Free Southland by Nina Revoyr Page A

Crenshaw, always had. Sometimes, as he drove to work in the morning, hearing palm trees rustle and seeing children walk to school and watching the sun start to come into its power, he experienced a joy so perfect and complete that he didn’t need anything else. It would pass—kids would get arrested, drop out of school, or die—but this one moment of perfect happiness, of one-ness with the neighborhood, was the thing that made it all worthwhile.
    But now, he felt bad for being abrupt with Frank’s granddaughter. He saw Frank’s angular face on her, his thin sharp blade of a nose. So he looked at her directly and said, “I’m sorry about your grandfather.”
    Staring down at her hands, she said, “Thank you.” Then, looking up, she saw that he meant it. He really had a good face. His forehead was wide and expressive, and running across it were three long wrinkles, just starting to lay claim in the flesh. His nose was stately, and Jackie noticed that when she said something, it registered not in his eyes but in his flaring, widening nostrils. His lips were full and moist, and his jaw was square and anvil-like; any fist that struck it might disintegrate on impact. The thing that both disturbed his face and underlined its perfection was the deep, inch-long scar just inside his left ear. James Lanier was on the verge of being a beautiful man, and his scar both pushed him toward that distinction and held him safely away from it.
    “We all are,” Jackie continued. “It’s been a crazy last few weeks, with him dying and the earthquake.”
    Lanier nodded. “Did you have a lot of damage?”
    “No, not really. There were some cracks in my walls and I lost a few plates. How about you?”
    “About the same. A few plates, a couple of lamps. And we didn’t have much damage here either, so it was real busy for a while—the schools were closed so all the kids were coming here.”
    “You know, on top of everything else, my poor grandfather had to live through another big quake. He hated them. My aunt told me that after the quake of ’71, he slept out in the back yard for a week.”
    Lanier smiled wryly. “There are people still doing that this time,” he said. A noisy group of people passed by in the hallway, and he waited until they were gone before he spoke again. “Were you close to your grandfather?”
    “No, not really. I used to be when I was younger, but then he moved further away, and I got older, and we kind of, just, you know. Lost touch.”
    “I didn’t know him well, either,” Lanier said, which made Jackie feel a bit less judged. “That’s why I didn’t go to the funeral. Didn’t even hear about it, actually, until Loda told me this morning. I was only about eight when his store shut down. But I do remember that he was always real nice—he gave the older boys baseball cards every time they got an A on a test. The kids I hung out with knew him better.”
    Jackie nodded. “I wish I could have seen him then,” she said, and she didn’t know this was true until she’d said it.
    You could have seen him now , Lanier thought, but he kept this to himself. It wasn’t his business to chastise her. And he was making her nervous, although this wouldn’t have been unusual, even if she wasn’t a stranger, and small, and Japanese. Lanier was the kind of man that other men loved—strong, understated, dependable. He gave his life to them, and to boys who had started the journey. And they accepted and admired him, his sternness and discipline. But women didn’t know what to do with him. He was like a mountain that provided no avenue for scaling, no trails up through the dense and thorny brush. So it was no surprise to Lanier that this woman didn’t know how to approach. Not that men understood him any better. Although they admired his purity, his complete independence, they couldn’t see that this strength came at the price of company and comfort. They didn’t know that half Lanier’s sternness was