The Misbegotten

“You know, Eff, we gotta talk about Tirza,” declared Ramona a second or two after I announced my cousin had news.

“Yeah, I know,” I began immersed in thought. “I think you all are pretty much in agreement when it comes to me meeting her. To be honest, I really don’t want meet her myself.” That got Ramona’s attention, but not in the fashion I had intended. She was thinking I thought Tirza was lying about her true intentions. I had to remedy that, and quick. “I’m not saying I don’t believe her when she says it has nothing to do with her and me. About that, I have no doubt. She doesn’t think of me in that way anymore, and neither do I. I just don’t see the value of meeting with her under any circumstances. I don’t know, so much has happened between us, I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“What I don’t like about the whole thing is, she won’t tell you why she needs to talk with you. And, why is she so desperate in the first place?” Katie speculated, moving to sit on her knees, perched as she was upon the couch. “All the cloak and dagger shit is a little tedious.”

“Yeah, I feel you on that,” agreed Ramona. “I just don’t want you guys to be alone. I don’t care what the topic is. I just don’t want that, especially after what you demonstration upstairs. Eff, you are too strong and still haven’t gained full control over what you can do.” She looked at me square in the face. “Sorry, Babes, I don’t think I could deal with that right now.”

I nodded, trying to express that I felt the same. She was correct even in my book. My eyes inadvertently wondered over to Leda, who wasn’t looking at any of us.

She seemed to be staring at the coffee table with grim scrutiny. She was as still as a statue.

I recall wondering what she was thinking about. If what Ramona had said was true. The idea began to creep into my brain, maybe she was thinking about what she had done up in the Loft. Maybe the idea of it was no longer embarrassing her as much as it had hours ago.

“Whatever you do, Effy, just don’t go alone like Ramona said,” echoed Sandy, then turned to look forward. “What you did to us, to me, was powerful. I have never felt such compulsion like that before.”

“Tell me about it,” joked Leda, but her tone was snide. Incredible as it seemed, she directed it more toward herself than any of us, or the situation at hand.

My, my, wasn’t she full of surprises today.

“I wonder what she has to talk to you about, though. What would get her so riled up that she’d put herself out there like that, you know? She has opened herself to be an easy target. Why would she do that? And why come to you of all people?” It was Katie.

I was a glad for the change of topic. I didn’t want to risk a rehashing of Leda begging me to fuck her just yet. As intriguing as it seemed on the surface, what rested below was too weird to think about, in depth, at the time. It was too soon for my taste.

“She said she wanted to talk to me, because it would be the last thing anyone would expect. Or maybe she had said ‘suspect’. I can’t remember,” I offered, but even that didn’t answer any of my cousin’s questions.

“And that’s what makes it all the more weird, Estefan. Who the fuck is she hiding from and why?” Katie slapped her knees in frustration.

“You know, that’s a pretty god damned good question now that you mention it,” said Leda. She appeared to realize the problem from a different vantage.

“You don’t think this is all more Muto bullshit, do you?”

We all turned to look at Sandy, remembering Leda’s rough treatment of her mere minutes ago over the same subject.

“You think she’s been sick?” I asked of the group, but my query was more for my girlfriend.

She closed her eyes and got super still.

The rest of us frowned in confusion. What the hell was she doing? We all wanted to know.

The silence continued for a few more heartbeats and I was about to say something.

Ramona spoke. “She’s too far away, I can’t tell.”

“What?” I asked her.

“Ramona, what are you talking about?”

My girlfriend gazed at Sandy with a small smile dancing across her lips.

Then it hit me. It’s her “power”! She can access her ability to see into others at will now! Holy fuck that was fast!

The house phone rang like the bells of Notre Dame, scaring the fucking crap out of every one of us.

Jacob! I thought and made a dash for the phone at the corner of the room closest to portal that led to the staircase.

“Jeya,” I answered in my deepest tone, already knowing who it was.

“No deeeeck, you’re not a gansta from the hood. You’re just a skinny pendejo with the world’s most sexy fine cousin, bitch!” It was Jacob alright.

“Yeah Katie is a true knockout,” I reposted knowing what he was getting at.

He laughed for a second or two, then stopped, remembering it was Katie we were speaking about. “Hell ya, cuz, that girl is tight everywhere – tits, ass, face. Hey, when you gonna put in a good word for me, so I can sample that pussy!”

Whoop-dee-doo, it was Jake alright – stupid, dipshit Jake.

“Aaaah, let’s see… how about never.”

“Ah shit, man that’s cold-blooded.”

“No, it’s more like common sense.” I turned back toward the girls, seeing looks that varied from resignation to indignation.

They all knew Jacob. They all knew precisely what he was talking about.

I shrugged.

More than one of them glanced away, revolted.

“So, fucknuts, what did you find out?” I asked, certain I had hurry the conversation along. Otherwise, the girls were likely to snatch the phone from me and take matters into their own hands.

“About what?”

“Fuck Jake, have you been hitting the bong hard already?”

“Naw, man, I haven’t been high since you sent me on this fucking wild goose chase…” He trailed off as his drugged-up brain began to recall why he had called in the first place. Then he chuckled like a tween. “Ah fuck, man, sorry about that.”

Tool!

“So… what did you find out?”

“Yeah man, this shit is pretty fucked up,” began my intractable cousin. “It seems that the nice and helpful Yard Monitor at Lisa’s school has a bit of habit.”

I frowned. “Why do you mean by that?”

“Well, I went to the same dealer I went to when I went to buy the shit for you and Katie the other day. He and I go way back. Anyhow, I asked him if he would do me a solid and snoop around to see if there was anyone new out there buying up drugs. He looked at me all suspicious at first, and asked me what the fuck for. I had figured he’d ask. So, I told him that someone close to me got pinched by some stoolie and that my family wanted a little payback.”

Jacob paused to take a breath, then: “He smiled real big, because he liked what I said. He mumbled something about just making sure and how he hated all the fucking NIA finks around the neighborhood. He says they’re fucking up his business.

“So, I asked him if he was cool with looking under a few rocks for me. He said he didn’t have to. He says a few hours before, one of his irregulars had bought a whole slew of shit from him – weed, “x”, acid, even some good old meth. When I asked him why that was such a big deal, he said because - and these are his words, Eff - he said, ‘that lunch lady barely has enough money to buy a nickel bag. Now she’s got enough cash to buy $3,000 worth of shit, come on.”

“I said, ‘lunch lady, why do you call her that?”

“And he’s like, ‘cuz that’s what she does, man. She works at the school for retards they got on Aldama Street.

“I was quiet for a while and he seems to notice. He asks me if that’s who my family is looking for. I looked up at him and his expression changes and shit, and he’s like, ‘you guys are going fuck her up, huh?

“I just nodded. I guess I was pretty mad, Eff. I mean, Lisa is a little hard to be around sometimes, you know, but she’s never hurt anyone, man. She doesn’t deserve what happened to her,” he finished. He was almost apologizing, like he’d done something wrong by showing too much emotion to his drug-dealing acquaintance.

“So you thinking what I’m thinking, then?” I asked an edge to my tone as well.

“Yeah man, that fucking lunch lady sold out Lisa for the Discovery Cash. Because she needed liquid funds to please her habit, bro, so she turned in Lisa. She marked her as a suspected Muto. That fucking pisses me off!” If Jacob was nothing more than an idiot at times, he was a loyal idiot. He’d known Lisa since she was a little girl. We all had, having grown up in the same neighborhood.

“I guess I will be meeting with Tirza then,” I mumbled my thoughts aloud.

Around me the girls all moved a bit closer; their curiosity peeked by my change of heart.

“What’s that?” asked Jacob.

In a rush, I told him about Tirza’s messages and our phone call. I included my thoughts on the matter – both before and after his call to my house.

“Fuck, cuz, you think that’s smart? She won’t tell you over the phone and now we have a pretty good idea they've pegged her sister a Muto suspect. You might be getting yourself into even deeper shit than you ever have before.” Jacob was still mad, but I could hear genuine concern in his voice for me.

I guess there’s a deep seeded reason why I hung out with him so much. In a pinch you could always count on him. He was what we used to call back then, “cool people.”

“Jake, I’m already in deep shit, man,” I replied, looking over at the girls.

“How so, bro?”

“I’ll tell you when I see you.” Like Tirza I wasn’t going to risk anything by talking over the phone about what had happened to me, to Katie, to Leda and to my girlfriend. The NIA might suspect that Lisa was a Muto, but we were Mutos, and we all knew it. “Are you coming over?”

He didn’t hesitate in the least. “Naw, cuz… so far all of this shit is just hearsay. I’m gonna stay on these streets a bit longer and see if I can turn some of it into fact. We’ll meet up later, maybe tomorrow and see… ‘What’s the haps’.”

Wow, I thought, Jacob’s fucking pissed! “What’s the haps” was our code for “dropping elbows”. This could translate, in a loose, street-wise manner, to kicking someone’s ass in a royal fashion. One did so by whatever means available.

“We gonna take it that far, Jacob?” I asked, searching for clarity.

“If we have to… you know The Uncles will help, those crazy vatos are always down to fuck somebody up,” was his subdued retort.

“Yeah, but that usually involves guns and shit, Jacob. They might be relations, but they always take shit to the head.” I was doubtful whenever it came to my father’s two surviving full-blooded brothers. They’d been in and out of prison for more years than I had been alive and were still heavy hitters in the old Barrio. So much so, when Jacob had mention that “our family was looking for someone” to his drug-dealing acquaintance, we both knew the guy would take that to mean The Uncles wanted to find someone. We knew no one turned them away empty-handed. Their rule was simple - give up what you know and it’s all good. The threat was there, though, it was just never voiced out loud.

“Well, let me hammer more of this shit down and we’ll decide later, ok?”

“Ok, man, talk to you later.”

“Later,” was all he said and the line went dead. He hadn’t even called me a dick, which was his calling card.

Yeah, it pissed him off.

“So what did he have to say, Effy? Nothing good, I presume from the way you look,” wondered Katie. She came around the coffee table to stand before me. Her hand reached to stroke my cheek before she could stop it.

Over her shoulder, I watched Leda’s slight frown flower. I knew she was beginning to realize how close Katie and I were. I could see she knew we'd crossed boundaries. Katie was just too intimate with me sometimes.

I breathed, a small explosion, pushing those thoughts aside. I was fast finding that as this day wore on that particular topic was becoming ever more irrelevant. “He is seventy-five percent sure someone sold Lisa out for the Discovery Cash.”

“Fuck!” yelled Ramona. I knew it wasn’t just outrage over Lisa's seizure by the government, there was some real angst in there. Because, now I would be dead set on meeting with Tirza and that was something she definitely didn’t want to happen.

“Damn,” muttered my cousin and half-turned from me. Her thoughts making her go inside herself.

Leda walked closer toward us, stopping a few feet away, putting a hand on her hip. “You are not going alone, Estefan. We are all going with you.”

From the cast of her face, I knew there was no changing her mind.