a finger against his eye as if I wouldn’t believe him. “Those are my songs.”
Moby Dick interrupts my grandfather’s reverie with an urgent bulletin: “I’m only laying this on you because I hope and pray the FBI could do something about it but I’m warning you right now that when the shit goes down, I’m gone. I’m invisible. Okay?”
It turns out he’s heard there are satanic sacrifices of children taking place at Frank Sinatra’s compound in Palm Springs.
By this time I have killed the bottle. We forget about the steaks, work our way through two Domino’s pizzas and the birthday cake. “Let’s go down to the Escapade,” suggests Moby Dick.
In my present state it sounds like a lot of fun: “You mean that place with the twin girl saxophone players?”
“Those dolls were in their sixties at least,” Poppy corrects me.
“All I remember is drinking Salty Dogs and dancing with a retired locksmith,” I say.
“He’s dead. Sorry, golf tomorrow, seven a.m.”
“It’s a rough life, Commissioner.”
Poppy slips on a polo shirt and khaki slacks and we all go down to walk the beasts. It is midnight and the air must still be seventy degrees. The moon is high, crumpled, yellow as an old dead tooth. Moby Dick loads the animals into his van, which is spray-painted black and gray, and mercifully drives away.
We take a circuitous route through the complex just to breathe the night air. I suddenly decide that it is too late to start rooting around the family tree. I still feel stung by Poppy’s refusal to acknowledge the question about my father and don’t want to bring it up again. Besides, I’m tired. He’s tired. I have to get up at five to drive back to L.A. and be on duty by eight. Another time. Maybe over the phone. But my voice is talking anyway:
“Do I have a cousin named Violeta Alvarado?”
“Not to my knowledge. Not with a name like that.”
“On dad’s side of the family.”
‘Who is dad?” Genuinely puzzled.
“My father. Miguel Sanchez. Or Sandoval. Nobody ever told me which.”
Jesus, what is this? Just saying the name out loud, seeing him tense, and a cold chill passes through my body. Through the warm cozy alcoholic shroud I am suddenly alert. I am scared.
“We don’t know a lot about that son of a bitch, do we?”
“We must know something. Was he from El Salvador?”
“Somewhere.”
‘What was he like?”
“He was a common laborer. What do you care?”
“I’m curious.”
“Forget about it.”
Almost thirty years old and still afraid to make Poppy angry.
“Some people have shown up claiming to be relatives.”
“What do they want?”
Making it simple: “Money.”
“You know what I would tell them, whoever they are — get lost.”
“You didn’t like him because he was Hispanic?”
“I have nothing against Hispanics. I was pissed off because he knocked up my daughter.” He says this easily. Authoritatively. As the one in charge of history. “Then the son of a bitch walks away. Abandons her — and you. Why would you care about a guy who left? I’m the one who raised you.”
“I know that, Poppy.” I take his hand. “Would you rather he stuck around?”
“No. I didn’t want her to have anything to do with him.”
“What did she think?”
Poppy makes a little snuffle. A warning. “Didn’t matter what she thought. She was eighteen years old.”
“Why didn’t she ever marry again?”
“She was busy raising you.”
“But she was pretty. Did she go on dates?”
“I didn’t encourage dating.”
“Why not?”
“She was too young.”
I laugh. “Young? She lived with you until she died at the age of thirty-eight.”
Unexpectedly he puts his arm around me. “You getting this from the L.A. crowd?”
“Getting what?”
“This multicultural bullshit.”
I grin with slow deep amusement. “Poppy … I think maybe I am the epitome of multiculturality.”
As has been said of the Ayatollah Khomeini: he doesn’t get irony.
“Like hell you are. You’re an American and if you’re not proud of it then one of us has fucked up beyond belief.”
He goes behind a palm tree to take a leak.
I call after him, “The house on Twelfth Street is for sale.”
“I’m surprised it’s still standing.”
“Who lived in the little white place next door?”
“Swedish family. Everyone in the neighborhood was German or Swede. What I remember about them is I was working nights and they had a dog that barked its head off all day long so I couldn’t get any sleep.”
Alone, I sit on a curb with my arms around my knees. I am getting a headache from the gummy pizzas and the saccharine cake and too much wine and I really don’t like it in the parking lot anymore. Although the sky is jammed with glittering stars, down here it is very, very dark and the lights spotting the parked cars are too weak. A constant dry wind rakes the palm fronds, rattling them with a sound like the snapping of cellophane. I am wearing cutoffs and a sleeveless denim top and I feel vulnerable. My gun is in my bag upstairs. Just around the corner from these last silent buildings is open desert. Black space.
My heart is beating fast. I keep hearing dogs. No, now I can identify them as coyotes, laughing like a bunch of lunatics out there in the darkness. The parking lot looks strange. Did that fat asshole put LSD in my drink? I am walking home with Juanita Flores. She is wearing a sleeveless lilac-colored cotton dress trimmed with red rickrack and she is older than I am, maybe eight years old. She has stolen a tablet of white paper from school for the novel she is writing about a pair of sisters who live in a haunted house and she is asking me to steal some stamps from my mother’s bureau drawer so she can send it in to be published. She seems to be lonely and never supervised and I don’t know where she lives. We met in the playground at Roosevelt Elementary School and she drew me into her vivid world of fantasy, often wandering up to Twelfth Street on her own to find me and continue our games.
In this memory I am seeing in the black and white of the park ing lot, a mongrel named Wilson gets out of the yard of the brick house next door and confronts us in the middle of the street, snarling and snapping. We are terrified to go on. Juanita begins to whimper. I know I must save her. I drag her back to my house.
“Wilson’s out! Juanita can’t go home!”
My policeman grandfather will take care of this. He comes out of the bathroom holding a rolled newspaper, big, blocking what little light there is in the narrow corridor to the kitchen.
“She can’t stay here.”
“But Wilson—”
“I don’t want a little spic girl in my house.”
I watch dumbly as he escorts my friend to the front door and out. Parting the white lace curtains that cover the narrow windows on either side of the door I see Juanita Flores alone, immobilized by humiliation and fear. The barking dog is ahead. A closed door is behind. Slowly a yellow stream trickles from beneath the lilac dress, puddling on our doorstep.
But I am safe. I am not thrown out. Even though I have heard the boy who was my father referred to as “the Mexican,” that was far away and doesn’t count and I am not a little spic girl like Juanita Flores. In the cool darkness I look up at my grandfather, grateful for his love. From that moment on, I want to be just like him.
