“He was in a shiny red car, right?” Fermín shook the churritos one final time and placed the open bag in the middle of the table.
“Yeah,” Luis chuckled. He grabbed a handful of churritos. As he chewed, he sucked in cool air through his puckered lips and gave Fermín a nod of approval.
“Yeah, looked like a fuckin’ joto in that Mustang,” Luis said, still chewing. “Made me sit in it with him. Played that shit music with his system. Never got out of the car, just wanted to talk. Why the fuck would I want to talk with that pendejo. That’s what I told my tía, anyway. She knew I was angry.”
I was waiting for Fermín to grab some churritos first, but he looked at me and pointed to the bag. His dark eyes were intimidating, yet there was a gentleness in his attention.
I thought it’d be rude not to dig in, so I popped some into my mouth. The stimulation of spice and acidity made my mouth water.
Fermín had been waiting for me—he plopped a handful into his mouth. I noticed Luis’s furrowed brow, a confused wrinkle between his narrow eyes.
He tossed his head back and continued, “I threw out the chicle wrapper he put his cell number on. Said he’d buy me my own cell, so we could talk. But fuck it, que se chingue.”
Fermín chewed with his mouth open. His fine-trimmed moustache contrasted with the fullness of his lips. As his mouth chomped up and down, I saw that his braces were missing the wires. Silver jewels encrusted his teeth. Fermín maintained his gaze on Luis while he kept speaking, but I’d grown bored by Luis’s bastardly rant.
“What I should have asked that puto, really, is why he doesn’t fix up my mom’s papers, you know? Why not do that? But, who knows . . .”
“My amá left too,” I blurted, not entirely sure why. “Some years ago.”
Luis and Fermín stared at me.
“Yeah, I know,” Luis said. “No big deal right, ni pedo.” He dropped the last few sopping wet churritos into his mouth. Those were the best ones.
The empty bag lay between us—a gutted animal—hot sauce and pulp leaking like viscera from its mangled plastic body. On the table, we spread our dangerous fingertips, wet with Salsa Amor and lime. Those red fingers, in a forgetful moment, could take their vengeance on your face or, for the most unfortunate, your cock.
I could feel the heat from our feast rising in my mouth.
“Too much Amor?” asked Fermín.
“Just the right amount,” I answered.
MS. McGAW HELD up a bottle of hand sanitizer and squirted a gelatinous dab into her open palm. The rubbing alcohol smell wafted toward me in the back of the minibus, then disappeared as the funk of manure blew in through the open windows.
“Would anybody care for some?” she asked. “A little goes a long way.”
That morning we’d left the high school and traveled in two white minibuses to visit what Ms. McGaw called her “favorite ecological accident.” We had no AC. On the highway, the roar from the open windows beat down all conversations and within minutes our excited chatter turned to silence. The plastic cover on my beige seat warmed and grabbed my flesh like wet glue.
North we went, across fields of crops and desert for what seemed hours, until in my groggy haze I saw the sign: SALTON SEA STATE RECREATION AREA. Past the decay of forgotten houses and rusted hulls of cars, the dark blue sea—its color found around here only in the sky—reached out wide in all directions. Behind the blue, the distant horizon jutted up as smooth caramel-colored mountains.
I’d seen the Salton Sea once before, when my cousin drove us past it on a camping trip. “It’s really a lake,” he said. “Mutants and religious locos live out here.” Caifanes bumped in his car’s speakers. “They eat the three-eyed fishes that fuck in that thing.”
Once we were off the minibus, the Salton Sea welcomed us with a moist breeze that carried a hint of rot. Sticky sweat coated my bare skin.
Ms. McGaw stood in the sunshine and rubbed sunblock into her arms and face, but she didn’t rub it in all the way. The skin on her arms looked even redder with the creamy stuff on them. On her face, the sunblock thickened into the creases of her wrinkles.
Suddenly Fermín walked up to Ms. McGaw. He wanted sunblock to protect his fair skin. No. It wasn’t that. He’d gone to tell her to rub the excess sunblock further into her skin. Now she wouldn’t look like a clown.
Fermín wore a red shirt, brown pants, and a black pair of dress shoes that shined. His tucked shirt showed off a white belt made of some kind of reptile.
I felt nauseated. Was it the putrid odor coming from this unnatural body of water? Death’s smell? Ms. McGaw had told us the water was drying up, and as the Salton Sea died, dust storms would blow the lake bed—full of the poisons from our fields—back to our towns for our asthma-ridden lungs to breathe. She called it ironic.
I walked toward the water, white pebbles of who-the-fuck-knows-what crunching under my shoes. I kicked around a bit and uncovered the remains of a fish.
Ms. McGaw and Mr. Fillmore chatted as they walked together along the crunchy white shore and asked us to follow. In her raspy voice, Ms. McGaw explained that agricultural runoff kept the Salton Sea alive. That many types of birds visited, and if we were lucky . . .
I saw Fermín walking toward me. His black dress shoes were nearly gray now, completely covered in the white sand stuff of the Salton Sea.
“Yo, haven’t seen you around,” Fermín said. “You don’t hang at Zapata?” He kept his voice low.
“Sometimes. I saw you, though, one of those games during first period. I forgot to say when Luis and me went to your spot last week. You were like a cat.”
“Ni pedo. That was nothing. Just messing around.”
“No, you were real good, bien cabrón.”
“Now, follow along this path,” Ms. McGaw said. The moist breeze picked up, carrying her words, as well as the water’s stench, to us.
“Got no homies here?” Fermín asked.
“Nah, not ‘students of promise,’ I guess,” I said, using air quotes.
“Don’t make fun, guey. We were handpicked for this. Enjoy it. Only we get to see all of this,” he said, spreading his arms out wide.
“You seen Luis lately?” I asked.
“A couple days ago, at Zapata. I goalied for his team. Says he starts at D.O. in a few weeks or something.”
“Pinchi idiota. Rolls a blunt at school, then has to blaze in the library.”
“Always bragged to me the dog would never catch him, that he was cool with Officer Peña. Didn’t even matter.” Fermín shook his head.
Mr. Fillmore tightened and adjusted his ponytail to cover his bald spot. “So,” he clapped his hands once. “We’re basically walking on top of a big fish graveyard. Those are fish bones that you’re standing on.”
“What!” cried some of the group, followed by “guacala” and “gross.”
Fermín kicked a few of what I now knew to be bones onto my sneakers. I kicked some back at his shoes.
“See, now you’ll have to clean these,” he said.
“What, they were dirty as fuck, already all cochinos.”
“You’re crazy, I could see my face in my shoes.”
“All right, I’ll do yours, but you’ll have to do mine.”
“Sneakers are no thing, I’m wearing real leather.”
“You look nice,” I said.
Mr. Fillmore was much farther ahead now, though the crunch of his hiking boots was still audible to us. “That smell is dead fish. That sound, the bones of thousands of fish breaking,” he said. “Hundreds of thousands, in fact.”
“Millions,” said Ms. McGaw, as she walked ahead of him.
I found myself at peace, surrounded by fish death. We were headed for a tall hill.
“You ever go into the hotel?” I said.
“A few times. Have you?”
“No, just your house.”
“Yeah, my house. What the fuck, right?”
“Nah, what do you mean?”
“I m
ean, I live in a hotel, Chava. That doesn’t seem kinda fucked to you?”
“Shit, I thought it was cool. Honestly. I mean, you probably get to be around some cool stuff.”
“Yeah, I guess.” He smiled. “There is this one veterano kinda lives there. About half of the people just live there.”
“In the hotel?”
“Yeah. I see the same people all the time. This veterano’s room is right above mine, my walls are like paper. So, this guy used to be real hard—”
“It’s the salinity level of the Salton Sea that killed the fish we’re standing on. Few can survive these harsh conditions,” Ms. McGaw said.
Fermín continued, “Yeah, so this guy, Ernesto. Real barrio. He claims Chicali 13. One day he’s walking through Posada del Sol, you know, the apartments by the Raspado’s Toño.”
“Don’t really know the north side,” I said.
“Then you don’t know Raspado’s Toño? Crazy. Guey, they hook it up there. They got so many different types of syrups you can use. They get so good that I eat too fast and feel like my brain’s gonna split. But rico.”
“A raspado would be good right now . . . So what happened with the guy, at Posada del Sol?”
“Right, so he starts going over there because his haina’s there. Him and this girl go way back, he used to finger her in high school.”
“You know all that?”
“He told me, talks more than a parrot. So, since his haina’s at Posada, he starts to sling there, just mota, I think. Northside hears of this—”
“The tilapia is one of the types of fish that survives these waters,” said Ms. McGaw.
Fermín leaned in close to me. Sweat rolled down and landed on his whiskers. “Posada del Sol has no lights. Ernesto is walking through and the Northsiders, they come up on him, and they got bats and paquetelas. They slam him till they drop him.”
“Damn,” I said.
“Kept going while he’s dropped. He had to have metal plates stuck inside his head. You see him now, guey, his dome looks crazy. It doesn’t make sense—bulges out here and there. It’s the metal.”
“Verga,” I said.
“All right, guys. Walk up here, there’s a great view. We’ll be able to see a great variety of birdlife from this vantage point,” Mr. Fillmore, on the hill, called out to us from behind a pair of binoculars.
“But here’s the real chorizo of the story.” Fermín’s body pressed closer to mine, a hard shoulder against my soft flesh; his mouth moved close to my ear. “I hear him at night, when I’m in my bed. Never the same girl’s voice. I hear smacking, like cachetadas. She’s breathing hard, and slapping and slapping, and he shouts shit like ‘Dale duro! Smack that head! Puro pinchi metal!’ Sometimes the women stop, maybe they freak. But he orders them, like a veterano, and they always keep smacking him.”
By the time he finished talking, white saliva crust lined the corners of Fermín’s mouth. As we reached the top of the hill, my heart and eyes throbbed in unison. I became aware of how wet I was; my T-shirt was a moist rag stuck on my skin. Calm waves moved across the dark blue water of the Salton Sea; they flowed away from the skirts of the mountains and rolled to its shore.
“Look.” Ms. McGaw pointed toward the mountains. “Those are pelicans flying over the water.”
A black speck of a bug landed on Fermín’s neck. Two trails of black hair ran down from his head, through his wet nape. I crushed the bug with a small slap that covered my palm in Fermín’s sweat.
He turned toward me, those black eyes held wide—usually carefree, until they weren’t. Now they looked only at me.
I showed him the dead insect in my wet hand, and that furry brow of his relaxed. He looked to the water. Ms. McGaw’s white pelicans flew tight to the surface, crossed paths in an X shape and flew apart.
I brushed off the dead bug and moved my hand toward my mouth. I licked the sweat he’d left on my palm; the taste of his salt swam through me.
LUIS HELD HIS body like a lizard taking the sun. “See, fists down,” he said, holding his naked torso over the hard cement. “The middle knuckles take all your weight. They’re the ones you use when you punch some puto.” He began a ferocious sequence of push-ups.
There was only a small nub of the sun left on the horizon. We were awash in the soft orange of the security lights behind an abandoned Kmart. I watched Luis’s thin but firm frame sweat as he showed me how El Papayo had shown him how to strengthen his knuckles.
“So, this is your own personal gym then,” I said.
He wouldn’t stop to talk to me.
Finally, he stood. “The cops never roll through. We can smoke, work out, tag the walls, work out. Do some on your knuckles, go.” He pointed to the cement.
“Nah, I don’t think so.”
“You’re a bonbón, cabrón. You know las honeys, first thing they look at is your arms,” Luis pumped his veiny arms up and down and began to do jumping jacks. “Or don’t you care about girls?”
“You learn about that at Desert Oasis?” For a second I felt bad for mocking his continuation school, but he was acting out.
“Ha, D.O. Shit’s a joke. You turn in a packet a week of bullshit and get out by noon. Stopped going. A month in I’m doing pericasos with Mr. Z in his trailer. Pure Colombian shit that gets flown in. He parties with El Papayo.”
I wanted to leave. “Be careful with El Papayo. I keep hearing shit.”
“Careful?” Luis said, as he stopped jumping to take gulps of air. He smirked and pulled out of the long pocket of his sagging gray Dickies what looked like a metal pipe with a handle and trigger on one end.
“I got my hechiza,” said Luis, holding the crude weapon up proudly, his chest quickly rising and falling.
The homemade gun looked like it might only pop a pigeon’s head off, but when he pointed it at my face and said, “What do you think? El Papayo said always keep her loaded,” I nearly fell on my ass.
“Ya guey!” I shouted. “Point it away!”
He kept walking toward me, one corner of his mouth turned up, his quick shallow breathing, that shitty little pipe pointed at my head. I lost my cool. I wanted to cry. I ran and behind me saw Luis shouting from inside the orange fluorescence, “You gotta work your arms, mijo!”
BACK THEN, ZAPATA had no light at night. A few weeks after the trip to Salton Sea, Fermín had invited me to one of his matches. As the game ended, the sun was in its final descent. Slivers of cloud lined the sky and soaked the dying light, as if purple bruises had sprouted across it.
When it was finally black, Zapata emptied out. Fermín and I sat on a patch of grass beneath a mesquite tree in the park. Across the street from us was a dirt lot filled with torn-up tires. Houses stopped growing here, at the end of town.
Through the buzz of cicadas, I heard footsteps behind me. We turned and saw Luis walking toward us in the dark, shirtless, cigarette in hand.
“A bunch of us are going to Alex’s house to drink. He got a chingo of Tecates left over from his sister’s quince.” The lit end of Luis’s cigarette grew brighter as he sucked it down. The soft glow lit up his face and stretched out the menacing shadows of his cheekbones. “Or you guys staying here?” Luis asked, blowing out smoke.
“Yeah, just for a bit. I’ll rest up my knee a bit, then head over,” said Fermín.
I heard Luis wheeze as he walked away.
The stars appeared from behind the black clouds and more cicadas joined the chorus. The darkness of the empty lots behind Zapata stretched out so far that it became hard to tell where the ground and night sky met.
Fermín had his leg out. He rubbed his hairy knee with one hand. He’d dashed out of his box for a one-on-one, bravely dove into the feet of the striker, and kept the ball. But the man, and it was a man—Fermín played against full-grown adults—had jumped and landed on his knee. I could see the red cleat markings.
“What do you think, hang here or go to the kickback?” Fermín asked.
“Whatever’s cool,” I ans
wered, hoping we’d be able to just talk by ourselves.
“Or we can stay until the chicharras stop buzzing. They’re giving a real concert.”
“Man, those things go all night. We’ll never leave.” An excitement I couldn’t place in my body made me jittery.
“Yeah.” Fermín looked down and ripped out a tuft of dry grass from the dirt.
We faced the empty railroad tracks. And though I never saw it, I imagined that the smooth steel of the tracks themselves must glow under a full moon and create a luminescent line that cut across the east side. But now there was only darkness—on the pitch next to us, in the sky over us, in Fermín’s eyes behind his goggles.
“How’d you stop that guy? You’re so focused out there,” I said, pointing to where the action had taken place.
“You liked watching me out there?” Fermín took off his goggles and sweaty shirt, stuck them into the duffel bag at his side.
“Yeah, guey. But I wish I knew how you do it. How do you not care about these mamones yelling at you from the side, and everybody looking at you?”
He scratched his bare chest. His wet chest hair covered his fingers.
“I guess it’s like you said, I focus. Then it’s like nothing matters, not my mom, not school, and especially not these pendejos out here.”
I didn’t know when it began, but our mesquite tree now buzzed with cicadas. Fermín put on his round glasses as he looked at me.
I remember the sensation of a prickly pear cactus gently tapping my fleshy back as I pushed in to kiss him. And as the sharp taste of salt from his mouth and neck covered my tongue—the brackets on his teeth scratching my lips—I felt the coming sheets of sweat. This wasn’t a lonely drop running down my chubby cheek; it was my body pumping its aquifer and pooling in every pore—from the arch of my nose to my damp shins.
Before he left, he wanted me to come along too but I refused. I worried he’d notice how nervous I’d become. I worried he’d touch me and become disgusted by my warm sweaty skin.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
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