Last Summer of the Death Warriors

by Francesco X Stork

  “I was heading out there now. I’ll look for it.”

  “Yeah. I don’t know why he likes it so much. It’s like he can’t live without it.”

  “If you made it, I can understand why he wants it.”

  He felt a lump in his throat. There was no reason in the world why he should be getting a lump in his throat at this particular time. What was the matter with him anyway? He was going soft all of a sudden.

  “Pancho, are you there? What’s the matter?”

  He put the receiver away from his mouth and cleared his throat. “Ahh, you think you could bring it when you come visit? D.Q. said you told him yesterday when we were walking to the park you’d come visit.”

  “I won’t be able to come till next Saturday. Can he wait that long?”

  “Probably not. If you can hold on to it, I’ll see if this guy who works here can go get it. His name is Juan.”

  There was a pause on Marisol’s end of the line. “Did D.Q. tell you what we talked about during our walk to the park last night?”

  “He said you would come visit us, ah, him, here and maybe even go to Las Cruces. You have an aunt and a cousin who live in El Paso.”

  “Is that all he said?” She sounded relieved.

  “What else would he say?”

  She spoke slowly. “We talked about things, like we always do. We talked about the difference between friendship and love. I told him that what he and I had was friendship.” She stopped.

  “Oh.”

  She waited for him to say more. Then she asked, “How’s he doing?”

  He knew that this time she was asking about D.Q.’s emotional well-being. “He seems hurt. Angry. I’ve never seen him like that. He’s even angry at me.”

  There was a long pause, then she said softly, “Wouldn’t you be angry as well, if you were in his place?”

  Pancho felt suddenly uncomfortable. “Yes,” he finally answered. Then he said, “So…we’ll see you…next Saturday. Someone will go pick up the parrot. Or leave it in the TV room. No one will take it. Wait. Do you know where his mother’s house is?”

  “Yes. D.Q. gave me the address. It’s a pretty ritzy area on the way to Santa Fe. Everyone knows about it. I’ll find it. What time on Saturday? I have to do errands in the morning with my mom. Is the afternoon okay? Around four?”

  “Four. That’s good.”

  “Good-bye, Pancho. Thank you for calling me. Don’t lose the phone number now, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  He hung up. He felt both lighter and heavier at the same time. He stepped out of the room and walked to the large room of the apartment. Juan was standing over the stove, scraping a black pan with a spatula.

  “I made us chilaquiles for lunch,” Juan said as soon as he saw Pancho. He took the pan over to the plates on the table and deposited half of its contents on one and half on the other. “You like chilaquiles? I grow the chiles back there. La Misses doesn’t know. They mixed up with all other plants.”

  Pancho sat down where Juan had pointed and waited for him to sit down. They started eating. “What do you use for a car?” Pancho asked.

  Juan stopped, the fork halfway from the plate to his mouth. He clearly wasn’t used to company while he ate. “The truck. El Senor Stu bought a truck. He use it every year one weekend maybe, when he go fishing. Rest of the time I use.”

  “A truck.” They ate in silence for a few more minutes. Then Pancho asked, “Do you think maybe I could borrow it sometime for a couple of hours?”

  Juan didn’t look up. “You have license?”

  “I woulda had one, but…” He didn’t want to tell Juan that first his father died and then his sister died. He ate the last piece of egg and tortilla from the chilaquiles. He shouldn’t have asked Juan. He should have figured out where they kept the keys and just taken the truck.

  Juan drank half the water in his glass in one gulp. He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “You know how to drive?”

  “We had a 1997 Ford Ranger. I drove it.”

  Juan was studying Pancho, squinting, deciding something. “When you want the truck?”

  “When it’s not a problem. It would be good if no one knew I had it.” He tried not to sound like he was up to something bad.

  “Probably best time for that is on Saturday afternoon. Saturday evening, I go have a few beers and watch fútbol with my friend Rafael at his house in Bernalillo. I go around five. You use truck. You pick me up after. All right?”

  “All right.”

  “But we can’t tonight because I don’t go to Rafael’s house. He’s in Phoenix until next week. Tonight I just go for a few beers by myself.”

  The following Saturday was when Marisol was going to visit. He thought it was just as well if he wasn’t around when she came. It would be less painful. “Next Saturday—would be good,” he told Juan. He would stay only one week with D.Q. rather than the two he promised, but maybe D.Q. didn’t want him around for two weeks anymore.

  He waited for Juan to ask him where he would be going with the truck, but Juan only drank the remaining water in his glass. Then he walked over to the sofa and lay down, propping a brown cushion under his head. “You go to college?”

  Pancho turned his chair around to answer him. “I’m in high school.”

  “But you go to college someday, right?”

  “Not me. I’m not smart enough for college.”

  “Shh. No digas eso. You smart enough. I can tell a smart horse and a smart man when I see it. You go to college. You want to be like me all your life?”

  “That’s not so bad.”

  “Is not if you’re me. It is if is you. Don’t be stupid. You wanna take orders from people like La Misses all your life? I close my eyes for half an hour. Then I go get the perico from the Casa Esperanza.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “La Misses told me. You come?”

  He thought of seeing Marisol once again. Then he thought of D.Q. “I guess I’ll stay,” he said.

  CHAPTER 30

  D.Q. slept the rest of the day, barely waking even for dinner. When Pancho told him that Marisol was coming next Saturday, D.Q. said “How nice, you must be happy” in a voice Pancho had never heard before. He accepted the perico from Juan with a mumbled “Thanks” and went back to bed. Pancho lay awake in D.Q.’s room late that night, listening to his raspy breathing.

  The next morning Pancho was hauling rocks from the driveway to an area next to the pool when he heard a car drive up. He looked up from the wheelbarrow and saw Johnny Corazon stepping out of Helen’s SUV. He wore a black cowboy hat with a feather sticking out and black sunglasses that hid most of his face. When he saw Pancho, his mouth stretched in a grin of recognition. Pancho looked away. This is no good, he said to himself.

  “Pancho!” Helen called. “Look who I brought.” She sounded as if she thought seeing Johnny Corazon would make him happy.

  Pancho dropped the rock he was holding and walked toward them. Johnny Corazon had a green canvas bag slung over his shoulder. Juan stood behind him, struggling with two oversized red nylon suitcases. Johnny Corazon extended his arm to shake Pancho’s hand, but Pancho avoided it by taking one of the suitcases from Juan. He grimaced at the weight.

  “My medicine stuff,” Johnny explained.

  You use bricks to cure people? Pancho thought. “This isn’t a good idea right now,” he told Johnny Corazon. Helen gave him a piercing look but Pancho didn’t much care. “D.Q. could use a couple of days to get his strength back.”

  “Johnny needs to be here right now,” Helen said. That was all the explaining she was willing to do. She walked toward the house and the rest of them followed.

  Juan stopped to take a deep breath. Apparently the suitcase he still held was heavier than the one Pancho took from him. “I got some sacred rocks in there,” Johnny Corazon said to Juan.

  He is usingbricks, Pancho said to himself. “Give me that.” Pancho grabbed Juan’s suitcase and allowed Juan to take the suitca
se he was carrying. He knew Juan didn’t like to appear useless.

  As soon as they were inside, Helen said, “Juan, put Johnny’s things in the guest room next to my studio.” Turning to Johnny Corazon, she said, “There are only two rooms on the third floor, my studio and the guest room. The view is fantastic.”

  Pancho and Juan exchanged glances, thinking of carrying those suitcases to the third floor.

  “Shall we go see Daniel?” Helen asked Johnny Corazon.

  The fact that Johnny Corazon kept his hat and sunglasses on inside the house didn’t help Pancho’s impression of the man. He moved with a kind of nervous energy that did not inspire confidence. He didn’t have the solid assurance of the fighter who knows he will have to take a few good, painful punches in order to carry out his strategy. Instead he was jittery, like someone who didn’t want to get hit.

  But it could be that Pancho was wrong about him. He remembered when Johnny Corazon told him that he had not chosen the medicine, but the medicine had chosen him. If the medicine, as Johnny Corazon put it, could choose whomever it wanted, then it could, likely as not, choose a man who wore pointed, shiny boots and kept his sunglasses on indoors.

  “Hello.” It was D.Q. He had silently maneuvered the motorized wheelchair to the entrance of the kitchen.

  “Daniel!” Helen exclaimed. “What are you doing out of bed?”

  “I thought I’d try this.” He jiggled the knob with his right hand and the wheelchair moved left and right.

  “Daniel, there’s someone I want you to meet.”

  D.Q. slid forward a few inches. “You must be the miracle worker who’s going to save me.”

  Johnny Corazon took off his sunglasses. “I’m no miracle worker, but I’m going to do all I can to help you heal yourself. My name is Johnny Corazon.”

  “Mmm,” D.Q. said, stretching out his skinny arm for a handshake.

  “Johnny has agreed to stay with us a few days. Pancho, would you and Juan take Johnny’s things to the guest room?”

  Pancho hesitated for a moment. He tried to catch D.Q.’s eyes to see if he was okay, but it seemed as if D.Q. was doing everything possible to avoid talking to him or even looking at him. He gave up and nodded to Juan.

  As soon as they were out of the kitchen, Pancho took the other suitcase from Juan. This time, Juan let it go gratefully. They began their long climb up the stairs to the third floor. “I don’t like it when that guy comes over,” Juan confided to Pancho.

  “He’s been here before?”

  “He come over with plants for La Misses sometimes. He never stay over before. He smell funny.” It was true. Johnny Corazon smelled like those violet candles in his house, plus cigarettes and a bitter kind of sweat. “What he gonna do to Daniel?”

  “Cure him. He says.”

  “Si Dios quiere,” Juan answered. God willing. It was what Pancho’s father liked to say as well whenever a wish was made.

  There were only two doors on the third floor. Juan opened one to reveal a room with a single bed and a window that went from wall to wall. The curtains were drawn open and Pancho could see a series of rolling hills that gradually turned into mountains. Here and there, houses sat on the side of the hills. He dropped the two bags on the floor. “Nice, eh?” Juan said.

  “Nice,” Pancho agreed. He wondered why Helen had not given this room to D.Q. It was just the kind of room that D.Q. liked. There was no reason why the wheelchair elevator could not have been built to come up to the third floor.

  Back in the hallway, Juan closed the door and looked to see that no one else was around. He put his index finger to his lips and slowly opened the door at the end of the hallway. Pancho stepped in silently. The room was Helen’s studio. Curtainless windows curved around a space flooded with brightness. Pancho realized the room was located on top of the tower he had seen when he first arrived. He saw a table with tubes of paint and brushes in jars half filled with water. There was a roll of canvas and pieces of wood, and when he looked further, Pancho found a saw and a small hammer, which surprised him. He didn’t think Helen was the type to work with wood and nails and hammers.

  While Juan kept a nervous lookout, he walked up to a large easel in the middle of the room. There on the canvas was the painted image of D.Q.—not D.Q. as he was now, but a healthy D.Q. as he might be. His cheeks had color and his lips were not cracked. His thick hair was light brown with shades of gold and his pale blue eyes were happy. The painted D.Q. sat in a chair floating in the light of a sunset with mountains in the distance. Helen was still working on the background, but the painting was almost done.

  Pancho moved closer and examined the picture taped to the side of the canvas. It was a photograph of D.Q. when he was ten. Helen had amazingly transformed the picture of the ten-year-old into an accurate portrait of D.Q. as a young man—a young man who didn’t have cancer, or one who had it once and was rid of it. And yet, despite the painting’s accuracy, there was something unreal about it. It was as if Helen had decided to create her own private version of D.Q., one where she could pick and choose those qualities she liked and dismiss the ones she didn’t.

  “Who’s that?” Pancho asked, moving away from the easel to study a painting on the wall. The painting portrayed a man who looked the way D.Q. would have looked if D.Q. was twenty years older and had thick, wavy, brown hair.

  “Thas D.Q.’s father,” Juan answered. “La Misses talks about him all time. I think she still love him.”

  Pancho looked away to the finished paintings leaning against the walls. “Look at this,” he said to Juan. Juan entered the room softly as if his footsteps might be heard all the way to the first floor. It was a painting of Caramelo galloping wild and free, his tail and mane blowing in the wind.

  “Ay, Dios mio! Thas good. She got even the white marks on his leg. See.”

  “You never seen these?”

  “I see her take the pictures of the horse, the flowers. She takes paintings out downtown sometimes but always wrapped in plastic.”

  “Maybe there’s one of you in here. Maybe she painted you strong with some meat on your bones. Wanna look?”

  “Ha-ha. Thas good. You make a joke. You so serious always. I was thinking maybe you not Mexican.” Juan pulled Pancho’s arm. “Les go see what they doing to Daniel.”

  “Daa-nee-EL,” Pancho repeated, pronouncing it the Spanish way as Juan had done. He saw D.Q., Helen, and Johnny Corazon out of one of the studio windows. They were examining Helen’s garden. D.Q. was looking away in the direction of the mountains, clearly not listening to what Helen was saying.

  Pancho noticed a half-dug trench that went from the corral to the grove of trees in the distance. Juan saw him looking at it and said, “La Misses wants to build a sidewalk all the way up those trees where the kiosko is. You see?” He pointed to a green spot in the distance. “I got ready to put in forms to pour the cement.”

  That’s something else I can do this week once I finish with the rocks, Pancho thought. Thinking about how he could use the muscles in his body gave him a strange comfort. If he started the sidewalk on the other end, he could park D.Q. in the shade of the trees so he could watch. Of course, D.Q. might not want to be anywhere near Pancho. He touched his wallet where he had Robert Lewis’s address. He knew all about anger and how long it could last.

  Later that afternoon, he snuck into Juan’s apartment and picked up a map of Albuquerque that lay with a stack of papers on the table. The names of the streets in Albuquerque were in alphabetical order on the side of the map. He found Handel Road and next to it an 8-R. Letters ran down the side of the map, the numbers along the top. He located the street by drawing an imaginary vertical line from the number eight and an imaginary horizontal line from the letter R. He took a pencil and circled the spot where he would find Robert Lewis. Then he folded the map into a small square and stuffed it in his back pocket.

  The next morning, he and Juan started training Caramelo. His job was simply to get in the corral with a loose rope tied
around the horse’s neck and try to get him to go clockwise. Juan told him to be patient. Just getting the horse to be used to his presence could take a week or more and a horse could smell impatience.

  But it was hard for Pancho to be patient. Another week at Helen’s sounded like an eternity, especially since D.Q. was acting as if Pancho’s mere presence caused him added pain. While Pancho continued to sleep in his room, D.Q. rarely said anything to him other than curt requests, given without pleases or thank-yous. He spent almost all his time sleeping, or sitting with Helen and Johnny Corazon, talking. Pancho knew where Juan kept the keys to the truck, and part of him just wanted to take the keys, get in the truck, and follow the map to Robert Lewis’s house. He didn’t think he could stand to stay around much longer.

  It wasn’t until Wednesday afternoon that he saw D.Q. alone. He was returning from the area beyond the corral, where he had been working on the trench for the sidewalk to the grove. Juan had gone to his apartment to fix himself lunch and then nap for a while. Helen and Johnny Corazon had driven into the city to buy some medicinal supplies. Pancho looked at D.Q. sitting by the pool, and for the first time that week, D.Q. did not look away. Pancho took a deep breath, braced himself, and walked over and sat in the patio chair closest to the wheelchair. D.Q. was holding the small green perico in his hand.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  D.Q. nodded.

  “How come you haven’t been writing on that Death Warrior Manifesto of yours anymore?”

  D.Q. turned his eyes fiercely toward Pancho. Despite the shakes and teas that Johnny Corazon prepared for him, he still looked as if a light inside of him was slowly dimming. “The Death Warrior Manifesto is so much bullshit,” D.Q. said, and then he turned to look at the mountains again.

  After a few moments of silence, Pancho asked, “Were you really writing that for me?”

  “At one point.”

  “I wouldn’t mind having it,” Pancho said.

  “I don’t know.” D.Q. looked down at the perico in his right hand. He seemed to be thinking about what to say next. Then he spoke without looking at Pancho. “The truth is that I was secretly writing it for Marisol, hoping she would read it and fall in love with me, with how brave and brilliant I was. You were right back then when you accused me of writing it for her.”