style="font-size:15px;"> Go told me I should come visit Unalakleet. They were leaving LA, and he said I should come for Bible camp or for silver fishing or even to play on his basketball team in the holiday tournament Jamboree. He said, “Did you know Alaska is so big it stretches from Florida to Minnesota to California? And the whole state only has the population of Milwaukee.”
I knew Pop never had any interest in Alaska. When he was around, living with us—which wasn’t often—he never talked about Mom’s family or where she’d grown up. Never gave her the chance. He’d even change the subject.
Mom’s take on her marriage with Pop was this—when she needed him, he was never around, and when she didn’t need him, she said, “He eats all our food and tries to get me pregnant.” That wasn’t true, but this was after she kicked Pop out of the car and left him with the street murals by the Celaya Bakery on Twenty-third. She was trying out this attitude to see how it sounded. I didn’t expect she’d turn it into a habit. And that was the last time we saw Pop. Not long after, she started talking about moving to Alaska.
I kept telling her I wanted to stay with Pop, start a business with him, stay in LA. I kept telling her I wanted to stay for Wicho because when I turned eighteen at the end of summer, I would be able to visit him. I told her I wanted to be with my friends.
“Fine, I don’t care,” she said after a while. “Don’t come. Do whatever you want.”
That year I was running with a Sureños Thirteen clique—Clicka los Primos. It was a rival gang of Wicho’s on the streets, but in prison it was the same. Wicho was Mara Salvatrucha, six years earlier, and maybe even more now that he was in prison.
We both ran with Hispanic gangs even though neither of us had a drop of Hispanic blood. Pop always tried telling us our great-grandma was Mexican and we shouldn’t forget that. All Pop’s friends were Chicanos and he seemed to think he was Chicano too. He was older than Mom and had grown up in a part of town where being white wasn’t cool—that was why he gave his sons Mexican names. Wicho—Luis. Luis Daniel Stone. Me—Cesar. Cesar Silas Stone. He had our names tattooed on his chest, and later I learned that we were named after friends of his who had died. RIP WICHO. RIP CESAR. Pop said they were also family names from his grandmother’s side. But Wicho said that everybody in LA had a Mexican grandmom and that Pop was just full of shit. And when it came to Pop and his stories and his plans, Wicho tended to side with Mom.
It was just like when Pop beat us, how Wicho—from when he was a little kid all the way up—would throw himself in front of Mom or try to pull Pop away. And it was Wicho who ended up with the purple cheeks and the weeklong limps. Pop would only hit us when he was superdrunk, and I reminded myself of that. Regardless, his punches ended when I was about nine, when Pop threw me backward over an end table, about to pounce because I’d said something about money, and Wicho, at fifteen, stomped in and beat Pop into some kind of mess that surprised both of them. But it was during the years that Pop was raging and we all got beaten that I felt he was raging against us for who we weren’t. I felt he was beating me because I wasn’t Cesar enough and Wicho because he wasn’t Luis enough.
All through growing up, we didn’t see Mom as an Eskimo. Maybe Mom didn’t talk about it because she was trying to forget about her family, or maybe Pop tried to ignore the fact that his wife had darker skin than he did. And maybe that was why he thought he could get away with giving us Mexican names—he knew Wicho and me would look just like those pale-skinned Chicanos he’d been running with his whole life. Light, but not pinkish, with black hair, and a day at the beach would tan the shit out of our skin. And he was right. We were those chameleon kids who almost blended in but never quite did—we were too dark to look white with white people and too pale to look anything but white in the streets. I don’t know about Wicho, but I always felt like an imposter—Cesar, the white Chicano—like it was a matter of time before my friends called me on it. But they knew our mom wasn’t Mexican because she didn’t speak Spanish. Not a syllable. And our friends didn’t care. Wicho and me weren’t the only light-skinned kids running with Sureños or Salvatruchas. We ran with the crews who didn’t keep track of where everyone’s family was from. And regardless, or maybe as a result, I had forgotten Mom was Native.
Mom said, “It’ll be good for you to spend time with your real family.” She was trying to convince me that going to Alaska was a good idea. But I’d only met Go-boy and his parents, and the rest were just a bunch of strangers. That wasn’t family.
The first step Mom took in leaving Pop was leaving his neighborhood. She moved us out of LA right after Wicho was sentenced. Besides leaving Pop, she thought a better area would be good for us, get us away from the place that landed her son in jail, get us away from the things she related to being poor—the street art and street vendors and tangerine-colored buildings on Pico Boulevard. We moved in with first-generation strip malls. Moved to Santa Ana. And that was where I hooked up with Los Primos.
That was why I didn’t want to leave—my friends were in Santa Ana. But more than that, if I moved I could never come back. The thing that had landed Wicho in prison was the same thing that would happen to me if I was ever seen around home again. None of my friends knew I was going to Alaska.
They asked me one night when a dozen of us were at a hotel party. Kids were sitting on beds and tables and the air conditioner under the window, ladies too, smoking and drinking, waiting for me to answer. They were extra suspicious these days because about half our crew was in jail, waiting on a trial, and anyone who disappeared was suspected of pulling some shit and making a deal with police.
I told them we’d bought a house a couple miles up Tustin Ave in Orange. I told them that in spite of moving, nothing would change.
Even though all those kids in the gang would’ve left if they’d had the chance, disappearing was the worst. Any secrets were the worst. We weren’t a real violent clique, like those always out there carjacking or starting shit in other neighborhoods for no reason. Sometimes, if necessary. And we had some enemies. But most of the time we’d just be hanging out, throwing these hotel parties, selling some drugs, getting high, and having sex with girls. School nights, weekends, anytime, it didn’t matter. Teachers would flunk us and send us to the non-college-bound part of school. And those teachers would just chuckle when we fell behind and send us down to the technical high or to charter schools—whoever would take us. The teachers spent all their time trying to convince us that we needed to believe our future was important, that we needed to commit our lives to something. They always tried to convince us to get off our butts and work harder when all we wanted to do was have fun. And they were just saying that stuff to make themselves feel good, feel like they were doing the right thing. We knew our future was important. We knew what they didn’t believe—that it would work out, somehow.
Nope,” Go-boy says. “I bet you never leave, man.”
We’re still parked on the concrete bridge. Still blocking the road. But it doesn’t matter because nobody is coming or leaving. Go adjusts the rearview mirror, nods, says, “You’ll sure always find a nice Native girl and get married and have a bunch of real Native kids.”
“Tell me what we’re betting.”
Instead Go-boy tells me more about the village and our family. He tells me he’s just gotten back from college in Anchorage, and he’s working upriver for the summer on a fish tower. He’s not planning to go back to school, though. He’s dropping out. And I’m not supposed to say anything about it to anybody because it’s still a secret and he doesn’t want his sister to find out, but I don’t even think twice. Who would I tell? When I ask him what he plans on doing instead of school, Go says he doesn’t know yet, but he has lots of ideas and possibilities, maybe jobs, and maybe even a few options that will include me.
“Something’s
