Seeing Off the Johns

by Rene S Perez II

  And, barely without a pause, he went on. “So, without further ado, I give you my friends and my neighbors, Arn and Angie Robison.”

  The crowd stood up, even those on the visitors’ side, and gave a huge ovation to the two people who came arm in arm out of the tunnel under the home stands. They were an odd couple. It wasn’t just that she was so beautiful and he so plain. She seemed lost under the lights, startled at the sound of the crowd’s applause as if she had expected to walk out into an empty stadium, while he looked determined, like a bad actor rushing to his place on stage. Arn appeared to be pulling Angie with him to the poorly painted greyhound at the center of the fifty-yard line. When they turned to face the home crowd, however, they were indiscernible as individuals. They were a single unit, two equal parts of a machine bigger and more important than them, made so by more than thirty years of living with and for no one but each other and the boy they lost.

  Angie handed Arn the microphone she’d carried out with her. He took it and regarded it like a piece of foreign technology, raising his eyeglasses over his brow and squinting at it. He flipped the switch at the side of the plastic baton and began speaking. It was a short speech that he gave, most likely a predictable one giving thanks for the support and kindness of his neighbors. It probably would have moved the entire stadium—nearly two whole towns worth of people—if the words he was speaking were being transmitted from the center of the field to the stadium speakers, to be amplified and sent into the air, broadcast on the school’s AM band and out into space to be heard, millennia from now, by races of alien people tuning in to see what would become of Greenton’s loss and the Robisons’ pain. But the microphone was off.

  Everyone sat silently, waiting for someone to do something. When it became obvious that it was too late for that, that Arn had already started and couldn’t be stopped, people kept quiet from embarrassment: a man full of grief had bared his soul to an entire stadium of people who couldn’t hear him.

  He spoke for less than a minute, enough time for him to give a few conversational nods and a sweep of his arm to signify that he was talking about “this field” or “this town” or “this whole unfair existence where I give and give my whole life only to get one boy I put all of my hopes into and when I finally do almost a full job of raising him, I have him taken from me just when it was about to start getting really good” or something like that. His final words, “thank you,” were obvious, because he gave a slight bow when he said them and he and Angie raised a couple of waves to the crowd and began to walk off.

  What else was there to do but cheer?

  The Robisons were met at the sideline by Coach Gallegos, who gave them hugs and exchanged a few words with them. Then the Greyhounds took the field in brand new jerseys—shiny green and silver with a thirty-four and an eight above each corner of the chest, paid for with John-star money after new uniforms were bought for the baseball team and the stars continued to sell. The crowd cheered. Rapt as they were in trying to see the new jerseys, no one in the stands paid attention to the Robisons, who exited the field and left the stadium as the teams warmed up. Almost the whole town was at the game, so no one saw them as they drove home and put their packed bags in their car and left town never to return.

  With John dead, the only ties that remained between the Robisons and Greenton were painful ones. All of Arn’s family was gone. When Angie’s parents died, so too did all of the blood family that she had in the world worth claiming and who would claim her back.

  So Arn and Angie left. It was not a romantic departure. They did not stop to share a hug and a kiss after reminiscing good times gone by in the house they designed and had built with every intention of growing old together there. They just grabbed their essentials and shut the door. It wouldn’t be until the next morning—when, driving by, people would see the movers loading a van—that anyone noticed the Robisons had gone for good.

  The news spread quicker than you would think, even in a town like Greenton. People felt slightly betrayed but mostly embarrassed for having let the old man talk into the turned-off microphone, for having let him and his wife live and grieve in much the same manner—with them watching and doing nothing except worrying about the propriety of their response and their emotions and themselves. When they heard about the Robison’s silent exit from Greenton, a new dimension would be added to the tragedy that everyone in town was remembering and experiencing. They would begin evaluating their distance from and involvement in the Johns’ deaths. It would be a sobering experience for some who would realize they had just joined in the mourning because it was something to do.

  Others would realize, though, how much it really did still hurt. They had lost the Johns and now the Robisons. These were the sort of awful things that happened to other people in other towns. People couldn’t believe it had happened to them.

  All of this would occur because an older couple decided to pick up and leave town. But it would happen tomorrow. Tonight there was cheering to be done and memories to be made. Tonight there was a football game to be lost.

  Chon pushed down on the Dodge-nasty’s horn before the car came to a stop in front of Henry’s house. The property—a big lawn that was almost all dirt with a small, once-white ranch house in the center, fenced all around by wrought iron—was looking better than it had all summer now that the pall of David Monsevais was removed. Once Araceli and her mother returned, he stayed at home trying to act like he had his shit half together for the sake of his daughter. Then again, it seemed to Chon that all of Greenton had taken on a new luster now that Araceli was back.

  Chon had been walking through the halls of GHS with a smile on his face. He had to remember to hide it from anyone who might notice. It signaled a shift in Chon towards a happiness that could only be brought about by an act almost so self-serving as to be considered criminal. He was working with the same comforting knowledge he had always armed himself with, only now it was amplified. He was thinking about the possibility of an escape, a future.

  In almost three years at the Pachanga, Chon had managed to save close to $11,000 in the account his parents had set up for him at the local bank. When Chon was fifteen, Artie Alba began paying him his minimum wage earnings in cash so as to keep his hiring a minor under wraps while not paying taxes. He took the money from the till. Chon knew his situation was a rare one, so he never brought it up to Henry or Ana or even to Pito.

  His parents never required him to pay for anything other than whatever recreation he sought and the gas and repairs his car needed. He had to fight them to allow him to spend his own money on his school clothes—an expense, along with food and shelter, they viewed as their responsibility. It was the way the Gonzales family did things. It was not, however, the way most Greenton families operated: a working kid had to give every cent they earned to their parents or had to work for free at a family business or had to stay at home to babysit younger brothers and sisters or—in some cases—aging grandparents.

  Chon had been obediently putting his earnings in the bank, just like his parents requested. In Chon’s junior year—when the Johns signed their futures away to UT, insuring that Chon would have nine months to win the love of Araceli and whisk her away to some better future in a better place (probably junior college in Laredo or Alice or Corpus Christi)—he began to make his twice monthly deposits at the bank with the pride and determination of a wrongly convicted man digging a righteous tunnel out of the big house.

  He surfed the dials on the car’s radio while he waited for Henry. There was nothing good on. He settled for the first music he could find that played clearly. It was a slow pop song about, as far as Chon could tell, how some girl’s love is similar to various bodies of water. The voices of the boys singing were so annoyingly saccharine that Chon considered trying for another station. But he was tired and in the same bad mood he was always in on the day of a football game.

  It used to be that Chon attributed his bad mood to the fact that he was going to yet another even
t where the Johns were in the spotlight. But the Johns were dead. No matter, he still felt as insignificant as he always had. Was he just another nobody, no different from anyone else who went unloved and unnoticed?

  Chon always had these kinds of thoughts when he waited for Henry. The only friend he had in the whole world was a fat class-clown weirdo. But people knew and generally liked the fat class-clown weirdo. Maybe it was Chon who was the social dead weight in their relationship. He hated these thoughts. He hated the song on the radio. He slammed on the horn.

  “Goddamn, Chon. Don’t get your panties twisted in a fucking ball,” Henry said as he got into the car.

  Chon hadn’t seen Henry exit the house. He didn’t have a chance to explain his impatience or to put the blame on Henry by complaining because before Henry even settled squarely in the passenger seat, the back door opened up and Araceli slid in.

  “Hope you don’t mind me joining you guys,” she said, brushing her hair behind her back and buckling herself in. She smiled at Chon who looked at Henry in disbelief. Henry shrugged.

  “It’s really not a problem,” Chon said, turning back to Araceli. She rubbed her hands, like being in the car was sending shivers down her spine. Chon’s insecurities didn’t have time to do their work.

  “N*Sync? Really?” Henry flipped through the dial on the radio.

  “It’s all that was on,” Chon said. He put the car in gear.

  “Yeah,” Henry said. He found a station playing an old Selena song and left it there. “It’s all that was on that you could jack off to. Fag.”

  “But what are you even doing here?” Chon asked Araceli, having to work hard to look at the street in front of him.

  “She was going to come with us to the game, but if you’re going to be an asshole about it, we can walk,” Henry said.

  Chon ignored this and instead continued his questioning of Araceli.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be—”

  She cut him off. “I quit the cheer squad. I already got my elective and P.E. credits, so I didn’t really have any reason to continue in the class.”

  “Weren’t you the captain?” Chon pulled the car onto Greyhound Way.

  “I’ve been done with cheering for a long time. If I can’t do what I want my senior year, when can I do it?”

  “Man, the cheer squad pretty much shit themselves over the prospect of replacing Celi as the captain,” Henry said.

  “Yeah,” Araceli continued. “It was pretty vicious. So they don’t have a captain right now. They think I’ll come back, but—”

  “Fuck those bitches,” Henry said. He unbuckled his seatbelt and opened the door. Somehow Chon had gotten them to the stadium and parked the car safely. He couldn’t stop staring at Araceli.

  “Yeah,” she said with a dry chuckle. “Fuck them.”

  They walked to the home team entrance on the far side of the stadium. Cutting through a sea of people in Freer’s blue and gold T-shirts, there were already heads turning, eyes being drawn. Araceli’s celebrity extended beyond the bounds of the signs that told you—as if to try and convince you to stay—Now Leaving Greenton. At the Greenton fan entrance, everyone in sight of Araceli turned to stare at her, to see for themselves that she was actually still there, living and as real as anyone else among them. The attention was hard for Chon to ignore, but Araceli had practice. The death of her high school sweetheart wasn’t the only reason people looked at her. This, Chon decided, is what it’s like to be with, or at least stand next to, a beautiful person—so much longing and jealousy from men and women, boys and girls alike, wanting to have her, so many eyes to be ignored gracefully and tactfully.

  “Goddamn, where are the bathrooms?” Henry said loudly. “I have to take a mean shit.”

  Henry’s outburst made people turn away. Conversations took a new direction, went to the jerseys that the boys would supposedly be wearing. Henry walked ahead of the people in front of him, glaring at anyone who would let him in, as if to tell them that they were the ones who had made an awkward situation of his digestive goings on.

  “He’s really good at that,” Chon said.

  “Yeah.” Araceli was laughing. “I just can’t tell sometimes if he’s doing it for me or for his own amusement.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it’s fifty/fifty, right down the middle.” Chon looked out on the field at the Freer players warming up, trying to use the distraction as a means of not suffocating Araceli with his attention or falling all over her every word and gesture.

  “But, I’ll tell you, he’s the only reason I’ve survived this place,” Araceli said. “If I didn’t have him to make a joke of everything here, to make fun of me when I take myself and my bullshit too seriously, I think I’d have gone crazy by now.

  “You know, you grow up without any siblings and you’re forced to spend all this time with your cousin and you’re told, of course, that you have to love him like a brother. But I can really see why you’d be friends with him. If he loves someone like he loves you”—Chon rolled his eyes here, but Araceli waved his stupid machismo away—“like he loves me, he’ll do anything to make things better for you.”

  They got to the front of the line. It was five bucks to get into the game.

  “I don’t have my money, Henry does.” She looked up into the stands to see if she could spot her cousin.

  “Don’t worry,” Chon said. “I’ll get them.”

  He gave the kid in the ticket booth a ten and got two tickets and a look of disbelief from the guy in return. Chon guessed the kid was trying to do the math: what would put her there with him on a Friday night when there were so many other people who would be better suited to take up her time and attention. Screw him.

  Chon watched Araceli walking slowly across the bottom of the stands. He wondered what she was thinking, if maybe she was only now realizing what she had done—quit the cheer squad and come to the first football game with two of the least popular people in school. She was just like everyone else now, a spectator, no longer a star of the whole show of Greenton football on a Friday night.

  “Sorry,” she said behind her shoulder, her eyes peeled in search of her cousin, her attention so focused it emanated the kind of poise she would probably need to get through this night. “I haven’t had to pay for a game since, like, the seventh grade. I’ll pay you back when we find Henry.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Chon said. “I insist.”

  He said these last two words right when Araceli turned to look at him. They must have struck her in a funny way, because she gave him a look that seemed to say she didn’t want him or anyone else buying her way anywhere. Maybe she wasn’t ready for it so soon after John, maybe that’s the kind of girl she was, but her reaction came out of her like a warning—take a step back. It stopped him cold. They would have stood there in front of rows and rows of people in green and silver, almost all watching them—her, then him by proxy—if Henry hadn’t called down from the stands.

  They walked up to the stretch of aluminum bench Henry had claimed for the three of them. It was very near the top row, at the far end of the stands—a seat selection made by someone who didn’t care—or want—to be seen by any of the players or cheerleaders or general passers-by, someone with instincts honed over years of existing, with Chon at his side, on the periphery of anything that mattered at school or in town. How serendipitous it was that he had forged such an existence—serendipitous and useful to Araceli. He and Chon were like Greenton’s two-man witness protection program.

  “They were so freaked out at the idea of me shitting myself that they didn’t make me pay to get in,” Henry said, laughing.

  “Speaking of,” Araceli said. “Can I see my wallet? I need to pay Chon back for my ticket.”

  Pulling the wallet out of his pocket, Henry shook his head.

  “What, you couldn’t just pay for her, you cheap asshole? You work so many hours at that damn store and you can’t spare five bucks?”

  Chon looked at Henry, then at Arac
eli shuffling through her wallet and pulling out five singles. She straightened them out and faced them all in the same direction. Chon was certain then that he would love her forever.

  “It starts with five dollars. Then she’s borrowing my car and asking to copy my homework,” Chon said. He took the money from Araceli and gave her a smile that told her he would keep their moment of silent understanding forever in his confidence.

  “One fucking time!” Henry said. “One time I copy your homework and you act like I owe you a kidney or something.”

  “Don’t worry, Chon, my dad lets me borrow the Suburban whenever I want to. The Dodge-nasty’s safe from me. But I need a report on Candide by Monday,” she said.

  “Wait, Celi, I copied his homework once, but it was for a failing grade,” Henry said. “This guy’s dumber than shit.”

  Araceli laughed out loud. Seeing her this happy, made so by his presence, if only as the butt of a joke, Chon was lost in taking in a whole new side of Araceli—in adding these brand new perceptions to the bank of knowledge he’d once only stocked for imaginary and masturbatory purposes—so lost that he dropped the ball in the game of witty and stupid repartee. The two of stood looking at him, standing slack-jawed and unaware of the turn their conversation had taken Chon in.

  “Aww,” Araceli said. “C’mon, Chon. We’re only playing. You don’t have to sit and sulk. We’ll be nice, I promise.”

  She grabbed his arm and gave it a little squeeze. Her thumb hit his bicep and her fingers made to reach around to his triceps, but got lost in the width of his deltoid. He melted. This was the culmination of all of his working out and preening, of his minutes and hours spent staring at himself in the mirror, assessing what could be fixed and trying to cover up what couldn’t be mended.