The waitress brought him an oval plate with a jalapeño burger and the Max Country Fries, which were nothing but regular fries in the shape of a pig’s tail. He took a bite out of the jalapeño burger. The fat man had finished eating and ordered another beer. He was taking slow swigs from the bottle and looking in Pancho’s direction as if he were waiting for him to finish eating. As soon as Pancho pushed his plate away, the man grabbed the beer bottle by the neck and waddled over to his table.
“Mind if I join you?” the man said. He pulled out a chair and sat down before Pancho could answer. The couples got up to leave. Pancho and the man were the only customers. The waitress was yelling into a cell phone. “You’re not from around here, are you?” The fat man looked down at Pancho’s backpack.
“Nope,” Pancho said.
“I didn’t think so. Not too many Mexicans come in here.”
Pancho looked around. There was country-western music on the jukebox and no Mexican-looking people in the place. “I saw the sign for the jalapeño burgers. I thought it might be okay.”
The man nodded. “You visiting here?”
“Yeah,” Pancho said, smiling. “I’m visiting.” He knew what was going to happen before the evening was over, and he was going to enjoy it as much as possible until then.
“Listen, you want a beer or something? I can get you a beer if you want.”
“Thanks, man. I don’t drink.” He tried not to sound rude.
“You don’t drink? I never met a kid your age that don’t drink. You’re bullshitting me, right?”
“No.”
The man lifted the beer bottle as if to toast to Pancho’s health and then he tilted his head back and drank the rest of it. He shook the empty bottle in the direction of the waitress. “What do you do for fun? You smoke weed? You must do something for kicks.”
The waitress came over with another beer. She looked at Pancho’s plate. “You didn’t like the food?”
“I wasn’t hungry,” he responded without looking at her.
“Hey, bring this guy a beer. Put it on my tab.”
“He ain’t twenty-one,” she told the fat man.
“Put it in one of them dark glasses and don’t make any foam when you pour it.” The man winked at the waitress. She made a face like she didn’t like the idea and went away. The man looked around as if to make sure no one was listening and then leaned across the table. “Let me give you a little piece of advice.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “You shouldn’t flash your money like you did when you first came in. You never know, you know what I’m saying?”
“Yeah, you’re right. You never know who’s watching.” Pancho tried to make it a joke, but it went over the man’s head. All day long he had been struggling to understand what people were trying to tell him. It was a relief to finally know exactly what was going on.
“That’s right, man. There’s some bad elements here in Albuquerque.”
“Whereabouts?”
The man stopped with the beer halfway to his mouth. “What?”
“Whereabouts are the bad elements?” Pancho asked.
The waitress came and put a big plastic cup in front of him. He looked into it and saw the foamless beer.
“Drink up,” the man said, pointing at the plastic cup with his chin.
“Thanks, I don’t drink.”
The man’s eyes narrowed. The grin froze and then the lips tightened. There, Pancho thought, there’s the hate. “I’ll pay for it. And I’ll buy you another one,” Pancho added.
“It’s not polite to turn a person down when they buy you a beer. Around here, that’s an insult.”
“I don’t mean any insult,” Pancho said. “I don’t drink, that’s all.”
“Why the fuck not?” Droplets of spit landed on Pancho. He took a napkin from a dispenser on the side of the table and wiped his face. It came to him that this man might kill him before the evening was over. They would go outside and the man would want his money, and maybe the man had a gun tucked in his pants, or maybe the man would overpower him and strangle him before he had a chance to land a punch. He was amazed at how all right he was with any of those scenarios. It made him feel almost friendly toward the man, like here was someone he could talk to at last.
Pancho moved the beer to one side and put both of his elbows on the table. “There was this Anglo guy, his name was Jeff. He worked with my father at the Sears Auto Center back in Las Cruces. My dad was in charge of batteries and he changed the oil on cars and he patched flat tires. There was no one who could patch a flat or change a battery faster than my father. But he didn’t do any heavy-duty mechanic stuff. The guy Jeff did that.” The waitress had left behind his Coke and he took a sip. “My name is Pancho.” He stretched out his hand. “What’s yours?”
The man looked at the outstretched hand with suspicion. “They call me Billy Tenn,” he said, floating a fat hand toward Pancho, “’cause I’m a hillbilly from Tennessee.”
“Billy Tenn. Nice to meet you.” He sat back. The man seemed like he was anxious to hear the rest of the story. “This guy Jeff who used to work with my dad. He was an alcoholic. He wouldn’t like show up drunk at work, but he’d keep vodka in a big water bottle and he’d go through one of those every day, just sipping little sips all day long. My dad found out and talked to him about it, but this guy Jeff, he had five kids, the oldest one was maybe ten, and my father didn’t want to tell the supervisor about the guy’s drinking problem because then the guy would lose his job.” Billy Tenn leaned to the side of the chair and spit. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Pancho stopped talking.
“Go on, I’m listening,” Billy Tenn said, still clearing his throat.
“My dad used to come home and tell me about this guy Jeff. Every day the guy would make mistakes, and my dad had to cover up for him. He would forget to tighten bolts on tires or he’d be doing a safety inspection and forget to inspect the brakes. He would have gotten fired except that my dad would constantly check up on him. My dad was doing two jobs really. Those little sips of vodka made the guy more and more careless every day.”
“You guys want anything else?” The waitress was standing beside them. She looked at the untouched glass of beer.
“How much do I owe you?” Pancho asked. “I’ll pay for him too.”
She took out a pad from the front of her apron and then fished around her ear for a pencil. She didn’t find a pencil, so she flipped the tiny pages from the pad and appeared to add the whole sum in her head. “Nineteen dollars even,” she said. “He had two beers before you got here.”
Pancho took out his wallet and gave her a twenty. “You want change?” she asked.
“Sure.”
She didn’t seem happy with this answer but slapped a one on the table. Billy Tenn’s eyes were glued on Pancho’s wallet. Pancho held the wallet in his hands a few moments before putting it back in his pocket. He looked at the waterfall clock. D.Q. was probably back in the hospital room by now. He wondered what D.Q. would do if Billy Tenn killed him and he never made it back. The kid was going to die in a few months, but Pancho would have beaten him to it.
“You mind?” Billy Tenn had finished with his bottle of beer and was now reaching for the plastic glass.
“Help yourself.” He thought that here he was, minding his pleases and thank-yous with this drunk, and he couldn’t bring himself to do so with D.Q.’s mother.
“Go ahead and finish your story ’cause I gotta have a smoke pretty soon. I left my smokes back in my car.”
“Go ahead. I’ll finish it when you get back.”
“I can wait.” He seemed afraid that Pancho would take off on him.
“There’s not much more to tell. One day, Jeff was working on one of those dump trucks they use to haul gravel to construction sites. He raised the bed to grease it and he asked my dad if he could lube the hydraulic arm that lifts the bed. So my dad went in there under the bed with the lube gun. Meanwhile, Jeff’s replacing a filter, only he’s
not too stable because he’s been hitting the vodka like he always does, and he stumbles and on his way down, he grabs on to a hose. Turns out the hose fed hydraulic fluid to the arm that held up the truck bed. Without the fluid, the arm collapsed, and the truck bed fell on top of my father. His head, his chest, they were both crushed. They told me he probably didn’t even know what happened to him. They wouldn’t let me see his body.”
“Oooh, shit! That’s bad!” There was a look of half disgust and half laughter on Billy Tenn’s face, as if he had just imagined what the crushed head must have looked like.
Pancho stared at him. He kept staring until he could tell that the man was getting uncomfortable. Then he spoke again, almost in a whisper. “Ever since that day, I swore I wouldn’t drink.”
“Shit, man. That’s heavy.” Billy Tenn gulped the remainder of the beer. “Let’s go outside. I need a cigarette.”
“I’m not done yet.”
“What?”
“There’s another reason why I don’t drink and never will.”
“Man, I’d love to hear it, but I need to get me that cigarette.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“What is it?”
“How much is point-zero-one milligrams of alcohol in a person’s blood?”
Billy Tenn, who had begun to stand up, sat down again.
“Shit, man, that’s not even one beer. I can tell you ’cause I’ve been DUI a couple of times, and you’re not even legally drunk unless you got point-oh-eight milligrams in you. We’re talking blood. Breath is different. Why’d you ask?”
“Something I read someplace. Not even one beer, huh?”
“It’s nothing, man. It’s the smallest amount that can be detected. I happen to be an expert on this, not ’cause I wanted to be.” Billy Tenn burped. “Excuuuse me.”
They sat there face-to-face, looking at each other. Then Pancho picked up his backpack and stood up. “You wanted to go outside? Let’s go.”
He stepped out first, the big man following him. “My car is out back,” Billy Tenn said. “That’s where I have my cigarettes.”
“All right.”
They walked side by side around the mall toward the back, where two brown Dumpsters stood open and overflowing with garbage. There were no cars parked back there. They were alone.
“I guess you know I need some money,” Billy Tenn said. “I’m sorry about your old man, man. Honest. But this is business.”
“Yeah.”
“I guess you’re not going to hand it over easy.”
“I can’t. Most of it is not mine. What’s mine I need.”
“I could probably let you keep some of it.”
“I can’t.”
Billy Tenn reached into his blue jeans and took out a shiny silver object. With a flick of his thumb, the object turned into a switchblade. Pancho moved the backpack to his left hand and raised it as a shield. Billy Tenn edged forward and began to make invisible circles with the switchblade. The sky was a dark blue, violet almost. A light on a pole by the Dumpsters flickered on. Pancho thought that if he got killed, he had nothing on him that would connect him to D.Q. The kid would be worried about him if he didn’t show up soon. Billy Tenn lunged at him. Pancho deflected the thrust with his backpack. He could hear the knife tear through the canvas and hoped it didn’t damage his sister’s diary. Billy Tenn began to breathe heavily. Pancho saw individual drops of sweat bead on his upper lip and on his forehead. Sooner or later, the sweat would flow into his eyes, and when it did, Pancho would make his move.
He could not hold the backpack high enough. The knife came at him one more time. Billy Tenn grabbed the pack and tore it away from Pancho’s hand. There was a fixed smile on his face, a fake smile, like the smile on a Halloween mask. Then, with a speed that Pancho did not think possible for a heavy man, Billy Tenn feigned a thrust to one side and brought the blade sideways, cutting a line through Pancho’s shirt and across his chest. The sensation that raced through his flesh was almost delicate, what a laser burn would probably feel like. The blood soaked the white T-shirt before the cut began to burn.
“Give me the money. What you wanna die for?” Billy Tenn said.
The drop of sweat that Pancho had been watching rolled down Billy Tenn’s forehead and through his eyebrows and curved itself inside the eye. Billy Tenn blinked and raised his hand to his eye. At that moment, Pancho flung his right arm forward as far as it would go. He heard the nose bone crack, a sound as light as the snap of a pencil breaking in half, but that was all it took. Pancho knew Billy Tenn’s brain was flooded with a white pain that blotted out all thought, all memory, all knowledge of past and future. He heard the knife drop and then the gagging and choking as the blood filtered down his nasal cavity to the throat. Now Billy Tenn was on his knees, and a second after that, he was doubled on the ground, holding his face and moaning. “Oh, oh. Oh. Ma nose. You broke ma nose.”
Pancho picked up the knife and tossed it toward the Dumpsters. He reached into Billy Tenn’s back pocket and lifted out his wallet with two fingers. He took out a twenty-dollar bill to reimburse himself for the beers and dropped the wallet on the ground. Then he grabbed the backpack with one hand, and with the other hand on his chest, he began the walk back to the hospital.
CHAPTER 17
Back on Lomas Avenue, a few blocks from the restaurant, he took off the blood-soaked T-shirt, tore it, and tied it around the cut. Then he took his New Mexico State sweatshirt from the backpack and put that on. He went into a drugstore and bought a small bottle of hydrogen peroxide and a roll of gauze. Behind the drugstore, he looked at the slit across his chest. It was straight and thin, like the kind of mark his father used to make with a plumb line just before he sawed a long piece of wood. He poured the bottle of peroxide on the cut and tied the full roll of gauze around his chest as tight as he could. Then he walked very straight to keep himself from breathing deeply, because the cut was deep enough to hurt every time he did so. If he kept the cut closed, the bleeding would stop.
It was nine P.M. when he walked into the hospital. He looked at the front of the sweatshirt and made sure that blood had not seeped through. A sign said visiting hours ended at eight, but no one stopped him or even seemed to notice him.
D.Q. opened his eyes as soon as Pancho stepped into the room. “There you are,” he said, as if Pancho had just popped up in a dream he was having.
“Go back to sleep,” Pancho said. The only light in the room came from a table lamp next to D.Q.’s bed.
“I wasn’t asleep.” D.Q. groped around his bed until he found a remote control pinned to the upper part of the mattress. He pushed a button, and his torso tilted slowly up. “I like these beds,” he said. Then he pushed another button, and his feet went up.
Pancho went into the bathroom with his backpack and changed into a St. Anthony’s T-shirt and shorts. The gauze around his chest was only slightly pink. He came out and put the sweatshirt and blue jeans on the chair next to his bed. Then he jumped on top of the bed.
“Go ahead and turn on the TV if you want,” D.Q. said from the other side of the curtain.
Pancho crossed his arms. The pain from a knife cut was not as bad as the pain from a fist. He could feel the cut’s pain and still think. “Naah,” he said. He waited a few minutes, expecting D.Q. to ask him where he had been.
“I’ve been cleared for takeoff,” D.Q. announced.
“What?”
“They’re all set to start the treatments tomorrow.”
“We’re staying here then.”
“We’ll be moving into Casa Esperanza tomorrow afternoon. After the first treatment.”
“Mmm.” Pancho closed his eyes. A minute later he heard the curtain that separated his bed from D.Q.’s pull open. D.Q. was standing there in the funny nightgown. He went over to the chair next to Pancho’s bed, placed the sweatshirt and blue jeans on the bed, and sat down. Apparently there was going to be more talking before the day was over. Pancho found it strange that th
is prospect did not bother him. Tonight, for some reason, there would be something comforting about listening to D.Q. Pancho tried to sit up, but the pain stopped him.
“Push the back of the bed up with that gizmo there on the table. You’ll be more comfortable that way.”
“I was hoping maybe I could get some sleep,” he said.
D.Q. tapped his index finger rapidly on his knee. He looked like he was sending a frantic telegraph message. Pancho folded his arms and shut his eyes tight. He knew that wouldn’t stop D.Q. from speaking. “You look like you sat on an anthill. What’s the matter?”
“Well…”
The reason for D.Q.’s uncharacteristic inability to talk came to him in a flash. Pancho smiled. “It’s the girl,” he said, putting a hand on his chest. “You’re worried about the girl. María.”
“Marisol,” D.Q. corrected him. Two red circles had appeared on his pale cheeks. Pancho had never seen anyone blush like that before. It was good to know that underneath all his highfalutin talk, D.Q. was just another regular kid.
“It’s not like that,” D.Q. said, recognizing what was behind Pancho’s smirk. “It’s different.”
“You wanna get laid.” He was going to say before you croak, but he stopped. He closed his eyes and concentrated on breathing through his nose because it was less painful.
“When you meet her tomorrow, you’ll understand,” D.Q. said with confidence.
“I understand,” Pancho muttered, still with his eyes closed. You could call it true love or whatever, but when you stripped the pretty words away, it boiled down to the same simple need. Then he remembered what D.Q. had said back in St. Anthony’s about coming to Albuquerque. He said something about Albuquerque being part of the preparations. “You came to Albuquerque to see her,” Pancho said with his eyes closed.
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