Yasha-bis / Tonalli
Saul pressed his hands flat against the vents on the dash, his palms turned up into the airflow, his fingers hooked over the plastic slats. The fan ran at its top setting and the air coming through it had gone hot enough to sting where the skin had split across his knuckles. Brenton sat behind the wheel with the truck in park, his boots pulled back under the pedals. Jacob had the middle of the back seat with his forearms folded over the top of the console between them.
The defroster had cleared a wide arc across the windshield. Fog held along the edges of the glass and ran down in thin lines toward the wipers. Past it the lot spread out gray under a flat white sky, rows of trucks nosed in against the curb with their exhaust pluming up and breaking apart before it cleared the tailgates.
Jacob brought his fists up in front of his mouth and blew into the gap between his thumbs.
“Every summer I say the same shit. I can’t stand the heat, I want it to be winter, I wish it was cold. Then the winter come and we get this shit. Now I wish it was the damn summer.”
Saul turned his hands over under the vent to get the backs of them. His vest was zipped to the throat over his hoodie and the collar had gone damp against the side of his neck where the heat worked into it. Out past the hood a man in coveralls crossed the lot with his shoulders pulled up around his ears and a clipboard pressed against his stomach.
Brenton sucked his teeth. He had a hand warmer packet pinched between his palms and he worked them back and forth over it, the plastic crackling under the pressure.
“All that complaining y’all doing but y’all just lucky that we working right now. With all these turnarounds starting, shit done got slow slow.”
Jacob’s fists came down off his mouth. He tucked them into the front pocket of his hoodie and his chin dipped toward his chest.
Saul let his hands come off the dash and rested them on his thighs, the heat holding in his palms a few seconds before it worked out of them. “I heard Jeff paying sixty-five an hour for that turnaround at Nutrien.”
Brenton’s head came around toward him. His hands kept moving over the packet. “Seventy at IMTT and seventy plus a per diem if you carry your ass down there to Norco at Marathon.”
Saul ran his tongue along the inside of his bottom lip. He pushed his hands back into the airflow, his fingers spreading under it, and the heat worked into the cracks across his knuckles.
Jacob’s forearms pressed down harder against the console. “I tried to get on that Marathon job. Told Jeff just tell me what I had to do.”
“Pause.”
Brenton’s laugh came out fast. He reached over and punched Saul in the chest, the back of his knuckles landing flat against the front of the vest. “That boy been around brothers too much now.”
Jacob shook his head behind them. “Look, I’ll do what I gotta do for fourteen hours at seventy plus a buck fifty every day for two months. My girl gonna understand what my mouth had to do.”
Saul laughed. Brenton’s came in as well, and he dropped his head back against the headrest, his hand slapping the top of the steering wheel twice.
“Oh, that remind me.”
Brenton’s hand came off the packet and he pointed his finger across the cab at Saul. “Your girl Francesca ain’t in the permit office anymore.”
Saul’s eyebrow rose. “Since when?”
Brenton shrugged. “New year’s I guess. She in procurement here or some shit. My potna that works the boards told me she took a transfer because she fucked some other chick here’s husband.”
Jacob’s face came up into the gap between the seats. “The husband works here, too?”
Brenton shook his head. “Nah. She said they met at some shit in French Settlement and you know how Francesca gets down.”
Saul looked out through what the defroster had cleared. “That’s crazy.”
Brenton settled the packet back between both palms and worked it once.
“Yeah, but now you can fuck her because ain’t no one gonna say that she ain’t doing your permits right because you’re punching dick in her.”
Saul sucked his teeth. He shook his head, and Brenton’s laugh filled the cab with Jacob’s joining in behind it from the back seat.
~~~
Caine had both feet up on the glass of the coffee table with the remote sitting on the cushion beside his thigh.
Autumn stood at the range in a silk robe with the sash tied loose at her waist. She dragged a spatula through a pan of eggs, folding them over on themselves and pulling the pan a few inches off the flame before she set it back down. Bacon worked in the second pan beside it, the fat rendering out and running to the low side.
A knock landed on the front door.
Caine took his feet off the table and stood. He crossed the hardwood to the foyer and leaned in to the peephole with one hand flat against the frame. Tatum stood on the other side with Marissa a step behind him. Caine turned the deadbolt and pulled the door open.
He nodded to them. “What’s good?”
Tatum came through, his hand landing on Caine’s shoulder and patting it twice on his way past. “We came to talk to you about how we’re going to handle the next ten days.”
Marissa followed him in with a folder held against her side. Caine pushed the door shut and lifted two fingers toward the living room.
Autumn looked over her shoulder from the range, the spatula still in her hand.
Tatum nodded across the room at her. “Autumn.”
Marissa smiled.
“Hey.”
Tatum dropped into the chair angled toward the windows and put his ankle up over his knee. Marissa took the other one and crossed one leg over the other. Caine sat down on the end of the couch nearest them, his weight settling back.
Marissa opened the folder and looked at the top page, a column of dates down the left margin in her handwriting. “I need to know what you plan to do as far as the draft goes so that we can change any messaging at midnight on Tuesday.”
Tatum’s hands came together between his knees. “If we’re going to declare then there are some levers that need to be pulled for us to maximize your earning potential from now until April.”
On the set across the room a receiver came down along the sideline with both feet in and the frame froze on the catch, the analysts’ names running in a bar under it. Behind Tatum the spatula clicked twice against the rim of the pan and the burner cut out with a turn of the dial.
“Can you not do that whether he declares or not?”
Tatum’s head turned toward Caine.
Caine shrugged. “She do got a point.”
Marissa’s thumb moved down the edge of the page and stopped near the bottom of the column. “Either way, we’ll look to leverage your decision, but the copy that we’re going to go with is different depending on that decision.”
Caine’s eyes went from the folder on her thigh to Tatum and back. “I’m about eighty percent sure I’m staying for my senior year. Living in LA suits me, I’m getting the money either way and I ain’t trying to play for the fucking Browns or the Jets.”
Autumn pulled two plates down from the cabinet and set them on the marble. She carried the pan over from the range and worked the eggs out of it, dividing them across the plates, then went back for the bacon and laid the strips out along the edge of each plate, four to a side. She set the pans in the sink and ran water into them.
“You’re probably not leaving much on the table when you compare whatever you get from USC to whatever you’d get from a rookie contract.”
Caine nodded. “She always right.”
Tatum snorted a laugh. “I thought it was happy wife, happy life, kid. Not happy girlfriend.”
Caine held his hands up. “Just because it’s wife don’t mean you shouldn’t start early.”
Marissa turned a page over and laid it flat against the ones behind it, her eyes coming up to Caine. “As much as I would love to hear Tatum’s opinions on relationships and keeping them fruitful, I do think we need to have a little more than an eighty percent decision. You could wake up tomorrow and decide that the twenty percent is looking a little better than it is today.”
Caine looked at her. “Just stick with the shit we been doing. I only got 72 hours after the championship to decide anyway. Worst case scenario, we miss a few days. Whatever.”
Marissa’s finger tapped once against the page. “Those three days would be a peak window for a social run.”
Tatum’s hands came apart and opened toward Caine. “She’s not wrong about that. We’d be missing money every hour you don’t make an announcement one way or the other.”
Autumn came around the end of the island with a plate in one hand and crossed the hardwood. She stopped at the coffee table and put the plate out over the glass. Caine took it. She put a fork out after it and he took that too, and she turned and went back toward the island with her sash trailing loose behind her hip.
“Wouldn’t his familiarity and favorability be at its highest in the weeks after the championship anyway?”
Marissa’s chin lifted a fraction. “Yes, but it’s still a risk.”
Caine held the plate in one hand and put the fork into the eggs. “We’ll be alright. Especially since we gonna win the natty.”
~~~
Ramon pushed the car door shut behind him and came around the front of it onto the strip of sidewalk, his keys already out with the ring hooked over his index finger. The cold worked through the sleeves of his hoodie and pressed at the back of his neck where the fabric sat away from the skin.
He came up the two steps onto the porch and found the house key against his palm and slid it into the knob. It went in to the shoulder. He turned it and the key moved a few degrees and came up against something solid. He backed it out an eighth of an inch and tried it again with his wrist behind it. The knob refused to budge.
Ramon sucked his teeth. He pulled the key out of the lock and hit the door twice with the heel of his hand, the wood giving under the strikes and the frame taking the rest of it.
“Nina, come open the fucking door. I need to get some shit I left here.”
The deadbolt turned on the other side. The door came off the jamb four or five inches and stopped, and Nina put her head into the gap with her hand on the edge of the door and the rest of her body behind it.
“What do you want, Ramon? You made your decision.”
Ramon looked at her hand, then back at her face. “You know that’s how we go back and forth. Can you just let me in the house so I can get my shit?”
Nina’s breath went out through her nose. She looked at him for a beat with her head still in the gap, then stepped back and pulled the door wide, her hand coming off the edge of it and turning over toward the front room.
Ramon came through and stopped a few feet in. His eyes went along the front room, the sofa, the coffee table, the armchair pulled a foot further from the wall. He pulled a breath in through his nose.
“Asia still staying here?”
“You should know where your sister is.”
Ramon’s hand cut the air between them. “Asia a fucking crackhead. She could be at this bitch today and turning tricks on Frenchmen, living under 610 by the end of the fucking week.”
Nina rolled her eyes. She pushed the door shut with her hip and turned the bolt over. “Asia went to Natchitoches like she said she was going to. You’d have been here to see her off if you weren’t in the streets trying to be a fucking gangster.”
Ramon shook his head. He crossed the front room to where the hall opened and went down it into the bedroom.
Nina came behind him. Her feet stopped inside the doorway. “What shit is it that you need to pick up anyway?”
Ramon’s finger came up at the dresser against the far wall. “The rest of my clothes unless you done had another nigga in here and got him moving in.”
“If I did, that wouldn’t be none of your fucking business. You were the one that walked out of the door, remember?”
“I don’t know why you acting like this. I been a hood nigga since the first day that you met me. It wasn’t a problem when a nigga was giving you this dick for years. Now all of a sudden it’s too much? That don’t make a lick of fucking sense.”
Nina crossed the room past him, close enough that her arm passed a few inches off his. She pulled the second drawer of the dresser open and stood over it with one hand on the top of the frame. Inside it his clothes had been squared up along one side, the stacks pushed against the left wall of the drawer with a hand’s width of bare pine showing on the right.
“You need a bag or something or you just going to carry everything?”
Ramon’s eyes went from her hand on the dresser down into the drawer and came back up to the side of her face.
“Girl, stop playing. You know we gonna end up back together. You had two months of pretending that you won that argument. Just let a nigga come home. Damn.”
Nina’s hand came off the frame. She turned and faced him, her chin level, her eyes on his. “I told you that I’m not burying you and I’m not going visit you in jail. I mean that shit. You can go find some bird bitch somewhere who wants to do that.”
Ramon’s jaw shifted once behind his lips. “You serious?”
“Do you need a bag for your shit or not?”
He ran his tongue along the inside of his cheek. “Yeah, bring me a fucking bag.”
Nina nodded. She walked past him and out through the doorway, her steps going down the hall. A cabinet opened and shut again.
Ramon stepped to the dresser and pulled the drawer the rest of the way out on its track until the runners stopped it. His hands went in and came up with a stack of t-shirts, the fabric holding the shape of the drawer where it had sat folded against the bottom, and he set them on the corner of the bed.
~~~
Mireya had a section of Sena’s hair gathered up off her shoulder, splitting it into three parts across her palm, letting them slide loose again, then gathering them back. She sat turned toward the middle of the couch with one knee folded onto the cushion and her weight settled on her hip, her shoulder pressed into Sena’s arm. Across the room the villa ran gold on the screen, a girl at the firepit talking with both hands, the rest of them arranged around her in swimsuits with their drinks on the arms of the chairs.
Mireya’s head turned and her eyes settled on the side of Sena’s face. Her fingers kept working the section, drawing it taut against her palm and letting it fall. She took it up again from the root and pulled it through, feeling along it for the place near the ends where it had knotted. She found it and held the length above it in her left hand. Two fingers separated the strands below in small pulls, working the knot loose a piece at a time.
Sena’s eyes came off the screen and went back to it. Then they came over again and went back. he third time she turned her head all the way, her chin coming around until she was looking straight at Mireya.
“What?”
Mireya smiled. “Just looking at how beautiful you are, baby.”
Sena rolled her eyes. “What are you trying to butter me up for?”
Mireya let the section go and combed her fingers up under it to gather a new one from lower down, near the nape, where the hair sat warm against Sena’s neck. She drew it out and laid it across her palm. The ends slid cool over the back of her hand. On the screen the girl at the firepit had stopped talking and one of the others had leaned in with a hand on her knee.
“Nothing. I’m just letting you know because I don’t think you hear it often enough.”
Sena’s lips pulled up at one side. “Sounds like you’re trying to call me ugly.”
Mireya snorted a laugh. “That’s some gaslighting shit. You keep forgetting that you ain’t the only one that goes to therapy once a week.”
“We both might go to therapy but you’re a little slower on actually doing the shit that your therapist is suggesting you do.”
Mireya’s fingers stopped. She picked the rhythm back up, running the length from the nape out to the ends and starting again at the nape, three passes, four, her thumb riding along the underside each time.
“You got jokes today.”
Sena laughed. “Every joke got a little truth in it.”
Mireya nodded. “Fair enough.”
On the screen the girl at the firepit stood and walked off toward the dark end of the villa. The camera went after her. The rest of them stayed where they were with their heads turning to follow, and one of them said something to the girl beside her behind a raised hand.
Mireya twisted the hair in her hand until it wound tight on itself, then eased her fingers open and let it unwind against Sena’s shoulder, the strands turning slow as they came apart. “I still want you to move in with me.”
“I still want to have some kind of independence and a way that we don’t get sick of each other.”
“I don’t know why you think that I would get sick of you. You realize that if I ain’t have Camila and Mica that I’d be following you around everywhere you were going anyway.”
“You really doing the crazy lesbian clinger thing right now.”
“Shit, I’m clingy with everyone. I love hard.”
Sena’s eyes came around off the screen. They moved across Mireya’s face, from her mouth up to her eyes.
“What if I spend a couple more nights over here? Split the middle?”
Mireya pulled the hair straight down its length and released it. The ends fanned out against Sena’s collarbone and she smoothed them flat with two fingers.
“I just told you that I ain’t trying to split the middle. You mine. I want you with me as much as possible.”
“Mireya.”
Mireya’s free hand came up. “I know. I’m being an overbearing bitch. I’m sorry. I ain’t respecting what you saying.”
“Looks like that therapy is working after all.”
Mireya rolled her eyes. She let the hand come back down and found the hair again, her fingers threading in near the root, Sena’s scalp warm against her fingertips.
“I’m serious, though. I want you to know I’m serious about us, about us being together for the long haul.”
Sena smiled. “I know. But we got all the time in the world for that.”
Mireya shrugged. “Alright. I’ll ask you again in a couple weeks when you talk to Autumn and see she’s living with Caine now.”
Sena’s eyebrow went up. “What? She is?”
Mireya nodded. “Sure is.”
“That’s a little crazy.”
Mireya’s head turned back toward the screen. Her free hand came up and cut toward it, two fingers out at the man who had come into frame at the edge of the pool with three of the girls turning toward him at once.
“That dude’s not attractive enough for all of these bitches to be falling over themselves over him.”
~~~
Jill sat at the table in the corner of her office with her hands settled in her lap and the window at her shoulder, the light coming through the blinds flat and white across the laminate. Micah had the chair across from her with a tablet balanced on her thigh and a stylus held between two fingers, the tip of it moving in short strokes down the screen. The recorder sat between them on the table, a red pinpoint showing on the top edge of the housing.
Behind Jill, her desk held the week’s work in two stacks with a legal pad squared on the blotter between them. Past the door the floor ran its midmorning business, a phone ringing at one of the desks down the row, someone crossing the tile with a hand truck, the vents overhead pushing dry heat down into the room while the cold pressed against the glass from the other side and beaded the corners of the pane.
Micah’s stylus came off the screen.
“So, what do you think is the reason that New Orleans has such a long history with its brightest athletes being involved in crime?”
Jill let a beat pass. Her eyes went to the recorder on the table and came back to Micah’s face.
“We all know what the city was like in the 1980s and 1990s, even into the pre-Katrina 2000s. This was a rough place to be for law enforcement, but that extends back to the very founding of this city. It’s always had vice and illicit activities being the main economic drivers. When you already have young people who are already of the mindset that they need to bring home money through their athletic exploits, it’s easy for that to morph into criminal behavior. Don’t forget that a lot of these athletes are glorifying the behavior of criminals with music anyway.”
Micah’s stylus moved across the tablet, the strokes coming in a run and then stopping. She read back over what she had written, her thumb bracing the frame against her thigh. The tip came up and struck through something near the top. Then she wrote it again, lower down, in a shorter line.
“What would you say to people who believe that you shouldn’t be bringing this up because many of these people have paid their debts to society.”
Jill shrugged. “I’m not speaking with you because I think they should be put back in prison, or sentenced to prison if they weren’t before, but I think young children should know that these are not people you should be aspiring to be.”
Micah’s eyes came up off the screen and Jill watched them arrive.
“And if more prosecutions comes from it?”
“Then more prosecutions come from it.”
Micah’s eyes stayed on her another second. Then they went down and the stylus went with them, moving in three or four words this time. She pulled the tip off the glass and read the line she had made. Her thumb slid up the frame and the screen scrolled under it, back through everything she had put down since she sat.
Out in the hall the phone that had been ringing cut off mid-tone. Jill’s eyes went past Micah’s shoulder to the doorway and came back to her.
Micah nodded. She reached across to the recorder and put one finger on the top of it. She turned it a few degrees on the laminate until the pinpoint faced her, looked at the light for a moment, then took her hand back to the frame of the tablet.
“Is there anything else that you want to add before we wrap up?”
Jill shook her head. “I think that covers everything.”
Micah pressed the button on the side of the recorder and the light went out. She lifted the tablet off her thigh with both hands and laid it on the table beside the recorder. She squared the bottom edge against the edge of the laminate and put the stylus down across the top of it.
“We’re about wrapped up with all of the reporting and interviews so we should be sending something to print soon.”
“What’s soon? I’ll need to give my boss a heads up that this is coming down the pike.”
Micah shrugged. “Probably next Tuesday. Our A section is pretty packed Saturday, Sunday and Monday with the national championship.”
Jill’s finger tapped once against her knee. “So, it’ll be coming out the day after the championship game.”
Micah’s eyes moved off Jill’s face and went out across the office, along the shelf on the far wall where the code books sat in a row, over the two stacks on the desk, up to the certificates hung in their frames above it. They came down the wall and back to Jill.
She nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking because our budget is smaller Tuesday.”
Jill smiled. “I’m looking forward to it. I know it’ll be a great story.”
