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Seeing Off the Johns

Page 5

by Rene S Perez II


  “Well, whatever,” the man said. “How much is it?” He looked at the number on the register, pulled out his wallet, and let a hundred fall down to the counter in front of Chon. Chon gave the man his change. The man walked out of the store to his car. He popped the hood and sat reading his car’s manual in its dome light glow.

  “What an asshole,” Henry said.

  Chon stood looking out at the man sitting in his car. He threw a towel at Henry.

  “Go help him,” he said.

  “Me? I don’t work here. Let him figure it out,” Henry said, turning around to see what the guy would do.

  “Man, I told him to open his radiator and flush it with water. He’s probably going to burn himself. You know he doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Chon said.

  “Well, why don’t you go help him then,” Henry asked. He looked back at his friend and seemed to get something.

  “Fine,” Henry said, and walked out of the store.

  Chon watched Henry go and talk to the man, who had tried to open the hood just as Henry walked over to get the nozzled water hose from the side of the store. Henry found the latch the man hadn’t been able to. Using the towel to protect his hand and forearm from the steam that would issue forth, Henry opened the radiator and proceeded to spray water into it to cool it down.

  “The dumb asshole’s radiator cap wasn’t screwed on right. He must have smarted off, private school-style, at the last guy who changed his fluids,” Henry said, drying his hands with a paper towel. “You could have helped him, you know.”

  Chon had mopped the store up in the time it took Henry to help the man. “Yeah, I know. But I had him. I made him look like the asshole he was. How am I going to turn around and help him outside when I just won inside?”

  “Won what?” Henry asked. “The guy was trying to buy some coolant to fill his car. Sure, he was an asshole. Sure, you made him look like more of an asshole. But what did you win when he didn’t even know he was playing your little game? You got him, but he didn’t even know he was gotten. You think he’s even going to remember you tomorrow, or even me?”

  Chon shook his head and scanned an 18-pack of beer. “Give me some money,” he said.

  Henry handed him a twenty. “My tip for helping the businessman from Tamaulipas,” he said.

  Chon paid the money into the register and put the change and the beer on the counter.

  “I know we’re not being taped,” Henry said, looking up at a shot of himself from behind on the TV monitor above the counter, “but it still feels weird seeing myself on this monitor.”

  “That’s the point,” Chon said, waiting for his register totals to print out. “That’s why they don’t even bother recording anything. Watching yourself do something wrong is enough to make you think twice about doing it.”

  Chon put the printout in an envelope and slid it under the office door. “You know so much about this store,” he said, standing in the doorway, Henry waiting for him to lock up the shop, “that if we ever break up, I’ll have to kill you.”

  “Shit,” Henry said, “I’m only with you for your car.”

  They got in the Dodge-nasty and rode silently, with the windows down, a dry breeze rolling into the car. It was a nice enough night, by Greenton’s hot standard. It had reached 103° earlier that day. Another night wasted drinking beer and watrching TV with Henry didn’t seem too bad a prospect, because what else was there to do?

  When they arrived at Henry’s house, Chon noticed a Suburban parked where he would otherwise have parked his car if he were coming to pick up Henry. He raised an eyebrow at Henry.

  “They’ve been hanging out and drinking and talking about Mejia and my cousin like they had already been married or something,” Henry said, looking at his uncle’s Suburban. “He’ll be there all night and pass out on the couch. My dad’s trying to be cool, but he has to work in the morning—alone, because my uncle won’t show up. My dad’s getting annoyed with this, it’s almost every night. Fuck it. Let’s just ride around.”

  Chon veered left at the Y,’ the place in South Greenton where Main forks and becomes Smith Street going southwest toward Zapata and Fal Street going east toward Falfurrias. The night was cooler than usual. Summer’s end approached. But autumn’s crawl into town wouldn’t bring any leaves changing colors, fluttering down from trees. There would be no cold snaps and little or no call for scarves and earmuffs or thick jackets. Chon would be back in school—that was autumn in Greenton. Back to a place like a prison, sitting in a room full of people who shared the same insecurities and desires but who were too self-absorbed, too teenaged, to notice that everyone else felt exactly the same.

  In a week Chon would return to school for the last nine months of his sentence, but he would do it with a mission and a hidden smile.

  He turned the car right onto Old Cemetery and parked, rolling his window down while Henry pulled out two beers from the case in the backseat. Chon opened his beer and took a pull. Henry turned on the Dodge-nasty’s radio. On certain nights, radio stations drifted into Greenton from San Antonio. On days when storms were blowing in, stations could be picked up from Houston or Mexico. Chon leaned back on the headrest and closed his eyes, letting a satisfying belch come up slowly and feeling the day’s work roll off his shoulders while Henry moved the radio’s dial through white noise and evangelists. He even skipped some good songs in search of foreign frequencies bringing in brief bands of new, cool, hip elsewhere.

  Henry opened his beer and took a drink. “One more week, man. One more week and it’s back to that goddamn hole,” he said, looking out of his window at the ditch as if he’d heard a scuttle. “I don’t care how much my father needs my help at work. I’m just going to drink beer and watch TV and sleep till noon between now and then—if I can get a beer from the goddamn fridge before Araceli’s father drinks them all.”

  “So he’s there like every night?” Chon turned the radio up a notch.

  “Pretty much, with my aunt out of town,” Henry said, taking another drink.

  “So, when’s she getting back?” Chon asked. He tried to crush his empty beer can, but only bent in one side, pinching his hand nearly to the point of bleeding. He grabbed another, opened it, and had his first sip before he looked over at Henry who was staring directly at him, waiting for his eyes. It startled Chon. He thought his nonchalance was sufficient cover for the interrogation.

  “Listen, man. I’m not going to help you out,” he said, then put his beer on the dash in front of him. “I’ve never had to bring it up because Mejia was always in the way, but now…I’m not going to help you with my cousin.”

  Chon made to speak, but Henry cut him off.

  “I mean, I knew it was going to come up, and if that’s not what was happening just now, I apologize. But even if that’s not what you were doing, you eventually would. My aunt left last week for Corpus to bring Araceli back home. She’ll stay there with her best friend, the one Araceli stayed with all summer. They’ll all go to the beach and shop for school clothes and try to not think of Greenton or any of the bullshit here. Then at the end of the week, my aunt will come back with Araceli so she can finish school. That’s what I know and that’s all I’ll tell you. After that, bro, you’re on your own.”

  Chon looked over at Henry, then at the sky out Henry’s window. Lightning traced faint blue branches across the sky over Falfurrias in the distance. The storm’s rains were flirting with the smell of Greenton’s dry-cracked orange dirt and with Chon’s senses and his need for the doom-jazz mood of a rainy night. He drained his beer for lack of anything to say and came up coughing before the bottom of the can.

  Henry grabbed a couple of beers and got out of the car. Chon opened a new beer and followed Henry.

  “So that’s it, right? We don’t need to talk about this again?”

  “Fine by me,” Chon said.

  Henry nodded and looked over the cemetery at the storm in the distance. “Why do you think rain only ever comes to the edge of tow
n?” he asked. “It’s like, nine out of every ten storms that come by stay out of town. Isn’t that weird?”

  “Would you want to come to this town, even to visit, if you didn’t have to?” Chon said.

  “No, but it’s not like the rain stays somewhere better. Falfurrias and Benavides suck too.”

  “But they’re not here,” Chon said.

  “You know, people have been sneaking into the cemetery at night to visit their graves,” Henry said. “My dad and uncle came over all drunk the other night and saw some people.”

  “Place looks empty to me,” Chon said.

  “Well, yeah. It’s Sunday.”

  “So they’ve been sneaking in and what, just hanging out?”

  “I guess. You wanna go?” Henry asked.

  “Why would I want to sneak into the cemetery?”

  “Why would you want to park your goddamn car next to a cemetery in the middle of the night? Because there ain’t shit else to do.”

  Chon shook his head at this. He couldn’t argue so solid a point if he tried.

  “And to see them,” Henry added. “You don’t have to be all sad and obsessed like everyone else in this town—all morbid and weird and shit. But it’s also kind of strange that you haven’t come by to see them. Before whatever the fuck you think happened happened, they were people you knew. People you played with. People who are dead.”

  “And what? Seeing them will help me heal or something like that?” Chon asked.

  “How the fuck would I know? But at least you’ll have gone.” Henry put his two extra beers in the back pockets of his jeans and waded into the knee-high dried whitish-brown grass. He cut a path through the ditch and around the cemetery fence with such confidence that Chon was certain he’d been to visit the Johns already this summer. Chon rolled his eyes and followed. Henry got to a post that Chon would not have noticed was severed of its connection to the dozen or so bottom links of fence. He pulled up the fence and, with a practiced agility Chon wouldn’t have expected of his big clumsy friend, duck-walked under.

  “I can’t believe I’m sneaking into a cemetery,” Chon said, handing his beer under the fence to Henry and getting down on his hands and knees to crawl through the break. “So what…” Chon said, pulling dry dirt burrs from his hands when he got to the other side, “people cut a back entrance to the fence so they could be with their Johns whenever they need a fix of late night what-might-have-been?”

  “No, they’ve been hopping the fence. I did this myself when I was little. So I could be with my mom.”

  Chon took his beer from Henry, had a drink, and looked up at the full moon’s bright pale glow for something to say. It gave back nothing, only a bluish white light. It looked and felt like New Year’s Eves gone by when, as a child, Chon learned that night’s scary dark could be painted fun by phosphorus, magnesium, and copper burning bright in the sky and by the moon that glowed through the gun smoke left hanging in the air.

  Henry spoke up. “I used to ride my bike out here and just sit. Sometimes I’d talk. Sometimes I wouldn’t say anything because I knew she knew exactly what I was feeling and thinking. I would come because I was scared. I was always real scared when I was little, and my mom would let me come to her bedroom to sleep on the floor by her bed. After she died, my dad would let me crash on the bed. But it was different. It didn’t feel, or even smell, the same. So I took to not bothering. I’d just stay up scared and, when it got to where I couldn’t take it, I’d sneak out here. I still come out a lot, but not at night anymore.”

  “Did you ever see anyone else trying to sneak in?”

  “No, but every now and then the sun wouldn’t wake me up and the gravedigger would find me. He’d throw my bike in the hearse and drive me home. He never told my dad.”

  “Wow,” was all Chon could say.

  “Fucked up, huh?” Henry said, walking with the perfect balance of a high-beam construction worker, not looking back at Chon, taking care not to step on any graves, bending over to right fallen vases or wreaths without breaking his stride.

  “This is it,” he said when they got to the adjacent graves.

  Chon looked down. Even in the moonlight, he could see the strange outline the recently laid sod cut into the surrounding dirt and dead grass. For all of their exultation in life, Chon expected the Johns would have gotten something more than slabs of granite identical to all of the other slabs around them save for their jersey numbers—8 for Mejia, 34 for Robison—engraved in the upper right-hand corner.

  Chon pursed his lips into a tight frown and stuck his chin out. He nodded, as if appraising the work of the stonemason who made the headstones. He drank down the last of his beer and dropped the can to the ground.

  Henry picked up the can, placed it on a large rock on the caliche cemetery drive in front of the graves, stomped it flat and put it in his pocket. “You know, they’re not the only people from this shit hole who’ve ever died. The whole town seems to think so, even you. You act like this is the goddamn John Cemetery and all the other people here were just test runs or something. The sooner everyone in town realizes that these are just two guys who died, the better. And it sucks—they could play ball, and they were going to make it and put us on the map or whatever. They have families who miss them—not the futures they were going to have. But they died like everyone else here, and the grass on their graves is going to die and in a few months their graves will look like all the others. Until Greenton realizes that, we’re going to live in a goddamn circus.”

  Chon looked at the Johns’ graves, then at the rows of the other ones that held Greenton’s departed. There were statues big and small, the Virgen and St. Jude the most prominent among them after Christ. There were headstones pink, grey, and black; double and single; with hinge-shut peepholes that revealed faded pink and yellow photos of the dead. Chon imagined that they were like the photos his parents had at home of different family outings, always with kids slamming away at a piñata, always one of the cousins crying.

  There were empties next to graves—some brown-bag special tallboys, some amber glass long necks. He could even see an Oso Negro. They were the remnants of the daily or weekly catch-up sessions between the survivors and the hallowed ground they came to talk to, to cry on, to seek comfort from in the middle of the night.

  Lightning flashed in the east and a cool, damp air blew in.

  “I’m gonna go see my mom,” Henry said. Before he left, he pulled a beer out of his back left pocket and handed it to Chon. He opened the other and held it up in the cool air.

  Chon cracked open his beer.

  “Here’s to coming to see off the Johns,” he said. “And seeing everyone.” Neither he nor Henry made to tap their drinks. Arm still held out, Chon added, “God bless them.”

  Henry nodded and they drank. He turned on his heel and had already taken two steps away from Chon in the time it took Chon to bring the drink to his mouth.

  The pull he took of the beer tasted off. The beers had gotten warm enough in the backseat of the Dodge-nasty, but adding the heat of Henry Monsevais’ sweaty ass on the other side of a layer of denim and cotton and the shaking they got from his crawling and walking, Chon’s seemed to have gone flat.

  He looked in the direction Henry had gone, but he couldn’t see him, just diagonal rows of headstones that met at the road like a series of arrows pointing at Chon. He was tired and hadn’t had a proper dinner. His stomach was aching from the beer. The breeze picked up and the sweat at Chon’s hairline tingled, making his ears feel cold.

  Odd that he didn’t feel scared or anxious. He felt himself, a man—a boy—alive and alone among so many people who were cut off from consciousness and worry, existing unaffected by all of the sadness of the world.

  Mejia owed Chon nothing. If the two of them had ever really competed at or for anything—and Chon could admit now that, outside of Little League baseball, they hadn’t—no score that existed between them mattered anymore. If Mejia had ever laid claim to Araceli,
a claim that could only be valid in reciprocity, that claim was now not only nullified, but nonexistent. So too was Chon’s anger and resentment toward Mejia.

  Chon let go. Even he could see that if what he had felt could be so easily unfelt, it probably meant that he had been grasping at straws. Letting even that go was a relief to Chon. He could proceed without anger or negativity guiding him.

  Chon caught sight of Henry sitting beside a grave a few rows back of the road, pulling weeds that had sprouted up. He looked down at the Johns’ graves and poured half of his beer out for Mejia and the other half for Robison. Just like in life, his actions went undetected by the Johns—that made Chon smile. He didn’t register to them. They were on a totally different plane, and that put many things inside of Chon Gonzales at peace.

  To the east, rain that Greenton so desperately needed had fallen and was being soaked up by Falfurrias’ own thirsty soil. In the morning, Greentonites would wake up to the same hot temperatures that they’d faced the day before. Most of them would not know about the storm that had flirted with the city limit sign or the brief cool it blew through the Greenton Cemetery.

  Araceli Monsevais arrived in Greenton the same way she left—secretly and in the hope of evading the teary gazes and unmitigated sorrow of Greentonites. Greenton seemed the same to her, which struck her initially as odd. It reminded her of something she’d thought about in catechism when they told her time doesn’t pass in heaven. Or how they said in physics that time is relative. She figured maybe it would stop existing when she did. She hadn’t necessarily thought Greenton would cease existing when she left it, but the fact of it existing so very much without change made her think that it was a place existing on a timeless plane, not unlike heaven, but probably closer to hell.

 

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