Hailey's War (18 page)

Sigmundo merely nodded. “You can lie down on the bed,” he said, indicating the queen-size bed with a cheap chenille spread. “Where do you want it, anyway?”

“Um, lower back, I guess,” I said. My lower back had remained unscathed in the initiation, and there the tattoo would remain mostly out of sight.

Serena hoisted herself to sit cross-legged on the bureau, then
spooned partially frozen pineapple juice concentrate into a half-full pint bottle of vodka.

I lay down on the bed and pulled my T-shirt up to expose my back, listening to the sounds of Sig's prep work and the gurgle of Serena's vodka bottle. I felt very peaceful. Tomorrow I would be hurting, but for now, the post-battle endorphins were flowing, giving me the feeling that all was well.

“So?” Sig was saying, not to me but to Serena. “What am I doing?”

Serena got up and handed him a folded slip of paper. He opened the fold and looked at the word she'd written. “Okay,” he said.

Serena smiled, dazzlingly, at me. “You trust me, right?”

“Right,” I said.

The truth was more complicated. Who knew what Serena was thinking? It seemed likely that she'd chosen something Latin. She hadn't whispered it to Sig, she'd
shown
it to him, suggesting that he'd needed to see the spelling. What troubled me about that was the possibility Serena had chosen a name that defined me only in relation to her—
gladia
, for example, or
dextra
, which meant “right hand.” I was just proud enough to have my own loss-of-face issues about that.

But it'd be another breach of etiquette to speak up now and make sure that she hadn't. So I was going to trust her.

Sig began to prep me, tracing the letters of the pattern with his pen. I half tried to pay attention and figure them out but couldn't.

The needle's buzzing filled the air, not loud but pervasive. I rested my head on my forearm, eyes closed, barely flinching at the first pinpricks of sensation. After a moment, I got used to it, the needle nibbling away at my old identity to make room for a new one.

When he was done, Serena got off her perch and walked over, looking down at Sig's handiwork. “Nice,” she said. “I like it. You want to see, Hailey?” She tilted her head toward the bathroom.

I got to my feet and followed. The bathroom was small and narrow, and the mirror was a small one, high over the sink. Serena handed me a ladies' mirror, the round kind with a pearlized plastic handle, because only in the second reflection would the tattoo be in readable
order, left to right. Holding the mirror, I turned and looked over my shoulder. No good. The mirror was still too high, and I was too close to it. I moved awkwardly forward, until I was standing over the toilet, legs wide. I said, “I guess it wouldn't have killed me to have this done someplace more readable, like on my arm.”

“It's good where it is,” Serena said. “Where it is, no one has to see it and hassle you about it, if you don't want that.”

In the wall mirror, I could see the ash-gray Old English lettering, and so I held the hand mirror by my hip and tilted it until the letters came into view.

“Oh,” I said.

I'd guessed it was Latin. I hadn't guessed this.

The new name Serena had chosen for me was Insula, Latin for
island
.

“Are you surprised?” She was looking closely at my face with an uncertain expression I'd rarely seen on her.

“A little,” I said.

“I know it's funny, because this whole thing, getting jumped in, was about you becoming part of something,” she said, “but
insula
, that's who you are. Even way back, when you were studying Latin while everyone else was doing Spanish and French, thinking about West Point—you were the only one of us who thought she was meant for something different, and that's a lonely thing.” She paused, then smiled. “Did you think I was going to put something like ‘Fearless' on you?”

I shook my head.

“So you like it?” she pressed.

“I do,” I said.

In the bedroom again, Sig gave me a salve to rub on the tattoo for the next
few days. Then Serena poured me some vodka and pineapple juice in a plastic cup, and I knew the toast she was going to make before she spoke.

“Como vivimos?”
she asked me.

“Ad limina fortunarum,”
I answered.

We'd invented that one, half Spanish and half Latin.
How do we live? To the limits of our fates
. It meant that we were going to push our luck, to live until fortune said it was time to die.

We were going to see Payaso, the leader of El Trece
.

He lived about six houses away from Serena. That surprised me at first, then I felt stupid for being surprised. Their name, Trece, meant 13th Street. It wasn't as if he'd live across town.

Serena was wearing a trench-length down coat in a shimmering gunmetal color, with fur trim on the hood. The weather outside wasn't cool enough to justify it, but she looked great, every inch the gangster. I'd borrowed a scuffed leather jacket, which, along with my boots, made me look like a young aspiring biker. I'd woken up this afternoon stiff from the beating, but I'd limbered up okay since, and I hadn't put any makeup on the bruises; they were part of my credentials.

It was a day after my initiation, a little before eight in the evening. The sky was overcast, the low ceiling limned with bright peach from the reflected streetlights. Serena and I crossed 13th Street, her strides long, her coat rippling around her calves. She began to coach me for the meeting.

“Payaso's interested in you,” she told me. “Mostly because of West Point. I told him about that.”

I nodded.

“If he offers you anything, a beer or a cigarette or a joint, accept it,” she said. “That's hospitality around here. To refuse is rude.”

“I know.”

“When you talk to him, don't front and try to act real tough,” she went on. “Don't be a shrinking violet, either. Act like you respect yourself, but that's all. And, this is important, if he plays with
you”—she meant if he made a joke at my expense—“and you think of a comeback, don't say it. He's the man. Let him feel like the man. But don't flirt with him, either. You're here for business.”

We were on the sidewalk in front of his house, where we'd stopped so she could finish her thoughts.

“He's not a bad guy, and I think he knows that you're more qualified to lead the mission than he is. What I'm saying is, when the time comes, Payaso will let you lead, if you act respectful of him. If you front, he's gonna have to front, and that's not gonna be good for anyone.”

“I understand.”

“Okay.”

We went up the walk. There was a metal port in the door, like from a Prohibition speakeasy.

“Damn,” I said, impressed.

“Yeah,” Serena said. “Old Payaso read about these things somewhere and decided he had to have one.”

She'd explained “Old Payaso” to me earlier. The Payaso we were coming to see wasn't the one who'd led Trece when Serena joined at fifteen. That had been the former Payaso, who'd shared his moniker with a promising fourteen-year-old. Sharing the name hadn't made Lil'Payaso first in line to take over, but when Payaso was shot to death by rivals, Lil'Payaso became just Payaso, and in time he fought to lead Trece and won.

A skinny, shaven-headed boy pulled back the port, saw Serena, and nodded. He closed the port, and a bolt slid back.

“Not a lot of protection from gunfire to the face, that thing,” I said.

“Not for him,” Serena agreed.

The inside of the house wasn't substantially different from Serena's. There was a low throb of music and a pervasive scent of cigarette smoke, and about six or seven homeboys lounging in the living room. A pit bull barked once, not really interested.

The only surprise was that I wasn't the only white person there. A red-haired teenager was on the couch, in the arms of one of the boys.
Her hair was braided in a complicated way up over her head, and her shirt was open nearly to the waist, revealing a lacy blue bra. It apparently served like a tank top or camisole; she seemed to feel no modesty about revealing it in front of a roomful of guys.

I didn't need to be told which one was Payaso. For one thing, the name was tattooed high on his pectoral muscle, which was laid bare by his wifebeater shirt. It was also implicit in the grouping of guys around him, the way they loosely surrounded and faced him. He didn't look tall, maybe five-nine, but he had good muscle, like a fighter. When he saw us walk into the living room, he nodded to the white girl on the couch. “Go kick it with Mel and Jaime for a while,” he said to her. “We're gonna talk some business.”

The girl got up without argument, though she looked at me with veiled curiosity before disappearing into one of the bedrooms. I wondered if it was my white skin or the bruises from my initiation that she found more curious. I wondered if she thought I let a man give them to me.

There was a small reshuffling as a place was made for Serena among the guys. I could already see where I was supposed to sit, in a straight-backed chair that had clearly been borrowed from a dining table and which faced Payaso directly, job-interview style. I took my place and let him look at me.

“Trece eres?”
he asked. Loosely translated,
Are you one of us?

“Por vida,”
I said.
For life
.

Payaso pulled an exaggerated face of skepticism, his long, mobile mouth turning down, but with a trace of amusement. “Funny, I ain't seen you around the neighborhood,” he said.

“I know.”

His eyes flashed with humor. “I'm just playing with you,” he said. “I know who you are. You're the famous Hailey.”

“I doubt I'm famous.”

“Warchild used to talk about you, not just recently, but a long time back. Talking about how you used to jump outta airplanes for the Army, shit like that, saying how tough you were.”

This was news to me. I disciplined myself not to look back at her in surprise.

Payaso said, “You want something to drink?” He looked at the boy who'd answered the door. “Get her something. Warchild, too.”

“I'm cool,” Serena said. Apparently, her status with Payaso was such that it was acceptable for her to turn down hospitality.

When the boy came back with a Coors for me, Payaso said, “Warchild tells me they just initiated you last night.”

I nodded.

“Yeah, you got some marks on you,” he said, and smiled. “I bet you didn't know Latin girls were so tough, eh?”

I shook my head modestly. Actually, I had expected a good beatdown from Serena's sucias, but Payaso wanted to brag on his homegirls, and I wanted to let him.

He said, “So now you're In
-soo
-la,” exaggerating the second syllable. “What kind of name is that?”

“Latin,” I said.

“You really speak that?”

“Mostly,” I said. “I couldn't get a job translating or anything.”

“There's jobs translating Latin? I thought it was a dead language.”

“It is,” I said, “but scholars are still doing new translations of the classic poems.”

“Why do people translate things that have already been translated? What's the point?” he said.

I said, “The same reason that bands cover songs that someone else has recorded, I guess. To put their own spin on it.”

He nodded thoughtfully. His homeboys were all watching and listening. I wondered if they really found this interesting, or if it was their way of showing Payaso respect, pretending to be absorbed in everything he found interesting.

Payaso said, “So what's my name in Latin?”

“Fossor,” I said, for
clown, jokester
.

“Fossor?” He frowned exaggeratedly again. It was easy to see where
he got his moniker; he did have mobile, clownish features, with intelligence underneath them.

I said, “Sorry. It does sound better in Spanish. Latin isn't as pretty a language as a lot of people think. It can make a lot of things sound like an STD.”

His guys laughed.

“You were at West Point, too,” he said.

“Yes.”

“What's that like?”

“Hard,” I said, “but like a lot of things, if you work hard and respect the underlying ideals, people respect you. It's rigorous in a lot of ways: academically and physically and psychologically. A lot of people don't make it. Including me.”

This was risky. If he wanted to know why I washed out, he'd ask now, and I didn't know if I could refuse him. And if I did tell him the answer, I didn't know how he'd feel about it.

But he just said, “They got a lot of girls there? Are the guys cool with that?”

“Most guys are,” I said.

“What about guys like me? Does West Point take
vatos?”

“I don't know if I'd call them
vatos,”
I said. “They take Latinos, if they're as square as I used to be.”

Payaso lit a cigarette, not offering me one. He took a drag, held it, and exhaled at length. Then his face changed, turning serious. I didn't have to be told it was time for business.

He said, “So tell me about the shit that went down in Mexico.”

I told him the story. Fast through the part I knew Serena had told him already, about Lara and the arrangements to take Nidia to Mexico. More detailed on the things only I witnessed, like the ambush in the tunnel, and my run-in with Babyface up in San Francisco. Briefly, I talked about what lay ahead, getting Nidia back. In doing so, I salted the conversation with words from my military background, calling the information-gathering I was doing
intel
and a prospective
mission against Skouras
asymmetric warfare
. I wasn't just playing to Payaso's earlier interest in West Point, but to every gangster's romantic conviction that his life was part of a war. It was no coincidence that most writing done on the Mafia, for example, referred to
lieutenants
and
foot soldiers
.