Resurrection Express Read Online Free PDF Page B

perceived and re-embraced time and again by the human animal.
    Perception is unreliable.
    Language is the glue of civilization.
    People are no damn good.
    The next year, we ran off together. Walked right out of that place, right under their noses. Slept under freeways, learned the street. Discovered what real love was. Four years running scams, until I was busted. They told me I could spend eight months in a juvenile detention center for being drunk and violent, or I could become a soldier and work off some of that aggression. When I went in the army, Toni told me I needed to learn a trade. We couldn’t be common hustlers for the rest of our lives. Hustlers die, she told me. So do soldiers. We must cheat those evil men who want to steal our birthright. We must know the names of our killers in the moment before they make us run for our lives. We must live, and our children must live after us. Otherwise, we’re not immortal creatures. Just dead creatures, lost on the face of time.
    I loved her best when she spoke to me that way. She was wise beyond anything I’d known before. As if something higher was speaking to me through her words. You think that way when you’re in love, I guess.
    Though love cannot stay.
    I knew that, even as a child.
    Knew that so many things were temporary—the most important things.
    But I loved her then, loved her so much . . . and so I did it. Trained my body and my mind. We became the best. Traveled from one end of the world to the other. Ten years of ripping off banks. Ten years before the trouble started again. That’s what beautiful girls get for being beautiful girls in a world of sharks. Sometimes I wish she hadn’t been so beautiful. Maybe Hartman would have kept his hands off her.
    Who am I kidding?
    I get out of bed and sit on the floor, trying to focus myself. Trying to see her face. Trying to resurrect her. It never worked on the inside. It’s still not working. I lost her before I even went in that terrible place of concrete and steel . . . and now . . . now that I know she might still be alive . . . that she’s still his woman after all this time . . . that I might still hold her in my arms again  . . .
    The smell of gunmetal and roses is more overwhelming than ever.
    Down and down, I go.
    Lost forever without her.
    I remember that her hair was long and black, but I can’t bring back the color of her eyes.
    They were like firecrackers, but I can’t bring them back.
    The smell of roses haunts me in the dark.
    •  •  •
    A gent Washington arrives in the black Lexus with the tinted windows and drives me to my first day at the toy store. I ask him where the surfer is and he says he’s with my father. Twenty-four-hour guard on the safe house and they’re understaffed today. No one gets to him until we make our move.
    Toy Jam is in one of the busiest areas of the downtown campus drag, Twenty-sixth and Guadalupe. The intersection is just inchesfrom the front door of the place, flowing with kids and teenagers and mothers with babies and lots of traffic. Sidewalk musicians play for quarters and scrawl chalk art. Hip cafés on the drag teem with the breakfast rush. A guy wearing a paisley kilt sells mural rugs in a pizza-parlor parking lot across the street. A pay phone near a bus stop, where a bunch of homeless people jabber in some weird language that isn’t exactly English. I make note of the pay phone.
    Inside, the place is like the toy closet of the nerdiest man-child on earth, with racks of action figures, plastic figurines and wind-ups that look like Luke Skywalker, Speed Racer and evil nuns that breathe fire. Smells like hippies in here.
    And speaking of hippies.
    The manager is a perky young granola girl with long braided ponytails and striped stockings, and she’s only as nice as she has to be. Her name is Sunshine. How adorable. She explains that they’ve become part of the work release program in Austin because the store has been here for twenty