Underbelly Page 11

  But Magrady knew she’d checked off the petty thief box in her head and would be aware if he reached for the money. His taking a risk for the ducats became moot as the owner of the bag, a curvaceous mixed-race young woman in hip huggers, returned.

  A little past eleven the open mic session was over, and the coffee house was closing up. He tried a collect call again to Bonilla, but again no luck. As Magrady started to leave, he noticed a color flyer sticking out from underneath a saucer with a partially eaten piece of marble cake on it. Magrady ate the cake and grinned at the image on the leaflet as he pulled it loose. The slick advertised a local gallery, the Middle Eye, which had a show up about early California. The graphic was a photo of the floating mummified head identified as Talmock.

  Magrady had expected the mystic to have his lips and eyelids sewn together and spiders crawling along straggly hair like some apparition out of an old EC Comics horror eight-pager. His lips were closed and the reptilian skin drawn tight across his protruding cheekbones. But the eye sockets were open and gems of some sort had replaced the orbs. Was this why Floyd and his sister wanted the head? For the jewels? But how much could they be worth? A few thousand at most. That didn’t make any sense he reasoned. If Talmock had been buried with the jewels in his eye sockets, whoever unearthed the head would have snatched them. Down at the lower left in small letters the credits included a thank you to the Nakano Family Foundation. He took the flyer with him.

  Energized by the new information, Magrady went in search of another pay phone but couldn’t find one that worked. He had to take a dump and did his business in an alcove beside a nail salon set on a tiny strip mall. He used some thrown away fast food wrappers to clean himself. He wasn’t embarrassed. This was a necessity, and like any other bereft person, he did his best to adapt to his present conditions.

  He wanted to at least reach Ventura Boulevard because he knew how to get back downtown on Line 96. For this was the Valley and even more about mobility via private car than where he normally hung. So he walked. He soldiered up into the dark and the cold, putting one foot in front of the other.

  Fuck Stover.

  Fuck Boo Boo and Elmore.

  Fuck ’em all.

  Blowing on his fists, Magrady walked on, telling himself that each step brought him closer to a bed and sleep—even if he wasn’t really sure where that would be. At the bus stop his frigid fingers were lanced with pins of cold in his pockets as he stamped back and forth behind the bus bench. Finally the bus came and he paid his fare and slumped in a seat in the rear, among four other passengers. There was heat and he unfroze.

  One of the other passengers was a man about Magrady’s age in polyester pants, a dirty corduroy sport coat, and a Bob Marley T-shirt. He mumbled algebra formulas to himself and laughed at his answers. Exhausted, Magrady half-slept till the bus got over the hill and turned to let them out on Hollywood Boulevard to transfer to the next bus. Magrady and a woman he took to be an office cleaner given her blue khakis and work shirt under her coat, waited.

  The two exchanged quick nods as the Black Flame and the Dread Knight walked up, sharing a flask. The newcomers nuzzled each other. Each had on a jacket, and the Dread Knight’s cape trailed below his car coat. He offered the booze to Magrady and the other woman. She declined but Magrady had a sip. His first drink in eight months. Damn, he missed the stuff.

  “Hard day, huh?” the Dread Knight asked him, slipping his cowl off to reveal a ruggedly handsome face. Along the Boulevard, some who were looking to make their break in the Industry and in between waiting tables or selling cell phones, would dress as superhero or fairytale characters and prowl about, looking to swoop in and have their picture taken with the typical gawking tourist, whose kids invariably would be the ones to point at them and exclaim their character’s name. Said costumed adventurer would then hit up their unsuspecting patron for a tip for their so-called service. Thus unlike the do-gooders they pretended to be, they would depart before a security guard or cop could run them off or bust them for panhandling.

  “You know it,” Magrady concurred.

  The Black Flame, a good-sized woman in a straining skimpy top, fired up a joint done up in a chocolate blunt wrap. Magrady was tempted but was determined to fall back into one vice at a time. He did have another sip and soon all four were passing the time with talk of no consequence. When the bus came they got on and sat in separate areas. But when the Black Flame and the Dread Knight got off on Western and Beverly, the man gave a half wave and Magrady returned the gesture. Through the bus windows, he watched the city go by in the early morning semi-dark.

  Back downtown, out of perverse pride, he didn’t go by Bonilla’s or Angie Baine’s place. Maybe he didn’t want them to smell the liquor on his breath. He got down to the Nickel. He found some greasy and musty clothing tatters in a cardboard box. He gathered the remnants under an arm and went on. Magrady passed a grouping of twenty-somethings spilling out of an after-hours spot called Che’s Barracks. They were lining up to get food from the Goro-Ga spicy sausage lunch truck. A pretty woman in a micro-mini bit into a chili dog as she weaved along the street with her two giggling female friends in their high heels. She gently bumped into Magrady.

  “Hi,” she said sweetly.

  He grunted and kept walking.

  “Hey,” she said, “mister.”

  Magrady turned to see her silently offering him her food. She wore no makeup, probably sweating it off dancing all night he surmised. She smiled genuinely. Her friends glared at him with unfocused eyes.

  “Thank you,” he said quietly. They three didn’t laugh behind his back as he walked on, finishing the chili dog. There were some chili fries in the bag too. He wiped his mouth on his found clothes when he was done. Then using the clothes the best he could like blankets, he slept under the Sixth Street Bridge with several others.

  In his dream a one-eyed talking tiger like in the animated Jungle Book chased him through the dense Vietnamese undergrowth. The tiger said he was late for his dental appointment. He awoke at light with a hard-on and wanting a drink.

  VII

  DOMINGO AGUDIN POPPED THE TOP on the Aleve bottle and shook out two tablets. He placed one in his shirt pocket and downed the other one with his morning coffee. Overhead a plane glided along its flight path into nearby LAX, the rattle rising through his shoes barely registering as he sat at the kitchenette table. Living in a two-bedroom apartment in Lennox with his wife and two fast growing daughters—did Olga really need those new shoes so soon?—the concrete overlaps of the busy 105 and 405 Freeways casting shadows across the windows, you got used to a lot. But this week, as it had been for several weeks, he had no complaints, aches and stiff fingers notwithstanding.

  He was doing dry wall on the rehab of yet another condo conversion. Did the gabachos never tire of their precious tiny balconies and all the just-so marble counters and what did they call it? Stressed surfaces. To make furniture look like it had been in use for some time. Yes, the stressed wood of the fireplaces and dinner tables also had to be just so—a phrase he’d heard the heavily perfumed realtor utter often. And if that wasn’t enough, the owners of this building, given they were not exactly in a stylish neighborhood yet, were also giving away cars when you bought a condo. That is, they’d pay for your lease on a Mini Cooper for the first year if you paid the incredible price it cost you to buy one of their fancy boxes.

  He made a face in the half-light. This crazy shit brought work, and work was always needed. No matter he couldn’t afford to move his family into the place he was fixing up. The building he was now restoring had once been a hotel for the likes of fry cooks, housekeepers and those passing through with no present and no past. Then at some point it became some kind of halfway house. It was way down on Grand, near the DMV office and Exposition Boulevard, not in the already-fancy redone part of downtown L.A. Agudin knew the place had been a halfway house because some years ago he’d had a distant cousin, recently released from Corcoran and in some sort of d
rug program, wind up there. His mother had called him from Sinaloa and asked him to drive over there and see if there was anything he could do for this unknown relative.

  Do for him? Agudin shook his head at the memory. There they were with an infant and a toddler, his wife working a part-time waitress job at a sports bar keeping hands off her ass and him getting day work standing outside the Home Depot. But it was his mother so he went. The cousin answered to his street name, Frog Boy, but damned if he could remember his actual one now. He was as he’d expected him to be, a sullen, the world-owes-me-a-living lump who blamed everybody else for his troubles. Agudin gave him ten dollars he could ill afford to give, got a grunt for a reply, and his good deed was done.

  Two or three years after that, he got word that Frog Boy had been shot in the head trying to hold up a jewelry store in Albuquerque. Turns out the retired sheriff of the county was in there that day to purchase a diamond anklet for a new firecracker of a girlfriend. From what he understood, Frog Boy amazingly managed to run away, leaking blood. Whether Frog Boy lived or died, nobody in the family knew.

  Washing out his cup, Agudin considered what the world brings you… How the wheel always turns and how the episodes of your life always seem to come back around to you. The dream he’d had last night, was it an omen of what was to come? This one had stayed with him and hadn’t blown away like smoke as most of his dreams usually did. The old head he’d dug up about a year ago working as a laborer on the Emerald Shoals project had floated to him as he walked along a dark street, bare trees with branches like icy fingers reaching for him as a steady wind blew.

  He arrived at a particular house, names murmured on the wind but were indistinguishable to his ears. The door was nicely stressed he’d noted. He walked in and there, in what would be the living room, Frog Boy was stretched out on a stone slab atop several squat cactus plants. He stood over Frog Boy who was dressed like a pilot in the World War II movie he’d seen on TV late one night, Twelve O’Clock High. He looked okay, no head wound he could see, only he just lay there, seemingly unable to get up. But when Frog Boy talked some kind of nonsense came out of his mouth. That’s when the head reappeared and translated Frog Boy’s words, reciting a recipe for making his abuela’s enchiladas.

  Gathering his tools and lunch, Agudin still regretted turning over the head but he didn’t have a choice. He’d been part of the crew digging trenches for piping, and there it was. Somehow it hadn’t been crushed as the grader had recently finished scraping away a layer of earth from the side of a rise. At first, seeing the face partially sticking out of the dirt in that hillside, Agudin figured a kid must have thrown his Halloween mask into the worksite. But he went over to it and with little effort pulled the Indian head free and stared at it.

  By then a few of the others had noticed, and murmuring was going around the site about what he found. One guy, a welder, said it must have been a drug dealer who was chopped up after a deal gone bad. Another worker opined it seemed to him the head was probably older than that. As they gathered around him, Agudin’s chance to hide his find and maybe sell it to a museum or a collector vanished. The foreman came over and took possession, thanking Agudin and telling everyone to get back to work.

  A week later the big boss Wakefield Nakano showed up with a pretty photographer. The dirt had been brushed off and the head was in a safe box locked in the foreman’s office. He and Nakano stood side by side, each having a hand under the glass case he’d put the head in, smiling goofy grins while photos were taken. Nakano also had him sign some paper about making sure that Agudin knew what he found on SubbaKhan property belonged to the company. What could he do? Refuse? Run away with the head? How far could he go and what would that get him but thrown in jail. He signed the goddamn paper.

  The construction was stopped for a time as some college types and their students came to the site to do their special digging looking for more heads or pots or arrow tips, but nothing else was found. Agudin didn’t see any extra money in his check and eventually when his part of the job was done, that was that. Though a few of the men, including Latinos, had joked with him about finding the head, calling him Tamale Raider, Indiana Mex and what have you.

  Odd that after putting the mummy head out of his mind so he wouldn’t be bitter, his wife had warned him, he had a dream about it and Frog Boy. He checked his watch. Whatever it meant, he concluded, that dry wall wasn’t going to install itself, as his supervisor kept telling him and the crew. Agudin left for work.

  WAKEFIELD NAKANO RODE HIS horse Harbinger into Bixby Stadium in Long Beach. The freshly mown grass was a heady aroma for rider and beast. Bouncing slightly in the saddle, Nakano trotted the horse around some, letting her stretch her muscles. He graduated the mare into a gallop, then seamlessly went into his check and turn with the animal. He smiled, imagining the bump he was going to deliver against Caleb Anderson in the upcoming charity match. That bastard wasn’t going to ride him off like he did in last year’s match. Damn that grin-and-bear-it model-minority Asian shit. Nakano had a long memory.

  He practiced some swings with his mallet on the new composition plastic ball that was going to be used on Saturday. The weight of the ball was regulated but each time some new version was introduced, you had to get the feel of the thing; how it spun, its response to being hit and particularly how that ball rolled once it contacted the turf after flight. He struck and moved, horse and rider leaning and surging forward, pulling back and making their turns and cuts cleanly. He came to a rest and wiped sweat off his face with his sleeve.

  He then rode over to inspect the ad boards on the arena wall for the Cherry Barrel vineyard he’d invested in last spring. The label had been started by some friends from business school, some of whom had had successes as restaurateurs. He still wasn’t too crazy about the logo. This was supposed to impart poshness, but maybe after all he was just a kid who grew up in the JA section of the Crenshaw District. Sitting on Harbinger, studying the sign, the damn words were too hard to read in that fru-fru script the designer had insisted on using. Still, if it sold it must be good, so he’d quit fixating on the lettering and wait for the year-end report.

  His cell phone buzzed and after digging it out, Nakano answered. “Yes?”

  “Wake,” his assistant Alicia Sinnott began, “we’re getting complications from the mayor’s office.”

  Harbinger shook his mane and Nakano patted his corded neck as he talked. “What does he want?”

  “His office has forwarded different language on the Housing Trust Fund section.”

  “Why is that a problem?”

  She said flatly, “You should read it.”

  “Come on, Alicia,” he laughed dryly, “I doubt he’s calling for the sort of set-asides and punitive measures on developers that his one-time allies Urban Advocacy are calling for.”

  “You know him. He doesn’t want to be seen as, well, flitting from one thing to the next.”

  “But he does,” Nakano observed. Though he was certain SubbaKhan would pony up for his re-election bid, which was looming. The mayor had his drawbacks, but once he got on task, he got results. He was a hell of a negotiator, and shared a lot of the conglomerate’s vision for remaking the city.

  “He wants this to have some teeth,” she said. “I think he finally figured out the report wasn’t going to be the usual dull, academic exercise and he wants to make sure the Trust is seen as real.”

  They both were aware that the mayor had created rifts among the shaky alliance of grassroots activists, organized labor, and the boardroom denizens that had brought him to office. He’d been politically wounded for not having a comprehensive affordable housing strategy with the Trust Fund being a somewhat moribund proposal he’d grasped at, though it had been inherited from the previous administration. It was the mayor’s people who shoehorned a section on the Trust Fund into the report the Central City Reclaiming Initiative that SubbaKhan underwrote was readying. The report offered a series of recommendations regarding sustain
able living conditions, using the Emerald Shoals effort in the downtown area as a hub from which to build out.

  “And the mayor needs to entice some of his detractors back to the fold.” Nakano said to her.

  Harbinger was getting restless standing still and Nakano started her in a circuit around the field to cool down properly. “I’ll be in to go over the rewrite then talk with him. I also want to schedule time to have another meting with our friends.”

  “Before the report comes out?” his assistant asked. Part of SubbaKhan’s strategy was to use friendly press around the report as a way to blunt the ongoing attack from the coalition of community groups. The so-called united front was using the Environmental Impact Report’s findings to slow the expansion anchored by the Shoals project. SubbaKhan was not opposed to these measures, but had to balance such concerns with reasonableness and profit margins. Too bad Urban Advocacy and its ilk didn’t have the building trades perspective who were all about growth because it meant their members were working, buying new pickups and making those timely house payments.

  Why the hell did Reagan bring down the Berlin Wall if not to symbolize the triumph of the free market Nakano groused inwardly. The historic televised speech of the Gipper at the Brandenburg Gate challenging Gorbachev had determined his course when Nakano was a kid. Wasn’t it bad enough he had to learn Chinese for the sake of business? America had to hold on and he was for damn sure doing his part to get her back on her feet post the meltdown. He refocused.

  “Just set it in motion, Alicia. It’s all about good faith, isn’t it?”

  “Fine, fine,” she drawled and hung up.

  Nakano headed Harbinger back to the horse trailer hitched to his Range Rover. He couldn’t help picturing himself as the laconic Gary Cooperesque cowpoke on his way to face down the owlhoots. After securing his horse, he looked out into the empty stands and saw a headless man in cotton pants and faded floral shirt and moccasins. He had one leg crossed over the other, arms folded, waiting.