Last Summer of the Death Warriors

by Francesco X Stork

  With this transformation, Coop flung punches at Pancho’s face as soon as Pancho stepped into his range. Pancho blocked the punches with his forearms. A chant of “Coop, Coop” started from the sidelines, and Coop swung harder and faster. None of the punches jolted Pancho, and seeing that he did not respond, Coop slowed the barrage, confident and playful as he tried to sneak jabs through the protection of Pancho’s gloves. The boxing match became a show for him.

  There was something refreshing, pleasurable almost, in the feel of Coop’s punches against his arms and the occasional blow that landed on his ribs. It was like being in a daze and getting shaken into wakefulness, or like a ghost regaining flesh and bones. He dropped his left hand and allowed Coop to land a solid hook to the jaw. A collective “oooh” went up from the crowd.

  “Thirty seconds,” the tall boy holding the watch announced.

  He had planned to go like that through the whole match—receiving whatever Coop sent his way until he got tired, and then Pancho would bop him a few times—but something happened. Maybe it was Coop’s arrogant smile, or maybe it was his blue eyes and the golden skin glistening with sweat, or maybe it was just impossible to contain the rage that fueled him. Gracefully, effortlessly, Pancho dodged a wild right hook from Coop and buried his left hand in Coop’s abdomen. He sent the punch the way his father taught him, as if he planned for the arm to go through his opponent’s body. Coop dropped his arms, deflated. His upper body bent forward, his head floating in midair, and Pancho exploded with an uppercut that landed fully on Coop’s open mouth.

  He stepped out of the way and watched the unconscious body tumble forward. There was a stunned silence. Marcos and others rushed forward to Coop’s sprawled form. “Turn him on his side so he doesn’t choke on his blood,” Pancho said. He began to untie his right-hand glove with his teeth. He knew that Coop was not badly hurt. If they had been wearing headgear, he probably wouldn’t have gone down.

  “Man, where’d you learn to box like that?” Memo took his other glove and began to untie it. “I think you broke his front teeth.”

  “I told him to put the headgear on,” he said. He was filled with a sense of irritation, the lingering aftereffect of the rage that had surged through him momentarily. The irritation was more with himself, but for what? He didn’t know. A week ago when Reynolds called his sister a slut, he had busted the kid’s jaw with no regrets. Now he felt as if he had broken a promise. “Shit,” he muttered.

  Up by the basketball court, D.Q. sat in his wheelchair, watching.

  CHAPTER 8

  The following day, Pancho called Mrs. Olivares from Lupita’s office. He asked if she was still planning to go to the trailer, and when she said she was, he told her he wanted to come. D.Q.’s talk of writing made him remember that Rosa had kept a diary. Now and then he would see her scribbling in it. Maybe she wrote something in there about the man she was seeing.

  At ten A.M., Pancho was in front of St. Anthony’s, waiting for Mrs. Olivares, when D.Q. showed up. He was standing up, no wheelchair in sight.

  “You’re walking,” Pancho said.

  “Today I seem to have some strength.”

  “Where you going?” Pancho asked and looked away. He didn’t want D.Q. to inquire about the fight.

  “I’m coming with you,” D.Q. said.

  Pancho was about to object when Mrs. Olivares stopped her green Toyota in front of them. Before Pancho could do or say anything, D.Q. got in the front seat. Pancho resigned himself to D.Q.’s company and sat in the back. “Hello, my name is Daniel Quentin, but they call me D.Q. I’m Pancho’s friend.” He shook Mrs. Olivares’s hand with an energy Pancho had not seen before. The kid doesn’t get out enough, Pancho thought.

  Mrs. Olivares and D.Q. chatted all the way to Pancho’s trailer. D.Q. was interested in a legal process called emancipation. Pancho understood it as a kind of divorce between a minor and his parents. D.Q. wanted to know if Mrs. Olivares had ever participated in that kind of process and what it took for a minor to prove his case. Mrs. Olivares told him that emancipations were only granted when the parent was abusive or neglectful and the minor demonstrated the ability to take care of himself. Emancipations were very rare. It was easier for the court to appoint another family member or the State as the legal guardian for the minor. Mrs. Olivares looked at Pancho in the rearview mirror when she said this.

  Mrs. Olivares veered off Picacho Drive onto a dirt road. The trailer park where Pancho lived consisted of thirty quarter-acre lots. Each lot was separated from the adjacent lots by waist-high chain-link fences. The quality of the mobile homes and upkeep of the yards varied from lot to lot. There were eighty-by-twenty homes surrounded by emerald green lawns and crawling rosebushes, and there were rusty twenty-foot trailers resting on cement blocks in the middle of a patch of dirt.

  Mrs. Olivares pulled into the driveway and turned off the car. Pancho’s trailer was sad-looking. The grass in the front yard looked like hay that was ready to be harvested. Jackrabbits or prairie dogs had eaten the tulips around the flagpole. The windows were shut and there were yellow notices pasted to the door of the front porch, as if the place had been condemned. The three of them sat in the car, observing, unwilling to move. Then D.Q. opened the door and swung his legs out. Mrs. Olivares was next. Both of them stood next to the car, waiting for Pancho to get out. Maybe it had not been a good idea to call Mrs. Olivares that morning.

  Finally he came out of the car. Mrs. Olivares opened the fence gate and stepped onto the first of the flat, round stones that led to the front door. The boys followed her. The energy that had animated D.Q. in the car was gone. He shuffled his feet as if he could barely walk. It was like they had entered a space where all happiness had been sucked out. Mrs. Olivares opened the door to the porch, tearing in half the yellow announcement for the upcoming auction. “I’ll wait out here,” D.Q. said.

  “Come in,” Pancho ordered. He held the door open for D.Q., and D.Q. quietly entered.

  Everything was the same as he had left it when the sheriff knocked on the door two weeks ago. There was the cup of coffee he placed on the kitchen counter on the way to the door. There was a pair of white socks on one end of the sofa and a rumpled pillow on the other end. Mrs. Olivares flipped the light switch up and down, but the electricity had been cut off. She went around drawing curtains to let the daylight in. “Oh,” she said, remembering. “I brought some boxes to put your things in. They’re in the trunk of the car. I’ll go get them.”

  When she left, D.Q. said, “I thought you said you didn’t read.” He had picked up a book that lay open on the brown chair. He read out loud: “The Soul of a Butterfly: Reflections on Life’s Journey, Muhammad Ali…” Pancho snatched the book from his hands. There was a knowing grin on D.Q.’s face. “You are not who you purport to be,” he said.

  “I don’t POOPORT nothing,” Pancho said. He tucked the book under his arm and headed for Rosa’s room. He stopped in front of the closed door and took a deep breath, then he slid the door open and entered. Immediately he was overwhelmed with her smell, a mixture of mint leaves and lilacs. He held his breath. If he didn’t breathe while he was in her room, he would make it.

  He opened the top drawer of the dresser and immediately saw the diary. It was locked with a small lock that opened with a tiny key. He went to the shelves where Rosa kept her dolls. Rosa liked to hide her money behind the dolls or inside the dolls’ dresses when she was a child. He figured she hid the key to the diary there as well. There were dolls from all over the world. His favorite was the one from Holland with the wooden shoes. Maybe the only time he ever saw Rosa get angry was when he cut off the long blond braid of the Danish doll. He was seven at the time, old enough in Rosa’s mind to know better. He went through the dolls, lifting them up gently.

  He found the key under the Mexican doll. Of course, he thought. He stuck the diary in the front of his pants and put the key in his pocket. Mrs. Olivares was calling him from the living room. “What should I pack?” she
asked.

  “Whatever,” he told her, looking down the hall. She had four unopened boxes on the floor. D.Q. was not on the living room chair where Pancho had left him.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll go through and see what’s worth saving. You might want some of these things someday, you know.”

  “I’ll be in prison,” he said. He didn’t say it loud enough for Mrs. Olivares to hear.

  His room was between his sister’s room and his father’s at the far end of the trailer. D.Q. was sitting in the chair by the small desk, his eyes closed. “It’s nice in here,” D.Q. said, opening his eyes. “Who’s that?” He was looking at a poster of a boxer on the wall in front of him. The boxer was crouching, his hand cocked back as if about to deliver a left hook. Pancho followed D.Q.’s eyes to the poster but did not respond. It suddenly occurred to him that there was something besides Rosa’s diary that he should get. He turned around and went to his father’s bedroom.

  Nothing had been disturbed in his father’s room since his death. Neither Rosa nor Pancho ever considered removing their father’s things or moving into the larger bedroom. He found what he was looking for in the bottom drawer of his father’s bureau, underneath the work shirts. It was a .22 Smith & Wesson revolver his father had bought to shoot the jackrabbits that ate his tulips. Pancho never saw him use it. The worst his father ever did to the jackrabbits was cuss at them in Spanish. The revolver was not loaded. His father kept the bullets hidden on the top shelf of the closet. Pancho had discovered them just before he was taken to Mrs. Duggan’s, when he was looking for his father’s war medals. He took out seven bullets and put them in the same pocket where he had dropped the key, then he grabbed his father’s blue jean jacket from the closet and folded it around the revolver.

  He went into his room, where D.Q. still sat, opened the closet, took out a black backpack, and put the jacket and the diary in there. Then he went to Rosa’s room, grabbed the book he had left on the bed, and dropped it into the backpack as well. When he walked out, D.Q. was in the hallway holding a wooden parrot the size of a child’s hand. “I’d like to have this for my new room, if you don’t want it.”

  “Take it,” Pancho said. He had carved and painted a Mexican perico in shop class during his freshman year. It represented the only A-plus he had ever received. There were so many objects with history, so many memories embedded in things around the house. It would be excruciating to choose one over another. What he had was all he could handle.

  “Pancho,” Mrs. Olivares said to him. She was standing by the kitchen counter, holding what looked like a large cigar box. “I found some silverware in here. It looks like real silver. You’ll want to save that.”

  D.Q., behind him, said, “Let me see.”

  Pancho walked outside, the backpack on his shoulder. The sunlight made him squint. “Take a box with you. See if there’s any of your dad’s tools you want to keep,” Mrs. Olivares yelled after him. Across the street, Mrs. Romano was pretending to sweep the front steps of her trailer, but Pancho could tell she had come out to investigate. She motioned for him to come over. He waved to her and walked around to the back.

  The two pecan trees covered almost all the backyard with shade. In the far corner, there was a swing set that had been converted to a workout area. The swings had been removed, and a heavy punching bag hung from the overhead pole. A pear-shaped speed bag dangled next to it. Pancho went up to the swing set and sat on top of the plastic toy box where he kept the boxing gear.

  When Mrs. Olivares told him that there was no way that the State of New Mexico would let him live in the trailer by himself, he thought they were taking the only thing left to him. What else was there to take? Now he thought that even if they had let him be, he would not have been able to stay in the trailer for long. In there, a few moments ago, he had felt as if his brain were suffocating, as if his head were filled with a mental steam that steadily increased in pressure.

  D.Q. was limping toward him, the green perico in his hand. He sat next to Pancho. “We should take these with us, add them to the bag you’ve already hung.” He pointed at the boxing bags with his chin.

  “Why?”

  “You could start a boxing club. St. Tony’s used to have one, you know. It was before my time, but one kid actually won the state Golden Gloves for his age group.”

  “Luis Rivera,” Pancho answered without thinking.

  “Right. How’d you know?”

  “I saw the trophy.”

  “I got an idea. We get Brother Javier to come over with the truck and pick up the swing set and bags.” He touched one of the pipes. “A little paint and it would look great right next to the basketball court. What do you think?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Yeah, I know, you’re not planning on sticking around for that long.” He took off his cap and combed the fine hair, what little there was of it, with his fingers. He put the cap on. “I’m not planning on sticking around for long either,” he said, trying to make Pancho laugh but not succeeding. Time went by without either of them saying anything. Pancho was about to stand up when D.Q. spoke.

  “What was it like living here, before people started dying out on you? I mean, did you have any friends? What did you do when you came home from school? On weekends?”

  Pancho thought hard. Did he have any friends? What did he do when he came home from school? His father worked at the Sears Auto Center from seven A.M. to three P.M. As soon as he got out of there, he came home and waited for Pancho to get back from school, and then they did carpentry jobs and construction jobs, building porches, cabinets, additions, whatever came up. He hung out with his father most of the time. His father was his friend. They worked together, trained together, laughed together. Rosa was his friend also, in a different way. The people at the gym were friends, or like friends, you could say. Did he have any friends his age? The absence of friends had never come up before. It was a lack he had never noticed. There were kids at school. He talked to them, ate lunch with them, joked around with them. He could give D.Q. some names, but he knew those were not the kind of friends D.Q. was asking about. “I worked out. I helped my father. I always had things to do.”

  “Yeah,” D.Q. said, as if he understood what that meant—that Pancho didn’t have any friends.

  Then, unexpectedly, Pancho added, “After my father died, it seems like I was always busy with one thing or another. I had use of the truck. I didn’t have a license, but I never got caught. People hired me to take stuff to the dump. There was always some place to go, to buy food, to the laundromat, to take my sister to work.” But you never went to pick her up, a voice said. “There’s a gym over by Mesilla,” he said quickly. “I had a job after school there.”

  “You boxed there?”

  “Mostly I washed the towels, cleaned the locker room. I used to get a few bucks for sparring with people, whenever they needed someone live to hit.”

  “You probably did some hitting of your own.”

  “Manny, the guy that owned the gym, he’d let me pop a few heads now and then. Nothing major. He didn’t want to lose any paying customers. It was all right, living here. We never lacked anything. I went to sleep tired every night.” He stood up. There was something about the way D.Q. asked questions that lulled him into saying more than he wanted. He waited for D.Q. to stand and then he opened the plastic toy box where they had been sitting. “Let’s take these,” he said.

  “Jockstraps?”

  “Groin protectors,” Pancho corrected him. “In case we have some more matches. I don’t want my pecans getting cracked.”

  CHAPTER 9

  He waited until all the lights in the dormitory were out. Then he waited some more. After they got back from the trailer, he and Memo had painted the storage room, so it had been a long day and it was hard to stay awake. When he thought everyone was asleep, he sat up in bed and turned on the lamp. He dug out Rosa’s diary from the backpack and held it in front of him. He searched for the tiny key in his walle
t pocket and found it. He paused again for a second before he inserted the key in the lock and turned it. He opened the diary to the first page.

  He read: “My DAIRY by ROSA SANCHEZ.”

  He smiled at the misspelling. There were so many times when he had felt like grabbing the diary from Rosa’s hands and tossing it outside. He’d be on the sofa trying to watch television, and Rosa would be sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter asking him how to spell this and how to spell that. “If no one’s gonna read it, what difference does it make?” he would say to her irritably. “Oh, Pancho,” she would say without looking up, waiting for him to give her the right spelling, knowing that he would. Fortunately, the words she asked about were easy words. He wasn’t a great speller himself.

  Rosa had learned how to write and read at a school for so-called special students. A light blue van with round yellow lights on top would pull up in front of the trailer at seven twenty-five A.M. to pick her up. His father had already left for work, so it was up to him to make sure she got in the van. Mostly, he hurried her along by counting down the minutes until the van arrived. “Five more minutes,” he would say to her. “Thirty seconds,” he’d yell, as she ran around looking for a shoe. When the van came, he opened the door to the trailer to let the driver know that Rosa was on her way. He’d watch the van pull away and then he’d walk to the entrance of the trailer park, where he would wait for the regular school bus, the one for students who were not “special” like Rosa. He thanked his lucky stars that he and Rosa did not get on the same bus.

  The special school that Rosa attended was a fifteen-mile drive from their trailer park. The first time he went there with his father, he was surprised to see that not all the students looked like the ones he saw in the back of the blue van. Rosa’s school was a regular elementary school large enough to have special-education classes. The hope was that at some point, the special students would catch up to the regular students and join them in their classes. But that would never be the case with Rosa. According to her teachers, Rosa’s mind would remain forever at the level of a not-very-bright ten-year-old. But a ten-year-old mind could read and write and add and subtract and work certain jobs, and so could Rosa.