Savages

either.”
    “You’ll put up with what we tell you to put up with,” Lado says.
    “Just handle your own problems, okay?” Ben says. “Don’t worry about me. I’m taking care of business.”
    He walks away.
    Crosses the PCH and leaves them standing there.

185
     
    Sal comes to Jesus.
    Yeah, it’s a cheap joke, but what do you want, it’s his name.
    They find Jesus where you always find him, in the parking lot behind the liquor store, next to the car wash, hanging with five other 94s, drinking beer and smoking a little
yerba
.
    Eleven AM and they’re just out.
    Three years now, Sal and Jumpy been trying to join the 94, but been shut out. Jesus told them it wasn’t like the old days—you lived in the barrio, you could get jumped in—now you have to bring something to the table,
m’ijo, ese.
You have to bring—what did Jesus call it? Assets.
    “Hola, Jesus.”
    Hola, hola, m’ijo
, all that.

186
     
    Jesus is no kid anymore.
    He’s twenty-three, and he’s spent eight of those twenty-three behind bars. Lucky not to have spent more, all the gangbanging he did. Him and the other 94s, defending their turf against the other Mexican gangs.
    Cliché, stereotyped you’ve-seen-it-all-in-the-movies drive-by, eye-for-an-eye bullshit. By age twelve Jesus already had a sheet. Beat the fuck out of another kid, the judge looked at those unrepentant eyes (remorse? for
what
?) and sent him to the CYA in Vista, where the bigger boys made him jack them off and suck their dicks until he got more angry than scared and grabbed one of them by the hair and slammed his head into the concrete wall until it looked like a sloppy tagging.
    Came out, got beat into the 94s (again, cliché, stereotyped you’ve-seen-it-all-in-the-movies), thirteen years old selling dope on the corner, fucking fourteen-year-old
chucha
on bare mattresses in crack houses, gets caught with the crack in his hand, don’t give up nobody and he’s back in CYA, but this time he
is
one of the bigger boys (got thick forearms, big hands, some weight on him) and it’s him who makes the smaller boys jerk him off, suck his cock, and he looks at them with those dead eyes and they do it, do what he says.
    Out again, the gang wars are on, they just shoot the shit out of each other for drug turf, for revenge, for fucking nothing, he takes a bullet in a drive-by. Just hanging out on the front lawn, smoking
yerba
, drinking cerveza, getting ready to tip his
piton
into this sweet little piece when
bam
he feels this pain in his thigh and the piece is screaming but not like he likes her to and there’s blood running down his leg. He finishes his beer before he goes to the hospital.
    When he goes out two weeks later, still with a cane, to get a little of his own back, he has his boys drive him past a house in the Los Treintes barrio, sticks his AK out the window, and lets loose. Gets a Treintebut also gets a four-year-old
niña
on the rebound, but Jesus don’t care about that.
    The
prole
don’t get him for that, but they’re laying for him because now he’s a
jefe
and they’re looking to put him away. He fucks up and gives them their shot, too. This
lambioso
takes a long look at his girl and Jesus just goes off and smashes the guy’s face and they put him away for six in the Q.
    Except for the food and the lack of
chucha
, Jesus liked prison.
    Pumping iron, hanging with the same boys he’d hang with on the corner, fighting the Aryans and the Zulus, blowing
yerba
, skin-popping, fucking punks, getting tatts. He killed two more men in the Q and they never got near him for it. No one was going to talk on Jesus. Ran the 94s, or what was left of them, from his cell. Ordered three more killings on the street and they got done, too.
    Out again, back again to the 94s and found there wasn’t much left of them. A lot of them were dead, more in the joint, some were
craquedos
and junkies. The gangbanging thing was over,
finito.
    And he ain’t that young anymore.
    The years, they slide.
    The people, they don’t.
    The people, they grind and scrape and it shows.
    Anyway, he did his time and now he’s out and now he’s back and they say the days of the gangs are over, we all killed each other off and there’s some truth in that but there’s some false in it, too. The gangs are coming back—like they say, good taste never goes out of style—but in a different way.
    A serious way.
    A business way.
    Making money.
    The prison counselors used to yap about “making good