The Cocaine Chronicles Read online

  One day the girl walks the kids past the car. She leans toward the window and asks if I have the time. I’m so surprised it takes me awhile to answer. Then she tells me her name, Yvonne, and asks mine. Right before she turns away she smiles, and that white smile flashing out of her gold-brown face is like a birthday gift, a burst of bright flowers. Her hair is clean and shiny, reflecting the sun; it twists and flows like smooth black water.

  After that I start getting out of the car. As soon as the kids come pouring from the building for lunch, I get out, shut the door, and walk over to the metal fence. Chester doesn’t seem to mind—he’s maybe fifteen feet behind me, can hear everything that goes on, anyway. Yvonne comes to meet me, half an eye still on the kids. “I’m going to college soon.”

  “When?” I ask.

  “Next month.” She’s real excited, as if she were getting married or something. It’s a quiet kind of excitement, though, more in her eyes than in her voice, like she doesn’t quite believe that it’s true. She says the college is about five miles away, but the bus trip takes an hour—she’ll take the commuter line that goes down Venice Boulevard.

  “I just graduated in June,” she says. “I’m the first one in my family to go to college.” I can tell she’s real proud. I am, too, although I don’t know why. A gust of wind comes along and shakes the fence, makes a sound like twenty people rattling chains all at once. The fence is maybe eight feet high, diagonal squares set spinning on their corners, three strands of barbed wire across the top. I glance up at the barbed wire and then back to Yvonne, who’s smiling.

  “So what are you doing here?” she asks. I tell her my mother and I just came out from the east a few weeks ago, and I’m not doing much of anything because school hasn’t started yet. “My mother went away for a while, but she’ll be back soon,” I say.

  “Don’t you get bored?”

  “No, I’m kinda busy.”

  “Who’s that man?” she asks quietly, gesturing toward Chester.

  I pause. “Just a man.”

  Then a little girl comes running over and hugs Yvonne around her legs. Yvonne leans forward to face her, and I think of how bright her red blouse looks against the gray concrete, the dead grass, the dry summer.

  “Hi,” I say to the little girl, but she says nothing, and those big round eyes fix on me from out of that chocolate-brown face.

  “You look pretty today, Carla,” says Yvonne, but the girl doesn’t answer her either; she makes a strange, low noise, almost like she’s in pain, although I can see she’s smiling. Then she scrambles toward something chalked onto the pavement. It’s on a slope, facing away, and it looks like a curving bell shape, with a half-circle on one side and two straight, branchlike parts on the other.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “It’s a Mary,” Yvonne says. “Mother of God.”

  I stand on my tiptoes, peer down the slope, see the vague shape of a person, the thin legs and covered head. “Who drew it?”

  “I did. I draw one every day. There’s a whole bunch more on the other side of the schoolyard, and one by the park, and one over there on the sidewalk.”

  I look where she’s pointing, to the right of me, and sure enough there’s one on the sidewalk, right next to the car. “Why do you draw Marys?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve always drawn them.”

  The little girl squatting next to the Mary sticks her finger in her mouth and then rubs it against the chalk, smearing part of the outline. I don’t tell Yvonne that her Mary reminds me of the police drawings I’d seen sometimes on the streets of D.C. I think of Chester in the car behind me and don’t want to go back; when I do he’ll be sitting there with his pants shoved down around his thighs. Yvonne turns toward the little girl, who stands up and runs back over to the other kids. She keeps looking at the drawing, even after the girl has left. We both stand there staring at the Mary, not saying anything, as if it might peel off the ground and fly away.

  At first the only man my mother took into the room was Chester. Then there were others, until I had to wait for hours at a time in Chester’s car, or in the coffee shop with the torn red vinyl seats. The owner of the coffee shop, Pedro, gave me hot dogs and grilled cheese sandwiches. I’d go around back to eat them, watch the cars speed by on the freeway forty or fifty yards away, and wonder where all those people were going. My mother still drove around with Chester and me in the morning, but she got quieter and quieter, and hardly said a word to either of us.

  Then one day in the coffee shop, when she wouldn’t even look up at Pedro when he brought her scrambled eggs, Chester leaned over the table and said real low, “I keep telling you, woman. I got something that’ll make you feel better.” My mother sighed and looked past him and said, “Okay.” They sent me upstairs and went someplace else; I just waited and watched an hour pass by on the clock. When my mother came back to our room, her eyes were red and she was jumpy like a nervous animal. She moved from the bed to the chair to the bed again; she couldn’t seem to keep herself still. She kept saying that she was thirsty, but when I gave her some water, her hand shook so bad she couldn’t hold the glass.

  After that it seemed like she was always off with Chester somewhere, asking him for something. Even when she was with me she didn’t seem like herself; her hair was stringy and dull, and she was starting to lose weight. She didn’t seem to sleep much, but she never got tired; I’d wake up and find her mumbling to herself. Then one day when I was changing the sheets, which I did every afternoon, I found a little plastic sandwich bag like the kind I used to take for lunch, with some clear, jagged pebbles inside. My mother grabbed it from my hands and started yelling at me, eyes wild. I was scared, but then she stopped, came and put her arms around me. “I’m so sorry, baby,” she kept saying, and I could hear the tears in her voice. “I’m so sorry. I never meant for this to happen.” She pulled away and put her head down, bad hand laying in her lap like a dead bird, and for a second she looked like she did the day we heard about Tammy. Then she got herself together and left. I don’t know where she went, maybe to tell Chester to leave us alone, maybe off someplace by herself. When she came back, though, her eye was swollen and there was dried blood around her mouth. She went straight to the bathroom and shut the door. She wouldn’t let me help her. That night one of the men who’d been coming around picked her up and didn’t bring her back till the next morning. She’d never spent the night outside the motel before, but after that she did it three more times. Two weeks later she drove off with a man about seven o’clock, his car blending in with all the traffic on the freeway. That was the last I saw of her.

  I waited a couple of days, thinking the man just wanted her for longer than usual. Chester was pissed, said the man had cheated him, left with his woman and his best shit, too. He raged around, kicking his car tires and yelling at me like I’d stolen her. But he paid for my room and kept buying me food. The third night, though, he grabbed my elbow and shoved me into the room, said that debts left by the parent had to be collected from the child. He threw me down on the bed, pressed one fat arm across my chest, and yanked my shorts down with the other, popped the buttons. What I remember is his lips against mine, his tongue a slimy fish in my mouth, his skin so moist and rancid it was like I was drowning in his sweat. Pain so sharp between my legs I thought he’d stuck a knife inside me. The sound of the bed banging against the wall and the bunched-up sheet like white flowers in his fist. It was like he was hammering me down into something, making me disappear. His eyes were half-closed and he made high crying sounds like an animal having the life squeezed out of it.

  After that there were others, some the same ones who had come for my mother. Chester told me I had to earn my room and board, kept my pockets stuffed with condoms, held clean cloths against me after as I bled and bled. He bought me new clothes, tight things it embarrassed me to wear. He sits in the parking lot or the coffee shop now and waits, talks to the men and gets their money when they’re throu
gh. They don’t leave, though, he won’t let them leave, until I tell him they didn’t hit me, and that they put on the condom I offered. They’re all different, those men—some never say a word to me, some use language my mother would have covered my ears against, some talk to me awhile, before and after. Some bring a flask or bottle into the room, some the little plastic bags that Chester sells them. Most of them drive nice cars and dress in suits, sneaking over from their downtown offices on their lunch breaks. Two of them are lawyers, one works in a bank, another does something in movies. Sometimes they’re young, no bristle of beard against my cheek, but most of them are older than Chester.

  When I’m with them I try to listen to the sounds of the freeway, or to count, and not think about my mother, or what she would do if she knew what was happening. I look away when they take out their mirrors or their little glass pipes, and as soon as they leave, I run to the shower and scrub myself all over until it hurts. It doesn’t matter, though. The dirt’s under my skin, and I can’t seem to get it off me. The bed smells like the men, and me, and I don’t want to sleep there; I curl up at night on the floor. Chester started buying me more food to fatten me up—spaghetti and bread and milk shakes—but it doesn’t work, I can’t keep it down anymore, even when I eat alone. I think of running away, but if my mother comes back she wouldn’t be able to find me. So I stay.

  Once a week Chester takes me somewhere nice, the movies or the mall or the beach. He buys me things—a radio, a small stuffed pig to sleep with. One time he even took out a pipe and asked if I wanted something to make me feel better. But I just shook my head no, because I saw what that did; I knew what it could do to me. Chester tries to get me to talk, but I don’t say much, and I never laugh at his stupid jokes. Sometimes when we’re driving around, I look out the window and start to cry, and he looks over at me between sips of his Coke-can beer. “Why you so sad?” he asks. “I take good care of you, don’t I? Shit, at least you ain’t out on the streets.”

  At 12:10 we pull up beside the schoolyard. I get out of the car to wait the five minutes till the kids come out, hoping Yvonne will be with them. She doesn’t disappoint me. She steps out the door and smiles so wide I can see her teeth all the way across the schoolyard. As she comes toward me, I notice for the first time how she always walks a little awkwardly, faltering now and then, like her body’s a borrowed car she isn’t sure how to handle.

  “Hi,” she says, “I missed you yesterday.”

  “I was sick,” I say. That isn’t true. I was in the motel room with the banker.

  “Are you feeling better?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Want a candy bar?” She takes a Mars bar out of her pocket and sticks it through the fence. I take it. There are no Marys on the concrete today, but two on the side of the building. They’re bigger than Yvonne, but nothing’s in them, they’re just outlines—cold, white, untouchable. “Aren’t those clothes a little old for you?” she asks. She looks at me kind of sideways, then she glances toward the car.

  “They’re all I got,” I say, and I start to tell her that Chester picked them out for me, but don’t.

  She looks over at the car again. “Listen,” she says softly, “do you need some food? Some clothes? Cos I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff at home I could—”

  “No thanks,” I say, and I look quickly behind me. Chester’s watching us now, his forehead wrinkled, his hands wrapped tight around the wheel.

  Yvonne looks like she’s about to say something else but then three little boys run up to her. They’re cute, smiling and huffing, and they only come up to her waist. One of them makes a high, weird, wavering noise, and another answers him the same way; they sound like whales talking underwater. The first one holds his arms out toward Yvonne, asking to be picked up.

  “Hey, handsome,” Yvonne says, and then, “You’re a little old for this, Miguel,” but she picks him up anyway. She turns to me again, and the two boys on either side of her tug at the legs of her shorts.

  “Hi, guys,” I say. They all keep staring at Yvonne and don’t say anything. I look at her. “Hey, how come the kids never answer when I talk to them?” I ask.

  Yvonne looks at me like she’s surprised at the question. “Don’t you know?” she says, smiling. “They’re deaf.”

  It’s the mornings I think most about my sister. The picture my mother brought is still in the room, and when the men come in, I turn it face down on the dresser. Early mornings I have time, though, and I sit and look at it awhile. It was taken two years ago, when Tammy was three. She’s laughing in it and looking off at something above the camera, and I remember the day it was taken, a Saturday, and that we all went out for ice cream after. When the picture was made and framed, we showed it to Tammy. She’d never seen a picture of herself before and she didn’t believe it was her.

  What happened was that Tammy came down with something, maybe pneumonia, no one ever knew for sure. She got a real high fever and my mother pressed ice bags to her head, put her in a tub full of cold water, but nothing brought her temperature down. My mother had no insurance, and we couldn’t afford a doctor. Three days after she took sick, Tammy died. My mother went a little crazy after that, shaking Tammy like she could shake her alive, my sister’s head flopping forward like that Raggedy Ann’s. It was a few days later that we up and left for L.A.

  One Friday we get to the school a little late. The kids have eaten already, and a bunch of them are climbing on the jungle gym. Yvonne stands next to them, laughing out loud and talking although she knows they can’t hear. I look at the way the sun shines off her hair, the way she stands so straight and proud, and I think of how lucky she is, how she has everything, or at least she can someday. I get out of the car and go to the fence, and when she sees me, she starts to walk over.

  “I brought you a candy bar,” I say, and I have, a Milky Way that one of the lawyers gave me. But when I reach into my pocket, I pull a condom out, too, and the blue square of foil flutters down my leg and lands in front of my feet.

  Yvonne sees it and her eyes get wide. “Is that yours?” she asks.

  I keep my head down, not able to look at her, and I want to say I’m sorry. I can’t seem to hold my face together, and I feel the tears begin to come. “Not exactly. I mean …” I move my shoulders a bit, half-nod in the direction of Chester. She doesn’t say anything, and I finally bring myself to glance at her. She looks like she can’t believe it, but like she has to believe it, and then she steps up close to the fence.

  “Why don’t you come in here?” she says. “Let me call someone. Go around to the front of the building and come in.”

  Just then I hear the car door slam, and Chester yells, “Hey!”

  I turn and look at him; he saw the condom fall, or maybe he heard Yvonne. He starts to walk over, glaring at me, hands open like he’s ready to catch something.

  “Come on, come in the school,” Yvonne urges quietly, but I can’t move, I feel stuck, and Chester’s getting closer. When he’s right behind me, I stick my fingers through the squares of the fence.

  “Hey, girl, let’s go!” Chester says, but I tighten my grip, and then I feel him grab the back of my shirt, pull so hard it starts to tear.

  “Stop it, leave her alone!” Yvonne says, but Chester just ignores her, and starts pounding my fingers, hard metal cutting into my flesh.

  Yvonne reaches out with both her hands and touches my fingers, hooked down to the second knuckle through the squares; it’s the warmest touch I’ve felt in weeks, and I want to close my eyes and fall into it. But Chester’s yanking at my shoulders now and I think, I hate this man, I hate him, and I think, Please let me squeeze through these squares so I can be safe with Yvonne. And I think how nice it would be to play in the schoolyard with the kids, who are finally looking over at us now, but my fingers are getting tired and the metal starts to hurt and he’s pulling even harder and I let go.

  Chester falls backward with the weight of me, but then he gets his balance again. He goes u
p to the fence and punches out at Yvonne, slams his fist against the metal so hard I see the blood on his hand when he pulls away. He drags me to the car, and I look back at Yvonne, her foot on the head of a Mary and her fingers looped through the fence where my hands just were. Chester throws me into the front seat and then shoves himself in after me, screeches away from the curb. He raises his hand, and I expect to feel it any second, but although his fist is clenched, he doesn’t hit me. “Goddamnit, girl,” he says, “we’re never going back there.”

  And as he puts his hand back on the wheel and cuts hard around a corner, I look at him and say, “Where’s my mother?”

  “I don’t know!” he yells, swerving into the middle lane, and then, again, softer, “I don’t know.”