over on Booth Street, so we told Chunky what was up, slipped him forty dollars, and he pointed us toward a big-ass dual-cab pickup parked in the lower level. He said there was a stripper who wouldn’t miss the truck until three or four in the morning.
Kid Cab drove because he always drove. Kid Cab drove reckless. We laughed when we turned on the stereo and heard some heavy metal. We hollered at girls. And when we came up on the block where the party was, Kid pulled out his .22 pistol and just started banging off shots, pocking the stucco between partygoers.
What we should’ve done was drive off and have some more fun with the truck before we returned it. Instead Kid Cab turned back around and drove us past the party, hoping the crew who’d busted his car would be out on the front lawn. They were. But this time they came at us hard, firing shots from two or three different guns. Our truck took a couple holes to the rear fender. Kid got us gone, quick, but a minute later the Eighteenth Street crew had caught up and a full-out chase had started. We ran red lights on West First. Kid tried losing them in parking lots. It was real cops-’n’-robbers shit, except robbers-’n’-robbers, and it was then—during the part of the chase where nothing was happening but high speeds and traffic violations—that I wondered what the hell we were doing. This was the result of me talking to a girl at a mall. At worst it was jealousy. At best a rivalry.
Two gunshots cracked the driver’s-side door with a denting sound. That girl Lily was next to us, gun in hand, elbow in the open window, that same mean smile on her face, that same mean laugh. Kid Cab ran the truck down a side road, stopped hard, started screaming. His thigh was all blood.
Sometime later we ditched the truck and Kid’s sister picked him up and drove him to the hospital. Kid Cab told the police he was at a party over on Booth Street when a big white truck drove by, shooting up the place, and one of the shots got him in the thigh. They took it all in, skeptical.
Kid spent a week in the hospital. His thigh ballooned to the size of a pumpkin, purple and black, and they had to pump him full of morphine to keep him from weeping like a pussy. I thought a leg wound would be nothing, but it was weeks before Kid was back to normal. And with no insurance, Kid’s mom was stuck with a stack of hospital bills, the payments scheduled over a decade, all because of some stupid stuff with that girl.
I wanted to hit Mr. Larsen for the way he was talking to Go. I thought about admitting to him that I was the one who’d lied, but contradicting Go-boy didn’t seem right. And before I could do either, Mr. Larsen told me to leave, to climb up the tower so he could talk to Go-boy in private. He said, “Count accurately.”
Valerie had already cut up two of the fresh salmon with Go-boy’s ulu. She was working on the last fish. A square of burlap was stretched across the picnic table, soaked with dark blood.
Valerie first cut down the belly of the fish, unloading strings of guts. Next she hacked off the head, crunching through bones and gills. It was raw—the sounds of fracture. I almost stopped watching, but what came next was different. What happened next was she traced a tender slice along the spine. Her free hand—bare—lay flat along the scales of the salmon, feeling each move she made with the ulu. The blade slid between the pinkish flesh and the branches of white spine—a clean, inaudible slice. She peeled back each fillet, now using the Eskimo knife as a gentle guide. When she was done she held up two rectangular slices of bright red meat, still connected at the tail. There was twice as much fish in her hand as waste on the table. She went to the river and rinsed the meat clean of blood and loose scales. Afterward she rinsed the ulu, the burlap, and her hands. She left a cloud of blood in the clear water—dark red and drifting down the shoreline.
I told them about Go and the fish counts.
“Araa!” my cousin said. “Larsen’s sure always bugging about stuff.”
I was hoping that as we stood there, Go-boy was telling Mr. Larsen the real reason for the unrealistic fish counts—that I didn’t know how to count fish, that I didn’t try very hard, that I skipped out and made him work a few shifts straight. I wanted to get caught without turning myself in. I wanted Go-boy to act like he knew me better than I knew myself, like he had the first day I was here.
“Is Go like this?” I asked.
“Like what?”
“Too honest.”
She didn’t answer, and neither did my cousin.
“He’s a good person,” Valerie said.
She was picking dried fish scales from the blade of the ulu. She looked up, right at me, and said, “Go-boy hates lies.”
The three of us went silent.
Valerie then told me that a friend of Go-boy’s had committed suicide the night before. His name was Jay, but everyone called him Trilogy because he was the third brother in the family and all the boys were so similar. Go had known him pretty well. Valerie had come up to the fish tower that morning with Mr. Larsen and my cousin hoping to tell Go. Some people in town were saying that Jay had hung himself; others said he had used a gun. It still wasn’t known what had happened. It was still new. Valerie had heard he’d been walking around town, drunk and soaking wet, saying cryptic things to people, and that his dad’s boat had been found swamped in the slough.
“I’ll let you tell Go,” I said.
“And I also wanted to . . .” Valerie said. “You should talk to Kiana.”
“Why?”
“About what happened last night, at the party,” she said. Valerie wasn’t looking at me. She was looking up at the kitchen tent, looking for Go.
“About what?”
“I think you know.”
“I don’t.”
Valerie turned and looked downriver.
My cousin said, “Come on. All night you were telling people you slept with her.”
“Poor,” Valerie said with half sympathy, half embarrassment.
“She has a boyfriend,” my cousin added.
When Kid Cab’s stitches were removed and the scabs were all scratched off, he decided it was time to pay back that girl who had shot him. I was feeling like he should drop the whole situation, but this was a month before I was moving to Alaska, and I needed to blend in and ride along with my friends so they didn’t get skeptical. The unspoken suspicion of each other’s loyalty was always with us. Besides, I was still running by the rules of the game—never snitch, never give, and never ever feel sorry for the shit that happens to people as a result of their own choice.
We found the girl on her walk home from working at Carlo’s Market—this made me think Kid had been planning everything for a while. I wondered then if she really was a gangbanger or if it was all a mistake. She looked so harmless in her outfit—blue slacks, yellow apron. I imagined she worked in the bakery or the deli. It had been over a month since she’d shot Kid. It looked like she was now trying to do things right, trying to play it straight. And maybe we all knew that when we grabbed her and locked her in the trunk, but we also knew—including her—how this retaliation shit worked.
At Chunky’s valet lot we parked in a corner stall of the basement. The girl was an animal, and it took five of us, at all times, to restrain her. Kid Cab lowered the tailgate of a small pickup. We drug her into the truck bed, each of us kneeling alongside her, pinning
