to the area. Lucius, befuddled by Slayton’s apparent lack
of methodology, stayed quietly nervous in the cramped back seat of the psuedo-sportscar.

The neon- and flyspecked watering holes littering the periphery of the barrio area all looked identical, all sporting roughly
the same selection of road-weary whores and debilitated human garbage. Few low-riders were to be found in this part of town;
the bar clientele here was composed of the work-booted blue-collars and unskilled general laborers. Sex was twenty dollars
per orgasm, performed in the nearest convenient place. The domestic swill-water beers were overshadowed by Dos Equis and Triple-X.
The buildings were wasted, laid open like wounds in the night. A whole street of them bore an unmistakable resemblance to
a heavy firefight zone.

Kiko was the only one who could tell them which places to go.

“Kiko goes to the bars sometimes. Mercy is there, sometimes. She dances with men and they give her money.” That was all he
would say. It seemed to be the only depth at which he perceived “Mercy’s” profession, as well.

The place to which Kiko pointed repeatedly was emblazoned with a sputtering neon-tube sign proclaiming the establishment to
be El Condor. Slayton stopped his own silver bird across the street and several paces down from the bar.

Two blocks behind the Trans-Am, a slow convoy of low-riders broke apart and infiltrated the side streets. Slayton had made
them blocks ago. He would have preferred to snatch Mercy off the street and high-speed it onto less fiery turf, but there
was no other way to accomplish the purpose of his trip except Kiko’s way.

“Kiko will go inside now,” he said.

“We’ll all go in, Kiko,” Slayton said.

“You can’t.”

“Why?” Slayton had expected another childish condition, or an irrational reason why they could not go with him into El Condor.

Suddenly, Kiko’s voice resonated, low and methodical. It sounded like the voice of perfect, deadly reason, if only for a single
utterance: “Because you can’t go in there. You’re
gaviotas.
You can’t go in.” He got out of the car by himself, moving exaggeratedly, like a cinema hero on the vengeance trail.

When Lucius made a move to follow Kiko out of the car, Slayton stayed him.

“What the hell is going on, Ben? He’s not going in that place alone—?”

“You don’t get it, Lucius. You and I are
gaviotas, gringos.
We’d stir up more trouble in there than two men can handle. And we wouldn’t get anything out of it. Kiko moves in and out
of the bars with relative impunity. Sure, he gets boffed around for drinks and such—but he
knows
that. He’s willing to go in there anyway, to get Mercy out for us with no hassle.”

“Couldn’t he use a little help?” Lucius said, with a cheesy expression on his face. “I mean, a guy like him—he’s got a good
chunk of his attic insulation missing, Ben, in case you didn’t notice.”

“That’s just it. Nobody has ever offered Kiko the opportunity to be a man, to brave it out. Nobody gave a shit until I saved
his ass from the
cholos.
He has enough brains to think he owes me one. Whether he does or doesn’t isn’t important; what
is
important is that that poor bastard was never given a chance by anybody. He can do something besides be a punching bag. He’s
going in there knowing that he can use his ‘weakness’ as an advantage—to get me what I asked him for!” Slayton’s face was
flushing red with anger at the whole helpless situation. “Are you too goddam stupid to see what he’s doing, Lucius?”

“Yeah, yeah, okay. Sorry.”

Slayton’s eyes never left Kiko as he shambled across the street and entered El Condor.

“Trouble,” he said, after a minute.

The flashy, chrome-encrusted low-riders who had dogged them earlier were beginning to ooze out of the woodwork. Twice the
parked Trans-Am was cruised, all heads within the moving auto turned in Slayton’s direction. Another car slotted itself into
the row of trucks and tired autos in front of the El Condor. Four
cholos
unhorsed themselves and sauntered arrogantly into the bar.

“C’mon, Kiko,” Lucius muttered to himself. “Goddam building’s not big enough to take this long…”

“She might not be in there,” Slayton said. “He could be just waiting around. She might be out on call. That might be her,
for instance.”

He indicated a brown and tan Bronco that had just ground to a dust-clouded halt in the parking lot. An overweight Mexican
in a yoked shirt and a battered felt cowboy hat jumped down and rushed around to open the door for a woman who did not look
battered or common enough to be his wife.

“
Fodongas
and
forrazos;
we got ’em both, step right up,” Slayton said. “I’d say that was a
forrazo.”

“Huh?” Lucius was lost.

“A
fodonga,
my dear colleague, is like the whores you see on Sunset Boulevard—stringy, sallow, track-marks up one arm and down the other,
comprende?
A
forrazo
is of a little better stock. The cleavage you see is real. And the price is probably higher than for your average street
whore. Take the makeup away, and she still probably looks pretty good.”

“Oh,” said Lucius, unnerved by the whole topic. “Here come the shock-absorber marines again. Listen, what if we have to leave?”
His body involuntarily crouched lower in the seat as the low-rider passed again, this time on the opposite side of the street.

“Kiko knows we might not be here when he comes out. He said it was okay, that this—the barrio—was his home.”

“How lucky for him.”

“He has graciously volunteered to be my eyes and ears in the barrio regarding this Starshine thing. He seems to be accomplishing
more than your boys.” He had stung Lucius, and knew it, but having made the point, he shifted to more immediate concerns.
“I think it would be a good idea to let him do just that. It’s going to hot up if we hang around. Let’s park somewhere else
for a while and then come back.”

“Kiko can take care of himself?”

“He’ll check for the car. If we don’t show up by closing, he knows he’ll see me
mañana.”

“Fine by me.”

Slayton started the Trans-Am and pulled easily out. As he did, Kiko was booted out of the entrance to El Condor by the gang
of
cholos
who had entered moments before. The sight of the man sprawled in the dirt of the parking lot cancelled all Slayton’s reservations
about leaving the Trans-Am.

The gang jostled Kiko into the cleft between their own Chevy and a parked pickup truck overloaded with house-painting odds
and ends. Slayton spun the Trans-Am around and ground to a stop, blocking the far end of the tunnel formed by the parked vehicles.

“Lucius, I want you to be threatening as hell with that Magnum you’ve got wanning your armpit. Most of these dudes are probably
packed, and they’ll try to stand if we challenge them!” With that, Slayton jacked his own door open and was out. He knew that
members of Chicano gangs rarely just walked away from anything.