“What about it?” Saber said.
“I heard about you. You hung your johnson through a hole in the ceiling over a teacher’s head. That’s something else, man.”
Saber looked at him. “I just washed my heap.”
“So?”
“Try to keep your pits off it.”
“I’ll tell Loren I saw y’all,” the hood said. He tapped the window jamb and walked away.
“You know that guy?” I said.
“No.”
“You think he’s hooked up with Vick Atlas?”
“You know it,” Saber said. He put the wishbone he was eating back on the tray. “Man, oh, man.” He got out of the car.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“I cain’t take this anymore.”
“Take what?”
“Getting jobbed by these guys all the time. Dangle loose.”
“Come back here, Saber,” I said, getting out of the car.
Saber walked to the driver’s window of the hoodmobile and leaned down. “I don’t know what that guy in the backseat told you, but he’s on the stroll. He just propositioned us and tried to get us over to Herman Park. I’m going inside now and call the cops. This is a class joint. If I were y’all, I’d dump this guy somewhere. Talk about no class.”
I thought we were dead. But nothing happened. Saber was glowing. In his innocence, he believed he had confronted evil and defeated it with guile. I don’t think that was the case. I believed the fear of the kids in the hoodmobile was so great that they would eat any insult rather than report back to Vick Atlas with information he didn’t want to hear. They were born poor and hid their insecurities by wearing the clothes of 1940s zoot-suiters, and they didn’t even have the vocabulary to describe the impulses that controlled their lives.
“We stuck it to them, didn’t we?” Saber said as we headed down South Main toward the roller rink.
I looked out the window without answering.
“Did I tell you I had a conversation with the organ player at the rink?” he said. “I think she digs me.”
“You’re the best, Saber,” I said.
The clouds were as yellow as sulfur and roiling in thick curds all the way to the horizon, as though we were trapped beneath an ocean that was sliding over the edges of the earth.
Chapter
31
I COULDN’T FALL ASLEEP that night. I didn’t get up until nine. My parents had already gone to work and my mother had fed our pets, which was usually my job. I made coffee and opened the morning paper. On the first page of the local section was a photograph of a pickup truck that had been hit broadside by a locomotive and mashed int
o scrap. The story stated that the driver of the pickup had tried to beat the rail guard and that he and his passenger probably died upon impact. Their names were Manuel Delgado and Cholo Ramirez, age twenty-one and twenty-two, respectively.
I felt perspiration break on my forehead. My stomach flared as though someone had dragged a match head across the lining. I called Cisco Napolitano. She picked up and cleared her throat before she said hello.
“I need to talk with you, Miss Cisco,” I said.
“You again?”
“Can I come to your apartment?”