Southland. Nina Revoyr
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nodded. She took her hands off the wood and turned back toward Lanier, who was standing, a bit awkwardly, on the sidewalk. “Thanks,” she said. “I’m glad I saw this. It makes everything more real, somehow.”
Three young boys careened around the corner on bicycles, rode between them, then turned again and darted down the alley. Lanier watched them go. He and Cory always biked over around this time to see what Curtis was up to. “You know, a lot of times at this time of day your grandfather would be sitting outside with his friend Mr. Conway to greet the kids when they were coming home from school.”
“You think that’s how he met Curtis?”
Lanier shrugged. “Probably. Curtis and Cory lived a couple blocks from here and they would’ve walked by on their way back and forth from school.”
“What do you know about Curtis? Why did my grandfather like him so much?”
“I don’t know why your grandfather liked him, but I know why I did. He was always there, man. Always. He was solid.” And he kicked me in the ass when I needed it, Lanier thought. He paid attention to me, and wasn’t embarrassed to have me and his brother hanging around with him. With him I felt big, like I mattered. And so much of what I do now is still about him.
“What was his family like?”
Lanier sighed. “Complicated. I’m not sure their parents liked each other much. Bruce—my uncle—was from L.A., but he met Curtis’s mom when they were working in Oakland. Actually, Curtis was born up there, and his mother went back up there after he died. Anyway, Bruce and Curtis used to fight something awful. I don’t know what the problem was—Curtis was a pretty good student and didn’t get into any trouble. But he did whatever he wanted and hung out with whoever he wanted, and I don’t think that sat very well with his dad.” Nothing ever did sit well with Bruce, he remembered. Jimmy’s own mother didn’t, which meant that neither did Jimmy. Uncle Bruce was more frightening than any version of Jimmy’s father, drunk or sober. He had a way of making you feel like you were being beaten, even though he never raised a hand.
“Anyway,” Lanier continued, “Bruce and Alma, Curtis’s mom, used to fight a lot too. Usually about Curtis, I think.” But Alma, he remembered, could handle him. Fiercely loving but also aloof somehow, she was Jimmy’s first love. And Curtis’s. And everyone else’s.
“What’d they do for a living?”
“Bruce worked for Goodyear. When I was growing up, there were a bunch of factories and plants in the area. A lot of men walked to work—you could actually hear the five o’clock whistles. And Alma was a teacher. She ended up getting some important job with the Oakland School District after Cory graduated from high school, but back when I knew her, she was a teacher. Before that, she was a factory worker. And before that, she worked as a domestic.”
“My grandmother was a teacher, too. And my great-grandmother was a domestic.”
Lanier laughed. “My great-grandmother was a domestic, too. And my grandmother. And my mother. I guess that was the fate of most women of color back then.”
Jackie didn’t answer. She was surprised and a bit uncomfortable that someone from her family could be lumped together with someone from Lanier’s family, and from the Martindales’. Even though she knew that her grandparents, and great-grandparents, had lived in this neighborhood, she didn’t really think of them as part of it. Their stay here—and her tour—was only an accident, a fluke. They’d been interlopers, visitors, and now they were gone.
Jackie and Lanier walked back toward the car. Jackie noticed, across the street, more remnants of the earthquake—cardboard covering windows, broken glass sparkling on the lawns. But then, just as she was about to open her door, a string of small children, linked in pairs, came into view on the sidewalk on Crenshaw. There were a good twenty or twenty-five of them, and judging from their organized procession and from the four tired-looking women who walked beside them, they were a class from a local elementary school. The first children were halfway across Bryant Street when one of them yelled, “Look! It’s Mr. Lanier!”—and then suddenly children were breaking out of line, sprinting fullspeed down the sidewalk. About ten of them streamed toward him yelling “Mr. Lanier! Mr. Lanier!” and they all hit him more or less at once. “We saw a dead squirrel!” one of them announced. “Yeah,” said another, “and its head was all bloody!” “Mrs. Davis showed us all different kinds of trees!”
“Whoa, whoa!” Lanier said, laughing. But he’d come back to the sidewalk and dropped to one knee, giving the kids more access to him, and he seemed somehow to be looking at all of them at once, enclosing them all in his arms. The other children were still in the middle of the street, their line depleted and confused, and the women quickly herded them onto the sidewalk, calling to the kids who’d surrounded Lanier: “Shaniqua! Todd! Angelique! Get back here!”
But the children paid them no mind, even when Lanier instructed them to return to their class. They couldn’t take their eyes off of him. And as they kept telling him about what they’d seen and done that day, they all managed somehow to touch him—hand to his knee, arm on his shoulder, an elbow linked around his elbow.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Lanier said to the middle-aged, long-suffering woman who came over to retrieve her charges. “They’re in my after-school program.”
“I know who you are,” she replied. “They talk about you like you’re Disneyland.”
Because the kids refused to go back on their own, Lanier had to take them. He stood up with one child hanging onto his shoulders, a child tucked under each arm, and the rest of the kids clutching his shirt or pants. Like a many-headed, many-limbed creature, they made their way to the corner where the rest of the class was waiting. After he’d disengaged the last child and safely returned her to her partner, he came back down the sidewalk toward Jackie.
“They love you,” she said, smiling.
Lanier looked a bit sheepish. “Yeah, well, you know.”
But she didn’t; she hadn’t. The childrens’ obvious adoration of him, his tenderness with them, was a surprise, and a recommendation. By the time they reached the parking lot, Lanier’s usual face and voice and demeanor had already snapped back into place. But Jackie didn’t buy it anymore. She’d seen something that she wished to see more of.
FRANK DIDN’T tell his father, but it was the rabbits and frogs that swayed him. Not that he was sick of going to Little Tokyo, although that was also true. Every weekday that summer he was working at Old Man Larabie’s store, and every Saturday he made his own trip to Li’l Tokyo with his sister and the Hiraoka brothers for three hours of practicing kanji and bowing stiffly at Japanese school. The last thing he wanted to do on his one day off was to go back again and follow his parents around as they shopped, as they called on their old-time friends. Especially since he’d just seen them all anyway at the big kenjinkai picnic in Griffith Park, where all the Issei from Nagano-ken had gathered to feast, play, trade news of home, get red-cheeked and teary-eyed from sake and beer. Get intoxicated, too, on their memories of mountains and rice paddies and the plump, juicy apples that his father said made the American kind look like raisins. And he’d see them all again in another three weeks at the Nisei festival, which Frank didn’t mind as much because he liked the colorful parade, the red dancing lion with its swirling mane, the women in bright kimonos, the men with drums so large you couldn’t see their faces. And because he liked the sumo tournament, the powdered sweating bodies and slick tied hair and the small, t-shaped, diaper-like mawashis. And most of all, because he was performing in the judo exhibition in the new, still-stiff white uniform he’d paid for with his earnings from the store.
But Sundays were too much. They didn’t live in Li’l Tokyo anymore—the Sakais had