MARCOS DONNELLY

EL HIJO DE HERNEZ

 *
"His fingers, they noticed, were ever straying As if impatient to be playing . .
."

-- Robert Browning

The neighborhood's north boundary was East 82nd Street. When I was growing up,
I'd watch the black kids play basketball there, on the pavement inside the
eight-foot fence around Saint Malachy's church and Catholic school. The priests
left the gate unlocked from sun-up to dinner time. There was never any trouble
there, no drugs, no blades or guns, no gang members showing colors. Not on the
church grounds. The priests just figured there'd be no trouble, and there
wasn't.

I saw Saint Malachy's in the newspaper last week. I think I did. One of those
helicopter photos, and not a real high-up picture like the ones the LAPD
helicopters take. It was low, a Times shot. The crazy-mother journalists feel
it's their life duty to keep taking those pictures. If you ask me, the cops got
the right idea: stay high, real high.

The photo showed seven towers on what used to be the Saint Malachy's grounds.
You could make out the pole for the basketball hoop, still there west of the
rectory. Three of the towers looked finished already, sprouting out of the
skeleton frame of the church like accidental steeples. They're like the hundred
or so other towers around the old neighborhood: tall, rungy, like concrete
spider webs pulled from the middle on up toward the sky, and decorated with
dishes, stop signs, soda cans. Other bizarre stuff.

Bizarre stuff . . . the stuff you mention last. Like the tower at the comer of
10th and Compton, made up all of skulls. That one's forty-five feet high. And
the one at Imperial and Avalon, the one called Las Munecas. Dolls, hundreds and
thousands of them, cemented into the pipe and chicken-wired struts -- stuffed
dolls, rag dolls, china dolls, Cabbage Patch dolls, and every race, shade, color
and creed of plastic Barbies.

I don't know, of course, but I like to think that Mr. Pietr had my brother Luis
help build that one, the tower Las Munecas. That would be fitting. That would
have made Mama proud.

I still hear him sometimes. Not my brother Luis, but Mr. Pietr. And not just at
night, either.

"Jose," he says. "Jose, come build the city." And there's the music, the sweet,
sweet, goddamn music behind his words. And the only thing holding me back is
remembering I don't call myself Jose. Me Ilamo Joey. Eso es, si que es.

The Save-Our-Cities lady started shouting at the man from the LA Mayor's office.
Mama was up there on stage behind them, and I saw her pinch the bridge of her
nose. She picked that up from television; one night she'd pointed it out to me,
how tense people on TV always pinched their noses, and after that she always did
it, too. A few of our neighborhood leaders, also sitting on stage, noticed her
pinching, and two of them mimicked her. I don't think they realized why they
were doing it.

Mama had that sort of influence.

"Millions of dollars are pumped into areas like Beverly Hills, Park La Brea, and
West Hollywood, while this community rots of neglect!" The Save-Our-Cities lady
was a white woman with stringy red hair and a baggy T-shirt.

Besides Mr. Pietr, my seventh-grade teacher, she was the only white person in
St. Malachy's community hall. It was hot, and the hall was way too small for the
hundred or so of us packed in there. A couple of ceiling fans turned slow enough
that I could count the separate blades; they spun useless and lazy, twisting the
heat around for us.

"Los Angeles County and the federal government have invested heavily in this
area." The man from the Mayor's office talked quieter than the lady. "My
participation here tonight is evidence of our interest in your anti-drug
efforts. Grass-roots movements like these encourage us to continue our
investments." He was a black man, and even at thirteen I could imagine the
conversation downtown. "Fringe of the Watts area," some white politician would
have said. "Better send a Black or a Mexican. We got any free?"

I didn't want to be there that night, but Mr. Pietr told us it might be a good
idea. He said we should show our support for the South Central Drug-Free Zone
effort. The way Mr. Pietr said it meant he might not play the pipe for the class
if we didn't show up. Everybody from my seventh grade class was there.

"Invest!" The Save-Our-Cities lady had a shriek like a bus braking on a wet day.
"You call the Watts Shopping Center an investment? How many people here in this
hall do you think can actually afford to shop there? You have no idea, do you?"

I wondered if she had any idea. Father Galloway, the pastor of St. Malachy's,
had brought the woman in as a guest speaker for the meeting. I'd never seen her
before, and she'd probably never be back. Not to shop, not to live here, not for
nothing.

People from the crowd started yelling out their own opinions, but the Mayor's
man stayed calm. "Since 1990, nearly fifty million dollars have been invested in
the Fifteenth District and surrounding areas. We've used HUD allocations to
create seven immense housing projects, two additional senior citizen centers for
. . ."

He hesitated because the audience shut up, all at once. He saw why when he
looked to his left, our right: Mama had stood. Father Galloway, with skin like
nighttime and a permanent face of worry, stepped in front of the Save-Our-Cities
lady to talk through her microphone. "If we could yield the floor for a moment,
I believe La Viuda de Hernez has a comment to make." Most everybody still called
Mama that, "the Widow of Hernez," even though it was five years since my father
got killed down on Imperial. Mama liked being called La Viuda.

She didn't use the microphone. "Fifty million dollars since 1990. That would be
eight years. Mr. Pietr, how many people would you say live in the Fifteenth
District?"

All our heads turned to find Mr. Pietr. He wasn't hard to spot, tall, lanky, and
paler than any Anglo I'd ever seen. Mr. Pietr stood to answer, the way he made
us do in class. "I would guess around forty thousand, Senora." He said senora
funny, all swallowed and white-like.

"That seems to be an arithmetic problem, doesn't it?" Mama said. "I wonder how
much that would be just for me, just for one day."

More movement in the audience -- Zane Gerard, Lucinda Ramirez, Tyque Raymond,
everybody else from my class shifting all nervous because they knew what was
coming. Mr. Pietr looked around until he found the first student who hadn't
disappeared in a slouch.

"Jose Hernez," he said.

I hated when people called me Jose.

I stood.

"Could you solve that problem for us?"

I caught the Mayor's man rolling his eyes. The Save-Our-Cities lady looked
distracted, maybe a little confused that she was no longer the center of
attention. Mama had a smile, tight and proper.

I closed my eyes and listened for it. I could remember the exact tune, the pipe
song for math class. I could see Mr. Pietr playing, I could feel the breeze
blowing numbers all around me, and I saw the right numbers lining up and
behaving themselves for me when I told them to. Fifty million dollars was
divided by eight years, which was split for forty thousand people in the
Fifteenth District, and a portion I gave to my mother who I saw bubble apart
into three hundred and sixty-five days, all in a rectangle of seventy-three rows
by five columns, which was the only way I could make them float neatly. I
reached out, took one bubble, and read it.

I opened my eyes. "Forty-two cents, plus eighty-one one hundredths of a penny if
you round up." I checked over to Zane Gerard. He was nodding at me. I knew that
even though it wasn't his math problem, he couldn't resist working it, too. None
of us wanted to resist. Behind Zane Gerard, Tyque Raymond was thumb-upping me.

"Course, I didn't count leap years," I said. The man from the Mayor's office
didn't seem to know what to say to that. I watched Mama digging through her big
wicker purse. She pulled out two quarters, walked over to the Mayor's man, and
pressed them into his palm. "You can have today's investment back. You haven't
done anything for me today."

That broke the crowd's quiet. People hooted, yelled insults, even tossed
quarters, dimes, and pennies up on stage at the man's feet. The seventh grade
class of Saint Malachy's school sat still, doing nothing shouting nothing,
tossing nothing. I glanced at Zane, at Tyque, at Lucinda, Marialuz, Jamal,
Manuel, Bobby, Tamara. They were all remembering it, just like me: the pipe song
for quiet, for staying calm and not joining in trouble. I looked back toward Mr.
Pietr; the fingers of his right hand tapped restless on his left forearm, like
he was anxious, real anxious, to play.

The meeting broke up. Mama, the Save-Our-Cities lady, and Mr. Pietr talked
together on stage in a tight huddle, while Father Galloway hurried all anxious
through the crowd, blessing everybody and wishing them goodnight. Me and Zane
and Tyque stood by the hall doors. Zane had his arms crossed and looked mean.
Tyque jittered and bounced on his toes. Tyque was always touching things --
walls, light switches, people's arms, like if he didn't keep some contact going
he might zoom away off the face of the Earth.

When most everybody was blessed and leaving, Zane asked, "We going out?"

"Gotta tell La Viuda."

"He's gonna tell La Viuda first," Tyque told Zane. Zane smirked.

Before I could walk over to the stage, the Mayor's man stepped in front of us.
This close, he was a hell of a lot bigger. I didn't know he'd stayed around. He
was all by himself, no huddles like Mama's and no blessings from Father
Galloway. "Hello, boys," he said.

"Yuh," said Zane.

"I'm Mr. Curtis." Tyque jiggled in his direction. "Hi, Mr. Curtis."

"Are the three of you friends?"

Zane scowled, and I thought it was a stupid question, too. "Yuh," Zane snapped,
"cause we sure as hell ain't blood."

We laughed, and even Zane smiled. Tyque pounded my shoulder four or five times.
"We bad, we beat, but we ain't blood! We bad, we beat, but we ain't blood!"

Our motto.

Nothing frazzled the Mayor's man. "Dr. Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when
children of different races would play together and live side by side --" The
man was playing teacher.

"'That one day on the red hills of Georgia,"' said Zane, and Tyque hummed the
pipe tune for history class, "'they'll all sit down together at the table of
brotherhood. That my four little children will one day live in a nation where
they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their
character.' " Zane recited it real good, with lots of emotion, even though most
of the emotion was sarcasm.

"You think Georgia's all red?" Tyque asked, really sounding like he wanted to
know.

As quick as he'd stepped up, the Mayor's man walked away. I got still, because I
could feel him leave. A pipe tune played in my head, going after him. I'd never
heard the tune before, but it echoed lonelier than any Mr. Pietr had ever
played. I looked at Zane and Tyque, but I don't think they were paying attention
to Mr. Curtis's tune.

"Go talk at La Viuda," Zane said.

More people were in Mama's huddle now, and she was at the center of it all. She
didn't need to say nothing much to be the center. Her every small comment was
holy word-of-God.

"It's a war," the Save-Our-Cities lady explained. "Until we see it's a war,
there'll be no mobilized effort. There'll be no victories in our cities." She
was begging Mr. Pietr to believe her.

Mr. Pietr's voice was smooth and soft. "Saving cities is too hard. I don't try
anymore." He kept glancing down at the floor when he talked. With old people, he
wasn't so forceful as when he was in our classroom. "It's a lot easier to save
individuals."

"That's where it stars!" the Save-Our-Cities lady said, sounding like she and
Mr. Pietr had just agreed on the most important thing ever.

Mama saw me standing there. "Ven aca, m'hijo."

I waved her to me instead. They pared for her, and we stepped away.

"I'm going out."

The power of La Viuda faded away all at once. She had her back to the others,
but I could see the weak woman under all the respect that they put on her. That
they invested in her. My brother Luis was the first one to figure out how to
make Mama weak, how to make the face of La Viuda disappear. He was good at it.
After he took off from home -- early last year, just not showing up one night,
just running off and leaving me behind without even telling me he was going to
-- I had to learn for myself how to weaken La Viuda.

I didn't know why Luis never told me he was taking off. I still don't know why.
Mama didn't argue. She never did anymore, not with me. "Cuidate, hijo."

"Yuh," I said. "I'll be late."

She took a moment to put a proper face back on. Behind me as I left, I heard her
speak to the Save-Our-Cities lady. "You're a very nice girl," she said, and I
knew at that second the lady was transformed into a Very Nice Girl, on La
Viuda's say-so.

Mr. Pietr just showed up one day. It was six months earlier, the middle of
November. We were getting into the classroom on a Monday morning, waiting for
our teacher, Miss Lincoln. In walked Mr. Pietr instead. We got quiet, wondering
who the heck he was. He dropped a stack of books on Miss Lincoln's desk, and he
stared at us for the longest time without saying a word. He was smiling.

"Miss Lincoln has taken a job with the public school district. I'm your new
teacher, Mr. Pietr."

He started right in taking attendance, which wasn't the right order. Prayers and
the pledge of allegiance were supposed to come before attendance. Nobody
corrected him, though. We'd never seen any white teachers at Saint Malachy's,
and we'd never had a man for a teacher.

When he called off my name for attendance, he said "Jose Hernez." I just said,
"Here," and nothing else.

After attendance, he had us take out our Number Seven Readers for silent
storytime. That was it -- no rules for the classroom, no long talks on behavior,
not even directions on what page we should turn to in the readers. I opened mine
to the middle of a story about the circus, and I started sounding out words. I
never read as fast as everybody else in the class. Zane and Tyque could get
through a whole story faster than I could read two pages.

That was the first time we heard one of his pipe tunes. While we read, he pulled
out a long silver pipe and started playing on it. A few of us laughed -- stupid
white guy with a stupid pipe thing making a damn fool of himself.

But then the music started doing something in my head. Mr. Pietr stopped long
enough to tell us, "Keep reading" and when I did, the words on the page looked
different. Bigger. I could see them in whole chunks, and I didn't have to sound
them out letter by letter. I read smooth and fast, past words like "Ferris
wheel" and "interesting" and "entertainment," without having to sound them out.

The pipe music did something else, too. It made my stomach feel comfortable and
full, and my mouth had a chocolate taste like a KitKat bar. While I read, I
tasted it even more. I wanted to read, faster and faster, and I remembered
everything I read.

That was the first tune, the Reading Song. We begged him to play songs for other
things -- spelling, math, vocabulary, history, religion. He did. We memorized
all the songs. We hummed them to each other even after school was over for the
day.

And we started getting A's in all our classes.

I loved going out after the sun was down. I don't think it was the way the
streets looked at night; it was how they smelled and how they felt and how they
sounded -- car horns far off, and, somewhere you couldn't see, some guy
screaming at his girl or a muffled crack that might have been a door breaking,
might have been a gun. When night was hot, it sat in your ears and pressed on
your brain. The streets right around you were always quiet, the noise was always
someplace else far off. The quiet gave night its edge. When you couldn't see
other people anywhere, it was scariest. That's when it was best.

In the year before he left, my brother Luis sometimes let me go around with him
and his friends at night. Luis was the first one ever to call me Joey instead of
Jose, and I liked it so much that he made everybody else call me Joey, too,
starting with his night friends.

There were other nights, though, that Luis wouldn't let me come out with them --
the nights where they were doing something like drugs or shit, or nights they
were gonna cause trouble over by Compton. Luis didn't want me there because he
didn't want his little brother to get fucked up in any way. I never told him
that his little brother didn't want him getting fucked up, neither.

I should have told him that. Now I went around the streets with Tyque and Zane.
"We live in the ghetto," Tyque said, like nobody knew this. It meant more than
that, of course. Tyque and his Mom came from New York, where Tyque said ghettos
were built different. "This ghetto got lawns," he'd always say. I tried to
picture a New York ghetto, imagining pretty much our streets except with yards
all flat, hard dirt. It didn't seem much different. Just taller buildings, was
all.

We walked the side streets, heading south toward the one-hundred numbers just to
convince ourselves that we were bad, that we could beat. We talked a lot of shit
in whispers, like wondering whether Jamal was really fucking Tashina, and
whether Marialuz would ever do it with anybody. We walked the darker side of the
streets ("We bad!") and jumped behind palm trunks or front-yard bushes whenever
a car drove by ("We so bad!").

About midnight, we were as far as 103rd, near Alameda and up from Martin Luther
King Jr. Boulevard. Tyque pointed down that way and laughed. "Are the three of
you friends?" he asked in a deep voice, and he laughed even more, like it was
hilarious or something. Near a place called the Myers Furniture Shop, Zane waved
us into an alley. A few feet in, we had to jump a couple rusted shopping carts
that blocked the way. It got dark halfway down the alley, but cars passed the
Alameda side, their lights reflecting off the barred windows of Myers and
letting us see clear every now and then. The far side of the alley opened on a
quieter street -- maybe Tweedy, I didn't know, we'd never come this far down.

"Tyque," Zane said all quiet and intense. "I need you to hold for me."

"Yeah, Zane," Tyque said, and then he said, "Huh?"

"To hold for me. Some stuff." Zane held out a bottle as thin as a pencil, about
as long as your middle finger. My stomach went twisted and I swore out loud.

"What that?" Tyque stopped smiling for the first time that night. "What the
hell, Zane, what you got? Jesus, Zane, Jesus."

"It's my Dad's. He'll be tearing up the house finding it, so you gotta hold for
me for a while."

Nobody said nothing. Zane kept holding it out. Tyque jittered and jerked without
a sound. Public school kids passed drugs. Saint Malachy's kids never did, or, if
they did, they weren't around Saint Malachy's for long. Stupid Zane,
Zane-Insane.

Drugs made people like my brother Luis run away, without ever saying goodbye to
me or telling me where he was off to.

"Don't do this shit, Zone." Tyque stared at the bottle like it was gonna
explode. "That'll kill you dead, man. You know so, you know they say so on TV
and at school."

"Shit, just like you, Tyque! Ain't it just like you to believe every word you
ever hear said!" Zone looked insulted, but his eyes were wide. "I ain't gonna
touch it, Tyque. Gonna sell it."

"What for, man?" I said, without letting my voice shake.

"For money, what the hell you think? My Dad will strip me down looking, so Tyque
gotta hold."

Tyque looked scared as all shit. He reached forward a little, his hand
completely still.

"It's just till my Dad give up looking."

Tyque took it. I didn't say nothing.

A bottle broke loud, down the alley toward the street I didn't know. The three
of us scampered over the shopping carts and crouched.

Four black men; two were in colors. They were shouting faster than I could
understand, but one of the colors had a broken bottle in his hand. The two
without jackets backed into the alley toward us. We ducked lower.

"You ripped us, skin. You ripped us, so you fucking pay."

"No money, blood! I swear to God we pay tomorrow night! You know we pay, we
always pay!"

"Yeah, you fucking pay whenever we move to cut your wasted asses. Tired of it,
blood."

There was the sound of another bottle breaking, and then scuffling, and
smothered grunts, and endless swearing too fast to take in.

And then music. Pipe melody. The sound was almost like the heat, pressing in on
my ears, but not quite forcing its way into my brain. It even smelled, like a
burning cigarette with a little cinnamon toast behind it on the morning after .
. . after something I couldn't recognize.

I looked. His outline at the alley's end was bright without lights. Dressed real
crazy, real crazy. His clothes were fifteen, sixteen colors wild, red, greens,
yellows, blues, more, all glowing, and there was a scarf blowing from his neck
without any wind to keep it whipping out that way. I swear to God, his eyes
burned. They burned.

It was the ugliest music I'd ever heard in my whole life. The four black men
stopped fighting and stared at him. For a second, I thought, We're gonna have to
fight. We gotta save Mr. Pietr's ass, crazy-mother white guy busting in like
this. It was four against four if Mr. Pietr punched, too, but we were small. We
were little.

All the broken bottles dropped. The four guys' eyes went empty, staring nowhere.
They grinned, all stupid.

We bad.

They shuffled toward Mr. Pietr; the awful music was making them walk toward it,
even though it wasn't doing nothing to me. Funny, because I thought the music
worked the same for everybody all the time, but I just heard the music ugly.

I saw Tyque climbing the shopping carts. Same dumb eyes, same maniac grin.

Zane grabbed him. "Mother, stay here!" But Zane couldn't hold on to him. Tyque
hears it different, I thought. Jesus, Tyque hears it like they do. I jumped him
hard and knocked him down. Zane hugged his waist, I held his shoulders.

Tyque stood up. We dangled from him. He walked after Mr. Pietr and the others.

"Hum!" Zane screamed at me. "Hum the one where you don't join in!" We hummed,
the pipe song for calm. I didn't hum too good, but Zane was better, louder.
Tyque slowed and started looking confused. But he didn't stop. Zane was crying,
something I'd never seen, and he held Tyque for anything beating on him to stop
him. Then Zane reached down into Tyque's pocket and pulled out the pencil-thin
bottle.

Tyque collapsed under our weight.

Drags, I thought. DrugSong drugs drugdrugdrug . . . We could still hear the pipe
music, down the street somewhere. Zane's face began to twist up screwy. I moved,
I didn't even think. I kicked his arm, and the bottle flew out of his hand. It
smashed on the brick alley wall of Myers Furniture Shop, left a white powder
stain and a quick cloud.

Quiet, then, except for our breathing. Tyque smiled again, his real smile, not
the crazy face. "Music," he said. "Think the Vocabulary Song, you guys."

Zane was still crying. "I'm sorry, Tyque. I'm so sorry, man."

"Do it! Think the Vocabulary Song." Tyque never ordered us for nothing so we
tried. We listened for the Vocabulary Song.

"Lots and lots of colors. The way Mr. Pietr looked. Colors everywhere."

"Variegated," I said.

"Spectral," said Zane.

"Pied."

Zane and I looked at each other. Pied was the right word. "Jesus," Tyque said.
"I would follow that music anywhere." Zane scowled, but he nodded, real slow.

I am Joey Hernez, the son of the widow Rosario Santon de Hernez and of the dead
Joaquin Hernez who got killed on Imperial Avenue in 1993. My family is very
large. We live in Los Angeles. In the house lives my mother and my three older
sisters Maria, Carolina, and Rosalinda. My older brother Luis does not live in
the house no more. He is gone a year now and he does not call. In the back yard
we have three trailers where lives my uncle Jesus and his boy Paquito in one.
They are waiting to make money so they can send for my aunt in Mexico and the
smaller children. In the second trailer lives the family of my aunts people who
are not our family. They are seven in that trailer, they would have been ten
except that three died in crossing the desert to the north river in a van. The
last trailer has my grandmother who does not talk English like me. She has the
whole trailer herself and she is an ancient. She never talks to no one. She eats
lonely. We are all Catholics and I go to Saint Malachys school for seventh
grade. I use to go to public school but it is a bad thing there. My brother Luis
went there, My sisters two of them go to Verbum Dei on a bus, which is another
Catholic school but for high school. My other sister is embarrassed and stays
home. I have black hair. Zane Gerard is my best friend and so is Tyque Raymond.
I think being from Mexico is stupid.

"It's a little short," Mr. Pietr told me. "The essay was for three hundred
words."

I didn't say nothing. Everybody in the class was working in math groups, but I
felt like they were staring at me while I stood up there at Mr. Pietr's desk
getting graded. I didn't look at him. I kept thinking he might turn all pied.

"Some other problems. You've got to learn to paragraph, Jose. Your handwriting
and spelling are excellent, but if you don't use paragraphs your reader will get
too tired. Also, look here." He circled a line about my grandmother. "What's
wrong with this?"

She never talks to no one. 'Nunca habla a nadie.' 'Nunca habla con nadie'? "She
never talks with nobody."

He laughed at me. "It's a double negative, Jose. You can't use 'never' and 'no
one' in the same phrase. Didn't you think the Writing Song while you did this?"

My face prickled up all hot. I had things wrong because I'd thought the Mexican
words when I was writing. And I wrote it without the music. I was afraid to
think any pipe music, ever since that night with the Drug Song.

Still, I was pretty sure Zane would say, "She never talks with no one," or at
least, "She don't talk to nobody."

"This part isn't clear," Mr. Pietr said. "Why is your sister too embarrassed to
go to school?"

My head felt fuzzy. "You don't go to school like that. All fat and with people
talking."

"Your sister's fat, so she's too embarrassed to go to school?"

"No! I . . . you know, it's that she got embarrassed, then fat, see?"

Mr. Pietr didn't see. I must have had the words wrong again. I could have
thought the Vocabulary Song, but I didn't want to. "She's embarrassed. Having a
baby." Embarazada.

I heard music for laughing. Laughing wasn't a pipe tune Mr. Pietr had ever
played for us, but I could tell it was one of his songs, just the same, coming
from him right now. It was playing in the back of my head, even though Mr.
Pietr's face didn't show nothing even like a smile. "Stop it," I said.

He frowned. "Stop what?"

"Laughing at me. Laughing at me because I'm a stupid Mexican."

His eyebrows scrunched up, and the tune I could hear in my head switched to
another melody he'd never played. It was a song for lining up thoughts when
you're confused.

"Why are you so angry, Jose?" He really didn't know. He didn't understand.

"I wanna get the words right. Not just when I make your stupid essays, but when
I talk, too. I wanna get them right, but without the fucking music!"

The class got all quiet because of my yelling. Mr. Pietr was quiet, too, and in
a whisper he said, "Don't ever use that kind of language with me."

The whisper didn't fool me. I could hear the music he wanted to play. It was
very, very sad music, and had some pain, like I'd just kicked him real hard.

Our house was filled with dolls. When Mama was a young woman . . . long before
she was La Viuda, even before she was Mama . . . she worked in a factory that
made dolls. She said the factory was right down in Watts, although I couldn't
think what use so many dolls could be in a neighborhood like ours.

Mr. Pietr was walking around our living room, studying the dolls while he waited
for dinner. In the kitchen, Mama was frying tortillas while Carolina got the
beans ready and Maria set the table. Rosalinda was hiding in her room. She
didn't want Mr. Pietr, or anybody outside the family, to see that she was
pregnant.

Pregnant. That was the right word for embarazada. I looked it up myself. It was
about two weeks since I didn't know it for my essay, which made two weeks since
I'd said a single word in class to Mr. Pietr, and which also made two weeks
since I'd gone out at night with Tyque and Zane. They were always whispering
now, and when I walked up they would stop whispering. They would say the normal
things to me, like, "Yuh," and "We bad, but we ain't blood," but they were
different, and getting a little more different every day. Zane smiled a lot more
than he used to. Tyque didn't smile quite so much.

Mama took one tortilla out of the oil and put it in the warmer plate. She
started patting out another one to cook. She was trying hard to ignore me.

"Why, Mama? Why did you invite him to dinner? I already gotta see him all day at
school!"

"Calmate, hijo." The hot oil sizzled when she put in the next tortilla. Some of
the oil splattered on my arm, little pinpricks on my skin, but I didn't move or
show that I felt it.

"Well, why didn't you even tell me? Why not, Mama?"

She didn't answer. Tortilla after tortilla, she ignored me, and then kept right
on ignoring me through cutting up vegetables for the colache and frying the
chorizos in vinegar and brandy. She hummed to herself, but the tune she hummed
was some mariachi song she liked. It didn't have any meaning or power. It was
just an empty tune for shutting me out.

In school for the last two weeks, I'd learned that I could shut out Mr. Pietr's
music. I made up my own tunes; for Pietr's math tune, I made up a song I called
"No Math For Me." For the Social Studies pipe melody, I thought up a tune I
named "I Ain't Nobody, I Ain't Nowhere, I Ain't Nothing, So There." And then I
would study on my own. My test grades got a lot lower, but I wasn't flunking.
And they were my grades, mine.

"Why, Mama?"

No answer.

"Mama, why?"

She started cooking up more tortillas now, and began to stack them between the
ones she'd cooked twenty minutes ago. It was a trick of hers for big dinners.
She'd cook the first ones early, the first half of them, and then she'd cook the
rest right before serving and place them between the others: a cold, a hot, a
cold, a hot, and so on until they were all done, and the hot ones would cool off
onto the cold ones, leaving all of them warm for dinner.

I couldn't figure why she was making so many until the doorbell rang and up
showed Father Galloway, the Save-Our-Cities lady, and Mr. Curtis, the black man
from the Mayor's office. La Viuda was throwing a whole damned party.

I just ate and didn't say nothing. Didn't say anything. My sisters didn't say
anything either, so it was just the adults talking and being overly polite to
one another, like there was more to be said than what fund drive the church was
having, what social activism groups the Save-Our-Cities lady was involved in,
what the next LA County initiatives might be, and what sort of stuff Mr. Pietr
was teaching right now in the seventh grade.

It got funny, then. Talking about what Mr. Pietr was teaching made them all feel
funny. I pretended to be busy pouring myself some more Pepsi, but I started
trying to listen to their tunes, the background music that hung behind everybody
there. I gave the tunes names as I listened to them. The Mayor's man had a tune
I called, "This Is Crazy, Why Did I Come Here?" My sister Carolina's was, "What
Should I Wear, Oh, Tomorrow, Tomorrow, What Should I Wear?" Not very interesting
music. Mama had a strange tune I couldn't follow, but I could feel enough of it
to call it "Oh, My Babies, My Poor Dolls."

And Mr. Pietr's was strongest of all. His tune was "Change The Subject."

Mr. Pietr changed the subject.

"Speaking of school I got a very nice essay from Jose two weeks ago. It was all
about his family."

The bastard. He wouldn't let m e stay invisible. "Really, Jose!" The
Save-Our-Cities lady leaned forward at me, acting like she was all interested,
but I could hear her tune switch from a song called "Can We Save The World?" to
a lush, perfumy melody I called, "Does Mr. Pietr Notice Me?"

"Yuh," I said.

"And what did you write about your family?"

I couldn't concentrate, because the song from the Save-Our-Cities lady was
getting louder and louder in my head. What would Zane say right now? Probably
something like, "That bitch be hot!" She was. She was hot for Mr. Pietr, and
that threw me. I got all nervous and stared down at my plate. If I talked, I
would have stuttered.

Mr. Pietr saved me from the stutter. "Jose's essay was very nice. He wrote about
La Viuda, and about his father and his grandmother, and a lot of his other
relatives."

Thank you, Mr. Pietr. Very much. For saving me.

"And what did you write?" Mama asked. She said it all proper, using the voice of
La Viuda.

"I wrote . . ." I said. ". . . I wrote that I think it's stupid being Mexican! I
wrote that I wish I wasn't Mexican!"

All their musics quieted at once. Nobody knew what to feel. But then the
Save-Our-Cities lady turned all sweet and said, "Jose, you should be proud of
being Mexican. You should celebrate your heritage, and everything connected with
being Mexican. You come from such a rich culture, and let me tell you that
there's nothing special about being white. Most of the white people in this
country have forgotten who they are and where they come from. They're not
anywhere n ear as close to who they real I y are as your people are. I don't
know why anyone would want to be white when they have the rich, beautiful
culture that you have."

She smiled real nice, every bit of her hoping that she had made an impression on
Mr. Pietr. I called the song, "See Me! See Me!"

"Stupid bitch!" I yelled. "I don't want to be white! I want to be black!" Like
Tyque. Like Zane. Even like Mr. Curtis the Mayor's man, like everybody who I
felt made sense, and not like people like Mama or Mr. Pietr or the
Save-Our-Cities lady. "I wish I was born black!"

I jumped up from the table. I spilled the Pepsi when I did. I ran away, out of
the house, then down toward 80th and 73rd where Zane and Tyque's houses were.

I didn't care what they were really all meeting at the house for. I didn't care.
I just wanted to get away.

It took me a long time to find them. Zane's More said that he was over at
Tyque's house, and Tyque's More said he was over at Zane's. I started running
south -- it seemed right, it felt right. South and more south, trying to feel
the air for tunes that played like Tyque's or Zane's. Crazy, I thought. Crazy
that I was depending more and more on the tunes and the notes and the melodies
and the songs, just like him, just like what I didn't want to be, didn't want to
become, didn't want . . .

Down near 101st, I found them running and hiding from tree to tree. I felt the
air for songs and could tell that there was nothing scary nearby, but that
didn't seem to matter to them. Most of the thrill was in pretending there was
something scary everywhere, all the time.

"We bad!" I hollered. "We bad, we beat, but we ain't blood!"

They turned, and Zane smiled at me, all big and crazy. Tyque smiled, too, and
just as big, but, when you consider Tyque, it didn't seem as crazy.

"Hey!" yelled Zane. "How you doing? Come here, you jerk!"

My heart felt light all at once. Tyque and Zane. I ran to them.

"About time you got here," Zane said, punching my shoulder. "We been wondering
where you been. Where you been, Joey?"

"Around, man," Tyque said. "He been around. Why you pushing him? He's here now.
You're here now, Joey, ain't you?" He laughed, and he punched me, too.

Zane Gerard is my best friend and so is Tyque Raymond. I think being from Mexico
is stupid.

"Well, then, let's go!" Zane yelled. "Joey gonna wanna see this!"

"See what?" I asked.

"Yeah!" Tyque said. "Let's go!"

So we went. Really, they went and I followed, because they weren't going to tell
me anything until we got there. That was how they were, Tyque and Zane. That was
how they really were.

So we went south. More south than we'd ever gone before, deep into the Watts
area, down into the parts where you weren't supposed to go, where we were always
warned not to go. Down to 107th Street East, a little north of the old railroad
tracks that hadn't been used for years. The tracks sat there like a failed try
at doing something worthwhile this far south.

"Just look at those," Tyque said. I looked. They caused me to stop breathing for
a second: three towers jutting out from the middle of the dead neighborhood,
reaching almost a hundred feet up. We got closer, and I could see the garbage
they were built out of: broken pottery decorated the walls and rungs, the
bottoms of 7-Up bottles formed the archways that led into the areas around the
towers' bases, with Milk Of Magnesia bottles next to the 7-Up green with their
crystal blue, and seashells, corn-cob imprints, tiles of all sons, teapot
spouts, toys in the shapes of unicorns, horses, dolls, all of them blending
together to form three garbage towers reaching high, high up.

"Wow," I said. "How'd you find these?"

"We been following Mr. Pietr every night," Tyque said.

"This is where he always goes!"

"He stands here and plays almost all night, I think." Zane was rocking on the
heels of his sneakers. He twitched a little, smiling big. "It's crazy. It's like
he's in love with these towers."

"Are they his?" I asked.

"Nah, they been here for years. Think the History Song, it tells everything
about them."

I scowled. "Just tell me."

Zane ran up to the arched gateway in the wall around the towers. Me and Tyque
followed. "Look close,"Zane said as we stood there. "You might have to squint to
see them."

I didn't need to squint. The towers had their own music; I just had to think
clear about the tune, and then I was able to see them. There were about fifty or
so people in there . . . ghost people, shadow people, and they would have been
harder to see if I didn't let myself hear the tower music.

"See 'em?" asked Tyque.

"Yeah," I said.

"Yeah," said Zane.

They wandered around in there, inside the gates. A lot of them were poking at
the bases of the three towers. It was like they were searching for soft spots,
and like they were looking around for anything rocks, stones, old Pepsi bottles,
to make the garbage towers even bigger and stronger than they already were. They
looked lost, although not afraid.

"See how many Grips there be in there?" Zane asked. It was true. I could see
nine members of the Grips Gang, still dressed in colors, wandering around but
almost invisible like everyone else. Grips were a scary gang. I felt myself
shiver even seeing them here, locked up safe. If I could only count nine, there
were probably more Grips in there that I wasn't seeing.

"Crazy old Italian guy built these things," Tyque whispered. "Long time ago. He
just started picking up garbage, cementing it all together, and stacking it up
bit by bit."

"And now Mr. Pietr is filling it up with people," Zane said. He peered through
the barred gates. "It's like they're in the zoo."

"Yeah," I said. "And the music holding them there, ain't it terrible? It hurts
my head."

Zane looked at me funny. "Music? You hear music, Joey?"

"I don't hear nothing," Tyque said.

And all at once, I understood what the big dinner at my house was really for.

I ran, north, and ran and ran towards home.

I ran in through our front door. They were all there: Mr. Curtis the Mayor's
man, sitting on our couch next to Father Galloway, wiping his forehead and
looking dazed; the Save-Our-Cities lady, with her eyes wide and a hand over her
mouth; Mr Pietr, the pipe in his hands.

And Mama, who was holding my brother Luis in her arms. Both of them were crying.
"I'm home, Mama," Luis said between his sobs. "I'm so sorry. But I'm home,
Mama."

All of Luis's friends were there, too. They weren't doing anything. They stood
in a straight line, shoulder to shoulder, unmoving, eyes empty. Behind them were
the walls of shelves holding Mama's own unmoving, empty-eyed collection of
dolls.

Mama released Luis and faced the Mayor's man. "I told you he could. I told you
so."

"I never . . ." Mr. Curtis stammered. "I didn't even imagine he could . . ."

No one bothered to notice me.

"As for the rest of you," Mr. Pietr said to Luis's friends, "I want you to go
back to your families as well. Love your families. Be there for them."

He started playing the pipe, and I shut out his tune by humming "I Ain't Nobody,
I Ain't Nowhere, I Ain't Nothing So There."

Luis's friends, one by one, walked past me, out the door. The Save-Our-Cities
lady walked to Mr. Pietr and touched his arm. "With this . . ., she said. "With
this . . . the wonderful good you can do!, Her music, the tunes behind her, were
a confused jumble of her Save-The-World and I-Want-You-Mister-Pietr songs.

The Mayor's man stood, too. He was still shaking and wiping his head. "What do
you want? In exchange for your help?"

Mr. Pietr shrugged, but he was smiling. "What do you offer?"

Mr. Curtis stared at my brother Luis. "Anything," he whispered. "We'll pay
anything!"

Mr. Pietr's smile got bigger. Then Mama saw me. Her arms were still around Luis.
"Mira --" she said, "Look. Your brother is home."

I looked at him. "Luis," I said.

"Hello, Jose," said Luis.

Jose.

"No, Mama," I said. I glanced at Mr. Pietr. "He ain't home."

The world of our neighborhood started becoming so nice after that. Nobody saw
any more Crips in the streets, and other gangs around the Fifteenth District
grew smaller and smaller. The exceptions were the gangs that figured Out
something funny was happening. They either stayed low, broke up, or started
working on community stuff like cleaning up the projects or helping the new
youth groups that started appearing at schools and churches. A lot of people
just disappeared. I heard the adults call them the "Ones Who Left Town."

Mr. Pietr and his pipe walked the streets every night, and taught our class
every day. As far as I could tell, he never slept.

Luis was a model son. I couldn't remember my father too good, but Luis reminded
me of my father. He took Mama to Mass every morning, worked a cashier job during
the day, and helped around the house at night. Every Monday evening, he and Mama
dusted La Viuda's doll collection. Sometimes, some of Luis's nighttime friends
stopped by to help out with the dusting.

School ended, most everybody in my class got A's or A-minuses. I got mostly C
's, two D's. And a B-plus in reading a B-plus. Summer gave Mr. Pietr more time
to walk the streets and play his songs. When he wasn't out doing that, he spent
time with the Save-Our-Cities lady. They were engaged now, planning to get
married in August.

I walked the streets alter midnight. I think I was the only one left who could,
except for Mr. Pietr himself. I avoided him, although sometimes we would see
each other from far away, at opposite ends of deserted streets. He'd stop
playing and call out, "Jose ! Come here, Jose !" I would run away.

He caught up with me just once. I was at the Watts Towers, staring in at the
shadows of the "Ones Who Left Town." There were hundreds of them now, maybe a
thousand piled in there, twisting around on top of each other like they were
still trying to move around, to find something to do.

"They're not dead, you know."

I jumped because of the voice. Which was stupid. It could only be one person.

"They might as well be," I said.

Mr. Pietr nodded carefully, watching them. He didn't move toward me or even try
to look at me, but I kept an eye on his pipe. He held it loosely, but I couldn't
be sure he wouldn't try to play something at me when I wasn't ready to catch him
at it.

"These towers," he said, "do you know why they're so beautiful? Do you know what
they mean, Jose?"

I didn't say anything.

"They're garbage. Beautiful, beautiful garbage. And they mean something.
Something about what you can do with people, even the ones you think are
garbage."

He stared at them, the Ones Who Left Town, so deeply that I had to look myself.
But I couldn't see it. I could see how beautiful the towers were, but I couldn't
see what was so beautiful about a pile of addicts and pushers and hookers and
pimps all caught up by music that made them a stack of shadows and prisoners to
the piper. I didn't feel sorry for them/I just couldn't see what made them
beautiful.

Luis could have been in there. If things had been different, it could have
turned out a lot worse for him, I supposed. He could be buried there, somewhere
I couldn't even see him, under a bunch of other people-shadows that stretched
upwards on the insides of the towers. But was it any different now? He might as
well be. He might as well be in there.

I tensed when the pipe music started, and I almost ran away. But the first few
notes told me that the song wasn't aimed at me, and that it couldn't hurt me. It
was about me, though, a song that had my name in the title. I looked at him, the
piper all pied again, eyes burning and colors everywhere, but this time it was
less violent, a lot quieter. It was a hard tune, one that I couldn't understand
all the way, and one I knew I couldn't remember for myself after just hearing it
once. It was a song that needed a lot of practice.

The colors got tighter around Mr. Pietr. They crushed on him and mashed him up,
and for a while he was all blurry. The light became all white, then, and when it
went away, when the music stopped, I was looking at somebody else. It was a
small black boy. A boy my size, my height, shaped like me, and very, very
definitely with my eyes. It was me I was looking except it was me as a black
boy.

"You can be anything you want to be, Jose," the little black me said. "And
that's rare. Not everybody can hope for that. Most people . . . "--he gestured
toward the towers and the Ones Who Left Town --" . . . most people can't be what
they want. They follow the paths and roads laid out for them from when they were
born. From even before they were born. But every once in a while there is one
born out of thousands who can become what he wants. And every generation, out of
the ones born who can be what they want, there is one who is even more. The one
who can understand the music. Not just hear it, but understand it. And that's
you, Joey. It was me, too, but now it's you."

The night was cold. Or maybe I was shivering because I was listening to myself,
myself the black boy, telling me about who and what I was. Telling me I could
become anything I decided, except that I also had to be him because I could
understand the music.

"This will be your pipe, soon," he said.

"I don't want it."

He laughed short, a grunt really. He looked at the towers again. "It doesn't
matter. You know the power isn't in the pipe. It's in the music. But you'll want
the pipe, anyway. It's like a symbol of the office. We've used it for centuries,
every one of us since the maniac of Hamelin used it. It might go back even
further. I don't know."

"I don't want the fucking pipe! I don't want the music, either! Why don't you
take the goddamn thing and keep using it yourself? Just leave me alone!"

He looked at me then, burning and angry. It was like me, staring at my own
dreams of myself, and myself staring back with a hate that I didn't expect. He
lifted the pipe and threw it, hurled it away from himself and from me and from
the tower. It looped through the air, but turned in a curve and looped right
back toward him, landing smack against his chest, where he caught it. "Keep it?"
he screamed. "Keep it? You think I have any choice but to keep it? You stand
there hating me, Jose Hernez, without even knowing who I am! Without even
knowing what I've been through! Do you think it's easy trying to save the world?
Trying to save the mindless masses from themselves, only to discover that you've
completely lost yourself in the process? It's not my fault you are who you are.
Just as it's not my fault that I'm who I am! We are pipers, Jose ! And now it's
your turn to carry the music. Ask me. Just please ask me, and the pipe will be
yours."

He held it out toward me. He was crying, fucking crying. "I can do anything with
this pipe, Jose. Anything, except force you to take it away from me."

I tried to glare at him. I imagined Zane's best glare, and I tried to imitate
it. He held the pipe closer. "You see," he said, quieter, "I can stop doing this
now, if you help. There are two criteria for handing over the pipe. Do you know
what the word 'criteria' means?"

"It means 'rules,'" I said, without having to think the Vocabulary Song to find
out.

"Yes, rules. Two rules. The first is that I be willing to surrender the pipe to
another piper who can understand the music. The second is that I stop trying to
save everybody and focus on one person. One person that I love. And I've found
that, Jose. I love someone, now, even more than I love loving everyone."

He started switching back now, done with being me and starting to be Mr. Pietr
again. The colors swirled around him, and he grew taller, paler.

"The Save-Our-Cities lady, you mean?"

He grimaced, looking confused at first, but then he smiled. "Susan. Yes, the
Save-Our-Cities lady, Susan. I love her, Jose, and all that remains is for you
to let me retire from all this and give you the pipe."

Now I felt haunted. Even seeing him standing there as Mr. Pietr, tall and too
thin and too white, I kept thinking of him as short and black and me. Anything I
wanted to be, that's what he was saying.

"But the power isn't in the pipe," I said. "It's in the music."

"Yes," he said, sadder than anything I'd ever heard him say. "Yes. But the
office is in the pipe. The responsibility is in the pipe. And there's more power
there, too. More in the pipe than the music alone could ever have."

Me, I thought. He was me, but looking like Tyque and Zane, and looking good that
way, looking right. "Anything?" I asked. "You can do anything with the pipe?"

"Yes," he said. "Almost anything."

"Then keep it," I said. And I ran. I ran into the night of Watts, away from him,
from his towers, and away from anything and everything.

I stole fifty cents from La Viuda's big wicker purse the next afternoon. As I
took it, I heard the voice of Mr. Curtis the Mayor's man, and I heard Mama
saying he could have back the two quarters that were the government's investment
in her for the day. I'm not stealing from her, I decided. I'm borrowing from Mr.
Curtis.

I went to the little store on the corner of East 83rd Street and Compton and
bought a cheap kazoo. There was six cents in change, which I decided I should
put back in La Viuda's purse later. I ran from the store to Martin Luther King
Jr. Hospital, nearly four miles. That was where Tyque, Zane, and a whole bunch
of other kids from my class were working around the outside fences, clearing out
papers and weeds and broken glass as part of the Saint Malachy's Summer Youth
Group's project-of-the-week.

"Hey, Zane!" I said, "Yuh, Zane!" He looked up at me and grinned. He'd been
lifting the chain-link part of the fence, the loose part in between the metal
posts, and Tyque was on the other side, picking up broken soda and beer bottles
and putting them in a trash bucket.

"Yuh, Jose!" Zane said. "You come to help? This is a real pain in the butt, and
we can use the help!"

"In a minute!" I said. "But listen to this -- I just made up a new song of my
own. Wanna hear?"

"Sure," said Zane. "Go ahead, sure!" Tyque leaned up on the fence to listen,
too.

I took out the kazoo and hummed through it one of the new songs I'd been
thinking up. It was called, "I Am Me, and Ain't No Music Make Me Nothing Else."
It wasn't a very good song since it was something I'd made up real fast. Could
have been better, I knew. But then any song could be better.

When I stared humming through the kazoo, both Tyque and Zane got real still, and
their faces scrunched up like they were trying to decide something inside their
heads.

I hummed and kazooed my breath out, looking them both in the eyes as much as I
could. Zane broke first.

"What the luck, man?" he said. He dropped the part of the chain-link fence he'd
been holding up. "What the fuck?"

Tyque followed soon after that. "Hey, Joey," he said, "what the hell's happening
to us?"

"Nothing man," I said. "It just stopped happening."

They looked shook up, and were looking around like they were trying to figure
out where they were.

"Keep thinking that song," I said. "Keep humming it to yourselves."

I had two and a half hours to wait until they were together. They'd all be there
again, La Viuda had said: Mr. Pietr, Father Galloway, the Save-Our-Cities lady,
Mr. Curtis, there at our house for another meeting. I made Mama tell me by
playing "Say Me Everything" on the kazoo, and then I played "Forget I Played
Music" to her.

I spent the next two hours outside the gates of Saint Malachy's watching some of
the older black guys play basketball. To them, I knew, most music was nothing. I
only heard one song behind them: "Gotta Beat, Gotta Beat, We Bad." There was
nothing wrong with that song. It was a good song in fact, one that they'd picked
for themselves, and although it was clouded with other minor harmonies -- "Gonna
Be Michael Jordan" or "Gotta Find Some Money" or "Should Be With the Woman" --
they were real tunes, tunes they'd picked for themselves and that weren't forced
on them. I spent the whole two hours listening to the real songs that came from
out of them, songs that didn't come forced from Mr. Pietr's night music.

Then I went home, with half an hour until the meeting. It was Monday night, and
Luis was sitting in the front room, carefully dusting the dozens of dolls.

"Yuh Luis," I said.

"Hey, Jose" He was working on one of Mama's porcelain girl dolls in the fluffy
white dress with lace all around the bottom edges. Even when he looked right at
me talking Luis's dust rag traced slow circles around the doll's eyes.

"Luis, do you like me?"

"Of course I like you, Jose. I love my family."

He kept dusting.

"I like you, too. I really do." I took out the kazoo.

Luis smiled. "What's that? Where'd you get that, Jose?"

But before I could play, the doorbell rang. Mama brought them into the living
room, and Mr. Curtis was already yammering all excited. "No murders! Not one in
an entire week! Los Angeles had been averaging four murders a day, a lot of them
from this area --"

"I read the news article this morning." Father Galloway looked relaxed. I think
it was the first time I'd ever seen him when he wasn't nervous. "Perhaps it's
time to make some sort of statement. If the local press is starting to notice
the drop in crime, it won't be long before the national media --"

"Who would believe us? Do we even believe it?"

Then in walked Mr. Pietr. Save-Our-Cities-Susan was with him, holding his arm
and pressed up all close to his side. "No press," Mr. Pietr said. "That wasn't
part of the bargain." Then he looked at me. "Hello, Jose."

It was funny how he was the only one who even noticed me anymore. Even Mama
hadn't said hello to me.

"Yuh," I said.

Mr. Curtis couldn't stop gushing. He took hold of Mr. Pietr's other arm, the one
Susan wasn't hanging on. "Imagine, though! If we got national coverage, and we
could broadcast your music coast to coast!"

Mr. Pietr frowned deep. I could feel my own face doing the same thing the exact
same expression.

All these people now, crowded in our front room. Mama started going around with
coffee, and they were all trying to talk at once. The noise started hurting my
head, and all their music playing behind them grew louder and louder. I got
angry. Who did they think they were? What gave them the right to take away other
people's lives? Other people's minds and hearts?

Hidden in my palm, the kazoo was getting sweaty. I squeezed it hard.

"There's an issue," Mr. Pietr said. "Before you make any other plans, there's an
issue that needs to be resolved. Payment."

Everybody got quiet.

"I expect to be paid in full before you receive any more services."

"Well, of course," Mr. Curtis said. "I'll have to talk to the council. In fact,
if you could demonstrate for them the way you did for us, I know we can convince
them to cut a check the same day." He shuffled a bit, staring at the floor. "Of
course, we didn't discuss amounts . . ."

"I don't want money. I want property."

Mr. Curtis eased a bit. "Property? That would be fine, too --"

"The Watts Towers. I want them legally transferred to my name and Susan's."

Even Susan looked thrown by that one. She loosened up her arm-clenching a bit.
"Honey, I don't think --"

"We made a deal. An agreement, Mr. Curtis. As I recall, you offered me anything.
Not a very responsible offer, I'll admit. But what I'm asking is modest
considering what you've received."

Mr. Curtis was shaking his head. "But they're a national monument. National.
They're not ours to give! Look, we can give you money and land, we can be
extremely generous to you, but we can't give you what's not ours."

"Honey," Susan said, "what do we want with --"

Mr. Pietr pulled his arm from hers, real gentle. "It's what I've chosen. They're
what I want, and you'll give them to me. It was agreed."

Mr. Curtis crossed his arms, but I knew he was seared. "Please. Please don't
push this way. We have no written contract that says you'd be given the Watts
Towers."

"Contract?" Mr. Pietr reached under his coat and pulled out the pipe. "We didn't
seem to need a contract when we started all this."

Beside me, Luis grabbed my shoulder. I looked at hi s eyes; he was looking at
the pipe. Barely, just real, real quiet, I could hear a song coming from him. It
was a struggling song. It was the real Luis, trying to find his way up again.
Buried far, far under. But the longer he stared at the pipe, the weaker it got,
until I couldn't hear it any longer.

"I don't care about a lot of things," I whispered to Luis. "I guess I don't care
about anybody too much. But I care about you, Luis. It's like that I love you,
you know?"

Luis looked at me funny. "I know that. I know that, Jose."

"I really do. Please call me Joey. Just one time, call me Joey."

"Sure. Why?"

"Just do it."

"Okay. Okay, Joey."

I smiled at him. Then I lifted the kazoo to my lips. The song I played was "Come
Home, Luis." As I played, his face got confused and he stopped making the dusty
circles on the porcelain doll's face. "Joey?" he said.

Everybody stared at us. Then Mama shouted, "No, hijo, no!"

Mr. Pietr started playing the song he'd first used on Luis, called "Be A Good
Boy."

I switched my tune to "Pietr Can't Breathe." The pipe tune stopped, and Mr.
Pietr's eyes popped wide. When he finally managed a breath, he gasped, "Very
good, Jose."

"My name is Joey, mother fucker!" I hit him with "Pietr Can't Stand." He fell to
the floor, but kept the pipe to his lips. He played, "Burn, Joey, Burn," and I
felt like I was frying from the insides out. I screamed.

And he stood. He glowed, just like that first night, his eyes all on fire, and a
blowing scarf appearing out of nowhere, his hair being whipped by a wind I
couldn't feel. I tried to stop him, but the pain, the burning, I could hardly
move. I couldn't even hum.

Mr. Pietr began playing the first few notes of "Luis Hernez Is Mine Forever."

"You're hurting him!" Luis yelled. And that quick, he was almost flying across
the room, jumping right into Mr. Pietr and knocking him back against the wall.
No one else moved; Luis still held the china doll and pounded and pounded it
against Mr. Pietr's head until Pietr lost his colors and burning and glowing.

My burning stopped, too.

Mr. Pietr was almost unconscious, but it didn't look like Luis was gonna stop
pounding. The Save-Our-Cities lady jumped on Luis's back, not saying anything or
screaming the way I had -- just clawing at Luis's face, trying to make him stop.

Luis hit her. It was so fast that I didn't have time to stop him. He swung the
china doll around and smashed it into the side of her head. The doll's face
shattered, but he kept swinging, cutting her up, cutting her bad, jamming the
jagged edges into her face and neck. She still didn't scream. She just fell back
onto the floor looking surprised, bloody and surprised. Her neck was bad, blood
coming really fast. Her eyes stayed open. I listened for it, but her music was
gone.

Mr. Curtis, Father Galloway, and Mama finally moved. I realized they'd been
frozen. That's why they didn't do anything; Mr. Pietr had froze them up solid so
that he could fight my music. But now they could move, and Luis bolted up toward
the front door. He stopped for just a second, just to look back at me. I think
he wanted me to come. He wanted me to run with him.

I couldn't. There was blood everywhere, blood all over him, all over the floor,
all over the shattered china doll lying next to the Save-Our-Cities lady. "Run,
Luis," I said, but too quiet for anybody but me to hear.

Mr. Curtis tended to Mr. Pietr, who was starting to move again. Father Galloway
leaned over the Save-Our-Cities lady's body, whispering what I figured were
prayers for the sacrament. And Mama sat quietly on the sofa, hands folded, head
down. All the La Viuda mask was gone. She was just an old, beaten woman now.

I stepped past them, all of them. I stepped into the doorway and watched Luis
running down East 83rd, west toward Florence. He got farther and farther away.

Inside, Mr. Pietr was crouching over Susan, holding her in his arms. "I loved
her," he said. I realized he was looking right at me. His voice sounded like an
echo, far away. "She was the only one I cared about. I loved her. You took her
away from me. You took away the only thing I loved."

Down the road, Luis sprinted around a comer, down a side street, out of sight.

Father Galloway sat beside Mama and took her hand. "Viuda, we need to call the
police." Mama said nothing. She didn't even look at him.

Then I heard a tune growing, playing in the background behind Mr. Pietr. It was
scratchy, strange, a deranged bunch of notes. "My towers," he said. "I'll bury
her at my towers. You'll take care of the paperwork, right? I have to bury her
at my towers."

He lifted his pipe and started playing; I raised the kazoo, but waited. As his
tune started, the air around him and Susan's body turned smoky. It was like a
hole or something opened up right behind them, and I could see the base of one
of the towers right there in our living room. And at the base I saw some of the
shadow people, the Ones Who Left Town, starting to grow more solid, so that I
couldn't see through them any longer. A couple of them had shovels and big steel
picks, and were already breaking at the pavement to dig a grave.

Mr. Pietr picked up Susan. "You can send the deed to my new address," he said,
and then he, Susan, the hole, and the smoke were gone.

"Sweet Jesus," said Father Galloway. "My sweet Jesus."

Fifteen minutes later, it hit. Mr. Curtis and Father Galloway were still arguing
about what to tell the police when they called, and Mama still hadn't moved one
bit. I stood over by the wall of dolls, actually thinking that I should maybe
dust the ones that Luis hadn't gotten to. That was all I was thinking. I could
have been thinking a lot of things, but I made myself not think them.

Then we were all knocked down. It was like a solid wall of sound tore right
through the house, coming up from the south and keeping on going. South, where
the Watts Towers were.

I stood up, but it was like standing in hot, muddy water. Nothing had fallen
down except the people; Mama was lying on her side, still on the sofa.

And then the yank. I felt the music, stronger than any music ever, pulling me
toward the south. My feet started moving, but I grabbed one of the doll shelves.
Everybody else started walking toward the door, even Mma. I tried to yell to
them, but I couldn't even hear my own voice. As they filed out, my sisters came
from their rooms in the back. They left, too.

I made myself hum a wall of silence around me, but it was weak and I still could
hardly move. I let myself walk to the door and threw up my arms to catch myself
on the portal. Everybody was in the street . . . everybody. Doors were open up
and down East 83rd, and the whole neighborhood, old, young, babies in their
mother's arms, were walking across the street, through yards, all facing the
direction of the Watts Towers. My Uncle Jesus and his boy Paquito were even
carrying my grandmother between them.

I couldn't make music for them to hear. I couldn't stop them. I couldn't do
anything.

So I went north. Each step was like dragging myself through a hurricane that
tried to pull me back toward the towers. Sometimes I even had to push my way
through crowds of people walking against me. I crossed Florence, forced myself
to Gage, rested for a bit at Sleuson, and then finally, when I reached the north
side of Vernon, fell to the ground. I was out of it.

A Korean man stepped out of the small grocery store I'd fallen down in front of.
"Are you hurt, boy?" he said. "Boy, are you hurt?"

I was breathing so hard that all I could say was, "Don't!" When he stepped over
the curb I'd fallen on, his eyes went all empty. He stopped looking at me and
started walking south.

I felt a nudging on my foot. The edge of the wall was moving forward. It was
slow, just a creeping up that you could hardly notice, but it was growing.

I crawled a little farther away from it, and when I'd gotten my strength back,
went three miles farther north.

The first tower went up a week later. It was Las Munecas, the one made out of
dolls.

It took the National Guard about three units to figure out that anybody who went
in wasn't going to come out.

The Army didn't quite believe that. I think it took them about five units.

And six helicopters that flew too low.

And for seven years now, they've staked a perimeter around it, backing up a few
feet every day as it continues to grow. They argue about estimates for how long
it will take to reach downtown Los Angeles, and they argue about how many people
are actually in there building those crazy towers. Other weird things happen,
too. Every once in a while, whole busloads of people drive into town from
Chicago, or Houston, even one from New York. And they smash through the
barricades and drive right into the area. Some of the buses get stopped by the
police or the Army, but the people in there can't be stopped unless they're
actually pinned to the ground by six or seven cops. Some of them stand up and
keep walking anyway, dragging a few cops right inside. I read an article in the
paper last week that said the police union was going to refuse to stop anybody
else.

Me, I live in Highland Park now, way northeast of LA. I work in the library
there, helping re-stack books. I'd like to become a librarian some day because I
like to read. It used to be that I couldn't read very well. Now I can. I taught
myself. I didn't use any music to help.

I still hear him sometimes. And not just at night, either. He keeps calling,
"Jose, come build our city. Come save our city, Jose." Or sometimes he has a
different message, like two years ago when his voice said, "Your Mama passed
away this evening, Jose. Come to her funeral. We're burying her beside Susan."
Or last year when he taunted, "Luis says he wants your help, Jose. He says,
'Tell Joey to come here.'"

And one day I just might. But not to build their city of towers. Instead, to go
back and get Luis out of there. And then to find Tyque. Then Zane, then my
sisters, all one at a time. I haven't done it yet because the songs I have
aren't strong enough. There's no way I could beat through the wall and save
anyone but myself. But when my music is strong enough, I will. I'll get them
out, one by one. I'll save individuals.

Because that's how it needs to be done. Eso es. Si, que es.