Hailey's War

rest of the world wouldn’t understand but that made sense to us.

Perhaps it was inevitable that Serena started to kid me about getting initiated into her clique. She said I could become her second. I took it as gentle condescension. But she kept on it, asking me when I was going to take my beating, get jumped in for real. Slowly I began to realize that she wasn’t entirely kidding, and I began to understand. The things that set me apart from her sucias were, in fact, assets-chief among them my white skin and blond hair. Those alone would make me the ideal driver on a pharmacy job. I was the anti-profile; any LAPD officer would think twice before pulling me over.

“Look at the way you live now,” she said one evening, watching me gingerly put makeup on a bruise I’d gotten in a bar fight. “Getting beat on, partying, sleeping until noon, no plans for the future-how is that any different from la vida?” She’d put an arm around me and looked at us in the mirror. “Come and be mi gladia.”

“Gladius meus,” I said. My sword. Serena had learned all the words that went with her warlike life-milites, hostes, bellum, mors-but she tended to hybridize them with Spanish. “And no thanks. I’ve seen the beatings that your girls give each other jumping them in, and those are bad enough. I don’t want to go through the beatdown they’d give a white girl to make her prove herself.”

“Scared?” she said.

“You know better. But what’s the point? I’d never be one of you. What would my street name be? Blondie?”

“The girls will accept you if they see I accept you. And they can learn from you. Nobody ever taught them anything about fighting, about protecting themselves.”

“Think about what you’re asking me. To teach young gangbangers to be better shots, better at beating someone up? I really need that on my conscience.”

“You can teach them honor. Teach them when not to throw down, when to walk away.”

“Honor?” I’d said. “Been there, done that, didn’t get the gold bars. Listen, Serena, I don’t make moral judgments about what you’re doing. I’m happy you’ve got something that means something to you. But it’s not for me.”

She’d shrugged. “You’ll come around,” she said. That was how we left things. The last time Serena came by my place, I was waiting for my ride up to San Francisco, my old Army duffel at my feet. Serena had pressed the five- shot Airweight into my hands, told me to watch out for myself, and then kissed me on both cheeks, like an old-style gangster.

We hadn’t kept in contact. Ours wasn’t the kind of friendship that would survive long-distance. Which is why it surprised me to learn that she was trying to get in touch with me.

four

My living situation in San Francisco was pretty simple: I rented a room over the base of Aries Courier, in Japantown.

To get to my room, as I did when I came back from what had become a day’s worth of pickups and drops, I had to walk through Aries’s ground-floor space, which resembled a garage more than an office: bike frames and parts, freestanding filing cabinets, posters advertising bike races and rallies, a big, circa-1950s refrigerator full of Red Bull and Tupperware containers it was best not to open. When I came in, Motobecane over my shoulder, the owner, Shay Clements, was on the phone with his back to me.

Shay was a hard guy to figure out. Rather, he was the sort of person whom people assumed they understood immediately upon meeting him: bike messenger turned slightly bohemian entrepreneur. He was about thirty-five, six-foot-four with a straight, ice-blond ponytail and blue eyes and good facial bones. He still had the build of a cyclist. He wasn’t married, and I didn’t think he ever had been, but he would never lack for dates as long as there were coffeehouses and the kind of women who frequented them, looking for guys who were sexy in a left-wing way. You just looked at Shay and thought, pesco-pollo-vegetarian, knows some yoga asanas, votes Democrat.

In truth, like all blue-state small-business owners, Shay was remarkably Republican when it came to his own bottom line, full of complaints about regulations and taxes, and nearly as resentful of his own employees. Aries was all-1099, as riders put it, meaning everyone was an independent contractor, without job security or health insurance. This didn’t do much to foster loyalty. Riders regularly quit Aries without notice. This led Shay to look on his riders as irresponsible flakes. It was a vicious circle.

My relationship with him was a little better than that, largely because I was reliable. I didn’t kiss his ass, but I didn’t have to. As I’d told Jack, I was usually his top-earning rider. I got hurt sometimes, true, but I also rode hurt, so it didn’t cost Shay any downtime. Beyond that, if Shay wasn’t the warmest guy in the world, well, he probably thought the same about me.

Seeing me out of the corner of his eye, Shay waved me over, not interrupting his conversation on the phone. I came over without speaking, and he handed off a pink slip of paper, a phone message. Please call Serena Delgadillo.

Only then did I remember the call I hadn’t answered on the bridge. I took out my cell and brought up the call log, and sure enough, there they were, Serena’s familiar digits. I raised my eyebrows, but Shay had already turned back to what he was doing and didn’t notice my surprise. I slipped the message into my bag, lifted my bike to my shoulders, and went up the stairs.

Once in my room, I hung the Motobecane on its hooks on the wall, then went over to my little half-height refrigerator. I took out a pint bottle of vodka, drank, then kicked off my shoes and lay down with my bare feet up on the wall.

I’d lived over Aries for nearly as long as I’d been in San Francisco-not quite a year-and I still didn’t have enough possessions even to make this small room look lived in. There was the bed and a dresser and a mirror. The bathroom was down the hall, and the kitchen was the little refrigerator and a single-coil burner, with my few cooking supplies on a pair of high, plain shelves.

Had I been religious, a cross on the wall or a Buddhist altar would have given the room’s bareness a kind of monastic sense. But I wasn’t. Nor could I bring myself to care about personalizing the place. The things that made me who I was weren’t on display, but under the bed, out of sight: My Wheelock’s Latin, with my birth certificate and my only photo of my father tucked inside. A scarlet dress, never worn and still in the box. My class ring, set with real West Point granite, and my cadet sword.

Feeling the vodka filtering into my bloodstream, feeling relaxed, I dialed Serena’s number.

“Hailecita,” she said. “It’s been a while, eh?”

“Yeah.”

“How’s life up there?”

“It’s all right,” I said. “Kind of dull.”

“I figured,” she said, and the conversation lagged.

I tipped the bottle again, drinking. “This isn’t just a call to catch up, is it?” I said. “You want something.”

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s not a big thing, honest.”

“What?”

“There’s a girl up in your part of California who needs to go back to Mexico, to the village where her mother grew up and her grandmother still lives. The abuela’s sick, and this girl, Nidia, is going to take care of her.”

“Okay,” I said, meaning, Go on.

“This girl needs a, what do you call it, an escort. There’s no one who can take her, and I thought of you.”

“Me?” I said, surprised. “What, on my bicycle? I don’t even have a car. And what do you mean, there’s no one who can take her? I don’t want to be racial here, but don’t Mexicans do everything together? Go places eight to a car, sleep four to a bed?”