The Starshine Connection Read online

  Then he remembered that he had gone from Washington to a cross-country flight to the barrio without stopping, and fatigue was beginning to make inroads on his concentration and stamina. He marched around and jerked the rear door open.

  “Come on, cabrón, let’s go. Rise and shine!”

  No reaction. The sleeping man curled up in the rear of the van continued to snore.

  “My friend, you’re being difficult,” Slayton said, reaching in to poke the man, and instantly regretting it for two reasons.

  The effect on the man was galvanic. He came awake like a shot, eyes snapping open to reveal hard, bloodshot whites and dilated pupils. He shrieked and retreated toward the front of the van, cowering; agitating the air already thick with his smell.

  “No!” he said in a weak voice. “No hitting! Please!” He held his hands defensively in front of his face and was shaking his head violently from side to side like a frightened child.

  “Now wait a minute,” Slayton said, unsure of what was happening, and feeling he had missed something crucial.

  “No hitting! No hitting!” the man continued in desperation. “Please! Kiko will be good! Please, no hitting me!”

  Realization slammed home in Slayton’s gut. He saw that the man was crying, that he still was shaking his head madly. Kiko—it had to be the man described to him as Kiko—was scared out of his mind and crying. Crying like a child. The man had to be lightly retarded, which would explain the members of the barrio thinking mistakenly that he was stupid, or an uva, a wino… or crazy. He was wearing ancient, shiny-thin pants and a grime-blackened Army fatigue shirt. His head was a mass of oily black curls, and his eyes were glistening with fear at Slayton’s mere presence. Kiko probably got the shit kicked out of him regularly—the neighborhood punching bag. Slayton felt mildly sick.

  “Kiko,” he said, as gently as he could. The man continued whimpering, begging Slayton not to strike him. More sternly he said, “Kiko!” and Kiko’s fear shut him up. He was used to obeying every order—any order—to keep from getting hit.

  “Listen, Kiko, I’m not going to hurt you. I’m not going to do anything to you. Kiko! Pay attention! I’m not… going… to hurt… you? Understand?”

  Catching the words, spaced out as though for a very small child, Kiko nodded vigorously, swallowing hard in a valiant effort to stop his tears.

  “Kiko, I’m not going to kick you out of the van, got it? You don’t have to go. You’re not going to get hurt. I need to know about the ones who hit you. It’s important. Kiko? You understand?”

  Another too-enthusiastic nod. God, it was like dealing with a people-shy dog you had to coax and coax just to get him to approach for a pat on the head.

  “Nothing’s going to happen to you.”

  Intelligence flickered behind the eyes. “No hitting?” Kiko said.

  Slayton had to smile. “No hitting.” The sun was down and the streets were dark. Where there were lamps on poles, most had been broken.

  “Kiko’s sorry he climbed in your car, mister,” he said, eager now to apologize, since he had not gotten smacked.

  “It’s okay. Kiko can sleep there if he wants.”

  “Really…?” Again his eyes lit up.

  “Yeah,” Slayton said. “If he’ll talk to me.”

  “Oh sure, mister, sure!” He grinned, wiping tears from his face. “What do you wanna talk about!”

  “I want to talk about the people who hit you, the ones who moved out,” Slayton said. “They went away.”

  Kiko’s dark eyes clouded. “No they didn’t,” he said, his voice trailing away. “They didn’t go away.”

  “They moved, Kiko—they went away, they left. They’re gone. Where’d they go?”

  “Oh, sure they went away, I know that!” Kiko said, bobbing his head from side to side as though he were pantomiming consternation at Slayton’s stupidity. “They come around. They went away, but they come around.” He opened his hands one way, then the other, to illustrate.

  “Why do they come around?”

  “To smoke up!” Kiko acted as though he were puffing a joint. His arms sagged. “To pick on Kiko. Kiko makes everybody laugh. They tell Kiko he’s a cholo, like them. But everybody laughs.” Again Kiko’s peculiar brand of instant despair rushed in. His personality shifted as fast as fine desert sand in a heavy dust-devil.

  “Kiko, where are they now?” Slayton was physically attempting to shoot good vibes toward the confused man, hoping his extremely limited attention span did not wander.

  “Where are they?” he repeated, dumbly.

  “The ones who hit you,” Slayton said. “Where?”

  “Oh, that’s easy!” Kiko said, clapping his hands.

  “Where?”

  “Right behind you,” Kiko said tonelessly, looking past Slayton’s shoulder. “That’s their car.”

  9

  The Chevy that had just rounded the corner less than a block away was chopped and channelled, and riding about three inches off the street. It practically glowed in the dark—an evil, perfect sapphire-blue paint job. It moved purposefully around the corner and down the street with its engine growling at a low, almost inaudible register. It was packed full of cholos, and it was very definitely on the prowl, like a huge jungle cat.

  Slayton slammed the back doors of the van on Kiko’s expression of resignation and jumped into the driver’s seat. Hiding in a strange vehicle would do as little good here as expecting the low-riders to simply pass them by. They had not been consulted as to this intrusion, and Slayton knew his only way out was a chase.

  He tried not to think about the vehicle he had stuck himself with, and momentarily wished he was behind the wheel of that flashy, idiotic, fast Trans-Am that Lucius had gotten him, instead. He kicked the van to life. In the mirrors, he noted that the Chevy had neither quickened nor slowed its steady pace. It loped along inexorably. They were already sure that they had him.

  As they came no less than two or three houses distant, Slayton idled. They would need a short warm-up period to pull alongside and try to prime him with taunts or threats. They needed to pump themselves up for the fight. When they were a single car-length behind the van, Slayton gunned it.

  The Ford roared in protest, its front end almost coming off the street as it leaped forward. Before any speed at all could be gained—and with it, the incitement to race against what the Chicanos knew to be his inferior engine power—Slayton cranked the van around in a sweeping U-turn, literally driving a circle around the low-riders. There was a commotion of movement inside the car. The chase was on.

  Instead of chugging down the street behind them, Slay-ton hung into the turn for a few seconds longer, trundling up a dirt driveway and cutting a sweeping diagonal across two front lawns that were mostly weeds. He heard the Chevy cough behind him as it was unceremoniously jockeyed into reverse.

  Heads darted out of front screen doors as Slayton’s van blasted past, mere feet away. He twisted into a hard right turn that aimed him up a dead-end driveway toward a rotting picket fence that was mostly gaps. It came apart like summer chaff when the van hit it and tore into a line of hanging wash.

  Slayton pushed high in the driver’s seat, trying to see over the rear fence. A split second later, he blasted through it in a cascade of cinderblock dust and jagged splinters of fence, bouncing over the narrow, rutted alleyway and crashing into a barricade of fenders and auto parts strung haphazardly up on a barbed-wire fence.

  It sounded as though he had just driven the van through a restaurant kitchen and taken out all the dishes and cutlery in the process. Battered hunks of rusting metal shot into the air, and several threads of barbed wire snaked into the van’s radiator and fenders. Slayton found himself dragging lines of hubcaps and door panels behind him like a bizarre wedding train. He divested himself of this mobile junkyard as he plowed through the next rickety fence.

  Bumping up into the air over a small mound of driveway fill dirt, Slayton crunched to a halt in the center of the residen
tial street two blocks distant from his starting point. He realized that, at most, he had bought a few seconds.

  “Kiko!” he shouted as the van stopped at right angles to the street.

  He turned to see that the final jolt had sprung the back doors, and that Kiko was sitting on his ass in the middle of the street.

  “Oh, Christ!” As he jumped down from the van he spotted the tendrils of acrid smoke already curling out from the overtaxed engine. The van would be finished in minutes, if it was not already. It was handily blocking the street as well.

  Kiko pulled himself up on the bumper of a vintage 1950s Pontiac, a fire-engine red car with sweeping tail-fins. It looked like a crimson version of the Batmobile. Slayton abandoned the van and rushed to the driver’s side door.

  “Kiko! Get in the car!” Kiko’s logic did not allow room for protest; he did as he was told.

  “Tell me when they come around the corner,” Slayton commanded, sweetening it with: “Don’t forget, Kiko, they want to hurt you. We’ve got to get away. Watch for them.” He was not looking at the retarded man, he was digging under the steering column for the ignition wires. It was a rough toss-up between who would get them first, the low-riders or the owners of the automobile being stolen.

  “That’s them!” Kiko said, frightened now.

  Slayton’s connection was crude and rushed, but it was enough for a spark, and that was all the ignition needed. The Pontiac came alive just as two burly Mexicans in straw cowboy hats came piling out of the house to Slay-ton’s right, yelling profanities and racing for the car. Slayton reached over and battened down the lock on Kiko’s side, revving the car just once before blasting off.

  He saluted the cowboys as he laid a generously wide double-U of rubber down on the street. One of them reached the driver’s side as the car came around and punched at the window, yanking back his blow at the last moment. It was his car.

  “Puto pendejo!” He tossed his hat to the pavement and stomped on it. “Chinga a tu madre! Ratón!”

  While he was shaking his fist, almost comically, at the departing Pontiac, the Chevy showed up on the opposite side of the block. Angered now, his macho threatened, the driver was a little less discriminating about where to take his own car. He slammed the accelerator down, not slowing for the Ford van blocking the street. Savagely the Chevy careened up one driveway, across a lawn—scattering children’s toys every which way—and down another drive on the other side of the dead vehicle.

  The Pontiac proved better-maintained than the Ford, and Slayton was able to push it to sixty on the side streets. It handled well, and was reasonably responsive. Kiko kept craning around to see behind them, and when he saw the distance between them and the pursuing Chevy, he darted a look at Slayton and clapped his hands, giggling. Slayton felt the belly of the auto meet the pavement with a crunching scrape as he shot through an intersection and a red light.

  But the pilot of the Chevy was considerably expert at losing tailing police cars when he got high and pushed the speed limits too far. Gradually the Chevy ate up the distance between the two speeding vehicles until Slayton could count the number of Chicanos inside in his rearview mirror. Kiko went pale. The chrome grille of the Chevy winked brutally at them from behind.

  Slayton smacked the wheel with his free hand. “Got to get to a wider street!”

  He slid the Pontiac into a screeching power-turn at the next intersection, and saw with satisfaction that as the Chevy hung on, copying him, smoke began pluming out of the rear wheel-wells. Slayton found himself on the wider street he had wished for. The Chevy caught up with them again as they neared a four-way stoplighted intersection at seventy per.

  The light clicked to red as the chase cars chewed up the final block of distance. The Chevy did not even cut speed; the driver assumed Slayton would run the light.

  Slayton stood on the brakes. The Pontiac locked up and fishtailed into a horrendous skid. The eyes of the cholo in the Chevy went as big as dinner plates. He slammed his own brake pedal to the floor half a second after Slayton, and it was half a second enough.

  Using his momentum, Slayton spun the Pontiac around at high speed, his rear end screaming sharply around into the opposite lane. He continued skidding backward, cutting through the crosswalk, as the Chevy blew past, still doing sixty, at least, and still pointed forward. His nose and the driver of the Chevy’s flashed by inches from each other.

  Behind Slayton, the Chevy rocketed through the red light. The driver screamed, and his buddies hit the floor when they saw the U-Haul truck headed north cut by them at a healthy 35 mph. The truck was going too slow for a head-on flame-out, but it did manage to clip the rear end of the blue Chevy as it thundered across its path. The impact sent the low-rider into a sloppy version of the spin Slayton had executed on purpose. It slewed around like a runaway carousel and broadsided a row of parked cars, still sliding backwards, the impact slowing their speed and providing an awful lot of work for L.A.’s body, fender, and paint people.

  It would be a race between the cops—to get to the scene of the pile-up—and the low-riders, who would have to get their hearts out of their mouths and work up the cojones to split the area. Slayton figured the cops to break even on that score.

  The Pontiac began to make sick noises, but he trusted it would get him to the freeway.

  Kiko raised a few eyebrows when Slayton conducted him through the lobby of the Hyatt House. Slayton was too tired to care.

  “I didn’t think you’d show up,” Lucius said disdainfully, over the telephone. “Give me fifteen minutes to get there.” He hung up, and Slayton answered the door in time to greet room service. He had ordered a huge tray of food for dinner, and the sight of all the neatly covered dishes and rich smells clearly held Kiko in awe.

  “Dig in, what are you waiting for?” Slayton attacked his steak. “Eat it before Lucius comes and steals it.”

  Kiko stared dumbly at the food, and Slayton realized what was going on. “Look, Kiko, the food—it’s free. You don’t have to do anything for it. I got it for you. Okay?”

  “Why?” His eyes were cold and black now. With the irrationality of a child, he was positive something stank about this idyllic arrangement.

  Reverse strategy was the only answer. “Kiko, I lied.” It had the effect Slayton knew it would have; immediately the man’s eyes lit up. “You do have to do something for this food,” he said soberly. “You have to tell me everything you know about those men.” Interrogation was nothing next to the labor required to get simple bits of fact from someone like Kiko. It could become exasperating very easily.

  “What men?” Kiko said, all innocence. He picked up a French fry and bit it in half. He was determined to be a man in Slayton’s eyes, but the steam from the food brought his appetite roaring up.

  “The cholos,” Slayton said. “The ones who hit you. The ones who chased us.”

  “Oh, them,” Kiko said, as if only a dummy could not see the connection. “Sure. They chase me. They hit Kiko all the time.”

  “I need to know—”

  “But the cholos are nice to me too!” Kiko interrupted. His initiative was a good sign. “They say I’m a cholo. They let me smoke up with them. Kiko gets stoooooonnned. They laugh at him, but I get them back because they get stoooonned and Kiko laughs. Right back at them!”

  “Is that why they still come around?”

  “No. They don’t really pay attention to Kiko anymore. Except to hit him; they still hit him.” Apparently Kiko thought of himself in the first, second, and third person simultaneously. He chewed in pouting silence for a while, having dredged up less pleasant memories. At last, he looked back up. “They come back for Mercy.”

  Slayton did not understand.

  “Mercy is Kiko’s girlfriend. They all said Kiko did not have a girlfriend, that he was ugly. But Mercy is my girlfriend. She gave me a kiss. My girlfriend. She gave them a kiss too. But she’s my girlfriend.” The way Kiko repeated the word, it sounded as if even he did not really b
elieve it.

  Slayton tried to tread as lightly as possible. “Tell me about Mercy, Kiko.”

  He had hoped to key a specific memory in Kiko—everything seemed to be a stimulus for a short, episodic version of reality. Apparently Slayton did not need to lever it out of Kiko; there was only one real episode, and Kiko explained his memory of it as best he could. As he spun the story out in halting phrases, clearly embarrassed by some of it, Slayton was able to synthesize it into the series of events that most likely had taken place.

  Even high on dope, someone like Kiko would have very limited entertainment value for the low-riders who abused him. There was no way to humiliate him—he’d do anything to keep from getting beaten up, or simply to attempt in the only way he knew to win some kind of favor—so the answer lay in the outrageousness of things Kiko could be convinced to do.

  The cholos had tired of pounding on him. The jump to sexual humiliations was an easy and obvious one. Slayton knew that eighty percent of Chicano slang had to do with sex or bodily functions, in that disproportionate way that all slang has of reducing its users to biological basics.

  They had stoked him on dope and wine, then torn off his clothes, then shoved him into a back bedroom with a pichón who was at least as well-fortified. She was crudely sexy, jammed as she was into tight black underwear which she slowly peeled away. The cholos had crowded into the narrow room to watch, and laughed raucously as Kiko found himself the father of a wholly unwilling and misunderstood erection. He ejaculated just as unwillingly, to the coarse adulation of his audience. The girl did a wholly unexpected thing, whether motivated by pity or by the load of dope in her, no one would ever know. She strode over, a bit wobbly but purposefully, and kissed Kiko on the cheek. There were tears in her eyes.