“It was,” Danny said, and then Tina and Anna were at the front door, babbling in unison about how Raul and David kicked their toys away and Danny couldn’t make them stop and Bobby was chiming in and Mom was entering the house, trying to get the kids calmed down, let’s get this hashed out one at a time, and then Anna’s mom was over to pick up Anna and it became a whirlwind for Danny, who could only sit at the dining room table with Bobby, casting worried glances at each other as the girls told the women what happened. Danny’s mom listened, stroking Tina’s head as the girls took turns telling their version of what happened, and then Anna’s mom, who reminded Danny of his fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Hinkley, because she wore glasses with huge frames and looked too young to have a daughter Anna’s age, said, “Well if he tries to pick on you girls again, you either run into Tina’s house or my house and we’ll take care of it.”
“Why didn’t you do anything, Danny?” Mom looked at him expectantly. Well? Her look seemed to say.
“What could we do?” Bobby asked.
“I asked Danny.” Mom directed the comment to Bobby but she was looking at Danny. “I know Bartell is older than you guys, but Raul is younger. The two of you could’ve—”
“Done what?” Danny asked, his voice cracking in a falsetto squeak. “Fight him?”
“I’m not telling you to fight him, Danny,” Mom said. “I’m just saying that you’re a responsible young adult, you have an obligation to take charge and be the mature one in a situation like this. You don’t need to encourage creeps like Raul and David.”
Danny sighed. Mom just didn’t get it. Raul didn’t care about listening to authority. Mom didn’t seem to get the picture that if Bobby and Danny had tried to physically make Raul and David get off their property, they both would have gotten their asses kicked. “He would have killed us, Mom.”
“No, he wouldn’t,” Mom scoffed. “He’s a creep. His whole family is nothing but a bunch of low-life degenerate scum. You two are—”
“He would have kicked the shit out of us, Ms. Hernandez,” Bobby said, and at the sound of the word shit, Mom and Anna’s mom gave startled little gasps of surprise. “Raul is a kid you don’t mess with. He’s bad news.”
“Don’t say that word in my house, and if you’re afraid to get in a little scuffle with the neighborhood creep, then you’ll have people walking all over you for the rest of your life, Bobby.” Danny’s mom glowered at Bobby, than turned her attention to Danny. For the first time in months—no, years—those eyes held disappointment. “That goes for you too, Danny. Are you really afraid of Raul Valesquez?”
Danny was, but he was now afraid to admit it. He was on the spot, and he was embarrassed and he didn’t want to talk about this; he just wanted it all to go away. He swallowed a lump in his throat, his cheeks burning with embarrassment. “No,” he said.
“Then next time deal with it,” Mom said. “If you want to be the man of the house, act like one. If it happens again, don’t egg Raul and David on. Tell them to stop picking on the girls and if they don’t, make them stop.”
“Easy for you to say,” Bobby muttered, shaking his head.
“I’ve heard about enough from you!” Mom said, raising her voice. “I think it’s about time you go home!”
Everything came to a close quickly after that. Anna went home with her mother, which was a short walk up the block, and Bobby toddled off on his skateboard. “See ya, Danny,” he said, his eyes displaying sympathy as he skated down the driveway into the night. When the front door was closed and locked for the night, Mom turned to Danny. “I don’t want to see this happen again. Do you understand me?”
“Yes.” Danny nodded, feeling an overpowering sense of shame that he had let his mother down. It was a rare occurrence to let her down; he always tried to do things right because he wanted her confidence in him, but that was eroded now.
“I know Raul is bad news,” Mom said. “But kids like him are cowards. Trust me, Danny, I know. He wouldn’t have been such a shit today if he didn’t have that other piece of garbage with him.”
Danny nodded. In a way this made sense. David Bartell was older and taller, and Danny had a natural inclination to be more fearful of older, physically bigger boys. If Raul wasn’t such a shit-head and was a normal kid, Danny wouldn’t be afraid of him.
“Raul picks on other kids because nobody sticks up for themselves,” Mom continued. Tina hovered on the periphery, perched on the sofa, listening. “He’s a typical bully. If you stand up to him, he’ll back down.”
“But he doesn’t,” Danny said, rushing to explain. “Tina will tell you. Everybody’s afraid of him because the few kids that have tried to stick up to him get beaten up!”
“I’ve never seen him beat up other kids!” Tina stated.
“He goes to your school!”
“He’s in the sixth grade, though,” Tina stated again, as if she were addressing a mentally defective person. “He doesn’t hang around with the littler kids.”
“Listen,” Mom said, overriding them both. “I know he probably has a reputation for causing trouble, and that’s what’s probably made everybody so afraid of him. His reputation precedes him. He keeps doing this stuff because nobody puts a stop to it.”
“Yeah!” Tina said; the comment was clearly directed at Danny.
“I’ve had a hard day,” Mom said, looking suddenly weary. “I don’t like coming home to this kind of chaos and I trust that it won’t happen again. Correct?” She was looking at Danny now in that patented dressing-down look.
“Yes, ma’am,” Danny said, feeling his soul being chipped away yet again.
“I don’t want to see that kid on my property or hear that he’s been on my property again,” Mom continued. “If he and Bartell try this again, call the police. Otherwise, if Raul is by himself, you can handle it.”
“Okay.” Fat chance that would happen. There was no sense in mentioning the idle threat Raul had made in the minutes prior to Mom arriving home for the evening. If she didn’t believe Raul had savagely beat up a kid so horribly that the kid’s eyeball popped out, she wouldn’t believe he was capable of sneaking into their house at night and stabbing them in their sleep.
“Good.” Mom ruffled Tina’s hair. “I’m going to take a quick shower. Can you get some supper ready for you and your sister?”
“Mom?”
“Yes, Danny?”
“Do you think Raul would ever do anything really horrible?”
A sigh. “Like what, honey?”
“Like kill somebody?”
Tina gasped. Mom sighed again and rolled her eyes, as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Raul’s a bully, honey. Nothing more, nothing less. He wouldn’t kill anybody.”
“Suppose he threatened to do it?”
“Who would he threaten?”
“Me.”
Mom looked irritated again. “Danny, kids like Raul are all talk. They don’t mean it. They do it to scare you.”
“So you don’t think Raul could kill somebody?”
“I think you need to stop believing everything he tells you,” Mom said, the tone of her voice displaying annoyance. “What that kid needs is a good swift kick in the butt and some discipline, which he doesn’t get. He’s bad news, but kids don’t kill other kids. Okay?” The matter was closed in Mom’s mind. She nodded at him to make sure the point was made, than headed down the hall to her bedroom.
Danny watched her go, feeling empty with dread. Tina was still on the sofa, her presence another indicator that he was outnumbered. He glanced at her, trying to get a read on her, but the expression on her face clearly indicated she was disappointed in him as well. Those eyes seemed to say, you’re my big brother and you didn’t do anything to make Raul and David stop! Today I lost confidence in you.
“Why did you lie like that?” he asked Tina, his voice lowered.
“I didn’t lie!”
“You didn’t back me up when I told Mom that Raul beats up kids that try
to stand up to him.”
“He doesn’t! I’ve seen him at school. He’s a troublemaker, but I’ve never seen him beat anybody up.”
“How would you know?”
“I see him!”
“Haven’t you ever heard about some of the things he’s done?”
“No!”
“Well, I have.” Danny headed to the kitchen. Tina followed him.
“He’s only a pest outside school,” Tina said, as if offering an explanation as to why she was not witness to Raul’s supposed atrocities within the confines of the schoolyard. “And he’s gross, so I don’t want to be seen around him. And his house is gross, too!”
“I know,” Danny said. As far as he was concerned the subject was closed. His mother had no idea what kind of threat Raul Valesquez represented and she didn’t want to know. Tina had no clue because she was lost in her own little world of make-believe and play time whenever she wasn’t at school. She was totally insulated from the real world; she and mom both were.
Danny opened the refrigerator and took out lunch meat, mayonnaise and mustard. He pulled the bread down from the cupboard, opened the utensil drawer and began making sandwiches. Tina said, “I want ham in my sandwich, too!”
“Okay,” Danny said. He made the sandwiches, telling himself it wasn’t their fault they didn’t have a clue. They didn’t have to experience the mean streets the way he did, especially his first year at Peary Junior High School. Elementary School was insular, a protective cocoon. His first day of Junior High School was like being thrown to the wolves. There were members of at least three different street gangs that attended the school, and among the rules the administration set forth that governed the student body were those that decreed that possession of weapons such as knives, switchblades, and guns were strictly prohibited and were cause for immediate expulsion. When this rule was bantered casually during orientation for all the in-coming seventh graders in the school auditorium, Danny had been struck by the absurdity of it. To him it was a no brainer; you just didn’t bring weapons to school; there was no reason to; you were supposed to learn things in school. In the weeks to follow he was to see how drastically things were different in the world of the inner city middle-school system.
The first fight he witnessed was behind the gymnasium between two gang members, who’d pounded each other furiously amid flying fists and blood. Not a word was spoken, nor a grunt of pain uttered. The students who had been milling about waiting for the dismissal bell to ring immediately surrounded the combatants like flies drawn to shit. None of them attempting to stop it. Instead, they all watched as the fight became bloodier, and when Mr. Heale, one of the Physical Education teachers, stepped in casually and grabbed one of the boys by the scruff of the neck and pulled him away from the kid he was fighting with one hand, holding the other boy back with one outraised arm, the tension was quickly punctured. “Let’s go,” Mr. Heale had said, marching both boys through the assembled crowd of spectators to the rear doors of the locker rooms where he would escort them to the front of the building that housed the P.E. office. Danny remembered how bloody the kids were; one kid had gore drenched down his shirt and he later heard the kid suffered a broken nose and two shattered teeth in the fracas.
It had not been at all like the schoolyard scuffles he’d witnessed at One Hundred and Fifty Sixth Street School where the fights had been mostly a lot of pushing and shoving. Once fists were thrown it was all over; whoever got popped in the face first was usually the loser, if it ever got that far. And the worst any of those got was a bloody nose, maybe a blackened eye. Nothing permanent, nothing requiring plastic surgery and hospitalization. Junior High was a different story: all bets were off. In addition to the brawl behind the PE building, he’d witnessed at least two other violent confrontations on school grounds that were just as bloody, and he’d heard about one kid who was gunned down by gang members while walking home from school. A car had pulled up alongside the kid and somebody asked him where he was from. The kid named a street and ka-pow! He was shot-gunned right on somebody’s front lawn. A guy in Danny’s homeroom class told him all about it—he’d actually seen it happen.
Danny told Mom about that one day because he’d been scared by the story, afraid something like that would happen to him in their neighborhood, but Mom didn’t believed him. She’d been tired that day from having worked late the night before and dismissed Danny’s fear as “something that won’t happen here, honey. Shit like that only happens in the inner city, like Watts or Compton, and we don’t live there.” Danny could see her point in that; the gang members he was afraid of were overwhelmingly black, and there weren’t any black kids in his neighborhood, but that hadn’t made the concern go away.
When Danny was finished with the sandwiches, he placed Tina’s on a paper plate and scooped up a handful of potato chips. He placed these on the table. “Want some milk?” he asked.
“Yeah.” Tina sidled into a seat at the dining room table and began to dig in.
Danny got the milk out of the refrigerator and poured two glasses. Things were different now than they were when Mom was growing up. It was obvious she didn’t believe him because she wasn’t experiencing it. Hers was a world of maturity and grownups who didn’t do this kind of stuff. In Mom’s world there were clearly consequences to the kind of behavior Raul and David displayed this evening: if you did shit like that, you went to jail. This didn’t happen in Danny’s world, where gang members were let back into school after having beat up another kid for their lunch money and kids like Raul were continually placed back in the environment they were allowed to run rough shod over. In Mom’s world, if an adult punched another adult, it was called assault and battery and you went to jail for it. But if a kid punched another kid at school, that kid got a three-day vacation and was allowed back in school to do it again if he wanted to. It didn’t make sense.
Danny sat down at the dining room table with his sister and ate his sandwich. One of his Skateboarder magazines was left on the table from earlier that morning and he reached for it, flipping it open randomly and began looking through it as he ate. Tina gave him a curious look, then picked up her plate and glass and tromped on to the den to turn on the TV. So much for the better; Danny didn’t want Tina to see that he was trembling.
He couldn’t stop thinking of Raul’s insinuations that he snuck up to their house late at night and spied on them while they were sleeping.
And now after what happened tonight, he was too ashamed to bring this up to Mom. No way would she believe him.
But he had to tell her. He couldn’t just not tell her.
He spent the rest of the night in his room listening to music and reading comic books without really paying attention to them, wondering how he was going to broach the subject to Mom.
Seven
GETTING DANNY HERNANDEZ out of the house was tougher than shit; the fuck didn’t want to stop talking, but Jerry had been listening to him yammer on now for two hours and it was getting on his nerves. Plus, Chrissy was coming home soon with their daughter and he didn’t want Danny around when they arrived. Chrissy would ask too many questions. She’d already started to when Danny called earlier that day.
Who is he, Jerry? she’d asked when she informed him of the phone call when he got home. He could tell her questioning was hinting around the inevitable: He isn’t one of your old drug buddies, is he? You’re not secretly copping behind my back, are you?
Luckily, he’d been able to tell her the truth on that one. He’d told her all about his brief flirtation with professional-level skateboarding when he was a teenager and she’d seen photos of him that were published in Skateboarder magazine back in the late seventies. His sister and brother confirmed during family get-togethers that Jerry had been more interested in surfing and skateboarding than in school back in his teenage years of rebellion. As a result, it was easy to convince her that Danny was simply who he was: an old buddy from the neighborhood who used to pal around with him and looked up t
o him as a big brother figure.
What to tell her about his sudden plans to vacate this cozy little rented bungalow that Chrissy had come to love so much, though?
Jerry didn’t know. But he wasn’t going to cut and run, leaving Chrissy and Olivia behind. He’d worked too hard at this relationship; he wasn’t losing it because of that fuck Raul Valesquez.
Jerry Valdez sat on the living room sofa and cradled his head in his hands. The smell of alcohol was strong. It came from the open beer bottles that had Danny consumed, and even though Jerry had abstained beautifully, he was now being drawn by their intoxicating power. He’d made Danny drink all the beer that was in the house so there’d be none left when it was time for him to skedaddle and, sure enough, it worked. Now it was a matter of gathering the empties and placing them in the garbage out back. Chrissy would know their guest consumed the brews—she’d know if Jerry drank them. Problem now was Jerry wanted a drink himself.
Jerry closed his eyes, trying to calm the pounding in his head. Two years of sobriety and so far not a hitch. Now the past comes rumbling through—not the past of the eighties and nineties when he’d been pretty much a lost cause—but the past that came before all that, which had led him down that slippery road to begin with. It came back and bit him right on the ass.
And Jerry had a feeling it wasn’t going to let go.
I didn’t do anything wrong, he thought, repeating this to himself. I didn’t do anything wrong. Danny and I did nothing wrong. We did nothing wrong. We did nothing wrong...
And on the heels of that: I am not going to let this fuck up my life.
Jerry looked up, staring out the window. Chrissy would be home with Olivia any minute and he quickly realized he could do one of two things. He could pack up their stuff real quickly, and when she got home tell her they had to get out of town, and then hustle them in the truck to much protest and crying. That would be bad; he’d have a lot of explaining to do and he knew he would fuck that up. Two, he could simply cut and run, but if he did that he could kiss Chrissy and his daughter goodbye forever, and if that happened he wouldn’t be able to live with himself. Might as well stick a .45 to his head and pull the trigger or dive face first into a mountain of blow and inhale until his heart popped. Or three, he could wait it out and see if this detective came poking around.
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