It’s early enough that most of the girls are keeping a low profile. The bus pulls to a stop half a block up. Dorian doesn’t chase it. The walk will do her good, clear her lungs of the heavy kitchen air and maybe get rid of some of the grease smell that clings to her clothes.
The bus is idling, lowering the plank so a wheelchair can roll off. The drivers behind it lay on their horns. Dorian arrives at the stop before the doors close. The driver is fiddling with the controls to raise the handicap ramp. Dorian reaches into her bag to locate her TAP card. There’s a screech of tires from the southbound lane of Western followed by the roar of a powerful engine. Dorian looks up to see a black car—black tinted windows, fat tires with brilliant chrome spinners—thread a needle between the stalled traffic, then pull up to the opposite curb. The passenger door opens, releasing a preposterous amount of white smoke. A woman gets out.
“You getting on?” The bus driver is shouting at Dorian. “You getting on?”
A passenger bangs on a window. “Lady, get on the fucking bus.”
Dorian doesn’t take her eyes off the woman across the street because it’s Lecia climbing from that car. Seventeen, unblemished, beautiful and alive. Her curly golden hair tight to her head and pulled into a high ponytail that swishes over her shoulders.
“Get on the goddamned bus!”
Dorian hears the door swing shut as the bus pulls a few feet away only to be stopped by the traffic light.
“Lecia,” she calls, even though she knows it’s crazy. “Lecia.”
Then she’s tearing into the street, zigzagging between cars coming from both directions, summoning a mad chorus of honks and screeches. “Lecia.”
As she reaches the middle of the street, she comes to. It’s not Lecia, of course—but Julianna. The resemblance between Lecia and the girl she had been babysitting the night she died still surprises Dorian. She stares at Julianna, who’s leaning into the passenger window of the car she’s just exited. Julianna laughs at whatever the driver just said and steps back onto the sidewalk.
Thefuckoutofthestreetlady.
Getoutthefuckingstreet.
Two cars close in from opposite directions, trapping Dorian. The drivers lay on their horns. The wind charges from the east.
She scrambles to safety. But Julianna has already walked away.
“Julianna,” Dorian calls after her. “Julianna.”
No response.
“Julianna,” she tries again. But her voice is lost as the black car revs its engine and tears off, somehow carving a path for itself through the stalled traffic. Julianna has turned her back and is walking away when Dorian realizes her error. “Jujubee,” she calls. Dorian squints, trying to tease Julianna’s shape from the dark street, but she’s lost her.
She leans against the bus stop on the southbound side. The number 2 is pulling up. When it rolls to a stop, Dorian kicks its bumper. Pain radiates up her leg. “What’s your problem, lady?” the driver calls through the open door.
“What’s yours?”
The only answer is a gust of wind.
3.
SHE CONTINUES NORTH PAST THE ODD ASSORTMENT OF INDEPENDENT shops—Martin’s Fishing Tackle, Crown & Glory Hair Design, Queen’s Way beauty supply, a barbershop, two water refill stations, three Pentecostal churches, and a Laundromat, all surviving between the strip malls that are eating up Western. You’d think there weren’t customers enough for another budget cell-phone place, knockoff chain pizzeria, donut shop. But the city, especially south of the 10, seems to have an insatiable appetite for the same stores sloppily reproduced.
It’s just over a mile to her house—the last uphill stretch giving the neighborhoods surrounding the 10 the title of Heights: Western Heights. Arlington Heights. Harvard Heights. Kinney Heights. The houses grow grander on the incline. Three- to five-thousand-square-foot Craftsman, Victorian, and Beaux Arts homes, not to mention the row of oddball mansions lined up on Adams Boulevard.
From the business corridors like Western it’s hard to see the neighborhood’s old grandeur. Hard to see how West Adams and all its constituent neighborhoods were once upscale and desirable. That was before Los Angeles lifted restrictions on nonwhite home ownership, moving the city’s focus farther north and west. And once blacks moved in, staking their claim in a genteel hood in the middle of town, city planners didn’t think twice about where to put the 10 connecting downtown to the beach. They laid it right in the middle of West Adams, creating a five-hundred-foot-wide gully obscuring one part of the neighborhood from the other and tearing down houses like they were razing a rain forest. And as an aftermath, or rather an afterthought, some of the most beautiful houses in Los Angeles have a tidal wave of traffic or a stagnant sea of red and white lights in their backyards.
The houses that remain unsettle Dorian, reminding her of how fast the city can turn its back.
Dorian’s not a neighborhood booster. She understands why people don’t want to live in West Adams, why they can’t envision a life for themselves between Boost Mobile, Cricket Mobile, and Yang’s Donuts. Why they don’t want to live next to a once beautiful home chopped up into a boardinghouse with too many occupants in a warren of rooms. She knows why folks pass up the opportunity to own a pristine bungalow or a rambling six-bedroom mansion on the wrong side of the 10.
Still, every year there’s more and more chatter about the neighborhood coming up, about how it’s the last great value in Los Angeles, the last place to buy a substantial house and be part of an actual community. But tell that to the guy who got murdered in front of Moon Pie Pizza on Western and Adams, or the bartender who got shot at Lupillo’s on Western by Pico, or the dozens of stray cats flattened by boys drag racing their steroidal Nissans up and down the residential blocks.
Dorian’s breathing heavy by the time she reaches the 10. She stops before crossing over the freeway. In the triangular strip between the eastbound on-ramp and the street where the girls have a regular beat someone has opened a nursery. Dorian peers through the chicken wire at the plants in their pots, some woven on three-by-three-foot square trellises and lashed to the fence and choking on freeway exhaust. There are pencil plants and other succulents, a few cacti, some shrubs, roses, as well as California natives—wild geraniums, sages, and asters that will attract birds. Soon, she imagines, finches, hummingbirds, and even orioles will swarm this grim plot next to the 10.
There’s a rustle in the air and she braces for a gust of wind. But when she looks up she sees a flock of green parrots tearing through the sky, their wild birdsong cutting through the traffic noise in an unfettered, melodic mania. Dorian cranes her neck, watching the birds swoop low, then rise as one—a multicolored storm funnel in the last light. Ever since she first spotted the swarm of parrots in her neighborhood she’s been hoping to lure them to the fish shack or to her house. But the parrots follow no discernible pattern—appearing for days, stirring up the sky and trees, shaking the palm fronds, chattering wildly, then taking their excitement elsewhere.
You’d think it’s either random or a panicked response. One goes, so go the others. But there’s a method to the flocking—to the great mass of twisting, soaring, wheeling creatures taking to the sky together. It’s not the action of a mindless herd but a precise communication, each bird interacting with at least seven neighbors, adjusting, coordinating velocity and individual movements, copying angles and vectors and directions so the whole flock moves in graceful lockstep.