by Don Winslow
Then it was up Eighty-Second, past the Duane Reade drugstore and McDonald’s (yes!), where he actually had money to eat sometimes, the Gap Outlet, where Tía Consuelo and Tío Javier bought him new clothes, then Foot Locker, Payless Shoes, and the Children’s Place, which they couldn’t afford. Then he’d cross Thirty-Seventh Street, a major thoroughfare about which his aunt warned him to be very careful. The next two blocks were pretty dull, not a lot on them, just “residential” (as he learned to say) apartment buildings, until he got to St. Joan of Arc Elementary, where Consuelo would like to have sent him but they couldn’t afford the tuition; Nico, however, was just as glad because the kids had to wear uniforms, lame red sport jackets.
And he liked PS 212.
Of the eight hundred kids, more than half of them were Hispanic, most of the rest were Indian or Pakistani. Nico was in an ESL class with a bunch of the other Spanish speakers and did well in reading, but what he really liked was math.
Numbers are the same in both languages.
He was good with them, and every Saturday morning he sat down with his uncle and aunt and helped do the weekly budget—how much they needed for rent, for groceries, how much, if anything, they could spend going out, how much they could save.
Sometimes they went to McDonald’s, KFC or one of the restaurants on Thirty-Seventh, but mostly they ate at home. A lot of rice and tortillas, but sometimes Consuelo cooked pepián with pork or chicken, or pupusas, filling the thick corn tortillas with beans and cheese or sometimes pork. When there was time and she wasn’t too tired, she’d make Nico’s favorite, rellenitos, plantains with bean paste, cinnamon and sugar. When she didn’t have the time or energy, Javier usually gave him some money to go treat himself at Dunkin’ Donuts.
Nico didn’t see as much of his aunt or uncle as he’d have liked because they were working their asses off most of the time. Javier was a janitor at one of the condos where the rich people lived, and Consuelo cleaned people’s houses. They worked as many hours as they could because they needed the money for food and rent and were saving to start their own cleaning supplies business.
Like most of the kids in his school, Nico was a “latchkey kid.” He didn’t think anything of it—he’d always been pretty much on his own most of the day. The only difference between being a latchkey kid in Guatemala and the United States is that in the US he actually had a key.
On Sundays they’d go to church.
Not a Catholic church, Nico was surprised to find out, but Iglesia la Luz del Mundo, because Javier and Consuelo had become “Pentecostals.” Nico didn’t like church very much, it was boring, the minister went on and on about Jesus and they sang really terrible music, but there was a pupusa stand right outside where Javier would usually spring for a few with cheese and chipilín.
Nico missed his mother. Every few weeks they managed to get her on the phone so he could at least say hello, but the calls were short and usually made him sad. They were trying to find a way to bring her to the United States, but between the expense and the legal complications it didn’t look good. And the calls left Nico feeling a little guilty because he knew that even if he could go home to Guatemala, he wouldn’t.
He was an American now. It was better here.
He didn’t have to scrounge through garbage to eat, and he wasn’t always sick and hungry. He had a bed behind real walls, a toilet indoors, and he went to a school where they fed him lunch, gave him an education free-for-nothing, and the teachers were nice.
One thing hadn’t changed from Guatemala.
Or Virginia, for that matter.
The gangs.
Eighty-Second Street, where he lives, is Calle 18 turf.
Nico learned this one day walking home from Travers Park, where he was playing fútbol on the old basketball court with a few kids from school. He crossed Seventy-Eighth Street and went to cut through another ball court in back of Salem House, but a group of about five black kids stopped him.
“What you doing here, pepperbelly?”
Nico didn’t know what pepperbelly meant, but he figured it meant him. He didn’t answer.
“I ask what you doing here.”
“Just going home,” Nico said.
“You find some other way to go home,” the kid, a big teenager, said. He was wearing a T-shirt made by the Mecca company, and Nico saw that the other four had the same gear. “This our block. You know who we are?”
Nico shook his head.
“We ABK,” the kid said, and when he saw that Nico didn’t understand, he clarified. “Always Banging Kings. Who you with?”
“I’m not with anyone,” Nico said, struggling to say it in English.
The kid laughed. “Tell you what, I’m Not with Anyone, you run now. We give you a head start of three. If we catch you, we fuck you up. Go!”
Nico ran.
Nico Rápido ran for his life.
He’d done it before on the top of a moving train, so he was good with running across Thirty-Fourth Avenue, down Seventy-Ninth Street, through an alley to Eightieth. These mayates were fast and they were yelling as they chased him and he turned around to see that they were gaining on him because they were older and bigger and had longer legs.
Nico took a breath and sprinted toward Eighty-Second with the ABK right behind him and closing in.
Then Nico heard their feet stop.
He looked ahead of him and saw a group of Hispanic guys, maybe ten of them, standing on the corner.
One of them yelled, “¡Píntale, pendejos!”
The ABK kid who had fronted Nico yelled back, “Go home, you fucking border rat!”
But he stopped.
“I am home, porch monkey! This is Calle 18 turf!” The guy opened his shirt to show the butt of a gun.
The black kids threw a few more insults but backed off.
Nico said, “Gracias—”
The kid slapped him across the face. Hard. “What you doing over there, pendejo? Where you was?”
“Travers Park.”
“That’s all mayates now.”
“I didn’t know.”
“What are you, stupid? Where you from?”
“Guatemala.”
“Who you with?” the kid asked.
“No one,” Nico said.
“Where you live?”
“Eighty-Second Street, over Casa del Pollo.”
“Well, you belong to us, puta,” the kid said. “You need to be cliqued up with 18.”
“I don’t . . .”
“You don’t what?”
“I don’t know.”
Nico was confused as hell. These guys didn’t look like Calle 18—none of them had tattoos on their faces. And they weren’t dressed like gangbangers—they wore polo shirts and nice jeans or khakis.
“You don’t know nothing, do you?” the kid said. “Let me tell you how this works. You got Calle 18 around here, you got Sureño 13. You wear black and blue, you’re with us; you wear red, you’re with them. But you don’t want to be with them, hermanito, because every time we see you in red, we’ll beat the shit out of you. You also got ABK here, and they don’t care if you’re black or blue or red as long as you’re Spanish, they’ll mess you up.”
“What if I don’t want to be with anyone?” Nico asked.
“Then you’re a little bitch,” the kid said, “and everyone fucks with you.”
To illustrate, he slapped Nico again.
No different here, Nico thinks, than it was there.
“You think about it,” the kid said. “Come find me, give me your answer. But, hermanito, if you don’t come and find me, we’ll come and find you. Understand?”
Yeah, Nico understood.
He was scared shitless that they’d see he already had the 18 tat on his ankle and they’d kill him for being disloyal and running away. And he felt stupid as shit; he comes two thousand miles to escape Calle 18 and he ends up right in the middle of them.
Nico didn’t know what to do. He’d have liked to talk to Jav
ier about it but was afraid that his uncle would tell him not to join the gang (they probably weren’t too big on gangs at the Iglesia la Luz del Mundo) and then he might have to go against him, which he didn’t want to do because he liked and respected Javier.
But Javier wouldn’t understand, Nico thought. He probably doesn’t even know what Calle 18 is.
Nico didn’t sleep that night. He wanted to do the right thing, stay out of the gangs, that’s what he came here for, after all; but at the end of the day, life made Nico Ramírez a realist. Life taught him that there are bad choices and worse choices, and that you have to do what you have to do to survive.
The next day was Saturday.
Nico went up to Modell’s, grabbed a black Yankees cap with blue letters, shoved it under his shirt and walked out. He put it on his head and went looking for Calle 18, found them hanging in the Taco Bell on Thirty-Seventh.
The boss saw the black cap. “You’re smarter than you look. What’s your name?”
“Nico Ramírez.”
“And you want to be Calle 18?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll make you a paro,” he said.
“What’s that?” Nico asked.
“You’re too young to be a full member,” the boss said. “You can be an associate until you prove yourself.”
“Okay.”
“But first you got to get beat in,” the boss said. “Don’t look so scared, hermanito, we whale on you for eighteen seconds. It’s over before you know it.”
“When?” Nico asked, forcing himself to not look scared at all. “Where?”
The boss looked at him with a little more respect. “Moore Playground. Tonight. Eight o’clock.”
“See you there,” Nico said, and walked out.
He went to the playground that night. A dozen 18’s were there, nine guys and three girls. They circled around him, surrounded him, closed in.
“This is Nico,” the boss said. “He’s asked to get beat in.”
Eighteen seconds didn’t sound like a lot of time when you weren’t getting shoved and punched and kicked but it was a loooong time when you were. Nico took it, though, and was smart enough not to go down.
“Time!” the boss yelled.
He hugged Nico. “Bienvenido, hermano. My name is Davido. We’re brothers now.”
Blood ran from Nico’s nose, but it wasn’t broken. His lower lip was thick and swollen and he had a black eye and bruises on his face and all over his body. His ribs hurt where one of the girls planted her pointed toe into them.
But he was in.
As a paro, an associate, the lowest rung on the gang ladder.
Davido and a few of the others took him to Taco Bell on Thirty-Seventh and treated him to a meal. Nico asked about the lack of tattoos.
“We don’t do that anymore,” Davido said. “The cops are onto it. They see that shit on you, they find a reason to arrest you and then you get deported. We pulled it back, niño. This shit you see is camouflage. You got to be smart.”
When Nico got home that night, he tried to sneak past his aunt and uncle, but Javier was awake and saw Nico’s face.
“Sobrino, what happened to you?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? Look at you!”
What happened was what Nico was afraid would happen. Consuelo woke up and made a big deal of it. Washed his face with a washcloth, then put ice cubes in the cloth and made him hold it over his mouth and his eye.
While Javier interrogated him. “Who did this to you?”
“Some black kids,” Nico lied. He figured it wasn’t that much of a lie, because the black kids would have done this or worse if they’d caught him.
“Where?” Javier asked.
“Travers Park.”
Javier was suspicious. “Why didn’t they take your watch, your shoes? The blacks usually take your shoes.”
“I got away from them,” Nico said. “I’m fast.”
“Stay away from that park,” Consuelo said.
“It’s right near the school.”
“Find another place to play.”
Javier waited until Consuelo went back to bed, then he came into Nico’s room and said, “You’re not getting involved with gangs, are you? Tell me you’re not getting involved with the gangs.”
“I’m not.”
“Because I know how it is on the streets,” Javier said. “I see things. I know. You think you need boys to back you up. But you have to stay away from that stuff, Nico. It’s bad. It will only get you in trouble.”
“I know.”
But you don’t see things, he thought, and you don’t know how it is.
How it is is you get cliqued up.
Or you get cliqued out.
It was good, it was sweet.
Nico sucked in another toke of the yerba and passed the blunt back to Davido. He held the smoke in his lungs for as long as he could and then let it go.
And giggled. “Good shit.”
“No shit, good shit.”
They were partying in Davido’s crib on Eighty-Sixth. A dozen or so of Nico’s new brothers and sisters. Big Boy and Jamsha were pounding “Donde Están Toas las Yales” on the flat-screen Sony. Nico watched the video and took another pull off the Cuervo.
On the screen, a chica with a big ass and big tits walked into Big Boy’s crib and yelled at him. Threw his shit into a garbage bag. Big Boy got into the car with the pizza guy, Jamsha, and they started their rap as they drove through the streets looking at girls.
The girls in the video were smokin’.
So was the girl dancing off to the side of the TV, shaking her ass and hips like she didn’t know Nico was looking.
He was looking.
Knew Dominique went to Pulitzer, was like in eighth grade.
Already had these nice tight little tits, and that ass . . . Long, shiny black hair bouncing off her ass, then brushing her tits.
“You like that, boy?” Davido asked, noticing.
Davido noticed everything.
Nico laughed. Davido handed him back the joint.
“I’m trying to educate you, paro,” Davido said. “Pay attention. You even know what a mara is?”
“A gangbanger.”
“Where the name came from, I mean,” Davido said. “A mara is an ant. The kind of ant that swarms together and then kills everything in front of them. One ant is easy to crush, but an army of ants is unstoppable. Conquer or die, ’manito, that’s us. Like the song go, La vida en la 18 es fatal.”
Life in 18 is fatal.
New video.
The girls from “En 20 Uñas” were twerking.
Dominique imitating.
Nico getting hard.
“Shit,” Davido laughed, “there’s no talking to a hard dick. It won’t listen. You want some of that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yeah, you know. Dominique, venga.”
Dominique danced over. Looked down at them and smiled.
Davido asked, “You think my boy here is cute?”
“He’s okay.”
“Why don’t you take him into the bathroom,” Davido said. “Show him you like him.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t know,” Nico said, feeling shy all of a sudden. He’d never even kissed a girl before.
“He doesn’t know,” Dominique said. She started to dance away.
“It’s okay,” Nico said.
“No, it’s all good,” Davido said. “You’re 18 now. It works like this—you’re just a paro, so she won’t fuck you, but she’ll suck your cock. Bitch, get back here!”
Dominique came back.
Davido said, “Break our boy in.”
Dominque reached out her hand, led Nico into the bathroom and pushed him down on the edge of the bathtub.
Knelt in front of him.
Nico never felt anything like that.
He didn’t last long.
Dominique got up, looked into the mirror, adjusted her lipstick,
sprayed something into her mouth. “That was your first time, huh?”
“No.”
“Yes, it was. Don’t worry, papi, you did fine.”
Nico, he was in love.
“Put yourself back in,” she said.
“Oh, yeah.”
She smiled into the mirror at him and walked out.
He took a second to get it together and went back out into the party. Davido grinned at him. Nico grinned back.
Pouya was on.
“South Side Suicide.”
A week later Nico showed up where he was told.
The parking lot outside Burger King.
Davido walked up on him. Real close, chest to chest. Reached into his Yankees jacket, took something out and slipped it inside Nico’s windbreaker. “Take this. Put it somewhere safe.”
It was a gun. Nico could feel it. “I don’t want it.”
“Did I ask you what you want?” Davido asked. “Take it, put it under your bed or someplace your aunt won’t find it.”
“I won’t use it.”
“No shit, you won’t,” Davido said. “You better not. No, you keep it for me until I ask you for it, then you give it back.”
“Why don’t you just keep it?”
“Because you’re a minor,” Davido said. “If you get caught with it, you go to juvie for a few months. I get caught with it, I go upstate for years. You understand now?”
“I guess so.”
“It’s your job,” Davido said. “As a junior. This is what comes with the weed and the alcohol and the girls. You want that, you take this.”
Nico walked home hugging the gun to his chest.
Felt like everyone on the street could see it.
A cop car rolled by and he thought he might piss his pants.
Thank God no one was home when he got home, both pulling double shifts. He lifted the mattress off his bed, set the pistol between it and the box spring, then put the mattress back. Looked at it carefully to see if there was a bulge.
When he tried to go to sleep that night, he felt like the gun was poking into his stomach. But the next night it didn’t feel so bad, and a couple of nights later it felt kind of good, having the gun there.
Felt powerful.
Like, come fuck with me now, see what happens.
Mess with Nico now, see what happens to you.