North of Montana by April Smith

people.”
    “Relatives.” Donnato shakes his head. “Take ’em to Disneyland.”
    The wonderful simplicity of that idea makes me laugh.
    “Okay now?”
    I nod.
    “Can you take care of it?”
    “Sure.”
    Donnato squeezes my arm. “Good triceps.” That wry, affectionate look. “Go swimming. See you tomorrow.”
    When I duck inside to grab my bag I notice the Bank Dick’s Undercover Disguise embracing the phone in a tangled heap on the floor, the empty hanger still rocking above it.

SIX

    A FEW DAYS later I slip into my car with the intention of returning a humidifier. I hadn’t been too precise about changing the water so it stopped working last winter and rotted in the bedroom all spring. When I finally dumped the tank out sometime around Halloween it was evident that new life forms had sprouted inside. The store where I bought it guarantees a “lifetime warranty” so you can keep bringing in the old fishy-smelling one and exchanging it for a brand-new one, no questions asked, for the rest of your life. I know, because I already pulled this stunt last year, when the original humidifier dried up and died.
    Somehow despite the excellent intention of running over to Century City and back during my lunch break, I am still sitting here in the G-ride without having turned on the engine. I have found the Bible that belonged to Violeta Alvarado thrown on the passenger seat along with a ton of papers and law books and am looking through it, suddenly disoriented in the middle of the parking lot of the Federal Building.
    Slowly removing the crossed rubber bands with the same care as Mrs. Gutiérrez, I run my finger down the dense type printed in Spanish on delicate tissuey pages and look through the faded snapshots again, stopping at the one of Violeta’s mother holding a baby. Behind them the landscape is gray green, scrubby and heartless.
    I have never been to the tropics. I cannot know what life is for that woman and that baby. My past begins and ends with my grandfather—his California boyhood, his own mother’s trek across this country from Kansas, his devotion to the moral duties of police work in the expansive fifties, have formed my sense of myself as a full-blooded optimistic American and, growing up, there was never any reason to question any of it.
    Now I am forced to question it all as I hold a piece of paper torn from a small notebook upon which is written the name of a white woman who allegedly fired a cousin of mine who was Hispanic. The name is Claire Eberhardt. The address is on Twentieth Street, eight blocks from Poppy’s old house, north of Montana, where I spent the first five years of my life, in the city of Santa Monica—a former beach town of funky bungalows and windswept Pacific views that has now become an overbuilt upscale enclave on the westernmost edge of the Los Angeles sprawl.
    Even pulling out of the parking lot I hesitate, then make a decisive turn away from Century City and the sweet new humidifier, west down Wilshire and on to San Vicente Boulevard. These days I come to Santa Monica on Bureau business or to catch a movie at the Third Street Promenade, but north of Montana is definitely not my turf. This is the land of the newly rich where noontime joggers pass beneath scarlet-tipped coral trees on a wide grassy meridian. The Ford looks stupid next to Mercedeses and BMWs and hot Toyota Land Cruisers that have never seen a speck of mud. I take the fork onto Montana Avenue and curve past a golf course. Already the air is flooded with the scent of flowers and cool watered grass, pine and eucalyptus.
    The top end of Montana Avenue could be a small nondescript residential street anywhere, but as you pass a school and start down an incline all of a sudden you are hit by a row of shops with blue awnings.
    I have noticed that whenever you have awnings you have quaint.
    On Montana Avenue there are lots of awnings: maroon awnings with white scallops, artsy-fartsy modernistic awnings that hang