Shouldn’t we call an ambulance?

He looks at me and shakes his head.

Man, I can’t believe you, he says. He was going to knife you.

Out on Windward the boulevard’s wide, and the buildings low, the sky opened up. Low, enormous clouds move not far above us, and their insides glow with sunlight though the undersides are dark with shadows.

I don’t really care about him, I say.

He ignores me. He pulls out the foil and uncrumples it and looks through it and crunches it up and hands it over so I can put it under the carpet. In the past we have often been pulled over, though this has not happened since he got his new car and started wearing straighter clothes (he says too many white kids dress like gangsters now). We pass the Santa Monica cop station, with its ordered rows of police cars parked next to the civic center dome that looks like something out of The Jetsons. I am worried.

V

We come up along Main Street towards the nice part of Santa Monica. Posh stores. Artist’s galleries. The pier’s archway passes on our left. This is not the quickest way home.

Where we going? I say.

You hungry?

I guess so.

You want Fat Burger or pizza?

My fingertips rest on my jeans. Isn’t Mom going to have made something for dinner?

She’s working late, he says.

That’s not what she told me.

He frowns. You want to eat her tired old paella?

It might hurt her feelings if we eat something else first.

We’ll tell her a client made us eat some of her food, he says after thinking a moment. Mom loves it when we do education and work kind of shit.

It sounds like a stupid excuse to me, but my brother seems irritated, so I keep quiet. Lately he has been increasingly inconsiderate towards her. I don’t exactly know why. Maybe I notice it more now, after what happened in Oregon. It has been a gradual development, and maybe it has been coming on as Tomas has grown taller and more confident, and found more friends.

At Shakey’s we go to the bathroom and splash water over our faces and dab napkins over our face and hands and pat our shirts. The paper comes away damp and pink. I run a few matted napkins through my hair, even though it is so dark you could not see any blood on it anyway. He orders a pizza with lots of meat and pineapples and green peppers, then we go over to the drink bar.

Pitchers of beer are cheap, he says. You want to try it?

No thanks.

He grins. I didn’t think so.