always wore a faded baseball cap. Somehow Cortez could easily straddle my world and these gritty streetballer types, but I couldn’t.
“Hey, appears we got us some buckwilders,” Slinky said, pointing out a couple sitting in the back seat of an old Toyota parked across Broughton. It didn’t look like they were buckwilding to me; they were just sitting, the woman with her arm around the guy’s shoulder.
Slinky scampered over, giggling, and peered in the window, his hands cupped around his face to block the glare.
“Shit!” he screamed, leaping away from the car like he’d burned himself, pulling on the mask dangling around his neck.
“What is it?” Cortez asked, pulling on his own mask and squatting to look in the window for himself. I followed suit.
The guy was dead. His jutting tongue was swollen to three times its normal size, his sinuses and adenoids bulging like water balloons under his skin. Some sort of designer virus.
The woman had it too—she looked like a basset hound. Her eyes were closed, her breathing labored. She was just sitting with her man, waiting to die, practicing good virus etiquette with the windows cranked up tight in the blistering heat. It broke my heart to see it, but there was nothing I could do. I was no doctor. There were no doctors downtown, period, even if I had that kind of cash.
“C’mon,” Dice said. He tried to resume his cool-walk, but it had lost much of its bounce.
We cut through Madison Square, which was right near Cortez’s apartment house. Twenty or thirty vagrants were making a camp in the square. I’d never seen such destitute people in my life. You couldn’t even call what they were wearing rags—more like patches, pieces of material stitched together, half the time not even covering the spots that people typically covered. There was a teenage girl running around topless. She was probably good- looking, but it was hard to tell because she was so filthy. I felt for them; I’d been in their shoes (although they weren’t actually wearing any shoes).
They were chopping low-hanging branches off the Live Oaks and leaning them against the base of the Revolutionary War monument to make lean-to shelters.
“That kills me,” Cortez said. “Makes me sick to my stomach, seeing that beautiful square corrupted like that.”
“Somebody should call the berries on them,” Slinky said, snickering.
“They’d have to be hacking limbs off babies before the public police would come,” Dice said, glancing at Cortez to get some appreciation for his wit.
A skeleton of an old lady was pulling Spanish moss off branches to fire the cooking pots. It
“I’m gonna go talk to them,” Cortez said. He pulled his Eskrima sticks out of his sock, tucked them into the front of his pants, probably so they’d be nice and visible. Displaying exotic weaponry likely gave people pause. Most people probably knew to stay away from a guy carrying Eskrima sticks (unless they had a gun), because if someone is carrying Eskrima sticks, chances are they know how to them use them. Cortez did know how to use them.
Dice glanced down at the sticks. “You anticipating blood and guts?”
“I just want to have a talk. I can’t put up with this desecration.”
We crossed the street and wandered along the brick walkway, through the center of the camp. When we hit the end of the square Cortez doubled back, probably expecting someone to tell us to get lost, but they just went on doing what they were doing. Finally, Cortez approached the biggest and strongest guy.
“Ho,” the guy said, smiling and nodding.
“Where you coming from?” Cortez asked, hands on hips. I hovered behind him with Dice and Slinky.
“Bamboo forests to the West,” the guy said, pointing. He had a peculiar accent; bamboo sounded like bumpoo. His beard was so shaggy you could barely see his mouth, his skin leathered from too much sun.
“You mean the sacrifice zone past Rincon and Pooler?” Cortez asked.
“I don’t know towns. West. Good hunting there.”
“Good
As if on cue, there was a squeal in the grass behind us. A squirrel twisted on the ground, a little wooden arrow jutting from its side. The topless girl ran to it, squatted, and brained it with a half-brick. She picked it up by the tail and took it to a steaming pot.
“Shit, that’s just odious,” Slinky said, lips pulled back from his big square teeth.
The guy just shrugged. “What’s those?” he asked, pointing at Cortez’s Eskrima sticks.
“Weapons,” Cortez said. He pulled them out and assumed a karate pose. He launched into a display, filling the air with blurry sticks, sometimes veering decidedly close to the vagrant. The guy flinched, but kept smiling. When he finished, the guy dropped his hands back to his sides and nodded vaguely.
I think Cortez had figured on a circle of spectators, a little shock and awe, and I was guessing he felt a little stupid now, because no one had stopped to watch.
“You mind taking it easy on those branches?” Cortez said to the guy, still breathing hard, wiping sweat from his eyes.
The gypsy squinted, shook his head like he didn’t understand.
“The tree branches, would you mind not cutting them?”
“It won’t kill the trees,” he said.
“No, but it looks bad, and we live here.”
The guy stared up at the trees, then back at Cortez like he was whacked.
“This is a park,” I said. “The reason the trees were planted was to make the park look nice.” I loved those trees, the way their gnarled branches formed shady roofs over the streets. I also loved how tough they were—they survived the climate shifts and chemical dumps, while the crepe myrtles and azalea, the little yellow songbirds, those little green frogs that stuck to windows had mostly died. They had turned brown or blue and rotted. Brown and blue, the real colors of death. Who made black the color of death? Black was the color of night, and the potential of a cool breeze.
“Just don’t cut any more branches, okay?” Cortez turned without waiting for an answer. He turned to Dice and Slinky. “Dudes, I gotta bounce. If I don’t put in a few ticks hauling dirt to the roof for the garden expansion, the old man is gonna toast my biscuits.”
“I thought we were going to the blanket district,” Dice said.
“Another time.”
As Dice and Slinky took off, I waved goodbye to Cortez, but he gestured for me to stay.
“I just didn’t feel like having those guys around right now,” Cortez said when they were out of earshot. “They’re good guys and all, but you can’t really talk to them, you know?”
I nodded. We headed toward his place, hugging along the buildings to stay in the shade as much as possible.
“You know I’m thirty-four years old today?” Cortez said.
“I didn’t,” I said. “Happy birthday.”
“Yeah, thanks. But it’s weighing on me.” He sighed heavily, shook his head. “Thirty-four years old and I’m still beating the sidewalks with my friends like I’m fifteen, sitting in that sauna apartment staring at the TV when we can get a signal, hauling sacks of dirt to the roof to try to keep from starving.”
“It’s not where we expected to be by now, that’s for sure,” I said. “I kept expecting things to improve, and that our opportunities would improve with them.” I had to admit, though—Cortez’s prospects were even bleaker than mine. He had no real job, just a high school education.
“Yeah. I just keep thinking if I’d been born in an earlier time, before you needed boats to navigate the streets of LA and shit, that I could’ve been somebody, could’ve been a legend at something.” He looked at me, maybe waiting to see if I was going to laugh. “I don’t know, a martial arts champion, maybe a major businessman. You know? Now I’m just one step above those gypsies in the park.”
“Hey, you seen this?” An old guy in the doorway of Pinky Masters gestured into the bar. We peered in, saw he was specifically gesturing at the TV. One of those Breaking News Special Reports was on, with flashing red all
