Title: Vocation
Fandom: All-New Ghost Rider (Marvel Comics)
Challenge: Note 
Rating: PG-13
Length: 5k
Content notes: Cursing.
Summary: Newly-disabled young gangster Guero Valdez tracks down Ramon "El Perro Rabioso" Cordova for an interview for the school paper.

Ramón Cordova got off the metro bus at 5:15 in the morning, hitched his lunch bag around his shoulder, and walked, slow, watchful, the seven blocks up the street from the bus stop to Canelo’s Auto and Body. At six, Canelo would arrive to let him in. Until then, he would lean against the side of the building, watching the traffic, peering at the faces of the other early birds who passed by. He had his reading glasses and a book about child soldiers. Once he got inside, he would start the coffee machine. Then he would have his workstation, a parade of repairs and diagnostics of varying difficulty, his lunch, and hopefully no stupid interruptions.

He scanned the tags on the buildings as he walked, alert to new gang signs, changes in territory. The bus crossed through the territories of four different Sureño street gangs, including Ramón's first—Maravilla CHECK, which was nothing but children and strangers after twelve years' absence.

He wanted to keep an ear to the ground, but to really understand the shifting patchwork of invisible walls that divided East Los Angeles, he would have to be trusted, he would have to be back in it. So he walked the streets he'd grown up on deaf and half-blind, with only hints as to who the Black Hand might send to make an example of a notorious deserter like him.

Well. He could never have fought the way he had, for Maravilla and for the EME and for himself, if he'd ever planned on living long.

He reached the block beside the auto shop, the high spiked wrought-iron fence that surrounded the lot, and leaned against the wall of the insurance agency that faced it, watching. Marking the cars that passed up and down the two-lane, the commuters and old people walking in the chill of the morning. At last, Canelo's truck pulled in and unlocked the gate. Ramón waved to him, crossed the street, and followed him in. The rest of the morning shift filtered in over the ten minutes that followed, checked over the projects and messes left by the evening shift, and split off around the garage.

By noon, he'd finished a clutch job on a race-modified and much-abused '12 Civic, and started on one of the morning's drop-ins, a diagnostic on an '02 Ranger with a rough idle. Then it was time to break for lunch. It was always a bit dizzying, an illicit thrill, to be able to look at his own watch, walk over to the time clock, and punch out whenever he thought it appropriate. No bells. No orders.

He got his lunch out of his locker and waited for the microwave. The guy ahead of him, heavy-set, shorter than Ramón, gazed at his own meal, turned around idly, then jumped, eyes popping, and spun back around, canceled the microwave, and cleared it out. Ramón waited for him to clear out of the room, then put in his sour cream tub full of goat stew.

When it was heated, he gave it a stir and inhaled the steam critically. Little flat. He needed to brown the meat more. Next time he'd do better. He was a free man. He could make jalisco every week for the rest of his life if he wanted.

“Cordova,” a man said from behind him, and Ramón straightened, set his stew safely on the microwave. He stopped himself; the next step would be to spin around, hands at his sides. He looked over his shoulder instead.

Canelo. His boss, half a head shorter than him but barrel-chested enough to give him trouble. Suspenders, arching mustache. If it weren't for Canelo, Ramón could never have found a job that paid his rent, could never have kept up his parole.

“Yes, sir?” he asked, making himself smaller.

“Message for you,” Canelo said, waving a little yellow note.

Ramón took it with trepidation. “Thank-you, sir.”

“That's all. Take your thirty, then we need you back on the floor.”

Ramón nodded. He waited until Canelo had left, then he retrieved his stew. He left the break room so someone else could use it, and ate alone in the alley.

He read the note. It was not an estranged relative, a homie looking for backup that Ramón would no longer give, his parole officer, or a coded threat from the Black Hand. It read:

Student reporter from Hillrock High requests to interview. To R Cordova. From M Valdez. 11:03 AM. Please call back.

What. No. Ramón balled up the note and let it roll into the gutter.

He finished his day quietly. Replaced his equipment, folded up the drapes that protected his last customer's '98 Caddy from scratches, shot a warning look at the Reyes kid and received a challenging stare back—talk about more balls than brains, Reyes was half his size and too young to buy beer yet—and shrugged off Hernandez' attempts at “friendly” conversation—what was it like inside? Did you really? With a machete?—questions Ramón had never discussed with his lawyer, let alone some brainless cabrón from the auto shop.

Sunday afternoon, he was home kneading lard and masa for a new batch of tamales when someone knocked on the door.

The cat, who had been watching him from the top of the refrigerator, jumped across the kitchen, bounced off the counter, and disappeared into the house.

Ramón straightened, washed his hands, shook off his apron and folded it on the counter. In case he was about to be executed, he didn't want to die in a dirty apron with flour on his hands. He turned off the stove and dampened a towel to cover the masa, keep it from drying off or the house burning down in case he had to go down to the courthouse, or to talk some idiot out of shooting his neighbors. Then he approached the door, face-front, watching the windows. He angled himself away from the door and waved his left hand in front of the peephole, blocking off any light from within. No gunshots through the door. He looked. No one standing outside.

He had ordered some roast chiles from down south, and they ought to be coming by mail. But they would be a small package. Nothing a deliveryman would leave at his door. Perhaps a bomb.

It would take some genius to build a bomb that went off automatically when you looked at it, and anyway, there were easier ways to kill him. He opened the door slowly and stepped around to look.

There was a freckled young man in a wheelchair parked on his porch. “Mr. Cordova,” he said. He had a sharp grin, narrow gray eyes. Wore a loose-fitting jersey and shorts, had a backpack strung onto the handles of his chair.

Ramón looked behind the kid at the low concrete steps leading to his porch. “What do you want.”

“Martin Valdez,” the kid said, raising one hand to shake. He had a coffin tattooed on his forearm, a pistol high on the inside of the opposite bicep. “Hillrock High Weekly Bulletin. Was hoping you could answer me a few questions.”

The note. The message at the auto shop that he'd ignored. He stared down at the kid. Wondered how he'd found his house. Wondered how he'd gotten up the porch. Persistent fucker. “How'd you find my house.”

“Asked around,” said Martin, as if it were that simple.

“Answer the question.”

The kid mouthed, fuck you, but he said, “With respect, I'm not giving up my source.” Then, “Got time for a short conversation, Ramón Cordova?”

“Who did you say you're with?”

“Hellrock Bulletin,” the kid said. “Got a few? Or are you—” he cocked his head to peer behind Ramón's waist. “busy with anyone back there?”

“What's a school newspaper want with someone like me?” Ramón demanded, stepping cautiously out to the porch and shutting the door behind him. He swung his head from side to side, alert to any movement in the corners of his eyes. Traffic. Birds.

The kid shrugged. “With respect—you're news. People want to know. I've done the kiddie-work, published a series on hygiene in the cafeteria kitchen, but that don't make me my bones as a reporter.”

“You're here for a grade?” Ramón stared down suspiciously at the coffin on the kid's right forearm.

“Grades? Feh,” the kid said. “I'm here to publish. The whole varrio's scared of you, sabes? That how you want it? You can just step back, shut that door in my face. Or, you let me in, you get to tell your side of the story, I get my byline.” He clicked his tongue, cocked fingerguns. “Up to you, Mr. Cordova.”

Ramón stared down at the kid. This lanky, twitchy guero with death inked on his arms and a too-sharp smile and eyes that took in everything and met his stare when they'd finished. Kid had balls like small oranges. “Tell me how you found me and I'll think about it.”

The kid's grin shrank, his lips went flat except where a scar pulled down the left side. His eyes flicked from side to side a moment, thinking. At last he said, “I'm no snitch. I tell you that, whole street knows my promises no valen una mierda.”

Ramón opened the door, backed into the house. “Bueno. Ask your questions.”

The kid's eyes widened for an instant before he recovered, made them sly and confident again. He shifted in his chair and wheeled himself over the front threshold with a jolt and a bang. Ramón turned his back slowly. Washed his hands again, put on his apron, and got back to kneading the masa while the cornhusks boiled.

“So you're Ramón Cordova, the same Ramón Cordova who lived around here in the summer of 2005, correct? For the record.”

“Correct.”

“You ran with the Maravilla Lobos back in the day?”

“Correct.”

“Spent time in Atwater and Tehachapi Penitentiary, verdad?”

“That's public record.”

“Si, si. Formalities. So I hear you were in it when Leyenda put that hole in Castillo Avenue last month. What exactly went down?”

Ramón rolled the masa up into a ball and thumped it on the counter, watched it crumble. Just about blended. “Couldn't tell you.”

“You can't or you won't?”

“The Feds claim there was a mass release of hallucinogenic gas that night. So, no, I can't tell you what went down.”

“What'd your eyes tell you?”

“I don't want you to put that in your paper, make people think I'm really a mad dog.”

“But you were there?”

“Thought I could help out. Got my motorcycle blown up.”

“So something did go down. Real enough to trash your ride.”

“Correct. They still haven't fixed the hole. Next question.” He took a pair of tongs and fished a cornhusk out of the boiling water.

“What're your thoughts on the Ghost Rider?” The kid's voice was oddly tense, the consonants hard and hissing.

He turned to look. The kid's head was cocked, his phone in his lap, hands clenching and releasing on the chair arms. “Who?”

“You know. The local luchador. Rides around on fire all night like he owns the place.”

“La Leyenda? Needs to learn how to mind his own business.”

“Heh-heh.”

“Like you.”

The kid sniffed. “So, back in the day. What was the Maravilla Lobos' beef with the Hillrock Treces?”

Ramón looked up from tying a freshly-filled cornhusk. “How do you know the Hillrock Treces?”

“I asked around.”

“No. Tell me.”

The kid flipped through photos on his phone. “Vacant buildings, aerial walls, you can still see the tags.” He stopped at a photo, pinched over the screen and zoomed in. “Here, you can see the edges. Or this here, the Lobos just crossed 'em off, didn't bother with a fill-in. Like they're not worth the time. Owl, he's a street artist now, but when he was a kid, he was a tagger. He was tagging the same time the Kings were banging. He told me they had a feud with the Lobos, but didn't say why.”

“You won't hear it from me, either. I don't know.”

“How could you not know? You—you're El Perro—”

“I'm a man, not a dog,” Ramón snapped. “I don't know because it wasn't my business to know. It won't do any good to know. I don't think any of the jefes knew what started it, or cared.”

The kid flipped back through his phone, to a page of notes. “So. Mr. Cordova. I won't ask you for details about July in '05. But what happened in June?”

June, 2005. Suddenly Ramón felt the heat, and it wasn't from the steaming water. He sectioned off a new handful of masa, molded it into a neat rectangle in the center of a fresh cornhusk. “That was a bad time.”

“How so?”

“Saw friends die. A lot of friends die. Marco, he got hit wandering where he shouldn't have. Treces killed him. It was a blow, he was a carnal, he did a lot of the organization, distribution, and such. I think he was in the Treces' territory for his little cousin's baptism, stayed too long. They killed him in the street. Almost to Lobos territory.

“So we set up a shrine. A man dies on the street, it's the decent thing to do. Funeral wasn't 'till next week. We set up a shrine, all the boys came and lit a candle, Treces kept an eye on us but didn't try anything. First night. Second night, more of us came. And Marco's wife. His son. The captains and the freshies. That second night, some Treces drove by with automatics. Tried to take out everyone at the shrine. Killed Marco's wife. Killed some kid who knew his son, who wasn't even in the life. Killed my brother, my sponsor. Grazed me in the neck.”

“And there's no more Hillrock Treces,” the kid finished.

“That's what I hear.”

“You have anything to do with that?”

Ramón smacked the damn tamale, spattering masa all over the counter. “You did not ask me that question.”

The kid watched him, hands low, smirk fading.

“You know the Treces, you talked to Owl, you found me. You know so much, you should know better than to talk about what should be left buried.”

“All behind you. Put it in the past.”

Ramón scooped up the masa and molded it back onto the cornhusk. “Your school paper, what're you writing about?”

“You, Mr. Cordova. People know you, they want to know more.”

“Well, look around.” He waved at his little house, the walls bare except for a crucifix and two faded, watermarked photographs squashed into a single cheap frame, that had survived seven years in a federal penitentiary. “Tell them what you see.”

To his credit, the kid did look. He spun around to survey the living room. The second-hand coffee table half-sanded down, waiting to be refinished. The mismatched chairs—one folding, one wicker. The photograph of a young Ramón, almost unrecognizable, with his brother and parents, and another photograph, an inkjet print on yellowing paper, of a young woman with a baby.

“Seen better days.”

“No.” Ramón had never before been as self-determined, as capable, as he was today. He had never had command of his own space. He had run from his father's house straight into the arms of los Lobos, and from them, after a few smaller stints in juvie, and then local jails, the mission against the Treces and a long stay in the state pen. These were the best days Ramón had seen.

“What's the kid look like now?” Valdez had wheeled over to where Ramón's photos hung. He was taking a picture with his cell phone.

“Pinche fisgon! The fuck you think you're doing.” Ramón abandoned his latest tamale and stormed over to him. He grabbed Valdez' chair with one hand and grabbed the phone with the other. Valdez threw the phone. Ramón dove and snatched it up, looked down at the camera app still running, then up.

Valdez had a gun trained on him. His finger was on the trigger and his face was sheet-white under his freckles.

Ramón stood slowly, the phone low at his side. He saw Valdez swallow, his eyes dart back and forth, fear and regret dancing behind them. “How dare you,” Ramón growled.

“Hand the phone over. You go your way, I'll go mine, no hard feelings, guey,” the kid said, his voice strained, his hand trembling, but his gun staring Ramón right in the eye.

“Fuck me if I ever let un pandillero impúbero order me around in my own house,” Ramón growled. “How dare you. You come to my house. You take a picture of my son. And you don't show me the basic respect of telling me you have a weapon.”

“I—my bad,” the kid said, still training the gun on him. “Delete the picture. I shoulda asked first.”

“You keep pointing that gun at my face, you're not a human being, understand? You're an enemy. You treated me like I was your enemy.”

“Lo siento, Mr. Cordova. Sincerely.”

“Put it away.”

The kid lowered the gun, flipped up the safety, and tucked it back under his thigh, concealed by his loose-fitting shorts. He stared back up at Ramón, his lips white and pressed together, his breaths heaving deep. “How about that phone back.”

Ramón looked down at the picture of his ex-girlfriend and his son, the familiar water spot distorting the bottom corner. The most precious thing he owned. He deleted it off the kid's phone, tossed it at the kid's lap. “Get the fuck out.”

The kid grinned his sharp false grin and wheeled himself to the door. “Thanks for the interview,” he said, struggling to open the front door from the wheel chair while watching Ramón over his shoulder. “Ey—What was it like?”

Ramón walked over, slow, and opened the door for him. Ignored the question.

“What was it like, to make it big?”

“Get the fuck out of my house.”

The kid got the fuck out of his house. He rocked the wheelchair over the threshold, then, on the porch, he leaned over the arm and put the gun on the cement, then he rolled off the chair, pushed the chair down the steps, scooted himself down after it, retrieved his gun, scooted over to the chair, and hauled himself back up.

Well, that answered the question of how he'd made it onto Ramón's porch. Persistent little shit. Ramón shut the door on him, and watched through the peephole until the kid rolled out of sight down the street. He flipped the deadbolt, turned around, and shook the adrenaline out of his hands. Tamales. He'd barely started the batch. Make enough for work. Put the rest in the freezer. Take a dozen to Cecilia Palas and her four kids down the road.

He stared again at his spare house, the smell of fresh cornmeal and sawdust, the half-refurbished table, the cracked ceiling, the cobweb in the corner. Something bumped his ankle and he almost drew his own gun; it was the cat, back from wherever it had run off to, rubbing back and forth against his shin. He petted it with his shoe so as not to get cat hair on his hands and then in the tamales.

At his age, he should have married Maria long ago. His son, almost Valdez' age, should live with them both, and more children besides. He should have a work history, a reputation.

Well, a reputation he had. El Perro Rabioso. His reputation made Canelo's Auto and Body the last, the first, the only resort he had for a legitimate job, and even there, he had no respect, just fear. His mother was dead; his father and his son and his son's mother wanted nothing to do with him. Same with his homies: dead, calmado or quit, or bent on dragging him back into the fold dead or alive. Los Maravilla Lobos and the Black Hand that puppeteered them had taken everything of value Ramón had ever had.

And this stupid kid wanted to hear about his “glory days.”

 

He finished the batch of tamales and ate them with the jalisco, and later some chile verde, over the next week. He kept his head down, tried not to scare his coworkers more than they deserved, bit back his temper, punched an emissary from Maravilla Catorce in an alley on the way to his bus stop. He missed his motorcycle.

On Thursday night, Cecilia's two oldest kids banged on his door and he abandoned his half-varnished coffee table to walk down the street, pistol tucked into the back of his pants in case of Lobos or Catorces and beer in hand to stop himself from strangling Cecilia's ex-boyfriend. After a very long, soft, repetitive conversation with the boyfriend that would've given Ramón's parole officer concerns for his community by the time the drunken idiot finally tucked tail and drove home, Ramón returned to find the varnish had dried on half the coffee table and it would either need to be completely sanded again or re-stained from the nice honey-maple he'd picked to something like dark walnut to cover the streaks. Friday, he worked. Saturday, he worked. Sunday, he went to church, took mass. The taste of the wafer took him right back to the penitentiary: it was the same tasteless cracker used by the priest who visited the prison chapel.

He thought about the kid.

“What was it like, to make it big?”

Such a deafening gulf of ignorance.

He pictured his son, his gap-toothed face burned in his brain, just as it was when he’d been staring too long at the worn picture. Unchanging, laughing. But his son was fifteen, maybe sixteen, wherever he was. Who would tell his son not to follow in his footsteps and become a hatchetman for the Black Hand? The kids here learned from what they saw, just like he had. They saw clean new clothes, new cars in good repair, families rising out of debt, new toys for the little ones. They saw things they thought were worth killing and dying for, and others, outsiders, warning them away from these riches. Who would tell them to count their blessings, keep their heads down, and work honestly, when as far as they could see, honesty had so little reward?

He called Hillrock High, left a message to pass on to the student paper: Ramón Cordova, and his phone number. Permission to call back.

He got a call from Martin Valdez Monday night. The kid wasted no time. “You got my word, Mr. Cordova, nobody knows I talked to you, nobody knows I went to your house. My lips are sealed, como una tumba, patrón. Like it never happened.”

Ramón rolled his eyes. “No mames, pandillerito.”

“Verdad! No hay mamada!”

“That's not why I reached out. You asked for an interview, and I got time to spare for kids like you. Who want to know about the life.”

A silence on the line as the kid thought better of putting his hackles up at being called “kid.” “Thank-you, Mr. Cordova.”

“Ask your questions. You have, eh...twenty minutes.”

There was a long pause. A shuffle, a clunk. Then the kid said, “Your place. Never seen better days?”

Ramón had to cast his mind back to figure out what he meant. “No. No, it hasn't. I haven't. This is my first place of my own. Solitary doesn't count.

“My time is my own. I can do whatever I want with it. Food, rent, work. I fix things up on the side. I can finally get right with God, so I go to mass. The only thing I have to do is meet my parole officer, and every meeting is a step toward finally getting free. Free in the eyes of the law, because I'll never truly be free. I'll never get back what the life took from me. But I can finally make a life of my own.”

Silence from the kid. Then, “What do you want from life now?”

I want to see my son. Ramón said, “To rejoin society. To pay back what I took.”

“Guilt? Make amends? That's it?”

“Some people, you can't make amends to. Your actions, God's will, the time on the inside—they're gone. If I could beg forgiveness from everyone I've wronged—well, I can't. So I do what I can.”

“Feels good?”

“Makes me feel like a man instead of a bitch.” He lowered the phone briefly, petting the cat with his free hand. He took a sip of beer. “Kid, you asked about the Hillrock Treces. I know that's why you tracked me down. The rumors.

“I'm not gonna tell you the whole story. I'm not a snitch and I'm not a fool. What I will tell you, I'd advise you not put it in your paper because it would put a target on your school, and I hope you know better than to do that. Correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“It wasn't a beef. Between los Lobos y los Treces, it wasn't revenge. The drive-by at the shrine I told you about had nothing to do with what happened to the Treces. No one person could have done that, no one gang could have wiped out an entire cliqua.

“It was an order from Tehachapi. I met the man who gave that order, during my stay. He told me, if he wanted, he could have made the Lobos and the Treces shake hands over a drink, go into business together. But, he told me, the Treces had to go. They'd been cheating on their taxes.

“See, that's what the life is really about. It's not about business, or el varrio, or brotherhood; por y sobre la verga—all bullshit. It's all about power, and no matter how powerful you think you are, you're always under the boot of someone stronger, some jefe sitting in a cell in Tehachapi with a life sentence. So it wasn't because the Treces were murdering cowards who sprayed bullets at Marco's mourners because his shrine was on their turf. It was because that jefe wasn't getting his cut of their revenue, and he was mad. So he gave his blessing on all the gangs in East LA who wanted a piece of the Treces, and because East LA is always at war, four different gangs answered his call.

“That's how it goes. The wars, the fighting for turf, the dealing, none of it's for you. It's to keep you hungry and angry and scared. Keeps you ready to shoot when the jefe says fire, so he can use your anger to keep all the other cliquas in line. Marco and his wife never got justice from what happened in '05. But el jefe, next year, he got his fucking taxes.”

Ramón kept his hand deliberately open, rigid with gentleness, as he petted the cat. The cat made an angry noise and bumped its chin hard on his hand, so hard one tooth scraped along his palm.

“I had to keep my mouth shut while he talked about Marco's death, and what he'd used—his men to do, here in Hillrock. I had to let him touch me. El Perro Rabioso. Puta Rabiosa.

“So that's what it feels like when you've made it, Valdez. You feel like the lowest puta to ever drag her tits along the ground.”

The cat licked his thumb, then bit him. He jerked his hand away, and it rolled over on his lap, grabbing for his hand with its claws. He looked down and resumed petting it, very carefully.

“You spend time in Juvie?” he asked.

“Sure,” the kid said, careless. Of course. I'm not a freshie.

“They make you fight?”

The kid snorted. “Make me. Tried to stop me. I ruled that place—”

“All bullshit,” Ramón said. “Why do you think you had to fight? Fighting doesn't just weed out the soldiers from the weaklings, fighting drives you into the gang. Gives you something to run away from. And for what? So some sixty-year-old bastard walled up in Tehachapi gets a soldier to collect taxes for him. And if you try to get out—you'd be lucky to end up in a chair. There's no way out.”

“Why did you get out?” the kid asked, after a pause. His tone was dubious.

“Didn't you hear me? There's no way out. I'm waiting for a death sentence,” Ramón said, exasperated. “But why did I get out? Because they didn't deserve me. They used me. They took everything from me, my freedom, my family, my honor, and gave me nothing for it. But when I die, I'll die on my feet, fighting for my own conscience, like a man.”

“So you work, cook, and fix furniture,” the kid said.

“It's my life,” Ramón said. “It's finally my life. So I do what I want and what I believe in, when I can.”

“I respect that,” the kid said, magnanimously. “Mind if I quote that?”

Ramón gave the cat one last stroke, looked down, and noticed a strange wild light in its eyes, drool streaming down its chin. He stopped petting and ignored the cat's pleading for more. The next stroke, the little devil would really bite him. “Go ahead, kid. It's all I have.”