Because apathy was the new America.
The day still brutally hot, the sky still laden with hazy green smog. He saw pigeons, and doves, and sparrows; the ugly and obnoxious black great-tailed grackles. They soared gracefully in the sky.
A few blocks over, he heard the sirens of all the police cars, and all the ambulances, and the fire trucks still cleaning the bodies-the mess-of Lauro, the murdered kids.
“Is this the motherfucker right here?”
He felt the gun at his head.
Miss Padilla and her boyfriend stepped from the shadows of another abandoned house.
So fast, Angel didn’t have time to notice them before it was too late and her boyfriend was behind Angel, pointing the gun.
“That’s him,” Miss Padilla said, “Fuckin’ no good rotten kid.”
From their doorway, Momma Rodriguez waved.
Looking to the sky, Angel saw the sun, the birds in the sky.
The boyfriend flashed a mouth full of gold, “Take back what’s yours,” he said.
Miss Padilla smiled, satisfied.
Then she snatched back the gold chains from Angel’s hand.
He looked in his palm before the gun took his life, and he was holding Brandy’s thin gold chain, the one she had hoped to pass to her daughter someday.
The Gleaner's Union by Court Merrigan
I come home from the Gleaner’s Union hangdog with a corn whiskey stumble in my step, trying not to believe what the boys was saying. How a man didn’t hardly have a choice no more. How he had to hire out. The boys who still came in to the Union, they was stalwart, they knew good as me the difference between laboring for wages and working your own land. But young ones can’t eat your knowing all winter, can they?
Cora sat by the stove, skinning spuds.
“How you been, little girl?” I said to her. “You go out walking today?”
“Yeah,” she said.
She looked up from that half-skinned spud all ladylike, knees pressed tight together, hands on her lap. Cora never sat like that unless she was bad upset.
I pulled up a chair. Took the tater and knife out of Cora’s slick little hands. Wanted to wrap her up in my big arms but that wouldn’t do, big as she was getting.
“Ma,” I said, “I plain forgot to change out the goat’s hay. Maybe you want to give it a look.”
“I already been out there,” said Ma. I just…” Then she saw how I was looking at Cora. “Yeah,” she said, reaching for her coat. “I better check.”
She’s always been a good woman.
“Now what is it, baby girl?” I said to Cora when Ma was gone.
“I was over round Griselda Harlan’s place today,” she said.
