Home > These Women(4)

These Women(4)
Author: Ivy Pochoda

“That’s fucked up,” Kathy says.

“It’s how I save them.”

“Save,” Kathy says. “That’s a good one. How many you got now?”

On top of the refrigerator are two shoeboxes of dead birds perfectly preserved and nestled in cotton wool.

“Twenty-eight,” Dorian says.

“Shit,” Kathy says. “I wouldn’t want to be a bird around here.” She takes a bite of fish. “You gonna do something about this situation?”

“What situation?”

“Somebody’s trying to fuck you up. Somebody’s sending you a message. It’s straight-up cartel. Dead birds. Hell, I’ve seen girls do shit like that to other girls. Back them off their turf. Seen pimps do worse.”

“I’m not on anyone’s turf,” Dorian says.

“Seems like it,” Kathy says, polishing off another piece of fish. She cocks her head toward the radio. “The fuck you listening to?”

“Classical.”

“Lemme change that.” She swipes at the radio, shifting it to the other NPR affiliate in L.A. that runs All Things Considered on a slight delay.

Idira Holloway is talking. It seems that ever since the verdict was handed down about the death of her son—all officers found innocent although they shot the kid at point-blank range in broad daylight—the woman’s been talking nonstop, swamping the airwaves with her rage. Dorian could tell her a thing or two about how the rage is senseless. How it accomplishes nothing. How all that screaming and anger only digs you in deeper, alienates you, makes people pity and fear you—as if grief is contagious.

“Bitch is pissed,” Kathy says. “Bitch is mad pissed.”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

“Hell, someone kills one of my kids, I’d kill a whole bunch of motherfuckers in return. No shame in that. Only shame in doing fuck-all.”

Sometimes Dorian imagines there’s a city full of women like Idira Holloway. Women like her. A city of futile, pointless anger. A country. A whole continent. It’s a fantasy she hates, but it comes anyway. It makes her claustrophobic, like she’s going to choke on the proximity of all these grieving mothers.

“Only one way to get justice for Jermaine,” Kathy says. “Law of the streets. An eye for an eye. It’s like how I tell my girl, Jessica—don’t look for trouble, keep a low-pro, because when shit goes down, you’ve got to represent yourself. What’s more, I tell her if she gets herself into some real shit, there’s a chance I’d have to go to work on her behalf. And neither of us want that.” She roots around for any fish she’s missed. “What I wouldn’t do for her or the others. Protect them to my grave.”

Yet here’s Kathy, night after night, strolling Western, putting herself out there, right in the way of danger. A strange form of protecting her kids if you ask Dorian. But choices are choices. And some people don’t get too many.

Maybe Dorian had doomed Lecia from the start. Maybe choosing Ricky, a black man, to be the father of her child was her first mistake. Growing up in small-town Rhode Island, Dorian didn’t understand the curse of skin tone.

On the radio, Idira is still raging, shouting down the cops, the lawyer, the justice system. As if any of it will change a thing.

Kathy finishes and crushes the Styrofoam. She pulls a compact out of her gigantic shiny red purse and touches up her makeup.

“How do I look?” she says, puckering her lips and narrowing her eyes like she wants to devour Dorian whole.

“Good,” Dorian says. “Nice.”

“Fuck you mean by nice? You think nice is gonna get me a train of dudes so I can make rent and pay for that bounce house for my boy’s birthday?”

Dorian knows this game. “Kathy, you look like one badass sexy bitch.”

Kathy snaps her compact shut. “That’s what I fucking thought.” She combs her fingers through her short bleached curls and shoulders her bag. At the back entrance to the fish shack she stops. “You gonna do something about those birds? I don’t feel safe eating where someone’s murdering fucking hummingbirds.”

“Like what?” Dorian asks.

“Least Jermaine what’s-his-face’s mother is raising hell. Least she’s getting heard.”

“You want me to raise hell about some dead birds?”

“I fucking would.” And Kathy’s gone, taking her game out to Western, lighting up the night with her brilliant blond hair and hard cackle.

Finally the news switches over to a different story—a possible bullet train from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Dorian exhales, letting out the tension that always surges inside her when she hears Idira Holloway’s voice.

She stares into the fryer, checking the oil to see how long before she can dump it.

Dear Idira, I know it’s hard to talk over the fury because the fury does the talking. But you’ll learn eventually. I’ve got fifteen years on you and there’s not a day that I don’t want to scream at someone, press my meat cleaver into my hand, punch the wall. The scars I should have in addition to the one on my heart. But there’s no point. Over time you let it go. That’s what you do. Stop making noise. Or that’s all you are. Noise. Nuisance. A problem. You are nothing but your pointless rage.

Dorian claps a hand over her mouth. Who the hell is she talking to in her empty kitchen? How come the past won’t stay put?

She turns the oven off, hits the lights, locks up, and says the same lame prayer that feeding Kathy and the rest of them will keep them safe on Western.

It wasn’t too long ago that this strip of Western was a hunting ground. Fifteen years back, thirteen young women turned up dead in surrounding alleys, throats slit, bags over their heads. Prostitutes, the police said. Prostitutes, the papers parroted.

Lecia wasn’t a hooker, but getting killed the same way as a few hookers seals your fate no matter how much noise your mother might make, how much hell she might raise.

And Dorian had made some noise. Lots. All up and down Southwest Station and even Parker Center. At the local papers—the free weekly and the Times.

No one listened.

In fact, the mothers of some of the other victims got in her face about it. Different ’cause she half white? they wanted to know.

Death don’t care if you’re black or white. Only thing in this world that don’t indiscriminate, one of the other mothers told her.

Thirteen girls dead. Fifteen years gone. By Dorian’s count, and her count is right, three other serial murderers have been hauled in, tried, and locked up in Los Angeles in that time. But not a single arrest for the murder of girls along Western.

The cops got lucky—the killings stopped after Lecia. No need to revisit old crimes in a city where tensions are always on a simmer. Let sleeping dogs do their thing.

Dorian peers back through the bars on her window, checking that everything’s in order. The winds are still ripping through the city, swirling trash, shaking trees, and sending palm fronds swirling down. She steps to the curb and checks for the bus, then figures she might as well walk home.

The air is choked with the sounds of the evening commute—the idling cars slower now that everyone’s distracted by their phones, the heave and wheeze of buses snarling traffic, the overhead noises, the planes flying too low over West Adams and local news choppers out pursuing some story for the nightly digest of other people’s misery.

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